Philip Hoffman was a true San Franciscan, of a kind they are not making any more. He passed away on April 20 at St. Mary’s Hospital, where he was born 80 years ago. Death came suddenly and unexpectedly.
“Phil had a tremendous sense of history and place,” Grant Ute told mourners in his eulogy for Phil at St. Dominic’s church on May 12. “But to think of him as someone who ‘lived in the past’ would be to get him all wrong. Rather, to walk with him was to recognize that rather than living in the past, the past lived in him. And there’s a big difference.”
Phil fell in love with the city’s streetcars and cable cars as a young boy and was constantly out and about on them. Growing up in Cow Hollow, Muni’s original E-line, with its distinctive single-truck ‘dinkies’ was Phil’s favorite. He also saw a lot of the city in the automobile of his physician father, who made house calls. Phil’s detailed knowledge of the old 16-line streetcar out Third Street came from such trips, past the shipyards and slaughterhouses to reach the Bayview District.
Phil went to Lowell High School when it was on the 21-Hayes streetcar line, and loved to recall the finer points of his education. As Grant Ute recalled in his eulogy, “He commented that he lettered at Lowell. ‘Oh, not in football or basketball but in fender riding,’ that long lost sport of riding the back fender of streetcars to avoid paying the fare.”
As a young man, Phil moved to Russian Hill and often rode the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde cable car. It was nothing like today’s tourist attraction, Phil would explain much later; just a friendly neighborhood transit line where gripmen and conductors knew their regular riders’ names and vice versa. But it ran on downtown streets that the city wanted to make one-way (in fact did run in the wrong direction for two blocks on Pine, already one-way), and so was threatened. Phil joined the San Franciscans trying to stop this sabotage of his line, a group including Friedel Klussmann, who had saved the Powell cable lines in 1947.
It was a glorious fight, encapsulated by a great photograph of Phil protesting on the roof of an O’Farrell line cable car. Unfortunately, it was the last car to operate on the O’Farrell line. The Hyde portion of the line was preserved and combined with the inner end of Muni’s Washington-Jackson line to create the Powell-Hyde line, but to Phil it was never the same. But though his O’Farrell line was lost, Phil gained something that did endure, for he met a fellow cable car defender, Nancy Bent, during that fight, leading to a marriage lasting 52 years.
“He was the consummate San Franciscan,” Grant Ute eulogized. “He had his opinions about the Golden Gate Bridge (due to its effect on eliminating rail and ferry service to Marin). He was the only one who held Herb Caen accountable for anything—particularly his early position in support of removal of cable cars from O’Farrell so that Macy’s could get a one-way street. And I don’t think he set foot in Macy’s from 1954 until a year or so ago when the SPCA asked him to be a pet handler in the window display.”
His SPCA volunteer work was a separate but important part of Phil’s life for the past eleven years. He would spend many hours socializing pets in the SPCA shelter, sharing kindness that was second nature to him. He worked for the State Compensation Insurance Fund for 45 years, but it was his avocations that seemed to matter most to him.
A long time volunteer at Market Street Railway, Phil served as our unofficial historian and joined our board of directors just this past January. He had declined repeated invitations in the past, but after his wife Nancy passed away last year, he accepted our invitation.
His passing is a real loss not only to us but also to the San Francisco history community as a whole. Phil’s knowledge was encyclopedic. At the time of his death, he was volunteering with Muni’s archives project, helping archivist Heather Moran identify the location of various photographs, even those taken decades before his birth. He was also helping us on a variety of our own projects tied to Muni’s centennial next year.
Phil’s wit and sense of whimsy was delightful. To him, history was not some dry series of events, but a joyous carnival to celebrate. We will miss him greatly, but take some consolation that some of his knowledge and wit will live on in a forthcoming book on Muni’s centennial he co-authored with Grant Ute, Bob Townley, Walt Vielbaum—and Cam Beach. (The book, to be released this fall, will be featured in our museum.) Future generations of San Franciscans will also be able to enjoy Phil’s stories through his videotaped recollections, some of which are currently shown on our museum video screens; others of which will be added later this year.
In many ways, Phil was very much like his friend Cam Beach. Both kept a delightful boyishness about them their entire lives, reflected in their great enthusiasm for remembering—and preserving—transit history. You couldn’t be in the company of either man for more than a minute or two before a smile would flash across their face as they remembered something, smiles that would make you smile too.
As Grant Ute recalled, the last walk Phil took, the night before he died, was to Swensen’s at Hyde and Union, for an ice cream. The store has been as much a part of the neighborhood as Phil, there for more than 60 years. “His daily routine was filled with the texture of his lived history,” Grant eulogized. “The simple choice of where he went had meaning. Hyde and Union was the crossing of two of his favorite car lines: the E-Union streetcar and his beloved Hyde Street cable.”
I always looked forward to seeing Phil, because I knew I would come away enriched in knowledge about our shared hometown and lifted in spirit by his wry personality. I was looking forward to showing him a photo that Jason Brickman had just taken for us; we had asked Jason for a shot that emphasized the Russian Hill
neighborhood it served, rather than the usual Downtown or Wharf angles. The shot (above), printed on the back cover of Inside Track as a tribute to Phil, featured Swensen’s. I wish Phil could have seen it. Oh, the stories it would have evoked!
