Free refills? Richmond?
A very American idea I think. Buy a coffee in a restaurant or café and they will keep filling up your cup until you drown.
And Richmond, a district in the west of San Francisco and my favourite, home also of the Toy Boat dessert café. If you buy a coffee at the Toy Boat and come back at any time that day with the same cup you qualify for a refill.
This is one of the initiatives of the owner, Jessie.
The only other male Jessie that I have, sort of met is Jessie James, legendary gunslinger. I don’t think there is a connection although Jessie does sell guns in his coffee shop. Toy guns, cap firing. In fact The Toy Boat would be a perfectly normal and typical Independent San Franciscan coffee shop with delicious homemade ice cream cookie sandwiches, fresh breakfast bagels and room to pass many an hour unhurriedly contemplating life if it wasn’t for the toys. Jessie collects and sells toys as well, in particular Pez.
This morning, on the way to take the car back to the hire place, which for some very long story is way over the Golden gate Bridge and up the Freeway (101) in a suburb called San Rafael, I stopped at the Toy Boat hoping to meet Jessie and to get a double cappuccino with cream cheese bagel to go.
Jessie's son served me and introduced Jessie who had just knocked over the display of organic chocolate bars. He had been trying to reach the “Stop Starbucks” petition that he has started up against the corporate giant’s plans of opening (yet another) outlet down the road.
He argues that it is things like that that destroy a neighbourhood and since Richmond, or at least the Clement part of it is still very much a local neighbourhood then the residents must fight such intrusion. The slogan of the campaign is “Friends don’t let friends go to Starbucks”.
Right on! I signed. The coffee was perfect and the slightly toasted cream cheese bagel was from paradise.
But the main reason I needed to speak with Jessie was about the Darth Vader Pez dispenser that I needed for my own collection and which was on display with the other hundred or so in his.
I am assuming here that you know about Pez, the candy dispenser originally marketed by the Austrian company as a substitute for smoking. They started in small tins and then a small-patented dispenser was introduced and then in 1955 they started to put heads on the top.
Jessie is the second enthusiast that I have met here in San Francisco. Just outside the city, past the airport you come to Burlingame, a suburb that would probably remain anonymous if it wasn’t home to the Pez museum run by curator and collector Gary.
Gary started out intending to sell computers but his collection of Pez attracted more interest so he converted his store into a small museum.
Although the parent company doesn’t recognise the museum “officially” and although from the outside it looks like a dentist's office, Gary has amassed an impressive exhibit, including part of the original factory sign and the original patent application. He has an original pre-war headless dispenser (in original packing) along with his own collection of, - well - many. He claims to have one of every Pez EVER, and not many people would dare to admit that.
He also admits to attending the yearly conventions in a Los Angeles hotel.
Gary is very tall, looking a little like an oversized Pez dispenser himself, but as a host he is impeccable. He showed me the rarest of his collection, the build your own face Pez which was quickly withdrawn from sale because of small digestible parts, which reaches 5000 dollars at auction. (Matt stop catching baseballs and invest in Pez).
He also told me the unlikely but probably true tale that e-bay was originally set up as a web site for the founder to sell and trade her Pez collection.
He introduced me to the first Pez of his collection, an astronaut that had a Colonel John Glen feel but in fact was not a human.
The first human Pez, everything before was either cartoon or fantasy, is a set of 3 Elvis (young, old and fat) currently on sale both in the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia (214 California Drive) and the Toy Boat Dessert café (401 Clement Street).
The amazing thing is that Jessie has never been to Gary’s museum, though since his own café is open from 7.30 to midnight he won’t have a lot of time to make the trip across the city.
So, Jessie was happy to sell me the Darth Vader Pez, and I got a Valentine’s Day Heart Pez too.
The Pez Company has a separate marketing department in America and Europe and so Jessie got quite excited about the possibility of trading with me, though I explained that in my quiet corner of France they are few and far between.
Almost as excited as I was to get a Darth Vader and a Heart - though I may not be able to compete with the weird stuff he found in Indonesia.
P for Pez (and love)
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