Swally's

I didn’t travel with dad to all of the places he worked and could only go with him if it worked out with my school vacation times. But he did take me to work with him at times when he was going in to the office on a Saturday. And once in awhile I would get to spend the whole day with him during a regular workday; going to lunch with him and the other men in the office. Swally’s Key Club was the favorite hangout for lunch. And I remember dad buying a Racing Form newspaper just before lunch, studying it and then placing bets with a bookie in the club. (The bartender)

Sometimes dad would bring his work home over the weekends and take over the kitchen table with a pile of plans, his trusty comptometer and stacks of paper. And that work would include refractory product catalogs, which I always enjoyed looking at. The most common catalogs were those of the Gladding McBean Company, a name that I found to be comical for some reason.

(And I remember a patio that dad had built for his sister, Jay, at her home in Tarzana. He used firebrick for the patio and most were stamped, “Gladding McBean”.)

After awhile it was no longer a funny name, it was just part of what dad did for a living. So you can imagine my surprise when I found the Gladding McBean factory was located just a few miles from our house in Roseville.

Swally's? I looked it up on Google and found nothing at all...although I think mom was still using black Swally's ash trays until the very end of her life.