A California Love Story: Rest In Peace, Uncle Ward

Ward Dunham was a Green Beret, a bouncer, a bartender ... and a world class calligrapher.

The work of Ward Dunham, Harrison Collection at the San Francisco Public Library

I can’t claim to have known my late uncle Ward all that well but I loved him all the same. 

Uncle Ward was loved by my favorite aunt — my aunt Linnea — and that was enough. Of course you’re not supposed to have a favorite aunt but I do and it isn’t particularly close. A hippie to this day I used to think she was crazy; now I know she was right about nearly everything.

When last I saw her she asked me never to invite her to my wedding. “Because I just don’t believe that stuff.” I thought for a moment. “Neither do I,” I replied, “but I live in the world as it is.” “Poor thing,” she replied. I couldn’t help but laugh.

There’s a danger when you love someone you never quite let them know how much. By the transitive properties of love I loved him too. If he was good enough for her, he was more than enough for me. He was a big man. He carried knives and he knew how to use them. While he would prefer to use his blades to make pens out of bamboo, he could and would cut you if he had to. He delighted in smuggling his 7-inch Bowie knife through TSA. Whenever he got caught he told them he could — and had — killed with a shoelace. This I did not doubt.

More than once he threatened to eat me and my siblings. I was a lot older than I should have been when I realized that that was unlikely.

Ward Dunham, circa 1965

In any event, among my few happy childhood Christmases we spent it with my aunt Linnea and my immediate family camping out in the San Diego house my father, brother and I renovated. (My father had grown up in Coronado and kept the home, which was, like my father, always in a state of disarray and disrepair.)

Unique to her siblings, my aunt Linnea loved my father. She saw him exactly as I did — as lovable and well meaning, if at times not exactly put together. From my father I learned how to dream and that was all I really need anyway. For all of my maternal grandfather’s virtues — I’ve written about them here — he lacked the one that would make me really love him: he distrusted and disliked my father and he made no secret of hiding it, berating my poor dad even when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Grandpa never thought my dad was good enough and he, right about so much, was wrong about that.

Overbearing to the point of suffocating, my grandparents could be downright cruel if you didn’t march in lockstep. My aunt wouldn’t hear of it — and to her credit, she actually ran away as as a teenager. Then named Susan, she ran away first to the Army where she was a paratrooper and an honor guard. “She came out west to find the sun. She lost her name, but found a new one,” the Everclear song.goes, and so it was with her. She began calling herself Linnea.

I can’t even begin to tell you how often I thought of her when I was in high school. Running away to California is always an option. When it came time to go away to college I picked the best college the furthest possible from home. I didn’t return on holidays and vacations. I became a Californian, thanks in large part to my aunt Linnea.

My aunt has invented a great many fonts which are a big part of what has made the Internet so wondrous. When I asked her directly which firms she had worked for, she replied with a smile, “You’ve seen my work, probably every day,” and left it at that. Years later I learned that she had designed for Adobe.

Here’s her bio:

Award-winning type designer Linnea Lundquist was a member of the type design and production team at Adobe Systems for twelve years. There she worked on design, production, and testing of many of the world’s most widely used typefaces, including Optima, Sabon, Adobe Caslon, Chapparal, Tekton, and numerous others.

She is expert in font production in various formats using various production tools, having worked closely with both designers and software engineers and is experienced with the design and production of various glyph sets including Latin, Central European, Greek, Cyrillic, etc.

Lundquist has an undergraduate degree from Rochester Institute of Technology in Printing Management and Technology. She studied calligraphy and book design under Hermann Zapf (designer of Optima, Palatino, Melior, and Zapf Chancery) and typography with noted type historian Alexander Lawson. She has done graduate work in the Book Arts at Mills College and in Printing and Typographic History at UC Berkeley. An active calligrapher, she organized the 2001 exhibition, lecture series, and catalog for Zapfest: Calligraphic Type Design in the Digital Age.

With partner Ward Dunham, Linnea runs Atelier Gargoyle, offering fine lettering and a unique line of calligraphic paraphernalia. Linnea’s studio is in San Francisco.

Aunt Linnea Lundquist and Uncle Ward Dunham at their studio

My uncle Ward was many things: Army Special Forces, bouncer, bartender — and world famous calligrapher. He found himself in California by way of New Orleans and Vietnam.

A man should do many things. A big man he carried his knives for his many crafts — first killing Viet Cong, later bartending and calligraphy.

I’ve loved diving into his time in San Francisco, a place he moved to right after military service. His friends included all sorts of people from San Francisco.

My personal favorite? The burlesque performer, restauranteur, and filmmaker Magnolia Thunderpussy.

There’s a long discussion, not exactly PG, about Uncle Ward’s time working at a local bar.

Enrico was a brilliant guy," Ward resumed. "And it was the most amazing place. Everybody went there. Enrico's informal rule was that you could do or be anything you wanted to be as long as you didn't step on anybody else's toes. You could look any way you wanted to, you could dress any way you wanted to. We'd have cops and pimps in there, the social elite, Bukowski was in there all the time. It was kind of like neutral ground; an oasis."

Ward came to San Francisco in 1965 when he got out of the Army (Special Forces). A huge man who knows how to handle himself, he worked as a bouncer in a couple of beer joints, then got hired as night manager at The Roaring '20s (where beautiful Magi Disco used to work as a barker, standing out front in tails and a top hat, greeting the passerby with smiles and intelligent patter). "It was still kind of fun back then," Ward reflects. "San Francisco had the best strippers during the late '60s and the early '70s. Before that strippers were just street broads, some of whom may have graduated from high school. But then the hippy thing came along and it became kind of an in trip for a while for college girls to be strippers --topless dancers, actually, that was the new wrinkle. At that time it paid real well and they had great rock 'n roll groups. When I was at the Roaring '20s the Charlatans were the house band and the girls were absolutely gorgeous. We had a concert pianist in there... San Francisco was, for a while, the only place that really had topless dancing. Everywhere else it was the tired old end of the burlesque scene. San Francisco was the place to go in the late '60s because they had Haight St and they had topless. The world just beat a pathway to our door. It was new and fresh, the girls were gorgeous and everybody was making money hand over fist."

….

Ward was originally hired at Enrico's as a bouncer/bartender. "Broadway was overrun by pimps and hookers. Some middle-aged guy would be a little drunk, five or six girls would surround him and he'd wind up getting his pocket picked. Well, that's just bad for business. So they wanted to get rid of these guys and they hired me to be behind the bar -- I wasn't a great bartender in those days -- and my half-brother was hired just to be around and act like a customer. Some guy would get out of line and he would grab him and take him outside and kick the living dogshit out of him and then wander off. The cops would show up -- of course they knew exactly what was going on and they loved it. We'd say, 'Well, we don't know, two customers got into and it didn't happen in here, they went out on the street...' And there would be one getting thrown in the meat wagon and the other one, well, he just wandered off..."

…

It was pretty loose. The girls would be in and out... I asked Ward if working on the edge of the sex industry had resulted in his getting a lot? "Not really," he replied. But it's resulted in me getting some. Most of 'em, you know, you have to talk to 'em and they drive you crazy. In San Francisco the sex scene pays so badly that you get drugged-out freaks and others you'd be afraid of, what with AIDS and everything. Even before AIDS they were a scarey bunch -- tattooed, mindless, cracked out, totally fried by the time they're 30, the absolute dregs. It's frightening."

…

His next job was at the Chez Paris on Mason. "That was an ideal job for me. I was making three or four hundred a week and working five nights, which is more than I like to work, but I could sit there and write letters or write in my journal... They'd been having trouble with street toughs -- idiots, kids, punks, junkies, the scum that you get down here. They were coming in and making it hard for the girls in there to do business." After six months' of Ward's presence behind the bar the problem diminished. "Three or four of these idiot junkies are not a problem. They'll shove a waitress around, but anybody even near their size, they'll make a little noise and back right down. I would just immediately shove them out and slap them around a little bit. I never broke any bones or anything like that but I kicked a couple of shins pretty good. Well, I did break one nose, but that was by accident.

"Same thing in here. Three weeks ago I hit a guy and my hand was swollen up like a catcher's mitt. I'm not sure now that I didn't get AIDS from this idiot. He was this huge guy with a very bad attitude. As wrecked a human being as I've seen that young. This guy had to be in his early 20s and he looked like he was 50 and busted up pretty good. He just not gonna leave. I'd been downstairs getting ice and I came back and he was scaring the customers. So I just started walking up on him and pushing him out. He pushed back so I backhanded him and I guess I hit a tooth or something."

As San Francisco gentrified the very things which made the place marvelous priced out my aunt and uncle. Their work had found its way into the companies whose growth fueled their displacement, ultimately to Half Moon Bay where they taught classes, collected students and recalled stories.

Maybe it’s always been this way but it seemed unusually cruel to see my aunt and uncle wind up in what amounted to a glorified trailer park when so many had cashed in from their work. Couldn’t Adobe have given them a bit more? I think often about how Steve Jobs of Apple worked with Adobe to suppress the wages of people like my aunt.

That’s a conversation for another day, perhaps.

What I do remember about Uncle Ward is writing his friends in my grandparents’ kitchen.

I also remember him going off on politics. He was a warrior who hated war. 

“Your job is to use your mind,” he told me when deterring me from joining the military after September 11th and the Iraq War. “And prevent the wars from happening.”

He had almost assuredly killed a man or several and the less said about this the better. So I listened up. 

He had told me that John McCain had sung like a canary, and that guys he had served with in Viet Nam had heard McCain betray his country. I couldn’t believe it at the time but later I proved that my uncle was entirely correct.

My uncle was much loved. The tributes have poured in him from his students and disciples. His work endures.