More Fun Than The Watusi

The game calls for four players to draw five dominoes apiece. The remaining eight dominoes in the deck are left on the table and called the boneyard (or the stoneyard, in old English how-to-do-it books). In the San Francisco game any domino may be played to start the action. The tiles are laid out as in a normal domino game, with a number from one's hand played against a number on the table, but in the San Francisco game (or in muggins) a point is scored whenever the total of domino spots at the ends of the line adds up to five or a multiple of five.

Suppose there is a 5 at one end of the line of dominoes and a 1 at the other. If you have the 1-5 domino in your hand and play it—the 1 on the 1, of course—the total number of spots at the two ends of the line is now 10, which gives you two points. Fifteen would give you three points, 20 would give you four points, etc. Score is kept on a cribbage board, with the first team to score 61 points winning. When you cannot play you draw from the boneyard, as in ordinary dominoes. As soon as one player has played all his dominoes, he has won that hand. The spots on the dominoes in the hand of the losing team are counted, and the winning team gets one point for each multiple of five. That is how points are made, and at 8 and 80 they accumulate with calamitous speed.

It would be easy to assume that this basically simple game is merely a fad in San Francisco, doomed to go the way of mah-jongg and the spelling game of Scrabble. But this is far from the case. As long ago as the turn of the century, muggins was so deeply rooted in the city's folkways that it began to be known everywhere as the San Francisco game. Why did San Francisco welcome it? The only scholar to deal with the subject was a gifted and little-known Philadelphian named Robert Stewart Culin, a state trooper and amateur ethnologist who eventually became a curator at the Brooklyn Museum. Culin came from an old Pennsylvania family—some of his ancestors were Swedish contemporaries of William Penn—and in his early years he liked to hang around the joss house and headquarters of the Lum I Tong on Race Street in Philadelphia while he was supposed to be working in his father's store. In his Customs of the Chinese in America , Culin wrote: "It is not easy to obtain much information from Chinese men concerning the games and sports of their childhood. They regard the subject as too trivial for discussion, and always burst into loud laughter when one, more good-natured than the rest, attempts to explain them."

Culin persevered, however, and over the years gradually extracted from these merry Orientals the material that went into such works as The Gambling Games of the Chinese in America and The t' Hing or Patriotic Rising, a Secret Society of the Chinese in America . In the 1890s Culin investigated gambling in San Francisco's Chinatown. There were more than 60,000 Chinese living in seven square blocks just north of the financial district. During the day they worked making overalls, earning $10 to $16 a month and their board. At night they patronized some 150 gambling houses, playing fan-tan or a complicated lottery game called white pigeon ticket or dominoes. In Dominoes, the National Game of China , Culin said dominoes is the "favorite social game of Chinese laborers in the United States, and is often played in shops after dinner, where all who happen to be present will gather around the table and watch the four players. It is an animated game. The players cry aloud as they play, and the sharp click of the long wooden dominoes as they arc whirled in shuffling and piled one on another adds to the noise." That is a good description, with a few minor changes, of modern San Francisco bankers at the end of the day's work.

What with dominoes in one form or another having been a part of the San Francisco scene since the Gold Rush, it came to Carl Livingston Jr., a descendant of Gold Rush-era storekeepers, that the local obsession might be a civic asset. It was 1960 and the Hunters Point Boys' Club had been formed, with clubrooms in an abandoned wartime cafeteria built for shipyard workers. As blighted areas go, Hunters Point was in fairly good shape, but there were few recreational facilities for the Negro children. With people like Willie Mays and Abe Woodson of the 49ers on the board of directors, the Hunters Point Boys' Club tried to fill the need by stocking the ex-cafeteria with pool tables and putting up basketball courts outside.

The budget was $25,000 a year. Livingston and William Fleishhacker, who were also on the Boys' Club board, were charged with putting on some sort of drive to raise part of this amount. "I suggested a domino tournament, because every club holds one for its own members," Livingston said, "and I thought we could get the clubs to send their winning teams to a citywide event." So the entry fee was set at $100 a team, and it was expected that about 100 teams would enter. But Livingston had not reckoned with the eagerness of lesser-known players to try their domino skill against socialites and celebrities (remember Palmer Mendelson's "every player thinks he is the best"). All sorts of clubs were hastily put together. There were the Lost Coot Gun Club of Petaluma and the Royal Eskilstuna Yacht Club of Sweden, the latter probably the most exclusive club in the world, membership being limited to two Swedes who were visiting San Francisco. In a particularly complicated Scandinavian joke, they named their yacht club for a landlocked mining town high in the Swedish mountains. In all, 142 teams entered. "I am about to do something that has never been done before in the history of mankind," said the then mayor, George Christopher. "I am about to throw out the first domino in a world championship domino tournament."

By the end of the day the Boys' Club had cleared $11,200, and the domino championship had been added to every social calendar in the city. But the annual tournaments remain highly informal gatherings. Thus there were loud cheers this year when Lawrence Metcalf, a grandson of Huntington, received a skunk cap for having, with his partner, made the lowest score in the championship. In dominoes, to be skunked means that the winning team has moved its pegs up and down the cribbage board to score 61 points before the losing team has turned the corner at the top of the board with 31 points. A team that is skunked pays double the stake.

The fact that domino players seem to have a weakness for practical jokes adds to the informality. For example, there is Robert Tuck, the president of a furnace works, who used to carry light plastic baseballs to Candlestick Park. When a high foul came into the stands, he would toss the plastic baseballs into the air while the real baseball was descending, much to the bewilderment of the crowd. At this year's domino tournament he limited himself to passing out printed warnings addressed to the Internal Revenue Service reading THIS IS A BUSINESS MEETING. Then there is Dan London, the manager of the St. Francis Hotel, who once had a cable-car bell attached to his Cadillac. He would startle motorists by ringing it on streets where there were no cable cars.

Domino players also have a weakness for dressing in some fashion appropriate to their game, such as the ruffled shirts with domino patterns worn by Wally Haas and his partner John Sutro at this year's tourney. Carl Livingston Jr. wore ebony and silver domino cuff links, and his wife Jean a matching pin, when they recently sponsored a domino benefit for opera students. But the all-time champion at dressing up is Mike Desiano. Many years ago, when he had a small plumbing business, he was cajoled into being photographed on horseback, wearing a false beard and pretending to be Don Gaspar de Portola, the discoverer of San Francisco Bay. He did so well at it that soon he was a permanent parade leader. Wearing a plumed hat, sword, coat of mail and embossed gauntlets, he appeared on St. Patrick's Day, Columbus Day and at innumerable festivals in between. "When he would pass by in his plumed hat people would say, 'Our plumber! There goes our plumber!' " said Mrs. Zellerbach reminiscently.

"No one seemed to know who I was supposed to be," Mike said. "Even in San Francisco, people would see me and say, 'Who the hell's that?' They thought I was Cortez. In North Beach they thought I was Columbus." Now a builder and apartment-house owner, Desiano finished near the bottom in this year's tournament, winning only two games.