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Island Sees Great Roller Derby Revival
His name is Icebox. He’s been a roller derby fan since he first saw the high-speed, super-competitive, extreme-contact, action-packed sport on TV at age 10. Now the 6-foot-3-inch mountain man who proudly states his weight—357 pounds—is turning up the heat.Icebox is general manager of the new-look Alameda-based Bay Bombers, the 2007 version of the legendary San Francisco Bay Bombers, formed in 1954, that drew nearly 35,000 fans to an outdoor match at the Oakland Coliseum in the early 1970s—before giving way to competition from baseball and football and fading into obscurity. As a participant in the national grassroots renaissance that dawned with the new millennium, the expert blocker’s aim (his size, he affirms, gives him elbowing advantages) is to lure back former roller derby fans and fire up new ones.
To achieve this goal, his No. 1 action item has been the introduction of a regular game-a-month schedule at the Alameda High School gym, the Bombers’ home base. “Games were sporadic until recently,” says Icebox. Spectators to date have numbered between 700 and 1,200 per game—a raindrop in the Bay compared to the numbers that once watched Bay Bombers games on 120 television stations nationwide.
Icebox—a familiar face and popular figure at the Oakland Coliseum, where he has worked in security for 25 years—is a Bombers veteran. He skated for the late, great original team in the ’70s, and for the Los Angeles T-Birds during an ’80s roller derby revival. “I once skated for both teams in the same year,” he says. He got his nickname in the 1980s. A fan shouted: “He’s bigger than a refrigerator.” Then someone said: “He looks like an icebox.” He liked it. It stuck. He gave up on being Robert Smith Jr.
Icebox’s partner in the mission to make roller derby a major Alameda attraction and to grow it nationally is Bombers team captain Maverick “I beat up folks on Saturday night and play the organ in church on Sunday” Howard. That he gets as good as he gives becomes clear when he reels off a list of dislocations and breaks from past games. “Once,” he says, “Icebox threw his body on top of me and cracked my ribs.” He unbuttons his shirt and reveals a muscular shoulder etched with a deep 2-inch scar. “Someone kicked me with a skate last time out,” he shares. “That’s not legal.” But he’s not complaining. “In roller derby you get pain, you mend, you forgive. You don’t hold grudges off the track.”
The new-look Bay Bombers have a men’s team and a women’s team. They take turns playing on game nights. Some of the teams formed since roller derby started making a slow-at-first, now faster-growing, comeback are amateur. The Bombers, however, true to their origins, are a professional team.While a would-be player has to be at least 18 to compete—and the Bombers boast a couple of players older than 60—enthusiasts call it is a family sport. “Kids love it,” says Maverick. “Seeing people skate on the track—that is the first thing that appeals. Then there’s the colorful gear. Then someone is elbowed and falls right in front of you. It’s scary and exciting. It hypes them up like they’ve had sugar.” It’s as cool, they think, as, well—Icebox!
For the Bay Bombers July and August schedule, call (510) 472-1153 or visit www.sfbaybombers.com. The Bay Bombers home base is the Alameda High School gym, 2201 Encinal Ave.
—By Wanda Hennig
Veggie Tales: Supporting Small Farms and Your Community
Most of us have heard of those home-delivered organic-produce boxes, but if you haven’t, here’s the scoop: Growers working on small farms in the Central Valley deliver seasonal organic produce to your home or to a central neighborhood drop-site each week. This is community-supported agriculture, or CSA, at its finest, sort of like a subscription to fresh, sustainable fruits, nuts, veggies, herbs, eggs and, sometimes, dairy products—right off the farm that morning.
The box contents vary by season and by week. One box might contain heirloom apples, walnuts, squash and fresh rosemary, while another season’s box might have blackberries, heirloom tomato varieties (yellow-striped, green, black, purple or luscious red ones), baby lettuce, white radishes and more. Boxes typically contain 10 to12 varieties of produce and will feed a family of four over several meals. Bigger family? Order more than one box. The CSA box helps support local farmers—often family operations that grow organics or heirloom varieties, helping to heal the Earth.
The bigger scoop is that Dan’s Fresh Produce (2300 Central Ave., 510-523-1777) is now offering a CSA box three times a week. The content changes weekly, and you pick up your box right at the produce stand. Owner (and Alameda Magazine contributor) Dan Avakian works closely with the Del Rio Botanicals farm in West Sacramento to bring delicious and sometimes unusual produce right to our Alameda kitchens. The cost is $32 per box; call ahead to order. According to Avakian, home delivery is coming soon.
If you ask Emily Allegrotti what she thought she’d be doing as a college junior at Stanford University, she’ll tell you, “Definitely not this.”
But the 2004 Encinal High School graduate is spending her summer in Zambia at the Mwange Refugee Camp as a volunteer with Facilitating Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Empowerment, or FORGE, a nonprofit started by a Stanford student. She’s toting hundreds of books in French and Swahili to the camp, home to refugees from the People’s Republic of Congo, helping with educational programs and setting up a library.
Allegrotti, 20, recognized by Alameda Magazine in 2004 as an outstanding graduating senior, is majoring in urban studies with an emphasis on urban education and a minor in political science. What exactly motivated this southern African humanitarian sojourn? Her own good fortune, plus a desire to share her personal resources with the less fortunate, she says.
1. OUR NEIGHBORHOOD CUL-DE-SAC
It’s like a giant, asphalt backyard shared by all of the neighbors. Parents sit on benches on their front lawns and watch their kids play together. One neighbor puts out orange construction cones to warn cars to slow down as they approach. There may be an occasional scraped knee, but other than that, it is suburban heaven.
2. THE HARBOR BAY CLUB
I love to be there with friends playing tennis on the blue-and-green courts, surrounded by trees and right next to the estuary. On many days the sky is blue and the weather is perfect, and here is the capper: geese in formation flying overhead. The tennis stops for a moment, and everyone looks up. We get nature, sport and friends all in one spot—and it’s all close to home.
3. MY BED
It’s big, it’s firm, my wife is there with me, and when I wake up in the morning, I open my shades and look through my window, which overlooks my backyard in Alameda. For me, it is comfort and safety all in one. It’s an even better place to be when I know that my 17-year-old son is home in his bed!
4. THE JET IN FRONT OF ENCINAL HIGH SCHOOL
What an unusual and cool monument that is! Even people upset with anything having to do with the military have to admit the A4-C Skyhawk jet is the perfect mascot for a high school near a former Naval air station. It’s a unique sight, and it reminds people of Alameda’s historic past.
5. THE HIGH STREET BRIDGE
First of all, that we live on an island and have to cross bridges to get to our town is, in and of itself, a pretty special thing. The High Street Bridge isn’t necessarily attractive; in fact, its retro-industrial look seems out of place near a residential area. But the vibrations and the rumble under my tires when I pass over the steel-grate drawbridge means I’m almost home.
Veggie Tales: Supporting Small Farms and Your Community
Most of us have heard of those home-delivered organic-produce boxes, but if you haven’t, here’s the scoop: Growers working on small farms in the Central Valley deliver seasonal organic produce to your home or to a central neighborhood drop-site each week. This is community-supported agriculture, or CSA, at its finest, sort of like a subscription to fresh, sustainable fruits, nuts, veggies, herbs, eggs and, sometimes, dairy products—right off the farm that morning.
The box contents vary by season and by week. One box might contain heirloom apples, walnuts, squash and fresh rosemary, while another season’s box might have blackberries, heirloom tomato varieties (yellow-striped, green, black, purple or luscious red ones), baby lettuce, white radishes and more. Boxes typically contain 10 to12 varieties of produce and will feed a family of four over several meals. Bigger family? Order more than one box. The CSA box helps support local farmers—often family operations that grow organics or heirloom varieties, helping to heal the Earth.
The bigger scoop is that Dan’s Fresh Produce (2300 Central Ave., 510-523-1777) is now offering a CSA box three times a week. The content changes weekly, and you pick up your box right at the produce stand. Owner (and Alameda Magazine contributor) Dan Avakian works closely with the Del Rio Botanicals farm in West Sacramento to bring delicious and sometimes unusual produce right to our Alameda kitchens. The cost is $32 per box; call ahead to order. According to Avakian, home delivery is coming soon.
—By Julia Park
The opening of Nob Hill Foods in early spring was the talk of the town—and for good reason: The new 58,977-square-foot grocery store at 2531 Blanding Ave. brings more upscale food-shopping options to Alameda, breathing new life into the once-decrepit and blighted Bridgeside Center; and the $14 million makeover of the center has also attracted a slew of other businesses to the area.
Big parking spaces and an easy-to-maneuver parking lot, convenient access via the Park Street or Fruitvale bridges, and the shopping center’s development around the Oakland Estuary make shopping pleasurable enough, but the Nob Hill outlet itself exudes toniness, from its high-sheen floors to its immaculately polished meat case and its well-stocked shelves.
Well worth noting is Nob Hill’s natural foods section, which invites lingering in the bulk food aisles for nuts, grains and flour, and sets forth umpteen rows of higher-end organic items, including many gluten-free and nondairy products. Discover a nice (and sometimes exotic) array of fruits and veggies in the produce department, or browse the store’s reading center for books and magazines, before venturing into the remaining aisles for other daily shopping needs. There’s a friendly, helpful cadre of employees on hand to point confused consumers in the right direction. Other perks: a post office, bank, pharmacy and coffee shop, plus to-go items from a deli.
Fine Furniture
Lighter, more flexible and just as strong as most woods, bamboo isn’t just food for pandas anymore. “This stuff really pushes the limits,” Anthony Marschak, 26, says of the material he started using to make furniture about five years ago.
A graduate of California College of the Arts, where he studied furniture design, Marschak first used bamboo when he worked for a company making skateboards out of the material. “I realized I could mold it,” he says. “I took that knowledge into my background as a furniture person.”
Because bamboo is technically a grass and not a wood, it grows very quickly and is a sustainable material, Marschak says. After spending years developing his designs for a chair, stool and coffee table, Marschak launched his two-person, Alameda-based company, Modern Bamboo, in 2006.
Marschak worked for three years on the design for his Spring chair. “That’s our flagship piece,” he says. The chair went through 11 versions as he continued to revise its design with input from colleagues. “A chair is the hardest thing to design correctly,” Marschak says. It needed to contour to a person’s body and feel comfortable for different types of people. The end result was a simple and fluid chair with a gentle bounce that owes to bamboo’s flexibility.
Other products in the Modern Bamboo furniture line include Marschak’s Becca stool, which can be used for seating, storage or as a side table. The company also manufactures a game table with a bamboo molded base and glass top. The furniture maker hopes to eventually extend his line to include a bar stool and dining table.
Although Marschak makes the prototypes in Alameda, the furniture is manufactured in Michigan; prices range from about $500 to $1,200. Marschak also designs custom pieces upon request, with pricing starting at $1,000. In the Bay Area you can see samples of Marschak’s work at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco and the Gardener on Fourth Street in Berkeley. For more information, go to www.modernbamboo.com.
From Blight to Bright
The opening of Nob Hill Foods in early spring was the talk of the town—and for good reason: The new 58,977-square-foot grocery store at 2531 Blanding Ave. brings more upscale food-shopping options to Alameda, breathing new life into the once-decrepit and blighted Bridgeside Center; and the $14 million makeover of the center has also attracted a slew of other businesses to the area.
Big parking spaces and an easy-to-maneuver parking lot, convenient access via the Park Street or Fruitvale bridges, and the shopping center’s development around the Oakland Estuary make shopping pleasurable enough, but the Nob Hill outlet itself exudes toniness, from its high-sheen floors to its immaculately polished meat case and its well-stocked shelves.
Well worth noting is Nob Hill’s natural foods section, which invites lingering in the bulk food aisles for nuts, grains and flour, and sets forth umpteen rows of higher-end organic items, including many gluten-free and nondairy products. Discover a nice (and sometimes exotic) array of fruits and veggies in the produce department, or browse the store’s reading center for books and magazines, before venturing into the remaining aisles for other daily shopping needs. There’s a friendly, helpful cadre of employees on hand to point confused consumers in the right direction. Other perks: a post office, bank, pharmacy and coffee shop, plus to-go items from a deli.
ALAMEDA MADE
Fine Furniture
Lighter, more flexible and just as strong as most woods, bamboo isn’t just food for pandas anymore. “This stuff really pushes the limits,” Anthony Marschak, 26, says of the material he started using to make furniture about five years ago.A graduate of California College of the Arts, where he studied furniture design, Marschak first used bamboo when he worked for a company making skateboards out of the material. “I realized I could mold it,” he says. “I took that knowledge into my background as a furniture person.”
Because bamboo is technically a grass and not a wood, it grows very quickly and is a sustainable material, Marschak says. After spending years developing his designs for a chair, stool and coffee table, Marschak launched his two-person, Alameda-based company, Modern Bamboo, in 2006.
Marschak worked for three years on the design for his Spring chair. “That’s our flagship piece,” he says. The chair went through 11 versions as he continued to revise its design with input from colleagues. “A chair is the hardest thing to design correctly,” Marschak says. It needed to contour to a person’s body and feel comfortable for different types of people. The end result was a simple and fluid chair with a gentle bounce that owes to bamboo’s flexibility.
Other products in the Modern Bamboo furniture line include Marschak’s Becca stool, which can be used for seating, storage or as a side table. The company also manufactures a game table with a bamboo molded base and glass top. The furniture maker hopes to eventually extend his line to include a bar stool and dining table.
Although Marschak makes the prototypes in Alameda, the furniture is manufactured in Michigan; prices range from about $500 to $1,200. Marschak also designs custom pieces upon request, with pricing starting at $1,000. In the Bay Area you can see samples of Marschak’s work at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco and the Gardener on Fourth Street in Berkeley. For more information, go to www.modernbamboo.com.
—By Ellen Keohane
Although they didn’t know each other, Alamedan Grant Ute and Oaklander Bruce Singer, longtime railroad buffs, were both members of the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association when the Alameda Museum’s Judith Lynch had the brilliant idea to bring the two together.
“Grant worked in the archives, which is our kind of scholarly activity, and I always wanted to be a train engineer, so I was involved in operating the antique electric-railway equipment,” explains Singer. And both of the men had a particular interest in the railroads of Alameda. Lynch “knew us both individually and asked if we would put on some kind of slide show” on historic railways in Alameda.
That slide show turned into a much larger project—the book Alameda by Rail (Arcadia Publishing, www.arcadiapublishing.com), which is chock full of vintage images of the city and its trains, from the dawn of Alameda’s railroad age in 1869 to the end of the city’s electric rail service in 1941.
Singer explains that the city, partially because of location and partially because of luck, had an extremely important railway system, much more complex than the size of the small community seemingly warranted. For two months in 1869, Alameda, which already was sending ferries to San Francisco, became the first tidewater port of the Transcontinental Railroad. The terminus soon moved to Alameda’s bigger sister, Oakland, but the tracks were laid and the way paved for the electric commuter rail that followed.
“The electric railway was an outgrowth of the steam railroads,” says Singer. Its “Red Cars”—so called for their cherry-red exteriors (repainted from their original Pullman green)—traveled lines that linked Alameda to Oakland and the greater Bay Area. Photographs in Alameda by Rail show electric railcars cruising by houses that are still recognizable today.
Alas, the rails weren’t destined to live forever. The combination of cars, bridges and regulation eventually killed the electric rail service in 1941. For now, all that remains of Alameda’s storied railways are the memorial signs on Lincoln that commemorate the stations and “the Rosenblum Cellars that used to be the electric car shop,” says Singer. “That’s where they maintained and repaired the electric cars.”
But a little piece of Alameda history may be up and running again soon. “We’ve pledged all our royalties to restore a Red Car,” Singer says.
For more information on the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association and the Western Railway Museum, visit www.wrm.org.
Riding the Rails
Although they didn’t know each other, Alamedan Grant Ute and Oaklander Bruce Singer, longtime railroad buffs, were both members of the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association when the Alameda Museum’s Judith Lynch had the brilliant idea to bring the two together. “Grant worked in the archives, which is our kind of scholarly activity, and I always wanted to be a train engineer, so I was involved in operating the antique electric-railway equipment,” explains Singer. And both of the men had a particular interest in the railroads of Alameda. Lynch “knew us both individually and asked if we would put on some kind of slide show” on historic railways in Alameda.
That slide show turned into a much larger project—the book Alameda by Rail (Arcadia Publishing, www.arcadiapublishing.com), which is chock full of vintage images of the city and its trains, from the dawn of Alameda’s railroad age in 1869 to the end of the city’s electric rail service in 1941.
Singer explains that the city, partially because of location and partially because of luck, had an extremely important railway system, much more complex than the size of the small community seemingly warranted. For two months in 1869, Alameda, which already was sending ferries to San Francisco, became the first tidewater port of the Transcontinental Railroad. The terminus soon moved to Alameda’s bigger sister, Oakland, but the tracks were laid and the way paved for the electric commuter rail that followed.
“The electric railway was an outgrowth of the steam railroads,” says Singer. Its “Red Cars”—so called for their cherry-red exteriors (repainted from their original Pullman green)—traveled lines that linked Alameda to Oakland and the greater Bay Area. Photographs in Alameda by Rail show electric railcars cruising by houses that are still recognizable today.
Alas, the rails weren’t destined to live forever. The combination of cars, bridges and regulation eventually killed the electric rail service in 1941. For now, all that remains of Alameda’s storied railways are the memorial signs on Lincoln that commemorate the stations and “the Rosenblum Cellars that used to be the electric car shop,” says Singer. “That’s where they maintained and repaired the electric cars.”
But a little piece of Alameda history may be up and running again soon. “We’ve pledged all our royalties to restore a Red Car,” Singer says.
—By Elise Proulx
For more information on the Bay Area Electric Railroad Association and the Western Railway Museum, visit www.wrm.org.
Student Update
If you ask Emily Allegrotti what she thought she’d be doing as a college junior at Stanford University, she’ll tell you, “Definitely not this.”But the 2004 Encinal High School graduate is spending her summer in Zambia at the Mwange Refugee Camp as a volunteer with Facilitating Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Empowerment, or FORGE, a nonprofit started by a Stanford student. She’s toting hundreds of books in French and Swahili to the camp, home to refugees from the People’s Republic of Congo, helping with educational programs and setting up a library.
Allegrotti, 20, recognized by Alameda Magazine in 2004 as an outstanding graduating senior, is majoring in urban studies with an emphasis on urban education and a minor in political science. What exactly motivated this southern African humanitarian sojourn? Her own good fortune, plus a desire to share her personal resources with the less fortunate, she says.
TAKEFIVE with Randy Shandobil
Favorite Hot Spot
1. OUR NEIGHBORHOOD CUL-DE-SACIt’s like a giant, asphalt backyard shared by all of the neighbors. Parents sit on benches on their front lawns and watch their kids play together. One neighbor puts out orange construction cones to warn cars to slow down as they approach. There may be an occasional scraped knee, but other than that, it is suburban heaven.
2. THE HARBOR BAY CLUB
I love to be there with friends playing tennis on the blue-and-green courts, surrounded by trees and right next to the estuary. On many days the sky is blue and the weather is perfect, and here is the capper: geese in formation flying overhead. The tennis stops for a moment, and everyone looks up. We get nature, sport and friends all in one spot—and it’s all close to home.
3. MY BED
It’s big, it’s firm, my wife is there with me, and when I wake up in the morning, I open my shades and look through my window, which overlooks my backyard in Alameda. For me, it is comfort and safety all in one. It’s an even better place to be when I know that my 17-year-old son is home in his bed!
4. THE JET IN FRONT OF ENCINAL HIGH SCHOOL
What an unusual and cool monument that is! Even people upset with anything having to do with the military have to admit the A4-C Skyhawk jet is the perfect mascot for a high school near a former Naval air station. It’s a unique sight, and it reminds people of Alameda’s historic past.
5. THE HIGH STREET BRIDGE
First of all, that we live on an island and have to cross bridges to get to our town is, in and of itself, a pretty special thing. The High Street Bridge isn’t necessarily attractive; in fact, its retro-industrial look seems out of place near a residential area. But the vibrations and the rumble under my tires when I pass over the steel-grate drawbridge means I’m almost home.
—By Gina Jaber
