At Thurber House, you can use James Thurber’s toilet
A bathroom being a bathroom, however, the docent at the front door told a visitor to go ahead and use it.
Surrounded by such trappings of humility, a visitor could scarcely imagine all the great stuff that happened within its brick walls.
In Thurber’s tales, the quiet house on Jefferson Avenue where the family lived from 1913 to 1917 (it was built on the grounds of the state lunatic asylum) was generally a booby hatch of chaos and confusion, with three generations of Thurbers dashing about in pajamas and panic, throwing shoes at imaginary intruders and worrying whether electricity was leaking out of wall sockets.
Thurber, half blind, was himself a squinter whose poor vision did not prevent him from drawing an amiable amalgam of dogs, seals, rabbits and battling spouses.
Upstairs is the hallway where Rex the terrier slept, on the rare occasions he wasn’t up to something.
Rex, Thurber wrote, “never lost his dignity even when trying to accomplish the extravagant tasks my brothers and myself used to set for him.”
Rex never ran after cars, because he “didn’t seem to see the idea in pursuing something you couldn’t catch, or something you couldn’t do anything with, even if you did catch it.”
Outside, in a small park, is the garden that Thurber’s famous unicorn never visited.
[...] his fable about the unicorn appears, in its entirety, on a brass plaque.
[...] they took her away, cursing and screaming, and shut her up in an institution.
In the dining room is a TV, a later addition to the
The video, in which Thurber complains that his blindness must have been punishment for writing about human foibles, is the only sad thing about Thurber House.
After you see it, you walk into the dining room, which has been turned into a store that peddles knickknacks.
A Thurber pencil, with a picture of one of his cartoon dogs on it, costs 50 cents.
Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
Author James Thurber (1894-1961), creator of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and scores of stories, essays and cartoons for the New Yorker magazine.