By now, huge portions of San Diego’s literate and book-buying public know that Chuck Valverde, owner of Wahrenbrock’s Book House on Broadway, downtown, died on Saturday, August 23, from respiratory illness and complications at the age of 73. As many as would rightly claim him as a friend as well as those who wish they could, I will claim him as not only friend but very much a father figure. Chuck expressed flattery and amusement when he read my brief tribute to him on the occasion of his 65th birthday when I noted he would have been about the same age as my dad. In fact, he was some years younger than my father. He then inquired about my mother, whom he had never met. Had you known Chuck, you would see the inimitable and gentlemanly humor there.

Shortly after 9/11, when I found myself without a convenient place to write, Chuck offered me a desk on the third floor of the bookstore. Surrounded by rare and antiquarian volumes, the cream of Wahrenbrock’s stock, I wrote my weekly “T.G.I.F.” column in its early days as well as other things, including a novel based on Tristan and Isolde, which Chuck encouraged me to take on simply by saying he didn’t think anyone had done it as a straight novel other than Rosemary Sutcliffe and her short book for young adults. Chuck would know, and if he hinted that it might be worthwhile, well then the idea was sheer genius. Unfortunately the unfinished novel was something less. Writing that autumn, in that space surrounded by the most wonderful volumes, was a manifestation of a childhood dream I had of heaven. Exactly that and Chuck furnished it free of charge.

I had met him through Jan Tonnesen though I may have spoken to Chuck first, as far back as 1976 at the store’s previous location. Tonnesen and I became fast friends and performed music together for nearly 20 years. It is Jan and Chuck Jr. as well as Gerhardt Boehm, Tim Kennedy, and (recently onboard) Donald Baird who will have to fill such unfillable shoes.

“We’re still all kind of numb,” Tonnesen told me the Saturday after Chuck died. “We’re on autopilot.” He paused here, thought: “Chuck lit a fire under me to love the whole commerce of books — the buying, the selling, the love of books, and the ability to put the right book in the right hands.”

* * *

Excerpt from “Book Kings,” written by Judith Moore for the Reader, October 19, 1989:

“I ask Chuck Valverde, Sr., if he has a memorable book buy story, and he tells me this: ‘I went out in the backcountry — to Spring Valley — and went into a garage where the books were stored. I heard a kind of rustling. The hair just stood up on the back of my neck. And I looked around, and there was a mountain lion, caged up in a kind of flimsy pen.’ I asked what happened then. ‘I left.’”

* * *

Rather than Frank “Bring ’Em Back Alive” Buck, Chuck might be seen as a kind of Cary Grant/Woody Allen backing slowly away from what might well have been a treasure trove of literature. Had it been copies of Valley of the Dolls, it would have made no difference. “In fact,” Tonnesen once told me, “those are rather valuable.”

Moore began her article nearly 20 years ago this way: “When you ask how Wahrenbrock’s Book House got its start, the story most often told is this. It was summer 1935. Vernon Wahrenbrock had just graduated from Pomona College. Jobs were scarce. Using books that belonged to family and friends, Wahrenbrock amassed a small stock and opened a store at the northeast corner of Ninth Avenue and Broadway, downtown. He had so few books that to fill shelves he would stand one book up, lay two books down, stand one up, lay two down, and so on, around the shop….

“Fifty-four years later, [now 63 years, as of 2008] Wahrenbrock’s Book House (now at 726 Broadway) is San Diego’s oldest book shop. Vernon Wahrenbrock, in his mid-70s, semi-retired and living in Escondido, sold the store in 1965. In that same year, Chuck Valverde became the store’s manager and is now its owner.

“At the front counter, a heavy-bellied fellow around whose sunburned arms tattooed blue spider webs wreathe, needs, ‘books on the subject of Scientology.’ No sooner has Chuck Jr. dispatched the fellow down a side aisle than a woman walks in, asks where mysteries are kept. She’s directed upstairs, to the second floor. She gasps. ‘You mean there’s more?’

“A rangy 19-year-old, taller than his father and darker complexioned, with black curls loose on his neck, Chuck Jr. can remember being in the book shop from the time he learned to walk. But he still finds intimidating the sheer numbers of books here, some quarter of a million volumes.

“‘People who’ve never been in here before,’ he tells me [Moore], ‘will stand at the counter and look around and say something like, ‘I’m overwhelmed!’ And then you say to them, ‘Have you seen the second floor? The third?’

“Books rise up on either side along the marble stairs that lead to the second floor. Twelve volumes of The Writings of George Washington. Eleven volumes of John Fiske’s Historical Writings. Two more steps up, there is James Truslow Adam’s March of Democracy in seven volumes. The Great Events by Famous Historians in 20 volumes. Another step up is Documents of German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, in six, fat, dusty volumes. At the top of the stairs is a Thackery set, bound in green cloth, spines stamped with gold flowers.

“The second floor window looks out over Broadway. Under the window there are three shelves packed with books by and about Winston Churchill. From the cover of The Gathering Storm, his dear old bulldog face looks up. Nearby, a brown bookcase holds up four shelves about the Kennedys — from PT-109 to the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”

* * *

Chuck’s obituary in the San Diego Union-Tribune read, in part:

“Charles Anthony Valverde was born Feb. 12, 1935, in Philadelphia, to Charles and Della Valverde. He was the only child of an Army officer, and he attended several schools throughout the United States and overseas, including in the Philippines.

“In the Union-Tribune interview, Mr. Valverde said that books became his childhood companions when his parents were abroad and he was staying with a married cousin in Washington’s Olympic National Forest.

“With all the rainfall, I’d be inside reading,” Mr. Valverde said. In high school, Mr. Valverde played basketball, baseball and football, said his daughter, Tara Rettig. He went on to play football at San Diego State College, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business in the mid-1950s.

“Before owning Wahrenbrock’s, Mr. Valverde helped organize the University of California expansion to San Diego, Irvine and Santa Cruz, guiding the start of campus bookshops and libraries.

“Mr. Valverde was a board member of Father Joe’s St. Vincent de Paul Villages and was a supporter and former president of the Central Library Friends of the Library.

“Mr. Valverde is survived by his wife, Teri Anne of El Cajon; three children, Chuck Valverde of San Diego, Tara Rettig of El Cajon and Tricia Valverde of El Cajon; and six grandchildren.”

* * *

Chuck would talk to me often on the sidewalk in front of the store. He expressed an interest in my work and on more than one occasion, after closing the shop, he and staff members would share judicious amounts of bourbon, possibly a cigar, and discuss San Diego history, literature, religion, or the street people that frequented his shop. Chuck’s concern for the homeless of his city was well known and he might have taken issue with me when I once published an interview with a former case manager from Saint Vincent’s and offered my own critical description of the facilities there. He did not say so. He did once, however, suggest I might have been unfair to the Friends of the Library in a piece I did (though I did not intend to be so) and he reminded me of a gentle mother lioness.

Chuck was a handsome guy. To say he appeared bookish is only an observation of his eyeglasses and surroundings. He always appeared to be the same age, roughly 45, no matter what his true age might have been or what physical condition he was in. Phlegmatic is a word that comes to mind, rather slow-speaking, a considered manner of delivery and always aware of context and to whom he was speaking. Never unkind (that I recall, though I hardly knew him fully) he would smile when he happened to agree with me on some crack at the expense of some writer, agent, or politician. In recent years he would alternately appear in pain or thoroughly free from it. He never complained to me but it was clear that he was often, at least, physically uncomfortable. Either way, he did not allow it to dictate his demeanor — not in public and never to me.

He was hardly the jolly bookseller, no Dickensian eccentric; if anything, he might have been the smartest guy in a Damon Runyon story. He would have fit neatly into any one of Raymond Chandler’s novels, and if Robert Mitchum played Philip Marlowe so well, certainly Chuck would have been convincing had he been an actor. To me, he even looked a bit like Chandler — if you squinted just a little — only tougher. He bought books from me at a rate higher than he had to. He could not have made a profit on these many and often sales. I remember him telling me, “A writer has to have his books. He’s not a writer otherwise.” On these occasions he would pay me what I needed and then slide back toward me certain books, the ones he rightly suspected I was loathe to part with. One of these was Frank McShane’s biography of Raymond Chandler.

When he could see that drinking was getting the better of me some years ago, he would not buy books but would talk to me for as long as I cared to hang out on the sidewalk with him. He never mentioned booze on these occasions.

Yesterday, a good friend of mine, a woman, came to my hotel room in tears. She brought me Lexapro, an antidepressant I had left at her home some time ago and said, “I thought you would need this.” The pills don’t quite work that way and certainly they would do little in the face of writing this piece. My friend did not want her name mentioned, but she loved Chuck dearly (thoroughly platonically, lest anything else be read into it) and she often brought gifts of cactus, orchids, and other plants I knew little about with her to the store. (Apparently Chuck’s knowledge of plants was more limited than I assumed and some of those plants were for Tonnesen, as it turns out). “He always treated me so well,” she said, then proceeded to bury her face in her arms on the couch. As to who comforted whom for the next several moments would have been debatable.

The senior Valverde had a facility for knowing how to connect people with whatever it was they might be looking for, and not just books. Over 30 years, I might have seen him at the swap meet once or twice but for the most part he seemed only to exist in the confines of his bookstore. And yet, an impression was created that the world came to him for miscellaneous information as to auto auctions, estate sales, 78 rpm recordings, farmers’ markets, cabbages, and information on kings or sealing wax.

It is hardly my intention to write hagiography here. I think I can be assured that Chuck was not a saint. He was simply one of the very few best people I know. I never worked for him and could see that he might be prone to impatience and irascibility. Those who did work for him would, at times, demonstrate a nervousness that might well indicate this side of Chuck, but again, I was never subject to it.

He would let me use the phone without question or store my backpack, guitars, or suitcase there many times. The surety that he was being too generous with me was often unshakable.

* * *

Another Moore snapshot of Chuck at work in 1989:

“The telephone rings (the 11th call in 30 minutes). Chuck Sr. answers. ‘The Blacksmith’s Sourcebook? Give me a moment. I’ll check.’ He heads down through the shop; threads between shelves that rise from floor to eight-foot ceilings; zips past sections set aside for films, psychology, prenatal care, hobbies, rivers, deserts, caves and caving; steps over a box out of which books spill; edges past a customer who has open in his hands The Shooter’s Bible. He disappears into a book-lined alcove at the back of the store, 100 feet away.

“Emerging from banks of shelves, Chuck Sr. says, ‘Hi there, Bob! Be with you in a minute,’ to a suited gentleman studying the titles of books stacked spine-up on the 50% off table. Chuck Sr. pushes a shock of graying hair off his forehead and picks up the telephone. ‘We don’t have The Blacksmith’s Sourcebook. What we do have is The Complete Guide to Blacksmithing and Practical Blacksmithing. Okay, I’ll leave them here at the counter for you.’

“Blacksmithing books rubber-banded together, Chuck Sr. joins Bob. Bob collects materials about Baja California and wishes to add to his collection. Ten years ago, he’s saying, he bought a first edition of Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez for $100. Noting that The Sea of Cortez in its first edition now can’t be purchased for less than $200, Chuck Sr. says, ‘A book I liked about Baja was Forgotten Waters; Adventure in the Gulf of California. Have you seen that?’

“Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha gripped in both hands, a scrawny teenager asks Tonnesen if he can help him find something to read in philosophy.”

* * *

I remember Chuck either the calm center of a flurry of activity from telephone calls to enquiries about books or in moments of relative repose, usually standing on the sidewalk with one of his cigars (until he gave them up) and listening as well as dispensing anecdotes. One time it might be about a politician and a gangster in the 1920s or some old Wild West action in Old Town at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries. He was the go-to guy for more than books. To me, he was a giant and we’ll see no more of giants.

— John Brizzolara

A memorial service for Chuck Valverde takes place at the Scottish Rite Center (1895 Camino del Rio South) tomorrow, September 5, at 12:30 p.m.