Painter George (S8E19)

Painter George, aka George Harry Crampton-Glassanos, is fine if you wanna call him just "George." In this episode, meet and get to know George. Both of his parents came to San Francisco early in their lives. His mom hails from the East Coast and her family were all working-class folks. His grandpa was a business agent for a machinist's union in Massachusetts. That grandfather shaped George's later involvement in organized labor. (Today, he's a member of the ILWU). George never knew this grandparent who had an outsize impression on him. He died shortly after George was born. But in Massachusetts, in addition to his union involvement, he owned a store that sold records on one half and hats on the other. His dad moved to San Francisco from the Midwest to attend school at the Art Institute (RIP). He got into that school and often slept overnight on a ledge on campus. Both of George's parents were punk rockers in SF in the late-Seventies. Amazing. His dad even lived with the guitarist from The Avengers (Penelope Houston's punk band). Though they would meet later, both spent time at the famed Mabuhay Gardens back in the day. George's dad was a painter as well, and that turned out to have a huge influence on George. His parents met when his mom got a job with his dad's construction working crew. This was around the mid-Eighties. George came along in 1989. After that, his parents had two more boys, making George the oldest of three. His earliest memories are from around the mid-Nineties in The Mission. George spent time when he was a kid running around The Mission and pre-gentrification Dogpatch with his dad. They lived on 18th between San Carlos and Lexington (or, zooming out a bit, between Mission and Valencia). That's two blocks from where I lived from 2003 to 2017, incidentally. But George's family got evicted from that apartment on 18th. The building sold and the new owners evicted tenants one by one, including families like George's. Both of his brothers were born in that apartment. His dad had made modifications there, handyman that he was. And George was old enough to remember all the awesome neighbors they had. I ask George about his favorite restaurants when he was a kid. "I fuckin' ate burritos every night of the week," he answers. He'd hit up nearby La Cumbre or El Buen Sabor around 300 times a year. Whiz Burger also figured big in George's childhood diet. There was a diner across 16th from The Roxie called Aunt Mary's (George shows me a coin purse from the place while we're recording) that he loved as well. Art was always encouraged at home. George's dad would bring home boxes of fax paper for him to draw on with ballpoint pens. He'd draw and draw and draw, often of things he saw. He remembers staring out the window of their place on 18th and watching cars go by, and he'd draw those. But it wasn't until high school at School of the Arts that George really started cranking it out. At SOTA, teachers encouraged George to draw whatever the hell he wanted to. He remembers drawing a skeleton pushing a paleta cart. When George tells me he attended SOTA 2004–2008, I mention that a number of past guests of this show went there around that time. "[The school] churned out a lot of us," he says. Joe Talbot, who co-wrote, produced, and directed The Last Black Man in San Francisco, went to SOTA in that era. George goes on a sidebar to share a story of getting caught smoking pot by a SOTA vice princi