Inside Doc Ricketts’ lab with the Jazz Guy, the Psychologist, the Hotel Guy and the Roughneck.

These passages are excerpted from a story that was originally published in the Weekly on Dec. 29, 2011. Dan Linehan speaks on Saturday, Oct. 24, about his new multimedia serial novel, Princess of the Bottom of the World, viewable virtually via the National Steinbeck Center at steinbeck.org.

SANDWICHED BETWEEN THE MONTEREY BAY AQUARIUM AND INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL SITS A SHACK. Lights burn inside it, back-lit silhouettes move behind the curtain-drawn windows, and this hole in the skyline, which was once known a long time ago as Pacific Biological Laboratories, rekindles some of its illuminating qualities.


It is unusual that the lights are on at all, but what’s going on inside is even less common: The gathering of a distinguished band of local figures that traces back to Ed “Doc” Ricketts.


I climb the creaking stairs and knock on the door. A man answers. I tell him that I have been writing about Ricketts, that I saw the light. 


“Come on in,” he says. “Have a look.”


As nondescript as the outside appears, the inside leaps from the pages of Steinbeck novels – a piano, photographs, a phonograph, posters. But no pumps hum. There are no tanks, test tubes, beakers, Bunsen burners or coils of pipe feeding water to slimy sea creatures. After Ricketts was killed by a train in 1948, the marine biologist’s equipment was cleared out. Nevertheless, memories of Cannery Row in its literary heyday hang about the lab like a lingering fog. And a poker game with a cast of characters is happening.


The Musician invites me to the table. The Actor, who looks more like a swarthy fisherman, deals the cards. The Jazz Guy, the Psychologist, the Hotel Guy, and the Roughneck round out the table. I half expect Mack and the Boys to bound through the door.


The Jazz Guy, who helped conceive the Monterey Jazz Festival in this room, gets impatient at the Musician for paying more attention to my questions than the cards. The Musician lays down four queens. The others grumble. That won’t be the last four-of-a-kind tonight, but it will be one of last poker games at Doc’s.


BACK IN 1955, HARLAN WATKINS, A SCHOOL TEACHER, HAD RENTED DOC’S and took his students to read Cannery Row there. Watkins’ new bride refused to live there, so the group got its start at Doc’s laboratory after Watkins convinced friends, who were already meeting up at a local restaurant to share stories and discuss interests, to buy it as a clubhouse in 1958 for $14,000.


Frank Wright, 92, an original member of the group, is the only surviving member who knew Ricketts. Wright doesn’t like to play poker. He’ll tell you that he’s too much of a card already.


Wright and Ricketts met in 1942 while in the Army. “After I’d known him for a couple of years, I said, ‘Ed, I notice that you accept people at face value, don’t you?’ He said, ‘I do. I accept people at face value until they prove themselves to be assholes,’” Wright says. 


He visited Ricketts often, and though he never got to meet Steinbeck personally, he rotated through the same spare bunk the author also crashed on.


One day, Wright says he spotted the manuscript for Cannery Row on Ricketts’ table and asked to read it. 


“Oh my God, I forgot you were coming down here tonight,” Wright remembers Ricketts saying. “I have to put that away. Frank, it is a new book. That is all I can tell you to satisfy your curiosity.”

In 1993, the remaining members sold Doc’s digs to the city of Monterey so it could be protected as a historic building. One of the terms of the sale was that the group would still have use of Doc’s until 2015 or until none of the old guard remained.