Carol Double-D II

Jeanette Etheredge

I've experienced yet another example of living on a Möbius Strip. We are all connected.

Just a few days after writing about how my posting of December 1, 2015 on the passing of Carol Doda has recently surged in views—for unknown reasons—Ms. Doda's name appears in the  New York Times August 3, 2026, print edition obituary by Penelope Green, of Jeanette Etheredge, 85, a legendary owner of a North Beach San Francisco bar. 

Ms. Doda was San Francisco's most famous stripper, and maybe the most famous stripper of her time. Ms. Doda's names appears in Ms. Etheredge's obituary as an example of the eclectic, celebrity crowd of A-Listers, B-Listers, No-Listers, and likely ex-cons, who favored going to Tosca. It was the West Coast Elaine's, the famous bar, eatery on Second Avenue in New York that was hosted by the ineffable saloon keeper, Elaine Kaufman. 

Elaine's is no longer there since Elaine passed away, but Tosca remains, and now serves food. With Ms. Etheredge, there was no food served.

Ms. Doda's names is dropped: "Carol Doda—once San Francisco's most famous stripper—who in the 1960s danced at the nearby Condor Club in a Rudy Gernreich monoskin, showcasing her newly enhanced breasts, was a regular."

Rudy Gernreich was a famous fashion designer in the 1960s who designed swimwear, amongst other articles of clothing for women. He was famous for designing the topless bathing suit. (It is California.)

But Penelope Green's obit is about Ms. Etheredge, and what a backstory. It almost reads like a spy novel.

Jeanette "was born in China. Her grandparents were Armenian refugees who fled the Ottoman genocide of 1915, settling first in Manchuria, and then in Qingdao on China's eastern coast, but their community was Russian—Jeanette's first language.

"During WW II, the family was interned in a Japanese prison camp in northern China. When is was liberated by American troops, they returned home, only to be exiled again after the Communist Revolution in 1949, when they fled China and spent a year at a refuge camp in the Philippines. In 1950, when Jeanette was 9, they immigrated to San Francisco." You don't have to own a bar to be able to tell stories.

Jeanette was famous for only remembering customers' first names. Like the fictional Boston bar Cheers, everybody knew your name.

I was only in San Francisco once, in1971, when I could ride the streetcars for 25¢, and the subway BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit, was still on the drawing boards. I never got to North Beach.

The Condor Club, mentioned as where Ms. Doda danced, was the scene of her grand entrance being on a piano lowered from the ceiling. The Club, and the piano continued to be famous for a most unusual death.

Read on, McDuff. It's California.

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