❒ Neighborhood icon has seen a lot from ‘Bottom of Third’

By Donna Beth Weilenman
Staff Reporter

Phil Lucas always wanted to live in Benicia.

Lucas and his wife, Connie, moved from Oakland to San Ramon so their daughters could attend that city’s schools. But as soon as they could, in 1978, they began house hunting in Benicia.

They picked the first house they saw, he said, because it was in the older part of town. Soon afterward, Lucas set up shop in the garage, turning it into the spot where he would spend years watching the neighborhood.

The Lucases started out as being “the young whippersnappers” of East Third Street, as Joe Henderson, the noted Benicia educator and senior resident of the street at the time, called the newcomers 33 years ago.

“We were the kids in the neighborhood,” Connie Lucas said.

Now the Lucases are the venerable members of the street. And Phil, 69, has spent as much of that time as possible in a chair in his garage — or as one neighbor nicknamed it, “Phil’s Bottom of the Third.”

The nickname is borrowed from the name of a local bar, The Bottom of the Fifth. And like the bar, the baseball reference is no accident.

Phil Lucas loves sports. A large photograph of Joe Montana, the legendary 49ers quarterback, is mounted on the door that leads to the rest of the house. A Giants pennant is on a wall. Sports-oriented magnets decorate the full-sized refrigerator that’s stocked with beer and soft drinks.

And when Lucas pulls down the garage door, it looks like Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s old red No. 8 NASCAR ride is flying past.

“I love NASCAR,” Lucas said.

When his friends gather around his home to watch sports with Lucas, they know that even during baseball and football seasons, Lucas is likely to switch the channel to the racing broadcast to check on his favorite drivers.

“I used to watch golf, but I don’t get to play,” he said. “So I haven’t watched golf in a while.”

He used to. At one time, Lucas had a neighbor across the street who resembled Tiger Woods. They would amuse neighbors, using clubs to swing whiffle balls across East Third Street to each other.

But Lucas watches more than sports from the garage. Friends call him the neighborhood watchdog, because he keeps an eye on happenings up and down the street.

And he’s seen a lot.

“They moved a house up the street,” he said. It wasn’t just any home. It was one of the ones associated with the noted writer Jack London when he used to frequent Benicia’s First Street.

“It was the house next to the Lido. They towed it up here.”

Once he saw a neighbor tackle a peeping tom; he helped out by calling police to take the miscreant away.

Another time, police arrived at his home because a youngster had run away from a nearby day care center.

Because Lucas waves and smiles at all his neighbors going past — and because folks are just as likely to walk up his driveway and pause for a visit — the officers had hoped the youngster had done just that.

“They had the helicopters out,” Lucas recalled. “And the first place they stopped was here.”

But the child was determined to make it to his home across town and hadn’t visited with Lucas. “He made it home all right,” Lucas recalled.

Lucas likes his view of the world. He said it was always his plan to have such a view when he moved to Benicia.

As a child and young man, he used to observe retired men who gathered at barbershops or in front of drugstores to pass the time and people-watch. “I decided I was going to do that when I retired,” he said.

Connie didn’t believe him. “She said I was too hyper.”

But he was too hyper to sit in his neatly groomed back yard. “There’s nothing to see back there.” So Lucas chose his garage as an ideal vantage point.

Long before the term “man cave” was coined, Lucas had just that.

Friends who would come by for his sports event cookouts often came with decor for the garage: Signs, calendars, sports pictures, NASCAR schedules.

Now, few surfaces are uncovered. Among the gifts: Dangling behind Lucas’s chair is a “redneck wind chime,” a wooden plank with a row of dangling crushed beer cans. On a shelf is a carved bear wearing a ball cap, a gift from a park ranger who found two of them left behind in a park.

A wine barrel cut in half is Lucas’s table. It’s sturdy, and it has a rim that prevents beer cans from tipping. And out front is the driveway — plenty of room for his buddies who flock to his home to watch television with him.

They bring the food, prepared in advance or cooked on the spot, like a neighborhood tailgate party. “I’m the only one who doesn’t cook,” he said.

And there are Lucas’s famous ladies, gifts from Connie, who doesn’t mind their appearance on the wall.

Lucas’s chair now is a wheelchair. He’s been battling a longtime illness, and while his doctors say it’s getting worse, he’s already beaten their expectations.

Assigned to hospice care, he’s outlasted the six-month lifespan that normally means.

For a while he was in a scooter, and was known for taking the little red motorized vehicle around the downtown area. He even rode it up to the center of the Benicia-Martinez bridge when the pedestrian and bicycle path opened.

In fact, Lucas has sports plans of his own, as soon as the weather clears for good.

“I want to try nine holes of golf,” he said. If he succeeds, he said, he’ll play even more.