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 that 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 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.”


Months later I return. The Broadway Guy reads to the group: “If you have to steal, steal time. If you have to cheat, cheat death. If you have to lie, lie with the one you love. If you have to drink, drink with us.”


The Poet plays the piano, adorned with a bust of Ricketts and a cheeky painting by Playboy cartoonist and former member Eldon Dedini. The Attorney accompanies on harmonica.


This time the gathering is only a few hours long and ends without a card being dealt. Even with an infusion of young blood, the group is becoming as endangered as the Monterey sardine.


Over the years they refused lucrative offers to sell out to developers. But in 1993, as members started to pass on, 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.


A plan for how to use Doc’s still remains to be formulated by the city; in the meantime, what will happen to the fellowship is also unresolved. With those chapters yet to be written, the potential void that could result concerns Wright. 


“The oral tradition is very important,” he says.


Sometimes history, in other words, can’t be bottled up in a specimen jar or packed tight in a metal can.