Splash, Slurp & Bang

04Dec07

John C. Fremont gave the Golden Gate its name. To “The Pathfinder” this San Francisco Bay inlet was the imperial equivalent to the Golden Horn of Constantinople, that Rome of the eastern world. From the time America took possession of California in 1846 visionaries sited the inevitable – that the Bay would be bridged in one or more places. Even Emperor Norton I demanded the construction begin.

While both the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridges were constructed simultaneously back in the 1930s, it was the gracefully poetic one spanning the entrance to the Bay that piqued the world’s fascination. What once became the longest single span bridge in the entire world, was, in its initial design a butt-ugly cantilevered abomination. We can all be thankful this design was deep-sixed.

Instead we admire that bridge generally considered the most elegant the world has yet to produce. For seven decades the Golden Gate Bridge has been the inspiration for those with dreams aplenty, a source of pride for natives of the entire Bay Area, as well as that most popular place in the entire world to commit suicide.

Not to make light this terminal subject, but in keeping with our region tending to wackiness, some suicide doozies may be told of that bridge.

Like the 70-something gentleman who left this note before taking the plunge back in 1959: “Survival of the fittest,” it read. “Adios – unfit.”

Ten years earlier the “Black Widow” jumper, an Oakland man going through contentious divorce proceedings faked his death and fled to Illinois. However, his presumptive “Black Widow” didn’t take the bait. She tracked her ex-man down and made him pay. In 1973, with 499 suicides from the bridge already, a man raced across it with the magic “500″ pinned to him like a marathon runner. Then there was the woman who tried to jump from the bridge 8 times, to no avail. However, she did receive a few minutes of psychiatric counseling on each of these occasions. One day she made three attempts, but alas, her every attempt was foiled. Bridge authorities were not amused.

And then there was the case of the chance-met stranger. Dr. Louis Naylor was a physician visiting the City by the Bay from Connecticut. He struck up a pleasant conversation with a man while the two walked the bridge back to the City. The man, one Harold Wobber, suddenly stopped midway across the span, removed his jacket and told his newfound friend, “This is where I get off.” His plunge was the first recorded suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge, which to this day has the dubious distinction of being the most popular spot in the entire world to voluntarily end it all.

But the strangest story regarding suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge entails a suicide protest.

He was knee high to a cockroach and already preachin’ back home in rural Ohio. As a young man our prodigy preacher sold monkeys. That’s right – he was a monkey man. And oh-boy, did he love Elvis! Just ask any plastic surgeon. While destined to be lauded a civil rights activist, his pappy trod a different path. Pa was a proud member of the KKK.

Did Pa know his son had become a powerful San Francisco civic leader, oft in the news for this or that good deed doing? Junior’s liberal political allies adored him, and showered him with praise and accolades. After all, they could bank on him for votes.

In 1977 he shepherded some 600 of his flock onto the Golden Gate Bridge. Each protester brandished a black armband, upon which the name of a suicide victim was written. With well over 1,000 having already taken the plunge, each protester had lots of suicides to choose from. The idea behind the march was to cow bridge authorities into constructing a suicide barrier to, well, save lives. This was, indisputably, one noble and righteous cause.

Imagine our surprise when, 18 short months after said march, news-flashed that our compassionate preacher had ordered the assassination of our very own U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan (as well as his entourage), and then presided over dispensing cyanide-laced Kool Aid to 800 loving, trusting followers – deep in the jungles of Guyana.

Some claim the whole mess stunk to high heaven of CIA involvement. Perhaps our good buddy Dr. Stanley Gottleib (of MK-ULTRA fame) was involved? Whether he sucked the gun of his own volition, or someone whacked him, the Rev. Jim Jones lay dead from a bullet in a pool of his own blood.

So for anyone planning a holiday excursion across the ol’ Golden Gate I paraphrase pioneer broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow’s patented wrap: Good hike, and good luck.

Filed under: San Francisco Bay Area   |  9 Comments

Dreams, Myth & Saga

29Nov07

We, The People of these United States hold this truth to be self evident: that our America is the Dreamer’s Dream Incarnate.

Though weak and nearly friendless amidst a creaky Old World of monarchies, autocracies and subjugated masses, America, it is said, lit the first beacon of liberty and freedom since the brilliancy of Athenian democracy was extinguished. Those 13 original states, constitutionally joined as one—that mythic United States of America, is said to have been a rarified union, where justice was blind and balanced, and talent fairly rewarded no matter one’s humble origins.

Here, personal initiative and willpower, when pushed nose-to-grindstone, provided each citizen tools to master his own destiny. In exchange for allegiance to our infant republic we granted ourselves the limited freedoms put forth in our Constitution; a representative voice in governing, peace when not at war, and implied financial stability to the thrifty and prudent. These privileges were accorded every land owning citizen, assuming that citizen was both male and Caucasian. And thus our grand bump-and-stumble experiment began.

Those statesmen who were convinced our budding republic’s survival demanded its grand expansion soon triumphed. The Manifest Destiny of our young nation would stretch it from one ocean to the next. Few suspected the seeds we planted would grow into a global empire.

Having arched across the vast continental rainbow, our nation’s territorial quest temporarily dead-ended upon the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Out here western pioneers no longer identified as mere citizens devoted to some pie-in-the-sky national commonwealth for all, turning instead to obsessing their very own Midas-like fortunes.

Most claim the madness erupted in 1848 with the discovery of our fabled Eldorado. Depthless pots of gold lay, they said, free for the pickin’s out West in Californy—out there, out at the end of the emigrant rainbow. Here lay humanity’s eternally quested cornucopia, from which sprang, in time, not only the shiny and metallic, but likewise mineral, liquid, and vegetable gold; human, industrial, high tech and just plain ol’ garden variety dirt patch gold. With native peoples dispatched and/or disposed of, the pillage and plunder continued unchallenged, and the eager creation of the Great Western American Myth would challenge even those of ancient Greece and Rome.

A self-anointed aristocracy had already emerged back East. These robber barons laid the hereditary foundation for latter day corporate imperialism. Still, even their enormous depredations paled in myth and legend compared to those of the glittering, kaleidoscopic Wild, Wild West.

Out here on the razor edge of the rainbow anything goes hedonism; every filthy, amoral, treacherous, two-faced, lyin’, cheatin’, connivin’, thievin’, violent and just plain no-good dastardly behavior was finely honed to a near art form. Siren songs blared out hot and loud from every Barbary Coast dive, creep joint, deadfall, cow-yard and crib; from each and every winedump, gambling and dance hall, shanghai and opium den in the city of terminal romance, roulette luck and twenty-four hour depravity—the one and unmatched City of San Francisco.

But we can’t stop with the City. So on we push, on into this entire present day post modern pre-apocalyptic San Francisco Bay Area. Here, nature’s sublime perfection is re-imagined into Pixars and Lucasfilms, into oil refineries, cargo ports, nuclear arms and biotech labs, into obscenely expensive “affordable” housing and gated golf course communities; re-imagined into freeways and collapsing bridges, into internet communes and staid financial houses built on mud; re-imagined into Masserati dealerships, underground sewers and cable systems, faux Victorian mixed-use malls, into Apples and Oracles and Suns—and into thousands of acres of world class vineyards providing ego-nectar for the endless bacchanalia our pantheon of provincial gods host to fete their own growing fortunes and the fortunes of their kind.

Tallied together and we SF Bay Area folk constitute the haves, the have mores, the hope-to-haves and the desperately impoverished. But in contrast to good ol’ fashion salt of the earth rebel & Yankee cornpone sodbusters, we out here in weirdo-land proudly power those fraternal twin engines named Genius and Madness, in total and in tandem. Of course, many of us landed here from elsewhere, so we’re lickety-split to re-imagine our boring and checkered pasts, puzzling each new moment as it arises, and flinging ourselves dead-on into myriad optimisms and the fantastic possibilities of tomorrow.

San Francisco’s storied fog-enshrouded nooks and film noir crannies interweave into the larger tapestry of our Beemer & Brie Left Coast environs. Six successive flags covered the patriotic butts of those many who “developed” and decimated this Eden. Audacious schemes and Utopian dreams heaped high hill upon golden hill their inventions, art and broken corpses. Out from these shifting sand-hills emerged our nation’s first instant metropolis. Starry-eyed Argonauts, atom bombers, cannibal emigrants, Beats, Raiders, Hounds, Silicon Valley vandals, Bohemians, Hippies, shrewd madames, Queers, Panthers, Diggers, Dot Com-bustants, Vigilantes, labor unionists, Paint Eaters and greasy Barbary Coast Rangers mixed with countless ethnic, religious, artistic and political groups pouring through our Golden Gate: dream-laden malcontents, misfits and human refuse, from each and every corner on earth. Each soul came to create and/or to take every good thing here, or else to pawn off failures to the next poor mark in line. “Sodom!” charged the critics. “Gomorrah!” added choruses of pious distant cowards.

Yes, the San Francisco Bay Area is just another seismically doomed chunk of this tiny, fragile planet—though we who actually live here ponder inevitable annihilation less than, say, whether to go with the round loaf sour or the baguette. Our San Francisco Bay Area is that perfect unholy place of things best and worst, ever strange, shocking, shifting, timeless and new.

Listen now—the ancient redwoods whisper. Listen closely for ghetto yearnings in a thousand foreign tongues. Brace for paradise in hell, where Nobel laureates ponder abstractions aloud while shuffling among our homeless. Here, in this microcosmic chip on planet earth millions live, die and suffer the exquisite, excruciating pain of euphoric mundanity. Ultimately, none survive, but strive to work from the heart and this saga may continue….

Filed under: Native Americans, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area History, Vitus vinifera, democratic society, eccentrics, gold rush, legend, madness, the elite, thieves & scoundrels   |  Leave a Comment

Sins Invalid & The Other

08Nov07

Ancient Spartans placed “unfit” newborns out to die on Mount Taygetos’ “Place of Rejection.” Of course we all know how Spartan culture obsessed and enshrined physical perfection. Yet thousands of years after Sparta disappeared forever an obscure and overlooked provision in a U.S congressional spending bill came rolling into the very heart of civil rights legislation. Out from this Section 504 Trojan Horse emerged hundreds of fierce ably-disabled warriors overwhelming self satisfied politicians who’d denied them their rights. Just goes to show that world history is, ahem, handicapped with irony.

On April 5, 1977 hundreds of disabled folks assembled outside federal offices of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in eight cities across the country. They protested unfair and inequitable treatment of persons with disabilities (PWD). Issues included access to buildings, restrooms and sidewalks, living arrangements, and academic and career opportunities. The Rehabilitation Act, civil rights legislation embedded with language inferring equal access to all this, and more, had become law in 1973. But it had yet to be implemented. Jimmy Carter campaigned vowing to right past discrimination and to implement the legislation, but now the newly elected Carter seemed to have bigger domestic fish to fry. That said, the PWD community had its own notion of how to hold Carter’s feet to the fire.

Orders simply needed signing by the current HEW chief for Section 504 to get moving. Resulting actions would, however, cost money. Spending these resources on a fractured and politically marginal community wasn’t something high on Joseph Califano, the new HEW chief’s, agenda. Califano probably figured the protests were no big deal. They’d get little media play. And as for Califano himself, well, what can you say about someone with a Bohemian Grove Lakeside Chat entitled “Who lives, Who dies, Who pays”? Considering compassionate lectures like that, the cynic might expect Califano to hold a jaundiced view of cripples demanding civil rights. So imagine Califano’s shock when hundreds of these folks, rather than simply protesting outside and moping home, instead poured through HEW doorways across the country—and refused leave.

Well, actually most of the protesters did soon leave. In Seattle and Denver, Los Angeles, New York and Washington D.C. the demonstrators did leave. But, in keeping with the Bay Area’s contrarian nature, protesters refused to vacate San Francisco’s offices of Health, Education and Welfare. They would not budge—not even when threatened with arrest. Nor did they leave when denied food, water and access to restrooms. In fact, as per normal here in Weirdsville, U.S.A., City government under Mayor George Moscone, together with a motley and unorganized defacto coalition of supporters, rallied to aid them. Imagine, in your wildest dreams the American Legion teaming up with the Communist Party, the NAACP, a gay self protection patrol, the State Health Department, Safeway, both the Black & the Gray Panthers, a lesbian cafe, McDonald’s and a drug rehab center—not to mention labor unions, farm workers and robed seminarians.

Only in San Francisco.

The siege lasted almost four weeks. Califano faced enormous growing pressure. Finally, he was forced to sign on. Though full implementation of this legislation is still worlds from perfect many of the crucial PWD considerations, like wheelchair ramps to buildings—things we take for granted today—were finally begun at that time. Had there been no month-long sit-in it’s doubtful any of these changes would have occurred.

Which lead us to Sins Invalid.

Last Saturday night close to a dozen performing artists gathered before a packed house at the Brava Theatre in San Francisco’s Mission District. It was “Sins Invalid, An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility.” Their literature states “Sins Invalid is social and economic justice for all people with disabilities—in lockdowns, in shelters, on the streets, visibly disabled, sensory minority, environmentally injured, psychiatric survivors—moving beyond individual legal right to collective human rights.”

Participant artists came from Canada and New York, from Houston, Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley. They included a college professor, a doctoral student, a Project Director on Race, Disability and Eugenics, a filmmaker, poets, published authors, activists and a musician or two. They were here to claim turf on perhaps their community’s most hidden taboo—the sensuality and sexuality of the disabled. I will not describe the nature of these performances, but I will say that some of you might well have been shocked, though no performance was pornographic; they enlightened and educated, though in ways I had not expected—and they were revolutionary art in the highest and often most conventionally unacceptable sense of that word.

In fact, I would go so far as to say Sins Invalid was, in an entirely different context, as revolutionary as was the month-long HEW building occupation thirty years before. While Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act gave legal standing to begin leveling the playing field for PWD in the public sphere, Sins Invalid 2007 celebrated this oft hidden community’s most hidden secret, thrusting it out of the closet for the world to see. Sins Invalid addressed their rights, needs and desires to be and openly live as entirely whole individuals—as whole, independent and, yes, as emotionally complex and functionally sexual as any of us. These disabled artists spoke to, acted out, sang, danced and demonstrated their own personal sexuality—a societal taboo if there ever was one.

From humanities’ beginnings they’ve suffered pity, been condemned as evil, murdered, warehoused and dispised; the disabled have been experimented on, condescended to, misunderstood, discriminated against, ignored and looked down on as less than equal. Yet we often say they inspire us, despite, or because of what we perceive as their limitations. Mostly, though, they are The Other—and we have always feared The Other.

While we celebrate presidents, industrialists, stars of cinema and world renowned artists, scientists and notables of every stripe—those many we now know were or are disabled; and while the sheer breadth of this designation makes any pat definition worthless, still we have always feared The Other. And as with the ancient Spartans, The Other never leaves us. No matter what we do to kill them, no matter that we turn from them, just glance deep into any mirror and somewhere they are there.

Filed under: San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco history, disabilities   |  1 Comment

We Never Sleep

31Oct07

From our Bad Ideas Live Forever file:

It’s plastered all over the news. Blackwater “private military company” operatives shoot first, never mind asking any questions. And back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with nary a FEMA employee in sight, hundreds of Blackwater personnel descended on and patrolled New Orleans, martial law style, even before they’d been contracted by the government to do so.

Facts:
1) Over 90 percent of Blackwater USA business is funded by our taxes.
2) To date Blackwater (just one of some 60+ private security firms we fund in Iraq) has snagged over $1 billion in government contracts.
3) More than two thirds of these contracts have been no bid, meaning non-competitive, hence anti-free market.
4) Blackwater charges U.S. taxpayers six times the equivalent cost of a U.S. soldier for each of its security personnel—$445,000 a year, per operative.

Unlike their official soldier counterparts, no laws—military, domestic or foreign have governed otherwise illegal Blackwater behavior. Simply put, Blackwater, and the many other private security firms we employ in Iraq have been getting away with murder. Now, you might think this sort of “cowboy capitalism” is something new to we here in the land of the free and home of the brave.

But it’s not.

Just ask San Francisco literary icon Dashiell Hammett. Well, okay—he’s dead. But were Hammett still around he’d be the guy to clue us in on our country’s long tradition tolerating, financially supporting and even celebrating private militias like Blackwater USA.

Dashiell Hammett was born in Maryland, May 27, 1894. Hammett began and pretty much ended his writing career in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. The Maltese Falcon is his best known novel. It may be the most evocative story ever penned about The City in the fog.

Hammett’s career pioneering hard boiled detective fiction came directly from years spent working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Hammett and his fellow “Pinks” were the Blackwater of their day.

The Pinkerton Agency was created by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton in 1850. It was a private detective and security firm that gained prominence by uncovering a plot to assassinate then President elect Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln showed his gratitude by hiring the Pinks as his personal body guards. However, they were no longer guarding him when he was actually assassinated.

Much of the Pinkerton work was putting down labor unrest for industrialists like Andrew Carnegie. The agency grew rapidly, it’s covert agents infiltrating labor unions and others violently breaking up organized strikes. Pinkertons hired out as security guards and served as a military force for hire. They came into the national spotlight chasing desperadoes like Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In 1871 Congress appropriated funds for the Department of Justice to investigate, arrest and prosecute persons in violation of federal law. The amount granted couldn’t cover costs to build an arm of the Justice Department expressly to hunt down criminals, so they hired the Pinks.

For the next 23 years the Pinkertons investigated cases as a quasi-government arm of the DOJ. The relationship ended in 1893 with the passage of the Anti-Pinkerton Act, which forbid Pinkerton National Detective Agency employees or any similar agency staff from being employed by the United States Government.

It’s not hard to understand why the Anti-Pinkerton Act became law. The Pinkerton Agency had grown so large its’ operatives actually outnumbered soldiers in the U.S. Army. They owned more tommyguns then the celebrated gangsters of the era could ever hope for. Pinkerton operatives were virtually above the law, protected by government contracts and big money interests. Sound familiar? Ohio so feared Pinkerton’s potential as a militia force they tossed the Pinks out of the state. Ring any bells?

Dashiell Hammett’s personal epiphany came in 1917, while employed by Pinkerton as strike-breaker at the Anaconda Copper Mine in Butte, Montana. Hammett was offered $5,000 to murder labor leader Frank Little. Though Hammett claimed he rejected the offer Little was dragged away by six men masked men, castrated and lynched. While the crime has never been solved, it’s commonly believed Pinkerton Ops were responsible for the murder.

Hammett’s politics shifted dramatically to the left following this incident, though he did return briefly to work for Pinkerton following military service in World War I. A veteran of both world wars, Hammett openly supported a wide progressive agenda. He stood up to HUAC in the early 1950s, paying for his refusal to cooperate with 6 months behind bars.

Meanwhile, back here in the present seventeen unarmed civilians get gunned down by Blackwater Ops in Baghdad. Now we’re told our State Department has promised the perpetrators immunity from prosecution. The Justice Department, naturally, is in the dark. It seems Blackwater’s Dark Prince, Eric, and his personal strike force get off the hook, again.

But even Blackwater, with the world’s largest private army training compound near the aptly named Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, with another camp in Illinois, with it’s proposed facility just north of the Mexican border in Southern California, with its own armored vehicle manufacturing plant and it’s retired Navy Seal, CIA, Ranger and Special Forces hired guns, is just one of innumerable players in today’s ever-growing U.S. private forces marketplace.

It just goes to show how good ol’ American private spy, security, and outright gun-and-run mercenaries not only rate fatter taxpayer take-home pay than our military personnel, but stand guns and holsters above laws applying to everyone else, anywhere.

The Pinkerton single-peeper logo inspired the phrase “private eye”. Their motto “We Never Sleep” is equally apropos, both then and now.

Let’s just hope we citizens manage to remain conscious, too.

Filed under: Blackwater, Dashiell Hammett, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco history, blood money, writers   |  1 Comment

Riptides

31Oct07

My favorite Bay Area event is San Francisco’s Annual Big Book Sale. It’s held each year at Fort Mason. Like many such book sales this soiree benefits a public library. Comparing this to other regional book sales, however, is like calling a linen closet Oracle Arena. Queuing up hours in advance together with the ever-swelling mob of salivating bibliophiles, each anticipating the mad rummage through the airplane hanger-size building—is akin to an army of four year olds staging a do-or-die assault on Ghiradelli’s Chocolate factory.

Once the mob pours in the savvy print hound makes for the shopping carts. Securing your own cart is like brandishing a bank safe on wheels. And, it saves you a trip to the chiropractor.

I’ve snagged many of my all-time favorite books at this sale—like an 11 volume set of novels and stories of Brett Harte, published in 1903, and a set of classic works by authors ranging from Dickens to Dostoevsky. The range of subjects and titles is always overwhelming. I always buy too many, and regret I hadn’t grabbed more. It’s like a Roman orgy for book fiends, only instead of grapes, wine and roast squab you’re eyes eagerly consume titles and your lungs breathe deeply of musty archival dust.
Of my many precious Big Book Sale finds, one stands uniquely apart. I hadn’t much thought of it like this before but it’s likely what first planted the seed which eventually sprouted up as this weekly column. That which I squirreled away from massive piles of print on that Big Book Sale isn’t actually a book, nor is it some fancy schmancy history society periodical. Nosirree, this thing is a big ol’ honkin’ rusty three ring binder. I paid five bucks for it, and still have the sticker to prove it. Inside the binder ninety-seven newspaper columns from the 1940’s lay preserved in plastic sheaths. The author is Robert O’Brien, a fellow who did his Irish heritage proud providing weekly tales of fantastic people, places and early Bay Area happenings.

Robert O’Brien wrote a column called “Riptides.” Some of you old timers may recall it. Riptides was published from 1939 until 1952 in the San Francisco Chronicle. O’Brien wove magical yarns of the Lost Pegleg Mine, the Camels of California, of Pop Demerest—the Hermit of Russian Hill and of legendary plays on Mt. Tam and the origins of The Big Game.

O’Brien’s style was personal, engaging and near poetic. Though yellow with age his pieces read like they were writ today. Sure, they deal with history, but O’Brien transformed mere fact into fiction-like melodies.
O’Brien graduated from Yale, then began his career at small town papers in Virginia and North Carolina. He arrived in San Francisco in 1939.

Accounts tell of how The City’s beauty and freedom charmed and thrilled him. O’Brien family legend holds that he landed his Riptides column, promoted as the “blend of California’s brilliant past and present” after he’d penned a short ditty about a moth’s lone ferry ride across The Bay. An editor happened to read it and put him to work.

For the next thirteen years this near-forgotten columnist regaled his readership with Tong Wars, Lightning Trains and the Telescopic Eye, with adventures traveling around early California, visiting haunted houses and jaunts through, around and over Butchertown, Irish Hill and Mt. Olympus. O’Brien wrote about Ishi, the last of the Yahi Indians, and chronicled snow falling in San Francisco. He waxed fondly on “odd characters” ranging from the inimitable Emperor Norton to that famed promoter of sobriety and benefactor of those with a thirst for water, Dr. Henry Daniel Cogswell.

One of the pleasures in reading Riptides is realizing that much of O’Brien’s subject matter were still living memories for his many readers. What seems like ancient history today—the Great Earthquake, Woodwards Garden and Sutro’s Cliff House were, some sixty or seventy years ago, still wistfully recalled by a great many in his audience. Ironically, these columns remain crisp and oddly contemporary.
Riptide columns were compiled into two books, both out of print, but still available if you’re willing to dig for them. Look for “California Called Them” and “This is San Francisco.”

Robert O’Brien left the Bay Area for the East Coast in 1952. He spent the remainder of his career writing for Reader’s Digest, Collier’s magazine and Time-Life Books. Upon retiring he took up glider planing. O’Brien lived to age 93. He died in Hawaii on August 15, 2004.

Back on December 19, 1952 O’Brien signed off his final Riptide with “It is strange that after having said so much in all that time, there is so little to say now. Good-byes are always that way.”

Filed under: Robert O'Brien, San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area History, journalists, newspapers, writers   |  Leave a Comment

Hail, Sparkletack!

17Oct07

If you’ve ever read this column you know my tastes favor off-beat Bay Area topics—be they yesterday’s or today’s. Perhaps you’re as passionate about regional history and/or contemporary Bay Area stuff as me. You may share my tastes, hunger for the more conventional, or perhaps seek even weirder flavors. You haunt bookstores and libraries, catch the occasional special on KRON 4, PBS or the History Channel—but when it comes to the internet (specifically Bay Area Web sites, blogs and podcasts), you’re lost.

I know I was.

Bay Time Reporter emerged after conducting countless mainstream tours of San Francisco, Muir Woods, Monterey Peninsula, Yosemite and Wine Country. I soon tired of these cookie cutter tours and began offering more specialized and esoteric experiences (anyone up for an informative jaunt around poetic Tar Flat?) I grabbed any and every SF Bay Area title I could lay my mitts on—whether from library, bookstore or garage sale. I hunted down obscure museums, local historical societies, reading rooms, movies, television shows and leads on ephemera and historically important sites and buildings. Sure, I surfed the net for stuff, but not until launching this column did I systematically dig into the Web’s staggering array of treasures regarding our San Francisco Bay Area.

Today I’ll share a few Bay Area Internet finds your fingers can easily walk to.

General online Bay Area Guides:
Want to know what’s playing in the City? Looking for an apartment?
How about info on restaurants, tours, museums, accommodations, special events? These are nuts and bolts sites. A few of them, like Inetours, even have short history blurbs. Try SFstation.com, San Francisco Bay Yahoo directory, or Citysearchsf.com

Special Interest Sites & Blogs:
Word’N’Bass.com keeps us abreast of regional literary and musical news & happenings. At SFist.com you’ll find a lively potpourri of blogs, info and photos from an array of contributors. Friscovista.com blogs Northern California culture, history, the outdoors and news and opinion.

History Resources:
SFmuseum.org boasts nearly five thousand pages to browse through. Califoriahistoricalsociety.org publishes a magazine, has exhibits, collections and offers in-house historical programs. Sfgeneology.com serves up history links aplenty. The Online Archive of California lets you search through almost one thousand online texts, including letters, oral histories and newspapers.

Creme de la creme:
One site shines brighter than all others. Sparkletack.com is a unique supra-entertaining delight. You’ll hear podcasts of San Francisco Bay Area history from the lips of master storyteller Richard Miller. These addictive audio podcasts are complimented by exquisitely penned essays on all sorts of historical things San Francisco Bay Area.

The Sparkletack Web site is sophisticated, yet fun, informed but accessible, chock-full of engrossing text, photos, maps and drawings laid out in a friendly, professional manner. Sparkletack is not only steeped in Bay Area history, Richard Miller’s genetic branch grows from Mark Twain’s own illustrious family tree. It shows.

Old Sam Clemens had a passion for emerging communication gadgets. He toyed with telephones, typewriters, dictaphones and short-lived state-of-the-art printing presses—like one he went broke investing in. If he were with us today Mr. Clemens would no doubt podcast his many offerings. And I’ll bet they’d sound a heck of a lot like those you’ll hear on:

http://www.sparkletack.com

Filed under: Mark Twain, Richard Miller, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area History, San Francisco history, Sparkletack   |  Leave a Comment

Operation Midnight Climax

09Oct07

Weird, twisted and bizarre tales about the SF Bay Area are so numerous some merely make us yawn. But if any one story stands out for its sheer audacity, moral depravity and utter madness—this is it.

Years ago I came across a magazine article about something called Operation Midnight Climax. I knew it had to be a joke. The CIA, with the blessing and full cooperation of both the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the SFPD sets up and runs an LSD brothel in San Francisco for ten solid years? Who do you think you’re kidding? Still, I dutifully dug for corroborative facts concerning this alleged operation.

Turns out Operation Midnight Climax was no joke.

Its story is particularly timely in light of this past weeks’ revelations concerning secret Bush Administration memos green-lighting CIA and Army Intelligence torture techniques supposedly designed to obtain information from “detainees” and “enemy combatants”.

Back in the 1950’s and ’60’s CIA experiments aimed at obtaining information and controlling human behavior gravitated to covertly dispensing numerous powerful psychotropic drugs. The CIA’s original charter prohibited it from engaging in any domestic operations. Yet many of these drugs were given to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil without their knowledge or consent. Anyone interested in this unseemly labyrinth can trot down to the the library or just google MK-ULTRA. If ever there was a reason to inform ourselves and hold political feet to the fire concerning our inalienable rights it’s MK-ULTRA. Its many programs had no external oversight and no accounting. For years fully 6% of the CIA’s entire budget went into MK-ULTRA programs that even Congress knew nothing about.

But I’m wandering from the story at hand, namely:

Operation Midnight Climax—a Bay Area baby born of MK-ULTRA.

*****

He was a tough, fat, bald guy—a character right out of Hollywood central casting. Back in the early 1950’s an itinerant San Francisco journalist, former OSS operative and then Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent named George Hunter White, aka Morgan Hall, was assigned by his boss Harry Anslinger to team up with the CIA. Together they created Operation Midnight Climax. White’s assignment: explore and record how a new drug called LSD affects behavior when consumed by unsuspecting male johns in the company of drug addicted hookers. A great comedy scenario, if it weren’t so damn perverse.

By day George Hunter White continued to work the streets of San Francisco, ferreting out drug deals and drug dealers, setting them up and taking them down. By night he’d repair to the portable toilet his friend Leo Jones had provided him behind the two way mirror set into a wall of “the pad’s” Telegraph Hill bedroom. The L-shaped Chestnut Street duplex featured fantastic views of the San Francisco Bay. It was festooned with Toulouse-Lautrec posters, hidden microphones, tape recorders and a refrigerator stocked with pitchers of martinis. White was a notorious booze hound. He’d knock back a quart or more of gin nightly perched on the seat of his toilet scribbling notes on concurrent activities in the adjacent bedroom.

But dosing unwitting johns produced, well, wildly inconsistent results. White observed innumerable men behave in ways that suggested insanity. So White gave LSD the pet name “Stormy”. It fit. The “psychedelic revolution” was still years away. We can hardly imagine how the varied socio/ethnic/economic group of philanderers who wound up at “the pad” must have reacted when dosed. Most had never heard of, much less consumed any hallucinogenic substance before.

Richard Stratton interviewed George White’s last living Operation Midnight Climax associate for Spin Magazine in 1994. According White lieutenant Ira “Ike” Feldman:

“White was a son of a bitch, but he was a great cop. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew. The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA.”

George Hunter White continued operating his Telegraph Hill LSD brothel until 1965, when he retired from the service. He moved to Stinson Beach. Locals came to know him as Colonel White. He became the Stinson Beach Fire Marshall—and, after a few years on the wagon White died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1975.

Upon his death White’s widow gifted the Electronic Museum at Foothills Junior College, forty miles south of San Francisco, with his diaries. According to a Washington Post article dated September 5, 1977 these diaries:

“provide documentary evidence that White met to discuss drugs and safe houses with such CIA luminaries as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Division and the man who ran MK-ULTRA, and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, a CIA chemist who worked with LSD. Other high-ranking CIA officials mentioned prominently include James Angleton, C. P. Cabell and Stanley Lovell. Gottleib and Lashbrook have been subpoenaed to testify Sept. 20 (1977) before a Senate subcommittee investigating the MK-ULTRA project.”

Upon retirement George Hunter White wrote to Harry Anslinger, his old boss at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, reflecting on White’s many years of service:

“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

And so concludes yet another true San Francisco tale about your American taxpayer dollars working to protect you and yours.

Filed under: Bay Time Detective, George Hunter White, LSD, Morgan Hall, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area History, San Francisco history, drugs, madness, psychedelics, religious experience, thieves & scoundrels   |  15 Comments

1850—all over again

02Oct07

Clayton Earl Duncan is on a mission. He wants Lake County’s Kelseyville to change its name. Why? Because Andrew Kelsey, the man this little town at the base of Mount Konacti honors is best known for his cruelty to the native population.

Clayton Earl Duncan’s federally recognized tribe is the Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians. But Duncan belongs to four other tribes, including Maidu and Yuki, though “I refer to myself as a Do-na-pa-ti Hinto, which means a Northern Mountain person—a human being.” Some 200 of his Pomo people were slaughtered in May of 1850 on a little island off Clear Lake they called Ba-don-na-pa-ti. History books call this The Bloody Island Massacre.

Captain Nathaniel Lyon’s U.S. Army detachments’ intended retribution against those Indians who murdered American pioneers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone was actually perpetrated against tribelets who had no hand in this previous crime. Women and children were shot, bayonetted and dumped in surrounding tule rushes and heaped on a pyre to burn because, well…, they were Indian.

Andrew Kelsey and business partner Charles Stone were the first white men to settle in what would become Lake County. The two acquired Salvador Vallejo’s cattle operation in the fall of 1847, a little more than a year after Sonoma’s Bear Flag Rebellion resulted in perhaps the shortest-lived Republic, ever. Just three weeks after declaring independence the Bear Flag Republic became part of the United States.

But the writing was already on the wall regarding Kelsey. According to Alan Rosenus in his book, General Vallejo And The Advent Of The Americans, “Two of the Kelsey brothers, Andrew and Benjamin, had come to California in 1841 with (John) Bidwell’s group… If there were Indians around and laws to be obeyed, the Kelseys were bound to wind up at odds with the authorities.”

At the time of European contact as many as 3.000 Pomo, Miwok and Wappo peoples lived in the vicinity of Lake County’s Clear Lake. These tribelets inhabited tiny villages scattered throughout the region. I don’t know how many lived near the present town of Kelseyville, but some 80 Native Americans live in Kelseyville today. While about 8,000 Pomos inhabited Northern California just prior to first European contact, by 1880 their population had dwindled to less than 1,500.

Certainly California’s Indians had been grossly mistreated by Spanish, Russians and Mexican alike, but Kelsey and Stone set the bar at miserably new lows. The oft drunken pair enslaved the indigenous population, beat at least four Indians to death, shot others, hung many from trees by their hands, intentionally starved families and repeatedly raped Indian women and children.

When gold was discovered in 1849 Kelsey forced 50 Pomo men into the gold fields as laborers. Once there, Kelsey sold provisions intended to sustain his workers to other miners. Kelsey proceeded to starve and literally work these men to death. Of the 50 Pomos forced into service, only two returned home alive.

Of course Kelsey wasn’t alone abusing the native population. On April 22, 1850 the State of California passed “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” virtually legalizing slavery for “vagrant” Indians who didn’t happen to be employed, but regarding their mistreatment, “in no case shall a white man be convicted of any offense upon the testimony of an Indian.”

An editorial in the Yreka Herald went straight to the heart of the matter. “Now that general hostilities against the Indians have commenced we hope that the government will render such aid as will enable the citizens of the north to carry on a war of extermination until the last redskin of these tribes has been killed. Extermination is no longer a question of time—the time has arrived, the work commenced, and let the first man that says treaty or peace be regarded as a traitor.”

Now ponder this headline from the the Humboldt Times: “Good Haul of Diggers… 38 Bucks Killed, 40 Squaws and Children.”

Eighteen treaties were negotiated and signed between the United States and California’s indigenous peoples. They deeded 8.5 million acres of land to various tribes. But these treaties weren’t to the liking of California’s mining and agricultural interests. The entire lot of them were conveniently misplaced and never brought before Congress for ratification.

With such compassionate souls shaping our newly formed state is it any wonder those affected by these laws, judgments and attitudes rebelled? Andrew Kelsey, namesake of Kelseyville paid for it with his life.

When stuff like this is dredged up and placed before us we often respond with, “Well, sure…, but that was way back then. We don’t do those sorts of things today!”

Oh yeah?

I accompanied a group Sonoma State University students to the sight of the Bloody Island Massacre recently. I had the pleasure to talk with Heidi LaMoreaux, assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies as we drove to and from Lake County. I also had the opportunity to interview Clayton Earl Duncan at the sight of The Bloody Island Massacre. Duncan says he’s tried to convince locals to change the name of Kelseyville before. According to Duncan one supervisor told him, “Clayton, why do you want to open up an old can of worms and cause trouble?”

Now, there are those who’d likely dismiss Duncan’s remarks as sour grapes. To illustrate his point Duncan suggested I read a recent letters-to-the-editor page from one of Lake County’s local newspapers. So I did. Four different missives supported a previously published article encouraging school districts to take a hard line in retaining Indian caricatures as their mascots—and to hell with local tribal member objections.

But one of the letters really brings history into the now:

“They should have been glad to see a superior culture come to their rescue’, it reads, ‘They have no respect for what they have received free. Their reservations are examples of what pure Communism does to people and is ironically supported by a free enterprise economy they hate… The reservations are fading because young Indians see more opportunity beyond their fences and rebel against the enforcement of ‘the old ways.’ Who wants to eat rodents tossed onto the coals of a dying fire by a fading culture in a smoke-polluted teepee when a warm pizza parlor with cold beer is a mile away and has a sign in the window, ‘help-wanted’?… The old Indians are poisoned by their own ideas. In three generations they will be gone. What is the sense of preserving a culture of helpless hardship and hate?”

I swear, it sounds like 1850—all over again.

Filed under: Bear Flag Revolt, Lake County, Native Americans, Pomo, San Francisco Bay Area History, drunks, slavery   |  4 Comments

Guy Fieri & the Hangtown Fry

11Sep07

 

Bellies growl as we genuflect before Julia Child’s alter—her pots and pans hung like copper relics from a punch-board wall in the town of Napa. It’s “Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts.” Elsewhere, Cal-culinary pioneers Alice Waters and Sonoma County’s John Ash innovate, using the creme de la creme of local edibles. Healdsburg’s Cyrus, by impressing haughty French critics, plucks two prized Michelin stars. Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, naturally, snags three. It’s just the dawning of another day in the epicurean capital of the western world.

Our San Francisco Bay Area boasts a galaxy of culinary superstars ranging from “Can Cook” Martin Yan to Citizen Cake’s Elizabeth Falkner. Michael Chiarello moved Napa Valley’s style from PBS to the the Food Network. Santa Rosa’s own skyrocketing star is Guy Fieri, host of not one, but two smash-hit foodie shows. And talk about bridging cuisines—Fieri’s restaurant, Tex Wasabe’s, pairs ornate Japanese sushi with “off the hook” white trash Texas BBQ.

Northern California, with its ocean, rivers and streams; mountains, hills and valleys—and the San Francisco Bay itself, provide an unsurpassed year ’round bounty. Our seafood, dairy products, meats, grains, fruits, herbs and vegetables are so prized they grace dinner tables worldwide.

Choosing meal beverages can be a chore. Thousands of ultra-premium wines are produced here, along with microbrewed beers, ales and ciders, and pricey boutique hard liquors. Natural bubbly gets bottled in Calistoga, and the High Sierras provide San Francisco some of this nation’s purest municipal water.

Famed horticulturist Luther Burbank developed vegetable and fruit hybrids we still eat today. Burbank proclaimed our region unequaled to the task of growing delicious fruits, vegetables and the unending flower varieties which festively decorate even our most modest of affairs. With its mild weather and many microclimates Northern California has perfect nooks and hidden crannies growing a wider array of non-tropical foodstuffs than practically anywhere else on Earth.

California’s dairy industry was founded by Point Reyes Italians and Azore Islanders. Today, master cheesemakers—like Sonoma’s Ig Vella, produce such a range of exquisite cheeses that unending columns could be entirely devoted simply to their praise. Petaluma still celebrates its “Egg Capital of the World” heritage. Gourmet Mushroom Inc., of Sebastopol, grows fungal exotics, including the delectably rich and meaty Trumpet Royales I enjoyed just this week. We Bay folk haunt scores of farmers’ markets. They feature artisan breads, fresh seafood and smoked meats, exotic varieties of locally grown cured olives and fresh pressed oils. We choose from a dizzying array of hand made pastas and delight in organic produce farmed locally on tiny plots of dirt.

But, holy cow—have Bay Area food tastes changed over time.

“In 1850 typical restaurant entrees might include baked hog’s head with cranberry sauce, calf’s head, dressed heart, mutton pie, and fricasseed oxtail. There was an abundance of game: venison, hare, antelope, elk, bear, curlew, goose, partridge, snipe, plover, quail, duck—a good assortment of which appeared on every menu.”
—Doris Muscatine, Old San Francisco

Anyone up for a good ol’ fashion snipe, curlew, heart and plover party? Sounds more like a law firm than a meal.

Daily restaurant dining was born, ironically, from economic necessity in Gold Rush San Francisco. Housing then was even higher than the stratospheric costs we suffer today. Most 49ers couldn’t afford homes with a kitchen. Hell, most couldn’t even afford their own room. So, practically everyone took their meals at commercial eateries. That’s why, even today, San Francisco has the highest ratio of restaurants to city dwellers in the entire country.

Clarence E. Edwords’ culinary history book, Bohemian San Francisco, was first published in 1914. It has nothing much to do with artist-type Bohemians, nor members of the exclusive Boho fraternity, but has everything to do with classic San Francisco food, restaurants and recipes. Near the end of his book Edwords presents us with “A Good Bohemian Dinner” menu. Imagine indulging in this sumptuous fifteen course affair. You’ll feast on Bisque of Ecrevisse, Sand-Dabs Edward VII, Cassolette of Terrapin, Maryland—as well as everyday favorites like Tagliarini des Beaux Arts and Chicken Portola. Now imagine that while savoring two of these fifteen courses you’re provided with and expected to—smoke cigarettes.

Now that’s livin’!

Enormous gold and silver wealth paid for some of the finest dining of its day. It’s said that San Francisco millionaire Francois Pioche lured forty Parisian chefs to San Francisco in the mid 1800’s. Ernest Arbogast, chef at the old Palace Hotel, was celebrated for his Oyster Omelet, a concoction that included six eggs, an onion and one hundred oysters! But Arbogast’s omelet merely hinted at the most famous creation of those Gold Rush days—the Hangtown Fry:

“A scramble of oysters, eggs, and bacon, it originated in Placerville, then Hangtown, supposedly as the last dinner for a condemned prisoner, whose request was designed to delay his execution as long as possible.”
—Doris Muscatine

The origin of this classic dish, hangee notwithstanding (egg scarcity, not plentiful oysters, being his shun-the-necktie card), has at least two other plausible versions, but like many contested dishes, any story told well piques the rapt listener’s appetite for more. Which brings us to other oft disputed regional creations: Green Goddess dressing, cioppino, Crab Louis, chop suey, fortune cookies, Monterey Jack cheese and the beloved martini. Each has its own wonderful story—to be told at some later date.

San Francisco has always catered to the open-minded gourmand. At Bab’s, for example, “….one dined off a coffin and was lighted by green colored tapers, affixed to skulls.”

One of San Francisco’s most beloved early restaurants was the Poulet d’Or, universally known as the Poodle Dog. It had its imitators. The Poodle Dog was, of course, a French restaurant. Back then, however, “French restaurant” meant something quite different than it does today. Take, for example, the five floors comprising the Poodle Dog. Floor one was what we would expect of any fine public dining room’s decorum and cuisine. Floor two serviced banquets and special events. Ahhh, yes—but floors three, four and five—these were each reserved for discreet affairs of the heart,….and such. These private suites provided luxury accommodations, bath and bed included. Entering required taking a special elevator. Occupant identities were jealously guarded by discreet and attentive Poodle Dog staff.

While touting today’s culinary daring-do, we might still appreciate bygone Bay times when, like today, gastronomic creativity flourished. Though these aging recipes may no longer be in vogue, who among us could resist a delicious “Italian Salad” featuring salt herring in milk tossed with cold veal, boiled carrots and boiled tongue, raw apples, potatoes, capers and beets?

Yum, yum….yum.

Filed under: Alice Waters, Bohemians, Copia, Julia Childs, Napa Valley, San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area History, Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, Sonoma County, Thomas Keller, famous hotels, farms, food, gold rush, grape vines, guy fieri, home prices, john ash, restaurants, wine   |  Leave a Comment

Al Gore & the Fog

05Sep07

Dashiell Hammett concocted the hardboiled detective, framing his stories in the stuff. Newfoundland, Argentina and Washington’s Point Disappointment have even more of it than us—but who celebrates disappointment? London’s pea soup turned out to be pollution. There are at least 12 identifiable types of it.

We’re not talking Foggy Bottom, nor the Fog of War—nor memory lapses by administration officials testifying before Congress. We’re talking our fog, the world’s finest fog—that stuff pouring into the SF Bay Area at those exquisite moments when all points east suffer triple digit temperatures. It’s the world’s best air conditioning system.

Poor souls condemned to California’s Central Valley suffer stifling heat, frigid cold and oatmeal-thick Tule fog. Our fog, by contrast, is mythic, romantic, generally welcomed and often gorgeous to behold. It comes in lacy wisps, billows up like cumulus cotton, caressing and cascading down our hillsides. Our fog floats in, spreading out in wraith-like fingers. Its arrival is heralded by a raw symphony of barnacled fog horns bellowing out from bay and coast, alike.

Today’s question is: Where does it come from—and will we lose it to global warming?

“What residents know for sure is that the San Francisco Bay Area has three seasons: winter, summer and fog.”
—Carl Nolte

Labor Day’s done. The kids are back in school. Halloween’s already goblin-ing up shop windows. For the rest of the country summer’s officially, if not technically, kaput. But here in the Bay Area summer weather is just cranking up. In fact, it’s getting damn hot. Why? Because fog pouring through the Golden Gate and sliding between North and South Bay mountain chinks is receding.

What’s beginning to change now is:

The Pacific High
Each spring we inch toward the sun. A warm high pressure system near the equator pushes north over the Pacific Ocean towards the Arctic.

“Some of it cools off and sinks to the ocean surface again several thousand miles to the north as the Pacific High—a ‘mountain’ of cool air weighing heavily on the water.”
—Harold Gilliam

The Sun’s rays evaporate surface water, pumping moisture into winds heading our way. The earth’s rotation spins northern hemispheric winds clockwise, so those winds hit us at about a 45-degree angle from the northwest. This phenomenon is called the Coriolis Force. As this moist air approaches the Bay Area cold up-rushing water replaces warmer surface water along our coast. Salt sprayed into the air captures minute water particles as moisture-laden winds meet cold coastal waters, condensing and producing “the great fog bank.” From late spring through summer this mass of fog hugs our coastline. It’s often a hundred miles thick and a half mile from the water up into the sky.

‘This… is a point upon a map of fog.”
—Ambrose Bierce

Meanwhile, as spring wends toward summer California’s Central Valley turns infernal. One hundred-plus degree temperatures become the summer norm. With Sierra peaks blocking it from heading east, the Central Valley’s hot rising air sucks fog into the Bay Area, like goose down into a vacuum. Fog sneaks through land-breaks like the Russian River Valley, Petaluma Gap’s Estero Lowland and the Nicasio and Muir Woods Gaps to the north; and the San Bruno and Crystal Springs Gaps to the south. Of course, the heavy fog-hitter is the Golden Gate, providing both unhindered access to the interior, and plenty of cool water to juice up the in-rushing fog.

But our fog is not an equal opportunity weather provider, even here in the Bay Area. I’ve left San Francisco’s Richmond district covered with fog in the upper 50’s, driven across the Golden Gate Bridge a few miles to Sausalito, where it’s sunny mid-90s. On days like that you can’t even see San Francisco for the fog bank overwhelming it. I’ve driven from the Alexander Valley south to the City, monitoring temperatures rising and falling three or four times through Sonoma and Marin Counties, the fog coming and going, until the temperature bottoms out in foggy San Francisco. Then consider the many microclimates within the 47 square miles comprising San Francisco itself. It’s even possible to experience a range of different types of fog on the very same day when traveling from one Bay Area destination to the next.

Cycles & Breakdown
The fog comes and goes in cycles—daily, weekly and such, from spring through summer. We’re all familiar with these cycles. But in September and into October, as the Central Valley temperatures begin to dip and the Pacific High heads south, the whole system breaks down. That’s why we often experience our clearest, hottest days this time of year.

Global Warming & The Fog
No one knows for certain how ongoing world climate change will affect our fog. While we’ve heard dire predictions concerning the toasty fate of Wine Country vineyards, I was pleasantly surprised to read Harold Gilliam, the dean of Bay Area environmental journalists’ opine on this subject in the updated edition of his 1962 classic Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region. Gilliam contends that as the earth warms we may actually experience more fog than at present. But he sure doesn’t guarantee it. Earth-wide weather patterns, greenhouse gasses, melting ice caps, the jet stream and our localized carbon emissions might combine to alter or dissipate the fog entirely, though it seems unlikely to happen in our lifetime.

Of the many things our Bay Area is famous for, summer fog ranks right up there with wine, computers, cable cars and sourdough. Can you imagine life here without any one of them?

Filed under: Ambrose Bierce, Coriolis Force, Harold Gilliam, North Bay, Pacific High, Russian River, San Francisco Bay Area, climate change, fog, global warming, wine country   |  1 Comment