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.

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….

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

I don’t know who worked the first “job” here in the North Bay.
Certainly, no pre-European contact Miwok, Wappo or Pomo Indian labored in exchange for money. Lacking cash, barter was always an option to get stuff done, but, like money, Bay Natives had no concept of getting paid to work for the benefit of others.

Spanish padres pressed indigenous people into building and maintaining their missions, but their labor was more akin to slavery than free-willed work-for-pay.

Perhaps the Russians first established pay-for-plunder in these parts, with their Kodiak Islander fur hunters up at Fort Ross. Aleut natives received considerations for efforts in annihilating entire populations of sea mammals.

America’s chapter of Bay Area labor history opens full-throttle in 1848, with James Marshall’s discovery of gold, mere weeks before Mexico ceded Alta California to the United States. Tens of thousands of fevered young men soon lit out from all corners of the earth for California’s gold fields. Their intention was simply to strike it rich quick. Most failed.

Many gold rush “Argonauts” had signed on to companies organized back in their hometowns. The idea was to share work, expenses, and their mutually acquired booty. But it didn’t pan out. Most quit these companies ASAP and went out to pan for themselves.

Southerners tried bringing slaves to the gold fields, and some attempted to press Indians to labor for them. But it wasn’t until surface placer gold disappeared that wholesale employment by capital investors became common in the Sierras.

San Francisco grew in staccato fits and starts, both up from sand dunes and out into the Bay. As everywhere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the city was where work-for-hire really took root.

During the Civil War Central Pacific “railrogue” Charles Crocker employed thousands of Chinese “coolies” to build the western half of the Transcontinental Railroad. Hundreds lost their lives on the job, working long hours for a pittance. Of course, Crocker and his “Octopus” cohorts attained Midas wealth, but to demonstrate how Crocker assessed contributions by his Chinese workers, simply look at the historic photo joining the twin transcontinental efforts, east and west, in Promontory, Utah. Not a Chinese face to be seen!

By the 1860’s work-for-hire was so commonplace that labor in San Francisco organized to secure the 8 hour work day. The SF Bay Area, and San Francisco in particular, became known for the strength of its organized work force. This reputation didn’t come without numerous struggles, nor was it always fair to all workers. Ten people lost their lives when a bomb exploded at the Preparedness Day Parade in 1916. Those responsible were never prosecuted, but two labor leaders took the fall on trumped up charges. Bloody Tuesday, amidst the 1934 General Strike, speaks for itself.

Labor blemishes include Denis Kearney’s anti-Chinese Workingman’s Party, Musicians’ Union president turned mayor “Handsome Gene” Schmitz’s corrupt Union Labor Party, and labor hero ILWU president Harry Bridges turning his back on the mostly black “B-men”, while port shipping operations moved from San Francisco to Oakland in the 1960’s.

By 1941 virtually every restaurant in San Francisco was unionized. Cafes and diners that didn’t display a union window sign sat empty. Can you imagine McDonalds, Starbucks and Pizza Hut with union shops today?

No matter labors’ past faults and shortcomings, those of us enjoying what we have today owe a profound debt to organized labor. Were it not for 19th and 20th century union struggles it’s highly unlikely there would be such a thing as a middle class in America today.

While union strength has receded, so too has labor shifted. With international trade agreements has come what Ross Perot famously called “that great sucking sound” of overseas outsourcing. Good paying factory jobs were first to go, often with American corporations actually being subsidized with taxpayer dollars to take them away.

We’ve shifted from manufacturing jobs to high tech and financial services on one end of the spectrum, and increasing numbers of low paying service sector jobs on the flip-side. This hollowing out of middle class benefit-paying employment has contributed to the greatest disparity in individual economic worth since the Great Depression.

Today’s United States is the world’s only industrialized country which doesn’t provide universal health care to every worker, never mind the general public. We have the developed world’s lowest rates of personal savings, the highest credit card debt, new draconian bankruptcy laws, weakened whistle-blower protections, skyrocketing higher education costs, the highest incarceration rate in the history of humanity, threatened social security, an aging infrastructure, trillions of dollars of foreign-held national debt, a costly on-going war; and, while real income for the majority of us has fallen five straight years, now comes this bubble-bursting sub prime housing market collapse, and with it—really tight money.

Oh, and did I mention the many potential effects of global warming, loss of civil liberties, runaway corporate welfare, and shifting the tax burden off corporations and wealth to those on lower rungs of the economic ladder?

We’re talking middle class challenges here, folks.

And so as we celebrate this Labor Day weekend of 2007 around our backyard grill or down at the lake, take a moment to thank those who’ve made everything from our homes to vacations, benefits and comfortable retirement possible. Then look ahead to next year, when we might inaugurate a new era of working folk dialogue with Rohnert Park’s own Breadwinner Fest. We who labor long and hard need to take time to address issues affecting each and every one of us, even as we celebrate and project our mutual hopes, dreams and aspirations on a better future for all humankind.

Jud Snyder hit the nail on the head. Last month in Coffeegrounds, Snyder asserted Rohnert Park “has a profile lower than a snake’s navel.” He cited community celebrations, or rather their absence, as one big reason for RP’s asphalt-level identity. I agree. Jud Snyder’s proposals, particularly his envisioning a Farmer’s Market, as well as Seed Farm and Sweet Pea fests are all really good ideas.

Then, in last week’s “Letters” section, Vera Blanquie gave an impassioned pitch for the First Annual Rohnert Park Sonoma Mountain Art & Wine Festival. Sounds like fun. I wish it well.

And, I think we can do even better.

But first a little celebratory backstory.

Festival comes from the Latin word festivus, but, as you know, many were the organized festivals that pre-date even the Romans. Sumerians sowed barley and celebrated Akitu some 5,000 years ago. There’s Chinese New Year, the Aztec Quetzalcoatl fertility fest, Krisha’s Hindu birthday bash, and the ancient Greek Olympics. Each of the four seasons and various celestial bodies give pause to party. And we all know of holy Christian, Moslem and Jewish feast days dating back millennia. Locally, Miwok tribelets gathered together for annual acorn festivals.

Back in the here and now, summer’s dog days tail off into autumn. The sun’s out, weather’s warm, and rain won’t dampen spirits ’til October. It’s peak outdoor festival season. We SF Bay folk celebrate apples, eggs and accordions; garlic, crab and crush. We stage heritage and adobe days, and even a citrus fair come February. There’s a San Francisco leather fest, and Burning Man amidst the desert heat. Penngrove has its Sons of Italy Family Picnic, while Rohnert Park chimes in with this new art & wine fling.

Now what we need is a flagship jubilee defining who we in Rohnert Park are, and why our town is so vital and so special.

If you want a city-defining festival to become “great,” grow it from roots established in the community’s formative years. Do this and community “is-ness” permeates the bash. Best to start with something you already have, or perhaps, once had. Sebastopol Gravensteins. Cloverdale Citrus. Petaluma Chicken & Eggs. Sonoma Grapes & Wine. Bodega Bay Crab.

These city-defining wingdings share something in common. They grow from, cultivate and nourish their communities, in fact and by tradition. Great community festivals grow like well-tended gardens. They define, frame, paint and boost their town’s profile; they proclaim accomplishments and promote everything their community hopes to become. Great festivals project images community members savvy and incorporate into their personal lives. A great festival binds a community, and those who attend, together.

So, when Jud Snyder asks you “What does Rohnert Park have?”, how do you respond?

Think back. Yes, Rohnert Park sits atop ancient Indian land. It was once part of a vast ranchero. Later it transformed into a seed and a sweet pea farm.

Now ask yourself: What makes the actual City of Rohnert Park special? Have we anything no one else can claim?

Fifty years ago, at its birth, how did Rohnert Park’s founders envision this city-to-be? Moreover, what does Rohnert Park strive for even to this very day?

Plainly, what makes Rohnert Park unlike any other Bay Area city, its extraordinary “is-ness”, stems from its founders intent that it be as a “country club for the working class.”

Now that’s something special. It sets us apart. Rohnert Park is no generic gated community for the investment class and inheritance elite, nor is it yet another hoity-toity golf course for the rich and famous. Rohnert Park was built by and for people just like us. Hail working America— cornerstone and foundation of our free and democratic society! So, Hail Rohnert Park, “Country Club of the working class!” And, if you can’t have a good time at your own country club, what’s the point in membership?

Check out the statistics. Rohnert Park boasts the least expensive home prices in the entire North Bay. Rohnert Park’s a bargain at $45,000 below Sonoma County’s 2005 median home price, and a whopping $101,363 below the county average. And, over all, Sonoma County home prices are a steal compared to Napa and Marin.

But what does this mean?

Walk around or drive through town. Point out the mansions. Find me the slums. There are none to be found because we live smack dab in what has, for a solid half century, been a growing community conceived and designed by and for working class folks and their families to live in pleasurable dignified comfort.

Let’s celebrate that!

Okay, then who’s our audience?

Well, how many of your friends, family and acquaintances work, or have worked a job? White and blue collar workers, service sector employees, management, professionals, homemakers, small business owners and every master of occupation diversification qualify.

Aside from heirs and scions, how many of us haven’t worked for a living? If this happens to describe you I’m afraid you’re vastly outnumbered. So stay at home or tag along and prepare for the old hint-hint.

One question is bound to crop up. Just how and why should we celebrate something, namely work, that many of us don’t exactly relish? I mean, who, with the exception of unions, actually equate Labor Day with labor?

Roget’s thesaurus has two antonyms for celebration—job and work. So how to overcome prejudice against efforts which place bread on the table? Since work, labor and the working class have devolved into less than appealing labels we might employ the one word that both defines us, and which has nothing but positive connotations: We can create Rohnert Park’s First Annual Breadwinner Fest!

By making Breadwinner Fest fun, informative, entertaining, inventive, challenging and inclusive we’ll not only commemorate our founders’ vision, we’ll embrace and project our community’s unique birthright. By providing canvas to create better futures we’ll address needs, hopes, dreams and desires that working Americans share as one. We’ll make Breadwinner Fest something folks want to experience because, well, it’s a festival designed just for them.

“Careful now,
We are dealing here with an illusion”
—Ambrose Bierce

On Saturday, September 17, 1859 Joshua Abraham Norton walked into the San Francisco Bulletin’s office. He handed the editor a document. This screed proclaimed that he, Joshua Norton, was henceforth Emperor of the United States.

Emperor Norton, in concert with Bummer and Lazarus—his beloved and loyal imperial curs, are oft referred to as “The Three Bummers.” While this moniker seems to reference the trio’s sum worth, inclination and trade, the true tale behind the Three Bummers regrettably mirrors recent headlines in both local and national news.

Picture two cherished, if mangy flea bitten mongrels, together with their mad imperial master, frolicking about the city, not a care in the world between them; sharing free saloon buffet meals, free-ticketed to each gala theatrical opening, front row center, and, in general having their happy-go-lucky run of the city.

This account of the Three Bummers, popularly depicted in 1860s caricatures drawn by Edward Jump, and later fleshed out by the writer Theodor Kirchhoff, is one of San Francisco’s most endearing legends. It’s a sweet, wonderful and heartwarming story.

But it’s a pack of lies.

That’s right: the tale of the Three Bummers is entirely fabricated, a confection – pure unadulterated fantasy. However, the actual historic truth behind the Three Bummers teaches a far more timely and vital lesson than any saccharine romance possibly could.

First, a little background. Joshua Abraham Norton, as many of you know, is far and away the most celebrated in an unending bounty of eccentrics our Bay Area is both exalted and damned for. Born and raised in England, a reputedly sane Joshua Norton sailed into Gold Rush San Francisco from South Africa. He toted a substantial grubstake along with him. The would-be commodity baron proceeded to lose his every last penny in a vain attempt to corner the city’s rice market. Norton left town for a time, and upon returning, the now screw-loose speculator proclaimed himself “Norton I, Emperor of North America and, (two years later) Protector of Mexico.”

Over the next two decades Emperor Norton was widely quoted, mock-lauded and occasionally upbraided for his imperial proclamations and his flamboyant public persona. Mark Twain even patterned a character in Huckleberry Finn on the Emperor.

Emperor Norton’s purported pooches were of questionable parentage. In his book Bummer & Lazarus, Malcolm E. Barker describes Bummer as a “Newfoundland, with protruding teeth, a permanent grin, and a clumsy walk.” The Daily Evening Bulletin on Saturday, October 3, 1863 wrote “Lazarus was supposed to be a cross between a cur and a hound, with a dash of the terrier… In color he was of a yellowish black—and proudest of the black.” The two dogs achieved local renown, while the Civil War raged back east, for their unusually close bond with one another, and because they killed lots of rats.

They, like Norton I, garnered reams of newspaper attention, but the facts are the facts: Bummer and Lazarus didn’t give one guttural growl about Joshua Norton.

As for the Emperor – it’s clear any suggestion that he associated with rat eating mongrels was grounds for violent retort. In fact, according to February 14, 1863’s edition of the Alta California, Norton, passing a store window displaying the Edward Jump lithograph depicting the Three Bummers dining together, became so incensed by it he, “let fly his walking stick at the window pane and smashed—his stick.”

Despite fuzzy-wuzzy legend, both Bummer and Lazarus lived the cruel existence of homeless strays. While accorded high-minded accolades in the press and by city government, they each survived for wont of shelter, food, care and protection. Each died horribly painful, neglected deaths.

Lazarus was born a stray. He never learned to behave around humans. In October of 1863 Lazarus bit a child. In response, the child’s father fed Lazarus meat saturated in rat bane. Lazarus suffered an excruciating poisoned death.

Bummer’s was a prolonged, wretched demise. According to the September 14, 1865 edition of the Daily Alta California, a mean drunkard “kicked poor old ‘Bummer’ down a stairway… His body is now swollen to twice its usual size, and the poor fellow appears at death’s door.” Bummer managed to hang to life for three agonizing, neglected months before he, too, succumbed, two years after his friend, Lazarus.

You’d think we’d have learned how to treat animals since then. Yet even today we’re constantly faced with grisly accounts of human cruelty perpetrated upon animals. The list seems endless: Dog fighting rings, canines trained to attack and kill humans, race track and circus abuses, animal clubbings, shootings, hangings, beatings and electrocutions. Now we read of three Mill Valley house dogs poisoned while out with their walker. To these headline grabbing atrocities add the far more common everyday abuses, namely pet neglect, abandonment, and irresponsible owners refusing to spay and neuter their pets.

And right here at home we follow the ongoing tribulations of a little black kitten named Adam, deliberately set afire and nearly burned to death. This shocker has reawakened public outrage at human cruelty to animals. Adam’s suffered surgery after agonizing surgery. Yet somehow he’s mustered the courage to surmount constant pain, to grasp for and to embrace life. We’re cheered by Adam’s grit and fortitude, wishing him only the best. Yet out there—often hidden from sight, vast multitudes of Adams and Bummers and Lazarus’s live miserable lives, castaways and the offspring of castaways, denizens of the streets and hidden in the urban wilds, suffering hunger, the elements, and ever mounting injuries and disease—before they finally lie down in peace.

While the Emperor Norton and the two celebrated mutts never comprised a triumvirate, I’ll submit that the Three REAL LIFE Bummers are actually we humans who: Abuse, ignore or abandon our animals; don’t spay or neuter our pets; and those of us who adopt pets we don’t, won’t or can’t care for, protect and give the love they so richly deserve.

On Sunday, November 5, 1865 the Daily Alta published its Elegy On Bummer:

“He, who was faithful to the end,
The noble Bummer sleeps;
Gone hence to join his better friend,
Where doggy never weeps.”

Horrors! Batboy’s been pitched onto tabloid history’s scrap heap! We billion bored shoppers, standing in a million supermarket check-outs, stare blankly at our eggs and our lettuce. Why? Because our wacky beloved Weekly World News (“The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper”), and with it Batboy, Ed Anger and Hillary’s Alien Offspring—have vanished from our supermarket news racks.

Elsewhere, Rupert Murdoch, the grand poobah of agenda news, gobbles down the Wall Street Journal, sending investors, who require objective, truthful financial reports, into mass hysteria.

But that’s not all.

Deregulation sweeps locally owned radio and television stations into vacuuming maws of rapacious media conglomerates. News agencies, like UPI, vanish. Newspapers, magazines, film studios and publishing houses are subsumed into honeycombed bowels of multi-national corporations. They’re then downsized, or liquidated. The sticky tentacles of media consolidation reach deep into virtually every American media resource.

All this seems to run contrary to an American democracy conceived, created, nurtured and taught to speak its many minds freely, via an vast array of media outlets. Suddenly our proud and fiercely independent national media sounds like the monotone dirge of the authoritarian propagandist.

Yet long before Rupert Murdoch’s quest for media hegemony reached Fox; long before some fantasy rag called the Weekly World News was birthed from old National Enquirer presses, and yes, even long before the words media and consolidation were first paired as one—our nation marveled at a vast media empire built by San Francisco’s own prodigal son, William Randolph Hearst.

I know it’s a terrible cliche, but history does occasionally repeat. William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow press” publications made zany claims and invented bizarre stories, ala the Weekly World News. His drive to acquire still more media outlets, like media conglomerate Clear Channel has following media deregulation, was only halted with financial collapse forced upon Hearst by the Great Depression. And as for pre-dating Rupert Murdoch, well, as Hearst’s youthful populist/progressive sentiments faded, he turned ever more reactionary. Ultimately, Hearst espoused national policies akin to fascism.

Hearst entered the media game, gifted with the failing San Francisco Examiner when he was just twenty-fours years old. At his pinnacle Hearst owned 28 newspapers in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. He published scads of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar. Hearst owned a Hollywood film company, two news services and the King Features Syndicate. These media sources provided him a platform with which to launch his own political career, and to promote his many other ambitions.

Let’s face it—unimaginable wealth fascinates us. With wealth comes power, and the ability to mold one’s life into legend, whether it be true or not. William Randolph Hearst was one such wealthy man of distorted legend. Hearst’s legend stands largely at odds with who he really was and what he set out to accomplish.

William Randolph Hearst inherited vast tracks of land not only in the United States, but in Mexico and Central and South America as well. While his quarter million-acre San Simeon property remains impressive, “the ranch” was dwarfed by Hearst’s seven-plus million acres in Mexico, alone. Add to this his Central and South American holdings. Then there were the diversified stocks, innumerable gold, silver and other mines, including the Comstock Ophir and Montana’s Anaconda, vast stretches of timber, oil, and uncounted properties in major U.S. metropolitan areas from San Francisco to Manhattan.

While William Randolph Hearst never realized his dream to make the White House his own, he took credit for his media-muscle creating bogus wars with Spain and in the Philippines. Hearst sent author Stephen Crane and famed illustrator Frederick Remington to Cuba shortly after the U.S. Maine sank in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. When Remington informed Hearst that there was no war to record, Hearst reportedly wired back “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”

“The interests of (Hearst), his mother, and his nation were, in his own mind, identical, and he believed that he knew how to motivate his fellow citizens to realize those ends. His policy of America First… effectively erased distinctions between national defense and offense… he employed a limited palette of proven adjectives and a liberal application of the nouns ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty. A child could understand him; Hearst’s enemies often caricatured the publisher as a spoiled brat,” wrote Gray Brechin, in his recent classic and superlative book, Imperial San Francisco.

A most egregious example of Hearst’s using his press power to promote his own self interest was in urging our nation to mount a second war with Mexico. The first war with Mexico, according to Ulysses S. Grant, was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Hearst’s reprise was meant to be more of the same. It’s particularly instructive considering our country’s ongoing immigration debate.

Hearst once relegated Mexicans to “that mongrel mixture of Aztec, Indian and Spanish buccaneer.” Hearst’s aim was to both protect his own Mexican financial interests, and in doing so to grab the entire nation for “The Greater United States.”

Hearst didn’t stop there. According to him:

“If we have no right in Mexico we have no right in California or in Texas, which we redeemed from Mexico.

“If we have no right in Mexico we have no right anywhere in the U.S., for this whole country from ocean to ocean, has been rescued from savagery and redeemed for civilization….”

If he’d had his way William Randolph Hearst would have been president. He’d have trumped up wars with Mexico, Japan (he hated the Japanese), and who knows who else. He’d have swept up every mass media outlet he could afford in order to shape and frame our shared national perceptions—to suit his own opinions and self interests. Something eerily similar is happening to our media and our country today.

That’s why you, dear reader, might well appreciate that you hold in your hands a precious and vanishing treasure—a truly independent locally owned news source. Would but it flower and seed, from which endless fields of new voices sprout up in the grand tradition of American democracy. And let these voices be heard, a cornucopia of news and opinion playing the exquisite cacophonic symphony that is American democracy.

Tom Snyder died Sunday at his home in Tiboron. Tom was loud, brash, informed and grand gesturing—what media-folk call “larger-than-life.” It seemed he chain-smoked to keep clean air from polluting his lungs. Belly-laughter, intelligent repartee, and ongoing devil-may-care studio banter were Tom Snyder trademarks.

He’d be hilarious, combative, self deprecating, dogged and cheesy-sentimental; all this before he fired up his second on-air smoke. We viewers felt Tom was, well, our slightly twisted buddy, and we were in on each yuck, sitting right there with him on his bare-bones studio set. He’d tell us to “Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air.”

Tom Snyder, was, in my opinion, the best talk show host ever laid down on tape. Period. But more than anything else Tom was a great storyteller. So in his honor I’ve dug a vintage Tom Snyder story out from the ol’ memory bank. While Tom was legion for his enormous ego, this story begins with me.

It was 29 years ago, 1978, during the dog days of summer. I was a suburban Chicago-bred hip-billy living in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas. One day out hiking up a dirt logging road I happened upon a tiny beat-up trailer home. Not a mobile home or a “manufactured home”, in today’s parlance, but a rust bucket of a one room thing you’d lug behind an old Ford and pray it didn’t disintegrate along the way.

Next to this shack-on-wheels sat a brand spanking new, loudly decorated Peterbilt semi-trailer rig. It’s lettering proclaimed all sorts of stuff about the Lord Jesus Christ. Two junk yard dogs stood tied to a post next to the Peterbilt, patiently awaiting that opportune moment when I’d walk within striking distance, offering my hippie peace-be-unto-thee hand to them, like the village idiot clothed in raw hamburger.

A women suddenly flung open the flimsy door of the flimsy trailer. I don’t recall what she said, if she indeed had a thing to say, but oh-boy do I remember how she looked. Picture a boney pale faced gal with piercing coal-black eyes, in a severe long-sleeved jacket over a dark navy dress wearing granny shoes and sporting a white bonnet drawn tight beneath her chin. No air conditioning in that trailer, and it had to be a hundred degrees outside, with humidity to match. The woman’s jet black Groucho Marx eyebrows sprouted from her furrowed brow.

I didn’t dare address her. I simply turned, and walked away. But not before spotting this skinny guy staring at me over her shoulder. He had the face of a craggy, ill-fed angel, and the crazed deep-sunk eyes of a prophet. I snuck another glimpse at that lettering on the fancy new Peterbilt. This rig hauled “revival tents” for the infamous Reverend Daniel Aaron Rogers. That’s right, this guy was the one, the only, Daniel Aaron Rogers, and I had just sorta-met he and his wife, Elizabeth, all quite by chance.

I know what you’re saying, you’re saying, well then, just who the bleep is this Reverend Daniel Aaron Rogers? Well, Rogers was a tent revival preacher who’s moment of national fame stemmed from his determined efforts to raise the rock solid remains of his recently deceased mother, Gladys, back to life from her standing position within the arctic confines of a Kenmore upright freezer.

What’s-more, an Indonesian Resurrectionist, Gladys’ own flickering frigid eyelids, a media-hound undertaker and a ex-con cowboy evangelist also factor into the story, but space won’t permit further elucidation. However, getting back to the point of this story, the Reverend Daniel Aaron Rogers closed the deal on his own sub-celebrity as the result of his guest appearance on Tom Snyder’s late night Tomorrow Show.

And talk about an A to Z list lineup! Tom’s first two guests that night were Keith Stroup and San Francisco’s own Margo St. James. Stroup was the founder of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. St. James, who inaugurated San Francisco’s Hookers’ Ball, was this nation’s leading prostitute activist. She helped found and spearheaded the SF based organization COYOTE, Call Off Your Tired Ethics, which demanded respect for and legalization of her ancient profession. No doubt about it, these were two fascinating, if controversial guests, but each was merely a warmup to the shooting star to come.

Late in the show and it finally came time for Tom to introduce the Reverend Rogers. He launched into one of his patented Tom Snyder dissertations, giving viewers the backstory on his next guest’s two month long set of legal trials and holy tribulations. Tom waxed eloquently about the 80-year-old Gladys, her loving son, Daniel—and Daniel’s unwavering faith that God would once and forever prove his own existence to a unbelieving humanity by making the God-loving Gladys walk straight from her freezer.

Tom wove details after detail into Daniel Aaron Roger’s righteous quest. This was all part of the typical Snyder schtick, but in doing so Tom began to chuckle.

What started as low primordial guffaws grew into tiffs of laughter, then hiccup-like eruptions. Soon came the belly laughter, tears running down his cheeks. Tom could hardly keep his smoke down. He doubled over and seemed set to roll on the floor with fits and outpourings of uncontrollable hilarity. Tom simply couldn’t control himself. Something about Rogers’ story—perhaps it was his visualization of glacial reanimation—something grabbed Tom’s funny-bone and shook his entire being as if he were literally possessed. Yes folks, Tom Snyder was suffering from serious funny-bone possession.

Somehow Tom managed, with an olympian feat of professional fortitude, to pull himself together and go to commercial break. Upon his return it was as if he’d taken a cold shower, or a stint in the freezer, or something.

Tom’s actual interview with the Reverend Daniel Aaron Rogers proved anti-climactic. Tom was somber and respectful. He even gave heartfelt apologies to a man who, after all, truly believed in just what he believed in. For this hillbilly preacher, Daniel Aaron Rogers, was no sleazy charlatan, and Tom Snyder, to his credit, recognized this. Tom conducted the interview in a dignified way that, at the time, mystified me. I guess I just wanted more yucks. But as the years passed and I matured I came to appreciate how Tom conducted that brief televised encounter. Tom Snyder, man-of-the-world, clown-cynic and loose canon satirist could not bring himself to make a fool out of a sincere and honest, if naive and ill-educated, backwoods preacher–no matter the man’s bizarre beliefs.

Tom showed me something that night that has stayed with me to this very day—that an essential measure of any human’s being is in how we treat the other fellow, no matter how they look, where they come from, or what brand of freezer they place their mother in.

This week’s column title first headlined Sunday’s edition of the San Francisco Call—back on May 7, 1899. That 19th century investigative hit piece featured three unflattering John Clawson illustrations portraying “Mammy Pleasant” as a bonneted evil-eyed crone. The story gobbled up the entire front page of that day’s paper. Its “Angel or Arch Fiend” dualism embodies endless confusion and contradictory assertions surrounding the life of this incredible woman —confusion and contradictions lingering on to this very day.

The “Mammy” tag, clearly meant to be a slam, fits neatly within a cluster of Black stereotypes. While Pleasant’s tall, thin frame, her finely honed features and regal bearing contrast sharply with the rotund happy-to-be-a-slave mammy of plantation lore, the name itself intentionally places her status akin to a Samba, Uncle Tom, Step and Fetchit, or to a licentious Jezebel. The mythology of these “halcyon days” of slavery is what Eric Lott calls “the dialectic flickering of racial insult and racial envy.”

Mary Ellen “Mammy” Pleasant’s legacy is an enigma rolled up inside layers of legend, gossip, greed, fantasy, racism and conjecture. She’s been called “San Francisco’s Powerful And Sinister Ruler” or “The Black City Hall”, as well as a “one woman social agency” and “the Mother of Civil Rights in California.” That covers one heck of a lot of reputational territory.

Some claim that Mary Ellen Pleasant was a mixed blood Voodoo Queen who aimed “the black arts” against her enemies, that she sold babies, murdered as many as 49 people, ran brothels, committed fraud, spied through walls on victims she would later blackmail, and that she held unholy powers over a vast network of underlings and protégés. One rival charged that after Pleasant murdered her husband she “had put her fingers in the hole in the top of his head and pulled out the protruding brains.”

Others tout Mary Ellen Pleasant’s work as a philanthropist, her wide array of long time devoted friends, both black and white, her financial wizardry – and her undying devotion to women’s and civil rights, and, before that – her commitment to the abolition of slavery. In fact, Mary Ellen Pleasant’s Napa gravestone reads—SHE WAS A FRIEND OF JOHN BROWN.

Indeed, when Brown was captured following his ill-fated attack on Harper’s Ferry he carried with him a promissory note signed MEP. Had not the authorities misread the M for a W Mary Ellen Pleasant would undoubtedly have had her neck stretched next to John Brown’s.

Everything about Pleasant’s formative years is subject to debate. She was born a slave in Virginia, or Georgia, or perhaps it was Louisiana. She claims to have been born free in Philadelphia on August 19, 1814. Others say she was born in 1817, give or take a year—or two. She was convent educated, or else was entirely self-taught. Her mother may have been a West Indies Voodoo Queen, or not. Her father was a wealthy white slave owner. Then again, perhaps he was a slave. Nobody knows for sure.

What we do know is that sometime between 1848 and 1852 Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in San Francisco. She may have been accompanied by her second husband, a former slave named James Pleasant, or Pleasants, or perhaps it was Pleasance. Whatever his surname it’s clear that the shrewd, focused and ambitious Mary Ellen was a power unto herself.

James, who died in 1877, seems hardly to have factored into Mary Ellen’s life. His one notable contribution was in the co-creation of Mary Ellen’s one and only child, Elizabeth, whom she called Lizzy. However, Mary Ellen gave their daughter her first husband’s family name—Smith. It was only fair, since James Henry Smith had left seed money to Mary Ellen upon his death, some years before. Mary Ellen built her financial empire with the help of these funds.

Once in San Francisco, Pleasant set about purchasing boardinghouses, real estate, laundries, restaurants and stock shares in mines, railroads and other business ventures. This was no small accomplishment in an era of near unfettered legal bias against both racial minorities and women. Money from these investments built her 30-room mansion dubbed “the House of Mystery”, atop Cathedral Hill in San Francisco.

In her later years Pleasant purchased a large tract of land set against the Mayacamas Mountains. She named it Beltane, either after Thomas Bell, or, as some critics claim, in honor of the ancient pagan celebration of the same name. Beltane lies outside Glen Ellen, in the heart of the Sonoma Valley. The stately New Orleans-style Victorian house she built there (now a B&B) is set amidst an immense flowering garden and hundreds of shady oaks. One fanciful claim is that Pleasant cast Voodoo spells from a cave somewhere on the property.

But with all her accrued wealth, Mary Ellen Pleasant seems always to have performed, or dressed as if she performed, domestic labor. It’s said that she would ride to the markets in her own custom built carriage, accompanied by a driver and a footman, each garbed in impeccable livery. Though always attired in a servant’s black dress and large white apron, she “walked like a duchess.”

Sometime in the mid 1860s Mary Ellen Pleasant hooked up with a stockbroker named Thomas Bell. The “canny Scot” was money savvy, but lacked imagination. Pleasant took him under her wing. Together they created one of the largest financial partnerships in that era of San Francisco. Pleasant and Bell may (or may not) have been lovers.

It’s said that Mary Ellen arranged Thomas’s marriage to the future Teresa Bell, having first instructed Teresa in the “genteel arts” necessary to flourish in elite society. Others say Thomas Bell discovered the beautiful Teresa on a visit to a house of ill repute. No matter which story is true it seems the marriage provided adequate cover from charges of miscegenation, which might otherwise have been leveled at the cohabitation of the white Thomas Bell with the octoroon (or perhaps quadroon) “Mammy” Pleasant.

What’s undeniably true is that Mary Ellen Pleasant was actively involved in the Underground Railroad, and that she placed former slaves and geographically displaced freemen as domestics in many of San Francisco’s “better” households. She also clearly advocated for and personally rescued unprotected and often attractive young white women, who Mary Ellen then trained to become the wives and mistresses of wealthy men in The City.

These actions led to many of the questionable charges against her, since persons beholden to Pleasant for their livelihoods provided her eyes and ears within San Francisco’s most prominent households.

Mary Ellen was well into her 80’s when her finances began to unravel. She’d both overextended her business dealings, and had incurred the wrath of her former protege, Teresa Bell. Mary Ellen had exposed Teresa’s young lover to embezzlement charges, landing him a stint in San Quentin. As payback, the mentally unhinged Tereasa became Pleasants most rapacious foe. She set to pummeling Pleasant’s good name even long after sending Mary Ellen to her grave. Because of the sensitive nature of Thomas Bell’s and Mary Ellen Pleasant’s financial partnership Teresa managed to gain control of their mutual resources following Thomas’ death. Mary Ellen Pleasant was ultimately stripped of her wealth and forced into bankruptcy.

Pleasant’s diaries were stolen and lost to posterity, while many of Teresa’s hallucinatory rants made their way into newsprint following Pleasant’s death. Consequently, Teresa Bell’s accounts fundamentally shifted the Mary Ellen Pleasant mythos into the realm of evil phantasma. Fortunately, contemporary scholars have begun setting Mary Ellen Pleasant’s record as straight as a story with such twists, squiggles and gaping holes can be set. As confusing and contradictory as her life story may be, Mary Ellen Pleasant optimistically forecast her own legacy when she wrote:

“… You can’t explain away the truth.”

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
—Jack London

“(Jack London writes) as if his digestion, like his politics and rhetoric, was out of order.”
—Ambrose Bierce

Take two famous, controversial and egotistical writers. Pair them up for the first and only time amidst towering ancient redwoods. Place bottles of Three Star Martel cognac in each of their eager hands. Okay, history buffs – what do you get?

Answer: The legendary 1910 Bohemian Grove bender pitting 67 year old misanthropic satirist, poet and author of macabre fiction, Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce, against a man half his age – the one-time oyster pirate, avowed socialist, white supremacist and world’s best selling novelist, Jack London.

****

It started out innocently enough. “Bitter Bierce, the Wickedest Man in San Francisco,” was camping out on his brother’s property, across the Russian River from Sonoma County’s Bohemian Grove. Bierce had been invited to attend that August’s Bohemian Club High Jinx spectacular, no doubt aiming to run his literary dagger through this fanciful pageant at the first opportunity presented him.

When his old friend and former personal sycophant George Sterling (himself a poet and long time Boho) informed Bierce of Jack London’s presence at the Grove, Bierce pressed Sterling for a face-to-face pow-wow. Sterling claims he was none too anxious to arrange the meeting.

“You mustn’t meet him,” Sterling insisted, “You’d be at each other’s throats in five minutes.”

“Nonsense,” Bierce responded, hoisting his drink. “Bring him on. I’ll treat him like a Dutch uncle.”

Bierce demanded Sterling perform his mission post haste. Meanwhile Bierce, ever dapper, draped in his customary derby-topped black-suited garb, continued tippling brandy beneath the open air Bohemian Grove redwood bar. Soon he pulled focus on a gaggle of besotted Bohos stumbling towards him from some distance beyond.

A stocky fellow wearing Levis and a red vest led the parade. The man’s muddy workshirt pushed out from his jeans. He had a moon face, piercing blue eyes (like Bierce’s own), and displayed a wide smile revealing the gap where two front teeth paid the price for a marvelous barroom brawl. The man’s bottle swung to and fro as he moved, and grew ever lighter with each bottleneck-to-mouth inspection. This man, of course, was Jack London. Ambrose Bierce smiled wickedly, and motioned his bar boy to refresh his drink.

Brandy, n. A cordial composed of one part thunder-and-lightning, one part remorse, two parts bloody murder, one part death-hell-and-the-grave and four parts clarified Satan.
—Ambrose Bierce from “The Devil’s Dictionary”

****

The two combatants had three things, and only three things, in common: Writing, alcoholism and occasional paychecks from William Randolph Hearst, whom each reviled. Beyond that they were a study in contrasts.
The surly yet gregarious “Wolf” London knocked about through cat houses, creep joints and dive saloons the world wide. His two missing front teeth attested this.

London consumed oceans of liquor, built an every-boy’s fantasy stone mansion specifically to house, party with and impress his many friends. While a communal idealist, a utopian farmer and radical socialist, Jack limited his love of humanity to caucasians, espousing the “humane” extermination of even a certain derelict portion of that white minority.

Radicalism, n. The conservatism of tomorrow injected into the affairs of today.
—“The Devil’s Dictionary”

****

Ambrose Bierce, by contrast, survived the horrors of the Civil War to write what is arguably the conflict’s most notable piece of short fiction. He had long been the bad boy of San Francisco journalism and a thorn in the side of most everyone, but most especially railing against the high and the mighty.
Bierce called Big Four member and California Governor Leland Stanford “Stealand Landford.” He singlehandedly prevented Stanford and his fellow “Railrogues” from robbing the U.S. Treasury of more booty than they’d already plundered from it.

Though an avowed political conservative, Bierce often sided with abused minorities while still looking down his nose at them and continually pummeling big money interests, politicians, writers and humanity in general. But Ambrose Bierce didn’t acquire his misanthropic reputation for hating humanity equally. In fact, he hated some people much more than he hated others.

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
—“The Devil’s Dictionary”

****

The lauded and successful Jack London wrote 1,000 words each and every day no matter his condition, and he was proud of it. But London’s boast was grist for Bierce’s contempt. And no wonder – London’s work was wildly uneven, and Bierce was green with envy over upstart London’s incredible success. One can only imagine what linguistic tortures Bierce devised watching the near embalmed London lurch toward Bierce’s liquored web that day.

Success, n. The one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows.
—“The Devil’s Dictonary”

****

Unfortunately, specifics concerning what further transpired between the two literary titans that day are slim to none. Even photos purportedly shot of the two were either lost or ruined.

So while today’s rich and powerful spend the next week or so terrorizing their livers at the Bohemian Grove, each member owes an unpardonable debt to two legitimate “Bohemians” who did battle there, nearly a century ago. While dialectic specifics passed on unrecorded we still hear echoes in the famed lexicographer’s timeless study of humanity:

Loquacity, n. A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his tongue when you wish to talk.
—“The Devil’s Dictionary”lL

San Francisco’s Bohemian Club was founded by “boho” newsmen, artists and dramatists back in 1872. How this cutting-edge arts & intellensia drinking fraternity morphed into today’s rich and powerful ultra-conservative version of Animal House in the Sonoma County redwoods is a slight puzzler.

“Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” is the Bohemian Club motto, meant to suggest that no deals are to be cut at their two week long Bohemian Grove summer bacchanalia. And if you believe that, why I’m selling some sunny oceanfront property in North Dakota…

William Shakespeare spun “Weaving Spiders” into A Midsummer Night’s Dream four centuries ago. Methinks even ol’ Will would be dumbstruck at the absurdity of 1,500 filthy-rich plundercrats calling themselves, of all things, bohemians, invading Sonoma County from all corners of the corporate universe, hell-bent on perpetual inebriation and stumbling about looking for ancient redwoods to whiz on. The notion that these guys (no gals allowed) spend their time singing Kumbaya while uttering nary a business &/or political-dealing syllable, as their motto demands, transcends satire.

So, back to the beginning. How did the Bohemian Club transform from a maverick literary arts performing society into today’s Masters of the Planet confab” How did backwoods drinking bouts between icononclasts like Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce and socialist Jack London come to host “Lakeside Talks” on healthcare entitled “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Pays”, discussions concocting the Manhattan Project back in the 1940’s, those conspiring to break the 1934 West Coast General Strike, or the pow-wow between Tricky Dick and Ronald Reagan whereat Nixon convinced Reagan to back off running for prez in ‘68′? I

In other words—this ain’t Camp Avant Garde. But why did the Bohemian Club turn its 180?

Well, because broken down newsmen and artist-types are perpetually more bombastic and consumption-adept than they are fiscally solvent. Simply put—the deadbeat proto-bohos needed someone to foot their outrageous bar tab.

Businessmen Bohos soon cloned themselves into the majority clubbers. Career-active newsmen were actually banned. Instead, Big Business invited Old Money, bankers, Joint Chiefs, right wing think tankers and high ranking politicos to their party on Russian River.

However, artists were still needed to concoct, produce and perform the many year-round club offerings. Most artists couldn’t afford the steep dues, and since businessmen are apparently tar pit songbirds with two left feet and the acting talent of sno-cones the club created “associate memberships” for comparatively poor millionaires working down on the boho performance plantation. Rock stars like Steve Miller and Grateful Deaders Bob Weir and Mickey Hart are members. So is the former Ronald McDonald.

Herbert Hoover called the Bohemian Grove’s summer encampment “The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth”. There are over a hundred permanent Bohemian Grove camps. They sport names like Cave Man, Silverado Squatters and Hill Billies. One camp is famous for it’s perpetual daiquiri machine. Another for its pre-dawn gin fizzes. While we know that Dick Cheney gave a pre-Iraq Fiasco lecture on “War in the 21st Century”, a mammoth statue of the clubs’ patron saint, John of Nepomuk, finger to lips, cautions bohos to keep everything they see and hear within from the unwashed masses outside the Grove gates.

While early bohos included Mark Twain and Jack London, today it’s Stephen Bechtel, the Bush boys and Henry Kissinger. In the early years, when the summer encampment was held in Muir Woods, a towering pacifistic Buddha oversaw the proceedings. The all seeing Owl has long since become the symbol and mascot of the organization. Defense contractors are everywhere.

Each year club members gather before scores of hooded performers holding firey torches up on the grand stage. This spectacle, the “Cremation of Care,” has mock-mythic underpinnings. Texas-based journalist Alex Jones snuck into The Grove and bore witness to the proceedings in 2000. He claims the Cremation of Care ceremony is an “ancient Canaanite occult ritual…carried out by world leaders.” I don’t know about that, but photos of the event qualify as the essence of weird.

The heady combination of wealth, power and secrecy tethered to scandal rumoring and innuendo has produced a sub-industry of Bohemian Club conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most bizarre assertion is by former journalist David Icke. He claims that the bohos are actually reptilian shape-changers who invaded Earth millions of years ago. Others swear there is actual human sacrifice committed at the Grove, or that a secret underground dungeon is used to enact unspeakable atrocities.

But despite any tin-hat fantasies the fact remains that in a few short days some of the world’s most powerful men will gather mere miles from us, each of them sworn to absolute secrecy. Perhaps they’ll just dress up in drag, drink themselves silly and blow off a little steam; or run through the redwoods au natural to relieve the incomprehensible stress of running our world. Maybe they’ll just sit around playing rummy and howling at the moon. But then again, they’re not telling, so perhaps we’ll never know.

Famed playwright Oscar Wilde cut through the Bohemian Club mythos just 10 years after it’s founding. Wilde came to San Francisco a celebrated and scandalized writer. His boho hosts conspired to get him drunk and make a fool of him. After successfully drinking his antagonists under the table, the still-witted Wilde noted “I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed business-looking Bohemians in my life.”

Yes, and isn’t life just chock-full of little ironies like that?

Brace yourself. Here, we’ve suffered mute witness to baby boomers grabbing social security, cashing in KBR and Pfizer stocks to fund North Pole eco-jaunts and souped-up i-walkers. Moreover, it’s safe to say geriatric rock is here to stay—for at least one long, arthritic generation.

Now this: The Summer Of Love, plus forty.

First stop in the Way-Back Machine takes us to January 1967. It’s Golden Gate Park. The Human Be-In was fun for all, and arguably the last gasp of true hippie anarchism. Contrary to accepted 60’s mythology, hip-evolutionists who’d been living in The City itself were truckin’ on in droves by summer of that year. Many bona-fide hippies had already fled town for the rural hills of Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino counties, or up to Taos and into Colorado.

Meanwhile, for locals San Francisco’s Summer of Love was like bunkering down in mid 1940’s Berlin. Tens of thousands of young Americans followed the media’s piper call to The Haight, searching for something. For free love. Free music. Good vibes. Drugs. Lots and lots and lots of drugs. Thanks to Digger Panhandle meals and the Digger Free Store these children crusaders didn’t starve or freeze in the fog; and thanks to medical volunteers from the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, bad trips were steered to port and social diseases kept at bay.

Soon came busload onslaughts of scandalized blue-hairs from Omaha and Abilene, passing through the Haight like ogling wraiths, peering out from the comfort of giant mobile tour cans, giving a Fellini-in-a-fishbowl aura to the Hashbury scene.

But perhaps I rhapsodize too romantically.

After all, if we strip back the Beat Era connective tissue, the decades-post Depression era deprivations, once we savvy a youth generation awash in material splendor, yet yearning for meaning beyond—and what are we left with? If we take into account the draft, a horrific war in Vietnam, the constant threat of atomic annihilation, the plastic food, our repressed smiley-face nuclear families and lilly-white suburban isolation cells, just what comes to mind?

The good ol’ days, for sure.

It all made sense. Come to San Francisco. “Wear some flowers in your hair”—the song penned by a L.A. schlockmeister to cash in, big-time.

This isn’t to say the Summer of Love wasn’t worth its weight in incense sticks. No, this nation, shocked and perversely fascinated though it was, changed because it had witnessed, mere feet from our livingroom boob tubes, a generation searching for something . I’d say America changed for the better. Yes, some claim Charlie Manson and Altamont spun out from the same psychedelic cloth, but both were antithetical to what the Summer of Love meant to embrace—namely peace, human kindness, sharing, giving—and looking deep into oneself, questing the essence of our existence.

So, be forewarned: The Way-Back Machine purrs in overdrive this summer. Us oldsters will be packing folding chairs, sunscreen and ice chests, grabbing our kids, and our grandkids, heading off to this or that dinosaur rock concert. Please excuse our goofy pretense. We’re reconnecting with a time, a place and a feeling once claiming fantasy pasts and sci-fi futures. It was a time, which bathed each and every shared excess in lightning-true rays of a NOW that would never end, some forty years ago today.

series recap: The Geysers’ fumaroles rise like infernos, shooting steam plumes into the North Bay sky, while thick mineral-laden springs roil up from layers of permeable super-hot rock lying miles beneath the earth’s crust. The Geysers stretch down a dramatically steep canyon, and out across forty square miles of the Mayacamas Mountain range in northeast Sonoma and southern Lake counties.

A modern complex of twenty-one electricity plants mine steam from the Geysers. It’s the worlds largest producer of geothermal power. According to the final report on the Santa Rosa Geysers Recharge Project, by 1998 the Geysers had almost three times the generating capacity of their closest rival, Mexico’s Cerro Prieto.

Wastewater from your home is pumped to Santa Rosa. It’s treated, piped 40-plus miles into the mountains, injected into deep wells, thereby “recharging” rock lying like a frypan, atop ancient, but still extremely hot magma.

This water-injection causes earthquakes.

Humans enjoyed and benefitted from these volcanic fumaroles and hotsprings for 12,000 years. At least 6 native tribes inhabited the area at the time of first euro-american contact. Recorded history notes 3 U.S. Presidents, a future King of England, Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum were among the many famed visitors to sign the “Devil’s Inkwell” registry at the once pricey resort. Over time The Geysers has been used for physical therapy, recreation, sightseeing and wonderment, and for native ceremonies.

Since 1921 “Sonoma’s Eighth Wonder of the World” has developed into the crown jewel of the world’s geothermal industry.

****

The quest for electricity at The Geysers began in 1921, when a visionary gravel pit owner from Healdsburg leased The Geysers Hotel Resort. John D. Grant remodeled much of the resort, but dreamed of harnessing The Geysers’ enormous energy potential.

Grant formed The Geysers Development Company. World renowned horticulturist Luther Burbank came aboard as an investor. A photo of Burbank on-sight shows him turning a valve, letting off a little steam. Grant hired a 17 year old youngster named Glen Truitt to tap “the Witches’ Cauldron”—the hottest opening in Geyser Canyon. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but after digging mere feet from the surface, well No. 1 “blew up like a volcano”. The well-digging operation was moved across the canyon, and they went at it again.

After two years walking a financial tightrope The Geysers Development Company was reorganized, bolstered by new sources of funding. The operation contracted with and provided the town of Healdsburg electricity for a time, but cheap oil prices spelled its doom. The two tiny power plants shut down in 1934, when Healdsburg let go its contract for Geysers power. One plant was dismantled, hauled down the canyon, and reassembled to provide electricity for the resort. According to Glenn Truitt, electricity generated from this plant lit the resort buildings and grounds so that they “…looked like a Christmas card.”

The Geysers Resort Hotel burned to the ground four short years later. A good deal of press bandied about various proposals concerning what to do with the property, most emphasizing that as a sanatorium it was without equal. Indeed, that’s just how it was advertised during the brief tenure of Dr. Joseph Sooy, who operated The Geysers facilities for the three years prior to the devastating fire. It was Dr. Sooy who promoted “The Big Steam Geysers” as the “8th Wonder of the World”, while touting the health benefits of its arsenic and hydrochloric acid-laced mineral springs, and its “Radium Active Caves”.

The Geysers remained a resort until the 1970’s drew to a close. It was the end of an era. By 1980 the last buildings were destroyed and the Geyser’s turned exclusively to electricity production.

But energy development had continued right alongside Geysers recreation. This, even after initial electricity generating efforts failed to turn a profit back in the 1920’s and 30’s.

Magma Power Company teamed up with Thermal Power in 1955. The firms, owned by two close friends, jointly drilled wells as deep as 1,400 feet, selling electricity generated from their operation to utility behemoth PG&E, beginning in 1958.

The first “modern” plant at The Geysers was built and operated by PG&E, itself. It went online in September of 1960. By 1968 The Geysers was producing 82 megawatts of electricity, about one-tenth its current output.

Electricity production peaked in the 1980’s at twice what is produced today. The Geysers simply could not sustain those high rates of energy production. The decision was made to cut back for the sake of production field longetivity. It’s like taking a really long hot shower. You’ve run your hot water heater cold. It takes time for it to reheat the now cold water, only in the case of The Geysers, once cooled, it takes the magma a much longer time to reheat the porous rock above.

Numerous business concerns have had their fingers in the hot Geysers’ pie over time. Today, Calpine Corporation owns and operates 19 of the 21 currently operating geothermal power plants. While Calpine is the largest producer of geothermal energy in the world, geothermal is just a tiny fraction of its energy wholesaling portfolio.

From an initial investment of $1 million dollars back in 1984, Calpine grew to a net worth of $23 billion, before falling $22 billion in the red by 2005. In 2004 their 89 energy complexes stretched across 21 states, producing a combined 22,000 megawatts of energy. Stock zoomed above 50 dollars a share. But it all came crashing down. Stock dropped to 30 cents a share. Calpine filed for bankruptcy 18 months ago. It hopes to emerge from bankruptcy later this year.

Calpine expects to launch a five-year $200 million Recharging Project at The Geyser soon, which it hopes will ensure continued energy production for years to come.

While the issue of geothermal energy production is complex, there’s little doubt that tucked way up in a corner of our own Sonoma County a unique resource called The Geysers will continue to awe us, and will undoubtedly play an enormous and pivotal role in geothermal research and development for our planet, and our future.

recap: The Geysers is the world’s most productive geothermal energy field. It straddles northeastern Sonoma and southern Lake Counties. Twenty-one plants currently generating electricity at The Geysers produce enough power to satisfy the demands of every coastal community starting at the Golden Gate heading north to the Oregon border. But, long before its use as an electricity resource…

****

From the Indian Geysers Legend with its grizzly bear phantom, to novelist Robert Louis Stevenson squatting just over the hill. From the wilds of backcountry Sonoma County to an audience with Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, and visits by both the Prince of Wales and Italy’s most prominent revolutionary. From the Witches’ Cauldron and the Devil’s Gristmill all the way to Wall Street and Washington D.C. From the mid-1800’s on, The Geysers was world renowned, visited and remarked upon by luminaries including the future King Edward VII, Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, famed midget Tom Thumb, Ulysses S. Grant, William Jennings Bryan, Guiseppe Garibaldi and J.P. Morgan, to name but a few.

To get to the Geysers Resort Hotel, Clark Foss, The West’s most famous stage coach driver, raced visitors from Knights Valley to the foot of Geyser Peak. He charged over the narrow “Hog’s Back” hilltop ridge down the steep and harrowing descent to the resort, whipping his team of horses and letting go yells to awaken the dead.

The road dropped 1,500 feet in the course of two miles. In his account of this stage coach ride Benjamin Avery tells us, “There are 35 sharp turns in ‘the drop,’ and the road, just wide enough for the team, frequently hugs the edge of steep rocky precipices… The great speed maintained, instead of increasing the danger, lessens it. Yet there are persons in almost every wagonful of passengers who pale and shrink as the vehicle dashes wildly down, and as they see below them, under the very wheels, as it were, the yawning chasms that threaten death… When the wagon reaches the hotel, all its tenants have a half-wild-look, as if they had just come down in a balloon and were thankful it had ‘lit.’”

The stage riders, once safely planted on terra firma, could peer off from the ridge overlooking Big Sulphur Creek, while spreading out before them innumerable rampaging infernos rose from craggy rocks like vapor demons. Fumaroles hissed, springs contorted, seething and grinding up subterranean hells. All this, steaming and streaming—stretching down the length of Geyser Canyon.

The Geysers Resort Hotel started out humble enough, as a cloth house in 1854. By 1890 it was a sizable complex. It’s kitchen served up venison, bear, grouse and trout. On busy summer days guests might be compelled to sleep on billiard tables or in bathhouses because the hotel was booked solid. The registry book was signed using black muck drawn from “the Devil’s Inkwell.”

Pioneering photographer Eadward Muybridge was probably the first to photograph The Geysers. In his famous 1870 stereograph “The Witches’ Cauldron, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I,” Muybridge poses three women in front of the roiling “cauldron”, hands joined together high in the air, yet grasping their “Geyser Pony” walking sticks like wizard wands or witches broomsticks to effect the passage:

Eye of newt and toe of frog
Wool of bat and tongue of dog…
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble. —William Shakespeare

The Geysers Resort Hotel was in its prime for less than 20 years. By the mid-1880’s it was already falling on hard times. Where it once catered to the rich and famous in an informal albeit pricey fashion (The Knight of the Whip, Clark Foss–charged close to $2,000 in today’s money simply for the stage ride to the resort), The Geysers Hotel owners now turned to budget-minded tourists with pitches like: “the grandest, most beneficial for health, and cheapest pleasure trip in the world”.

Whether financially successful or no, folks occasionally flocked, and often trickled to The Geysers, recreating in a setting even the most jaded and well-traveled admitted was, at the very least, different. Pilgrims traveled to The Geysers for thousands of years. Their skin pores opened by odorous steam blasting from molten subterranean furnaces, they stewed in warm, the searing hot, cold and tepid mineral springs. Perhaps some latter-day visitors simply heard of The Geysers, this freak of the natural world, in some distant place, and wanted to say they had seen it with their own eyes—much like a modern day RV enthusiast boasting decals from every National Park.

Here, at “the Gates of Hades,” as many as two hundred earth fissures blew vapor plumes to the sky, and bubbled up hellish broths of minerals and chemicals considered beneficial to health and healing. In 1935 Dr. Joseph Sooy signed a lease to the property. He intended to build a one hundred twenty room hotel and convelescent facility. Ernest Finley opined, “Development of what is sometimes referred to as ‘Sonoma’s Eighth Wonder of the World’ into a health and recreation center doubtless will attract large numbers of tourists, sightseers and invalids to The Geysers annually.”

Alas, it just didn’t work out. While the resort continued to attract visitors long after its glory days, the entire resort complex was gone by 1981.

Meanwhile, the first stab at geothermal energy development had already begun at The Geysers. John Grant recognized The Geysers energy production potential. In 1921 Grant hired Glen Truitt to tap the Witches’ Cauldron. The race to develop The Geysers as a massive geothermal energy complex was on.

The previous column noted how The Geysers are the most productive geothermal energy resource in the world. They produce more energy than all of California’s wind and solar, combined.

Now it’s 1847.

Renowned grizzly-hunter William Bell Elliott races up a steep Mayacamas Mountain embankment on the heels of that wily bear-beast “Old Slewfoot.” Elliott slips around a narrow canyon corner, his body pressed hard against the steep crumbling mountainside, desperately digging toes into loose gravel, while a vertigo-inducing chasm drops 1500 feet straight into the gorge beneath him. To calm himself, he nervously casts eyes across the length and breadth of the deep North Bay canyon. With that single furtive glance, William Bell Elliott makes a sudden and startling “discovery.”

No, it’s not Old Slewfoot set to maul Elliot straight to his eternal rewards. Instead, Elliott confronts…, well, let’s just let famed journalist Bayard Taylor describe it:

“The torn irregular walls…glare with patches of orange, crimson, sulfur, livid gray, and fiery brown, which the last rays of the sun, striking their tops, turn into masses of smoldering fire. Over the rocks, crusted as with a mixture of blood and brimstone, pour angry cataracts of seething milky water. In every corner and crevice, a little piston is working or a heart is beating, while from a hundred vent-holes about fifty feet above…the steam rushes in terrible jets. I have never beheld any scene so entirely infernal in its appearance. The rocks burn under you; you are enveloped in fierce heat, strangled by puffs of diabolical vapor, and stunned by the awful, hissing, spitting, sputtering, roaring, threatening sounds–as if a dozen steamboats blowing through their escape-pipes, had aroused the ire of ten-thousand hell-cats…”

In short, on that bright sunny day back in 1847 William Bell Elliott felt certain he had just passed into—the very Gates of Hell.

One hundred and sixty years have passed since Elliott’s so-called “discovery.” Sixteen decades seems like quite a lot of steam whistling through the devil’s kettle. Consider, though, that this thermal “hell” Elliott espied had been a Native American therapeutic spa and resort for at least one hundred CENTURIES before a single person of European extraction first caught sight–or smell, of it.

But The Geysers are the legacy of ancient volcanic incidents long pre-dating human existence. In his Geologic History of Middle California,Arthur D. Howard lays it out for us:

“Volcanic activity, which had begun about 2 million years ago in the Clear Lake region continued on a grand scale… Volcanic cones rose sporadically, pouring out flows of light and dark lavas and spewing great quantities of ash, cinders, and rock fragments over the countryside. The rhyolite lavas of Cobb Mountain just east of The Geysers steam field were extruded about one million years ago…That the Clear Lake region is still highly unstable is indicated by the numerous earthquakes that beset the region. There is no reason to believe that volcanic activity may not resume at some time. We have already noted that a body of magma probably lies only 6 miles or so below the surface. This accounts for the many fumaroles and hot springs in the region. Hot vapors issuing from the ground may be seen… The Geysers steam area, about 15 miles south of Clear Lake, is now a major source of geothermal energy… The field includes the world’s most prolific geothermal steam well.”

Some claim that Joel P. Walker and John Ransford actually beat William Bell Elliott to The Geysers by five years. Regardless the authenticity of this contention, none dispute that back in the 1840’s, six different Indian tribes were each intently occupying specific parts of this 40 square mile geothermal field Elliot had misnamed The Geysers. Why misnamed? Well, the rugged and remote district between Sonoma and Lake Counties that we call “The Geysers,” as stated last week, are bereft of the water spouting rarities. The Geysers do, however, feature the world’s greatest array of fumaroles—steaming spouts of mineral laden vapor, with hellacious bubbling hot springs thrown into surrounding environs for good measure.

Various Wappo, Miwok and Pomo peoples trod the crisscrossing pathways leading to these mutually shared hot springs, steaming mud pools and fumaroles. For countless ages Indians soaked in the sacred mineral baths, sweated out toxins, and breathed deep vapors produced from the magma-hot depths of the seismic underworld.

Then came the white man, property rights—and hard cold cash.

Did you know that with each flush of the toilet you both power your home—and cause earthquakes?

“Say, what?”

Well, it’s a twisty, windy story, but here’s a thumbnail sketch: Rohnert Park, Cotati and Sebastopol wastewater is flushed to Santa Rosa. It’s treated there, then pumped 41 additional miles up into the Mayacamas Mountains east of Geyserville. We call this remote area straddling Sonoma and Lake Counties The Geysers—which, incidentally, they are not.

These misnamed “Geysers” are actually fumaroles. They emit vapors, or fumes—hence fumaroles. They don’t spout water. They do, however, generate more electricity than any geothermal field in the entire world.

Each day 11 million gallons of our treated wastewater (and an additional 8 million gallons from Lake County) is injected into seismically active earth at The Geysers. The wastewater shoots down hundreds of wells, each drilled two miles or so into the earth’s crust.This process is called “recharging.”

No cavernous reservoirs like below. Instead, wastewater is injected into tiny fissures of extremely hot permeable rock. And that’s just what it looks like to the naked eye—solid rock. But it’s not. These hot rocks and attendant gasses vaporize, or “flash” the water, sending it back to the surface in the form of steam. This compressed steam turns turbine blades, producing electricity. Each day enough electricity is generated from our wastewater at The Geysers to serve the needs of the entire North Bay, or put another way, the power produced from “recharging” The Geysers equates to over 60 million barrels of oil each year.

On the flipside—recharging causes earthquakes.

According to the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory: “There were no earthquakes observed in the area of (The Geysers) geothermal field between 1949 and 1975. Starting in 1976 earthquakes were observed in the geothermal field and the rate steadily increased…”

Calpine operates 19 of the 21 powerhouses producing electricity from The Geysers. Their geologists estimate that earthquake frequency has risen 40% since Geyser wastewater injection began. USGS seismologist Dave Oppenheimer notes, “You’re going to have small earthquakes that may not have occurred at a rate that you’re seeing now because your rate of stress change is higher.”

Fortunately, wastewater injection at The Geysers is unlikely to produce anything larger than, oh, say—a magnitude 5 earthquake! Count your lucky stars the geothermal field lies amidst minor fault lines. On the other hand, were The Geysers part of the San Andreas or the Hayward fault regimes…well—we’ll leave that one alone for now.

The really good news is while electricity produced from the Geysers peaked some 20 years ago, we benefit from this energy resource in more than one way.

Remember that proposed nuke on Bodega Head? Don’t need it. And what sounds better to you—44 billion gallons of wastewater producing 850 megawatts of clean renewable energy, or 44 billion gallons of treated wastewater pumped into the Pacific Ocean at one of our pristine beaches every year? What’smore, we have bragging rights in that we live in the very county that produces more geothermal energy than anywhere on the face of the planet.

But there’s more to the story than that.

Alma de Bretteville (1881-1968) grew up big, strong and loud amidst the caterwauls and contusions of one odd and impoverished household. Just picture Oliver Twist’s version of The Addams Family. Now dispel the romantic assumption that papa Viggo de Bretteville (1840-1922) would move mountains to rescue his family from privation. In fact, any suggestion he should perform work of any sort was, well, an unforgiveable affront to Viggo’s self-annointed aristocratic dignity. Yet never has pretension served a family better than did the imperious moxie of these de Brettevilles.

Viggo de Bretteville claimed noble lineage—not an uncommon assertion back in those days. The Wild West, after all, provided time and distance from verifiable truths. Practically any good liar with a decent foreign accent could pass himself off as a Count Haraszthy, a Grand Duchess Yoonohoo, or the Emperor Norton I.

But, back to Viggo. Though born and raised in Denmark, Viggo insisted his title came straight from that primordial swamp of pre-revolutionary Cheveliers and Chatelain. Viggo failed to realize that these minor French nobles were, even back then, often as penniless as he.

A haughty Viggo de Bretteville hastened to Gold Country in 1866, eager to morph from beggar to king. He hit town 17 years after California’s Argonauts first weighed anchor, expecting he’d bag unending heaps of gold, like so much dust swept from the floor. This was akin to making with the flowers in your hair, expecting ’67’s Summer Of Love to be extended through the winter of 1984. No matter, Viggo reasoned, if unwashed “commoners” could claim riches, how much more fitting that he, perfectly bred for lavish leisure, should grab his righteous due. Viggo felt preordained to wealth and status. Hell, it was his birthright. To meet these ends Viggo begrudgingly acquiesced to the occasional stoop–but only if to pocket precious metals lolling about on the ground before him. Thus would Viggo de Bretteville ascend to his rightful place in life–at the pinnacle of San Francisco society.

But it just didn’t work out that way.

A well dressed Viggo was legend for aimlessly strolling San Franciso’s streets, arrogantly aping the idle rich gentleman, caning any breathing thing daring to happen past him. He carried a chip on his shoulder the way a gunslinger wore his stock in trade–always at the ready. Wife Mathilde, in contrast, must either have been a saint or a sap. Imagine putting up with such a pompous whiney bore as Viggo. Moreover, while Viggo lifted nary a digit to help her, poor Mathilde labored around the clock baking pastries for sale, taking in the neighbors laundry, and giving massages to put food on the family table. All that and a half dozen kids to attend to.

As he had with her four elder siblings, Viggo plucked Alma from school to help support the family. She was 14 years of age. But Alma had no interest in washerwomen work. She quickly set to her own methodical and sometimes mercurial rise to fame and fortune. “I have a great destiny to fulfill” was Alma’s oft voiced mantra.

Unlike papa Viggo’s, Alma’s weren’t embittered pipe dreams, nor were they fairydust contrivances. The teenaged Alma set in motion a realistic, if risque strategy to accomplish her desired goals. To finance new clothing Alma posed her buxom six foot hourglass frame proudly and notoriously nude before gaggles of budding artists. Nature had endowed Alma with Aphrodite’s looks and libido, Machiavelli’s cunnning, with the heart and the will of a lion–and with the energy of a full throttle locomotive. Her booming voice was custom-made to drown out competition. “Big” Alma reveled in shocking others, often blaring out lines like “You got anyone you want murdered, Pet?”

Unlike Viggo, Alma grappled with her dreams in the real world. She pursued and eventually married a wealthy playboy 23 years her senior. Here enters Adolf Spreckels, heir to the sugar fortune. Alma’s pet name for Adolf was destined to be enshrined in our American lexicon. She called Adolph “Sugar Daddy.” Like Alma said, “I’d rather be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave.”

When The City’s society crowd iced her out, Alma created her own bohemian salon, entertaining avant garde and internationally acclaimed artists, writers, statesmen and nobility. Rumors swirled that hers was more than a mere friendship with Loie Fuller, the inventor of modern dance. Alma chain smoked, swam buck naked in her enormous indoor pool, drank martinis by the pitcherful and cared not one loud damn what anyone thought of her. Alma Emma Charlotte Corday Le Normand de Brettville Spreckels didn’t need to give a hoot. After all, she had an exceptionally long name, and she was filthy rich.

The damp chill fog swept in from the sea like a nightmare invading a dream. It crept through flesh, bore through bones, settling like an icy plague, deep within the marrow of The City. Jack lay bundled, shivering upon his cot, lost and alone. It had been one long month since his Delirium Tremens imposed exile.

That night Happy Jack Harrington waged war, battling armies of inner demons. Miraculously, Happy Jack emerged victorious.

Suddenly, brilliant light fell upon him. Jack twisted about ecstatically, emersed in a true and all-powerful spiritual awakening. In an instant he recognized the grotesque folly that was his life. Heavens opened. An angelic chorus swelled. Revelation shook Jack like a rag doll. It threw him from his bed. There, face down against that clammy floor, You-Know-Who spoke directly to him. The clear no-nonsense basso profundo ordained Happy Jack Harrington with his life mission.

Consequently, Jack did what any self respecting Barbary Coast Ranger would do upon transformative awakening. Happy Jack marked a pack of playing cards and headed down the hill—down into Satan’s playground, back into the gaping maw of pure evil, province of the lost and the wretched—San Francisco’s own Barbary Coast.

Happy Jack Harrington was happy to be heading home.

Jack cashed out that night’s gaming with enough money to buy himself a new dive. But, alas, he couldn’t buy back Big Louise. She’d run off with a wealthy miner. His heart bled for her, but he needed to move on.

Once his newly acquired melodeon was up and running Jack focused next on establishing his born again credentials. Soon, habitues of the Coast remarked on to the many fancy posters fastened to walls throughout their environs. These gave notice of a sermon cum lecture offered free of charge by Mr. Happy Jack, himself. The poster read: “The True Inwardness of the Gospel Temperance Movement, or, the Potato Peeled.”

The day finally arrived. Inside the immense auditorium, brass band blaring, sat six bemused newsmen, and not a single other soul. God must have smiled down upon him though, for Happy Jack was saved from the embarrassment of an indifferent public when a vociferous drunk stumbled into the proceedings, quite by accident. This character boosted Jack’s spirits, and made for an inspirational cheering section.

But it is not those missing or even those precious few in attendance that matter here. It is, rather, the nature and content of Happy Jack Harrington’s sermon which will be acclaimed long after we pass from this world.

Once he’d confessed to a vast litany of sins habitually committed throughout his lifetime, Jack launched into an account of his brief affair with the Praying Band. He explained that consequent to his conversion he’d turned his back upon all that he valued most in life, and how he missed Big Louise, too. Then, in a prophet’s roar Happy Jack Harrington counted off each extraordinary thing he’d forfeited to the ladies’ Lord Temperance. Still, Jack admitted he was solely to blame for his misfortunes. He let it be known he had chosen to follow a false god.

Finally, Happy Jack Harrington vowed to existence itself that he was now an utterly changed man, and a newly and truly saved soul. He now knew, he shouted, what he had never known before—that sobriety was the root of all evil. Happy Jack swore to his God and to all present that never again would he draw a single sober breath-not so long as God gave him the breath of life.

As far as we know, he never did.