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According to Hollywood legend, a Hollywood talent scout discovered the sixteen year old Lana Turner while she was sipping a soda at the Top Hat drugstore on Sunset Boulevard, but that story is no more unique than that of the discovery of Crockett’s husky blond actor Aldo Ray whose career will be celebrated at the Aldo Ray Film Festival at the Crockett Community Center on September 25 with the screening of three of his best and well known films.

Aldo Ray, like Lana Turner, born Julia Jean Turner, allowed Hollywood to change his name but only slightly. Aldo entered the world on September 25, 1926 as Aldo DaRe in Pen Argly, Pennsylvania as one of five brothers and a sister in a large Italian family. In his 2009 film Inglouious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino paid homage to Aldo’s Italian heritage and to the war movies that have become the basis of his continuing movie fame. Brad Pitt introduces himself to the men under his command with the line,” My name is Lieutenant Aldo Raine.” Knowledgeable movie goers knew that Tarantino, a fan of older film actors, was making a cinematic reference to Aldo Ray.

The DaRe family moved to Crockett while Aldo was still an infant, and he grew up in the blue collar town on the Carquinez Strait and participated in all the normal small town activities from swimming at the town pool to playing on the high school football team. Nancy Reiser of the Crockett Historical Society is doing an oral history project on Aldo. She told me that the longtime residents of Crockett still have vivid memories of Aldo and his family. His mother, Maria, was a pillar of the Italian immigrant community in the town and fabled for her cooking. Aldo’s football teammates at John Sweatt made her home the site of their unofficial training table and legend has it that there was a well worn groove in the plywood where she rolled her ravioli dough for the young men she found at her table.

Aldo was an excellent swimmer. He would later serve in the Armed Service as a frogman, and Jerri Daniel of the Museum says that Aldo taught most of the children in Crockett how to swim. Jerri said that several people have told her that one day Aldo went to visit a friend in Rodeo and on a whim the two of them decided to swim back to Crockett.

Aldo’s athletic prowess was not limited to the pool. He played on the 1944 undefeated Indian football team as a tackle. The team, which won all nine of its games, outscored its opponents by an impressive 189 points to 31. His brother Mario would go on to play tackle for the USC Trojans.

At the age of 18 Aldo joined the Navy and served from 1944 to 1946. He was with Underwater Demolition Team 17 in many Pacific Landings as a frogman including Okinawa. He returned to Crockett after receiving his discharge and for a short time attended the University of California at Berkeley where he studied political science.

Aldo drove his brother Guido, who was an actor, to an audition for a role in a John Derek-Donna Reed film, Saturday’s Hero when Guido noticed a call for extras in the San Francisco Chronicle. The film featured Derek as a rising football star at a southern university. The film was not the usual inspirational film about college sports but an examination of the seamier side of college athletics which depicted football players as paid gladiators rather than scholar athletes. The director, David Miller, showed more interest in Aldo, supposedly because of his husky voice, than his brother Guido and cast Aldo in the film.

 The Turner Classic Movie review of the film notes that the unknown Aldo DaRae received better reviews for the film than did Donna Reed who would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in From Here to Eternity. Aldo played a rube from West Virginia named Gene Hausler, but the Turner article states his noticeable masculinity, his energy, made him stand out among a group of other non-descript look alike actors.

In the early days of his movie career before he achieved stardom Aldo made a foray into Crockett politics. He had made a screen test for Columbia in 1950 and was still attending UC Berkeley and working at the C and H Sugar plant when he decided to take advantage of his popularity in town by running for the office of constable which was the enforcement arm of the local justice court. In the primary election he outpolled the incumbent Constable Manual Fortado and another long time Crockett resident Stanley Magielda but did not gain a majority. Magielda dropped out and Aldo defeated Fortado handily in the general election.

The twenty-four year old Constable Elect promised his constituents that he would perform his duties in “as efficient and complete manner as possible.” In his article on the Constables of Crockett for the Crockett Historical Society, Keith Olsen notes that Aldo had difficulty pursuing his duties as his movie career blossomed. The Crockett Community Council sent him a strongly worded letter “deploring” his lack of enforcement of parking and speeding regulations. On August 1, 1951 Aldo ended his short lived Crockett law enforcement career by announcing his resignation effective September 1 to pursue his movie career full time.

The most productive period of Aldo’s film career quickly followed. Legendary director  George Cukor, who would later win the Academy Award for Best Director for My Fair Lady and who would be nominated for The Philadelphia Story, Little Women, and Born Yesterday, paired Aldo with Judy Holliday in The Marrying Kind in 1952 and with Spencer Tracy in Pat and Mike in the same year. His work in Pat and Mike led to a Golden Globe nomination for Best Newcomer with Robert Wagner and Richard Burton, and although Burton won, Aldo’s career was launched.

Film critic Emmanuel Levy noted that in The Marrying Kind, Cukor wanted to make a movie about the breakup of a blue collar marriage. Cukor chose Aldo because he was attractive with an offbeat personality but most importantly because he looked average. Aldo created Cukor for teaching him all that he knew about acting which was essentially not to act but to be natural in the two films that he made for Cukor. The Marrying Kind made Aldo an A list Hollywood star.

Aldo’s career hit its apogee in 1955 when he made Battle Cry, Three Stripes in the Sun, and We’re No Angels. We’re No Angels stars Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, Basil Rathbone, Leo G.Carrol, and Joan Bennett as well as Aldo. It was one of the few comedies that Bogart made and told the story of three convicts who had escaped from Devil’s Island and end up in a small French coastal town. As the sweet dumb Albert with a heart of gold Aldo holds his own against the acting heavyweights Ustinov and Bogart. Many critics cite Angels as Aldo’s best loved film.

In Battle Cry Aldo plays one of a group of young Marines in the Pacific Theater. The film was popular among World War II veterans but it was one of among a group of films including the film adaptation of Norman Mailer’s World War II novel The Naked and the Dead that would lead to Aldo’s typecasting as a tough guy. In a poignant interview Aldo gave to Grover Lewis of Movie Line in 1991 given while Aldo was receiving chemotherapy for throat cancer in the Martinez VA Hospital, Aldo characterized his roles in those two movies directed by Raoul Walsh as his two best. Aldo observed that Raoul liked him because he was not “the actor” with airs unlike his co-star Van Heflin whom Walsh characterized as a prima donna.

 Machismo fell out of style in Hollywood at the end of the 1950s and the sensitive actor roiled by inner conflicts typified by Marlon Brando, Montgomery Cliff, and James Dean came into vogue. Aldo’s best known role in the 1960s was that of Sergeant Muldoon with John Wayne in The Green Berets, regarded by many Vietnam veterans to be a travesty of a war film. In the Lewis interview Aldo stated that he considered John Wayne to be a personality and not an actor. Lewis noted that after the Berets Aldo’s career plunged rapidly from “B” films to sub “B” films to off “Bs.” He had to take virtually any role that he could get to pay for his expensive health care. He even lost his Studio Actors Guild card when he accepted work in a non union film.

Aldo had a turbulent personal life with three failed marriages that produced four children together with problems with alcohol that stemmed from the hard drinking on the sets of his movies. He succumbed to throat cancer on March 27, 1991. He was cremated and buried in Crockett and virtually the entire town turned out. He remained to the end and to this day Crockett’s favorite son.

In a thoughtful article for National Public Radio novelist Anthony Giardina summarized Aldo Ray’s lasting appeal.  The novelist said that to young men growing up in the 1950s Aldo Ray was the man most like their fathers, the man who would spend all day at his job and still come home and play catch with his son. In Giardina’s words:

“…Ray knew how to do things: how to hold a baby, how to cement a marriage, how to fix a broken pipe. It’s that forgotten ‘50s presence that Tarantino is sending a shout-out to. And hearing it a little like hearing my father’s name called out in the dark…”

 Dr.James Pennebaker, the Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, has written a new book about how we use the little words that comprise  parts of speech that we label pronouns and articles. The way we use these parts of speech  says a great deal about our personalities and our inner lives.  In a  Scientific American online post he relates that in the 1980s he and a group of his students discovered that if people wrote about their emotional upheavals their mental health improved. Dr. Pennebaker and his students developed a computerized text analysis program to help them analyze what was happening in this writing therapy.

Dr. Pennebaker made the startling discovery that the way people used pronouns in their writings predicted which of the writers mental health would improve. Those whose mental health improved the most changed their pronoun use. Their use of pronouns reflected their ability to change perspective which enabled them to look at their problems from a different point of view.

 The researchers grouped words into six  sets, first person singular ( I,me, my), first person plural ( we, us, our), articles (a,an, the),emotion words (happy, sad, love, hate), cognitive words (because, reason, think, believe), and social words (he, she, friend, cousin).

The program yielded some surprising findings. Women used social words more, but women use I-words and cognitive words at a far higher rate than men. There was no discernible difference between the sexes in the use of emotion words, but men used articles more than women. Dr. Pennebaker and his associates found that these differences were present in other languages that they studied. His conclusion is that we do not hear these sex differences in language because our brains are not trained to listen to what he terms these “junk” words. We focus on what the other person is saying rather than on how he or she is saying it.

The researchers concluded that the two sexes used language differently because they negotiated their worlds differently. Women talk more about other people which requires social and cognitive words. Men talk more about concrete things which requires the use of concrete nouns and their accompanying articles. The use of pronouns is also an indicator of status. The person with higher status uses I-words less than people of lower status. Dr. Pennebaker notes that concrete nouns are used to categorize events and ideas in the speaker’s world. People who tell stories use verbs and pronouns. He observes that currently schools reward categorizers instead of story tellers and asks if that should be so.

In the New York Times review of the book, Ben Zimmernotes that critics of President Obama have found him to be an I-word person and argue that this shows that he is self-centered and egotistical. Using his analytical software Dr. Pennebaker discovered that Obama uses the I-word less frequently than any modern President dating back to Truman. He chalks the erroneous conclusion of the President’s critics up to the way people process information. If we believe a person is arrogant, we look for proof of the arrogance in the person’s speech to confirm the belief. He argues that Obama’s  relatively infrequent use of I-words demonstrates the President’s self assurance. and not his egotism.

These observations indicate that the book should provide some rich food for thought about these seemingly innocuous and inconsequential parts of speech. I hope to read the entire book when it becomes available at my local library.

Tags: Linguistics

Polls indicate that over eighty per cent of all Americans disapproved the conduct of Congress and the President during the recently concluded “debate” on raising the federal debt ceiling, but the uncivil behavior that brought such censure is not without precedent in American legislative history. My wife and I are going to Charleston and the Virginia Civil War battlefields in October and are then going to  spend a couple of concluding days in Washington. I had a great grandfather, Stephen Mitchell, who served with a Union light artillery brigade from Portland, Maine who was wounded at the Second Battle of Winchester, Virginia. So the vacation is also a search for roots of sorts.

I have been reading James McPherson’s superb one volume history, Battle Cry of Freedom on the Civil War, as background to the trip. Tensions between the North and South reached a zenith in the late 1850 s and one of the catalysts was the debate in the spring of 1856 over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. The  Republican and Democratic parties had introduced competing bills. Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina stated that the admission of Kansas as a slave state was crucial to the South even rising to a  point of regional honor.

Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was one of the most fervent abolitionists in the Senate. He delivered a two day address to the Senate galleries on May 19-20 which was by any measure of the time intemperate. He made South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, who was also Congressman Brook’s cousin, a particular object of his invective. Sumner described Butler as a “Don Quixote who had chosen a mistress to whom he had made his vows, and who… though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight-I mean the harlot, Slavery.”

The speech created a furor even among members of Sumner’s own party. Some aggrieved Southerners would have challenged Sumner to a duel except they knew he would not accept. Others such as Congressman Brooks felt dueling was reserved for parties who were social equals and that a lout, in his eyes, such as Sumner was in need of a horsewhipping rather than a chance to defend his honor.

Two days after the speech Brooks walked into the empty chambers of the adjourned Senate where Sumner was seated at a desk writing letters. He approached the desk and told Sumner that the speech was a libel on South Carolina and on his cousin Senator Butler. When Sumner started to rise, Brooks began beating the older man over the head and administered thirty or more blows with a gold-headed cane. Sumner found his legs trapped under the bolted down desk, and wrenched the desk free of the floor only to collapse on it with his head covered with blood.

Sumner suffered physical injuries and post traumatic syndrome that kept him away from the Senate for the next four years although  the Massachusetts legislature reelected him as a symbolic tribute to his stand.

On the other hand, the South lionized Brooks for what a disinterested observer would regard as a criminal battery. Papers in South Carolina expressed pride in Brook’s act in defense of the honor of South Carolina. Braxton Bragg, a Louisiana planter and West Point graduate who later became commanding general of the Confederate Army of the Mississippi said that the House of Representatives should pass  a vote of thanks to Brooks since one could only reach the sensibilities of dogs such as Sumner through their heads with big sticks.

The House voted to expel Brooks but the Southern block blocked  the necessary two-thirds majority for the expulsion. Brooks resigned anyway and went home  to South Carolina where he was triumphantly reelected. People from all over the South sent him new canes, some inscribed with mottoes such as “Hit Him Again” and “Use Knock Down Arguments.” Brooks bragged that every Southern man sustained him and that many asked for fragments of the cane that he had used as sacred relics.

As we approach a Presidential election year, the two parties are bitterly divided on strategy and ideology, no  one expects anything approaching a Sumner like incident, but the event is a vivid reminder of  the extremes of conduct possible when partisanship  is taken to extreme lengths. A scant five years after the Sumner caning incident, the Confederates opened fire on Ft. Sumter on April 12, 1861 opening the bloodiest period in the nation’s history.

In the midst of the Depression in 1926 the 20,000 citizens of Richmond, California passed a bond issue to construct a state of the art two story building housing an indoor swimming pool. The beautiful structure had an a fountain, an open truss roof, and observation decks overlooking the warm water pool. The Richmond Memorial Natatorium or the “Nat” as it would become known to generations of Richmond citizens was the East Bay equivalent of the famous Sutro Baths in San Francisco. When the Nat opened in 1927, the entire town turned out.

In World War II Richmond became the site of what some have called the second California Gold Rush. The City hosted the largest number of defense industry and war housing projects in the nation. At the height of the War 27 % of the workers at the Richmond Kaiser shipyard were women, and in other industries women composed up to 80 % of the workforce.

Women dressed in overalls and wielding industrial tools became a common site, and the efforts of these women became an icon in the form of  “Rosie the Riveter,” a popular song in 1942. Today Richmond is the home of the Rosie the Riveter National Monument. Rosie and her sisters enjoyed the Nat during the war years, and the natatorium was home to swimming exhibitions, musical performances, and other events. The Nat, or the Plunge as the locals also called it, was always open to people of all ages, of all colors, and of every economic status.

But the post war decades have been difficult for Richmond as the City has faced issues of poverty, unemployment, and violence while the population of the City has fallen to 80,000. The City had to defer maintenance on the Plunge and in 1997 the City came to the conclusion that it did not have the funds to seismically retrofit the building and determined to close it.

Fortuitously for the Plunge and the swimmers who loved it so much a Berkeley architect, Todd Jersey, committed to green principles, saw a PBS documentary about the Plunge that intrigued him. He learned from the City that two architectural firms had done estimates that put the cost of restoring the building while retaining its historical characteristics at $ 8.5 million, a sum far beyond the reach of the City and the volunteer organizations working with it.

Todd did a pro bono analysis for the City and concluded that he could preserve the historical nature of the structure and retain its functionality for far less. He joined with the Save the Richmond Plunge Trust in both a fund raising effort and in the getting the approval of the necessary review boards to undertake the restoration. They melded together city redevelopment funds, revenue from a bond measure and grants from organizations such as the Valley Foundation and the California and Cultural Endowment to come up with $ 7.5  million dollars to do the restoration project.

On April 21,2011 Todd led me and a small group of people on a tour of the renovated facility sponsored by the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of  Architects. Todd explained that the work had proceeded in two phases. In the first phase the original natatorium and the pool were restored including restoring the beautiful clerestory monitor which had been removed. In the second phase the changing, bath, and changing facilities were rebuilt and the neoclassical facade of  the building was restored.

Todd pointed to a number of green features of the eighty year old building:

• It has over 200 operable windows allowing for the constant flow of fresh air that exhausts the indoor humidity and saves 100 k in energy bills over a mechanical electric dehumidification system and provides healthier interior air.
• A 32 kilowatt solar electric system and 3600 square feet of solar hot water panels on the southward facing roof. This combination will lead to a 60-70 % reduction in energy costs, saving $ 200,000 to $ 300,000 a year at today’s energy prices.
• An ultra violet disinfectant eliminates chlorinates from the pool and the “chlorine smell” and the pool uses a saline chlorination system.

Beyond the utility and greenness of the structure it is piece of art. John Wherle created a full wall mural at one end of the pool that creates the illusion that the pool is in an open park. Mosaic starfish and seahorses dot the walls, and the dressing hooks are made out of brass.

But two human things demonstrate the connection between the community and the plunge. The first person in the pool was June Albonic who has been a swim instructor at the Plunge for over forty years. Todd had to remove a mushroom fountain in the shallow end per health code requirements. Todd moved it outside where I watched a three year old place a rock on the handle to keep the fountain flowing while she wheeled her tricycle through the stream created establishing a new tradition for Richmond kids. Who knows maybe the swim instructor will teach the toddler to swim in a couple of years.

The Point Richmond Natatorium proves that everything old can be new again and as an added bonus greener than it was before.

Union Square in the heart of downtown San Francisco is the City’s most elegant shopping district, but this has not always been the case. On the eastern side of the Square on Stockton Street is a Maiden Lane, two blocks of boutiques and galleries. Before the 1906 Earthquake ladies of the night displayed their wares from the waist up along this street which was then known as Morton Street. The 1906 fire and earthquake destroyed this red light district and led to its redevelopment, but the  ” Maiden” in ” Maiden Lane” recalls the colorful history of this two blocks.

Just off Stockton Street at 140 Maiden Lane walkers on the San Francisco City Guide Rising Steel tour and shoppers will find the Xanadu Gallery with a windowless wall of fine brickwork in the form of a Romanesque Arch. To the left of the entrance is a vertical grille which is created by removing every other brick and adding recessed lights. The gallery is housed in the only building in San Francisco that Frank Lloyd Wright designed. Wright designed the building for the V.C.Morris Gift Shop in 1948, the legend is that Wright, who by this time in his eighties,obtained the commission from the owners because he was at the time designing their residence. Wright said that the the arch was intended to beckon the passerby into the building and to avoid the vulgarity of displaying the shop’s wares on the sidewalk.

As one enters the building, the arch gives way to a glass tunnel atrium. Wright placed a circular mezzanine in the gift shop that the patron reaches by ascending a spiral ramp. Wright had already formulated the spiral ramp design for the Guggenheim Museum. However, that structure was not completed until 1959 and the Gift Store gave Wright his first opportunity to actually construct such a ramp.

The Xanadu Gallery purchased and invested a million dollars in restoring the Gift Shop with the guidance of Aaron Green, who had worked with Wright on other projects such as the Marin Civic Center. The interior contains a cast white plastic ceiling and walls of sand colored poured concrete and Wright’s curved built in cabinetry. On its website the Gallery, www.xanadugallery.us/building, states that the sum is a “perfect synthesis of theatrical and organic splendor.” The Gallery provides an elegant starting point for the Rising Steel walk.

I am going to Steinbeck Country, Salinas, Monterey, Carmel, in a couple of weeks and have been reading about John Steinbeck’s best friend and most influential colleague,Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts, who became known simply as Doc Ricketts. Doc was born in Chicago in 1897 and after a year at Illinois State Normal University served a tour of duty with the Army Medical Corps during World War I. He returned and enrolled in the University of Chicago where he attended classes between 1919 and 1922 studying Spanish, German, philosophy, and zoology. He left without taking a degree but was heavily influenced by the thinking of one of his teachers, W.C. Allee, who believed that all animals, including man, showed universal social behavior and that animals and men acted differently in groups than they did as  individuals, Allee summarized his ideas in his 1931 treatise Animal Aggregations and observed:

The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects.

Doc Ricketts moved to Monterrey in 1923 with a University of Chicago classmate, A.E. Galigher, where the two men opened the Pacific Biological Laboratories in a one story board and battern building at the corner of Fountain Avenue and High Street, now called Ricketts Row. The lab supplied biological specimens and slides to schools and research institutions. Galigher moved to Berkeley leaving Ricketts as the sole owner of the business. He moved the lab to 740 Ocean Avenue in Monterey. The street address was subsequently renumbered as 800 and the street name changed to Cannery Row. On November 25, 1936 a fire in the adjacent Del Mar Cannery set fire to the lab and completely destroyed the lab and its contents. The lab had been a meeting place for writers such as Joseph Campbell and Henry Miller and after the fire his friends helped him rebuild the lab and replace its contents. Steinbeck financed the rebuilding costs and became a silent 50% partner in the lab. Steinbeck provides a detailed and humorous description of the lab its contents, and its operation as well as his own recollection of Ricketts in an appendix to Log of the Sea of Cortez entitled “On Ed Ricketts.”

Ricketts first met Steinbeck at a cottage in Carmel in 1930 and Ricketts became a major influence on both Steinbeck’s philosophy and his writing. In addition to being a marine biologist Ricketts was a philosopher who postulated that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, an idea that runs through the Grapes of Wrath in which the human community is greater than the sum of its individual members. Ricketts abandoned the search for cause and effect and accepted things for the way they are much as JIm Casy in the Grapes of Wrath, who abandons formal religion to experience life as lived by normal human beings. Jim Casy expresses this view this way in Chapter 8 of the Grapes of Wrath:

I got thinkin’ how we was holy when we was one thing, an’ mankin’ was holy when it was one thing. An’ it on’y got unholy when one mis’arable little fella got bit in his teeth,an’ run off his own way, kickin’ an’ draggin; an’ fightin’. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they’re all workin’ together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed for the whole shebang-that’s right,that’s holy.

Ricketts ecological work on Between Pacific Tides is still used by many universities even though it was published in 1939. He and Steinbeck sailed on a collecting trip on the Western Flyer to the Gulf of California between March 14 and April 18 which became part of Steinbeck’s nonfiction canon as The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Steinbeck used Ricketts as the model for the “Doc” of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, but blurred the outlines of the real man.Ricketts was a hard working scientist not a solitary bachelor interacting with those on the edge of conventional society. The two men were planning another collecting expedition to the Queen Charlotte Islands when Ricketts was killed in an auto accident in 1948. Ricketts was driving across the railroad tracks on Drake Avenue just up the street from the lab when his car was hit by a Del Monte freight train. There is a life sized bust of Ricketts at the now defunct railroad crossing. Ricketts’ biographer, Eric Enno Tamm, noted that with the exception of East of Eden, the quality of Steinbeck’s writing declined when he no longer had Ricketts available as a source of inspiration.  The one tribute that Ricketts would have enjoyed is the fact that several species were subsequently named after him:

• Hypsoblenniops rickettsi ( Blenny)
• Longiprostatum rickettsi (Flatworm)
• Mysidium rickettsi (Opposum shrimp)
• Siphonides rickettsi ( Peanut worm)
• Nephtys rickesttsi ( Polychaeter worm)

Tags: John Steinbeck

The San Francisco Historical Society sponsored a Halloween walk of the Barbary Coast Trail, and I volunteered to be the docent at the City Lights Bookstore station. Approximately 250 people did the walk. City Lights is the spiritual home of the Beat generation or the Beatniks of the 1950s. The Beat Generation is at the edge of my own personal consciousness. The San Francisco Giants are in the World Series and on a couple of occasions the television commentators have referred to the 1954 Cleveland Indians who won 111 games.

I remember the Indians. My brothers, my mother, and I were living in Reno at the time, and I feigned illness so that I could stay home and watch the game on black and white television. I was eleven years old and can remember Willie Mays’ dramatic catch of Vic Wirtz’s long fly ball. But the Beats were in the social, not athletic realm, so they did not impress themselves on my consciousness as vividly as the Cleveland Indians but they were there. We eventually moved to Sacramento where we were less than 100 miles from the epicenter of Beat life in San Francisco’s North Beach.

The United States had led the victorous coalition that defeated the Axis powers in World War II. The United States was unequivocally the strongest nation in the world and entered the decade of the 1950s on a path of unparalleled prosperity. Everyone “liked Ike” and “loved Lucy.”

But not everyone had a sanguine view of the triumphant America. One group of people viewed the nation “through a glass darkly.” John Clellon Holmes coined the term the “Beat Generation” in article entitled “This Is the Beat Generation” that appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 16, 1952. He noted that the World War II post war generation lacked the air of bereavement that typified the Lost Generation that came out of World War I. Holmes said that the Beat Generation took shattered ideals and muddied morals for granted since they were brought up with these realities and no longer took any real notice of them. ” They drink  to ‘come down’ or to ‘get high,’ not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiosity, not disillusionment.”

The Beats were free spirits seeking less conventional life styles than their parents had lived. They employed novel forms of expression in art and poetry and even in the way they lived their lives that shocked the society around them. The Beats gravitated to two poles at opposite ends of the country, Greenwich Village in New York City and North Beach in San Francisco. Poets and writers such as Jack Kerouac, Neil Cassidy,and Allan Ginsberg used vibrant and unconventional imagery in poetic free verse.Literary critics labelled the collective movement the San Francisco Renaissance.

San Francisco had a history of being a place to begin anew. From its inception the City had been a melding of peoples and cultures and a place where diversity and tolerance were not only observed but virtually encouraged. North Beach in the 1950s was still an inexpensive place to live and work. Expresso bars and saloons where the Beats could gather to present and discuss their work dotted the area.

My station on the walk was Jack Kerouac Alley between City Lights Bookstore and the Vesuvio Cafe. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti established the bookstore in 1953 to subsidize a literary magazine. The magazine quickly vanished, but the bookstore has remained for over half a century. It was the first paperback bookstore and was one of the first bookstores to provide benches and chairs for patrons to use while they browsed the stacks.

City Lights has also played an important role as a book publisher. Lawrence Ferlinghetti attended a reading in October 1955 by Alan Ginsberg of his poem “Howl” at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street. Ferlinghetti was so impressed by the work of the poet that he asked Ginsberg for permission to publish the piece. Ginsberg granted permission and Ferlinghetti published Howl and Other Poems in November 1956 to little or no notice.

However, on June 3, 1957 two undercover policemen appeared at the bookstore and paid seventy-five cents for a copy of the book. When the manager Shigeyoshi Murao, known as Shig in the neighborhood, sold them the copy the officers arrested him for selling obscene material that would corrupt youth. The police deemed the book obscene because of its raw language and graphic sexual and homosexual imagery. The arrest cause great shame to his family within the Japanese community. The United States had interned Shig and his family in Idaho during the war, and he had served with U.S. military intelligence in Japan during the occupation after release from internment.

Ferlinghetti, Shig, and City Lights stood trial at the old Hall of Justice. The court exonerated Shig because the prosecution was unable to prove he had knowledge of the book’s contents when he sold it. Justice Clayton Horn, who taught the Bible on Sundays, held that the work could not be considered obscene because he found the poem of ” redeeming social importance.” The Howl trial was a major victory for artistic expression and facilitated the later publication of other controversial works such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Capricorn, and Naked Lunch.

If the City Lights Bookstore gave the Beats mental and intellectual sustenance, the adjoining Vesuvio’s Cafe gave them liquid sustenance. The original proprietor Henri Lenoir had been born Silvio Villerman in Switzerland and had danced in the chorus of Can Can in Paris before immigrating to the United States and eventually San Francisco. The outside wall of the cafe has a poem that illustrates the vivid imagery the Beats loved and in the cafe is a piece of stone listing the poets including Paddy O’Sullivan, Gregory Corso, and Bob Kaufman who were barred from the establishment because of their obstreperous behavior. In 1954 Ginsberg wrote a poem entitled ” In Vesuvio’s Waiting for Sheila,” in honor of his girlfriend at the time Sheila Williams. Six months later he broke up with her after he met his lifetime companion Peter Orlovsky.

When Time Magazine ran articles on the hipsters of North Beach, would be Beats flocked to the cafe. Lenoir placed a mannequin in the window wearing a beret, sunglasses, mustache, and sandals and advertised it as a “Beatnik Kit.” I wore a similar outfit sans mustache for the Walk.

Howl is back as film produced by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. I saw it advertised in the window of City Light as I waited for the walkers to reach me. According to the New York Timesreview by A.O. Scott every word in the film is from the historical record. In the courtroom scene Jon Hamm of Mad Men plays the defense attorney, David Strathairn plays the prosecutor,and Bob Balaban portrays Judge Horn with Treat Williams, Mary Louise Parker ( who I thought was the one redeeming factor in RED) and Jeff Daniels appear in witnesses. The review states there is a coffee house reading of the poem by James Franco as Ginsberg and finally an animated sequence evoking passages from the poem. My immediate thought despite the intrinsic interest of the subject was “video, at best.”

I had checked a 1985 edition of Howl and Other Poems out of the library and read through it on the BART ride to the City. The poem failed to capture my imagination. The language is  no longer shocking and I found the imagery to be forced, especially given what we can now see in video games and movies. But it was a pleasant afternoon, and the two groups that I spoke to applauded my two minute spiel. But I was glad that I had not purchased a pair of bongo drums to complete my costume. That would have been going too far to try to recreate the Beat Generation.

As America entered the Twentieth Century many of its cities had over a million residents, but few of these cities had planned for such a large population. The American cities had grown organically in an ad hoc fashion that made them shapeless, inefficient and dangerous. But things were about to change and change would come in through the works of a Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, who is referred to as the “Father of the City Beautiful.

The aim of the City Beautiful Movement was to achieve something like cultural parity with the great urban centers of Europe, London, Paris,Rome. The City Beautiful Movement was opposed by prominent American architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. They sought a “uniquely” American culture that had enough confidence to cease relying on European culture for its architectural models. Burnham and his supporters felt that this emphasis on New World and the abhorrence of all things European reflected a national insecurity. Real maturity would lie in an acknowledgment that America was not culturally isolated from Europe but the rightful heir to those European traditions. The City Beautiful would recall and celebrate those traditions. The City Beautiful was intended to cure social ills since the beauty of the city would inspire civic loyalty and moral rectitude in the impoverished.

Burnham was born in Henderson, New York but raised in Chicago. He failed the admissions test for both Harvard and Yale and apprenticed as a draftsman. At the age of 26 he moved to the offices of Carter, Drake, and Wight where he met his future business partner John Wellburn Root. They were the architects for one of the first American skyscrapers, the 21 story Masonic Temple Building in Chicago. When Root died prematurely in 1891 the firm became known as D.H. Bentham and Company.

The firm had accepted the responsibility to oversee the design and construction of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, celebrating the 400 th anniversary of Columbus’ founding of the Americas in Jackson Park on the southern lakefront. Burnham was joined by a team of distinguished American architects and landscape architects that included Fredrick Law Olmstead, Charles McKim and Louis Sullivan. These men changed Root’s style to a classical revival style, and the fairground became the first example of comprehensive urban planning with grand boulevards, classical building facades, and lush gardens. The Grand Court of Honor, seen above center, brought together a collection of momumental,classical buildings all painted bright white. The press and the public, 27 million of whom visited the Exposition, referred to the project as the “White City.”

Burnham went on to contribute master plans for cities as diverse as Chicago, San Francisco, and Manila. He delivered his plan for the redesign of San Francisco on April 17, 1906, shown above right,one day before the massive fire and earthquake. His plan called for great boulevards cutting through the existing grid and converging upon central axes throughout the city. The plan called for a monumental city center and the replacement of wooden buildings along the city’s thoroughfares with building of stone. The city would dedicate one-third of its area to parks and green spaces and house a population of two million. Grand monuments would sit on the city hills to honor the pioneers and to highlight the city’s future role in the Pacific.

In the aftermath of the Quake and Fire many advocated building according to the City Beautiful plan, but the city’s residents and shop owners prevailed in arguing that old property lines should be followed so that they could return to business as quickly as possible. The Beaux Arts ideal survived principally in the monumental core as embodied in the San Francisco Civic Center with the magnificent City Hall.

The letter form on the right is the chud and that on the left is the yud

I applied to become a San Francisco City Guide. The City Guides is an outreach program of the San Francisco City Library. The Guides provide history, architecture, and neighborhood walks in forty-one different locations in San Francisco. Those of us in the class have completed four of the scheduled seven sessions, and at the next session on Saturday at the Cameron House in Chinatown we will turn in a list of five tours that we would be interested in giving once we graduate. 

Last Friday I took the South of Market Street stroll with Coordinating Guide Lief Isaksen, and he started the tour on Yerba Buena Lane in front of the “Big Blue Cube” of the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The day was fitting as Yom Kipur commenced that evening. The Museum began in 1984 as the Jewish Community Museum in the Financial District of San Francisco. But in 1994 the Board decided to move the Museum to Yerba Buena Gardens on Mission Street. 

The Board and local residents rejected an initial design of the building proposed by architect Peter Eisenman and retained Daniel Libeskind to design it. A proposed alliance between the Judah L. Magnes Jewish Museum of Berkeley, the holder of the third largest collection of Judaica in the United States and the San Francisco Group proposed in 2002  collapsed 13 months later in the dot com bust.  Mr.Libeskind had first proposed a gold bronze shape and a four story museum, but when the merger of the two groups failed  the Board and the architect scaled down the size of the project and the gold section turned blue. A part of the Museum was cut into the adjoining Four Seasons Hotel that rises forty stories behind the Museum. Construction began on the $ 47.5 million structure in 2006 and the Museum opened in the Summer of 2008. 

Libeskind’s initial claim to fame is an unusual one.Born in Poland he became an accordion virtuoso and played on Polish television. He won an America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship and played with a young Itzakh Perlman. His parents moved to the United States in 1959, and he became a U.S. citizen in 1965. He graduated from the Cooper Union in New York City and received a postgraduate degree in History and Theory of Architecture at Essex University. 

He became a widely known academic but did not complete his first building until he was 52 when his Felix Nussbaum Haus opened in 1998. His first international success was the Jewish Museum in Berlin, today Germany’s most visited museum. Architectural critics have described his work as “deconstructivist.” The Wikipedia describes deconstructive architecture in the following way: 

Deconstructivism in architecture, also called deconstruction, is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the late 1980s. It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure’s surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope. The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit the many deconstructivist “styles” is characterized by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos. 

David Liebskind has gone on to design concert halls, residences, university buildings, shopping centers, and university buildings from the Studio Daniel Libeskind which he operates in conjunction with his wife Nina from its headquarters two blocks south of the World Trade Center in New York City. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation chose him to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. 

The facade of the Museum that faces Mission Street is the brick wall of the the old Jesse Street Substation built in 1881. after the San Francisco Fire. When the South of Market area now known as Yerba Buena Gardens was slated for redevelopment in the 1970′s the  Jesse Street Substation became a cause celebre. Famed  San Francisco architect Willis Polk remodelled it twice between 1905 and 1909 after it was damaged by two fires and the San Francisco Earthquake. 

In his report on the Substation in a 1974 report architectural historian Paul Turner noted Polk had addressed a classical problem in designing the substation. How does one make a mere wall a sophisticated architectural composition? Polk designed the wall with its large expanse of red brick to include  a large arch, seven elegantly detailed windows, a small door supporting a sculptural grouping of putti and garlands, and cornices and dentil-cornices at the top of the wall. As noted by James Young in Daniel Liebskin and the Contemporary Jewish Museumin the eyes of preservationists  the wall embodied the City Beautiful credo of the era, the civic impulse to turn all buildings-no matter how utilitarian-into works of art. He states that the wall maintains an “independent legibility” and “emerges anew” even as it serves as a screen and gateway for Liebskin’s new building.

Libeskind made two dramatic additions to the Power Station wall, a blue clad steel cube that rises in Yerba Buena Lane in the alley and a blue rectangle that juts from the roof. King says that Liebskind intended the colliding bar and rectangle to represent the Hebrew letters that represent the phrase, l’ chaim, or “to life.” The two letter forms are set forth in the center illustration above. 

In his commentary on the Museum in the Wall Street Journal, David D” Arcy postulates that the reference to l’chaim is intended to be life affirming and to focus on the future and the present, not the tragic past that is the reference in his Berlin Jewish Museum. 

In his review in the New York TimesEdward Rothstein picked up this theme. San Francisco’s history as a metropolis dates to the Gold Rush of the 1850s. The influx of immigrants included many Jews,whom as he notes, felt at home in the City By the Bay. As a consequence, he notes, a highly assimilated form of Judaism developed with many interfaith families. In this society Judaism was treated more as a culture than a history. 

In a Letter from San Francisco from the Architect edition of July 2008 Jimmy Stamp quotes from Libeskin’s opening night remarks. The architect described the building as “not just a building, but a place to experience Jewish culture.” He continued by noting the inherent symbolism of the Hebrew language and of the challenge of changing the power station from a place of physical energy to one of creative energy and to create not the illusion of history but a dialog with history.

This will be the first in a series of posts on the buildings on the walk. So I hope you join me on the virtual walk and Lief and the other City Guides on the real walk.See the schedule at www.sfcityguides.org.