California
Related: About this forumInside the cult of San Francisco
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Inside-the-cult-of-San-Francisco-6164306.phpRicky is just one of a growing number of people who are leaving the city for Oakland. And despite threats, they are starting to talk. They say San Francisco is a lie. They say San Francisco controlled their lives. They say San Francisco is a cult....
In 1953, a little-known newspaper columnist named Herb Caen wrote a science fiction novel called Dont Call It Planet Frisco, about a planet that didnt want to be called Frisco and its intergalactic war with other planets who insisted on calling it Frisco. The book, in which an alien planets population eats soup out of bowls made of bread, failed to catch on. Disappointed, Caen went back to his newpaper job, allegedly humbled by the experience. Or so it seemed at the time....
As Caens influence grew, an economy was built around it. Again dipping into his failed novel, Caen singlehandedly created the sourdough bowl craze of 1958, which left a once-thriving plastic bowl industry in tatters. The result: Thousands of traditional bowl factory workers were laid off. Few knew that Caen had shady business deals with several sourdough bowl companies in the city. The Chronicle looked the other way, gladly printing lucrative multi-page sourdough bowl ads every Thursday and Sunday.
arcane1
(38,613 posts)pinto
(106,886 posts)Herbert Eugene "Herb" Caen (April 3, 1916 February 2, 1997) was a San Francisco journalist whose daily column of local goings-on and insider gossip, social and political happenings, painful puns and offbeat anecdotes"a continuous love letter to San Francisco"[1]appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for almost sixty years (excepting a brief defection to the San Francisco Examiner), and made him a household name throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
A special Pulitzer Prize called him the "voice and conscience" of San Francisco.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_Caen
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)to express his disapproval of the '50s North Beach scene.
edit: I loved how he referred to all non-San Franciscans as "Elsewhereans".
yuiyoshida
(41,861 posts)LOU SEAL ATE HIM!!!
hunter
(38,327 posts)One of my grandmas was born in San Francisco but left for the romance of 1920's Hollywood. Her dad was sucked in too, leveraging the small family fortune into movies, aircraft, and real estate, just before the market crashed and burned.
My ancestors were Wild West, probably because they feared 19th century east coast U.S. immigration authorities, or that their fellow immigrants might recognize and rat them out as religious or political dissidents, pacifists, and other riffraff.
I've got just one properly documented ancestor, a mail order bride to Salt Lake city. She didn't like sharing a husband and ran off with a non-Mormon guy, thus firmly establishing her family's relationship with the Mormon Church as people one might discreetly ask to settle bitter disputes without fear of back-stabbing Mormon church politics, or purchase alcohol, condoms, and "French" postcards from.
One of my great grandmas disliked the Mormons immensely, pretending to be proper White Anglo Saxon Protestant, but she never let that interfere with business.