Episode 1: Vice Defined San Francisco's DNA At Its Inception

Welcome to The Secret History of Frisco, a podcast peeling back the layers of San Francisco's vibrant and often illicit past during its last wide-open era, 1934 to 1953. Join host Knox Bronson as we journey through the city's smoky backrooms, bustling waterfronts, and glittering nightlife, where fortunes were made and lost, and a unique live-and-let-live ethos reigned supreme, naturally contingent on the right palms being greased. From the early days of Gold Rush outlaws like The Hounds and the Sydney Ducks, who set the stage for a city steeped in vice, to the looming figures of Mafia boss Frank Lanza and the corrupting influence of the McDonough brothers, we'll explore the intricate dance between crime, politics, and the burgeoning cultural landscape that captured the world's imagination, as immortalized in Tony Bennett's iconic ode to the "cool grey city of love."

In this inaugural episode, we set the stage for our exploration of Frisco, a term embraced for its outlaw swagger and the swirling mix of cultures, dreams, and darkness that defined San Francisco. We'll encounter the legendary defense attorney Jake Ehrlich, a true embodiment of the city's spirit, and glimpse the powerful forces that shaped its underworld, including the entrenched Mafia and the deeply compromised San Francisco Police Department, whose lucrative take from vice painted a picture of a city operating by its own set of rules. From the Barbary Coast's den of iniquity to the nascent jazz clubs and the shadow of the impending crackdown, prepare to delve into the secret history of a Frisco on the cusp of transformation, a city as seductive and dangerous as the fog that rolls through the Golden Gate.

Transcript

Welcome to the first episode of the Secret History of Frisco podcast. I am your host, Knox Bronson. The focus of the Secret History of Frisco will be the last two decades, 1934 to 1953, when San Francisco was still a wide-open town and the over-riding ethos of the city was keep your powder dry, eat drink and be merry, and, especially, live-and-let-live, as long as the proper payoffs had been made, naturally.

My original intent for FRISCO was to focus on San Francisco’s post-World War II years of 1947-1953, the last throes of the Wild Wild West. As I researched the decades prior in order to set the stage for the stories of post-war era, I discovered so many little-known events, intrigues, crimes, and characters, I realized I had to expand the scope of the series, so 1934-1953, it is. We will be jumping backwards and forward in time, as needed, to tell the story of FRISCO.

The world has always loved San Francisco. Tony Bennett’s album, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” released in 1962, sold fourteen million copies worldwide. The single remained on the Billboard charts for three years. Why? Because everybody across the globe was transported to the cool grey city of love, as newspaper columnist Herb Caen called it, whenever Tony sang …

I left my heart in San Francisco

High on a hill, it calls to me

To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars

The morning fog may chill the air, I don't care

My love waits there in San Francisco

Above the blue and windy sea

In 1953, Herb Caen, a lifelong hero to me, published a book called “Don’t Call It Frisco.” Since announcing this podcast, I have heard from any number of people objecting to the use of the term, “Frisco.” As a fourth generation San Franciscan, I get it, but FRISCO is so more than the city itself. It’s an attitude, a swagger, a way of life, a love affair, a swirling galaxy of culture, crime, politics, industry, art, music, romance and dreams, the little city built on seven hills, surrounded by the brilliant blue waters of the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay.

FRISCO has always been an outlaw town. Crime, or at least vice, is in its very DNA. It’s part of the city’s charm. The nature and structure of the city’s underworld and its public facing representatives, the politicians and civic leaders, have continually evolved over the years, but at its core, it has always come down to money, power, booze, sex, and gambling mixed with civic pride, art and literature, music, theater, and nightlife, bustling industry, the port, the gateway to the shining Pacific at the edge of the continent.

In 1848, two years before California would become a state, a group of soldiers, many of them former members of gangs in the notorious Bowery and Five Points neighborhoods in New York City, arrived in San Francisco and settled there. Less than a thousand people lived in the city at the time.

They called themselves The Hounds and paraded around town as if they were military. They set up headquarters in a tent on Kearny Street and called it Tammany Hall. 

They harassed anyone of Spanish origin and extorted money from local businesses for protection services. Anyone who did not pay was likely to lose a nose, an ear, or experience other great bodily injury. When a group of 230 men organized into a militia and confronted the gang with possible arrest, The Hounds fled San Francisco. They would later return.

And then James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill, a hundred and thirty miles to the east of San Francisco and the clarion call of instant riches rocketed around the world. The Gold Rush was on. San Francisco’s population jumped from 1000 to 20,000 in one year. 

By the end of 1849, ships from arrived from Australia carrying former members of Great Britain's penal colony – ex-convicts, ticket-of-leave men (a term meaning parolee), and criminals – to San Francisco. They marshaled their forces, calling themselves the Sydney Ducks and set up operations on the northeast edge of FRISCO, named it Sydney Town, and began terrorizing the city.

To aid in looting San Francisco's neighborhoods, the Sydney Ducks would set fire to San Francisco six times between 1849 and 1851 in order to distract citizens from their pillaging and murdering. They were clever, these boys. Whenever they planned a fire and a pillaging, they waited for south westerly winds so that Sydney Town itself would not also catch fire. 

in 1851, the citizens of FRISCO formed the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. They arrested two of the Sydney Ducks, Samuel Whittaker and Robert McKenzie for arson, robbery, and burglary. They were quickly tried, found guilty and hanged.

A newspaper of the day, the San Francisco Herald, wrote of Sydney Town, which would later be known as the Barbary Coast:

The upper part of Pacific Street, after dark, is crowded by thieves, gamblers, low women, drunken sailors, and similar characters... Unsuspecting sailors and miners are entrapped by the dexterous thieves and swindlers that are always on the lookout, into these dens, where they are filled with liquor – drugged if necessary, until insensibility coming upon them, they fall an easy victim to their tempters...When the habitues of this quarter have a reason to believe a man has money, they will follow him for days, and employ every device to get him into their clutches...These dance-groggeries are outrageous nuisances and nurseries of crime.

In his book, Lights and Shades in San Francisco, published in 1876, Benjamin E. Lloyd wrote: 

“The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.”

All this to say …

I would wager my very last dollar that they all, every  Forty-Niner from around the world, every sea-faring argonaut who arrived by ship, every adventurer, every gold-fevered prospector and sourdough, every priest, piker, pimp, and publican, every merchant, lawyer, barkeep, blacksmith, newsman, every madam and good-time girl who came to San Francisco seeking fortune, every desperado, lowlife and outlaw, and all the rest for a century to come, every single one of them called Frisco, Frisco.

There’s a sea chanty from the Gold Rush era, “Shanghai Brown.”

When first I went to Frisco boys, I went upon a spree,

My hard earned cash I spent it fast, I got

drunk as drunk could be,

Before me money was all gone, or spent on some old whore,

I made up me mind and was well inclined to go to sea no more.

No more, no more, To go to sea no more,

I made up me mind and was well inclined to go to sea no more.

That night I spent with Sally Brown too drunk to roll in bed,

Me clothes was new me money was too, in the morn with them she

fled.

A feeling sick I left the house and went down to the shore.

There I went me head all bend and the crimps at me did roar.

Did roar, did roar, the crimps at me did roar.

("crimp" was slang for a person who swindled or coerced others into military or naval service. It could also refer to the act of recruiting people this way. )

All the similar songs of the era refer to San Francisco as FRISCO.

My first bonus episode, “Don’t Call It Frisco,” where I shall be discussing the history and evolution of the term, will appear shortly. Please subscribe at Patreon to receive a notification. Here’s a little hint: even Herb Caen wasn’t as hardcore about not using the term Frisco as many would like to believe.

For the first couple of months, all main and bonus episodes of the Secret History of FRISCO will be available for free to everybody who signs up at Patreon. You can find it at http://Patreon.com/FRISCO. After that, the bonus episodes and other perks will be paywalled on Patreon, with paid-tiers starting at $1 a month. Please join me at The Secret History of FRISCO for free. All the main episodes of the podcast will always be free.

While the Barbary Coast was founded on extreme lawlessness, over time, the city government matured and the entertainment scene emerged with more legitimate dance halls and jazz clubs and saloons, along with an abundance of brothels. The Barbary Coast’s reputation as the heart of the city's underworld persisted for many years. Later developments, like the International Settlement, occupied parts of the former Barbary Coast territory.

To quote the book Lights and Shades in San Francisco,” again:

“We do not wish to say, or even imply, that San Francisco is the wickedest and most immoral city in the world; that her men are all libertines and her women all fallen; that she has no noble sons and pure daughters. This is only a single chapter on her wickedest ways-the deepest shade among many brilliant lights. 

“But we would say to the parents of San Francisco to look closer to their daughters, for they know not the many dangers to which they are exposed—know their associates, guard their virtue and to mildly counsel their sons, for when upon the streets of this gay city they are wandering amid many temptations.”

In 1895, nineteen years after the publication of that book my great-grandfather, Edward Bronson, arrived in San Francisco with his wife, Mabel Knox Bronson and their four children. My grandfather, Tingley Knox Bronson, was born in 1901. Ed sold books by the yard to newly rich gold miners and other wealthy denizens to fill the libraries in their recently built mansions on Nob Hill, Pacific Heights, Seacliff, and St. Francis Woods.

My father wrote a number of California history books, the most popular being, “The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned,” which is, sixty-six years later, still considered by many to be the definitive book on the 1906 conflagration that leveled San Francisco. So I guess I am following in dad’s footsteps. Impossible shoes to fill, but something to aim for, nonetheless.

While it is my intent to focus on the last two decades where San Francisco was still wide-open, we will occasionally go back in time and venture far afield as needed, for the history of FRISCO is vast, bold, and deserves a kaleidoscope and cinematic telling.

Jake Erlich was the most infamous of San Francisco’s barristers and some say the greatest defense attorney of the twentieth century. In his autobiography, “A Life In My Hands,” he tells the story of arriving in San Francisco by stowing away on a ferry from across the bay in 1918.

He wrote:

And this is how I arrived in San Francisco, black as sin, empty as a drum, broke as a bankrupt, pulling a large green van loaded with luggage (he was pretending to be a stevedore), completely pleased with life and myself. I had at last made it to the city of my (and my grandmother’s) wildest dreams. I quickly made for the nearest men’s room. When I emerged with a half a pound or so of Union Pacific roadbed removed from my face, hands, and torso, I was ready to greet my new hometown.

I strode on up Market Street, ignoring the protests from my empty belly.

I admired the people about me. The men seemed more robust, more male, more capable of absolutely anything-good or bad-than any I'd seen, and I liked the curious, uninhibited feeling of democracy that seemed to exist between them. Teamsters and draymen addressed sulphurous warnings and bawdy wit to their so-called social betters and even to the police, as well as to their peers in the traffic interchanges that enlivened life on Market Street. 

Men didn't hurry single-mindedly along the pavements as they did in the East and the Middle-West, their eyes vacant and self-centered, their minds on their profits or problems. San Francisco men conversed with gusto. They guffawed explosively or made extravagant exclamations of scorn, disbelief or agreement. They cursed with inoffensive robustness, and they hailed newsboys, cabs and friends a block distant with strident whistle blasts achieved through two fingers hooked in the mouth. And they didn't feel called upon to eye me, in my motley, half-military garb.

I admired San Francisco women even more greatly. As I watched them on that initial trek up Market Street I remember how interestingly different I found them. They were dressed; that was the first thing. Not one of them looked as though she'd said, "I am only going to the store at the corner for stays for my corset so it doesn't matter how I look." Not one had said, "I'm no longer young, so the condition of my hair and makeup really doesn't count." None had said, "T'll wear my old shoes downtown today; comfort is more important than appearance."

I remember them as if it were yesterday, and have admired them unfailingly through the years; these super-feminine women of San Francisco who that night helped to entice me into permanent citizenship: the careful,, chic apparel, the smart hats, the rarely ungloved hands, the little white collars or jabots or dickeys at the neck, the corsages of violets, the fine look of conscious worth. And I especially remember that they did feel called upon to eye me—a little despite my unappealing appearance.

I completed my tour of Market Street, up past the gracious old Palace Hotel where I was to dine so often in the decades ahead.”

We will encounter Jake many times in episodes to come. Over the course of his career, He represented politicians, policemen, actors, writers, night club entertainers, musicians, athletes, industrialists, madams, murderers, mafiosos, as well as every day bigamists and petty crooks. 

Here’s a small sampling of names: Gene Krupa, Billie Holiday, Errol Flynn, James Mason, Frank Sinatra, Caryl Chessman, madams Sally Stanford and Dolly Fine, Howard Hughes, He defended stripper Sally Rand when she was busted for lewdness at the Club Savoy, later known as the Savoy Tivoli, in 1948.In 1957, he was lead attorney for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, proprietor of City Lights Books in San Francisco’s North Beach, defending the sale of Allen Ginsberg's book “Howl and Other Poems” in that historic obscenity trial. 

Jake was FRISCO, through and through.

With the end of prohibition in 1933, business went back to normal in San Francisco. There were four major entities controlling vice and crime across the city.

Mafia Boss Frank Lanza had consolidated power over the relatively small presence of the East Coast mob in San Francisco with the murder of rival gang leader Luigi Malvese on May 18, 1932. Lanza's criminal portfolio was diverse, encompassing bootlegging (until the repeal of prohibition), pimping, loansharking, gun running, and narcotics dealing. He was also a co-owner of Frisco’s famous Fisherman's Wharf, alongside partner Giuseppe Alioto, an immigrant fisherman from Sicily,. Giuseppe’s son, Joseph, born in 1916, was elected Mayor of San Francisco in 1968 and served until 1976.

Then there were the McDonough brothers, Peter and Tom. Of Irish descent, they were the proprietors of the deeply corrupt McDonough Bros. Bail bonds company, which they operated out of "The Corner" saloon near the Hall of Justice, a crucial nexus for facilitating police corruption, protecting vice operations, and wielding political influence. They pioneered a system providing comprehensive services for the accused, developing sophisticated communication networks with police stations to ensure rapid release for their clients, allegedly with judges and police on their payroll. They would alert brothels so the madams could prepare for incipient raids. Their influence was such that a grand jury oncemconcluded, "No one can conduct a prostitution or gambling enterprise in San Francisco without the approval of the McDonough brothers.”

That the McDonough brothers and the Lanza Crime Family could coexist in such geographically small area that San Francisco was unique anywhere in the county, an only-in-San-Francisco thing. The Lanza family represented more traditional Mafia rackets, while the McDonoughs derived their power directly from manipulating the levers of the justice system itself.

The combined strength of the Lanza mob and McDonough cartel created such a formidable barrier to external competition, it led Al Capone to remark that San Francisco's underworld was so "highly organized and well protected that outsiders couldn't break into" the city. 

But it wasn’t just the Lanzas and the McDonoughs who kept the mob from getting its hooks too deep into FRISCO. The third and perhaps most important entity in San Francisco’s underworld: The San Francisco Police Department itself. In 1937, under great political pressure, the Grand Jury an independent investigator, Edwin Atherton, to investigate vice in all its forms for $40,000. In his autobiography, Lawyer Jake Erlich put the price at $100,000. I believe he was prone to embellishment, like many of the characters we will meet in the future. He represented a number of the police implicated in the final report, which rocked the city to its core. In the Atherton Report, it was estimated that the police collected $1,325,000 a year from gambling and prostitution operations alone. That is almost $30,000,000 in 2025 dollars. Not bad for a city with a population of 645,000. 

We will, of course, be diving deep into the Atherton Report and all its ramifications in future episodes.

Before the opening of the Bay Bridge in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, the city was mostly accessed via the trans-bay ferries. San Francisco policemen were stationed at the terminals in San Francisco and if anybody got off the boats who looked like a wiseguy from back east, he was questioned. If unable to convince the cops of the purity of his intentions for their fair city, he was put on the next departing ferry to the East Bay. This was part of the protection that Al Capone complained about.

In 1929, Bill Graham and Jim McKay, who owned Lake Tahoe’s Cal Neva Lodge, one of Nevada’s oldest casinos, hired Bones Remmer to manage the lodge. Bones had moved into the world of professional gambling after playing for the Canton Bulldogs in the nascent National Football League in his early twenties. 

The next year, The Cal-Neva Lodge made international headlines when Bones tried, unsuccessfully, to collect a $13,000 blackjack debt, about a quarter million dollars today, run up by actress Clara Bow. She had written a check to cover her losses, but had cancelled it upon her return to Hollywood.

Bones was a large, tough man with an appetite for both power and food. As time passed, both his waistline and his ownership in the Lodge increased. In 1937, when Graham and McKay were sent to jail for mail fraud, he took over the club.

The Cal Neva Lodge had a profitable sideline laundering money for racketeers and bank robbers. Remmer cleaned “hot” bank robbery money for desperados like Alvin Karpis and “Baby Face” Nelson. Remmer let Nelson hide out in cabins near the lodge and introduced him to California bootleggers, who the hired Baby Face to protect their liquor shipments. Nelson returned the favor by getting rid of an important witness in the trial against Graham and McKay.

In the 1940s, Remmer expanded his operations into Northern California, running the 21 Club in El Cerrito, the Oaks Club in Emeryville, the 110 Eddy and the Menlo clubs in San Francisco. He had numerous fronts for his gambling operations. You couldn’t buy a cigar at Remmer’s B&R Smoke shop at 50 Mason St., but you could always make a bet on the ponies.

Throughout the forties and into the fifties, Bones Remmer was FRISCO’s kingpin of vice. He lived in a mansion in the exclusive Claremont neighborhood in Berkeley across the bayand.

Bill Wren, as managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner and William Randolph Hearst’s consigliere, he ran the city and the state Democratic Party. Born in 1897 in Boston, he was orphaned in infancy and raised by relatives. He ran away at thirteenHe had a lifelong love of horses, even working at a stable in his youth, and he loved to play the ponies. 

He didn’t love paying his gambling debts when his horse didn’t come in. Bones Remmer didn’t like this.

Jimmie Tarantino was a bad boy. In the early forties, he was a stringer for Knockout, a trade magazine for professional boxing. He worked his way into Frank Sinatra’s orbit, becoming a member of his first rat pack, “The Varsity. Privy to a lot of Hollywood gossip, he had an idea for magazine, Hollywood Nite Life and got gangster Mickey Cohen and Frank Sinatra to invest in it. Soon, he was extorting celebrities all over town, threatening to expose some kink or peccadillo or crime if they didn’t “buy an ad” in his morally crusading anti-communist gossip rag. Eventually, he had the nerve to blackmail Frank Sinatra, his very own benefactor, over some dirt upon which he had stumbled. Sinatra paid up, but was so angry, and we all know what a temper Frank Sinatra had, Jimmie had to leave town before the sun went down. He headed up to Frisco, where he joined up with Bones Remmer and there was room for a guy like him in the town. At some point he renamed the magazine, Hollywood Life, and promptly got back into his nefarious action again. Bones had uses for him.

 Bob Patterson was Bill Wren’s Jimmie Tarantino, after a fashion. Writing under the nom-de-plume Freddie Francisco he was the most powerful journalist in Northern California in the mid-forties. Believe me, Bob aka Freddie was a character and we have plenty of stories to tell, but I’m going to let Time magazine explain some of it. From their February 7, 1949 issue:

[Freddie Francisco] also crusaded against Elmer ("Bones") Remmer, owner of San Francisco's three biggest gambling houses, and drove Bones out of business. (When offered a $500-a-month bribe to lay off, Patterson hid a microphone and got a transcript of the offer; it made juicy reading.) One day last month, Freddie's column casually mentioned an obscure and unappetizing Los Angeles weekly called Hollywood Nite Life. It was nothing but a "brash, often spiteful publication," he wrote, and its swarthy and droopy-lidded publisher, one Jimmy Tarantino, struck him as a man who liked to toot his own horn.

Last week Tarantino struck back. Shipping thousands of extra copies of Nite Life into the Bay area, he gave San Franciscans a shocking story under a black, front-page headline: FREDDIE FRANCISCO -EMBEZZLER-THIEF. Who was Freddie Francisco? Why, said Tarantino, he was a man of eight aliases, with a 20-year criminal record studded with seven arrests (forgery, robbery, grand larceny, theft of Government property) and four convictions for theft, forgery, and fraud. A four-time loser, he was on parole from the fed- eral prison at Atlanta, and was an "accomplished shakedown artist." 

Well, talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

I knew Bob Patterson in the last few years of his life, in the early seventies, when I went to work at the San Francisco Examiner as a copyboy. He was friend of my father’s. He remains one of the most charming and entertaining people I have ever met and I am happy to say I have been lucky to know more than a few of them. I knew he had had quite a fascinating history and I was vaguely aware of his criminal past.

One afternoon, I sat with him in the M&M Tavern at 5th and Howard, down the street from the Ex. It was right around the Examiner’s 4 pm deadline, so the usual crew had not arrived yet. They would be arriving shortly, like clockwork. Since the paper was less than a block away, the M&M was second busiest saloon in the city.

Bob said that he had heard from someone that I was a big “Kojak” fan. Indeed I was, so we talked about Kojak for a while.  My father had told me about Bob and Jimmie’s battles in the forties, but it didn’t register at the time. I was twenty-two. I asked him if he thought there were any cops who were as honest, clean, and incorruptible as Kojak in real life. I don’t remember his words, but it was quite a lengthy reply, for Bob was a man who could indeed hold court in a saloon, the gist of which seemed to me, as such a young sprout, was, “No.”

Bob had a million tale to tell, and, as more than one fellow ink-stained tippler had declared, never let the facts get in the way of a story. He always insisted on buying the rounds. I should mention that, along with everything else, Bob Patterson was very talented writer. Now that I’m working on this podcast, I wish I could go back in time to that day.

In fact, Bob was the ghost-writer of Sally Stanford’s wonderful 1966 autobiography, “The Lady of the House.” Sally was FRISCO’s pre-eminent madame in the thirties and Forties. 

Bob Patterson, FRISCO through and through. Bones Remmer, FRISCO. Jimmie Tarantino? … I don’t know … he never got all the Hollywood stink off him and he was still extorting celebrities from afar. But he managed to make a fair amount of trouble in the years he was here.

Born into extreme poverty on the outskirts of  Baker, Oregon, a small rural town in 1903, Mabel Janice Busby ran away with a customer at the diner where she worked as a waitress at age sixteen. He had showered her with gifts and had promised her marriage. She had been looking for a way out of the town of Baker her whole short life. 

They took off and the honeymoon was great until he got arrested for passing bad checks. She claims in her book that she had no idea what he was up to. I believe here. She was, after all, only sixteen. Then the cops came after her she went to jail for two years as his accomplice, having been promised probation by the town’s prosecutor if she would just confess. 

At the point, she vowed to never be broke or be dependent upon a man again. When she got out of jail, she made her way to Santa Paula, California, where an uncle lived. 

She worked as waitress and made money on the side bootlegging.  In 1923, at the age of twenty, she made her way to San Franciso, where she managed speakeasies and houses of ill repute, of where there was an abundance. A woman of many aliases over years, she settled on Sally Stanford shortly after arriving in San Francisco,. Within a few years, the newly christened Sally Stanford was running the finest brothel in San Francisco and it was her own.

It is said that the formation of the United Nations was hammered out in her living room at 1144 Pine Street on Nob Hill, as the delegates from fifty nations would gather there every evening after the official negotiations at the War Memorial Opera House. 

As the Forties came to a close, the crackdowns on vice increased across the city. She closed up shop and moved across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and opened a world-famous restaurant, Sally Stanford’s Valhalla. She eventually became Mayor of the city. 

Sally was FRISCO, through and through.

*****************

So there you have it, for now. 

With this first episode of The Secret History of FRISCO, II hope I have at least partly set the stage for all the stories and characters to come.

Poets, writers, and philosophers  have waxed poetic about what has made FRISCO Frisco  since its beginning … 

Was it the Gold Rush, Frisco’s international clarion call, the influx of adventurers from around the world? 

Was it Frisco’s geography, forty-nine square miles on the tip of a sixty-mile peninsula, isolated from the American continent? At least until the thirties when the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate bridges were built?

Was it the 1906 earthquake and fire when the earth shook and the sky burned, forging San Francisco’s steel character and burnishing her reputation around the world, as she miraculously rose from the ashes?

Was it the air? That very same air that makes San Francisco’s magnificent sourdough taste unlike any other sourdough in the world?

I have a stellar cast of writers, journalists, and historians who will be joining us on episodes in the future. We will be looking at the great film noir movies that were made in San Francisco in the thirties and forties. We’ll be covering Frisco’s nightlife, the dazzling constellation of nightclubs, saloons, theaters and restaurants, the jazz, the blues, that spread the cool grey city of love’s reputation far across the globe. 

We’ve talked about a few of the city’s characters in this episode. I could have gone on for hours! You will meet them all and so many more in these tales of the last good time years when Frisco was still the wide-open city that seduced the world. 

The Secret History of Frisco is a listener supported podcast. Main episodes will always be free. Our website is www.thehistoryoffrisco.com. Please join us on Patreon at www.Patreon.com/Frisco. Paid tier members, starting at as little as $1 a month, will receive bonus episodes and other perks of membership.

I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time.