## Metadata * Author: [[David Talbot]] * ASIN: B005C6FDFY * ISBN: 1439108218 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005C6FDFY ## Highlights he costarred with Bette Davis in Fog over Frisco, a snappy thriller about high-society types who fall into the violent grip of the underworld. — location: [86](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=86) ^ref-19380 --- San Francisco became somewhere you did things rather than protesting about them. — location: [456](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=456) ^ref-60470 --- They had met in the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the radical street theater group, and they knew how to command a stage. — location: [718](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=718) ^ref-18367 --- A young, politically ambitious, African-American attorney from the Fillmore named Willie Brown was retained to represent Huckleberry House. And within hours, Judge Joseph Kennedy—a black jurist who strongly supported Glide’s social programs—released Beggs on his own recognizance. A couple of months later, the case was dismissed. — location: [867](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=867) ^ref-4540 --- They had flocked to San Francisco from all over the world, but they were now the city’s children. And you take care of your children, particularly when they are lost and broken. — location: [880](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=880) ^ref-27956 --- The Haight was actually more like Calcutta, with its hordes of beggars in brightly colored rags and its stew of human misery. — location: [957](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=957) ^ref-23312 --- His story, “A Medical Mission in the Haight Ashbury,” ran on the front page, and it produced an outpouring of public support. — location: [966](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=966) ^ref-43496 --- The word spread quickly on the street: any methamphetamine freak who knocked off Smith or Reddick would get $100 worth of speed. “I freaked out,” Smith said. “The neighborhood was so crazy then that if you put out the word like that, it could easily happen.” — location: [983](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=983) ^ref-31169 --- The cops’ attitude was, Here’s this insane asylum in the Haight, and whatever you crazed animals do in there to each other, we don’t give a damn—just don’t let it spill out into the rest of the city.” — location: [986](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=986) ^ref-33833 --- If long-haired boys and girls dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free was the kind of spectacle that ruined your day, the Chronicle told its readers, well, maybe you weren’t a true San Franciscan. — location: [1367](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1367) ^ref-39068 --- his San Francisco was more like Oz, Wonderland, and Gotham City all rolled together. — location: [1399](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1399) ^ref-50117 --- THE 1960S WAS essentially a cultural dialogue between San Francisco and London. The music, art, fashions, comics, drug experimentation, sexual innovation—it was all driven by the creative interplay between the two cities (with some heavy assistance from Detroit, in the music department). — location: [1495](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1495) ^ref-13022 --- San Francisco beckoned to dreamers and losers everywhere. — location: [1500](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1500) ^ref-13215 --- NURTURED BY FM RADIO and concert promoters Bill Graham and Chet Helms, San Francisco bands proliferated like fungi in the deep, wet woods. Rolling Stone later estimated that there were about five hundred rock groups playing in the San Francisco area during the sixties golden days. — location: [1547](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1547) ^ref-18690 --- Moby Grape married the sweet folk-rock harmonies of the Byrds with the ballsy rage of the Rolling Stones. — location: [1552](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1552) ^ref-44251 --- Moby Grape demanded in its swooping, breathtaking anthem “Omaha”—a song written by the group’s mad genius, Skip Spence, — location: [1563](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1563) ^ref-9891 --- Indeed, the song that would become the city’s anthem, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” was written in 1954 by two gay lovers who were pining for “the city by the bay” after moving to Brooklyn Heights. — location: [1696](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1696) ^ref-13852 --- Hibiscus went on to start a rival drag company, the Angels of Light. But it never achieved the same giddy level of phantasmagoria. He eventually drifted back to New York, where he became a high-priced rent boy in sleek Armani suits. Nothing was free anymore. — location: [1764](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1764) ^ref-8902 --- No city would go through more convulsions than San Francisco as it processed the 1960s. Like the mystics who eat from strange and sacred plants to let their minds touch God, the people of San Francisco first had to know hell. As the decade expired, the drugs became harder, the sexual freedom more rapacious, the demands on the human psyche more severe. Meanwhile, the outcasts from America—and its domestic and overseas wars—grew more damaged. They carried within them a hot and reckless lust for salvation as they showed up on the streets of San Francisco. The city was still known for its enchantments, but it would soon become notorious for its terrors. — location: [1770](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1770) ^ref-23100 --- WHAT BEGAN IN San Francisco as a celebration of life would become the opposite. Like the moon pulls on the tides, more and more young people were drawn inexorably to the darker shores of oblivion. — location: [1780](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1780) ^ref-14807 --- he made a junkie’s bargain with himself. This would be his final trip to the underworld. — location: [1922](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1922) ^ref-53679 --- The great notions spawned by San Francisco’s revolution—peaceful coexistence, racial harmony, sexual liberation, ecological consciousness, organic food, communal living, alternative commerce, free culture—did indeed spread throughout the country, where their green tendrils could be seen sprouting here and there in the stony ground. — location: [1983](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1983) ^ref-48518 --- By 1971, 15 percent of the servicemen returning from Vietnam were addicted to heroin. — location: [1992](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=1992) ^ref-2870 --- Among Meyer’s circle was none other than her secret lover, President John F. Kennedy. — location: [2045](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2045) ^ref-7138 --- After his Haight experiment in the summer of 1967, West predicted the demise of the counterculture: “The very chemicals they use will inevitably enervate them as individuals and bleed the energies of the hippie movement to its death.” Some counterculture figures thought the death of the movement was, in fact, a primary goal of the CIA’s drug experimentation. The ever-stronger drugs, the hollowed-out zombies walking the streets, the violent psychotics. — location: [2058](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2058) ^ref-6477 --- But the most horrific explanation was the one offered by Manson himself: “These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them . . . You made your children what they are.” — location: [2154](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2154) ^ref-35263 --- That’s how the 1960s ended, with Manson and Altamont. — location: [2157](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2157) ^ref-42810 --- that’s what the period was all about—exploring the limits of bad judgment. — location: [2258](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2258) ^ref-733 --- For [the Rolling Stones], the power and violence is fantasy, something close to pornographic literature. But Americans just ain’t like that. The real Americans want to get their hands and faces in the mud and the blood and the beer. — location: [2268](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2268) ^ref-65360 --- But, in the end, Stephen Gaskin gave up on San Francisco, rolling out of the Haight with his congregation in October 1970 in a caravan of thirty-two rebuilt school buses and dozens of other motley vehicles. Gaskin’s great exodus ended in Tennessee, where he established one of the most successful and longest-running communes in American history, the Farm. — location: [2289](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2289) ^ref-50157 --- It was still a time when mayors could think big, and he wanted the whole city to share his gusto. — location: [2390](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2390) ^ref-58104 --- “Good Earth won, they beat the heroin dealers, because they were a warrior tribe,” marveled Haight-Ashbury activist Calvin Welch. “They knew how to fight.” — location: [2560](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2560) ^ref-29281 --- The party also envisioned transforming San Francisco into an eco-friendly urban model, banning cars from the downtown area and replacing paved streets with green spaces. — location: [2608](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=2608) ^ref-2390 --- “We thought San Francisco was the world—and it wasn’t.” — location: [3050](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=3050) ^ref-21249 --- ON THE AFTERNOON OF September 18, 1975, San Francisco police and the FBI finally swooped down on the Harrises, as they returned from jogging in nearby Precita Park. — location: [3219](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=3219) ^ref-64465 --- The clean, chill wind smelled like freedom to him. — location: [3275](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=3275) ^ref-19963 --- But the stress took its toll, and he died too young of a heart attack. — location: [3659](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=3659) ^ref-59911 --- And in a brazen move to cover up the voter fraud committed by the temple during the 1975 election, Freitas put the temple’s lawyer in charge of the investigation. — location: [4355](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=4355) ^ref-17516 --- Three years later, after the name Jim Jones had gone down in infamy, state and federal investigators finally began looking into the shady election. When they asked for all the rosters showing who voted, the city’s deputy registrar of voters went searching for the records in three locked vaults where they were kept. All the records were missing. — location: [4358](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=4358) ^ref-10371 --- It was Willie Brown who first recognized that Jones’s organization could play a pivotal role in his friend George Moscone’s run for mayor. — location: [4472](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=4472) ^ref-2302 --- In October 1976 Moscone announced that he was naming Jones to the San Francisco Housing Authority, which oversees the operation of the city’s public housing. — location: [4504](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=4504) ^ref-14992 --- “This is the last hurrah for conservatives in San Francisco,” he bitterly told an Examiner reporter on the night that Proposition B went down to defeat. “I’ve done everything I can to expose the deceit, deception, and dishonesty in city government. Maybe the people will wake up someday, but I’m going back to my family and business.” — location: [4617](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=4617) ^ref-37242 --- political supporters like Harvey Milk, newly elected to the board of supervisors, stuck by the increasingly fanatical leader, out of fear, expedience, or stubborn loyalty. — location: [4733](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=4733) ^ref-43214 --- The same free air that had nurtured the beats, hippies, gays, and a growing garden of the imagination had given birth to a monster. — location: [4895](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=4895) ^ref-25638 --- Moscone and San Francisco’s liberal leadership had aided and abetted Jones’s reign of “horror, inhumanity, and bizarre brutalities.” — location: [4927](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=4927) ^ref-12728 --- The San Francisco police force was deeply implicated in the murders of Moscone and Milk. — location: [5249](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=5249) ^ref-8833 --- San Francisco had become “Aberration City,” wrote conservative Examiner columnist Guy Wright, sounding like White himself. “A fermentation vat for oddball notions. A haven for all sorts of kook cults . . . A city where tolerance deteriorates into license. A town without a norm.” — location: [5344](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=5344) ^ref-45348 --- San Francisco in November 1978 was a broken vessel on a dark sea. — location: [5383](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=5383) ^ref-12964 --- Joe Montana, the eighty-second choice in that year’s draft, did not strike most NFL experts as starting quarterback material. — location: [5825](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=5825) ^ref-9982 --- “Sin Funcisco,” — location: [6011](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=6011) ^ref-60149 --- We were living in a fantasy world.” White was trying to save a world that never existed. — location: [6171](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=6171) ^ref-31445 --- “In the old days, fully a third of every restaurant crowd, every nightclub, every parking lot was homosexuals. They spent more, they yelled more, they had more fun—and they were the best dressed. They were the cheerleaders of our culture. Then, poof, they were gone. The restaurants were half-empty, the clubs weren’t as jammed. A light was turned off in this town. Because if you left the straights to handle the party, it just wasn’t going to happen. — location: [6209](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=6209) ^ref-21271 --- Under Mayor Feinstein, San Francisco mounted the most aggressive campaign in the country to confront the health crisis. In 1984 alone, San Francisco poured $7.6 million of scarce city funds into AIDS programs, while New York, with triple the caseload, was spending little over $1 million. — location: [6295](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=6295) ^ref-53365 --- In the mid-1980s, San Francisco spent more on AIDS than the entire federal government under President Reagan. — location: [6297](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=6297) ^ref-3199 --- According to Caen, those locals who turned up their noses at the hippie invasion were guilty of the ultimate San Francisco sin: they were “bores.” — location: [6469](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B005C6FDFY&location=6469) ^ref-5676 ---