TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the Secret History of Frisco Podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson.
We are going to revisit the question of “FRISCO” today. Some people are quite passionate about it. This is the “Call It FRISCO, Part 2” Episode.
Ever since I got sober many years ago, I have liked to joke that I spent much of my life shooting the dart into the beehive just to see what would happen. And that since getting sober, I’ve gotten a lot further away from the beehive, but, because I am sober, my aim is so much better.
I knew that naming this podcast The History of Frisco would ruffle some feathers, but I was unprepared for the vehemence of the anti-Frisco brigade.
I posted a link to our first episode, Vice and Crime Were In San Francisco’s DNA at its Inception, on the San Francisco Reddit Group, which has 585,000 members. I felt I had enough episodes to announce our existence.
The very first comment was from a guy named Voltaire who posted, “OMG! Change the name!”
Now one would think that someone who chose Voltaire for a screen name would be a little more open-minded, since Voltaire was one of the eighteenth century architects of the Enlightenment.
Alas, this was not the case. I replied, “You’re funny! I want to bring “Frisco” back! I did an episode, “Call It Frisco. About the origins and history of the term—I know lots of people hate it, but the people I want focus on called it Frisco. I’m about to do “Call It Frisco Part 2.” (And here we are.) Even Herb Caen softened his stance on”Frisco” later in life.”
Voltaire replied, “The terms San Fran and Frisco are hated in SF! Do a reddit search to see the strong reaction. Although your podcast might be interesting, I will pass because of the name.”
Dollarist chimed in and said “Dude read the room.”
I once again replied that I had read the room and something to the effect that the people I was writing about in the podcast called San Francisco Frisco.
Sugarwax responded: “I think you’re mistaking others using it with permission for you to use it, but do you.” I want to bring snobbery over “Frisco” back!”
I think Sugarwax meant, “you do you,” as the youngsters say now. In the hippie days, we said, “Do your own thing.” But I’m very happy that Sugarwax was forthright about bringing snobbery over Frisco back.
All this to say, I’m appreciating the engagement and all the people chiming on the topic. I have suggested they listen to the “Call It Frisco” episode, part one, but it seems they won’t!
A friend of mine posted a very positive comment on the Reddit thread. This is what we do for our friends, correct? I’m grateful. He told me the next day, that some guy who down-voted his comment on my post took the trouble to go to archive of all his comments on Reddit and down-voted every single one of them. That is passion!
Now, this is where things get a little weird, as they often do in Frisco.
I waited a week and decided I would post on Reddit the most recent episode, a wonderful discussion of the two Maltese Falcon movies and Dark Passage from 1947, all set in San Francisco, with local noir film historian and author Rachel Walther.
I posted the link with a short description and immediately got this notice:
This item was automatically removed because it contained demeaning language. Please read the rules for more information.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
I wrote to the moderators, explaining the episode, with link to it. Today, I tried to post the “Call It Frisco Part 1” episode, hoping the ban had been lifted.
No such luck.
I have a feeling that whoever downvoted all my friend’s history of Reddit comments rounded up some friends to report the episode—it only takes four of five to trigger the algorithm. I wrote them again and I expect that the ban will be lifted before too long.
I’m going to say something that’s very nice, but of it I am certain: Dan White, murderer of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, never, ever called the city Frisco.
And now I’m watching that dart sail across our beautiful blue California sky to that distant beehive. As Elvis Costello sang, my aim is true.
[intermezzo]
In my very first episode of The Secret History of Frisco, I touched on the Frisco question and included a snippet of a song from Dick Holdstock’s wonderful album, “San Francisco Shanties of the Gold Rush.” I did this because all of the songs refer to the city as Frisco. I included another excerpt from a different song on the album in “Call It Frisco” episode.
I want share my favorite song of the album here, well, at least a little bit of it. I’ll have link to it on YouTube in the show notes. It’s called “Whisky Johnny” and it tells the same story about the dangers of drinking rum and whisky in Frisco and how you better watch out for Shanghai Brown.
If you haven’t listened to that first “Call It Frisco” episode, I strongly recommend it. Emperor Norton is featured in it.
In 1872, The good Emperor Norton issued a proclamation about the use of the term “Frisco,” which was duly reported in all the local newspapers.
It read:
“Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word “Frisco,” which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of a High Misdemeanor, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars.”
That would be about $650 today.
I can find no record that he managed to collect any fine.
I thought I would go back to that great San Franciscan, Madam Sally Stanford, and her thoughts on the term Frisco. If you haven’t listened to the Sally Stanford/Humphrey Bogart episode, I also recommend it. It covers a lot of Sally’s early life.
I want to read the first few pages from Chapter Three of Sally’s autobiography, The Lady of the House, ghost-written by Bob Patterson, aka Freddy Francisco.
Sally had very strong convictions about calling the city “Frisco,” and I’m sure you can guess that she was other side of the fence from Emperor Norton.
Before we read Sally’s dictum, I want to introduce a couple other legendary San Franciscans to whom Sally refers in Chapter three.
Fog Horn Murphy was an Irishman well-known in both Los Angeles and his hometown San Francisco. At different times, he was wholesale liquor dealer, politician, and a radio announcer.
He was also a ballyhoo specialist which is where he became known as “Foghorn” Murphy.
What’s a ballyhoo specialist? you ask.
In baseball regalia, equipped with a megaphone, and astride a horse he would ride up and down Market Street any time there was a ball game scheduled, yelling about that day’s game.
He was at times involved in questionable business dealings. On more than one occasion he fled with his wife Jean to Idaho to lay low while people tied to organized crime searched for him.
Foghorn was mentioned in the book “TNT – The Power Within You” by Claude Bristol and Harold Sherman, published in 1957, where they told this story:
“Foghorn Murphy, the famous umpire baiter, said over the radio on Groucho Marx’s ‘You Bet Your Life’ show, that the ‘cheapest’ thing a person could do was to be nice to other people, greet them with a smile and trust them – that this paid the biggest dividends.”
Pure Frisco, that Foghorn.
The other character Sally mentioned was Charles Cora.
San Francisco gambler Charles Cora had taken a lady of the night, Arrabella Ryan, as his mistress and later his wife.
On November 15, 1855, while the couple was at a theater on Market Street, United States Marshal William Richardson drunkenly and publicly insulted Arrabella in the lobby. Charles was furious. A few days later, he shot and killed Marshal Richardson to defend his Arabella’s honor.
I am certain this is why Sally Stanford respected the man.
Charles was arrested and quickly became a propaganda target of local newspaperman and self-proclaimed reformer James King of William. Yes, that was his name, James King of William, although newspaper reports referred to him, mostly, as James King.
King of William called for the hanging of Charles Cora, writing that if Charles Cora were set free it would prove that vice lords had thoroughly corrupted San Francisco, or that the jury had been bribed, or that gamblers or other people of vice had gotten to the sheriff or Bill Mulligan, the keeper of the country prison.
As a result, Charles was brought to trial quickly and found guilty.
At the time, King of William was also feuding publicly with another newspaper man, James P. Casey, editor of The Sunday Times. They hated each other. Casey was also on the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors and, more importantly, was a good friend of Charles Cora’s.
On May 4, 1856, King of William’s Bulletin newspaper revealed that Casey had served a term in New York State’s Sing Sing prison for grand larceny, embarrassing and infuriating Casey.
On May 14, 1856, at five p.m., Casey accosted King of William at Montgomery and Washington streets, and said “Are you armed?”
Without waiting for an answer, he aimed a large Navy revolver King of William, and demanded that King “Draw and defend himself.”
Then he fired one shot into King of William’s chest. Surgeons worked in vain to save King of William, to no avail. He died a few days later. Casey was arrested.
A few days after that, on May 22, authorities allowed Charles and Arrabella to marry in a jailhouse ceremony. I like to think they were allowed to consummate the marriage.
Two hours later, Charles was taken from his cell by the San Francisco Vigilance Committee and lynched along with his friend Supervisor James Casey.
The widow Arabella Ryan Cora passed away at the age of 35 six years later.
So, remember these names: Foghorn Murphy and Charles Cora. While we’re at it, let’s remember Arabella and the valor Charles demonstrated in defending her honor.
And here at long last, we arrive at Sally Stanford’s denouement with the opening pages of chapter three in her autobiography.
THEY were a wonderful set of burglars, the people who were running San Francisco when I first came to town in 1923, wonderful because, if they were stealing, they were doing it with class and style.
When they turned City Hall and the Hall of Justice into a pair of stores with bargains for all, they did it with charm, finesse, and what the French call “savoir-faire.” They were the municipal swashbucklers and the civic high- binders. And compared with today’s local statesmen, they didn’t really try very hard to be much else, except just before election.
This is understandable. The politics of the town were dominated by Mayor Jimmy Rolph (Sunny Jim, or Dirty Jim, depending upon where you sat politically), but believe me, he was a doll, a political dreamboat. Say what you will for New York’s Jimmy Walker or Boston’s Jim Curley, Jimmy Rolph wore San Francisco like tailor-made plaid suit and on him it looked wonderful.
Not only did Jimmy do o.k., but the rest of us did pretty well too. For if there ever was a live-and-let-live type, it was Mayor Rolph of San Francisco. At one time in his colorful career, when asked to make a statement about prostitution he said, “Leave it alone; just regulate it.” That was his motto.
Although the old Barbary Coast was gone, the town was spinning just as lustily as it always had ever since the first pirate stepped down the gangplank from his ship, looked around, and ordered a passing Indian to bring on the women.
The Tenderloin was teeming with prosperity. French restaurants with private rooms and acquiescent ladies upstairs abounded. The North Beach or Italian District for years had been given over to the sober intercourses of industrious Neopolitan fishermen, hardworking broken-English purveyors of salami and Gorgonzolla, and respectable Mafia types who spent their time playing bocce ball and beating their wives.
Now it bubbled with alcoholic activity. Speakeasies, wine flats and nightclubs were plentiful. Even in the conservative financial district and practically every premise in town where more than three men might congregate simultaneously, a Klondike game awaited, a game of chance where you throw a dozen dice out of a box to a layout, hoping that the proprietor will pay you a certain amount of money in the event that you shoot unlikely totals.
Men loved it; no fortunes were lost, and some were made. Made by the proprietors, that is.
All this was done pretty much out in the open with God and Jimmy Rolph looking on. The love business flourished too. It should be stated at this point that it was easier to come by professional female company in San Francisco than it was to catch a rash in a leper colony. Not during services and not on election in St. Mary’s Cathedral day when every right- minded, hustling gal was out voting for Jimmy Rolph. But there was plenty of stuff around.
A curious “coincidence” about it is that the statistics on rape were lowest then than they ever have been since. Molestation and attacks by reason of perversion were 11 percent per capita of what they were 25 years later at the time when Police Chief Charles Dullea announced the end of prostitution in San Francisco!
But one thing was certain in those days: San Francisco was an open town and the people were happy about it. Like Rolph said, pleasure wasn’t prevented; it was regulated. Such regulation had to be organized and paid for. It was. There were price tags on most things and usually the tab was fair. Now and then, unfortunately, some hungry cop or city hall hog would declare his own little personal markup and then there would be a hassle, but mostly things jogged along on a cash- and-carry basis.
There were few complaints. It’s all very well in righteous retrospect to give the rap to corrupt officials, but this is a lot of borscht. This particular period of permissiveness lasted for more than thirty years. Nothing lasts that long unless the people are willing that it should.
The people of that San Francisco liked a free-and-easy town. They were not shocked by the facts of life. They were apparently disinterested in a blue-law town. They turned down, year after year at the polls, every clown who sought office on a clean-up ticket. World War II brought an entirely new species of San Franciscan to town.
Fascinated by what they saw in our town on their way to Guadalcanal and Okinawa, thousands of young servicemen returned to Paducah, Peoria, and Pocatello, packed up their wives and goods, and headed back to the Golden Gate town to stay. They also packed up and brought their Midwest or down East small-town standards too, the jerks. As soon as they had established enough residence to enable them to vote, they voted like the provincials they were for purity and started the destruction of the spirit of the colorful city that had fascinated them.
[and now we get to the crux of it]
These are the people who claim that some of us debase ourselves by calling the town “Frisco.” The real San Franciscans from Charles Cora to Fog Horn Murphy have never called it anything but Frisco.
I’m sure I’ll keep hearing about it, my decision to call it The Secret History of Frisco. I will try to get our outraged protectors of propriety to listen to this episode, or the first one, but probably to no avail.
I could not ever put it better than Sally did, so I’ll say her words one last time and then I’ll put the subject to rest here on Frisco.
The real San Franciscans from Charles Cora to Fog Horn Murphy have never called it anything but Frisco.
The Secret History of Frisco is a listener supported podcast. Main episodes will always be free. Our website is www.thesecrethistoryoffrisco.com. Please join us on Patreon at www.Patreon.com/Frisco. Visit the website for show notes, references, and bibliographies. Please take advantage of our free membership option on Patreon. Paid tier members, starting at as little as $1 a month, will receive ad-free and bonus episodes and other perks of membership.
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Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time, please get a little crazy and call it Frisco.