Timecapsule podcast: San Francisco, December 1-7

San Francisco History Podcast – Sparkletack

A weekly handful of weird, wonderful and wacky happenings dredged up from the kaleidoscopic depths of San Francisco history. THIS WEEK: In 1856, the birth of a great newspaper; and in 1896, a legendary gunfighter referees a boxing match.

December 1, 1856:
Birthday of the "San Francisco Call"

One of San Francisco's Gilded Age newspaper giants begins its life today: the San Francisco Call.

San Francisco was lousy with newspapers in the Gold Rush era -- by 1858 there were at least a dozen -- but the Call, with its conservative Republican leanings and working class base, quickly nosed to the front of the pack to become San Francisco's number one morning paper. It would stay there for nearly half a century.

By the summer of 1864, the Call already claimed the highest daily circulation in town, and it was this point that the paper famously gave employment to a busted gold miner and trouble-making journalist from Nevada by the name of Samuel Clemens -- er, Mark Twain. The Call had published a few of his pieces from Virginia City, but upon Twain's arrival in the Big City the paper employed him full time as a beat reporter and general purpose man.

In just a few months at the Call's old digs at number 617 Commercial Street, Mark Twain cranked out hundreds of articles on local crime, culture, and politics.

I don't know that Twain was cut out for newspapering. Years later he spoke of those days as

"... fearful, soulless drudgery ... (raking) the town from end to end, gathering such material as we might, wherewith to fill our required columns -- and if there were no fires to report, we started some."

Twain's attempts to liven up the work with the occasional wildly fictitious embellishment were frowned upon -- the conservative Call was apparently interested in just the facts, thank you very much.

Twain also had a few problems with the Call's editorial policy. In a common sort of incident, notorious only because he'd witnessed it, Twain observed a gang of hoodlums run down and stone a Chinese laundryman -- as a San Francisco city cop just stood by and watched.

"I wrote up the incident with considerable warmth and holy indignation. There was fire in it and I believe there was literature."

Twain was enraged when the article was spiked, but his editor -- and this can't help but remind you that some things never really change -- his editor made it clear that "the Call ... gathered its livelihood from the poor and must respect their prejudices or perish ... the Call could not afford to publish articles criticizing the hoodlums for stoning Chinamen." A campaign of passive-aggressive resistance to doing any work at all was Twain's response -- perhaps better described as "slacking" -- and he was fired shortly thereafter.

read on ...