Word: franciscos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Except that it was held amidst the distracting beauties of San Francisco, last week's 77th annual meeting of the National Education Association was a typical coldwater convention. Thanks to the delights of Treasure Island, the incidental joys of cable-cars, Chinatown and the city's justly-famed cool weather, few delegates even bothered to attend the meetings-though smart pressagentry managed to fill the Opera House for one series of dull speeches. As usual, the convention delivered itself of some earnest "Whereas-es" and "Be-it-resolveds"; this time they were in favor of democracy...
...FRANCISCO'S LITERARY FRONTIER-Franklin Walker-Knopf...
...Francisco was a jerry-built village with two hotels, two half-finished wharves, 800 inhabitants. That year James W. Marshall, a wheelwright, discovered gold in the tailrace of James Augustus Suiter's sawmill at Coloma. Twenty-one years later San Francisco had shot up to a polyglot giant of 149,473 inhabitants, a challenger of New York's financial might, a cultural threat to Boston. That year San Francisco went on a three-day spree. Officially it celebrated completion of the transcontinental railroad-"Uncle Sam's Waistband-He would burst without it." Historically it celebrated...
This week that teeming literature is celebrated in a 425-page volume called San Francisco's Literary Frontier. An absorbing book, it contains a big cast, centring on Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller. But at least a dozen of its 45 secondary and minor characters are as interesting if not as important as these. They shuttle in & out of a narrative brightened by anecdote, distinguished by excellent writing, weighted by a shrewd understanding of frontier social forces. The six-year work of a 37-year-old professor of English at San Diego State College, San Francisco...
After 1850 Western mines produced an average $50,000,000 a year in gold and silver. That golden figure is the key to the uneven lives and works of San Francisco's frontier writers. With few exceptions, gold brought them West. Gold brought the sophisticated, cosmopolitan population, the wealth and leisure that make readers, writers and publishers. Because gold was elusive, restlessness and skepticism became a familiar literary tradition. Because male Argonauts outnumbered female twelve to one, traditions of rough-&-ready humor and violence grew apace...