Tag Archives: San Francisco

Banned Books That Shaped America: The Call of the Wild

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The Library of Congress created an exhibit, “Books that Shaped America,” that explores books that “have had a profound effect on American life.” Many of the books in the exhibit have been banned/challenged.  Give yourself the gift of a beautiful story and read one and them imagine what your life would be like if you were never given that gift.

Fight censorship.

The Call of the Wild, Jack London, 1903

Generally hailed as Jack London’s best work, The Call of the Wild is commonly challenged for its dark tone and bloody violence. Because it is seen as a man-and-his-dog story, it is sometimes read by adolescents and subsequently challenged for age-inappropriateness. Not only have objections been raised here, the book was banned in Italy, Yugoslavia and burned in bonfires in Nazi Germany in the late 1920s and early 30s because it was considered “too radical.”

call of the wild

Jack London was born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876, the illegitimate son of Flora Wellman, the rebellious daughter of an aristocratic family, and William Chaney, a traveling astrologer who abandoned Flora when she became pregnant. Eight months after her son was born, Flora married John London, a grocer and Civil War veteran whose last name the infant took. London grew up in Oakland, and his family was mired in poverty throughout his youth. He remained in school only through the eighth grade but was a voracious reader and a frequent visitor to the Oakland Public Library, where he went about edu-cating himself and laying the groundwork for his impending literary career.

In his adolescent years, London led a rough life, spending time as a pirate in San Francisco Bay, traveling the Far East on sealing expeditions, and making his way across America as a tramp. Finally, temporarily tired of adventure, London returned to Oakland and graduated from high school. He was even admitted to the University of California at Berkeley, but he stayed only for a semester. The Klondike gold rush (in Canada’s Yukon Territory) had begun, and in 1897 London left college to seek his fortune in the snowy North.

The gold rush did not make London rich, but it furnished him with plenty of material for his career as a writer, which began in the late 1890s and continued until his death in 1916. He worked as a reporter, covering the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s; meanwhile, he published over fifty books and became, at the time, America’s most famous author. For a while, he was one of the most widely read authors in the world. He embodied, it was said, the spirit of the American West, and his portrayal of adventure and frontier life seemed like a breath of fresh air in comparison with nineteenth-century Victorian fiction, which was often overly concerned with what had begun to seem like trivial and irrelevant social norms.

The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, remains London’s most famous work, blending his experiences as a gold prospector in the Canadian wilderness with his ideas about nature and the struggle for existence. He drew these ideas from various influential figures, including Charles Darwin, an English naturalist credited with developing theories about biological evolution, and Friedrich Nietzsche, a prominent German philosopher. Although The Call of the Wild is first and foremost a story about a dog, it displays a philosophical depth absent in most animal adventures.

London was married twice—once in 1900, to his math tutor and friend Bess Maddern, and again in 1905, to his secretary Charmian Kittredge, whom he considered his true love. As his works soared in popularity, he became a contradictory figure, arguing for socialist principles and women’s rights even as he himself lived a materialist life of luxury, sailing the world in his boat, the Snark, and running a large ranch in northern California. Meanwhile, he preached equality and the brotherhood of man, even as novels like The Call of the Wild celebrated violence, power, and brute force.

London died young, on November 22, 1916. He had been plagued by stomach problems and failing kidneys for years, but many have suggested that his death was a suicide. Whatever the cause, it is clear that London, who played the various roles of journalist, novelist, prospector, sailor, pirate, husband, and father, lived life to the fullest.

Fight all forms of censorship.
Fight all forms of censorship.
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Dining Out For Life – Fogon Cocina Mexicana

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DINE OUT. FIGHT HIV.

Dining Out For Life returns on Thursday, April 25th, 2013 for its amazing 20th year! When you dine at a participating restaurant on this day, a portion of your bill will be donated to Lifelong AIDS Alliance and the fight against illness and hunger in the greater Seattle/King County/Puget Sound area.

Find participating Seattle restaurants HERE. Dining Out For Life is the perfect excuse to grab dinner with friends and family, plan on lunch with colleagues, or simply grab a coffee on your way to work. If you cannot make it out on the 25th or live in an area that is not participating, you can donate online HERE.

This year, I will be at Fogon Cocina Mexicana, the restaurant owned by some really great friends. This is the first year they are participating and they are generously donating 50% of their proceeds from the event. FIFTY PERCENT! That is absolutely amazing. Eating at Fogon will help 20% more than almost any other restaurant that night. Even if you cannot make it to Fogon on the night of the event, you should swing by for some great Mexican food/drinks the next time you are in the neighborhood. Be sure to thank them for their support.

fogon

Here are their details:

Fogon Cocina Mexicana
600 E Pine (Pine and Belmont on Capitol Hill)
Seattle, WA 98122
(206) 320-7777
fogonseattle.com
https://www.facebook.com/fogonseattle
Fogon on Yelp
Fogon on Open Table
If you are in a giving mood, please click on over and sponsor my friend Pete as he rides his bike 545 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles for the AIDS Life Cycle Ride to End AIDS.  You can find out more and donate HERE.
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Patty Hearst – Style Icon

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I adore this photo, it has done time as both computer and phone wallpapers and I think I have even thrown it in a few calendars I have made.  They just do not do heiress mug shots like this anymore, and that saddens me.Patricia Campbell Hearst (born February 20, 1954), now known as Patricia Campbell Hearst Shaw, is an American newspaper heiress, socialite, actress, kidnap victim, and convicted bank robber. Her kidnapping case is held by many as an example of Stockholm syndrome.

The granddaughter of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst and great-granddaughter of millionaire George Hearst, she gained notoriety in 1974 when, following her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), she ultimately joined her captors in furthering their cause. Apprehended after having taken part in a bank heist with other SLA members, Hearst was imprisoned for almost two years before her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. She was later granted a presidential pardon by President Bill Clinton in his last official act before leaving office.

Hearst was born in San Francisco, California, the third of five daughters of Randolph Apperson Hearst and Catherine Wood Campbell. She grew up primarily in Hillsborough. She attended Crystal Springs School for Girls in Hillsborough and the Santa Catalina School in Monterey. Among her few close friends she counted Patricia Tobin, whose family founded the Hibernia Bank, a branch of which Hearst would later aid in robbing.

On February 4, 1974, the 19-year-old Hearst was kidnapped from the Berkeley, California apartment, she shared with her fiancé Steven Weed by a left-wing urban guerrilla group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. When the attempt to swap Hearst for jailed SLA members failed, the SLA demanded that the captive’s family distribute $70 worth of food to every needy Californian – an operation that would cost an estimated $400 million. In response, Hearst’s father arranged the immediate donation of $6 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area. After the distribution of food, the SLA refused to release Hearst because they deemed the food to have been of poor quality. (In a subsequent tape recording released to the press, Hearst commented that her father could have done better.) On April 3, 1974, Hearst announced on an audiotape that she had joined the SLA and assumed the name “Tania” (inspired by the nom de guerre of Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, Che Guevara’s comrade). For this reason, she is often referred to as a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.

On April 15, 1974, she was photographed wielding an M1 carbine while robbing the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank at 1450 Noriega Street in San Francisco. Later communications from her were issued under the pseudonym Tania and asserted that she was committed to the goals of the SLA. A warrant was issued for her arrest and in September 1975, she was arrested by the FBI and SFPD in a San Francisco apartment with other SLA member Wendy Yoshimura. FBI Agent Thomas Padden is credited with their actual arrests.

While being booked into jail, she listed her occupation as “Urban Guerilla” and asked her attorney to relay the following message: “Tell everybody that I’m smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there.” However, according to Hearst interviewer Margaret Singer, a noted authority on prisoner of war and other victims including Maryknoll priests released from the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, this is not unusual in such cases. Singer strongly pleaded for understanding in Hearst’s behalf before, during and after the trial. Court-appointed doctor Louis Jolyon West as well as interviewers Drs. Robert Jay Lifton and Martin Theodore Orne agreed. Lifton went so far as to state after a 15-hour interview with Hearst that she was a “classic case,” about two weeks being needed for almost all persons undergoing that level of mind control to shuck off a good deal of the “gunk” that has filled the mind, as happened in his opinion with Hearst’s case. “If (she) had reacted differently, that would have been suspect” and Hearst was “a rare phenomenon (in a first-world nation)… the first and as far as I know the only victim of a political kidnapping in the United States” were direct quotes from Hearst’s autobiography attributed to the doctor. Dr. West firmly asserted that while Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze and other movement members had used a rather coarse version, they did employ the classic Maoist formula for thought control; Hearst was young and apolitical enough to be at extreme risk and, in his professional experience, that it would have even broken many experienced soldiers.

In her trial, which commenced on January 15, 1976 (and in her dozens of previous interviews by FBI agents Charles Bates and Lawrence Lawler—any reference to which was not allowed by the presiding judge to be included in the trial), Hearst’s attorney F. Lee Bailey claimed that Hearst had been blindfolded, imprisoned in a narrow closet and physically and sexually abused. Hearst’s defense claimed that her actions were the result of a concerted brainwashing program.

The prosecution countered with two experts: Dr. Joel Fort, who, unsolicited, had previously offered favorable testimony in paid service to the defense team, which was refused; and Dr. Harry L. Kozol, noted expert on brain disorders, sex offenders and high-profile mentally ill criminals. He formerly had been the long term doctor for Eugene O’Neill and evaluated the confessed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, a case defended in 1967 by Bailey. Kozol claimed Hearst was “a rebel in search of a cause” and that the robbery had been “an act of free will.” During a pre-trial interview, Hearst accurately described the apartment where the SLA was captured, but neglected to mention the narrow closet where she was allegedly confined. In Kozol’s view, Hearst’s omission confirmed the prosecution’s thesis: returning the embrace of the SLA, she had ceased to be a victim. The rebel had come out of the closet. When Kozol testified, Hearst turned “the dead white color of a fish’s belly,” according to journalist Shana Alexander. “Harry never lost the spirit of the law,” Dr. Harold W. Williams, then a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, told The New York Times in 1976, when prosecutors asked Dr. Kozol to examine Hearst. “Harry is very much in personality a lawyer.”

Bailey argued that she had been coerced or intimidated into taking part in the bank robbery. However, she refused to give evidence against the other captured SLA members. This was seen as complicity by the prosecution team.

Hearst was convicted of bank robbery on March 20, 1976. She was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment, but her sentence was later commuted to seven years. Her prison term was also eventually commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and Hearst was released from prison on February 1, 1979, having served 22 months. She was granted a full pardon by President Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001.

This is the Zodiac speaking – Not So Secret Obsessions

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I have seen probably every episode of all those crime reenactment shows on A&E.  I am endlessly fascinated with the whats/whys/hows of crimes.  I am not interested in doing them myself, but I am interested in what makes people think it’s OK to do it.  (Watch “God Bless America” on NetFlix to get an idea of what I am meaning if you don’t understand.  Watch it anyway, it is amazing.) The Zodiac Killer interests me because of the desire for notoriety, the need to prove intellectual superiority over the law enforcement attempting to catch him.

Below is just one of many letters sent to the San Fransisco Police Department by the self-titled Zodiac Killer, a person whose identity is still unknown. This particular taunt was received June 26, 1970. 5 deaths have been officially attributed to the Zodiac Killer whilst the killer claimed to have actually murdered 37 people. The case is still open.

This is the Zodiac speaking.

I have become very upset with the people of San Fran Bay Area. They have not complied with my wishes for them to wear some nice (symbol) buttons. I promised to punish them if they did not comply, by anilating a full School Buss. But now school is out for the summer, so I punished them in another way. I shot a man sitting in a parked car with a .38.

(Symbol) -12   SFPD – 0

The Map coupled with this code will tell you where the bomb is set. You have untill next Fall to dig it up.

The Wiki:

The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The killer’s identity is still unknown. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. The killer originated the name “Zodiac” in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers). Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved.

Numerous suspects have been named by law enforcement and amateur investigators, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced. In April 2004, the San Francisco Police Department marked the case “inactive”, yet re-opened the case at some point prior to March 2007.  The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo, as well as in Napa County and Solano County.  The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.

ᔥ Letters of Note: This is the Zodiac speaking.

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Nowhere to Be and All Day to Get There

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Today is my mother’s last day of work, ever.  She retires at probably 3:30pm.  This is a letter I sent her last night so she would get it first thing when she got to work:

Today is your last day!

It must be a relief.

I remember you working as a Teacher’s Aid and going to school without any support from our father.  I remember eating a lot of spaghetti.  I remember you graduating and getting your first new Computer Programmer job and how much better you felt about yourself.  I remember you getting your current job and people relying more and more on you there.  I remember the difference in you once you got a job using your brain in a way that you enjoyed and for which you knew you were uniquely adept.

You need to know that I appreciate everything you did for us:  all the sacrifices you made and hard work you put in to make our family successful.

Now is your time to relax and focus on purely selfish persuits.  Find things that you never had enough time to do, things you always wanted to try, foolish things.  Waste entire days.  Although, I am guessing that gradually, what once seemed like a “wasted” day will become a productive movie marathon or sunbathing and book reading day.  At least I hope.

I hope you have decades of wasted days.  You have earned them tenfold.

Isadora Duncan – Style Icon

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Today is Isadora Duncan’s Birthday.  Ever since a winter scarf I was wearing was briefly caught in the handrail of the transit tunnel escalator, I have felt a connection to her.

NAME: Isadora Duncan
OCCUPATION: Choreographer
BIRTH DATE: c. May 27, 1877
DEATH DATE: September 14, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH: San Francisco, California
PLACE OF DEATH: Nice, France
ORIGINALLY: Angela Duncan

BEST KNOWN FOR:  Isadora Duncan was a dancer who taught and performed in a new and less restrictive form. Many regard her as the mother of modern dance.

Although Duncan’s birth date is generally believed to have been May 27, 1878, her baptismal certificate, discovered in San Francisco in 1976, records the date of May 26, 1877. Duncan was one of four children brought up in genteel poverty by their mother, a music teacher. As a child she rejected the rigidity of the classic ballet and based her dancing on more natural rhythms and movements, an approach she later used consciously in her interpretations of the works of such great composers as Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven. Her earliest public appearances, in Chicago and New York City, met with little success, and at the age of 21 she left the United States to seek recognition abroad. With her meagre savings she sailed on a cattle boat for England.

At the British Museum her study of the sculptures of ancient Greece confirmed the classical use of those dance movements and gestures that hitherto instinct alone had caused her to practice and upon a revival of which her method was largely founded. Through the patronage of the celebrated actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, she was invited to appear at the private receptions of London’s leading hostesses, where her dancing, distinguished by a complete freedom of movement, enraptured those who were familiar only with the conventional forms of the ballet, which was then in a period of decay. It was not long before the phenomenon of a young woman dancing barefoot, as scantily clad as a woodland nymph, crowded theatres and concert halls throughout Europe. During her controversial first tour of Russia in 1905, Duncan made a deep impression on the choreographer Michel Fokine and on the art critic Serge Diaghilev, who as impresario was soon to lead a resurgence of ballet throughout western Europe. Duncan toured widely, and at one time or another she founded dance schools in Germany, Russia, and the United States, though none of these survived.

Her private life, quite as much as her art, kept her name in the headlines owing to her constant defiance of social taboos. The father of her first child, Deirdre, was the stage designer Gordon Craig, who shared her abhorrence of marriage; the father of her second child, Patrick, was Paris Singer, the heir to a sewing machine fortune and a prominent art patron. In 1913 a tragedy occurred from which Duncan never really recovered: the car in which her two children and their nurse were riding in Paris rolled into the Seine River and all three were drowned. In an effort to sublimate her grief she was about to open another school when the advent of World War I put an end to her plans. Her subsequent tours in South America, Germany, and France were less successful than before, but in 1920 she was invited to establish a school of her own in Moscow. To her revolutionary temperament, the Soviet Union seemed the land of promise. There she met Sergey Aleksandrovich Yesenin, a poet 17 years younger than she, whose work had won him a considerable reputation. She married him in 1922, sacrificing her scruples against marriage in order to take him with her on a tour of the United States. She could not have chosen a worse time for their arrival. Fear of the “Red Menace” was at its height, and she and her husband were unjustly labeled as Bolshevik agents. Leaving her native country once more, a bitter Duncan told reporters: “Good-bye America, I shall never see you again!” She never did. There followed an unhappy period with Yesenin in Europe, where his increasing mental instability turned him against her. He returned alone to the Soviet Union and, in 1925, committed suicide.

During the last years of her life Duncan was a somewhat pathetic figure, living precariously in Nice on the French Riviera, where she met with a fatal accident: her long scarf became entangled in the rear wheel of the car in which she was riding, and she was strangled. Her autobiography, My Life, was published in 1927 (reissued 1972).

Isadora Duncan was acclaimed by the foremost musicians, artists, and writers of her day, but she was often an object of attack by the less broad-minded. Her ideas were too much in advance of their time, and she flouted social conventions too flamboyantly to be regarded by the wider public as anything but an advocate of “free love.” Certainly her place as a great innovator in dance is secure: her repudiation of artificial technical restrictions and reliance on the grace of natural movement helped to liberate the dance from its dependence on rigid formulas and on displays of brilliant but empty technical virtuosity, paving the way for the later acceptance of modern dance as it was developed by Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and others.

Isadora Duncan’s life has been portrayed most notably in the 1968 film, Isadora, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Vivian Pickles played her in Ken Russell’s 1966 biopic for the BBC, which was subtitled ‘The Biggest Dancer in the World’ and introduced by Duncan’s biographer, Sewell Stokes.

Most notably, Duncan was the subject of a ballet, Isadora, written and choreographed in 1981 by the Royal Ballet‘s Kenneth MacMillan, and performed at Covent Garden.[17] When She Danced, a stage play about Duncan’s later years by Martin Sherman, won the 1991 Evening Standard Award (best actress) for Vanessa Redgrave. A Hungarian musical based on this play was produced in Budapest in 2008.

Robert Calvert recorded a song about Duncan on his Revenge LP. The song is called “Isadora”. Salsa diva Celia Cruz sang a song titled “Isadora” in Duncan’s honor. Finnish musician Juice Leskinen recorded a song called “Isadora Duncan”. Russian singer Alexander Malinin recorded a song about the death of Isadora Duncan. Russian band Leningradhave a song about her on their Pulya (Bullet) album. American post-hardcore group Burden of a Day has a song titled, “Isadora Duncan” on their 2009 album OneOneThousand.

The children’s gothic book series, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, includes a set of fraternal triplets named Isadora, Duncan, and Quigley Quagmire.

And Then There’s Maude, the theme song to the 1970s American TV sitcom Maude contains a reference to Duncan with the line “Isadora was a bra burner.”

In his song Salome, British singer Pete Doherty makes a reference to Isadora Duncan by saying: “As she dances and demands, the head of Isadora Duncan on a plate”.

2003 in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days”, the necklace Andie wears is named after Isadora Duncan

In a deleted scene of Titanic (1997), Rose talks about her dreams, saying “I don’t know what it is, whether I should be an artist or a sculpter or a, I don’t know, a dancer like Isadora Duncan, or wild pagan spirit!”

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Halston – Style Icon

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NAME: Roy Halston Frowick
OCCUPATION: Fashion Designer
BIRTH DATE: April 23, 1932
DEATH DATE: March 26, 1990
PLACE OF BIRTH: Des Moines, Iowa
PLACE OF DEATH: San Francisco, California
AKA: Halston

BEST KNOWN FOR: Roy Halston Frowick, best known as Halston, was an iconic clothing designer of the 1970s. His sexy, yet elegant dresses became a staple in American discos.

Halston was born on April 23, 1932 in Des Moines, Iowa. The son of a Norwegian-American accountant and his wife, Halston was originally given the name Roy Halston Frowick. He later dropped his first and last names, preferring the moniker. As a boy, Halston loved to alter and make clothes for his mother and sister. He studied at Indiana University and then at the Art Institute of Chicago. While attending night courses at the Art Institute, he worked as a fashion merchandiser at the upscale chain department store Carson Pirie Scott. Soon after, he met André Basil, a hairdresser who owned a prestigious salon at the Ambassador Hotel. Taken by both the man and his work, Basil set up a display of Halston’s hats in his salon. When Basil opened his Boulevard Salon on North Michigan Avenue, he offered Halston half the space for display. In 1959 their personal relationship ended, and Halston moved to New York to take a design position with the respected milliner Lily Daché.

Halston’s hat designs brought the fantastic to whimsy; he used all manner of jewels, flowers and fringe to decorate hoods, bonnets and coifs. Within a year, he was hired to serve as head milliner for the luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman. In 1961, Jacqueline Kennedy made his work famous when she wore a pillbox hat of his design to her husband’s presidential inauguration. Halston’s friends and clients soon included some of the most alluring and well-known women in the world, including Rita Hayworth, Liza Minnelli, Marlene Dietrich and Diana Vreeland.

Halston began designing women’s wear in 1966, offering a perfect look for the international jet set of his era. His line was renowned for sexy, yet elegant pieces. In the fall of 1972, he introduced a simple shirtwaist dress made from “Ultra suede,” a fabric that was washable, durable and beautiful. Two years later, he offered the world his most iconic design, the halter dress. It was instant hit in America’s discotheques, giving women a narrow, elongated silhouette. Halston’s trademark sunglasses, worn both day and night, completed the look.

Halston was known as the first designer to fully license himself as a brand onto itself; his influence went beyond style to reshape the business of fashion. Through a licensing agreement with JC Penney, he created designs that were accessible to women at a variety of income levels. He also became influential in uniform design, changing the entire feel of Braniff International Airways’ staff uniforms.

In spite of his achievements, his increasing drug use and failure to meet deadlines undermined his success. In 1984, he was fired from his own company and lost the right to design and sell clothes under his own name in. However, he continued to design costumes for his friends Liza Minnelli and Martha Graham. He was a long-time and central figure in the nightlife scene of New York’s Studio 54 disco. He died of lung cancer and complications of AIDS in San Francisco, California, in 1990.

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Dian Fossey – Style Icon

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NAME: Dian Fossey
OCCUPATION: Anthropologist, Zoologist
BIRTH DATE: January 16, 1932
DEATH DATE: December 26, 1985
EDUCATION: Cambridge University
PLACE OF BIRTH: San Francisco, California
PLACE OF DEATH: Volcanoes National park, Rwanda

BEST KNOWN FOR: Zoologist Dian Fossey was one of the foremost primate researchers in the world who for 18 years studied of a group of gorillas in Rwanda.

Primatologist and naturalist. Born on January 16, 1932, in San Francisco, California. Dian Fossey enriched our understanding of gorillas through her intense study of these animals from the 1960s to 1980s. She was interested in animals from childhood, but changed college courses from pre-veterinary studies to occupational therapy.

Dian Fossey moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to be director of the Kosair Crippled Children’s Hospital occupational therapy department in 1955. But she soon became restless and dreamed of traveling to Africa. On her first trip to Africa in 1963, Fossey met palaeontologists Mary and Louis Leakey, who encouraged her dream to live and work with mountain gorillas.

In 1966, Dian Fossey caught up with Louis Leakey at a lecture in Louisville, and he invited her to study the mountain gorillas in Africa. She accepted his offer and lived among the mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo until civil war forced her to escape to Rwanda.

Dian Fossey established the Karisoke Research Foundation in 1967, alternating her time between her fieldwork there and obtaining a Ph.D. based on her research at Cambridge University. She earned her degree in 1976 and later accepted a visiting associate professorship at Cornell University. In 1983, her book, Gorillas in the Mist, was published and became a best seller. A film with the same name was also released in 1988 starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey.

Considered the world’s leading authority on the physiology and behavior of mountain gorillas, Dian Fossey fought hard to protect these “gentle giants” from environmental and human hazards. She saw these animals as dignified, highly social creatures with individual personalities and strong family relationships. Her active conservationist stand to save these animals from game wardens, zoo poachers, and government officials who wanted to convert gorilla habitats to farmland caused her to fight for the gorillas not only via the media, but also by destroying poachers’ dogs and traps. On December 26, 1985, Fossey was found hacked to death, presumably by poachers, in her Rwandan forest camp. No assailant has ever been found or prosecuted in her murder.

Dian Fossey strongly opposed tourism, as gorillas are very susceptible to diseases by humans like the flu for which they have no immunity. Dian Fossey reported several cases in which gorillas died because of diseases spread by tourists. She also viewed tourism as an interference into their natural wild behavior. Fossey also criticized tourist programs, often paid for by international conservation organizations, for interfering with both her research and the peace of the mountain gorillas’ habitat.

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Candy Matson – Not So Secret Obsession

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I have been a fan of radio dramas for as long as I can remember.  My mother used to play them for me on the little AM radio in my bedroom at night, some were supposed to be scary, but most were detective dramas.  Now, with the internet and podcasts and everything, you can find many many radio shows from the 1920′s through the 1970′s available to download or stream.  I am obsessed with several at the moment, they come out weekly and I look forward to listening to them as I fall asleep.  One is Candy Matson, she is one of the only female detective leads that I have come across.  She is quick with the comeback and just a little bit smarter than her male counterparts.  Take a listen some time.

via Candy « The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio.

San Francisco tried in the mid-to-late 1940s to be a radio town and the most popular show in the series featured a hard boiled gun-toting private eye who took on the bad guys and talked tough. What made this detective unique?

The Detective was a woman.

The program was created by Marty Masters and the title role was played by his wife, Natalie.  The detective show had been successful in San Francisco before, with Pat Novak for Hire having been a hit.  Having a female private eye allowed Candy Matson to be more than a carbon copy of Novak.

Candy was a fashion plate PI who charged top dollar to maintain her generous clothes budget and swanky apartment.  She was assisted by her sidekick Rembrandt Watson who, in the pilot, was a drunk like Jocko Madigan. In subsequent episodes, he was more of an older eccentric man.

Candy’s love interest was Lieutenant Ray Mallard of the Homicide squad, whose constant desire to watch Westerns and fear of committment annoyed Candy to no end.

While there had been other female detectives on radio such as the soap operatic Kitty Keene and the gimmicky Phyl Cole, there had never been anyone quite like Candy as she often played as tough as the boys, as she came definitely from the hard boiled school of detection.

Candy Matson  was as San Franciscan as the Golden Gate bridge including local landmarks, local businesses, and local celebrities. The show became San Francisco’s most popular series. However,  the show could not obtain a sponsor and the show shifted days and times at will.  It was a West Coast production throughout its two years run.

This is a show that is often taken too seriously and some commentators impose modern mores, viewpoints, and controversies on the stories. One commentator complained about the lack of Asian character in the show’s surviving 14 episodes (although the same commentator hadn’t checked the large number of Candy Matson scripts available at the Thousand Oaks Library.)  This is perhaps because the idea of a female hard boiled eye is considered groundbreaking for the late 1940s and early 50s.

In reality, neither the producers of the program or the fans thought of the show as a great step forward for women. Candy Matson never took itself too seriously. (Although, as Candy became more popular, the show did cast her in a little more serious light.)  The adventures were told in a way that made them fun and winsome whether listening to the show in 1950 or 2011.

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Carol Doda – Style Icon

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Carol Doda is the subject of a cherished family story. She plays a very important role in the story of how Susie met her soon-to-be brother-in-law Waldie. She was originally going to take him to a classical music concert, but got the days mixed up and the tickets were for a different night. Waldie being Waldie, he said he knew a place he wanted to go and off they went. It turns out the places that Waldie was talking about was the Condor Club, a topless (and for a while, bottomless) bar in North Beach, San Francisco. It was the 1960s. The music started, and Carol Doda was lowered from the ceiling.

At Waldie’s memorial service this past summer, Susie spoke and included the story of how they first met. She referenced Carol Doda by saying “She was the most well-endowed woman I had ever seen” and received laughter and cheers from the family and friends that filled the Chapel at Interlochen Center for the Arts.  Ladies and gentlemen, Carol Doda.  Style Icon.

Carol Ann Doda (born August 29, 1937) was a topless stripper in San Francisco, California in the 1960s through 1980s, one of the first of the era.

In 1964 Doda made international news, first by dancing topless at the city’s Condor Club, then by enhancing her bust from size 34 to 44 through silicone injections. Her breasts became known as Doda’s “twin 44s” and “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco.”

Carol Doda attended the San Francisco Art Institute and worked as waitress and lounge entertainer at the Condor Club, at the corner of Broadway and Columbus in the North Beach section of San Francisco. Doda’s act began with a grand piano being lowered from the ceiling by hydraulic motors; Doda would be atop the piano dancing, as it descended from a hole in the ceiling. She go-go danced the ‘Swim’ to a rock and roll combo headed by Bobby Freeman as her piano settled on the stage. From the waist up Doda emulated aquatic movements like the Australian crawl. She also did the Twist, the Frug, and the Watusi.

On June 19, 1964, when Doda was approximately 23 years old (actually 26), the Condor’s publicist, “Big” Davy Rosenberg gave Doda a “monokini” (topless swimsuit) designed by Rudi Gernreich. She performed topless that night, the first noted entertainer of the era to do so. The act was an instant success. Two months after she started her semi-nude performances, the rest of San Francisco’s Broadway was topless, followed soon after by entertainers across America. Doda became an American cultural icon of the 1960s. The Republican National Convention was held in San Francisco, during the summer of 1964; many of the delegates came to see Carol Doda. She was profiled in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Pump House Gang and appeared that same year as Sally Silicone in Head, the 1968 film created by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, and featuring The Monkees. The movie was produced by Columbia Pictures. She appeared in a Golden Boy parody with Annette Funicello, Sonny Liston, and Davy Jones.

Encouraged by her success, Doda soon decided to enhance her breasts with silicone injections, going from size 34 to 44. Doda became renowned for her big bust, and was one of the first well-known performers to be surgically enhanced. She had 44 injections, a large dose of silicone,[4] at a cost of $1,500.

For the topless and waterless Swim, Doda wore the bottom half of a black bikini and a net top which ended where a bathing suit generally began. Doda performed 12 shows nightly so that management could keep crowds moving in and out. The large lit sign in front of the club featured a cartoon of her.

Nicaraguan dictator General Anastasio Somoza Debayle paid an unexpected visit to the Condor Nightclub in November 1973 as seven limousines pulled up before starled parking attendants. About two dozen U.S Secret Service agents accompained the general Somoza’s party of nine and guarded each door. Somoza sent to Doda a word backstage as he departed that he considered her performance “most outstanding”.

From the late-1960s through the late-1970s, Doda was the spokesmodel for what is now the San Jose, California television station KICU-TV Channel 36, then known as KGSC-TV. Filmed from the waist up and wearing clothes which amplified her most prominent physical attributes, she would coo “You’re watching the Perfect 36 in San Jose.” She would also occasionally appear on-air to do editorial commentary on the issues of the day.

In 1982 Doda was again dancing at the Condor three times a night. She was 45 and performed to rock ‘n’ roll, blues, and ragtime. Each act was the same, with Doda appearing in a gold gown, traditional elbow-length gloves, and a diaphanous-wraparound. Her clothing was removed until she wore only a g-string and the diaphanous wraparound. In the final portion she was attired in only the wraparound. Her small body looked slimmer without clothes, a perception which was emphasized by the dwarfing effect of her breasts. At the time she was taking dance and voice lessons but had no definite plans for her future.

Doda retired from stripping in the 1980s and now runs “Carol Doda’s Champagne and Lace Lingerie Boutique“, a lingerie shop in San Francisco.

As of 2009 Doda had been performing (fully clothed) for several years at several North Beach (San Francisco) clubs, including Amante’s and Enrico’s Supper Club.

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