24 hours in San Francisco!

A movie no one will make, because I'm boring.

Me with journalism legend Martin F. Nolan (Marty) of the Boston Globe on Friday, November 22.

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I’ve been doing quite a bit of speaking to promote You Betcha! recently. I haven’t really given many talks since the pandemic. I used to give a lot of speeches, and it was a significant part of my income for years. I prided myself on my extemporaneous speaking skills, which is critical if you do a lot of talks.

(I’m hireable. Send me a note. If I can promote my Substack, and you’re in the Sacramento Designated Market Area, Portland, or San Francisco, I’ll usually throw on my new blue suit and come on out or try).

I call my anecdotes “Legos”—I could just snap two minute anecdotes together until it added up to 20 or thirty minutes, and I was good to go.

My opening line is usually, “I was born in 1960. My parents were actually named John and Jackie (true). They named me Jack.”

“And they voted for Nixon.” (True).

Anyway, I gave a speech to the Harry Truman Democratic Club here in Sacramento, and got off to a rather apocalyptic start (who can blame me, it was about a week after the election). After five minutes of catastrophe, I stopped, and said something like, hey, we’re all traumatized. My apologies. Let’s take questions.

Then I was generally fine. I enjoyed it, but my usual bag o’ anecdotes was, well, not coming to mind immediately. Is it my age? Did I forget everything? Am I…you know…slipping?

Eh. No. You just have to start off with that Kennedy joke. Everyone my age and older thinks it’s quite amusing.

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My next speaking event was at Perry’s restaurant in San Francisco, which is a venerable old watering hole in the Embarcadero. I was speaking to the Sacramento Seminar, which was a group started in the 1960s by local S.F. Assemblymen. One was even a Republican—in San Francisco!

I took the train over from Sacramento. I was finishing up a poster on commission on the train, which is cheaper than driving ($29 one way), and, my God, I never noticed the motion until I tried to move my tiny triangular cursor around the palette (Photoshop on my laptop, which, of course, was at about 18 percent battery power left). I got most of the way through the coloring, and then stopped to chat with my tablemate, who was a delightful young biologist who was getting married soon. We chatted about cooking and pans, and she expressed the correct amount of alarm about The Incoming Administration.

I took the bus over from Emeryville and got to my hotel. My Uber said it was 6 minutes, and then it became 18, and that would make me late. Suddenly, a taxi pulled up the entrance, and I jumped in, thank God.

The cab driver was 36, my oldest son’s age. He had a very distinct Brooklyn accent, which was fun. He showed me a video of his first baby—of course he was cute— discovering rain for the first time.

I asked him why he was in San Francisco. Well, he said, my mom came out here, and my brother came out here, and we found a rent-controlled apartment. Got married, had the baby. He likes the weather, even as we were plowing through an atmospheric river.

I said, “What kinda work did you do in Brooklyn?”

“I used to put bodies in trunks. Pulled five years. Got out.”

Uh. You were a guy? I meant “made guy”. Or something. I was just glad I wasn’t in the trunk.

The fare was $12.86. I gave him a $20, gladly.

He could have brought me over in his trunk.

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As I was riding in the cab, I got a text from one of the organizers, giving me a few tidbits about the guests, which I will share now.

I came in, on time-ish.

It was Friday, November 22, which is black letter day for people my age and older. We were discussing that as I sat down, for my table mates were all young people back then. I shook hands with the president of the group, a very nice fellow named Jon.

Jon told me that his father-in-law was Sen. Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee.

For you historians out there, Kefauver beat JFK for the 1956 Democratic Vice Presidential nomination. This was, of course, riveting television then, and was the last time the Democrats had a real floor fight. Kennedy lost narrowly, but his telegenic concession speech made him an instant 1960 front-runner for the presidency.

I was really quite astonished by Jon’s connection, and we chatted briefly about a well-known anecdote about his famous father-in-law, who also died in 1963. I hope to get with Jon again soon to hear more, although I am pretty certain he never met Kefauver.

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Seated kitty-corner from me was Marty Nolan.

Marty Nolan—Martin F. Nolan of the Boston Globe—is a legendary journalist, and I do not understate here. Let me set the table for you. Nolan started at the Globe in 1961, covered President Kennedy, and won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for a story about the failed federal judgeship nomination of Francis X. Morrisey, who was an old Joe Kennedy bagman that Papa wanted to put on the federal bench. Poor Teddy had to walk point on it in the Senate, and was embarrassed by the whole thing.

Marty then covered the 1972 presidential campaign, and he was an original “Boy on the Bus”, made famous by Rolling Stones reporter Tim Crouse’s book, “The Boys on the Bus”. Hunter S. Thompson was also on that bus, ingesting God knows what (ibogaine?—read the book: ibogaine is practically the subtitle of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail). Every single journalism student my age has read that book. I have also met David S. Broder and Carl Leubsdorf, two other “boys”.

Let me also add that my dear buddy George Skelton of the Los Angeles Times was also a Boy on the Bus, and I spend way more time with him than he wants. We sometimes meet for breakfast on Saturdays at a secure, undisclosed location. George is a mentor to me, and he’s always right, period. George was in the Sacramento UPI bureau on November 22, 1963, and was on a first-name basis with virtually every major politician of our times.

Marty then became editorial page editor of the Globe, and was one of the first editors in the country to buy my cartoons in 1980 (not a typo). I ran in the Globe for about 35 years.

I cannot tell you excited I was to meet Marty. I’m trying.

I’m excited. I even took a selfie with him. He’s like my Taylor Swift, and that tells you more about me than you want to know. We had a nice chat, and he was very game when I referred to him 55 times throughout my speech.

There were many other delightful, interesting people in attendance. One fellow, Mark Dicamillo, was the former director of the California Field Poll and is now running the Berkeley/IGS poll. I could have chatted about cross tabs all day with him.

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I went back to my hotel, and, for some reason, did not seek nor find an umbrella. I walked down to Sears Fine Foods, my fave comfort food joint on Union Square. I tried to dry my hair off, which is like owning a Labradoodle that lives on my skull when it’s wet. My cashmere topcoat (got it 25 years ago) weighed 48 pounds by the time I sat down. All my Oregon feels were dredged up.

I am not a Down-on-San Francisco person, and do not write nor draw Doom Loop material, as the Chronicle has lots of people who are assigned to that. I will say, however, that there was virtually no one in Union Square, and the ones who were there mostly seemed to need major assistance of some kind or the other. Quite a number of little stores were vacant, which were once seemingly thriving little t-shirt and camera kiosks. Granted, it was raining like 40 Days and 40 Nights. The Ark was even running over to Oracle.

No cable cars were running, and there was the microphone-amplified religious speaker (this one preacher asserted that the rock before Jesus’ tomb was moved by an earthquake, which is not any explanation I was aware of).

He also said non-Christians never started any hospitals, and that they weren’t at all interested in social service programs. Again, news to me, but he was riffing. Cedar-Sinai? UCSF Medical Center at Mt. Zion? Those are just two I can think of in California, but hey.

Maybe he forgot his opening anecdote.

I am not sure how to “fix” San Francisco, and I wish Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie nothing but good luck, particularly as he faces off against what I suspect is going to be the first major Trump v. California confrontation with ICE raids.

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I stopped off to see former Mayor and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, local PR guy and center of the S.F. Universe (and buddies with Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and was Laura Nyro’s manager) Lee Houskeeper, Pete Wevurski (my editor/hero and my other Taylor Swift —OK, Ernie Kovacs) , and Christine Weicher, a CBS News producer who was fascinating and was full of anecdotes. I used to contribute to ABC News Nightline (bumpers) 40 years ago, and I shared my cherished memory of standing next to Sander Vanocur in the men’s room. Oh, and the time I made Walter Cronkite laugh during a short speech at the Overseas Press Club, and how Susan Zirinsky told me, at that speech, that 60 Minutes Executive Producer and legend Don Hewitt said “This guy could be the next Andy Rooney”.

That didn’t play out.

“Do you ever wonder why you were supposed to be the next Andy Rooney and it didn’t happen?”—Me, in an Andy Rooney voice.

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See you later, kids. Back at national cartoons tomorrow, sigh. As always, I welcome your subscriptions, paid or not, with a slight preference for the former. Also, please share these and tell your friends if you’re digging the material. I’m now on Bluesky (@jackohman.bsky.social), like every other non-Trumpie in the United States—J.