Day 79 -- Saturday, July 18

Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon,The Thin Man and countless other hard-boiled mystery stories and novels, is often associated with San Francisco. This is understandable, in spite of the fact that he didn't live here so very long. Most of his published work was written while he was in San Francisco, the stories are often set here and he created for his readers a literary portrait of a city that would remain unmatched in detective fiction until Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe began to walk the mean streets of L.A.

One of Hammett's haunts while in SF was a little spot called John's Grill. Hammett, a heavy drinker, spent many an afternoon and evening here damaging his liver. He even included John's in The Maltese Falcon; Sam Spade had a quick dinner here in the novel.

My brother and sister-in-law were in town for a relaxing, fun-filled weekend so we decided to meet for lunch at John's. It's a great old place, the kind of spot they call a chop house (chops are what Sam Spade ordered, in fact). The walls are of a dark, rich tone; the bar has that classic look to it. It's just the sort of place Spade would choose. They have a whole room devoted to Hammett and The Maltese Falcon. It's up one flight of stairs; the walls are lined with stills from the movie and quotes from the book. For any buff of classic mystery fiction, John's is a don't miss. In fact, I deem it worthy of a BRETTnews Highlight Attraction Award.

I hopped a cable car to the Wharf to take a sightseeing cruise around the Bay. It was cool and breezy out on the water; San Francisco looked absolutely beautiful on this clear day.

I spent the evening in Haight-Asbury. As one might expect, much has changed since the Haight's glory days when flower children, revolutionaries, and musicians all mingled here. The area is now a bit gentrified but some feeling of the old days remains. I encountered, as I walked along Haight St., many people young and old who would have fit right in those days, visually at least. There are many young, seemingly able-bodied people on the dole in San Francisco, especially in this area. One doesn't get the sense that they've been put out of an apartment or lost a job or any of the other circumstances that can often force a person to live on the street; rather, it seems they choose this life as an alternate approach. That's their choice; my choice was not to give them money. It seems to me there are needier people and worthier causes. I was a kid during the '60s, old enough to see hippies, yippies, and such in Life Magazine and on television, but not old enough to have much first-hand knowledge of the day-in, day-out life of the counter-culture in those days. Perhaps they, too, bummed money from passersby but my feeling is that they, in dropping out, were attempting to find a new path, a new way of doing things, a new system. I may be romanticizing the '60s (I wouldn't be the first to do so) but it seems they were, in that sense, revolutionaries. These kids seem content to just mooch off the system. The only thing I can see that they are rebelling against is work.

In any case, I enjoyed my stroll through Haight-Asbury, even if I was about 20 years too late. After all, people still seek out the Civil War and its sites of battle and that was a whole other '60s.


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