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widening a highway, if a San Francisco newspaper had not investigated and found that the Longshoremen were working the docks as usual and if the Salinas housewives had not got on their high horse about not being able to buy groceries. The citizens reluctantly put away their guns, the owners granted a small pay raise and the General left town. I have always wondered what happened to him. He had qualities of genius. It was a long time before Salinians cared to discuss the episode. And now it is comfortably forgotten. Salinas was a very interesting town.
    It is a kind of metropolis now and there must be nearly fourteen thousand people living where once a blacksmith shop stood in the swamp. The whole face of the valley has changed. But the high, thin, gray fog still hangs overhead and every afternoon the harsh relentless wind blows up the valley from King City. And the town justifies the slogan given it when it was very young . . . Salinas is!

The Golden Handcuff
    HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED how attempts to write about San Francisco invariably turn into autobiography? And could it be that she is such a personal even subjective city that, once you know her, you can never again sort out which is San Francisco and which is you? One advantage of this confusion of identities is that she never gets dull. There are as many San Franciscos as she has lovers and she has many. I am one and I have known her on several levels.
    Being born in Salinas, I do not recall as a child ever using the name San Francisco. She was The City, and I guess by that we meant all cities, which isn’t a bad evaluation for a kid.
    My first knowledge of The City was derived from my Uncle Joe Hamilton, who came from King City and ascended the Acropolis to work on the old San Francisco Wasp. At least that’s what he said. He also said he had sat in the chairs once occupied by Mark Twain and Bret Harte. I was a little kid then and I learned The City from Uncle Joe on his infrequent visits.
    I figure that Julius Caesar was stabbed near the arched entrance of the old Ferry Building, that Market Street led under the Arch of Titus, past the Forum which was of course the Palace Hotel, and went thence up the Capitoline or Nob Hill. It was obvious that Joan of Arc was burned in Union Square with her eyes fixed on the Fairmont, that Moses went up Twin Peaks to receive the Tables of the Law. You may understand that through my uncle’s star-dusted eyes, I knew The City quite well before I ever went there.
    My second level did not diminish the first although it was different. My mother was a lady with a high church attitude toward culture. She always knew what she liked and, to a surprising degree, what she liked turned out to be art. As a medium-sized kid I was taken to The City to be blooded with culture.
    Music in Salinas was George Rowling on piano and his nice sister working away on a sweet and sour violin and never getting it sawed through, plus Joe Conner singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “The Rosary.” You must admit it was pretty heady to fall without preparation into Caruso, Melba, Tetrazzini, Scotti and the rest of that fantastic band of Archangels. And then a little later I saw, heard and felt Eleonora Duse and even though she played Ghosts in Italian, it didn’t matter. Even at that age it seemed to me that she brought something to the theater that was lacking in our seasonal Chautauqua or the Salinas High School’s version of Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh. There was no conflict of interests. Salinas was Salinas but The City was magic.
    My third San Francisco came to me when I was going to Stanford. I was very broke and couldn’t indulge in as much sweet-scented sin as I wished, but what I did manage to chisel in on was in San Francisco. Who needed Paris or the silken sewers of Rome when there were Bush Street apartments and the Pleasure Domes of Van Ness Avenue? Much later I found Pigalle and the glitter-works of the Right Bank