Fun with UC Regents – or – Goddamned Chimpanzees

I am still researching the 1958 Mosk campaign for Attorney General of California. One of the pivotal issues is why, how and when Pat Brown chose (finally) to run for Governor thereby opening the way for Mosk to run for the vacancy Brown created. This naturally got me into the wider issue of the 1958 [...]

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Charles O’Brien and the end of California cross-filing

The Sunday, Sept. 7, 2008 edition the San Francisco Chronicle had an obituary for Charles O’Brien, lawyer and for some time, Chief Deputy Attorney General for California who died September 3.
I was acquainted with Charles exactly fifty years before and the occasion for that acquaintance and associated events have some historical interest. The fabric of [...]

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Playing an African Game

I Googled myself for the first time in a couple of years the other day and was surprised to see a decent number of references to a book I “published” in 1995. You might find it of some interest. The price is right – $0.00.
 
 

 

 
 

 
In October of 1993, less than three months before my sixty-fifth [...]

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MLK and the Bolinas Motorcycle Gang

My wife, Barbara Degenhardt Kovach, started making day trips from San Francisco to Bolinas in 1951. Her sister, Paula Gower, had a sister-in-law, Mavis Gower Lundmark, living on the “Little Mesa.” Mavis’ husband Herb Lundmark was the manager of RCA’s Bolinas transpacific transmission station which was built by Marconi in 1913 and sold to the [...]

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Studs: Move on up a little higher

Studs Terkel died the other day, aged 96.
I only saw him once but it was a memorable occasion, a preamble of sorts for several careers.
I am not able to pin the time down with any certainty but I think it must have been in 1947, perhaps in the spring. The laborers of the University of [...]

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Kay’s First Flight

In the post about Freddie and truck-stop counter slang I opened a couple of topics without completing them, promising to do so later. Here’s the fulfillment of that promise.
First, about the McGraw-Hill building: it’s still there. I had trouble finding it in Google’s Satellite and Street Views for reasons that will soon become apparent. I [...]

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Saving Joey

One afternoon there was a discreet knocking on the kitchen door which was the main entry to our cold water flat on 6th Avenue and Prince Street (see the Mama Savarese post). When I opened the door standing there was a most unusual looking man for that neighborhood. He was wearing a suit, with tie, [...]

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My Life in Theater (seats)

In the November 19, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, in the Onward and Upward with the Arts section, there is an article by Claudia Roth Pierpont entitled The Player Kings – How the Rivalry of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier made Shakespeare Modern. Along with the stated thesis the article consists mainly of a [...]

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A Walk in the Park

It was either the fall of 1981 or the spring of 1982, after Ronald Reagan had been president for about a year, when, after a week in Milan, I went to Rome for a week’s work with our Italian partner Olivetti Consulting. The Olivetti people arranged for me to stay at the Jolly Hotel near [...]

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How to read these posts

I have noticed from the reports provided by WordPress that nobody clicks on the links that I have provided in my posts. This strikes me as very peculiar given the rather off-beat subjects that I bring up.
I realize that many of the hits on my blog arise from search engines and that the seeker [...]

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