Blandina Farley arrived in San Francisco in 1971 and fell in love – with North Beach. It was to be a long-term relationship, a kinship of spirits. Home of the Beats, Italian immigrants, musicians, artists, writers and the strip club industry, North Beach in its heyday was flamboyant, full of color and passion. Lenny Bruce, ...
The hardest decisions Eng Ng ever had to make – though they meant family separations – turned out to be the right ones for herself and her family, she said. Four years after she was born, in 1948, Burma shed British rule to become a newly democratic socialist country. Her father and a partner started ...
Casinos like the Tropicana, the Sahara and the Sands sprung up in Las Vegas in the 1950s. Big bands backed top entertainment like Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland and Elvis. In this heady environment, Tom Zimberoff came of age. “My father played violin in the big bands at the time when big bands had string ...
Despite winning a hard-fought scholarship to study commercial art at the University of Miami, Katherine Campbell stayed less than a year. It was 1969 and the school had only integrated a few years earlier. A handful of unsettling encounters left her feeling unwelcome and somewhat traumatized, so she returned to San Francisco and enrolled in ...
Charles George had charisma, smarts and a purposeful nature. They propelled him through life despite the constraints of poverty and racism. He was shepherded along the way by people who valued his worth. When George was born in 1923 in Wilmington, N.C., life was hardscrabble for most African Americans. “My father took jobs where he ...
When a black man asked her out in San Francisco in 1960, interracial dating just wasn’t being done and Marty Harper was no pioneer. But as the ’60s rolled on, things were being done that hadn’t been before. Young people were bucking the establishment’s war, work and cultural ethics. The Civil Rights movement spotlighted racial ...
