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William Saroyan hides out coyly in the Sunset district sand dunes. Kathleen Norris, longtime favorite author of millions of housewives, has just published another work—a penny postcard bearing her signature and addressed to all registered voters: "San Francisco is my home city and the city I love. It must be saddening to you as it is to me to see our city's reputation for fairness and dignity sullied ... by this ridiculous and baseless recall campaign. . . . The attempt to recall [Lapham] simply because of a difference of opinion is unfair and fundamentally unAmerican. I appeal in the name of the city we all love for your 'no' vote against the recall."
Saints & Sinners. Why do San Franciscans love their city so?
Mayors may come and mayors may go, but in San Francisco it rarely snows, it rarely freezes. The worst it does in the winter is rain, which turns the Pacific hills green. Even in summer the thermometer rarely climbs above 70°.
The New Yorker, the Parisian, the Londoner, the cosmopolite, all find something in San Francisco that is reminiscent: the babel of languages, the ships along the Embarcadero, the slope of Telegraph Hill which looks like the tumbling slopes of Algiers, the pagoda roofs of Chinatown, the Spanish missions.
Many have tried to define the city's charm; most decide that it is indefinable. It invites where New York overwhelms. Its pleasures are within reach. Saroyan wrote desperately: "It is an unreasonable city. It makes friends of thieves . . . and opens its hearts to saints. But only for a moment. It soon returns to the thieves and abandons the saints. It loves the good as well as the evil." It is a city of splendid beauty. It is most beautiful when seen at sunset from "the Top of the Mark," the glassed-in penthouse saloon in the Mark Hopkins Hotel.
In the evenings, from behind the Golden Gate the fog rolls in, swallowing the sun and reaching for St. Ignatius' ornate spires. The web of Golden Gate Bridge is black against the clouds. A ferry trails two white ribbons of wake from the foot of Market Street toward the Oakland Mole. The yachts in the St. Francis Yacht Club basin vanish in the bay shadows. Searchlights shoot up nervously from the walls of Alcatraz, and a beer sign flowers in the floodlights over the ballpark.
To the south rises the blue dome of City Hall. Near the Civic Auditorium, where the doctors gathered, waits the Faceless Man, who also loves San Francisco, if for different reasons.