 My name's Taryn Edwards, and I'm one of the eight librarians that we have on staff here at the Mechanics Institute. And one of the delights of my job is that I get to plan fun events like this. How many of you have never been here before? Fabulous! Well, I hope you're having a good time so far. Right? Wonderful. Can you hear me all right? Okay. Where do I start? All right. Let me... Let me thank our sponsor for tonight, the RAF Distillery. Did you all have a chance to taste something? The rum is pretty good. I'm gonna hit that after I'm done talking. Yeah, thank you so much for coming. Let me tell you a little bit about Mechanics Institute since most of you have never been here before. Mechanics Institute was founded in December of 1854. So we're 163 years old. We're the oldest library in the West designed to serve the public. We are the oldest chess club in the United States, and we are a fun place with all kinds of activities and events and classes. Since we are so old, we are still a membership organization like all libraries were in California prior to 1878. I can talk to you a lot about that. If you ever want to come back here and take a tour, please come. We have a free tour every Wednesday at noon. Quarterly, we have them in the evenings at six o'clock, which involves wine and other goodies. The next one is April 2nd. So this is our library. There's a whole other level upstairs. So I want you after the event tonight to trundle upstairs and peek through the glass doors and take a look at that part of it. We also have a chess room on the fourth floor. We have a lot of fun times here as you can tell. Now I'm going to talk about Lee. Lee Bruno, our speaker tonight, has been a Mechanics member for, I don't know, 15 years. We have been friends for about eight. He wrote his first book, Panorama, here and also worked on a lot of this book here as well. And of course, making friends with all our librarians. That's one of the hallmarks of Mechanics Institute is we love to promote our members. We love to help our members with whatever creative project you're working on. We have a wonderful staff, a beautiful library, and lots of other services to help you get whatever it is you're working on done. Be it starting a business, writing a book, or just looking for something good to read. You're all smiling at me. Thank you so much for coming. I mean, Lee, I would love to have you come up and start your talk. Okay. Tess. Yeah. Tess. Tess, Tess, Tess. I guess I'm good. I'm wired. One thing I have not blown. So thank you, Taren, and thanks to Mechanics Institute. This is like an incredible place for the people that have been here for years, those who are just new to it. It's pretty amazing. And the leadership of the leadership now, creating more salons, more cross sections between different parts of the city is really important and vital. And I'm thrilled to be here. I just want to say thanks to Cameron Books for putting their energy and their effort behind this book. This was like the sprang out of my first book, Panorama. And the members of the staff at Cameron are just amazing. So once you open up the book, you will see what I mean, great design and whatnot. So I'm just going to read just a little bit to start. We'll go through some slides of the book and want to leave like 10, 15 minutes of questions, maybe 10 minutes of questions. Because I know in the audience there's always like people that know 10 times what I know about any one character. So I'm always humbled. When I wrote my first book, Panorama, I wanted to understand my great grandfather, Arby Hale's role as visionary and director of the Pan-Pacific Exposition of 1915. After several years of poking around in books and archives, I learned his story and the stories of San Franciscans who for more than a decade of twists, turns and heartbreaks pursued a dream with remarkable drive and resilience. It opened up a world of stories and historical events that surprised me with their diverse cast of oddball characters ranging from ingenious inventors to mischievous artists to corrupt politicians, all resolute in a shared quest to establish San Francisco as one of the great cities of the world. I was hooked. Those quirky, endearing characters set me on a quest to discover more. Many of us have met our fair share of misfits and eccentrics and know they're not an endangered species. Many enjoy the community of others and local clubs and organizations across the Bay Area, like the South End Rowing Club to which I belong. Our club plays special tribute to this coldest week of the winter, which is February 9th, by jumping into the bay wearing only a swimsuit cap and goggles and just for the thrill to experience what we call a nutcracker swim. Works out to two hours of swimming, some four miles with the tide and bone-chilling temperatures around 49 degrees. So why the title Misfits, Merchants and Mayhem? I don't know about you, but I can't resist stories of these kinds of characters, including those that I've run into the course of my life. As more of these misfit stories arose up out of books, newspapers, and letters, they stuck in my mind and wouldn't leave. It probably has something to do with their spellbinding qualities, their erasable, un-conforming, unrelenting, and having a hefty appetite for taking risks as they reinvent themselves. Yet misfits and eccentrics often get a bad rap in history, depicted as strange people with mental afflictions. But it's the very essence of their character that beckons us to root for them as they pursue their dreams, unleash their powers on those people around them, and transform their world. It's those qualities we admire and perhaps secretly fantasize we too could possess. The boom and the bust of the West was the perfect playground for these men and women, an unsettled landscape sharply contrasting the East and its underlying and established social moors. Neuropsychologists and author David Weeks studied a thousand eccentrics over the course of 400 years in his book, Eccentrics, A Study of Sanity and Strangeness. He pinpointed some of the shared characteristics in this book. He included that they were highly curious and creative, idealistic and armed with a mischievous sense of humor. And most important, they're not much interested in the opinions of others. Yes, these charming crackpots refuse to hold commonly held beliefs nor do they want to act in accordance with the norms of society. So we're going to get to the first slide. This is an 1884 illustration showing Yerba Buena before the discovery of gold around 1846, 1847. So in 1844, for most people that know their history about this area, there were only about a dozen houses that served commerce. The area was just a point of exchange for trading goods between the Spanish and Mexican ranchers and East Coast merchant vessels. Here's another. These illustrations that are at the Bancroft, it's just pretty remarkable. When I went into Ralph's office, Ralph Lewin, who is the director here, and I showed him this illustration, he immediately did what most people do. And he says, where is the Mechanics Institute? You know, you look at Montgomery Street and you go, wait a minute, Montgomery Street is right on the waterfront. Okay, so there's a lot of Bayfield, but you just, this sort of transports you back into a different time. And I think that's what's so evocative about the images and the illustrations. The year before the gold rush, only 11 ships dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay, nine whalers and two merchant ships. After gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, some 650 American and foreign vessels arrived carrying more than 90,000 passengers. Many abandoned their ships in the mudflats of San Francisco shores where several remain in tune today. And I think you probably saw the Exploratorium, also the National Park Service, and I think they've done this extensive sort of mapping underground and there's going to probably be an exhibit that comes out to show some of the locations and history of that. So here we are, this view of San Francisco, the waterfront in 1850, just rough. And as you can see these, again, just detailed illustration that when it, you know, in the size that it was and then it was blown up, it just continues to just marvel you in its detail. Gambling saloons, hotels and restaurants offered a place for men to socialize. They passed their hours drinking, playing billiards and gambling. Nearly all the saloons and gambling houses employed prostitutes who drank with the men and sat at car tables to attract other players. A woman walking along the streets of San Francisco was reportedly more of an oddity than an elephant or a giraffe. The town's wide open living conditions created a wild atmosphere that lacked the moral and social restraints men were accustomed to in their hometowns. So this is just the table of contents and just briefly, these are 28 stories spanning 1849 to 1934. And I tried to pick individuals and characters that had an impact not only on the moment that they arrived, but sort of lasting into, you could sort of see the ripples from these unique characters. And you'll also see just that the characteristics that I kind of outlined that David Weeks had used and then some of the others are very evident in all these characters. So, of course, what book about misfits wouldn't be, it just couldn't be without Joshua Norton, the benevolent emperor. More than 150 years ago, we discover San Francisco's most enduring misfit. This man was well-dressed and had a serious look on his face when he walked into the office of San Francisco bulletin newspaper editor George Fitch. He handed Fitch an unusual letter which had all the makings of a good story to lighten the mood because of most San Franciscans were mourning the death of the popular abolitionist senator David Broderick who'd been killed in a duel at Lake Merced by pro-slavery Chief Justice David Terry. The editor printed the proclamation in the paper, under the heading, Have We an Emperor Among Us? And John is here in the audience and he is the resident expert on, oh, sorry about this, he's the resident expert on Emperor Norton. And it said, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Agua Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the past nine years and ten months of San Francisco, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of the United States. So, here's this guy that arrives, you know, he's, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to get my notes here. Where's my tech guy? What's this, the slide bar? Anybody? I'm just gonna, alright, let's see if I can do this without cursing forward. Okay, sorry, I just had a question. So my slide bar here just to go down through here. Okay, alright, I wasn't gripping it. Okay, thank you. Small technical. So Norton goes on to urge his San Franciscans to assemble in the music hall of this city to make alterations in the existing laws of the union to ameliorate the evils under which this country is laboring. So Norton's backstory was he was a successful businessman who tried to corner the rice market three years earlier. And he disappears from San Francisco and returns and enters George Fitch's office. As Emperor, he became this mascot beloved by San Franciscans and written about by reporters at the papers. And he sent orders to Abraham Lincoln, Mexican President Porfirio Odeas, Tsar Alexander of Russia, and Queen Isabella of Spain. I am gonna get this control right. I'm sorry about this. The emperor made it his business to go about town inspecting San Francisco streets, monitoring the behavior of police, a natural orator. He gave speeches to bystanders about the problems of the city. And popular legend says he held at bay a vicious anti-Chinese mob by reciting the Lord's Prayer. Some 21 years later in 1880, Emperor Norton collapsed from a heart attack walking up California near Grant. His only possessions on him were a gold and silver piece and an 1828 franc. His fans gave him an elaborate funeral fitting for an emperor attended by 30,000 loyal subjects. So, okay, sure. This is the wonders of PowerPoint. Oh, good. I like that. Okay, so 1850s. And Taryn just said this is when the Mechanics Institute started. So here we have another unusual misfit, Mr. Henry Meigs, who walked the same streets as Emperor Norton. He was known as Honest Harry, a swashbubbling capitalist who built the biggest sawmills on the west coast. And by age 26, had amassed a fortune as a Manhattan lumber dealer before the panic of 1837 put his company out of business on the east coast. The irrepressible Meigs rebounded, then headed for San Francisco with a ship loaded with lumber to supply the Gold Rush City, much in need of the wood to rebuild from its half-dozen major fires. He rolled his mighty profits of 20X into two sawmills and began building piers in the city, becoming the biggest landowner in the area, amassing $500,000 in gold or $15 million in today's currency. In 1854, real estate prices plunged from rampant speculation, forcing him into bankruptcy, which he managed to keep secret through a Ponzi scheme. As a city councilman, he embezzled $1 million from the city, $29 million in today's currency, which wiped out hundreds of unwitting investors, most of the city's bank reserves. He finally realized the gig was up. Fearing for his life, he left town in the middle of the night, sailed for Peru, but the story goes is that as his ship was sailing out of the bay, work got around and some of the investors who were armed with guns and definitely wanted to hang him pursued him in a sideboat steamer, and one of their paddles was broken. They were just about to get to him at the Feralons Islands when the wind came up and all of a sudden, Megs is off to Peru. So with his pot of muddy and a mob of investors chasing his ship, he arrives in South America where he begins building railroads in Chile and Peru, made millions, and eventually paid back every cent he owed to investors in the city of San Francisco. He died in 1877 in Lima, Peru while constructing a railroad in Costa Rica. So William Shory, some people know Shory. I think he may even have a plaque on the waterfront. The Pacific's Wailing Prince is the way I capture him in the book. And this is a picture where he's posed in Oakland in the late 1880s as a family portrait with his wife and children who often were on his wailing voyage. And at the time, just wailing voyages were super dangerous. So this says something about the caliber of the man and also his fortitude. So William Shory, who was called Black Hayab, established himself as the only African-American ship captain and large shipowner on the Pacific Coast a few years after the Civil War had ended. Born in 1859 to a Scottish father and a Creole mother, he grew up on the West Indie Island of Barbados. He became a cabin boy on a ship bound for Boston where he had learned navigational skills and was sort of tutored in this, but he was a very serious student and continued to pry a skill. And several years later, he ends up in San Francisco in 1878 where he captains successful wailing voyage to the Arctic and Pacific for more than 30 years. Despite mishaps and a near mutiny when his white crewman set fire to his ship, he retired in 1908 and worked as a security officer in the port in Oakland. And here is a picture of a slain whale. This is not from that period. I think it's a little bit later at Point San Pedro. So Julia Morgan. Everybody knows Julia Morgan, I think, in the Bay Area. It's like she's quite remarkable. And I put her in my category of misfits because she really was unrelenting in her drive and a person that had been told that, you know, really you probably shouldn't pursue architecture. But this is a picture where she's visiting Notre Dame in Paris in 1901. And she became the first woman admitted to the architecture program at La Colle d'Arte. Women like the great architect Julia Morgan was undeterred by the fact that women didn't have a path to become architects, yet she went on to become California's first woman licensed architect and designed more than 700 buildings over the span of her prodigious career. She was born in San Francisco in 1872. She took a class at UC Berkeley with architect Bernard Maybeck, whose design philosophy emphasized materials should fit their environment, ideas that profoundly influenced her efforts to introduce environmentally sensitive architecture to the West Coast. Maybeck encouraged her to study architecture in Paris at the La Colle d'Arte. After pressure from a union of French female artists in three exams, which she had not made the proper marks to pass, she became the first woman admitted to that school. In 1902, she became the first credentialed female architect in California and opened San Francisco office on Montgomery Street. After the 1906 quake, she was one of the architects and also this massive rebuilding that went on in the city and worked on the Fairmont Hotel, and there's a picture in the book of that as well. This view is of James Lombard's Piedmont home in 1915. So her office is destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, and she does these amazing projects. She included her probably most famous, are the ones that she did for William Randolph Hearst, which was a Los Angeles examiner building in the Hearst Castle. Her residential architecture work is embedded in the arts and craft movement and won her international acclaim. And there were merchants with a penchant for eccentric tendencies like the Crowley brothers shown here. Tim and Dave Crowley conversed at the Howard Street wharf in San Francisco around 1905. As a child, Thomas Crowley fell in love with Whitehall boats known as the Bicycles of the Sea, used to ferry services and sailors to and from boats coming into New York Harbor, and these boats were named after Whitehall Street. In 1892, at the age of 17, Crowley purchased an 18-foot Whitehall boat for $80 in San Francisco and began a water taxi service, delivering supplies, passengers, and crew members to and from ships anchored in San Francisco Bay, armed with an unrelenting drive and mischievous sense of humor. The Crowley brothers realized in 1897 that they needed to upgrade their row boats to gasoline-powered boats to reach vessels faster. By the early 1900s, the Crowley brothers had established a strong taxi service for shipowners and merchants, 6 million tons of goods from around the world passed through San Francisco at the time, making San Francisco poor at the International Trading Center of the Americas West Coast. The brothers continued to grow and expand over the next several decades to keep pace with the boom in the global shipping and the outbreak of World War I. Both the Red and White Fleet Ferry Service and Crowley Maritime that both sprang from these two men's dream and vision, and they survived today. Crowley Maritime is like a multi-billion dollar company, and it's pretty impressive. I'm going to read just a little excerpt from the book about the Crowley brothers who definitely had the mischievous sense of humor and an unrelenting drive. Crowley's ambition kept him drawing a fine line between playing fair and breaking the rules and being the first launch to arrive at a ship and other taxi service. His eagerness got him in hot water with the Federal Quarantees Service, yet again, when he and his men approached an incoming ship as reported in the June 27, 1905 San Francisco call, the six men, quote, the six men had gone alongside the ship, Aaron, before it had been released from quarantine. They claimed to have waited until the yellow flag was hauled down before making those close connections with Aaron's steep sides. The problem was the flag had been prematurely lowered without official clearance of the medical officer on duty. The officer demanded the flag be raised again and the six men were intercepted and towed to Angel Island's quarantine station where surgeon coming, quote, surgeon coming, sentenced the offenders to be vaccinated against plague, according to the San Francisco call. Doctor Drew had six men aboard this taxi service arrested which included Thomas Crowley, David Crowley, senior Michael Coleman for the sailors home, Steve Cassidy, a runner for a produce room, and Captain Kitgard and James Sennett, the gasoline pilot, launch pilot. As men left the operating room, one of the doctors referred to the after effects of the vaccinations which would surely cause physical discomfort and nausea. And when the vaccination takes, just let your thoughts dwell on that section of the law, forbidding communication with quarantine vessels. We have other tortures here, but if that vaccine acts as I hope, it will hold you all for a while. This was a, this, and Crowley did this wonderful oral history with the, with the Berkeley, Bancroft Library in the 60s and he talks about how he thought this was just a complete joke that it was just ways to make money for the city. So anyway, onward to Lou Hing. Lou Hing, here he's sitting in a portrait taken in the late 1890s with one of his daughters on his knee and one of his sons standing on his side. Other merchants like Lou Hing faced challenging obstacles in the business career that began in 1871 when he sailed from China to San Francisco. And within six years he pioneered commercial scale food canning and established the Pacific Coast canning company. He'd used his creative ingenuity to drive his experiments in canning to figure out how to safely can foods on a large scale. Chinese faced discrimination at the time, especially after an economic downturn during the 1870s. In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act stopped Chinese immigration and prevented Chinese already in the country from owning real estate. Hing's unrelenting drive and shrewd business instincts helped him weather not just discrimination but legal run-ins like the authorities when they seized 516 cans of elicit opium that bore the label of his company. He was eventually cleared of the charge. In 1906 after the Great earthquake and fire destroyed his home Hing helped victims opening his cannery to the homeless including them. He expanded his business to include fruit orchards, a hotel, import and export companies and became president of the Canton Bank of San Francisco. Despite discrimination, Hing's reputation as a respected businessman and community leader increased. He died in 1934 with scarcely a mention of his passing in the local newspapers. So Irving Scott, this is another wonderful mechanic institute. I don't know if he's a, Taryn, is he a founder or is he? No, he was just, he was an early, he was one of the early crowd. So Irving Scott, the man who made iron ships. In 1865 Peter Donahue, a failed gold prospector and iron foundry pioneer, sold his ironworks, union ironworks to his apprentice Irving Murray Scott, a 28 year old with a sharp mind and an aptitude for all things mechanical. After he bought the ironworks, Scott designed and built most of the machinery used to mine the silver of the Comstock load in Nevada. He went on to make a fortune by manufacturing and selling equipment to mine owners and railroad companies. Scott recognized that the mining booms wouldn't last forever and shifted to building locomotives and ships. He spent three nights a week at the Mechanics Institute, the fourth night in the study of German and the fifth at a lecture of one kind or another. In 1880 Scott went on a trip around the world to San Francisco businessman James Fair. And while in Europe he made a close study of the industries and industrial establishments of several countries, paying special attention to the shipbuilding of France in England. When he returned home, Scott expanded the union ironworks and relocated it to Pretorio Point. It now covered more than 25 acres of San Francisco waterfront at Pure 70 and was the largest and most versatile ironworks in the United States. In fact, the union ironworks rivaled the East Coast shipyards and that was quite a coup because we were just the West Coast. A lot of the East Coast establishment just kind of looked down on us and didn't think we were much and much of anything. In 1885 the plant built the first steel-hold ship in the Pacific Rim in 1890s. The USS San Francisco, a steel-protected naval cruiser that defended the American coast from German submarines in World War I. Union ironworks built the US battleship Oregon and if you read about any of the times when this Oregon was in port, it was like this massive celebration. San Franciscans were just absolutely gaga over the ship. He died in 1903 and today the shipbuilding site is owned by the city of San Francisco which is planning to develop the area and restore some of its huge industrial buildings. It's quite an interesting project. So in the book I hit this era of the 1906 quake and this is the famous photograph. Anybody know whose photograph this is? Genthe, good. So it's Arnold Genthe and he's also featured in the book. This is looking down Sacramento Street on the morning of April 18th, 1906. Genthe basically toured the city after his apartment had been destroyed. He went down to a camera shop on Montgomery Street and went in and asked, you know, can I buy a camera? The camera owner said, my shop's going to go up in flames, take what you want. He took a camera, a small new Kodak and stuffed his pockets with film and circled around the city pretty much exhausting himself over those days and it's a pretty, if you've seen any of the celebration of the 1906 quake the images are just absolutely stunning and so some of the images of his are in this book and I urge you to look for others. The earthquake left more than 3,000 people dead and destroyed more than 28,000 buildings. Experts estimate that 300,000 out of the 410,000 residents were left homeless, half of whom fled to other cities and countries. Damages were estimated at around 500 million which is nearly 13 billion today. This is the burn area, this William Lee's map which is just absolutely quite stunning and again on the full layout of the book it's really these images of Singh. And the city rising from ashes, this was only two years after and if you see this, this is the great white fleet, Teddy Roosevelt. Let's see. It's like my light. Oh, there it is. You can see these. This is done. And my first book which is about the Pampas Civic Exposition really starts in 1904 and goes to 1915 but the rebuilding, the rampant rebuilding of the city of San Francisco was quite amazing and by 1909, three years later they're doing kind of their first Portola Festival which is kind of like this mini, it's a small scale fair but it was a test run for the first World's Fair which was the Pampas Civic Exposition. So, getting to the waterfront and the great Italian fishing community, Achilles Palladini. Italians like Achilles Palladini pioneered the fishing industry in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. The Italians had dominated the West Coast fishing industry due to their skill and technology on Saturdays fishermen would mend their nets while in port as shown here in 1905. Palladini arrived in San Francisco from Italy in 1865 on a merchant ship and encountered a picturesque city in a thriving Italian community. He learned there was money to be made as a fisherman. Italians dominated the industry with a bay abundant with dungeons, crab, oysters, salmon and striped bass. He worked hard and applied his creative and cunning skills to the business investing in his own boats in real estate. He loved opera and was living the high life until 1906 when the earthquake destroyed all of his uninsured properties and left him broke. Palladini went back to fishing with a small boat, a hand cart for peddling his fish, then acquired a horse and a wagon and then a small fish stand. He was an aggressive businessman and widely known for being the first to can tuna on the Pacific Coast. Fishermen would typically leave on these... Let me just see if I can highlight this with again with the... These are faluchas. Let's see if my light works. Anyway, you can see the spars from the faluchas. These are Latin rigged. Very versatile boats that could be rowed with the tide and with the ingenuity of these fishermen. They were very small. These are relatively short and really not much of a place to stay out of the weather. Very dangerous conditions, but these fishermen were quite in a class of their own but extremely hard to... to... to grab the wonderful fish that we had in abundance at the time. This picture is of the 1920s fisherman's worth. By 1910, a Palladini company had grown into an formidable powerhouse and came under the scrutiny of the California antitrust regulators for its monopolistic market practices. Despite the challenging setback, Palladini grew his operation for the next decade into the West Coast's largest wholesale seafood distributor. He died in 1921 at the age of 78. And of course, there are stories in mayhem. So, as we know, this... you know, the early 1850s, there's hardly any of... there are nonexistent police force and we have this wonderful story about Isaiah Lees who some people probably already know, but this... he was... the way I pegged him in the book is he's the mugshot detective. He was born in Scotland and came to San Francisco shore as an iron worker. After witnessing a murder, he brought the perpetrator justice and decided to become a patrol officer in 1853, when lawless was a part of everyday life and the police force was nearly nonexistent. The sudden rise in population from the Gold Rush had brought many desperate criminals to our shores and Lees solved many famous criminal cases during the course of his career, as he moved up to detective including a double murder with dogged investigation skills. The curious Lees studied the autobiography of Francois Vaudot, the world's first private detective from Paris who pioneered the use of disguises and formats, detailed criminal records and meticulous record keeping. But Lees applied his methods and then also realized that criminal... that with the rise of photography at the time, that he could take photographs of criminals and as a result he over the course of his career by the time he retired he had 15,000 photographs of criminals and he had made his trips back and forth to Scotland and Scotland Yard still has a picture of him hanging in their location. So this is just again he retired in 1900 and was quite a remarkable character. So the Barbary Coast which was known for its many vices and Lees Isaiah Lees news all too well. It's worldwide reputation for brothels and whatnot. But the world of brothels and vice was sort of being kind of closed off from progressive movements. So on January 25, 1917 some 300 female prostitutes organized by two madams, Reggie Gamble and Mod Spencer marched in protest an anti-prostitution crusade by Reverend Paul Smith. A nationwide anti-prostitution reform movement had finally reached San Francisco shores. Our city had a long tradition of prostitution in the Barbary Coast the area between North Beach and the financial district was a perimeter attack. In 1917 the Red Light Abatement Act gave city authorities right to impose civil court actions against any property used for purposes of prostitution and 1400 sex workers were evicted marking the end of the sanctioned brothels. Reggie Gamble asked Reverend Smith a question that would haunt him. Are you trying to reform us or are you trying to reform social conditions? You leave us alone. It is too late to do anything with us. Give your attention to the boys and girls in the schools and to the social conditions responsible for the spread of prostitution. Well, that's good. And of course coming towards the the book end of the other side of it is the Great Strike of 1934 which there's still a lot of living oral history people that even the few talks I've already given that's like amazing stories that start popping up. San Francisco's port was booming with work and maritime commerce in the 1930s during the Great Depression but was marked by the violent conflict between Longshoremen and shipping owners. On July 3rd 1934 those tensions led to a strike that paralyzed our port and led to utter mayhem. Longshoremen had walked out of their jobs demanding reforms and hiring practices and pay. Owners desperate as their losses mounted recruited and provided police protection for strike breakers and ports determined to crush the strike. The Longshoremen stood their ground Alfred Bridges better known as Harry Bridges was the chief spokesman for the union and the negotiations like other Longshoremen he was forced to work grueling shifts at an unrelenting pace that was unsafe and led to two injuries. Bridges was a consummate an unrelenting organizer he visited black churches and asked congregations to join the strikers promising that blacks would be able to work on west coast docks when the strike was over. Eventually the thousands of striker striking Longshoremen prevailed after four weeks of strikes our city barely surviving the killing of two strikers, hundreds of bloody skirmishes, citywide labor walkouts and owners suffering big losses from undelivered spoiled goods stranded on the dock. In the aftermath Bridges kept his promise to blacks that all peers were open to them. Harry Bridges served as the president of the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union for 40 years and died in 1990 at the age of 88. And that is the conclusion of my