GOLDEN SAN FRANCISCO

Evening Star, Issue 22326, 30 April 1936, Page 11

GOLDEN SAN FRANCISCO

WHERE ALL ARE YOUNG Brigham Young is the patron saint of Salt Lake City, and Colonel Cody still prorides the excuse for civic memorials in Denver, but General Smuts is the talk of San Francisco and of Berkeley (writes Paul Anning, in thg ‘Cape Times’). It is of Smuts, the intellectual, the prophet of Holism, that the young men- ask in the mentally stimulating air of the northern Californian coast— the first home of brains and brawn in the New America. Los Angeles is a town of old men and old women, lured to the soft Pacific shores by the strains of Aimee Semple Macpherson’s angelic choir and the beauty parlours of Hollywood for uplift and face-lift. But San Francisco can boast, as well as its flaming youth, an even greater number of golden weddings and hearty old-timers-flourishing in the unusual climate of northern California. You yawn in Los Angeles, but you grow young in San Francisco.

There is' no other city where the inhabitants are so voceriferously proud of their birthright. They are so superbly certain that San Francisco is 'the'finest town in the world, set in the most beautiful surroundings—from the streets- that rise so steeply that the street cars have to run on cogs, to the view from the top out over, the Golden Gate towards the horizon of the China seas and over the great bridges that curve so clearly above the bay. Yet, curiously, the real charm of San Francisco lies less in the magnificent views that greet the sunshine which is the daily boast of every Californian, than in the uncertain weather, cool and bracing after the dull white heat of the Eastern towns, the less obvious and more truly friehdly atmosphere of its hotels, and the individual character of its streets which have defied the s'et squares of man with his grids and right angles. At last there is an American town where business does not seem to be the only interest in life. Though, even here, automobile laundries bustle alongside garages where “ flats ” are fixed, and across the road a fine poster proualy cries “ Personality Plates. Ten Dollars. Try Dr Zieves, Modern Dentist.”

They claim that the West is unusual, and they are right. The approaching train comes down through the hills at night and stops by a town so brightly lit that it looks like a huge fair. It is only Reno, where the staple industry is not the sale of divorces, but the management of roulette and baccarat houses under the Nevada State license. Next door, in the State of Utah, you cannot

drink: you cannot even buy a packet of cigarettes. Proud. Californians, sweltering in the dry air of the Middle Western . plains, will give promises of cool, soft sunshine on the coast. But San Francisco is “ unusual,” and the sun shows no sign of shining - through, the cold-mist and. rain that ' blows through the squat ferry chugging across the bay from Berkeley to §an Francisco. Coats and mufflers, coffee stalls on the ferry, and foghorns screaming past Alcazar Island, where A 1 Capone now rests in solitary detention, suggest that all Californians are liars. But the fog lifts, the sun does shine, and San Francisco is ahead—a few skyscrapers, but with none of the dramatic suddenness of the towers of Manhattan in approach, THE BOHEMIAN CLUB. San Francisco has 75 night clubs and a gaily-bannered Chinese quarter, but it has only one Bohemian club—an exclusive, refined, and almost typical institution. This most hospitabjp sanctuary is a palatial buildings whose walls are lined with the worst paintings that ever escaped from a brush. The members represent the upper bourgeosie of San Francisco with a leaning towards the arts. They lean very largely on a group of associate members, professional artists, who provide the correct atmosphere for this artiste cratic Bohemia. Once a year the club has an outing to the Bohemian Grove, miles away to the north in the woods, where there is an open-air theatre, camp fires, and camping grounds. Every August the exhausted but high-minded business men of San Francisco leave their wives and take their intellectual refreshment in these bosky glades, with music round the camp fire in the evening, and, as the climax, an entertainment, part opera, part play, part pageant, especially written each year and bearing the surprising title of ‘ The Jinks.' Only in San Francisco could be found A sufficient number of elderly and rich men with such a need for art with » capital A. Art in the woods, surrounded by superb wines, excellent cooks, and faithful artists. In this atmosphere of intellectual bobbery it is not surprising that there are two universities in the district, Jarely endowed by millionaires with an elderly conscience. The Leland-Stan-ford University is one—erected by Mrs Stanford as a memorial to her son, who died in adolescence. In the centre‘of the library of this fine and progressive tombstone is a fire-proof room containing relics of the child—his toys, his clothes, his this and that. There is a story that the relics included a wax replica of the last breakfast eaten by this wretched child—but the earthquake provided a suitable moment for its removal by the university authorities. Over the bay, in Berkeley, lies the University of California, among the houses clinging to the side of the hill like the Japanese wood_ and rice-paper dwellings of Kobe. It is a large institution, with 13,000 internal students on the books this year. As a State university they are admitted free of charge, save for an annual fee of 23 dollars, and for board and lodging expenses. Most of them live in rooms in the town, or in the houses run by the various fraternity and sorority clubs, but Rockefeller’s “ International House ” takes a few—of whom 50 per cent, must be foreigners, including today English and Malayans, Japanese and Liberians. - DEAD-WEIGHT. Free university education means many “ dead-weight ” students who never graduate—at present about twothirds of the whole. American parents are passing through a phase in which the presence of a son or daughter at college is considered to give a cachet to their own social position. Another feature of the \yasteful side of American university life lies in the absurd 1 importance of football. The games be- *

come the great event of the week, in the stadium seating 80,000, and two dollars is considered a very reasonable charge for a seat. Enormous gates are the rule,'and from this money all the student institutions are run, while in some cases the university itself may draw this source for its funds. The result is that a high school player of renown is a prize above boobies, and such a man will have little difficulty in getting to the university of his choice, free of all expense. He may not accept a gift of money for playing, but there is nothing to prevent his accepting a salaried but purely honorary post in the local bank of a supporter of the team; or even, as happened recently, taking the bet of a wealthy alumnus of 5 cents to l.OOOdol that he cannot jump over a brick or something equally absurd. „ , , , But the spirit of Berkeley is one ot eagerness for learning, whatever it may be in other universities, and the many students who are there to work give it a virile atmosphere. Most of them do paid work in the evenings to pay for their keep—as attendants at petrol filling stations, or pages and clerks in the university library, or running the daily paper, the ‘ Californian.’ This excellent journal includes a syndicated foreign news service, and, though the printing is done by tradesmen on the premises, the editing and reporting is done entirely by the students—an excellent training for future work in journalism. In the streets to-day’s poster says “ Back to School To-day.” Above the stadium through the deep, cool scent of a fore b of eucalyptus trees the stone tiers of one of the finest Greek amphitheatres in the world rises to the deep blue evening sky. Here, in the quiet air, lies the real centre of this young and eager university. Through the trees the white and red lights of San Francisco twinkle across the water, and patches of cloudy mist hang here and there between sea and sky, absurdly obscuring the middle of the huge bridge pylons so that the curving peaks, dissociated from their bases, peer foolishly into the night. The fresh scent from Berkeley Gardens wafts up the hillside as the last red glow of the sun sets over the hills beyond the Golden Gate. From this vantage point the cool loveliness of the distances seems suddenly to explain the breadth and the freshness of thought of this university town where contemplation—anathema generally to American life—becomes here magnificently possible.