Only in San Francisco could a young man who took a near-lethal dose from Janis Joplin’s needle wind up overseeing the city’s criminal justice system—but that’s precisely what Terry “Kayo” Hallinan did three decades later when he was elected San Francisco’s district attorney.

No city would go through more convulsions than San Francisco as it processed the 1960s. Like the mystics who eat from strange and sacred plants to let their minds touch God, the people of San Francisco first had to know hell.

He told his listeners, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”

Caen lived and breathed the city. He was so devoted to it, that his first wife, Bea, a bright-eyed showgirl with a blond bubble, threatened to name San Francisco as a co-respondent when she sued him for divorce. In his columns, he was always trying to find the city’s heart.

remains in its thrall years after his death. He called the town “Baghdad by the Bay” in his column, conjuring the exotic wonders of ancient Babylon. But his San Francisco was more like Oz, Wonderland, and Gotham City all rolled together. If much of it was Caen’s own creation, it’s the city that San Franciscans wanted to live in.

Armstrong—who was maintaining his own strict health

“What I liked was that the game was not always on the goal line out there. It wasn’t always life and death. There were time-out signs. It was a nicer game.” Graham

Music was at the heart of San Francisco’s magical transformation in the 1960s. And at the beginning of the decade, the Fillmore was the music’s hot center. They called the Fillmore “the Harlem of the West.”

The Haight was actually more like Calcutta, with its hordes of beggars in brightly colored rags and its stew of human misery.