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01:00:12 12.01 |
Insert Interview - Scott Newhall, part 3
Scott Newhall 0:12 I just can't get too specific Interviewer 0:14 Nobody wants to mention a name Scott Newhall 0:15 Well, it's one thing, it would be embarrassing for me in some respects, honestly. Interviewer 0:22 That's all right. Scott Newhall 0:23 Listen I just I just can't. I mean, I don't want to get too specific, or what the hell, I've known him too long. I've been among them for too long and got problems. Interviewer 0:36 I'm gonna have to find an outcast here. Let's go back to the years after the war, you were saying are pretty dulled times. Scott Newhall 0:44 Well, it was a period of reorganization. Everybody had been living in a sort of in a hyper tonic society. And suddenly here, we were, nobody to kill. We'd sort of won the war. And now we had to get back and pay for it. And so what were we going to do with the factories, which are now dead, the grass had not yet started to grow in appears where they'd been manufacturing the warships. The aircraft industry wanted to cover the earth with private planes. But that's in the southern industry is not up here. But the whole country had to find out what to do with all these magnificent machine tools, these factories is trained manpower. And as I say, we just began to drift. And I think we drifted. I mean, I don't want to get into history too much. We just drifted finally, where we had to take another crack at the military. So for a while there was a little spurt when we got into Korea. And then finally, the generals found a little something rather for us to do in Southeast Asia, which is a matter that people will be debating for centuries. And we weren't that we got into the beatnik the what was it before anyway, and then the flower children, we got into these different cultures that came to San Francisco. But these are on later years, which are not covering now right now. Not yet. But we were getting prepared for these new waves of immigrants, most of them young, many of them unattached, most of them looking for a legend for some kind of a fantasy that they thought existed here in San Francisco. And the tragedy of it isn't San Francisco isn't legendary place. It is a fantasy. But you have to be willing to accept the fantasy as it I mean, I feel you should be willing to accept the fantasy as it exists, and not impose your own fantasy and put the city in handcuffs, according to your own perceptions, or the way the world should be organized. Interviewer 2:55 What fantasy did they have that it didn't fulfill that they were trying to impose on it? Scott Newhall 3:02 Well, that would be unknown, I would not be of course, a perfect person to come up with an answer, because I did not see it from their point of view. But people came out here with kind of this grin in this smile thinking here was the answer to everything they'd been, I think freedom from their parents. Freedom from war, freedom from discipline. I mean, we've been, generally speaking and discipline, we've been in handcuffs as a society for five years or so four or five years. And now people wanted to express themselves. And we got into this period, where everybody, you know, wanted to get his head back on or screw it on, or whatever they did, and feel good about themselves. And it's not as now today. It's not quite as bad as it was 15 years ago. But anyway, I, as a whole area, I can't get into that Interviewer 3:53 A different era. Well, let's go back. And one thing I wanted to ask you was, how do you think the city would be different if World War Two had never happened? Scott Newhall 4:03 That's a very interesting question. And no one's ever asked that before asked me that before. What would have happened? I think the same thing may have happened. But much, much slower. Because, again, so many people during the war came out here and saw it and I think it would have taken longer simply for this buildup of immigrants. Now, of course, San Francisco particularly, has always been an immigrant city. I own great grandfather came out. About 130 years ago, there was 1850 in search of gold. More people came to California in 1849 and 50. And I guess the succeeding 10 years, is the greatest movement of men, human beings since the Crusades, which was the 12th century. Then, after the gold and the silver had been found and exhausted To the city of the state settled down into kind of an agricultural, an agricultural society in which the big money more or less up here in San Francisco was based which had been based on gold and silver was based on real estate on agricultural large farming enterprises and ranching enterprises. A lot of agriculture money here. And so San Francisco had been a town, very vibrant. It was a mining town. Los Angeles started as a farm town the start is a mining town and a mining town always had better body houses, it had better theaters, it had better paintings and things like that, that people enjoy it but we tapered off into land ownership. And then we became a sort of a commercial center. We were the, the sea port for the Orient. And the Orient trade was big. This was up to and through the Depression not before the depression after going through the boom years after World War One. The dollar steamship lines went around the world from San Francisco when they became the American President lines or any number of big shipping lines and went into all the Trans Pacific trade. And the San Francisco waterfront was the most marvelous thing still in the depression years because the ships would come in to San Francisco, Los Angeles was just they might go there if they had to make a pitstop. You know, the passengers were impatient or something but always came San Francisco, the ships and they would come in from the south pacific with Cobra. They would come in from Central America with coffee on board the smells in the city were just unbelievable in those depression days and right up to the war. Because the big Folgers and MJ B and hills brothers all a big coffee companies were doing their roasting right down there in the waterfront. And any small boy or girl would come to San Francisco. You smell this aroma of coffee and it was a wonderful, exciting city. You go along the waterfront and a boat you see the Stern's of these big transpacific and intercoastal freighters there and it came from all over the world from Oslo and from London and Calcutta and Hong Kong and Singapore and this business. It was a city of dreams, no question about I don't mean to wax too poetic or romantic. But this is what made San Francisco was a seaport. And it was a marvelous seaport. It was always one of the world's great sea ports right up through World War Two. And then it's only been a seaport to take troops in and out different adventures that we've had overseas. The people, a seaport is a cosmopolitan and an exciting place. And again, I use the word a very permissive and tolerant place. And this was a city that accepted people and let them live their lifestyles, it all sort of the same package I'm talking about. But there was the old produce district. And that was marvelous, all the greens and groceries, groceries and all produce came in from all over California, which is the greatest farming state in the world, as you probably know, acre for acre. And again, there were the sounds and the smells of the produce district. What have you got there now, you've got these plastic, antiseptic apartments and condominiums down there on the whole city. I say I don't understand all east of Sansom or battery street. Oh, north of mostly north at market, and then south of the Telegraph Hill. And now this is a Warren, of people from somewhere else who are trying to find something and I don't know what it is they're trying to find. It's like the salmon coming in and going up the river to spawn these fellas and his women all go to the bars. And I don't know they're going to spawn or what they're going to do, but they're looking for something. And it looks to me again, like it to a certain extent, plastic kind of culture that we have in certain parts of the city. I don't mean to be critical of anything. I'm very, I'm very laid back. Not very. Yeah, I am very mellow. Interviewer 9:20 If you had to sum it all up into one statement, the 40s were blank. Scott Newhall 9:27 Well, I can make one statement easily. As far as I'm personally concerned, the 40s were the culmination of the most exciting metropolis with which I have ever had any contact. San Francisco had started out as a city in the 1850s. As one of the most remarkable again dramatic and romantic cities in the world, with the mining and oil The excitement and the lynchings in the hangings. I know my great grandfather, one of them was a Presbyterian minister who happened to be on this friendly with the southern side of the Civil War. So he was hungry, they tried to lynch him. But another great grandfather drove him out of town in a wagon and but they hung him in effigy. So things were breaking, they were interesting in those days. And it went on through the big land Baron years, through the marvelous boom after World War One where it was a very rich city. And we built what high rise existed before this latest boom. We went through the Depression, which was a remarkable time, where everyone got to know each other, there's little democracy a little more democracy than than there had been in the preceding decades. It all ended up and wound up in this sort of cataclysmic cultural orgasm of World War Two, San Francisco was a busy port. And then were born the seeds all this new generations that have come along since. And, in my experience, sent the real vital San Francisco culminated, flowered at blossomed, and then it died in the, with the flower children out in near the park there in the old Haight Ashbury district. And then now a new city is being born at the moment, in my opinion, there's obviously the remnants of some of the old around, there are discarded corpses here and there from different eras. And I don't think we can ever return to something that was quite as informal, quite as easy going, and quite as mellow, as San Francisco was, in the years, up to 1950 |
01:11:51 711.62 |
Interviewer 11:54
In 1939 1940, What were your expectations, your personal expectations, Scott Newhall 12:01 I wanted to become king of San Francisco, you know, to be serious. I want to San Francisco. And I work hard for it. For two things. When I was the editor of the Chronicle and sub editor of the Chronicle, one. I want to San Francisco to become a city state, or at least a totally independent of California. I had wanted earlier to split Northern and Southern California, but the votes weren't there. But if we could have got San Francisco out and made this a city state, such as Tangier had once been or for you, Mayor, Hong Kong, Singapore, I think we would have continued as the most illustrious area the world has ever known. But unfortunately, you have this sort of peasant outlook that one does encounter at times, among the Los Angeles crowd in Sacramento, and the legislature, so we were never able to gain our independence, at least without bloodshed. The other thing I wanted to do was tear down the Embarcadero freeway because that was the beginning of the cancer that has eaten away at the city. That was the first great plastic disgrace. I don't know if I answered your question. I tried to Interviewer 13:21 what I'm trying to get at is in it 1939 1940 41. Before the war, what? Well, before it reached here, what were your personal expectations? And then how did the war change those Scott Newhall 13:36 by personal expectation Interviewer 13:38 I mean for you personally, in your life? If you were well, in 40? If I was to ask you, what are your Scott Newhall 13:43 Well, alright, my ambition in 1935 was to get a job, my ambition in 1936 while I took a year off and started around the world in a small boat, but that's another story. My ambition in 1937 or eight was to hold a job. And therefore my ambition in 1939 was to hold a job and perhaps earn more money in the years ahead of pleasant living in a delightful city. I'd never looked at far ahead, I some people perhaps do start out the beasts I got into the newspaper business. I've been in it since 35. Through 71. I went into the newspaper business, I needed the job, but mostly because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And you're I think asked me what was it I wanted to do? Well, I am still in newspaper business in the south at the moment with my own little paper. And I still don't know what I want to do. But I will find out someday because I went into the newspaper business because I figured that in the newspaper business. You meet people from every other walk of life and you will find something challenging and something meaningful, which is the word they use now. And I'm still waiting. I have found the newspaper business to be very challenging, very challenging and very meaningful. And I can't answer your question anymore. Now I just wanted to keep doing what I was doing. And perhaps do it even better, or in a more exciting way because it was the best business in the world and the best city in the world. Interviewer 15:15 How did the war change that? Scott Newhall 15:18 Well, there's a lot of new people in the city. So there's no room for an old guy like me. Interviewer 15:24 Okay. Scott Newhall 15:26 I'll come back. I ran for mayor, you know, it was the most disastrous political campaign in the history of San Francisco. I paid more than $10.50 per vote, and I got fewer votes than anyone, including George McGovern. McGovern got. Interviewer 15:43 Was he running for mayor? Scott Newhall 15:44 No, but we got about as many votes as I did when he ran for the President. And so they asked me again, when it was all over, and channel 4 your good people came to interview each one of the candidates and they said, Well, now, now that you've lost the race, Mr. Newhall, what about this? What are you going to do? I said, Well, just a minute, I'll have lost the race. I won. I began sort of kidding along that way. And suddenly some frightened person who was interviewing me said, Oh, by the way, we better announced that this is a Mr. Newhall did not really win. I said, Well, of course I won. So what do you mean by so they don't have to serve a term up in the office. And when I come back in 10 years, I'll be king. So that was the end of it, and I didn't ever come back to be king. That's still a year or two ahead. Interviewer 16:30 Okay, let me just look back over. What I wanted to ask you about what's the UN Charter signing? And what that did to Scott Newhall 16:41 keep it down to a minute. Interviewer 16:43 Okay. Scott Newhall 16:46 Well, you've asked me about the signing of the United Nations Charter here in San Francisco in 1945, which is I'm delighted you asked that because I had covered that personally, along with about 15 other guys at the Chronicle who was the biggest story that ever hit this city. And as far as we were concerned, we were the local paper. It was, I think, a moment of greatness, a moment of sublimity for San Francisco. And I, all the heads of all the nations in the world gathered here. And thank God, they came to San Francisco and not in New York, because this was a perfect place, at least among American cities, to hold this at charter assembly. I had felt very strongly that if it were to be if the United Nations were to be located from then on in San Francisco, in the United States, if it were to be located in the United States, and were to have a chance of survival in any serious manner, any serious employee with any serious implications, they should keep it here in San Francisco because I thought this would be a marvelous thing for San Francisco. We have the whole procedure to here as you know, the old what is it? Eight, the Ninth Army core areas is obsolete as it can be. Some people wanted to turn the procedural into homes or something, which we were very strongly against. If we could have had the United station, United Nations Headquarters. |
01:18:14 1094.37 |
End Interview - Scott Newhall, part 3
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01:18:17 1097 |
End Reel.
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211 Third St, Greenport NY, 11944
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