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On March 20, I crossed seven years of writing this little newsletter, and it’s been one of the best journalism experiences ever. I missed the anniversary initially, but hey, it’s a holiday today, so why not write about it?

Per Reddit, a seven year anniversary symbolizes a “durable, warm, and comfortable relationship,” and a year of renewal, encouraging a deeper connection.

Sounds good to me!

I started this project while still at USA TODAY, when I interviewed the young co-founder of a new platform that promised to make it easier and way less costly for writers to reach out directly to readers. His name was Hamish McKenzie, and the platform is Substack. (USA TODAY being USA TODAY, the article seems to have disappeared, so I can’t share it with you!)

Before Substack, I had experimented with Mailchimp and Constant Contact, e-mail platforms that charged a good deal to use, with escalating prices depending upon how many people you reached. Their software was clunky, and just composing a post could take hours.

Then I found Subtack, the easiest, most user friendly program I’d encountered—and that was before they added audio and video tools and urged us all to go live as often as possible—and bug people to pay to support you. (And did I mention it’s free to use?)

You open a page, compose a headline, write some words, throw in a photo or two and with that, you could click send and reach your list immediately.

Spend some more time to add A/V tools, plug it on their Notes social platform, which has replaced Twitter for me as a place to throw out and share quick thoughts and yeah, it’s still 100% free. (Speaking from my perch as a writer.)

I worked at what was once the largest newspaper in the nation for three decades and rarely heard from readers. (Publicists yes. Readers not so much. Only on Twitter. And usually to complain about something disagreed with in an article.)

But on Substack, I’ve developed this large group of fans who I do hear from all the time, and I love it. When you write in a vacuum, you want feedback, good and negative.

(Look at all the former legacy media journalists who have since built a career on Subtack, like Chris Cillizza, Jim Acosta and Chris Matthews, just to name a handful. Bari Weiss left the New York Times, founded a Substack called the Free Press and ended up selling it to Skydance Paramount for $150 million. If interested, I’d be happy to offer my wares for only $1 million. Just sayin.’)

I started my little newsletter while still at USA TODAY, as an adjunct to the Saturday column I wrote there, a way of showing off my beach sunrise and sunset photos.

What I said at the time: “I’d love to share my latest videos, photos and musings more often. Up for it? You won’t have to go to Facebook and Twitter daily to see them.”

I still do Facebook, haven’t posted on the former Twitter since Elon Musk took it over and now have a “newsletter first” policy on posting. You readers have top priority.

As for those pier photos, after I left my longtime job in 2021, I started traveling a lot more for Photowalks, and wanted to expand my photography beyond the same Manhattan Beach images I was photographing all the time. (Do you blame me?)

So hello Route 66, New York, Savannah, Monument Valley, Catalina, Atlanta, et. al. And yes, every shot seen below was shot on an iPhone. (Questions? I’m all ears.)

I’ve developed here what I think is a nice rhythm of tech meets photo meets travel posts on Saturday, and travel photo ones on Sunday, usually alerting you to the latest Photowalks episode as well.

Is that what you want? Anniversary time is a great opportunity to fill me in.

I know you always want more photo tips, more intelligence on new mobile photo/video gear and apps, as well as my hot takes—right?

Here’s your chance to tell me directly about what you like and don’t like: Survey Says: https://www.jeffersongraham.com/survey/6712045

Listen to my interview with fellow Substacker Simon Owens on life post USA TODAY: Newsletter, YouTube channel and TV.

Stats

Most of my newsletter readers live in California, followed by New York, Illinois, Florida and Ohio.

Eighty-seven percent live in the United States, followed by Canada, United Kingdom, India and Morocco. Morocco? Really? Please raise your hand. I want to hear from you.

We have been to 33 states so far to film episodes of Photowalks, with a goal of hitting 50 sometime in the next two years.

(The remaining 17: Alaska, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, W. Virginia, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Wisconsin.)

Good news: we’ll hit five of those in the second half of the year, getting the list to 38.

Most desired place to visit? Most travel bloggers would cite an exotic country. I like where we live, and my choice is the Mississippi Delta. And Memphis. As you’ve probably surmised, I love music.

Next stops: Bakersfield, followed by Las Vegas, Paris, Torino, the Indiana and Kentucky backroads, Juneau and Fairbanks, Alaska.

Latest stop—idyllic St. Augustine, Florida.

Help Me Celebrate!

Now’s a great time to watch the latest episode of Photowalks, from the aforementioned St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in the United States and the one that has trademarked this phrase: “The Most Photogenic City.”

Truth or fiction? Tune in to find out.

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Thanks again to everyone for sticking with me through the years, and reading, watching and listening.

Jeff

The headline in the L.A. Times grabbed my attention: “California Governor Race Wide Open.”

This follows an announcement this week from California Sen. Alex Padilla that he won’t run for the post. Former presidential candidate Kamala Harris made a similar declaration a few weeks ago.

Well, if this is a job that few quality people apparently want, why don…

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How many times have you heard people say yes to this, whether it be watching “Citizen Kane,” and deciding to go to film school, or switching motifs, listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” and having a different outlook on life?

But in this case, for me, the tiny, controversial and little seen 1982 film “White Dog” from cult director Sam Fuller really did change my life. It played a pivotal role in landing me a new higher paying job, which in turn led to a greater one and a multi-decade career at a once proud institution. It got us our first house and a new car. And without “White Dog,” there’s no Photowalks.

I’m not kidding. This is all for real. Read on.

It’s 1984, and I’m 2.5 years into what was my dream vocation: serving as the “Cable TV/Home Video” editor of the Hollywood Reporter, a then tiny newspaper with just 15,000 readers, but each one of them seemingly a VIP.

Our audience was the Hollywood studios and production companies. We competed neck and neck with the dominant Hollywood trade paper, Variety and my beat was obviously the cable TV channels like HBO and Showtime, as seen through the prism of the studios, and their home video divisions.

Meanwhile, I had a friend named Jerry Harvey who ran programming for the Z Channel, an out of the ordinary Los Angeles based movie channel that was basically an art house cinema showing classics and foreign films, along with recent hits. We were initially friends of convenience. He wanted press, I wanted inside dirt on what was going on re my beat. But we did end up spending a lot of time together. We had breakfast together at least once a week at a now defunct diner in West Los Angeles and once had dinner at Guido’s on Sawtelle Blvd., which just closed this year after 45 years in business.)

Z “presented an astonishingly eclectic array of fare to its subscribers, from mega-hits like Star Wars to obscure classics by directors like Kurosawa, Fellini, Antonioni, Peckinpah, and others,” per Amazon, in its review of a documentary made about Jerry and the Z Channel several years back.

Jerry was a tiny fish in a huge pond, and was constantly dreaming up ways to bring attention to his little channel. He has been described as a “film obsessive” and was. He probably called me every day, to the point of annoyance. But he always had a tip or two, and I appreciated it. (He was also mentally ill, which the world would discover when he murdered his wife Deri and took his own life as well.)

Jerry was especially keen on the great directors and one of those was Fuller, who helmed 1950s and 60s cult classics like “Pickup on South Street,” which has been cited by Martin Scorcese and Quentin Tarantino as influential and Shock Corridor. (I used to write articles for the Z program guide magazine that was sent to subscribers.)

Jerry got word that Fuller’s barely released film “White Dog, “ originally intended to play on cable TV outlets like HBO, Showtime and yes, Z, after a one-week only theatrical run in just one city had been pulled, and was headed instead to NBC for broadcast during the February sweeps, unbelievable as this seems today.

Can you imagine NBC even daring to show this today?

The film is about a dog that had been trained to attack and kill black people and the heroine’s (Kristy McNichol) attempt to reform the dog. It was actually based on a true story, and billed as a statement from Fuller about racism, who argued that this was something that is taught, not natural. I’ve never seen the film, as the premise is so stomach churning I don’t think I’d be able to sit through it.

However the directors Scorcese and Tarantino and critics have both praised White Dog as a masterpiece. “This terrific movie is even more remarkable than the travails it suffered on the road to recognition,” wrote the critic J. Hoberman.

Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate.

(If you’re hoping to view “White Dog,” good luck. It’s not currently available on any of the streaming services, even as a nightly rental. The film’s trailer and a few clips are on YouTube and it was released on DVD by Criterion Collection several years back, but those aren’t currently available for sale either. (You can find the DVD on eBay for around $50.) In its write-up, Criterion referred to the “misunderstood” film as “a tragic portrait of the evil done by that most corruptible of animals: the human being.”

Meanwhile, a scoop is a scoop, and I was happy to run with Harvey’s tip, as the lead story (the “banner” as we called them back then) for THR, circa January 16, 1984.

The story was reported on a Friday, and published the following Monday.

Later that day, I got a call out of the blue from a man named Jack Reilly, who was then the executive producer of the TV show “Entertainment Tonight,” asking if I’d like to have my salary doubled and come work in TV, as an off-air reporter, which he billed as a writing position. He wanted to meet me that day, after work, at the late Brown Derby (then still in operation) to discuss.

We indeed met, and he outlined what his expectations were: shoe-leather reporting, scoops, that sort of stuff. The next day my co-worker and longtime pal Henry Schipper looked up what Writer’s Guild scale was for a writing position. Back then, it was in the $100,000 range, (probably worth like $300K today) and we jumped up and down in joy. This was four times what I was earning at THR.

What we didn’t know was that this whole encounter came courtesy of my “White Dog” scoop. Reilly didn’t let on.

So later that day, when the offer came in from Reilly for a seemingly paltry $35,000 for the first 13 weeks, which could grow after the first period was over, I was understandably let down.

But I took the gig anyway. THR had recently had a recent management change, the new editor was an idiot, and doing something new seemed exciting. I handed in my two weeks notice.

It wasn’t until several months later that I learned why I had gotten there in the first place.

While reporting the story, I had called Paramount for comment. Specifically, I was reaching out to Richard Frank, who was the head of Paramount TV, which owns ET and was the distributor of “White Dog.” In fact, I had left 16 messages for him that day.

He declined comment, but said to his underlings, “We need someone like that at ET.” He told Reilly to call and hire me. (Frank later recounted this story to me after I had moved on from ET.)

So a new job, a new (slight raise from what I was getting) and eventually a mortgage to buy our first house in West Los Angeles. All thanks to “White Dog.”

(Postscript: NBC eventually backtracked on running White Dog at all, saying it would be “inappropriate.” )

Meanwhile, that’s the good part. The bad: Reilly made a bunch of promises about what my reporting job would be like, (including doubling my salary!) but once I quit THR and joined ET, none of what he said turned out to be true, and he saddled me with a person to report to who was mad that I was hired—and not her pick.

My 13 weeks there were pretty miserable. I had been the king of my beat at the Hollywood Reporter, a very prominent person at a widely read paper, but at ET I was one of many, extremely low on the roster, with very little to contribute except casting news. If I could even get one-sentence on the air in a show, that was considered a miracle. I wrote questions for the reporters to ask in interviews, and considered that demeaning. For the money they were making, they didn’t know how to do an interview?

The saving grace was that I got to share a room with three of the best: the movie historian legend Leonard Maltin, critic Pete Hammond, and Doug Herzog, who would go on to become the head of Comedy Central.

During this time, I also started free-lancing for a then new newspaper called USA TODAY, thanks to a woman named Susan Spillman, with whom my wife Ruth was working with at Advertising Age, a trade paper for Madison Avenue. She had told me that her boyfriend at the time, who was the TV editor, was looking for people to contribute.

And from there, I was able to parlay the freelance writing into a full-time job. The editors there seemed to be very impressed to getting a hire to cover movies and TV directly from—none other than “Entertainment Tonight. “

And so once again, thank you “White Dog. “

And Susan Spillman, Rich Frank and Jerry Harvey!

I can also tie “White Dog” to “Photowalks,” and add a key phone call and a friendship that I kept active. Want to read more about it? Just say the word.

Meanwhile, is there a movie or event that changed your life and got you a career? I’d love to hear all about it!

Thanks for taking the time to read these stories.

Jeff

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I am so lucky that my uber-talented brother Jez (as well as my pal Paul Ellis) contributes original music to the Photowalks soundtracks. Where would Photowalks be without them?

I’m venturing that most people never give it a second thought—oh, there’s some melody in the background, underneath a voice narration, so I wanted to bring it to your attention.

I pulled 13 of Jez’s best compositions and pulled them into a 40-minute YouTube compliation for your musical listening pleasure. And he put the songs onto a soundtrack album that’s available for sale at Bandcamp. Please give it a listen!

For Photowalks I need background music to augment the voiceover, as I noted, and make it sound less flat, plus the melodies also bring style to images that you see on the screen. Imagine a Photowalks episode without music?

It’s not as drastic as a movie like “Jaws” or “Psycho” without the soundtrack—as music is the co-star of films like that, but it really adds so much to my little show. Especially when the music is as great as what I get from my brother and Paul.

I ask you to consider this: most music that you hear on original YouTube videos are “royalty-free,” crappy, either very generic, bland or AI created concoctions that are rented from companies like Epidemic Sound and Artlist via a monthly subscription.

Music 101: You can’t just grab any song you like and put it in your video. That’s a violation of copyright laws. So the options are to subscribe to a royalty free music service and hope for the best or get original music for your production.

YouTube has a “free” music section, mostly drek, but there is some decent stuff in there. I like a group called TrackTribe. Yet the music is only for use on YouTube—so that knocks out Facebook and Instagram. The music from sites like Epidemic and Artlist are for all social media.

And there’s my problem. When I accessed some of the songs from all three of these locations earlier in Photowalks’ life, and then got the show on Amazon Prime Video and later Scripps News, I had to wipe the soundtracks and start all over again, replacing them with music I had rights to for online, streaming and broadcast.

Which brings me back to my brother. He sits down at the keyboard and creates original compositions on the spot, records them into his computer and dashes them off to me. They are emmintley hummable, melodic and fit perfectly with the whole “on the road” vibe of the show, with a twist. When’s the last time you heard solo piano on a travel show? My guess is never, and I just don’t think there’s anything cooler. (He also augments with other instruments on some tracks and also plays with other people, including Victor Bisetti and our cousin Peter Grant.)

Jez has been playing the piano since around age 10, inspired by Elton John, Leon Russell and Chico Marx (yes, Chico) and he went on to carve a career in the Atlanta area playing in bands and leading combos at clubs and concert facilities. But it’s on solo piano where he really shines, and he now performs most days at the Atlanta airport, in the perfect gig. Show up, sit at the piano, play some songs, get paid.

We grew up together in idyllic New York City, where we spent most waking hours listening to show tunes as kids, before we transitioned to rock and roll. Most weekends we headed over to the Fillmore East (I had free tickets, courtesy of a great neighbor) to hear the likes of Elton John, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, the Jeff Beck Group, Traffic, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Who and Jimi Hendrix perform. We saw the Rolling Stones and Hendrix at Madison Square Garden and the Who (again) at Lincoln Center.

We went to Marx Brothers movie revivals in New York at the Thalia, and ordered ice creams together at Carvel and grilled cheese sandwiches at Stanley’s Diner in New Milford, CT., near where my parents had a “weekend” home. (Jez actually grew up, food wise, unlike his older brother.) He posed for me in the city and country as I started figuring my way around a Pentax Spotmatic. And even on vacation in Puerto Rico.

(We also have a sister from my father’s second marriage, Lily.)

Jez eventually moved south, banking on there being more work for a musician in Atlanta—and he was right. He built a wonderful family with Mindy and kids Janna and Bill and is the happiest person I know. Especially when he’s behind a keyboard. (Sort of like me around an ice cream cone.)

Give a listen to the music and tell me if you don’t agree about how lucky I am to have his music on the show—and to be his brother, of course. You can read more about him at his website, http://www.jezgraham.com

Thanks for giving this all a read and listen and if you’re hungry for more, catch the interview I did with Jez about his music, directly below.

People ask, you do a travel show; your dad did one too. Are you following in his footsteps, keeping the family business alive?

What did you learn from him?

The funny thing is, everything and nothing.

Did I develop my love of travel from my late father, Jerry, who back in the 1980s and 90s hosted the Bay Area Backroads TV show in San Francisco?

That would be a big no. Growing up, we as a family never traveled. I can count a handful of family trips with my parents and brother, then known as Jimmy: to Indianapolis and Hawaii to see the grandparents, an excursion to Puerto Rico and Miami, a drive into rural Pennsylvania, where uncle Hal and his family had rented a summer house. They did a trip together to L.A. once, but I didn’t participate.

That was it. Otherwise, we loaded up into the family Buick and drove from New York City to Candlewood Lake, Connecticut, where we had a vacation home that we visited all summer lomg and on many weekends.

As a proud city boy, I didn’t like leaving New York, home of self-sufficient living, where rock concerts were happening nightly. I eventually arranged with the family to just stay behind in the apartment for one summer while the rest of the family were at the lake.

So no, we didn’t travel together. We never talked travel. Ever.

I didn’t develop my love of travel until I was 21 years old, living in Marin County, where in search of great photo subjects I grew to love hopping in the car with my Pentax and photographing the backroads of those great old towns in the shadow of San Francisco, like San Anselmo, Larkspur, Novato and Petaluma. (What’s changed, right?)

My dad did join me on a shoot to Petaluma once. But trust me, he was not touring the backroads in his free time. It wasn’t his thing. He liked sticking around home, and driving to small towns in the Bay Area during the week for the job.

So what I did learn: how to write and communicate.

Jerry worked in radio, first as a writer and later as news and program director at WNEW in New York, which led to co-owning and operating a radio station in Pittsfield, Mass.

He wasn’t a good businessman (the station was constantly losing money) but he knew how to write. He would dash out daily editorials that were acclaimed (the New York Times even came up to profile him) that zipped out of his typewriter within minutes, with no time for reflection.

Like these columns all these years later. They get transferred from my brain to the computer seemingly as fast as I can think them.

Remember that my school years were ones of total boredom. I just didn’t find any of it interesting, and tuned out much of what the teachers were saying.

So when I started working at the radio station for him, I had very poor writing abilities. I couldn’t spell. I certainly couldn’t craft a sentence.

But unlike school, I found broadcasting fascinating, and dived in headfirst.

I remember him telling me to make my writing copy at the radio station for commercials conversational. (I was so bad he really shouldn’t have had been paying me to work there. But that’s another story.) And years later, when I showed him some of my early USA TODAY videos, he warned me about trying too hard to be funny, when I should just stick to the facts and offer viewers news they could use.

I now think about that every time I write an article or make a video—what will the viewer/reader get out of this? So chalk that up to my dad.

If I do anything, I somehow learned storytelling, either by, as I said, osmosis from being around Jerry Graham and watching him work, through the genes or something else that I’m just not aware of.

The apple not falling too far from the tree.

When he did his travel show, starting in the late 1980s, I was just starting my career at USA TODAY, on the TV beat, and very happy and focused on covering the world that he was working in (network TV vs. local television.) The idea of me doing my own travel show one day never popped up.

So why did I start Photowalks (which airs Sundays at 10 a.m. ET on Scripps News and on YouTube, BTW.) years later?

On a lark one day while filming an episode of my video series Talking Tech for USA TODAY, I had a camera operator with me in San Francisco, and thought it would be fun, for the heck of it, to do a piece on why I loved the Italian enclave of North Beach.

Stepping out of the tech reviewer restrictions (Ooh, here’s a cool new gadget!) and getting to interview the local cop at Caffe Triestte, a sandwich artisan at Molinari’s Deli and the long-time female bartender at one of the oldest restaurants in the city was a thrill, and a stretch.

Cut to a few years later, and while visiting our son Sam in Japan, I decided to make another travel video, just for the fun of it, from Osaka, and I loved the way it looked. The pictures seemed more impressive when collected within moving video. I got a thrill of signing out from Japan. A world traveler!

So much so, that I wanted to do more of them.

I showed the Osaka video to my friend Bill, who liked what I did, but he said it needed the twist of photo tips to make it stand out from other travel videos.

So I did just that, and people responded. So much so, I started shooting the entire show on my iPhone. And photo tips are one of the unique selling points of the Photowalks. A show that has now filmed in 24 states—and next week Michigan makes an even 25!

My dad died in 2013, five years before I started Photowalks, and I have no idea what he might have thought of the show. Rip-off? Tribute? Who knows?

He did buy me that first camera at age 13, the same year I was gifted an Epiphone guitar, two tools still being used every day since.

I look like him, I sound like him, but I do enough differently that I’d like to think I’m my own person. Still the influence, even if just by osmosis, was huge. In the long list of media influences in life, who could be bigger than your father?

As many of you know, I embarked on a project to merge some of the old Backroads footage with Photowalks, by stepping into the footsteps of places he visited back in the day. If you’ve never seen them, please check it out.

How did your father influence you? I’d love to hear all about it.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there.

P.S. From the archives: Do a video interview with Dad!

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This is part 4 of a personal history story that breaks format of the newsletter with an origin tale. Hope you enjoy the diversion.

When last we met in this series a few weeks ago I told you how two young guys quit their jobs at a used record store in Berkeley to start their own shop in San Francisco and how it was a wild success.

But two years into it, at age 23, I decided that the retail life wasn’t for me, and I wanted to break free and pursue a career in photography. I made a deal with my partner Bruce to leave, effective August 1, and continued working through the end of July 1979. (And he kept the place going for 40 years, through 2017!)

On or about June 26, I was running the cash register and manning the Recycled Records store on Haight Street with my co-worker and family friend Gary Lambert.

A woman with short curly hair and a winning smile, who I would describe as having a New York look, a grown up in a sea of hippies, upwardly mobile gay and black clients—our usual collection of customers in the Haight district, came in and asked for help.

She had just bought a new stereo and wanted advice on records to take home. She said she liked James Taylor and Carly Simon. I was happy to oblige, and walked her through the store to the appropriate sections, suggesting that if she already had Sweet Baby James, Taylor’s breakthrough, she might like his follow-up, “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon.” This was the disc with Taylor’s rendition of “You’ve Got a Friend” and other great songs like “Love Has Brought Me Around,” and “Hey Mister, that’s me on the jukebox.”

For Simon, I liked “Boys in the Trees,” her most recent album, which featured her cover of the Doobie Brothers song “You Belong to Me,” and a duet with then husband James on “Devoted to You,” a cover of the Everly Brothers classic.

Gary joined in with some recommendations as well, and the conversation turned lively and fun. We were performing for Ruth, throwing in comedy and music references, most of which probably went over her head, but she seemed to enjoy the experience.

Customers and the cash register called Gary back to the front, and I continued to walk Ruth around the store, which should have been lined with rock and roll memorabilia on the walls, but wasn’t. Because I was obsessed with photography, I had hundreds of prints that were begging to be shown, and we had these huge walls.

I walked Ruth through the photos, which also included my specialty at the time: hand-colored black and white prints. This was a process that went back to the early part of the 20th century, where artists would “tint” their photos by painting directly on the print. I would make huge 16x20 black and white prints, and with a toothpick and a tiny piece of cotton, apply oil paint to the photos. It was a slow, laborious process, but I enjoyed it. And I loved the way the final print looked. My goal was to take this and run with it, to move to L.A. and forge a new career photographing album covers for the rock bands of the 1980s.

At the time, when I wasn’t at the store, I was roaming around Marin County with my camera, taking black and white images to transform into wild color images in this pre-digital area. I would spend hours at the rent a darkroom in San Rafael making prints, and take them home to paint. I kept myself company with the great television of the day—All in the Family was my all-time favorite show, and I never missed The Rockford Files. I wanted to be Jim Rockford and live in a small trailer on the beach, like he supposedly did.

Beyond records, I was also obsessed with TV, and collected old TV Guides. I bought the first VCR when it went on sale. I watched Taxi, Laverne and Shirley, Barney Miller, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, reruns of I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners. I even thought it was cute to photograph the shows off the TV set and re-color the images with wild colors.

Ruth seemed intrigued by my explanation of the hand-coloring process, and we certainly were hitting it off, so I asked her to join me for dinner the next night. She accepted and agreed to meet at the store the next night.

However, she didn’t show up.

But Twinkies brought us back together.

At the time, I was a huge fan of terrible snack foods, from Twinkies to Suzy Qs, from Ho Hos to Ding Dongs. So much so that I had a bumper sticker, “Twinkie Power,” and for some dumb reason, I thought it would be cute to have it in our store window, along with old albums piled high. (What can I say?)

You’ll recall that a San Francisco supervisor, Dan White, killed the mayor, George Moscone, and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk in cold blood at City Hall in 1978. When he went on trial for the murders, his attorney’s claimed the “Twinkie Defense.” in May of 1979. It was the Twinkies that made him do it. (Diminished Capacity due to the all-sugar diet he was on.)

Dan White was given an ultra-light sentence.

At age 23, I wasn’t paying attention to current events, and should have known better than to have that bumper sticker in the window.

One of our neighbors let me know this as well, and smashed our window on June 28. I got a call to get into the store right way, called the Glass Repair shop, and stood outside the store at 8 a.m., awaiting their arrival.

Meanwhile, as fate would have it—our store happened to be directly in front of a bus stop. One in which young Ruth came to frequent for her ride downtown, where she was working as a secretary at radio station KKHI.

Was she surprised to see me in front of a store with a smashed window.

“Hey, what happened last night?” I said.

Caught, she apologized, said something came up, and promised to make it up to me.

“Great—how about tonight?” I said, as her bus pulled up.

Yes, she said, and started for the bus.

“No finking” I said. “Six o’clock!”

She promised. No finking.

The glass company arrived, fixed our window, I removed the bumper sticker (which I should have kept for sentimental reasons) and we opened for business, as usual, at 11 a.m.

At or around 6 p.m., Ruth showed up, in a black beret and tan trenchcoat. We left and headed to my car, a white Mazda Miser which had been purchased as a gift from my father in 1977.

The next question was where to eat. I didn’t have a place in mind. Neither did she. So we started driving.

We left the City and somehow ended up an hour away on the El Camino Real in the South Bay, by Palo Alto, where she had grown up, but we still couldn’t make a decision. So we kept driving.

She didn’t know anything about records. Or TV. But somehow, and this makes no sense, we clearly were enjoying talking to each other. We ended up in Santa Cruz, some 90 miles away from San Francisco (we must not have been very hungry) and ended up at a place called Suzanne’’s By the Sea.

I’d love to tell you what we ordered, but my memory can’t call that up, and Ruth doesn’t remember either. I can tell you there was an ocean view and the restaurant was everything you’d want: quiut, dark and romantic.

I can report that we went to the Boardwalk after dinner, went on the bumper cars, walked around, and kissed on the pier.

We drove back to the city, I dropped her off and we agreed to meet again.

We had several dates—at the bowling alley, breakfast by the sea in Tiburon and a visit to the July 4th Fair in San Rafael.

Thirty days later we were back together in the Mazda, heading up and down the coast and across the West on our first big Road Trip.

Sound familiar?

Want to hear about the journey, and what happened at the end of it? About how a budding photographer ended up shifting to a writing career and Ruth found journalism in Los Angeles as well? Just say the word and Part 5 will be delivered right to your inbox!

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(I’m breaking format again today with a personal history story—it has nothing to with photography, tech or travel, but you just might get a kick out of this third installment of the series.)

The Personal History series:

Part 1:

Part 2:

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When last we met, I told you how two young guys worked at a used record store in Berkeley and were set to strike out on th…

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A few weeks ago, I broke format and told you about how important music was to me growing u…

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I was really struck when Kamala Harris recently recalled a life of laughter and music in her childhood home.

Our family home had lots of pain, strife and arguments, but in looking back, it’s also the “laughter” and “music,” I remember more than anything else. Probably the most important aspects of growing up. Was it that way for you too?

This post isn’t …

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