-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Golden Gate Bridge 50th Anniversary Radio Broadcasts
- Thread starter MasterDJ
- Start date
Why does it seem like all the *really* fun things in SF happened 30+ years ago?
The Bay Area nowadays seems to me to be quite dull by comparison, and is becoming a strangely bifurcated society where a majority of people are either very wealthy or very not, with a rather small and increasingly struggling middle class lingering in between.
c
The Bay Area nowadays seems to me to be quite dull by comparison, and is becoming a strangely bifurcated society where a majority of people are either very wealthy or very not, with a rather small and increasingly struggling middle class lingering in between.
c
I mean, yes and no.
Patty Hearst's kidnapping, the Zodiac killer, the murder of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk...
Things were so crazy-bad in the 70s, that one morning, driving into SF from Ukiah, having just listened to the news on the radio, I asked the toll-taker at the Golden Gate Bridge if he shouldn't be charging people to get out.
That's just shy of 50 years ago.
The city runs in cycles, probably more than any city I've ever known.
It's always been expensive. When I was paying $135 a month for a one bedroom in Ukiah, a studio in SF was going for $600. Adjusted for inflation, that's $3,300.
Bill Lee did an interview with a Swedish journalist about American radio back in 1984. At that time, he said you needed "at least $50,000 a year" to live in SF comfortably.
By sheer coincidence, I was in town from NYC for a computer conference the night of the Moscone-Milk murders. I don't think I'd seen a big city as shaken up since RFK was killed. (And at that time, Bobby was our senator.)
I could take issue with that statement: "FORD TO NYC: DROP DEAD" (NY Daily News headline, circa 1975) San Francisco seemed like a paradise by comparison on every trip.
Wasn't this just a short time after John Mac Flanagan threatened to quit KFRC because every jock except DDR was making $37K/yr? (And then he did quit shortly thereafter, claiming KFRC's improved offer was "insulting".) This seemed to be an ongoing problem with RKO General (also Bill Lee's employer), regardless of the market. Just ask any of the multitudes that cycled through WOR-FM in those days.
Also, it didn't take a particularly long drive or BART ride to get to a suburb where a comfortable lifestyle could be had for significantly less than $50K/yr. And IIRC, Bill was living in one of those suburbs at the time. (Lafayette, Concord, Walnut Creek, somewhere east of the Caldecott Tunnels.)
Here is one of the news clips from the Golden Gate Bridge from 1987.
The Jonestown murders were the week before; the city was already shaken up when the murders at City Hall happened - plus the tensions between Dan White and Harvey Milk had very clearly been building up.
That wouldn't be the case any more. You'd have to go farther east, and it would be either an hour-long BART ride or 90 minutes on the freeways.
I worked downtown for almost 20 years and got to see those cycles up close. Downtown SF, at least, seems to be deader than it's ever been. But the outer neighborhoods seem to be thriving and residential real estate is as expensive as ever. I saw the same phenomenon in Portland when I was working there; in fact, the contrast between downtown Portland and the neighborhoods was even sharper. Denver is seeing much the same thing. It's largely due to central business district office vacancies.
There was one good thing that came out of the Harvey Milk incident" It put Diane Feinstein on the national map!
The obituaries for Dianne Feinstein made it clear that she was acutely aware of what was going on in the city, and cared a lot about it, even well after she became a senator.
In 1981 I was offered a manager's position in San Jose for a prosperous Spanish language station. It paid $120,000 along with a car allowance and a couple of other perks. I spent the next two days after the interview driving around the South Bay area and found that my standard of living would be significantly reduced from what I was making (about 35% less) in Puerto Rico... a place with a very high cost of living.
I ended up taking half that offered amount as a GM in Miami and ended up living better than before in South Florida, even with the mosquitos and gators.
It is pretty, but I can think of a variety of other beautiful ones such as Santiago, Chile, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Lisbon, Portugal and, of course, Rome and Athens. Add in Cape Town, Sydney, too.
Here is a TV Special on the Golden Gate Bridge 50th Anniversary KPIX aired in 1987.
I've lived and worked there and wouldn't again, even though it was fun, it was very hard to get ahead and housing was/is way overpriced for what you get unless you go way East like @Mark Roberts said. Though I was really surprised at how modest Steve Jobs old house was in Palo Alto:
Steve Jobs' House, Palo Alto, eventseeker
This quaint Tudor-style house was home to the iconic entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs. Jobs led a quiet family life in this sleepy Palo
www.eventseeker.com
I think this is overstating it. And, yes, I moved last year to Denver, motivated by multiple concerns, particularly wildfire and earthquake risks. It's been a good move. Even so, I don't regret the almost quarter-century I lived in San Francisco and Oakland. The first decade was especially good (though the radio dial was becoming increasingly bland and sanitized). I especially enjoyed the two years I lived in the Castro, though the apartment I had was rather crappy. The solution to that problem was to go out and do things and get to know the whole city. Then we moved to Oakland (already in 2000 we were priced out of SF) and got to experience Oakland's revival during that time. Then there was the 2008 financial crash which suffocated business activity for a couple of years. After that, there was the recovery led by the tech companies and cheap money pouring into various start-ups. Too much money was sloshing around and a few people got quite rich. If they would have shut up about it, things would have been fine, but they started poking their noses into various public endeavors with some promoting a "libertarian" ideology that amounted to pure selfishness. The financial services industry that had been so much a part of San Francisco largely moved away to less expensive locations. Local politics, already quite intense, became increasingly dominated by fractious advocacy groups working at cross-purposes and drowning out the voices of everyday citizens. The aftermath of the pandemic exposed all these tensions. Yet the neighborhoods are still vibrant, the cultural activities continue to be offered by world-class institutions, and not even the liber-toon-ian rantings of tech billionaires can put a dent in the natural beauty of the place. I may have moved away, but still plan to be a frequent visitor.
PS: I do wish I had been there for the KEXC launch, but that just wasn't possible.
I missed the memo about you being a moderator. We do that kind of stuff all the time (David included) where it helps to illustrate a point.
And Zillow says the "modest" house is worth $8.91 million. It's not just because it was Steve's---there are comps all around that house that are between $7 million and $15 million.
All good intel from someone who knows.
I love San Francisco. It's fallen to 2nd place now that I've seen Paris, and my upcoming Italy trip might knock it a few rungs further down, but I love it.
Purely from the top of my head, because I've never actually lived in the Bay Area:
If I had tons of money---independent wealth---I'd live there, though probably not in the city. We love the Peninsula and Marin. There is no scenario under which I come into that kind of money, so it's just a daydream thing, but, with the resources---yeah.