![]() ![]() Self-proclaimed Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, he was also a familiar figure in the city across the bay from the seat of his realm, conducting reviews of UC Berkeley military cadets and upstaging a real-life emperor who’d come to lecture on a university stage. Take Emperor Norton for example-that genteel and majestically delusional soul and legendary San Franciscan whose funeral in 1880 drew 30,000 mourners. If, in the year 2107, someone were to write a book like Richard Schwartz’s latest effort, he could well be one of its subjects.Įccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley is a guiltless pleasure, a delightful collection of tales about some of the city’s most fascinating and wrongly forgotten characters.Ī builder by trade, Schwartz is Berkeley’s resident amateur historian, the author of two previous works of community history.Īfter his Berkeley 1900 account of the city at the dawn of a new century and Earthquake Exodus, 1906 with its account of Berkeley’s response to the Great Earthquake of 1906, Schwartz moves on to profile in words and contemporary images some of the folks who help the city’s justifiable reputation as home to some of the most colorful, cantankerous and fascinating folks on the nation’s Left Coast. ![]()
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