San Francisco is a wealthy tech haven today - but not long ago it was an apocalyptic madhouse
You've probably heard of the 'Summer of Love' in 1967.
Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor and LSD guru, spoke to the crowd, telling them to "Tune In, turn on, and drop out."
But not everybody was sure about the forces being unleashed. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg said to his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "What if we're wrong?"
As the summer ended, a lot of the temporary hippies left the city and headed back to their home towns. In October 1967, there was even a mock "funeral" for the hippie movement.
After that, things got very dark in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood where the hippies had once gathered. There were riots, boarded up storefronts, and sidewalks filled with aggressive junkies and tweakers.
Talbot writes, "As the 1960s drew to an end, and America's pain intensified, more and more of the suffering washed up in the Haight. Runaways who could never go home, strung-out Vietnam vets, draft dodgers terrified of what awaited them when they were caught, teenagers sickened by what loomed ahead of them in adult America....
"Life in the Haight got more violent and disturbing. The drugs got harder. By 1971, 15 percent of the servicemen returning from Vietnam were addicted to heroin. Smack and speed began to shove aside psychedelics."
The figures populating the counterculture got stranger and darker to match the times, too. For instance, there was Anton LaVey, leader of the self-styled Church of Satan, who performed bizarre rituals in an old black-painted Victorian mansion.
One of the young runaways who fell into LaVey's orbit and acted in his "Witches Sabbath" show was a woman named Susan Atkins.
But while LaVey always had a carnival air about him, "Susan felt something deeper. She liked the way the gaudy ritual made her feel each night; she liked her wicked role's power to shock and excite," Talbot writes.
She later fell in with a 32-year-old ex-con who had just been released from prison. His name was Charles Manson.
Atkins followed Manson to Los Angeles, where she joined the so-called "Manson Family." In August 1969, the group murdered actress Sharon Tate and several others in their homes. Atkins died in prison in 2009. Manson is still imprisoned in San Quentin, a few miles north of the city.
Meanwhile, San Francisco descended into chaos. The city was rocked by a series of bombings, including a bomb left in a box of See's candy outside the home of mayor Joseph Alioto.
You've probably heard of the mysterious Zodiac killer, a serial killer who murdered at least 5 and possibly as many as 28 people in and around San Francisco in the early 1970s.
The killer sent taunting notes filled with "clues" to police and newspapers. Police never caught the killer.
But you probably haven't heard of the Zebra killings, which were much more terrifying to San Francisco residents. In 1973 and 1974, a group of fanatic black Muslims committed 15 murders and 8 attempted murders. According to Talbot, they were specifically targeting white people, who they saw as "devils."
Talbot writes, "They were on the lookout for white children, because killing women and kids was the quickest way to become a Death Angel. [Jesse Lee] Cooks, who as a boy had tried to smother his dozing mother with a pillow, had particularly savage fantasies about white kids, telling his Muslim brotehrs that he wanted to pick them up and smash their brains out against a wall."
While the murder spree was going on, the entire city grew afraid to walk outside at night. Racial tension rose to a peak, as the police fielded protests from civil rights groups and anonymous calls from white people promising to kill blacks in revenge.
Finally, the killers were picked up in May 1974.
On February 4, 1974, a group of radicals calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
The radicals broke into the Berkeley apartment Hearst shared with her boyfriend, Steven Weed, "dragged her down the building's concrete stairs in her bathrobe, smashed her in the face with a rifle butt, and stuffed her in the trunk of a car," writes Talbot.
They kept her blindfolded for weeks in a house in the town of Daly City, just south of San Francisco. But nobody would have guessed what was going to happen next...
On April 15, the SLA robbed a bank in San Francisco's Sunset District. Hearst joined them, announcing herself under her group name, "Tania," and shouting orders to victims during the robbery.
Hearst was eventually captured and sentenced to seven years in jail for her participation in the robbery. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979 after two years served.
In December 1975, George Moscone (right) was elected mayor, winning a narrow victory over conservative John Barbagelata. One of his most important constituencies was a largely African American church in San Francisco's Fillmore neighborhood, led by a charismatic preacher named Jim Jones (left). At one time, the church had as many as 3,000 congregants.
"The two institutions that were most helpful in getting George elected were the Delancey Street Foundation and the Peoples Temple," Moscone's right-hand man Richard Sklar later told Talbot for the book. "They each put hundreds of bodies on the street during the campaign."
But disturbing reports were starting to emerge about Jones. Two defectors told the city district attorney that he was a "violent, drug-crazed despot."
"They accused him of ordering the murders of disaffected members and subjecting others to savage beatings, including their sixteen-year-old daughter, who was whipped so severely, 'her butt looked like hamburger,'" Talbot writes.
But Jones had some sort of sway over the mayor, and Moscone eventually named him the chief of the San Francisco Housing Authority, which runs the city's public housing projects. Jones quickly turned it into a power center.
"Jones swept into the normally tedious meetings of the housing commission like a banana republic despot, surrounded by an entourage of aides and grim-faced security guards," writes Talbot. "Looking stern and inscrutable behind his aviator sunglasses, Jones ran the meetings with scripted precision while sipping a frothy white drink brought to him by a hovering retainer. The audience, packed with elderly black temple worshippers, erupted into wild cheers at his most routine pronouncements."
Eventually, word spread about Jones' dictatorial hold over Peoples Temple members, and journalists and the authorities started to take a closer look. So Jones and more than 900 of his followers fled the city and set up a camp called "Jonestown" in the jungles of Guyana in South America.
Jones grew more and more paranoid. As word of his cult reached back to the states, US Representative Leo Ryan traveled to Jonestown on a fact finding mission. On November 18, 1978, as Ryan boarded his plane home, Jones' men opened fire, killing him and several members of his entourage.
Then, Jones ordered the entire camp to drink poison. Children were told to go first. The camp was surrounded by armed guards who shot anyone who tried to escape. More than 900 people died that day. Jones committed suicide as well.
Jones taped his last sermon. On the recording, you can hear a woman named Christine Miller stand up to him and try to convince him not to go through with his plan. She did not prevail.
A side note: The drink they mixed the poison into was Flavor Aid, according to Talbot's book, not Kool-Aid.
Meanwhile back in San Francisco, there was more madness in store. A year before, in November 1977, the city had elected gay rights activist Harvey Milk to the board of supervisors — San Francisco's city council.
Milk (on the left here, with mayor Moscone) was already known as the "Mayor of Castro Street" for his role in organizing and protecting the gay community there.
"I had been bullied all through my childhood, and I hated straight people out of fear," Milk's political protege Cleve Jones told Talbot for the book. "But to see him fearlessly crossing all these boundaries, going into union halls and all these ethnic and racial communities–it made us all braver."
But Milk often sparred with fellow supervisor Dan White, an ex-cop who Milk thought was a closet homosexual, according to Talbot's book. On November 10, 1978, White surprised everybody by stepping down from the board.
But a few days later, on November 27 — just 9 days after the Jonestown massacre — White was back in City Hall. This time, he was carrying a gun. He walked into the mayor's office and shot Moscone.
Once the mayor was down, White "stood over the mayor's body like an executioner, and, sticking the barrel of his gun almost directly against his victim's ear, pumped two more exploding bullets into Moscone's brain," Talbot writes.
Next, White walked into Milk's office and asked him to come into White's old office. There, he closed the door and started screaming at him. "Why do you want to hurt my name, my family?" Then he shot Milk five times at point blank range.
The president of the board of supervisors, Dianne Feinstein, had heard gunshots and thought White had killed himself. When she got there, she saw Milk and felt for a pulse. "Her finger slipped into a bullet hole, and was coated with blood and slime when she pulled it out."
Feinstein was quickly sworn in as mayor.
She presided over the city for 10 years, then became a U.S. Senator in 1992. She still serves in the Senate today.
There's a lot of other amazing history in "Season of the Witch" as well, including current SF Mayor Ed Lee's history as a tenants rights organizer in a Chinatown public housing project, a hookers' liberation group created by Margo St. James, the rise of the Mitchell Brothers as the city's preeminent sex club proprietors, and the scourge of AIDS that hit San Francisco harder than almost any other city in the 1980s.
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