In 1984, Malcolm E. Barker published his little book, Bummer and Lazarus: San Francisco’s Famous Dogs, about the free-range canine friends and ratters of the early 1860s who were so beloved that the city’s Board of Supervisors exempted them from its severe dog-culling policy — and who subsequently were immortalized in cartoons of this period by Edward Jump and others.
The book includes Barker’s finding — since widely accepted — that there is no contemporaneous evidence supporting the persistent, wishful claim that Bummer and Lazarus were Emperor Norton’s dogs — rather, that the association between the Emperor and the dogs is just another of the many later apocryphal legends attaching to the Emp.
Sometime in the 13-year period between the publication of Barker’s book and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen’s death in 1997, Caen praised the book as “a wonderful addition to the shelf of Sanfriscana.”
But, for some four decades in the mid 20th century, Caen was among those who quietly but persistently gave oxygen to the urban myth that Emperor Norton owned Bummer and Lazarus.
Documented here are six examples from 1948 to 1985.
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There are many contemporaneous references to Emperor Norton’s associations with various people and places.
But, the Emperor was a public character. And, the accounts of his engagements with particular people mostly are accounts of conversations and sightings in public places: libraries, lecture halls, churches, saloons, parks, resorts, trains, ferries, streets.
Much rarer are eyewitness reports of Emperor Norton in more intimate settings, such as someone’s home.
Herein, a trace memoir of the Jewish friend who had the Emperor home for dinner on more than one occasion — and documentation of who the friend was.
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The Emperor Norton Treasure Hunts, produced by the San Francisco Chronicle between 1953 and 1962, loom large in modern Nortonian lore.
The central symbol and talisman of these treasure hunts is an elaborate 7” medallion. When winning competitors discovered and dug up a plastic version of this medallion, they were gifted with a keepsake bronze “original” that was struck by Shreve & Co., the legendary jeweler established in San Francisco in 1852.
But, it’s never been clear exactly what these medallions looked like — front and back — until now.
New close-up photographs of one of the original 1953 medallions is on the flip.
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When the fraternity of E Clampus Vitus sought in 1939 to place a plaque honoring Emperor Norton at the Transbay Terminal, in San Francisco, the California Toll Bridge Authority — the developer and de facto owner of the Terminal — said No.
Finally, in 1955, the plaque was installed at the Cliff House. But, a lingering question has been: What did the Clampers do to find a home for the plaque in the 16 years between 1939 and 1955?
Certainly, World War II made it difficult to push the project forward. But, even allowing for that, we’ve uncovered some news accounts suggesting that there was more behind-the-scenes activity than previously thought.
It appears that the Clampers continued to make appeals to the Bridge Authority for at least 18 months in 1939 and 1940.
And, the effort that resulted in getting the plaque at the Cliff House in 1955 started at least 5 years earlier, in 1950 — with several brick walls on the path to the first proper dedication.
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The Emperor Norton mural in The Pied Piper, at the Palace Hotel, in San Francisco — painted by the city’s longtime “artist laureate,” Antonio Sotomayor (1904–1985) — is one of the best-known and -loved Emperor-themed works of art.
A newly discovered art-historical survey done for the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1953 offers an elusive date for the painting — and a new way of seeing it.
Includes rarely seen photographs.
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The period of the 1950s and ‘60s was a high-water mark of the Norton Cultural Complex in San Francisco.
Probably the best-known engine of “Emperor Norton awareness” during this time was the San Francisco Chronicle’s Emperor Norton Treasure Hunt. But, there were many other Norton-related projects, too — and some of them left behind beautiful physical traces.
At least three — perhaps all four — of the Nortonian artifacts discussed here trace their origins, production and promotion to the Chronicle.
And, two of them — a medallion and a medal — are relics of a “Grand Order of the West” that remains very mysterious indeed.
Includes rarely seen photographs.
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