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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In spring 1961, two establishments opened in San Francisco.
One was a hotel bar on Geary Street. The other was a lunch spot and cocktail lounge on Maiden Lane.
Both were less than two blocks from Union Square.
One was created by a designer who went on to be celebrated in the pages of the Architectural Digest. It had an "Emperor Norton" doorman. And, per Herb Caen, it once was host to Jack Dempsey and Lefty O'Doul — sharing a bowl of peanuts on the same night.
The other was home to a new portrait of the Emperor commissioned by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Both were called the Emperor Norton Room.
Here’s the intriguing story of two Nortonian stars that briefly rose and just as quickly fell in the same San Francisco season.
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Did you know that the longstanding call to name the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton traces part of its pedigree to legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen?
Exactly 70 years ago — in what may be some of the earliest published statements of the idea that a San Francisco Bay-spanning bridge should bear the name of the Emperor — Caen, with some persistence, called for a planned "second Bay Bridge" to be named the "Norton Bridge."
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In a brief article last year, veteran San Francisco journalist Lynn Ludlow offered a fascinating, erudite and thought-provoking account of why early Herb Caen had it all wrong on "Frisco."
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Herb Caen had his reason's for not liking "Frisco." But perhaps they had very little to do with Emperor Norton.
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