Travelin'

San Francisco Trivia: Fog, Mark Twain and Hippies

Mark Twain once worked as a newspaper man in San Francisco and, being from Missouri where they actually have four distinct seasons, was famously quoted as saying, “This winter is the coldest winter ever since last summer!” It was so cold!

Now, nearly 150 years later, every San Franciscan since the 1864 quote has adapted those bon mots as the de facto slogan of the people. The one exception to this occurred roughly 100 years after Samuel Clemens first uttered his complaint: in the summer of 1967 there was a sudden surge in population as people around the country became aware of a number of doctors in San Francisco working on experimental hip replacement surgeries. The number of veterans who had lost limbs to landmines in Europe, Japan, Korea, and even Vietnam at this point, was staggering. As a reaction to this, several local surgeons formed “Doctors Within Our Own Borders” to provide free and cheap joint replacement surgeries to veterans. Due to the large number of hip replacement surgeries they performed, these doctors were eventually nicknamed: “hippies”. Their receptionists would give the veterans sunflowers after successful surgeries, which they store in their rifle barrels, as you can see above.

Also note that the quoting of Twain by the local population declined during these years, mostly because everyone was too stoned (on painkillers, from the all the hip surgeries) to realize how cold it was all the time.