Ghost of Politics Past

"It was good to see him, and I gave him my telephone number, and told him to contact me. He wasn't in any place where I could contact him. I said, 'You contact me.' And he never did," Herbert Bass Sr. says. "From what I could understand from his sister, he was going from San Francisco to New York all the time. Like I said, I didn't know where he worked, or where he was getting money to do that. But flying from one coast to the next, that takes a little money, and I don't care how you travel. He had friends or something that were helping him. The only thing I could figure is he had a job somewhere. Where, I don't know. I just happened to know he was an activist as far as political things.

"He was into politics, trying to make things better."

And perhaps he was, in an ambiguous, peculiar, San Francisco kind of way. That is what I like to think, anyway, even though I probably will never know for sure.