Chronicle Pickings

Over the years, when I go to the Bay Area I try to make time to spin the Chronicle microfilm to check out the listings. Corry has done some of this as well, and I don’t think he’ll mind me aggregating a sense of what we have accomplished together.

It is relatively painstaking, of course, though after awhile you learn that the weekday entertainment stuff comes along after the classifieds (which you can train your eyes to detect moving by at fast speed), after the day’s TV highlights. Enough hours of this, and you can spin it fast and land right where you want. I never did quite get the hang of the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle in the same way, but now that it’s been digitized that’s no longer of any moment, and the overall progress is faster. That said, the SFE being digitized also decreases the marginal benefits of hitting the Chron.

Yesterday I did 10/16/68-12/31/68, and 3/16/69-5/31/69 (less 5/1-15/69, which I seem to have overlooked). This took almost exactly two hours. I didn’t discover anything totally new in the Garciaverse. It’s not that frustrating, it’s what I expected given that the SFE and the SFC should have covered much of the same ground, especially with a name as big as Jerry’s.

So, below I report what we have covered at some level (Corry mostly captured the Ad Libs in Gleason’s columns, I have done those and the Datebook openings) and what we mare missing.

Caveat Lector:

• The data are fragmentary in two senses. First, early years especially just snapshot Gleason’s Ad Libs – no Datebooks etc. Second, for a time I was trying to get every day, with an eye toward the needs of future researchers (and realizing that it could all be surpassed if the paper is ever digitized, which I hope it is). But the last few visits I just can’t justify it to myself. So I look at every listing, but I only capture it if something catches my eye. Unevenly, this can be the Fillmore Tuesday auditions, Matrix gigs, anyone who touches the Garciaverse, other weirdness that seems noteworthy. So even what we have might be quite incomplete when it comes to what other researchers might be looking for.
• Also, I am basically comfortable stopping in the mid-to-late 70s. As the Garcia Band drifts into predictability and comfort, and our existing knowledge presumably becomes more complete, I have less inclination to search for needles in haystacks.

So, here is where we are with the Chronicle: