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<\/p>\nOn the 80th anniversary of the Golden Gate International Exposition, in 2019, the Treasure Island Museum held a symposium. There were four panelists who’d been at the world’s fair, and maybe 100 audience members devoted to the lore and romance of it, and they all leaned forward in their chairs whenever Richard Reinhardt spoke.<\/p>\n
Most were familiar with his definitive history, “Treasure Island: San Francisco’s Exposition Years,” published in 1974. But Reinhardt’s attachment to the fair was more than scholarly, as he wrote in the book’s wide-eyed opening. “When I was a boy they built an island in the center of San Francisco Bay that was the capsule of my dreams. It was a peaceable island crowned with towers and glistening with light, where boys could feast on buttered scones and fried potatoes and the world was flat.”<\/p>\n
Reinhardt was 92 at the time of the symposium, but he still had plans to update his classic with a new edition that would add color photographs. He ran out of time on that project and several others when he died on Sept. 4 at his home of 72 years on Lake Street, in the Richmond district of San Francisco. He was 99.<\/p>\n
“He didn’t have a stroke or anything. He just died of old age,” said his son, Andy Reinhardt, a retired Chronicle editor. “A month before his death, he was still insisting that he meant to get back to work on two unfinished novels.”<\/p>\n
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Photos of opening day of the Golden Gate International Exposition, February 18, 1939. (Photographer Unknown\/The Chronicle)<\/p>\n
A Bay Area native, Reinhardt had grown up in Oakland and managed to attend the World’s Fair on Treasure Island so many times that he was able to build a replica of it in his own backyard. He left home to earn degrees from Stanford and Columbia before embarking on a career studying, teaching and writing about the West, from the expansion brought by the railroad to the 20th-century boom of the Bay Area. He began his career as a reporter for the Chronicle, first covering religion and soon City Hall in the 1950s, then switched to books and freelance magazine writing.<\/p>\n
In the span of 40 years, he published seven works of nonfiction, ranging from “Out West and the Overland Train,” a re-creation of a 19th-century railroad trip from Chicago to California, published in 1967; to a 2007 history of the Mechanics’ Institute of San Francisco, where Reinhardt was a trustee and frequent lecturer.<\/p>\n
“He was a gentle soul who had great enthusiasm for architecture and history,” said Katherine Bella, CEO of the Mechanics’ Institute of San Francisco. “Everyone in the organization knew him and loved him.” As evidence, Bella noted that Reinhardt inscribed copies of his Mechanics’ Institute book, personalized to each employee and trustee, about 50 in total. “Each one was relevant and inspiring to that person,” she said. In between book projects, Reinhardt contributed articles to major magazines of the day, including “American Heritage,” “San Francisco,” “San Francisco Focus” and “New West.” He also was a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, from 1977 through 1997.<\/p>\n
“He was a journalist’s journalist,” said Ken Light, the Reva and David Logan Photojournalism Professor at UC Berkeley. “Very committed to teaching and working with undergrads, when we had classes in the graduate program that catered to Berkeley undergrads.”<\/p>\n
One such class was Journalism 100, which was enormously popular because each class featured a guest lecturer introduced by Reinhardt. There were no tests and no term paper. All that was required was 100% attendance, so every seat in a large lecture hall was filled to hear notables like Pulitzer Prize winner Frances FitzGerald, rock promoter Bill Graham and Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik.<\/p>\n
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Richard Reinhardt speaks at the Mechanics’ Institute at an event to honor the 80th anniversary of the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939. (Courtesy of the Mechanics’ Institute Library Archives.)<\/p>\n
The honorarium was $25, but Reinhardt was too polite to argue with the school about it, and “his guest lecturers admired him too much to complain,” said Tom Leonard, a faculty member who went on to become associate dean of the journalism school. “I saw San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto beam outside Dick’s office in North Gate Hall, happy to see a man who had covered his political career.”<\/p>\n
Reinhardt could always pull a guest speaker from his own circle of friends. He was part of a literary lunch group called the Writers Roundtable that met at the Washington Square Bar and Grill and later Moose’s. It included Herb Caen, Herb Gold, Art Hoppe, Clay Felker and Oakley Hall. When the lunch expanded to include women, Cyra McFadden, Lynn Freed and Garchik were added.<\/p>\n
“Mostly they talked about who was getting the biggest advance,” said Garchik, who had met Reinhardt through Hall, co-founder of the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference. Reinhardt spent a decade at the summer workshop teaching nonfiction writing seminars in a program he developed with longtime Chronicle science writer David Perlman.<\/p>\n
“Richard seemed happy to be in that company and he didn’t feel the need to push himself as a star. He was dignified and he was fun at the same time,” said Garchik, in reference to the lunch group. “He had a great sense of humor. I can picture him laughing.”<\/p>\n
That took care of lunch. In the evenings, he was also a member of a dinnertime round table called the Chit Chat Club, which was founded in 1874 and meets monthly at the University Club for the purpose of presenting essays members write about literary figures. The group had been planning a surprise 100th birthday meeting for Reinhardt next March. Highlights from his essays through the years were to be read by fellow members. That reading will now happen at the Oct. 13 meeting, according to Chit Chat Club member George Hammond.<\/p>\n
“Dick Reinhardt is probably the longest-lived member ever of the 153-year-old Chit Chat Club,” said Hammond, “and his vigorous wit and expressive way of presenting himself fit right in.”<\/p>\n
Richard Warren Reinhardt was born March 25, 1927, in Oakland, the only child of Emil and Eloise Reinhardt. His father ran an advertising agency in Oakland and the family lived in adjacent Piedmont, where Dick, as he was known, graduated from Piedmont High School in 1944. He enrolled at Stanford University, where he met his future wife, Joan Maxwell, who was from San Marino. He left school to enter the U.S. Navy as a hospital apprentice, but ultimately returned to Stanford to earn his bachelor’s degree in international relations, in 1949.<\/p>\n
From there he went directly to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, graduating in 1950 with a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He then spent a year abroad doing freelance newspaper articles while touring Europe and the Middle East.<\/p>\n
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Richard Reinhardt in Morocco in 2009. (Courtesy of Andy Reinhardt)<\/p>\n
He and Maxwell were married at her parents’ home, on Dec. 15, 1951, and they settled in San Francisco, where he was hired as a Chronicle reporter in the early 1950s. He left that job in 1957 when he won a Ford Foundation grant to spend three years researching a novel at Princeton, and abroad in Athens and Istanbul. That book, “The Ashes of Smyrna,” set during the wars between Greece and Turkey that followed the end of World War I, was published in 1971.<\/p>\n
At the house on Lake Street, the Reinhardts raised three sons – Kurt, born in 1954, Paul, in 1955, and Andy, in 1960. He also raised a garden, and would talk to his plants as if they were children, according to Andy. He loved jazz as much as he hated the “music that killed jazz” as he described rock ‘n’ roll.<\/p>\n
His preferred modes of travel were train or ocean liner. He collected bawdy postcards and tchotchkes, and served on the board of the California Historical Society and San Francisco Heritage along with a forward-oriented think tank called California Tomorrow.<\/p>\n
“My dad had a great sense of civic duty, and was passionate about the future of California and San Francisco,” said Andy.<\/p>\n
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Richard Reinhardt on a cruise on the Baltic Sea in 2012 (Courtesy of Andy Reinhardt)<\/p>\n
When his literary friends started dying off, Reinhardt developed his own small literary industry in finishing books that the friends had started. He completed “The Last Grand Adventure,” a history of the Klondike gold rush, by William Bronson and ‘San Francisco: As It is, As It Was,” a then-and-now collection of photographs, with text by Paul Johnson. Reinhardt was able to imitate the writing style of his colleagues, but there may be no one left who can imitate his.<\/p>\n
“One of the sad things about my father’s situation at the end is that all of his friends and colleagues had died,” said his son, Andy. “There isn’t someone comparable who can finish his books.”<\/p>\n
Anne Schnoebelen, of the Treasure Island Museum, still hopes that a new edition of Reinhardt’s “Treasure Island” can be released, maybe with a new introduction and all the color photographs that Reinhhardt had in his possession.<\/p>\n
“The value of the book is in the irony that is intermingled with Richard’s sense of beauty and his love and enthusiasm for the topic,” said Schnoebelen. “It’s a personal history, as well as a history of an event.”<\/p>\n
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