Notes
Notes Part 1 1. Many, though not all, members of Belmont’s first class did indeed attend Harvard , graduating in 1890. Along with Brown himself, they included Summit Louis Hecht (1869–1949), who became a wool merchant in Boston; Frank Lamont DeLong (1867–1963), who returned to San Francisco where he maintained an office in the Merchants Exchange Building; and Marcus C. Sloss, who practiced law for many years in San Francisco. Although Brown neglects to mention them, Charles Hitchcock Adams (1868–1951), whom Brown mistakenly assigns to Norris’s class, and Hubert Howe Bancroft (1867–?)—the A. L. Bancroft whom Brown mentions was actually Hubert’s father, Albert Little Bancroft (1841–1914)—a nephew of his more famous namesake, Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918), were the remaining members of Belmont’s first graduating class. Adams had begun his sec ond year at the University of California when his father’s financial reverses forced him to suspend his college studies (Aitken 1951, 284), while Bancroft elected to embark on a business career immediately upon leaving Belmont. 2. Gertrude Glorvina Doggett Norris (1841–1919) was the eighth child of nine born to her parents, Samuel Wales Doggett (1800–1872) and Harriet Wotton (1804– 1892). Manifesting an early penchant for the dramatic, she taught school for her brother Simeon Locke Doggett (1829–1914) in Dubuque, Iowa, and then later in Chicago, where she also enjoyed moderate success as an ingenue before marrying Benjamin Franklin (B. F.) Norris (1836–1900) in 1867. After they moved to San Francisco in 1885, Gertrude sys tematically established herself as a formidable society matron, not only by founding the city’s famous Browning Society in 1902, before whose members she routinely gave memorable readings and for which she served as literary director (Davison 1990, 15–16), but also by becoming a member of the Century Club of California , a private women’s club founded a few years earlier in 1888. B. F. had built up his wholesale jewelry business from scratch, first in Lockport and Peoria, Illinois, and then in Chicago and New York, as evidenced by census reports: the 1860 census lists his worth as $1,300 in property and personal assets, while a decade later that fig ure has mushroomed to a staggering $70,000 (Crisler 2002, 15); in San Francisco B. F. made another fortune in real estate, income from which, after the couple later divorced, allowed Gertrude to continue to live more than comfortably (see Davison 1988). 3. Willis Jefferson Polk (1867–1924) was already a highly successful carpenter, 206 / Notes to Pages 12–14 draftsman, and architect in Chicago and elsewhere before 1889, when he moved to San Francisco, where he continued his career, opening his own firm, Polk & Company, in 1911. Along with several other artists and writers in the Bay Area, self- consciously calling themselves Les Jeunes, Polk contributed to The Lark, the group’s ex peri men tal avant- garde publication, which issued twenty- four monthly numbers from May 1895 through April 1897, completed by the Epilark, appearing the next month. While Norris never contributed to this preciously satirical “little magazine,” he was on intimate terms with its members. 4. Norris’s good friend Gelett Burgess, who along with Bruce Porter founded and coedited The Lark (Dinnean 1980, n.p.), contributed the famous humorous poem “The Purple Cow” to its initial installment (May 1895, n.p.) as well as several subsequent pieces featuring his drawings of ghostly “goops,” cartoon characters he also later incorporated into several books. In a follow- up letter to Walker on Oc to ber 16, 1930, Brown enclosed not the promised menu but a photocopy of an invitation to a dinner of Les Jeunes, held at Martinelli’s on May 1, 1896; those who signed the menu included Norris, Brown, Polk, Porter Garnett, Burgess, Ernest Peixotto, and John O. Cosgrave. 5. Outside the window of an office at the corner of Kearney and Geary Streets, two dentists, Mark Lawrence Libbey (1816–?) for several years and later Luther A. Teague (1850–?), displayed as an advertisement of their trade a huge gold tooth, which Norris later incorporated into his 1899 novel McTeague (Norris 1899e, 196). Located at 1309 Polk Street was a branch post office above which Norris placed McTeague’s “dental parlors”; the “candy store on the corner” (Norris 1899e, 34) is most likely that owned by George F. Robert at 1301 Polk Street, as Neustadter suggests; a drugstore at the northeast corner of Bush and...
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