We were running errands the other day and listening to NPR, when Garrison Keillor came on for “The Writer’s Almanac” and read this droll description of San Francisco by Kenneth Rexroth:
It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward-spreading puritan tradition, or by the Walter Scott, fake-cavalier tradition of the South. It had been settled, mostly, in spite of all the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers, prostitutes, rascals and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn. They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather.
That’s just perfect.