MISS JO HAS BEEN A REPORTER FOR 30 YEARS, making a living by selling words that readers can count on. As a member of the Old Media, she knows that getting the story straight is nothing to sneeze at. Take note digital dawgs.
Sometimes sticking to the facts means sacrificing a great anecdote, like the one about Fog City summers incorrectly attributed to 19th century San Francisco newspaper man Samuel Clemens. Miss Jo heard it repeated today on the radio. “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” Clemens never said. Nor did he write it under his emerging nom de plume, Mark Twain.
From 1863-1865 and in his late 20s, Clemens wrote for the San Francisco Call and then the Chronicle. He ended up in the City by way of Nevada, where he moved from Hannibal, Mo., to ride out the U.S. Civil War.
In 1861, Clemens had lost his Mississippi River pilot job when Union troops blocked boat traffic. With his brother Orion as Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and the Nevada Silver Rush in full swing, he headed West by stage coach.
While Clemens failed at panning for silver, he did succeed as a reporter for the Virginia City, Nev., Territorial Enterprise, where he first wrote under the name Mark Twain. Declaring that writing would be his career, Clemens next headed to San Francisco.
When he arrived in the Golden Gate City in the spring of 1863, Clemens wrote his mother and sister that he was just visiting and would finally return to the Midwest in two weeks, according to the Mark Twain Project’s archives of his letters. However, by September it was clear Clemens was too smitten with SF to pack his bags. “The Unreliable & myself are still here, & still enjoying ourselves,” Clemens wrote his family on June 1, 1963.