In this episode, I let Jake Ehrlich do a lot of the talking, because frankly, no one skewered San Francisco’s hypocrisy quite like he did. Dolly wasn’t just fighting a criminal charge—she was being fed to the wolves in a city that had tolerated, taxed, and quietly protected vice for decades. Suddenly, after one raid involving a handful of well-connected teenage boys, everyone found religion.

What fascinates me most here is Dolly’s code. She could have blown the lid off police graft. She could have named names. Instead, she chose silence—and then she chose to disappear. Whether you see that as loyalty, pride, or strategy, it says everything about how the underworld operated. And in the middle of it all? A mother terrified that her child might see her face in the papers.

In this episode, I continue the story of Dolly Fine as San Francisco’s long-standing system of tolerated vice begins to unravel in the wake of the Atherton Report of 1937. Police shakeups, grand jury investigations, and rising public pressure tightened the noose the long-tolerated and city-wide machinery of grart, even as those very same players who profited for decades scrambled to protect themselves. 

When a police raid on Dolly's house triggered  by a high-society matron's call to the Chief of Police, caught her son and his friends in her parlor, the response was swift and ferocious: felony indictments, screaming headlines, and officials suddenly eager to prove they could clean house. The men walked free, the broader system went largely untouched, and Dolly—branded the “Lady in Red”—was singled out as the fall guy. Faced with the choice of prison, suicide, or breaking her lifelong code of the underworld and becoming a snitch, she vanished, setting off a nationwide manhunt, or madam-hunt. Her tell-all interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, published after she had absconded, did not help her case, nor Attorney, Jake "The Master" Ehrlichs' future defense of her crimes.

Dolly Fine was one of San Francisco’s last great madams and a defining figure of the city’s wide-open 1930s nightlife. Tall, blonde, impeccably dressed, and deeply embedded in the city’s underworld, Dolly ran one of the most profitable and professionally managed houses in town—right as Frisco’s long tradition of tolerated vice was beginning to crack under public scrutiny.

Before diving into Dolly’s reign, Knox takes us on a whirlwind tour of the city’s legendary madams, from Gold Rush pioneers like Irene McCready and Ah Toy to fan favorites Tessie Wall and Jessie Hayman. These women helped define San Francisco’s peculiar relationship with sex, money, and moral flexibility—a relationship that lasted for decades, until reformers, headlines, and political embarrassment forced the city to look too closely at its own reflection.

Dolly Fine’s story sits squarely at that breaking point. With ties to Prohibition-era smuggling, early gangster life, and a past that police later dredged up with relish, Dolly faced the full force of the Atherton investigation and a changing civic mood. Though she survived the Grand Jury and continued operating, the ground was shifting beneath her feet. Part One sets the stage for her dramatic fall—her arrest, flight, and nationwide manhunt—stories that will unfold in Part Two.

Key Topics Covered

• San Francisco’s long tradition of tolerated vice
• Legendary Frisco madams from the Gold Rush onward
• Dolly Fine’s rise in the 1930s underworld
• Prohibition smuggling and early gangster connections
• The Atherton Report and systemic police graft
• The McDonough Brothers and institutional corruption
• Public revulsion at graft versus tolerance of vice
• Jake Ehrlich’s defense of Dolly Fine
• The cultural turning point that ended old Frisco

We pick up alongside Episode Nine on Bones Remmer, zooming out to look at what was happening in San Francisco in 1928 as the La Cosa Nostra gang war intensified in North Beach. Along the way, we pause on the culture of the moment: the movies people packed theaters to see, the arrival of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, and the everyday stories that shared front-page space with organized crime.

This special holiday episode of Frisco — The Secret History explores how Christmas was celebrated in San Francisco from the Gold Rush through the 1940s. The episode opens with a reflection on Emperor Norton, the city’s most beloved eccentric and an early, outspoken champion of civil rights, whose proclamations stood in stark contrast to the exclusionary realities of his era.

From there, the story traces the evolution of Christmas in San Francisco: from the rough-and-tumble mining camps of the foothills, where celebrations could stretch on for days, to the rise of elaborate urban traditions centered around downtown department stores. Listeners are taken inside the origins of iconic holiday spectacles at City of Paris, the transformation of Union Square into a month-long winter festival, and the Emporium’s famously extravagant rooftop attractions.

Blending archival newspaper accounts, civic history, and wry observations, the episode captures a distinctly San Francisco version of Christmas—equal parts spectacle, improvisation, excess, and absurdity—set against moments of hardship, war, and rapid change. The result is a vivid portrait of how the city celebrated the holidays while remaining unmistakably, and sometimes unruly, itself.

In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco, Knox Bronson returns—hopefully for the last time—to San Francisco’s most emotionally charged semantic battlefield: the word “Frisco.”

Building on the earlier episodes Call It Frisco and Call It Frisco #2 — Sally Stanford Weighs In On The Eternal Conflict, Knox dismantles two of the most commonly cited weapons in the anti-Frisco arsenal: Emperor Norton’s supposed 1872 proclamation banning the word, and Herb Caen’s famously stern admonition, Don’t Call It Frisco.

New historical research from the Emperor Norton Trust reveals that Norton’s decree almost certainly never existed at all—an invention of a 1939 biography that somehow hardened into accepted truth. Meanwhile, Herb Caen himself ultimately reversed course, publicly inviting the city to reclaim “Frisco” as the sailors’, adventurers’, and Gold Rush city it once was.

Along the way, we explore sailor slang, Gold Rush linguistics, cultural snobbery, postwar migration, and the shifting moral geography of San Francisco itself. The episode closes by giving the final word to legendary madam and restaurateur Sally Stanford, who reminds us that the city’s original characters never called it anything but Frisco.

This is less a debate than a historical reckoning—and perhaps a small act of linguistic liberation.

Shownotes courtesy of ChatGPT. I find perverse enjoyment these weird summations.

In this episode, we step back into San Francisco at the end of the roaring twenties, when bootleggers, blackhanders, and quiet Mafia bosses carved out invisible empires in North Beach. It was a time when the city’s underworld tried to keep its violence out of sight — but the headlines told another story. 

It’s also the backdrop for the rise of Elmer “Bones” Remmer, the city’s gambling king who would come to rule its after-hours joints, brothels, and backroom poker games from the Tenderloin to Lake Tahoe. His story intertwines with that of Jack Ruby, who once dealt cards for him, and the quiet influence of the Lanza family, who kept the Mafia’s presence subdued but steady. The bridges were about to open, the old order was crumbling.

This installment is all about the wild 1947 film noir The Lady From Shanghai, and guest Rachel Walther, a film historian with a book coming out soon called Born To Lose, The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon, breaks down the chaotic story behind it. 

The Lady From Shanghai film was a last-ditch effort by Orson Welles to get back in Hollywood’s good graces after his studio battles over The Magnificent Ambersons. He literally phoned up Columbia head Harry Cohn and pitched a thriller based on a random book title he saw, just to get the cash for a play he was staging. The drama ratcheted up when Cohn insisted Welles cast his then-estranged wife, superstar Rita Hayworth, which Hayworth was actually into! She saw it as a chance to ditch her "sex goddess" image, even cutting and dyeing her famous red hair platinum blonde as a big middle finger to Cohn. However, Welles—being Welles—turned a simple plot into a "noir dreamscape fantasia" with a confusing story, kicking off the shoot with a crazy production on Errol Flynn’s yacht in Mexico where a cameraman tragically dropped dead on the first day. Errol's suggestion to simply put the corpse in a duffel bag and throw it overboard was ignored.

Rachel explains that while the plot is "nuts" and full of holes, the film's stunning visuals, especially once the action moves to San Francisco, are what make it a classic. Welles shot in distinct city spots like Chinatown, the Steinhardt Aquarium, and the iconic Hall of Mirrors at Playland at the Beach, which was a huge, custom-built set back in L.A. This visual feast, full of off-kilter energy, is why the film sits so high in the pantheon of SF noir. Interestingly, the film was a flop at the time because audiences and critics just weren’t ready for how strange and abstract it was. The discussion wraps up by exploring the tragic arc of Welles' career after Citizen Kane, where his inability to compromise and his obsessive creative nature led him to be constantly shut out of his own projects, proving that the film's theme of duplicity was really Welles’ commentary on his hostile relationship with Hollywood, not just his messy divorce from Hayworth.

Welcome back, Frisco fans! You're tuning into Part Two and the conclusion of our deep dive into the San Francisco Examiner's 1944 sensation: "WOMEN IN SALOONS—The Shame of My Sex," by the legendary, if controversial, author Gertrude Atherton. If you missed the start, you definitely want to go back and listen to Part One! This episode picks up where we left off, following Atherton's increasingly frantic, first-hand reports as she descends from the glittering "Top of the Mark"—where she finds "all...attending strictly to business" in the gloom—down to the "second rate" clubs. She’s on a mission to document the moral "menacing breakdown of Feminine Morals in Our Brawling Barrooms." Things get louder, darker, and in her estimation, much uglier, with reports of "lewd" remarks and women "leaning heavily on the men" in crowded, raucous nightclubs.

Atherton, an 86-year-old self-proclaimed lifelong teetotaler, continues her survey of San Francisco's wartime nightlife, moving from the crowded dance halls to the more respectable cocktail bars frequented by women after a hard day's work. She actually offers a rare moment of nuance, distinguishing between the girls who are "out for the best that life has to offer" and the "frustrateds on the loose," seeking only an expensive fling. However, her true disdain is reserved for the affluent, blowsy women drinking from 11 AM to midnight in Marina bars, whose children wander in begging for dinner. This segment culminates in Atherton’s final, scathing assessment where she concludes that the majority of these "degraded women are fools—possibly morons" who lack the mental discipline to handle their newfound wartime "freedom" and turn into "human tanks."

The conclusion of Atherton's crusade isn't about mere disapproval—it's about a proposed societal cure. After rejecting prohibition as a remedy, she argues that these "fools are superfluous" and suggests they should be allowed to "drink themselves to death and the sooner the better," or else be "shut them up in institutions." Yikes. She then pivots to what she sees as the real problem: the children. Atherton makes a final, passionate appeal for saving this "new generation" by establishing large, comfortable country colonies with schools, proper care, and "personal affection" from "intelligent, motherly women." It’s a wild, shocking ride from a woman whose history includes links to eugenicist ideas and a clear sense of white supremacy. Join us for this final, unsettling look at a major San Francisco media event of 1944. 

In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco, we're diving into the San Francisco Examiner's sensational 1944 moral crusade against Barfly Women and the threat they posed to the social fabric of San Francisco. The paper hired the renowned 86-year-old author and novelist, Gertrude Atherton, a San Francisco native, to mount an investigation into the phenomenon of unaccompanied women drinking in saloons and nightclubs.

We trace the history of William Randolph Hearst's and Joseph Pulitzer's battle for domination in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century and the sensational, fact-free style style of reportage that gave rise to the term "yellow journalism," and created the outrage that led to the Spanish-American War in 1898, the one where Hearst famously said, "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war!" 

Finally, we circle back to to 1944 and Gertrude Atherton's first installment of "Women In Saloons, The Shame of My Sex."  The city bursting with wartime workers. Women daring to have a drink in public. Atherton's piece is a classic piece of moralizing, painting these women as mothers neglecting their kids and succumbing to "riotous indecencies." She herself was born to great wealth and privilege and it shows.

In her first installment, she hilariously brings along an escort to down her drinks while she performs her first-hand research, since she is a teetotaler. This installment ends as she and her escort make it to the legendary Top o' the Mark Restaurant and Bar atop Nob Hill.

To be continued.