Slide Show of Historic Photos April 18

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

PHOTO FROM BRUCE FORRESTER

To kids, the Sausalito waterfront was a giant playground.

Long-time Marin photographer Bruce Forrester has spent the past 50 years photographing people and events for a wide range of publications, corporate and private clients and just for fun. On April 18, he will give a Zoom presentation on two collections of his works: "Celebration & War: The Sausalito Houseboat Community in the 1970s" and "Celebrity Photos from the 1980s and 90s" plus his current pursuits. The one-hour online slide show will start at 7:30 p.m.

In my 2017 review of his Houseboat book, I noted that he recalls the 70s waterfront as “a place of creativity and high energy with theater, art, boat building, music and more... Every occasion was a cause for a celebration. Then came development that threatened this free wheeling way of life. New docks were planned along with rent increases. The community came together and fought back with every means at their disposal in an attempt to keep the Sausalito houseboats affordable housing.”

Bruce was an eyewitness and chronicler of those turbulent times.  He moved to the north end of Sausalito, across the street from the early houseboat community, shortly after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 with a BFA in photography. While a landlubber, Bruce became involved with the waterfront community and from 1975-1980 he extensively photographed there. His book is a collection of Bruce's favorite historic black and white images in glossy, high quality reproduction.

"It was a community where people took almost every opportunity to have a celebration, a celebration of life," says Forrester. "One person's creativity inspired the next person's creativity."

After photographing the local waterfront, Bruce went on to a successful career in photography, specializing in people and events. Town & Country Magazine once called Bruce one of the top wedding photographers in the country. His photographs of celebrities have been published in more than 30 countries worldwide and his photography has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The free online slide show will be open to all. To RSVP, please send a one time email to stephmopho@gmail.com.

"Celebrity Photos from the 1980s and 90s" is available at Waterfront Wonders, 314 Caledonia Street or directly from Bruce at bruceforrester1@gmail.com.

From Frances with Love — Part II

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

PHOTO FROM SAUSALITO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The portals of the Nook.

Recently we brought you excerpts from Frances Reed Rideout’s memoirs of Sausalito in the 19th century. Here are some later recollections from the 1890s, lightly edited for continuity. By the time Frances was growing up, the village of Sausalito had grown. She recalled:

The whole waterfront burned down once (in 1893), and fire has often played havoc in Sausalito.

Every day the Chinese vegetable man went staggering up the hill, a piculan (pole) across his blue denim shoulders, with a deep basket swung at each end. Gladly enough he set the baskets down by your kitchen door, eased his shoulders out and gave a falsetto cry if you had no bell. The vegetables lay temptingly in the top trays of each basket, with potatoes and fruits underneath, and for every child who hung round to watch, he had a grin and the gift of an orange or banana.

In the village, too, was a Chinese laundry, of course, which was club to the vegetable man and every Chinese cook. A steamy breath wafted from its door and inside, you could see the Orientals in their undershirts, and loose cotton trousers doubled over at the waist, in loose slippers with their queues coiled round their heads and hear them as they plunked their sadirons from stove to board or wafted a fine spray over the ironing from nature's own sprinkler.

Baraty kept the butcher shop, a fat swarthy little Creole from New Orleans who spoke French with Grandma. The Fiedlers had opened a grocery store to keep Fred busy after he had taken the Keely Cure (injections of biochloride of gold to treat alcohol and drug habits). Old Constantine, the Greek, sold fish or kept a restaurant—a real old character with a white beard. Old Consy, we called him. There was Dan Slinkey (owner of the El Monte Hotel) whose name always made me feel it described him and probably I was right. There were the Wossers—old Mr. Wosser was engineer on the Princess and subsequent ferries and the Wosser boys have carried on the tradition.

There was Captain Brooks, who captained a ferry boat down to the time I went to school and who stood at the ferry gate and collected tickets with a watch in one hand. He knew who his passengers would be and held the boat for the last galloping latecomer. Though there was no excuse for missing the ferry in those days. It always blew a five-minute whistle at which signal every paterfamilias rose from his breakfast chair, wiped his mustache, kissed his wife on his way to the door as she handed him the market basket and, according to whether he lived on Bulkley or Santa Rosa Avenues, sauntered or galloped down the alleys. Market baskets! All the married men carried them at least several times a week, for Baraty's beef was fiercely tough and Fiedler's stocked only the plainest necessities. They were brown wicker suitcases the size of a champagne basket. Every morning in San Francisco and at 5 every afternoon, you could spot the suburbanites by their baskets.

How I longed to go on a Sunday “excursion.” We in Sausalito could see our familiar ferries cutting unfamiliar capers on Sundays and holidays. Decked with flags, brass band playing, and crowded to the rail, the San Rafael would sweep by on her circle of the Bay. Societies and lodges spent their annual picnic day in that fashion, besides which, in the ‘80s, there were regular excursions to California City picnic grounds. Market Street toughs — the south-of-the-slot-boys — and a great deal of liquor made these diversions wind up in a lower deck free-for-all fight. Hence the special constables and the policemen’s stock.

In 1892 Frances’ family moved into their new mansion, the Nook, at the head of Princess Street. Noted architect Willis Polk designed the structure. Frances recalls:

On its old lot, Grandma and Willis Polk and Contractor Traxler built the new Nook as my children knew it. Willis Polk was fresh back from studies in Paris and trying to break away from all the hideous monstrosities of architecture which had plagued California. Grandma did not build all that she planned, and in those days, one bath was thought enough for one family.

But the house was much admired; the gate surely was a work of art, and there were many lovely touches in woodwork which we loved. It was built on solid rock high above the road, in a backdrop of hillside garden and trees. Later, it seemed too near the village and too noisy with passing cars because it stood above the first crossroads, where everything clattered by. But in 1890 there was little traffic, the town was small, and it was convenient to live so short a way from the Ferry Depot.

The Nook was demolished in 1961 to make way for an apartment complex.

From Frances With Love

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

PHOTO FROM “FROM FRANCES WITH LOVE”

Henry and Frances Reed Rideout in 1910

Frances Reed was born in Sausalito in 1887 to Rev. and Mrs. Frederick Reed. She was a skilled writer and avid diarist, and married Henry Milner Rideout, well-known novelist and short story writer and former professor at Harvard University.

When Henry Rideout died in 1927 while they were on a trip abroad, Frances returned to Sausalito to make her home with her mother—then Mrs. Ellie Avery Campbell. Over the years Frances compiled a collection of stories, some from her own memory, some from tales told by her mother and grandmother, who moved here in 1869. After her death in 1953, her daughters collated those writings into a book, “From Frances With Love – a journal 1869-1909.”

The Historical Society is proud to have two copies of the 293-page book, richly bound in gilt-stamped green leather with raised bands and silk bookmark ribbon, Illustrated with color and black and white photos. The charmingly written memoir offers unique glimpses into life in 19th century Sausalito. Here are some lightly edited excerpts:

I enjoyed my stay in Sausalito so much. It is the only place where all care seems to go away from me, and I can just throw back my head and enjoy living.

The English people lived on the hill, looking down physically and mentally on "the Waterfront." and when the Tillinghasts first built a home there, they called their place Government House, sometimes flew the Union Jack on a tall pole, and generally as other English people came to live on the hillside, set a pattern of snobbishness. But Belle was a sweet woman, and the life these early settlers lived was idyllic. Only two ferries a day, and the shore and Bay was as quiet as if much further from any city. There were boats to row and hills to climb—old clothes were worn and the days were spent outdoors as much as possible.

A few shops and saloons straggled along "the waterfront"; there was the hideous El Monte Hotel (near the present Presbyterian Church) and the wharves, primitive pilings and shacks, and the Pacific Yacht Club in South Sausalito, south of the boatyard. There was no Mill Valley and no Belvedere, but a railroad bridge crossed from Strawberry Point.

Even when I was a child, Sausalito was a very small town, a village. In 1870 houses were few and far between. The roads, dusty in summer, muddy and rutted in winter, followed no plan at all, and for short cuts up the hill, there were "alleys" with wooden steps. At night there were no street lights and only the glow here and there of a lamp in a window. Across the Bay "the City" showed its gas lamps, and a few twinkles marked Oakland. A few small yachts were moored in the cove, a few fishing boats pulled up on the beach by the saw mill, whose whine broke the primeval stillness by day. It was so quiet that Mrs. Mason could come out on her front porch and call to her coachman shopping in "the village" not to forget the bread.

At night one heard the waves lapping the shore, and then and now the hollow blare of the Lime Point [Military Reservation, later Fort Baker] foghorn when the fog came in. Trees were newly planted—cypress hedges beginning to grow up—and the scrub oaks. Picket fences and cypress hedged the gardens, but there were long sweeps of bare hillside still which are now built on and thicketed. The houses were all wood, steps and gateways and fences and bulkheads—all wood. They were rather ugly houses, too. But everyone said Sausalito was beautiful—its natural beauty saved it from any danger of being commonplace.

There were some fine new houses. Captain Harrison's, the Millers', the Campbells', the Wheelers'. Mama's friend, Lilah Townsend, had married gay, young Arthur Lowe. At the Hutch, Claude Terry Hamilton kept bachelor quarters and camped one summer in a tent above the Nook garden, where the Meads built "Hollyoaks." There were the Jacksons, the Beasleys, the Windsors, and soon, the Sperrys. Mrs. Campbell continued to be dearest to my mother.

Now the ferries ran oftener. The San Rafael, imported from the Hudson, sped more quickly than the old Princess, or even the Tiburon. She tied up sideways at the Ferry wharf, where the railway came in beside the smelly mudhole that is now The Plaza. More shops were built along the waterfront—and also more saloons—and many of the vacant grass lots were built on. My uncle George and his wife and little daughter came to live in Sausalito. The old settlers may well have thought it was getting urban, but there were no street lights, no fire department, no police except one most unreliable town constable. If there was a fire, the church bell was rung till it turned over and everyone flocked to watch the house burn down.

To be continued…

A Musical Trip to the 50s

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

Radio Sausalito, southern Marin’s only 24/7 community radio station, recently began airing historic broadcasts from San Francisco’s Club Hangover in the 1950’s.

COURTESY PHOTO
Club Hangover in its glory days

In its day, Club Hangover was the local touring destination for top performers like Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Earl “Fatha” Hines.  Every Saturday, a half hour live show was broadcast to the entire west coast. Radio Sausalito has acquired the largest ever collection of the broadcasts and is re-airing them in chronological order. Hosting the series is Dave Radlauer, former host of Jazz Rhythm on Radio Sausalito, an expert on the music of this period and custodian of several of the recordings included in the broadcast.

Club Hangover opened in the late 1940s at 729 Bush Street, run by Doc Dougherty. Dougherty was a bandleader and co-writer of the standard “I’m Confessin’ That I Love You.”

In 1955 the Sausalito News announced that a local talent, Skip Morr, “did a week-long stint at the Club Hangover in San Francisco, replacing Kid Ory, who had wound up in the hospital nursing some broken ribs. The popular Sausalito trombonist expects to appear again at the San Francisco club sometime in June when Wild Bill Davidson’s band takes brief leave from Eddie Condon’s club in New York to perform for jazz fans here.”

Later the Oakland Tribune reported: “The Club Hangover became a bastion of dixieland jazz, with Earl Fatha Hines and trumpeter Muggsy Spanier and pianist Joe Sullivan, both the latter now dead, as its musical foundation. Owner Doc Dougherty sold the club in the 60s.”

One of the Club’s competitors was The Tin Angel at 981 The Embarcadero, operated by Sausalito’s own flamboyant entrepreneur and artist Peggy Tolk-Watkins.

Radio Sausalito’s half-hour Club Hangover broadcasts air on 1610 AM (or https://radiosausalito.org) Sunday mornings beginning at 9a.m. and 5p.m. through May 2025.

Radio Sausalito itself has become part of Sausalito’s history since it first went live in the year 2000. Station owner Jonathan Westerling recalls how it came about:

“The reason I started broadcasting was in order to listen to music from my stereo system on the radio in the kitchen while I was cooking. I had just moved from the midwest to a small apartment on Bee Street and my belongings were mostly in boxes. I found a small transmitter that I had built for a high school science fair project and hooked it up. The folks next door in the Rotary Housing started listening to my transmissions and telling each other about the new local radio signal. A few months later, the mystery about this new Sausalito radio station (which I called Radio Sausalito on the air, just for fun) was mentioned in Ralph Holmstad's column in the Marin Scope newspaper — much to my surprise. It was evident from that point on that there was a need for community radio in town!”

I asked Jonathan what inspired the vintage jazz programming, and he replied:

“Once I realized that other people were listening to my transmitter, I had to think about what kind of music to play and picked something that wasn't available on the radio dial in the North Bay. At the time KCSM had a smaller signal and didn't reach Marin, so jazz was the obvious choice. When KABL disappeared from the dial, I added Big Band to the playlists as well.”

What had been the high point of Jonathan’s Radio Sausalito experience, I asked, and he replied:

“The high points are changing all the time, but one consistent high point is the people. From the thousands of listeners, many of whom generously send financial support to keep us on the air, to the over one hundred volunteers that I have gotten to know and work with.” Full disclosure: I’m one of those volunteers, recording brief Sausalito Secret History spots to supplement the music.

“More recently,” Jonathan added, “one high point has been the importance of promoting and giving air time to the local jazz artists, who have fewer and fewer places to get airplay these days.”

Jonathan also described one of the low points of his long broadcasting career:

“Early on, Radio Sausalito was asked by Parks and Rec to broadcast the music for the 4th of July fireworks and everything went horribly wrong. I had coordinated with the pyrotechnics company who sent us a CD of patriotic music to go with their display. They also sent a second CD that had verbal instructions for the pyrotechnic engineer on the barge so he would know when to fire each one. If both recordings were started at the same time, the fireworks show would match the music that I would be playing on Radio Sausalito. That evening when the first firework went off, the loud noise caused our CD player to skip. Then it kept skipping with each subsequent boom! Within 30 seconds it had skipped to the finale of the show and stopped. As if that wasn't disastrous enough, people listening on the radio told me they never heard patriotic music and I realized I had accidentally programmed the transmitters to play the music at 9:15 a.m. (not p.m.), so people listening at home on the radio never heard the music to go with the show on their radios. I learned a lot that day and subsequent collaborations were obviously more successful.”

Radio Sausalito’s 20th anniversary celebration was cancelled due to the Covid 19 pandemic. During the pandemic, the number of listeners more than doubled as people found dependable reassurance in the shows and broadcasts which were all pre-recorded away from the studio.

Here’s to jazz and Radio Sausalito. May they both live long and prosper.

The Great Diamond Hoax

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

A cover of one edition of Asbury Harpending’s memoir.

We recently profiled Asbury Harpending, the boy wonder who was an early investor in Sausalito’s Northwestern Pacific Railroad. Harpending went on to become a successful real estate magnate and respected capitalist. But in 1872 even his keen business sense failed him, as he detailed in his memoir The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents.

The gold rush that began in 1848 and the Comstock silver lode discovered in Nevada in 1859 “filled the West with people hooked on the Next Big Thing,” according to an article in Smithsonian Magazine. “From grubby prospectors washing dirt in a thousand Western streams to bankers and speculators in San Francisco, New York and London, everyone, it seems, embraced the idea that the West’s mountains and riverbeds held an abundance of mineral wealth there for the taking.”

In 1870, two cousins, Philip Arnold and John Slack, walked into a San Francisco mine broker's office, reported a diamond mine and produced a bag full of gems. They stored the diamonds in the vault of the Bank of California, founded by William Chapman Ralston.

Word spread, and prominent financiers convinced the prospectors to document their find. The cousins offered to lead investigators to a remote location in northwest Colorado Territory.

The group finally reached a huge field with various gems on the ground. A mining engineer, Henry Janin, evaluated the find and submitted a highly optimistic report, which worked its way into the press. After that, more businessmen expressed interest. They included such luminaries as banker Ralston, General George S. Dodge, Horace Greeley, Harpending, George McClellan, Baron von Rothschild, and Charles Tiffany of Tiffany and Co. Tiffany's evaluated the stones as being worth $150,000.

As Harpending wrote: “In fact, after the Tiffany valuation, the personal examination of the mines and the statements of Mr. Janin before he promulgated his famous report, every suspicion gave way to an unbounded enthusiasm.”

And so, the stage was set for the Great Diamond Hoax, described by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1872 as “the most gigantic and barefaced swindle of the age.”

San Francisco was a city of some 150,000 souls in 1870. One of them was Philip Arnold who was working as an assistant bookkeeper for the Diamond Drill Co., a San Francisco drill maker that used diamond-headed bits. Arnold had acquired a bag of uncut diamonds, presumably taken from his employer, and mixed them with garnets, rubies and sapphires that he likely bought from Indians in Arizona.

When Harpending learned of the find during a business trip to England, he swallowed the bait as hungrily as everyone else. He made his way back to San Francisco as fast as he could to get in on the action.

The investors offered to buy out the two prospectors. At first, they appeared to resist a quick payday. But then Slack asked for $100,000. With that seed money, he and Arnold headed off to England to buy uncut gems. In July 1871, under assumed names, they bought $20,000 worth of rough diamonds and rubies, thousands of stones in all, from a London diamond merchant. Upon return, they led investors to believe that they had made another visit to the diamond field and had returned with 60 pounds of diamonds and rubies said to be worth $600,000.

And then the pair offered to make one more trip to the diamond field, promising “a couple of million dollars’ worth of stones,” which they would allow the businessmen to hold as a guarantee of their investment. Off they went, to salt the fields rather than mine them.

What finally led to the hoax’s collapse was a chance encounter between Janin and members of a government survey team led by geologist Clarence King. When Janin showed them some of the diamonds, King decided that they had better inspect the diamond fields as soon as possible. After five days of hard travel, they set up camp and soon began finding gems sitting on anthills, as promised. But the next day, King noticed that wherever he found a diamond, he also found a dozen rubies, too neat a scheme for a natural deposit.

Harpending’s book describes what came next: “One of King’s men came on a stone that caught his eye and filled him with wonderment. It bore the plain marks of the lapidary’s art. He took it immediately to his principal. ‘Look here, Mr. King,’ he said. ‘This is the bulliest diamond field as never was. It not only produces diamonds, but cuts them moreover also.’

“King grabbed the half-cut diamond. Everything was clear as day. Beyond a doubt the fields were salted.”

On November 26 The San Francisco Chronicle stacked headlines that began with “UNMASKED!” followed by “The Great Diamond Fiasco,” “THE MAMMOTH FRAUD EXPOSED” and “Astounding Revelations.”

Harpending was blamed for abetting the hoax, but maintained his innocence while rebuilding his fortune, and eventually retired to New York where he wrote his memoir and died in 1923 at age 83.

The Historical Society has a leather-bound copy of his memoir in its rare book collection, and various soft cover editions can be ordered through the Internet.

Juanita Aboard the Charles Van Damme

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

ILLUSTRATION BY DONA SCHWEIGER

Juanita and her famous motto.

The story of how Juanita Musson moved her Galley onto the Charles Van Damme ferry is as colorful as the old girl and the old boat themselves.

By 1959, Juanita was a nationally known restaurateur. The Fort Worth Press reported on how she found her way onto the old ferry:

“It wasn't only Halloween on the horizon near the end of 1959, it was a double-wheeled ferryboat wallowing a few hundred yards out in the bay. For as long as she had been in the business of feeding people, she had longed to feed them on board the half-sunk Charles Van Damme.”

After nearly a half century of service, bridges had put the old paddle-wheeler out of business and the old hulk was towed to Sausalito. There her petcocks were opened, and the ferry was scuttled up to her gunwales in muddy water. When Juanita's lease was almost up on Gate 5 Road, her rent was raised to an unacceptable $550 a month, and as Sally Hayton-Keeva put it in her book Juanita!, “she decided it was time to fish or cut bait. Without preliminaries, she went to speak to one of the ferryboat's owners [Don Arques]. She wanted it for a restaurant, she told him, and how much would he want for it if she towed it to land? ‘If you can get a permit to put a restaurant on it,’ he told Juanita, ‘you can have the boat rent free for one year.’”

By then Juanita was known for her epic breakfasts and monumental servings of prime rib. Visitors came and went frequently, including a raft of celebrities from Janis Joplin to Noel Coward, sharing space with Juanita’s menagerie of dogs, cats, fawns, turkeys and other semi-domesticated fauna. Despite her prickly reputation, Juanita was soft-hearted and generous to her staff and patrons, some of whom took advantage of her casual business sense by ripping her off. Debts began to mount up even as her reputation became the stuff of legend.

By 1963 Juanita owed the IRS many thousands more than could fit in her cleavage. A series of fundraisers began, largely supported by customers and local teens. The faithful Kingston Trio, Tommy Smothers, Glenn Yarbrough, and many others performed for free. "They were great, those guys,” Juanita remembered.

But there was also a notorious motorcycle gang that held weekly meetings, with her permission, on the Van Damme. One day they got into a brouhaha that spelled the beginning of the end of Juanita’s time in Sausalito. One combatant told Sally Heaton-Keeva:

“It looked like one of those Tom Mix movies, with chairs flyin' out the windows and plates sailin' through the air and jam splashed all over the walls. There must've been about twenty people on each side and nobody was standin' around and waitin'. That fight was really the most amazing thing I ever have seen.

“A couple of days later I saw her picture in the paper with a chair over her head and she was sayin', "This is the end of my business," which it was, at least on that boat. The income tax evasion people got after her and then the Board of Health, until she actually had to close her place down. Its closing was really the direct result of the fight because once that went down, so did everything else come down on her.”

Juanita later told the Contra Costa Times, “After the boat closed, I didn't know where to go or what to do with myself.” Bored and broke, she accepted a job with her old frenemy, Sally Stanford at the Valhalla. Contrary to many rumors, this was the first time Juanita ever worked for the notorious ex-madam. Then, with the help of Stanford and other loyal customers, she took over a ramshackle resort in Sonoma County, which led to a long career running various incarnations of the Galley in the North and East Bay, a number of which were destroyed by fire.

In 1982, Juanita retired from the restaurant business and moved back to Sonoma, where she lived mainly on Social Security benefits. In 2002, friends raised enough money for her to move to a retirement community in Agua Caliente. In 2011, she died at Sonoma Valley Hospital after suffering a stroke, at age 87.

A year later the ferry was demolished leaving just the paddlewheel and smokestack. The Richardson’s Bay Maritime Association (RBMA), a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit, is spearheading a campaign to restore those relics for permanent public display in the park off Gate 6 Road, near where the ferry was beached. For more information or to donate to their campaign, go to https://www.charlesvandammeferry.org.

Melvin’s Belli Flop

By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society

COURTESY PHOTO
One of many books by Melvin Belli.

Legendary San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli was known as “The King of Torts” for his flamboyant courtroom histrionics. After his fifth divorce, he moved onto a yacht, named Adequate Award, in Sausalito in the late 1980s. Belli accused his ex-wife, Lia, of having an affair with archbishop Desmond Tutu and of throwing one of his dogs off the Golden Gate Bridge. He was fined $1,000 for repeatedly calling her "El Trampo". During the proceedings, Belli was ejected from the courtroom after accusing the judge of sleeping with his former wife's lawyer. He was ultimately compelled to pay Lia an estimated $15 million.

According to Wikipedia, Belli “had many celebrity clients, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Errol Flynn, Chuck Berry, Muhammad Ali, The Rolling Stones, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker, Martha Mitchell, Maureen Connolly, Lana Turner, Tony Curtis, and Mae West. During his legal career, he won over $600 million in damages for his clients. He was also the attorney for Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” Belli also acted in numerous television shows and movies. He was frequently mentioned by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, who called him “Melvin Bellicose.”

During his time here, Belli was a good citizen of Sausalito, earning mentions in this newspaper for donating Christmas lights for Viña del Mar Plaza, serving as featured speaker at the third annual “State of the City” dinner and taking part in the first annual lighted yacht parade But he is probably best remembered locally for his “Belli Flop” on Bridgeway. Here are excerpts from the story by Betty Dietz, writing in the September 23, 1988 Marin Independent Journal:

“Melvin Belli, a master of demonstration in the courtroom, proved Thursday in Sausalito that his white Rolls-Royce convertible can actually climb stairs.

“The unexpected trip up five stairs to a cement wall came after Belli fell asleep while driving to his yacht in Sausalito. He'd been on a long flight shortly before the 2 p.m. accident.

“Belli had stopped in Tokyo after attending the Olympic Games in Seoul, his spokeswoman said.

“Holding a piece of black plastic that broke off the Rolls-Royce Corniche, Belli leaned against the railing of a nearby office building shortly after the accident. The ‘King of Torts’ — known for such courtroom demonstrations as dropping a tray of handmade knives to show how many weapons are found within prison — was dapper, albeit a bit disheveled, in a black suit with red silk handkerchief in the pocket.

He had worked an hour in his San Francisco office before leaving for the 105-foot yacht anchored in Schoonmaker Harbor where he has lived since his wife, Lia, began divorce proceedings this summer.

‘I was fighting it. I figured I've got to get out of here,’ said Belli, 81. ‘I should have stayed and slept there.’

“The Rolls Was leaning on its side along Bridgeway, its left wheels on the sidewalk and the right wheels atop a four-foot wall.

“Corp. Scott Wyatt of the Sausalito police said Belli exhibited no signs of drug alcohol use. He was not cited, although the investigation is continuing, said Sgt. Don McQuarrie

“Todd Anderson of Richmond, who was two cars behind when the accident occurred, told police that Belli had been driving about 30 mph. The speed limit is 25 mph, Sausalito police said.

“Jeremy Lynch was outside his used bookstore about a half block from the collision. ‘I saw him go by. He looked kind of out of it, half asleep,’ Lynch said. ‘He was slowing down, driving real slow, like for a stop sign, which there isn't. I should have yelled to him.’

Kathy Kronenberger, a reservations manager for Tahiti Nui, a tour company next door, heard a clunking sound. ‘I looked out the window and saw the car go up the steps and smash into a pole,’ she said. She dialed 911.

“Within seconds, Belli ‘rolled out of the car and stood back, dazed,’ Kronenberger said. People ran out of the offices to make sure Belli was not hurt.” While not reported in the IJ, local legend has it that Belli’s first words to rubberneckers were: “Does anybody know a good P.I. [personal injury] attorney?” The IJ continued:

“A small crowd of gawkers gathered across the street. ‘We're just waiting to see how they get the car off the wall,’ said one woman.

"’It's the biggest thing to happen in this town in a long time," said Becky Holbrook of Sausalito. ‘If it were a Chevy, nobody would have stopped.

“The license plate on the climbing Rolls?

"Tibet" — as in the home of the world's tallest mountain, Mount Everest.

Belli died of complications from pancreatic cancer at his home in San Francisco on July 9, 1996, aged 88. At the time of his death, he had three sons, three daughters, twelve grandchildren, and two dogs. He is buried in Odd Fellows Cemetery in Sonora, California, his birthplace.