The History (or Histories) of Valentine's Day

A 1961 composite illustrating traditional
Saint Valentine's Day.
Illustration: Library of Congress.

In the February 2013 issue of the Marina Times in San Francisco, I investigate the history of the February 14th holiday.

EDITOR'S NOTE | BACK STORY
The Stories Behind St. Valentine's Day
By John Zipperer 

Hearts, cupids, boxed chocolates, and mailboxes stuffed with greeting cards are all signs that we’re approaching Feb. 14 or, more formally, St. Valentine’s Day. Americans will purchase 145 million valentine’s cards this year, the Greeting Card Association estimates, and we can add to that an uncounted number of electronic greeting cards. 

The holiday brings to mind childhood viewings of Charlie Brown’s V-day travails, and probably a mixture of ...

Read the entire article

Doyle's Legacy Goes Farther than His Drive

View of Doyle Drive during the April 28
demolition (Photo Courtesy of CalTrans)

My latest article in the Marina Times:

Doyle's Legacy Goes Farther than His Drive 

By John Zipperer 

More than 90,000 people have driven over Doyle Drive daily, yet few are likely to know why the elevated roadway carried that name. There are a number of things in the Bay Area named after Frank Pierce Doyle, but the now-demolished roadway leading to the Golden Gate Bridge was arguably the most apt. Frank Doyle, who passed away on Aug. 5, 1948, was a significant Bay Area figure in the early 20th century, involved in everything from banking to the recovery from the 1906 earthquake. As president of the Exchange Bank,...

Read the complete article

2012 Predictions: My Latest Northside San Francisco Column

Here is my column in the January 2012 edition of Northside San Francisco magazine, available online and in print across San Francisco.

Common KnowledgeSurprise Me in 2012
By John Zipperer 

A few decades ago The Commonwealth Club began each year by hosting a local psychic, who would make predictions about world events in the year ahead. For example, psychic Barbara Mousalam’s forecast for 1984 included the prediction that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov “will pull some dramatic antics during the first part of 1984, but he will settle down.” True enough; he died in early 1984 and settled down permanently.  

For 1985 Mousalam predicted further change ...

Read the entire column

After 43 Years, Star Trek Episode "Patterns of Force" to Air in Germany

"Don't mention the war," was the warning from Fawlty Towers. It appears that Star Trek didn't get the message, and it paid for it for more than four decades.

German public broadcaster ZDFneo is going to air the original Star Trek episode "Patterns of Force" for the very first time, nearly 43 years after it aired in the United States, according to a report on The Local, an English-language German news website. Though the episode did air on German pay TV in the mid-1990s, this is the first time it'll air on public TV.

The episode, written by John Meredyth Lucas, is an extremely unsubtle homage to World War II and a certain rotten little German regime run by Nazi fanatics. Whatever art might have been in the episode is probably drained away by the heavy-handed bluntness; as The Local notes, it involves a war between two planets, one of them named Zeon, whose partisans are called "Zeonist pigs."

Okay, so not all science fiction is finely honed cultural critique. Sometimes the critique is slathered on with a ping-pong paddle.

Nonetheless, the German broadcaster apparently decided that the Huns – oops, one war too far back – could stand a little thinly veiled attack on a German government that was soundly blasted into smithereens 66 years ago.

One wonders what they would think about Starship Troopers ...

My Review of Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts

ERIK LARSON. Photo
by Benjamin Benschneider

In the current edition of Northside San Francisco, my review of Erik Larson's new nonfiction book In the Garden of Beasts is published.

Book Notes
Strangers in a stranger land 

By John Zipperer 

Adolf Hitler met my stepmother. True story. She was a young schoolgirl in the 1930s, one of thousands of locals lined up to observe the Nazi leader on his visit to their eastern German city. As the dictator walked through the crowd shaking hands, he stopped long enough to playfully tug on my stepmother’s pig-tails, and he moved on. 

History is filled with such minor but interesting details that either make history come alive or bogs it down even further for people who hate history. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, the new nonfiction book from author Erik Larson, is filled with just those kinds of details of character and location, sight and even smell.

READ THE WHOLE REVIEW

President-Elect Obama

Finally.