Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley by Richard Schwartz

Writing an obituary for the Berkeley Daily Planet may seem premature since the paper is still maintaining a web site and one reporter.

Most advertisers look for younger readers. Rock concerts, blockbuster films, and poetry slams were rejected for classical music performances, opera, theater, and art-house cinema reviews.

In a town filled with transient students and renters, the paper chose to report on topics of more interest to property owners and older residents. While the first version of the newspaper aimed at a general audience, carrying wire service stories on national and international events along with a sports page, the second incarnation focused more narrowly, with its greatest emphases on land use and reader submissions in the form of letters to the editor and op-ed commentaries. I was hired three months after the O’Malleys took over, and was laid off four months before the presses stopped on February 25, 2010. The final print incarnation began as a twice-weekly under the O’Malleys on April 1, 2003, and it eventually became a weekly publication. Schwartz brings forth these long-forgotten people from their resting place, and does so with such skill as a storyteller that we can, for a time, straddle two worlds and sense their profound continuity.The Berkeley Daily Planet also was a misnomer, but it’s the brand that Becky and Mike O’Malley bought when they took over the last remaining assets of a six-days-a-week newspaper founded by Peninsula-based investors and which had published between April 7, 1999, and November 22, 2002. Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley shows how deeply we share the emotions and motivations of our ancestors whether she be a Native American girl trapped as a Berkeley domestic, a Civil War veteran gossiping and reminiscing his way down Shattuck Avenue in a horse-drawn wagon, or an African American dairyman whose keen observations bring him riches in a community that embraced him as a town founder. Although the world these wise and colorful characters inhabit is in so many ways different from ours, their spirit rings true to our modern sensibilities. The seventeen stories Schwartz tells here remind us of an often-overlooked reality: that the face of humanity of the past is the same as our own.

The intimacy he has developed with men and women of nineteenth and early twentieth century Berkeley blurs the fact that these people and events are of another time. In Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley, author Richard Schwartz seems to have leaned so far over the magic hole of history that he fell in and lived with the people he studied.

Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley by Richard Schwartz