Dolly Fine Pt. 3: The Lady In Red Vanishes
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...
Ep. 11, Pt. 2: The Lady In Red—Collateral Damage
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...
Ep. 11—Dolly Fine, The Lady In Red & Frisco’s Empire of Vice
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...
A Frisco Mafia Deep Dive 1928-1932
This is a trailer for my first official Patreon bonus episode. To hear future bonus episodes, please join FRISCO: The Secret History at Patreon. TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to the Frisco the. Secret History Podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. This is a bonus episode for...
A Very Frisco Christmas Special
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...
Call It Frisco Part 3: Emperor Norton and Herb Caen Myths Debunked!
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...
Ep. 9 Bones Remmer, The Tenderloin’s Gambling King, Jack Ruby, & A Short History of Frisco’s La Cosa Nostra
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 —...
Rachel Walther Discusses Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai” (1947)
REFERENCES: NOIR CITY 41, in which the cover story, “Queen of the Cutters,” sees Mary Mallory discuss the career of editor Viola Lawrence, and the role that she played in shaping Orson Welles’ confounding masterpiece The Lady from Shanghai....
Ep. 8—Women In Saloons: The Shame Of My Sex Part 2
Welcome back! 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...