10/07-11: Bay Area: Joe Lutrell, Law Antiquarian

I arrived safely into the Bay Area on Sunday, the 7th, and moved nicely into my son Zeb's dad's spare room in Richmond. Howard has a beautiful place that I find very safe and peaceful. He's a student of crazy wisdom master, Kusung Lingpa and spends a lot of time travelling, hosting various Tibetan teachers, and managing rental properties in central California.

I did fulfill one of my missions, to visit Joe Lutrell (and took a pic), of Boswell Meyers Bookstore. He's an expert on Clarence Darrow. It was really fun to meet face to face. I'd been corresponding a bit via the web. He was recommended to me by my cousin Elva and Randy, another lawyer I'd found who's an expert on Darrow.

I finally got to see the insides of Boswell Meyer (http://www.meyerbos.com/perlshop.cgi?thispage=home.html), which is on Mission Street in San Francisco. It's on the third floor over a house paint shop of a very unassuming brick building. Joe very kindly let me park my car in his spot as he'd ridden his bycicle to work. He showed me his collection of Darrow books, which occupied three very tall bookcases in a "library stacks"-like isle in the spacious room.

We went to lunch at the nearby Tartine Bakery (http://www.tartinebakery.com/), specializing in bakery delights and quiche and salad that had a queue that had about 10 people almost all the time we were there.

On the way there we passed the most amazing painted building that I'd ever seen. It was three stories and painted with all kinds of women images in vivid paint. Joe said it was the S.F. Women's Centre. Here's a web page with closeups of some of the images. http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Women's+Building+Mural%20San+Francisco&w=all

He talked to me about his young days in the Peace Corps and his work with civil rights law in Georgia. I talked with him about my idea of writing a pictorial essay on Clarence Darrow. After I'd come back from getting a coffee refill, I asked about how his interest in Darrow began. He said he was thinking about that and couldn't remember exactly, but that everyone needed a hero and his is Darrow. He said that Darrow doesn't disappoint.

On the last day I went to my favorite book store in Berkeley, Cody's, even though Cody died (along with Moe of Moe's Bookstore) and the store has been bought by a Japanese businessman, or so I heard. They have a really good group of employees who will help you find the book you want. In my case, "Outsourced," a novel about outsourcing the U.S. Intelligence community. I also bought "Look me in the Eye" about a man with Asberger's Syndrome, and "The Imperial Presidency," about Bush et al.