Travelin' with Phil Frank

"San Francisco has its own comic strip, its own private inside joke on the news,"

-Phil Frank

People are badmouthing San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown's idea to let homeless people camp in the city's parks. The mayor's advisor, guru Baba Rebok, suggests the try it himself. Brown, a man of action and style, immediately calls Wilkes Bashford, San Francisco's exclusive clothing store, and orders a suede tent for the outing.

That night at "Camp Willie" the mayor is hungry after an invigorating hike on the Municipal Golf Course. "I've got trail mix and dried apple rings," Baba says. But the urban camper prefers won-ton soup, spicy prawn black-bean chow fun and green tea ice cream. "I know a place on Irving that delivers," says Brown. "Give me my cellular phone."

You don't know the real skinny about Camp Willie unless you read the comic strip, Farley, in the San Francisco Chronicle. Phil Frank, 53, is a cartoonist and writer, a journalist who draws his stories. He has produced his timely brand of the news exclusively for the Chron since 1986. San Francisco is his beat and what takes place there today, may be in Farley tomorrow.

Anyone can relate to Frank's loving, satirical account of the happenings, inhabitants, settings and politics of San Francisco. He makes this city of 750,000 as homey as a small town.

"Travels With Farley", the syndicated incarnation of Farley, ran in the Chronicle from 1975 to 1985. But syndication meant a five to six week lead time. After doing three strips at the same time-two strips for syndication (Travels and Miles to Go) and an overnight turnaround strip for a local weekly, Marinscope, for seven years, "strictly for the pleasure of doing local humor ... and free photocopies"-it became progressively harder to draw the syndicated strip. Frank missed the timeliness and joy of doing local politics.

He asked Stan Arnold, the Chronicle's features editor about taking Farley out of syndication and doing it locally "The Chronicle was apprehensive," Frank says, "they'd never seen anything like it ." Farley was the first.

After a six week trial run, they gave him a three to four month contract. That was 10 years ago. Farley runs on the inside back page Monday through Friday under the wrap-ups of front page stories, and also in the Sunday section.

Recently, stories of merging the two San Francisco dailies hit local papers, but Frank had already broken the story. "It's been in the rumor mill for the last year and a half about the merger of the Chronicle and the Examiner," Robins says. Frank has been facing the merger while others avoid it, she says. "(He) is the only one of the journalists handling it with a grain of salt and a laugh."

Farley is a reporter on the Daily Requirement, a San Francisco newspaper which may merge with another city daily. He meets with his editor, who cautions him not to allude to a merger between the two dailies. Farley agrees, then asks him why he moved his office to a camper with the motor running?

The Chronicle doesn't censor Frank's work. "They leave the editing up to me, generally," Frank says. "They pull two or three (panels) a year because the humor is out of context, or it's too repetitive a joke."

"I think Phil Frank has a wonderful, warm, occasionally biting sense of humor that adds to the richness of the Chronicle's daily coverage," Brown says. "I especially like the idea of a local, San Francisco-produced and San Francisco-oriented daily cartoon strip."

Frank began copying cartoons from the funny papers by the time he started kindergarten in Holland, Mich., and has never stopped drawing since.

He worked on the Holland High School newspaper as a cartoonist and writer. For four years at Michigan State University he drew panel cartoons (not a strip) with local flavor about what the students did and how they lived and studied, for the college paper. He maintained good relationships with his readers and the university, he says, "by entertaining the students and not offending the management."

Syndication grew out of the panels he drew. College newspapers subscribe to other college papers and rerun stories and cartoons they like-sometimes with someone else's name on them. Consequently, his work was getting exposure, but not his byline.

By this time, Frank was teaching creative writing in the journalism department at MSU when Bob Harris, a friend of his who now teaches in the business school at UC Berkeley, suggested they threaten to sue and then offer the thieves a chance to buy the strip. It worked, Frank says, and within three years, 350 papers were carrying his work.

Frank says he does an eternal dance with San Francisco, an homage. "I really love the city. I love it for its physical beauty, the people who live there, and its politics."

He faces politics and other Bay Area matters with the help of Farley; his sidekick and alter ego, Bruce; Baba, his spiritual advisor; and a cast of other human, animal and insect characters. Orwell T. Catt is a feral cat, Beppo is a sensitive, homeless Vietnam vet, and Davy Cockroach is an activist in a coonskin cap who files a class action lawsuit against Muni "on behalf of maligned cockroach commuters of San Francisco." Alphonse, a die-hard Giants fan, and Bruin Hilda, who is periodically infatuated with Farley (especially when she's in estrus), are two of the four bears who run the Fog City Dumpster, "where the elite with four feet meet (to eat)."

Farley met Bruce, "a loud-mouthed, opinionated, urbanized opportunist" raven, says Frank, a few years into "Travels With Farley." Bruce came with the apartment Farley moved into, an apartment formerly rented to an assistant of former Interior Secretary James Watt, because the lease was in Bruce's name. Bruce has mellowed, says Frank, and "it's good to have (Farley) be able to talk to somebody."

Bruce is flying over Ocean Beach and spots San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto sitting on the sand, wearing business clothes and looking vulnerable, but glamorous. She has just lost the race for state senator to John Burton. "You've had a rough go of it lately, kiddo," Bruce says.

"There's an old Italian saying," Alioto says. "Ve drai che il sole resplenderà do mani! You'll see that the sun will shine tomorrow!"

"E anche la figlia! And so will the daughter," counters Bruce.

"The way Burton's campaign beat her up was overkill," Frank says. He drew the strip because "(Alioto) needed a pick-me-up."

Every city needs its "bad boys," so Frank periodically creates some. In 1988, he read "numerous stories of an estimated 1,000 pigs that were terrorizing Bay Area watersheds with their rooting and rutting," but nobody actually saw them.

Frank said there were only four very elusive "feral pigs driving around in a white BMW." They had vanity plates (Pigs R Us), parked in handicapped zones, and wore gold nose rings.

A few years later, feral cats were being blamed for the diminishing songbird population in Golden Gate Park so Frank had the parks department subpoena two feral cats as expert witnesses. They were only supposed to be in the comic strip three days, but there was such a positive response to Orwell that Frank kept him. He uses him to confront politicians and celebrities, and for opportunistically-ripe events.

When Frank Jordan became mayor in 1992, he appointed Ted Dienstfrey, an ex-developer, as head of Housing and Community Development. "It didn't seem to fit," says Frank. Jordan also appointed his godchild, Annemarie Conroy, as a supervisor. "His joke was his appointments," Frank says. "I went a step further and appointed Orwell head of the aquarium."

"He has no morals. He's so bad he's predictable," Frank says of Orwell. "He's just trying to survive." Orwell was head of Feline Security at the White House. President Clinton said he was "one hairball away from being first cat" if something happened to Socks. And he wanted the job.

In a possible international incident, Orwell flew to London with a lemon meringue pie from Victoria's Pastry in North Beach, "to hit Princess Di's cad of a former lover, one James Hewitt, in the puss with a pie."

Readers love Orwell, but an everyday diet of him would be too much. As a result, no character appears daily. Even Farley has been out of the strip for up to 10 days in a row.

Many people think the writing is great. A citizen's committee chose Frank as one of 160 20th century writers whose names are engraved on a new, five-story sculpture, "Constellation," at the new main library. Some of the other writers are Robert Frost, Amy Tan, Armistead Maupin, William Falkner, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett.

Farley readers often talk enthusiastically about the comic strip. Bruce D. Raven is the favorite character of a reader who owns parrots. She also likes the punny comments in parentheses between the last two frames. Another prefers Tom Tomorrow, but likes Farley , too, and says the artwork is great. A third reader feels good after reading Farley, and a fourth describes the cartoon as visually Herb Caen-like.

Frank would like to follow Caen's example and work "as long as they want me." As San Francisco changes, his characters and the cartoon will continue to develop and improve. And he will continue to poke fun at San Francisco's public figures.

"I think Frank presents San Francisco warmly and with great affection," Brown says. "In that respect he's similar to Herb Caen, or even myself ... he really seems to genuinely love this city, and it shows in his work."

"I thought (the Camp Willie spread) was hilarious," the mayor says. "As a person who uses humor from time to time myself, I'm not afraid to take a little razzing." But then he adds, "I think I'm much better looking than his cartoon gives me credit for."

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