Reporter's Note Book
Reporter's Note Book
Duffy Jennings became a San Francisco Chronicle reporter at the dawn of the 1970s, one of the century’s most turbulent decades for crime and social unrest in Northern California. The period was marked by political assassinations, serial killings, kidnappings, a mass suicide, attacks on police, a courthouse shootout, racial murders, gang warfare, and an assortment of counterculture terrorists and whack-job loners with guns and bombs. It was also a time of profound cultural and political upheaval anti-Vietnam War marches; draft protests; the black power movement; feminism; gay rights; and new excesses in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. In some ways, it was all connected. In just over eleven years, we went from the 1967 Summer of Love to the 1978 winter of hate.
ISBN: 978-1-950393-92-3
“Duffy Jennings’ riveting coverage of the Moscone-Milk murders and the Dan White trial was an arduous reporting job and daily journalism at its finest. His account of a reporter’s life makes for vivid reading.”
— David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle City Editor, 1977-1978
“Duffy Jennings brings the reader inside the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom directly to his reporter’s typewriter to present valuable insights into events during the most turbulent, chaotic decade in San Francisco’s modern history. He adds a very gutsy human dimension with intense and painful personal revelations even as he was writing the stories that mesmerized us during his prolific career.”
— Art Agnos, former Mayor of San Francisco
“Duffy Jennings wrote more than 500 stories for the San Francisco Chronicle, but he may have saved the best one — his own — for last. Written with admirable skill and moral clarity, his memoir reveals what it was like to cover a city gripped by the Zodiac and Zebra killings, Jonestown, the Moscone-Milk assassinations, and the Dan White trial. But this isn’t only a sharp, vivid snapshot of a city in crisis. It’s also a family saga that defies stereotypes at every turn.”
— Peter Richardson, San Francisco State University lecturer and author of A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America.
