Richard Warren Reinhardt

Richard Warren "Dick" Reinhardt (March 25, 1927 – ) is a journalist, author, and historian whose books and articles have focused mainly on the American west, especially San Francisco and California, and also on railroads, mining, travel, urban issues, historic preservation, and world's fairs. He is the author of one published novel set during the Greco-Turkish war following World War I. Reinhardt taught journalism at the University of California, Berkeley for two decades and has served on the boards of many civic and historic preservation organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Early life and education[edit]

Reinhardt is the only child of Emil Charles Henry Reinhardt (1896-1974) and Eloise Rathbone Reinhardt (1903-1982). His father founded and ran an advertising agency in Oakland, California. called Reinhardt Advertising that served local clients including Kilpatrick's Bakery, San Francisco Brewing Company (Burgermeister), and Annabelle Candy Company. As a child, Reinhardt spent summers with his mother at her parents' home in Eldora, Iowa. He attended Crocker Highlands Elementary School in Oakland and graduated from Piedmont High School (California) in 1944. He began studying at Stanford University in the summer of 1944 but in June 1945, enlisted for military service and entered the U.S. Navy in San Diego as a hospital apprentice. After the war ended, the Navy sent him to Oregon State University in Corvallis on the G.I. Bill, where he studied naval science for a year. He returned to Stanford in the fall of 1946 and graduated in June 1949 with a degree in International Relations. The following year, he went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he graduated in 1950. He was the recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship from Columbia, and spent the following year on a trip through Europe and the Middle East during which time he wrote freelance newspaper articles. In 1951, he returned to the U.S. and married Joan Maxwell of San Marino, California, whom he had dated in college. They settled in San Francisco.

Career[edit]

After his return from Europe, Reinhardt turned down a job offer to be a copy boy at the The New York Times|New York Times in favor of a reporting position with the San Francisco Chronicle during the Scott Newhall era. He started out in 1951 editing church notices and writing general assignment stories but was soon promoted to cover San Francisco city hall during the mayoralties of Elmer Robinson and George Christopher. In 1957, he received a three-year Ford Foundation grant to pursue his interest in the history of the Middle East and quit the Chronicle. He and his wife and two older sons spent an academic year at Princeton University, where he studied Near Eastern languages and history, followed by a year living in Kifissia|Kefissia, near Athens, and a year living in the Bebek area of Istanbul, during which time he researched his 1971 novel The Ashes of Smyrna. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1960, Reinhardt worked as an advance man for the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign and on local political campaigns into the mid-1960s, after which he worked briefly in public relations before becoming a fulltime freelance writer.

Books In 1967, Reinhardt published Out West on the Overland Train, a large-format book that interleaved travelogues and illustrations published by American engraver and writer Frank Leslie in the late 19th century with contemporaneous descriptions of a similar trip Reinhardt took by train from Chicago to San Francisco in 1966. In 1970, he wrote and edited an anthology of stories about American railroads and railroad workers called Workin' on the Railroad that was republished in 1988 and 2003.

In 1971, Reinhardt published a novel set during the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)|Greco-Turkish war that led to the formation of the modern Turkey|Turkish Republic, which he had been working on since his 1957 Ford Foundation fellowship. The Ashes of Smyrna, published by Harper & Row in the U.S. and subsequently in the United Kingdom, Greece, and Turkey, received positive notices, including a review by British historian and author Mary Renault, who said "Reinhardt presents with a Goya-like ruthlessness, humanity and precision the disasters of war and their dreadful expense of spirit: a war, too, which should not be forgotten by anyone who wants to understand modern Greece."^[1] The book dramatically concludes with the great fire of Smyrna, whose precise origins remain controversial. Minerva's Owl bookshop on Union Street in San Francisco hosted a joint book launch party for The Ashes of Smyrna and Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972.

Boyhood memories of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, a world's fair held on the man-made Treasure Island, San Francisco|Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to commemorate the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge|San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, provided the impetus^[2] for Reinhardt's illustrated history of the fair, called Treasure Island: San Francisco's Exposition Years, which was released in 1973 and reissued in paperback in 1978. In subsequent years, he was occupied with completing two books for friends who died leaving unfinished manuscripts: The Last Grand Adventure by William Bronson, about the Klondike Gold Rush|Klondike gold rush in the 1890s; and San Francisco: As It Is, As It Was, with Paul C. Johnson, a collection of historic photographs of the city paired with contemporary shots of the same locations, some of which were taken by his oldest son, Kurt.

In 1981, Reinhardt collaborated with photographer Baron Wolman on a picture book of the California coast. Wolman, an amateur pilot and former chief photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, shot the aerial images from his private plane and Reinhardt wrote the accompanying text. Reinhardt's latest book is a history of San Francisco Mechanics' Institute|San Francisco's Mechanics' Institute that was written for and published by the historic library and meeting club.

Magazine articles From the 1960s to 1990s, Reinhardt published numerous articles in periodicals including the original San Francisco (magazine)|San Francisco magazine (under Jack Vietor), KQED (TV)|KQED's San Francisco Focus, American Heritage (magazine)|American Heritage, and World's Fair, a quarterly newsletter published by writer and historian Alfred E. Heller. He was listed as an associate editor for San Francisco magazine from 1964 to 1967 and was a contributing editor of American West from 1965 to 1975 and of World's Fair from 1981 to 1995.

Teaching Reinhardt was an adjunct professor and lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism|U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1971 to 1993. He taught writing and reporting, and for many years led a class called Journalism 110 that consisted of a single one-hour lecture per week from an invited speaker on public affairs and the media. The one-unit course was consistently one of the most popular on campus.

For 10 years, he led non-fiction writing seminars at the annual Community of Writers at Squaw Valley|Community of Writers conference in Olympic Valley, started in 1969 by novelist Oakley Hall and writer Blair Fuller. He helped direct the non-fiction program with award-winning San Francisco Chronicle science writer David Perlman from 1991 to 2001.

Board service[edit]

• Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, director, 1968-1974
• San Francisco Council for Civic Unity, 1974-1976
• California Historical Society, trustee and publications chair, 1978-1985^{[citation needed]}; publications committee, 1994-
• Community of Writers, board, 1982-2000 (formerly the Squaw Valley Community of Writers)
• California Tomorrow, advisory board, 1984-1994^[3]
• San Francisco Heritage (which owns/operates the Haas–Lilienthal House|Haas-Lilienthal House), board member, 1980-1994; president, 1984-1986; chair, 1986-1988, 1989-1992
• Pardee Home, board member, 1995-2001^{[citation needed]}
• San Francisco Mechanics' Institute, trustee, 1998-2020^{[citation needed]}

Reinhardt has belonged to the Authors Guild, the defunct San Francisco Writers Roundtable, and the Chit-Chat Club.

Works[edit]

• The Tall Book of San Francisco (with Kenneth Pratt), H.S. Crocker Co. (1966)
• Out West on the Overland Train American West Publishing Company (1967), ASIN B000O6IBJW
• Workin' on the Railroad Weathervane Books (1970) International Standard Book Number|ISBN 978-0517189283; Gramercy (1988) ISBN 978-0517189283; University of Oklahoma Press (2003) ISBN 978-0806135250
• The Ashes of Smyrna Harper & Row, U.S. (1971), hardcover, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 69-15284. ASINs: B089628LF4 and B000OK86NY; Macmillan, U.K. (1972), hardcover, ISBN 978-0333141724; İzmirin Külleri Hürriyet Publishing (1973) hardcover; Oi stachtes tis smyrnis / οι στάχτες της σμύρνης, Ekdotikos Oikos A. A. Livani (1992) paperback, ISBN 978-9602362822
• Treasure Island: San Francisco's Exposition Years (designed by John Beyer), Scrimshaw Press (1973) hardcover ISBN 978-0912020242; re-released by Squarebooks (1978) paperback ISBN 978-0916290092
• The Last Grand Adventure (by William Bronson, with Richard W. Reinhardt), McGraw-Hill (1977), ISBN 978-0070080140
• San Francisco: As It Is, As It Was (with Paul C. Johnson), Doubleday (1981), ISBN 978-0385098823 (with an introduction by Herb Caen)
• Chinatown, San Francisco (with photographs by Peter Perkins), Lancaster-Miller (1981), ISBN 978-0895810387
• California 2000: The Next Frontier (edited by Richard W. Reinhardt, with research by Charles Warren (California politician)|Charles Warren), California Tomorrow (1982), ISSN: 001-2224
• California from the Air: The Golden Coast (photographs by Baron Wolman, text by Richard W. Reinhardt), Squarebooks (1981) hardcover ISBN 978-091629013; republished by Chronicle Books (1984) paperback ISBN 978-0877013204
• Four Books, 300 Dollars and a Dream: An Illustrated History of the First 150 Years of the Mechanics' Institute of San Francisco Mechanics Institute of San Francisco (2007), ISBN 978-0977643509.

Contributions:

• The Ultimate High-rise: San Francisco's Mad Rush Toward the Sky, by the editors of the San Francisco Bay Guardian (1971)
• Three Centuries of Notable American Architects, American Heritage, Scribners (1981) ISBN 978-0828111577 (ebook 2018) ISBN 978-1640191174, "Bernard Maybeck"
• The New Book of California Tomorrow, William Kaufmann Inc. (1984) ISBN 978-0865760772, "Miss Tilly's Garden," "From California 2000: The Next Frontier."
• A Sense of History, American Heritage, 1985
• Discovered Country: Tourism and Survival in the American West, Stone Ladder Press (1994) ISBN 0-963762303, "Careless Love"
• The World of Wilderness: Essays on the Power and Purpose of Wild Country, The Wilderness Society, Roberts Rinehart (1995) ISBN 1-570980179, "Desert Storm"
• American Heritage Overrated Underrated: 100 Experts Topple the Icons and Champion the Slighted! Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers (2001) ISBN 1-579121632, "Aviatrix"

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