Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground

Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground, Lionel Rolfe, California Classics Books, 1998

The author has spent the last forty years as a traveling newspaperman in California, writing for everybody from the Los Angeles Free Press to the San Francisco Chronicle. This group of essays explores his travels and the people he has met along the way.

In the post-war era, San Francisco may have been the "center" of bohemian living, but Los Angeles had quite a thriving bohemian community of its own. The author's leftist political leanings got him blacklisted by the California Newspaper Association. Rolfe was the only member of the Menuhin family (the virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin was an uncle) to actually work for a living; his politics also got him cut out of the family will. He explores the joys, and heartbreaks, of owning six cockatiels. His parents divorced when his mother wanted to live in London and continue her musical career; Rolfe's father, a worker's compensation attorney, didn't want her to go on tour, even some of the time. He talks about an emergency trip to Los Angeles County Hospital. It's a rather old teaching hospital that may not be state of the art in all things, but Rolfe found it to be full of conscientious doctors and nurses (not something that every hospital can boast), and it survived the 1994 Northridge earthquake, when many other newer buildings collapsed.

I really enjoyed this book. It isn't just a heartfelt autobiography in essay form, or a history of modern California as seen from the underside of society; it's more than that. This is well worth reading.