Sausalito’s master of pen and ink gets tribute in bronze
The late Phil Frank, creator of the Farley comic strip, was always worthy of a statue cast in bronze. Now he has two of them.
One is life-size. The other is of his head. Both are bronze and will soon be on public display in Sausalito, where the Chronicle cartoonist lived for 35 years and became as much of a town character as the ones he drew with his pen.
“Sausalito loved and still loves Phil,” said Jerry Taylor, president of the Sausalito Historical Society. “He energized everybody constantly.”
Most prominent of the two statues is the fulllength Frank, 5 feet, 10 inches tall. It will stand as a greeter at the corner of Bridgeway and Bay, outside the historic Ice House, which Frank helped turn into a oneroom museum to the fishing, shipbuilding and bootlegging past of his adopted hometown. The Ice House, which serves as the Sausalito Visitor Center, is next to a decrepit cinder-block seating area that will get a complete makeover and be named Ice House Plaza.
Paid for through community donations, Ice House Plaza is threequarters of the way to its fundraising goal of $400,000, which is close enough to schedule a groundbreaking after the conclusion of the annual Sausalito Art Festival over Labor Day weekend.
The festival foundation paid for the statue, which was conceived by Paul Anderson, its longtime managing director. It was cast at Walla Walla Foundry in Washington state. The statue has been standing on the second floor of City Hall, in the Sausalito Historical Society Gallery, a place where Frank liked to hang out.
“It is waiting for instruction,” said Frank’s widow, Susan. “Phil would be laughing.”
By late October, the statue will be out in the salt air, with a smile on that friendly face, hands on hips, rolled-up Chronicle in its right hand, and Farley’s sidekick Bruce the Raven standing on its left shoulder.
“He’ll probably have a pigeon on the other shoulder,” said Dana Whitson, former Sausalito city manager, who can still evoke the Frank sense of humor even 11 years after his death, at 64, from an aggressive brain tumor.
The bronze head of Frank was done by Piedmont sculptor Bruce Wolfe, who also made the bust of former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom for City Hall, and maestros Kurt Herbert Adler and Lotfi Mansouri at the Opera House. More recently, Wolfe did the full-length Tony Bennett, which stands outside the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill.
Frank and Wolfe were tentmates at Monkey Block, a camp full of artists at Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County. Frank sat for Wolfe several times, and Wolfe presented the bust at the grove a few months before the cartoonist died. Every year since, the bust has represented Frank at the Bohemian Grove encampment in July.
But after this year’s encampment ends, the bust will be put on permanent display at Cavallo Point, probably in Farley Bar, which is decorated with Frank’s cartoon strips.
Farley began as Travels With Farley on Nov. 3, 1975, and ran daily in The Chronicle for 32 years. Readers came to know the rumpled reporter for the Daily Requirement, who lived in a North Beach apartment with bay windows and roommate Bruce the Raven.
The strip was populated by Farley’s reliable sources: his girlfriend, Irene the Meter Maid; Velma Melmac, the chainsmoking plugged-in RV camper in Yosemite National Park; Alphonse, the bear who ran a restaurant called the Fog City Dumpster; and Orwell T. Catt, leader of a feral pack in Golden Gate Park.
Had he lived, Frank would have no doubt delighted in the arrival of coyotes on city streets, not to mention the sea lions and seals nipping swimmers in Aquatic Park.
He also would have made light of the fuss being made over him with this statuary. “Phil would have been honored,” Susan Frank said with a laugh. “But he would have thought this is more than what needed to be done.”
The bronze in Ice House Plaza will be maintained by the Sausalito Historical Society. Nobody is sure who the other bronze belongs to, another aspect Frank would have enjoyed. Sculptor Wolfe figures it belongs to him because “no one ever paid me for it,” he said. “I did it because I wanted to. Phil was my buddy.”