SFGATE contributor Christian Baba explores the history of the room where the gonzo journalist wrote 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72'
By Christian Baba,Freelance WriterFeb 27, 2024 Around noon on a cold January day in 1973, Rolling Stone magazine’s book editor Alan Rinzler walked down the hall of San Francisco’sSeal Rock Inn, knocked on the door of Room 305 and braced himself. It was dark and cold and the man on the other side of the door was not expecting company.
Rolling Stone spent a year bankrolling Hunter’s exorbitant bar tabs as he covered the general election of 1972, in the hopes that the weekly dispatches would turn into a book. Months later, there was no book. Most of the time, there was also no Hunter: “I have a powerful aversion … to working in offices,” he once said.
So in a last-ditch effort to finish what would become “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” the then-upstart magazine rented Thompson a room at Seal Rock Inn to better monitor his progress. Sitting near the end of Geary on Point Lobos Avenue with windows facing a roaring ocean, the Inn is less of an office and more of a makeshift abbey. Hunter agreed to the stay, but hardly expected his editor to show up at the door.
Thompson looked Rinzler up and down before inviting him in. Alan was accompanied by a large paranoid poodle, but he also brought with him 40 pounds of supplies: two cases of Mexican beer, four quarts of gin, a dozen grapefruits, one IBM Selectric typewriter, a few reams of paper, a hefty mass of firewood, and as Thompson later said, the most important ingredient of them all: “enough speed to alter the outcome of six Super Bowls.”
At the cool nightly rate of $23 in the winter of 1973, Thompson stayed at Seal Rock Inn for weeks at a time. It was these weeks that produced the book “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” a high watermark of modern political journalism and a frighteningly prescient prediction of the world to come. On any given day, fog may roll in from the ocean and blanket the building. Across the street, cypress trees and a row of jagged cliffs are the final barrier before reaching the vast, frigid Pacific. Thompson was right when he said, “This is the end of the line, for buses and everything else.” https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/hunter-s-thompson-san-francisco-hotel-18684777.php
A view of Seal Rock Inn, where Hunter S. Thompson wrote “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” and the view out the window of Room 305 at Seal Rock Inn, where Hunter S. Thompson holed up to write “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” as seen on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
I was at Venus’s first pro match at the Oakland Arena (former Warriors home) on Halloween in 1994. Her clacking beads loudly echoed in the nearly empty arena as she ran. Also saw the Rolling Stones that night, who were playing next door at the Oakland Coliseum, former home of the A’s and Raiders.