Moscone, Chris: Moscone connections

Abstract

Chris Moscone: My dad (George Moscone) opened up when he was with people. He loved to talk to like a cable car operator or a janitor. I mean he really would. He wasn’t goin’ out with them later on for drinks that night, but he would really want to talk to ‘em. I remember these things now. They come back when you start thinking about those times. It was a long time ago and so I have to focus on it. But now I’m remembering that people would recognize him or stop him on the street, and he would talk to ‘em. “What do you do? How’s it goin’? What’s goin’ on with that? Oh, I know that guy, you know Jimmy? That’s my buddy. You know Jimmy? Yeah, what an asshole.” Whatever, right? And they would talk because he would find something to connect, and it wasn’t a BS thing. It was just pleasure. He enjoyed it. I dunno why he enjoyed it so much. It was good though because politics is people, and he loved people, especially San Francisco. Jon Rubin: He also had [ ] memory. I don’t know if any of you guys do. Chris Moscone: I didn’t know that. You mean he knew peoples’ names? Jon Rubin: He knew everybody’s name. If you got him to focus, to look somebody in the eye for like five seconds, and said this guy’s name is Chris Moscone and he’s whatever you know. And you just get him to focus for five seconds, the next million times he saw you, he’d remember. I saw he’d remember peoples’ names that I knew when I couldn’t remember their names he would remember every name. Had you not heard that before? Chris Moscone: Well I heard he was pretty good at it. I didn’t know really... Jon Rubin: I introduced him because I was doing field operations. Lots of people whose name I couldn’t even remember, and he’d remember every single one of them. It was remarkable. Chris Moscone: That is remarkable. He had that smile. He was into it. He enjoyed it. It was his passion; that was his job. But I think when he wanted to come back to San Francisco and when he came back, that was really where he was having some fun. You get to a certain age, you put a lot of time in and you get to be pretty good at it I think, and he was right there.

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Type

Interview

Date Original

2011-05-09

Relation

The Moscone oral history interviews are part of the George Moscone Collection, MSS 328.

Contributing Institution

Holt-Atherton Special Collections and Archives, University of the Pacific Library

Rights Information

To view additional information on copyright and related rights of this item, such as to purchase copies of images and/or obtain permission to publish them, click here to view the Holt-Atherton Special Collections policies.

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