Jack Boulware's enduring naïveté

Before we get started, love and support to all of my LA people, except for you who don’t go out in the streets to protest this week. Y’all people? I am completely off your sorry ass.

Now…

The man just seemed to be everywhere in my San Francisco writing life. That night when the story I told failed to entertain, just minutes before Marc Maron killed at a San Francisco Litquake storytelling event? It was Jack Boulware’s face I saw as I exited onto a Mission sidewalk, a frowning person falling in with inebriated book revelers.

Back When The City Was Great, Boulware’s humor magazine The Nose did a credible take on Spy. Until Madison birthed The Onion, it wasn’t promised that a second- or third-tier municipality could have a humor mag of its very own. His lasted from 1989 to 1995.

Most undeniably, dude was a columnist. Litquake you could just not go to. He had published five issues of The Nose per year. (Who sees a regular publisher, anyway?) The SF Weekly though? That free newspaper was in your face if you were at all involved with the prominent and fiercely competitive Bay Area alternative media scene of the 1990s.

Photo by Bart Nagel

Through most of the nineties, this rural Montana native’s column set the tone for a certain stripe of San Francisco culture follower. I read my share of Boulware, learning the city and laughing lots. Still, the greatest contribution this columnist has made to the media culture, in my opinion, is his Substack’s title:

From his home in Marin County, our latest WCS podcast guest explained that newspaper letter writers deserve the credit for this perfect distillation.

Ya see, back in the day readers would get their danders so far up they would put pen to paper or fingertips to keypad and write out their hostility over what you had written. (“There’s something about your voice that just sets my teeth on edge,” went my most memorable reader mail.) The computer correspondents would print out their missives. Both sets of commentators had to somehow obtain a postage stamp, find an envelope, and then carry their product to a mailbox. Others would hand-deliver their thoughts about your to the front desk of your job.

Them was the motherfuckas you needed to look out for.

“What Jack Boulware fails to realize” repeats a phrase—or a sentiment, at least—that’s known to any scribe who’s regularly written opinion for a legacy news outlet. Civilian readers weren’t going through the physical steps of getting their ideas to the columnist over a minor piffle. The letters got written and delivered because this thing in your head—this discrepancy—had to be clarified.

What Jack Boulware Fails to Realize was just sitting there, waiting to be used. Stakes in the raw.

How today’s guest got from Montana State University to Eugene says a lot about him, his trek from Oregon to San Francisco still more. And how Jack Boulware became a significant figure in SF journalism while armed with little more than curiosity, personality, an autodidact’s instincts, and a random sampling of book learnin’ might be the biggest scoop of all.