During my stay in San Francisco I lived at the Reno House, a small workingman’s lodgings in Sacramento Street. It was owned by a man named Rolkin, a carpenter, who invested his small savings in it knowing nothing about the hotel business. He had a “crazy notion” that he could put clean linen on every bed every day in this cheap place and survive. His competitors said he was insane. He persisted, however, and on that “crazy idea” he built a string of fine hotels that he counts today like a barefoot Franciscan counting his beads.
I brought a terrible cold out of the Seattle jail that hung on for months. I got worried about it and went to a doctor. After looking me over carefully he pronounced one of my lungs bad and said I was in a fair way to fall into consumption. He advised me to go to a different climate, not to worry and get into a panic about it, and to take cod-liver oil. “Not the emulsion,” he said, “but the raw oil. It’s nasty stuff to take, but it will save you. Take it for a year if you can stomach it that long.”