ROBERT FROST WAS A SAN FRANCISCO KID
In 1884, Robert Frost visited saloons all over San Francisco with his father, who was running for city tax collector. The future author of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” and “The Road Not Taken” was 10 years old. He had never climbed a birch, never been snowed on, and the roads he took each day were San Francisco’s streets, some paved but others muddy or dusty, depending on the weather.
He had been born in San Francisco and raised in cheap digs on the backside of Nob Hill. His father, William, was a newspaperman; his mother, Isabelle, a fey spiritualist poet. The family moved often, probably for reasons of economy; when flush, they liked to live at the Abbotsford House, a small hotel at Broadway and Larkin.
Robert was a street kid. He hated school and manipulated his mother into letting him stay home much of the time. Belle taught him herself, but he resisted her; he was lazy about homework, and he didn’t like to read.
His San Francisco youth—11 turbulent, painful years—profoundly shaped him. The great event, which brought that period to a close, was the early death of his father. The perplexity of a child who suffers a great loss before he’s able to make sense of it finds echoes in much of his best poetry, in which baffled people lose children and others they love, take the wrong paths and end up imprisoned by fate, and too soon, too intimately, are acquainted with the night.
William Frost had been born in New Hampshire, Isabelle in Scotland, their son Robert in San Francisco, and their daughter, Jeanie, Robert’s younger sister, during a trip to visit relatives in Massachusetts. Yet here they all were: a California family.
As a Harvard student (class of 1872, cum laude), William had been eager to get out West, excited to see the “wickedest city in the world,” as San Francisco was often described. Belle, though no friend of wickedness, had been moved to read Thomas Starr King’s book , which combined nature worship with strenuous Christianity.
