Richard Reinhardt

Richard Reinhardt (born March 25, 1927) is an American journalist, author, and historian whose books and articles have focused mainly on the American west, especially San Francisco and California. He also authored The Ashes of Smyrna, a novel set during the Greco-Turkish war following World War I. Reinhardt taught journalism at the University of California, Berkeley for two decades and has served on the boards of many civic and historic preservation organizations in the Bay Area.

Early life and education Reinhardt is the only child of Emil Charles Henry Reinhardt (1896–1974) and Eloise Rathbone Reinhardt (1903–1982). His father founded and ran an advertising agency in Oakland, California He graduated from Piedmont High School in 1944 where he wrote for the school's newspaper. The following year, he went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he graduated in 1950. He was the recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship from Columbia, and spent the following year on a trip through Europe and the Middle East during which time he wrote freelance newspaper articles.

Career After Reinhardt's return from Europe he accepted a reporting position with the San Francisco Chronicle during the Scott Newhall era, where in 1954 he won the Press and Union League Club of San Francisco's Best News Story. In 1957, he received a three-year Ford Foundation grant to pursue his interest in the history of the Middle East. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1960 became a full-time freelance writer.

Books In 1967, Reinhardt published Out West on the Overland Train, a large-format book that interleaved travelogues and illustrations published by American engraver and writer Frank Leslie in the late 19th century with contemporaneous descriptions of a similar trip Reinhardt took by train from Chicago to San Francisco in 1966. In 1970, he wrote and edited an anthology of stories about American railroads and railroad workers called Workin' on the Railroad that was republished in 1988 and 2003.

In 1971, Reinhardt published a novel set during the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish war that led to the formation of the modern Turkish Republic, which he had been working on since his 1957 Ford Foundation fellowship. The Ashes of Smyrna, published by Harper & Row in the U.S. and subsequently in the United Kingdom, Greece, and Turkey, received positive notices, including a review by British historian and author Mary Renault, who said "Reinhardt presents with a Goya-like ruthlessness, humanity and precision the disasters of war and their dreadful expense of spirit: a war, too, which should not be forgotten by anyone who wants to understand modern Greece." The New York Times stated, "Mr. Reinhardt is an even handed and sympathetic interpreter of the truly Byzantine motivations that pile horror upon horror. As his book unfolds like a great mural, one gets an intense appreciation of the feral hatreds that infect individuals." The book dramatically concludes with the great fire of Smyrna, whose precise origins remain controversial.

Boyhood memories of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, a world's fair held on the man-made Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to commemorate the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, provided the impetus for Reinhardt's illustrated history of the fair, called Treasure Island: San Francisco's Exposition Years, which was released in 1973 and reissued in paperback in 1978. In subsequent years, he was occupied with completing two books for friends who died leaving unfinished manuscripts: The Last Grand Adventure by William Bronson, about the Klondike gold rush in the 1890s; and San Francisco: As It Is, As It Was, with Paul C. Johnson, a collection of historic photographs of the city paired with contemporary shots of the same locations, some of which were taken by his oldest son, Kurt.

In 1981, Reinhardt collaborated with photographer Baron Wolman on a picture book of the California coast. Wolman, an amateur pilot and former chief photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, shot the aerial images from his private plane and Reinhardt wrote the accompanying text. Reinhardt's latest book, Four Books, 300 Dollars and a Dream, is a history of San Francisco's Mechanics' Institute that was written for and published by the historic library and meeting club.

Magazine articles From the 1960s to 1990s, Reinhardt published numerous articles in periodicals including the original San Francisco magazine, KQED's San Francisco Focus, American Heritage, and World's Fair, a quarterly newsletter. He was an associate editor for San Francisco magazine from 1964 to 1967 and was a contributing editor of American West from 1965 to 1975 and of World's Fair from 1981 to 1995.

Teaching Reinhardt was an adjunct professor and lecturer at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1971 to 1993.

For 10 years, he led non-fiction writing seminars at the annual Community of Writers conference in Olympic Valley, started in 1969 by novelist Oakley Hall and writer Blair Fuller. He helped direct the non-fiction program with award-winning San Francisco Chronicle science writer David Perlman from 1991 to 2001. They settled in San Francisco and had three sons.

Board service California Historical Society, trustee and publications chair, 1978–85; publications committee, 1994– Community of Writers, board, 1982–2000 (formerly the Squaw Valley Community of Writers) Pardee Home, board member, 1995–2001 San Francisco Mechanics' Institute, trustee, 1998–2020