Famed San Francisco Journo Harry Jupiter Dies

By: E&P Staff Harry Jupiter, the journalist/raconteur/saloonkeeper, died
Thursday in San Francisco of congestive heart failure at the age of 73.

In his early days, Jupiter, a native New Yorker, covered sports for the Bremerton (Wa.) Sun and the old San Francisco Sun, and worked for The Associated Press out of Fresno and Sacramento. But he earned his widest exposure covering the baseball Giants during the Willie Mays era of the 1960s. Showing his playful side, he once wrote that a ball went through the infielder's legs and illustrated it with the typewriter symbols: (.)

Jupiter was "one those characters that gave the city a unique flavor," Bay Area sports announcer Hank Greenwald told the San Francisco Chronicle for Friday's paper. Jupiter was often quoted in Herb Caen's columns.

He was also the man who nicknamed the Giants' star pitcher Juan Marichal "The Dominican Dandy." Jupiter was once aligned with Mays, and the star slugger has said that Harry showed him around San Francisco when he first got out there in the late 1950s.

Jupiter, with three others, bought the popular Templebar in the late 1960s, but returned to newspapering at the Chronicle in 1972, later moved to the Examiner, and retired in 1993. He once said he was planning to write a memoir and would call it "From Hack to Flack and Back," but never did.