SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Robin Williams was everywhere in San Francisco, it seemed, as he made a place for himself in the everyday fabric of a city where he once said he passed for normal.
The comedian was there to usher a few fellow inhabitants of the Bay Area into life – visiting a pediatric ward, unheralded, each year on Christmas Day to welcome newborns to the world.
He also ushered friends out of life- delivering a boisterous eulogy for an iconic local journalist known as Mr. San Francisco, musing on heaven as a nice bar in the city with a dry martini.
In between, Williams had turned out to cheer everything from the Giants to the opening of a local public library. Bay Area people got used to seeing the actor at restaurants and stand-up clubs, even handing out treats to children at his house, with a topiary dinosaur looming in the yard, at Halloween.
After word of his apparent suicide this week at his home in Marin County, residents who had encountered Williams recalled a comedian who didn’t always try to be funny but never failed to be gracious.