Did I leave my heart in San Francisco?

As I hopped up onto the barstool at the Buena Vista Bar I asked myself that very question. Why do we go back to the same places we have visited before when we return to a city after 15 or 20 years?

The Buena Vista Bar is a famous San Francisco landmark located exactly at the corner of Hyde and Beach Streets. It is on Fisherman's Wharf, where the cable car is manually turned around to go back to Powell and Market Streets. Alcatraz is visible, sitting quietly, empty in San Francisco Bay.

As I write my thoughts, I have just imbibed two Irish coffees and my innards are warm and my psyche is relaxed. Irish coffee is the hallmark drink at the Buena Vista. This is the time-tested recipe:

1. Fill glass with very hot water to pre-heat, then empty.

2. Pour hot coffee into hot glass until it is three-quarters full. Drop in three cocktail sugar cubes.

3. Stir until the sugar is thoroughly dissolved.

4. Add full jigger of Irish Whiskey for proper taste and body.

5. Top with a collar of lightly-whipped whipped cream, pouring it gently over using a spoon. Enjoy while piping hot.

Twenty-year-old memories sweep through my jumbled brain. Governor Jerry Brown was sitting at a table in the corner with a date. It wasn't Linda Ronstadt, but we kept glancing at them and talking about them in hushed tones. Today Jerry Brown is the mayor of Oakland, just across the bay. Just a bit of 20-year-old gossip.

San Francisco has changed!

My first visit to the "City by the Bay" was in 1959 and it was the last stateside stop before shipping out to Korea. We pretended to be carefree but we wondered what the future held in store for us.

The "we" was Dave Gordy, a dentist from Chicago; Dan Schneider, a physician; a Catholic Chaplin from somewhere in America; and two Turkish soldiers who were being shipped to Easter Island.

Our first stop was the Purple Onion Night Club. Headliners were the Smothers Brothers. Maybe I am having delusions, but I remember three Smothers Brothers. Could I be wrong? Probably! Maybe I am confusing them with the Kingston Trio, who also appeared there.

Next stop - Finocchio's, with men dancing as female impersonators. It was shocking to a recent dental school graduate who had spent his previous 25 innocent years in the East Bronx.

The city in 1959 was a small western town. During the 1960s it become the 'Capitol of the Flower Children." The Hippie revolution was focused here, in Haight-Ashbury.

Today, San Francisco is one of the most popular tourist spots in America. Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf, The Saint Francis Hotel, The Mark Hopkins, Muir Woods, sourdough bread, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio and those crazy cable cars make it a wonderland.

Sitting at the Buena Vista Bar, writing this column, gives me a clue to what makes salmon return to the place of their birth.

Tony Bennett was 100 percent correct.