November 28, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Former reporter's book knits together S.F.'s twin tragedies of 1978, by Kathleen Sullivan,

November 28, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Former reporter's book knits together S.F.'s twin tragedies of 1978, by Kathleen Sullivan,

As a San Francisco Chronicle reporter in 1978, Maitland "Sandy" Zane wrote many stories related to the twin tragedies that hit the city that November: the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the deaths of more than 900 members of the People's Temple at a jungle compound in South America.

Ever since, Zane, a Pacific Heights resident, has been working periodically on a book about the "dreadful six months" that began Nov. 18 with the mass suicide and murders in Jonestown, Guyana, and ended with the "White Night" riots that racked the city, after a jury convicted the man who killed Moscone and Milk of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder.

"Exorcism is a good description of my own feelings about writing this book -- just because it was such a burden carrying all this knowledge around, " Zane said.

"The stuff that has been written up to now hasn't even scratched the surface."

Zane, 75 and retired, doesn't have a publisher for the book, titled "Blood on the Steps."

But he's optimistic about its chances of getting published, saying it would be the first book to tie together the two tragedies.

"I just passed the 600-page mark, and I'm writing the last chapter," Zane said last week.

"There is so much ground to cover about San Francisco in the '70s -- the rise of Jim Jones and the People's Temple, the rise of gay power in the Castro, plus the murders."

Zane knew all the major players at City Hall, because he had been writing for years about the political careers of Moscone and Milk, and of Dan White, the embittered supervisor who killed them.

He had also covered Dianne Feinstein, who was then president of the Board of Supervisors.

"Obviously I had a ringside seat," said Zane, who worked for The Chronicle for more than 40 years.

Zane also wrote articles about the trial of a man involved in the plot to kill a delegation of elected officials -- and reporters and photographers --

who flew to Guyana to investigate the compound at the request of worried relatives of temple members.

He said one of the most poignant coincidences of that time involved a meeting between Moscone and a man whose wife and children had died just 10 days earlier in Jonestown.

"The very last civilian who talked to the mayor before he was shot was a black man named Fred Lewis," Zane said. "Lewis was the biggest single loser in the Jonestown tragedy. His wife and seven children -- 27 relatives in all-- were killed in Jonestown. He had come to City Hall to beg for Moscone's help in getting the bodies back from an Air Force mortuary in Delaware. He actually heard the shots when he was going down the back stairs."

Zane has accumulated a library of documents and tapes related to that day, including White's confession, which was played at his trial, and a tape recording of the last hour in Jonestown when Jones exhorted his followers to drink punch laced with cyanide.

Before joining The Chronicle in 1959, Zane worked as the "dawn patrol police reporter" for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, one of four daily newspapers in the city.

"I went to work at 2 in the morning at the old Hall of Justice," he said.

In his earliest days at The Chronicle, Zane wrote stories on a manual typewriter.

"It was a much noisier and smokier atmosphere back then," he recalled with a laugh. "Everybody smoked. There were spittoons filled with soggy cigars at the city desk."

He graduated to an electric typewriter. Eventually, smoking was banned at work. Computers arrived.

Zane, who retired in 2002 and is also writing a novel based on a real, unsolved murder in San Francisco, has happily converted to the new technology at home, saying: "Oh, yes, I'm writing the books on a computer."