SAN FRANCISCO — If ever there was a man worthy of a grand birthday bash in San Francisco, it had to be Tony Bennett. And that is what happened Friday.
After the speeches, the music and the praise for the legendary crooner, hundreds of people watched as an 8-foot-tall bronze statue of Bennett was unveiled outside the Fairmont Hotel, where he first sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in 1961.
“I can’t get over what just happened,” said Bennett, who turned 90 earlier this month. “That’s the most beautiful statue I have ever seen.”
The theme of the day was how Bennett has always been there for the city by the Bay.
“When the cable cars broke down and were closed down for two years and we brought them back, he came,” said Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, the chief of protocol for San Francisco and the state of California. “When we had the earthquake and we put the Bay Bridge back together, he came.”
San Francisco Bay Area sculptor Bruce Leslie Wolfe created the statue.
–From news service reports
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