When King Tut ruled San Francisco in 1979

The King Tut exhibit at the de Young Museum in 1979 is one of those events where the hype starts to skew reality. There was so much local television coverage, newspaper stories and water cooler talk that I honestly wasn’t sure if I attended the event as a child, or just picked up everyone else’s memories by osmosis.

I remember kids talking about King Tut on the playground at Washington Elementary School in Burlingame, where I was a second-grader. Imagine that. At a time when the blockbuster movie era had started and “Battlestar Galactica” was on the air, 7-year-olds were talking about a fine art exhibit. For the next year, the black and gold T-shirts from the Tut gift shop were almost as popular as their “Star Wars” counterparts.

I looked at The Chronicle’s coverage of the event, and the hype was as I remembered. One article focused on the then-highway robbery $4.50 ticket prices. De Young officials explained that the museum wasn’t part of the original consortium that brought Tut to the states, and they didn’t have a huge sponsor to offset shipping and security costs.

The exhibition, which opened to the public June 1, 1979, featured 55 objects from the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb, most notably the gold death mask and coffin that held some of the boy king’s internal organs.

There had been a Tut exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in the 1960s, but it hadn’t caught quite the same zeitgeist wave. Tut arrived in 1979 after three years mostly in Eastern states, and a year after Steve Martin’s “King Tut” song had gone platinum. The hype was off the charts.

Reading The Chronicle’s 1979 King Tut coverage now, after I’ve worked at the newspaper for 15 years, I can imagine the editors and reporters in a pitch meeting, desperately brainstorming for ideas and picking even the bad ones. Among the five articles, editorials and columns that ran on June 2, was a feature from a reporter who tried to sneak in to the exhibit. (He was successful.)

The front page article, well-written by Chronicle reporter Don Wegars, describes a surprisingly orderly scene, made less chaotic by the museum’s wise decision to give people tickets with “start times” in 15-minute intervals. A smart idea Disneyland wouldn’t figure out for a couple more decades.

Here’s my favorite paragraph from his piece:

“At times inside the museum, three or four people crowded for the same space to ponder the spectacular treasures laid out before them under plexiglass,” Wegars wrote. “There were murmurs of awe and envy at times, and an almost funereal tension seemed at times to encase the spectators. … But that was in the King Tut gift shop. Further inside the museum, where the actual 55 mementos from Tutankhamun’s tomb were on display, things were pretty calm.”

Herb Caen was there, of course, reporting the scene mostly in sentence fragments, while throwing in a jab at recently built Sutro Tower.

Caen wrote: “Wednesday night in Golden Gate Park. Very special. A Maxfield Parrish dusk, all pinky-blue. The biggest King Tut party yet. Tents, blimps, helicopters, banners, searchlights forming a pyramid of light. The TV tower on Mt. Sutro glared down, myriad red lights pulsing. Couldn’t tell if it was excited or angry or both. It is definitely a monster and bears close watching.”

The Chronicle reported that a fascinated Jerry Brown, in his second term as California’s governor, came two days in a row. Another King Tut fact I find interesting now: Orson Welles recorded the voice on the audio tour — The Chronicle reported that he was “very cheap.”

Finally there was Bill Graham, the greatest music promoter in Bay Area history, standing in awe of someone else’s show. Caen reported that Graham stood in front of the museum, heard the TV news helicopters, and put the scene in perspective.

“Y’know, this looks like the last scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’!”

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic. E-mail: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub.