FRANK WERBER -- CHARISMATIC MUSIC AGENT, ENTREPRENEUR

If anyone ever lived up to the image of the swinging 1960s hipster,
Frank Nicholas Werber was the man.

The original manager of the Kingston Trio and a successful restaurant
and business owner, he had been living it up for several years by the
time the Summer of Love rolled around. The bearded entrepreneur wore
beads and a tweed coat with a flower in the lapel. There were sports
cars, miniskirted young ladies, a penthouse office in San Francisco,
sailboat cruises in Mexico and pot.

Lots of pot.

Narcotics agents said six sea bags full of marijuana were delivered
to his swanky home overlooking Richardson Bay in 1968, leading to his
arrest, two sensational trials and a six-month jail sentence in Marin County.

The charismatic hippy music agent died May 19 of heart failure in
Silver City, N.M., where he had lived on a ranch since 1974.

Born in Cologne, Germany, in 1929, Mr. Werber spent time in a Nazi
concentration camp during the Holocaust.

He told his family that he and his father were at one point lined up
to be shot by a Nazi firing squad when an officer ordered the elder
Werber pulled from the line. As the story goes, the officer didn't
want to lose the camp's best cook. Because his father wouldn't leave
without him, Mr. Werber, too, was saved. The father and son later
escaped, although details about that are vague.

Mr. Werber learned to cook from his dad, and from then on, good food
played a major role in his life.

He immigrated to the United States. After high school, he joined the
Navy and served as an aviation photographer, midshipman and
sharpshooter. He later attended the American Academy of Art in
Chicago and the University of Colorado.

Family members said Mr. Werber worked as a commercial artist, gold
miner, cabdriver, horse rancher, ski-lift operator, construction
worker and press photographer.

He eventually landed in San Francisco, where he met Enrico Banducci,
the renowned North Beach impresario who operated the hungry i
nightclub. Mr. Werber impressed Banducci and was hired as manager.

He stayed at the nightclub for four years and then happened upon a
group of young Stanford singers at a bar and signed them to a
management contract. The Kingston Trio soon blossomed into a national
sensation, ushering in a folk music movement that lasted through the 1960s.

Mr. Werber turned out to be a masterful promoter. He created a
multimillion-dollar recording studio and promotional development and
publishing company called Kingston Trio Inc., which took up two
floors in the Columbus Tower office building.

He then established Sausalito's famous Trident Restaurant, which
started out as a jazz hot spot in the 1960s. Mr. Werber later turned
it into a psychedelic health food restaurant with hanging plants and
handmade candles where rock musicians hung out and ogled braless waitresses.

The now-defunct restaurant, on Bridgeway, set aside a table for Janis
Joplin, and a young Robin Williams worked there as a busboy,
according to Mr. Werber's daughter, Chala Werber.

"Everyone who was anyone hung out at the Trident," she said. "He
interviewed all the waitresses, and they had to be super hot. They
weren't expected to wear a bra."

When Native Americans occupied Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971, the pier
outside the Trident was used to ferry supplies to island dwellers. In
1974, the Rolling Stones held a private party at the Trident thrown
by Mr. Werber's good friend Bill Graham. It was, according to several
revelers, a mind-altering experience.

Erudite and witty, Mr. Werber had a financial interest in the hit
show "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." He was active in numerous
sports, including sailing and scuba diving, which he practiced often
in the tropical waters off Puerto Vallarta.

He was, by all accounts, on top of the world in 1968 when federal
agents raided his Marin County home and seized 258 pounds of Mexican
pot they accused him of conspiring to transport.

Mr. Werber admitted smoking pot, but said he never trafficked in it.
He argued that he was set up by dealers who were trying to save their
own skin. A federal court jury eventually found him not guilty after
a widely publicized trial. He was then tried by Marin County
authorities for possession and cultivation of marijuana.

Mr. Werber was defended by Terence Hallinan, who would later become
San Francisco's district attorney. The trial was a circus. Sheriff's
officers dragged sea bags full of pot into the courtroom, and
Hallinan talked about Mr. Werber's spiritual connection to pot rooted
in his experiences during the Holocaust. Celebrities marched in and
out of the courtroom as a fan club of young women in miniskirts
rooted for Mr. Werber, who, participants said, smoked pot a few times
during the breaks.

Mr. Werber loved to recount how Tommy Smothers of the Smothers
Brothers testified that he had known the defendant for years and
"before he started smoking pot, he was a real -- hole."

"It was a pretty interesting trial," said Smothers, 70, a longtime
friend who got a big laugh when he testified. "It was very stressful
for him at the time, but he just moved on."

Mr. Werber retired at age 43 to an old adobe lodge on 160 acres of
wilderness in New Mexico once used by Teddy Roosevelt on his hunting
expeditions.

"Everything my dad ever did, he did completely," his daughter said.
"His philosophy was there is nothing worth doing that isn't worth
overdoing. There was never any half-assing in anything in his life."

Smothers said: "He was a little slick, a little slippery and
wonderfully funny and entertaining. He was a guy you would go out of
your way to visit."

Besides his daughter Chala, he is survived by another daughter,
Mishka Werber, sons Bodhi Werber and Aari Werber, stepson Daniel
Benavidez and two granddaughters, all of Silver City.

A memorial is planned for the fall.