David Johnson, also known as the World Famous Bushman, is a homeless man who has been scaring passers-by along Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco since 1980. Johnson hides motionless behind some eucalyptus branches and waits for unsuspecting people to wander by. When they approach, he shakes the bush towards the unsuspecting tourists and startles them. Crowds gather to watch him work, often including those he has previously scared.
Crowds usually watch Johnson in front of Joe's Crab Shack, located across the street from where he usually sits, to see him entertain people.
In a "good year", Johnson claims to earn $60,000. At one point, he employed a bodyguard to protect himself against attacks by the unamused, distract his targets, and to alert him to the approach of elderly people so he could avoid scaring them.
The police have received a number of complaints about the Bushman, and Fisherman's Wharf merchants have tried to shut him down. In 2004, he was charged with four misdemeanors, but a jury cleared him. The District Attorney subsequently dropped several remaining public nuisance complaints.
Read more about World Famous Bushman: Two Bushmen, Bushman Holiday Video
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or famous:
“What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The treasury of America lies in those ambitions and those energies that cannot be restricted to a special, favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men; upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)