Sam Whiting and Nora Mishanec February 23, 2021Updated: February 25, 2021, 10:24 pm Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his apartment in North Beach in March 2018. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle 2018 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the first poet laureate of San Francisco, was so beloved that on Tuesday, Feb. 23, a day after his death at age 101, Supervisor Aaron Peskin closed the regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors with a four-minute memorial sermon that went uninterrupted. Peskin touched on the great poet’s internal contradictions as both a Navy man and a pacifist, and his abiding belief that the funkiness of North Beach must be protected, which Ferlinghetti himself did by cranking his red jalopy truck up and down the steep hills and along Columbus Avenue. By the end of his speech, Peskin was visibly emotional.