Page One

Project is wrong for San Pablo 

After the first meeting of the neighbors and developer Patrick Kennedy, he called the group “an angry lynching mob.” I don’t think the likes of our rich, white boy from Piedmont was what Billy Holiday had in mind when she sings “Strange Fruit.” This time he calls the neighbors “citizen vigilantes” – equally inappropriate. The people in the area all took Civics 101, and are exercising their rights as citizens of our city. 

Who are builders to tell the people who live in the area what they need – who is Bill Lambert to tell them either? Where does he live? 

People who have to live in an area and adjust to whatever comes into their neighborhood should have more say than the outsiders who only plan to make money off the projects and city employees who live elsewhere. 

Rosemary Vimont 

Berkeley 

Tragic irony in man’s death 

In your article about the death of Noah Baum (Tues., June 13, “Berkeley native dies”), you explain that he was a novice lawyer interested in environmental issues and that he “especially opposed logging old-growth forests and driving gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles.” I feel certain that those who knew him as well as many of us who didn't are deeply touched by the tragic irony that “he was watching a basketball game in a sports bar in West L. A. when a Jeep Cherokee sped out of control and crashed into the restaurant. Baum was killed instantly and others were critically injured.” 

It could only have been more ironic if it had happened in a redwood forest. 

Gary Skupa 

Berkeley