Editorials

First Bay Area Chinese teacher dies at 95 

LAFAYETTE – Alice Fong Yu, the first Chinese American public school teacher in San Francisco, died earlier this week. She was 95. 

Yu died Tuesday at a nursing home. 

Yu came to San Francisco in 1916 from the small gold-mining town of Washington, Calif. She applied to and graduated from the San Francisco State Teacher’s College in 1926, only to be told by administrators that Chinese Americans were not being hired. 

But the principal of Commodore Stockton Elementary School insisted that his campus needed a bilingual teacher and Yu was hired, a first for San Francisco. She went on to teach public school for 44 years. 

The San Francisco Unified School District recently named its Chinese school after Yu. 

Yu was also the founder of the 67-year-old Chinese women’s service organization called the Square and Circle Club which serves charitable causes. She received many acknowledgments for her achievements over the years including the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Distinguished Service Awards in 1975 and the Women of Achievement, Vision and Excellence award in 1986. 

Yu is survived by two sons and two grandchildren. 

New Examiner loses another editor 

SAN FRANCISCO – Yet another editor has left the new San Francisco Examiner. 

Managing editor Bob Porterfield has been fired, becoming the third editor to leave the newspaper since it released its first issue a month ago. 

Porterfield told The Associated Press Friday he was fired “for exercising an action that I believed I had the right to exercise as managing editor.” 

When the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner was hired by publisher Ted Fang, some saw it as an indication that the paper would set a high standard for his journalism. 

In its first few weeks, the Examiner has been bedeviled by such problems as front-page misspellings, stories that ended in midsentence, improperly sized type that made reading difficult and relatively few staff-written stories. 

The newspaper replaced executive editor Martha M. Steffens Dec. 11, and editorial page editor Susan Herbert resigned a week earlier. 

Porterfield said he could not elaborate about his Dec. 15 termination, referring questions to his lawyer Alan Exelrod, who did not return calls made late Friday and early Saturday seeking comment. Calls to Fang were referred to his spokesman, Ken Maley, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

The Examiner, which launched the publishing empire of William Randolph Hearst, ended a 113-year run as a Hearst-owned newspaper last month. Fang, a publisher of giveaway neighborhood papers, hired a new staff and now competes for morning readers against the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle.