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Without Sylvia McLaughlin and her fellow “tea ladies,” San Francisco Bay might’ve become just another example of urban sprawl—filled in, paved over and transformed into a flat urban plain. 

Back in 1961, Berkeley city officials had ambitious plans to double the size of the city by filling in 2,000 acres west of the shoreline, while the Army Corps of Engineers [ACE] was floating projections of the Bay in 2020 in which most of the bay would have been transformed into filled development. 

McLaughlin was the right person in the right place to foil their plans at the time. 

Her newest concern? 

“Casinos.” 

McLaughlin’s presence has been a given at the ever-growing number of meetings in recent months along the East Bay called in response to the growing number of casino developers targeting the area with plans for Las Vegas-style gambling palaces. 

“Point Molate is such a beautiful area. I was just appalled when I saw plans for such a huge development covering much of it.” she said. “I would hope that there are a lot of people who are opposed to gambling. But this is one of the challenges and opportunities we have—a big one.” 

Her battle to preserve the bay began in the 1960s, when she formed the Save San Francisco Bay Association with a few friends. 

Her spouse, Donald—then chairman of the board of Homestake Mining, America’s largest gold mining company—was a San Francisco native and UC Berkeley graduate who had served as the first dean of Berkeley’s College of Engineering and was then serving on the UC Board of Regents. 

One of McLaughlin’s closest friends was Kay Kerr, spouse of UC Chancellor Clark Kerr.  

“We were both concerned about the bay, and I told her I would rather work on this than anything else,” McLaughlin said. 

Kerr suggested a third member of the team, Esther Gulick, who was married to a Berkeley economics professor. 

“We held a meeting with all sorts of conservation organizations, and David Brower,” Berkeley’s most famous environmentalist, “said somebody ought to start a new organization” devoted to the issue. “So that’s what we did,” she said. 

Their first mass mailing featured an ACE diagram of a filled-in bay captioned “Bay or River?” and invited recipients to send a dollar to join the Save San Francisco Bay Association. The $1 membership was picked to draw the largest possible numbers—and it worked, drawing about a 90 percent response. 

“Kay had been a journalism major, so she did most of the writing. Esther had been an economist, so she kept the books and kept track of the major donors,” McLaughlin said. “I was the French major, so I became the one to go around to other organizations, where I learned about all these other issue and their interrelatedness.” 

With their connections and a growing membership base, the group was gaining clout, and drawing requests for help from other Bay Area communities. 

“We did manage to get the Berkeley City Council turned around on” the 200-acre bayfill proposal already cleared by the city planning commission, McLaughlin said. “They changed their policy.” 

As for the larger issues, “we felt the only way to stop the bay fill was through state legislation, so we talked to Bill McAteer and Nick Petris,” two powerful state legislators. 

McAteer, who owned a waterfront restaurant in Sausalito, was a natural choice since the Army’s map showed a future in which his pristine views were filled in by miles of development. Petris had already sponsored bay-saving measures which had failed. 

“McAteer got a study commission appointed in 1965, a very top-level group that recommended the creation of a regulatory agency, the Bay Area Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC),” McLaughlin said. 

Created on a temporary basis in 1965, the agency became permanent two years later after a struggle in the Legislature in which McLaughlin’s group led a drive that flooded Sacramento with calls and cartons of letters. The measure won by a single vote in the Senate and was signed into law by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan. 

“It was the power of public opinion versus highly paid lobbyists,” she recalled. “I don’t know if we could’ve done it in today’s world, because so many of our volunteers were so-called homemakers with the leisure time to go to public meetings and write letters and so forth. Now many women’s organizations are having trouble attracting new members because so many women are now in the workforce.” 

Their opponents—including the railroads, Ideal Portland Cement, investment bankers Lazard Freres LLC and the Crocker Land Company—certainly mustered massive political clout. 

The “Save the Bay Bill” was the only piece of environmental legislation presented to the Legislature that year. In 1970, more than a thousand were submitted. Establishment of a permanent commission was a major step, but there have been plenty of other challenges along the way. 

When Westbay Community Associates presented a plan to chop off the top of San Bruno Mountain and dump it in the South Bay to make way for development, McLaughlin’s group joined the lawsuit that eventually blocked the grandiose plan. 

They also joined forces with the City of Berkeley when the Santa Fe Land Company and George Murphy sued the city for $12 million each after the planning commission blocked their bid to construct a regional waterfront shopping center. 

Though mining companies have been frequent targets of environmentalists, McLaughlin said her husband “greatly supported my efforts for the Bay.” She points to Homestake’s McLaughlin gold mine—named in his honor—at the confluence of Napa, Yolo and Lake counties, “which was held up as a model for handling environmental issues” and later turned over to the University of California for a preserve when the mine finally closed.  

With the passage of time, concerns shifted. 

“We recognized that wetlands are very important and needed attention, so we brought together 30 environmental organizations to save them,” McLaughlin said. “We’ve always been concerned with water quality and quantity, too—so there’s always been plenty to do. One of our major efforts has been watchdogging the BCDC to make sure they were doing what’s necessary.” 

McLaughlin said she has continually worked to save the BCDC from attempts to weaken the organization. 

“One of our chief concerns has always been public access to the waterfront,” she said. “In the beginning, it could be measured in feet. Now there are several hundred miles of access.” 

McLaughlin’s interest in waterfront access led in the early 1980s to the creation of Citizens for the Eastshore State Park, a group which now consumes much of her time. 

While the park itself has now been created, there’s an ongoing struggle to insure adequate funding, she said, although voters and municipal governments have been rising to the challenge. 

Though she stepped down from the Save the Bay board four years ago, she remains in frequent contact with Executive Director David Lewis. 

At 87, McLaughlin remains very active, serving on the boards of the Resource Renewal Institute and Eco-City Builders and deeply involved with the Public Trust Group, which is leading the fight to save the state Lands Commission from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s drive to eliminate state agencies. 

Then there are the meetings, which take up the largest part of her time, “public hearings, meetings, and sometimes meetings before meetings.”  

Her membership on the Friends of Bancroft Library Council has a more personal aspect. The library already houses the collected papers of her late husband, and she is currently assembling her own papers for their collection.