“Today, Housing Director Stephen Barton stepped down from his post,” Berkeley City Manager Phil Kamlarz wrote in an email to the mayor and City Council Tuesday.  

Some of Barton’s supporters reacted strongly, telling the Daily Planet Wednesday morning that the dedicated champion of low-income and affordable housing, also a widely-respected academic and author in the field of housing, has taken the fall for a department fraught with problems and impossible to manage from the time he took it over as director in 2001.  

“Barton is a sacrificial lamb for the years of [City Council] neglect of the Housing Authority,” Councilmember Kriss Worthington told the Daily Planet. 

Others however welcomed the departure of the man they say was responsible for the “troubled” designation that the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) has given the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA). BHA is the Housing Department division that oversees low-income housing. They also blamed Barton for a Condominium Conversion Ordinance that makes it difficult to convert rental apartments to condominiums.  

“The buck has got to stop somewhere,” said Berkeley resident David M. Wilson, arguing that Barton’s advice to the council is generally based on ideology rather than objectivity. 

Barton’s departure is part of an overall restructuring of the BHA. A new board will take over July 1 and the BHA staff will be laid off and reassigned to other city departments. Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna will take over the department temporarily. 

See the full story in Friday’s paper. 

Rounds of applause punctuated occasionally by bouts of “boos”—enough to prompt a scolding from City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli—greeted varied proposals for Safeway’s planned North Shattuck Avenue makeover at a meeting Thursday evening at the Jewish Community Center. 

The loudest boo choruses from the standing-room-only crowd targeted a plea from Livable Berkeley, the meeting’s sponsor, for the new building to rise to at least three or four floors, with housing on the upper levels. 

But Todd Paradis, real estate manager for the grocery giant, told the crowd that the firm’s earlier proposal to build housing and a new market at the site of its store at 1500 Solano Ave. in Albany “went over like a lead balloon. We reeled it back in and said, ‘not today.’” 

The suggestion of housing above the new store at 1444 Shattuck Ave. had been raised in a letter from Berkeley developer Chris Hudson to Paradis urging construction of 50 to 100 units of housing above the store. 

But Paradis said housing “was not our plan, and if we’re not forced to do housing on top, we would not advance it because it makes the project more difficult.” 

Applause followed, and there would be boos later in the meeting when Livable Berkeley board member Jim Orajala rose to advocate for housing over the store. 

The North Shattuck store will probably still feature three levels, Paradis said, consisting of underground parking, the main shopping area and an upper level for offices. City codes restrict the total height to 35 feet, he said. 

Safeway has already hired Berkeley architects Marcy Wong and Donn Logan for the job, a firm whose local projects include the Berkeley Repertory Theater and the new Berkeley High School gymnasium.  

Paradis said he envisions a radical new store, both inside and out. Compared to the 27,000-plus square feet of the existing store, the new market would occupy 45,000 to 50,000 square feet and offer a dramatically different array of goods. 

Organic produce, wider aisles, a make-your-own nut-butter bar, wrapped-to-order meats and fresh fish, a bakery and a deli are likely features of the new facility, he said, which will take about a year to build and open sometime in 2011-2012. 

And if all goes the way Paradis hopes, the reincarnated retailer will be a truly “green” grocer, built to strict environmentally friendly standards and generating its own wind and, perhaps, solar power. 

Safeway’s latest television ads boast of the wind generators incorporated into store designs, and Paradis testified to their benevolence. “They’re not the type of windmills that chop birds up,” he said. 

When solar advocate Harvey Sherback advocated solar panels for the store’s roof—to be used either for resale or for charging the batteries of electric or hybrid vehicles—Paradis suggested Berkeley’s climate might not be suited for solar panels. 

Then David Stoloff spoke up, a planning commissioner whose office is near the store: “I put solar on the roof of my building, and it has cut our power bills in half.” Paradis promised to investigate. 

While the thought of an environmentally sensitive business offering both union wages for its workers and edibles that meet the exacting culinary criteria of Berkeley’s sophisticated shoppers was clearly popular—the only bad thing anyone could say about Safeway was the corporation’s strong financial backing for Republicans—most in the overwhelmingly gray-haired crowd were sweating the details. 

One Livable Berkeley idea did fare well with the crowd, a call for a lively retail facade along the sidewalk on the west side of Shattuck. 

A neighbor suggested siting the store’s fish market there, and perhaps a deli—ideas Paradis said he found particularly intriguing. 

A landlord who owns apartments on Vine Street directly behind the store said some of her tenants had said noise and dust concerns had led them to say they would move out if construction began. 

Paradis said construction would be staged, and promised measures to control dust and noise, particular concerns of long-time residents of Henry Street, which runs directly behind the store. 

The Safeway official promised immediate neighbors a meeting of their own where they could share their concerns in greater detail. 

While the store currently has some underground parking, one Henry Street resident asked the store to locate all parking in the new store underground, with an entrance on Shattuck. Other shoppers said they wouldn’t park in an underground lot because of safety concerns, and when Paradis said the store could have employees stationed in the lot, another shopper said she feared they’d be the first to go if layoffs ever came. 

Another alternative suggested was locating whatever above-ground parking remained between the proposed sidewalk-fronting stores and the main store body. 

But for the immediate neighbors, traffic was the enduring concern, especially at the intersections of Rose and Henry streets with Shattuck. One neighbor also called for restrictions on delivery hours. 

Other concerns and suggestions included: 

• A call from Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee member Dorothy Walker and two others for a shuttle service for shoppers, especially those who live in the hills where bus service is less than frequent. 

• A request to clean up and perhaps relocate a store recycling center that Paradis acknowledged could stand improvements. 

• A lowered height for upper shelves. 

Paradis promised to create a web site and post regular updates as the project progresses. 

“I’ll put a button on the District Five web site for updates and notices about future meetings,” said Capitelli, where one and all could make their requests known. I want no-calorie potato chips.” 

The councilmember ended the meeting by chiding the audience. 

“I want to give you one opportunity to boo me,” he said. “I personally don’t find booing people who are expressing their views a very civil thing to do,” he said, urging applause for agreement and silence for the dissent. “We’re not all going to get our way.” 

Silence followed.

A retired Berkeley police officer was jailed Sunday night on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter and drunk driving after he allegedly struck and killed an elderly Berkeley woman on Solano Avenue. 

The Alameda County Corner’s office identified the victim as Betty Kietzman, 82, of 915 Fresno Ave. The cause of death is listed as multiple blunt force injuries. 

Berkeley Police Lt. Wesley Hester said the suspect charged in the death is Guillermo Robles, 56, who retired from the department in 2001, where he had been serving as a patrol and narcotics officer. 

According to witnesses, Robles struck the woman as she was crossing Solano Avenue at Fresno Avenue. 

Police and paramedics arrived at the scene within minutes of the 10:50 p.m. call. The injured woman was rushed to a local emergency room, where she was later pronounced dead, said Hester. 

After a field sobriety test at the scene, Robles was handcuffed and taken to city jail, where he was held on the two felony charges. Hester said he was transported to the county jail at Santa Rita Monday morning. 

After booking at the jail, said the officer, Robles was released on $30,000 bail. 

Hester said he couldn’t reveal the results of the blood alcohol tests, but said that because of the death, “fairly extensive testing was involved.” 

Since retiring from the police department, Robles has become a business owner, said James Carter, the former manager of the Albany Chamber of Commerce. Known as “Memo” to friends, Robles opened Casa Oaxaca, a store which features imports from the Mexican state where was he born, Carter said. The store opened in July 2004 at 1274 Solano Ave. 

Hester said he believes that Keitzman’s death is the city’s first traffic fatality for the year.

A Berkeley jazz school that has profited from tens of thousands of city dollars is remiss in hiring an almost all-white faculty, serves mostly white students and has engaged only a handful of African Americans for the Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival, say local African American musicians and supporters. 

It’s like the master appropriating the work of the slaves, Samuel Fredericks, owner of Samuel’s Gallery in Jack London Square and specializing in African American art, told the Daily Planet.  

Fredericks is one of a group of people who have been meeting for about three weeks to address the question of how race affects the jazz community. In separate interviews with the Daily Planet, many of the group underscored that the discussions are aimed at giving African Americans their due, not taking away from talented white artists. 

“As far as the dominant culture is concerned, jazz is deemed too important to have been created by black people,” Fredericks said. “Whatever comes from a colonized people, you own it.” 

At issue locally has been the recent revelation that the Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival, produced by the Jazzschool at 2067 Addison St., has hired few African American artists for the August festival. Almost simultaneously Yoshi’s, the celebrated Oakland jazz club, produced a 10-year anniversary CD with no African American musicians. (The CD has reportedly been pulled from circulation.)  

African Americans have been aware for decades of the expropriation of jazz, said Rhonda Benin, also part of the group meeting on the question. And so the problems at Yoshi’s and the jazz festival came as no surprise.  

Concerns around the Berkeley festival have been festering for the event’s three years of existence, according to Anna de Leon, owner of Anna’s Jazz Island in downtown Berkeley.  

De Leon said she was outraged a few weeks ago when Susan Muscarella, director of both the Jazzschool and the festival, sent de Leon an e-mail with the names of the artists she had booked at de Leon’s club for the festival. “She proposed four artists—there was no black group,” de Leon told the Daily Planet on Friday. 

` “I objected. I said that’s not OK,” she said. “My belief is that jazz originated in the African American community and comes out of the African American experience.” 

An e-mail from de Leon about the situation went the rounds of Bay Area jazz musicians, which led to a forum and follow-up show on Doug Edwards’ KPFA program Ear Thyme, several community meetings and a story Friday in the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Refusing to be interviewed, Muscarella sent an e-mail statement to the Planet, saying that the Chronicle article was “heavy on sensationalism.”  

In an apparent response to criticisms of lack of diversity, Muscarella said, “The stated purpose of the festival, incidentally, is to celebrate jazz and related styles of music from throughout the world. Part of the festival’s mission has been to reflect the diversity of downtown Berkeley, and it has accomplished that and more.” 

Muscarella further stated that as a female artist, “the minority throughout the history of jazz, I am particularly sensitive to any issue around discrimination and diversity.” 

The controversy over the booking, which Muscarella says is still in progress, led to the scrutiny of the Jazzschool itself, its board of directors and its faculty.  

As for the board of directors, there might be either zero or one African American on it, depending on whom you talk to. 

Another concern is the lack of diversity in the school’s Sunday concerts. Benin said she counted 25 Sunday performers on the school web site. “There were two black people in the line-up,” she said. 

Out of about 92 people listed as faculty at the school, “There are three, maybe four African American teachers,” jazz saxophonist Howard Wiley told the Planet.  

Wiley, who was born in Berkeley, said there is “no excuse” for not hiring African American teachers and performers, given the large number of highly respected black artists in the area. 

“There’s blatant bias right under our nose,” he said. “If the most left [area acts like that] what does it say for the country?”  

In a June 1 e-mail to the Jazzschool which he copied to the Planet, Wiley turned down an invitation to play at the festival. “Your attempt to quickly hire me and other black musicians seems to be damage control as you are well aware of the publicity around your racist hiring practices,” Wiley wrote. 

Adding fuel to the fire is that the city of Berkeley is listed on the festival web site as a co-sponsor of the event. Further, according to Economic Development Director Michael Caplan, the city has just refinanced and consolidated two loans to the jazz school, equal to $88,000. 

“Muscarella’s getting all kinds of public funding,” said jazz bass player Michael Jones. 

On Friday, Caplan said he was unaware of the controversy, but said he would discuss the question with Muscarella.  

Budget Manager Tracy Vesely said in an e-mail that the Jazzschool has received grants of around $3,000 in 2005 and 2006 and has been awarded a $9,000 grant for 2007. Civic Arts Coordinator, Mary Ann Merker, said the Civic Arts Commission looks at criteria such as diversity when it makes its awards. 

Muscarella told The Chronicle: “I hold African American heritage in high esteem. But I do choose quality and not ethnicity alone.” 

“Jazz is the highest order of our black music,” Jones told the Daily Planet. Muscarella “went to the Chronicle and told us we weren’t qualified,” Jones said. 

Rather than hiring highly qualified Bay Area artists who need work, “she’s shipping in a singer from Germany,” Jones said. 

Fredericks said, while the immediate focus is on the festival and Yoshi’s CD, “It’s much bigger than the flap over the Jazzschool and Yoshi’s. What’s happening now is the tip of the iceberg.” 

White musicians have the money and the power to reinvent history, he said, “to build monuments to themselves.”  

The group that has emerged from the controversy is looking for answers. “Nobody has a roadmap,” Fredericks said.  

“We’re ready for some real hard work,” Benin said. “Everybody should come to the table on this in truth and honesty.”  

The group meets at the Public Conservatory of Music in Oakland: 836-4649. 

A revived and newly energized movement to restore local control to the Oakland public schools held several hours of testimony from Oakland residents on Friday evening calling for an end to the state school takeover of Oakland Unified School District and a moratorium on school closures in the district until that time. 

Full control of OUSD was taken over by the State of California in 2003. Since that time, the Oakland public schools have been run by a state administrator hired by State Superintendent Jack O’Connell, with the elected school board stripped of all power and functioning without pay, in an advisory capacity only. The legislation authorizing the takeover gives O’Connell broad discretion in deciding when to return local control, and O’Connell has refused to give a timeline as to when that will happen. 

Just over a year ago, the Oakland local school control movement appeared stalled. 

But in May of last year, after O’Connell announced he was working on a deal to sell more than eight acres of downtown area property owned by the district—including the administrative headquarters and five schools—to an east coast developer, the momentum shifted. An ad hoc committee to restore local control—made up of local activists, educational professionals, and officeholders—formed to fight the property sale, eventually leading to a February announcement by O’Connell that the sale is dead. 

Meanwhile, newly elected District 16 Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland) fulfilled a campaign promise by introducing legislation immediately after his swearing in, calling for an immediate return to local control of the Oakland schools. Swanson’s AB45 was later modified to put power over local control in the hands of the semi-private school intervention Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team, taking it out of the discretion of the state superintendent. AB45 has passed two assembly committees, Education and Appropriation, and is scheduled for a vote on the assembly floor this week. 

Last week, buoyed by the change in momentum, school board members agreed to ask OUSD State Administrator Kimberly Statham to put a resolution on the board-state administrator meeting agenda calling for a moratorium on school closures. 

Board member Chris Dobbins, who introduced the resolution at the request of local organization Education Not Incarceration, stressed that he did not want to rule out an OUSD school board ever closing an Oakland public school; he only wanted such closures held off until the school board regains control over the operation of district activities. In addition, at the request of board member Noel Gallo, the discussion on the school closures is expected to include a broader discussion on the financial and enrollment situation in the Oakland public schools. Gallo said he was offering that inclusion in anticipation of the board beginning to take on a larger role in setting school policy. 

It was in that atmosphere that Friday’s meeting was called by the ad hoc committee to end the state takeover. Oakland Education Association teachers union president Betty Olsen-Jones, the convener for the meeting, said the ad hoc committee had gone dormant late last year, but members decided to revive it after a dramatic February board meeting presentation by representatives of the East Oakland Community High School. After an announcement by the state administrator that EOC was scheduled for closure at the end of the school year, faculty, students, and parents marched eight miles from the school site on the old Kings Estate Middle School campus in the East Oakland hills to the board meeting on Second Avenue near the lake, and then presented more than two hours of emotional testimony, asking that the state administrator rescind the closure order. 

EOC is still slated for closure this month. 

On Friday, with Olsen-Jones called EOC “the poster child for problems under the state takeover,” many of the residents providing testimony were EOC students or parents. 

“When they closed my school, they told me I could get my first choice in any school I wanted in the district,” EOC student Leonard George Jr. said. “But I can’t get my first choice, because my first choice is East Oakland Community High School.” 

Besides Olsen-Jones and several school board members, panelists listening to testimony included Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Assemblymember Swanson, Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, and representatives of Congressmember Barbara Lee and several local school-based unions and organizations. 

Organizers of the meeting had scheduled a time for the introduction of resolutions at the end of the meeting. But after public testimony took the meeting more than an hour over schedule, Olsen-Jones told gatherers, “I haven’t heard anyone tonight say they were in favor of keeping state control, or closing schools, so I think we can go on record as saying this body is in favor of a return to local control and a moratorium on school closures.” 

There was a unanimous showing of hands. 

A group of about 10 civic-minded residents turned out for a lightly publicized public hearing on the budget at the North Berkeley Senior Center Tuesday evening, hoping city staff would listen to their ideas.  

The emphasis was on public safety. “There’s just one police person at night in District 5,” Bob Allen told those present, which included Councilmember Gordon Wozniak and four employees from the city manager’s office.  

This was the second in a series of three public hearings on the budget. The first was held at 10:15 p.m. as part of the May 22 City Council meeting. There, the public focused on funding social service programs, especially those that had not been funded by the federal Community Development Block Grant program. 

The last public hearing on the budget will be at the June 19 City Council meeting. 

In reality, most budget choices have already been made by past councils and staff. About 80 percent of the budget is personnel costs and another chunk is for fixed costs such as payment on debt, ongoing programs and maintaining “prudent reserves” of about 8 percent. 

There is, however, some wiggle room for new choices, according to the city manager. That includes about $5.1 million from the $15.6 million the city is receiving this fiscal year in transfer taxes and another $2 million in savings from vacant employee positions. 

City Manager Phil Kamlarz said that in order to pay for large projects—the storm water infrastructure and long-term police and fire needs—the city will have to tax itself. 

Longtime budget watcher Barbara Gilbert said the city has the process backwards. City revenue from property and utility taxes should pay for public safety, she said. 

“Tax measures should be for special things—a youth center, the Brower Center [the environmental center being built downtown next to low-income housing],” she said. 

Barbara Allen of BudgetWatch called for more money for public safety. Councilmember Wozniak, who has asked the council to consider giving an additional $1 million per year to the Berkeley police, did not speak at the hearing. 

Kamlarz argued against those pressing for more city money for public safety. “We have more fire stations per square mile than any place around,” he said. “And we have more police, when you include UC Berkeley Police, than anywhere around.” 

Kamlarz added that fire-fighting needs have changed over time: 87 percent of calls to the fire department are medical calls. 

And there are other ways to increase public safety than hiring new police, such as neighborhood watch groups, he said. 

One resident said the city was shooting itself in the foot by making money from parking meter fines, which, in the end, deter people from shopping in Berkeley. (Mayor Tom Bates has suggested raising meter fees and adding new meters where there are now none.) 

While the city manager has proposed putting almost $1 million into the city’s beleaguered housing authority, which oversees subsidized housing, Gilbert said she’d be happy to see the oversight leave Berkeley and go to Alameda County, something the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has threatened if the city doesn’t improve the agency. “We’re creating a huge dependent population,” she said, arguing that people in Berkeley would rather pay for police than for affordable housing. 

Kamlarz addressed the question of a need for more revenue. The city earns about 1 percent of the sales taxes people pay within the city. “When I talk to people in town, they don’t want retail,” Kamlarz said. “They all want to go to Target, but they don’t want a Target in town.” 

One person raised the question of the high cost of department heads, all of whom make more than $100,000 per year plus about another $50,000 in benefits. Kamlarz talked about “holding down labor costs,” which could mean having employees pay more for their health benefits. This change would only come out of contract negotiations. 

In some jurisdictions, such as the University of California, salary savings have been realized by giving the lowest-paid employees the highest percentage of a salary increase and the highest-paid, the lowest percentage. 

Christopher Lien said the answer is to reduce staff and asked Kamlarz to suggest where that can be done. “We would like the ideas coming from you,” he said.  

Those in attendance said the hearing should have been better publicized. “Everyone in the city should have gotten a notice,” Gilbert said. “I’m really disappointed.” She added that the city should be surveyed to see where people really want their money spent. 

The city manager has made a number of budget proposals. Some are:  

• $900,000 for deferred maintenance for city buildings and recreation facilities, including swimming pools, senior and recreation centers. 

• $1 million for transportation planning. 

• $2.86 million for streets and other transportation funding and $1 million for clean storm water/creeks planning. 

• $306,000 for youth: $136,000 to fund 50 youth jobs and another $170,000 for youth recreation programs cut in earlier budgets. 

• $66,000 for a full-time watershed coordinator, increasing a half-time position to full time. 

• $947,000 over two years to subsidize the Berkeley Housing Authority; and $1.5 million to fund three low-income housing projects. (This $1.5 million is expected to be reimbursed to the general fund through future fees for condominium conversion.) 

• $900,000 for public safety; $600,000 to keep all fire stations open (ending rotating closures) until December 2008 and $300,000 for training public safety dispatchers on new communications equipment. 

City Councilmembers have made their own proposals, some of which include: 

• $50,000 to study the feasibility of a youth center (Anderson, Moore) 

• $65,000 to restore funding to the civic arts coordinator (Civic Arts Commission) 

• $380,000 to expand the street-sweeping program (Public Works Commission) 

• $200,000 for traffic calming in the Cedar/Rose/Hopkins/Gilman streets area (Maio) 

• $50,000 for the Public Commons/street behavior initiative (Bates) 

• $25,000 for a Panoramic Hill emergency access study (Wozniak) 

• $15,000 for services for severely disabled children in West Berkeley (Spring, Moore) 

• $85,000 for crisis Intervention training for police (Mental Health Commission) 

• $1.2 million for community-involved policing (Worthington) 

Call the City Clerk (981-6900) for the complete list of council referrals or look on line at the May 22 City Council agenda, supplement to Item 31. 

• June 26 the council will vote on the budget. 

The complete budget document is on line at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us, with a link on the city’s home page. The budget book can be purchased for $25 from the city clerk’s office.  

The budget will be discussed at every City Council meeting in June: 

• June 12, 5 p.m., City Council budget workshop. 

• June 19, there will be a public hearing on the budget at the council meeting. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. The mayor will present his additions to the city manager’s budget at that time. 

Berkeley was in the national headlines for weeks after the City Council approved a policy in December 2006 that requires local businesses to report to the city on their use of nanotechnology materials as well as guidelines for safety procedures and disposal of the substances.  

By the June 1 reporting date the only business following the formal reporting procedure was Bayer Laboratories, according to Toxics Manager Nabil Al-Hadithy. The other two local users of the technology, UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) responded, but did not include the specific data required by the ordinance. 

“I am especially disappointed because LBLN has been engaged in the process [of writing the reporting procedures] for two years and has failed to implement it,” Al-Hadithy said. 

The policy requires companies working with engineered nanoparticles—materials one of whose axes is 100 nanometers or less (a nanometer is one-trillionth of a meter)—to submit a report disclosing the toxicology of the nanoparticles used and “how the facility will safely handle, monitor, contain, dispose, track inventory, prevent releases and mitigate such materials,” says the city ordinance. 

The lab’s response was written by Howard K. Hatayama, of LBNL’s Environment, Health and Safety Division. Hatayama did not return a call for comment from the Daily Planet.  

Writing the city on May 31, Hatayama said the wide range of nano materials render the characterization of toxicity of each “extremely challenging.” However, without going into detail, he underscored that the lab follows safety procedures: “LBNL has procedures that take into account the toxicity, process and controls during evaluation of the work performed, in consultation with health and safety specialists as necessary.”  

The university response noted its independence from city regulation. “The university, as a state entity, is exempt from the city of Berkeley’s manufactured nanoscale material disclosure ordinance,” says a May 31 letter written by Mark Freiberg, UC Berkeley’s hazardous materials manager. Freiberg was out of town and unavailable for comment. His letter to the city was forwarded by the university’s Public Information Office. 

Freiberg writes, in general, about the university’s safety precautions: “Nanoscale materials created by UC Berkeley researchers are to be handled in accordance with the safe laboratory practices established in our laboratory Chemical Hygiene Plans…. Our researchers are also studying and helping better define and characterize the potential impacts manufactured nanoscale materials may have on human health and the environment….” 

Making sure that there is training in safety procedures in handling the nanoparticles is an important aspect of the reporting, Al-Hadithy said. The university’s letter says training “may be provided as part of the training provided on the laboratory’s Chemical Hygiene Plan.” 

Al-Hadithy noted that state and federal standards for disposal of the particles have not been developed. “They can be dumped in a sink or in a garbage can,” he said, noting that he had hoped that LBNL’s response would have helped in the development of such standards. 

Everything was purple at LeConte Elementary School Friday. 

Hues of purple greeted a community who had come to honor Berkeley High Vice Principal denise brown in the place where she had first started off as an educator. (She preferred to spell her name in lowercase letters.) 

Brown, who died in February following knee surgery, had sent both her children to LeConte and later went on to teach kindergarten, first and fourth grades there. Purple was her favorite color. 

“It was Denise who breathed life into this stage,” said LeConte instructional assistant Rita Petitt, looking around the auditorium Friday. “She brought drama to life and reality. She was not just a parent, a teacher and a friend, but also a magician. She pulled back these curtains for so many people.” 

Hundreds came by with flowers, photos, candles and memories to take part in the plaque dedication for Brown on Friday.  

A plaque was installed in the auditorium with the words: “As we walk through these doors, we recognize the contribution of denise brown.” 

“What Denise did here was create theater, create drama,” said LeConte first-grade teacher Debbie Barer. “This is her neighborhood. Everybody here knows her. This is why it continues to be such a wonderful place for community building. We want to carry on the legacy that she left behind.” 

A generation of LeConte alumni who had grown up taking part in Brown’s Performing Arts Program reminisced about their favorite teacher. 

“She’s the reason we are all friends,” said Shelly Gleason, an eighth-grader at Willard, as she rehearsed scenes from Brown’s skit “I Wanna Be” with her classmates for the event. “We all met while rehearsing for ‘I Wanna Be’ at LeConte. I have such wonderful memories. Ms. Brown was simply amazing with us kids. The one thing I remember is the way she would always ask us ‘why’ when something was weird. She had to get to the bottom of everything.” 

Brown, during her tenure as drama teacher at LeConte, produced numerous plays and musicals, each with a message to explore, such as war, violence and homelessness. 

She taught her students to have fun too, as was portrayed by the characters Carob Cookie and the Pixy Stick Twins in the play “The Wizard of Berkeley.” 

In a video that chronicled some of the best moments of all these performances, Brown said: “My inspiration for these stories came from none other than the children themselves. I have observed their behavior closely and watched the way they chisel away at each other with insults and putdowns. I see how they swallow and take it sometimes or lash out in anger ... The kids have developed these characters themselves. I just took them and put them in a script.” 

Excerpts from the video show Brown tying students’ shoelaces, arranging their clothes and hugging them in between scenes during the performances. 

Hilary Mitchell, a student teacher under Brown, described her as the “most loving person ever.” 

“She took everybody under her wing,” said Mitchell, who now teaches fifth grade at Washington Elementary School. “She taught me to advocate for my minority students and to teach everyone positive traits. There are certain things I do in my class that reminds me of denise every day. She helped me become a better person.”

A group of about 10 College Republican counterprotesters came out Saturday to support the Woodfin Suite Hotel in Emeryville, as some 50 demonstrators—separated from the Republicans by a handful of Emeryville Police—condemned the hotel for what they said is the unjust firing of 12 employees and refusal to comply with the city’s Measure C. 

Measure C was an initiative passed by Emeryville voters in November 2005 that guarantees a minimum wage for hotel workers and requires overtime pay for workers who clean more than 5,000 square feet of floor space. The hotel fired 12 workers in April for improper Social Security numbers.  

Hotel supporters say the firing was in retaliation for the workers’ protest around Measure C; management says it is complying with federal law. 

Ryan Clumpner, a senior at UC Davis, told the Daily Planet he came to demonstrate at the Woodfin for the second time to lend “support for a business that is unfairly targeted.”  

Clumpner, who said he and his friends were lodged by the Woodfin, addressed the question of Measure C on the Young Republican’s website, opposing its requirements to pay all employees at least $9 per hour.  

“So much for free markets,” Clumpner wrote. 

Protesters marched with signs calling for back pay—Measure C overtime—and chanted “Si se puede!” [Yes we can], while the Young Republicans taunted the organizers and unions for their support, calling for one of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE) organizers by name to go home as they yelled and sang into bullhorns.  

The Young Republicans call EBASE a “front organization” for the unions and say the support for hotel workers is simply a backdoor attempt at organizing them. 

Luz, one of the fired workers who spoke to the Daily Planet through a translator and declined to give her last name, said it was a shame “that people expressed themselves so disrespectfully.” She went on to ask, “If this is the way they treat workers now, how will they treat them when they work later in a big company?” 

Brooke Anderson, an organizer with EBASE, said last week the Emeryville Marriott Hotel, which agreed to abide by Measure C, paid workers back wages owed for Measure C overtime—$5,000 to $9,000 per worker. The Woodfin has not yet agreed to do the same. 

Woodfin spokesperson Eric Schellhorn was not available for comment. 

The former site of Flint Ink in West Berkeley went on the auction block Friday, but just who won remains a mystery. 

The site, covering almost 4.8 acres in two parcels south of Gilman Street, housed Berkeley’s oldest existing manufacturing plant, where Flint Ink Co. once produced a rainbow of hues for printers across the nation—including the first magnetic inks used for bank checks. 

Today, the site—declared a city landmark in 1986—stands vacant, and the owners, who include developer Ali Kashani, are awaiting the results of an auction being conducted by Accelerated Marketed Group (AMG) of Newport Beach. 

The larger of the two parcels, 3.36 acres, is bound by Gilman, Camelia, Fourth and Fifth streets. The second bloc of 1.42 acres, occupies the south half of the block bound by Gilman, Camelia, Fourth and Fifth streets, with the northern half of the block occupied by The Tannery. 

As a condition of the sale, the owners will be required to complete an environmental cleanup of the site, which is laden with chemicals from nearly a century of manufacturing in a complex that once numbered about 20 structures. 

Michael Caplan, the city’s acting Economic Development Director, said he had contacted the auctioneer Monday morning. “I believe they are waiting until all the anticipated bids have arrived,” Caplan said. 

City Councilmember Linda Maio, whose district includes the site, said she didn’t know anything more than Cisco De Vries, the chief of staff to Mayor Tom Bates, who had referred a reporter to Caplan as the most knowledgeable member of the city staff. 

The official deadline for bids was 5 p.m. Friday.  

Neither AMG President Todd Good nor Executive Vice President Bob Daniel had returned a reporter’s phone calls by late Monday afternoon. 

The site’s status as a landmark featured in last November’s election battle over Measure J, the revised Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (LPO) that went down to defeat by a 57-43 percent margin. 

Opponents of the ordinance, which would have preserved and legally buttressed the city’s existing and often-controverisal LPO, included the Flint Ink designation among those they charged were of questionable value. 

The Landmarks Preservation Commission had made the designation citing the plant’s architecture and its historic significance. 

The Berkeley Board of Education will review the proposed solar project at Washington Elementary School for the third time Wednesday and vote on whether to approve $750,000 in funds from the Office of Public School Construction (OPSC) and $305,000 in PG&E funds. 

Board members had asked district staff to develop a more comprehensive report on the financial aspects of the proposed project at the last meeting. 

Tom Kelly, director of KyotoUSA, said that unless the district issued a request for proposals for the project and submitted a copy to PG&E by June 16, the PG&E rebate would be lost. Kelly said KyotoUSA secured a 10-year financial municipal lease in the amount of $232,000 from Saulsbury Hill Financial to avoid bond funds. 

“KyotoUSA will donate approximately $8,000 to the district to bridge that difference,” said Kelly. “The district will be assured that it will be able to go forward with the Washington solar project without it affecting any other projects that are currently scheduled.” 

Collective bargaining 

The board will vote on whether to approve the collective bargaining agreement for 2006-07 with the Berkeley Council of Classified Employees (BCCE), which covers district secretaries, clerks and instructional assistants and includes an increase of 4.7 percent in salary and benefits. The board will also vote on whether to approve the compensation and salary increase for employees not represented by a union or under a bargaining agreement. 

Surplus committee 

The board will vote on whether to approve recommendations for five additional members for the district Surplus Facilities Committee. 

Current properties that are under consideration for being sold are located at Sixth and Addison streets and Milvia and Bancroft. 

The district pays the City of Berkeley $1 annually for using the Old City Hall in exchange for the city using the property at Sixth and Addison. This 20-year agreement is set to end in 2009. 

The board will also direct the committee to look at surplusing the Berkeley High tennis courts which could serve as a possible relocation for the warm water pool. 

B-Tech summer school program 

Traditionally, B-Tech students are assigned to Berkeley High School for summer school. This year, B-Tech principal Victor Diaz has worked with the B-Tech faculty to design a summer program to meet the needs of their students. The six-week- long program at B-Tech (June 20-July 27) is aimed at students not making satisfactory progress toward high school graduation. 

The mayor’s office will provide paid internships during the afternoon to up to 15 B-Tech students enrolled in the program. Tutors from UC Berkeley’s Cal Corps will also help the students during their morning classes.

Two DAPAC meetings—both centering on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)—and a session of the Landmarks Preservation Commission mark the week’s major events in land use. 

The first meeting is tonight (Tuesday), when the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee’s subcommittee on BRT commences at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

Their focus is AC Transit’s plan to establish Bus Rapid Transit service providing dedicated lanes and faster travel times along a surface street corridor from Berkeley to San Leandro. 

BRT will also be the topic when all DAPAC members meet at 7 p.m. with the city’s Transportation Commission, once again in the North Berkeley Senior Center. 

Jim Cunradi, BRT project manager for the bus company, will give a presentation on BRT service in downtown Berkeley, followed by questions from both city panels. 

Next, the two groups will consider the proposed chapter on parking that will eventually be included in the new downtown plan DAPAC must complete by the end of November, following discussions of pedestrians, bicycles, possible incentives to increase use of mass transit and policies to manage transportation demand. 

After the Transportation Commission leaves, DAPAC members will discuss upcoming meetings and the possible creation of additional subcommittees to work on draft chapters of the plan. 

The LPC meets Thursday night, again in the North Berkeley Senior Center, but starting at 7:30 p.m. 

Among the items on the agenda are: 

• A hearing on the addition of a by-right accessory dwelling unit (ADU) at the landmarked Wallace-Sauer house at 1349 Arch St. Designs for the ADU, planned for the owner’s father, faced harsh criticism by LPC members and neighbors during last month’s meeting. 

• A landmark application for a home at 1375 Summit Road, along with an application to create a historic district that would include that house and two others at 1363 and 1365 Summit. 

• An application to landmark the former car dealership office at 2747 San Pablo Ave., the site of a proposed “green” apartment complex. 

• An alteration permit to remodel the storefronts at 2340-2350 Shattuck Ave. 

• A permit for seismic strengthening of the Corder Building at 2300 Shattuck Ave. 

The commission will also review an application to raise the roofs of the canopies that once shaded gas pumps and the former gas station at 1441 Ashby Ave. The station, designed in a faux-Asian style, is on the state’s list of potential landmarks.

SB1019 Peace Officer Records (Sen. Gloria Romero)  

Passed the Senate on a 21-10 vote on Monday and now goes to the assembly. 

Among other things, this bill intends to restore open Community Police Relations Board complaint hearings against officers that were closed in such cities as Oakland and Berkeley by the State Supreme Court’s recent Copley Press, Inc. v. The Superior Court of San Diego County ruling. The bill would also provide expanded access to the public about officers who have been formally complained against. 

Last week, in order to pick up support from legislators on the fence, the bill was amended on the floor of the Senate to limit the amount of information about police records to be revealed to the public. In addition, the legislation picked up key support in Oakland with endorsements from both Mayor Ron Dellums and Chief of Police Wayne Tucker. 

On Saturday, with passage of the measure by the Senate still in doubt, Rashidah Grinage of Oakland’s PUEBLO organization, one of the groups leading the lobbying effort for SB1019, sent an email to supporters saying that the legislation still needed to pick up votes. 

“We need at least three [more] Senators to vote ‘YES’ this week on SB 1019,” Grinage wrote. “We’re that close to getting the bill through the Senate and on to the Assembly … This bill may come up for a vote as early as Monday or Tuesday! We could lose by a single vote, so we must make every effort to avoid that…. This is our opportunity to overturn that terrible Copley ruling that has placed police behind a curtain, shielded from public scrutiny!” 

Originally, the bill allowed any government entity employing peace officers to restore public hearings and the release of information on citizen complaints and other personnel investigations against peace officers that were in effect in that government entity prior to the Copley ruling. 

The amendments expand those provisions in some way, saying that a government entity could allow disciplinary hearings or release of police disciplinary information that were in effect not only in that government entity but in any government entity in California prior to the Copley ruling. Thus, if Berkeley allowed more access to disciplinary hearings than Oakland prior to Copley, for example, Oakland would be able to follow the Berkeley example if SB1019 is passed. 

But the amendments also allow police departments to restrict the release of disciplinary information if the police chief makes one of several determinations, including a finding that the release of the information might jeopardize the safety of the police officer. 

Meanwhile, the Oakland mayor’s office sent out a release this week announcing Dellums’ and Tucker’s support. 

“This bill will allow cities to, once again, hold public hearings on officer misconduct when appropriate and also protect the privacy of police officers accused of misconduct,” Dellums said in a prepared release. 

And Tucker added that, “I am pleased to be able to support SB1019 as it returns the open hearing process to pre-Copley conditions. SB1019 reflects what the residents of the City of Oakland want—open government.” 

Local progressives had been lobbying hard for the support of Dellums, who had been publicly silent on SB1019 up until this point. 

AB45 Oakland Unified School District Return to Local Control (Assemblymember Sandré Swanson) 

A bill that supporters hope will speed up return to local control of the Oakland Unified School District passed the Assembly Appropriations Committee on Thursday on a 12-5 partisan vote, with committee Democrats in support and committee Republicans in opposition. AB45, which previously passed the Assembly Education Committee, now goes to the full Assembly this week for consideration. 

In a prepared statement the bill’s author, Assemblymember Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland), said, “I am extremely encouraged by the giant step forward that AB45 took today.… When passed, AB45 will move us out of the debate over who will manage the school board and back to what is really at stake: our children’s education.” 

The bill makes changes in the original 2002 OUSD state takeover legislation, taking away the discretion of the State Superintendent to return local control of the Oakland schools and putting it solely in the hands of the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT). It has the support of State Senator Don Perata, who authored the original SB39 takeover legislation, but is opposed by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, who currently runs the Oakland schools. 

Without Republican support, the bill needs the signature of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to become law. Swanson is apparently still unsure about Schwarzenegger’s support. At a Friday evening meeting at the Oakland Unified School District administrative headquarters, Swanson asked the audience to send emails to Senator Perata thanking him for his support for the bill, but pointedly asked them to send emails to the governor asking him to sign it when it reaches his desk. 

SB67 Sideshow Car Confiscation Bill (Sen. Don Perata) 

A renewal of previous legislation aimed specifically at Oakland sideshows that allows cars to be towed and confiscated for 30 days solely on the word of a police officer that the car was being used in “sideshow activity.” 

After passing the Senate in mid-April, the bill was held at the desk of the Assembly speaker for a month while committees worked exclusively on bills written by Assemblymembers, and referred to the Assembly Transportation Committee on May 17. The committee holds its next hearing June 11, but SB67 has not yet been scheduled to be heard on that date.

They were singing along with the well-known Calypso tune, feet flying off the swimming pool floor and back again, weighted arms lifting high over their heads as they swayed to the rhythms pulsing from the boom box out across the water. 

The water aerobics teacher—Yassir Chadly, 53, about to lose the job he’s held for 17 years in Berkeley’s recreation department—was demonstrating the moves on dry land and describing them so the blind student could fit with ease into the West Berkeley Swim Center class.  

At Tuesday’s 2 p.m. session conversation and giggles flowed with the movements of the dozen students at class, anxious to tell a reporter that another 10 of their regular classmates, who had met at the class, were off together in Yosemite at a city of Berkeley camp. 

“Yassir builds community,” participants at the West Campus pool said. The thought was echoed in calls and letters to the Planet from swimmers at King, Willard and Berkeley High pools, expressing gratitude to the city worker and outrage that he faces a demotion in his job. 

“I plant love and get love back,” Chadly, a teacher, lifeguard, musician and imam at a small North Oakland mosque, told the Planet. 

Two years ago, according to Chadly’s boss, Scott Ferris, youth and recreation services manager, the recreation department decided to restructure the department to save money. Chadly’s 50 percent time “career” position was eliminated in the last budget, Ferris told the Planet. 

“We’re restructuring some of our programs to better serve our residents,” Ferris said.  

Meanwhile, three 75 percent supervisor positions are being created in the department. Chadly told the Planet he was invited to apply for a supervisor post, but was informed that he did not get the job.  

The alternative offered has been a demotion: work as an hourly employee.  

According to David Hodgkins, Human Resources manager, Chadly currently earns $20.72 per hour. If he accepts the hourly position with the city, his pay will be cut to $19.35 per hour. Both figures include a city contribution to benefits valued at about 7 percent of the salary. 

Chadly now generally works more than the 20 hours he is guaranteed as a “career” employee—paid at an hourly rate beyond the 20 hours—and works full time during the summer.  

In the hourly employee position he is being offered, however, Chadly will no longer work a guaranteed minimum number of hours, Hodgkins said.  

(As a point of comparison, a person in the youth and recreation manager position earns between $7,300 and $8,800 per month, more than twice as much as Chadly earns when working full time at his hourly rate. And the director of parks, recreation and waterfront earns between $10,500 and $14,500 per month. The manager and director also get about 50 percent more than their salary in health and retirement benefits.) 

Unlike most other city employees, lifeguards/instructors are not part of a union. “There’s no one to represent me,” Chadly said. 

“It’s tough to know there are workers who are like step children of the workforce in Berkeley,” said Carlos Rivera, communications director for Service Employees International Union 1021. 

The Berkeley Housing Authority just announced it would lay off 13 people, leaving the BHA workers, represented by SEIU 1021, in a very different situation.  

Another swimmer, Janet McColl, wrote the Planet, comparing Chadly’s situation to the BHA workers, who, she says “won’t lose an hour of time and will simply be moved into other departments.”  

And, according to a report written by City Manager Phil Kamlarz, if the BHA workers are moved into positions where they get pay cuts, they will receive their current pay rate for a year.  

Chadly not only brings people together in the classes he teaches, he manages to create community among lap swimmers, according to Peter Seidman, who swims at King Pool. 

He introduces swimmers to each other when they share a lane and chooses the lanes for the swimmers he knows so that they are compatible with the person they’re sharing the lane with, Seidman said in a phone interview. 

Another touch Chadly, a Sufi teacher, brings to his work, is that he greets each person with a bit of wisdom, Seidman said. 

“He goes so far beyond being the bored lifeguard, watching bodies swimming in the pool,” he added.  

Another swimmer, Summer Brenner, collected 110 signatures in support of Chadly at the West Campus pool and delivered them to the mayor’s office on Wednesday. 

Cisco DeVries, Mayor Tom Bates’ chief of staff, told the Planet that while the mayor is aware of Chadly’s situation, he is unable to get involved. There’s an ongoing personnel process and the mayor’s not part of the process, DeVries said. 

In a phone interview, Brenner praised Chadly. “He makes everyone feel comfortable,” she said, pointing especially to the way in which he brings disabled and obese people into the community he builds in his classes. “What he gives us is so much beyond a job.” 

No active faults lie beneath the site of the high-tech and highly expensive gym UC Berkeley hopes to build next to the landmarked Memorial Stadium. 

That’s the finding of the seismologic consultants hired by the university to conduct a detailed examination of the earth beneath the Student Athlete High Performance Center, a $125 million, 186,000-square-foot partly subterranean complex. 

That project is part of 451,000 square feet of new construction planned in the stadium area over the next few years. 

Geometric Consultants, Inc., an Oakland firm, conducted the study to complete the investigation of specific areas of the Student Athlete High Performance Center site not included in their earlier analysis. 

The report, announced Thursday by the university’s public affairs staff, could resolve one of the key issues of a lawsuit challenging construction of the center at the site of the grove where protesters have been perched in the branches in protest of the project for the past 183 days. 

The issue of seismic safety was one of the concerns that prompted lawsuits against the project by the City of Berkeley as well as neighbors and an environmental group. 

Stephan Volker, attorney for the California Oaks Foundation, a plaintiff in the suit, said the new report simply confirms that the university failed to follow state environmental law when it approved the gym project. 

“This is a very tardy report, six months too late. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires the university to circulate an adequate seismological review before approving a project,” he said. “That failure was not rectified by this after-the-fact report.” 

Volker said he is submitting the 92-page document to his own expert, seismologist Robert Curry, who has studied the faults of the Berkeley Hills and taught geology at UC Santa Cruz for two decades. 

The adequacy of the university’s earthquake studies prior to its approval last December of the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the massive construction program in the stadium area is only one of the alleged failures cited in the suits against the university by the tree advocates, the Panoramic Hill Association and the city. 

For Volker, a key failure of the EIR was its lack of any mention of the “logging operation” that will strip away a venerable grove of Coastal Live Oaks “held in the highest regard by thousands of citizens of the East Bay and by Native Americans everywhere.” 

In addition to the trees and the seismic issues, city officials are worried about other impacts that a major new construction program will cause to already strained city streets and public serrvices, and neighbors are concerned about those issues and specific impacts on their residences, including tightly constricted access during emergencies. 

Though the university had planned to start construction at the gym in January, the lawsuits won an injunction from Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller stopping work pending the outcome of a hearing on the evidence. 

A hearing on the action has yet to be scheduled. 

The seismological report remains a critical issue because all three plaintiffs had alleged that the gym project violated the Alquist-Priolo Act, which governs construction on projects on or within 50 feet of active faults. 

There is no question that the stadium itself sits directly over the Hayward Fault, which federal seismologists say is the most likely site of the Bay Area’s next major earthquake disaster, and Alquist-Priolo rules will apply to the university’s plans for a major stadium overhaul and expansion. 

Vice Chancellor Ed Denton, the university’s development boss, has estimated the cost of the year’s delay at between $8 million and $10 million on top of the already-estimated cost. 

The 142,000-square-foot, four-story gym would house the latest in technology designed to get the most out of university athletes whose programs are a major attraction for big-dollar donors to a university increasingly reliant on private pockets to fund its programs. 

By February, university Athletic Director Sandy Barbour was announcing that donors had pledged more than $100 million toward the gym. 

Construction can’t commence until after the end of the football season, putting off work at the site until next January at the earliest. 

Meanwhile, university police have continued to arrest protesters at the site, said Zachary Running Wolf, himself arrested twice at the site and currently facing felony charges. 

“The university police are not letting up,” he said Friday.

From David Gockley’s narrow point of view, the press release probably said it all in the first sentence: “After the final dress rehearsal for Don Giovanni, San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley, in consultation with Music Director Donald Runnicles and members of the artistic staff, made the decision that soprano Hope Briggs was not ultimately suited for the role of Donna Anna in this production.”  

But that bald statement, remarkably honest for the genre, leaves out in the cold all of the hundreds of Hope Briggs’ loyal fans in the Bay Area who are going to be deeply disappointed that they will be deprived of a chance to see the San Francisco-based soprano in what they were sure would be a perfect role for her. 

I should know—I’m one of them. I’ve been watching Hope Briggs for at least seven years in big venues and small. She has a glorious soprano voice. I’ve seen her at the Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, as the ideal Aida at the Sacramento Opera, and in her San Francisco Opera debut last year. 

The critics have always loved her: “Soprano Hope Briggs turned in a powerhouse performance marked by strong, clean vocalism and emotional transparency. The role calls for both tonal strength and limpid clarity, and Briggs provided both,” wrote Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Other singers who’ve worked with her say that she’s the ideal professional, hard-working and intelligent as well as vocally gifted.  

And she’s also generous and public-spirited, which not all singers are. In 2001, shortly after 9/11, I attended a concert at a high school on the peninsula which Hope had organized as a benefit for African-American students. At the end, when the lights went up, she called all the other singers to the stage and led them and the audience in singing “America the Beautiful.” Hokey-sounding, and I’m neither sentimental nor patriotic, but I was crying. 

She absolutely does not deserve to be treated like this. I’ve gotten to know her personally—she’s stayed at my house when she was between engagements. I called her as soon as I heard the news, and she clearly has no clue why this has happened to her. She’s had three weeks of rehearsals, including the final dress rehearsal attended by many people on Wednesday night, and no one involved said anything to indicate that she was on thin ice in the role.  

She said that members of the artistic staff, including Music Director Donald Runnicles, had been cordial and complementary throughout. I talked to a few opera house insiders who said that they were shocked, because she’d turned in a fine performance at all rehearsals, including the last one, but they were afraid to let their names be used for fear of retaliation. 

That might tell you something about what’s going on over there. There’s been no coherent statement other than what’s quoted above to reveal what was passing through David Gockley’s mind when he decided to dump Hope Briggs unceremoniously. 

I haven’t been able to get anyone in management to return my calls. However it’s well known that Gockley and Runnicles (a holdover from the tenure of the last General Director, Pamela Rosenberg) are not on the best of terms. Rosenberg took credit for picking Hope out of an open audition for her previous role, and that could be the kiss of death in the new regime. 

I heard Rosenberg tell that story at a dinner gala for African-American opera lovers held to honor Hope when she sang at the San Francisco Opera last year. A similar event was planned for this year, to honor Hope after the last matinee of Don Giovanni. I’ve already bought my tickets—even though I’m not African-American I got a gracious welcome at the first one. Now I guess that will have to be called off. What a shame, especially since Gockley claims that he’s trying to expand the audience for opera 

And as a cynical old-school veteran of the civil rights movement, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a (perhaps subconscious) subtext here. This production is going on TV: it will be simulcast to a number of venues. Hope is a big, handsome dark-skinned woman, with strong African features—quite beautiful, but not exactly like most faces you see in romantic roles on TV these days.  

Elza van den Heever, her replacement, whom I’ve heard many times and who also has a lovely voice, is a young South African woman of Dutch descent. She’s tall and pretty in a conventional European way, certainly destined for future stardom. I’m not willing to say that conventional racism affected Gockley’s decision to substitute her into the role, but by the standards of Texas, his last home base, Elza might be considered more telegenic, even though both are good singers.  

One hint that something’s been in the works for while: a Planet arts writer has been planning to do a preview of this production, and she’s been trying without success for two weeks to get the Opera public relations department to set up an interview with Hope. No luck. They never even sent photos as promised. Why? One wonders—did they know something? 

This will be—should be—a public relations disaster for the San Francisco Opera. When management starts casting about for fallback positions, they might consider letting Hope sing just one Sunday matinee, the one that all of the African-American opera supporters have already bought their tickets for. It wouldn’t hurt anyone, and it might help the Opera recover some of its lost luster.  

Berkeley’s Shipyard has been granted a reprieve—but for some artists, it may have come too late. 

City fire and building inspectors have ordered massive changes at the artisan colony, a font of creativity that had been housed in a nest of double-stacked steel shipping containers in a West Berkeley industrial neighborhood. 

But serious violations of a host of city codes and failure to comply with earlier deadlines had led to demands that essentially forced the popular creative center to close for the time being, scattering its tenants to other sites throughout the Bay Area. 

“We weren’t trying to evict them,” said Deputy Fire Chief David Orth, and the Shipyard’s architect, Les Young of San Francisco, agrees. 

“Jim Mason responded to the city’s comments basically by saying ‘We’re moving out,’” Young said. 

Mason, who operates the Shipyard and is the signatory on the property’s lease agreement, has maintained a strained relationship with city officials, and Young agrees that it’s probably best that he’s now handling relations with the city. Orth agreed. 

The publicity surrounding the move of artists from a city which has witnessed the closure of four other artists’ communities in recent years triggered an emergency meeting last week between Young, Mayor Tom Bates and other city officials. 

“They want the artists to stay,” said Young. 

“It’s just a wonderful operation,” said City Councilmember Darryl Moore Thursday. Moore attended last week’s meeting because his district includes the Shipyard. “They’re doing very creative work, and remarkable things around alternative energy. They have also been making very creative use of recycled shipping containers.” 

City Zoning Officer Mark Rhoades said Wednesday that while he signed off on the letter of enforcement that sparked the latest round of actions at the Shipyard, the zoning issues didn’t involve use of the property but building code issues that related to the ordinance. 

The letter, signed by Orth, city Building Official Joan MacQuarrie and Rhoades, cited 15 building code violations, 13 city and state fire code violations and four city zoning ordinance violations. 

Though Orth said the Shipyard “has made significant progress about rectifying their violations,” much remains to be done—and Young said bringing the eclectic gathering of artists and their studios back will mean major cash outlays. 

“We’re talking about the $500,000 range,” Young said. 

“I really hope they can work out their building and safety issues,” said Moore, who added that he will stay on top of the issue as it works its way through the city’s administrative process. 

“It’s going to be a very difficult, very expensive endeavor to turn those shipping containers into something someone can reuse in a safe manner,” Rhoades said. “I hope they can do it, but they have a long road ahead.” 

Meanwhile, the Shipyard gates were locked Thursday morning, though nine of the containers that had been stacked in the two-level ring that girded the northern end of the property had been removed and stored in the vacant railroad right-of-way west of the property. 

A large trash bin nearby was filled with broken boards and other discarded gear ripped from the vacated shipping containers, and Mason’s World War II-vintage amphibious landing vehicle was parked across Murray Street. 

Most Shipyard occupants have dispersed, many to the old American Steel plant in Oakland. “There was talk of some of them going to the Box Shop,” another artists’ collective in San Francisco, “and some went to other places,” Young said. 

Orth said that there’s one quick way to bring back some of the artists, and that’s to do the relatively minor work needed to bring the existing concrete workshop at the site up to code. 

“They misunderstood and thought they couldn’t use the space,” Orth said. “But they do need to get a permit if they are going to continue doing welding there.” 

Once a mechanic’s shop for the repair of BMWs, the building housed the Shipyard’s heavy machinery, used for crafting some of the high tech steampunk robotic gear as well as Mechabolic, the trash-to-energy system that was to have been a central feature of this year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada. 

“This year Burning Man is all about alternative energy, the Green Man, and the Shipyard was going to be” a leading participant, Young said.  

Another Berkeley artisan community shut down by the city—the Crucible, which operated within a block of the Shipyard—is back in business and thriving in Oakland, but only because of an anonymous $1 million gift, Young said. 

Young said he and city officials are also working on a timeline for improvements at the site. 

“The original deadlines they gave us were impossible,” he said, though a acknowledging that the facility had delayed submitting a permit for “to long” after originally promising to do so. 

But Young said the schedule outlined in the city’s letter was also “completely unreasonable,” mandating a 14-day deadline for submitting a permit application. 

“There’s no way we can bring in engineers, bring them up to speed and do all the drawings in that period,” he said. 

Young already has a structural engineer to help with the drawings needed before the next meeting with city staff. Young also has a structural engineer, but he still needs a mechanical, plumbing and electrical (MEP) engineer before he can finish. 

Once drawings are approved, “the ball would then be in the Shipyard’s court to find money and a general contractor,” he said. 

The architect is already sending out feelers to possible donors. “It’s not something we can do with a typical fundraiser that brings in $5,000 or so,” he said. But there are some well-connected people who are interested.“ 

Meanwhile, he’s also working with the Shipyard artist’s, trying to reassure them that the city inspectors had real concerns, “and they’re not out to get you.” 

Moore said that he hopes the city will find a way to include the use of shipping containers in its building codes. 

“I hope the Planning Department takes a look at them, like Portland and other cities have done,” he said. 

Even if the critical building issues are ironed out, two final questions will remain: will the former tenants return their old West Berkeley habitat, and will they be able to afford the increased rents that could come if Mason and Young can’t find enough donors to cover all their costs?

The citizen panel helping to chart the future of downtown Berkeley confronted the crucial questions of how high and how many, looking for answers that will shape the future face of the city center. 

Both issues are critically related, and members of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) are looking for answers that will shape the land-use element in the new plan mandated by the settlement of a town/gown lawsuit and shaped in part by the dictates of regional government. 

DAPAC has just six months left before it must submit a proposed new plan for the city center, and the issues of height and density will be central to their final vision. 

The new plan was one of the requirements of the settlement of the city’s lawsuit challenging UC Berkeley’s plans to add 800,000 square feet of new construction and a thousand or so new parking spaces in the heart of downtown Berkeley. 

While the committee has agreed that creating a green city core is the plan’s heart, the issue of building height and population density are more politically charged, especially when the topics of height and density are conflated. 

Matt Taecker, the city planner hired with university funds to put the plan between covers, offered committee members three alternatives Wednesday, one based on growth within the constraints imposed by the existing plan, one allowing for eight-story buildings throughout an expanded core area, and a third featuring a maximum height of five floors with the exception of seven new high-rises as tall as the Well Fargo building at the corner of Center Street and Shattuck Avenue. 

The high-rise model features half the number of skyscrapers than those in an earlier proposal that met with a chorus of criticism during earlier sessions. 

Under the existing plan, downtown could grow from the current 2,520 existing and approved residential units to 4,020 if all potential building sites are used under the current plan, to 4,720 under either the eight-story model or the five-floors plus seven high-rises version. 

Berkeley Planning and Development Director Dan Marks and Planning Manager Mark Rhoades have told the committee that creating policies to add more density to the city is important because without policies that allow expanded numbers to match the quotas set by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), the city runs the risk of losing out on some state funding programs. 

ABAG quotas for Berkeley are higher than those for more suburban areas because the city sits astride BART and other urban mass transit services, and ABAG’s “smart growth” policies are designed to encourage development on transit corridors. 

Marks has also told the committee that adding density downtown is the least politically controversial solution. No concentrated housing is planned for the North Berkeley BART station, which Marks acknowledged earlier would be a near-impossibility because of neighborhood opposition, and a public furor erupted over a proposal to build a 300-plus-unit apartment complex atop the Ashby BART parking lot. 

That leaves downtown, where a large percentage of residents are renters, most of them college students with little involvement in city politics. 

“I want the committee to have some discussion, and to admit that there are some benefits of high density worth considering,” Taecker told the committee. 

But to house the density, downtown also needs amenities like a grocery store, open space and a day care center, he said.  

And economic realities, Taecker said, make it likely that the continued development of the city center would be as a regional arts and cultural destination, with other uses following. 

A new plan would probably strive to preserve three key existing neighborhoods of homes at the northwest, southwest and southeast corners of the expanded area included in the new plan—boundaries called for by the university. 

Likewise, two other areas might be designated as sites of possible future change, Herrick Hospital, which might eventually move out, Taecker said, and the old Dwight Station area on Dwight Way east of Shattuck Avenue. 

Taecker also proposed a series of open space and park areas totaling 10.6 acres and with a probable development cost of $8.14 million. The largest, the one acre site dubbed South Park, would occupy the center of Shattuck between Durant and Haste Streets. Among the other possibilities are: 0.29 acres created by closing Harold Way behind the Shattuck Hotel between Allston Way and Kittredge Street; the proposed closure of the .46-acre, one-block of Center Street between Oxford Street and Shattuck, with a possible complementary 0.73 acre site across Shattuck at BART Plaza. 

Taecker said an open space framework was “absolutely foundational” for the plan, a point that had been stressed by several committee members, notably Winston Burton and Juliet Lamont. 

Taecker also said if committee members win approval of a sustainabilty analysis for new projects—a point favored by many, including Lamont, Helen Burke and other during ongoing discussions—Berkeley would maintain its reputation for cutting edge policies. 

Taecker’s presentation was merely a first glimpse into the topic that will likely dominate much of the remainder of DAPAC’s discussions.

In a lop-sided vote Wednesday night, DAPAC members voted to urge the City Council to declare downtown Berkeley a Priority Development Area (PDA). 

The Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee’s action followed by a week the Planning Commission’s refusal to make a similar endorsement. 

The only opposition vote this week came from Gene Poschman, one of three planning commissioners who had opposed the notion last week. Two other DAPAC members, Jesse Arreguin and Patti Dacey, abstained, while 16 others voted for the proposal—including Planning Commission Chair James Samuels. 

The final decision on the designation rests with the City Council. 

Planning and Development Director Dan Marks presented the PDA proposal to DAPAC, making a stronger and more detailed pitch than he had a week earlier. 

The designation would make the city eligible for state bonds funds that may—or may not—be released by the state legislature under Proposition 1C, a bond measure passed by California voters last November. 

The money would be available to local governments through the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), a state-mandated regional planning agency which also acts as a conduit for some state funding programs.  

The one condition DAPAC members urged was that any proposals be strictly in accordance with the adopted city plan—whether the existing version, with its 1990 downtown plan, or in the form that will result from DAPAC’s proposal, as adopted by the Planning Commission and City Council.  

Wednesday night’s vote followed presentations by Matt Taecker, the planner hired to work on the new downtown plan, and Marks. 

Both dealt with increasing density in the downtown, with Taecker airing proposals for the new plan and Marks citing the city’s existing downtown plan. 

The key to winning funding under the ABAG-administered state bond allocations will be conformance to the policies of Transit Oriented Development, Marks said, with creates higher density along transit corridors and in the downtown. 

“It’s perfectly consistent with what we’re already doing,” said Marks. “The issue for Berkeley, as always, is process,” he said. “The bottom line is that I need to get a sense of the group ... the only group I can go to in terms of what is planned for the downtown.” 

DAPAC Chair Will Travis backed the proposal enthusiastically, and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission he serves as executive director is one of chief sponsors of the ABAG-administered program, along with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. 

“The notion is that from the state planning perspective, smart growth—that is, transit-oriented development—makes all the sense in the world,” Travis said, adding that worries he was hearing from the community were “essentially bullshit.” 

“All this does, it gets Berkeley in the queue” for receiving bond funds, he said. 

Turning to Jesse Arreguin, a housing advocate who had questioned the designation, Travis said, “If you want affordable housing, Jesse, here’s your chance.” Turning to Juliet Lamont, who had also raised questions, Travis said, “If you want Strawberry Creek daylighted, here’s your opportunity to do it.” 

Noting that participation was voluntary, he added, “if you don’t want the money, you don’t have to take it.” 

Marks said no changes would be needed to apply, either for the downtown or for the San Pablo Avenue corridor. 

Arreguin said he remained unconvinced, “given the potential fallout,” a concern Lamont echoed. 

But as members commented, one after another, working their way around the table, the evidence for support was overwhelming. 

“We definitely should go for this,” said Rob Wrenn. Helen Burke agreed. 

“Go for it,” said Judy Chess, a university planner who serves as one of UC Berkeley’s ex officio DAPAC members. 

“Yes,” said Winston Burton. 

“I move that we direct staff to make downtown a Priority Development Area,” said former Councilmember Mim Hawley. 

“I second,” said Planning Commission chair James Samuels. 

Gene Poschman spoke for the longest time, noting that no one on DAPAC lived, worked, owned property or ran a business downtown. “We’re not stakeholders,” he said. 

More than that, he said, there was no guarantee the funds would go for any projects sought by committee members. “The simple truth is, we don’t know what it will be going for,” he said. 

But when it came time for the vote, Poschman was the sole opponent, and Marks will be able to carry their endorsement to the city council, where he said he would seek approval prior to submitting an application by the June 27 deadline. 

Just how much money will be available and for what have yet to be determined.

An Oakland School Board member has introduced a resolution calling for a moratorium on Oakland public school closures while the state remains in charge of the Oakland Unified School District. 

The call came as Oakland education officials said that 42 of Oakland’s 98 public schools have been closed for some period of time during the four years of the state takeover, and as Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 return-to-local-school-control bill is passing through its second State Assembly committee. 

Boardmember Christopher Dobbins introduced the closure moratorium resolution at Wednesday night’s board meeting on behalf of the Oakland-based Education Not Incarceration organization. 

At the request of boardmember Noel Gallo, who seconded Dobbins’ motion, discussion of the resolution will also include a broader look at OUSD’s current academic, financial, and enrollment situation. 

Meanwhile, a coalition of Oakland organizations and leaders is holding a public hearing on Oakland schools today (Friday), 4-6:30 p.m. at the OUSD administration building on 2nd Avenue, to talk about school closures, local control, charter- and new-school development, and other issues. 

The hearing was organized by the Ad Hoc Committee to Restore Local Control/Governance to the Oakland Public Schools, and sponsors include the Oakland Education Association, Education Not Incarceration, ACORN, state assemblymembers Sandré Swanson and Loni Hancock, county supervisors Keith Carson and Nate Miley, and several school board members  

The Dobbins Education Not Incarceration school closure moratorium resolution charges that recent decisions to close Oakland public schools “have been made in opposition to the democratically elected Oakland Mayor and without oversight of the democratically elected school board,” and says that “schools targeted for closure since the state takeover have been primarily in low-income predominantly African-American and Latino communities, who are already being under-served by California’s schools.” 

Under state takeover, OUSD state administrator Kimberly Statham will make the decision whether to place the resolution on the next joint board-administrator public meeting on June 13, but board president David Kakishiba said that if Statham refused, the board itself could hold its own meeting to discuss the matter. 

Several speakers came to the microphone at Wednesday’s meeting to support the resolution. 

Cassandra Martin, an OUSD parent volunteer and the parent of a Havenscourt Middle School student, said “I am saddened to see so many school closures in Oakland. It’s killing me. As a parent, I’m appalled. These kids have enough to go through. For some of them, the schools function as their second homes.” 

And Jonah Zern, an organizer with Education Not Incarceration, asked for Statham’s support for the resolution, saying that “the community knows best what to do with our own children.” 

In introducing the resolution, Dobbins, who was elected to the board last November, said that “as a school board, we can’t say that we would never close schools. But we would only do so by having a broader discussion that included consultation with the community.” 

And Gallo, in asking that the issue be broadened, said that “we need to have a serious discussion on why these closures may be necessary. We are facing lowering enrollment. The parcel tax renewal is going to be coming up next year. We’re going to have to pay for police services. We can’t balance our budget now. We’re still operating on borrowed money for the state. How are we going to pay for everything? The discussion has to be greater than just the closure of schools.” 

Major changes in AC transit bus service originally scheduled for June 3 have been postponed until June 24, according to district officials. 

The changes directly affecting Oakland and Berkeley will be the Launch of the new 1 and 1R International Rapid bus lines from Bay Fair BART to UC Berkeley, which will cause changes to AC Transit lines 5, 19, 40/40L, 43, 52/52L, and 82/82L. A district spokesperson said that the changes will involve a combination of elimination and consolidation of some of those lines, as well as schedule changes. 

Maps of the new lines and schedules will be available to the public today (Friday) on AC Transit’s website, www.actransit.org, as well as on the buses themselves by June 10. 

The biggest weekend of the UC Berkeley move-out is over. Students have emptied their dorms for the summer. This year for the first time they had the option of dispensing their trash in allocated dumpsters instead of dumping it on the sidewalk. 

While the university called the clean-up campaign, organized by the university and the city, a success, others viewed the process as mixed. The city of Berkeley contributed a third of the $30,000 price tag for the clean-up effort. 

“The American Cancer Society collected the clothes and the rest were donated to Goodwill,” said Irene Hegarty, director of community relations for UC Berkeley. “Uhuru House picked up the furniture and the Alameda Computer Resource Center took anything that had a plug. Anything that couldn’t be recycled ended up in the Transfer Station at Gilman Street. Urban Ore helped to sort out stuff there.” 

Hegarty added that a few more debris bins had been put out Wednesday to help students who would be moving out of private apartments in the next couple of days. 

“If there’s one thing I would do differently next year,” she said, “it would be to run the recycling center in a place other than the parking lot of the Clark Kerr campus. We need a parking area that’s more visible so that we can monitor people when they throw illegal waste such as cement and other toxic stuff into the dumpsters.” 

Hegarty said that when students dug into the 12-feet-long and four-feet-wide bins to look for things they could scavenge, they often ended up leaving stuff on the sidewalk. 

“As a result, we had to clean up after them,” she said. “We need to hold a campaign to educate the frats and sororities that dumping is illegal and that their habits need to change.” 

Berkeley Councilmember Kris Worthington—who initiated the clean-up campaign and helped secure $10,000 from the City Council for the process—said that the city looked “somewhat clean.” 

“I received angry emails from people who called the so-called hotline to report dumping and didn’t get called back for days and days,” he said. “Secondly, it’s wonderful that we have those big bins, but one of the problems is that the box gets overflilled and the trash ends up on the sidewalk. We need to make sure that we follow up and see that the dumpsters are empty.” 

Worthington added that the outreach had to be improved. 

“A lot of people haven’t heard about it except from me,” he said. “The flyers that went out to students did not have the hotline numbers on them. However, in spite of all the glitches, I think it’s still a success. Given the failure of the university to curb this problem in the past, it was important that the city put money and time into this to help.” 

UC Berkeley student and ZAB commissioner Jesse Arreguin applauded the city for the success of the campaign. 

“The city deserves all the appreciation,” he said. “And really, the university should pay for the whole thing.” 

Jill Lefebvre and Mert Yazicioglu, residents of Tau House, were two UC Berkeley students who had no clue about the clean-up campaign. 

“Do we think Frat Row is cleaner because of it?” asked Lefebvre. “No!” he said pointing to a broken couch lying outside one of the frat houses on College and Channing Way on Wednesday. 

As of Thursday morning, the Planet spotted a mattress, two desks and several broken couches along Channing Way. Broken furniture was also spotted in an alley outside the Delta Chi frat house. 

Alan Lightfeldt, a Spring 2007 graduate, said he had left a broken lamp inside a dumpster on the corner of Carleton and Ellsworth. 

“I used the dumpster simply because it was so close and easy to use,” he said. “From the amount of stuff that was overflowing from each dumpster, I’d say the drive was pretty effective, but I did still see some trash on some streets. Southside for the most part looked a lot cleaner than in previous years, but the drive definitely needs more publicity.” 

According to Hegarty, the worst dumping happened in the LeConte and Willard neighborhoods. 

“We received a lot of calls from residents on Piedmont and College and Ellsworth and Parker,” she said. “I am positive there are some frats nearby that are responsible. Once we find the source, we will be able to solve the problem easily.” 

Berkeley Councilmember Kriss Worthington criticized the library administration for announcing a process for selection of a new trustee—Trustee Laura Anderson’s eight-year term expires in October—without direction from a council-library committee established to create a new selection process. 

“It’s funny for the trustees to establish a sunshine committee and go off and do things on their own,” said Worthington, who chairs the Ad Hoc Committee for Sunshining the Selection of Trustees. 

The committee is composed of two city councilmembers and two members of the Library Board of Trustees. Its purpose is to bring transparency to the trustee-selection process. 

Library director Donna Corbeil told the Daily Planet she was following the trustees’ directive when she posted an advertisement in several local newspapers, including the Daily Planet, letting people know in a timely way that there will be an opening for a trustee in October.  

“My understanding is that everyone agreed to get the word out as soon as possible, Corbeil said, noting that the ad hoc committee had met a couple of times “but hasn’t given any direction to [the trustees].” 

The newspaper advertisement says prospective trustees should come to a June 19 reception at 7 p.m. at the West Berkeley Library and submit application materials to the city clerk’s office by July 1. The advertisement suggests people contact the City Clerk’s office for information; however the Daily Planet found that the city clerk’s office is asking people to contact the library administration at 981-6195 for information. 

Historically, the trustees have chosen new members when there is a vacancy at the end of two four-year terms, with only a pro-forma reappointment process and pro-forma confirmation from the City Council.  

However, the trustees acknowledged they were in need of a more open selection process in response to community and staff outcry over a number of problems including the purchase of a controversial radio frequency identification checkout system with little public input and staff conflict with the former library director. 

The trustees also had been threatened with a lawsuit by the community group SuperBOLD, Berkeleyans Organized for Library Defense, for limiting public comment at their meetings. 

The ad hoc committee is to set qualifications for new trustees and create a more open selection process. 

“I think advertising [the reception and the date to turn in applications] is within the spirit of the committee,” said Trustee Ying Lee, a member of the ad hoc committee. “The main object is to give the public notice.” 

But SuperBOLD member Gene Bernardi said she disagrees. 

“My feeling is that the trustees’ process is undercutting the ad hoc committee,” Bernardi said, noting that they’re advertising the upcoming vacancy without the qualifications having been finalized and that the June 19 reception for perspective candidates conflicts with a City Council meeting.  

Further, Bernardi said, “A July 1 deadline seems too soon.”  

She conceded, on the other hand, that the trustees “got our message. At least they’re advertising the vacancy.” 

One might anticipate little tranquility at Monday evening’s Peace and Justice Commission meeting, when commissioners address an item placed on the agenda by Commissioner Elliot Cohen: 

“Discussion on the use of e-mail system by commissioners to spread racist propaganda.”  

Also on the agenda will be recruiting for the military at Berkeley High, making Berkeley a city of sanctuary for conscientious objectors, discussion strategies to address prejudice and more. 

Cohen’s item refers to the use of the commission’s email list, particularly by Commissioner Jonathan Wornick, who sent out a video clip to commissioners that condemned Islam as a religion of war and its prophet Mohammad as “some rambling ancient desert nomad with a psychological disorder.” 

The tape, which Wornick told the Daily Planet at the time was sent out to provoke dialogue, stated: “Muslim women in Britain who cover their faces are mentally ill. If God had intended for you to cover your face then in His wisdom He would have provided you with a flap of skin for the purpose.” 

“The issue has been misconstrued as a question of the First Amendment,” Cohen told the Planet on Wednesday. “As commissioners, we are not acting as private people. We are representing the city.” 

The emails go to the commission staff that sends them to commissioners. “We shouldn’t be spreading racism through city computers,” Cohen said. 

The way the item is written on the commission agenda “is accusatory,” Wornick told the Daily Planet on Thursday, arguing that what he had sent to the commission was not “racist” but “critical of an ideology within a religion.”  

Wornick added that Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, who appointed him, stands by the appointment. “Gordon is very supportive although he doesn’t always agree with me,” Wornick said. 

Wozniak has told the Daily Planet that Wornick’s voice is an important addition to the commission as it adds diversity of thought. 

Wornick added that he will be working out of town during Monday’s commission meeting, but that he expects people will be at the meeting to support him. 

The Monday meeting is at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

The State of Black California will be the subject of a Saturday afternoon town hall meeting at Oakland City Hall hosted by Oakland Assemblymember Sandré Swanson. 

The 1 p.m. meeting, which will include presentations by education, health, political, and economic experts, is part of a series of meetings sponsored by the nine-member California Legislative Black Caucus across the state to discuss their recently released report on the condition of African-Americans in California. 

“The purpose of the report is to try to emphasize the racial disparities that continue to exist in California in such areas as jobs, education, health care, and incarceration,” Swanson said in a telephone interview. 

The report uses something called an “equality index”, with white Californians as the baseline, to conclude that African-American Californians fare poorly across the board in all social, political, education and economic categories. In addition, the report looks at conditions in individual sections of the state, finding, in one is example, that “racial inequality in housing quality [in California] is the greatest in Oakland; in large part because the black-white gap in homeownership is greatest there.” 

The equality index was developed by the Global Insight consulting firm, and the report was prepared by Assistant Professor Stephen Raphael of the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy and Associate Professor Michael A. Stoll of the UCLA School of Public Affairs. 

Along with its findings of conditions among African-Americans in the state, the 86-page report lists recommended legislation to address some of those conditions in the areas of education, economics, corrections and rehabilitation, health, housing, and foster care. 

But Swanson said by telephone that many of those bills have already been introduced in the legislature this year, including encouraging an increase of minority- and women-owned businesses in state bond construction projects, creating after school programs, inclusion of provisions in the various versions of the health insurance bills that provide accessibility to health care for those who are not working, and “making sure we are not just imprisoning people, but rehabilitating them as well while they’re in prison.” 

Swanson said the latter issue was of particular importance to African-Americans in the state “because obviously, African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.” 

“These bills have been stimulated and supported by the previous hearings on the report in other parts of the state,” Swanson said. “We expect the Oakland hearing as a follow-up to get feedback from the public and local elected officials on some of that legislation.” 

Swanson said that while there are no current plans to introduce a Legislative Black Caucus legislative package (“it’s difficult to make it that neat,” he explained), there are plans by the caucus following the end of the legislative year to issue a report on how legislation of specific interest to the Black Caucus has fared.  

“We see this as only the beginning of the process,” Swanson said. 

Swanson also said that there are no current plans by the Black Caucus to issue a legislative report card with reports on how state legislators voted on issues important to the Black Caucus, although he did not rule out such a report card being developed in the future. 

He said that to the best of his knowledge, the only African-American-based legislative report card issued in California is done by the state office of the National Association For The Advancement of Colored People. 

Money woes are forcing developers of the high-rise hotel and condo tower planned for the corner of Center Street and Shattuck Avenue to take another look at their project. 

One result is a search for ways to cut back on costs, including construction prices and the size of an underground parking lot, and for possible concessions from landowners or the city. 

Peter Diana, vice president of Massachusetts hotelier Carpenter & Co., told members of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee Wednesday night that high construction prices were “quite a bit higher than anticipated.” 

Diana said the rising prices “require us to figure out how to compensate,” and three alternatives were being considered: 

• Reducing costs. 

• Increasing income from the property. 

• Seeking less expensive sources of capital. 

One major cost factor has been the inflationary spiral of the price of structural concrete, sparked in part by the increasing cost of the energy used to make cement from limestone and in part by the rising demand for the material in China. 

On the bright side, Diana said, the project would prove a financial windfall for the city, providing $41 million in revenues during its first decade. 

Tax benefits would include “about $24 million in transit occupancy taxes” and $10 million as the city’s share of property tax reviews, he said. 

The hotel executive said his company would also be seeking to fix some of the costs paid to the city as fees and would be looking for concessions from Bank of America and the university, the owners of the land on which the high-rise hotel, conference center and condo building will rise. 

One possible cutback would be reducing the number of underground parking levels from three to two and seeking other locations for the lost spaces. 

“Underground parking is enormously expensive,” he said, and the third level would cost even more because it falls below the site’s water table. 

“If we take the spaces out of the building, we have to find room for them somewhere else,” he said, in part because the hotel will count on them as revenue generators. 

Diana said one factor complicating fund-raising for a project with 50 condos planned for the upper stories of the 19-floor tower is the lack of any comparable units already built in the city. 

Lenders like to know what probable sales prices are, but the only costly condos currently planned for downtown have yet to be built, the 149 units planned for the nine-floor-plus Arpeggio, soon to be built across Shattuck and a half block west on Center Street. 

Ed Denton, UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor in charge of construction and capital projects, was in the audience for the presentation, as was Donlyn Lyndon, a UC Berkeley architecture professor who is working with Diana’s company on the design. 

In addition to the condos, the project includes 210 hotel rooms, 16,000 square feet of meeting space, and 26,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space—including a jazz club. 

When DAPAC member Patti Dacey asked if parking lifts would help cut parking costs, Diana said the devices didn’t pencil out for the hotel project. 

Member Winston Burton suggested developing parking in cooperation with the Pacific Film Archive/Berkeley Art Museum the university plans for the eastern end of the block, something Diana said was already being discussed. 

When member Jesse Arreguin asked if the company was considering reducing the number of on-site parking units reserved for condo owners, Diana replied, “We’re looking at everything.” 

When Wendy Alfsen said that concrete was the biggest polluter of all building materials during the fabrication process, Diana responded with, “We have a rash of green consultants.” 

While DAPAC members may have been left with more questions than answers, Diana left things on a sweet note, in the form of two cakes from the Rubicon Bakery, which he had visited shortly before Wednesday night’s DAPAC meeting.

On Wednesday we sent this letter to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ website and to East Bay Express editor Stephen Buel: 

“Well, the new ownership of the East Bay Express gets more confusing all the time, and we at the Berkeley Planet admit that we might have had some role in spreading the confusion. Based on one of those “don’t attribute it to me” sources which we all ought to avoid, the Planet first reported that Hal Brody would own “51 percent” of the new enterprise. Responding to a call from editor Stephen Buel, the story on the website was changed the day after publication to reflect what the reporter thought he had heard Buel say, admittedly with a bad cell phone connection involved—that’s where the mythical 100 investors made their brief appearance on the stage. Next day Buel called again to set the record straight one more time. Based on what he said, the following correction appeared in the next print edition of the paper and is now on the website: 

“According to editor Steve Buel, two groups of investors, each holding a 50 percent interest, are the new owners, with one group of three headed by new President Hal Brody and the second group of five investors headed by Buel.” 

Evidently Buel was still not satisfied, since he wrote a letter last Friday to Association of Alternative Newsweeklies executive director Richard Karpel to complain about information reported by Berkeley Daily Planet and picked up on the AAN website. He didn’t bother to send us a copy, but a friend forwarded it to us. Here’s what he said: 

“The actual situation is that Hal Brody and I each assembled small groups of investors who collectively each own 50 percent of the newspaper. Hal’s team consists of himself and two friends; my team consists of myself and four friends. There are eight investors in total (although currently the Daily Planet website counts 100).” 

The 100 phantoms are now gone from the web. And the only other difference that I can see between the two formulations is that Buel’s latest version does not speak to control of either group. It doesn’t say that either is “headed” by anyone.  

Now, that’s interesting. In order to make things perfectly clear, we’d like to offer Buel and his new business associates as much space as they need to explain completely, in their own words via e-mail, exactly who’s going to own the new Express, and even more important, who’s going to control it? 

We do have few more questions we’d like them to answer while they’re at it. Still not public: Who are these eight people? We’ve heard about localites Buel and Kelly Vance on one “team,” and according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian there’s a Monterey guy named Bradley Zeve in Brody’s group.  

How about the other four? Who are they? Are they local? For that matter, where does Brody hang out these days?  

One major question: What’s the form of ownership? That’s what determines who controls the enterprise.  

Is it a partnership, and if so is there a managing partner? Or is it some kind of corporation, and if so, might there be two classes of stock, voting and non-voting? Who’s on the board? If it’s a partnership, does one of the eight investors have enough ownership to have control of the whole?  

The Guardian reported that Brody told them he had a “plurality.” That might have been where our source’s “51 percent” came from— a plurality is not exactly the same thing as a majority, but similar in effect. Everyone’s equal, but some are more equal than others, perhaps? 

And what’s the relationship of the new entity’s advertising sales department to the New Times chain that it’s supposedly separating from? Various news accounts have characterized the deal in various ways, but let’s just give Buel et al one more chance to tell us in their own words just what the plan is. Advertising policy is important, because it’s at the center of the Guardian’s predatory pricing suit against New Times, which is still very much alive. 

We have plenty of room available for Buel’s complete answers in his own words to these questions, and for anything else he might like to add. If his e-mail comes in before noon on Thursday, it could even be in our Friday print paper.”  

And Buel responded promptly, if not completely: 

“Your recent article about the change in ownership at the East Bay Express contained some errors with regard to our new ownership structure. My partner Hal Brody and I have each assembled small groups of investors who collectively own 50 percent of the newspaper. Hal’s team consists of himself and two friends; my team consists of myself and four friends. Among our investors are original Express co-founder Kelly Vance, who is once again reviewing movies for the paper, and Bradley Zeve, the founder of the Monterey County Weekly. Our other investors are silent partners with no other East Bay business interests or conflicts. Hal and I are the sole corporate officers of our new company, East Bay Publishing LLC.  

“I would also like to make it clear that this is a very amicable transition between ourselves and Village Voice Media. As I noted in the editor’s note in which I announced the purchase to our readers, I am very proud of the time I have spent working for the paper’s prior owner. Under their guidance, the Express enlarged its editorial staff, professionalized its reporting, sharpened its news coverage, and tightened its writing. While we will indeed do some things differently at the new Express, it would be unfortunate if readers of the Planet were left with the impression that I have a low regard for the company that I’ve spent the last six years working for. In fact, they are the best employers I’ve ever had.”  

Lots of words expended on this discussion, producing very little new information..... Some outstanding questions: Is Hal Brody the investor-in-charge, or isn’t he? Does he have a controlling interest in the venture, whatever his percentage?  

On May 16 the Express’s East Bay Blog said that “Brody will take over as publisher of the Express,” but later reports elsewhere say the former head of ad sales for the Bay Guardian will be the new publisher. And is Brody still living in Kansas City? Is he still a commercial real estate broker there, as one web site indicates?  

Is it correct to say that the revised Express will be locally owned, or are Buel and Vance the only investors who can really claim to be local? On the Express’s East Bay Blog Buel said that the “silent partners...live elsewhere”, a data point omitted in his response to us. Does it matter who they are or where they live or how they made their money? Are they in any way connected with the former New Times chain, which has now acquired the Village Voice Media label, the “best employers” editor Buel says he’s ever had?  

And how is the joint NT/VVM-Express advertising agreement going to work? That’s a whole big can of worms which we’ll leave for the Bay Guardian to empty out as part of their suit.  

One more thing: the name of the new corporation: East Bay Publishing Limited Liability Corporation. They might want to run that choice by the East Bay Publishing Corporation, the long-time publisher of the San Leandro Times and the Castro Valley Forum. According to Claudette Morrison, the office manager at the East Bay Publishing Corporation, her company has no connection to the Express venture. 

TRAFFIC DIVERTERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Hi, are there any proposed measures to remove existing traffic diverters near College Avenue or Ashby Avenue (near Claremont)? Because there are no other routes but College, Ashby and Claremont throughout the area, the traffic has become unbearable. It’s virtually gridlock on College most days. In the 1970s this may have worked, but it’s 2007! Let’s remove all barriers and let the city breathe again with normal traffic flows. 

The gridlock and aggravation of being forced to take only certain streets is prompting my family to consider moving from the city we love. I would like to see ALL Berkeley traffic diverters removed immediately. 

Please re-consider these old-fashioned barriers! They are ridiculous. Doesn’t anyone else feel the same way we do? Certainly anyone on College or Ashby would agree. 

Esten Sesto 

• 

WHY HURT TELEGRAPH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am deeply troubled that this AC Transit plan for their buses has not gone away. I am very concerned that the future of my business and my city may be in the hands of righteous people who think that it is appropriate to force others to use bicycles. 

Businesses that rely on barter, an ancient form of commerce, depend on the transportation of goods to be traded. A bicycle is an inefficient means of transporting books, clothes, or music. These are the goods which are traded every day on Telegraph. This is how many wonderful institutions in Berkeley function day in and day out. Moe’s Books is just one of many businesses that will have to close their doors if our customers are not permitted to bring us their objects to trade. Amoeba, Rasputin’s, Mars, Buffalo Exchange, and Shakespeare and Company also rely on barter. These businesses contribute financially to the viability of the City of Berkeley. If these businesses close, who will re-open in an empty neighborhood? Where will the city get its money? 

Please allow us to continue to do the business that we have been doing for years and years. Telegraph is the heart of our city’s history and we need your special care and consideration. This is not about politics, but survival. Please take the time to study real cities and the impact of bus lanes on people’s behavior. 

Project for Public Spaces (the nonprofit that ran the forum on Telegraph for the TBID with AC Transit, City of Berkeley, TAA and UCB) are responsible for turning around the New York Public Library area by redesigning Bryant Park. These experts made clear to me through numerous examples, that people vacate the areas where buses have the right of way. Bus malls kill commercial neighborhoods. 

Please do not strangle us. Our livelihood depends on your careful examination of the impact of your decisions. As the owner of Moe’s Books and a Berkeley resident, I am against designated lanes on Telegraph. Please help Moe’s stay open.  

By the way, I ride my bike almost every day. 

Doris Moskowitz 

Moe’s Books 

• 

VIRTUES OF TELEGRAPH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Moving from the Elmwood District to Telegraph Avenue as I did a few years ago was a traumatic experience for me. To this day I think wistfully of Elmwood’s genteel charm. Friends charge me with being a snob. “What’s so special about Elmwood? How is it different from Telegraph Avenue?” Dear Lord—how is it different? Let me count the ways. 

For one thing, there was something very stable about Elmwood. Businesses were constant, they didn’t come and go—the wonderful Wells Fargo Bank, Bolfing’s Hardware, a stationer’s, a great Deli, Trips Out Travel, the Elmwood Theatre, jewelry shops, the famous lunch counter where Ozzie used to hold court, and the warm and inviting Claremont Library, etc. 

How to describe Telegraph Avenue? I heard someone remark that it’s quite eclectic. Boy, oh, boy, is it ever eclectic! Just in the few blocks either side of Dwight Way—name it and we’ve got it. When the former Gorman Furniture Company was being remodelled a year ago, I happily fantasized about what business would move in that beautifully restored Victorian type building. Hopefully it might be an upscale women’s apparel shop, a boutique, perhaps an intimate little tea room with lace curtains, something that would add elegance to our neighborhood. So, who moved in? A tattoo parlor and body piercing shop! Oh, well, why not? Right across the street is a store that dispenses marijuana. Two or three pleasant young fellows stand guard at the entrance at all times. I thought marijuana was outlawed, but I guess that’s only the federal government, not the state. Who am I to doubt that the patrons who slip in are not seeking the weed for medical purposes? Another popular shop on that block is The Dark Entry, featuring “Goth” items. I personally am not into black leather and chains so I’m not a patron. The store is very popular with girls with green hair and young men sporting Mohawk cuts. Oh, and I mustn’t forget the Berkeley Hat Shop near the corner of Dwight. You won’t believe the hats they have. If Queen Elizabeth had seen the place on her recent visit she would have bought it out. 

Having mentioned the more bizarre attractions on Telegraph Avenue I should in all fairness add that there are several really excellent ethnic restaurants all along the street. And, to everyone’s delight, a new Peet’s Coffee where you might be lucky enough to get a table. I say “might” because many graduate students who frequent the place are obviously working on their dissertations, glued to laptops.  

Come to think of it, Telegraph Avenue is not such a bad area after all. Who needs Elmwood? 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

WILSON’S ERRORS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

David Wilson’s May 25 commentary (“The Housing Scandal: A Perfect Storm”) critical of the City of Berkeley Housing Department contained several errors and/or misrepresentations. 

For example, Mr. Wilson states that under Housing Department director Steve Barton, the city’s Housing Trust Fund (HTF) is “bankrupt.” This is erroneous. 

The city’s HTF is a pool of federal, state and local funds collected together for affordable housing allocations: i.e., new housing construction, existing housing rehabilitation, housing site acquisition, etc. 

The HTF is replenished with new funds every year. In recent years, the HTF allocated its money for the 100-unit, mixed-use Oxford Plaza affordable housing development in downtown Berkeley. With all HTF funding decisions approved by the City Council, this development started construction with a groundbreaking ceremony two weeks ago. 

The HTF is not “bankrupt.” It will receive new funds again—up to a million dollars—and allocate these funds for new affordable housing projects during the next fiscal year. 

At another point in his commentary Mr. Wilson states that the Housing Department “continues to resist any re-evaluation of Berkeley’s rent control program.” In point of fact, the Housing Department has no legal authority or sovereignty over the Rent Stabilization Agency which oversees the city’s rent control program. 

The Rent Stabilization Agency is a separate, autonomous city agency that regulates nearly 19,000 rent-controlled units citywide. The agency’s budget and effectiveness are audited by an outside firm every year. As the former president of the Berkeley (Rental) Property Owners Association, Mr. Wilson’s dislike of the city’s rent control program does not come as a surprise.  

Finally, Mr. Wilson unfairly tars the employees of the reorganized Berkeley Housing Authority with a single, broad brushstroke: commenting on the remarks of several BHA employees who strongly defended their individual job performance before the City Council during public comment, Mr. Wilson declares that “if this is how city workers behave in front of TV cameras, you can only imagine how they act with their clients, the citizens of Berkeley.” 

While the situation at BHA must be rectified and those responsible for documented misdeeds be held accountable, it is important that sweeping generalizations about employees and a “rush to judgment” mentality are avoided during the BHA reorganization process. 

Chris Kavanagh 

• 

WHY NOT SECEDE? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor impressively paints a bleak picture of the options for Congress ending the Iraq war, noting that cutting funding could cost seats for Congressional liberals, and a reversal of the authorization for war would just send the issue to the Supreme Court which might enjoy legalizing dictatorship. Allen-Taylor says at the end of his piece that we should keep fighting for peace. But he makes no suggestions on what to do. I have one. 

Let’s secede. Why not? As Allen-Taylor notes, Congress will probably never end the war. And following his reasoning: it will never pass single payer medical care, nor will it vote to end the high dropout rates in high school by abolishing tuition at all public colleges, nor will it act to solve prison crowding by legalizing marijuana; nor will it vote more than “compromise” actions on global warming. Meanwhile, we already have here a minimum wage much higher than the pitifully low one Congress just authorized. Our cities have already voted our own immigration policy of no-raids-in-our-backyard. And we have abortion clinics—which the court in Washington might soon outlaw. 

We who want peace in Iraq and a functioning nation should have our state Legislature vote that all tax money earmarked for Washington be sent instead to Sacramento. Then we butter-up the Austrian, “Hey Arnold. You can’t be president in Washington, but you could be in California.” Granted, he’s no liberal, but forced to relate to California without his current patrons in the national Republican Party he’d probably be manageable.  

Suggestions for the new national anthem are welcomed. 

Ted Vincent 

• 

DAVID GOCKLEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Becky O’Malley is well justified to be angered by the firing of Hope Briggs from San Francisco Opera’s production of Don Giovanni. One of the wonderful things about opera is the allegiance of fans to particular singers. To know a professional singer personally allows someone to witness the immense amount of work, sacrifice, persistence, joy, and disappointment that such a career provides. So it easy to understand Ms. O’Malley’s outrage at David Gockley’s decision. However, her accusation of racism is baseless and irresponsible. 

Mr. Gockley is almost single-handedly responsible for proving that Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess belongs among the great 20th century operas and deserves a place in the standard operatic repertory among the works of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. In addition, he resurrected Scott Joplin’s lone opera, Treemonisha. He cast an African-American soprano, Nicole Heaston, in the title role of the world premiere of Jackie O. He has commissioned bilingual operas and built outreach programs that have been models for the industry. The Houston audiences, despite your inference, were always open and supportive. 

I worked for Mr. Gockley at HGO for five years. I admire his brilliance but know the other side of that coin. In my time at HGO, a handful of singers were dismissed. I did not always agree with the decision and the process was always painful, but opera, like all of the arts, is subjective and he is allowed his prerogative as general director. You can and should question his decision regarding Ms. Briggs, but not on racial grounds. 

Brad Blunt 

Houston, Texas 

• 

HOPE BRIGGS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

You cite “Gockley’s narrow point of view” yet you never detail or support such an allegation. Could it be that your own world view is so narrow that any time a black artist is released from a role, racial prejudice can be assumed without evidence? Yes, Gockley’s explanation for releasing Hope Briggs was unusually honest, yet not very specific, as he knew that specific criticism of Briggs’ vocalism would be damaging to her career. From other accounts, the company would have gone along with the usual euphemistic route of citing illness, but apparently it was Briggs’ manager who chose the more honest route.  

I happen to appreciate Briggs in suitable roles such as Aida, but I know from having attended the dress rehearsal that going ahead with Donna Anna would have been utterly disastrous not only for Briggs’ career but for the company’s reputation as well, not to mention the fact that the musical enjoyment of thousands of paying opera lovers would have been ruined. Unlike Mr. Gockley, I can be more honest about Briggs’ performance: It was a painful, excruciating experience, completely ruining any chance of musical enjoyment of the opera. In a word, Briggs pitifully lacks the technique and range to sing Donna Anna, one of the most feared soprano roles in the repertory. Not only in the two extremely taxing arias, but in the all-important ensembles as well, she single-handedly ruined the overall musical experience of an otherwise superb performance. I have been attending opera for 45 years and have seen many productions of Don Giovanni, but I must say, it would have been a ghastly mistake to have proceeded with the original casting as well as an unforgivable crime against Mozart. 

Richard Yahiku  

• 

TRAFFIC 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Laura Spurrier feels hostility because she lives in the hills and drives a car to downtown Berkeley. Her complaint is a familiar one to transit advocates like me. Lost in the noise is that we need to reduce car traffic on our streets, not totally ban the use of cars. The Traffic Demand Management study, paid for jointly by the City and UC in 2000, concluded that a “modest mode shift” from driving to transit would eliminate the need for more downtown parking. The basis of this conclusion was the fact that many employers and employees park all day, taking up a downtown space which could be used by short-term shoppers, restaurant patrons and other visitors. Berkeley’s traffic and parking problems would vanish if most of these all-day parkers would just ride the bus to and from work. Employers could offer the EcoPass as a benefit to encourage transit use. There’s also the “guaranteed ride home” insurance offered by some taxi companies. 

Yes, people who live in the hills have poor bus service. That’s because hill residents have chosen not to demand good bus service. AC Transit maintains very good bus service in places where it finds riders, like along College Avenue, Shattuck and University. Hill dwellers could control their downtown car use by driving to a “satellite parking lot,” like the “Park ‘N Ride” lots in Richmond or Vallejo. There must be some unused land on the periphery of downtown, yet near one of the major bus lines, which could be operated like BART parking in the suburbs. During the week, some churches have parking available.  

Even trips with bulky packages could be covered if some enterprising merchants offered delivery service to the satellite parking. Safeway and Albertson’s offer home delivery service now. 

The fact is that we are making too many trips by cars and generating too much congestion and pollution. We need to stop giving our bad example to China and India, and find a better transportation lifestyle. Our hostility should not be toward cars, but toward pollution, congestion and poor land use. 

Steve Geller 

• 

YASSIR CHADLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for your front-page coverage regarding the plight of Yassir and his employment with the city. For anyone who has ever encountered Yassir, this is big news and deserves the full attention of the community. Plenty of hyperbole has already been shared, but I have to add my voice, noting three things in particular:  

1) Have you ever known another city employee who knows each of his “clients” by name?  

2) Have you ever known another city employee that lives, breathes, and shares with everyone his absolute joy in being alive 24/7?  

3) Since when has it been “OK” in Berkeley to eliminate the best employee due to some bureaucratic numbers-cruncher who is being penny-wise and pound-foolish? I am another person who will go to lengths to see Yassir reinstated at the city pools! 

Carolyn Sell 

The Berkeley Unified School District’s plans to demolish the original gymnasium building are wrongheaded, wasteful and contrary to the values held dear by Berkeley’s residents. The building, with its beautiful hardwood floors, classrooms, historic murals, and swimming pools, dates back to the beginnings of Berkeley High School and is worth preserving as a contribution to the school’s future. Many residents who use its warm water pool would not be able to function without the physical therapy it provides.  

In an era where creative reuse is a paramount concern not just for our city but for the world, let’s not throw away a perfectly usable structure. Maintenance is needed, as the building has been sadly neglected by BUSD. It cannot be replaced, but it can be repaired and retrofitted.  

Berkeley voters approved $3,250,000 to do just this for the pool, restrooms and lockers, and the money is available but has not been used. In the past year the City of Berkeley has replaced the roof on the pool, painted the pool interior and upgraded the electrical.  

Claims by BUSD that the building is beyond repair shouldn’t be taken at face value, based on a careful review of the published consulting reports. Testing done by ABS Construction’s structural engineering division shows the old gym to be surprisingly strong, and concludes it is “structurally feasible to upgrade the building to perform to the desired performance level.” BUSD prefers to base their argument on statements by Dasse, a design firm, that did no testing whatsoever and drew conclusions from a walk-through visual inspection only, before recent upgrades done by the city. Even so, Dasse acknowledged that the building can be retrofitted. 

Landmarking the building will make it eligible for funding from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment Fund. In January, the City of Richmond received over $2 million for their landmarked pool, the Plunge. In addition State funds such as 1D can be used to rehabilitate the classroom space in the building. Private and corporate funds will also be available to restore the building once it is designated a landmark. 

The gymnasium has a distinguished history connecting the City of Berkeley, the School of Architecture at Cal, and the development of educational facilities in the state. Designed in the Period Revival style by W. C. Hays, the building has a sense of place in the campus plan as well as in the downtown and civic center. Hays, who was involved in designing Princeton University, and three UC campuses including Berkeley, wanted BHS students to get sunlight and exercise by walking between campus buildings.  

In 1929, Walter Ratcliff, Jr., designed the expansion of this building. Ratcliff worked with John Galen Howard on the Hearst Mining Circle and Doe Library at UC Berkeley, as well as many other important and notable buildings in the Bay Area. Ratcliff met Hays while working on these two UC buildings. 

In 1936 a major seismic reconstruction of the gymnasium was undertaken by structural engineer Thomas Chase. The reconstruction, prompted by the State Field Act of 1933, was in response to the devastating earthquake in Long Beach. Berkeley was once again in the forefront of school construction and utilized the most modern seismic retrofit techniques then known. Chase was involved in the construction of Cal’s Memorial Stadium, Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, and Berkeley Iceland.  

These three noted architects and professors shaped a building that Berkeleyans can be proud of, continually adapting and re-using it to meet the needs of the day. Current estimates to demolish the building are $8 million plus another $20 million to replace it. BUSD has no funds to do this work. Consistent with Measure G passed by the voters in November, BUSD needs to focus on adaptive re-use and sustainability, not wanton destruction of community assets. This beautiful, historic and useful building should be kept in service to the future, not destroyed. 

Marie Bowman, on behalf of Friend’s Protecting Berkeley’s Resources

From time to time we read news stories about nuclear non-proliferation but seldom does the media attend to the general risk involving the existence of these “doomsday weapons.” The reason the media avoids this angle may be similar to the reason New Orleaneans avoid talk about hurricanes yet to come and Californians don’t talk much about earthquakes. Precisely because it is inevitable, forecasting regional destruction is uncertain and media reports arouse unnecessary un-ease. A more likely reason is cowardice: analyzing the possibility of total extinction exposes the absolute futility of everything else.  

Imagine a forested landscape where the atmosphere, under certain conditions, will produce a nuclear storm, total annihilation, by accident maybe but maybe not. Given this prospect, trees (standing for domestic and international problems) don’t much matter.  

Have we lived with the nearness of nuclear horror for so long that we can afford to forget about it or to take it for granted? Perhaps we as a nation think that being the world’s foremost nuclear power makes us secure.  

Ninety-two days after 9/11 president Bush officially withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thereby paving the way for resurrecting Reagan’s “Star Wars” boondoggle. The president’s action, consistent with the “second coming” of the neo-cons, enticed taxpayers into believing that maintaining nuclear superiority is a vital part of national security.  

Recently, ignoring criticism from scientists and rejecting protests from Russia, the White House announced that it will modernize and expand our country’s huge nuclear arsenal; it plans to develop new RRWs (reliable replacement warheads) and to install new missile sites in Poland and radar sites in the Czech Republic. This places us on the verge of an outer space arms race. 

When the Cold War ended our MAD (mutual assured destruction) foreign policy morphed into carrot-stick agreements, pledges, promises and pacts, relying on honor among nations to block the use and curtail the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  

From a practical point of view “non-proliferation” has meant (and still means) maintaining the status quo and especially our lead position. (The lead position, in every arena, is the hardest to hold and the most frequently attacked.) 

Needless to say, nuclear bombs separate us who have them from others who do not and although this may give us an edge it is a tenuous one because every nation today has access to the science, if not the capability, of releasing energy locked in the nucleus of atoms. 

Having been the first and so far the only nation to use this awesome weapon we struggle to retain the world’s respect. We did what we did in a worthy cause, we say. In other words, we claimed moral power sufficient to deploy the means (atomic bombs) deemed necessary to achieve the end (defeating Japan).  

If the ends justified the means in that instance, it may do so again. Thus, for us, double standard is our standard—all right for us but not all right for you.  

The Bush administration goes further. It proliferates even as it demands non-proliferation; neo-cons do not trust others – China, Russia, North Korea, Iran—but they insist that others trust them.  

Alas, conservative policy makers, having no precedent for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, resort to analogies. Laws restricting the possession of handguns are not very effective and so, unable to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys, some conservatives, invoking the Second Amendment, advocate putting them in the hands of good guys. This despairing attitude is echoed internationally: so-called “rogue nations” must not be allowed nuclear weapons.  

Nuclear armament, however, introduces something infinitely more lethal than hand guns, and to curtail their spread, whether to rogue or non-rogue nations, requires much more than fine tuning analogous control mechanisms. Nuclear non-proliferation is a new species of problem for it involves devising some way to prevent the spread of scientific knowledge. We could more easily prevent the flight of a cloud.  

Consider how we got where we are. 

The top secret detonation of the first atomic bomb before dawn at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945 exceeded the predictions of the team of scientists who brought its awesome potential to fruition. That explosion was so stupendous it effectively blasted a hole in time disconnecting everything that was there before from everything that came after. On that day science brought forth the “destroyer of worlds.”  

In less than a month atomic bombs destroyed most of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a few months later scientist developed nuclear bombs of more breathtaking capability. As time went by the Soviet Union, France and Great Britain joined the nuclear weapons club, then came the Peoples Republic of China and today there are three more, Israel, India and Pakistan.  

Nuclear bombs have the potential to reverse time and send the earth itself back to its initial condition as cosmic dust—Apocalypse now!  

When (not if) North Korea and Iran, crash their way, as India and Pakistan did, uninvited into the club, others will no doubt do the same because the “destroyer of worlds” is as unstoppable as the cloud of ideas that created it.  

The enormous magnitude of a nuclear explosion belittles earthquakes, hurricanes, floods; the prospect of it overshadows global warming. Nuclear Armageddon will make the future irrelevant; it would not just interrupt time but erase it altogether.  

Nuclear weapons color every contention with the dark possibility of annihilation. The “destroyer of worlds” obliges nations and indeed all mankind to measure themselves, their priorities and their relationships sub specie aeternitatem, from the standpoint of eternity. 

Two millennia ago another event occurred that slowly spread and irreversibly changed the world. Its mighty force is symbolized even today in the way we, in western culture, track and record time—B.C. for the run of years before, and A.D. for the run of years after the birth of Christ.  

Christ’s followers believe their power derives from a God who is the creator of life, while nations in the nuclear armaments club can release “the destroyer of worlds” with the press of a button and thereby obliterate the very possibility of life!  

Marvin Chachere is a San Pablo resident.

Personal attacks will not help make a point; rather, they dilute from the intention of making a larger point speak loudly. While Carmel Hara’s letter to the editor may be an isolated instance of a personal attack on Joanna Graham, sadly the pages of the Daily Planet continue to be used as a forum for assault on character rather than a place for intelligent discourse. I find a great opportunity within his letter to make a larger point. 

Carmel Hara writes about the work of the founder and president of the Jewish Peace Lobby, Jerome Segal. Dr. Segal’s work is to be commended as he is an expert on Palestinian/Israeli relations and was one of the first American Jews to meet with the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization when based in Tunis. However, I am not sure I understand Mr. Hara’s point. He mentions a piece that Dr. Segal wrote that he refers to as “Final Status in a new era” and “Who’s Afraid of 194” and then he puts “the Saudi Peace Initiative” in parentheses. Perhaps this was an editorial mistake, but I want to turn it into an opportunity to talk about both the Saudi Peace Initiative and U.N. Resolution 194, which are two different things. The Saudi Peace Initiative was created in 2002 and U.N. resolution 194 has been on the books since December 1948. 

U.N. resolution 194 is consistent with International Law. It states in the 11th paragraph "the [Palestinian] refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible." This basic right is still being denied. In 2005, according to the Badil Resource center, there were approximately 7.2 million Palestinian refugees, equivalent to 74 percent of the entire Palestinian population which is estimated at 9.7 million worldwide. This resolution has been affirmed over 130 times, with universal consensus except for the United States and Israel. 

The Saudi Peace Initiative of 2002 calls for the return of the refugees, full withdrawal of the occupied territories, normal relations with Israel and East Jerusalem as the capital for Palestine. This focus of the initiative holds a clear principle: land for peace. However, it is not as basic as calling for land for peace because both the issue of the refugees and Jerusalem are the real sticking points. And these are the issues that continually get pushed aside.  

It is important for people interested in this issue to have accurate and detailed information about the problem from many angles. The question of a peaceful resolution to this issue is likely one of the most complex in history; because of this, an easy answer is impossible. I appreciate all the passionate discourse that goes into letter writing when it comes to this topic. It seems that no two people agree on the best road to freedom for all in the region. But a best first step would be for all of us who live outside the region to get a wide, varied and balanced perspective. We may not always agree on history or on what is “fair.” But, I would venture to say that if we could put history aside and look at the human cost of the illegal Israeli occupation on Palestinian land and at the human cost of tactics from the militant groups in Gaza and the West Bank, we could agree on one thing: peace in Palestine/Israel is step number one for peace in all of the Middle East.  

Personal attacks here at home have no place in a dialogue when the real intention of putting thought to pen and paper is to open hearts and minds to an issue that affects all humans who care about justice. 

Tracie de Angelis Salim is a Berkeley resident.

KITCHEN DEMOCRACY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In your May 22 editorial, you wrote that Kitchen Democracy is “an east-hills-oriented URL funded in part through Councilmember Gordon Wozniak’s office account.” This is misleading. Kitchen Democracy is a non-profit, all-volunteer organization whose only agenda is to promote healthy civic discourse. Last July the full Berkeley City Council unanimously approved a $3,000 grant to Kitchen Democracy proposed by Councilmember Gordon Wozniak. Our 2,000 users live in all eight Berkeley districts, as well as Kensington and Oakland. Any resident can post any issue regarding any neighborhood or the whole city at www.KitchenDemocracy.org — there is no “orientation” enforced by Kitchen Democracy staff. If the Daily Planet disagrees with opinions expressed by users on a Kitchen Democracy issue, and wishes to promote civic discourse in Berkeley, it should publish civil arguments directed at the issue—not misleading statements directed against the forum itself. 

Robert Vogel 

Kitchen Democracy 

• 

CLEAN-UP CAMPAIGN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Noah Grant’s May 25 letter to the editor criticizes the current student move-out clean-up campaign co-sponsored by the city and university—and the Planet’s coverage of it—as having “missed a key point: recycling.” I’m afraid it’s Mr. Grant who missed the point, which was clearly stated in the earlier Planet article: “Door hangers were also hung up on the north side and the south side which alerted students about ways to recycle their trash . . . a drop-off recycling center will be set-up on the Clark Kerr campus. Non-profits such as the Alameda County Food Bank and the American Cancer Society will be there to pick up stuff. Computer parts and anything with a plug will be picked up by computer resource centers.”  

In addition, there has been a considerable amount of informal scavenging from the debris boxes, which is fine as long as the scavengers do not leave a mess behind. Finally, when the debris boxes are taken to the city’s transfer station the contents are sorted and recycled to the extent possible. 

There are some individuals who assume they can leave furniture and mattresses on the sidewalks of Berkeley and “someone will take it.” But too often no one does and the items are left to clutter the neighborhood until the city eventually hauls them away. In some cases, the items left curbside are toxic. It is everyone’s responsibility to prevent this kind of environmental pollution.  

Irene Hegarty 

• 

LOOKING FOR  

GOOD SAMARITAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On May 17, just after noon, I took a spill while going down Marin Avenue on my bike, near the intersection of Monterey, when I hit an “invisible” pothole. 

While unconscious I’m told someone in a van stopped behind me, preventing others from possibly doing me further injury and stayed until the Berkeley police arrived. I assume this person also called 911. He or she then left without giving his or her name to the officer. 

To this Good Samaritan: I would very much like to thank you in person. If you see this letter please contact me at dpbergen@cwnet.com. If you still want to remain anonymous, I hope you at least see this letter in the Daily Planet and thus receive my heartfelt thanks this way. 

David Bergen 

• 

CONDELL’S RESPONSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I feel I must respond to the May 22 letter from Peace and Justice Commissioner Elliot Cohen in which he again accuses me of racism for criticizing people who teach their children to hate Jews. I realize Mr. Cohen is motivated by his own narrow personal and political agenda which has nothing to do with me or the video clip, but I must object to his assertion, also made by this newspaper in the original story, that I called the prophet Mohammed “a rambling desert nomad with a psychological disorder.” Anyone who takes the trouble to listen to the video will hear that I’m referring to non-Muslims in the UK who, emboldened by the success of Muslims in demanding special treatment in British society, are now much more vocal in demanding respect for their own unprovable beliefs, and in fact I am referring to whoever wrote the Old Testament, not the Koran. I hope Mr. Cohen and the editor of this newspaper will both be big enough to review the video clip to establish what I actually said, and then offer a full retraction and apology for this important inaccuracy. 

Pat Condell 

• 

IMMIGRATION PLAN 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The latest Senate proposal of a new points system for immigration is just another attempt to exploit people in the name of “economic progress” and “security.” As is often the case, those with the fewest options will be exploited the most as those who come from more impoverished backgrounds will have to leave when we have taken what we can from them and given them as little as possible. Just as predictably, the debates quickly lapsed into a discussion on how to further eliminate the rights of non-citizens with a proposal to do away with certain aspects of judicial review. Let’s not forget that the Supreme Court has said “the Due Process Clause applies to all “persons” within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” It’s sad that our Supreme Court needs to clarify that “aliens” are, indeed, people. When we start valuing people based on their education and ‘productive value’ at the expense of recognizing that they are human beings with families, we have failed in setting our priorities as a society. How can we talk of “family values” and then value the family so little? Why is it that we are so willing to eliminate rights that are supposed to be (ironically) “unalienable”? So much for “give me your poor…” 

Drew Sieminski 

• 

DOG PARK COMMENTARY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

On May 25, a commentary published by the Daily Planet stated it was submitted “on behalf of the Ohlone Dog Park Association.” Without commenting on the article’s content, which was satirical, we would like to clarify that its author did not have authority to speak on behalf of the Ohlone Dog Park Association.  

The Ohlone Dog Park  

Association Board of Directors: 

Chris Bohnert 

Larry Gritz 

Eileen Harrington 

Michael Isaacs 

Dawn Kooyumjian 

Tim McGraw 

Grant McGuire 

Lewis Stiller 

Laura Young 

• 

PIT BULL ATTACK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing in response to Sally Tarver’s letter about a pit bull that allegedly injured her sister’s poodle. Supposedly, the pit bull was being walked on a leash when the poodle ran off leash up to the dog. Tarver makes a point that the pit bull was not wearing a muzzle, which I find interesting since there is no law in Berkeley requiring any particular breed to wear a muzzle while being walked on leash down the street. However, there are generally laws throughout most of California requiring that dogs be on leash when not on their property. At the time of this incident, according to Tarver, the poodle was out of its yard, off leash, and it (“being the friendly sort”) charged the pit bull. Of course, just about every owner of an off leash dog that has run up growling or barking while I walked my dog past has claimed their dog to be “friendly.” That’s great. Leash laws, however, are in place for a reason. I like to think I have a right to walk my on leash dog down the street without being accosted by all those “friendly” dogs. 

While it’s terribly sad what happened to the poodle, if Tarver’s account is accurate, she should look more closely at the culpability of her sister. I walk my dog regularly throughout my neighborhood, and I’ve lost count of the number of times some dog runs out of its driveway or out of the open garage and charges, barking and growling at my leashed dog. Sometimes the owners make a half hearted attempt to call their dogs back, sometimes they don’t. I would very much like to be able to walk my dog on leash without being accosted by other people’s off leash dogs. On one occasion, two loose dogs charged me and my dog, knocked me down, while the owner sat in the front yard pretty useless trying to call his dogs, whom he likely believed were just “being friendly.” I suffered scrapes and bruises while my dog was obviously put on the defensive being restrained on leash while I was knocked to the ground.  

People, please, keep your dogs on leash when they aren’t on your property. By doing so, you will prevent injuries to your dog and to other people and their on leash dogs.  

Dawn Capp 

• 

TRAVEL TIME ESTIMATES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Charles Smith questioned the travel time estimates on the Caltrans signs. 

The information is taken in real time by reading any visible FasTrak transponders in the traffic stream and aggregating the point-to-point time results. They apparently tried the idea and were surprised at the accuracy of the results. (The program discounts likely idiosyncratic stops, exit and re-entry, and so on.) Once discovering its effectiveness, they put it up in several places on low priority, and it’s all automatic. 

Even “stuck in traffic” people can get a good idea of likely arrival time and perhaps call ahead, or be reassured the trip looks good. Some might decide to leave that route, easing traffic. And Caltrans can use the remote information as a heads-up. 

Cost of the system should mostly be limited to installing some FasTrak readers, since the signs themselves and their controls were already installed for other purposes. Any FasTrak users who don’t like the idea of being traced for this purpose can cover or remove their transponders when not needed. 

Actually, I think it’s pretty neat. 

Janet Foldvary 

• 

UNFAIR HOSTILITY  

TO DRIVERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Downtown Berkeley is afflicted with ever-fewer parking lots and ever-increasing meter rates. The “message” to drivers is to stay away. The only socially approved means of access seem to be by foot, by bicycle, or by public transit. 

Lost in the noise is the fact that a lot of residents live too far away to walk downtown, cannot/will not bike in hilly areas, and don’t have convenient public transit. (My area in the hills has infrequent bus service, and the getting to bus stops requires walking blocks up or down hill, something you don’t want to do if you’re lugging packages or kids or are simply older.) AC Transit is cutting back, not improving bus service. The logical result? People like me will stop coming downtown; we’ll shop elsewhere and rent movies. We’ll also feel unwelcome in our own city. 

I wish the hostility to drivers—exemplified by all those “Stop Driving” signs—would go away. In light of the fact that there’s no good alternative, the criticism is unfair. 

Laura Spurrier 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your reporter writes that, at the recent Transportation Commission meeting, “the only hearts and minds Bus Rapid Transit seems to have captured ... were those it already possessed.” 

But he should have said the same thing about the opposition. Virtually all the speakers against BRT at this meeting were the professional kvetches who work against everything proposed in Berkeley, from Brower Center to infill housing to environmentally sound transportation. 

There was a roughly equal number of speakers for and against BRT at this meeting. It is true, as you report, that the only applause during the hearing came when speakers opposed the plan—but that is just because the professional kvetches are in the habit of being noisy and disruptive. 

Charles Siegel 

• 

DEFAMATORY OP-ED PIECES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Citizens of Berkeley, beware: The Daily Planet will publish opinion pieces or letters that contain unverified, scurrilous statements about you, presented as facts, as well as publicizing the block you live on. 

I am referring to Sally Tarver’s May 25 opinion piece headlined: “People Injured in pit bull Attack.” From the headline to the closing statement complaining about not getting an apology, the facts presented are arguable; but I am aware that my own opinion may be considered biased. I know the woman who is fostering the dog who bit the poodle; and I know the dog, who is half or pit bull or less. I have been a volunteer dog walker for about a decade and have attended shelter-offered seminars by trainers Bob Gutierrez, Ian Dunbar and Kathy Kear, as well as a Bad Rap presentation. And I have received countless excellent, knowledgeable tips from this foster/rescue activist for socializing and healing shelter dogs. She knows her dogs, and she knows how to handle dogs. Her work fostering as well as finding homes for shelter dogs make Berkeley’s euthanasia rate among lowest of any comparable shelter in the entire state. 

Because what I have been told about the attack and Floy’s medical condition may be deemed hearsay or biased, I won’t go through Tarver’s piece paragraph by paragraph. But my understanding, as a member of the rescue community informed of the incident, is that there has been an apology and that the foster mom paid 75 percent of the bills. As for the dog’s throat being ripped out, it is unlikely an old dog would have survived if this were the case. Stating all this is not to deny or withhold sympathy for the poodle’s suffering; of course, dog-on-dog bites are traumatic occurrences. The question is whether the incident occurred as Tarver related it; her piece contained as much reporting of alleged facts as expression of opinions. Has the Daily Planet corroborated Tarver’s statements with the veterinarian who treated the dog?  

The more mundane lesson from this incident is that all cities need leash laws. Furthermore, according to Tarver’s own account, Floy’s owner was the party in violation of the leash laws when her dog left her property and she didn’t or couldn’t call it back. Off-leash dogs on public property are meant to be under strict voice control--to protect dogs and people. 

There is much more to say generally on the plight of shelter animals, which most citizens seem to want to avoid, but it’s probably better treated in a separate op-ed piece. For now, I would urge the Daily Planet, even regarding your opinion pieces: check the facts. 

Alexandra Yurkovsky 

• 

A PIECE O’ WORK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Joanna Graham is a piece o’ work. Let me say first that I am a Jewish Lebanese (born of Syrian Jews)-American, who immigrated from Lebanon in 1949) so your readers can judge where I come from. She writes “Have you heard about the Arab Peace Initiative lately? No and you won’t.” 

For everyone’s information, Joseph M. Segal, president of the Jewish Peace Lobby, co-author of “Negotiating Jerusalem” (2000), and director of the Peace Consultancy of the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies, sent a recent mailing to American Jews, in which was reprinted an article he wrote and published in Haaretz, a major Israeli newspaper, on Feb. 16, titled “Final status in a new era” and “Who’s Afraid of 194?” (the Saudi Peace Initiative), published in English and Hebrew on YNET, March 20, the online edition of Yediot Aharanot, Israel’s largest daily paper. 

What’s your problem Joanna Graham, and where do you come from? 

Carmel Hara  

(first name Hebrew, family name Arabic) 

• 

IMPLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY  

AT BHA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Let me get this straight: Back in 2002, HUD said the Berkeley Housing Authority was “troubled” and needed fixing. For five years, the Mayor and Council got reports from Housing Director Steve Barton, describing how he had tried, and failed, to fix the problems. Four BHA managers served under Barton, unsuccessfully. Reports of outright fraud surfaced in the papers more than a year ago. Now, facing an imminent shutdown of the BHA by the feds, the City Council preemptively fires everyone and “reorganizes” the mess. A bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, isn’t it? 

So who is accountable? Not the mayor or council, who conveniently replace themselves with their own appointees, people who can be trusted not to investigate what came before. Not Steve Barton, who has suddenly stopped writing memos, and who now says he didn’t know (didn’t know!) what was going on right under his nose. Not the middle managers, who are long gone. And not even the staff: management has conveniently blamed them collectively but punished no individuals, and every full timer “fired” will, per their contracts, simply be “rehired” elsewhere in the city at the same pay. Collective guilt, collective ignorance, collective forgiveness. 

Someone(s), somewhere(s), did something(s) very wrong. Twenty-five million dollars managed “incompetently” is nothing to sniff at, especially when that money is intended to house the poor. If the Council cannot or will not investigate this matter, then the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury ought to do it for us all. 

Laurel Leichter 

Sally Tarver’s commentary “People Injured in Pit Bull Attack” is an example of a justifiable emotional response to a distressing situation, transforming into a nasty personal attack.  

When a dog is mauled or killed by another dog it is one of the most disturbing acts to witness. We have, especially in America, so anthropomorphized our dogs, so prettied them up, so created them in the image of “family members” that we forget where they came from. And that they do not have “human” responses.  

When my small 10-pound mutt, Roo, was badly mauled a year ago by a dog she knew and had been around with no previous incident, I blamed myself, of course.  

It’s natural when our child or animal is hurt to feel we could have done more to protect them. The dog that attacked was a shepherd mix. Roo, a year later, acts as if nothing ever happened, and I hold out the hope to the Tarver’s that Floy’s emotional recovery will be the miracle out of this trauma.  

The dog this time, Buster, is a dog with no previous history of attack. He was in a foster home, whose experience with dogs and with pitbulls (a loose definition of a certain breed and cross breed type) in particular, is exemplary. He was on leash on the sidewalk. With no prior history, why would a dog be forced to wear a muzzle? He served a 10-day quarantine at the animal shelter, the foster home contributed $2,000 towards Floy’s medical expenses. Could they have done more? Perhaps. Are the pages of the local paper the place to discuss that? I don’t think so. 

Nothing diminishes the anguish felt by everyone concerned. But surely it is unnecessary to generate such unbridled hostility towards good people. Or to heighten the sense of fear we, as a community, feel towards this group of dogs. Buster was a shelter dog, one of millions abandoned in our shelters every year across the United States. The type of dog most abandoned in America? The pit bull cross. The type of dog most frequently killed in shelters? You guessed it. 

Encouraging education around dog ownership issues, funding and providing easy access to vaccine and spay/neuter programs, and bringing new ideas to the table about how to raise a new generation of children who are neither afraid of dogs, nor treat them as disposable, will ensure a future more secure for everyone—Floy, Roo, the Tarver’s, Buster, shelter dogs and the amazing people who look after them.  

Berkeley resident Jill Posener is an artist and photgrapher.

This is in response to the May 15 article by Judith Scherr, regarding earthquake retrofit standards in Berkeley. I am very happy the city is finally recognizing that a lack of standards has seriously compromised the safety of our community. However, I do not believe Ms. Scherr’s article sufficiently explored the consequence of this fact.  

I am a licensed general contractor, and as the owner of QuakePrepare, a firm that evaluates existing retrofit work, I have seen more than my share of retrofits in Berkeley. (I don’t perform retrofit work for my clients because of conflict of interest concerns).  

In April 2006, a team of building inspectors evaluated a large number of retrofits, and found that 69 percent of retrofits will not perform as intended. I actually believe this much too generous. I would say the number of improperly installed retrofits is closer to 90 percent. I base this on the fact that the inspection team did not dismantle any retrofit shear walls, and thus did not see behind the plywood. So their evaluations were not truly complete: this is where many retrofits fail the test. 

Allowing contractors to do retrofit work without giving them a code to follow, without requiring they have any special licensing, and without competent review of their work by the Building Department, has cost all of us a great deal of our tax money. As of 2002, the city had helped finance 12,000 retrofits and spent 8 million dollars in tax money.By now this amount could exceed 12 million dollars.  

Doing the simple math and using the 69 percent statistic in the study mentioned above, the city has spent at least $8,280,000 dollars on ineffective retrofits. For that kind of money, I think we should have gotten something that works.  

The city has failed to act responsibly by not spending your money wisely. Information on proper retrofit principles and techniques have been understood for a long time. Our Building Department seems to have completely ignored this. For example, tests done by the Structural Engineer’s Association of Southern California in 1992 proved that old foundations perform just as well in earthquakes as new foundations. Nevertheless, the transfer tax program, under the Building Department’s supervision, paid for all types of foundation work—regardless of whether it helped a home’s earthquake resistance.  

In addition to spending millions for ineffective retrofits, the city polices have greatly compromised our level of protection. Many people who now think that they are protected are actually living under a false sense of security. These badly retrofitted houses will need to be retrofitted all over again at higher cost. It is much more expensive to tear out a bad retrofit and replace it than it is to start from scratch.  

Retrofit shear walls, which are a component in practically every Berkeley retrofit, are very sensitive to improper installation. Shear wall construction is so complex that the International Code Council published an entire book on the subject. The book can be seen at www.shearwalls.com In spite of this, the city has never required retrofit shear wall framing inspections. If they are not framed properly, they will not work.  

We have no way of knowing if millions of dollars of retrofit shear walls were properly framed behind the plywood. From what I have seen first hand, I would say very few of them were properly framed.  

The Building Department has also been very lax in the permit process: there is currently no way to know what has already been done to a house. A contractor with one of the largest retrofit firms in Berkeley told me that six years ago he forgot to put bolt inspection holes in the plywood. The inspector called him and told him she could not see the bolts and she would need to see them before she could sign off his permit. He told her he did not want to tear off the plywood so what should he do? She said, “Take the bolts off the plans!” and ever since then, just to stream-line the inspection process, none of the plans he has submitted to the building department have shown bolts on them, yet they were all approved as seismic retrofits!  

The article further mentioned that “Plan Set A” is now the standard the city is has been using since February 1. The three largest retrofit companies in Berkeley have all stopped doing transfer tax retrofits because they claim Plan Set A does not apply to Berkeley’s housing stock. I must agree with them. One contractor is even offering a free retrofit to anyone who can show him a cripple wall retrofit where Plan Set A can actually work!  

I am also aware that city staff is now being asked to fix these problems and is being given $25,000 to do so. I assume “city staff” means the Building Department. Why should we entrust $25,000 to the same people who have mismanaged $12,000,000? The Building Department got us into this mess in the first place, and I don’t think they should be trusted to get us out.  

Is this more Berkeley politics as usual, i.e., once you discover something does not work you just keep on doing it? Does this make sense to anyone?  

I think common sense and public safety demand that we go back to the drawing board, admit that Plan Set A does not work, and spend whatever it takes to develop a standard that does work. I doubt $25,000 is enough to do this, especially when managed by a Building Department that has already shown gross incompetence in this matter.  

Compared to the millions of dollars already wasted, and the projected billions of dollars in property damage, ten times this amount would be a bargain. The transfer tax program was approved by popular vote in 1992 and good management and proper funding is what we all expect.  

Larry Guillot is owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and gas shut-off valve installation service.  

This Memorial Day season we remember Berkeley’s fallen walkers. (It was called Remembrance Day in years gone by). Pedestrians killed on Berkeley streets by vehicle driver s nearly exceed all other killings, including murder.  

We honor Fred Lupke on behalf of all pedestrians who have died on Berkeley’s streets. Fred was a passionate pedestrian activist who fought for equal and universal access for everyone. Fred died in his wheelchair in a vehicle travel lane where the sidewalk was then impassable on Ashby Ave near the South Berkeley Senior Center. A new sidewalk was later built by Caltrans and the City. We urge everyone to walk, reclaiming our neighborhoods and city as well as our own personal health.  

Participate in upcoming public workshops on Berkeley’s Pedestrian Plan (www.altaplanning.com/berkeleypedestrianplan/index_files/Meetings.htm) and urge the city to fully fund needed walking improvements (clerk@ci.berkeley.ca.us). In Fred Lupke’s honor, let’s make Berkeley the safest, walkable city that it can be . 

Wendy Alfsen, Coordinator, Walk & Roll Berkeley 

Elderberry is a bit more a tree than last column’s rose is, but we usually see it as a shrub: multi-trunked, relatively small. But the wonderful natural history writer Donald Culross Peattie called it a tree, and I’ve seen western pewee and other tree-nesting birds make themselves homes in tall specimens; that’s good enough for me.  

Sometimes I have to stand back and look again to identify the little tree in front of me as an elderberry, if it’s (typically) in a tangle of oak and California bay and poison oak. The leaf shape, that feathery compound, is diagnostic. So, even in winter, is the arching fountain form of the whole individual, even when it’s being elbowed by more forceful neighbors.  

One odd thing about elderberries is the contradictory data about them. I’ve heard that they’re toxic; that just the red ones are toxic; that they’re delicious and by the way, here are five recipes for them; that either the red or the blue are toxic to everyone or toxic to only certain people, either always (especially the red ones) or only when raw; that the unripe blue ones are toxic; that only the blue ones are traditional food; that the red ones are traditional food too; that the leaves, stems, and other plant parts are toxic and “children have been made ill by using the stems as peashooters”; that aboriginal Californians have traditionally used the stems for flutes. That it’s poisonous and that it’s good for what ails you; that it’ll give you a bellyache and that it’ll cure a bellyache. 

I suppose what’s going on is that some people are susceptible in various ways to a compound in the plant—apparently there are plenty of suspects, like some lectins. (Lectins are proteins; they’re various, ubiquitous, and often poorly understood.) Whatever causes the problem, it can be neutralized by drying or cooking, so elderberry flowers for tea and elderberries for pie are often dried and then reconstituted before use. Those kids being poisoned by their peashooters would be better off if they dried the sticks before using them—which is what the Miwok do for their flutes.  

These traditional flutes are made from elderberry twigs chosen for their size, already hollow, or pithy and easy to hollow out. Flutemakers cut them green and let them dry; one writer says they used to bore fingerholes by touching hot coals to the sticks at random intervals, so no two flutes had the same scale. If true, that would make for some interesting compositions. Californians traditionally make clappersticks out of elderberry branches too. With both the wind and the rhythm sections accounted for, some people call it the music tree. For all these and for arrow shafts, elderberry plants are coppiced to produce straight stems.  

There’s a Miwok legend that, back in the days before the sun shone everywhere, only the Valley people had fire, and the Mountain people wanted some too. Robin guarded fire in the Valley roundhouse, and Coyote went out searching but couldn’t find it. White-footed Mouse figured out where it was, and sat down at a gathering in that roundhouse (either with just the Valley people or with the visiting Mountain people too, depending on who’s telling) and played his elder-twig flute till everyone was lulled to sleep. Then he hid some of the fire inside the flute, and after more adventures and a merry chase, brought it to the mountains, where it was tucked under a layer of leaves. When Coyote lifted the leaves to find the fire, most of it shot into the sky and became the sun. Some was left behind, and the people put that into the buckeye and the incense cedar, where now anyone can find it.  

Elderberry does occupy that margin between wild and garden, forest and field. Peattie in his Natural History of Western Trees calls it “a ruderal little tree”; that is, a plant that grows on “waste ground.” That’s a loaded term, but it just means disturbed areas; you often see wild elders on road margins—their white flowerheads light up mile after mile of highway in Florida—and along trails, a sort of forest doorkeeper.  

That’s an appropriate position for elderberry in a garden, too; you’d want it between your beds and whatever boundary of big trees you have. Ask your elder relatives for pie, tea, and fritter recipes, or try Carolyn Niethammer’s book American Indian Cooking. Share the berries with the birds, and you might even get a flock of waxwings to visit.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

This elderberry has grown to tree size in an unusually isolated spot in Sibley park.

Here on the left coast, there’s such strong opposition to the war in Iraq that the May 24 Democratic capitulation to President Bush came as a shock. We thought that Dems won back control of Congress because of their opposition to the war, so we didn’t understand why they pulled the requirement for troop deployment timelines out of the military appropriations bill. Fortunately, this isn’t the last vote on the war; it’s merely another skirmish in an extended battle between Congressional Democrats and the warmonger-in-chief. 

The good news is that trends in public sentiment favor the Democrats. According to the latest Gallup Poll, roughly 60 percent of Americans now believe that it was mistake to send troops to Iraq and 70 percent feel that things are going badly there. As a consequence, most Americans favor troop withdrawal. However, they are divided about when to withdraw: 20 percent say “immediately”; 38 percent say “in 12 months’ time”; and 26 percent say “take as many years as needed.”  

The 58 percent in favor of withdrawal within 12 months isn’t a huge majority and that’s reflected in the thin pro-withdrawal plurality in Congress, where a two-thirds majority is required to overcome President Bush’s veto. Some political observers believe that in the next debate over funding for Iraq—the one that will occur in September—enough Republicans will defect from Bush’s “victory at any cost” position that anti-war forces will finally obtain a veto-proof majority.  

In the meantime, what was most distressing about the May 24 war appropriations compromise was the tepid language about holding the Iraqi government accountable for meeting specific milestones. In December, the Iraq Study Group report observed, “There is no action that the American military can take that, by itself, can bring about success in Iraq.” The Iraq Study Group report highlighted the milestones proposed by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki; the bulk of these should have been met by May 2007, but so far none have been accomplished. Nonetheless, the May 24 appropriations bill lets President Bush waive consequences for the Iraqi government’s continued failure to meet their commitments. This is a tacit acknowledgement that there’s no there, there: the Maliki government is incompetent. 

However, in the latest Gallup Poll three quarters of respondents felt that there must be “benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet in order to continue to receive … assistance.” That’s consistent with the May 24 New York Times/CBS News poll that noted that “Thirteen percent [of respondents] want Congress to block all spending on the war … 69 percent … say Congress should appropriate money for the war, but on the condition that the United States sets benchmarks for progress and that the Iraqi government meets those goals.” Nonetheless, Democrats agreed to toothless language regarding these benchmarks because that was the only way to gain Republican support. 

While it’s discouraging to see Congressional Democrats capitulate to President Bush and give him what he wants for the next four months, it’s important to take a long-term perspective. What’s happening in Washington is a battle between two competing views of “success” in Iraq. One is the Iraq Study Group stance that there has to be a political solution and, if the Iraqi government can’t get it together, then the United States should withdraw. The other is the Bush position that there must be military solution, no matter how long it takes. In recent remarks, the president suggested that if the United States left Iraq without “total victory,” Osama bin Laden would turn it into a “terrorist sanctuary” from which al Qaeda would launch attacks against the United States. 

Most Republican presidential candidates have accepted Bush’s perspective: Rudy Giuliani believes “setting an artificial timetable for withdrawal from Iraq now would be a terrible mistake, because it would only embolden our enemies. Iraq is only one front in the larger war on terror, and failure there would lead to a broader and bloodier regional conflict in the near future.” John McCain says, “A greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success in Iraq.” And Mitt Romney argues, “I want to see us be successful, if at all possible, militarily in backing a central government and military in Iraq.” 

As May draws to a close, two trends are intersecting: one is the decline of public support for the war. The other is strident Republican advocacy of a military solution—coupled with President Bush’s stealth increase in combat forces. Inevitably, these two trends will collide. 

Four months from now, we’re likely to see increased public sentiment against the war and widespread recognition that the Maliki government is incapable of meeting any benchmarks. Meanwhile, President Bush and the main Republican presidential candidates will escalate their rhetoric and dogmatically pursue military “victory.” Sometime in September, anti-war Congressional Democrats will get another chance to restrict funds for the war. Will they have a veto-proof majority by then? Stay tuned. 

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net 

One of the old lessons we are relearning through the Iraq war experience is that in any conflict, the faction which is less concerned about catastrophic consequences resulting from their actions has a decided advantage over the faction which has those worries. 

And, yes, one might apply this to the fact that “their” Iraqis seem to be winning over “our” Iraqis, true, but what I really was talking about is why President George W. Bush and his friends have the current upper hand over the Democrats and Republican war opponents in the Iraq war funding fight. 

All of this has been prompted, obviously, by the events over the past month in which Congress passed a war-funding measure that included what were commonly called “timetables” for an end to the U.S. military involvement in Iraq, Bush vetoed the measure, saying that he would never sign a war-funding bill with such “timetables,” and Congress then passed a new war-funding measure (H.R. 2206, the “U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans’ Care, Katrina Recovery, and Iraq Accountability Appropriations Act, 2007”) that took out the “timetables,” but included something called “benchmarks” which the government of Iraq must meet, over time, or else something bad will happen. 

One could do a long study on the meaning of such things as “timetables” and “benchmarks” in American legislation. I haven’t done such a long study, and I have to confess that I have not followed the ins and outs of the congressional war-funding strategies as closely as I’d like. Perhaps you have not, either. Whether this legislation will eventually lead to an end to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq during the presidency of George W. Bush, or whether it delays a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq until after inauguration day in January of 2009, is debatable, and may only become evident with time. But for those who thought the Democratic electoral victories of November, 2006 would either bring an immediate end to the U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, or legislation mandating a U.S. military withdrawal by a date certain, this is a decided dashing of hopes. 

But if the (barely) Democratically-controlled Congress indeed has an electoral mandate for a swift end to U.S. military involvement in Iraq, why did Congress back off their original date-certain-withdrawal legislation? 

The dilemma was summed up by one anti-war Democrat, Congressmember Louise Slaughter of Buffalo, New York. 

In February, during opening debate on the war funding measure, Ms. Slaughter gave a stirring Congressional floor speech against “blank check” funding of the war, saying that “the simple reality is that two thirds of Americans, myself included, do not trust the President’s judgment when it comes to this war. It is a conflict that has been defined by mismanagement and misinformation since before it began, and the results have been devastating for the Iraqi people and for our men and women in uniform. …We need to stop this surge, and change what we are doing in Iraq. We need to promote a political solution and a diplomatic solution to that nation’s problems…. And at this moment in history, to give this Administration yet another blank check to send our troops on the wrong mission…, it wouldn’t be worthy of the dedicated soldiers this body claims so sincerely to support.” 

But two months later, while voting for the new bill that failed to set a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, Slaughter was decidedly more downbeat, noted that “the president and his allies in Congress have put our soldiers in harm’s way and Mr. Bush is willing to keep them there no matter how much they suffer. If this Congress delayed funding by continuing to back a bill we cannot pass at this time, we would not force the president to end the war. All indications are he would leave our soldiers in Iraq, and without adequate funding they would have to do even more with even less.” 

That is a start, but does not go far enough in explaining the anti-war Democrats’ dilemma. Mr. Bush actually has two options if war-funding is withdrawn—both options potentially devastating to long-term anti-war interests—and the president’s hand is enormously strengthened by the fact that he has already shown he does not mind risking bad consequences to U.S. troops or to the country of Iraq in order to pursue his own long-term goals. 

Mr. Bush’s first option in the event of passing of a war-fund-withdrawal measure, as Ms. Slaughter suggested, would be to leave the U.S. troops where they are, getting the money from other sources. He has that power. A more responsible president would figure out the way to fully fund the troops in such an event, but there is every reason to believe that this president would deliberately allow egregious shortages in certain areas in order to advance a political agenda.  

This is, after all, an administration that allowed U.S. troops to stay in harms way for months upon months with inferior combat vehicle armor that was allowing soldiers to get blown up by roadside bombs. Asked by a member of the Tennessee National Guard, you remember, “why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles? Our vehicles are not armored. We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat.", then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied that three years into the war, the army was putting armor on combat vehicles “(at a) rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment,” adding famously and airily that “as you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” 

Rumsfeld has since left the building, but his spirit remains in the Bush administration. And an administration that let American soldiers unnecessarily suffer in combat, perhaps so that favored corporations like Halliburton could get cushy insider contracts, would certainly have no qualms about allowing the same thing so that the blame could be placed upon the Democrats. That is, after all, the Karl Rove way. 

Democrats could try to force a troop withdrawal by specifically rescinding the original 2002 legislation authorizing the Iraq invasion but in that event, the Bush administration might argue that once a war is authorized by Congress, Congress has no right to unauthorize it while such a war is in progress. That would be a Constitutional issue which would have to be decided by the United States Supreme Court. Good luck with that. 

But disturbingly, Democrats and anti-war Republicans might not fare better if Mr. Bush were to “honor” a Congressional withdrawal of war funds and pull the troops out of Iraq. This would be in no ways comparable to the situation in Vietnam when the U.S. withdrew its military forces from combat, with a South Vietnamese government intact and an army in the field. A precipitous U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq would almost certainly result in a period of chaos and instability as various factions moved in to fill the U.S. void—Shi’a, Sunni, Kurdish, Iranian, and al-Queda, certainly.  

There is enormous political danger here within the United States. Such chaos and instability would be blamed on the Democrats by the Bush administration and their media friends, and while there is solid anti-war opinion currently within the United States, it is not based upon a unified theory. That opinion could turn, for example, if a U.S. withdrawal resulted in a wider Middle East war that seriously threatened Israel or if al-Queda—which is clearly benefiting from the U.S. military presence in Iraq—attempted to launch another terrorist strike either on U.S. soil or at U.S. interests elsewhere in the world. Either of those two events, if enough Americans blamed it on Congressional troop withdrawal legislation, could turn a favored Democratic victory in next year’s presidential race into a Republican triumph, and under those circumstances, God only knows what a President Guliani or McCain might do, especially if that was accompanied by a reversal of Democratic majorities in the U.S. Senate and House. 

Am I suggesting that progressives and other anti-war forces should, therefore, do nothing about the war in Iraq because the consequences of doing something are dire. Absolutely not. But in analyzing the current actions of the Democratically-controlled Congress, one has to take into account that these are consequences that are much on their minds. My guess is that the current crisis will have to deepen in some way—either in Iraq or inside the United States itself—before Congress on its own is ready to take the leap into those dark spaces. 

When Captain John Slater died in January 1908, a newspaper obituary declared him to have been “part owner in steamship companies with Captains Dudreau and Miles [sic]” and his family “among the largest property owners in the north end.” Slater’s employers were captains Boudrow and Mighell, owners of the California Shipping Company and residents of 1536 and 1533 Oxford Street, respectively. The writer of the obituary may have exaggerated Slater’s role within the Boudrow & Mighell company, just as Slater’s land holdings appear to have been inflated beyond their actual extent. 

Property assessment records indicate that the Slater holdings in 1908 consisted of two houses: 1335 Shattuck Avenue and 1426 Spruce Street. Family records confirm that the Slaters suffered a reversal of fortune as a result of the captain’s death. Louise Slater (1867–1948) remarried, but her second husband, Edward Phillips, lived for no more than three or four years. In 1912 or ’13, Louise sold the big house, keeping the smaller one. 

At the time, daughter Marguerite was a student at UC, while younger sons Norman and Colby were at Berkeley High School. For a while, the family lived at 2317 Haste Street, a house they may have found thanks to their former tenant, Andrew H. Irving. 

Plant superintendent of the Paraffine Paint Company, Irving was then living across the street, in the enormous and ornate Lafayette Apartments at 2314 Haste Street.  

In 1935, the Lafayette would become Barrington Hall, the University Students’ Cooperative Association’s largest residential co-op. By 1915, when Andrew’s elder brother, Samuel C. Irving, was elected mayor of Berkeley, their widowed mother and sister had also moved into the Lafayette. 

The mother, Jane Scott Irving, was born in 1829 in Nova Scotia and died at the Lafayette in January 1917. Her obituary in the Berkeley Gazette declared her to have been the granddaughter of Zephaniah Williams, “one of the heroes of the revolution. Williams was presented with a purse of $3,000 and a sword of honor for his services in the war by the Continental Congress.” 

The Gazette failed to mention that after fighting numerous battles against the British, Zephaniah Williams joined the Duke of Cumberland’s Regiment, in a unit consisting entirely of former officers and men of the American Continental Army, and spent three years as a British soldier on garrison duty in Jamaica. 

When the regiment was disbanded in 1783, the American soldiers were allowed to settle in Nova Scotia and given land grants. In 1785, Williams came to Antigonish, NS and put down roots in a place now known as Williams Point. 

While three Irvings were residing at the Lafayette Apartments, Louise Slater’s eldest son, James Herbert Slater (1889–1969), had gone to work for the Paraffine Paint Co. as an electrical engineer and took up residence at 1402–04 Spruce Street, a few doors to the north of his mother’s property. This two-flat Victorian cottage would soon be acquired by the Slaters and remain under family ownership until 1970. 

The Paraffine Paint Company of San Francisco manufactured specialty paints, building papers, and ready roofing materials under the Pabco and Malthoid brand names. Malthoid, a bituminous rolled membrane with adhered granules, was in demand for roofing bungalows. In 1908, it was used to roof the “ultimate bungalow,” Greene & Greene’s famed Gamble House in Pasadena. According to an architectural report, it failed within the first 10 years. 

Malthoid’s popularity extended as far as Australia and New Zealand, where many bungalows were being constructed. Sales were robust enough to warrant the extended visit of an executive from the home office. That executive was none other than Samuel C. Irving, Berkeley’s future mayor, who would serve as vice-president and manager of the Paraffine Companies from 1903 to 1930. The visit to Australia lasted close to a year, and Samuel was accompanied by his wife. The couple’s first son, Fred Elton Irving, was born in Sydney in October 1886. The Irvings would not return to California until Fred was six months old. 

Samuel C. Irving (1858–1930) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the son of Andrew K. Irving, a Scottish shipwright. The Irving family came to the Bay Area from New York in 1868. According to Jane Scott Irving’s obituary in the Gazette, Andrew K. Irving founded the first shipbuilding yard on the Pacific Coast at San Francisco and organized the first labor union in the West. 

In 1880, Andrew and Jane Irving were living with their five children in Vallejo, site of the U.S. Navy’s Mare Island shipyards. Samuel, who had graduated from UC in 1879, was still registered as a student when the census taker came calling the following year. 

Samuel married Laura Sell in 1886, and the couple settled in Cow Hollow, San Francisco, raising two sons. In 1901, Samuel served as president of the Mechanics Institute and an ex-officio UC Regent. 

Like many refugees of the San Francisco earthquake and fire, the Irvings moved to Berkeley in 1906. At the time, Samuel’s younger brother, Andrew, was rooming with the Slaters at 1335 Shattuck Avenue. Across the street, Captain Seabury’s house at 1322 Shattuck Ave. was unoccupied (more about Seabury in the next article). It seemed an ideal arrangement, and Samuel bought the house from Seabury. He would remain there for fifteen years. 

While living at 1322 Shattuck Ave., the Republican Samuel Irving was twice elected mayor of Berkeley, serving from 1915 to 1919 (in 1926 he would run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat). Shortly after leaving office, he acquired the former Slater house across the street and resided in it for the rest of his life. On December 2, 1930, he was fatally struck by a car while crossing Shattuck Avenue on his way home. Samuel Irving was a member of the Bohemian, Commercial, Commonwealth, Faculty, and Hillside Clubs, the Berkeley lodges of Elks and Masons, and the Golden Bear Society. 

Samuel Irving’s sons followed him into his businesses. Fred (1886–1973) was a department manager at the Paraffine Companies until his father went into the cider, vinegar, and fruit-juice business. Shortly after the end of World War I, Fred could be found in Sonora, CA, managing the California Cider Company. Living with him was his younger brother Livingston, who looked after the orchards. 

Livingston G. Irving (1895–1983) had made a name for himself as a World War I ace flyer in the Lafayette Escadrille and the 103rd Aero Squadron. After his stint as orchard keeper, he went to work at the Paraffine Cos. as an engineer. During the 1920s, he continued to fly in the Air Corps Reserve out of Crissy Field. When the Dole Race from Oakland to Honolulu was announced in 1927, Livingston was the first contestant to enter. His plane was a Breese monoplane purchased and sponsored by the Paraffine Companies. Christened the Pabco Pacific Flyer, the plane was painted bright orange and sported the Indian warrior’s head insignia of the Lafayette Flying Corps. 

Technical problems plagued the Dole Race; of the 15 contestants, only eight took off and a mere two reached Hawaii. The Pabco Pacific Flyer was one of the non-starters. On the second attempt to take off, the plane rose briefly before crashing down. Livingston bought the wreck from the Paraffin Cos. for a reported $10 and had it rebuilt to his specifications. Renamed the Irving Cabin Monoplane, it was sold in 1929 to the Pacific Finance Corporation. 

Livingston retired from the Army Air Force as a colonel. He was not the only illustrious son of a prominent father to have come out of the Slater-Irving connection. Captain Slater’s youngest son, Colby E. “Babe” Slater (1896–1965), was a world-class athlete. In 1911 and ’12, “Babe” led the Berkeley High School rugby team to county, regional, and state titles. In 1914, he went on to the University Farm School (now UC Davis), starring in rugby, football, basketball, and baseball. 

U pon graduation in 1917, “Babe” enlisted in the United States Army and served with the Medical Corps in France and Belgium during World War I. After the war, he raised sheep, hogs, and feed in Woodland, CA. When the Olympic Games Committee allowed the formation of a United States rugby team for the 1920 Olympics, “Babe” Slater was one of the first players chosen. To everyone’s surprise, the inexperienced U.S. team won the gold after beating France 8-0. 

In the 1924 Olympics, “Babe” was captain of the U.S. rugby team, which also included his brother Norman (1894–1978). Once again, the U.S. beat France to win the gold. Angry French fans rioted in the stands, and rugby was thereafter removed from Olympic competition. 

Around 1927 “Babe” Slater bought land in Clarksburg, CA and raised various crops for close to thirty years. Norman Slater, who had been a mechanic in San Francisco, joined his brother’s farming operations. The only Slater to remain in Berkeley was James Herbert, who continued to work for the Paraffine Cos. and raised a family at 1404 Spruce St. before moving north to 776 Spruce in the 1930s. Not far from him, at 1814 San Antonio Road, lived Fred Irving, who had forsaken Paraffine for apple juice. 

This is the second part in a series of articles on north Berkeley houses and the families that inhabited them. 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson.  

This house at 1841 San Antonio Road was the home of Fred E. Irving, elder son of Berkeley mayor Samuel C. Irving.  

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

It’s summer—a month from St. John’s Eve, but no longer quite the juvescence of the year—and time to take a deep breath. If you’re more organized than I am, as most humans are, you’ve got almost everything in the ground and watered and fertilized, at least sufficiently for the time being, and things are hinting at bearing fruit.  

Time to go for a stroll and look at other people’s gardens. 

The flush of official garden tours is past. But the roses are still blooming, and shade plants are spreading their foliage; tropicals are just getting on with it, blooming and greening in the brief beats of heat we’ve enjoyed this past month.  

Regular brisk strolls around the neighborhood are good for your health and for your observational skills too. Leave the iPod at home and tune your ears into the sounds that you can filter through the din of human cities.  

Chez nous, the robins are having a competitive year. There’s one couple nesting in the mutilated plum tree next to our backyard, which will keep the carwash folks in pocket change for a few months. When we water out back, they’ll come down to the wet spots, each taking a turn, to see what sort of tasty invertebrates might have come up from the sudden mud for air.  

Rival robins have been rockin’ just a few doors to the east, and just across the intersecting street to the west. Some evenings the boyos all come out to the streetside utility lines and stage song duels.  

A lately-insomniac neighbor tells me that our yardbird, at least, has been inspired to bursts of song at 4 a.m. some nights.  

That sad little whine from overhead is the call note of the local lesser goldfinch. His song is much sweeter, and he and his honey seem to be nesting in the Japanese maple next door. Such dialogues I’ve been hearing from that canopy!  

The crows are headquartered on the block just southeast of us, and they carry on at intervals all day. One thing I’ve learned from this family is that they use the same word for “raven” as for “hawk”—a nasal flat “caah”—when they see and chase one through the neighborhood. Listen for that note and look up to see what fancy predator is in transit. 

Meanwhile, the human neighbors’ gardens put on the visual part of the show. The guy on the corner has a hedge of white roses that smell better than white roses tend to, and his Brugmansia has a sweet scent too. Now I find myself sniffing as I go, like a dog. Think how this block must “look” to dogs! 

It’s enlightening to see how perennials fare here over a few years; what gets overgrown; who keeps their poor shrubs trimmed into poodleballs.  

Sometimes I even get to meet the people who garden my local favorites. We’ve swapped histories, tips, and cuttings. I’m not terribly social usually, but gardens (and birds!) bring out the gladhander in me. 

Where did you get that gorgeous iris? 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

Some things are always a bad idea. Karaoke with your boss, bell bottoms on chain driven motorcycles, long-haired thoracic surgeons or pesto-flavored ice-cream. 

Another thing that is nearly always a bad idea is converting a basement into somebody’s bedroom. 

I’ve seem this a lot and there is a special red flag (animated with flashing stripes) that goes up in my head whenever I walk down stairs in a house and see a “staged” bed over new carpeting and can just make out the flue from the furnace sticking out from behind the lacy curtain. As they say, “What could go wrong?” 

Long ago, when I was young, basements were places where people drank and shot pool. They were places where a boy could take apart the family TV and be threatened with a spinal transplant by a red-faced father (clearly this was way before Child Protective Services). They were, however, not living spaces. They tended in many parts of the country to be damp or even wet. They often housed a sump (a well recessed into the slab) and a pump for management of subsurface waters. 

You see, basements violate nature’s laws when it comes to grade (ground level), erosion patterns and the design of the watershed. If you’re lucky enough to live in a fairly dry part of the country, this is far less of an issue, but most places suffer as we do, with water that insists on filling up spaces that we dig out of the earth. They used to call them wells. Big ones might be called quarries. Whatever you call them, they’ve always tended to get wet. 

Regardless of this truth, in our modern age of common senselessness, we’ve forgotten all the basic stuff. While it was well understood a hundred years ago that a cellar would be damp and that action would have to be taken to keep one dry, we have forgotten these things and end up carpeting concrete floors 8’ below ground level. 

Basements ARE excellent spaces for crafts and storage and occasional short-term belching and cursing but they do not work well as bedrooms. 

One thing that is not commonly understood is that typical concrete is quite porous to water and much like a wick will transmit substantial volumes of water into a basement, even across a slab or wall of 6” or more. As concretes go upward in strength they also become less porous and so, when designing a basement, this is one of many strategies that can be employed in producing a dryer environment. 

It’s common to see a white crystalline precipitate (powder) on the surface of concrete floors and walls in basement as evidence of this slow water movement. We call this efflorescence. As water moves through the concrete it carries evaporative salts such as calcium chloride to the dryer side and as the water evaporates from the exposed side of the concrete, it leaves these salts behind. These are largely benign but do illustrate a problem with drainage.  

If the concrete is kept relatively dry, or if there is a low-pressure path to allow the water to move easily along the other side of the concrete (the soil side), the water would not make the more difficult journey through the concrete, at least not much of it. 

The pressure of water on the back side of the concrete wall or floor is known as hydrostatic pressure and the higher it is, the more it wants to push through the concrete and dampen the rug and grow the mold colony in the new bonus room. 

On retaining walls, we usually create holes through the walls to relieve this pressure. Without these “weep” holes, large walls can be slowly toppled. Water is amazing stuff. It always wins unless you let it through. There is no opponent more dangerous than the one that is patient and moves very slowly. 

In basements, it is possible to arrest some of the infiltration of water in liquid or vapor form by the use of sealants. The problem is that they cannot resist high levels of hydrostatic pressure. If there’s a lot of push to the water on the other side of the wall, the surface of the concrete including the sealant can “spall” or exfoliate in thin chips releasing the moisture and damaging the surface. 

If there is just a little weeping going on and the concrete quality is good, a sealant can be quite effective. There are two common sealants that have been in use for quite a long time, UGL Drylok and Thoroseal. Thoroseal is a cementitious sealant with an acrylic component and seals over the concrete. 

It comes in a range of colors and can be painted when installed. Drylok is a clear latex sealant that impregnates the concrete surface. In my experience, Thoroseal is the better choice for weeping concrete although Drylok is a nice choice for maintaining the appearance of brick or other masonry (being a clear sealer). 

Better than either of these is a line of products by Aquafin™. Included in these are epoxy sealants that can solve major problems where escaping water vapor has made living spaces uninhabitable and also cementitious sealants that can seal rough, highly porous concrete. 

I don’t want to create any illusions here. Damp basements can be restored to relatively dry conditions with these methods as well as ventilation, heat, dehumidifiers and drainage systems. But when pushing water comes to shoving humidity, nature often wants these basements to stay damp. 

The key to using this data properly is not in the utter abandonment of the basement but in reasonable expectations and appropriate use of space. To those of you who are now carpeting and painting that basement in preparation for sale, keep in mind that the next owner will assume that these finishes guarantee dry, cozy space. 

If nothing else, take some time to write down what you know and what you don’t know about the basement (“it’s seemed mostly dry these last four years but it wasn’t carpeted or painted”). It could mean the difference between a nasty phone call next January and a clear conscience combined with reduced liability. 

If you’re a buyer, look twice and three time at that basement and don’t start planning the office layout just yet. Give yourself a winter to assess the real utility of the space and be prepared to take some special measures (or to use it as a …. basement). 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

“Triangle of Life” – Watch Out! 

Every so often I get an email from someone passing on information from a person named Doug Copp, who is a self-proclaimed “expert” on disaster management.  

He says that, in a serious quake, the “drop, cover, and hold on” advice from the Red Cross and other American disaster agencies is wrong, and that instead you should find some “triangle of life” area in the room to protect you.  

Please don’t listen to this advice. His observations are based on buildings in third world countries and, even if his ideas may have value there (who knows?), they DO NOT have value here. Engineering researchers have demonstrated that very few buildings collapse or “pancake” in the U.S. as they might do in other countries. 

If you want more info on this, google “triangle of life hoax.” You’ll learn a lot. 

Wishing you a safe home and peace of mind. 

Larry Guillot is the owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and gas shut-off valve installation service. Contact him at 558-3299 or visit QuakePrepare.com to receive semi-monthly quake safety reports.

TUESDAY, JUNE 5 

THEATER 

Shotgun Players presents Week 30 in “365 Plays/365 Days” Tues. and Wed. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Tickets are $5. 841-6500. 

FILM 

“Unreleased Beatles” film clips and music shown by rock music historian Richie Unterberger at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ilona Meagher, editor of the online journal “PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Austin Grossman introduces “Soon I Will Be Invincible” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Book. 559-9500. 

Gordy Slack reads from “The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything” at 7:30 p.m. at Laurel Book Store, 4100 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ellen Hoffman and Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Middian, Minsk at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100.  

Bill Charlap at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200.  

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6 

THEATER 

Berkeley Rep “Great Men of Genius” with Mike Daisy in four different monologues at 2025 Addison St. through June 30. Tickets are $30-$75. 647-2949. 

“Colorstruck” Donald Lacey’s one-man show at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. at Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St., Oakland, through June 15. Tickets are $10-$20. 663-5683. www.colorstruck.net 

FILM 

“From Saturday to Sunday” on Jazz Age Prague at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sally Denton describes “Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Fremont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Johnny Smith Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $6. 841-JAZZ.  

Sauce Piquante at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Sweet Crude Bill and the Lighthouse Nautical Society at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100.  

In Harmony’s Way, a capella, at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

Two Sheds, Dame Satan at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Anat Cohen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

Disappear Incompletely at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

THURSDAY, JUNE 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Unknown Knowledge” Paintings and collages by Nicollette Smith. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Lisa Gluskin, Alison Powell and Barbara Yien at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476.  

Joseph Lease, poet, followed by an open mic, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720. 

Larry Doyle reads from “I Love You, Beth Cooper” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

New Century Chamber Orchestra with guest concertmaster Cho-Liang Lin at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $28-$42. 415-357-1111. www.ncco.org 

Berkeley Edge Fest “The Tyrant” composed by Paul Dresher, John Duykers, tenor, at 8 p.m. at the Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $36. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2006/edgefest/ 

Storyhill at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

“Two Cities, One Song” Rhonda Benin & Youth Choirs at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

GoGo Fightmaster, Dear Liza, Jon Raskin at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Anat Cohen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

Blurred Vision, The Cons, Hazerfan, rock, at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100.  

FRIDAY, JUNE 8 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “The Last Five Years” Fri and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through June 10. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Berkeley Rep “Oliver Twist” at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. through June 24. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org  

Berkeley Rep “Great Men of Genius” with Mike Daisy in four different monologues at 2025 Addison St. through June 30. Tickets are $30-$75. 647-2949. 

California Shakespeare Theater “Richard III” at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through June 24. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

“Colorstruck” Donald Lacey’s one-man show at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. at Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St., Oakland, through June 15. Tickets are $10-$20. 663-5683.  

Masquers Playhouse “Ring Round the Moon” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond, through July 14. Tickets are $15. 232-4031.  

Shotgun Players “The Cryptogram” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through June 17. Tickets are $17-$25. For reservations call 841-6500.  

Travelling Jewish Theater “Death of a Salesman” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through June 10. Tickets are $15-$44. 1-800-838-3006. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Lush Life” A group show by 15 artists whose work celebrates the garden. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Exhibit runs through July 8. 843-2527. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jason Roberts reads from “A Sense of the World” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Cameron Stracher describes “Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family Table” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500.  

Rafaella Del Bourgo, Rose Black, Gayle Eleanor read their poetry at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave. at Hearst. 841-6374. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley High Jazz Ensemble, Lab Bands and Combos at 7 p.m. at the Florence Schwimley Little Theater, Berkeley High Campus. Tickets are $3-$10. 

Berkeley Edge Fest “The Music of Frederic Rzewski” with Frederic Rzewski and Ursula Oppens, piano, at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2006/edgefest/ 

Clerestory “In the Midst of Life” Men’s octect performs music by Purcell, Elgar and Tavener at 8 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Bancroft Way at Ellsworth. Tickets are $8-$10. www.clerestory.org 

Susie Davis, TapWater at 5:30 p.m. at Park Place at Washington Ave., Point Richmond. Free. www.pointrichmond.com/prmusic/ 

Bay Area Classical Harmonies at 8 p.m. Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Tickets are $15, children $5. 526-9146. 

Hanif & The Sound Voyagers at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ.  

Donny Dread, Ancient King, Xcaliba and Nubian Natty, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Darol Anger & the Republic of Strings at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761.  

The Nomadics at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

The Bleu Canadians, The Phenomes, Bob Wiseman at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Ninja Academy, Walken at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Jeff Jernigan at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

5 Days Dirty, Round Three Fight, Traces of Reason at 8:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146.  

Nora Whittaker Band & Macabea at 8:30 p.m. at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 644-2204.  

San Pablo Project at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Chrome with Helios Creed, Triclops, progressive rock, at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $10-$12. 451-8100.  

SATURDAY, JUNE 9 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña ¡Vamos A Cantar! with Jose Luis Orozco at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $4 for adults, $3 for children. 849-2568.  

Flute Sweets and Tickletoons “Little Kids Little Songs” at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

ALICE, Arts and Literacy in Children’s Education with Congolese Dance, Ballet Folklorico and trapeze arts at 7:30 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave. Donation $25. RSVP to 482-0415. www.aliceprogram.org 

Bookpals Storytelling at 11:30 a.m. at Children’s Fairyland, at 699 Bellvue Ave., Oakland. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Self as Superhero” ArtEsteem’s annual exhibition at 3 p.m. at ASA Academy and Community Science Center, 2811 Adeline St., at 28th St., Oakland. 652-5530. www.ahc-oakland.org 

“Animals, Sea Creatures and Animation” Paintings, sculpture, digital and fiber art and more, in a benefit for Hopalong Animal Rescue. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Expressions Gallery, 2053 Ashby Ave. 644-4930.  

“One Thousand Words: New Paintings by Mary Younkin” Artist reception at 6 p.m. at Luka’s Taproom & Lounge, 2221 Broadway at Grand, Oakland. 451-4677.  

East Bay Open Studios Sat. and Sun. at various studios around the East Bay. For maps see www.proartsgallery.org 

THEATER 

Actors Ensemble of Berkeley “A Dream Play” Sat. and Sun. at 3 p.m. on the lawn in front of Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Wlnut St. at Berryman, through July 1. 841-5580. www.aeofberkeley.org  

FILM 

“Under a Shipwrecked Moon” by Antero Alli, at 8 p.m. at Kaleva Hall, 1970 Chestnut St. Cost is $5-$10. 464-4640. www.verticalpool.com 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Berkeley Edge Fest Composer Interviews with Sarah Cahill, Frederic Rzewski and Ursula Oppens at 2 p.m. at 125 Morrison Hall, UC Campus. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2006/edgefest/ 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mozart for Mutts and Meows Midsummer Mozart Festival fundraiser for Berkeley Humane Society at 7 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club. For information call 845-7735, ext. 19. 

Berkeley Edge Fest “The Tyrant” composed by Paul Dresher, John Duykers, tenor, at 8 p.m. at the Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $36. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2006/edgefest/ 

Matthew Owens, cellist and poet, will perform his new works at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., Live Oak Park. Cost is $10. 644-6893.  

Keith Doelling, double bass, at 4 p.m. at Crowden School, 1475 Rose St. 

Slavyanka Men’s Russian Chorus at 7:30 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St., Oakland. Tickets are $16-$20. www.slavyanka.org 

Na Leo Nahenahe Summer Concert at 2 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $15.00 at the door, children 12 and under are free. 

Passamezzo Moderno “Venice and Vienna in the Early 17th Century” at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864.  

The Sacred Jazz Symposium: Exploring Spirituality in the Music at 2 p.m. at The Black New World and Pleasure Club, 836 Pine St., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$20, no one turned away. Sankofacc@earthlink.net 

La Peña’s 37th Anniversary and Open House at 6 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $22-$24. 849-2568.  

Brazzissimo! at 8 p.m. at Piedmont High School Auditorium, 800 Magnolia Ave., Piedmont. Tickets are $5-$10. www.brazzissimo.com  

Gateswingers Jazz Band at 8 p.m. at Central Perk, 10086 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. 558-7375. 

The Ravines at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

Ellen Robinson and her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Pellejo Seco, Luis Valverde, and Ekobios, rhumba cubana, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cuban salsa dance lesson at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Katherine Peck and Michael Burles at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Mucho Axe at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Robin Flower & Libby McLaren at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $19.50-$20.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Meshugga Beach Party, The El Dorados, The TomorrowMen at 8:30 at Blakes on Telegraph. Cost is $10. 848-0886. www.blakesontelegraph.com 

Sheila Jordan “Jazz: A Life’s Work” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Draggin’ Suzy, Sorrow Town Choir, The Backorders at 9 p.m. at The Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakland. 

Don Burnham & Friends at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Diego’s Umbrella, Tippy Canoe & the Paddlemen at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082.  

Insaints, Fabulous Disaster in a benefit for A Safe Place Shelter, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $6-$10. 525-9926. 

Varukers, Scarred for Life at 7 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

SUNDAY, JUNE 10 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Photographs of China and Mongolia” by Berkeley photographer Caroline Johnson. Reception at 1 p.m. at The LightRoom, 2263 Fifth St. 649-8111. www.lightroom.com 

Paintings by Michael Adkins Opening reception at 4 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Jersey Boys cast will discuss the musical based on Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons at 11 a.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Khaled Hosseini introduces his new novel, “A Thousand Splendid Guns” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Ticekts are $12-$40. 559-9500. 

Architecture Tour of the Oakland Museum of California at 1 p.m. at the koi pond, first level, Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2200. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Junteenth Freedom Mass with the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir at 10 a.m. at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, 7900 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. www.stcuthbertsoakland.org 

Berkeley Edge Fest “The Music of Frederic Rzewski” with Frederic Rzewski and Ursula Oppens, piano, William Winant and Ben Paysen, percussion, at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $32. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2006/edgefest 

Chamber Music Sundaes with San Francisco Symphony musicians and friends, and featuring Tio Navarro at 3 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $18-$22. 415-753-2792. www.chambermusicsundaes.org  

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra Pops Concert at 2 p.m. at Greek Orthodox Church of the Ascension, 4700 Lincoln Ave., Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 849-9776. 

Soul at the Chimes with Promise, Called Out and the East Bay Church Men’s Chorus at 2 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $20-$25. 464-3086.  

Abji Dibril CD Release Party at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Jacob Wolkenhsuer at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Americana Unplugged: Donner Mountain Bluegrass Band Reunion at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

BandWorks Concert, with kids, teens and adult rock bands, from 1:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $5. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Piano Trio Summit with Dick Hindman, Joe Gilman and Mark Levine at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazz 

school. Cost is $18. 845-5373.  

Have Heart, Allegiance, Soul Control, Turn it Around at 5 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Damnweevil, Walken at 6 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $6. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Jessica Williams Trio at 7 and 9 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $14-$24. 238-9200.  

A cellist strikes up in pizzicato as an older man, dressed in the fashion of the late ‘40s, shambles onstage at the Julia Morgan Center, gazing out above the audience as if down the road—or into the past. A crowd forms, staring at him—and disperses. A woman’s voice is heard, calling his name. “I’m tired to the death!” And Willy Loman, brilliantly rendered by Corey Fisher, is home again, in Traveling Jewish Theatre’s remarkable version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. 

As Willy and his wife, Linda (Jeri Lee Cohen as a steady foil to Fisher’s Willy), talk about Willy’s abrupt return soon after departing on a New England sales trip, as well as the constant nag of payments on house, car, appliances, all bought on time—and about family: the return of ne’er-do-well son Biff from a stint wandering the West—the mood shifts constantly, from apprehension over Willy’s driving to a quick memory of peacefulness, to an admonition from Linda about his too-apparent disapproval of Biff. “I said he’s not making money. Is that criticism?” Willy replies. 

He is lost in revery, as the audience too is caught up in his quickly intercut visions and fantasies, memories of the past. The mention of his older brother Ben’s death triggers an apparition (Julian Lopez-Morillas, a presence as ironic as Hamlet’s father’s ghost) and a refrain, “When I was 17 I walked into the jungle; when I was 21 I walked out—and by God I was rich!” 

Ben’s hurried shade, always rushing off—as life itself seems to rush away from Willy—becomes a surrogate, a kind of trumped up co-dependent for the suicidally depressed, broken-down old salesman, an auto-suggestive confidant and executor. Ben also reminds Willy of their wayward father, a flautist and roving handyman, both free on the road Willy’s married to. 

The opposite of Ben’s specter is Charley, next door, (a playful yet direct Louis Parnell), and his nerdy son Bernard (Zac Jaffe, who modulates the ages of his part very well), “liked, but not well-liked,” another refrain. Charley is Willy’s true mainstay—and Willy rankles at his kidding and at his very decency, until finally admitting Charley’s his only friend, and how strange that is. Bernard is the only peer who both challenges and cares for Biff. 

Biff (starry-eyed, slack-jaw Michael Navarra) and brother Hap (scrappy John Sousa) keep mixing it up with the women (Meghan Doyle and Juliet Strong, both sharp in dual roles as chippies and secretaries) and with their thwarted dreams, their gags, their sparring. Biff, exasperated with self-consciousness, is leading the life Willy pines for (”If I’d only gone with my brother Ben to Alaska!”), only to earn the opprobrium of his parents: “Ah, go out to the West and be a cowboy; enjoy yourself!” says Willy, and Linda says, “You can’t look around all your life ... a man is not a bird to come and go with the springtime.” 

“Look at the moon, moving between the buildings!” exclaims Willy, in bed with Linda before slipping off into delusion and disaster. “It takes so little to make him happy,” she tells the boys. But “let go” by his dilettante employer, young Howard (a smarmy Danny Webber, doting on his wire recorder, touting it to Willy as a way to get the maid to record radio programs a busy socialite must miss), Willy is beyond both sadness and happiness, rapt in his passion, oblivious as he walks the line down the road that runs downstage through the middle of Giulio Perrone’s splendid, spare set. 

The mood swings of Willy and his family are the pivot, in Aaron Davidman’s excellent directorial conception, for the true theatrics of the play, reflecting Miller’s innovations as a former radio playwright adapting the multiplex style of the medium to the live stage. Jim Cave’s spot-on timing with lights and sound design by Rex Camphuis (also production manager) and cellist Jessica Ivry’s original music help deliver the goods to this audience, which is on three sides of the action, up on stage left and right as well as in the orchestra section in front. Few productions ever get the humor, the lyricism (which Miller would hauntingly refer to), the synthesis of approaches that catches up the social, the psychological, the moral, the sheerly pathetic content up into a vortex that sways back and forth until, as Antonin Artaud said of Euripides’ tragedies, “the floodgates are open ... and we don’t know any more just where we are.”  

There’s been much talk of Traveling Jewish’s intention to make this a Jewish show with a Jewish Willy Loman. The notes in the program recall the Yiddish theater translation and production of 1951, with a review speaking of that show “bringing the play ‘home’ ... [catching] Miller [son of immigrant Jews], as it were, in the act of changing his name.” 

True to their principle of being inspired by Jewish experience, Traveling Jewish has fashioned less a tragic look back at the Jewish diaspora in America than a true, multifaceted revelation of American experience through a Jewish perspective. “I still feel kind of temporary about myself,” says Willy. It opens up speculation as to other representatives of assimilated cultures being seen in the chief roles. Jackie Gleason, for instance, regarded more highly as a dramatic actor than as a comedian by the likes of Orson Welles and others, might have made a great Brooklyn Irish (or German-Irish) Willy Loman. 

Because this production’s accents, inflexions and mannerisms give this monumental play a different and fascinating texture, a new syncopation of street and domestic rhythms, it is a truly New York City Death of a Salesman—Manhattan-born Arthur Miller brought home. 

DEATH OF A SALESMAN 

Presented by the Traveling Jewish Theater at 8 p.m. Thursdays—Saturdays and at 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays through June 10 at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. 2640 College Ave.  

$15-$44. 1-800-838-3006.

Leave it to the Shotgun Players to organize a posse to go after weeks 26, 27 and 30 of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ monumental, year-long, nationwide collaborative theater project.  

The three companies—Shotgun, mugwumpin and Just Theater—will gang up tonight (Tuesday) and Wednesday at 8 p.m. on the Ashby Stage to play a grand total of 21 of Parks’ plays—three whole weeks’ worth—each night. 

In addition, Shotgun has announced they’ll be offering 365 drinks, 365 snacks and intermissions of 3 minutes 65 seconds to extend the numerical conceit of Parks’ astonishing outpouring of pieces to be staged. Admission is $5, which includes a drink. 

Parks’ project began a few years back when she set herself the goal of writing a play a day for a year. Now they’re being produced around the country, about midstream to conclusion. The Bay Area is one region of production—and East Bay companies have leapt at the challenge, devising unusual, creative ways to collaborate and stage each week of seven plays. 

But Shotgun decided that wasn’t quite enough ... 

“The question we asked ourselves was how we could make an interesting evening of theater which would do justice to the concept of the whole cycle of plays,” said Shotgun’s Liz Lisle. “So we decided to do a stretch, and invited two other companies we respect and have worked with before to join us in getting a leg up on it, to do three whole weeks at once: 26 (Just Theater), 27 (mugwumpin) and 30, which is ours.” 

As part of the process, Shotgun assembled a “mini-ensemble” to put on their portion of the plays.  

“Every piece will have a different director, and every ensemble member will both act and direct,” Lisle said. “This kind of immediacy of feedback isn’t usual with the process we go through to mount a production. Like Parks’ plays, it’s something really playful.” 

Denmo Ibrahim of mugwumpin, the innovative physical theater troupe in residency at San Francisco’s Exit Theatre, concurred: “We wanted to find a way of using the plays as a test to find new collaborators, new ways of working.” 

To that end, the troupe staged their week’s portion one night a few weeks back, as a party at Root Division in San Francisco’s Mission District. “It was crazy!” laughed Ibrahim, who both directed and performed. “Each director had a half-hour to cast and rehearse.” 

Molly Aaronson-Gelb of Just Theater, said, “This’s been right up our alley, using theater to reflect, create community, and to create a common conversation among theater people.” She compared it to the nationwide, antiwar Lysistrata Project a few years back, in which she participated. 

Asked about running themes and motifs in their portions, Aaronson-Gelb mentioned “a lot about war and peace; it affected our costuming!” Ibrahim quoted Richard Foreman, “Everything makes sense!” and went on to identify mugwumpin’s plays as having in common “the lonely sense of being witness to the last of something happening.” 

Lisle brought it all into perspective by reflecting on the playwright’s impulse: “What she does is transform her everyday into theater, which rolls over into the next day. In one of our plays, the characters from the next one come on and announce, ‘Your play’s over!’” 

The Daily Planet’s Justin DeFreitas swept two categories at the Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards Saturday night at Foster City’s Crowne Plaza Hotel. The contest is sponsored by the Peninsula Press Club. 

In the non-daily newspapers division, DeFreitas took first place for entertainment reviewing for his critique of the movie Cowboy del Amor (published Feb. 24, 2006), and second place for The Devil and Daniel Johnston (April 7, 2006). He also netted an honorable mention in the specialty story category for a preview of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (July 11, 2006). 

DeFreitas also swept the editorial cartooning category, which spans all divisions—daily and non-daily newspapers, magazines and trade publications. First place was awarded to his “Mousetrap” cartoon (May 5, 2006), regarding the proposed mixed-use development and Trader Joe’s at University Avenue and MLK; second went to “Sept. 10” (June 13, 2006); and an honorable mention was given to “Media Balance” (Sept. 1, 2006). 

The contest covers the 11 counties of the greater Bay Area: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Sonoma. Entries were judged by the Florida Press Club, Milwaukee Press Club, the Press Club of Cleveland, San Diego Press Club and the Press Club of Southeast Texas. For more information and a complete list of winners, see penpressclub.org.

Elderberry is a bit more a tree than last column’s rose is, but we usually see it as a shrub: multi-trunked, relatively small. But the wonderful natural history writer Donald Culross Peattie called it a tree, and I’ve seen western pewee and other tree-nesting birds make themselves homes in tall specimens; that’s good enough for me.  

Sometimes I have to stand back and look again to identify the little tree in front of me as an elderberry, if it’s (typically) in a tangle of oak and California bay and poison oak. The leaf shape, that feathery compound, is diagnostic. So, even in winter, is the arching fountain form of the whole individual, even when it’s being elbowed by more forceful neighbors.  

One odd thing about elderberries is the contradictory data about them. I’ve heard that they’re toxic; that just the red ones are toxic; that they’re delicious and by the way, here are five recipes for them; that either the red or the blue are toxic to everyone or toxic to only certain people, either always (especially the red ones) or only when raw; that the unripe blue ones are toxic; that only the blue ones are traditional food; that the red ones are traditional food too; that the leaves, stems, and other plant parts are toxic and “children have been made ill by using the stems as peashooters”; that aboriginal Californians have traditionally used the stems for flutes. That it’s poisonous and that it’s good for what ails you; that it’ll give you a bellyache and that it’ll cure a bellyache. 

I suppose what’s going on is that some people are susceptible in various ways to a compound in the plant—apparently there are plenty of suspects, like some lectins. (Lectins are proteins; they’re various, ubiquitous, and often poorly understood.) Whatever causes the problem, it can be neutralized by drying or cooking, so elderberry flowers for tea and elderberries for pie are often dried and then reconstituted before use. Those kids being poisoned by their peashooters would be better off if they dried the sticks before using them—which is what the Miwok do for their flutes.  

These traditional flutes are made from elderberry twigs chosen for their size, already hollow, or pithy and easy to hollow out. Flutemakers cut them green and let them dry; one writer says they used to bore fingerholes by touching hot coals to the sticks at random intervals, so no two flutes had the same scale. If true, that would make for some interesting compositions. Californians traditionally make clappersticks out of elderberry branches too. With both the wind and the rhythm sections accounted for, some people call it the music tree. For all these and for arrow shafts, elderberry plants are coppiced to produce straight stems.  

There’s a Miwok legend that, back in the days before the sun shone everywhere, only the Valley people had fire, and the Mountain people wanted some too. Robin guarded fire in the Valley roundhouse, and Coyote went out searching but couldn’t find it. White-footed Mouse figured out where it was, and sat down at a gathering in that roundhouse (either with just the Valley people or with the visiting Mountain people too, depending on who’s telling) and played his elder-twig flute till everyone was lulled to sleep. Then he hid some of the fire inside the flute, and after more adventures and a merry chase, brought it to the mountains, where it was tucked under a layer of leaves. When Coyote lifted the leaves to find the fire, most of it shot into the sky and became the sun. Some was left behind, and the people put that into the buckeye and the incense cedar, where now anyone can find it.  

Elderberry does occupy that margin between wild and garden, forest and field. Peattie in his Natural History of Western Trees calls it “a ruderal little tree”; that is, a plant that grows on “waste ground.” That’s a loaded term, but it just means disturbed areas; you often see wild elders on road margins—their white flowerheads light up mile after mile of highway in Florida—and along trails, a sort of forest doorkeeper.  

That’s an appropriate position for elderberry in a garden, too; you’d want it between your beds and whatever boundary of big trees you have. Ask your elder relatives for pie, tea, and fritter recipes, or try Carolyn Niethammer’s book American Indian Cooking. Share the berries with the birds, and you might even get a flock of waxwings to visit.  

Photograph by Ron Sullivan. 

This elderberry has grown to tree size in an unusually isolated spot in Sibley park.

TUESDAY, JUNE 5 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit the Wildcat Regional Trail. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

“Empty Bowls” fundraising event in conjunction with National Hunger Awareness Day at 5:30 p.m. at Alameda County Community Food Bank, 7900 Edgewater Drive, Oakland. Tickets are $20, or $40 for a family. 635-3663, ext. 328. www.accfb.org 

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 9 a.m. to noon at the Downtown Oakland Senior Center, 200 Grand Ave. 981-5332. 

Eco-Oakland Volunteer Opportunity Help elementary school students with mapping and habitat restoration at Lion Creek, near Merritt College. For information call 635-5533.  

Tilden Mini-Rangers Hiking, conservation and nature-based activities for ages 8-12. Dress to ramble and get dirty. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684. 

“The Citizen Powered Energy Handbook” with author Greg Pahl on renewable energy technologies ways that individuals and communities can work toward sustainable energy, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. 548-2220 . 

Climate Action Networking Lunch with strategies for reducing our community-wide GHG emissions at noon at Spud's Pizza, 3290 Adeline near Alcatraz. Hosted by the City of Berkeley. 981-7081. 

Digital Earth Symposium: Humanitarian and Climate Change Presentations A 5 day conference on using satellite and aerial images of the earth at UC Berkeley. For information see www.isde5.org 

Berkeley Rep Book Club meets to discuss “The Real Oliver Twist” by Jonathan Waller at 6 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. RSVP to 647-2916. 

Berkeley School Volunteers training for summer volunteer opportunities in preschool, elementary, and middle schools from noon to 1 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Free Legal Assistance the first Tues. of the month at 6 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Advance registration required. 526-3720, ext. 5. 

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Workshop for Low Income Berkeley Homeowners on how to get help for maintenance of your home, at 10:30 a.m. at West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5180. 

“Sustainable Futures” a documentary about seven communities where sustainability is a high priority at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., between Telegraph and Broadway, Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

New to DVD Screening and Discussion at 7 p.m. at JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. Discussion follows. 848-0237. 

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. 594-5165. 

Backpacking 101, a talk on the fundamentals needed for a weekend trip, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www. 

geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JUNE 7 

“Last Journey for the Leatherback Sea Turtle” A video and talk with Karen Steele, the coordinator of the Sea Turtle Restoration Network, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. 548-2220, ext. 233. erc@ecologycenter.org 

“Israel & Palestine - What Peace Could Look Like” with Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom and Husam El Nounou at 7 p.m. at Kehilla Community Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave, corner of Grand Ave. and Fairview, Piedmont. Donation suggested $10-$25. 547-2424. 

Storytime for Babies and Toddlers at 10:30 a.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, JUNE 8 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Philip P. Frickey on “U.S. Law of Federal-Indian Tribal Relations” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

“Born into Brothels” Academy Award winning documentary at 7:30 p.m. at The Center of Light, 2944 76th St., Oakland. 635-4286. 

Free Diabetes Screening Come find out if you might have diabetes with our free screening test and make sure not to eat or drink anything for 8 hours beforehand, from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. at the Latine Center, 3919 Roosevelt Ave., Richmond. 981-5332. 

Womansong Circle Participatory singing for women with Betsy Rose and Kelly Takunda Orphan at 7:15 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Suggested donation $15-$20. 525-7082.  

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 9 

Live Oak Park Fair, juried festival of arts and crafts, Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 1301 Shattuck Ave. 898-3282.  

Temescal Street Fair with music, art making, craft and community booths and food from noon to 6 p.m. along Telegraph Ave. between 48th and 51st. 654-6346, ext. 2. www.temescalmerchants.com 

Berkeley History Center Walking Tour “Buddhist Churches: Jodo Shinshu Center” led by Sady Hayashida, architect and Glenn Kameda, at 10 a.m. Cost is $8-$10. For information on meeting place and to register call 848-0181. 

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

“Point Pinole: A Place Apart” An exhibition on the explosive and peaceful past of the Point Pinole Shoreline. Opening reception at 1 p.m. at Contra Costa County Historical Society, 610 Main St., Martinez. Exhibit runs to Aug. 23. 925-229-1042. 

Trails Challenge in the Eastshore State Park from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Bring water, lunch, sunscreen and sturdy walking shoes for the eight-mile excursion. For information and meeting place call 525-2233. 

Shotgun Player’s Silent Auction Fundraiser at 6 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 841-6500, ext. 301. 

Berkeley Garden Club Spring Plant Sale from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 547 Grizzly Peak Blvd., at Euclid. Many native plants, succulents and perennials available. 845-4482. 

NAACP Meeting to discuss the 98th National Convention in Detroit, MI, and some local events at 1 p.m. at 2108 Russell St. All are welcome. 845-7416.  

Learn to Row Day from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Jack London Aquatic Center, 115 Embarcadero, Oakland. Participants must know how to swim. Call for more information. 208-6067. 

Great War Society meets to discuss “Sinking of the Lusitania” by S. Compagno at 10:30 a.m. at 640 Arlington Ave. 527-7118. 

California Writers Club celebrates the fifth-grade winners of the story contest at 10 a.m. at Barnes and Noble, Jack London Square. 272-0120. 

Hopalong Animal Rescue Come meet your furry new best cat friend from noon to 3 p.m. at 2940 College Ave. 267-1915, ext. 500. www.hopalong.org  

Exotic Birds 101 An introduction at 2 p.m. at RabbitEARS, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. 525-6155. 

Training for Small Business Owners and people interested in starting their own business at 2 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, 3rd floor community room, 2090 Kittredge St. Sposored by The Small Business Administration and the Berkeley Public Library. 981-6148. 

“Drought Tolerant Mediterranean Plants” with Gail Yelland, landscape designer, at 10 a.m. at 10 a.m. at Magic Gardens, 729 Heinz Ave. 644-2351. 

Mini-Farmers in Tilden A farm exploration program, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. for ages 4-6 years, accompanied by an adult. We will explore the Little Farm, care for animals, do crafts and farm chores. Wear boots and dress to get dirty! Fee is $6-$8. Registration required. 636-1684. 

Hall of Health Medical Mystery Festival for children ages 4 to 12 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hall of Health, lower level, 2230 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5. 705-8527.  

An Evening of Chanting with religious leaders from different Asian styles/traditions at 7 p.m. at the Jodo Shinshu Center, 2140 Durant Ave. at Fulton St. Donation $10. 809-1460. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755.  

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 10 

Live Oak Park Fair, juried festival of arts and crafts, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 1301 Shattuck Ave. 898-3282. www.liveoakparkfair.com 

Wild About Watersheds A 2 mile roundtrip hike in Wildcate Creek Regional Trail in Richmond. Meet at 10 a.m. For information and meeting place call 525-2233.  

Creek Care A resource conservation project from 1 to 3 p.m. on the Wildcat Creek Regional Trail in Richmond. Wear layered clothing that can get wet and dirty. For information and for meeting place call 525-2233. 

Green Sunday: The Successful Picket at the Port of Oakland What it means for the longer term struggle against the war and for funding our needs at home at 5 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., at 65th in North Oakland. 

Liquid Gold Fertilizers Learn how to turn weeds, kitchen scraps and natural byproducts into plant fertilizers. A workshop from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at EcoHouse, 1305 Hopkins St., near North Berkeley BART. Bring 2 liter plastic bottles, old hoses/ bicycle tubes, cardboard or newspaper, large containers or 5 gallon buckets w/ lids. Cost is $15, no one turned away. 548-2220 ext. 242. ecohouse@ecologycenter.org  

Social Action Forum with Antonio Medrano on Amnesty International at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Sylvia Gretchen on “The Art of Happiness” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

MONDAY, JUNE 11 

“Voices of Iraqi Workers U.S. Solidarity Tour” with Iraqi labor leaders at 7 p.m. at Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School, 1781 Rose St. 527-1222. 

Berkeley School Volunteers training for summer volunteer opportunities in preschool, elementary, and middle schools, from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations. At 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

CITY MEETINGS 

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., June 6, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190.  

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Wed. June 6, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., June 7, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs. June 7, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419.  

Community Environmental Advisory Commission Workshop The Co-Benefits of Climate Protection Thurs., June 7, at 7 p.m. at 2118 Milvia Street, 1st Floor Conference Room. 981-7461.

As part of an ongoing effort to print stories by East Bay residents, the Daily Planet invites readers to write about their experiences and perspectives on living healthy. Please e-mail your essays, no more than 800 words in length, to firstperson@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We will publish the best essays in upcoming issues.

FRIDAY, JUNE 1 

THEATER 

Altarena Playhouse “The Last Five Years” Fri and Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at 1409 High St., Alameda, through June 10. Tickets are $17-$20. 523-1553. www.altarena.org 

Berkeley High School “Schoolgirl Figure” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave. Benefits the Eating Disorders Program at the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University. Tickets are $6-$12. 236-1620. ShiftTheatre@aol.com 

Berkeley Rep “Oliver Twist” at 8 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. through June 24. Tickets are $45-$61. 647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org  

California Shakespeare Theater “Richard III” at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through June 24. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

“Dust Storm” the story of the artist Chiura Obata at the Topaz relocation camp in Utah during WWII, at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 238-2200. 

“Laughter with Paul Mooney and the Mooney Twins” Fri.-Sat. at 8 and 10 p.m., Sun. at 8 p.m. at Black Rep, 3201 Adeline St. Tickets are $25-$50. 652-2120. 

Shotgun Players “The Cryptogram” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through June 17. Tickets are $17-$25. For reservations call 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Travelling Jewish Theater “Death of a Salesman” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 and 7 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave., through June 10. Tickets are $15-$44. 1-800-838-3006. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Yosemite Night” Exhibition tour of “Yosemite: Art of an American Icon” at 6 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Patricia Mitchell “Selected Works” Assemblage, collage, photography and painting. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Eclectix, 7523 Fairmount Ave., El Cerrito. 364-7261. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Tom Odegard and John Rowe read their poetry at 7 p.m. at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Hearst Ave.  

Dixon Long describes “Markets of Paris” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Arts Encounters” featuring Faye Carol, John Handy, Kenny Washington with Khalil Shaheed, Richard Howell, Danny Armstrong, Glen Pearson, Ron Belcher, Deszon Claiborne and Babatunde Lea at 8 and 10 p.m. at the Kaiser Center Auditorium, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland. Benefit for the Oakland School for the Arts. Tickets are $25. 478-8896. www.bennubirdbookings.com  

Presidio Ensemble, modernist-classical quintet, at 8 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Ticketsa re $10-$15. www.hillsideclub.org  

Very Be Careful, vallenato dance music, at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Tanaora Brasil at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

John Gruntfest, sax, at Free-Jazz Fridays at 8 p.m. at 1510 8th Street Performance Space, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 

Jolly Gibsons, Headshear, 3-P-O, Mo’Fone and more at 5:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Norton Buffalo & Friends at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Star Ledbetter and Lisa Alice at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

David Jacobs-Strain Band, Cas Lucas at 10 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Godstomper, Magrudergrind, I Object, Noisear at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

Sweet Crude Bill at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

Interseed, Burned Beyond Recognition at 7:30 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Machina Sol at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Spiral Arms, Greenhouse Effect, Dolerada at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

Lalah Hathaway at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200.  

SATURDAY, JUNE 2 

CHILDREN  

Hanna Banana Children’s folk music at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 10th St. 526-9888. 

THEATER 

“Scatter My Red Underwear” Workshop performance by Milta Ortiz on vulnerabilities and struggles of four contemporary women of color at 8 p.m. at Malonga Casquelourd Arts Center, 1428 Alice St. Cos tis $7-$15. www.brownpapertickets.com/producer/4096 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Black/White & Color” Painters and photographer explore color and its absence. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Esteban Sabar Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland. 444-7411. www.estebansabar.com 

“The Edge: Where California Culture, Critters and Environment Collide” opens at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

East Bay Open Studios Sat. and Sun. at various studios around the East Bay. For maps see www.proartsgallery.org 

FILM 

Superfest International Disability Film Festival from noon to 5 p.m. and Sun. from 2 to 7 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Tickets are $5-$20 at the door. 845-5576. www.culturedisabilitytalent.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

James Wagner and Suzanne Stein, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition holds an open reading from 3 to 5 p.m. at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. 527-9905.  

Alan Bern introduces “Waterwalking” poetry at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Emerson Spartz and Ben Schoen on “What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley World Music Festival Sat. and Sun. from noon to 9 p.m. throughout the Telegraph Ave. district between Bancroft Way and Parker St. 647-3506. 

Gamelan Sekar Jaya at 3 p.m. in the gardens of the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St. at 10th., Oakland. Concert included with museum admission $5-$8. 238-2200.  

Moment’s Notice Improvised music, dance and theater at Western Sky Studio, 2525 8th St. Tickets are $8-$10. 847-1119. 

The Mixers at 9 p.m. at the Baltic Pub, 135 Park Place, Pt. Richmond. Cost is $5. 237-4782. 

Cave Painters at noon at Cafe Zeste, 1250 Addison St. at Bonar, in the Strawberry Creek Park complex. 704-9378. 

La Trova es Mujer with Leticia Servin and Meli Rivera at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $22-$24. 849-2568. www.lapena.org  

Quejerema! at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tom Rigney, cajun/zydeco at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

The New Hour, Shanks and Stilettos, Jon Weston at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Jon Roniger and Sentimental Heroine at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.com 

Margie Adam at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Laurie Antonioli Group at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373. www.jazz 

school.com 

Ric Didia & Aireene Espiritu at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $7. 558-0881. 

Rimshot at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100.  

The Underworld Opera Co. Circus and Variety Show at 9 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $8. 763-1146. www.oaklandmetro.org 

Mitch Marcus Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 848-8277. 

Resilience, Tried & True, Trouble Maker at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 3 

THEATER 

“Dust Storm” the story of the artist Chiura Obata at the Topaz relocation camp in Utah during WWII, at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$10. 238-2200. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Reception for Wang Gangfeng, photographer from Shanghai, at 3 p.m. at Alta Galleria, 2980 College Avenue #4. 421-1255. www.AltaGalleria.com 

FILM 

Superfest International Disability Film Festival from 2 to 7 p.m. at Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Tickets are $5-$20 at the door. 845-5576. www.culturedisabilitytalent.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

A Conversation with Peter Selz on Anslem Kiefer’s painting “Die Sieben Himmelspalaste” with Carl Worth at 3 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. 

Wednesday Writers of Oakland “Something That Metters” at 3 p.m. in the Peralta Pavilion of Alta Bates Summit, Second flr Living Room, 450 30th St., Oakland. Donation $10. RSVP to 869-8735. 

“Wars Within and Across Our Borders” Poetry and music at 6:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Open mic follows. Donations of $1-$10. 439-8777. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Berkeley World Music Festival from noon to 9 p.m. throughout the Telegraph Ave. district between Bancroft Way and Parker St. 647-3506. 

WomenSing and San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus at 4 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $10-$25. 925-974-9169 www.womensing.org 

Pacific Boychoir Academy Springtime Serenade at 3 p.m. at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, 400 Alcatraz, Oakland. Free. 652-4722. 

Dennis Edwards, pianist, performs music of Gershwin, Miles Davis, and more at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $12-$15. 644-6893. 

Twang Cafe with Val Esway and El Mirage, The Blushin' Roulettes at 7:30 at Epic Arts, 1923 Ashby Ave. Cost is $10.  

Missy Raines & the New Hip at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761.  

Benefit for Victims of the Arab-Israeli Conflict with Posterboy and Bring it Home at at 3:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Aleph Null at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Ken Berman Trio at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Don Neely’s Royal Society Jazz Orchestra at 5 and 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $8. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Philips Marine Duo at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Skinlab, The Face of Aggression, Ankla at 8 p.m. at Oakland Metro, 201 Broadway. Cost is $10. 763-1146.  

MONDAY, JUNE 4 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Photographs of China and Mongolia” by Berkeley photographer Caroline Johnson, opens at The LightRoom, 2263 Fifth St., Oakland. 649-8111.  

Works by Damon Guthrie at Lanesplitter, 4799 Telegraph Ave., through June 31. 815-0691. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Waterwalking” Poetry/dance collaboration with Alan Bern and Lucinda Weaver at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Poetry Express with Howard D at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. berkeleypoetryexpress@yahoo.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Valerie Bach, world music, at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100.  

Bill Charlap at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200. 

TUESDAY, JUNE 5 

THEATER 

Shotgun Players presents Week 30 in “365 Plays/365 Days” Tues. and Wed. at 8 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. Tickets are $5. 841-6500. 

FILM 

“Unreleased Beatles” film clips and music shown by rock music historian Richie Unterberger at 6:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Public Library, Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6100. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ilona Meagher, editor of the online journal “PTSD Combat: Winning the War Within” at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Austin Grossman introduces “Soon I Will Be Invincible” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Book. 559-9500. 

Gordy Slack reads from “The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything” at 7:30 p.m. at Laurel Book Store, 4100 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 

Freight and Salvage Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $4.50-$5.50. 548-1761.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ellen Hoffman and Singers’ Open Mic at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

Middian, Minsk at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100.  

Bill Charlap at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10-$16. 238-9200.  

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6 

THEATER 

Berkeley Rep “Great Men of Genius” with Mike Daisy in four different monologues at 2025 Addison St. through June 30. Tickets are $30-$75. 647-2949. 

“Colorstruck” Donald Lacey’s one-man show at 8 p.m., Sun. at 7 p.m. at Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St., Oakland, through June 15. Tickets are $10-$20. 663-5683. www.colorstruck.net 

FILM 

“From Saturday to Sunday” on Jazz Age Prague at 5:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Free screening. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Sally Denton describes “Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Fremont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Johnny Smith Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $6. 841-JAZZ.  

Sauce Piquante at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054.  

Sweet Crude Bill and the Lighthouse Nautical Society at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $5. 451-8100.  

Two Sheds, Dame Satan at 9:30 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

Anat Cohen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Unknown Knowledge” Paintings and collages by Nicollette Smith. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Giorgi Gallery, 2911 Claremont Ave. 848-1228. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Lisa Gluskin, Alison Powell and Barbara Yien at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. www.poetryflash.org 

Joseph Lease, poet, followed by an open mic, at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Larry Doyle reads from “I Love You, Beth Cooper” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. www.codysbooks.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

New Century Chamber Orchestra with guest concertmaster Cho-Liang Lin at 8 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $28-$42. 415-357-1111. www.ncco.org 

Berkeley Edge Fest “The Tyrant” composed by Paul Dresher, John Duykers, tenor, at 8 p.m. at the Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Campus. Tickets are $36. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/presents/season/2006/edgefest/ 

Storyhill at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761.  

“Two Cities, One Song” Rhonda Benin & Youth Choirs at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ.  

GoGo Fightmaster, Dear Liza, Jon Raskin at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $6. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Anat Cohen at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.  

Blurred Vision, The Cons, Hazerfan, rock, at 9 p.m. at the Uptown Nightclub, 1928 Telegraph, Oakland. Cost is $8. 451-8100. www.uptownnightclub.com 

The Superfest International Disability Film Festival, the world’s longest running film festival dedicated to films by and about the disabled community, takes place this weekend at the Gaia Arts Center in downtown Berkeley.  

Superfest was founded three decades ago in Southern California and made its way up to Berkeley about 15 years ago. The festival has long made its home at La Peña on Shattuck Avenue in South Berkeley, where it accomodated as many as 40 patrons per screening. But as the festival’s reputation has grown so has attendance, necessitating a change in venue. Thus this year’s festival will be held downtown at the Gaia Arts Center, a venue that can accomodate more than 100 theatergoers. 

Each fall, Superfest, a presentation of Culture! Disability! Talent!, sends out a call for entries and by January receives submissions from all over the world. This year’s call brought in more than 40 films from 10 countries. The program will consist of 13 of these films, representing seven countries and more than a dozen disabilities. The festival runs Saturday morning through Sunday night, and includes a reception and awards ceremony from 6-9 Saturday evening with live entertainment and opportunities for the public to meet the filmmakers.  

The festival starts at noon Saturday with The Rest of My Life: Stories of Trauma Survivors (USA, 25 minutes), a look at the lives of two people whose lives were transformed by sudden violence. The first is Presley LaFountain, a Chippewa sculptor whose injuries from a brutal hate crime nearly robbed him of the ability to pursue his art. The second is a young woman, a yoga instructor, who fought to regain her strength after a car accident. The film alternates between the two, allowing each to tell their own story, detailing the ways in which their lives were radically altered in an instant. 

A local film screens at 1:20 Saturday, spotlighting an Oakland arts center and its resident star. Outsider: The Life and Art of Judith Scott (USA, 26 minutes) presents a moving portrait of a deaf woman with Down syndrome who, after more than 30 years of institutionalization, finally got a second chance to prove that she was not a lost cause. Scott, with the support of her twin sister and Creative Growth, an Oakland art studio for the disabled, began a career as a fiber artist that led to international acclaim. The film was directed by San Francisco filmmaker Betsy Bayha and is the winner of Superfest’s Excellence Award. 

Another short film, showing at 2:40 p.m. Saturday, follows the process by which a 14-year-old deaf girl develops a spoken-word performance in sign language, accompanined by an orchestra. Symphony of Silence (Canada, 22 minutes) conveys the poetry of movement by revealing the range of subtle inflection possible within the gestures of American Sign Language and, in a striking shot during the final performance, juxtaposes the movements of the poet with the sweeping gestures of the conductor in a stirring tribute to the power of physical expression. 

Sunday’s schedule will feature a similarly broad program of films. Darius Goes West: The Roll of His Life (USA, 92 minutes), screening at 3:40 p.m., traces the journey of a young man with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy who sets out with a group of friends on a cross-country trip to Los Angeles to persuade MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” to overhaul Darius’ motorozied wheelchair.  

Screening at 5:30 p.m., Planet of the Blind (Germany, 20 minutes) takes the program in a radically different direction with a poetic rumination on blindness that pairs the words from Stephen Kuusisto’s best-selling memoir with distorted images to simulate the experience of living with impaired vision. 

The festival closes with the 6 p.m. screening of The Epidemic (Denmark, 51 minutes), the winner of Superfest’s 2007 grand prize. The Epidemic is a stirring Danish film that combines archival footage of that country’s 1952 polio epidemic with a first-person account of the tragedy from Neils Frandsen and his family. Frandsen was a child at the time, and through his own dream-like narration and interviews with his parents and sister we get a harrowing and inspiring glimpse of a family caught up in an epidemic beyond their control or comprehension. 

Other films include: 

• Headstrong: Inside the Hidden World of Dyslexia and ADHD (USA, 27 minutes), co-produced by Ben Foss and Chloe Sladden of San Francisco and Steve Schecter of Oakland. The film won this year’s Achievement Award for its uplifting look at the lives of people living with dyslexia and ADHD. 

• Stroke (Germany, 58 minutes) by Katrina Peters, winner of the Achievement Award for its look at the impact Peters’ young husband’s massive stroke has had on their relationship. Peters, who lives in Germany, studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1990s.  

• Mercury Stole My Fire (Australia,12 minutes), in which a woman’s environmental illness is dramatized through mime and poetry. 

• Carmela (Mexico, 30 minutes), the story of a polio survivor and her adult son with Down syndrome. 

• No Bigger Than a Minute (USA, 53 minutes), an irreverent portrait of how dwarves, or people of short stature, have been represented on screen since the earliest days of film. 

• Seeing is Believing (Russia, 13 minutes), a portrait of a blind Moscow college student. 

• Let Us Spell It Out For You (USA, 3 minutes), a pastiche of spirtuals and folk songs performed in sign language to protest government funding cuts to deaf theater programs. 

SUPERFEST 27 

International Disability Film Festival 

Noon-5 p.m. Saturday and 2-7 p.m. Sunday. A “Meet the Makers” reception will take place from 6-7 p.m. Saturday, followed by an awards ceremony from 7-9 p.m., both free of charge and open to the public. The venue is wheelchair-accessible. Braille and large-print screening schedules will be provided at the event. Please refrain from wearing perfume and other scented products. Gaia Arts Center, 2120 Allston Way. Tickets cost $5-$20 each day on a sliding scale and will be sold at the door. For a complete schedule, visit www.culturedisabilitytalent.org or call the CDT voice mailbox at 845-5576.  

Photograph: Images of the child are projected onto the man in Neils Frandsen’s The Epidemic, a memoir of Denmark’s 1952 polio epidemic.

Bay Area percussionist and educator Babatunde Lea will host a benefit Monday with a stellar lineup of West Coast jazz musicians to raise money for medical treatment for his middle daughter, championship athlete Tanya Lazar-Lea. 

The benefit will feature his quartet (Richard Howell, Glen Pearson and Geoff Brennan) with guests, trombonist Steve Turre, percussionist Bujo Kevin Jones, and Los Angeles vocalist Dwight Trible, 

Other performers on this bill include Khalil Shaheed and his Mo’ Rockin’ Project, vocalists Faye Carroll and Madeleine Eastman, drummer Vince Lateano, Frankie Kelly, David Gonzalez, the Bud Spangler Quartet, with singer Ed Reed, drummer Eddie Marshall’s Holy Mischief, Keith Terry and the All-Slamming Body Band, Linda Tillery’s Cultural Heritage Band, vocalist Rhonda Benin, past-San Francisco poet laureate Devorah Major and jazz poetry with UpSurge! 

Tanya Lazar-Lea’s troubles began at 19, when a vertibra in her lower back was broken in a fall on a high jump bar. A Vallejo High School championship athlete, whose records still stand, Lazar-Lea had been awarded a scholarship to UC Berkeley.  

“The permanent damage led to adrenal gland problems,” said her father, “and after a car accident in 2004, Medi-Cal refused to fund her ongoing treatment. She’s needed a concert of doctors, but instead has been sent to one, then another, until the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing.”  

Lazar-Lea is now living with her parents in Vallejo and doing her own research on her condition. “After 14 years, she’s pretty good at it, leading the doctors to where the problems are,” her father said. “She has that tenaciousness athletes have, to do what they have to do.” 

Babatunde, who plays set drums and congas, first arrived in the Bay Area in 1966, later had a stint in New York until 1977, resettled in San Francisco, and moved to Vallejo in 1991. 

He and his wife, Dr. Virginia Lea, a Sonoma State professor, founded the Edu-Cultural Foundation (educulturalfoundation.org) in 1993 to teach critical thinking in cultural and social studies through the arts, working with various West Coast schools. 

“Outside of an incredible night of music,” Babatunde said, “we want to fill the room with love and support to raise Tanya’s spirits, then go to work to get her what she needs, to give her back a degree of real independence, the quality of life she deserves.” 

BABATUNDE LEA 

7 p.m. Monday at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St. (at 27th Street). $25 donation requested.  

For Information call Arts First, Oakland at 444-8511.

By KEN BULLOCK 

Special to the Planet 

Late spring, and time for the diverse sounds of the Berkeley World Music Festival, which transforms Telegraph Ave. and its environs between Bancroft and The Village all weekend into a global celebration of an international spirit, expressed through the strains of each specific musical tradition represented.  

“I’m always amazed at the wide variety of talent in the Bay Area,” said Gianna Ranuzzi, the four year-old festival’s founder and director, adding that each year the line-up of musicians and groups changes—and that the broad spectrum of sounds don’t only represent the cultures of the world, but the diversity of this region: “They all live here!” 

And the festival is especially set up for the complement to music—dancing—with stages along the street and a Saturday afternoon extravaganza in People’s Park, sponsored by Amoeba Music and mc’d by digeridu maestro and KPFA radio personality Stephen Kent, featuring the likes of Balkan Gypsy-style Brass Menazeri, Yassir Chadly and Bouchaib Abdelhabi’s traditional Moroccan with the addition of Kent’s digeridu, and the great Samba Ngo, Congolese dance music master, with his very personalized Pan-African beat and vocals. “We’re lucky to have him!” Ranuzzi commented. 

One of the street stages—call it ‘Cody’s Corner,” said Ranuzzi—will be at Haste and Telegraph, in front of the former location of Cody’s Books, featuring Chilean singer Rafael Mariquez; the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music’s Youth Marimba Band, with a dozen young people playing diasporic music on seven marimbas and on goards; and the Belly Dance Bazaar on Saturday and Sunday will see on that stage Julia Tsitsi Chigamba and her Zimbabwe music and dancers; Ya-Elah, world spiritual choir and the Druid Sisters Tea Party, “Celtic Gypsy Tribal Grooves.” 

Also on Saturday, Mario’s La Fiesta restaurant will open its banquet room on Haste for Sara and Swingtime, Hollywood Latin dance. Portuguese Fado, the poetic ballads of saudade, will be sung by Ramana Vierra at Raleigh’s Pub, appropriately in the early evening, and Moh alileche will play the Parisian diasporic cafe form of his Amazigh Berber music to finish off the day’s festivities at The Village.  

Elsewhere, up and down the Avenue on Saturday, the Caffe Mediterraneum presents the Parisian cafe sounds of the Baguette Quartette; Rasputin Music features The Palm Wine boys’ acoustic world folk, while Magic Carpet combines Indian sarode with Latin rhythms at Naan ‘n Curry—and Tara Linda y Sombra de la Luna plays 1930s Tex-Mex dance music and songs at the corner of Channing Way. 

Sunday kicks off with Mamidou and vanessa with their seminal Mali Blues at Caffe Med, and Trillium World Harp Trio at the Musical Offering on Bancroft, followed by Gary Wade’s unplugged R & B at Moe’s Books, the Cajun All-Stars’ Zydeco at the Durant Food Court, the great Tito y Su Son de Cuba at Durant’s Beau Sky Hotel, Pusaka Sunda’s Javanese Gamelan Dejung at Julie’s Healthy Cafe on Bancroft, Evelie S. Posch and Mahal with Filipino Fusion at Caffe Milano (also on Bancroft), Grupo Falso with Brazilian Choro and Samba at Raleigh’s—and the festival closer, Freddy Clarke’s Wobbly World, world fusion at The Village, a fit finale for such a display of worldwide musical color. 

“This year’s line-up’s proven so stellar, the morning openers could all just as well be evening headliners,” said Ranuzzi. “These artists are the ones preserving and teaching their cultures. It’s a chance to hear in intimate places, to talk with or dance outside to performers who usually appear in expensive venues—and all for free, on Telegraph Avenue.” 

For details see www.worldmusicberkeley.org.

When Captain John Slater died in January 1908, a newspaper obituary declared him to have been “part owner in steamship companies with Captains Dudreau and Miles [sic]” and his family “among the largest property owners in the north end.” Slater’s employers were captains Boudrow and Mighell, owners of the California Shipping Company and residents of 1536 and 1533 Oxford Street, respectively. The writer of the obituary may have exaggerated Slater’s role within the Boudrow & Mighell company, just as Slater’s land holdings appear to have been inflated beyond their actual extent. 

Property assessment records indicate that the Slater holdings in 1908 consisted of two houses: 1335 Shattuck Avenue and 1426 Spruce Street. Family records confirm that the Slaters suffered a reversal of fortune as a result of the captain’s death. Louise Slater (1867–1948) remarried, but her second husband, Edward Phillips, lived for no more than three or four years. In 1912 or ’13, Louise sold the big house, keeping the smaller one. 

At the time, daughter Marguerite was a student at UC, while younger sons Norman and Colby were at Berkeley High School. For a while, the family lived at 2317 Haste Street, a house they may have found thanks to their former tenant, Andrew H. Irving. 

Plant superintendent of the Paraffine Paint Company, Irving was then living across the street, in the enormous and ornate Lafayette Apartments at 2314 Haste Street.  

In 1935, the Lafayette would become Barrington Hall, the University Students’ Cooperative Association’s largest residential co-op. By 1915, when Andrew’s elder brother, Samuel C. Irving, was elected mayor of Berkeley, their widowed mother and sister had also moved into the Lafayette. 

The mother, Jane Scott Irving, was born in 1829 in Nova Scotia and died at the Lafayette in January 1917. Her obituary in the Berkeley Gazette declared her to have been the granddaughter of Zephaniah Williams, “one of the heroes of the revolution. Williams was presented with a purse of $3,000 and a sword of honor for his services in the war by the Continental Congress.” 

The Gazette failed to mention that after fighting numerous battles against the British, Zephaniah Williams joined the Duke of Cumberland’s Regiment, in a unit consisting entirely of former officers and men of the American Continental Army, and spent three years as a British soldier on garrison duty in Jamaica. 

When the regiment was disbanded in 1783, the American soldiers were allowed to settle in Nova Scotia and given land grants. In 1785, Williams came to Antigonish, NS and put down roots in a place now known as Williams Point. 

While three Irvings were residing at the Lafayette Apartments, Louise Slater’s eldest son, James Herbert Slater (1889–1969), had gone to work for the Paraffine Paint Co. as an electrical engineer and took up residence at 1402–04 Spruce Street, a few doors to the north of his mother’s property. This two-flat Victorian cottage would soon be acquired by the Slaters and remain under family ownership until 1970. 

The Paraffine Paint Company of San Francisco manufactured specialty paints, building papers, and ready roofing materials under the Pabco and Malthoid brand names. Malthoid, a bituminous rolled membrane with adhered granules, was in demand for roofing bungalows. In 1908, it was used to roof the “ultimate bungalow,” Greene & Greene’s famed Gamble House in Pasadena. According to an architectural report, it failed within the first 10 years. 

Malthoid’s popularity extended as far as Australia and New Zealand, where many bungalows were being constructed. Sales were robust enough to warrant the extended visit of an executive from the home office. That executive was none other than Samuel C. Irving, Berkeley’s future mayor, who would serve as vice-president and manager of the Paraffine Companies from 1903 to 1930. The visit to Australia lasted close to a year, and Samuel was accompanied by his wife. The couple’s first son, Fred Elton Irving, was born in Sydney in October 1886. The Irvings would not return to California until Fred was six months old. 

Samuel C. Irving (1858–1930) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the son of Andrew K. Irving, a Scottish shipwright. The Irving family came to the Bay Area from New York in 1868. According to Jane Scott Irving’s obituary in the Gazette, Andrew K. Irving founded the first shipbuilding yard on the Pacific Coast at San Francisco and organized the first labor union in the West. 

In 1880, Andrew and Jane Irving were living with their five children in Vallejo, site of the U.S. Navy’s Mare Island shipyards. Samuel, who had graduated from UC in 1879, was still registered as a student when the census taker came calling the following year. 

Samuel married Laura Sell in 1886, and the couple settled in Cow Hollow, San Francisco, raising two sons. In 1901, Samuel served as president of the Mechanics Institute and an ex-officio UC Regent. 

Like many refugees of the San Francisco earthquake and fire, the Irvings moved to Berkeley in 1906. At the time, Samuel’s younger brother, Andrew, was rooming with the Slaters at 1335 Shattuck Avenue. Across the street, Captain Seabury’s house at 1322 Shattuck Ave. was unoccupied (more about Seabury in the next article). It seemed an ideal arrangement, and Samuel bought the house from Seabury. He would remain there for fifteen years. 

While living at 1322 Shattuck Ave., the Republican Samuel Irving was twice elected mayor of Berkeley, serving from 1915 to 1919 (in 1926 he would run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat). Shortly after leaving office, he acquired the former Slater house across the street and resided in it for the rest of his life. On December 2, 1930, he was fatally struck by a car while crossing Shattuck Avenue on his way home. Samuel Irving was a member of the Bohemian, Commercial, Commonwealth, Faculty, and Hillside Clubs, the Berkeley lodges of Elks and Masons, and the Golden Bear Society. 

Samuel Irving’s sons followed him into his businesses. Fred (1886–1973) was a department manager at the Paraffine Companies until his father went into the cider, vinegar, and fruit-juice business. Shortly after the end of World War I, Fred could be found in Sonora, CA, managing the California Cider Company. Living with him was his younger brother Livingston, who looked after the orchards. 

Livingston G. Irving (1895–1983) had made a name for himself as a World War I ace flyer in the Lafayette Escadrille and the 103rd Aero Squadron. After his stint as orchard keeper, he went to work at the Paraffine Cos. as an engineer. During the 1920s, he continued to fly in the Air Corps Reserve out of Crissy Field. When the Dole Race from Oakland to Honolulu was announced in 1927, Livingston was the first contestant to enter. His plane was a Breese monoplane purchased and sponsored by the Paraffine Companies. Christened the Pabco Pacific Flyer, the plane was painted bright orange and sported the Indian warrior’s head insignia of the Lafayette Flying Corps. 

Technical problems plagued the Dole Race; of the 15 contestants, only eight took off and a mere two reached Hawaii. The Pabco Pacific Flyer was one of the non-starters. On the second attempt to take off, the plane rose briefly before crashing down. Livingston bought the wreck from the Paraffin Cos. for a reported $10 and had it rebuilt to his specifications. Renamed the Irving Cabin Monoplane, it was sold in 1929 to the Pacific Finance Corporation. 

Livingston retired from the Army Air Force as a colonel. He was not the only illustrious son of a prominent father to have come out of the Slater-Irving connection. Captain Slater’s youngest son, Colby E. “Babe” Slater (1896–1965), was a world-class athlete. In 1911 and ’12, “Babe” led the Berkeley High School rugby team to county, regional, and state titles. In 1914, he went on to the University Farm School (now UC Davis), starring in rugby, football, basketball, and baseball. 

U pon graduation in 1917, “Babe” enlisted in the United States Army and served with the Medical Corps in France and Belgium during World War I. After the war, he raised sheep, hogs, and feed in Woodland, CA. When the Olympic Games Committee allowed the formation of a United States rugby team for the 1920 Olympics, “Babe” Slater was one of the first players chosen. To everyone’s surprise, the inexperienced U.S. team won the gold after beating France 8-0. 

In the 1924 Olympics, “Babe” was captain of the U.S. rugby team, which also included his brother Norman (1894–1978). Once again, the U.S. beat France to win the gold. Angry French fans rioted in the stands, and rugby was thereafter removed from Olympic competition. 

Around 1927 “Babe” Slater bought land in Clarksburg, CA and raised various crops for close to thirty years. Norman Slater, who had been a mechanic in San Francisco, joined his brother’s farming operations. The only Slater to remain in Berkeley was James Herbert, who continued to work for the Paraffine Cos. and raised a family at 1404 Spruce St. before moving north to 776 Spruce in the 1930s. Not far from him, at 1814 San Antonio Road, lived Fred Irving, who had forsaken Paraffine for apple juice. 

This is the second part in a series of articles on north Berkeley houses and the families that inhabited them. 

Photograph by Daniella Thompson.  

This house at 1841 San Antonio Road was the home of Fred E. Irving, elder son of Berkeley mayor Samuel C. Irving.  

Daniella Thompson publishes berkeleyheritage.com for the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (BAHA). 

It’s summer—a month from St. John’s Eve, but no longer quite the juvescence of the year—and time to take a deep breath. If you’re more organized than I am, as most humans are, you’ve got almost everything in the ground and watered and fertilized, at least sufficiently for the time being, and things are hinting at bearing fruit.  

Time to go for a stroll and look at other people’s gardens. 

The flush of official garden tours is past. But the roses are still blooming, and shade plants are spreading their foliage; tropicals are just getting on with it, blooming and greening in the brief beats of heat we’ve enjoyed this past month.  

Regular brisk strolls around the neighborhood are good for your health and for your observational skills too. Leave the iPod at home and tune your ears into the sounds that you can filter through the din of human cities.  

Chez nous, the robins are having a competitive year. There’s one couple nesting in the mutilated plum tree next to our backyard, which will keep the carwash folks in pocket change for a few months. When we water out back, they’ll come down to the wet spots, each taking a turn, to see what sort of tasty invertebrates might have come up from the sudden mud for air.  

Rival robins have been rockin’ just a few doors to the east, and just across the intersecting street to the west. Some evenings the boyos all come out to the streetside utility lines and stage song duels.  

A lately-insomniac neighbor tells me that our yardbird, at least, has been inspired to bursts of song at 4 a.m. some nights.  

That sad little whine from overhead is the call note of the local lesser goldfinch. His song is much sweeter, and he and his honey seem to be nesting in the Japanese maple next door. Such dialogues I’ve been hearing from that canopy!  

The crows are headquartered on the block just southeast of us, and they carry on at intervals all day. One thing I’ve learned from this family is that they use the same word for “raven” as for “hawk”—a nasal flat “caah”—when they see and chase one through the neighborhood. Listen for that note and look up to see what fancy predator is in transit. 

Meanwhile, the human neighbors’ gardens put on the visual part of the show. The guy on the corner has a hedge of white roses that smell better than white roses tend to, and his Brugmansia has a sweet scent too. Now I find myself sniffing as I go, like a dog. Think how this block must “look” to dogs! 

It’s enlightening to see how perennials fare here over a few years; what gets overgrown; who keeps their poor shrubs trimmed into poodleballs.  

Sometimes I even get to meet the people who garden my local favorites. We’ve swapped histories, tips, and cuttings. I’m not terribly social usually, but gardens (and birds!) bring out the gladhander in me. 

Where did you get that gorgeous iris? 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.

Some things are always a bad idea. Karaoke with your boss, bell bottoms on chain driven motorcycles, long-haired thoracic surgeons or pesto-flavored ice-cream. 

Another thing that is nearly always a bad idea is converting a basement into somebody’s bedroom. 

I’ve seem this a lot and there is a special red flag (animated with flashing stripes) that goes up in my head whenever I walk down stairs in a house and see a “staged” bed over new carpeting and can just make out the flue from the furnace sticking out from behind the lacy curtain. As they say, “What could go wrong?” 

Long ago, when I was young, basements were places where people drank and shot pool. They were places where a boy could take apart the family TV and be threatened with a spinal transplant by a red-faced father (clearly this was way before Child Protective Services). They were, however, not living spaces. They tended in many parts of the country to be damp or even wet. They often housed a sump (a well recessed into the slab) and a pump for management of subsurface waters. 

You see, basements violate nature’s laws when it comes to grade (ground level), erosion patterns and the design of the watershed. If you’re lucky enough to live in a fairly dry part of the country, this is far less of an issue, but most places suffer as we do, with water that insists on filling up spaces that we dig out of the earth. They used to call them wells. Big ones might be called quarries. Whatever you call them, they’ve always tended to get wet. 

Regardless of this truth, in our modern age of common senselessness, we’ve forgotten all the basic stuff. While it was well understood a hundred years ago that a cellar would be damp and that action would have to be taken to keep one dry, we have forgotten these things and end up carpeting concrete floors 8’ below ground level. 

Basements ARE excellent spaces for crafts and storage and occasional short-term belching and cursing but they do not work well as bedrooms. 

One thing that is not commonly understood is that typical concrete is quite porous to water and much like a wick will transmit substantial volumes of water into a basement, even across a slab or wall of 6” or more. As concretes go upward in strength they also become less porous and so, when designing a basement, this is one of many strategies that can be employed in producing a dryer environment. 

It’s common to see a white crystalline precipitate (powder) on the surface of concrete floors and walls in basement as evidence of this slow water movement. We call this efflorescence. As water moves through the concrete it carries evaporative salts such as calcium chloride to the dryer side and as the water evaporates from the exposed side of the concrete, it leaves these salts behind. These are largely benign but do illustrate a problem with drainage.  

If the concrete is kept relatively dry, or if there is a low-pressure path to allow the water to move easily along the other side of the concrete (the soil side), the water would not make the more difficult journey through the concrete, at least not much of it. 

The pressure of water on the back side of the concrete wall or floor is known as hydrostatic pressure and the higher it is, the more it wants to push through the concrete and dampen the rug and grow the mold colony in the new bonus room. 

On retaining walls, we usually create holes through the walls to relieve this pressure. Without these “weep” holes, large walls can be slowly toppled. Water is amazing stuff. It always wins unless you let it through. There is no opponent more dangerous than the one that is patient and moves very slowly. 

In basements, it is possible to arrest some of the infiltration of water in liquid or vapor form by the use of sealants. The problem is that they cannot resist high levels of hydrostatic pressure. If there’s a lot of push to the water on the other side of the wall, the surface of the concrete including the sealant can “spall” or exfoliate in thin chips releasing the moisture and damaging the surface. 

If there is just a little weeping going on and the concrete quality is good, a sealant can be quite effective. There are two common sealants that have been in use for quite a long time, UGL Drylok and Thoroseal. Thoroseal is a cementitious sealant with an acrylic component and seals over the concrete. 

It comes in a range of colors and can be painted when installed. Drylok is a clear latex sealant that impregnates the concrete surface. In my experience, Thoroseal is the better choice for weeping concrete although Drylok is a nice choice for maintaining the appearance of brick or other masonry (being a clear sealer). 

Better than either of these is a line of products by Aquafin™. Included in these are epoxy sealants that can solve major problems where escaping water vapor has made living spaces uninhabitable and also cementitious sealants that can seal rough, highly porous concrete. 

I don’t want to create any illusions here. Damp basements can be restored to relatively dry conditions with these methods as well as ventilation, heat, dehumidifiers and drainage systems. But when pushing water comes to shoving humidity, nature often wants these basements to stay damp. 

The key to using this data properly is not in the utter abandonment of the basement but in reasonable expectations and appropriate use of space. To those of you who are now carpeting and painting that basement in preparation for sale, keep in mind that the next owner will assume that these finishes guarantee dry, cozy space. 

If nothing else, take some time to write down what you know and what you don’t know about the basement (“it’s seemed mostly dry these last four years but it wasn’t carpeted or painted”). It could mean the difference between a nasty phone call next January and a clear conscience combined with reduced liability. 

If you’re a buyer, look twice and three time at that basement and don’t start planning the office layout just yet. Give yourself a winter to assess the real utility of the space and be prepared to take some special measures (or to use it as a …. basement). 

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor at mgcantor@pacbell.net.

“Triangle of Life” – Watch Out! 

Every so often I get an email from someone passing on information from a person named Doug Copp, who is a self-proclaimed “expert” on disaster management.  

He says that, in a serious quake, the “drop, cover, and hold on” advice from the Red Cross and other American disaster agencies is wrong, and that instead you should find some “triangle of life” area in the room to protect you.  

Please don’t listen to this advice. His observations are based on buildings in third world countries and, even if his ideas may have value there (who knows?), they DO NOT have value here. Engineering researchers have demonstrated that very few buildings collapse or “pancake” in the U.S. as they might do in other countries. 

If you want more info on this, google “triangle of life hoax.” You’ll learn a lot. 

Wishing you a safe home and peace of mind. 

Larry Guillot is the owner of QuakePrepare, an earthquake consulting, securing, and gas shut-off valve installation service. Contact him at 558-3299 or visit QuakePrepare.com to receive semi-monthly quake safety reports.

FRIDAY, JUNE 1 

Plaque Dedication for denise brown at 7 p.m. at LeConte School, 2241 Russell St. To donate food, please call 841-2110. 684-7273. 

Golden Gate Audubon Society Field Trip to Jewel Lake in Tilden Park. Meet at 8:30 a.m. at the parking lot at the north end of Central Park Dr. 843-2222. 

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Prof. George Bisharat on “Maximizing Rights: The One-State Solution to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

Wheelchair Yoga with Sally Maxwell at 11:30 a.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190. 

Movies that Matter “Roxanne” at 6:30 p.m. at Neumayer Residence, 565 Bellevue St. at Perkins, Oakland. 451-3009. 

Circle Dancing, simple folk dancing with instruction at 7:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut St at University. Donation of $5 requested. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

SATURDAY, JUNE 2 

Berkeley History Center Walking Tour “The Maybeck Estates” led by Paul Grunland with Bob Shaner, at 10 a.m. Cost is $8-$10. For information on meeting place and to register call 848-0181. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Strawberry Family Fun Fest with entertainment and activities for children from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center St. at MLK. 548-3333.  

Sushi Basics Learn the natural and culltural history of sushi as you learn to prepare it from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Parent participation required for children ages 8 to 10. Cost is $25-$39. Registration required. 636-1684. 

“Restore Wetlands in Oakland” with Save The Bay and the East Bay Regional Park District on a wetland restoration project near the Oakland Airport. From 9 a.m. to noon at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Regional Shoreline, Oakland. RSVP to 452-9261 ext. 109. bayevents@savesfbay.org 

Longfellow Middle School Annual Health Fair with student performances, activities, health information, food, fun for the whole family, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 1500 Derby St. Free. 883-5258, ext. 2. 

Spring Faire at Washington Elementary School with face painting, boat races, book exchange, soul food and performances from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 2300 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, enter on McKinley. 486-1742. 

“Planning and Caring for Aging Loved Ones” with workshops and resources from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Malcolm X Elementary School, 1731 Prince St. Sponsored by Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson. For information or to register call 272-6695. www.acgov.org/board/district5/event.htm. 

Eco-Oakland Volunteer Opportunuity Help elementary school students with mapping and habitat restoration at Lion Creek, neat Merritt College. For information call 635-5533.  

“Mentors for Backyard Garden Program” Volunteers needed to help low-income residents of West Oakland build and maintain vegetable gardens, provide ongoing support, seedlings, seeds and compost. Information meeting from 10 a.m. to noon at West Oakland Woods Farm, 537 Lewis St., corner of Peralta and 7th, Oakland. SPonsored by City Slicker Farms. 763-4241. 

“Build an Earth Oven” Learn how to build your own oven from clay, sand, straw, and bricks. From 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Grandma Mary’s Organic Farm, 100 Behrens St., El Cerrito. Cost is $150. To register call 527-9271. www.kleiwerks.org 

Twins by the Bay Annual Garage Sale Families with twins, triplets, and more, sell gently used baby gear, clothes, car seats, strollers, and more from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 1707 Gouldin Rd., Montclair. 593-5911. www.homestead.com/twinsbythebay 

Future Leaders Institute Legacy Awards at 4 p.m. at The Unitarian Church, 685 14th St., Oakland. www.thefutureleadersinstitute.org 

Citizenship Fair from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Fruitvale Village, located directly across from the Fruitvale BART station at the 3300 block of East 12th St,, between Fruitvale Ave. and 35th Ave., Oakland. 535-6900. svelazquez@unitycouncil.org 

“Crossing the Line” Chris Brown speaks of his experience as a Christian Peacemaker in Occupied Palestine at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 499-0537. 

“Exploring Class... “ A two day-workshop examining the impact of class on our lives, and breaking down barriers between people from different socio-economic classes. Workshop held in Oakland. Register online at www.classism.org 

“Take a New Step and Meet Your Neighbors” Community fair with programs and service providers, basketball tournament, music and drama to reduce risk factors and combat violence in West Oakland. From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 1143 10th St., Oakland. 677-6364. 

Free Electronic Waste Drop Off Sat. and Sun. from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the El Cerrito Department of Motor Vehicles, 6400 Manila Ave. E-waste accepted: computer monitors, computers/computer components, televisions, VCR & DVD players, toner cartridges, printers, fax machines, copiers, telephone equipment, cell phones, MP3 players. NO appliances, batteries, microwaves, paints, pesticides, etc. Please take these items to the Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) Facility at 101 Pittsburg Ave. in Richmond. For HHW facility information, call 1-888-412-9277. The HHW facility will be open June 2. For E-waste Event questions call 1-888-832-9839 

Rachel Corrie Rebuilding Campaign Benefit to rebuild the next home in Northern Gaza with Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom from Jerusalem and Husam El Nounou from Gaza at 7 p.m. at the Unitarian Church, Cedar and Bonita. Sponsored by Progressive Democrats of the East Bay, Ecumenical Peace Institute, Rebuilding Alliance, American Friends Service Committee, and the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Church. Donation $10-$25 sliding scale, no one turned away. 524- 4244. 

AnewAmerica Social Responsibility Summit with workshops on Immigration Reform, Healthcare for Immigrants, Advocacy for Small Business and Food Justice from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at St. Elizabeth Church, the Franciscan Hall, 1500 34th Ave. & International Blvd, Oakland. 532-5240.  

Children’s Fairyland Personalities in costume at noon, followed by music with John Weaver at 1:30 a.m. puppet show at 2 p.m. at 699 Bellvue Ave., Oakland. 452-2259. 

Origami for All Ages from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden Sat. and Sun. at 2 pm. Regional Parks Botanic Garden, Tilden Park. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. 

Car Wash Benefit for Options Recovery Services of Berkeley, held every Sat. from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Lutheran Church, 1744 University Ave. 666-9552. 

SUNDAY, JUNE 3 

Greening Albany Learn about community actions to reverse global warming, with speakers and information on goods and services, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Albany Middle School, 1259 Brighton Ave. 219-7211. 

“Climate Change: Technology and Policy” with Karen Street at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Meeting, 2151 Vine. 653-2803. 

Yosemite Family Explorations with Ranger Ben telling stories about the park’s black bears, and other activities, at 1 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$8. 238-2200. 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Clinic Learn how to keep your bike in excellent working condition through safety inspections, from 10 to 11 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Toddlers and Friends For 2-3 year olds to explore the meadows, ponds and trails in Tilden. Meet at 10:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Summer Ponds Look for tadpoles, newt larvae, dragonfly nymphs and more from 3 to 4:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. www.cal-sailing.org 

Berkeley City Club Wine Festival from 6 to 9 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave.Tickets are $40. 848-7800. 

Community Singalong with jazz pianist Ellen Hoffman from 3 to 6 p.m. at the Lake Merritt Hotel, 1800 Madison, Oakland, near 19th St. BART. Cost is $5-$15. 534-2750. 

Holistic Pet Consultation from 1 to 4 p.m. at RabbitEARS, 303 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, but appointment required. 525-6155. 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732. www.nativeplants.org 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Peace walk around the lake every Sun. Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712. lmno4p.org 

Social Action Forum with Mary Dewey-Wagner on ethical treatment for animals at 9:30 a.m. at Unitarian Univresalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Mary Gomes on “Everyday Compassion” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, JUNE 4 

“But What Can We Do About Global Warming?” A talk by author Ernest Callenbach at a brown-bag lunch at 12:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Explore Upper Codornices Creek on a challenging walk with Friends of Five Creeks Meet at 6:30 p.m. at the main entrance to the Berkeley Rose Garden, west side of Euclid Ave. south of Eunice St. This walk gains 500 feet elevation and includes hill staircases and narrow, uneven trails. Wear sturdy shoes; bring water, flashlight and walking sticks. 848-9358.  

“Renewable Energy from Synthetic Biology” with Jay Keasling of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, at 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theater 2025 Addison St. 486-5183. 

“Is Anybody Out There? The Search for ET” with Dan Werthimer of SETI at UC Berkeley, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $5 at door. www.hillsideclub.org 

Drop in Knitting Class at the Albany Library Work on your own project or make pet blankets and children’s hats to be donated to charity organizations. Yarn and needles provided for donated items. At 3:30 p.m. at 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. 548-0425. 

TUESDAY, JUNE 5 

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit the Wildcat Regional Trail. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

“Empty Bowls” fundraising event in conjunction with National Hunger Awareness Day at 5:30 p.m. at Alameda County Community Food Bank, 7900 Edgewater Drive, Oakland. Tickets are $20, or $40 for a family. 635-3663, ext. 328. www.accfb.org 

Eco-Oakland Volunteer Opportunity Help elementary school students with mapping and habitat restoration at Lion Creek, near Merritt College. For information call 635-5533.  

Tilden Mini-Rangers Hiking, conservation and nature-based activities for ages 8-12. Dress to ramble and get dirty. From 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684. 

“The Citizen Powered Energy Handbook” with author Greg Pahl on renewable energy technologies ways that individuals and communities can work toward sustainable energy, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave., near Dwight Way. 548-2220 ext. 223. 

Climate Action Networking Lunch with strategies for reducing our community-wide GHG emissions at noon at Spud's Pizza, 3290 Adeline near Alcatraz. Hosted by the City of Berkeley. 981-7081. 

Digital Earth Symposium: Humanitarian and Climate Change Presentations A 5 day conference on using satellite and aerial images of the earth at UC Berkeley. For information see www.isde5.org 

Berkeley Rep Book Club meets to discuss “The Real Oliver Twist” by Jonathan Waller at 6 p.m. at the Roda Theater, 2015 Addison St. RSVP to 647-2916. 

Berkeley School Volunteers training for summer volunteer opportunities in preschool, elementary, and middle schools from noon to 1 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833. 

Free Legal Assistance the first Tues. of the month at 6 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Advance registration required. 526-3720, ext. 5. 

Family Storytime for preschoolers and up at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org 

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org 

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around Preservation Park to see Victorian architecture. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of Preservation Park at 13th St. and MLK, Jr. Way. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Workshop for Low Income Berkeley Homeowners on how to get help for maintenance of your home, at 10:30 a.m. at West Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5180. 

“Sustainable Futures” a documentary about seven communities where sustainability is a high priority at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., between Telegraph and Broadway, Oakland. Donation $5. www.HumanistHall.net 

New to DVD Screening and Discussion at 7 p.m. at JCCEB, 1414 Walnut St. Discussion follows. 848-0237. 

American Red Cross Blood Services Volunteer Orientation from 10 a.m. to noon at 6230 Claremont Ave., Oakland. 594-5165. 

Backpacking 101, a talk on the fundamentals needed for a weekend trip, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

Stitch ‘n Bitch at 6:30 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

THURSDAY, JUNE 7 

“Last Journey for the Leatherback Sea Turtle” A video and talk with Karen Steele, the coordinator of the Sea Turtle Restoration Network, at 7 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way. 548-2220, ext. 233. erc@ecologycenter.org 

“Israel & Palestine - What Peace Could Look Like” with Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom and Husam El Nounou at 7 p.m. at Kehilla Community Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave, corner of Grand Ave. and Fairview, Piedmont. Donation suggested $10-$25. 547-2424. 

Storytime for Babies and Toddlers at 10:30 a.m. at the Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043. 

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755. http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline. namaste@avatar.freetoasthost.info  

CITY MEETINGS 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon. June 4, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee 

Peace and Justice Commission meets Mon., June 4, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5510.  

Commission on the Status of Women meets Wed., June 6, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190.  

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Wed. June 6, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Housing Advisory Commission meets Thurs., June 7, at 7:30 p.m., at the South Berkeley Senior Center. Oscar Sung, 981-5400.  

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs. June 7, at 7:30 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419.  

Community Environmental Advisory Commission Workshop The Co-Benefits of Climate Protection Thurs., June 7, at 7 p.m. at 2118 Milvia Street, 1st Floor Conference Room. 981-7461.