A student at Emerson Elementary School in Berkeley is dead, his mother has been hospitalized, and police are questioning her as the suspect in the boy’s death. 

Berkeley police Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said the San Jose police called Berkeley officers at 9:18 a.m. today (Wednesday) after their department had been called by a friend of the mother. The woman told the San Jose police that the mother had phoned her to say that her son was dead and she had been injured. 

On arriving at the wood-shingled house on Shattuck Avenue three doors south of Ashby Avenue, officers found the son dead and the mother suffering from possibly self-inflicted injuries. 

Berkeley Fire Department paramedics arrived moments later, and after treating the mother’s injuries, one of the firefighters carried her in his arms wrapped in a chenille bedspread to the waiting ambulance. 

She was taken to Highland Hospital, where she was being questioned by Berkeley homicide detectives, Sgt. Kusmiss said. 

“He was a wonderful little boy,” said a neighbor whose own children attended classes with the boy. “But we knew there was tension in the home.” 

Another neighbor said the apartment had been visited on several occasions by county social services workers.

Native Americans and their supporters rallied on the UC Berkeley campus Friday, demanding that the university return the remains of Indian ancestors so that they can be buried according to custom. 

“This is a human rights issue; this is a social justice issue,” Mark LeBeau, a Pitt River tribal member told the noontime crowd that swelled to about 300 people in front of Sproul Hall.  

“Our ancestors are sitting in boxes. They’re treated like lab rats,” Douglas Mullen from the Greenville Rancheria told the rally. 

At issue are the remains of some 13,000 humans currently at Phoebe Hearst Anthropology Museum on the UC Berkeley campus, the second largest collection in the country of remains believed to come from Native Americans. The largest collection is at the Smithsonian Museum. 

The museum staff formerly included a semi-autonomous unit led by Native Americans, which helped tribes prepare claims to these remains and artifacts under federal law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). 

The university recently integrated the museum’s NAGPRA unit into the regular functions of the museum, displacing Native American scholars who had supported the efforts of the tribes to establish their claims. This created an outcry among Native Americans and led to the formation of the NAGPRA Coalition that sponsored the rally. 

University spokesperson Marie Felde told the Planet last week that the reorganization improved efficiency of the process and was patterned on the way other museums evaluate claims under NAGPRA. 

But the Native American protesters say the non-native anthropologists the university has now charged with carrying out NAGPRA want to keep the remains at the museum for research purposes. 

“They have the scientific curiosity that has made them do this—robbing our ancestors’ graves for scientific study,” Lalo Franco, of the Santa Rosa Rancheria Tachi Yokut tribe said, speaking at the rally.  

The protesters said they have asked several times to meet with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who is Canadian-born and of French and Native American descent.  

“The Indian man refuses to meet with us,” said Reno Franklin of the Kashia Pomo tribe, speaking at the rally. “We’re not the ones being disrespectful … Tell the chancellor to wake up and be an Indian again.” 

Carrying signs that included messages such as, “Want research—use your own granny,” and “Berkeley—what part of sacred don’t you understand,” the protesters left Sproul Hall and marched to California Hall, where the chancellor’s office is located, to ask for a meeting.  

The coalition has been asking to meet with Birgeneau since July. Associate Chancellor John Cummins responded that he would meet with individual tribal representatives, but not with the coalition representatives of eight tribes as a group. 

Assistant Chancellor Beata Fitzpatrick stepped outside California Hall, listened to Mark LeBeau speak and addressed the crowd, saying that the chancellor has “great respect” for the issue of the ancestral remains.  

“He is himself a native person from Canada,” she said, going on to say, however, “We believe the university is in compliance with the law.” 

Responding to Fitzpatrick, LeBeau said if the chancellor continues to refuse to meet with the coalition and to resolve the issue, the next step could be to bring a lawsuit against the university for violating NAGPRA. 

The question of public comment at council meetings is back before the council today (Tuesday), with Mayor Tom Bates adding greater opportunity for public comment than in earlier iterations of his plan, but not enough to satisfy SuperBOLD (Berkeleyans Organized for Library Defense), the organization that had threatened to sue the city for skirting the state’s open meeting laws with inadequate opportunities for the public to speak at public meetings. 

Competing proposals by councilmembers Kriss Worthington and Dona Spring are also on the agenda. 

Also on tonight’s agenda is an audit showing the need for better oversight of controlled drugs used by paramedics, the firefighters’ new contract with the city and more. 

The meeting begins at 5 p.m. in closed session with the council discussing litigation filed against the city by GTE Mobilnet and Verizon and a conference with labor negotiators on labor negotiations with the police association. The public can comment before the meeting is adjourned to executive session.  

At 6 p.m. the city will hold a workshop on city efforts in economic development over the last three months. The regular meeting begins at 7 p.m. 

Public comment 

The mayor’s item on public participation before the council is the third version of Bates’ efforts to expand public comment in accordance with the Brown Act. 

Still at issue, according to Gene Bernardi of the SuperBOLD steering committee, is the public’s ability to address the council on items that do not appear on the agenda. 

According to Bates’ revised recommendation, those people wishing to speak early in the meeting on items not on the agenda must submit a card to the city clerk before the meeting begins. The clerk will choose five members of the public at random to speak at that time. Those not chosen must wait until the end of the meeting to speak. 

In Worthington’s competing recommendation, public comment on non-agenda items would be heard directly after councilmembers approve the consent calendar, where the council approves non-controversial items in a single vote. 

“We prefer Kriss Worthington’s recommendation,” Bernardi told the Planet on Monday. “Non-agenda items should be on the agenda early in the evening.” 

According to Spring’s recommendation, five members of the public chosen by lottery would be able to speak on non-agenda items before the public addresses items on the consent calendar, which is early in the evening.  

In earlier versions of his plan, Bates had all public comment on non-agenda items as the very last item of business, around 11 p.m. His new recommendation appears to be a compromise. 

New chambers 

Bates also added a search for a new council meeting place to the public comment proposal, something Worthington had brought up at the Sept. 11 meeting. “City Council meetings are held in one of the few public buildings in Berkeley that has not been seismically retrofitted,” the mayor wrote, noting that costs to retrofit the Maudelle Shirek Building would exceed $30 million.  

The Council Chamber is also small, allowing only 125 members of the public and is difficult for people using wheelchairs to navigate. A new venue needs to accommodate radio and television transmission, the mayor’s item says. 

Audit: Fire Department controlled substances  

The city must increase its oversight of the controlled substances carried by paramedics, including morphine, valium and diazepam, says City Auditor Ann Marie Hogan in a report that will be before the City Council tonight. 

While Hogan wrote that the audit didn’t find any misuse or misappropriation of substances, “there appeared to be opportunities for misuse or misappropriations,” she wrote in her report, citing incomplete inventory records and a lack of procedures to ensure controlled substance records are accurate, complete and readily retrievable. 

For example, Hogan writes that the ending balance on the June 2006 log was 66 vials of valium and the beginning balance on the July 2006 inventory log was 51 vials. “The beginning balance of the day should match the ending balance of the previous day,” Hogan wrote. 

The auditor further reported poor documentation on disposal of expired or damaged controlled substances. “Purchase records were not consistently maintained or filed,” she wrote, further noting a lack of supervisory review and monitoring of controlled substances. 

Hogan noted that the city did not require drug testing for paramedics or firefighters. In his response, City Manager Phil Kamlarz said the city “intends to implement pre-employment drug testing for all fire new hires effective with the next recruit class.” Kamlarz’ response further indicates that the city will continue to meet and confer with the association with respect to “a program of reasonable suspicion, post accident and return-to-duty drug and alcohol testing.”  

While it appears that drug testing was raised during negotiations, it was not included in the finalized contract recommendation. 

“Firefighters said, ‘what does this have to do with our contract?’” said Councilmember Kriss Worthington, reached by phone on Monday.  

The city manager’s comments in the audit report indicate that negotiators will go back to the firefighters to try to implement drug testing when there is “reasonable suspicion” of the use of drugs and alcohol and after a vehicle accident. 

In June, the City Council voted to rescind the city prohibition against drug and alcohol testing of employees, giving negotiators the option of negotiating for testing with employees. 

The question of the need to test arose after the conviction in 2006 of former police Sgt. Cary Kent of felony theft of drugs from the police drug vault he was charged with guarding. 

The city manager wrote in the audit report that the other concerns were in the course of being addressed. 

Firefighters contract 

After more than 30 negotiating sessions since February 2006, the Berkeley Firefighters Association and the city have tentatively agreed to a multi-year contract retroactive to July 2006 and continuing through June 2010. The City Council will be asked to ratify the contract tonight. 

The new contract for the 120 city employees, including firefighters, paramedics, fire prevention and hazardous materials response services, will boost the department salaries 13 percent over the four-year life of the retroactive contract. The total staffing and benefit costs to the city for employees represented by the association over the four-year term of the contract is $52.6 million, representing an increase of $5.96 million over the four years of the contract. 

Also before the council this evening is: 

• An audit of the senior and disabled home rehabilitation loan program; 

• Hiring a library information systems administrator at a range of about $7,000 to $9,000 per month plus benefits and a watershed specialist at about $5,000 to $6,500 per month plus benefits; 

• An increase in the percentage of bio-diesel fuels used in city vehicles; 

• Writing a letter of support to the governor of Louisiana for the Jena 6, the black students accused of beating a white student after altercations arising from nooses hung on a “whites-only” tree, which the black students sat under. 

• The sale for $200,000 of an easement to SNK Captec Arpeggio for fire separation purposes above the Center Street garage. 

Anti-tobacco advocate Stan Glantz spoke about tobacco money and tainted research at the University of California at last Tuesday’s Talkin’ Tobacco De-Cal class at UC Berkeley. 

On Sept. 20, UC Regents voted to continue accepting tobacco industry funding for scientific research but stated that such funding would require more oversight. 

In the wake of UC Berkeley’s accepting a $500 million biofuel research grant from oil giant BP, the issue of whether UC should continue to accept research funds from the tobacco industry has sparked debate on campus. 

Facilitated by students Betty Yang and Laura Miller, the class aims to coordinate on-campus anti-tobacco advocacy events this semester. Others involved in the class include Project TOBAC (Tobacco Out of Berkeley And Cal), UC Berkeley University Health Services and the City of Berkeley Tobacco Prevention Program. 

Marcia Brown-Machen, the city’s tobacco prevention program director, said that students would pressure the UC regents to reveal the truth behind the controversial “secret research” taking place at UCLA through a $6 million adolescent smoking cessation grant from cigarette-maker Philip Morris. 

Kim Homer of the California Youth Advocacy Network (CYNA) said she finally got a copy of the proposal used to win the grant money by UCLA. 

“It took UCLA four months to send me a copy of the heavily censored 200-page paperwork after I submitted a public records act,” Homer said. More than half of its pages were censored or missing, making it difficult to understand the exact nature of the grant, she said. 

“Under ‘Specific Aims, the document released by UCLA states that ‘The goal of this project is to develop a...,’” she said, pointing out the redacted sections to the students. 

“I was told that the university did not want to release information to us because there were animal experiments being done and they wanted to protect their faculty against harassment and attacks,” said Homer. “But it had nothing to do with animals. They were testing 14-22 year-olds ... Moreover, if they were so scared of being attacked by animal rights activists, why didn’t they white out the part which said they were testing animals?” 

The application also censored the names of the researchers, the experiments that will be conducted and the hypotheses that are being tested. 

“This is technically supposed to be a transparent record,” said Homer. “Is this transparent? What is UCLA trying to hide?” 

She said that the experiment was being conducted by prominent neuropharmacologist Edythe London, who has conducted research for Philip Morris in the past. 

Glantz, a professor of cardiology at UCSF, said that the experiment plans to take kids who smoked and do a brain scan on them to see what kind of changes took place when they smoked. 

“If you are interested in designing a cigarette for teenagers, this is exactly the kind of information you would be looking at,” he said. “Most people think that a cigarette is just nicotine wrapped up in paper. It is in fact a highly engineered product. Cigarette companies control the delivery of nicotine puff by puff. They do lots of experiments to maximize the addictivity.” 

Glantz added that the main reason behind UC accepting funds from tobacco companies was that the university was in a catastrophic financial condition. 

“If the university says no to tobacco, it means saying no to business,” he said. “People are frightened about where they are going to get the money to run this place.” 

Homer said she expected the full contract between UCLA and Philip Morris to be released this week.

While the reaction to AC Transit’s ambitious Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal has not stirred up the sort of public controversy in Oakland and San Leandro that it has in Berkeley, interviews with city officials show that the transit district may have a way to go before the development of a BRT plan will win approval in those cities as well. 

City officials in San Leandro have already told AC Transit that the city would “most likely not support a fully dedicated bus lane from beginning to end” of the project in that city. 

AC Transit is proposing establishing a BRT line along the streets currently operating the district’s 1 and 1R lines, south down Telegraph Avenue through Berkeley and North Oakland into downtown Oakland, then along International Boulevard / East 14th Street to terminate either at the San Leandro or the Bayfair BART station. The BRT proposal includes establishing dedicated bus-only lanes down the middle of Telegraph and International/East 14th, as well as traffic lights timed to allow the immediate passage of buses in order to speed BRT buses along those corridors.  

According to the district’s environmental impact report on the project, BRT is proposed in order to improve transit service and better accommodate existing bus ridership, increase transit ridership by providing a viable and competitive alternative to auto travel, improve and maintain the efficiency of transit service delivery, and support local and regional cgoals to enhance transit-oriented development. It is the district’s major development project. 

AC Transit has proposed mixed-flow lanes—sharing BRT lanes with autos and non-BRT buses—in three areas of the project. In Oakland, non-dedicated lanes are proposed for Broadway between 11th and 20th streets as well as along 12th Street, as in runs between Lake Merritt and the Kaiser Convention Center. In downtown San Leandro, AC Transit has offered the city the option of operating dedicated BRT lanes or mixed-flow lanes. 

In other parts of the BRT project, including along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where contention over the proposal has been at its highest, mixed-flow lanes were not originally offered as an alternative. 

Public hearings on the BRT EIR concluded this summer, and transit district officials are currently involved in discussions with officials and city staff members in the three affected cities. 

“We’re taking suggestions for possible alterations from them, and trying to figure out how those can be accommodated into our final design plan,” said AC Transit Public Information Officer Clarence Johnson. 

The accommodations are crucial because once the EIR process is completed and the BRT design is finalized, since the plan involves major street developments, the project must go before City Council in each of the three East Bay cities for final approval. 

Already, San Leandro has turned thumbs-down on BRT bus-only lanes in its downtown. Last July, the San Leandro City Council directed the mayor and city staff to send a letter supporting only those BRT alternatives which provided for mixed BRT, regular bus, and auto use. 

Only a few years ago, San Leandro re-striped and put in significant streetscape improvements in its downtown E. 14th Street corridor, by far the most congested traffic area of the city. 

“Based upon the information in the draft EIR, council believed that dedicated BRT lanes would have significant impacts in the northern end of our city,” Public Information Officer Jane McCray of the San Leandro City Manager’s office said by telephone. “We’re concerned about the major impact the dedicated lanes would have on businesses along E. 14th street, particularly because it would necessitate the elimination of on-street parking. Since then, AC Transit officials have met with us to try to get a better understanding of our concerns and to possibly come up with alternatives we could live with.” 

McCray said that “perhaps” one accommodation might be to have the BRT dedicated lanes set down in “limited sections” in the San Leandro downtown area. 

Another area where BRT dedicated lanes would have a major effect is in Oakland’s Fruitvale District, where the city only recently made streetscape improvements in connection with the Fruitvale Transit District. At some times of the day between Fruitvale and 38th avenues, along the heavily congested International Boulevard, traffic has been at a virtual standstill because of the improvements. 

Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, who represents the Fruitvale district and supports BRT, says he has been in negotiations with AC Transit officials about proposed changes to BRT in the Transit Village area adjoining the Fruitvale BART station. 

“Some of the business owners around 34th and 38th avenues had some concerns, particularly about where the buses are intended to stop, and we’re trying to work that out,” De La Fuente said by telephone. “We want to make sure that the impact on our area is beneficial. I’ve already been able to work out some of those concerns, and some of them, we are still working on. The good thing is that we have plenty of time to work this out.”  

In a letter sent to AC Transit General Manager Rick Fernandez, De la Fuente listed six “concerns” he had about BRT in the Fruitvale. On affordability, he wrote, “AC Transit already has some of the most expensive bus service in the Bay Area, and Oakland households have among the lowest incomes in the Bay Area. … The new Bus Rapid Transit service should a) be affordable to those who need it most and b) not do anything to increase the price of local service.” On the matter of service: “The level of service for both the BRT and feeder lines should be higher than what it is now at all hours of the day.” And on median landscaping: “The City/Redevelopment Agency has made a significant investment in the median strip on International Boulevard. The median provides for green public space and traffic calming. Any alterations the BRT project makes to the median should be at the expense of the East Bay BRT Project and should not result in any net decrease in public space and greenery in that immediate area.” 

In his letter to Fernandez, De La Fuente also said he had concerns about the impact BRT would have on congestion and the loss of parking along the Fruitvale-International Boulevard corridor. 

In a telephone interview, De La Fuente said that bringing rapid transit along International Boulevard is “essential” to the community, an “integral part” of both his and the city’s goal of bringing “transit-oriented development” to Oakland. But the council president said that it was “important to integrate AC Transit’s plans into what we already have.”  

In other parts of Oakland, city officials have either tried to re-write its streetscaping proposals to accommodate the proposed BRT, or else held up proposals altogether while waiting to see if BRT goes through. 

Stephanie Floyd Johnson, an economic development/redevelopment program manager with Oakland’s Redevelopment Agency, said that BRT’s proposal has affected city plans for four International Boulevard streetscape improvements south of the Fruitvale.  

“I won’t say I attribute all of the delay of those projects to AC Transit,” she said, “but the longer the city has waited to move forward with those projects, the more BRT has had an effect.” 

Johnson said that in the late ‘90s, Oakland allocated money for streetscape improvements in four “nodes,” in that area—40th to 44th avenues, 72nd to 75th avenues, 80th to 89th avenues, and 105th Avenue to the San Leandro border. Only one of those “nodes” was completed—the Durant Square area near the San Leandro border, where a median was put in along with other improvements. A median, along with landscape bushes and trees, was put in on International in the 80th to 89th avenue node, but completion of the project was stopped after AC Transit’s BRT proposal was introduced. 

“The city had plans for that area that would have improved pedestrian safety,” Johnson said, “including traffic calming measures, improved pedestrian traffic lights, and sidewalk bulbouts to make pedestrians more visible to vehicles, and to lessen the amount of street that they have to cross.” 

But Johnson said that the bulbouts, in particular, were not compatible with AC Transit’s plans for dedicated center bus lanes, and that after AC Transit expressed its concerns, “it made it difficult for the city to move forward to get additional funding to complete the projects. Because the bids were coming in higher than we expected, we had to supplement the city funds with other funding. We had been pursuing federal funds through the Metropolitan Transit Commission, but that’s when AC Transit began proposing BRT, which was not compatible with everything the city was proposing, and when your local transit agency is not in full support of your transit plans, it’s like waving an orange flag in front of the funders. The murkier the situation gets, the more the funders feel they should take a step back until the water clears. It’s difficult for the city to get a plan approved under those circumstances.” 

In addition, Johnson said Oakland held off on some of its streetscape improvement plans because part of the AC Transit BRT proposal is to also do streetscape improvement. “We decided it was better to wait to see what portion of their project was able to get funding,” she said. 

The city went through with the Fruitvale Transit Village improvements on International, according to Johnson, because the median width that the city placed in that area would accommodate a BRT dedicated center lane when and if such a lane is installed. 

Johnson said that meanwhile, the city has redesigned its four-node East Oakland plan to be consistent with AC Transit’s BRT. Those plans are currently being vetted by Caltrans and, if approved, would go out to bid by the end of the year. 

But BRT would be the death knell for at least one major portion of Oakland’s streetscaping project already completed in East Oakland. 

“It would pretty much take out the trees we’ve put in the median” from 80th to 89th avenues, Johnson said. “We would have to redesign that area to move some of the trees to the sidewalks.” 

Johnson said that the city funding for the International Boulevard streetscaping project is still in the budget, and “we’re still hopeful that the nodes will still happen.” 

Unable to defeat Tom Bates in a challenge at the polls last year, Berkeley tree-sitter Zachary Running Wolf launched a second campaign Monday, this one aimed at a recall election to unseat the mayor. 

But if the results of last year’s mayoral race are any indication, he has a formidable challenge ahead. 

In the contest held last November for a two-year mayoral term, incumbent Bates locked up 25,680 votes to Running Wolf’s 1,880. Challengers Zelda Bronstein won 12,652 votes and last-place finisher Christian Pecaut collected 517. 

But Running Wolf said that while he considers the vote totals suspect, given that a court has ordered a new election on the medical marijuana measure, a more important consideration is a shift in public opinion.  

“Things have gotten a lot worse, and he’s been opening up the city to UC and the big developers,” said the once and future candidate.  

“I don’t think it has a snowball’s chance in Hades,” said City Councilmember Laurie Capitelli, a frequent ally of the mayor in council votes. “It’s a terrible waste of energies on some people’s parts that could be better used in working toward something positive.” 

Running Wolf has garnered a higher profile in the last year after taking up residence in the branches of a redwood just west of California Memorial Stadium. 

The Native American activist climbed the branches Dec. 2, before sunrise on the day of the annual football Big Game with Stanford. 

He has said his protest is both to protect trees and to save the Native American remains he suspects are buried in the soil beneath the grove. 

Though he has been frequently grounded by a series of arrests by university police, fellow tree-sitters have occupied arboreal perches in their campaign to stop UC from building a high tech gym and office complex at the site of a grove dominated by venerable specimens of Coastal Live Oak. 

The 44-year-old Blackfoot said he formally launched the 75-day recall period Friday when he posted a registered letter to the mayor, who has 10 days to respond. 

With the mayor out of the country, Running Wolf said he believes he’ll be left with 61 to 62 days to get the 10,000-plus signatures he needs to account for a quarter of Berkeley’s registered voters. 

“He has to be stopped from giving away the city. With the downtown plan the university wants, we’ll be giving up our tax base so UC can build its tax-exempt buildings in the city,” he said. “It’s like the Oklahoma land rush, where the Sooners raced their covered wagons into Indian Territory to grab up all the land—except in this case, there’s only one wagon, and it’s called UC Berkeley.”

Registered nurses plan to walk off their jobs at two Berkeley hospitals in Berkeley starting at 7 a.m. Wednesday as the start of a two-day job action. 

Alta Bates Summit Medical Center at 2450 Ashby Ave. and the associated Herrick Campus at 2001 Dwight Way are part of the Sutter Health chain, which is the target of the action by members of the California Nurses Association (CNA). 

CNA represents 5,000 nurses at the 15 Sutter hospitals in Northern California. The chain is headquartered in Sacramento. The walkout is scheduled to end at 7 a.m. Friday, according to CNA spokesperson Charles Idelson. 

The union said members will hold noon rallies on both days of the walkout at the Ashby Avenue hospital. 

But will the walkout last two days, or will the hospital chain respond with a lockout, extending the absence of union workers by another three to four days? That possibility is raised by ads placed by two agencies specializing in providing strike-breakers which are looking for temporary nurses to fill the vacant slots. 

Participating in walkouts at the two Berkeley hospitals and Oakland’s Summit Medical Center will be 1,700 nurses, said CNA spokesperson Liz Jacobs. 

Among the key issues behind the action, Jacobs said, are the union’s calls for better staffing ratios, adequate nursing coverage during breaks, creation of a “lift team” at each hospital to assist in patient handling and instituting rapid response teams including a critical care nurse and a respiratory therapist to handle emergencies. 

Pay has not been an issue in negotations, said Idelson. 

Jacobs said that as of late Monday afternoon no new talks between the hospital chain and the union were planned. 

“We met with a mediator Friday, but there was no progress and nothing more has been scheduled as of this moment,” she said. 

Jacobs said U.S. Nursing, a Colorado-based firm which specializes in temporary staffing during strikes, has been advertising for nurses to replace the strikers. 

According to the firm’s website, the company, created in 1989, specializes in “working with healthcare facilities and nursing professionals to provide staffing solutions during labor disputes.” 

The site advertises for five-day positions in California and promises a $1,000 payoff if the strike is settled by the time the replacement nurses arrive.  

Another recruiter may be closer to home. The union is distributing copies of a flyer which lists a phone number that belongs to another agency which also specializes in providing strike-breakers: HealthSource, with offices on Howard Street in San Francisco. 

The flyer offers RNs the chance to earn $2,340 in four days, with a requirement for a commitment of four to six days. 

“We pay for your transportation and luxury accommodations. You are driven to the hospital from your luxury hotel,” it says. A footnote at the very bottom of the flyer adds, “A LABOR DISPUTE MAY EXIST.” 

Repeated calls to Alta Bates Summit spokesperson Carolyn Kemp were not returned as of deadline Monday.

The Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) holds its 43rd meeting next week, with the topic a perennial hot button issue: the role of historic buildings in tomorrow’s downtown cityscape. 

While the meeting is a joint session with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the decision on the proposed chapter drafted by a DAPAC/LPC subcommittee will be up to the DAPAC members themselves. 

The public will be asked to weigh in three days later during a three-hour workshop that will begin at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20, in the Berkeley High School Library. 

Following the workshop, four more are scheduled before the committee’s mandate expires Nov. 30: 

• Oct. 29, to discuss results of the workshop and to adopt chapters on environmental sustainabilty and the much more controversial proposals on land use. 

• Nov. 7, for adoption of the economic development and housing and community health/services chapters. 

• Nov. 12, for work on the committee’s final report and to consider and adopt any final revisions—if any—to the sustainabilty chapter. 

• Nov. 26 will be the committee’s 48th and final meeting, with members considering any last-minute changes to the final report.

When Nicole Sawaya steps into place as Pacifica Radio’s executive director—part-time in mid-November and full-time in December—she’ll have a couple of things that former executive director Greg Guma wished he’d had: one is a unanimous board solidly behind him and the second is a multi-year contract. 

Guma has sat in Pacifica’s executive director slot since January 2006. He left at the end of September, having worked in the tenuous position of “at-will” employee without a contract, answering to a board very different from the one that appointed and supported him, he told the Planet on Friday in an interview at a south Shattuck café.  

The problem, he said, is that some members of the 22-member national board change every year. 

The board, which appoints the executive director, is elected by the local station boards of the five Pacifica stations, plus two representatives of the 125 affiliate stations, which carry some Pacifica programs. Local station boards are elected by listener-sponsors. 

While the idea behind electing local station boards is to promote democracy, only 10 percent of the listener-sponsors vote in local station elections, Guma said. The result is that on local and national levels, board members “do not represent the broad spectrum of the network,” he said. 

Of the board members that originally selected Guma—divided on his selection from the outset—only five or six people of that board remain. Having lost the support of the board majority, Guma said he chose to step down earlier than he had planned, turning in his resignation several months ago. 

The division among the national board members is related to, in part, the members’ differing vision for the station. The question they face is whether the station acts as a cohesive network that includes strong national programming, which Guma favors, or whether it is what Guma calls a “feudal system,” with each of the five stations doing its own programming and rarely coming together with national programming. 

“My vision was in conflict with more local-focused people,” said Guma. 

For network-wide programming to take place, the local advisory boards of all the stations have to want it; support for it has to be built into their budgets, Guma said. At present, each of the local boards develops its budget and programming in a vacuum, he said. 

Consistent and focused national programming that would include a national Pacifica news show, national specials and network-wide editorials would allow Pacifica programming to impact national media and the national debate, Guma said. 

This cannot happen with fragmentation among the stations, where “one week you serve this group, the next week another,” Guma said.  

Nonetheless, he feel Pacifica is doing much that is right. “Despite battles, disagreements, and limitations, Pacifica does produce some of the most politically significant, culturally diverse and educational radio available in this country. And its boards, despite any shortcomings, try their best to reflect constructive values and guide the organization—often at great personal sacrifice,” he wrote in an essay on his experience at Pacifica. 

Guma’s not sure what’s next for him. He could go back to Vermont, though he said his partner likes the Bay Area. He will most certainly write. 

Write about Pacifica? Guma said he might do that, though the story would best be told in fiction. “I could tell the essence and be less likely to be sued,” he said. 

Most of his writing and editing has been nonfiction. He co-founded the Vermont Guardian in 2004, edited Toward Freedom, an international newsletter, and is the author of books including Uneasy Empire: Repression, Globalization, and What We Can Do and The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution. He’s produced a documentary film, written plays, managed and owned bookstores and run non-profits.  

Guma said he is hoping for the best for Sawaya. With the solid consensus of the board behind her and a five-year contract in place, Guma said he thinks she may be able to make some of the changes he was unable to do. 

It won’t be easy, he cautioned, “She’ll have to stick her neck out.”  

More of Guma’s thoughts on Pacifica can be found at http://kpft.wordpress. 

com/2007/09/28/ed-report-on-pnb and 

at http://kpft.wordpress.com/ 

2007/10/01/the-greg-guma-interview. 

Berkeley developers Ruegg & Ellsworth will ask the city zoning board for a permit to construct a 34,158-square-foot, five-story building with 44 apartments, 18 parking spaces and retail space at 2526 Durant Ave. after moving the historic Blood House from the site to 2508 Regent St. 

The project proposal was first submitted to the planning department in 2000 and has since gone through several modifications, the most recent being the proposed removal of the entire structure to make room for mixed-use development. 

Under CEQA, moving a structure designated as a historic resource is supposed to be considered as a significant impact equivalent to demolishing it. 

Originally constructed as a single-family home, the modified 1891 Queen Anne style building has been altered throughout its history and is now used as an office building. 

Designed by architect Robert Gray Frise, the house was built for Mrs. Ellen Blood, who first came to Berkeley in 1889. It is flanked by two other landmarks—the Albra and the Brasfield buildings. 

Although it was built for residential use, the building was illegally converted to commercial use in the late 1980s. 

The units in the house were previously rent-controlled, but it is not clear whether relocating the house would affect their rent control status. 

The Blood House was declared a structure of merit by the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission in September 1999. Ruegg & Ellsworth’s appeal of the designation failed at the City Council a month later. 

The zoning board had previously denied the demolition of the historically designated structure and had wanted the developers to explore other alternatives which would help preserve it. 

The Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association suggested as a compromise a 40-unit project which would retain the house on the site. The concept was approved by ZAB but has since been abandoned by the developers. 

Ruegg & Ellsworth presented the idea of relocating the Blood House to an empty lot at Regent Street and Dwight Way owned by developer John Gordon at a May 2004 ZAB meeting. 

According to a January 2007 addendum to the project’s environmental impact report, because “the residential character of Durant Avenue has been considerably altered, moving the building to another more residential location could mitigate to a less-than-significant level impacts to this historic resource.” 

If the proposal is approved, the house would be lifted from its first floor, using floor joists with steel beams, and lowered onto a trailer which would proceed north to Durant Avenue. After arriving at its location, it would be placed on blocks while the foundation and utility wirings were installed. 

The relocation would take place on a Sunday and local traffic would be detoured to alternative routes briefly. 

Plans to move the UC Berkeley-owned landmarked John Woolley House, at 2509 Haste St., to the same empty Regent Street lot to allow Ken Sarachan to build on the site, which is adjacent to another site he owns at the corner of Haste and Telegraph, are also being explored.

The Berkeley Board of Education will appoint six students to the city’s youth commission at Wednesday’s school board meeting out of the 13 that have applied to the district. 

The list consists of 12 high school students and one middle school student, said district spokesperson Mark Coplan. 

The Berkeley City Council and the school board are each responsible for appointing nine representatives to the youth commission. 

“Some are very young and they don’t have a lot of leadership experience,” Coplan said. “The board looks for any kind of previous involvement in the community and their reasons for becoming youth commissioners.” 

The commission’s principal role is to look at issues affecting youth in the district as well as the city. 

School safety plans 

The board will vote on whether to approve the school safety plans.  

State law requires that every public school in California have a safety plan which combines community, agency and school resources to respond during an emergency. 

Standard school safety site components range from emergency action plans to policies and procedures for sexual harassment and school and after-school disturbances, fights and assaults. 

Amer-I-Can 

The board will vote on whether to approve $20,000 in funds for Amer-I-Can, a life management skills curriculum, at King Middle School. 

Founded in 1988, the program has trained thousands of students and currently operates in 16 cities. It has proved effective in improving students’ grades while decreasing their absences and disciplinary incidents. 

Amer-I-Can will provides one-to-one counseling support to approximately 10 selected students who either need more intensive support or follow-up from earlier session. 

Public hearing 

The board will hold a public hearing to gather input about possible pay raises for bus drivers and custodians who are represented by Stationary Engineers Local 39. The public hearing is scheduled to start at 8:30 p.m. 

When Native America Calling—a live, daily call-in radio program based in Albuquerque, N.M.—started more than 12 years ago, they had a hard time gaining people’s trust. 

“The phones barely rang,” says host and producer Harlan McKosato. “The native communities weren’t just going to call in right away because of their distrust of the media for painting them as ‘savages’ and ‘redskins.’” 

Today, the show airs in 15 states and two countries on 52 stations, attracting some 500,000 listeners with topics ranging from the light-hearted (“Rezzed-Out Weddings”) to serious community issues like meth babies. 

“Our job is really to be in tune with Native America, and then being able to articulate that over the air waves,” says McKosato. “Now that they trust us, it’s just a matter of pushing the button to get people to talk.” 

But Native America Calling’s national success in connecting tribal communities doesn’t solve the lack of telecommunications infrastructure that plagues Indian Country. 

The communications landscape hasn’t changed for Native Americans in the last decade, according to Loris Ann Taylor, executive director of Native Public Media, an organization dedicated to strengthening Native American media capacity. 

“On some Navajo land, they still don’t have telephone lines and sometimes people can’t afford cell phones—and even if they can, reservations are often black holes for cell phone service. A lot of reservations are nowhere near connecting to the Internet,” Taylor says. “In this landscape, the radio is their information highway.” 

That’s why Taylor—dubbed the “Gospel Woman of Radio”—has been working to ensure that there is a radio station in each tribal community. She says that mainstream America is unaware of how important locally produced radio is to the health and safety of Native communities. 

On the weekly radio program “House Calls,” for example, which airs on a Hopi radio station in Arizona, a local doctor answers questions from listeners and discusses Native health issues. “This show is so important because it is connecting the community with a local health care specialist,” Taylor says. “It’s not a program that’s designed for them somewhere else.” 

But these shows are scarce in a media environment that largely ignores Native news. At a recent conference of tribal leaders in California, Taylor recalls, “they talked about how the mainstream media still did not carry stories about their communities. They said it was like writing 5,000 press releases and maybe getting one reported.” 

Native America Calling may have half a million listeners, she adds, but it is not enough. 

“We have 562 tribal nations in this country,” she says, “and they want the same freedom that the rest of America wants: the freedom to express themselves.” 

The national show sees itself as a connector between the local radio stations that dot the Native media landscape. “At the beginning, the whole idea was to create a conversation that would link these tribal stations in remote areas—because they don’t have the Internet, they don’t have cable,” says McKosato. “What they have is radio.” 

The program now serves primarily as a way to bring Native news to audiences in cities like Spokane, Billings, Boise and Flagstaff, McKosato says. “Even though the show’s become an urban thing—most of our listeners are in D.C.—they want to be connected back to the Rez.” 

In the last decade that McKosato has been working on the radio show, he says the core issues of the Native community haven’t changed. “It’s about identity, first and foremost. That’s the core issue. It’s about our relationships with non-natives, our relationships with state and federal governments, and with other minority communities.” 

Cristina Azocar, president of the Native American Journalists Association, says the strength of Native America Calling comes from its recognition of diversity. “They help recognize the differences among us, which mainstream media don’t when it comes to Native issues,” she says. “You can really see the diversity of opinions around Indian Country by listening to the show.” 

They aren’t afraid of controversial topics, either, she adds. “I was on a show a year and a half ago talking about Native American identity issues. We were talking about Rez life versus non-Rez and blood quantum issues and what makes someone an Indian. It got really heated and that made it really interesting.” 

In order to bring more Native broadcasters into conversations like this one, Native Public Media is pushing tribal nations to take advantage of the Federal Communications Commission’s window to apply for a non-commercial educational broadcast FM license, which is open from Oct. 9 to Oct. 15, 2007. 

But it isn’t as easy as it sounds. 

“What’s happening is that [radio] spectrum is a finite resource like land and water,” Taylor says. Available FM radio spectrum goes between 88 and 108 megahertz, and once those frequencies are secured in a certain area, there aren’t any left for Native communities. “The likelihood of getting frequencies in Phoenix is low. There are other areas where it’s locked out. The Cherokee in North Carolina are locked out; there aren’t any frequencies available.” 

Taylor says her group has been trying to educate Native American representatives about the importance of securing frequencies for Native radio stations, but they are concerned with more pressing issues like housing and education. Because Native Public Media only started working on this two years ago, she adds, they are “playing catch-up.” 

Native Public Media, however, will testify on Native telecommunications issues in front of Congress on Oct. 24. “This means that while the FCC’s rules on media ownership are being forged, we’re still working on education,” Taylor says. “It’s like we moved into the house while it was still being built.” 

Taylor says if they aren’t able to secure radio stations for all the tribal nations, they will have to look at new platforms of communication and delve into the FCC conversations on broadband and Internet neutrality. “It’s like this whole universe just opened up and there’s this critical conversation going on, but we’re just a small voice at the table.

This is one of the most stressful parts of the year for seniors at Berkeley High School. This is the time where first semester grades really count, this is the time where the idea of college hits you. This is the time where everything you do will make a difference for the next four years of your life. 

Probably one of the most annoying questions that high school seniors can get is, “So where do you think you are going to college?” Many of us get really annoyed because not only do we have to worry about going off to college, we also have to talk to everyone about how indecisive we are.  

Well, even though we do get really stressed out about college, we have some great resources at our school. A wide variety of resources exist at the College Career Center. There is a box with information about various scholarships in the center. Essay workshops are held there in the morning. Also, there are many essay readers available. We have two full-time college counselors, Ms. Abrams and Ms. Price, who work in the center. Altogether, they meet with each and every senior at our school for a half-hour. They also do drop-in appointments during lunch and after school. In addition, since the beginning of the school year, our counselors have coordinated college visits to our school (two to three different colleges every day). The counselors have been coming into English classrooms with handouts about the college application process.  

We all ask ourselves a lot of questions during this time. Did we take our senior portraits? Are all our absences cleared? Did I ask two teachers to write recommendations? What’s the CommonApp? How much does college cost? Can I afford it? Do I want to go to school in California? New York? Wisconsin? Germany? What am I going to do after college? When is my essay due? But don’t I have three tests today in AP Gov, AP French, and AP English? And I also have a student government meeting after school? How should I divide up my school work and college work? Where do my parents want me to go? Where do I want to go? Do I want to play sports in college? How many extra-curriculars should I do? Should I get a job? Can’t I just relax? Do I even need to go to college? And this is only a partial list.  

For many, this is one of the most hectic times that they will face. So, parents, try to give your kids a break. They have worked really hard in school for the last 12 years. Let them know that they’re doing well and maybe reward them.

Becky Lyman of Code Pink debates Lee Wolf of the San Francisco State Young Republicans in a demonstration / counter-demonstration at the Berkeley Marine Recruitment office, 64 Shattuck Square on Wednesday.  

Code Pink demonstrators say they think it is inappropriate to have a military recruitment office in a town that has passed a number of anti-war resolutions. They further argue that recruiters lie to young recruits about what they’ll get out of joining the military. 

Wolf, who has also counter-demonstrated with the UC Davis Young Republicans at the Woodfin Suites Hotel in Emeryville, the target of demonstrations because of its labor practices, told the Daily Planet that he was applying to the Marines and would become an officer in the intelligence services when he graduates college in May. When he was not debating Lyman, Wolf was filming Code Pink demonstrators. 

“Now more than ever we need those who are willing to serve and fight the war on terror and in Iraq,” Wolf said. 

The law barring construction and substantial renovations of existing buildings perched atop active earthquake faults doesn’t apply to the University of California, one of its lawyers said Thursday. 

That’s because the only mandatory provisions in the Alquist-Priolo Act refer only to city and county governments, John M. Sanger told Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara Miller. 

Sanger is one of two San Francisco attorneys defending the UC Board of Regents in litigation now underway in a Hayward courtroom that seeks to overturn Board of Regents decisions paving the way for a massive construction program at and around Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium. 

Three attorneys representing the City of Berkeley, Panoramic Hill Association, the California Oak Foundation, City Councilmember Dona Spring and other Berkeley residents are challenging approval the Southeast Campus Integrated Projects (SCIP). 

Harriet Steiner, Stephan Volker and Michael Lozeau are pitted against Sanger and partner Charles R. Olson in a case that focuses on two seminal laws governing real estate development in the state. 

By the close of court Wednesday it was all over but a tour of the site by Judge Miller and the lawyers, a day of final argument next Thursday and the judge’s decision—due within 30 days after the lawyers have had their final say. 

At issue are the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act, legislation first passed in 1972, and the California Environmental Quality Act, adopted in 1970. 

The former governs construction on or near earthquake faults which have been active within the last 11,000 years, while the later governs impacts of construction projects and their remedies. 

Alquist-Priolo 

Passed in the wake of the disastrous Feb. 9, 1971 San Fernando earthquake—a magnitude 6.6 temblor that collapsed two hospitals and killed 65 people—Alquist-Priolo bars new construction within 50 feet of an active fault and limits additions or alterations to existing buildings within the zone to 50 percent of a structure’s value. 

The fight over Alquist-Priolo is critical to the future of the Barclay Simpson Student Athlete High Performance Center—the four-story office and gym complex the university wants to build along the stadium’s western wall. 

The site is occupied by a recently fenced grove of coastal live oaks and other trees, several occupied by protesters who hope to save what the university acknowledges are more than three dozen specimen-quality trees.  

The judge’s rulings will determine if the university is bound by the law, and, if so, whether or not the 50 percent ruling should be fixed at a level the city and its allies contend would block its extensive renovation plans. 

Another crucial issue is whether the gym-and-office complex is part of the stadium or a separate building. Olson and Sanger have contend the structures are separate, noting that earlier plans that would have installed them in a six- or eight-floor structure replacing part of the stadium’s western wall were rejected. 

If the judge holds that Alquist-Priolo applies to the university and that the gym and stadium are one, the issue of the stadium’s value becomes critical. 

Project foes contend the stadium’s worth should be set at its current market value—arguably somewhat tarnished by the building’s age and the fact that the Hayward Fault slices through its walls, in Steiner’s phrase, “from goal post to goal post.” 

The university claims that replacement costs should be the standard, give a fat 50 percent margin that would encompass new seating, a lavish new elevated press and luxury skybox array, permanent lighting banks and other renovations—even with new gym added to the mix. 

Beaming up 

Sanger acknowledges that one aspect of the gym construction project will result in an addition or alteration: installation of a new “grade beam” at the base of the western wall to strengthen the structure. 

The university says the beam is needed to prevent possible collapse during excavation of the athletic and office center, and that the cost is trivial compared to the stadium’s value.  

Some of the session was taken up with dueling diagrams, displays on the courtroom screen of drawings each side used to bolster their claim that the gym was or wasn’t part of the landmarked stadium. 

Unlike CEQA, which has spawned a torrent of legislation and higher court rulings, there’s only one binding Alquist-Priolo decision, and it doesn’t deal with the critical issues before Judge Miller. 

Adding to the complexity of the case is the wording of the law itself. 

In court Wednesday, Lozeau pointed to the law’s preamble, which declares the state legislature’s intent “to provide policies and criteria to assist cities, counties, and state agencies in their exercise of responsibility to prohibit the location of developments and structures for human occupancy across the trace of active faults.” 

Sanger responded by pointing the statue’s specific implementation sections where the common phrase is “cities and counties shall ...” with nary a mention of the state or its agencies. 

CEQA claims 

California passed its law months after Congress passed the National Environmental Protection Act, legislation encompassing federal projects with similar environmental protections. 

At its heart are environmental documents that evaluate the impact of construction on biological, geological, historic, cultural, esthetic and other “resources,” spelling out mitigations for any adverse effects, and looking at alternatives that would avoid them. 

The most thorough going report, the one generally required of major projects, is the environmental impact report (EIR), a document which can run more than a 1,000 pages. 

The SCIP EIR is a massive document which includes the stadium upgrade, the gym, a nearby underground parking lot, renovations of Piedmont Avenue and some historic buildings, demolitions of other buildings, a new office and meeting complex joining functions of Boalt Hall law school and the Haas School of Business and repairs to the existing buildings of both schools. 

Adding to the complexity as well as the mass of paperwork stacked on tables along the jury box in Miller’s court is the fact that the SCIP EIR is a sub-document of yet another EIR. 

In legal lingo, the SCIP projects are “tiered off” the university’s 2020 Long Range Development Plan, which itself generated its own lengthy EIR. 

The result is a confusing maze of paperwork as impacts are sought first in one document then the other. Both documents also deal with multiple projects, adding to the twists and turns of the paper trail. 

The final two days of the hearing focused on the SCIP EIR’s sections devoted to project objectives, alternatives and the findings cited to justify the approval of both the EIR and the SCIP projects themselves. 

Poison pills 

Olson said the projects were bound together to maximize synergy, design and fundraising. “I admitted it was unusual,” he told the court, but the university had done it twice before in recent years. 

But the judge noted that descriptions of objectives included in the earlier bundled projects “are a little more concrete than some of the rather vague objectives included in the current projects.”  

While the project foes have charged that the EIR failed to give serious consideration to relocating the stadium elsewhere—perhaps to Albany, Richmond or the Oakland Coliseum, Olson said CEQA doesn’t require the university to look for other sites. 

“The university has the unfettered ability to define its own projects,” he said. 

Volker said that when it came to justifying some of the most hotly disputed projects, the EIR relied on the least objective, least measurable rationales—namely “to enhance historic places,” “to create extra-ordinary new spaces,” and “to increase the functionality of existing spaces and facilities.” 

“The objects are designed to eliminate a range of alternatives,” Volker said, and particularly, were used as “poison pills” to kill off any possible alternatives to its plans for the stadium. 

At the meeting where the regents’ Committee on Grounds and Buildings approved the SCIP EIR, Vice Chancellor Ed Denton had told the board keeping the stadium at its present site was critical because of the fond memories it stirred in the hearts of alumni. 

“There was no good-faith discussion of alternatives” said Steiner, and the stadium alternative—relocating to Golden Gate Fields in Albany—“was designed to be eliminated.” 

Thus, she said, the university failed to provide that reasonable alternative mandated by CEQA.

Accused by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office of lying about where he lives to maintain his seat on the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board, Rent Board Member Chris Kavanagh stepped down temporarily from his post while he battles the charges in court. 

Kavanagh, 49, pleaded not guilty at his Sept. 27 arraignment in Oakland Superior Court. He faces five felonies relating to election fraud. 

“He’s voluntarily stepping down,” Rent Board Executive Director Jay Kelekian told the Daily Planet Tuesday. Kelekian said he had encouraged Kavanagh to do so. 

Kavanagh made his decision public in an Oct. 2 letter addressed to Rent Board Chair Jesse Arreguin, in which he said that continuing to sit on the board had become “a distraction … and risk[s] impacting the critical work and mission of the Rent Stabilization Board.”  

Kavanagh requested the leave between Oct. 2 and the end of the year. “I will return to the board if the charges are resolved before the end of the year,” Kavanagh wrote in the letter, further asking for his $500 board stipend to be held in escrow. 

That stipend was the target of a grand theft charge against Kavanagh, accusing him of illegally accepting the stipend and benefits accorded by the city.  

Other charges include registering to vote where he is not eligible; voting where he is not eligible to vote; filing false nominating papers and perjury. Kavanagh was arrested by Oakland police Sept. 21 and freed on $30,000 bail two days later. 

“I continue to believe that when all the facts are presented that I will be cleared of the charges and allowed to continue representing the citizens of Berkeley,” Kavanagh wrote. 

Kavanagh is scheduled to return to Alameda County Superior Court Oct. 26 to have a preliminary hearing date set.  

At issue is a cottage on 63rd Street where Kavanagh’s name is on the lease. The question of Kavanagh’s residency was sent to the district attorney in 2003, but the office did not charge him at the time. Kavanagh’s possible residency in Oakland came to light again this year when a new owner of the 63rd Street property attempted to evict Kavanagh from the property. 

Kavanagh has told rent board members that he lives in Berkeley and that his girlfriend lives in Oakland. 

Local Green Party members put out a statement last month calling on Green Party member Kavanagh to step down immediately if he was not a Berkeley resident.  

Reached Thursday, School Board member John Selawsky, one of the signatories of the September statement, said the party steering committee had not met to formulate a collective response.  

Speaking for himself, he said he was disappointed that the issue is still unresolved. “He has a right to his day in court,” Selawsky said, adding, however, that he believes public officials should be held to higher standards than private citizens.  

There’s a new sign posted at the Albany Waterfront Park announcing an “Albany Bulb Clean-up Project” beginning Monday, Sept. 24, and going on for two weeks. It warns that “heavy equipment” will be used but assures that the “cleanup will not have a permanent impact on the Albany Bulb’s landscape or usability.” That is meant to be reassuring. On past occasions when bulldozers were used they tore up wide swaths of lush vegetation. Robert Barringer, who called the Bulb home for years, recalled how “they took down a lot of trees and shrubs and they laid them out like corpses.” As for impact on “usabilty,” that’s a very big question.  

To numerous dog lovers the Bulb is a place to let their dogs run free, to artists it’s a place to let their creativity expand, for the urban ecologists it’s a place to plant and nurture a tree, for youngsters it’s a place to skateboard—oops, the folks in City Hall didn’t know somebody built a skateboard ramp there a couple of months ago—and for a handful of people who, by choice or necessity, have no other homes, it’s a place to live—to be free and to be safe. Will this cleanup truly not affect any of these people and others who use the Bulb? Not likely.  

On Friday police went through the park telling campers that they would have to leave. Even if they had broken the news gently, it must have been pretty traumatic for people with no place to go. “They came carrying guns ... with a really bad attitude,” according to K.C., a homeless woman who has been there with her dog for over a year. Some of the campers began packing up their belongings. They talked about possible places where they could safely stay other than city streets and doorways. They called on Osha Neumann, one of the Bulb artists and also a lawyer who has defended many poor and homeless people.  

Neumann immediately wrote a letter to a number of city officials, including the mayor, city administrator and city attorney, pointing out that “this eviction is not only inhuman, it is illegal. Enforcing Albany’s camping ordinance against the homeless when there are no shelter beds available constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.” The city of Albany has no homeless shelters. Neumann cited a number of precedents supporting his allegations.  

On Monday the clean-up began. East Bay Conservation Corps crews rolled in to remove garbage and debris from abandoned campsites. The campers didn’t know when the ax would fall, or that only abandoned campsites were being cleared. They didn’t dare go far away. K.C. made coffee as she always does for whoever came by her campsite. Folks were angry, scared. Watching a pelican soaring and swooping, flying free, people wondered where the world had a place for them.  

K.C. used to breed and train service dogs for people with disabilities. She became homeless when the building she was living in was sold from under her. She has been happy living on the Bulb. When she first became homeless, she says, “For the first time I was really scared.” Instead she found herself welcomed, she felt cared for without losing her independence. If she’s evicted from the Bulb she has no place to go. Shelters will not allow dogs, and she doesn’t have the means to get into regular housing: “Once you’re out here, you’re stuck.”  

Pelican and his partner Berkeley are in their twenties, idealistic, and living on the Bulb by choice, “because it’s beautiful.” Rather than working at a routine job, Pelican wants to “live free and give to the community.” Berkeley shares his vision of the Bulb as a place for “renewal.” She points to the polluted air and water, raging traffic in the distance and Chevron across the bay and talks about working to recreate a welcoming environment for future generations. Together with campers and friends in the community they are cleaning up, planting trees and composting.  

Meanwhile, Albany city officials, having been informed that they can’t simply evict the campers, have been trying to figure out what to do. Reached by phone Monday afternoon, Assistant City Attorney Judy Lieberman explained that the usual procedures after informing people that they’re not allowed to camp, is to go out with Berkeley mental health workers and talk to the people about options and services available. Berkeley and Albany have a joint mental-health district, she explained, which seems to justify their sending homeless people to Berkeley, but it’s not clear what mental health can do for people who need a place to live. She acknowledged that Berkeley doesn’t have enough shelter beds.  

Asked what the city was doing after having told people they must leave without offering any alternative, she insisted that they were not rousting people. “We are not rousting anyone, but kind of standing by.” She quoted what she described as the official police statement, that they are “not taking enforcement posture.” At the suggestion that it would be kind to let people know that they had at least a temporary reprieve, she admitted, “Maybe I will talk to our maintenance crew and see ... if we can convey the message.”  

Albany Mayor Robert Lieber, also contacted on Monday afternoon, was equally vague. He confirmed that Berkeley mental health would be called in to counsel the campers. At this point, he said nobody was being moved. He was asked if the people were now no longer being told they have to leave. Reminded that a few days ago they were told to leave, he replied that “we were going to do that today, but as far as I know that actually hasn’t taken place.”  

Asked if there were plans to make it happen, he conceded, “I think we will. It’s a huge  

problem,” and he alluded to “what happened at Golden Gate Park.”  

Admittedly there are fewer than ten people involved here, but there are countless homeless people on the streets of Berkeley and El Cerrito. Was he worried they would all flock to the Bulb? He didn’t think so. The mayor did give assurances that the art would definitely not be destroyed. However, he considers the skateboard ramp a problem.  

One might be tempted to feel a little pity for the city of Albany. They’re stuck with this piece of land that didn’t even exist fifty years ago and they don’t have the money to manage it. They would like it to become part of the Eastshore State Park, which is part of the state park system. But again money is an issue.  

For the time being the eviction is on hold. Speaking to K.C. on Wednesday, she reported that the mental health people who came by on Tuesday afternoon were accompanied by police, so no one would speak to them. The clean-up operation has also stopped. The East Bay Conservation Corps crew were sent to an occupied campsite, she said, and refused to demolish it. She had high praise for the young people on the crew who “felt this was not right and wouldn’t do it.”  

Furthermore, she said, the contractors who were supplying the heavy equipment were backing off, apparently saying this was getting “too political.” With winter approaching and the city determined to evict them, the future of the Bulb campers is anything but secure.

As late as a little over a year ago, the name of the rising African-American political family dynasty in East Oakland was Hodge. But what appears on the surface to be a growing family feud in East Oakland politics may mean that might soon change. 

Call it the Hodges and Brooks feud. 

Alameda County Department of Social Services Civil Rights Coordinator Darleen Brooks, the sister of Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks, has announced she is running against Marcie Hodge for the Area 2 Peralta Community College District Trustee seat. It was only a year ago that Marcie Hodge lost to Desley Brooks for Brooks’ District 6 City Council seat. 

The Hodge family has been in Oakland elected office for more than a decade. 

Marcie Hodge’s older brother, Jason, was elected to the board of the Oakland Unified School District in 1996, choosing not to run for re-election after the district was taken over by the state in 2003. 

In 2004, while he was still on the school board, Jason Hodge briefly entered the race for the District 7 Oakland City Council seat after reports that incumbent Larry Reid was not running for re-election. But Jason Hodge stopped campaigning when Reid announced that he was still running. With Hodge’s name remaining on the ballot. Reid easily won re-election 68 percent to 20 percent to the District 7 City Council seat in the March 2004 balloting. 

Still, with name recognition built up from two terms on the school board and because he did not actively campaign against Reid in 2004, Jason Hodge remained one of the early favorites for the District 7 City Council seat whenever Reid actually did retire. 

Meanwhile, another Hodge did run and win an East Oakland election in 2004. Jason’s sister, Marcie, easily defeated Johnny Lorigo for the vacated Area Two Peralta Board of Trustees seat, 66 percent to 33 percent. 

A little over a year into her Peralta term, Marcie Hodge announced she was running against incumbent Desley Brooks for her East Oakland City Council seat. 

The Marcie Hodge City Council campaign was a distinctly family affair. Jason Hodge served as her campaign chair and often as her media spokesperson, her mother, Yvonne, served as her campaign treasurer, and for a while, until county election officials ruled it was an improper mixing of religion and state, the campaign was run out of the East Oakland church where her mother is pastor. 

Marcie Hodge had counted heavily on political and financial support from Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente in her race against Desley Brooks, and, in fact, there were some reports that De La Fuente, who has often feuded with Brooks on the council, originally approached Marcie Hodge to run against Brooks. 

De La Fuente, in fact, hosted an initial fundraiser for Marcie Hodge in the 2006 District 6 Council race. But De La Fuente, who was running for mayor of Oakland at that time, was counting on serious opposition in his race only from fellow Councilmember Nancy Nadel, and presumably could let extra money go Hodge’s way. 

After former Congressmember Ron Dellums entered the mayoral race, De La Fuente was forced to concentrate almost completely on his own election, and expected support for Marcie Hodge from outside the sixth district appeared to dwindle. Hodge faded, eventually losing badly to Brooks, 53 percent to 35 percent. A third candidate, Nancy Sidebotham, received 12 percent of the vote. 

Now, if she chooses to run for re-election next year, Marcie Hodge will have to contend with Desley Brooks’ sister, Darleen, for her own Peralta seat. 

For a period, Hodge had a rocky tenure on the Peralta board that might make her appear vulnerable to a challenge. 

In 2005 and 2006, Hodge made a series of charges in Peralta board meetings against the district’s Office of International Affairs, alleging that the office was mismanaging and misappropriating money. The charges grew so heated that after a particularly contentious September 2005 meeting, trustees voted 5-1-1 two months later to censure Hodge for “behavior that is out of compliance with the laws and regulations governing trustee conduct and the established policies of the Peralta Community College District.”  

Because the Hodge-Brooks council race was not close, it was difficult to tell if the censure had any effect on District 6 voters. And since that time, Hodge appears to have repaired her relations with fellow board members. 

However, polite relations and endorsements are two entirely different matters. Peralta trustees have a recent history of endorsing challengers to fellow incumbents. Last year, several trustees endorsed challenger Abel Guillen over incumbent Alona Clifton. Guillen defeated Clifton 55-44 percent in the November 2006 election. 

Point towers and pointed tensions dominated Wednesday’s DAPAC meeting, and by the time the session ended, a resolution for downtown Berkeley’s future skyline remained elusive. 

Members of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee were slated to approve two sections of the new plan for an expanded downtown area. 

With brisk efficiency—including a sharp rebuke of DAPAC Chair Will Travis for an interruption—committee member Victoria Eisen steered the committee through adoption of the plan’s access chapter.  

The 26-page document aims to discourage single-occupant car use, boost mass transit ridership and encourage pedestrians—if need be, even by increasing congestion for motorists. 

Committee members voted 17-0-2 for adoption, with Gene Poschman and Lisa Stephens abstaining. Travis then turned to what the agenda listed as “an opportunity to define and endorse a ‘preferred’ Land Use Alternative.’” 

Drafted by Matt Taecker, the planner hired with UC Berkeley funds to steer the planning process, the proposal calls for a much taller cityscape that DAPAC’s own drafting committee has proposed. 

“Staff has been working very hard to bring together something that draws together the best from all” of the proposals, he said. 

But Taecker’s plan brought back the “point towers” which the committee had repeatedly rebuffed, albeit in smaller numbers than the 14 he had originally proposed, along with significant height increases for most of the rest of Berkeley’s city center. 

Sparks began to fly, with the first and heaviest pyrotechnics coming from Juliet Lamont, who, like Travis, was appointed to the committee by Mayor Tom Bates. 

Lamont had been one of the architects of an alternative chapter drafted by an informal group of committee members, a document which differs significantly from Taecker’s version. 

Former Planning Commissioner Rob Wrenn, who chaired the UC Hotel Task force that drafted a proposal for the university’s plan for a hotel at the northeast corner of the Shattuck Avenue/Center Street intersection, inspired the proposed chapter’s key theme of granting height bonuses only in exchange for concessions beneficial to the city. 

That version, which Lamont helped draft along with Wendy Alfsen and Planning Commission Helen Burke, allowed a base maximum height of three stories downtown that could increase to eight in return for a variety of reasons—including the mandatory state density bonus, which gives increased size in return for developing affordable housing. 

“We worked very hard” to forge a compromise, Lamont said. “We went to people in DAPAC and beyond, into the community. And we tried to get people to move off their positions. We said over and over that it was a compromise. While I appreciate what the staff put into their plan, it is really hard to see it as a compromise based on what’s been discussed so far.” 

The staff proposal, she said, was destined to re-ignite polarizations that the subcommittee had worked hard to heal so they could forge a document that would appeal to the broader community. 

By throwing in the point towers and a call for significant increases in height, “the biggest hot button issue in Berkeley,” the staff plan was certain to ignite dissent and could “spur people to launch a referendum,” she added. 

Declaring that it was realistic to expect the plan to win approval in the city, La-mont said, “I would like to get away from these 16-story towers.” 

The downtown plan is being prepared to serve the needs of two outside agencies: The University of California, which is expanding is off-campus presence into the heart of the city, and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), a regional governmental agency which sets quotas for new housing levels. 

The university has final say over the plan because of the terms of the settlement agreement that ended a city lawsuit challenging the university’s expansion plans through 2020. 

ABAG can, in theory, shut off some state funding to the city if policies aren’t adopted to permit expanded numbers of new residences—though the policy doesn’t have to require the units to be built. 

City Planning Director Dan Marks has told DAPAC members he wants to concentrate new housing downtown because of strong resistance to increased density in the city’s other neighborhoods. 

Taecker’s proposal failed to discuss the mandatory state bonus and how it would apply to his proposed building heights—a point quickly made by Jesse Arreguin and Planning Commissioner Gene Poschman, who has been working on the density bonus question for several years. 

Were the 16 stories before or after the bonuses? And what about other potential bonuses? 

Likewise, was the 120-foot height limit around the BART station pre- or post- bonus? And the 100-foot limit in much of the rest of downtown’s commercial areas? 

“It all comes down to tall buildings,” said Arreguin, who called for a closer look at the volunteer subcommittee’s three-plus-five proposal. 

“We need more discussion,” he said, adding that he would have preferred starting it a year and a half ago. 

Arreguin and Lisa Stephens said they were concerned that the staff proposal didn’t give due attention to concerns about affordable housing. 

Dorothy Walker, a retired UC Berkeley administrator and the committee’s most ardent proponent of fast-tracking high residential density in the downtown, said the issue was people, not building heights. 

Though she wanted more people than the staff plan called for, she said she was willing to vote for it as a compromise. She also urged commissioners not to worry about concerns of current residents. Instead, she said, planners should think more about “the people who are not here” and not worry about “kickback” from angry residents. 

Terry Doran, a former school board member, said he thought fears of backlash were exaggerated. As for Wrenn’s proposal, “I personally am offended by a wall of eight-story buildings in the street.” 

What unites Walker with many of her opponents is a passionate belief that Berkeley needs more housing for people of modest means. 

Steve Weissman, describing himself as a strong believer in density, rejected the point-tower proposal. 

Noting that Berkeley wasn’t a featureless terrain, “I strongly believe that a cluster of 16-story buildings is not going to happen in Berkeley because of what people are saying and because of what it would do to the feeling of the place.” 

Weissman offered an argument quickly picked up by others: The committee should work for a compromise that would result in a strong majority, rather than a narrow, polarizing draft. 

“I agree that our goal should be to come up with a plan where we can have a super-majority vote,” said Wrenn. 

Members also questioned whether the plan should call for an increased number of offices, given that many could wind up occupied by the university—effectively removing them from the city’s tax base while providing no increase in housing to meet ABAG’s quotas. 

Wrenn said he also worried about a plan that would turn the downtown into a cash cow for city government, which could then take funds raised in the city center and disperse them to other parts of the city. 

He also said that the staff’s ready acceptance of a proposal to add a second 22-story hotel downtown should be placed on hold until the developer agreed to part with concessions in return for the right to build a skyline-piercing edifice. The push for concessions in return for height was a constant theme during meetings of the UC Hotel Task force he headed. 

At one point, Eisen moved to approve the staff proposal, but soon withdrew the motion in the face of strong opposition. 

It was Helen Burke who offered an option eagerly seized on by Travis. Why not, said Burke, create a committee to draft a compromise chapter? 

When Travis announced his picks—heavily weighted toward Walker’s end of the continuum—he relented, then called for volunteers, leaving members the opportunity to apply by e-mail. 

With that, the meeting ended.

The administration of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, left for practically politically dead by some local media outlets, rose dramatically from the grave on Tuesday night to win its second major political victory of the year, securing the nearly-unanimous City Council confirmation of its two Port Commission nominees. 

The Dellums’ administration’s first major victory occurred earlier this year when both union and management representatives publicly credited Dellums with negotiating the settlement that ended the Waste Management trash workers lockout. Late last month, as a result of that negotiated settlement, Waste Management officials announced that Oakland residents would receive an automatic credit on upcoming bills for service lost to Oakland neighborhoods during the July lockout. 

Council confirmed West Oakland environmental health activist Margaret Gordon on a 6-1 vote (Councilmember Desley Brooks voting no) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 595 Business Manager Victor Uno on a 7-0 vote. Just before the votes, Councilmember Larry Reid had announced his support for both Gordon and Uno, but was in the foyer outside Council chambers when the vote was taken. 

Some had questioned Gordon’s qualifications because her background is in environmental health and not business or management or development or labor, as most Port Commission appointees have been in the past. Gordon will replace labor leader David Kramer on the Commission, while Uno takes the seat formerly occupied by developer .John Protopappas. 

Dellums was not present in Council chambers during or following the vote, but later released a prepared statement that said, “Both Margaret Gordon and Victor Uno embody my sincere interest in addressing the critical and wide-ranging issues facing our city’s port. The overall success of the Port is a key component of the Model City vision, and I commend the council for recognizing the importance of appointing individuals who are capable of understanding both the economic and the environmental impact of the various Port facilities.” 

Gordon herself, while clearly elated by her confirmation, told reporters afterwards that she would have to see how effectively she will be able to communicate her views on the seven-member Commission. 

Gordon and Uno will both take office at the Commission’s next meeting on Oct. 16. 

Uno’s confirmation to the seven-member Port of Oakland Commission was never in doubt, but Dellums pulled the two nominations from the agenda for the last council meeting before the summer break after it appeared Gordon did not have the five votes necessary for confirmation. Only Councilmembers Nancy Nadel (in whose West Oakland district Gordon lives), Jean Quan, and Jane Brunner had announced their support for Gordon. 

A San Francisco Chronicle article on Dellums’ endorsement of Senator Hillary Clinton for president, published on the morning of the council commission vote, said that “the endorsement by Dellums came as new polls show that his support may not carry the clout it once did. Little more than a year after his election, Oakland voters have become disenchanted with the mayor’s leadership. The city continues to suffer from a high homicide rate and violence. A David Binder poll of 500 likely voters taken last month showed Dellums has lost considerable confidence of Oakland’s voters regarding his ability to deal with tough issues like crime and unemployment, and more than half of those surveyed would not vote for him again as mayor.” 

Presumably, either Oakland councilmembers did not read the Chronicle article or the poll numbers, or else had alternate sources of information on the strength of the Dellums administration. 

One of those sources was reportedly an intense lobbying effort of councilmembers by the mayor in the weeks between the July postponement and the Oct. 1 vote. Dellums and Gordon met personally with opposing councilmembers to explain the nominee’s qualifications and answer questions, and, in some cases, Gordon herself returned for a second interview. 

In remarks from the dais shortly before the vote, at least two Councilmember said that the interviews had convinced them of Gordon’s qualifications. 

“I didn’t know Ms. Gordon very well before she was nominated,” At-Large Councilmember Henry Chang said. “After I talked with her I was very impressed with her and her knowledge of the port.” 

And Councilmember Pat Kernighan said that she talked with Gordon “a couple of times,” noting that “she brings a great breadth of experience on health and air quality issues. If the port is to grow, it has to meet increasingly stringent air quality regulatory requirements. Ms. Gordon sees the growth of the port as important.” 

In announcing her opposition, Brooks said that “we need to move in a direction that enhances the port as one of the economic engines of this city.” Brooks said that while she did not believe that Gordon’s presence on the Commission would advance that goal, “I told the mayor I hope he will prove me wrong, and I look forward to him proving me wrong.” 

But Kernighan’s, Chang’s, and Brooks’ remarks were anticlimactic, the outcome a foregone conclusion after Council President De La Fuente, the reported leader of the opposition to Gordon on the Council, led off the debate announcing that he had switched, and would vote for her. 

“I’ve spoken to the mayor a couple of times, and he is absolutely committed to this nomination as a way to bring a balance on the commission,” De La Fuente said, to applause from Gordon supporters in the audience. “We have a responsibility to work with the mayor.” In the only reference to his earlier opposition, De La Fuente added that “if we have the courage to change our minds, that’s what we should do.”

Representatives of eight Native American tribes say UC Berkeley has failed to provide adequately for the return to their tribes of remains and artifacts it holds at UC Berkeley’s Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology.  

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) coalition will hold a demonstration today (Friday) at noon at Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus to call attention to what they see as the university’s refusal to adequately implement the law, which mandates that federally funded museums identify native human remains and cultural items in their collections and return them to the tribes. 

According to the coalition, the university-mandated reorganization of a semi-autonomous NAGPRA unit at the Hearst Museum has made it more difficult to establish claims that are the basis of the repatriation of native remains for burial.  

Native religious beliefs and the 1990 NAGPRA law that requires repatriation are both violated when remains are not returned to their tribes, Lalo Franco of the Tachi Yokut Tribe in Santa Rosa told the Planet on Thursday.  

For the university, however, the dissolution of the NAGPRA unit is a simple reorganization of functions, integrating the oversight into other museum functions.  

“The reason the university reorganized [the unit] was because it was not an effective unit,” university spokesperson Marie Felde told the Planet on Tuesday, adding that the number of personnel devoted to NAGPRA and the museum’s ability to comply with the law has not changed with the reorganization. 

Integrating the unit into the other museum functions “is the way all the other museums are doing it,” she said.  

Franco said, however, that the disbanded unit was led by Native Americans who understood the significance of the fragments and worked closely with the tribes to help them prepare their claims. 

Now there are no Native Americans at the museum responsible for NAGPRA, he said. 

“These are human beings,” Franco said. “They have a right to be reburied.” 

Corbin Collins, spokesperson for the coalition, characterized those who are seeking the remains as “just ordinary people.” It took the combined expertise and understanding of the Native American scholars in the now-dissolved NAGPRA unit to lay the basis for the claims, he said. 

After preparation at the museum level, claims go to a body that represents the statewide University of California, which includes the two archeologists that recommended the dissolution of the NAGPRA unit, Collins said.  

Franco argued that there is a fundamental clash between researchers and those who view the fragments as human beings. The researchers simply view the collections as “valuable research material,” he said. 

NAGPRA coalition members have been asking for a meeting with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau to create dialog around the issue, Collins said. 

Associate Chancellor John F. Cummins responded. “The chancellor did not want to meet with the coalition. He wanted to meet with individual tribes,” Collins said. 

Spokesperson Felde underscored that Cummins was “more than happy to meet with individuals. It’s important to note it isn’t like anyone is unwilling to meet,” she said. “The associate chancellor is quite open to meeting.”

Rights activist and devout Episcopalian Jane Jackson passed away peacefully Sept. 26 in her beloved Santiago de Cuba. She is survived in the U.S. by her two daughters and their families, by her daughter and her family in Havana, and by all those whose lives she made better during her lifetime of struggle for the rights of people everywhere. Jane was a brilliant, tenacious, determined champion of justice. It is impossible to list all the world’s, the country’s and her neighborhood’s problems to which Jane gave her time, energy, money and love trying to solve.  

To name just a few, Jane fought for civil rights in the United States, ending the Vietnam War, ending apartheid in South Africa, human rights for people with AIDS, and enabling the fullest possible participation for people with disabilities. She strove to prevent and then to end the Iraq War. She stayed up nights finding ways to ease the burden borne by Cubans. She fought for the rights of prisoners, people in nursing homes, medical marijuana users and so many more, including many people she just happened to meet who needed help.  

Born to an affluent family in 1934, Jane’s initial struggle was with dyslexia, which complicated but could never stop her logical mind from satisfying her irrepressible drive to learn. As a young woman she began to suffer bouts of dizziness, diagnosed decades later as Meniere’s Syndrome. Adopting the wheelchair for which she is now best known, she plastered it with social justice bumper stickers and globetrotted for the next 30 years, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.  

So, whenever you see a curb cut, or better yet four curb cuts in the same intersection, whenever you see a person in a wheelchair using a lift on a public bus, or riding BART because the elevator actually worked, Jane is one of the people to thank. We will miss her unavoidable, undeniable presence, usually found on the front lines wherever people are struggling for justice.  

A celebration of her life will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday Nov. 17 at St. James Episcopal Church, 1540 12th Ave., Oakland. Stories, memories and other expressions may be sent to janejackson7555@aol.com or to Jane Jackson, 275 E. 12th St., Oakland 94606.  

Donations in her name may be made to Episcopal Relief and Development c/o St. James Episcopal Church, 1540 12th Ave., Oakland, CA 94606, or to the donor’s favorite charity.  

With very minimal overhead, Episcopal Relief & Development funds immediate crisis relief and a wide variety of long-term development projects identified by local people in communities around the world who will directly benefit by these projects. Housing and water system construction, job training programs and many other projects use local labor and materials, generating a beneficial economic ripple effect in the communities where the money is spent. Its work is unrelated to differences within the Episcopal community on the issue of gender rights, except that those differences may hinder Relief and Development’s ability to raise funds for its work. Thank you for considering a donation to this important organization.  

Libby McMahon is Jane Jackson’s daughter. 

I-M-P-E-A-C-H-! will be spelled out at the Berkeley Marina Sunday, thanks to the efforts of Brad Newsham and some 1,500 others. 

When Newsham, 56, was a young man in 1974, he stood outside the White House as Richard Nixon got into the helicopter for his last official ride, having resigned under pressure of impeachment. 

Newsham told the Daily Planet he wants to see that scene repeated with the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. He has become one of the forces in the impeachment movement—to which he’s added a California twist he calls Beach Impeach. 

There’s been three Bay Area Beach Impeach events so far, during which more than 1,000 people lay their bodies down to spell out “I-M-P-E-A-C-H-!”  

Sunday’s event is set for 11 a.m. at Cesar Chavez Park. Volunteers can show up at 7 a.m. to help lay out the outlines of the letters in string, Newsham said.  

Most people come as individuals but some groups have adopted letters for Sunday’s event. The Green Party has asked people to wear green and will fill the letter “I;” Code Pink has taken “C” and is asking supporters to wear pink; The World Can’t Wait, dressed in “Guantanamo orange” according to Newsham, will fill in the exclamation point. 

Among the notables planning to be at the event are former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the first member of the House of Representatives to file impeachment proceedings, and peace activist Cindy Sheehan. 

Two helicopters will photograph the event at noon. The World Can’t Wait  

is auctioning off one seat on one of the  

helicopters. See: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/ 

eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200157884385. 

Run For Peace 

The Berkeley Marina is going to be a busy place Sunday. Before the Beach Impeach event, United Nations supporters are gathering there at 9 a.m. for the “Run for Peace,” sponsored by the East Bay United Nations Association. Councilmember Linda Maio will be giving out prizes at that event. For more information, visit www.run4peace.org. 

Run Cynthia Run 

Local Green Party members say they believe Cynthia McKinney will announce that she is a candidate for the Green Party nomination for president on Thursday night at an event in West Oakland (after the Daily Planet’s deadline).  

McKinney is slated to speak tonight (Friday) in Berkeley beginning at 6 p.m. at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. and will also be present at the Beach Impeach event Sunday. 

“I hope she says she will actually run for the party’s nomination,” John Morton of the Green Party told the Daily Planet Thursday morning. Morton, who lives in Oakland, said he supports McKinney personally “because there’s a war going on and most the people in America do not want to continue the war.” 

While the president and the “obedient congress” run the war, “How can we sit by and not offer another option?” Morton asked. 

Haiti 

A Bay Area delegation to Haiti will report on the current political situation there, including the role of the United Nations military, which they say is occupying the country. The event is 2-4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 7 at the Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St., Berkeley. 

Burma 

On Monday Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission passed a resolution asking the City Council to urge “the government of Myanmar/Burma to immediately cease the use of violence in suppression of nonviolent protests by its citizens, cease the detention of political prisoners and release those currently held, restore communications within and outside of the country … and enter into sincere negotiations with leaders of the movement for democracy and human rights in Burma/Myanmar.” 

There is a demonstration today at in San Francisco at 2 p.m. at the Chinese Consulate, 1450 Laguna St. urging the Chinese government “to step in and help resolve the situation peacefully,” according to a flyer publicizing the event. 

Watada on trial 

The U.S. Army announced Wednesday its intent to retry First Lt. Ehren Watada October 9 at Fort Lewis, Wash. Watada is the first military officer to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq. 

Watada’s first court-martial ended in a mistrial. 

“The court-martial of Lt. Ehren Watada is another incidence of erosion of the precious Bill of Rights, in this case, that of the soldier. He stood for us; and we must continue to stand with him,” said Watada’s father, Bob Watada, in a written statement. 

Members of the Asian-Pacific Islanders Resist/Watada Support Committee will travel to Ft. Lewis next week to support Watada. For more information call Betty Kano at 527-1401.

This week Berkeley High School students sat for the first of three sets of the California Exit Exam for the new school year. 

Approximately 200 juniors, seniors and students who have transferred from out of state took the English and math exams on Tuesday and Wednesday.  

Students can’t graduate from high school until they have passed the exit exam. 

The juniors and seniors who took the exam are ones who didn’t pass the exam in previous attempts, said Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan. 

“There were also a couple of former Berkeley High students who met all of the requirements for graduation last year, with the exception of the Exit Exam,” he said. “One of these students actually returned from her family’s new home in Texas to take the exam because her BHS diploma meant that much to her.” 

Seniors are allowed to take the test up to three times this year. Juniors can take it twice and the sophomore class will take the test once in February. 

Senior Lashawnda Thompson said that she was taking her math test for the second time. 

“I passed English, but my math is not that good,” she said. “Today’s exam was pretty good and I hope I pass.” 

Another senior, who did not want to give her name, said that she was taking the math test for the fourth time. 

The results are usually available within two months.

On Wednesday morning, Berkeley parents, teachers and elementary school children walked or rode on bikes to school to make a statement about global warming, obesity and to mark International Walk to School Day. 

Alameda County used the event, observed in 38 countries, to launch the Safe Routes to Schools program. 

“One reason why parents fear to let their kids walk to school is because of strangers or bullies. That has to stop,” said Nora Cody, director of Alameda County’s Safe Routes to Schools. “We are also trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, childhood obesity and asthma. All the studies about creating behavior changes show that you need to change the environment. We want to address any barriers that prevent that.” 

Countywide, 50 schools signed up to participate in the day, coordinated by the Safe Routes to Schools Alameda County Partnership, comprising the Transportation and Land Use Coalition, Alameda County Public Health Department and Cycles of Change. 

The partnership received $1 million in funding from the Alameda County Transportation Improvement Authority, Caltrans, Kaiser Permanente and the Laurel, Hewlett and Bayer foundations. 

At Berkeley Arts Magnet (BAM), 78 students walked to school Wednesday while 30 rode their bikes. Twenty students used cars and the rest arrived by school bus. 

Walking ”school buses” were set up at six locations within the one-mile non-busing-zone radius of the school. 

“We had two busy intersections to cross,” said Maureen Jerrett, the BAM task force representative for Safe Routes to School. “First, Virginia and Oxford, with over 25,000 cars a day, and then Virginia and Shattuck, with over 34,000 cars a day. Besides promoting the health benefits of physical fitness and reduced congestion around the schools, our walk increased the visibility in our neighborhoods that kids use these roads to walk to school and need to arrive safely.” 

City officials from the health department, Berkeley police department officers and volunteers from the YMCA were also on hand to help the students. 

According to the Safe Routes to School handbook, cars are responsible for 50 percent of the Bay Area’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

“Travel to school accounts for approximately 25 percent of morning traffic,” Jerrett said. “In one generation, the number of kids walking and bicycling to school has dropped from 70 to 18 percent.” 

Beth Gerstein, who walks her two children to school everyday, said that the exercise makes them more alert. 

“Those are some of the best moments with my kids,” she said. “Why waste the gas? We live in Berkeley. It’s got a fantastic climate and a mile is not that much anyway.” 

Brothers Connor and Cameron Henritzy said they had walked for 40 minutes from Shasta Road to get to school that morning. 

“We drive all the time except for today,” Cam-eron said pointing proud-ly at his “I walked to School Today” sticker. “I am a little tired but it was fun because I got to see a mom and a dad deer. I saw things I have never noticed before.” 

Thousand Oaks, the largest elementary school in Berkeley, asked students to chart with color-coded dots the ways they got to school. 

“A rapid and good natured competition grew between walkers and school bus users,” said Amber Evans, the school’s Safe Routes to School coordinator. “Bikers outnumbered scooters or carpoolers 2 to 1.” 

The two biking trains, which leave daily from Monterey Market and just south of Gilman on Santa Fe, added six families who have never biked to school before on Wednesday. 

Thousand Oaks plans to have Walking Wednesdays every last Wednesday of the month starting this Halloween, when kids traditionally parade along Solano Avenue in costume. 

Photograph by Mark Coplan. 

Alisha, a shy 6-year-old from Nepal, cannot recognize or write her own name.  

She also gets confused between the words “dog” and “dad,” as well as among a dozen other similar words. 

The Berkeley public school first-grader showed improvement during her recent Reading Recovery lesson, an early intervention literacy program that helps children who are struggling to read and write at grade level. 

Starting this fall, elementary school teachers in the Berkeley Unified School District are being trained in Reading Recovery after an eight-year hiatus of the program from the district. 

The current training will also include special education teachers for the first time, allowing interaction with more students. 

“All the children in the reading recovery program have been identified by their kindergarten teachers as being far below basic,” said district literacy coach Tom Prince, who also doubles up as the reading recovery teacher-leader. 

Developed by Dame Marie Clay from the University of Auckland, Reading Recovery has been called an effective intervention strategy by the U.S. Department of Education. 

Prince told the Planet that the reintroduction of the training program was a response to the change in the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act which allowed special education teachers to work with children who have difficulties and offer them an intervention before they officially went into special education. 

“What they are hoping is that a student gets a high quality intervention for a period of time so that they can make progress in class,” Prince said, as he observed a training session Tuesday from behind a one-way screen at Malcolm X Elementary School. 

“It takes a maximum of 20 weeks to get to the classroom average level. The program works because we only train really experienced classroom teachers who have already had successful literacy training. The one-on-one enables teachers to find the competencies each child has and without wasting any time helping them move from the things they know to the next step.” 

Funding from the district as well as the individual school sites helped to build a model classroom at Malcolm X complete with desks, blackboards and other first grade paraphenalia. 

Every Tuesday, 11 teachers face the one-way glass which looks into 108B—the tiny classroom wired for sound— and scribble notes enthusiastically. 

“Is the child engaged?” asked Prince, as Emerson literacy coach Jamie Carlson read aloud from the book “What Can Fly” and gave sound prompts to Alisha, who speaks English as a second language. 

“She’s not clear about her verbs,” pointed out Ellen Bernstein, the reading recovery teacher at Malcolm X who has taught the program for eight years. 

At the end of her kindergarten year, Alisha had scored zero on text knowledge. “Now that she’s in Reading Recovery, within just a matter of weeks she will be at level 3, which is the required level,” Prince said. 

Carlson praised the program. “I have been in the classroom for years and I know you don’t have the kind of strength there you need to give individual students,” she said. “Teachers are thrown into the classroom with a year’s training and that is not enough. Staff development is hit or miss.” 

The program, offered to children who were at the bottom 20 percent of their kindergarten class in the Berkeley public schools for the last nine years, has helped 75 percent of them catch up to the classroom average.  

Bernstein said that she had left the Oakland Unified School District because it had discontinued Reading Recovery. 

“I am glad Berkeley understands the importance of individualized programs,” she said. “I have never had a child who made no progress in Reading Recovery.” 

John Muir principal Gregory John said that the program had helped kids perform well in reading in the district’s Developmental Reading Assessment. 

Research has shown that Reading Recovery reduces the achievement gap. “Ninety percent of the kids in our program are African American or poor or speak another language,” Prince said. “Reading Recovery doesn’t fix everything for everybody, but It’s the best first step they can get. Because the effects of poverty are so great on children, they need additional support as they go on to second and third grades.” 

At a concert on Sunday night we encountered a friend in the seat behind us who has been active on multiple city commissions for many years. I asked him if I’d missed anything, since I’d been in Pasadena over the weekend. He said he didn’t know, because he’d been out of town too. I asked if it was a vacation. “It was outside of Berkeley,” he said. “That’s all it takes to make it a vacation.” But at intermission time I spotted him chatting with another commissioner, and threatened jokingly to bust them for a violation of the Brown Act, California’s open meeting law.  

It’s not illegal for two commissioners to chat about city problems at a concert, but perhaps I should be reporting them to a 12-step program for incurable optimists instead. They’re the kind of people who can’t stop hoping that hired planners and elected officials will be persuaded by reasonable arguments backed by impeccable statistics—regular Candides, in other words. They asked me if Pasadena was anything like Berkeley. 

I lived in Pasadena for my four high school years and spent summers there while I was in college, but I haven’t been back much in the intervening years. This weekend was my 50th high school reunion, but only the first one I’ve attended, so I was curious to see how Pasadena had changed since I’d been away. It gets great PR in urban conservation circles for managing to grow (now closing in on 150,000) without destroying its historic urban fabric. Well, at least for not tolerating any worse destruction than was inflicted by the Northridge earthquake or by Caltrans, which punched a freeway right through some pleasant neighborhoods I remembered from my youth. (Neighboring South Pasadena escaped a similar fate thanks to the labors of local hero attorney Antonio Rossmann, who teaches at UC Berkeley.)  

I was particularly anxious to experience the joys of “Old Pasadena,” a neighborhood which as far as I could remember didn’t exist in my high school days. Checking its obligatory web page, I found the history section , which had click-throughs to paragraphs for the decades in the late 19th century through the 1940s, and then again for the 1970s and forward, but nothing about the time my family had lived there, the late ’50s and early ’60s.  

It turns out that “Old Pasadena” is just what we used to call “downtown” when I was in high school. Its center is Colorado Street, which has historically had the same role in downtown Pasadena that Shattuck has in Berkeley—the street that Woolworth’s was on. Downtown Pasadena was threatened by redevelopment (planners’ code term for demolition of old buildings and relocation of undesirables) in 1971, but angry citizens fought back and managed to save it. 

The crowded reunion schedule left us a couple of free hours on Saturday afternoon when we were planning to walk around and take a close look at the result of their labors. This turned out to be impossible, however, since the city was completely overwhelmed by an enormous game in the nearby Rose Bowl. The participants were some combination of UCLA, USC, Stanford and Notre Dame—we could never figure out which two of the four were playing in Pasadena and which in Los Angeles—but whoever they were, their fans were numerous, noisy and driving massive SUVs. Every square inch of downtown had been consumed by their parking and their parties (it is Southern California, after all), so we finally gave up and spent the afternoon rocking on the porch of our early 20th century bed and breakfast, much pleasanter than trying to visit the stores which make up the new Old Pasadena.  

We did get a cursory look at the area at night, on our way to and from celebratory events. For Berkeleyans, the most unusual characteristic is the strong dominating presence of what some around here call “mall stores. That’s everything from Pottery Barn to Tiffany’s—many chains that I think of as “catalog stores” since I seldom go to malls. Evidently the Shop Local movement hasn’t caught on much in Pasadena. That might just be the inevitability of successful urban preservation, since you see the same national retailers in, for example, the much-praised Portland.  

Great big off-street parking garages were also evident. Shoppers don’t seem to have abandoned their cars, but at least they can get them off the streets. The garages offer 90 minutes of absolutely free parking, enough time to do a lot of shopping. On-street meters, on the other hand, charge $2 an hour, so drivers are motivated to use the garages. And if they’d like to spent more time just walking around, there’s a “Unified” valet parking service with stands all over downtown which serve all the area businesses. It lets you leave your car at one stop and pick it up hours later at another one.  

My old classmate who was with us, the one who has lived in New York City for most of her adult life, could hardly believe that one. She hadn’t rented a car, and was hoping to find a “car service” or “taxis” somewhere to get around, but those Manhattan exotica aren’t any more available in Pasadena than they are in Berkeley or El Cerrito, so she rode with us for most of the weekend. 

Yes, Virginia, we rented a car. Eager beaver Berkeley friends, transit groupies, had assured us that the LA Metro would render that unnecessary, but of course that’s still fantasyland. The Metro does whisk you from Pasadena to downtown LA if that’s where you happen to want to go, but it did nothing for my friend, who needed to get home to her sister’s house in the old bedroom suburb of Altadena from a Mexican restaurant in central Pasadena after the reunion dinner. A quick check of the online map for Pasadena Area Rapid Transit Service (ARTS) showed mostly buses running along big streets (“corridors”) in commute hours, just as AC Transit’s buses like to do. That’s cold comfort for a woman of 69 with a residential destination late at night. 

Inevitably, my thoughts turned to what I know about the progress, or lack of it, on the revisions to Berkeley’s downtown plan which have been forced on the city by the University of California’s insatiable appetite for expansion. The latest nasty rumor is that before he went to Europe the Mayor met privately with a couple of small groups of the true believers on DAPAC (Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee), notably the transit fans and the creek people. If you believe the stories, he told both sets that they wouldn’t get what they wanted, specifically Bus Rapid Transit in all its splendor and/or a water feature on Center Street, unless they agreed to allowing a forest of 16-story “point towers” to be built downtown. (And no, phallic jokes are off-limits in a serious discussion of public policy.)  

That’s the very plan which has been submitted—SURPRISE!—by the hired gun planner for DAPAC rubber-stamping this week.  

Is there any chance this group will be able to do even as well as Pasadena with the university’s heavy thumb on the scale and the electeds firmly in the pocket of the other major downtown landowners? Not very likely, particularly since the more public-spirited commissioners seem to have started bickering among themselves.  

One BRTaholic on the commission who met with the Mayor subsequently circulated an email charging Councilmember Kriss Worthington with being a tool of the dread NIMBYs just because he’s asked a few questions about possible BRT flaws. Said commissioner lives in the most barriered neighborhood in Berkeley himself, of course, but he wants more big busses for the rest of us who don’t have barriers. Even people who’d actually like to be able to take buses more often were annoyed by that one.  

Oh yes, and how was the reunion? That’s another story for another time, but let me just say here that they were all nice girls in our youth, not a mean one in the whole bunch, and they don’t seem to have changed much. It wasn’t Berkeley, that’s for sure—a real vacation, in other words. 

CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thank you for mentioning my book in your recent article on Nicole Sawaya. The correct title of the book is Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War, not Easy Listening... . 

Matthew Lasar  

• 

ERRATUM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have a correction to your Oct. 2 article, “The Theater: ‘Turn of the Screw’ Set in Louisiana” by Jaime Robles. The article said: 

“After two months of auditions, the role was double cast for two pairs of children: Brooks Fisher and Madelaine Matej, and Nick Kempen and Kelty Morash. All four children have sung the roles before; Nick and Kelty appearing in the 2007 Adler Fellows production at the Lincoln Theater in Napa.” 

Madelaine has not sung the role before—this is her first solo role. 

Elisabeth Thomas-Matej 

• 

SCHOOLS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Yolanda Huang most certainly is entitled to her opinion, expressed in her Oct. 5 letter to the editor. In fact, she was on an interview panel of community members that the school district put together, and had ample opportunity to express those views. 

However, I want to point out to those not familiar with Ms. Huang’s history with BUSD that she actively campaigned against our recent measure ensuring reduced class sizes, teacher training, music and art in our schools, library services and other programming for our Berkeley public schools. Her words of concern for our kids do not seem to correspond to any real financial support. And lest anyone believe the State of California adequately funds our public schools, our children and our teachers, I have one fact as witness against: California is 44th of the 50 states in per pupil monetary support. 

John Selawsky 

Vice President, Berkeley School Board 

• 

HUMAN FAMILY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his “Open Letter To Code Pink,” Captain Richard Lund rhetorically asks what he has done to be considered a traitor. Certainly Mr. Lund has shown “honor, courage and commitment” to his country. However, we are all living members of the human family as well as being Americans. In our larger, more inclusive family, we also have a responsibility of honor, courage and commitment. We also value peace, love and unity above war, hate and division. At our dinner table, Mr. Lund sits alone. 

Michael Bauce 

• 

DEATH OF GARY KING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Too bad Sam Herbert had a restless night from the noisy helicopters. I have a “strong hunch” the friends and family of Gary King have more than their share of wakeful nights. I read the Berkeley High School Jacket report of the killing and thought it was excellent. Ms. Herbert objects of their use of the word “murder” to describe the killing of Gary King, age 20, shot twice, in the back, by an Oakland police sergeant. Perhaps that is not technically, legally correct. Maybe the word should be execution. Whatever you call it, that child is dead. Yes, I’ll call him a child. My own grandkids are not that much younger.  

Ms. Herbert accuses the Jacket of being “tortuous and libelous.” Yet, she herself states that young Mr. King drew a gun on the officer. To my knowledge that has not been confirmed. An unnamed police spokesman stated that a gun was found at the scene. The story from the police is that the policeman thought King was a murder suspect, and was trying to question him. As it turned out, he was not the suspect at all. Ask yourself why would King attempt to fire on a policeman when he knew he was not the suspect in question. This is the third shooting by this policeman. Two have resulted in death. The third is permanently paralyzed.  

Ms. Upstanding Citizen Herbert, you may think Gary King and his ilk are just worthless criminals. Why don’t you go down to the corner of 53rd and MLK and take a look at the lovely shrine of flowers and candles that remain to this day? Apparently, this boy was loved. Now he’s dead. Sleep on that. 

Barbara Henninger 

• 

SUMMER OF LOVE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

After the Summer of Love, police dragnets swept Haight, rousting homeless youths as well as drug dealers. Many escaped to Telegraph. Moe (of Moe’s Books fame) raised money to fund the Heroin Emergency Life Project (H.E.L.P.) which sponsored the Berkeley Free Clinic. Janis Joplin died at a Los Angeles hotel in October 1970 at the age of 27 owing to an injection of too-pure heroin. “The stampede of misfits to the Bay Area, the heavy drugs that were passed, the lack of human services,” says the caption to an article published in the Cal alumni magazine, “all contributed to the Summer of Love’s short-lived celebration.” Country Joe was indeed one of the “more concerned and prescient and cause-committed of our generation.” The “summer” may be said to have started Jan. 14, 1967 at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park, and may be said to have finished January 30, 1968 at Pauley Ballroom, where Country Joe, Mad River and Charlie Musselwhite raised a tidy sum for H.E.L.P. I know because they needed to form a Cal student club to reserve Pauley, and Moe buttonholed me for the job because he knew I was then enrolled.  

Incidentally, the Berkeley Lothlórien co-op is but the pale shadow of the notions popularized in the ’60s, although maybe they embody the hippie virtues: drugs, free love, vegetarianism, and rock n’ roll.  

Richard Thompson 

• 

HUMAN RACISM 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Regarding the response to “Cheers to Edna by Jerry Landis: Mr. Landis, if you truly believe your own words, and are a man of your convictions, then by all means lead the way by example for population reduction, otherwise your convictions carry no weight in reality. This kind of self-loathing is the ultimate in human racism. There are indeed terrible people, environmental degradation, catastrophe and “stubborn breeders,” as you say. There has also been, in the last 120 years, amazing advances in medicine, science, agriculture, technology, spirituality and a myriad host of other amazing, life giving and life enriching leaps forward. I might also add, importantly, that these things do not come without sacrifice, without ill side effects or birth pangs. Goodness does not operate in a vacuum, and yes, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions, so to speak. Our human experience will ultimately be weighed by our efforts to minimize the strain we place on ourselves and our planet while moving forward, but make no mistake, we are moving forward, albeit awkwardly and at times stumbling backwards. The minds we have been blessed with (the only ones in nature with the ability to self loathe, as Mr. Landis so tactfully demonstrated) are a miracle of evolution, precious, fragile and filled with promise. Let’s use them for more than musing upon the desire to self destruct. 

Ernest Grouns 

Minneapolis, MN 

• 

SCHIP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As the great Fats Waller famously remarked, “One never knows, do one?” Certainly one never knows just what veto power President Bush will exercise next. This week it was the Children’s Health Insurance Bill, which comes as no great surprise. Having requested nearly $200 billion dollars in supplemental financing for war operations, no way was our “Decider” going to approve this insurance bill which would increase the program’s cost by $38 billion over five years. 

Democrats have pointed out that this equals the cost for about three months of operation in Iraq. Many prominent Republicans have expressed their dismay at this veto. 

Claiming that the bill is too costly, that it would amount to government-run health care, Bush callously dismissed the fact that 10 million poor children in this country are in need of health insurance. So what if there’s an alarming rise in the rate of children afflicted with asthma, birth defects and autism? This is of little concern to Mr. B., who chooses to sacrifice thousands of American military and wreak havoc in Iraq in his determination “to bring democracy” to a country which fervently wishes we’d get out! 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

NOT A VOYEUSE 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In a recent issue, Robert White writes a disingenuous response to my report about offensive behavior on Shattuck Avenue. Since I reported that a man stood around with his hand inside his pants on his crotch in downtown Berkeley for two hours, he assumes I stood there for two hours continually watching the man and makes a personal attack on me based on this disingenuous assumption. Robert, would you also term “voyeuristic” the unfortunate San Francisco pedestrians who observe and report to police the sex acts or urination/defecation taking place in public on San Francisco sidewalks, as described in stories on the homeless in this week’s San Francisco Chronicle?  

In this case I saw the offensive behavior three times during a two-hour period and it is a reasonable assumption that the behavior was constant during that period: a period during which hundreds of other people were also confronted with this man’s lewd behavior as they unfortunately had to walk by him. Having a forum as the Daily Planet provides for public discourse is quite valuable. I suggest that people bring their best selves and thoughtful writings to this forum, rather than using it to make personal attacks or disingenuous comments.  

Deborah Cloudwalker 

• 

LETTERS POLICY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In a recent issue of the Planet, you printed a letter from one reader (Robert White) which attacks another reader (Ms. Cloudwalker). I feel strongly that media should not publish letters which are absent of meaningful argument and whose sole purpose is to make snide remarks or mean-spirited accusations about another individual, particularly someone who is not a public/political figure.  

Robin Goldman 

• 

ALQUIST PRIOLO ACT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Your reporting of the three lawsuits about the student high performance center and other South East Campus projects is far superior to that of any other newspaper. Thank you. The lawsuits in part assert the university violates the Alquist Priolo Act. The Alquist Priolo Act governs construction on or near earthquake faults.  

Curiously, although the university in its environmental impact report states that the university is subject to the provisions of the Alquist Priolo Act, university counsel asserts in court that the university is not subject to the act. Which is it? It cannot be both.  

Certainly the university did not comply with the Alquist Priolo Act when they built the Foothill Housing Project on top of the Louderback trace of the Hayward Fault. Most likely, the parents of students living there were never informed. I bet they would like to have known that fact before they signed contracts for the most expensive student housing at UCB. 

Now, some 20 years after that violation, and in face of all the increased knowledge about earthquake faults and the damage and loss of life from earthquakes, the university asserts its right to violate this safety act once again. 

Apparently, the euphoria of a winning football team so intoxicates and drugs the public and the reporters, they are blind to the violation of good public policy and common sense. To them I say: “Get real!” The football team can train and win anywhere, if indeed winning football games is the most important activity for a university. 

Ann Reid Slaby 

• 

BIOFUELS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

It would be nice if the news media would at least scratch the surface of the issues. It only takes a moment’s thought to see the folly of the “biofuels” promises. 

1. It’s obvious that no amount of biofuels can begin to replace our huge appetite for oil. Just look at the number of vehicles on the road, and multiply by the number of roads and the number of cities in the world. 

2. It’s obvious that the growing of biofuels has to replace either (a) wildlife habitat or (b) land used for producing food. Neither is in such large supply that we can afford to lose it. 

3. It’s well known that invasive, exotic species are one of the major causes of the worldwide extinction crisis. Switchgrass should be left where it is native (China?), and not let loose in other environments, where it would be impossible to contain it. 

4. Solar energy is also no panacea. Unless solar panels shade only man-made structures (e.g. roads and rooftops), they will destroy more wildlife habitat. 

That leaves conservation as the only feasible solution to the alleged “energy crisis.” 

Mike Vandeman 

San Ramon 

• 

TRASHING THE NEIGHBORHOOD 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Would you consider buying an elegant home from realtors with garbage filling the walk outside their offices? Or patronize a bakery, in the same office building, with so many fragrant garbage and recycling cans in front, six days out of seven, that patrons and passersby play dodge-can to get through? Would you then eat your goodies on a bench ogling and sniffing this heavenly delight? Apparently, for some people, the answer is, yes. Amaze your senses. Walk up Colusa to Solano. Check out the scene. 

Unfortunately, resident neighbors in this mixed use area have all too ample opportunity. Andronico’s and a six-unit condo on the same block manage to avoid a public health, safety and pollution problem simply by bringing cans out at collection time, then putting them away. Several of us have suggested this to tenants and landlord on our corner—several times. Any ideas? 

H. Bruner 

• 

PUBLIC TOILETS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Almost everybody in Berkeley agrees that the city’s street dwellers should not be allowed to defecate or urinate on the sidewalks. The City Council won’t take action against this practice until there are enough public toilets meet the need. This should be a very easy problem to solve. There are already many portable toilets around the UC stadium. Surely, the university would allow the street people to use some of these. The city could install others in People’s Park and on public property near downtown. Portable toilets are not expensive to rent; the supplier would service them; and there are many suppliers who could deliver and install them on a couple of day’s notice. 

This would be a stop-gap measure. Permanent public toilets could come later. The city needs some, especially if it wants to realize its dream of becoming a world-class convention city. 

John G. McGarrahan 

• 

OAKLAND METRO OPERA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

We were faithful attendees of Oakland Metro Opera, performing in an old bar at First and Broadway, until the hot, crowded, airless Sunday afternoon Bob passed out (doc called it “just old church-lady syndrome”) and we decided we had to give up the work of this fine company. 

But then last week’s Daily Planet alerted us to their new venue at 630 Third St. at MLK Way, a big old warehouse that still presents formidable challenges and minor discomforts, but not suffocation. Their performance of Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw there is truly impressive. This is not a review, so I won’t go into detail. I just urge everyone to go and enjoy the work of these talented, accomplished folks before Turn of the Screw closes Sunday, Oct. 14. 

Dorothy Bryant 

• 

POOLS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Berkeley needs a new vision to reinvigorate our public aquatics programs. As of Oct. 6, two of Berkeley’s three outdoor public pools will be closed once again for seven months for the winter. The outdoor pools have serious deferred maintenance problems that could require any one of them to be shut down at any time because of safety issues. Attendance at Berkeley’s outdoor pools has been taking a plunge for over two decades; due to neglect, shorter hours, schools neglecting aquatics, elimination of fun features like high dives, and more. 

Meanwhile, the Warm Water Pool, used by many for warm water therapy, must move from the Berkeley High campus and find a new home and the money to build it. 

Berkeley’s public pools are on school sites and were built to teach children to swim. Unfortunately, BUSD has largely abandoned the pools. King and Willard students have perfunctory “swim lessons” a few times a year by their gym teachers, not aquatics coaches. Many if not most children sit out. 

Pool users have noticed some recent improvements in management, staff and day-to-day maintenance. However, small changes will not be enough. Berkeley needs a new vision for its pools that will reinvigorate public aquatics and make it a source of water competence, fun, exercise, and community for a much larger portion of our population. 

We think the existing outdoor pools will need to be fixed up, but that won’t be enough. Berkeley’s weather is cool in the winter, and a year-round aquatics center with an indoor element, fun features for the kids like slides, and plenty of room for aquatics exercise classes and lap swimming for adults would attract several times more users than our existing aquatics system. For example, the City of Newark, population 42,000, has an indoor Aquatic Center that attracts 180,000 visits per year and has lap swim 15 hours a day, extensive aquatics classes, and a line out the door for recreation swim. 

The most likely location for an aquatics center is BUSD’s West Campus site on University Avenue. The City already runs an existing outdoor pool at the site, the site has plenty of room for expansion, and a large part of the site is potentially BUSD surplus. Shared parking, freeway, transit and bike path access, and proximity to West Berkeley, with the largest concentration of Berkeley’s children, are all pluses. 

We need you, swimmers and non-swimmers alike, to help create and promote a vision to reinvigorate Berkeley’s aquatics programs. Please come to our public meeting about the West Campus aquatic center concept this Wednesday, Oct. 10, at 7 p.m. at the City of Berkeley Corporation Yard Public Meeting Room, 1326 Allston Way. More information can be found on our website at poolsforberkeley.org 

Bill Hamilton, Barbara Steuart,  

Stephen Swanson 

Pools for Berkeley 

• 

YAY! GREEN BINS! 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks Berkeley for the food scrap recycling service. I second Jennifer Steele’s suggestion (Letters, Oct. 4) to use BioBags from Elephant Pharmacy to line the small green food waste bins. I leave my green pail on the kitchen floor next to my chopping table. It’s simple to toss scraps in the bin as I cook. The bio bags make it easier to take out scraps to the large green trash outside before they get too ripe smelling. 

I’ve always wanted to compost food scraps, but never mastered the backyard compost business, so thanks Berkeley for helping out! Nice to have those green bins picked up every week as well. 

Robin Kirby 

• 

COMPOST BINS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Little green compost bins are a good idea. When I put it under the kitchen sink, two days later there was a loooong trail of ants in there, ugh! So then it went on the back porch, off the kitchen. Still ants, and the neighbor’s cat came to investigate. So the little green bin got washed, and put in a closet to store rags.  

Now, I take my small covered plastic bin with “compostables” every day and put that into the big green debris bin, which works fine. I do notice that some folks in the apartment up the street think one is to put out that little green bin for the recycle guys to pick up; they don’t get the “put into the large green debris bin” concept! 

Colleen Houlihan 

• 

TEXTBOOK PRICES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Today’s college students face many responsibilities throughout their college lifetime: grades, social life, and of course, textbook affordability. That’s right. A recent study conducted by the California Public Interest Research Group concluded that textbook prices have risen at twice the rate of national inflation, and the average public university student spends a quarter of his/her tuition on textbooks. The problem lies with the fact that many textbook companies frequently print unnecessary new editions, bundle extra materials, or fail to disclose their prices to faculty. Only 38 percent of the 287 surveyed professors reported that sales representatives always released their prices. This omission of information seems trivial, but in fact, violates a basic freedom, or the ability to make informed decisions based on information provided. An overwhelming 94% of professors said that they would choose a cheaper textbook if given two similar options. To combat this disturbing trend, a bill called The College Textbook Affordability Act, SB 832 (Corbett), has been introduced and is sitting in the governor’s office right now. As a college student, I believe that the Governor should sign this bill because it will give professors the opportunity to make a comprehensive decision while keeping their students’ best interests at heart. 

Xiao Song 

A far-reaching attack on the zoning protections of West Berkeley is being contrived by a small group of developers and real estate brokers. It is coming at us disguised as a either a new West Berkeley Business Improvement District (BID) or a Community Benefits District (CBD), which the organizers would control and use to lobby for zoning changes to gentrify the industrial areas. This lobbying would be financed by taxes collected from the many West Berkeley businesses and residents opposed to their goals. That’s the cleverest part of their plan: it makes the potential victims pay for it. And they’ve already gotten $10,000 from the city to organize it. The group behind it calls themselves the West Berkeley Business Alliance (WBBA), but their organization does not in any way represent industries, artisans and artists, which make up the majority of businesses in that area.  

The original proposal clearly stated that funds collected would be used to lobby the city on “economic development strategies. Outreach to political reps, city officials, ...attend public hearings. Hiring professionals [to] advise on land use issues, input on West Berkeley Plan.” There was $60,000 in their original first year budget plan targeted for these lobbying tasks. Despite repeated requests to remove land-use lobbying from their proposal, they have refused to rule it out.  

The BID would be instituted by a “weighted vote” of either commercial property owners, businesses or a combination of the two, depending how the district is based. The CBD would additionally include residential properties. Votes would be valued by the size of property holdings and/or gross receipts. Instituting a property-based CBD process would result in the sixteen largest property owners alone having enough “weight” to decide the final vote. Three-and-a-half percent of property owners would be able to institute the tax, but all would have to pay, as stipulated by state laws governing such districts. Even if the other ninety-six-and-a-half percent voted against, it would not matter. A BID would have a different, but essentially similar and grossly disproportionate weighted voting composition. This violates every principle of democracy that this country has ever stood for. The City Council must approve the BID or CBD. 

In a business-based BID, landlords would be treated as businesses, and taxed according to their gross receipts. But they wouldn’t really have to pay their assessments, because these taxes would in most cases be passed on to their tenants. So businesses that rent would get a double hit: taxed according to their own gross receipts, and also forced to pay their landlord’s taxes.  

This gambit is just the latest in a series of assaults on industries, artisans, and artists from the WBBA, which since its inception has been campaigning to weaken the land use protections of the West Berkeley Plan. These protections are at the heart of the plan, and are key to maintaining and safeguarding the strong and diverse economic reality that is working well in West Berkeley, providing city revenue, local jobs, and a synergistic environment that benefits of the entire city and region.  

The proposal on the table up to now has been a Community Benefits District (CBD), which includes West Berkeley homeowners. Due to massive opposition from these residents and small businesses in the area, the WBBA and the city are talking about possibly excluding homeowners and reconfiguring the CBD as a business-only BID, but there is nothing to verify this buzz. The original proposal also covered all the industrial zones of West Berkeley, but due to strong opposition in the northern section it was cut back to include only the area south of University Avenue. Since this action the WBBA has put the inclusion of the northern section back on the table in a possible “second stage” effort. This proposal ultimately puts all of West Berkeley at risk.  

BIDs are usually formed around commercial areas, where retail merchants share contiguous storefronts, common goals, and proportional sizes. But West Berkeley is a widely diverse area, in which all the stakeholders do not share the same problems, concerns and priorities, and where the largest property owners are at least 500 times the size of the smallest. What developers consider improvements are often destructive to the environment which artisanal and industrial businesses, and residents consider vital and need to thrive.  

Besides lobbying for land-use policies, the BID or CBD would also handle a bunch of mom-and-apple-pie areas, like neighborhood cleanliness and security. Of course neighborhoods can always be improved, but the anti-democratic CBD or BID is not the vehicle to accomplish such improvements. 

The office of Councilmember Darryl Moore, in conjunction with the city’s Office of Economic Development and the BID-CBD steering committee (i.e., the developers) have set up a community meeting to discuss the proposal. The meeting will take place on  

Oct. 16 at 7 p.m., at Rosa Parks Elementary School, 920 Allston Way.  

I urge you all to attend and to contact the mayor, City Council, and city manager, and tell them your thoughts on this offense to democracy.  

John Curl is chair of West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies (WEBAIC). 

I couldn’t help being shaken by the “accidental death” of Carol Ann Gotbaum, in a holding cell at a Phoenix airport. From what I can gather, she acted in an erratic and irate manner, a similar manner to a mentally ill person in crisis. It brought back memories of friends and acquaintances who are mentally ill and who died either while being restrained or in some other way because of the illness.  

It is a universal story that goes along with mental illness that police or other authorities often treat an ill person roughly, and sometimes in a humiliating or even dangerous manner. I have heard a story of a young man in custody who died in the transport van due to overheating. I can remember three other mentally ill who died of a heart attack, either because of their psychotic episode or because of the health problems associated with their medication. I know of several others who committed suicide. Mentally ill people have died while tied down on a four-point restraint table; repeated checking is legally required in California to prevent this. It doesn’t always work. 

Whether Carol Gotbaum’s erratic behavior was caused by drug addiction or a mental health diagnosis doesn’t concern this article. Airport security must have lacked training to deal with persons who are in crisis, who are not a threat to security. It should not be a life-threatening situation for a mentally ill person who needs to fly somewhere.  

Many police forces in recent years have received training to deal with mentally ill persons in a non-lethal manner. The officers who have received this training are not always sensitive and sweet; however the mentally ill person with whom they have dealt doesn’t get maimed or killed by officers as often. However this has come about because thousands of mentally ill persons lost their lives due to mistreatment or neglect. It is still not uncommon for mentally ill to be shot to death by police when the mentally ill person appears threatening. Mentally ill are usually not as threatening as they appear. 

A few years ago in the news there was a story of a man with bipolar illness who ran off a plane and whom security shot to death. Terrorists are the exception not the rule when someone acts erratic. There needs to be a system in place that accounts for terrorist behavior versus a mental health crisis.  

However, I speculate that airport security could have been quite aware this woman wasn’t a terrorist. They treated the woman in a way that was most convenient to them, which was to handcuff her and forget about her. Mentally ill have received this type of treatment a lot over the past five decades. Now it is being talked about because it has happened in a more visible place.  

Jack Bragen is a Martinez resident. 

On Monday, a cardboard sign in the window of the Halal Market on San Pablo at University announced that it was closing. 

Inside, the formerly crammed shelves were nearly empty. Naim, the proprietor, usually a fixture behind the counter, was nowhere to be seen. A young nephew of Naim’s staffing the register responded to my astonished inquiry by informing me that Naim had had a heart attack. He was OK, taking it easy, still smoking.  

Halal means permissible according to Muslim law. So the shop sold no alcohol, no pork, and only meat slaughtered per that law. Above the merely permissible, upstairs there was a room for prayer—all were welcome, shoes removed. In the aisles next to the cartons of black tea were shelves of Islamic books for sale. And, depending on current events, Naim placed on his countertops handmade collection cans for humanitarian relief in various Muslim places. 

The Halal market first drew me in with its superb and very reasonably priced feta cheese, olives, and halvah. Later I discovered the amazing organic chicken, fresh on Thursdays, bulk spices and magnificent olive oil. Over time, I came to know Naim, who often offered tea and loved to make observations on Palestine, his homeland.  

Patrons did not merely shop at the Halal Market. Naim engaged us, even if we imagined that we were in a hurry. It would not do to simply sell something to someone he knew. He would talk with us, ask questions, state opinions. The result: there was usually a small knot of people from Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, and neighboring places around Naim, congesting the checkout counter and the entryway, hanging out, arguing, relating.  

Naim personally knew every item among the rainbow of foodstuffs in his packed shop. He would present a sample of the exquisite fresh roasted peanuts that he had just bought fifty pounds of, or recommend the Lebanese olive oil as the best. He would offer a fig from the spectacular seasonal shipment of Turkish figs with a terse but accurate “very good.” I came to learn that his pronouncements were reliably correct. 

The tall, mustachioed butcher who presided over the lamb and chicken display, and operated the vintage meat-cutting saw in the back of the shop generally addressed me as “brother,” as in, “Will there be anything else for you, brother?” I found this irresistible, and would respond by asking for “the organic chicken legs, brother.”  

The organization of the fragrant spices along one wall, and the airy display of amber honey towards the front all expressed Naim’s sensibilities. The entire store, from the “Palestine Unbreakable” cartoon under the glass countertop to the hookahs on the top shelves was an expression of Naim’s own personality. This became starkly evident in the dispirited shell of a market that existed, temporarily, without him, like the body of a person who has died.  

Plainly, Naim’s family played an essential part in the thriving of the Halal Market. They often worked in the store: his thoughtful wife in traditional dress was a powerful, quick-witted, and warm presence. Their teen children would work the register while Naim was out, especially during school vacations. Last I heard, both daughters were in college.  

Speaking of family, Naim knew both my mother and my brother, and usually asked after them, or after something one of us had purchased. For example, he wanted to know how the lamb we had bought for my mother’s birthday feast had turned out. Since we had prepared it according to his instructions, it had pleased all of the nonvegetarian guests.  

From a much smaller shop tucked away on Ninth Street, Naim had built the Halal into this hub of commerce and socializing. Before his illness, he had talked about expanding to an even larger venue. During the time of the Halal Market, a Longs had moved in across the street. There could hardly be a greater contrast between the two establishments. There was no reason to go into the Longs unless one needed something they were selling. It closed, and remains empty, its passing unmourned. The Halal pre-existed Longs, and rightfully outlived it. 

Naim loved that I am a Jewish peace activist, and was particularly delighted when I told him about an action that my organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, had taken at a local Caterpillar dealership. (Caterpillar makes the huge bulldozers that the Israeli army uses to demolish Palestinian houses.) He had me tell the story of how we had surprised the Caterpillar management several times to friends visiting his shop. He graciously accepted a stack of postcards Jewish Voice for Peace had produced, protesting US policy towards Israel/Palestine for people to sign and send to Nancy Pelosi, and accorded them a place of honor upon his crowded countertop. 

Naim’s history includes layers of nuance and irony that characterize the situation of Israel and the Palestinians. Once when I told him that I had visited Hebron, an ancient Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank, he asked if I had also seen Kiryat Arba, the large, modern Israeli settlement near it. Naim volunteered that in the seventies, he had been one of the construction workers building Kiryat Arba. Naim’s job had been to build the settlement on his people’s land. 

There must be any number of small businesses in Berkeley, across the country, and around the world that share with the Halal market that they express the personality and imagination of their proprietors within the economic system they inhabit. To get to know these small operations is to become connected with the human beings who with their dreams, courage, and labor, build, sustain, and lead them. 

The immense skill, long hours and devoted work that Naim and his family invested in the Halal Market resulted in a precious and unique community institution. The market contributed a special human quality, unmistakably stamped with the personality of Naim, to that stretch of San Pablo. It will be remembered, and missed. 

Glen Hauer has lived and worked in Berkeley for 30 years.  

MISQUOTED ON  

TELEGRAPH 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I was misquoted in the recent Daily Planet article, “Community Says Yes to Public Bathrooms for Everyone,” as saying “Walking down Telegraph, I still feel uncomfortable [when panhandled].” I never mentioned panhandling. What I said is “I am a 6-foot-5 male and sometimes feel uncomfortable walking down Telegraph Avenue. And when my teenage nieces visit they definitely feel uncomfortable.” I was then correctly quoted as saying that Telegraph needs special relief from both sitting and lying on the sidewalk. It is my opinion that lying and sitting on the sidewalk are a major problem on Telegraph Avenue, not panhandling. I think it is largely because of folks lying and sitting on the sidewalk that neighbors such as myself infrequently visit and shop on Telegraph Avenue.  

John Caner 

• 

THE AIR BEAT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Helicopter pollution over South Campus seems to be at a nearly four-decade high. Is there someone that really believes that this regular militarized leaf-blowing helps to construct a more peaceful community? 

Jeff Jordan 

• 

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

When I grow up and get old and bitter I’ll move to Grass Valley where I’ll write letters accusing everyone who disagrees with me of racism and then I’ll send the letters to Berkeley where they will print them because they like that sort of thing there. 

In one recent diatribe, Ron Lowe warned that legislation to end automatic citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants “is a racially charged attempt to overturn the Anglo-American common law principal, dating back to 1608, which allows citizenship to all people born here.” 

Curiously, this ancient principle is not the law in England, or Scotland, or Ireland... or in those mean and nasty countries such as Sweden, France, or Norway. In fact, no country in Europe gives citizenship to the children of illegal aliens.  

It’s time for the United States to join the modern community of nations where citizenship means something more than just an accident of geography. 

Mark Johnson 

• 

CLOUDWALKER’S ISSUES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I would like to respond to Ms. Cloudwalker and her recent shopping experience in Berkeley in reference to the letter to the editor about the young black kids who were hassled by the Berkeley police officers. She stated that she observed three young black men standing around one of which had his hand on his crotch inside his pants for two hours. My question to her is, what was she doing watching a young man with his hand on is crotch—for two hours? I would like to suggest that perhaps Ms. Cloudwalker may have serious subconscious voyeurism issues that needs the attention of perhaps a mental health specialist. 

Robert White 

• 

CONN RESPONDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

In his letter “Taking Issue With Conn,” Chong Jones claims that my sources for charging that former Laotian CIA asset, General Vang Pao are “cut and paste” and unless I “can prove that Vang Pao was a drug lord” I must retract them. He then debunks Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia. He mentions my other source, Frontline’s “Drugs, Guns and the CIA,” but never addresses it.  

Smart move.  

First, his review of McCoy’s book is not one I think most readers would agree, and as for McCoy’s statement that the Church Committee found no evidence that the CIA was involved in aiding the drug trade, so what? The committee was wrong.  

Now let’s look at what Frontline found. 

Ron Rickenbach, who headed up the air arm of the U.S. Aid and International Development program told Frontline that he personally witnessed the off loading of raw opium from small U.S. Air America aircraft, which was then put on larger craft for transshipment to southern Laos and Thailand. Air America was on contract with the CIA. Rickenbach said the CIA knew the opium trade was going on, but that the Agency felt it was a necessary evil in the fight against communism. 

The traffic in opium eventually got so big, according to Richenbach, that the United States decided to create Sing Quan, Vang Pao’s personal airline. The CIA took an Air America C-47, painted it, and gave it Vang Pao. From that point on, the large shipments of opium flew on Sing Quan, which quickly became known by the nickname, “Opium Air.”  

Frontline interviewed pilots Fred Platt and Neil Hansen, both whom flew the opium on Air America planes, and journalist John Everingham, who reported on the control Vang Pao’s military had over the trade. 

Lastly, Leslie Cockburn interviewed Tony Poe, the CIA agent who worked with Vang Pao. Poe, an OSS and World War II veteran, and the Agency’s key man in Laos until he was forced out because he refused to tolerate Vang Pao’s corruption, explicitly implicates Vang Pao in drug running.  

Why should this surprise us? Vang Pao was a lieutenant in the French colonial army, fighting to keep Laos part of France’s colonial empire in Southeast Asia. Actually, compared to that kind of betrayal, maybe running opium is not such a big deal. 

Conn Hallinan 

P.S.: The transcript of “Guns, Drugs, and the CIA” can be read on the PBS website. 

• 

HOUSING SHORTAGE? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Chris Kavanagh’s plight once again highlights the supposed housing shortage that many say is the mandate for the various rent control programs in the Bay Area. Yet in North Oakland I can point out seven vacant houses in a two block radius of my home. The particular ones that I can think of have been vacant for more than five years each. The number of vacant properties in West Berkeley and North Oakland is astounding. The positive impact of the various inclusionary zoning schemes currently being proposed would be dwarfed by the benefit of the additional housing stock ‘created’ by limiting the amount of time a house could sit as a vacant blight. This would simply be the fastest and most cost effective way of increasing the supply of housing that I can think of. 

Tom Nemeth 

• 

BUS RAPID TRANSIT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Vincent Casalaina complains in his recent letter that Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) will “disrupt our lives.” This city has heard this complaint many times from affluent homeowners who live near the proposed BRT line, but it has not heard the stories of the bus riders whose lives will be improved by BRT, because most of them are so busy with their work and families that they cannot afford the luxury of being politically active. 

Here is the story of a potential BRT rider who a member of Friends of BRT talked to on the 1-R bus. This story is completely true, though the names have been changed. I hope that when the city make decisions about BRT, it will consider its effect on people like this commuter, even though they are not as affluent and vocal as members of local neighborhood associations.  

Maria and her husband Gerardo are parents of a 6-year-old son named Rodrigo. Maria works as a cook at a restaurant on Telegraph Avenue near the UC campus. She would like to live closer to where she works, but because she can’t afford the rents in Berkeley on her current pay, she takes the 1R to get to work from her home in East Oakland. She plans an hour each way for her commute. 

Maria says she would like to be able to use BART, but the station is too far from where she lives and works. To get to a BART station, Maria would first have to pay for a bus ride, and then a BART ticket on top of that. “It’s cheaper for me to take AC Transit and get all the way to Telegraph Avenue,” she says. “BRT would be so nice. I would be able to get to work even faster than if I were to take BART, saving the time it would take to walk from BART or to transfer on to a bus.” 

Occasionally, if she’s late and her husband doesn’t need the car, Maria drives to work. However, she says driving can be harder than taking the bus, because she often has to park far from where she works to find a space where she can leave her car all day. 

When asked what she would do if BRT were here and she could save 20 minutes extra each day, she responded “I’d spend more time with my family, of course!” 

Charles Siegel 

• 

CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Lauren Lempert, the mayor’s point person for the “Public Commons for Everyone Initiative,” made a great show at the Peace and Justice Commission meeting that the Daily Planet’s $50,000 estimate of her salary was wrong. 

I noticed she was sitting beside Assistant City Manager Jim Hynes, so I turned around and said, “Well, then, how much?” Hynes admitted to the whole curious room that she was being paid $6,800 a month for a nine-month contract. 

Your paper was wrong only in that its estimate was a little too conservative. Lauren Lempert owes the paper, your reporter, and the attendees at the Peace and Justice Commission an apology. It should also be noted that Lempert and Hynes missed the public comment period entirely, showing up late with a very fine speech about craving public input. The Peace and Justice Commission, with two abstentions, firmly turned down the opportunity to target the poor for Christmas. 

Carol Denney 

• 

FLOURIDE IN THE WATER 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Apropos of Yolanda Huang’s Sept. 14 letter to the editor, in the late 1970s when EBMUD began to flouridate its drinking water, East Bay Committee Against Flouridation (later Safewater) worked to prevent this practice I believe that the group eventually disbanded due, in part, to attrition and the ease (despite the expense) of purchasing spring water at local stores or home-delivery. The website (www.ewg.org/reports/caflouride) and its links, which Ms. Huang provided, focus on current safety concerns, including tooth mottling from excess flouride consumption, particularly in infants and children and increased cancer incidents. These issues and others are among the same safety issues Safewater raised 30 years ago. These concerns have not been resolved; rather they are being re-visited by the National Research Council and various physician groups. 

Recently some popular restaurants announced their new practice of serving water from the public water supply, in lieu of bottled water to reduce transportation-related energy use and resulting greenhouse gas effects. It is likely that the current generation of restaurant owners, many of whom may not have been here at the time, are unaware of the flouridation issue and that flouride is added to tap water that they serve. In the 1970s it was not possible to remove flouride from drinking water as it has been possible to remove other contaminants, such as chlorine. Perhaps since then a technique has been devised to do so. While many people understand environmental costs of transporting drinking water by air, sea, and land, not so many are aware of potential adverse effects of flouridated water. 

It is not a complicated issue. The basic questions are these: Should drinking water be medicated in any case? And, particularly when there is any question of its safety? 

Barbara Witte 

• 

24/7 HOMELESS SHELTERS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I propose that all homeless shelters in Berkeley be required remain to be open for their guests 24/7. I understand that the BOSS shelter kicks everyone out every morning to roam Berkeley all day until they reopen at night. 

It is irresponsible to draw large numbers of shelter clients to a shelter and then kick them out every day. If the shelters want those people at night, they should provide a place and for them to be during the day. 

If the shelters don’t want to see their clients during the day, they shouldn’t draw them to Berkeley to spend the night. 

Hotels manage to clean hotel rooms even when guests have not checked out. Shelters can too. 

David Lerman 

• 

BRICK WALL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Rich Crowl’s recent letter seems to chide you for your editorial about Berkeley Repertory Theater not advertising in the Daily Planet. Just tell him that you once said, I think, that there’s something like a brick wall between your advertising and editorial departments.  

Bob Marsh 

Bob Marsh  

• 

PUBLIC COMMONS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

As a life-long activist and low-income tenant in the North Berkeley neighborhood, I want to convey my strong opposition to the “Public Commons for Everyone” initiative on two counts: 1) Its hypocritical, false promise to be a commons for “everyone”—except the poorest and neediest among us. 2) The efforts by real estate developers (mostly non-Berkeley corporations) to further gentrify North Berkeley for private profit. 

I have watched North Shattuck become so upscale over 27 years that I hardly recognize it anymore and cannot afford to shop, eat, or hang out in my own neighborhood. This proposed blank check by some city officials to the developers would surely turn the area into another Fourth Street (but without adequate parking) and will result in urban flight and hardship for many residents—and not only for our homeless and street people, but for many of us who can barely afford to live here now. 

I urge Dona Spring, my Councilmember, Mayor Bates, and every city official who cares about ALL the people of Berkeley to act with the compassion and respect for ordinary citizens that Berkeley is known for, and to treat those less privileged in our midst in the same way that we speak out for peace, justice, and human rights around the world. 

Please vote against special interests and for the lives of Berkeley residents. 

Marianne Robinson 

• 

PUBLIC COMMENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Mayor Bates’ Public Comment proposal for the Oct. 9 City Council meeting has some very promising qualities. However, certain aspects seem unworkable. We refer to his proposal that the audience of willing speakers be polled on each and every Consent Item to determine the numbers pro or con. In view of the fact that there are often dozens of Consent Items this process would seem to be unduly time-consuming. It appears this would not be conducive to efficient Public Comment Procedure, clearly, one of the mayor’s priority goals. 

SuperBOLD suggests adopting the following alternatives as amendments:  

1. If there are a large number of persons desiring to speak, the presiding officer may suggest that persons in favor of Consent Items which remain on the calendar, forfeit their right to speak so as not to prolong the meeting. 

2. At the presiding official’s discretion, the official may grant up to 10 minutes to a speaker who desires to speak on multiple agenda items, so that the speaker shall address all items at one time before the body’s consideration of those items. Such comments shall be made under the Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items. (From the City of Benicia.) 

We also urge that Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items be held after Public Comment on Consent Items rather than pushed to the end of the meeting. Unless meetings are extended by the vote of the council, we fear that some councilmembers may leave before Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items which the mayor may have scheduled to occur after the official close of the meeting. This has happened in the recent past and drastically reduced the value of such Public Comment. 

Public Comment rules should apply, not only to the City Council, but to the Board of Library Trustees, all commissions, committees and other legislative and advisory bodies of the City of Berkeley. This creates a uniform standard which these bodies can follow and the public can readily understand. 

Ceasing experimentation with procedures for Public Comment and adopting procedures which allow all willing speakers to address each legislative body and advisory body, will protect the City of Berkeley from the lawsuit threatened by the First Amendment Project in the Spring of 2006. 

Jim Fisher, Gene Bernardi, Jane Welford 

SuperBOLD Steering Committee 

• 

UNICEF CARDS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley currently volunteering for the United Nations Association-UNICEF Center in Berkeley. I have been a volunteer for several weeks, and have been very impressed with the broad selection of UNICEF cards and gifts the center now offers to the community. It truly has been a rewarding experience to see customers excited about being able to purchase UNICEF cards and similar products again, and know that their purchase is supporting the United Nations Children’s Fund. 

Towards the end of last year, an article was published in the Daily Planet explaining how the UNICEF center was closing because we were no longer selling UNICEF cards. Although this was the case for a while, we are definitely back in business and are eager to relay the news to the East Bay community. 

We are a small center and value all of our customers, many of whom might think our center is closed. We would like to let everyone know we are here and are selling great UNICEF cards and products. Our center is run entirely by volunteers of all ages and nationalities within the community, spanning from high school to senior citizens. We are open Tuesday through Saturday, 12-5. 

Colleen McElroy 

• 

SEARCHING FOR CRIMINALS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

One night last week, beginning around midnight, I heard a helicopter circling my South Berkeley neighborhood. It shone a spotlight down, sweeping the streets and backyards throughout. This happens frequently enough that I didn’t feel too apprehensive until it continued on for a full half-hour. I called the BPD non-emergency number, and was told that they were looking for robbery suspects. That may or may not be the truth; I have strong suspicions that the suspects sought may be connected with some or all of the recent homicides, Oakland/Berkeley/Richmond. It was creepy, regardless. I slept poorly all night, waking at every small noise outside. 

By the by, I was alarmed and disgusted that the cover page of Berkeley High School’s newspaper, the Jacket, carried a “hit piece” about the death of Gary King Jr. in their Sept. 28 edition. The first paragraph of the article describes King’s death as “murder,” and it goes downhill from there. The tenor of the full article blames Sergeant Pat Gonzales for the shooting death of this ex-Berkeley High alum, exclusively. King is cast as this blameless victim of police brutality. 

I realize that the Berkeley High Jacket is a student paper, and students are given more latitude in expression than the standards applied to adult reporters. Still, it is intolerable that any student would be allowed to publish such scandalously libelous claims. It does a disservice to the students reading the article, it posts illegal (tortuous) claims against Sgt. Gonzales, and it tortures the truth. The incidental connection with Berkeley High makes it seem like Mr. Ward’s status as a graduate of Berkeley High should exempt him from criminal prosecution, or even suspicion. The fact that he pulled a gun on this officer is glossed over as unimportant. Are there any adults supervising this paper? It seems to me they ought to be held accountable for permitting the promulgation of such treacherous filth.  

And yes, I mean it.  

Sam Herbert  

• 

QUALITY OF LIFE  

FOR THE ELDERLY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have followed the many letters to the editor and other public discussions regarding the Public Commons for Everyone Initiative dating back to this past spring. However, not one of these very spirited and mostly thoughtful analyses has addressed how this initiative could significantly improve the quality of life for the “out and about” active elderly members of our community, which number over 10,000 in Berkeley. 

I have a photograph of my parents, Adolph and Marion Roe, taken in the late 1970s of them sitting on the benches adjacent to the corner of Shattuck and Center streets, just one of their resting places on their daily walks around downtown Berkeley. They lived at Francisco and Shattuck and ranged from Rose and Shattuck all the way south to Dwight Way and Shattuck. They went on foot to Safeway, Bill’s Drugs (now Longs), The Coop (now Andronico’s), Virginia Bakery, the hearing aid store, Bentley’s (no longer in business), Edy’s (also defunct) and Herrick Hospital. All along the way they could stop and rest on any bench on Shattuck Avenue and perhaps meet up with a friend or just enjoy the weather. 

Their favorite place to meet, sit and chat was at the benches provided by the Bank of America at Shattuck between Vine and Cedar streets near the French Hotel. These benches were ideally located for elderly people or young families to stop and take a rest while running errands in that stretch of Shattuck. But street people soon appropriated those benches for their exclusive use. First to sit and smoke, and then to harass passersby with aggressive language, drunken behavior, spitting, parking shopping carts, and occasionally using them as a toilet. My parents who were in their late ’70s were effectively chased away, along with their friends and other frail, elderly citizens. This little park-like setting became trashed and eventually Bank of America removed the benches to stop the antisocial behavior of the street people. 

Throughout the debate on the Public Commons Initiative, I’ve often thought that all of Berkeley’s residents are entitled to use the streets in comfort and safety. I am struck at how the street people who have made our public spaces into dysfunctional personal spaces have such vocal and committed representation in Berkeley’s public and political life. There are so many of us who aren’t being heard—elderly, frail, healthy others, workers, young parents, little children—who need access to safe, pleasant and orderly places to sit and rest during our day. I myself am approaching the age where I need to have a safe and pleasant place to sit and regroup for ten or more minutes without being harassed or displaced by antisocial behavior from other people. 

This is a critical issue considering Berkeley’s desire to “green” the city. As it is now, sitting on a bench or waiting for a bus along Shattuck Avenue, especially south of University Avenue, is usually a very unpleasant experience My seven months pregnant daughter and her 3-year-old recently took the bus from Shattuck and Vine southwards at 10 a.m. on a weekday and a street person at that corner yelled obscenities at her and her child the entire time they waited. 

We, the community as a whole, need an improvement in and a share of the benefits of Berkeley’s public spaces, which really have not been available to us for many years. I urge the mayor, the City Council and the city manager to move this initiative forward and include in their design and implementation the needs of all Berkeley’s residents, not just those who shout the loudest or longest. It is a much-needed improvement which will significantly improve the quality of life in our city for all. 

Evey Baughn 

• 

NEW SUPERINTENDENT 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What I want in a new school superintendent: 

1) Someone who really believes that education should be child centered—from this I mean, decisions should be from the point of view, “Does it help the child learn, grow, develop and become a whole person,” not whether actions or policies make it easier for administrators to do their job.  

2) Someone who is a good judge of character, meaning they value people who are really competent, experienced, and have the necessary knowledge to do a really good job. Competence and capability to do a good job should be more important than loyalty, obedience, and the ability to spin the talk. It shouldn’t take three years to get rid of incompetent staff. 

3) True commitment to diversity. I value folks of all colors because hopefully, a rainbow of people bring in the full color spectrum of experience, ideas, perspectives and cultures. However, if the commitment to diversity is skin deep but adverse to diversity of opinions, ideas, perspectives, then that’s not true diversity.  

4) Someone who is friendly. 

5) Someone who is excited by the learning process, because at the bottom, Berkeley public education is about learning. If the person we hire as superintendent left the classroom after the minimum two years, that says something about this person’s interest in teaching, and in helping students to learn. We have a very high achievement gap, a high drop out rate in the high school, and middle class families of color are either moving out of Berkeley or putting their kids into private schools, especially at the high school level. Someone who is committed to the learning process as the primary function of a school district, of course would be committed to running an effective and efficient administrator because the more efficient and effective and smaller the administration portion of our school district, the larger the share for our classrooms. 

I suggest that others in Berkeley also write the Planet, and tell the school board, what we want in a new superintendent. 

Yolanda Huang  

• 

WONDERSTRUCK 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I wonder when our top officials will understand the value of human life. Last year I wrote a letter to the editor regarding the ready availability of guns to the general public. I am wonderstruck that guns continue to be sold to any and everybody who can afford to buy them and who can provide some information about themselves, true or false. Most pawnshops carry guns; I am told their sale is brisk. 

When guns are used for murder, friends or family of the murderers try to protect them, saying, they were on drugs; they didn’t know what they were doing.? No one speaks about the loss an innocent person’s life or of the loss to the family of the victim. 

If some people enjoy killing just for the sake of killing, we must design a way of stopping such people. We, who are law-abiding citizens want to feel safe while we follow the laws of the land. 

Romila Khanna 

Albany 

The Berkeley Daily Planet published a political cartoon last week which showed a half-dozen snarling dogs surrounding a hunk of meat. The dogs were labeled as Berkeley property owners and the meat “Kavanagh.” There may indeed be a few local property owners who take some small degree of pleasure in the predicament in which Mr. Kavanagh finds himself. These would most likely include those who have been forced to sit and listen to his smug, self-righteous pontificating at rent board hearings where he has positioned himself on the moral high ground and has routinely treated landlords like lying crooks simply because they operate rental property in Berkeley. Now it appears the criminal justice system is telling Mr. Kavanagh to take a look in the mirror if he wants to know who the lying crook really is. 

When the citizens of Berkeley enacted rent control in 1980, the initial registration fee to be charged was $12 per unit. This was the estimate of the likely cost of rent control. If one applies the Consumer Price Index to that fee, it would now be about $30, which would make the Rent Board budget about a half-million dollars. Their current budget, however, is not $500,000 but more like $3,500,000. A rent-controlled apartment which rented for $350 in 1980 would rent for a tad under $900 today, an increase of 156 percent. The Rent Board’s budget over the same period is up over 1,300 percent! 

While the City of Berkeley struggles to keep its budget intact, the Rent Board sees the Berkeley property owner as the politically incorrect sugar-daddy upon whom greater and greater fees can be imposed with impunity. But money isn’t everything—even for landlords. The fees only tell part of the story. The broader tale would center on an inquiry as to why the Rent Board needs 18 employees and over $3.5 million when, for several years now, they have had virtually nothing to do. The original ordinance, still in force as modified, gave the Rent Board three tasks. None of them are now necessary.  

The first of the tasks assigned them was setting the Annual Rent Adjustment (AGA), an increase (or decrease) to be applied across the board to all controlled units. The law has since been modified so that the AGA is now automatic, set at two-thirds of the CPI increase. The Rent Board no longer oversees and deliberates on the annual adjustment to rent. All that is now necessary is for a staff member to look up the appropriate CPI index, divide by three, multiple by two and proclaim the result. Fifteen minutes a year, max.  

Second, the Rent Board is charged with creating, monitoring and administering a process whereby individual property owners can seek an Individual Rent Adjustment (IRA). A decade ago there were hundreds of IRAs a year. The process was often long, involved and complicated. Recently, however, the rules promulgated by the Rent Board have made the granting of IRAs almost impossible. Hearing examiners have been put on temporary assignment to other city agencies for lack of work. There are very few IRAs processed.  

The third charge of the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board is to maintain a registry of legal rents for all controlled units. Early on, they required annual submission of rents, an elaborate process to be sure. Later they only asked for changes to the registered rent. However, in 1995, the state Legislature overrode the Berkeley rent control law and dictated that the rent for voluntarily vacated units may be raised to market level (and thereafter recontrolled). Owners must now inform the Rent Board only of the rents for newly rented units. Processing these four-line forms is really the only chore left that the Rent Board has to do. It could be handled by a single part-time employee. But even this is totally unnecessary. When owners were required to keep the rent the same between tenants, registration was clearly necessary to assure that they did so. Now, however, every sitting tenant knows his/her legal rent and the legal rent for every new tenant is the rent to which they agree, so they too know their legal base rent. What purpose does registration serve?  

So essentially the Rent Board has nothing to do. Except maybe landlord bashing. From the property-owner point of view, the cartoon in the Planet last week could just as accurately have had the dogs labeled “Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board” and meat labeled “Berkeley Landlords.” And if the Planet ever chose to publish such a cartoon, it would not be inaccurate if the snarlingest dog of all were labeled Chris Kavanagh. Is there a bit of schadenfreude among Berkeley property-owners these days? Maybe.  

Albert Sukoffopini is a Berkeley resident.

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The Daily Planet should be deeply ashamed of the political cartoon that appeared in this newspaper on Sept. 28, depicting Berkeley landlords as a pack of vicious dogs. On the dog’s collars is written: “Berkeley’s Anti-Rent Control Landlords.” The dogs in this cartoon all have sharpened teeth and tongues hanging out. They are salivating and have an angry and dangerous look in their eyes. They are all looking at a steak labeled “Chris Kavanagh.” 

This is the worst and most dangerous kind of demagoguery. Throughout the sad history of the 20th Century, whenever governments or private organizations wished to stir up hatred against any group, it was nearly always preceded by political cartoons like this one—depicting the enemy as savage beasts. It is much easier to get people to condone and participate in acts of violence against your enemy if you first reduce them in people’s eyes to something inhuman and justifiably exterminated. 

During World War I, U.S. government propaganda posters depicted Germans as “The Beastly Hun,” a savage Neanderthal-like creature. During World War II, the Nazis depicted Jews as giant rats in their political cartoons. And growing up in the South in 1950s, I saw plenty of Ku Klux Klan cartoons depicting black people as gorillas, looking just like the dogs in the Planet cartoon of last Saturday, with sharpened teeth and a menacing look in their eyes. 

This is not a trivial matter. If history is any guide, depicting whole groups of people as savage, vicious beasts is a very dangerous thing. 

And finally, Berkeley landlords are not responsible for Chris Kavanagh’s legal troubles. Mr. Kavanagh is not a helpless victim or a lifeless object, like the steak in the Planet cartoon, having no responsibility for his misfortunes or control over his circumstances. Mr. Kavanagh is an intelligent and articulate man. He knew what he was doing when he ran for Berkeley rent control board claiming to be a Berkeley resident. 

At the risk of sounding banal in the extreme, the existence of independent media and its continued survival is critical. Independent media is invaluable. Particularly in today’s climate of media consolidation it is crucial that institutions such as the Planet are able to continue to thrive and survive. Berkeley is home to the free speech movement. Just as the Planet is a veritable institution in Berkeley, so is KPFA radio. Both have staff that render their services as labors of love whether paid staff at the Planet or unpaid staff at KPFA radio. The dedication and work of the staff at each of these institutions dovetail. For example on Mon. Oct. 1 KPFA interviewed Planet reporter J. Douglas Allen-Taylor on the current state of the city of Oakland and Mayor Ron Dellums. Planet editor Becky O’Malley has engaged in written exchanges with KPFA Sunday host Peter Laufer and has appeared on his show. The Planet covered the 1999 infamous KPFA lock out extensively. 

The unpaid staff (volunteer workers ) at Berkeley’s venerable KPFA radio received an unhappy surprise on Aug. 13, when a memo went out declaring that the unpaid workers’ organization was no longer recognized by station management. 

The Unpaid Staff Organization (“UPSO”) has existed for seventeen years to represent the interests of the more than 200 volunteers who produce the majority of the program hours at KPFA. Unpaid staff produce nearly all of KPFA’s music shows, and a substantial portion of its news and public affairs programs as well. KPFA’s volunteer staff is the crux of the station’s programming. Without their work the station, as we know it, could not survive. Without their work KPFA would have to air canned, prerecorded programs. 

The Aug. 13 memo, signed by interim General Manager Lemlem Rijio, declares, “Currently, there is no management-recognized ‘unpaid staff organization.’” Rijio’s memo says that station management acted because the UPSO had not functioned for nearly two years. Not mentioned was the fact that an election committee was in the process of conducting a vote to refill the posts of incumbents who had ceased to serve the UPSO. Rijio’s memo was issued only four days before the ballot due date of the UPSO election. Currently there is a petition circulating for unpaid staff to sign affirming signers wish to have the UPSO act as their representative body. The management memo of Aug 13 “pulls the rug out from under people who get very little for their dedication and hard work,” said Shahram Aghamir, a producer on KPFA’s “Voices of the Middle East” program. KPFA’s Local Station Board passed a resolution calling on management to rescind the memo and continue the long-standing policy of recognizing UPSO as the representative of the station’s unpaid workers; the Board vote was 13 yes, zero no, and five abstaining. 

Central to this is what management’s action portends for the future. Again to quote Aghamir, “This act by the GM is the canary in the coal mine.” The immediate effect of the Rijio memo was to complicate the upcoming election for Local Station Board members, possibly preventing some unpaid staff from voting in that election. Since her move to attempt to disenfranchise much of KPFA’s labor pool, in addition to the LSB resolution, the national election supervisor for Pacifica (KPFA’s parent organization) has ruled that the established UPSO guidelines for eligibility to vote in the 2007 LSB election must prevail, overturning Rijio’s memo. Still the management action may hamper the possibility of UPSO working to gain new benefits for unpaid staff, such as a formal grievance procedure comparable to that of the station’s unionized paid staff, or the option to buy health insurance at the station’s group rate. As of today, Rijo has taken no action per the LSB motion which speaks volumes about her lack of respect for the majority of KPFA’s programmers. 

More difficult to assess will be the impact of the disrespect management showed the station’s unpaid workers by withdrawing recognition of their organization. There is a story here about worker organizing, and that its a story made more interesting and perhaps more unique by the fact that these workers aren’t even paid. No, their livelihoods are not imperiled. But their passion and the efforts they put into their work, efforts that are often made at great personal sacrifice and due to intense beliefs about the importance of what they do, is being threatened. And as we know, especially in Berkeley, it is often the things that people do around and in between their paycheck gigs, that really does change the world and establish the alternative networks that sustain us in this difficult society. 

Coincidentally, the Rijio memo went out the same day as management at another media institution attacked a union: the Media News Group newspaper chain declared its “derecognition” of the Northern California Media Guild as the representative of employees at Media News Group’s ANG newspapers. But many KPFA listeners and workers plus readers of the Planet will surely be surprised and dismayed that KPFA management engages in the same behavior as the managers of a profit-driven media conglomerate. 

So if we care about alternatives to the mainstream, then we have to care about and value unpaid work. Because precious few of us are ever going to be paid a sustainable wage to do these things. So when an alternative institution like KPFA of 50 plus years duration turns on its heels and says “you’re not real workers”—“you don’t have the privilege of collective bargaining over your working conditions, your supplies and your equipment like the REAL workers", it’s a tremendous slap in the face to people’s blood, sweat and tears, not just at KPFA, but really all the cooperative networks that people build up in their spare time to do important work. If a progressive beacon like KPFA can’t support basic worker organizing in their midst, then who will? 

Tracy Rosenberg is interim director of Media Alliance. Ruthanne Shpiner is KPFA representative to the UPSO council. 

For a couple of decades at least, Joe and I have lurked around a few of the little stands of the weed Nicotiana glauca, tree tobacco, that are scattered along Del Puerto Canyon Road just east of I5. Short lurks are part of our usual spring day-trip itinerary along that route from Del Puerto Canyon to Mines Road because we might see Costa’s hummingbirds feeding on the tall shrubs’ tubular yellow flowers, and who knows what other hummers might show up while they’re migrating?  

So it was almost a reflex that made me pull over when I found a streetside stand of tree tobacco in west Berkeley. I’m lucky there wasn’t a lot of traffic there with me. Birders’ reflexes aren’t always adaptive; I remember a fender-bender occasioned by a kestrel who was doing an apparently convincing stage impression of a peregrine at close range over a freeway traffic jam. Having learned from that example, I do try to behave myself.  

Free advice, though: Never tailgate a birder. 

Nicotiana species—there are 45 to 100 of them, depending on who’s classifying—are native to the Americas. Those sweetly night-scented garden flowers are close kin to smoking-type tobacco, currently a favorite political red herring in public places. (Why, no; I don’t smoke it and never have. See? Behaving myself again! That might itself be a bad habit.) 

Come to think of it, I’ve never been on Del Puerto Canyon Road after dark; I’ll have to hie me down to Fourth Street tonight and have a sniff. 

This one is, fide the botanist Howard McMinn, the only woody species that shows up in the United States. Most of the various tobaccos cultivated by the First Peoples are herbaceous. Tree tobacco is native to Argentina, and came here with the Spanish missionaries. 

Tobacco is closely enough related to tomatoes to share some diseases like the dread tobacco mosaic virus, which is why nurseries ask people not to smoke while shopping, even outdoors. If you’re growing tomatoes, you might have been advised to wash your hands after smoking before messing about with your plants.  

It’s no surprise to those who’ve dealt with certain diseases in humans, Ebola fever for example, that one’s closest biological relatives harbor one’s worst epidemiological dangers. We share more diseases with our dogs and cats than with our turtles and snakes, who might harbor salmonella and such but ordinarily don’t suffer from them, and fewer still with our commensal arachnids or the average earthworm.  

The species are in the solanum family, along with potatoes and eggplants and chili peppers (sweet peppers too) and nightshades and Jimsonweed. We have a handsome native California plant, almost a shrub, called blue witch or Solanum umbelliferum, last time I looked.  

Why “witch”? Undoubtedly because of the plant’s association with other solanums and relatives like Atropa belladonna with highly active poisonous and intoxicating compounds. Both A. belladonna and Solanum nigrum get called “deadly nightshade.” Lots of members of the family are toxic or, even when edible, have toxic parts; don’t nibble on tomato or potato greens.  

People do all sports of foolish things with solanums. Smoking tobacco in the mass-produced, everyday, uncritical fashion that’s spread around the world is certainly one of them. People have smoked Jimsonweed for its hallucinogenic qualities, a dangerous idea because one has no way of knowing how concentrated the intoxicating toxins are in a given plant and what dose one’s taking.  

Belladonna is so called because women used it, way back when, as eyedrops to dilate their pupils, one of those “I’m interested” sexual signals that get rotated through the assembly line of fashion.  

Belladonna does have medical uses: you might get a (very low, carefully controlled) dose of atropine extracted from it before surgery to dry out mucous membranes and make the surgeon’s work a bit simpler. Rarely, it’s also used by opthamologists to dilate pupils during an eye exam.  

If you manage to get poisoned by certain insecticides you’ll get dosed with atropine in the ER. My great-auntly advice is to avoid messing with either of them if you can help it.  

Other insecticides are being produced from nicotine compounds. That flea-control stuff that gets applied to the back of the dog’s or cat’s neck is a nicotine derivative, which has the merit of being less toxic to most non-arthropods like you and me and the furry pets than the stuff that older treatments used. I believe the same corporations are making insecticides for plants out of nicotine analogues, too. Seems to me we’re coming full circle and you might want to go smoke a cigar in your garden after all.  

Photograph: Ron Sullivan. 

Glaucous leaves and yellow flowers of tree tobacco. 

Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section.  

On the evening of Sept. 19, I had a rare experience: I left a community meeting about a big new project feeling edified and even hopeful. Need I add that the event wasn’t run by the Berkeley Planning Department? Indeed, it wasn’t in Berkeley at all, but at the Albany Veterans Memorial Building. I was there because the project—the renovation and possible demolition and rebuilding of the Safeway at 1500 Solano—is a few blocks from my north Berkeley house. To judge from public comment, most of the hundred-plus people seated in the Memorial Building’s cavernous main hall were Albanians.  

The meeting’s engaging character, however, should not be attributed to the inherent affability of our neighbors to the north. Last year Albany was roiled by a nasty fight over a proposed mega-development at the waterfront. And in 2005 neighbors bristled at proposed changes in the Solano Safeway itself. 

No, the quality of last week’s discourse had other sources, all of which should interest Berkeleyans seeking more democratic public planning processes for our own city. (City of Berkeley planning staff, please take note.)  

A key factor was the developer’s apparent solicitude for the people whose lives would be most affected by the project. Early in the meeting, Safeway real estate manager for the East Bay, Todd Paradis (sounds like paradise), told the crowd that he had already conferred with neighbors whose property abuts the grocery store’s site, as well as with those who live across the street from the supermarket on Curtis and Neilson, which are both narrow and heavily trafficked. He then proceeded to respond to every one of the dozens of speakers who queued up to comment at the open mic. Some of Paradis’ replies were more satisfying than others, but all were rendered in a respectful tone that contributed greatly to the overall civility of the hour and half-long event. It also helped that there were no time limits on individual testimony, and that the event’s organizers—besides Paradis, the public relations consultancy of AJE Partners (the A stands for former Assemblyperson Dion Aroner)—allowed the meeting to go overtime so as to accommodate everyone who wished to speak.  

Lesson One: Treat the public with respect, and most of its members will respond in kind. 

Lesson Two: See that respect for the public extends to the content of the planning process as well as the tone and format.  

The flashpoint of controversy over Safeway’s 2005 proposal for the Solano store was the company’s proposal to put 40 condominiums on top of a new grocery building. Neighbors objected to condo-ization, noting that nearby streets are already thick with cars. At the start of last week’s meeting, Paradis defused the condo issue by stating that Safeway does not intend to put any housing on the site.  

So the question was—and is—what IS Safeway contemplating? On this matter, Paradis was ambiguous. Though he repeatedly assured us that no plans have been drawn up, he also indicated that some basic concepts are being considered. For example: bringing the store up to the lot line on Solano Avenue and moving all the parking—now situated in a 20,000-square-foot lot in front of the store’s Solano entrance—behind and underneath the building. Tied to that possibility was a second: creating a more “urban” ambiance by breaking up the Solano facade with smaller shops who rent their space (Paradis mentioned a café). He also spoke of upgrading the grocery’s offerings, especially its produce and organic sections, and adding a bakery. That would involve enlarging the store, which now has a problem with “run-outs,” due to lack of storage space. And Paradis said that Safeway wants to move the little pharmacy down the street, which it recently purchased, into the remodelled or rebuilt supermarket.  

All these disclosures drew lively responses from the audience—responses that contributed as much to the evening’s instructiveness as the disclosures themselves. Accustomed as I am to celebrating the specialness of Berkeley (and deploring its degradation at the hands of the current municipal regime), it did me good to witness Albanians’ deep affection for their town and their equally deep desire to protect its distinctive character. “We like Albany because of the small feel,” said Michelle, who lives on Cornell. The town is like “a village,” said Julie from Ordway. “We have a unique environment.” “The last thing I want to see,” said another woman, “is some big orange stucco building that looks like it should be in Pleasanton.”  

But when it came to specifying what they do want to see, Albanians were not of one mind. A few speakers liked the idea of putting the parking behind and beneath the store, moving the market up to the lot line on Solano and having small shops along the frontage. One such enthusiast, describing himself as a co-founder of Albany Strollers and Rollers, said that absent these changes, bicyclists and pedestrians would remain “second-class citizens” who had to dodge cars as entering and exiting the parking lot or looking for a free space. Others wanted to keep the parking in front. Several women, including myself, said that they liked parking in a highly visible location, especially at night, and that they wouldn’t use an underground lot. A neighbor of the north Shattuck Safeway wondered why Paradis didn’t report that the Berkeley store’s underground lot goes empty. An Albany resident took a refreshing approach: The up-front parking lot, she said, is precious “open space” that should be enhanced, not eliminated. 

Another issue that drew varied opinions was the store’s optimal size. Touting Albany’s walkability, Ordway’s Julie got a round of applause when she said that one very large building was a “drive-to idea.” But another Albanian, Carol, said the existing market is too small and runs out of things. Bettina from Curtis hoped the pharmacy will be folded into the new store. Nora, a young pharmacist who works at the Safeway pharmacy down the street, took the opposite view. Older customers who patronize the small, stand-alone shop because its entrance is right on a corner and its interior is easy to navigate with a cane or a walker. Move it into the supermarket, she said, and you will lose those customers.  

There’s an old saying: well begun is half done. The community planning process for the remaking the Safeway on Solano has had a promising start. Now, what? Paradis said that the company had created a website for the project, www.safewayonsolano.com and urged us to use it to contact him. As of Oct. 1, the store’s current floor plan was posted there, along with an e-mail address and a phone number to call for information, 849-4811. The “Community Outreach” window was blank.  

It would behoove the community to reach back and let Safeway know that we want our involvement in this project to continue in a meaningful way—and by “we,” I mean neighbors and patrons from Berkeley as well as Albany. Major changes to the store are going to affect the Solano Avenue and adjacent streets in both cities. The office of Berkeley’s District 5 councilmember, Laurie Capitelli, learned about the Sept. 19 meeting only a few days beforehand, and then, through a member of the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood Association Board. Safeway should give Capitelli’s office and his constituents timely notice of future activities.  

Throughout the Sept. 19 meeting, AJE’s Barbara Ellis appeared to be taking copious notes. How about posting her notes or some account of the proceedings, as well as additional comments from neighbors and Safeway’s responses to those comments? Also helpful would be a schedule of next steps in the planning process. Paradis mentioned a three- to five-year timeline that included 13 months worth of construction. Whatever the next step, it should deepen the dialogue between the company and the community, and within the community itself—a dialogue that includes decisionmaking. That’s a tall order; for the moment, I’m allowing myself to believe that Safeway is going to fill it.

The battle over Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 Oakland school local control bill has gone inside, behind the locked doors of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office in the state capitol building in Sacramento, where all pretense at open government ends, and a polite, uniformed California Highway Patrol officer always guards the hallway entrance, keeping the public away. 

How the governor deliberates while he’s considering whether to veto or sign any particular bill—who he talks to, which issues or facts he is considering and which ones he is leaving out—are one of California’s great secrets. Except where it accrues to his political advantage Mr. Schwarzenegger—as did his predecessors—almost never answers press questions, either before or after, about his reasoning to allow or not allow bills to become state law, and in the cases of vetoes, rarely, if ever, do the accompanying messages give us any special insight into what actually drove him in one direction, or the other. 

So, since we are reduced to guessing, and one guess is as good as another, I’ll take a stab at it. 

I think that political principle and considerations of public policy will have almost nothing to do with whether or not Mr. Schwarzenegger signs Mr. Swanson’s Oakland local school control bill, the issue, instead, to be determined by which one of the actions—signature or veto—will either gain or cost Mr. Schwarzenegger votes if and when he decides to run for the United States Senate. 

Mr. Swanson’s bill is certainly not the swift return to local school control that Oakland deserves and most Oakland residents would like, but at least it takes such a return away from the whims and fancies of State Superintendent Jack O’Connell, who once, we remember, served as the banker’s clerk who most recently tried to foreclose on large sections of Oakland Unified’s mortgaged property in order to pay the bank back the loan ahead of schedule. That sad, tawdry endeavor failed only as the result of the loud banging and clanging of pots and pans throughout Oakland, scaring Mr. O’Connell away. 

Meanwhile, with Oakland Unified’s financial situation sinking progressively under Mr. O’Connell’s rapidly-increasing parade of appointed administrators (the district debt being considerably larger now than when the state first intervened), our Republican friends in Sacramento—like members of the old British parliament once did in regards to the American colonies and members of the later American Congress once did in regards to Africans held captive on Southern farms and plantations—have sought to justify the continued state occupation of the Oakland schools on the basis that they are all for the return of local control, only they want to make sure Oakland is “ready” for it. 

Notable was Assemblymember Bill Maze, Republican of Visalia, who Katy Murphy and Steve Geissinger of the Oakland Tribune tell us said, during the final floor debate on Mr. Swanson’s bill, that said AB45 is “premature at this point. The state is ‘part way there’ in its effort to restore fiscal health and fix other Oakland school district problems. We’re maybe 30 percent or 40 percent along the way. We’re not over that mark where we can say we have a great degree of confidence in where you’re taking this ship at this point.” 

To which remark the chained Africans, having recently revolted and overpowered the crew of the old slave ship Amistad, might have answered, “we’ll take our chances, thank you. Considering where the captain was taking us, any change in direction looks good.” 

There is no small irony, of course, in the people who attempt to manage local school districts throughout California being lectured by the people who sit in the state Legislature. If a school district fails to properly manage its budget, it is subject to be seized by the state and shaken like a terrier shakes a rat. If the state Legislature fails to properly manage its budget—well, actually, there doesn’t seem to be any consequences to the state Legislature, either individually or collectively, if the budget is botched and held up for a month or more, as it was this year, while school districts and community colleges and the infirm and aged wonder when and if their payments will be made. The legislators simply go back to their respective districts, to be elected and re-elected, year upon year. As William Golding once explained in the point he was making in “The Lord Of The Flies,” yes, the adults in the Navy come in to rescue the boys on the island from their descent into violence and barbarism, but then, who is there left to come to rescue the adults in the Navy? 

In democracies, such as we hold ourselves out to be, that source of succor is supposed to be the public, who can intervene with the power of the vote. Digging amongst all the arguments being made these days about why state control over Oakland Unified should remain for “a little while longer,” however, all mention of the Oakland public is pointedly absent except when, as in the above-mentioned Tribune article, we are lectured by AB45 opponents that Mr. Swanson’s bill was “engineered mostly to appease angry constituents of Swanson’s district.” As if a legislator following the will of his constituents is a bad thing, and that the Republican legislators who oppose AB45 are not doing it, largely, because Oakland is such an easy target, and holding Oakland’s feet to the fire plays well to their Republican constituents in their largely Republican districts. 

And that, as we said earlier, takes AB45 out of the area of principle—where it never actually resided, except rhetorically—and into the area of politics. 

And the political question is, will Mr. Schwarzenegger gain or lose more votes if he runs for the United States Senate by signing or vetoing AB45? 

Answering the gaining part is easy. Although signing AB45 would be a popular move for Mr. Schwarzenegger in Oakland, it is not his bill, he was never the moving force behind it, and though many Oakland voters would be grateful, it stretches the imagination to believe that any would use that as the basis to vote for the governor over, say, Barbara Boxer when she runs for re-election in 2010, or Diane Feinstein (or any other Democratic party nominee, should Ms. Feinstein decide not to run again) two years later. 

The entire Republican side of the equation is even easier; Mr. Schwarzenegger with neither win nor lose Republican votes, regardless of what he does on AB45. While opposition to the bill is popular among Republican legislators—scarcely a one of them voted for it, after all—it is hardly a big issue in Republican districts, and will likely be long obscured by other issues by the time the U.S. Senate race comes along. Even if Mr. Schwarzenegger signs the bill and Oakland’s education system were to completely collapse following the return of local control, the governor and his handlers would correctly point to the fact that AB45 does not automatically confer such local control, but gives the responsibility of deciding when Oakland is “ready” to the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT). Mr. Schwarzenegger’s hands would be clean. 

The one area where signing or vetoing AB45 could have any effect on Mr. Schwarzenegger’s future California political prospects is in Oakland—if the governor vetoes the bill, the consequences from Oakland voters could be severe. 

At first, this might seem like an odd position to take, since Oakland is one of the most liberal-progressive cities in California, where Republicans traditionally get a lower percentage of the vote in statewide election. 

But the question if and when Mr. Schwarzenegger runs for another statewide office is: how pissed off will Oakland voters be about him, and how much will they go out of their way to promote the governor’s defeat? This “negative factor” is no small matter in political calculations. 

To date, no politician has suffered in Oakland because of their collusion in the state takeover of the Oakland Unified School District. State Senator Don Perata, former Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, former California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, Alameda County School Superintendent Sheila Jordan, and former Assemblymember Wilma Chan—each of whom had a hand, larger or smaller, in stirring the takeover pot—have all been on the ballot since that time, with no apparent Oakland consequences. 

But that may change. 

Oakland being Oakland, there was always a vocal minority who actively opposed the state takeover, fighting against it at every turn. But while it is doubtful that a majority of Oakland residents supported the state takeover when it originally occurred in 2003, most residents—particular parents of school-age children—probably saw it as impossible to quickly overturn, kept quiet, and tried to accommodate themselves to the new situation under state control. 

But that attitude took a noticeable change last year and this following the revelations that State Superintendent Jack O’Connell had long been secretly negotiating with east coast developers for the sale of OUSD’s administrative headquarters and five adjoining schools. Even former state administrator Randy Ward opposed that sale, a position that the East Bay Express’s Bob Gammon contends cost Ward his job. Mr. O’Connell’s proposed sale, in fact, invoked a rare political unity in Oakland, with all eight members of the Oakland City Council, all but one member of the OUSD school board, and the members of the Peralta Community College District all officially announcing their opposition. The deal collapsed of its own weight. 

At the same time, public opinion in Oakland against the continued state takeover has appeared to enlarge and stiffen as the district has gone through three administrators in a matter of months—the last one on an interim basis, so we might soon see four—and various local media outlets have begun to publish what many local education activists have long known, that the district’s financial situation has worsened under state control, rather than gotten better, as was promised. 

State Superintendent O’Connell—the immediate holder of the dungeon keys—has been the first and steadiest recipient of the resultant Oakland anger. If he runs for California governor in the 2010 Democratic primary, it is difficult to see how he could campaign Oakland without facing demonstrations, and his chances of pulling more than a smattering of Oakland votes seems nil. 

One of the considerations facing Mr. Schwarzenegger in a veto of AB45, thus affirmatively keeping Mr. O’Connell in the position of imprisoning Oakland democratic rights at his whim and will, is whether or not it is worth the chance that in three years, Oakland residents and voters will forget. 

In June 1906, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company released a three-minute film called “A Trip to Berkeley, Cal.” The short was filmed aboard a moving streetcar on the #4 line of the Oakland Traction Consolidated Company, a precursor of the Key Route System. The #4 line ran between downtown Oakland and the intersection of Euclid and Hilgard Avenues, four blocks north of the UC campus. 

The film, which is available for viewing on the Library of Congress website, documents most of the #4 line’s final leg, as the streetcar rolls along Oxford Street, turns east onto Hearst Avenue, climbs up to North Gate, and turns north onto Euclid Avenue, coming to a stop in the middle of the 1800 block—the one we know as the Euclid or North Gate commercial district. 

Except that in 1906 there was no commercial district on Euclid Avenue, and one would not develop there until the 1920s and would not become fully built until the late ’30s. 

In 1906, there wasn’t a single building on the western side of Euclid Avenue’s 1800 block. The eastern side boasted three structures, with nary a store among them. The north fork of Strawberry Creek ran in its open channel on both sides of the street. The creek isn’t visible in “A Trip to Berkeley, Cal.,” but the buildings along Euclid Avenue are. 

Before the streetcar makes its turn at North Gate, one can see the house of Rev. George B. Smyth at 2509 Hearst Avenue. The Smyth house occupied the upper third of a triple corner lot. The lower two-thirds, abutting on Euclid Ave., were planted with an orchard. Next door to the orchard was the Northgate Hotel at 1809 Euclid—a large, three-story-plus-basement structure, adorned with two front balconies and three round turrets topped by witches’ caps. A tall water tower rose in the rear. Just up from the hotel, across the creek, stood two homes built in 1892. 

1805 Euclid was a very early Brown Shingle (1891 was the first year in which this type of building appeared in Berkeley, the most prominent surviving example being the Anna Head School), featuring a round turret and a gable whose concave walls curved in to accommodate a central window. Its neighbor at 1801 Euclid had a plain façade and wood siding. 

The Northgate Hotel, designed and built by A.W. Pattiani in 1902, was torn down in late 1936 and replaced by the current one-story Art Deco commercial building, still clad with the original ‘30s glossy black tiles and vertical chrome strips. The Smyth house, built in 1891, gave up its orchard for the Euclid Apartments, which opened in 1913. The Smyth house itself was turned into a fraternity, then into a rooming house, and ultimately was razed and replaced by a food court. 

Against all odds, the two 1892-vintage houses at 1801 and 1805 Euclid Ave. still stand, albeit not as houses and not on Euclid. Both houses first appeared in the Alameda County assessment records in 1893. The corner house at 1801 Euclid was owned by Frank M. Wilson, the Indiana-born banker who swooped upon Berkeley in 1891 and purchased the entire Daley’s Scenic Park tract for $4,000 in gold. Wilson would quickly establish himself as a Berkeley VIP and in 1894 would engage contractor George Frederick Estey to build him a brown-shingle house on the crest of Ridge Road. Intended as the barn for a projected mansion that was never built, it served as the Wilson family’s permanent residence until 1969 and was razed in the late 1970s to make way for the GTU Library designed by Louis Kahn. 

Before his house was built, Wilson lived in San Francisco, and in October 1893 he rented the house of realtor and Shattuck brother-in-law Ralza A. Morse on the northwest corner of Shattuck Ave. and Bancroft Way. By then, he had sold 1801 Euclid Ave. to realtor Oscar G. May, but it’s possible that Wilson occupied the Euclid house before doing so, since the assessment record in his name shows personal property in the house. 

The shingled house at 1805 Euclid Ave. was built for William W. Clark, a Maine-born real estate agent, and his brood of four twenty-something offspring, three of whom were enrolled at the San Francisco Business College. The designer of the Clark house is not known. It might have been Fred Estey, who would soon build several other brown-shingle residences in the neighborhood. 

Much has been written about the professors and artists who were among the early residents of Daley’s Scenic Park, but little is ever said about the middle- and working-class families who settled on the Northside while their children were attending the university, or about the real estate speculators who saw an opportunity near the campus. At the turn of the century, Berkeley was a magnet for realtors—or for people who became realtors after practicing entirely different professions in their previous locales. 

Oscar G. May, born in New York in 1839, was a Congregational minister in Illinois and Wisconsin prior to arriving in California. In Berkeley, May initially pooled his resources with realtor Warren Cheney, but by 1896 he was running O.G. May & Co. at 2123 Center Street, with his son-in-law, Walter J. Mortimer, as junior partner. After May’s retirement in 1904, Mortimer took over the office, where two of May’s sons, Frank and William, also worked. 

Frank Morris May (1868–1936) spent the 1890s and early 1900s alternating between teaching in Tulare and Contra Costa counties and carpentry in Berkeley. According to his daughter, Evelyn May Tippett, Frank worked with Fred Estey for a while. In 1896, Frank would build a Dutch Colonial farm house for Olivia G. Wright, a widowed mother of six, at the top of Virginia Street. The house still stands. 

While his brother William, also a carpenter (as was a third brother, Robert), was content to work as a salesman for their brother-in-law, Frank was described by Evelyn as “a self-starter.” In 1905, he opened his own realty office at 2149 Center Street. In addition to selling real estate—a 1905 ad in the San Francisco Call listed an 8-room house on a corner lot east of Fulton Street; a 9-room villa near Dwight Way Station; an alfalfa ranch in Merced County; and ten acres in San Ramon Valley—Frank advertised “Plans Drawn, Houses Built.” Most of the houses he built were lost in the 1923 Berkeley Fire. 

Both the Mays and the Clarks had decamped from Euclid Ave. by 1900 but continued to own their respective houses for a number of years. These houses were the only ones on the block until 1902, when William and Mary Henry built the Northgate Hotel. 

The Henrys are best known today as the parents of Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt. William W. Henry, a native of Bennington, VT, who came to California in 1858, was for many years a wholesale grocer in San Francisco and southern California. The ups and downs of his business might have taken their toll on the family’s well-being had not his indomitable wife (a hardy pioneer who had crossed the plains from Iowa at the age of 13, riding alongside the covered wagon on a small pony) kept the family going and paid for the children’s music and speech lessons by taking in boarders. 

The Henrys first appeared in Berkeley in 1896, when Aurelia was a student at Cal, and the following year built a house at 2401 Le Conte Avenue, across the street from Frank Wilson’s home. A stately, turreted affair clad in brown shingles, the Henry house was constructed by Fred Estey. It was large enough to accommodate the couple, their youngest four children, five boarders, and a cook. 

A mere five years after building their hilltop house, the Henrys moved one block downhill and became hoteliers in earnest. He was 63, she ten years younger, but they would run the Northgate for 24 years, until Mary’s death. It was listed in the 1904 directory as a private hotel, and later advertised as “A Select Family Hotel with Homelike Surroundings, 35 Minutes from San Francisco.” 

The clientele consisted of middle-class and professional families, some of whom stayed for decades. Victor J. Robertson, treasurer of the Commercial Publishing Co. and editor of the San Francisco Commercial News, boarded with the Henrys on Le Conte Ave., moved with them to the Northgate, and was still there in 1930, after both William and Mary had passed away. Robertson was a prominent civic activist and longtime president of the Conference Committee of the Improvement Clubs of Berkeley, as well as heading the North Berkeley Improvement Club. In 1907 he initiated a campaign to check graft in Alameda County government and another for a new city charter. The following year, he called on the city to stop the Spring Construction Co. from blasting in the North Berkeley quarry (converted in the ’30s into the municipal Rose Garden). He was an ardent supporter of damming the Hetch Hetchy, cleaning up the city, improving public transportation, and beautifying Shattuck Avenue. 

While Mary Henry managed the Northgate, her husband turned his attention to realty and insurance. Berkeley’s swelling population in the wake of the 1906 earthquake must have improved his business, for he erected a small office next to the hotel, at 1807 Euclid. This office was located directly over the creek, which would exact its revenge in February 1940, flooding and destroying Reid’s drugstore, built on the northwest corner of Euclid and Hearst. 

Around 1910, the Henrys formed the W.W. Henry Investment Company and began buying properties along the avenue, including 1801 and 1805 Euclid. They moved into 1805 Euclid but soon found a more lucrative way to utilize it. In 1914, the creek behind the two houses was culverted, and the houses were moved to the back and attached back-to-back to form a six-unit apartment building at 2508 Ridge Road. The Henrys called it the Bennington Apartments, after Mr. Henry’s home town. 

The conversion, which placed the turreted shingled house at the front, included a lower floor in stucco, with interesting architectural details such as arched doors and windows, sturdy round columns, and an ornamental baluster. The architect is not known, but similar columns can be seen on several houses designed by Walter H. Ratcliff, Jr. The Euclid frontage, which remained unbuilt until 1929, was planted in trees. 

Today, 2508 Ridge Road is divided into 15 apartments and faces the rear of Euclid Ave. shops. Although its splendor has faded, the building can lay claim to being the oldest known residential Brown Shingle in Berkeley. 

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

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

The Bennington Apartments at 2508 Ridge Road combines two houses built on Euclid Ave. in 1892. They were constructed by William and Mary Henry, parents of Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt.  

Earthquake Tidbits 

There is no such thing as “earthquake weather.” Statistically, there is an equal distribution of earthquakes in cold weather, hot weather, rainy weather, etc. 

From 1975-1995 there were only four states that did not have any earthquakes. They were: Florida, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. 

The San Andreas fault is not a single, continuous fault, but rather is actually a fault zone made up of many segments. Movement may occur along any of the many fault segments along the zone at any time. The San Andreas fault system is more that 1300 km (800 miles) long, and in some spots is as much as 16 km (10 miles) deep.  

Make your home secure and your family safe. 

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

Call him at 758-3299 or visit www.quakeprepare.com 

There’s a house in my neighborhood that’s back on the market again. You know the one. Been on and off the market for years and despite all reason, it’s listing for well over a million dollars. It has big problems: foundation, parking, odd use of space, geological issues and problematic drainage (let’s not even talk about the paint job), but there it is, asking more money than the last time and you know what? They’ll probably do all right. 

That’s the weird and funny thing about this market and our locale. It’s so coveted, that even allowing for the wild-boar variability of interest rates, slide zones, impending earthquake and habitual zoning battles, people want to be here so badly that they will purchase all sorts of trouble without much question or debate.  

In fact, you can go about trying to buy something for months without success even when doing battle over some pretty sorry looking digs. 

Remember those fabulous 70’s? Wide lapels, avocado green appliances and amazingly ugly wallpaper. Well, we had so many more houses on the market than potential buyers, that you could actually find a genuine Fixer Upper. I love the term and I love it with a true sense of nostalgia because this thing (the word and the object) seems to have become a lonely artifact of history.  

Oh, to be sure, we absolutely see places that need serious remodeling and some that ought simply to be bulldozed, but we rarely see houses, today, that can be bought for a significant reduction in price based on the volume of necessary repairs. 

I see this as a compression of the value in the market and here’s why. If you look at two houses in a similar neighborhood that have similar size, number of baths and other grossly defining features, the prices, at least in this market, may not be all that different, despite their conditions differing substantially. They’re compressed. 

This was what was different thirty years ago and is certainly different when you go back where your parents want you to buy in Sioux City (whiney voice: “Honey, for that kind of money, you could buy a house like your father’s boss has up by that golf course!”)  

When the market is less aggressive, the houses that need serious rethinking and repairing just get left on the pavement when the Flea-Market closes down. Not so here. The desire for ANY house in the Bay Area is so great that considerations that might have sent buyers walking away or, at least, bargaining the price down measurably in another time or place simply do not carry much weight in the here and now. 

This means that great houses and so-so houses are compressed into much closer cost proximity and sometimes into transposition. This is particularly true if you make some allowance for the variability of the market. A good example is what happens when we hit those few very hot weeks each year in which everyone in America has chosen to move to the East Bay from Podunk or Baltimore. At least once a year during this season, I’ll see two similar houses that for reasons I cannot fathom, sell for about the same price while being radically different in condition.  

Now, it’s certainly true that individual neighborhoods are strong controllers of cost but it still seems to me that the state of the property is one of the poorest predictors of cost that I see. This is pretty bad news for me since I’m in the condition business. 

Embarrasingly, what I have to say about a property may not be all that salient in the value of a house these days. Of course, I don’t trumpet this when I show up to inspect a property. I make damn sure to act as if my words are vital and that my absence is concomitant with capsize. Hey, I’m in business. 

I see this play out during inspections when, having identified an array of conditions, we will sit down with the realtor and discover that to ask for much price adjustment based on my findings is somewhere between slim pickin’s and negotiation suicide. Again, this is all market relative and was far less true when I started inspecting houses 19 years ago.  

Also, I’d like to be clear that this isn’t just a function of realtors trying to keep deals in play. I’ve seen enough deals fall apart to know that, despite their best efforts to get their clients to offer enough money, real estate agents can’t make their clients spend more than they want to and I’ve met buyers who’ve lost out on seven deals before they got into contract on the house where we meet. 

It’s too bad, really. I wish that I were working in a market where ramshackled shanties could be bought for a song and that remodeling brought handsome profits, but it’s too often not the case. This last part is kind of sad and it frustrates me to see one party market a house that’s been totally ignored for decades and make more than someone who’s brought a year of spit-polish and innovation into manifestation. 

So, in the end, this is kind of warning. Actually, it’s two. First, if you’re buying to fix up and remarket a house (a proud and worthy undertaking, by the way) be very, very shrewd and make those pennies squeak as they leave your hand. Be design-smart and cost conservative. 

And… If you’re a buyer, look at plenty of houses and be sure that you can live with the conditions your buying because they may not be a function of the price you’ve paid. 

I guess the good new is this. The reason all this is true is that we live in paradise. My wife and I work too much and don’t get out enough, but when we do, we realize that we live in an amazing place, rich in natural beauty, intellectual satisfaction, political righteousness and the best food on the planet. I guess we have to pay for these things and I guess we’re lucky that this lifestyle is available at any price, so I’m grateful. Cheers and Bon Appetite. 

Photograph: Matt Cantor. 

This house comes with a ‘bonus room.’

TUESDAY, OCT. 9 

THEATER 

SporK Festival, a bi-racial, bi-cultural celebration of short plays featuring Leila Buck at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$25. 849-2568.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Lucille Lang Day, Ed Miller and Antohony Russell White at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. 

Peter Turchi talks about “maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

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

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

Scraptet, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Jazzschool 10th Anniversary Concert at 7:30 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $125. 238-9200.  

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 10 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Ancient Roots/Urban Journeys: Expressions for Dias de los Muertos” opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ann Patchett reads from her novel “Run” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Deep Sports with authors Michael Lewis and Dave Zirin at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Benedit for KPFA. Tickets are $10-$13 at Cody’s. 559-9500. 

Anne Willan presents “Country Cooking of France” at noon at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

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

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Young Musician’s Program perfroms at noon at Oakland City Center, 12th and Broadway. www.oaklandcitycenter.com 

Bach Festival with Angela Hewitt, piano, Wednesday, October 10 at 8:00 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net; 

Michael Barsimanto Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Folkdance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lessons at 7 p.m. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Orquestra Bakan at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Buxter Hoot’n at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Fred O’Dell and the Broken Arrows at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

John Scofield Trio featuring The ScoHorns at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun.. Cost is $16-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, OCT. 11 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

“A Class Act CCA-C” A group art show by students from California College of the Arts. Reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St. 465-8928. 

THEATER 

“Whatever She Wants” a romantic comedy stage play by Je-Caryous Johnson, Thurs. and Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 3 and 8 p.m. at the Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $34.50-$49.50. 465-6400. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Hidden History of the East Bay: Photographs Tell Towns’ Stories” at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Omali Yeshitela, Black Power Movement veteran and Uhuru Movement leader reads from his latest work, “One Africa! One Nation!” at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 98 Broadway, Jack London Square, Oakland. 272-0120. 

“Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in 18th Century Italy” with author Martha Feldman in conversation with Mary Ann Smart at 5:30 at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

“History, Culture and the Art of Puppetry in Japan” with Peter Grilli at 7 p.m. in Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Ken Weisner, poets and contibutors to “The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Edward J. Larson describes “Magnificanet Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera Theater “ Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

Bluehouse at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jim Grantham Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Five Dollar Suit, bluegrass, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Mark Growden, Professor Gall, Knees & Elbows at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Todd Shipley at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790.  

FRIDAY, OCT. 12 

THEATER 

California Shakespeare Theater “King Lear” at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through Oct. 14. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666.  

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “Rumors” by Neil Simon, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sundays at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave. at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Oct. 14. Tickets are $11-$18. 655-8974. www.cct.org 

Impact Theatre “Sleepy” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Oct. 13. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Ragged Wing Ensemble “Alice in Wonderland” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Envision Academy, 1515 Webster St., Oakland, through Oct. 13. Tickets are $15-$30. 800-838-3006. www.raggedwing.org 

Shotgun Players “Bulrusher” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through Oct. 28. Tickets are $17-$25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

“Whatever She Wants” a romantic comedy stage play by Je-Caryous Johnson, Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 3 and 8 p.m. at the Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $34.50-$49.50. 465-6400. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Thread Count” An exhibition of works by eight fiber artists. Opening reception at 6 p.m. at ACCI Gallery, 1652 Shattuck Ave. Exhibition runs to Nov. 4. 843-2527. www.accigallery.com 

FILM 

Midnight Movies “Scarface” Fri. and Sat. at midnight at Piedmont Cinema, 4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Cost is $8. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Jonathan Kozol reads from “Letters to a Young Teacher” in a benefit for The Edible Schoolyard, at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $8-$10 at Cody’s. 559-9500.  

Susan Faludi describes “the Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9-11 America” in a benefit for KPFA at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Tickets are $10-$13 at Cody’s. 559-9500.  

“War and Peace 3: The Future” readings from the anthology at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

“A Night of Poetry” with Andrew Bleeker, Maxwell Heller and Lindsey Boldt at 7 p.m. at Book Zoo, 6395 Telegraph Ave. 654-BOOK. 

Peg Kingman reads from her debut novel, “Not Yet Drown’d” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Ralph Dranow and Clara Hsu read at 7 pm at Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid Ave. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera Theater “ Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

Kurt Ribak Ensemble at 8 p.m. at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Cost is $15. www.hillsideclub.org  

The Junius Courtney Big Band, featuring Denise Perrier, at 9 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$14.. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Akosua, jazz-inspired folk fusion, at 8 p.m. at Maxwell's Lounge, 341 13th St. Oakland. Cost is $10. 839-6169. 

William Beatty, piano, at 6:30 p.m. at The Mount Everest Restaurant, 2011 Shattuck Ave. at University. 665-6035. 

Lua Hadar & Her Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Tito y su Son de Cuba at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cuban dance lesson at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Katzen Kapell at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. 

Ray Cepeda, Latin rock, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Tom Russell at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $22.50-$23.50. 548-1761.  

Tara Tinsley and Tim Jenkins at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Devin Hoff, Willie Winant, Lisa Mazzacappa, Ralph Carney and others at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Ceremony, Life-long Tragedy, Knuckle Puck at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

Kevin Beadles Band at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

“Old to the New Throwback Concert” with The Attik, Ise Lyfe, Rico Pabon & Agualibre at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $15. 548-1159.  

NewBlue at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

John Scofield Trio featuring The ScoHorns at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun.. Cost is $16-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, OCT. 13 

CHILDREN  

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Asheba at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

“Mexica: An Aztec Tale” Sat. and Sun. at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

THEATER 

Bunraku, The National Puppet Theater of Japan at 8 p.m. Sun at 3 p.m., at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus Tickets are $76. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Central Works “Every Inch a King” opens at 8 p.m. at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. and runs through Nov. 18. Tickets are $9-$25. 558-1381.centralworks.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA” Exhibition and celebration of the centennial of California College of the Arts opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“The Memorial Leaves Devastation in its Wake” A painting and mixed media installation. Opening reception at 4 p.m. at The Gallery of Urban Art, 1746 13th St at Wood. Donation $5. Bring something to BBQ. www.thegalleryofurbanart.com 

Tea Pot Show Works by members of the Potters’ Studio in celebration of their 35th Anniversary. Sat. and Sun. from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at 637 Cedar St. 528-3286. 

“Abundance of Color and Light” Opening reception at 6:30 p.m., light show at 8:15 p.m., at Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby Ave. 644-4930. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Naomi Wolf introduces “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, A Citizen’s Call to Action” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

“Telling Tales” Storytelling Festival from noon to 5 p.m. at Berkwood Hedge School, 1809 Bancroft Way. Cost is $5, $15 per family. 883-6990. 

Gloria Frym, Ethan Paquin, and Chad Sweeney, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Artists’ talk at 2 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

The Civil Rights Concert Series and Courage Awards from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. Tickets are $27-$37. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Taylor Eigsti, jazz pianist at 8 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. Tickets are $32. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net 

Bryan Baker and Friends “If Music Be the Food of Love” at 8 p.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, One Lawson Road, Kensington. Suggested donation $15-$50. For reservations call 525-0302, ext. 309.  

The Freedom Song Network, in celebration of its 25th anniversary, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$50. 849-2568.  

Bayside Jazz with Dan Hicks at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ.  

Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $15. 525-5054.  

Kirk Keeler and Meghan Baker at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

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

Al Young in Concert at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373.  

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

Culann’s Hounds, The Bog Savages at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082.  

Jinx Jones Trio at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Skitzo, Fog of War, Scarecrow, Witchaven at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

John Scofield Trio featuring The ScoHorns at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun.. Cost is $16-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SUNDAY, OCT. 14 

THEATER 

“By George, It’s War!” A musical satarization of the Bush administration by Dale Polissar at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $18-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Berkeley in the 1930s” An exhibition exploring the development of transportation, businesses, and industries. Opening reception at 3 p.m. at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St. 848-0181. 

Works by Mittie Cuetara Opening reception at 4 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

FILM 

“The Magic of Chinese Animation” Introduced by Beijing Film Academy Prof. Duan Jia at 2 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.  

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Jewish Folk Art: Recalling the Lost World of Polish Jews” Panel discussion at 2 p.m. at the Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St. Cost is $10-$12. 549-6950. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

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

Patrizia Ferrara & Isota at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Americana Unplugged: String Break at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

William Beatty and The Unconditionals at 6:30 p.m. at The Mt. Everest Restaurant 2011 Shattuck Ave. 665-6035.  

Don Neely’s Royal Society Orchestra at 5 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20. 525-5054.  

Inga Swearingen and Bill Peterson at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $15. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

MONDAY, OCT. 15 

EXHIBITIONS 

Richard Whittaker and Rue Harrison Photography and Drawings opens at The LightRoom, 2263 Fifth St., and runs through Nov. 9. 649-8111. 

FILM 

“Runnin’Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers” Premier showing at 8 p.m. at Elmwood Rialto Cinema, 2966 College Ave. at Ashby. Cost is $8-$9. 433-9730. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

PlayGround Six emerging playwrights debut new works at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $15. 415-704-3177. 

“Listening to Classical Music” with Joseph Kerman at 12:30 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

Rebecca Brown & Lucy Corin read at 7:30 p.m. at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave. 849-2087. 

Adam Clay and Andrew Grace, poets, at 7:30 p.m. at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave. 649-1320. 

Harry Shearer reads from his novel “Not Enough Indians” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

Poetry Express with Judy Wells at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Trovatore, traditional Italian music, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198.  

Songwriter’s Showcase at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $5. 548-1761. 

Julio Bravo y su Salsabor at 8 at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200.

When the Bunraku (National Puppet Theater of Japan) begins a performance—as they will this Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. in Zellerbach Hall, for the first time since 1983—a particular kind of magic takes over.  

Some of it comes from the ritual of the appearance of the shamisen player and the Tayu, the narrator, onstage, sometimes popping into view on a turntable, with the Tayu bowing to the text of the play in his upheld hands. Some of it comes from the penetrating sound and rhythms of voice and instrument, as the emotions of the words play across the Tayu’s face. And when the three-foot-tall puppets start to “act,” despite the three puppeteers for each in full view, some spectators begin to squint, the illusion is at once so lifelike, yet fantastic, as if another world has opened up, in a perfect, completely charming imitation of the Genroku period of 17th-18th century Japan. 

The Bunraku (more formally “Ningyo Joruri,” indicating “doll storytelling, with music and chanting”), despite its reliance on actors of wood and paint, is one of the great theaters of the world. It has had a profound influence on the development of the texts and performing style of the Kabuki, and exciting the imaginations of theater practitioners and theorists everywhere, a literal realization of Romantic playwright Heinrich von Kleist’s great essay and parable, “On the Marionette Theater,” in which a stage dancer watching a puppet show asserts that “a puppet built to the right specifications could perform in such a way not to be equaled by any of the geniuses of our time ... never guilty of the least affectation.” 

The company, which includes four “Living National Treasures” of Japan (a government-designated status), will present ‘Date Musume Koi no Higanoko’ (“Oshichi of the Fire Watch Tower,” 1773) and ‘Tsubosaka Kannon Reigenki’ (“Miracle at the Tsubosaka Kannon Temple,” 1887), with an introduction to Bunraku. 

Other events around the Bunraku’s visit include a free symposium, 7 p.m. Wednesday at Wheeler Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus, and a lecture-demonstration in Samsung Hall at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Fri. at 2 p.m. (free with museum admission).  

The Wheeler symposium includes a panel with Mary Elizabeth Berry (History Department chair), Janice Kanemitsu (East Asian Languages and Culture professor) and Peter Grilli, president of the Boston Japan Society (who also gives the free Sightlines pre-performance talks, half an hour before curtain). Both events will feature the screening of performance footage and a demonstration by puppeteers. 

Puppets were introduced to Japan in the 9th century, but it wasn’t until the late 16th century that the formula that would lead to the Bunraku was created, when Hikita, a puppeteer, joined forces with a shamisen player, Menukiya Chozaburo, to back the actions of the puppets with the musical storytelling of joruri. In 1685, the Takemoto-za was founded in Osaka, bringing together the talents of joruri narrator Takemoto Gidayu, puppeteer Tachimatsu Hachirobei, and “the Shakespeare of Japan,” playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and the Bunraku was born. 

Chikamatsu had come from Kabuki and was influenced by the humanistic acting style of Sakata Tojuro of Kyoto. In contrast to Kabuki, an actors’ theater, Bunraku would become a playwrights’ venue, and Chikamatsu wrote about 100 plays for the puppets, many adapted back to Kabuki and among its greatest classics.  

As the puppets improved technically and could be used with greater virtuosity—by the middle 18th century, eyes, eyebrows, ears and individual fingers could move and the stomach swell—Bunraku competed with Kabuki in popularity, and for awhile pulled ahead, due to government restrictions on live actors (similar to the conditions that made puppet opera triumph in France at about the same time). 

To catch up, Kabuki actors imitated puppet movement and joruri voice, taking the lead again, as described by Faubion Bowers, longtime Kabuki simultaneous translator and commentator, in Japanese Theater: “However much the public liked to see puppets act as humans, they were more delighted to see actors perform as puppets.” 

Bowers, who studied Kabuki in Tokyo before World War II, and afterwards, as MacArthur’s theater censor, saved Kabuki from closure when zealous reformers endeavored to have it banned completely, discusses both Kabuki and Bunraku as the expression of the Genroku era, late 17th to early 18th century (especially in the Kansai region, Kyoto and Osaka): “The moment of awakening of the common man in Japan ... there was emancipation to a certain extent, but it was emancipation of the emotions from narrow moral restraints. There was desire for equality, but for equality in the pleasure districts only ... The political rule of the military classes continued ... irrationality, conventionality and formality were harmonized... .” 

The poeticized dramas of Bunraku deal with sentimental and social conflicts, expressed in the common speech of the time. In the first play to be presented, a girl separated from her secret lover almost burns down the city trying to reach him. In the second, an older couple is rewarded for their exceptional sacrifice and devotion. Smaller than life, the life-like puppets create emotional overtones that become larger than life. As Kleist’s dancer says in his parable, “Grace appears with the greatest purity in whatever human shape having either no consciousness or infinite consciousness—puppet or god!” 

BUNRAKU (NATIONAL PUPPET THEATER OF JAPAN) 

8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. $76. Rush tickets, for $10-20, are announced two hours before showtime and put on sale an hour before. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu. 

Photograph: Bunraku Kyokai 

Bringing Japan's centuries-old form of puppet theater, Bunraku National Puppet Theater of Japan comes to Cal Performances Oct. 13 and 14.  

Featuring Richard Roundtree—“Shaft” on the silver screen—and TV star Viveca A. Fox in her theatrical debut, Whatever She Wants, a romantic comedy by Je’Caryous Johnson, is onstage this week, Thursday through Sunday, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. 

Boris Kodjoe (from Madea’s Family Reunion and Soul Food), “L’il G” (from Silk) and Scruncho (from BET’s “Comicview”) round out the cast. 

In the play, Fox’s character, Vivian Wolf, opens a private club where single women can meet men who have been screened: “No baby daddies, no bad credit, no pot bellies—and no living with your mama.” 

Roundtree plays Fox’s father Theodore. “I love the storyline,” he said. “It’s a black family trying to make it in America. What a novel idea.”  

Roundtree, with his resonant voice, has “always sort of fallen into the authority figure,” he said. Best-known for his signature film role, he began onstage as a member of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, playing Jack Johnson in their production of The Great White Hope. “That need to hear that hand-clapping,” is how Roundtree credited his origins in live theater.  

Whatever She Wants is just one example of the newer touring romantic comedies that have provided a venue for black film, television and recording stars. Coming out of the musicals and “gospel dramas” that were a hit with audiences in the ’80s, these broad, sitcom-like stories told with humor appeal to a broad spectrum of spectators, including devout church-goers, due to their moral and social messages.  

For a couple of decades at least, Joe and I have lurked around a few of the little stands of the weed Nicotiana glauca, tree tobacco, that are scattered along Del Puerto Canyon Road just east of I5. Short lurks are part of our usual spring day-trip itinerary along that route from Del Puerto Canyon to Mines Road because we might see Costa’s hummingbirds feeding on the tall shrubs’ tubular yellow flowers, and who knows what other hummers might show up while they’re migrating?  

So it was almost a reflex that made me pull over when I found a streetside stand of tree tobacco in west Berkeley. I’m lucky there wasn’t a lot of traffic there with me. Birders’ reflexes aren’t always adaptive; I remember a fender-bender occasioned by a kestrel who was doing an apparently convincing stage impression of a peregrine at close range over a freeway traffic jam. Having learned from that example, I do try to behave myself.  

Free advice, though: Never tailgate a birder. 

Nicotiana species—there are 45 to 100 of them, depending on who’s classifying—are native to the Americas. Those sweetly night-scented garden flowers are close kin to smoking-type tobacco, currently a favorite political red herring in public places. (Why, no; I don’t smoke it and never have. See? Behaving myself again! That might itself be a bad habit.) 

Come to think of it, I’ve never been on Del Puerto Canyon Road after dark; I’ll have to hie me down to Fourth Street tonight and have a sniff. 

This one is, fide the botanist Howard McMinn, the only woody species that shows up in the United States. Most of the various tobaccos cultivated by the First Peoples are herbaceous. Tree tobacco is native to Argentina, and came here with the Spanish missionaries. 

Tobacco is closely enough related to tomatoes to share some diseases like the dread tobacco mosaic virus, which is why nurseries ask people not to smoke while shopping, even outdoors. If you’re growing tomatoes, you might have been advised to wash your hands after smoking before messing about with your plants.  

It’s no surprise to those who’ve dealt with certain diseases in humans, Ebola fever for example, that one’s closest biological relatives harbor one’s worst epidemiological dangers. We share more diseases with our dogs and cats than with our turtles and snakes, who might harbor salmonella and such but ordinarily don’t suffer from them, and fewer still with our commensal arachnids or the average earthworm.  

The species are in the solanum family, along with potatoes and eggplants and chili peppers (sweet peppers too) and nightshades and Jimsonweed. We have a handsome native California plant, almost a shrub, called blue witch or Solanum umbelliferum, last time I looked.  

Why “witch”? Undoubtedly because of the plant’s association with other solanums and relatives like Atropa belladonna with highly active poisonous and intoxicating compounds. Both A. belladonna and Solanum nigrum get called “deadly nightshade.” Lots of members of the family are toxic or, even when edible, have toxic parts; don’t nibble on tomato or potato greens.  

People do all sports of foolish things with solanums. Smoking tobacco in the mass-produced, everyday, uncritical fashion that’s spread around the world is certainly one of them. People have smoked Jimsonweed for its hallucinogenic qualities, a dangerous idea because one has no way of knowing how concentrated the intoxicating toxins are in a given plant and what dose one’s taking.  

Belladonna is so called because women used it, way back when, as eyedrops to dilate their pupils, one of those “I’m interested” sexual signals that get rotated through the assembly line of fashion.  

Belladonna does have medical uses: you might get a (very low, carefully controlled) dose of atropine extracted from it before surgery to dry out mucous membranes and make the surgeon’s work a bit simpler. Rarely, it’s also used by opthamologists to dilate pupils during an eye exam.  

If you manage to get poisoned by certain insecticides you’ll get dosed with atropine in the ER. My great-auntly advice is to avoid messing with either of them if you can help it.  

Other insecticides are being produced from nicotine compounds. That flea-control stuff that gets applied to the back of the dog’s or cat’s neck is a nicotine derivative, which has the merit of being less toxic to most non-arthropods like you and me and the furry pets than the stuff that older treatments used. I believe the same corporations are making insecticides for plants out of nicotine analogues, too. Seems to me we’re coming full circle and you might want to go smoke a cigar in your garden after all.  

Photograph: Ron Sullivan. 

Glaucous leaves and yellow flowers of tree tobacco. 

Ron Sullivan’s “Green Neighbors” column appears every other Tuesday. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section.  

TUESDAY, OCT. 9 

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 Eastshore State Park and the Albany Bulb. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Birding Class on Owls Learn about their habits and habitats, then look for them on Sat. field trips. Classes are Oct. 9, 16, and 23 at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Field trips are Oct. 20 and 27. Offered in conjunction with the Audubon Society. Fee is $50. To register call 843-2222.  

“Tracking the Nation’s Groundwater Reserves” with William M. Alley of the U.S. Geological Survey at 5:30 p.m. in Room 112, Wurster Hall, UC Campus. 642-2666. 

“The Hidden Humor in Holy Scripture” with John L. Bell from the Iona community in Scotland at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 848-3696. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library. 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 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. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 10 

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.  

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Stephen R.J. Sheppard on “Global Warming in Everyday Places: Localizing, Spatializing, and Visualizing Climate Change” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Pools for Berkeley meets to discuss the possibilities of an aquatic center at West Campus at 7 p.m. at City of Berkeley Corporation Yard, Public Meeting Room, 1326 Allston Way. All welcome. Childcare for ages 5 and up. www.poolsforberkeley.org 

“Matewan” A film about labor and race in a West Virginia mining town at 8 p.m. at Long Haul Infoshop, 3124 Shatttuck Ave. www.thelonghaul.org 

An Introduction to Marxism, a free class for beginners and students at every level from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 595-7417.  

CodePink Picket in front of the Marine Recruiting Station, 64 Shattuck Ave. from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. 524-2776. 

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. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, OCT. 11 

“Hidden History of the East Bay: Photographs Tell Towns’ Stories” at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

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. 1-888-327-2757. 

35th Anniversary Celebration of Harbor House with Dr. Tony Campolo from 6 to 9 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway at 27th St., Oakland. Tickets are $30-$40, available from Harbor House, 1811, 11th Avenue, Oakland. 534-0165. 

University of California Press Book Sale from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 2120 Berkeley Way, one block north of University, between Shattuck and Oxford. www.ucpress.edu 

Jack London Aquatic Center Community Challenge and fundraiser to inspire diverse communiteis to participate in water sports, at 5 p.m. at Jack London Aquatic Center. For information call 208-6067. 

Food + Farming Film “Our Daily Bread” and “We Feed the World” with San Francisco area breadbakers Steve Sullivan, founder Acme Breads, and Julie Cummins, CUESA, at 6:40 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. at Arch.  

Benefit for Sickle Cell Disease and Thalassemia Programs at Children’s Hospital & Research Center with an Evening Under the Stars at Chabot Space & Science Center. Tickets are $40-$90. 428-3452. www.childrenshospitaloakland.org 

“How to Have a Healthy Childbirth” at 5:30 p.m. at Pharmaca, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

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.  

FRIDAY, OCT. 12 

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Regine Spector, on “United States-Russian Relations: A New Cold War?” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925.  

“Planet Earth: Pole to Pole, Mountains and Deep Ocean” A Conscientious Projector Film at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Hall, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. 841-4824. www.bfuu.org  

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

Red Cross Blood Drive from 11:45 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. atUCB Unit 3 Dorms, 2400 Durant Ave. To schedule an appointment go to www.BeADonor.com  

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, OCT. 13 

African People’s Solidarity Day with speakers from South Africa, Sierra Leone and the U.S. on conditions faced by African people around the world. Sat. from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Sun. from 1 to 5:30 p.m. at Beebe Memorial Cathedral, 3900 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. Sliding scale donation $10-$25. 625-1106. www.uhurusolidarity.org 

“Blood Money: Campaign Dollars and Health Care Policy in California” A panel discussion at 10 a.m. at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St. at 27th. Sponsored by the California Clean Money Campaign. www.caclean.org 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland uptown to the Lake to discover Art Deco landmarks. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of the Paramount Theater at 2025 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. 

Paws on the Square and a Katrina Pet Reunion from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Jack London Square, Oakland. Owner-Dog Look-Alike Contest, trick and costume contests for dogs and cats, and information on adoption and training. Sponsored by Hopalong Animal Rescue. For more informaion see www.jacklondonsquare.com 

“Berkeley in the 1930s” An exhibition exploring the development of transportation, businesses, and industries. Come see how Berkeley fared during The Depression at 3 p.m. at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St. 848-0181. 

The Great War Society meets to discuss “American Volunteers in the Canadian Army-1914-17” by S. Compagno at 10:30 a.m. at 640 Arlington Ave. 527-7118. 

Keep Our Water Clean: Pharmaceutical Take-Back Campaign Bring in your over-the-counter medications and supplements as well as non-controlled prescriptions. Bring medication in original containers with personal information marked out. Bring mercury thermometers in two zipper bags to prevent breaks and spills and receive a free digital thermometer in exchange. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Whole Foods Market, 3000 Telegraph Ave. For more infomation see www.teleosis.org  

School House Creek Commons Fall Clean Up and Sowing of Wild Flower Seeds at 9 a.m. at Virginia and Curtis streets, at the eastern end of the Berkeley Adult School. If the weather has cooled enough, we also hope to be planting a slope of a hill with plugs of native grasses. There’s a play area for kids, and coffee and snacks will be served. 559-8368. 

Codornices Creek Watershed Tour with different speakers along various points of the creek. Meet at 9 a.m. near the mouth of Codornices Creek at Albany Waterfront Park, where Buchanan St. dead ends north of Golden Gate Fields, west of I-580. There will be a complimentary lunch afterwards. Please bring your own water bottle to save plastic. RSVP required 540-6669.  

Celebrate Cerrito Creek by Making Art Join Friends of Five Creeks and environmental artist Zach Pine making art with natural materials on restored Cerrito Creek from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the south edge of the El Cerrito Plaza parking lot between Cornell and Kains, adjacent to Saturday El Cerrito Plaza Farmers Market. Free, all are welcome. 848-9358. www.fivecreeks.org  

Help Restore San Pablo Creek in El Sobrante from 9 a.m. ato 12:30 p.m. Sponsored by REI and SPAWNERS. Tools provided. To register call 665-3538. www.spawners.org 

“Thirteen Ways to Stop Global Warming and Have a Beautiful Garden” A workshop with Alrie Middlebrook from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at The Watershed Nursery, 155 Tamalpais Rd. Cost is $25-$45. 548-4714. www.thewatershednursery.com  

Autumn Arachnids Learn about the mysteries of the spider and then hunt for orb weavers, jumping spiders, wolf spiders and more at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Urban FIRE Walk-A-Thon A benefit for fund a Microloan Progam in Oakland. Meet at the Boathouse at Oakland’s Lake Merritt at 9 a.m. Donation $50. 655-1304. www.urbanvoice.org 

Indian Statue Day and Festival from noon to 5 p.m. in downtown Point Richmond. Music, arts and crafts, dress up your dog contest and a tour of the point’s Historic District. South of the Border luncheon from noon to 2 p.m. at First United Methodist Church, 201 Martina St. 234-4219. 

Celebrating Indigenous People’s Day at Peralta Hacienda Historical Park with a presentation of Native American arts and music at 2 p.m. at Peralta Hacienda Historical Park, 2465 34th Ave., Oakland. Free. 532-9142. 

“Telling Tales” Storytelling Festival from noon to 5 p.m. at Berkwood Hedge School, 1809 Bancroft Way. Cost is $5, $15 per family. 883-6990. 

NAACP Berkeley Branch meets at 1 p.m. at 2108 Russell St. All are welcome. 

“Wal-Mart: The Face of 21st Century Capitalism” with Prof. Nelson Lichtenstein, UCSB, at 7 p.m. at Alamda Free Library, 1550 Oak St. Alameda. Conference on “Labor, Wal-Mart and China” begins at 1 p.m. Sponsored by California Healthy Communities Network and Alameda Public Affairs Forum. 814-9592. www.alamedaforum.org 

Vegetarian Cooking Class “Sensational Soul Food” Learn how to prepare Smokin’ Barbecued Tofu, Hoppin’ John (Black-eyed Peas and Rice) with Sauteed Greens, Spicy Okra Rice Soup, Creamy Vegan Macaroni & Cheese, Sweet Bread Pudding from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro, Oakland. Cost is $45, plus $5 materials fee. To register call 531-COOK. 

Pancake Breakfast and Tiffany Tour of the Louis Comfort Tiffany glass mosaic mural triptych, “Te Deum Laudamus,” from 8 a.m. to noon at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church, 1330 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-4793. www.lakemerrittumc.org  

“Sogetsu Ikebana Flower Show” Demonstration at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022.  

“Strong at the Heart: How it Feels to Heal from Sexual Abuse” with author Carolyn Lehamn at 1 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6107. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 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.  

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, OCT. 14 

Spice of Life Festival in North Berkeley’s gourmet Ghetto, notrh Shattuck Ave., from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with product demonstrations, a culinary stage and live music. www.spiceoflifefestival.com 

Reptile Rap Meet our resident snake and turtle friends with an interactive talk for the whole family, from 2 to 3 p.m. at the Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Refuge Workday Help us prepare habitat for California Least Terns, which breed at the refuge. Meet at 9 a.m. at the main refuge gate at the northwest corner of former Alameda Naval Air Station, Alameda. Sponsored by Golden Gate Audubon Society. 843-2222. 

STAND Fundraiser and Garden Reception from 4 to 6 p.m. in the garden of a grand 115 year old Queen Anne Victorian in the heart of Temescal. 449 49th St., corner of 49th and Clarke. Speakers are Jeff D. Hoffman, the land-use/environmental attorney representing STAND, and Jeff Norman, Temescal historian. Cost is $25, $40 per couple. 655-3841. 

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 

7th Annual Crabby Chef Challenge benefiting Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Spenger's, 1919 Fourth St. Cooking competition begins at 2 p.m. 845-7771. 

The Friends of the Kensington Library Booksale from noon to 4 p.m. in the parking lot behind the library at 59 Arlington Blvd. A silent auction with ‘finds’ for book collectors from noon to 2 p.m. 524-3043.  

“The Revived Peace Process: Opportunities and Pitfalls” with Yossi Alpher, co-editor of bitterlemons, a web-based Israeli-Palestinian political dialogue magazine and columnist for Peace Now, at 7 p.m. at Congregation Netivot Shalom, 1316 University Ave. Donation $10. 525-3582. www.bridgestoisrael-berkeley.org 

“The Joy of Vegan Baking: Compassionate Cooks’ Traditional Treats & Sinful Sweets” Book party with author Colleen Patrick-Goudreau of Compassionate Cooks at 4:30 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. at Castro, Oakland. 531-2665. 

“Sogetsu Ikebana Flower Show” Demonstration at 2 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022.  

Architecture Tour of the Oakland Museum of California Meet at 1 p.m. at the Admissions Desk, second level, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“China Blue” Film screening and discussion of the conditions of China’s workers at 10 a.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 595-7417. www.tifcss.org 

“Unitarian Universalism, Why It Matters” with Bill Hamilton-Holway at 10 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

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 

Tibetan Buddhism with Hugh Joswick on “Dream and Illusion” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812. www.nyingmainstitute.com 

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 5 to 9 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Cost is $3 per hour. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

MONDAY, OCT. 15  

“New Public Policy Perspectives and the Power of Engaged Citizens” with Robert B. Reich, David L. Kirp, and Carol Chetkovich at 6 p.m. at FSM Cafe at Moffitt Library, UC Campus. fsm-info@ 

library.berkeley.edu 

Pumpkin Painting for Children at 3:30 p.m. at Elephant Pharmacy, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Books and Ideas Group discusses “The Poe Shadow” at 1:15 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. 981-5190. 

Teen Chess Club meets at 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, Benvenue at Ashby. 981-6280. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Join us to work on current issues around police misconduct. Volunteers needed. For information call 548-0425. 

Dragonboating Year round classes at the Berkeley Marina, Dock M. Meets Mon, Wed., Thurs. at 6 p.m. Sat. at 10:30 a.m. For details see www.dragonmax.org 

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth Mon.-Wed. from 3 to 7 p.m. at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Oct. 9, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www. 

ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6346. TDD: 981-6345.  

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5426.  

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. 981-6740.  

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Oct. 11, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. 981-7410.  

FRIDAY, OCT. 5 

THEATER 

California Shakespeare Theater “King Lear” at the Bruns Ampitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda, through Oct. 14. Tickets are $15-$60. 548-9666. www.calshakes.org 

Contra Costa Civic Theatre “Rumors” by Neil Simon, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m., selected Sundays at 2 p.m. at 951 Pomona Ave. at Moeser, El Cerrito, through Oct. 14. Tickets are $11-$18. 655-8974. www.cct.org 

Impact Theatre “Sleepy” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid Ave., through Oct. 13. Tickets are $10-$15. 464-4468. 

Masquers Playhouse “4 Plays by Peter Levy” Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sun. at 2:30 p.m. at 105 Park Place, Point Richmond. Q&A with the playwright at the Sat. eve. performance. Tickets are $10. 232-3888. www.masquers.org 

Ragged Wing Ensemble “Alice in Wonderland” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Envision Academy, 1515 Webster St., Oakland, through Oct. 13. Tickets are $15-$30. 800-838-3006. www.raggedwing.org 

Shotgun Players “Bulrusher” Thurs.-Sun. at 8 p.m. at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. through Oct. 28. Tickets are $17-$25. For reservations call 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

“Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” written and performed by Amy Wong, Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12-$15. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Quilts of Dorothy Vance” On display Fri. from 5 to 8 p.m., and Sat. from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

Tea Pot Show Works by members of the Potters’ Studio in celebration of their 35th Anniversary. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at 637 Cedar St. 528-3286. 

“A Class Act CCA-C” A group art show by students from California College of the Arts. Opening reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St. 465-8928. 

New Works by Peter Honig and Ce Ce Landoli Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway, Oakland. 701-4620. 

“Works by Keira Kotler and Jenn Shifflet” Opening reception at 6 p.m. at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, 25 Grand Ave., upper level, Oakland. Exhibition runs through Nov. 17. www.chandracerrito.com 

“Water Street: Works by Jenny E. Balisle and Antonio Vigil” Reception at 4 p.m. at Pro Arts Gallery, 550 Second St., Oakland. 763-4361. 

“Circular Logic: Works by Mae Leung, Jo-ey Tang and Jesse Powell” Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Front Gallery, 35 Grand Ave., Oakland. http://frontgalleryoakland.com 

First Annual Oakland Arts Day Ceremony and Reception at 5 p.m. at Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza at 14th St, & Broadway. RSVP to 238-7561. 

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world continuous sreenings Fri.-Sun. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“Irma Vep” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

Sunset Cinema: “Piece by Piece” on San Francisco’s graffiti art movement at 6:30 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Midnight Movies “Office Space” Fri. and Sat. at midnight at Piedmont Cinema, 4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Cost is $8. 464-5980. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Wendy Tokunaga introduces her novel “Midori by Moonlight” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Marina Lewycka reads from her new novel “Strawberry Fields” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera Theater “Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd. St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

The Korean Traditional Dance Company at 8 p.m. at Hertz Hall, UC Campus. No ticket required. 642-5674. 

Ric Alexander, jazz fusion, at 5 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Tin/Bag plus Chris Brown, Phillip Greenlief & Donald Robinson at 8 p.m. at Free-Jazz Fridays at the Jazz House, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 415-846-9432. 

Yore Folk Dance Ensemble “Semah” Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. tickets are $15-$25. 925-798-1300. 

Joffrey Ballet at 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Dwele and Melissa Young at 8:30 p.m. at Kimball’s Carnival, 522 2nd St., Jack London Square. Tickets are $30. 444-6979. www.kimballscarnival.com 

Michael Smolens & KRIYA at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Robinson, Brown & Greenlief in Trio at 8 p.m. at Free-Jazz Fridays at the Jazz House, 1510 8th St., Oakland. Cost is $5-$15. 415-846-9432. 

Youssoupha Sideibe and Shimshai, West African kora, at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Tamra Engle, rock, folk, at 8 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Australian Bebop Ragas at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Brothers Goldman at 9 p.m. at Downtown. 649-3810.  

Jeff Rolka and Robert Heiskell at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Berkeley Django Reinhardt Hot Jazz Festival at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $12. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Modern Life is War, Trap Them, Trash Talk at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

The Dave Stein Hub-Bub at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

William Beatty, piano, at 6:30 p.m. at The Mount Everest Restaurant, 2011 Shattuck Ave. at University. 

Ben Adams Quintet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Rahsaan Patterson at 8 and 10 p.m., through Sun. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $24-$28. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, OCT. 6 

CHILDREN  

Michael Katz, storyteller, at 10:30 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 3rd floor, Community Meeting Room, 2090 Kittredge St. 

Los Amiguitos de La Peña with Jerry Kennedy, aka J-Soul at 10:30 a.m. at La Peña. Cost is $5 for adults, $4 for children. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences “James and the Giant Peach” Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m., Mon. at 11:30 a.m. at Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College Ave. Tickets are $14-$18. 925-798-1300. 

“Short Attention Span Circus” Acrobatics and juggling by Jean Paul Valjean Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

Annie Barrows reads from “Ivy and Bean Break the Fossil Record” at 4 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“The Quilts of Dorothy Vance” On display from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Sign-language interpreted tour at 1:30 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

“Cross Currents: Artists of Alameda” Opening reception at 1 p.m. at Alameda Museum gallery, 2324 Alameda Ave. 865-0541. 

21st Annual Emeryville Art Exhibition A showcase for more than 90 artists who live or work in Emeryville opens at EmeryStation East, 2nd Floor, 5885 Hollis St., Emeryville, and runs to Oct. 28. 652-6122. www.emeryarts.com  

“Counter Intuitive: Photographs by Susan Tuttle” Opening reception at 3 p.m. at Montclair Gallery, 1986 Mountain Blvd., Oakland. 339-4286. 

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world, Sat. and Sun. from 1 to 9:45 p.m. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“The Big Game” A documentary about Berkeley’s urban tree-sit at 6:55 p.m. at the Landmark California Theater, 2133 Kittredge St. 464-5983. 

“demonlover” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 6:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

The Third Baby Beat Poetry Festival featuring Judy Wells, Neeli Cherkovski, H.D. Moe & Blake More from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at The Humanist Fellowship Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Free. 528-8713. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition Annual Contest and Poetry 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.  

Oliver Chin reads from his latest work “Julie Black Belt, The Kungfu Chronicles” at 3 p.m. at Eastwind Books of Berkeley 2066 University Ave. 548-2350. 

Poetry Flash with Tung-Hui Hu and Mari l’Esperance at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Erica Weber, soprano, performs the works of Mozart, Brahms, Schubert at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www. 

trinitychamberconcerts.com 

Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble “Transitions: Spanish Influence in the New World” at 8 p.m. at St. Albert Priory Chapel, 6172 Chabot Rd., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$15. www.wavewomen.org  

“Melody of China” Premiering compositions by Gang Situ and Yuanlin Chen at 7:30 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 2300 Bancroft Way. Tickets are $10-$18. 415-681-8599. www.melodyofchina.org 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, all Vivaldi program, at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Gamelan Sekar Jaya Music and dance of Bali, at 8 p.m. at Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 11th St. between Franklin and Webster in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza in Oakland’s Chinatown. Tickets are $6-$12. 237-6849. www.gsj.org 

Joffrey Ballet at 2 and 8 p.m. at Zellerbach Hall, UC Campus. Tickets are $34-$90. 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Jessica Williams, jazz pianist, at 8 p.m. at Piedmont Piano Company, 4382 Piedmont Ave. corner Pleasant Valley, Oakland. Donation $20. For reservations call 415-543-9988. 

Beep with Michael Coleman jazz, at 9:30 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5. 843-2473.  

Tanaora at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $14. 841-JAZZ.  

Melodians, reggae, at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $15-$18. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Sotaque Baiano, Brazilian, at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Jessica Rice and Stevie Barsotti at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Veretski Pass at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Faye Carol at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $18. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

Royal Hawaiian Serenaders at 9 p.m. at Temple Bar Tiki Bar & Grill, 984 University Ave. 548-9888. 

Vanessa Lowe and Elliot Randall at 8 p.m. at Spuds Pizza, 3290 Adeline St. Cost is $10. 558-0881. 

Sugar Shack at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Tried and True, Troublemaker, Call to Arms, at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $5. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, OCT. 7 

CHILDREN 

Asheba at Ashkenaz at 3 p.m. Cost is $4-$6. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

Rosemary Wells reads from her new books including “Mother Gooses’s Little Treasures” at 4 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

“The Panchatantra: Animal Lessons from India” at 12:30 and 3:30 p.m. at Children’s Fairyland, 699 Bellevue Ave. 452-2259. 

EXHIBITIONS 

Berkeley Treasures: Three Generations of Printmakers Works by Emmanuel Montoya, Miriam Stahl and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Opening reception at 2 p.m. at Berkeley art Center, 1275 Walnut St. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 2 p.m.at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. 

Michael-Che Swisher “Animals of Tilden” Artist talk at 2 p.m. at Tilden Nature Area, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

21st Annual Emeryville Art Exhibition featuring more than 90 artists who live or work in Emeryville. Reception at 6 p.m. at EmeryStation East, 2nd Floor, 5885 Hollis Street, Emeryville. 652-6122. www.emeryarts.com  

FILM 

Berkeley Video & Film Fest Independent cinema from around the world, from 1 to 10 p.m. at California Theater, 2113 Kittredge St. 464-5983. http://berkeleyvideofilmfest.org 

“Cold Water” with filmmaker Oliver Assayas and film historian Jean-Michel Frodon in conversation at 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu 

“A Celebration of Odd and Hilarious Found Videos” at 5 p.m. at Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakland. Tickets: $8. 814-2400. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Prometheus Symphony Orchestra at 3 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Montecito and Grand Ave., Oakland. 415-864-2151. 

Paul Hanson, bassoon, Steve Erquiaga, guitar, perform music of Brazil, Eastern Europe and more at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $8-$10. 644-6893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org 

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, all Vivaldi program, at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $30-$72. 415-392-4400. www.philharmonia.org 

Oakland Opera Theater “Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

Slammin’ the Infinite & Citta Di Vitti featuring Steve Swell & Sabir Mateen at 8 p.m. at 1510 8th Street Performance Space, Oakland. Cost is $10-$15. 415-846-9432. rob@thejazzhouse.com 

Esteban Bello, Meli Rivera, Ray Cepeda and other, noon to sundown on Edith St. just off Cedar. Look for balloons. Benefits “The Children of Chaguitillo Nicaragua” Cost is $12. 472-3170. 

Benny Watson Trio at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Americana Unplugged: The BAckyard Party Boys at 5 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

William Beatty and The Unconditionals at 6:30 p.m. at The Mt. Everest Restaurant 2011 Shattuck Ave. at University. 665-6035. 

Duamuxa and Rafael Manriquez recounting a musical history of the Chilean presence in California, at 7:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568.  

John Handy at 4:30 at the Jazzschool. Cost is $20. 845-5373.  

Philips Marine Duo at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

MONDAY, OCT. 8 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Express with May Garron and Terry McCarty at 7 p.m., at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Four Seasons Concerts presents Joyce Yang at 7:30 p.m. at Regents Theatre, Valley Center for Performing Arts at Holy Names University. Tickets are $30-$40. 601-7919. www.fourseasonsconcerts.com 

Ed Neff and Friends at 7 p.m. at Le Bateau Ivre, 2629 Telegraph Ave. 849-1100. www.lebateauivre.net 

Ric & Yolanda, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Viva Brasil at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $10. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, OCT. 9 

THEATER 

SporK Festival, a bi-racial, bi-cultural celebration of short palys featuring Leila Buck at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$25. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Lucille Lang Day, Ed Miller and Antohony Russell White at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College auditorium, 2050 Center St. 525-5476. 

Peter Turchi talks about “maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Sauce Piquante at 8:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Singers’ Open Mic with Kelly Park at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way Cost is $5. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Vagabond Opera at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Scraptet, jazz, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Jazzschool 10th Anniversary Concert at 7:30 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $125. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

Jazzschool Tuesdays, a weekly showcase of up-and-coming ensembles from Berkeley Jazzschool at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 10 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Ancient Roots/Urban Journeys: Expressions for Dias de los Muertos” opens at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Ann Patchett reads from her new novel “Run” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

Deep Sports with authors Michael Lewis and Dave Zirin at 7:30 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. Benedit for KPFA. Tickets are $10-$13 at Cody’s. 559-9500. 

Anne Willan presents “Country Cooking of France” at noon at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Berkeley Poetry Slam with host Charles Ellik and Three Blind Mice, at 8:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5-$7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Young Musician’s Program perfroms at noon at Oakland City Center, 12th and Broadway. www.oaklandcitycenter.com 

Bach Festival with Angela Hewitt, piano, Wednesday, October 10 at 8:00 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Tickets are $42. 642-9988. www.calperformances.net; 

Michael Barsimanto Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Folkdance at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Dance lessons at 7 p.m. Cost is $7. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Orquestra Bakan at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Salsa dance lessons at 8:30 p.m. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Buxter Hoot’n at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

Fred O’Dell and the Broken Arrows at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

John Scofield Trio featuring The ScoHorns at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, through Sun.. Cost is $16-$24. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, OCT. 11 

EXHIBITIONS 

“One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now” Guided tour at 12:15 and 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808 

“A Class Act CCA-C” A group art show by students from California College of the Arts. Reception at 5:30 p.m. at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St. 465-8928. 

THEATER 

“Whatever She Wants” a romantic comedy stage play by Je-Caryous Johnson, Thurs. and Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 3 and 8 p.m. at the Paramount Theater, 2025 Broadway, Oakland. Tickets are $34.50-$49.50. 465-6400. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

“Hidden History of the East Bay: Photographs Tell Towns’ Stories” at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

Omali Yeshitela, Black Power Movement veteran and Uhuru Movement leader reads from his latest work, “One Africa! One Nation!” at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 98 Broadway, Jack London Square, Oakland. 272-0120. 

“Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in 18th Century Italy” with author Martha Feldman in conversation with Mary Ann Smart at 5:30 at University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way. 548-0585. 

“History, Culture and the Art of Puppetry in Japan” with Peter Grilli at 7 p.m. in Wheeler Auditorium, UC Campus. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu 

Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Ken Weisner, poets and contibutors to “The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology” at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222. 

Edward J. Larson describes “Magnificanet Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign” at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books on Fourth St. 559-9500. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Oakland Opera Theater “ Turn of the Screw” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 p.m. at Oakland Metro Operahouse, 630 3rd St., through Oct. 14. Tickets are $25. 763-1146.  

Bluehouse at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $18.50-$19.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Jim Grantham Quartet at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $8. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Five Dollar Suit, bluegrass, at 7 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave., at Dwight. 548-5198.  

Mark Growden, Professor Gall, Knees & Elbows at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

Todd Shipley at 10 p.m. at Beckett’s Irish Pub, 2271 Shattuck Ave. 647-1790. www.beckettsirishpub.com 

TURN OF THE SCREW 

Benjamin Britten’s revisioning of Henry James’ ghost story is relocated in a Louisiana plantation by the ever adventurous Oakland Opera. 630 Third, St., Oakland. October 5-7, 11-14, Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 p.m. 510-763-1146 or www.oaklandopera.org. 

SLEEPY AT LAVAL’S 

Steven Yocky’s play Sleepy runs two more weekends at LaVal’s, 1834 Euclid Ave. Sleepy is a revival of the omni-bus play: different characters in different scenes, or vignettes, that somehow fit together. A credible job of fun. Through Oct. 13, Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m. Tickets $10-$14. 464-4468. 

WILLIAMS PLAYS AT  

PIEDMONT PIANO 

Jazz pianist Jessica Williams, a resident of the Bay Area until recently, returns to Piedmont Piano for two shows—tonight (Friday) at 8 p.m. in the San Francisco store on Second Street, Saturday (also 8 p.m.) at the Oakland store. Over the years, Williams has evolved a unique style, in part an interpretation of Monk, which is very much her own.

I’m fascinated by why some succeed, and why some struggle with life,” said Alameda County Deputy Public Defender and Berkeley resident Mark McGoldrick, “why similarly situated people do differently, even from the same family. Why do some make it and some have a harder time? It’s one of the mysteries of life. Why does one kid from East Oakland make it to Julliard and others never get out of the ‘hood? How do you describe it? Is it luck? The will to live? It’s unquantifiable.” 

McGoldrick was reflecting on the bigger questions behind his own new solo show, Countercoup, directed by David Ford, now playing at The Marsh in San Francisco through Oct. 20. 

Countercoup is “semiautobiographical,” the story of a young man from a white middle-class family in rehabilitation from an accident that paralyzed him, the friendship he makes with a man from the ghetto, paralyzed from a gunshot wound, and what happens to them both on re-entry into the real world, how their “lives end up in different places.” 

McGoldrick says the model for the principal character of his tale is himself as a teenager and young man, an at-risk youth from “a loving family” in Arizona leading a “don’t-tell-me-what-to-do lifestyle—typical: alcohol, drugs, being a jerk—and progressively getting into more trouble,” including breaking his hands twice in fistfights, getting suspended from school, until finally breaking his neck in a car accident during Christmas 1982 at age 17. 

Now the former angry young man finds himself defending other angry young men in court. “It’s interesting how the roles are reversed, now that I’m the seasoned graybeard, trying to counsel those bent on self-destruction. Generations keep coming up, and continue to do strange stuff.” 

After his accident and hospitalization, McGoldrick went through rehabilitation, “like a bootcamp,” eventually getting discharged to his waiting parents’ care. “It was frustrating. I couldn’t do anything. But at least my family was around to abuse!”  

McGoldrick enrolled in the local community college, then later at the state university. “Before, I wasn’t sure about going. College wasn’t interesting. But once I’d broken my neck, and couldn’t do the things I wanted to do, it seemed obvious college was a first step. I’d go for the thinking jobs.” He graduated from Harvard Law School, then clerked for a Federal judge in San Diego, before taking the job he still holds after 13 years with the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office and moving to Berkeley. “I like the climate, where it is on the bay,” said McGoldrick, “the ambiance, the mix of people.” 

His work as a deputy public defender brings him into immediate contact with those who “live in a different America than I live in. The clients I meet coming through the criminal justice system; that’s our point of contact, where the most resources ever invested in them are used to punish them. I start with that as the defendant’s reality.” 

“Some are the working poor,” he continued, “None have enough to pay for a private attorney. They have no health insurance; they go to the emergency room for health care. Some wait to get their dental work done in prison. Their probation reports, a kind of bio of five or 10 pages, often read like a Stephen King story. I look at their background, read through—and ask, what did we think was going to happen to this kid? Anything other than what did? It reads like a recipe for making a criminal defendant.” 

“What do we do? Catch them, put our hands on hips and say, ‘For shame!’? There’re no chances for shame—say, for a prostitute on San Pablo Avenue—and as if it’s not it’s own hell.” 

He reflected further on his job and on the system he works in: “It’s emotionally hard work, and often comes from the soul when terrible, terrible things go awry in the industry of pain I work in. But I like what I do. I believe in it. I’m proud of my office. There’s a world of choices of what I could be doing, could get paid for somewhere else. I have an immense amount of pride to be working as a public defender rather than a private attorney. I feel that’s on a public service model.” 

Countercoup is partly a straight-ahead cautionary story, which ends in an epiphany the character has when it’s almost too late about how he’s been messing up, and half buddy story, McGoldrick said.  

“He and his new friend meet in the hospital and go through the same process together, but end up in different places. The new friend is a blue collar guy who never thought about going to college; it wasn’t in the cards,” he said. “The buddy gets out, moves into substandard subsidized housing, with miscreant attendants who sometimes show up, sometimes leave him to sleep in his wheelchair all night. One life goes into a bad place, the other is lifted up. And the character based on me sees himself abandoning his buddy, where the audience might not. I like telling stories, not creating messages in that way. I prefer it if people afterwards, over a drink or dinner, have different opinions. That’s fine with me. It’s more the way I think life is.” 

McGoldrick’s reticence about message-mongering is reflected in how he gets his points across on stage: “The buddy gets upset when he sees my character, ensconced in privilege, tear off the head of a nurse’s aide. So social ideas are shown through dramatic interchange. There’s a lot of dark stuff, but it’s also funny. It’s graphic; people wince, then laugh, feel comic relief, in the spirit of the public defender’s sense of humor.” 

COUNTERCOUP 

8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday through Oct. 20 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St.,  

San Francisco. Tickets: (800) 838-3006. Information: (415) 826-5750 or  

www.themarsh.org.

The Berkeley Film and Video Festivals marks its 16th year this weekend with another vast and varied program of independent productions. If there’s a theme to the annual festival, the theme is that there is no theme; it simply showcases independent film in all its unruly diversity, from the brilliant to the silly, from mainstream to left field, from documentaries and drama to comedy and cutting-edge avant garde. 

The festival, put on annually by the East Bay Media Center, runs today (Friday) through Sunday at Landmark’s California Theater in downtown Berkeley.  

Festival Director Mel Vapour takes pride in one participant’s description of the festival as a bastion of artistic integrity among film festivals, and one that remains blissfully celebrity-free. This year’s program is no exception, providing a feast of cinematic pleasures untouched by commercial considerations.  

One of the most extraordinary films on this year’s program is George Aguilar’s Diary of Niclas Gheiler. Aguilar has created what he terms a “documentary mashup,” consisting of old family photographs and found footage combined with words from his grandfather’s diary. The result is a stirring poetic reverie on his grandfather’s life in Germany from World War I, when he served alongside a young Adolf Hitler, and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the run-up to World War II. It’s a 32-minute tour de force that approaches history from a deeply personal perspective. 

The Big Game, by L A Wood, presents a sympathetic view of the Memorial Stadium oak grove tree-sit. Regardless of where you come down on the myriad issues surrounding the UC Berkeley’s plan to build an athletic performance facility along the stadium’s western wall, this entertaining 30-minute film is sure to provide grist for your political mill. Though university officials declined Wood’s invitation to comment on camera, he does little to fill that gap in the narrative, at no point providing the viewer with an account of the university’s reasoning behind its plans or its responses to the protest. The result is a film which may be endearing to the like-minded, but which will only fuel the ire of those on the other side of the debate, encouraging rather than tempering the tendencies of each side to paint the other in broad strokes. Familiar faces abound; in fact, the film is a veritable who’s who of Daily Planet opinion page contributors.  

Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf’s Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place provides a compassionate portrait of the larger-than-life poet—his work, his humanity and his influence—using archival footage and audio along with testimonials from friends and colleagues. The central narrative concerns Olson’s quest to preserve the unique qualities of his hometown, a quest one fellow poet likens to a Superbowl match-up between the Minnesota Vikings and the Miami Dolphins, in which the Dolphins abandoned their game plan in favor of tactical improvisation that reached the level of poetry. It’s an analogy many tree-sitters would be loathe to accept, but in the context of Olson’s all-encompassing, all-embracing, big-picture view of life and community, such supposed polarities as football vs. poetry are exposed as meaningless. 

Other films from this weekend’s program: 

• Orit Schwartz’s The Frank Anderson, a sharp comedic short (featuring several familiar faces from larger-budget Hollywood productions), tells the story of an insurance agent who pays a price when he denies coverage for a man’s breast reduction surgery while enthusiastically offering to pay for enhancement surgery for a woman he hopes to bed.  

• Flaming Chicken, Gerald Varney’s 20-minute impressionistic musing on San Francisco, is comprised largely of hitherto unseen footage Varney shot while working as a Bay Area journalist in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  

• Silhouettes, a seven-minute short by Acalanes High School (Lafayette) students Patrick Ouziel and Kevin Walker, details the plight of a teen whose shadow, which takes the form of a rabbit, leads to bullying from his peers. 

• Chronicles of Impeccable Sportsmanship, Erika Tasini’s excellent silent short that depicts curious dynamics among a rooftop-dwelling family. 

• The Homecoming, a solemn and mysterious 10-minute film, consists of evocative scenes that almost play like trailers from longer films.  

• Tile M for Murder, an absurd, almost cartoonish comedy, features a hostile couple squaring off over a game of Scrabble on a sweltering summer day. “It’s a hot day and I hate my wife,” says the husband, and off we go on a bile-fueled ride in which the words spelled out on the board dictate the course of events. 

• Mark Hammond’s feature film Johnny Was boasts an excellent performance by Vinnie Jones as a former Irish Republican Army fighter hiding out in London. The film also features the screen debuts of boxer Lennox Lewis and former Who frontman Roger Daltrey. 

But this sampling just scratches the surface. There are simply too many films on the program to do justice to them in the space allotted here. Suffice it to say, this is a film lover’s film festival, one that eschews the predictable fare that so often passes for independent film these days in an effort to present an engaging and wide-ranging program of cinema artistry. 

Photograph: A scene from George Aguilar’s poetic “documentary mashup,” Diary of Niclas Gheiler, a found-footage reverie on the life of the director’s German grandfather in the years between the world wars.

In June 1906, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company released a three-minute film called “A Trip to Berkeley, Cal.” The short was filmed aboard a moving streetcar on the #4 line of the Oakland Traction Consolidated Company, a precursor of the Key Route System. The #4 line ran between downtown Oakland and the intersection of Euclid and Hilgard Avenues, four blocks north of the UC campus. 

The film, which is available for viewing on the Library of Congress website, documents most of the #4 line’s final leg, as the streetcar rolls along Oxford Street, turns east onto Hearst Avenue, climbs up to North Gate, and turns north onto Euclid Avenue, coming to a stop in the middle of the 1800 block—the one we know as the Euclid or North Gate commercial district. 

Except that in 1906 there was no commercial district on Euclid Avenue, and one would not develop there until the 1920s and would not become fully built until the late ’30s. 

In 1906, there wasn’t a single building on the western side of Euclid Avenue’s 1800 block. The eastern side boasted three structures, with nary a store among them. The north fork of Strawberry Creek ran in its open channel on both sides of the street. The creek isn’t visible in “A Trip to Berkeley, Cal.,” but the buildings along Euclid Avenue are. 

Before the streetcar makes its turn at North Gate, one can see the house of Rev. George B. Smyth at 2509 Hearst Avenue. The Smyth house occupied the upper third of a triple corner lot. The lower two-thirds, abutting on Euclid Ave., were planted with an orchard. Next door to the orchard was the Northgate Hotel at 1809 Euclid—a large, three-story-plus-basement structure, adorned with two front balconies and three round turrets topped by witches’ caps. A tall water tower rose in the rear. Just up from the hotel, across the creek, stood two homes built in 1892. 

1805 Euclid was a very early Brown Shingle (1891 was the first year in which this type of building appeared in Berkeley, the most prominent surviving example being the Anna Head School), featuring a round turret and a gable whose concave walls curved in to accommodate a central window. Its neighbor at 1801 Euclid had a plain façade and wood siding. 

The Northgate Hotel, designed and built by A.W. Pattiani in 1902, was torn down in late 1936 and replaced by the current one-story Art Deco commercial building, still clad with the original ‘30s glossy black tiles and vertical chrome strips. The Smyth house, built in 1891, gave up its orchard for the Euclid Apartments, which opened in 1913. The Smyth house itself was turned into a fraternity, then into a rooming house, and ultimately was razed and replaced by a food court. 

Against all odds, the two 1892-vintage houses at 1801 and 1805 Euclid Ave. still stand, albeit not as houses and not on Euclid. Both houses first appeared in the Alameda County assessment records in 1893. The corner house at 1801 Euclid was owned by Frank M. Wilson, the Indiana-born banker who swooped upon Berkeley in 1891 and purchased the entire Daley’s Scenic Park tract for $4,000 in gold. Wilson would quickly establish himself as a Berkeley VIP and in 1894 would engage contractor George Frederick Estey to build him a brown-shingle house on the crest of Ridge Road. Intended as the barn for a projected mansion that was never built, it served as the Wilson family’s permanent residence until 1969 and was razed in the late 1970s to make way for the GTU Library designed by Louis Kahn. 

Before his house was built, Wilson lived in San Francisco, and in October 1893 he rented the house of realtor and Shattuck brother-in-law Ralza A. Morse on the northwest corner of Shattuck Ave. and Bancroft Way. By then, he had sold 1801 Euclid Ave. to realtor Oscar G. May, but it’s possible that Wilson occupied the Euclid house before doing so, since the assessment record in his name shows personal property in the house. 

The shingled house at 1805 Euclid Ave. was built for William W. Clark, a Maine-born real estate agent, and his brood of four twenty-something offspring, three of whom were enrolled at the San Francisco Business College. The designer of the Clark house is not known. It might have been Fred Estey, who would soon build several other brown-shingle residences in the neighborhood. 

Much has been written about the professors and artists who were among the early residents of Daley’s Scenic Park, but little is ever said about the middle- and working-class families who settled on the Northside while their children were attending the university, or about the real estate speculators who saw an opportunity near the campus. At the turn of the century, Berkeley was a magnet for realtors—or for people who became realtors after practicing entirely different professions in their previous locales. 

Oscar G. May, born in New York in 1839, was a Congregational minister in Illinois and Wisconsin prior to arriving in California. In Berkeley, May initially pooled his resources with realtor Warren Cheney, but by 1896 he was running O.G. May & Co. at 2123 Center Street, with his son-in-law, Walter J. Mortimer, as junior partner. After May’s retirement in 1904, Mortimer took over the office, where two of May’s sons, Frank and William, also worked. 

Frank Morris May (1868–1936) spent the 1890s and early 1900s alternating between teaching in Tulare and Contra Costa counties and carpentry in Berkeley. According to his daughter, Evelyn May Tippett, Frank worked with Fred Estey for a while. In 1896, Frank would build a Dutch Colonial farm house for Olivia G. Wright, a widowed mother of six, at the top of Virginia Street. The house still stands. 

While his brother William, also a carpenter (as was a third brother, Robert), was content to work as a salesman for their brother-in-law, Frank was described by Evelyn as “a self-starter.” In 1905, he opened his own realty office at 2149 Center Street. In addition to selling real estate—a 1905 ad in the San Francisco Call listed an 8-room house on a corner lot east of Fulton Street; a 9-room villa near Dwight Way Station; an alfalfa ranch in Merced County; and ten acres in San Ramon Valley—Frank advertised “Plans Drawn, Houses Built.” Most of the houses he built were lost in the 1923 Berkeley Fire. 

Both the Mays and the Clarks had decamped from Euclid Ave. by 1900 but continued to own their respective houses for a number of years. These houses were the only ones on the block until 1902, when William and Mary Henry built the Northgate Hotel. 

The Henrys are best known today as the parents of Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt. William W. Henry, a native of Bennington, VT, who came to California in 1858, was for many years a wholesale grocer in San Francisco and southern California. The ups and downs of his business might have taken their toll on the family’s well-being had not his indomitable wife (a hardy pioneer who had crossed the plains from Iowa at the age of 13, riding alongside the covered wagon on a small pony) kept the family going and paid for the children’s music and speech lessons by taking in boarders. 

The Henrys first appeared in Berkeley in 1896, when Aurelia was a student at Cal, and the following year built a house at 2401 Le Conte Avenue, across the street from Frank Wilson’s home. A stately, turreted affair clad in brown shingles, the Henry house was constructed by Fred Estey. It was large enough to accommodate the couple, their youngest four children, five boarders, and a cook. 

A mere five years after building their hilltop house, the Henrys moved one block downhill and became hoteliers in earnest. He was 63, she ten years younger, but they would run the Northgate for 24 years, until Mary’s death. It was listed in the 1904 directory as a private hotel, and later advertised as “A Select Family Hotel with Homelike Surroundings, 35 Minutes from San Francisco.” 

The clientele consisted of middle-class and professional families, some of whom stayed for decades. Victor J. Robertson, treasurer of the Commercial Publishing Co. and editor of the San Francisco Commercial News, boarded with the Henrys on Le Conte Ave., moved with them to the Northgate, and was still there in 1930, after both William and Mary had passed away. Robertson was a prominent civic activist and longtime president of the Conference Committee of the Improvement Clubs of Berkeley, as well as heading the North Berkeley Improvement Club. In 1907 he initiated a campaign to check graft in Alameda County government and another for a new city charter. The following year, he called on the city to stop the Spring Construction Co. from blasting in the North Berkeley quarry (converted in the ’30s into the municipal Rose Garden). He was an ardent supporter of damming the Hetch Hetchy, cleaning up the city, improving public transportation, and beautifying Shattuck Avenue. 

While Mary Henry managed the Northgate, her husband turned his attention to realty and insurance. Berkeley’s swelling population in the wake of the 1906 earthquake must have improved his business, for he erected a small office next to the hotel, at 1807 Euclid. This office was located directly over the creek, which would exact its revenge in February 1940, flooding and destroying Reid’s drugstore, built on the northwest corner of Euclid and Hearst. 

Around 1910, the Henrys formed the W.W. Henry Investment Company and began buying properties along the avenue, including 1801 and 1805 Euclid. They moved into 1805 Euclid but soon found a more lucrative way to utilize it. In 1914, the creek behind the two houses was culverted, and the houses were moved to the back and attached back-to-back to form a six-unit apartment building at 2508 Ridge Road. The Henrys called it the Bennington Apartments, after Mr. Henry’s home town. 

The conversion, which placed the turreted shingled house at the front, included a lower floor in stucco, with interesting architectural details such as arched doors and windows, sturdy round columns, and an ornamental baluster. The architect is not known, but similar columns can be seen on several houses designed by Walter H. Ratcliff, Jr. The Euclid frontage, which remained unbuilt until 1929, was planted in trees. 

Today, 2508 Ridge Road is divided into 15 apartments and faces the rear of Euclid Ave. shops. Although its splendor has faded, the building can lay claim to being the oldest known residential Brown Shingle in Berkeley. 

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

Photograph: Daniella Thompson  

The Bennington Apartments at 2508 Ridge Road combines two houses built on Euclid Ave. in 1892. They were constructed by William and Mary Henry, parents of Mills College president Aurelia Henry Reinhardt.  

Earthquake Tidbits 

There is no such thing as “earthquake weather.” Statistically, there is an equal distribution of earthquakes in cold weather, hot weather, rainy weather, etc. 

From 1975-1995 there were only four states that did not have any earthquakes. They were: Florida, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. 

The San Andreas fault is not a single, continuous fault, but rather is actually a fault zone made up of many segments. Movement may occur along any of the many fault segments along the zone at any time. The San Andreas fault system is more that 1300 km (800 miles) long, and in some spots is as much as 16 km (10 miles) deep.  

Make your home secure and your family safe. 

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

Call him at 758-3299 or visit www.quakeprepare.com 

There’s a house in my neighborhood that’s back on the market again. You know the one. Been on and off the market for years and despite all reason, it’s listing for well over a million dollars. It has big problems: foundation, parking, odd use of space, geological issues and problematic drainage (let’s not even talk about the paint job), but there it is, asking more money than the last time and you know what? They’ll probably do all right. 

That’s the weird and funny thing about this market and our locale. It’s so coveted, that even allowing for the wild-boar variability of interest rates, slide zones, impending earthquake and habitual zoning battles, people want to be here so badly that they will purchase all sorts of trouble without much question or debate.  

In fact, you can go about trying to buy something for months without success even when doing battle over some pretty sorry looking digs. 

Remember those fabulous 70’s? Wide lapels, avocado green appliances and amazingly ugly wallpaper. Well, we had so many more houses on the market than potential buyers, that you could actually find a genuine Fixer Upper. I love the term and I love it with a true sense of nostalgia because this thing (the word and the object) seems to have become a lonely artifact of history.  

Oh, to be sure, we absolutely see places that need serious remodeling and some that ought simply to be bulldozed, but we rarely see houses, today, that can be bought for a significant reduction in price based on the volume of necessary repairs. 

I see this as a compression of the value in the market and here’s why. If you look at two houses in a similar neighborhood that have similar size, number of baths and other grossly defining features, the prices, at least in this market, may not be all that different, despite their conditions differing substantially. They’re compressed. 

This was what was different thirty years ago and is certainly different when you go back where your parents want you to buy in Sioux City (whiney voice: “Honey, for that kind of money, you could buy a house like your father’s boss has up by that golf course!”)  

When the market is less aggressive, the houses that need serious rethinking and repairing just get left on the pavement when the Flea-Market closes down. Not so here. The desire for ANY house in the Bay Area is so great that considerations that might have sent buyers walking away or, at least, bargaining the price down measurably in another time or place simply do not carry much weight in the here and now. 

This means that great houses and so-so houses are compressed into much closer cost proximity and sometimes into transposition. This is particularly true if you make some allowance for the variability of the market. A good example is what happens when we hit those few very hot weeks each year in which everyone in America has chosen to move to the East Bay from Podunk or Baltimore. At least once a year during this season, I’ll see two similar houses that for reasons I cannot fathom, sell for about the same price while being radically different in condition.  

Now, it’s certainly true that individual neighborhoods are strong controllers of cost but it still seems to me that the state of the property is one of the poorest predictors of cost that I see. This is pretty bad news for me since I’m in the condition business. 

Embarrasingly, what I have to say about a property may not be all that salient in the value of a house these days. Of course, I don’t trumpet this when I show up to inspect a property. I make damn sure to act as if my words are vital and that my absence is concomitant with capsize. Hey, I’m in business. 

I see this play out during inspections when, having identified an array of conditions, we will sit down with the realtor and discover that to ask for much price adjustment based on my findings is somewhere between slim pickin’s and negotiation suicide. Again, this is all market relative and was far less true when I started inspecting houses 19 years ago.  

Also, I’d like to be clear that this isn’t just a function of realtors trying to keep deals in play. I’ve seen enough deals fall apart to know that, despite their best efforts to get their clients to offer enough money, real estate agents can’t make their clients spend more than they want to and I’ve met buyers who’ve lost out on seven deals before they got into contract on the house where we meet. 

It’s too bad, really. I wish that I were working in a market where ramshackled shanties could be bought for a song and that remodeling brought handsome profits, but it’s too often not the case. This last part is kind of sad and it frustrates me to see one party market a house that’s been totally ignored for decades and make more than someone who’s brought a year of spit-polish and innovation into manifestation. 

So, in the end, this is kind of warning. Actually, it’s two. First, if you’re buying to fix up and remarket a house (a proud and worthy undertaking, by the way) be very, very shrewd and make those pennies squeak as they leave your hand. Be design-smart and cost conservative. 

And… If you’re a buyer, look at plenty of houses and be sure that you can live with the conditions your buying because they may not be a function of the price you’ve paid. 

I guess the good new is this. The reason all this is true is that we live in paradise. My wife and I work too much and don’t get out enough, but when we do, we realize that we live in an amazing place, rich in natural beauty, intellectual satisfaction, political righteousness and the best food on the planet. I guess we have to pay for these things and I guess we’re lucky that this lifestyle is available at any price, so I’m grateful. Cheers and Bon Appetite. 

Photograph: Matt Cantor. 

This house comes with a ‘bonus room.’

FRIDAY, OCT. 5 

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 Celeste MacLeod on “Immigration in Australia, Past and Present” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $14.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925.  

Birding with the Golden Gate Audubon Society at Jewel Lake in Tilden Regional Park Meet at 8:30 a.m. at the parking lot at north end of Central Park Dr. for a mile-long stroll through this lush riparian area. 848-9156. philajane6@yahoo.com 

“Grace Paley: 1922-2007, A Celebration” at 7 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way. Donations requested. 

“Confronting Empire” with Congresswomn Cynthia McKinney at 6 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowhip of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. Suggested donation $10-$30. 

“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” A documentary by Rory Kennedy at 7 p.m. at St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. For mature audiences only. Presented by the Bay Area Religious Campaign Against Torture and the Fr. Bill O’Donnell Social Justice Committee. 499-0537. 

“The Thursday Club” A documentary about the Oakland police in the 1960s, followed by discussion with the filmmaker, George Csicsery, at 8 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

“The Future of Food” A documentary on unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods at 7 p.m. at Center for UrbanPEACE, 2584 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Q and A follows. Free. 866-732-2320. 

3rd Annual Berkeley Juggling & Unicycling Festival Fri. from 5 to 7 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sun. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at King Middle School, 1781 Rose Ave. For details see www.berkeleyjuggling.org/festival 

“Catching the Wave: Connecting East Asia Through Soft Power” Conference on ways in which culture, product branding, export projection of national cultures, athletic events, and global NGOs serve to create a more unified (or divided) Asia. Fri. and Sat. in the Toll Room, Alumni House, UC Campus. For details see http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2007.10.05.html 

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310. 

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, OCT. 6 

Berkeley Indigenous Peoples’ Day Powwow and Indian Market, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Grand Entry at noon, at Civic Center Park, on MLK Way between Center St. and Allston Way. 595-5520. 

Berkeley Historical Society Tour of the Maybeck Estates in Kensington from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. To register and for meeting place call 848-0181. 

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. at the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234.  

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. 1-888-EBPARKS 

Swim a Mile for Women with Cancer Fundraiser for the Women’s Cancer Resource Center Sat. and Sun. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Mills College Pool, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. For information call 601-4040, ext. 180. wcrc.org 

Political Affairs Readers Group meets to discuss “High-Tech Capitalism and the Class Struggle” by John Bachtell at 10 a.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library for Social research, 6501 Telegraph Ave. Sponsored by the CPUSA. 595-7417. 

Annual Bonsai Show and Sale Sat. from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sun. from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Lakeside Garden Center, 666 Bellevue, Oakland near Fairyland. lsolivenster@gmail.com 

Stagebridge Theatre Company’s Open House from 3 to 5 p.m. at Arts First Oakland, 2501 Harrison St., at 27th St., Oakland. 444.4577.  

Introduction to Stamp Collecting with the East Bay Collectors Club at 1:30 p.m. in the 3rd flr Community meeting Room, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6143. 

Free Digital Fingerprinting for Children and activities for children Sat. from noon to 6 p.m., Sun. from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Hilltop Buick, 3230 Auto Plaza, Richmond. Records are given to parents.1-319-268-4044. 

Albany Tennis Tournament from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Memorial Park to raise money for the new Albany High School Men’s Tennis Team. All ages and levels are welcome to play in a doubles round robin format. Cost is $10-$25, sliding scale. BBQ lunch included. Advance sign up strongly suggested. 527-5775. bbguletz@sbcglobal.net 

Make a Miniature Japanese Kite at 2 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room, Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720, ext. 17. 

“Destination Studies Class: Hawaii” from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. Cost is $10. 981-2931. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10 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. www.nativeplants.org 

Around the World Tour of Plants at 1:30 p.m., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. 643-2755. 

SUNDAY, OCT. 7 

Beach Impeach Join 1,500 others to spell out IMPEACH on the lawn of Cesar Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. Arrive by 11 a.m. To sign up see www.beachimpeach.org 

Autumn Meditation Walk Guided exercises including walking meditation and quiet sitting at 9:30 a.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

Solo Sierrans Hike in Tilden Meet at 3:30 p.m. at Lone Oak big parking lot for an hour & a half hike through the woods and up the hills, before we dine on Solane Ave. Rain cancels. 234-8949. 

“The Big Game” A documentary about Berkeley’s urban tree-sit at 6:55 p.m. at the Landmark California Theater, 2133 Kittredge St. 464-5983. 

ACLU B.A.R.K.+ Chapter Annual Meeting “Govenment Surveillance 2007: Where Has Privacy Gone?” with Nicole A. Ozer, Gayle McLaughlin and Barbara Zerbe MacNab from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Doubletree Hotel, Berkeley Marina. 558-0377. 

Haiti Report Back with the East Bay Sanctuary Haiti Support Committee at 2 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St.  

CodePINK Newcomer Orientation & Activist Training at 10 a.m. at 1248 Solano Ave., Albany . RSVP to 524-2776. 

Friends of People’s Park meeting at 4 p.m. in the park at the stage. Topics include Park updates and work objectives. All are welcome.  

“Lose 5,000 Pounds” Cool the Earth Workshop from 2 to 6 p.m. at Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St. at Bonita. Cost is $25. www.bfuu.org 

EcoHouse Tour of the Ecology Center’s environmentally friendly demonstration home and garden, at 10 a.m. at 1305 Hopkins St., enter via garden entrance on Peralta. Cost is $10, sliding scale, no one turned away. RSVP to 548-2220, ext. 242. ecologycenter.org 

“Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War” with Iain Boal, at 10 a.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 595-7417. www.tifcss.org 

Rockridge Kitchen Tour of nine remodeled kitchens from Arts & Crafts to Contemporary, from 12:30 to 5:30 p.m. Register at 5951 College Ave at Harwood. Tickets are $30-$40. www.rockridge.org 

“Driving Public Policy to Improve End-of-Life Care” with former US Assistant Attorney General Robert Raben, at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge. 981-6100. www.compassionandchoicesnca.org 

Booksigning: “Yoga as Medicine” with Timothy McCall, M.D. at 1 p.m. at Elephant Pharm Berkeley, 1607 Shattuck Ave. 549-9200. 

Free Hands-on Bicycle Repair Class Learn how to do a safety inspection. Bring your bicycle and tools. At 10 a.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace Meet at 3 p.m. at the colonnade at the NE end of the lake. 763-8712.  

“Poetry and the Spiritual Journey” with Barbara Hamilton-Holway at 10 a.m. at Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, 1 Lawson Rd., Kensington. 525-0302, ext. 306. 

Tibetan Buddhism with Rosalyn White on “From the Roof of the World: Saving Tibet’s Culture” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 843-6812.  

Sew Your Own Open Studio Come learn to use our industrial and domestic machines, or work on your own projects, from 5 to 9 p.m. at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Cost is $3 per hour. 644-2577.  

MONDAY, OCT. 8 

Berkeley Green Monday meets to discuss “ Think Global - Act Local. Go Green at Work, at Home and at the Beach!” with Babak Jacinto Tondre of EcoHouse & Graywater Systems, Ecology Center; Pamela Evans of Green Business Program, Alameda County; Patty Donald of Marina Experience Programs, City of Berkeley, at 7:30 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Free. 848-4681. 

“Faith, Politics and Passion” with John L. Bell from the Iona community in Scotland at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 848-3696. 

Berkeley CopWatch organizational meeting at 8 p.m. at 2022 Blake St.548-0425. 

Free Boatbuilding Classes for Youth Mon.-Wed. from 3 to 7 p.m. at Berkeley Boathouse, 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. Classes cover woodworking, boatbuilding, and boat repair. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

TUESDAY, OCT. 9 

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 Eastshore State Park and the Albany Bulb. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 525-2233. 

Birding Class on Owls Learn about their habits and habitats, then look for them on Sat. field trips. Classes are Oct. 9, 16, and 23 at 7 p.m. at Oakland Museum of California, Oak at 10th St., Oakland. Field trips are Oct. 20 and 27. Offered in conjunction with the Audubon Society. Fee is $50. To register call 843-2222.  

“Tracking the Nation’s Groundwater Reserves” with William M. Alley of the U.S. Geological Survey at 5:30 p.m. in Room 112, Wurster Hall, UC Campus. 642-2666. 

“The Hidden Humor in Holy Scripture” with John L. Bell from the Iona community in Scotland at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. 848-3696. 

Berkeley School Volunteers Orientation from 4 to 5 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Come learn about volunteer opportunities. 644-8833. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., and Sat. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org 

Family Storytime at 7 p.m. at Kensington Library. 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Community Sing-a-Long every Tues, at 2 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave. 524-9122.  

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. 845-6830. 

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 10 

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours 

Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Colloquium with Stephen R.J. Sheppard on “Global Warming in Everyday Places: Localizing, Spatializing, and Visualizing Climate Change” at 1 p.m. at Wurster Hall, Room 315A, UC Campus. All welcome. laep.ced.berkeley.edu/events/colloquium 

Pools for Berkeley meets to discuss the possibilities of an aquatic center at West Campus at 7 p.m. at City of Berkeley Corporation Yard, Public Meeting Room, 1326 Allston Way. All welcome. Childcare for ages 5 and up. www.poolsforberkeley.org 

“Matewan” A film about labor and race in a West Virginia mining town at 8 p.m. at Long Haul Infoshop, 3124 Shatttuck Ave. www.thelonghaul.org 

An Introduction to Marxism, a free class for beginners and students at every level from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 595-7417. www.tifcss.org 

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. 548-9840. 

THURSDAY, OCT. 11 

“Hidden History of the East Bay: Photographs Tell Towns’ Stories” at 1 p.m. at the Oakland Museum of California, 10th and Oak Sts., Oakland. 238-2022. www.museumca.org 

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. 1-888-327-2757. 

35th Anniversary Celebration of Harbor House with Dr. Tony Campolo from 6 to 9 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, 2619 Broadway at 27th St., Oakland. Tickets are $30-$40, available from Harbor House, 1811, 11th Avenue, Oakland. 534-0165. 

University of California Press Book Sale from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 2120 Berkeley Way, one block north of University, between Shattuck and Oxford. www.ucpress.edu 

Jack London Aquatic Center Community Challenge and fundraiser to inspire diverse communiteis to participate in water sports, at 5 p.m. at Jack London Aquatic Center. For information call 208-6067. 

Food + Farming Film “Our Daily Bread” and “We Feed the World” with San Francisco area breadbakers Steve Sullivan, founder Acme Breads, and Julie Cummins, CUESA, at 6:40 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. at Arch.  

Benefit for Sickle Cell Disease and Thalassemia Programs at Children’s Hospital & Research Center with an Evening Under the Stars at Chabot Space & Science Center. Tickets are $40-$90. 428-3452. www.childrenshospitaloakland.org 

“How to Have a Healthy Childbirth” at 5:30 p.m. at Pharmaca, 1744 Solano Ave. 527-8929. 

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.  

CITY MEETINGS 

City Council meets Tues., Oct. 9, at 7 p.m in City Council Chambers. 981-6900. www. 

ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil 

Commission on Disability meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 6:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6346. TDD: 981-6345.  

Homeless Commission meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5426.  

Planning Commission meets Wed., Oct. 10, Oct. 24 at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7484.  

Waterfront Commission meets Wed., Oct. 10, at 7 p.m., at 201 University Ave. 981-6740.  

Downtown Area Plan Advisory Commission meets Thurs. Oct. 11, at 7 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7487. 

Zoning Adjustments Board meets Thurs., Oct. 11, at 7 p.m., in City Council Chambers. 981-7410.