For California’s premier public university, 2007 was a year of big trees, big buildings and Big Oil. 

And the year ended with a key development decision, like the tree-sitters perched in the oak branches next to Memorial Stadium, still up in the air. 

The fate of what UC Berkeley developers have dubbed the Southeast Campus Integrated projects (SCIP)—which include a four-story high tech gym complex at the site of the stadium grove—ended the year in the hands of an Alameda County Superior Court judge. 

But an even more controversial project, one that could literally transform the face of the earth, has already been decided. 

BP, the company once known as British Petroleum, has given the university a $500 million grant to produce crops and microbes genetically engineered to fuel the world’s planes, trains and automobiles. 

A second UC Berkeley-connected agrofuel project, bank-rolled by $135 million in federal funds, has already started to set up shop in Emeryville. 

And as the year ended the university was looking at a proposed new plan for downtown Berkeley, where it has plans for its own massive building boom, including a high-rise hotel and a world-class museum. 

SCIP suit 

The major SCIP projects include the gym, a new office and meeting facility to join staff and functions of the university’s law and business schools and an underground parking lot to be built at the site of Maxwell Family Field northwest of the stadium. 

The first SCIP project slated for construction is the Student Athlete High Performance Center, which will feature state-of-the-art training facilities for student athletes and offices for the athletic department. 

Work was originally set to begin last January, but construction was derailed when the City of Berkeley, neighbors and a group of environmentalist filed suit, alleging that the SCIP environmental review was legally flawed. 

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara J. Miller agreed that the litigants had raised enough questions to require a full airing in her court, and following a lengthy hearing and the submission of 45,000 pages of evidence, she promised a ruling by early February. 

Judge Miller has already rejected one contention raised by John M. Sanger, one of the two private San Francisco attorneys who represent the university in the action. 

Sanger contended that the university wasn’t bound by the Alquist-Priolo Act, which governs construction atop or within 50 feet of active earthquake faults. 

If accepted by the judge, that argument would have made one of the plaintiffs’ key arguments moot. But in December, Miller issued a finding rejecting the defendant’s contention, and asking for expert evaluation of whether the gym as proposed would be physically attached to the stadium, as the plaintiffs claim. 

If the gym were attached, then the gym project would be governed by Alquist-Priolo, which bans new construction in fault zones and limits renovations to half of the value of an existing structure. 

There is no question about the stadium itself, since the structure sits atop the Hayward Fault, which runs from end zone to end zone. 

Another key question is how to reckon the stadium’s value. The plaintiffs contend that the number should be set at what the existing building would command on the open market, while the university argues the figure should be set at what it would cost to build a replacement structure that conforms to current seismic code.  

The difference between the two numbers could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and a finding for the plaintiffs would drastically reduce the university’s plans to renovate the aging landmarked facility.  

While Berkeley city councilmembers and neighbors decided to sue because of the potential impacts of the SCIP projects on already overtaxed municipal services, another strain of opposition was more strictly environmental. 

The California Oak Foundation and Save the Oaks at the Stadium were fighting for the trees. 

Tree-sitters 

Even before the legal arguments could commence, another form of action elevated the controversy—literally. 

It was Big Game Day 2006 when Zachary Running Wolf, a Native American trounced the month before in his run for the office of mayor, ascended the branches of a redwood just west of the stadium, launching a protest that continues today, more than a year later. 

Joined by a changing cast of supporters, Running Wolf and his fellow protestors have targeted their action both at preserving the trees, a handful of which predate the 1923 stadium itself, and at preserving the Native American burials they say lie in the soil beneath the grove. 

University officials and an archaeologist retained as a consultant say they doubt the presence of any significant number of burials, but Running Wolf, Native American allies and local history writer Richard Schwartz challenge the university’s claim. 

The protest in the branches has drawn national attention, and reached a peak Jan. 22 when three venerable protesters climbed a ladder and took their seats on a platform specially raised for the occasion. 

The next morning’s New York Times featured Sylvia McLaughlin, then 90, joined by City Councilmember Betty Olds, 86, and former Mayor Shirley Dean, 71. 

In the ensuing months, the university won a court ruling for an injunction against the tree-sitters and have made numerous arrests at the site. Running Wolf, at last count, had been busted nine times and spent several brief stretches behind bars. 

The university has built two separate fences around the site, finally topping them with barbed wire after an event where a large group of supporters ascended up and over the chain link to deliver supplies to the tree-sitters. 

After younger supporters, including at least two students, were arrested for bringing supplies, for the last several weeks a group of grandmothers has been gathering at the grove every Sunday outside the fence to load up supplies to be lifted skyward in buckets and to haul out bodily wastes. 

Bowles battle 

Berkeley preservationists and dedicated alumni did win one decisive victory this year when the university shelved plans to turn another stadium-area landmark into a posh school for corporate executives. 

Haas School of Business Dean Tom Campbell had set his sights on Bowles Hall, the first men’s dormitory built in the UC system, as the site of his college’s executive training program. 

Word of the plan sparked Bowles alumni into action, with retired IBM executive John Sayles mobilizing the Bowles Hall Alumni Association to save the venerable building for its original purpose. 

One well-placed alumnus who joined the fray was Norman Mineta, Clinton-era Secretary of Transportation who had previously served as a congressional representative from the same district which had later elected Campbell to the House. 

Campbell wanted to transform Bowles into executive suites to house executives who would take classes in a new semi-subterranean structure to be built just to the west of the hall. 

But Campbell lost the fight late in the summer, and the cancellation of the plans was announced shortly before the former Congressman handed in his resignation as dean of Haas. 

Much work remains to be done on the hall, which has been neglected by the university’s student housing department, and the alumni are on the case. 

Berkeley city officials had also faulted the plan, and argued that it too should have been included in the environmental review of the SCIP projects, since it was located just across Stadium Rim Way from the planned underground parking lot. 

Shades of green 

While Berkeley officials have been selling their fuels from crops projects as vehicles to make the U.S. energy-independent and as a way to develop an economically vital “Green Corridor” of new businesses in the East Bay, BP is much franker about the program’s goals. 

During meetings with industry and legislative officials in Washington in June, BP officials stressed that their company was a global business with a global reach. 

The multinational is keen to develop crops suitable for growth in the tropics of Africa, South America and Asia—what BP chief scientist Steve Koonin called “the green parts” of the globe. 

BP’s targets are the tropics of the Third World, not just east of the Mississippi in the U.S., the region emphasized by officials at UC Berkeley and its partners at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

And the first researchers dispatched by the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), as Berkeley’s BP-funded project is formally known, headed to India and Africa in search of potential fuel crops five months before the research agreement was formally signed in November. 

The BP grant attracted strong criticism from some students and faculty—particularly from the ranks of anthropologists, sociologists and others in the “human sciences” as well as environmentally oriented members of the College of Natural Resources. 

But a strong support campaign organized by the engineering faculty helped win a two-to-one vote of support from the Academic Senate. 

Though BP opened up the cash pipeline when the research agreement was signed, the year ended with a battle still raging over the building that will eventually house most of the research. 

During a Dec. 17 hearing on the Draft Environmental Impact Report on the $160 million Helios building, not one single speaker commented favorably on the project, with criticisms ranging from the structure’s location on a hillside slope at LBNL to the research that will be conducted within its walls. 

The EBI wasn’t the only UC Berkeley-connected lab designed to turn plants into fuel launched during 2007. 

The second project, the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), has also begun setting up shop in Emeryville, funding by a $135 million grant from the federal Department of Energy. 

Before assuming their posts at the new institutes, both JBEI director and UC Berkeley professor Jay Keasling and EBI director Chris Somerville had created their own startup companies that are seeking to developing fuels from gene-tweaked plants—presenting potential conflicts Keasling has acknowledged will require careful handling. 

One of the chief criticisms directed at both projects has been the increasing dependence of public education on research agreements designed to create private profits, both for corporate sponsors and corporation-founding faculty. 

Agrofuel projects have the strong backing of President George W. Bush, and the recently enacted national renewable fuel standard mandates an annual production of 36 billion gallons of home-brewed crop fuels by 2022. 

Other projects 

The coming year will see the demolition of Earl Warren Jr. Hall, named for the UC Berkeley alumnus and former U.S. Chief Justice who presided over a court that set a new standard for civil rights and human equality. 

In its place will rise the Li Ka-Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, named for a Hong Kong real estate developer, container port magnate and cell phone entrepreneur. 

The new name followed his gift of $40 million to help fund the project. Ka-Shing is ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s ninth richest person, with an estimated net worth of $23 billion. 

Plans to create a major corporate/academic research park at the university’s Richmond Field Station remain on hold. They were shelved after controversy arose over cleanup of industrial toxins left on the site from a century of chemical manufacturing at the site and the adjacent Campus Bay property. 

Take a look back at Berkeley in 2007. 

There was the passage of an initiative that advocates for the homeless and mentally ill say could be used to criminalize vulnerable people. The promise of a sunshine law was all but ignored by the same city officials who said they want it written. Voices contesting the location of telecommunications antennas near their homes echoed in the wilderness. The process for filing complaints about police behavior was gutted. Plans for a new warm pool for disabled people are still in limbo. And the old ice skating rink remains an empty cavern. 

There’s still some fight left in the Berkeley of 2007. Code Pink and other organizations are demonstrating almost daily at the downtown military recruiting center and the Elmwood community continues to fight against what they say is out-of-scale development in their neighborhood. The Ed Roberts campus that will house a number of nonprofits serving disabled people finally got the funding advocates had sought for years. 

Public Commons 

In the same year the governor decided to slash funds for the homeless mentally ill—Berkeley lost $1 million from AB2034—the City Council got behind an initiative to bring business to Berkeley’s shopping areas by ridding them of people who act inappropriately. The measure does not target the homeless, said Mayor Tom Bates, who initiated the laws that just target those who lie on sidewalks and smoke in commercial areas. 

The initiative, which was called Public Commons for Everyone—nomenclature which has been compared to the Peacekeeper (missile), the Healthy Forest Ini-tiative (to cut down trees) and No Child Left Behind—was brought by the mayor and supported by the business community.  

If people didn’t act badly in front of businesses, more people would shop there, more sales tax would be raised and the city could provide more services, supporters reasoned. 

While the Fox News take on the initiative, lifted from a report in the Chronicle, was: “It will be harder to have sex or smoke on sidewalks in Berkeley, Calif.,” a staff report explaining the new ordinance says there will be “continuing enforcement of existing local and state laws.” The new resolution and ordinances expand laws targeting people lying on the sidewalk and smoking.  

Berkeley Police spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said the new laws would not be enforced until the police chief issues an updated police bulletin and training on the new ordinances takes place. 

However, attorney Osha Neumann says that even though the new law has yet to formally kick in, his clients are being told by police not to sit on sidewalks (sidewalk sitting is not part of the new laws) or lie in doorways. 

The law is said to take a “carrot and stick” approach, with the carrot being services for people whose behavior is inappropriate. The homeless and their advocates who spoke to the issue at various public meetings all said that what is most needed is supportive housing—housing coupled with services. 

The initiative includes plans to provide such housing for about ten of the hardest-to-serve individuals, and contemplates some other kinds of functions, such as building a computer system that tracks the location of available shelter beds. Any eventual services would be tied to new revenue from increased parking meter fees; the council will vote on these fees in January.  

At least one part of the services has already kicked in: Restrooms at Civic Center are now open until midnight, according to city spokesperson Mary Kay Clunies-Ross. The bathrooms at the Telegraph Avenue-Channing Way parking garage are open until the parking facility closes.  

The council has said it will not vote on new laws banning public urinating and defecating until more public bathrooms are provided on a 24-hour basis. Jobs cleaning the bathrooms are to be available to the homeless.  

A year in the dark 

A California Supreme Court decision, coupled with a Berkeley Police Association win in a court case against the city, gutted Berkeley’s 20-year-old complaint process, through which individuals could make public complaints against officers before a three-person Police Review Commission panel. The panel was able to make a finding that a complaint was either justified or it was not. The police chief and city manager were responsible for officer discipline in cases where complaints were found to be justified. 

The city is appealing the decision that found that this procedure violated police officers’ rights. It argues that the PRC is not directly responsible for disciplining the officers, while the police officers’ association says the PRC ruling impacts discipline decisions. 

A closed-door hearing process—intended to be temporary—has been established but is not in use. Under this process the individual would make a complaint to the panel, and then leave the room. The officer and his or her representative would remain and respond.  

A sliver of sunlight 

It took the threat of a lawsuit by SuperBOLD (Berkeleyans Organized for Library Defense) and attorneys from Oakland’s First Amendment Project, to get the City Council to revise rules to allow public comment on each item before the body, as mandated by the Brown Act, California’s open meeting law. 

However, city staff still has not moved forward, as directed by the City Council last spring, toward writing and adopting a Sunshine Law. Such laws as adopted in other cities guarantee the public access to meetings and records beyond what is stated in the Brown Act and the Public Records Act. 

Meanwhile, residents continue to complain that they cannot get documents requested from the city in a timely way. For example, it took a month for the city manager to provide a reporter with copies of a 2005 Request for Proposals for removal and disposal of hazardous waste and the response to it from the contractor that got the job. 

The Public Records Act says such material should be delivered within 10 days. 

Former City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque was charged with writing a Sunshine Ordinance based on community input at a council workshop, but she had not done so before she left her post at the end of November. 

By the time she submitted her resignation, city insiders were charging that Albuquerque, city attorney for some 25 years, had expanded her influence in city government beyond the scope of her office. Her public letter early in the fall, blaming the city manager, the deputy city manager, then Housing Director Stephen Barton and his staff for problems in the city’s housing authority, was roundly criticized by community members and formally countered by letters of support for Barton from the Rent Stabilization Board and the Housing Advisory Commission. 

Housing Authority 

Under threat of a takeover by another housing authority, ties between the Berkeley Housing Authority and the city of Berkeley were severed and a new entity was created.  

A mostly-new board appointed by the mayor replaced the city council which had previously functioned as the Authority’s board. Despite a gaggle of high-paid consultants, an infusion of about $1 million in city funds, a new director and a hands-on board, the new authority has not been able to regain the accreditation it lost and retains the designation of “troubled” authority. 

Community action 

A number of communities rallied to preserve their neighborhoods.  

Residents and small business owners in the West Berkeley community fought back against a small group of developers and owners of large parcels who wanted to include their properties in a new Business Improvement District without their consent or participation. 

Proponents, most of whom belong to the West Berkeley Alliance, said they will regroup and are likely to come back with a new plan, perhaps the formation of a district that doesn’t tax residents. 

Community loses antenna fight 

Neighbors lost their fight against the powerful telecommunications companies that will be allowed to place antennas on Patrick Kennedy’s UC Storage building at Ward Street and Shattuck Avenue.  

They had first won at the zoning board, but lost an appeal at the City Council, after the city’s attorneys said the city would be unable to win a fight against the companies in court—Verizon had filed a lawsuit. 

Elmwood community still fighting  

Some residents and merchants in the Elmwood neighborhood lost a battle at the City Council level to stop a developer from building a large restaurant/bar they say is too big for the small shopping area, which has limited parking.  

Their group, however, has filed suit against developer (and Elmwood resident) John Gordon, which has so far resulted only in required mediation. The neighbors say they are not giving up and have threatened to picket any restaurant that opens at the former Wright’s Garage site at Ashby and College avenues. 

Kavanagh 

Early last summer, Chris Kavanagh did what he’s known for doing best: he fought a landlord eviction—his own. His name was on the lease of the Oakland cottage from which he was threatened with eviction.  

Still, Kavanagh says his legal residence is not Oakland but Berkeley. That affirmation has some significance, as he’s an elected member of the Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization Board and has been so since 2002, when he was first elected. Kavanagh was elected in 2006. 

After the question was raised in the media, the Berkeley city attorney turned the case over to the Alameda County District Attorney, who charged Kavanagh with seven felonies related to allegations that he lied about his residence in order to serve as an elected official in Berkeley.  

Kavanagh stepped down from his post for the three months ending in December, after which he returns to his seat on the board. He has a hearing date scheduled in mid-January. 

In an unusual closed session City Council meeting Dec. 17—apparently initiated by the city manager and not by the mayor or five council members as required by the Brown Act—the council could have addressed the question of asking a judge to remove Kavanagh, but took no action. 

2007 has been a year of hype and hope about how green Berkeley is and might be. 

Bombarded by press releases, PowerPoint presentations, high-priced consultants, pledges, the proliferation of city-funded environmental nonprofits, the buzz of kick-offs, luncheons, press conferences and the profusion of green plans, how does one cut through the veneer to judge how green Berkeley really is? 

Past the glare of a TV moment, city government, individuals and businesses in Berkeley are taking concrete action to support the environment. Some examples: the availability of local produce; programs where people share low-emission vehicles; shops and flea markets where one can buy previously used stuff; and a network of relatively safe bicycle boulevards.  

The year 2007 has also seen a new housing complex topped with solar panels, businesses adding green techniques and the opening of an electric-car dealership; city efforts have paid off in planting trees and expanding recycling to food waste and demolition materials. 

Planning for plans 

In 2006, voters overwhelmingly approved Measure G, an initiative aimed at reducing greenhouse gases 80 percent by 2050. A mom-and-apple-pie initiative in Berke-ley, voters passed the advisory measure by 81 percent.  

The initiative calls on the mayor to “work with the community to develop a plan for adoption by the City Council in 2007 that sets a ten-year emissions-reduction target and identifies the actions that the city and its residents should take both to achieve both the ten-year target and the goal of 80 percent reduction in emissions.” 

The action plan didn’t make it to the council in 2007, but will appear on its agenda early next year. Planning for the plan has been high on the council’s 2007 agenda. 

“The ballot measure was advisory, but I will act as though it is legally binding,” promised Mayor Tom Bates in his Feb. 13 State of the City address. 

He’s kept his promise. 

While the city attorney’s analysis of Measure G said its costs would depend on plan contents, costs to create the plan came first, with the mayor getting council members to sign onto hiring a $100,000 consultant to write the plan. 

The consultant was handpicked by Chief of Staff Cisco DeVries, but his hiring did not go exactly as anticipated. 

The consultant, Timothy Burroughs, was to have worked for Sustainable Berkeley through a city contract.  

Sustainable Berkeley is an initiative that came out of the mayor’s office—a grouping of nonprofits, green consultants and the university. It originally included city staff—employees of the city’s energy division—and the executive director of the Community Energy Services Corporation (CESC), which would accept the funds as the fiscal sponsor for Sustainable Berkeley. 

(The CESC has a convoluted story of its own, with its executive director fired in August after her alleged personal use of CESC materials and staff, and its board of directors—the city’s Energy Commission—coming to the realization that CESC’s multiple operations needed greater oversight than the few minutes allotted to it at monthly Energy Commission/CESC board meetings. In fact, at least as far as the interim executive director knows, the CESC board has never evaluated a CESC executive director nor has it approved a CESC budget during its 20 years of existence.)  

The city’s legal department questioned whether it was appropriate for Burroughs to work for Sustainable Berkeley, Energy Officer Neal DeSnoo told the Energy Commission at the time. And some citizens and this newspaper were asking why an individual should be hired with city money to work with a group that did not meet publicly.  

The consultant contract approved by the City Council for Sustainable Berkeley was moved to the city’s energy division. The council added another $100,000 to produce the Climate Action Plan. Events around the plan have included kick offs and luncheons, with free compact fluorescent light bulbs for those willing to sign the Climate Action Plan pledge. Burroughs has attended various commission meetings to discuss the contents of the Climate Action Plan.  

More plans in 2007 

Another plan the city is pursuing is known as the East Bay Smart Solar program. It is billed as a pilot project that will target some 25 Berkeley homeowners and businesses for solar panels and other energy-saving options. Once the pilot is successful, the program is to be expanded throughout the region. 

The $200,000 Smart Solar grant from the Department of Energy—like much of the money the city takes in—is not free. The city must add about $188,000 to the mix, including $80,000 from the city’s energy division and $108,000 in city staff time. The university will contribute the time of two doctoral students. 

The program is, in part, aimed at taking the guesswork out of going solar, with the inclusion of “a trusted, knowledgeable third party” to guide the prospective client through the maze of decisions around solar equipment and energy efficiencies. In the original grant, the CSEC was to have played the trusted-third party role, but, according to Berkeley’s energy officer, speaking to the Planet in November, “There are doubts about [CESC’s} capability at this time.” 

Another plan that grabbed local and national headlines is intended to help homeowners finance going solar. The idea was approved by the City Council in concept only, giving the green light to the city manager to continue to use staff time and city resources to explore the details involved in the city’s getting bank or bond financing that homeowners and business owners would borrow for solar panels and other energy-saving options.  

The financing, presumed to cost less for most individuals than borrowing directly from a bank, would be paid back over 20 years through property taxes. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to give the city $160,000 in grant funds for the effort. The city is already spending funds in staff time on the project. 

Publicizing the plan, however, seems to have backfired. According to Energy Officer DeSnoo, speaking to the Energy Commission in early December, people who had planned to go solar are now waiting to see if advantageous city financing becomes available. 

Another plan whose concept that has been slow to bear fruit is Community Choice Aggregation, a plan for Emeryville, Oakland and Berkeley to join together to control the electric and gas supply in the three cities, taking that function away from Pacific Gas and Electric. The plan was to have been brought to the City Council in September, but the council will not get the plan until early next year. Voters in the three cities must approve the project. 

One more plan was revealed Dec. 3 to the surprise of the Energy Commission, which hadn’t been kept in the loop. This is collaboration among the UC Berkeley chancellor, mayors of Berkeley, Oakland, Emeryville and Richmond, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab director. The group stood before TV cameras and pledged to join forces to make the corridor between Richmond and Oakland a location that welcomes green research and industry. 

The details of this collaboration remain under wraps. The Daily Cal quoted mayoral Chief of Staff Cisco DeVries saying the idea was hatched at a dinner party last spring given by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. 

These sometimes-costly plans may bear fruit and thrive over the years, reducing Berkeley’s greenhouse gas emissions. Or the plans, as Councilmember Betty Olds once said of Sustainable Berkeley, could be “so much talk,” with stacks of dusty city plans growing higher.  

Real Green 

While planners plan and consultants collect paychecks, less-publicized actions impacting climate change today abound in city government and private industry.  

Among them: according to Jerry Koch, urban forestry supervisor in the city of Berkeley’s Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Department, the city planted some 600 trees along city streets, medians and in parks in 2007. It plants about that many each year. (Street trees are free to residents who agree to water them for two years. Call 981-6660—getting a tree can take a year.)  

Another try at biodiesel 

The city’s first attempt to use biodiesel in its trucks tanked in 2003 with engines destroyed by a bad batch of the fuel. This year, the city reintroduced biofuels, this time mixing 80 percent regular diesel with 20 percent biodiesel. 

In 2003, former City Manger Weldon Rucker was quoted saying: “The City of Berkeley has a long history of innovation and as a leader in public policy. The use of biodiesel fuel is yet another example.” 

This time, the city has an agreement with the provider, holding the company responsible for vehicle-engine damage, according to Matt Nichols, principal transportation planner, who spoke to the Planet by phone last week.  

“They will have to pay for broken engines,” Nichols said, adding that he did not know the name of the fuel provider. 

The biodiesel the city uses is not made from crops such as corn, soybeans or grasses. Some say these crops are controversial because the land used to produce biofuels, especially in developing countries, would be better-used producing food.  

“The source [of the city’s biofuels] is recycled cooking grease,” Nichols said. 

Berkeley buys green 

Among the city’s sustainable purchases are recycled white paper—since 2006, the city’s been using 100 percent post consumer paper made without chlorine—and cleaning supplies that meet Green Seal standards. 

All custodians employed by the city and those janitorial services contracting directly with the city use environmentally-sound cleaning products, certified by nonprofit Green Seal. However, in offices where the city rents space, custodians are not required to use sustainable products. 

Berkeley has also promised to build green, with the new fire station on Shasta Road that opened in 2006, an example of a building constructed to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards. It includes natural ventilation, use of recycled floor materials, sustainable wood, natural light and more. 

Recycling  

Beginning in March, all contractors that build or demolish structures in Berkeley have had to present a recycling plan for all waste and debris their project generates prior to submitting a building permit application.  

And they must submit a waste diversion report once the work is completed. The solid waste division of public works “has to see the weight slips,” said Tanya Levy, acting recycling program manager, speaking in a phone interview Wednesday. 

“The goal is to recycle 100 percent of the concrete and asphalt waste,” Levy said, noting there are companies that come to the worksite and grind up the debris for reuse at the site. 

“In old buildings, there is a lot of stuff people can re-use,” such as redwood beams or whole cabinets, Levy said.  

Unpainted wood not re-used is composted, Levy said. 

Bins for bone grinding 

Even residents who already feed their garbage to backyard bugs and worms can take advantage of the little green bins that appeared at their front doors in August or September.  

In addition to green table scraps, people can put items in the bins they don’t compost such as bones, paper with food attached and milk cartons. 

“Since the program started, 31 percent more organics have been collected and there’s been a drop in trash of 12 to 15 percent from residents,” said Levy who compared weeks in September to the first half of December of last year through the same time in 2007. Trucks bringing material to the transfer station are weighed, so the comparison is not simply an estimate, Levy said. 

The effort is funded with an $186,000 grant from Alameda County Waste Management at about $8 per home. The city pays for the four-to-five additional workers needed to handle the increased work—the project includes weekly pickup of yard material into which the green bin materials are dumped. 

City workers ride the bus 

The eco pass is a benefit for full-time city workers. The city pays about $90,000 annually and all city workers ride the bus free. The program has grown from about 37,000 bus rides in 2002 to about 50,000 this year, Nichols said. 

A fleet of cars belonging to City CarShare is available to city workers using them for city business during the day. These vehicles become part of the regular City CarShare fleet in the evening.  

Car sharing grows 

Car sharing allows people to get around on bicycle and foot, and use automobiles when they need one, without owning one. The nonprofit City CarShare has been joined in Berkeley by a for-profit car sharing company called Zip Car. 

“Berkeley has the busiest car share in the Bay Area,” said Anita Daley, director of membership development for City CarShare, noting that the fleet is made up uniquely of low-emission vehicles. “The culture of Berkeley takes to car sharing,” Daley said. 

Other initiatives 

Another notable green initiative has been the 54 units of affordable housing built on Ashby Avenue by Affordable Housing Associates that includes solar panels on the roof to provide savings to tenants. The project also includes flooring materials with recycled content, nontoxic paint and a hydronic hot water system. 

Then there’s the new electric car dealer that moved into an old Cadillac dealership at Jones Street and San Pablo Avenue and the news that Inkworks Printing is using a process that takes a job directly from the client’s computer straight to the plate, eliminating film and the environmental problems silver in film presents.  

Kirk Lumpkin of the Berkeley Farmers Markets reports an ever-expanding customer base bringing locally grown, sustainably grown food straight to the consumer. These farmer markets have been joined by the newer Spiral Gardens and Farm Fresh Choice veggie stands in southwest Berkeley. And this year, a new fresh fruit and vegetable stand has opened on the UC Berkeley campus.  

And so, out of the limelight, green is growing strong in Berkeley. As for the plans in process—they could bloom or mold on shelves. Stay tuned until 2008 or thereabouts. 

Car sharing grows 

Car sharing allows people to get around on bicycle and foot, and use automobiles when they need one, without owning one. The nonprofit City CarShare has been joined in Berkeley by a for-profit car sharing company called Zip Car. 

“Berkeley has the busiest car share in the Bay Area,” said Anita Daley, director of membership development for City CarShare, noting that the fleet is made up uniquely of low-emission vehicles. “The culture of Berkeley takes to car sharing,” Daley said. 

Other initiatives 

Another notable green initiative has been the 54-units of affordable housing built on Ashby Avenue by Affordable Housing Associates that includes solar panels on the roof to provide savings to tenants. The project also includes flooring materials with recycled content, nontoxic paint and a hydronic hot water system. 

Then there’s the new electric car dealer that moved into an old Cadillac dealership at Jones Street and San Pablo Avenue and the news that Inkworks Printing is using a process that takes a job directly from the client’s computer straight to the plate, eliminating film and the environmental problems silver in film presents.  

Kirk Lumpkin of the Berkeley Farmers Markets reports an ever-expanding customer base bringing locally grown, sustainably grown food straight to the consumer. These farmer markets have been joined by the newer Spiral Gardens and Farm Fresh Choice veggie stands in southwest Berkeley. And this year, a new fresh fruit and vegetable stand has opened on the UC Berkeley campus.  

And so, out of the limelight, green is growing strong in Berkeley. As for the plans in process—they could bloom or mold on shelves. Stay tuned until 2008 or thereabouts. 

Berkeley ended the year with the draft of a new downtown plan and a strong push to change the existing plan for West Berkeley. 

And in a city where the politics of big buildings is a blood sport, one of the biggest players sold his collection and other players failed to field their promised entries. 

Another team, fighting to save some of the creations of past builders, managed to stall legislation that could make it easier to tear them down. 

DAPAC’s finale 

The Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee ended its two-year run Nov. 30, one day after submitting its draft for a plan that’s certain to face a bumpy ride in the year ahead. 

While most chapters were adopted unanimously by the committee, whose members included two representatives named by each of the nine city councilmembers plus three members of the Planning Commission, two key sections generated strong dissent. 

(DAPAC ended up with four members of the Planning Commission after DAPAC member Patti Dacey was named to it too.) 

The plan has now passed into the hands of the commission and City Council. The planning commissioners will make their own suggestions for revisions, and the council—which has the final say for the city—can make whatever changes they choose. 

The two chapters that provoked strong dissent within DAPAC, one on historic buildings and urban design and the other regulating building heights and massing, were both opposed by Planning Commission Chair James Samuels. 

His votes are significant because at the commission Samuels usually votes with the majority on a panel where critical issues are often decided on five-four votes. The other commissioners who also sat on DAPAC—Gene Poschman, Helen Burke and Patti Dacey—often find themselves among the losing four. 

The final decision maker for the new plan will be UC Berkeley itself, because the plan can’t be adopted without the university’s concurrence. 

The DAPAC planning process was the result of a lawsuit filed by the city after the university unveiled its Long Range Development Plan 2020, which called for building 800,000 square feet of new off-campus buildings in downtown Berkeley. 

The city filed suit, contending the university’s plans didn’t provide adequate compensation for the impact on city streets and services of the new structures and the thousand or so new parking spaces the university planned. 

The ensuing settlement established some payments by the university to the city and envisioned a new plan to nearly double the boundaries set by the city’s existing downtown plan, laying out a timetable for its completion. If the final plan isn’t adopted by May 2009 the university may start cutting back on its payments to the city. 

During the two years DAPAC met, city staff repeatedly floated proposals for high-rise “point towers,” 16-story buildings designed to increase downtown population density and fill new housing quotas set by the Association of Bay Area Governments, a regional agency that dispenses state and some federal funds to local governments. 

A majority of DAPAC members consistently opposed the towers, but they kept reappearing until the end, when a compromise land use chapter allowed for up to four ten- and four eight-story buildings, plus two high-rise hotels, while raising the base building height for the downtown from a current five-story maximum to six. 

The plan also includes a strong call to preserve historic buildings, and outlines proposals for increased open space, energy conserving construction and for the possible closure of Center Street to through traffic between Shattuck Avenue and Oxford Street. 

Sale, suit 

Berkeley developer Patrick Kennedy made headlines twice during the year, first for selling the Berkeley’s largest collection of apartment buildings—including the ever-controversial Gaia Building and six other structures—and second, for losing a lawsuit. 

Kennedy, always a lightning rod for controversy in Berkeley’s endless land use battles, pocketed a tidy profit when he and his investors in Panoramic Interests sold the lion’s share of their holdings to Equity Properties. 

The $140 million-plus Berkeley deal added 368 apartments to Equity’s inventory from the Gaia, Fine Arts, Bachenheimer, Touriel and ARTech buildings, the Berkeleyan Apartments and Acton Courtyard. 

Equity is the nation’s largest holder of rental property, and is controlled by real estate mogul Sam Zell, who made headlines of his own earlier this month when he completed his purchase of Tribune media, becoming the publisher of California’s preeminent newspaper, the Los Angeles Times. 

Kennedy remains an active player in the local development game, and has been remodelling the Center Street building that housed the Act I and Act II theaters, which were shuttered last year. 

He also remains a tenant of the Gaia Building as a partner with Glass Onion Catering in the lease of most of the building’s ground floor “cultural space” and all of the mezzanine.  

The tallest structure built in Berkeley in decades, the Gaia Building has served as a lightning rod for critics of city development policies. A legal action, filed before the sale and completed afterwards, challenged the city’s implementation of downtown plan provisions which allowed Kennedy and his partners to build extra apartments in exchange for creating dedicated “cultural space.” 

In exchange for a promise to dedicate the first two floors of the Gaia Building for cultural uses, Kennedy was granted an additional floor of apartments above. He won another floor for providing the mandatory “inclusionary” units for lower income tenants. 

By stretching the upper floor units into two story-apartments by the addition of partial floors (dubbed “lofts”)he was able to raise the building to nine floors—though the official figure is seven, because the lofts and the mezzanine aren’t counted officially as floors in the argot of city codes. 

The original tenant for the cultural space, the Gaia Bookstore, folded before the building was complete, and the space remained empty for nearly three years before Anna de Leon opened Anna’s Jazz Island in part of the ground floor space.  

The remainder of the space was leased by Kennedy and his partner, refurbished and used for private events operated by the catering company and some public events, including a brief, irregular tenancy by The Marsh theatrical troupe. 

Conflicts over scheduling dates cause the theater group to leave—they weren’t able to book the weekend dates vital to their economic success, and de Leon and others claimed that genuinely cultural events were being displaced by more profitable private parties. 

De Leon also became embroiled in an ongoing dispute with the other ground floor tenants over noise and disruptive crowds at the private space controlled by the partnership—including one particularly rowdy event that brought out police—leading to her request to the Zoning Adjustments Board to look into the terms governing cultural use at the building. 

When ZAB members indicated that they were concerned about the city’s oversight of the space and started seeking clarification from city planning staff, Kennedy threatened litigation, leading the City Council to preempt the zoning board. The council eventually passed a resolution that backed the developer’s position. 

That’s when De Leon (who is also an attorney as well as the operator of the jazz club) filed suit on behalf of three Berkeley citizens, including Patti Dacey. 

The decision handed down earlier this month by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch backed Dacey and her co-plaintiffs, while slamming the City Council’s “abuse of discretion” in preempting of its own zoning board. 

Trader Joe’s lawsuit 

Another lawsuit pits neighbors of what has come to be called the “Trader Joe’s” building against two former Kennedy associates, and is headed for a March 3 confrontation in the same Oakland courtroom where the battle of the Gaia Building played out. 

Stephen Wollmer and Neighbors for a Livable Berkeley Way filed suit in August, challenging the city’s approval of the 148-unit apartment building planned for 1885 University Ave. 

Developers Chris Hudson and Evan McDonald, who built many of Kennedy’s later projects, were granted a city concession for 25 additional apartments after they promised to deliver a grocery store. 

Trader Joe’s, a German-owned boutique grocery chain with a cult-like following, is expected to bring the grocery store that even critics of the project agree is needed somewhere in downtown Berkeley. 

But the five-story project, located at the intersection of University Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, has alarmed neighbors, both because its five-story height would tower over the single family homes on Berkeley Way behind the protect and because of the traffic a popular grocery store is certain to attract. 

The City Council approved the project on a 5-3 vote July 16, prompting the lawsuit Wollmer had threatened after the Zoning Adjustments Board approved the project by the same margin in the early minutes of Dec. 15, 2006, at the end of a six-hour session. 

The lawsuit may wind up testing the city’s application of the state-mandated award to the developers of bonus units for a dense building and for its own inclusionary housing ordinance, which requires construction of affordable units or in-lieu contributions to the city’s housing fund. 

The case will be decided by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch, who also ruled on the Gaia Building action. A hearing on the issue has been scheduled for March 3. 

West Berkeley 

This was also the year when developers and city officials eager for new sources of revenue cast their eyes on West Berkeley, setting the stage for change and yet a new round of domestic political conflict. 

New zoning regulations that will ease the way for car dealerships to locate in freeway-close locations cleared the City Council this month. 

Current zoning in the district is largely manufacturing and light industrial moving inland from the freeway with commercial zoning along thoroughfares, and a core of mixed use residential. 

Because rents and sale prices are generally lower for land zoned for industrial and manufacturing use than for commercial and residential areas, West Berkeley is the last remaining haven in the city for artists and artisans, who have been driven out of other areas as land values increased over recent decades. 

The battlelines, long simmering, became apparent during the process which led to the granting of zoning variances for the popular Berkeley Bowl to build a new, larger market and warehouse facility in West Berkeley.  

One group that raised questions about the impacts of changed zoning was West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies, which has consistently fought measures they fear could send real estate prices soaring, driving out both craft workers and small manufacturers, which typically offer better paying jobs than stores. 

But it’s money that’s driving the other side of the equation as well. Opening up West Berkeley to car dealers was driven by the threat that dealers might leave the city, compelled by economics and the dictates of manufacturers who are demanding that dealers locate along freeways. 

Another move afoot in West Berkeley is a plan backed by the area’s most prominent real estate brokers, Don Yost and John Norheim, and their allies in the West Berkeley Business Alliance, to create a Community Benefits District that would assess payments by landowners to fund services in addition to those provided by their city taxes. 

Because decision power in the proposal was based on the size of the property owned, small property owners and businesses voiced concerns that they would be burdened with fees they couldn’t afford by the decisions of bigger landowners who could afford them. 

Another proposal still pending as the year draws to a close is a City Council directive to staff and the Planning Commission to offer proposals for more flexible zoning in the area. 

Funded by the city’s Economic Development Department, Principal Planner Allan Gatzke is drawing up proposals that would ease the use permit process for new projects, allow more “flexible” application of city height, mass, parking and other standards, and allow more uses in zones currently restricted to manufacturing. 

One prediction seems safe for the coming year: Expect more heat in West Berkeley.  

Other issues 

2007 was also noteworthy for what didn’t happen, with major development projects stalled by lack of funding. 

One is the Arpeggio, the nine-story luxury condo project approved for a site across Center Street from the new Berkeley Community College building. 

Economic uncertainty in the housing market couple with rapid inflation in the cost of steel and concrete triggered by rising energy costs and demand from China were blamed as key factors by one developer’s representative who didn’t want to be named. 

Another big issue that started the year with a big bang waits for resolution in the year to come. 

Opponents of the new Landmarks Preservation Ordinance (LPO), adopted by the City Council in December 2006, managed to stall implementation of the law by gathering enough signatures to force a referendum. 

Referendum supporters included many of the same preservationists who had backed an alternative LPO initiative they had placed on the ballot a month earlier as Measure J. 

In a campaign marked by heavy contributions from a development community opposed to the measure, the initiative managed to garner 42.8 percent of votes to the opposition’s 57.2 percent. 

On Jan. 12, referendum backers handed in petitions with enough signatures to force the council’s new developer-backed LPO—a proposal strongly sponsored by Mayor Tom Bates—to a popular vote. 

That will occur in November, at the same time Bates himself comes up for reelection.

There is only one phrase to properly describe the first year of the administration of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums: “mixed results.”  

It was a year in which the new mayor logged in several notable political triumphs and successes and began to make good on his promise for longtime structural reform and a change in the political climate in the city. But it was also a year in which the Dellums administration appeared to stumble out of the gate in several areas, particularly in regards to its own staff operations.  

In addition, while Dellums retained his popularity among his followers, who appear willing to allow him time to put his programs into place, the mayor came under withering criticism throughout his first year from many Oakland residents or media observers who believe he is going too slow. 

Triumphs 

Easily the most recognized political triumph of the Dellums administration in 2007 was the settling of the Waste Management sanitation workers lockout. 

Two days before the July 4 holiday, Oakland’s waste disposal company locked out some 500 sanitation workers in a contract dispute, replacing them with management crews and teams hired from the outside. For the next month, despite the replacements, trash piled up in many neighborhoods in Oakland, overflowing bins and raising citizen concerns and tempers. 

How the local media handled the Dellums administration’s actions in the dispute was indicative of how Dellums was treated in the press throughout the year. When officials of Waste Management and Teamsters Local 70 entered federal mediation to try to end the contract dispute, Dellums was asked by the mediator to sit in on the talks.  

Each night, footage on local television stations showed Dellums and his Budget Director (now interim Community and Economic Development Director) Dan Lindheim, going into or leaving the mediation talks. Regardless of that, local newspapers wrote repeated fierce criticisms of Dellums’ actions, charging that he had acted too slow in entering the talks, and that the talks appeared to be going nowhere.  

The day before a settlement was announced in late July, the Daily Planet reported “on Thursday morning, while Teamsters and Waste Management negotiators were meeting with Dellums and Lindheim in a federal mediator’s office in Oakland, working out the final details in the contract settlement, the San Francisco Chronicle was publishing an article by reporter Christopher Heredia saying that ‘next to the uncollected garbage, the biggest stink in Oakland right now might be the dispute over how Mayor Ron Dellums has handled his first major crisis, the lockout of trash haulers.’ ” 

The next day, at a City Hall press conference announcing the lockout settlement, both Waste Management and Teamsters officials said that no settlement would have occurred at that time without the mayor’s intervention, and Oakland City Attorney John Russo noted that the Dellums administration began taking timely and appropriate steps to protect the city’s residents and help end the lockout as early as two days after the lockout began, dispelling the criticisms that the administration had entered the dispute “too slowly.” 

The second major triumph of the Dellums administration in 2007 was the arbitration victory in the Oakland Police geographic accountability issue. 

Facing a nagging violent crime wave carried over from the last few years of the administration of former Mayor Jerry Brown, Dellums and his Chief of Police, Wayne Tucker—a carryover Brown appointee—proposed streamlining the stretched police resources by dividing the city into three geographic districts, a first step in the institution of a comprehensive community policing system in which officer patrols would be limited to specific geographic districts.  

As a first step in implementing the geographic district plan, Tucker said it was necessary to move the department from cumbersome and overlapping 10-hour per day shifts to more manageable 12-hour per day shifts. The Oakland Police Officers Association (OPOA) police union balked at the plan, and it went to arbitration. 

In the past, the politically powerful OPOA had been able to block most city attempts to limit their powers over police operations. In November, however, the impartial arbitrator ruled for the city, paving the way for the implementation of 12-hour/day shifts and the Dellums-Tucker three division plan. 

Dellums’ third major triumph in 2007 was the confirmation of controversial West Oakland health activist Margaret Gordon as an Oakland Port Commissioner, a major test of the mayor’s ability to move his policies through the Oakland City Council. 

Dellums originally nominated Gordon with a Council confirmation vote scheduled for Council’s last meeting before the summer recess, but the mayor postponed the vote after indications that Gordon’s nomination would be defeated. Opposition to Gordon was led by Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, whom Dellums defeated in the 2006 mayoral election. Over the summer, however, Dellums conducted an intense Council lobbying campaign. He and Gordon met with opposed Councilmembers, sometimes several times. By September, the lobbying campaign had been so successful that De La Fuente himself announced he was voting for Gordon after seeing that she had enough votes to win, and Gordon was nominated with only one councilmember dissenting. 

Another success for the Dellums administration in 2007—not yet a triumph—was the growing political alliance between Dellums and Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dellums said repeatedly during the 2006 campaign—and then again throughout his first year in office as mayor—that his vision of establishing Oakland as “the” model city that could pave the way for state and national urban redevelopment was dependent on funneling in federal, state, and private money to the city. The city’s own budget, Dellums said, was too packed with necessary items to be able to develop innovative new programs. 

When Schwarzenegger came to the Fruitvale to announce—at a press conference flanked by Dellums—his support for a privately-financed Oakland initiative to help homeowners in the subprime mortgage crisis, the Daily Planet wrote that “by throwing his name and prestige behind the project, Schwarzenegger appeared to be encouraging Oakland's role as a state center of pilot project innovation, as well as using it, as he said, to ‘encourage foundations all over the state to follow this fantastic example.’” 

Just as important to the Dellums administration’s plans—though not as widely publicized—was the mayor’s growing partnership with the city’s business community. During the 2006 mayoral campaign, critics had said that if the progressive (and sometimes radical) Dellums were elected, he would drive away business and development from Oakland. That has not appeared to happen. Instead, Dellums has forged an alliance with the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, with the chamber co-hosting the mayor’s economic summit in May. 

Setbacks 

Ron Dellums suffered no major political losses in 2007. Instead, the mayor’s setbacks during the year can be described more by the Old Testament passage at Hebrews 11:1 of “evidence of things not seen.” 

The major thing not seen in the Dellums administration in 2007 was a smoothly running, stable staff. There was turnover in the two most visible positions—chief of staff and public information officer—as well as unpublished reports of turf battles and squabbling between staff members, leading to a popular impression that management of the mayor’s staff was in something of a disarray. How much of that popular impression was true was difficult to tell from the outside, though it was clear that Dellums’ office staff was not operating at optimum efficiency. 

In January, Dellums hired 61 year old Dan Boggan, an Alameda County Medical Center trustee and former Berkeley City Manager and NCAA executive, as his first chief of staff. Boggan’s selection came as something of a surprise, as many observers had speculated that Dellums would give the job to former San Jose City Councilmember Tony West, who had spent the summer and fall working on the incoming mayor’s transition team. West, however, ended up with no role in the administration. 

But Boggan himself would last only six months on the job, resigning in early July. While Boggan came under criticism from some Oakland groups for remaining on several corporate boards while working as Dellums’ chief of staff, there was no indication that this criticism had anything to do with his leaving the Dellums administration. 

Boggan was replaced by former Clinton White House staffer and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom advisor David Chai. 

A month after the Boggan resignation, a second key Dellums staffer also resigned, Director of Communications Karen Stevenson. Stevenson’s tenure in the administration was marked with mixed results. On the one hand, she organized several Dellums full-media press conferences during her months in office, a marked departure from former mayor Jerry Brown, who chatted often with individual reporters but never held a full press conference in eight years in office.  

On the other hand, whether because of Stevenson’s efforts or in spite of them, Dellums held a rocky relationship with most of the media during her time in office. That relationship hit bottom during a disastrous August press conference, called to highlight the mayor’s new violence prevention plan, in which Dellums called a reporter “cynical” for questioning whether that plan would work. The mayor’s “cynical” comment dominated media coverage of the event, with little attention given to the details of the violence prevention plan itself. 

Shortly after Stevenson’s resignation, Dellums announced the hiring of former Red Cross media executive Paul Rose as her replacement. 

Nothing in the Dellums staff problems appeared to be fatal to the administration. There was no evidence of open staff revolt, and many important Dellums initiatives were moving steadily forward, including the police reorganization plan and the reorganization of the city’s zoning infrastructure, neglected under eight years of Jerry Brown. But an administration operates on the engine of its own staff, and as 2007 neared its end, mayoral staffing problems continued to be the major impediment to the carrying out of the Dellums Program in Oakland. 

If a high school English class were assigned to write a summary of the Oakland Unified School District for 2007, they would probably borrow and paraphrase from the opening lines of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: The year started out as the worst of times, and though by the end of 2007 it wasn’t the best of times, yet, it had certainly gotten decidedly better. 

At the beginning of the year, Oakland Unified was moving towards its fourth full year of state takeover, with little prospect on the horizon for local control. Randolph Ward, the state-appointed OUSD administrator who had run the district like a dictator, was gone, and had been replaced by the more likeable Kimberly Statham, but Statham retained Ward’s dictatorial authority to make decisions for Oakland schools without regard for the opinion of the elected school board.  

The May 2003 state legislation authorizing the state seizure of Oakland’s schools—SB39—allowed the state superintendent—Jack O’Connell—complete authority over the decision about when local control would be returned. O’Connell had already twice ignored the recommendation of the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) that Oakland’s powerless advisory school board should be granted authority over the limited area of community relations and governance.  

And over the objections of the school board, O’Connell was still considering the sale of 8.5 acres of prime East Lake OUSD property, including the district’s administrative headquarters and five education institutions, in order to speed up the payment of the $100 million state loan. O’Connell had dug his heels in in Oakland, and there seemed no way to budge him. 

By the end of the year, however, the state superintendent had signed over community relations and governance authority to the local board, and negotiations were in place to sign memorandums of understanding to return local authority in two more operational areas—personnel management and facilities management.  

O’Connell had also given the go-ahead for the board to hire a superintendent to run its three areas of responsibility, the first locally-hired superintendent the district would have since the state takeover.  

In addition, the newly-hired interim state administrator who replaced Kim Statham—Vince Matthews—was cooperating with the school board in an ambitious board initiative to build a multimillion education complex on the same 8.5-acre OUSD eastlake property that the State Superintendent had only recently been determined to sell.  

By any measure, 2007 was a year of remarkable political turnaround by the Oakland Unified School District. 

Introduction of AB45 

The political events of OUSD in 2007 actually began in the waning days of 2006, following the 2006 general election. On the day he was sworn in after winning the 16th Assembly District seat, Sandré Swanson followed through on a campaign promise to introduce legislation to speed up return to local control of the Oakland Unified School District.  

In its original form, Swanson’s AB45 would have granted control to the OUSD school board in four operational areas—community relations and governance, facilities management, personnel management, and pupil achievement—while leaving fiscal control in the hands of the state superintendent and the state-appointed administrator. 

Death of the Land Sale 

In February, the Daily Planet reported that O’Connell had finally given up his plans to sell the district’s eastlake educational and administrative properties. 

As reported in the paper on Feb. 23: 

In a dramatic but not necessarily unexpected announcement, California Superintendent for Public Instruction Jack O’Connell said on Thursday that the proposed deal to sell more than eight acres of prime downtown Oakland Unified School District land to an east coast development team is dead, killed by overwhelming Oakland opposition. 

In May 2006, the Planet broke the story that O’Connell was close to a deal on the sale of the property. Under the terms of the state takeover, O’Connell had sole authority to complete the sale on behalf of the Oakland school district. 

The Planet reported: 

But led by parents from the five schools slated to be displaced by the sale, opposition in Oakland quickly jelled, leading to a rare show of political unity in which the newly elected mayor, Ron Dellums, the incoming and outgoing assembly representatives, Sandré Swanson and Wilma Chan, the entire Oakland City Council and Peralta Community College District Board of Trustees, and the six of the seven members of the advisory OUSD Board of Trustees all either came out in opposition to the proposed land sale outright, or called for a slowdown in the sale negotiations. 

The AB45 Pressure 

The statewide publicity generated by AB45, coupled with continued calls for restoration of local control by Oakland residents and officeholders, began to take its toll on O’Connell, who had aspirations to run for governor of California in the 2010 election. AB45 passed the Assembly Education Committee and the full Assembly in June on party-line votes—Democrats supporting, Republicans opposing. As the bill moved over to the Senate, the political pressure also moved O’Connell. As reported in the Daily Planet on July 6: 

The president of the School Board for the Oakland Unified School District said late this week that State Superintendent for Public Instruction Jack O’Connell will come to Oakland next Monday to announce his decision to immediately turn over the area of “Community Relations and Governance” from state control to control by the school board. 

“The transition back to local control has started,” board president David Kakishiba said in a telephone interview on Thursday afternoon. 

The state superintendent’s official announcement of the turnover will come just two days before the State Senate Education Committee is scheduled to hold hearings and vote on Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 bill.”  

Modifications And Maneuverings 

The successful transition of AB45 through the first stages of the legislative process had forced O’Connell to cede some of his power over OUSD, but in order to keep the AB45 momentum going, Swanson was forced to make concessions himself.  

In order to win the support of powerful Senate President Don Perata—the Oakland Democrat who had written the original SB39 takeover legislation—as well as the possible support of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Swanson made significant modifications to his original bill as it moved over to the Senate side.  

Rather than granting immediate local control in four operational areas, Swanson’s amended bill would now grant local control only upon the recommendation of FCMAT, still taking, however, the granting discretion out of the state superintendent’s hands. 

In that new form, AB45 passed the Senate Education Committee in late August and the full Senate in early September, again on largely partisan votes. 

The Return Of The FCMAT Reviews 

Another Swanson legislative action kept the local control ball rolling. The money originally granted to FCMAT under SB39 to conduct reviews of Oakland Unified had run out, and without those reviews, even the state superintendent had no authority to grant the return to local control.  

Swanson included money for new FCMAT reviews in AB45, and then had that provision switched over to the main state appropriation bill. As a result of those new appropriations, FCMAT began new reviews of Oakland Unified in September and early October of 2007. 

The Death of AB45 

On Oct. 16, the Daily Planet reported what appeared to be devastating news for Oakland citizens seeking an early return to local control of the district schools: 

“In a move that Oakland Unified School Board President David Kakishiba said was ‘not unexpected,’ California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB 45 Oakland school local control bill on Saturday. The veto means that the fate of the future of the Oakland Unified School District remains under current state law, which allows the California school superintendent unlimited discretion as to when local control can be returned.” 

The Planet reported Kakashiba’s bitterness over the governor’s veto, writing that “While some people have been talking about the problems with the local school board, nobody in state government—from the governor’s office to the state superintendent to the Republican members of the legislature—wants to be culpable for what has happened to the Oakland schools under state control,” Kakishiba said. “During five years of state receivership, we have never had a balanced budget, and the executive turnover has been far worse than any other urban district in California during that time.” 

But the Planet also reported that Swanson was considerably more upbeat: “’I believe that the Governor’s action puts more pressure on the Superintendent, as he now must continue the transfer of authorities without the structural guarantees that I was attempting to put in place with AB 45,’ Swanson said in his prepared statement.” 

Swanson, clearly, knew something that others did not. 

The Dam Breaks 

In late November, the Daily Planet reported welcome news in Oakland: 

“State Schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell appears ready to turn over two more areas of control to the Oakland Unified School District on the recommendation of the Fiscal Crisis & Assistance Management Team (FCMAT), a move that could lead directly to the hiring of a new OUSD superintendent under local control. 

“O’Connell’s office has set up a conference in Oakland for Friday morning (today) in which it will “announce the process of returning two additional operational areas to the Oakland Unified School District governing board: Personnel and Facilities. 

“FCMAT, the state funded school intervention organization, issued a report on Wednesday in which it recommended that O’Connell turn over control of those two areas. 

“Following the release of this week’s FCMAT report, and even before O’Connell’s announcement of agreement with the organization’s recommendations, the OUSD board moved quickly to begin the process of employment of a superintendent. At Wednesday’s board meeting, OUSD Board President David Kakishiba said that he was putting an item on the board’s Dec. 8 retreat agenda that will ‘begin the dialogue on how we should go about the superintendent search process.’” 

Under the new arrangement, OUSD will operate for some time under bifurcated management. The state-appointed administrator will operate fiscal and pupil achievement matters. The board-hired superintendent will operate personnel, facilities, and community relations and governance matters, with the state-appointed administrator acting as a trustee in those areas with the power of veto.  

But events in December showed that interim state administrator Vince Matthews is likely to exercise that authority in a far different way than did his two predecessors, recognizing the new political realities in Oakland and the state. 

While O’Connell and the school board were sitting down to negotiate the terms of the turnover of the two new operational areas and the board was beginning its plans for a superintendent search, the Daily Planet reported on a mid-December OUSD administrator-board meeting showing how far the district had come in twelve months: 

“With little fanfare and no dissent, the Oakland Unified School District agreed this week to move forward with the building of a $75.5 million, four-school education complex on 6.5 acres of the district’s East Lake properties. 

“’I believe this project is long overdue,’ interim state administrator Vince Matthews said Wednesday night in approving the proposed operating budget for the complex. 

“Matthews’ decision came shortly after a unanimous advisory vote by the OUSD Board of Education. 

“Under the state takeover of the OUSD, the state administrator has sole authority to approve the project, but Matthews had said earlier that he would not do so until he had heard from the board on the matter.” 

2007, a year of many good-byes for the Berkeley Unified School District, ended with one notable welcome: the hiring of a new superintendent who is expected to take over the helm in Feburary. 

The Queen of Berkeley 

Denise Brown, teacher, dean and mother to students at Berkeley High, passed away on Feb. 2 from complications during knee surgery, leaving the entire district stunned and grieving. Students wore purple—Brown’s favorite color—to school for weeks and created a mural in the administrative building to remember her bright smile and warm hugs. 

Perhaps best remembered for scripting original plays such as “Vegetable Coup” and “The Biz” during her years as kindergarten teacher at LeConte Elementary School, Brown later became vice principal and dean of discipline at Berkeley High, where she was known as the “Queen of Berkeley” to many. 

She leaves behind two children, Justin, who recently graduated from the University of Oregon, and Sarah, who is pursuing a career in ance in New York. 

Coach Nak retires from Berkeley High 

Donahue Gym will never be the same again. When Coach Gene “Nak” Nakamura, who had coached the Berkeley High girls’ basketball team for the last 25 years, retired on Feb. 16, hundreds turned up to applaud the man who had led the high school to victory in the First Division state championship twice and the First Division Northern California championship seven times. 

An alumnus of the Berkeley High School Class of ’62, Nakamura dedicated 37 years of his life as a teacher and an administrator in the Berkeley Unified School District. 

He was named the 1997 NCS Honor Coach and 2006 BUSD educator of the year and has a record of 550 career wins. 

Occasionally, Coach Nak can still be spotted dunking the ball with his team at the basketball court. 

BUSD sued over warm water pool EIR 

Friends Protecting Berkeley’s Resources sued the Berkeley Unified School District in March for an inadequate environmental impact report on the demolition of the Old Gym and its warm water pool in the Berkeley High School South of Bancroft Master Plan. 

Superintendent Michele Lawrence informed city officials at a meeting in mid-December that the district was still fighting the lawsuit. 

The gym—recently landmarked by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission—is scheduled to be demolished in the summer of 2010. 

The warm pool is a lifeline for hundreds of seniors, disabled adults and students, as well as athletes recovering from sports injuries and rehabilitation patients who use the pool for physical therapy. 

The City of Berkeley has proposed relocating the warm water pool to the high school’s Milvia Street site, scheduled for completion in 2010. Architects have estimated the cost of a new warm water pool to be around $15 million, which the city hopes to raise with the help of a proposed bond measure next Novemeber. 

Sixth grade eliminated from  

Berkeley Arts Magnet 

Parents and students bade farewell to the sixth grade at Berkeley Arts Magnet (BAM) in March. The only elementary school in the district to offer the option of sixth grade to its students, BAM sought to provide a smoother transition to students specializing in the arts. 

District officials reported that the number of students requesting the sixth grade had fallen from 43 to 12 percent in 2007. 

Emerson, Jefferson Schools turn 100 

Emerson and Jefferson elementary schools celebrated their 100th year in May. The two schools were born in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. 

Jefferson principal Betty Delaney, who has been at the school for the past 12 years, retired in June, leaving behind a strong legacy and fond memories.  

Emerson, which started as ten rooms built on the corner of Piedmont and Forest avenues, has now become a full-fledged school with classrooms, offices, an auditorium and a playground as well as a very committed PTA and a strong academic program. 

Athletic Hall of Fame unveiled at  

Berkeley High 

Berkeley High School alums who went on to excel in sports in the last century were honored at the opening of the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame in June. This sports hall of fame is distinct from the already existing Berkeley High Hall of Fame, which recognizes alumni who have excelled in all fields. 

The reception at the Donahue Gym inducted Billy Martin (baseball), Glenn Burke (baseball, football and basketball), Steve Odom (football), Hannibal Navies (football and track and field), John Lambert (basketball) and 41 others who will have their names, graduation year, and varsity sports played displayed on banners in the Donahue Gym. 

“We were such a classy team,” reminisced Doug Kagawa, a 1968 graduate who helped the school win the Alameda Contra Costa Athletic League and the Tournament of Champions in the late ’60s. “When we walked onto the basketball court, we already had a lead over the other teams ... There was none of that on-court bickering or bragging. Our game did all the talking for us.” 

The youngest inductee—Anthony Lee Franklin—is a 2001 Berkeley High graduate who played baseball, football and basketball in high school. Diagnosed with leukemia at 13, Franklin’s story made headlines when San Francisco Giants left-fielder Barry Bonds visited him at the Children’s Hospital in Oakland. Bonds and Franklin campaigned to raise awareness of bone-marrow donation. Franklin died last year. 

BUSD wins discrimination lawsuit 

The district emerged victorious in American Civil Rights Foundation vs. Berkeley Unified School District in April. 

The lawsuit, filed by Sacramento based Pacific Legal Foundation in October 2006, charged the district with violating California’s Proposition 209 by racially discriminating among students during placements at elementary schools and at programs at Berkeley High. 

An Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled that the district’s integration system was fair and legal. 

“I hope Pacific Legal Foundation will now leave Berkeley alone,” Superintendent Lawrence told the Planet in an interview in May. 

A provision of the California Constitution, Proposition 209 was enacted by California voters in 1996 and “prohibits discrimination or preferences based on race or sex in public education, employment, and contracting.” 

Although a recent U.S. Supreme Court hearing limiting the consideration of race in school integration plans poses a new challenge for Berkeley Unified, district officials continue to defend the assignment system and have called it a model for other schools. 

The murder of Canon Christian Jones II  

Berkeley High alum Canon Jones, an 18-year-old Tuskegee University freshman, had planned to spend the summer with his family in Pinole starting as a volunteer with the Berkeley Boosters. Instead, he was robbed, beaten and shot to death outside his college campus in Tuskegee on the night of April 29. 

An interdistrict transfer to the Berkeley public schools at the age of 10, Canon’s death sent shock waves through the Richmond and Berkeley communities where he had grown up. 

An active member of the Youth Director Council and the Police Activity League Berkeley Boosters, Canon left behind a legacy of social service in Berkeley.  

Berkeley High and military recruiters 

Under threat of losing millions of dollars in federal funds, Berkeley High School administrators informed students in May about a change in board policy that required all juniors and seniors who do not want their names and addresses released to the U.S. military for recruitment purposes to sign an “opt-out” form. 

Prior to this, Berkeley High had simply handed over names and addresses of only the students who had “opted in” or wanted to receive information from recruiters. 

According to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, school districts must provide the military with the names and addresses of all juniors and seniors for recruiting purposes unless there is a signed letter from the parents or the student indicating that they are “opting out” and do not want information released. 

Berkeley High was the last high school in the country to acquiesce to this policy. 

Washington Elementary tries going solar 

Long debates at school board meetings about turning Washington Elementary School solar resulted in an agreement with Kyoto USA to carry out the design work for the proposed project in May. 

Estimated to cost $1.25 million, the HELiOS project—which proposes to put photovoltaic cells on the roof of Washington Elementary—is expected to cover 100 percent of the main building’s electricity needs. If the plan works, Washington will become the first school in the district to turn solar.  

Emerson mourns the death of Amir Hassan 

Friends of Amir Hassan turned the Emerson Elementary School library into a memorial for him after the fourth-grader was found dead inside his Shattuck Avenue apartment in October. 

As the trial to determine whether Amir’s mother was responsible for his death goes on, the school continues to mourn the loss of the 8-year-old boy. 

Berkeley High API scores 

Some Berkeley school board members expressed concern that Berkeley High School (BHS) did not meet the benchmark for the 2007 Academic Performance Index (API) scores. 

Berkeley Unified School District’s API for 2006-07 was 747, five points less than the previous year. Ranging from a low of 200 to a high of 1,000, the API reflects a school’s or district’s performance level based on the results of statewide testing. The statewide API performance level goal for all schools is 800. 

This year’s performance index was based on scores from 6,017 students, a participation rate of approximately 97 percent for elementary and middle schools and 84 percent for high school students. 

School officials said Berkeley High’s California standardized testing participation rates had decreased in 2006-07 in spite of efforts to increase student participation. 

Berkeley High Historic District nominated to National Register  

The State Historical Resources Commission unanimously approved the nomination for the Berkeley High School campus to be listed on the National Register as a historic district in November. 

The Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission’s vote to nominate the campus to the National Register earlier this month was tempered with the acknowledgment that the old gym on the campus, itself the subject of a landmarking battle and now slated by the Berkeley Unified School District for demolition, had been neglected and altered, and that a number of non-historic structures occupy the southern part of the campus. 

Located on four consolidated city blocks in downtown Berkeley, Berkeley High was the first high school in California to be built according to a campus plan and is the only collection of school buildings in Berkeley which comprises different architectural styles of early 20th-century school designs. 

In the event that the campus is nationally landmarked, the school district can still go ahead with the demolition. 

Marie Bowman, a member of Friends Protecting Berkeley’s Resources, the group responsible for writing the historic district nomination, said that the school district had sent a letter asking the state to exclude the old gym since it lacked the integrity needed to belong in the historic district. 

“I am proud that it’s finally happened after all this time,” she said. “The school district had the chance to work with the community to preserve the building, but they didn’t. Hopefully, they will have more respect for the community now.” 

BUSD picks a new superintendent 

The district embarked on a process to select a new superintendent after superintendent Michele Lawrence announced her retirement in September effective Feb. 1 

“Even though I have a deep and abiding role for public education, my role as superintendent, with the long hours and time commitment, have afforded me little time for myself,” Lawrence, 60, said. “So, while I am still young and healthy enough, I want to explore other life interests.” 

Reactions to Lawrence’s departure were mixed. Her critics have often painted her as unresponsive and elusive while her supporters continue to praise her for her determination and high standards. 

After taking over a troubled school district from former superintendent Jack McLaughlin in 2001, Lawrence spent four of her six years as district superintendent trying to balance the district’s staggering budget deficit. 

She leaves behind a legacy of stronger facilities and academic programs and an attempt to defend the BUSD student assignment and integration plan. 

As 2007 drew to a close, the school board hired Bill Huyett, superintendent of the Lodi Unified School District, as the new Berkeley school superintendent to replace Lawrence when she retires on Feb. 1.

Erica Madrid, a supervising public health nurse in the Berkeley Public Health Department, died Friday, as a result of injuries sustained when she was hit by an automobile Dec. 12 at about 4:25 p.m., while crossing Solano Avenue going south at Fresno Avenue. 

Traffic police initially estimated that the driver was going about 20 miles per hour heading east and that Madrid was in the crosswalk. It was determined at the time that the motorist was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol, according to Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss. 

Traffic officers were not available to answer questions on whether the driver would be charged. 

There was a pedestrian fatality at the same intersection on June 3, when a retired Berkeley Police Department officer, found to be under the influence of alcohol, struck and killed a pedestrian.  

There have been 13 automobile accidents at Solano and Fresno between 2002 and 2007—this is the third auto-pedestrian accident among them, Kusmiss said. 

Year-in-Review issues of papers like ours (well, there aren’t many papers like this one, but let’s say of any periodical publication) are anomalies. 

The events reviewed need to have been somewhat important to be mentioned, and yet regular readers can probably remember major happenings without our help. The holiday lull is supposed to provide us with the opportunity to step back and view the news from a longer perspective, but increasingly there is no holiday break in the hard news cycle. This past week alone brought the stories of the killing at the zoo by an escaped tiger and the assasination of Benazir Bhutto. 

Fortunately, neither of these tragedies took place at the local level in the news gap we spend most of our time trying to fill, so readers will learn about them from other sources. 

Here in the urban East Bay this year was a lot like last year. 

Underfunded and understaffed local governments attempted to cope with the big challenges, notably a shortage of affordable housing and public school systems increasingly unsure of their mission. Blaming the victims in both of these problem situations continued to be popular, and there are always enough victims and enough blame to go around.  

Berkeley politicians attempted to cope with the sight of homeless and crazed people on the street by trying to make them vanish, authorizing police crackdowns on anyone foolish enough to display basic human functions like sleeping and defecation in the viewspace of their more fortunate brethren. The state of California continued the fiction of running the Oakland public schools, while actually attempting to privatize as much of the educational function as possible and to sell off public property of the Oakland Unified School District in the guise of fiscal responsibility. None of this was “only in the East Bay”—San Franciscans were trying similar shenanigans.  

Crime continued to make headlines everywhere. State legislators piously clucked-clucked about it, and then voted to continue ducking the real causes of crime by building more prisons. In fact, as usual, when winners and losers are tallied, the real winner always turns out to be the building industry. There’s never been a problem that Californians didn’t try to solve by throwing cement at it.  

The University of California at Berkeley exhibited no shame at the revelation that most of its undergraduates seem to be taught by post-graduate teaching assistants instead of faculty members, but just continued its bricks-and-mortar (or concrete-and-steel) metastasis, oblivious of the Hayward fault. A major percentage of the school’s property has already been turned over to private for-profit research and development, and there’s a lot more of the same in the works, courtesy of the former British Petroleum, now coyly rechristened BP.  

The latest scam is the theory that we can build our way out of the desperate global warming situation. “Green building” is all the rage, despite ample proof that re-use is the greenest alternative in almost every situation. Converting drivers to using mass transit is said to require millions of dollars worth of “capital improvements”: constructing bus shelters, special lanes and concrete islands, instead of providing more frequent buses on more convenient trajectories. The logic here is that the federal government in its wisdom, tutored of course by the construction lobby, has allocated the money for building all this stuff, so why not use it? And while we’re at it, how about a nice new Bay Bridge, even though the old one could have been fixed? We can always borrow the money. 

And that’s the biggest—as yet uncalculated—new crisis for this year. Many observers think that the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market is only the beginning of a situation that could get a whole lot worse. Debt is accumulating on all levels: personal, municipal, national, international. The consequences are not clear, but some predictions are ominous.  

Americans, and especially Westerners, are not fond of The Big Picture. The study of history has just about disappeared from many public schools, and if they have it at all it’s American, just the short history of our little country not even three hundred years old. The long history of the vast continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, from which we might learn something about long-term survival, is barely mentioned.  

It’s stylish at this time of year for commentators to make fun of Christmas Letters, the inserts enclosed with greeting cards which started to appear with some frequency as personal computers and xeroxing became widely available. They seem to have peaked and are now on the wane—we only got one at our house this year, and that’s a pity.  

The writer of a holiday letter is confronted by the same problems as the editor of a Year-In-Review issue. What’s important enough to mention, what should be omitted, and how can it be analyzed? We used to get an annual letter from a friend who had a series of personal tragedies to report over several years, and not surprisingly she stopped writing after a while. On the other hand, too much Pollyannish good news is suspect, the frequent target of derogatory comments by self-satisfied sophists too busy to write letters themselves.  

When newspapers are in a self-congratulatory vein, they’re fond of saying that they’re the “first draft of history.” In fact, the first draft of history has mostly been written personal communications: letters. The invention of the telephone ended letter-writing for many of us, but holiday letters created a brief opportunity for some hardy souls to continue the tradition for a while.  

E-mail, while handy, is no substitute, since it rarely represents considered analysis, and we’ve yet to receive an email holiday letter. Most blogs, another promising novelty, read more like diaries than like letters, long on self-expression and short on attempted communication with envisioned readers.  

Central to the impulse to write history, whether in newspaper or letter form, is the assumption that someone, somewhere, is going to be reading it. We couldn’t—wouldn’t—do it without you, Dear Reader. Thanks for keeping up your end of the bargain. You make the whole effort worthwhile.  

• 

WHY NOT STEROIDS? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

What is woefully lacking in the media frenzy surrounding the release of the Mitchell Report on steroid use among professional baseball players is the growing steroid use among college, high school, and even grade school students. We forget that many of our youth look on professional athletes as role models. If professional athletes use illegal drugs as the easy path to big salaries and glory on the playing field and get away with it, is it any wonder that the would-be professional athletes of tomorrow will follow their example. 

But does it matter? In this age of wide-scale cheating and lying by public officials, researchers, academics, etc., the professional athletes’ use of steroids appears irrelevant to a lot of people. After all, professional sports is just entertainment and “everyone” was doing it. It should matter and if it doesn’t, that just demonstrates how far we have fallen as a society. 

Ralph E. Stone 

San Francisco 

• 

SILVER SCREEN 

NOSTALGIA 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Thanks for another of Phil McArdle’s excellent articles on California writers. The piece on play/film script writer Sidney Howard took me back to one of my most moving hours in a movie house, where, in the pre-TV days of my childhood, I spent so many hours, three double features per week, never knowing or caring who wrote the script. No, I’m not referring Howard’s hitting the trashy big time with Gone With The Wind. What Phil brought back to me was a film version of Howard’s play, They Knew What They Wanted, which I saw when I was about 10 or 11. 

This was the version in which Charles Laughton plays an Italian-American farmer (!) near Fresno, who writes to a rather shopworn mail-order bride, played by Carole Lombard, desperate for a home. The new hired man, played by William Gargan, sizes her up instantly as battered, vulnerable, an easy lay, and doesn’t hesitate a minute.  

One reason I remembered this movie was that I asked my mother what happened between the scene that ended with them kissing, and the news that she is pregnant (10 years old was younger then) and my mother wouldn’t tell me “until you’re older.” But a much greater reason I remembered it was for the theme that even a 10-year-old could get. Phil calls this drama a comedy, but either he uses the term in the classical sense that if the stage isn’t littered with bodies at the end, it’s a comedy, or tremendous changes were made between Howard’s play and the adaptation that hit the screen three times (scripts never written by Howard). 

I held my breath as Laughton’s mild-mannered farmer went after the hired man with a terrifying bellow, having suddenly become huge as an avenging god. No staged Hollywood fist fight here; Gargan stands mute and defenseless as Laughton attacks him. 

Then, after the hired man leaves, the farmer gains even more stature in our eyes, in his wife’s eyes, maybe even wins her love, by forgiving her freely. In those days of censored but steamy movies, when everything was sex and sentimentality, I realized, even at that age, that I had actually seen something different, a love story on the screen, a love so strong that it really changed the woman who’d seen the farmer as any old port in a storm. Even the hired man, in silently acknowledging his self-indulgent near-destruction of lives, seemed almost redeemable in his surprising sense of guilt. A rough story about ordinary people, about morality and decency and love, with no sermons. 

The film haunted me for years, as a standard that other movies rarely even approached. Then I forgot it. Thanks, Phil, for bringing it back to me. I’m tempted to try to rent it on video, but maybe it wouldn’t live up to my memory of it. Better stick to the old movie enshrined in my shredded memory. 

Dorothy Bryant 

• 

FEAR OF CHENEY 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I’ve been so afraid of Cheney and his ilk that I moved to New Zealand. I want to come back home, but only when we have a legal democratic government that upholds the constitution of the United States of America. 

Dr. Judy Lightstone 

• 

CORRECTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I am writing in regards to Richard Brenneman’s article in the December 21-27, 2007 Daily Planet about the December 17, 2007 public hearing on the proposed BP Helios biofuel project at LBNL. In that article he erroneously identified me as a “retired UC Berkeley engineering professor.” 

Never in my career working for the university have I held, or claimed to have held, an academic position as a professor. All the positions I have held at the university were either in engineering design development or administrative, and never academic. 

P.S. Please correct the spelling of my name. 

John R. Shively, P.E. 

• 

PLAY TO BIAS AND FEAR 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Republican presidential candidates and the anti-immigration crowd are blaming Mexican immigrants for America’s economic morass. I thought Bush and Republicans had been in control of the U.S. government, not farmworkers and fry cooks. To make Hispanic immigrants out to be the villains that are responsible for society’s ills is unconscionable; but its the GOP way in an election year. 

Republican presidential hopefuls are pandering to the lowest common denominators, biases, prejudices and fears. What else can they do, trot out their failed war, huge debts, tax cuts for the wealthy. 

The GOP, conservatives and religious right-wingers are just the latest groups to vilify new immigrants. 

Ron Lowe  

Grass Valley, CA  

• 

AUTO POLLUTION 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Our state government’s response to the EPA’s irrational ruling in favor of automobile pollution should be quick and simple. The court suit should be pursued, but it could take years to yield results. We have other options. Let the market decide. 

To facilitate that decision, the legislature should pass a onerous vehicular carbon tax that is collected at the time of sale. It could be a very simple tax, like $20,000 or 20 percent of the sale price per vehicle (whichever is more) on vehicles whose CO2 emissions exceed acceptable levels. More sophisticated formulas of paying for vehicular carbon credits could certainly employed and even enacted later, but what is needed now is a swift, draconian response that will provoke marketing fear in Detroit. 

Will this tax provoke court challenges? Of course it will. However, we could collect a lot of money and exert a lot of influence before the case is settled. It could take years for those challenges to get through the courts. Once this tax is passed, we can kick back and watch the glory of laissez-faire market forces do their magic. 

Thomas Laxar 

El Cerrito 

• 

TOT LOT MEDIATING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

So Art Maxwell doesn’t want to bother with city mediation services to resolve the dispute between himself and the kid park because he “didn’t think that mediation would lead to a solution.” Instead, Maxwell feels that screaming and cursing and threatening little kids, and throwing bratty temper tantrums, and blaring obscene rap music at little children, and making them cry, is the way to resolve the dispute. Hey Art, glad to see you’re handling the situation with such a high degree of maturity . . . And I should add, as one of the THOUSANDS of homeless people in Berkeley (many of whom are also seriously disabled), you can be sure that we have incredibly sympathy for the terrible, terrible living conditions that you’re forced to endure.  

Ace Backwords 

• 

OPPOSING CELL PHONES 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

My cherished family live within a few short blocks of 2702 Shattuck Ave where the city is about to erect cell phone towers that emit radiation and can cause cancer. Even if there is a difference of opinion about just how dangerous these towers are for human health, there is substantial research that does confirm increase in the cancer rates of those living in close proximity. I would think that in a community like Berkeley who has been a leader in caring about people( the disabled and handicapped) as opposed to profit making corporations, you would oppose such an endeavor. 

This is a residential community and people’s treasured homes are at stake. If this was happening in your own backyard, I am sure you would have a different feeling about this. 

Please reach out to those opposing this plan and reach inward into your own conscience as well. Do the right thing, in the spirit of all those who have come before you—those leaders who stood up and opposed plans which clearly endangered the lives of others. 

Margo Davis 

• 

REPLACING PARKING 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

I have read much of the AC Transit report on BRT. Among other things it does estimated that approximately 1,100 parking spaces would be eliminated should the entire project come into being from Berkeley to San Leandro. The repost also says some percentage of parking spaces would be replaced or mitigated. 

My question is: Where? 

If, say 30% of those parking spaces are replaced---just where are the going to be located? The BRT report is very detailed--except when it comes to just where AC Transit would create 300 or more new parking spaces. On this issue the report is silent. 

So, does anybody out there know just where AC Transit is planning to put the replaced parking spaces? 

Frank K. Greenspan 

• 

HOW BEST TO FIGHT CRIME? 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

The chief justification for killing fallow deer at Point Reyes was that : “...they were voracious eaters.” And since it follows that Americans eat more voraciously than any other nation on the planet (35% obesity), doesn’t the slaughter of these innocent creatures have ironic overtones?  

Robert Blau 

• 

SHELLEY BERMAN IS ALIVE AND WELL 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Now why on earth would a good Irish Catholic celebrate Christmas by attending a Kosher comedy program? Well, for one thing, after morning Mass there’s little to do on Christmas Day in Berkeley. The town’s deader than a door nail. Plus, I happen to love Jewish humor. So, when I saw an ad for the Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show in San Francisco, I coaxed a friend into going with me. 

This was the 15th Annual Program, produced by Lisa Geduldig, herself a stand-up comedian, held at the New Asia Restaurant in Chinatown. People were lined up hours before the doors opened and were assigned tickets for one of the tables seating 10. My friend and I sat at the Woody Allen Table up in the balcony, affording a perfect view of the show. But first we were served a nine-course dinner; no turkey, but a delectable feast served on a revolving lazy Susan. We knew none of the people at our table; they were mostly from out of town. But by the evening’s end we were fast friends. 

After dinner came the “hot and sour” Jewish comedy, m.c.ed by Lisa, poking fun at Jews and gays. She was followed by a youthful comedian, Scott Blakeman and Esther Goodhart (a very, very funny Asian woman, afflicted with Familial Dystonia that had confined her to a wheelchair for many years.) 

Ah, but then came the attraction that had lured me to this show in the first place—Shelley Berman! 

No, friends, he ISN’T dead. But he does show his age. Dressed in sartorial splendor, he moved slowly and at times seemed weary. But his gentle humor brought howls of laughter, except for one moving telephone monologue, where he portrays his own father, owner of a Chicago deli, questioning why he should give his son $100 to enroll in an acting school in New York, when he should be helping in the deli. It was a tender, touching skit, one that was very personal to the actor. 

At the program’s conclusion, Mr. Berman stood in the lobby, shaking hands with people eager to speak to him. He was genuinely and humbly grateful for the enthusiastic response to his act, reminding us that he started his career 50 years ago in San Francisco at the Hungry I. 

So, if you’re at loose ends next Christmas, I would suggest you get yourself over to the 16th Annual King Pao Kosher Comedy show for a truly delightful experience. 

Dorothy Snodgrass 

• 

SHOPPING V. HOMELESSNESS 

Editors, Daily Planet: 

Downtown Berkeley seeks to become a regional theater district and successful shopping district. But there’s a problem because Downtown Berkeley also wants to be a national center for solving homelessness. In trying to do both, Berkeley will fail at both. 

According to journalist Carolyn Jones, 40 percent of Alameda County’s homeless live in Berkeley which has only seven percent of the county’s population. As Downtown Berkeley successfully attracts more and more drug addicts, mentally ill persons, and street drunks, shoppers will more and more prefer to spend their time and money in Fourth Street, Emeryville, or El Cerrito Plaza where panhandling and public intoxication are forbidden. 

Perhaps Berkeley should put it to a vote—should Downtown Berkeley be the successful shopping district it can be with theaters, museums and restaurants or a community more like San Francisco’s Tenderloin with lots of homeless people and the social service agencies which enable them.  

Nathaniel Hardin 

El Cerrito 

SCHERR BELONGS TO LOCAL 70 

I have a suspicion that Judith Scherr who wrote the article on the councils new recycling bid may have been a member of Local 70. 

In the article ‘Council Opts to Send Out New Bid for Recycling’ dated 12/26/07 she advised that I was retired. Others have said much the same but in spite of it all I am still active and engaged. In my opinion, most of the time. 

Chuck Mack 

I was pleased to accompany our school board on an excursion on December 18, to visit the Lodi Unified School District to learn about their superintendent, Bill Huyett. It’s a large and diverse school district, with over 31,000 students (36 percent Hispanic, 17 percent Asian, 9 percent African American, 30 percent white) and 51 school sites. By comparison, BUSD has about 9000 students (17 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Asian, 29 percent African American, 30 percent white, 16 percent mixed or decline to state), and 16 school sites. 

Lodi does not have a parcel tax like our BSEP, which we passed as Measure A last fall (2006), but they do have a school bond for which they have a citizens’ oversight committee. I was able to meet with several parents, including two who had chaired that committee, and they gave me their full assurance that Superintendent Huyett regards transparency and community oversight as essential to fulfilling and maintaining the trust of the voters, and that he is scrupulous in meeting that obligation. Our school parcel tax promises Berkeley voters not only rigorous oversight to guarantee that funds are spent according to the purposes specified by the Measure; it also promises that there will be genuine community participation in planning how its funds will be spent, at school sites and at the district level, so I was very interested to find out how Superintendent Huyett views parent involvement and community participation. All of the parents I met spoke with real conviction about his genuine commitment to including parent and community members in decisions about their schools. They praised his openness to new ideas from any source, and his strong, involved, and collaborative leadership style. 

He also holds strong and deep beliefs in equity. This is a person who has taken a bold position on the urgency of eliminating the achievement gap in a politically conservative community, and demonstrated it in words, actions, and results. The data from the Lodi Unified School District show a diminishing achievement gap between white and Hispanic students, and between white and African American students, in both Math and English Language Arts, with all numerically significant groups showing increases in test scores every year for at least the last three years (the only years for which I saw data). In view of these impressive results, I asked parents if Superintendent Huyett might be narrowly focused on improving test scores at the expense of the arts in education, which we also value very highly in Berkeley. They assured me that that is not the case. They do have a music program in their schools (but parents must supply instruments), and they were unanimous in affirming that Superintendent Huyett values arts in education, and would be delighted with the resources available for the arts provided by Measure A, as well as the other community resources for arts education in our community.  

I congratulate the School Board on their excellent choice, and I congratulate Berkeley on our outstanding new Superintendent, Bill Huyett. Let’s welcome him into our community in a spirit of collaboration and shared commitment to the academic achievement and well-being of all our children. 

Julie Holcomb is co-chair of the BSEP/ Measure A Planning and Oversight Committee, and parent of two students in the BUSD.

Regarding Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), it’s time for Charles Siegel to put up or shut up.  

For months Mr. Siegel has asserted without evidence that AC Transit intends to replace parking removed by BRT. I challenge Mr. Siegel to produce a single citation from the draft EIR or other AC Transit material, or a written statement from AC Transit spokesperson Jim Cunradi, to support his claim.  

When it comes to parking in Berkeley, here’s what the DEIR really says: “Build Alternatives 1 and 2 would remove approximately 146 spaces, or 75 percent of curb parking, along [north] Telegraph Avenue. The displacements amount to 25 percent of total estimated supply within the Berkeley/North Telegraph survey area, which includes accessible parking on cross streets. Alternatives 3 and 4 would remove approximately 142 spaces (equivalent to 73 percent and 25 percent of, respectively, [north] Telegraph Avenue and survey area supply)” (p. 3-112). “Parking loss is possibly the most evident long-term impact” of BRT (p. 8-22).  

Here’s what the DEIR says about “replacement” parking in Berkeley: Commercial parking loss would be mitigated by taking parking from residential neighborhoods (p. 3-127). “The number of spaces proposed for mitigation would range from approximately 16 to 29 percent of total spaces displaced” (p. S-16).  

Some may quibble that “replacing” lost commercial parking with existing neighborhood parking is an unusual definition of the word “replace,” but in any case, Mr. Siegel’s assertion that all or even most of the commercial parking would be “replaced” by any definition is obviously false. 

The DEIR does not even address the residential impacts of this parking loss, but it acknowledges (with lip service, not facts, studies, mitigations, or solutions) that parking loss will be “detrimental to certain types of business activity” (p. 4-25): “the greater the extent of adverse effects on auto access, the more likely that customers would be deterred and encouraged to seek businesses in other locations where parking and traffic are less problematic” (p. 4-63). Duh! Most businesses on Telegraph survive only through a mixture of walk-in and drive-in customers. A less obvious concern for the route near the university, supported by at least one study in another city, is the likelihood that neighborhood-serving retail use would be replaced by institutional use. 

Instead of addressing these legitimate concerns of both neighbors and businesses, Mr. Siegel spreads lies and takes cowardly, unsubstantiated, personal, and just plain silly potshots at Mr. Buckwald.  

It’s time for one of the few BRT supporters in Berkeley to accept Mr. Buckwald’s courageous invitation to debate. The debate should take place before the City Council, which is in dire need of facts on this important project, and it should be advertised and televised. In this debate, I will place my money on the one who will bring brains, integrity, courage—and guess what? actual facts!—to the dais, namely, Mr. Buckwald.  

But in the end, BRT opponents cannot depend on rational argumentation to sway our current Council, which seems strangely immune to facts and reason. Mr. Siegel may not debate because he is afraid and factless, but more savvy “Friends of BRT” don’t debate because they expect insider networks, special interest influence, and simplistic adherence to ideology—all of which have a massive head-start on the facts—to carry the day. Unfortunately, this might be the one aspect of BRT on which they are factually correct.

Berkeley residents are proud of our well-deserved reputation for being passionate about our beliefs and committed to our causes. Most of us are dedicated to the diverse individuals and opinions that make our community truly unique, and we have the courage in our convictions to defend them to the utmost of our abilities. 

Much of the time this leads to interesting dialogue and lively debate, the hallmarks of civil public discourse that are instrumental to the success of any democratic society. Nonetheless, all too often this critical element of civility falls to the wayside when the discussion turns to the issues that matter the most to us. Even the most reasonable among us can transform into a loud-mouthed bully when confronted with an opinion or point of view that runs contrary to what we are absolutely, positively, beyond the shadow of a doubt certain is right. We tend to forget that it’s virtually impossible to be right unless you can first consider the possibility that you may very well be wrong. 

Many of us have attended marathon Berkeley City Council meetings that have disintegrated into shouting matches. I myself have watched in amazement as a vocal minority of a dozen individuals claiming to represent truth and justice trampled on the interests of a silent majority who were either too busy leading their lives to show-up and make themselves heard, or too disenchanted by the degree of conflict one must tolerate to participate in the process. If individuals are forced out of the dialogue or choose not to engage because they find the experience so distasteful, we lose any hope of seeing a democratic outcome, because the opportunity for the average individual to participate is precisely what defines a democracy. 

I have a few tenants I’d like to offer as possible building blocks for fostering a more civil public discourse that leads to the type of positive outcomes most of us are striving so hard to achieve: 

1. If we truly want to be heard, we must first learn to listen respectfully to each other. Genuine community requires fostering open dialogue between diverse constituencies and interest groups. We all have a right to be speak our minds, not just the folks with the loudest voices. 

2. Don’t demonize the opposition. All too often, when tempers are flaring in the heat of the moment, the temptation to personalize an argument is hard to resist. We must take a deep breath before unleashing a diatribe against an individual simply because we’re convinced that he or she is wrong. It’s possible to question a point of view without attacking the individual for holding it. 

3. That old adage about “agreeing to disagree” offers a tremendous amount of wisdom. To my mind, how we go about achieving our goals is far more important than any specific outcome. Winning, especially when we are working hard to create a successful business community, cannot be a zero-sum game. None of us are winners if the folks sitting across from us leave the table feeling like losers. 

A new year offers us the chance for new beginnings. I look forward to engaging with you in many meaningful, passionate, engaging, and civil conversations in the coming months. 

Jonathan DeYoe is Government Affairs Chair of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce 

“Where the dead are ghosts on the fragile abacus 

used to calculate loss, to estimate tragedy” 

—Persis Karim 

from Body Count 

The narrative in the media these days is the success of the U.S. “surge,” which has poured an additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq. Last month, war critic and close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa), said, “I think the surge is working.” Polls indicate that concern over the economy has replaced the war as the major issue for voters, and, that while a majority of Americans want the troops out, those saying that things are going better jumped from 33 percent to just under 50 percent. 

Are they going better? Car bombings, sectarian violence and attacks on U.S. troops are down, although 2007 has been the deadliest year of the war for the Americans. But does the reduced violence have anything to do with the surge? 

As Patrick Cockburn of The Independent points out, Americans and the U.S. media tend to “exaggerate the extent to which the U.S. is making the political weather and is in control of events there.” 

Take the attacks on Americans, which are down. The Sunni-based resistance carried out the majority of those. Sunnis, who constitute five million of Iraq’s 27 million people (there are 16 million Shiites and five million Kurds), dominated the country under Saddam Hussein.  

Initially the Sunnis formed an alliance with al-Qaeda that turned out to be a disaster. Al-Qaeda, an extremist Sunni organization, targeted Shiites, whom it considers heretics. The relentless bombings and shootings culminating in the 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, spurred Shiite militias, like Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, to counterattack.  

The Sunnis suddenly found themselves fighting a two-front war against the Americans and the Shiites, a war they can never win. They soon were driven out of large sections of Baghdad by the Shiites, while absorbing massive casualties from the U.S. military campaign.  

These defeats forced the Sunnis to turn on al-Qaeda and to reach a détente with the U.S. In return, the new Sunni militias—like the Baghdad Brigade, the Knights of Ameriya, and the Guardians of Ghazaliya—were given vehicles, uniforms, flak jackets and $300 a month for each member by the Americans. The so-called “Sunni awakening” soon fielded 77,000 militia members, larger than the 60,000-member Mahdi Army and half the size of the Iraqi Army. 

But, according to the Sunday Times, many of these Sunnis were formerly al-Qaeda members, and the current “truce” with the Americans is little more than a tactical maneuver to buy time. “Of course the coming war is with the [Shiite] militias,” Baghdad Brigade intelligence officer, Abu Omar, told the Times. “God willing, we will defeat them and get rid of them just as we did with al-Qaeda.” 

The flashpoint may come if the Shiite-Kurdish government of Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki continues dragging its feet in integrating the Sunni militias into the security forces. “If the government continues to reject them [the Sunni militias],” says Baghdad Brigade commander Abu Maroff “let it be clear this brigade will eventually take its revenge.” 

Baghdad is calmer because the city has gone from one of mostly mixed neighborhoods to a city of rigid ethnic enclaves guarded by sectarian militias. While this has reduced the level of violence in the short run, it hardly bodes well for the future. 

In short, the “surge” has very little to do with the reduction of violence in Baghdad, and virtually nothing to do with the relative peace in Western Iraq. Both are the quiet that follows in the wake of ethnic cleansing. 

Iraq’s south has been mostly calm, but, once again, this has nothing to do with the surge. The U.S. has few forces in the region, and the British have been driven out of Basra. They are currently bunkered down in an airport. The major violence in the south has been between rival Shiite factions, in particular al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq’s (SICI) Badr Brigade. Sadr’s forces generally represent the bulk of the Shiite masses. The SICI has fewer followers, but much more money than the Badr Brigade and, most importantly, the support of the U.S. Army.  

Following a major shootout in August between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade in Karbala, Sadr and SICI head Abdul Aziz al-Hakim signed a ceasefire. For Sadr, the truce has more to do with avoiding a fight with the SICI while the latter can call on the U.S. to back it up, than with any sudden conversion to the surge. Speaking in a mosque Dec. 7, al-Sadr told the Americans, “Get out of our land. We don’t need you or your armies, the armies of darkness; not your planes, tanks, policies, meddling, democracy, fake freedom.” 

The recent car bombings in the southern provincial capital, Amarah, were not the work of al-Qaeda—which has no presence in the largely Shiite south—but a sign of growing tension between rival Shiite groups. At stake is 80 percent of Iraqi’s oil revenues and control of the country’s only port, Basra. 

Iraq’s north is relatively calm because it is controlled by the powerful Kurdish militia, the Persh Merga. But violence is on the increase in Mosul, in part because insurgents driven out of Baghdad have moved north. But also because Sunnis and Shiite Arabs have buried their differences and unite to resist what they fear will be Kurdish domination. Attacks in Mosul during November jumped from 80 to 106 a week.  

The most volatile issue in the north is Kurdish autonomy and an upcoming referendum that will decide who controls the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the strategic city of Mosul. An autonomous Kurdish region is something most Arab Iraqis—and all of Iraq’s neighbors—oppose. The Turks, Syrians and Iranians worry that an autonomous “Kurdistan” will stir up similar moves for autonomy in their countries. And the Baghdad government fears that it will lose the revenues from the northern oil fields. 

With the recent across-border attack by Turkey, and the growing internal tensions in the region, the peace in the north has all the stability of a power magazine. 

“We are now funding all the major Iraqi warring parties, the Sunnis, the Shiias and the Kurds,” says former CIA and National Security Agency official Bruce Reidel. “They are happy to take our weapons and our money, but they’ve not necessarily brought into the same strategy as we have.” 

While the U.S. will have to begin drawing down troops this coming June, the Bush Administration says it intends to remain in Iraq. Last month Bush and al-Maliki signed an agreement that, according to the Financial Times, “paves the way for a possible long-term U.S. presence in Iraq.” 

Certainly the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is being built with that in mind. When finished, the $736 million project will cover 104 acres, with 21 buildings reinforced against bombs and mortars. The huge complex will cost $1.2 billion a year to run. 

According to a BBC/ABC poll, with the exception of the Kurdish north, Iraqis not only oppose the U.S. presence, 57 percent of them support attacks against coalition forces. Even the Maliki government has to tread softly in this area. Speaking to the press last week, Iraqi National Security Advisor Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, said “permanent forces or bases in Iraq for any foreign forces is a red line that cannot be accepted by any nationalist Iraq.” 

The success of the surge is an illusion. “Nothing is resolved in Iraq,” says Cockburn. “Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile ceasefires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.”

2007 wasn’t a happy year, as the major political stories were mostly downers. Here are my choices for the big winners and losers. 

Winners  

Given that his approval ratings hovered in the 30s all year—an unprecedented stretch of negative poll numbers—it may seem strange to declare President George W. Bush a winner for 2007. Nonetheless, Bush had a good year: not for what he accomplished but rather for what he blocked. The President took an obstructionist role and was able to stop changes to his Iraq policy and his conduct of his “war on terror.” Pundits predicted Bush would be remembered as “a President who made many mistakes but refused to admit any of them.”  

Crucial to the 2007 “success” of the President was the advent of General David Petraeus, who in January became the Commanding General of the allied forces in Iraq. Petraeus convinced Bush to shift his strategy in Iraq and send additional troops to take over the day-to-day security operations, to police the civil war. In September the General reported the troop “surge” had reduced violence but made little political progress. Polls indicate 48 percent of the American public now feel the situation in Iraq is going well; nonetheless, a majority want our troops to be withdrawn. Bush and Petraeus talked about keeping troops there indefinitely. 

The war cost $2 billion per week with much of this money going to the military contractors used in Iraq. The Washington Post reported more than 100,000 contractors were employed in Iraq, not including subcontractors, plus an additional 20,000 security operatives. Some of the largest contracting firms include Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater. The war slogged on while their bank accounts grew. 

The presidential campaigns started unusually early and produced two big winners. Among Democratic candidates, Barack Obama emerged as a surprisingly strong candidate. The junior Senator from Illinois raised more than $80 million and ran an unexpectedly strong second behind Hillary Clinton in both fundraising and voter support. At year-end, Obama was leading in Iowa and running a strong second in the early primaries. 

The weak set of Republican Presidential candidates provided an opportunity for dark horse Mike Huckabee, former Governor of Arkansas. Raising almost no money, Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, won the hearts of many conservative Christians. At year-end, he was leading in the Iowa primary and had become a factor in the national race. 

Losers 

It came as a surprise to no one that Hillary Clinton decided to run for president. She entered 2007 with the aura of inevitability; most observers thought she would easily raise more money than any other contender and, therefore, effortlessly win the Democratic nomination. At year-end, it appeared that Senator Clinton might lose some of the first few primaries. Many Democrats were giving her a second look, wondering if she was actually the most competitive presidential candidate. 

Given the amount of money they have spent, and the amount of media attention they’ve garnered, it’s surprising that the Republican candidates for President have fared so poorly: Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner, but voters have questions about his personal life and hard-core Republicans wonder about his values. Mitt Romney has spent lots of money, but so far his candidacy has not captured the imagination of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. John McCain was the early favorite but faded due to money problems and the perception that he was too unpredictable. There was great anticipation that Fred Thompson would bring new energy to the competition, but instead he delivered ennui. At year end, the most popular Republican candidate was “none of the above.” 

Another big loser was the 110th Congress. Beginning in January, Bush-weary Americans expected the Democratic-controlled Congress to make major changes in the conservative policies that have derailed the U.S. over the past six years. While Congress was active, held many more hearings, and passed more bills than had the 108th and 109th Congresses, the big items didn’t get fixed: the war continued with no plan, there was no immigration reform, the farm bill was dominated by agribusiness, and the AMT problem was fixed by increasing the deficit. At year end, Congress was more unpopular than the President. 

This was the year when most Americans recognized that global climate change was a reality and not some figment of the imagination of alarmist liberals. As scientific report after report rolled in, the news became evermore disturbing. The public finally realized their future well-being is threatened by global warming. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know what to do about it because there has been no leadership from the Bush Administration. 

In 2007, the big losers were mainstream Americans. The war dragged on and the economy faltered; meanwhile, we were confronted with the daunting twin challenges of global climate change and reduced energy supplies. As the year ended, it came as no surprise that many Americans felt discouraged, and an overwhelming number told pollsters the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. 

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

In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the East Bay population ballooned practically overnight, absorbing 200,000 refugees of which three-quarters remained permanently. To accommodate their burgeoning communities, Berkeley and Oakland acquired new housing developments, factories, and transportation routes, as well as a good number of churches. 

Three of the earliest churches to be constructed after the earthquake were completed one hundred years ago this month. One of the three—First Presbyterian Church at Dana St. and Channing Way—was demolished in 1973. The other two—St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church at 1640 Addison St. and Shattuck United Methodist Church at 6300 Shattuck Ave.—are still standing. 

The current St. Joseph’s (an earlier Gothic Revival church had been used by the parish since 1883) was the brainchild of Father Francis Xavier Morrison, D.D. (1869–1924), who became pastor in September 1905. For the design of the new church, Morrison turned to the San Francisco architectural firm of Frank T. Shea and John O. Lofquist. 

An alumnus of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Frank T. Shea (1859–1929) was best known for the Catholic churches he designed throughout California, employing a wide range of styles, from Romanesque and Gothic to Classical and Mediterranean.  

Shea’s San Francisco churches include St. Brigid’s at Van Ness Ave. and Broadway (altered); St. Vincent de Paul in Pacific Heights; St. Paul in Noe Valley; St. James and Mission Dolores basilica (altered) in the Mission district; Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe on Russian Hill; St. Anne’s in the Sunset district; Holy Cross in the Western Addition; and Star of the Sea and St. Monica in the Richmond district. In Oakland, Shea designed St. Augustine’s Church on the corner of Alcatraz and Colby. Many of Shea’s churches were constructed under the aegis of Archbishop Patrick Riordan, for whom the architect built a mansard-roofed château at Alamo Square in San Francisco. The mansion is now a tony hotel. Other prominent Shea buildings include the 8-story Bank of Italy (later Bank of America) at 552 Montgomery Street, and the Sacramento Hall of Justice. In Berkeley, Shea also designed the Brasfield (now Beau Sky Hotel) on Durant Avenue. 

Shea’s plans for St. Joseph’s had to be drawn twice, the first set having perished in the 1906 fire. When the second set was ready, a shortage of materials and workers delayed the start of construction by several months. The cornerstone was not laid until June 16, 1907, in a ceremony that was attended by a throng of several thousand, yet the contractors, Kidder and McCullough, expedited the work, enabling the church to open for its first service on Christmas Day of that year. 

St. Joseph’s architectural style is an amalgam of Neoclassical and Italianate, at the time described by the press as “later Roman style, with concrete foundation and superstructure of wood.” Its most prominent external feature are the soaring twin towers that at one time were the tallest in Berkeley. 

The large interior seats more than 900 and boasts many fine stained-glass windows. Particularly notable are the 14 windows manufactured in Munich by the firm of Franz Mayer, purveyors of stained glass and artistic mosaic since 1847. Still in operation today, the Mayer’sche Hofkunstanstalt has installations in over 100 cathedrals—St. Peter’s in Rome being one—as well as in countless public, institutional, and corporate locations around the globe. 

Ten of the Mayer windows—eight in the nave and one at each end of the transept—depict scenes from the life of Christ. Above the two transept windows are large rose windows. A third rose window graces the choir loft on the north side. Below the choir, a transom window displaying a crown and a cross is positioned above the main entrance to the nave. 

The Mayer windows were donated by parishioners and installed between June 1911 and December 1912. They retain their brilliant colors to this day. Above the rectangular Mayer windows in the nave is a set of eight arched clerestory windows created in 1965 by Carl Huneke (1898–1972), the German-born founder of Century Stained Glass Studio in San Francisco. Over the 30-year existence of the Century studio, Huneke made about 1,200 windows for 80 churches, at least one of which was designed by Shea and Lofquist—St. Vincent de Paul in San Francisco, which contains more than 40 Huneke windows, most of them installed in the 1940s. 

Representing concepts such as Wisdom, Fortitude, and Piety, Huneke’s windows for St. Joseph’s, also donated by parishioners, were part of a major remodel of the church, completed in 1966. Prior to their installation, the clerestory windows had contained plain translucent glass. 

Alternating with the windows on the nave and transept walls are beautifully carved sculptural ensembles representing the Stations of the Cross. Four massive oak confessionals, no longer in use, are clustered along the northern side of the nave. They feature dentiled broken pediments, scrollwork, and arched doors flanked by smooth columns crowned with Ionic capitals. 

The church was completed at a cost of $65,000. 

Three days after the Christmas opening of St. Joseph’s, local newspapers were announcing the imminent completion of the Shattuck Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, which was to be dedicated in early January 1908. 

Much was made of the church’s architect, 24-year old Minnie M. Jackson, who at that time was the only woman to have graduated from the Wilmerding School of Industrial Arts in San Francisco. Opened in 1900 as a branch of the University of California, this boys’ school offered training in carpentry; cabinet making; wood carving; forging; clay molding and art; mechanical and architectural drawing; and mathematics and geometry. 

Minnie Jackson’s father was a mechanical engineer and her brother was a machinist. Both worked for the Byron Jackson Machine Works in West Berkeley but were unrelated to Byron Jackson. The family lived at 1634 Oregon Street. 

In July 1906, Bishop John W. Hamilton of San Francisco secured $50,000 for the reconstruction of Methodist churches in the area. Rev. Kennedy of the Shattuck Avenue Methodist Church requested $5,000 toward the building of a $11,500 church. A month later, the San Francisco Call reported that the church had “decided to change its name to the Hamilton Church and will build a new church edifice at Sixty-third and Dover streets. The building will be of the Mission style of architecture and will cost $12,000.” 

The name change did not take place, nor the building on Dover Street, the architectural style, or the price tag. After some legal entanglement over two lots, the congregation settled on its current location and turned to Minnie Jackson, a member of the church, to design and supervise construction of the new church. Miss Jackson had never practiced architecture since graduating in 1903, but she accepted the task with equanimity. The result was eclectic, combining Colonial Revival style with Gothic arches and Art Nouveau stained-glass windows. The final cost was $16,000. 

Innovative features designed by Miss Jackson included a moving pulpit platform that could be made larger or smaller according to need and a pressed steel ceiling with unusual groin vaults. Of these features, only the charming vaults remain, but now in plaster. Also gone is the steeple over the entrance turret. 

The stained-glass windows bear floral motifs, with an identical iris in all but the rose window. Windows donated by church members display their names in a red glass panel. The stained glass is not original, since all the windows were reported smashed in June 1910, when a gang of boys aged 8 to 13 broke into the church and vandalized the sanctuary. Nevertheless, one can assume that the original pattern was replicated at that time. 

Minnie Jackson used a mirror image of her plans for another Methodist church dedicated in Bishop, Inyo County, in August 1908. That church still retains its steeple and pressed steel ceiling. 

At the dedication of the Shattuck Avenue Methodist Church on Jan. 12, 1908, Bishop Hamilton focused his remarks on women’s equality, no doubt as a gesture of respect toward the young woman who had played such a decisive role in the building of the church. 

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

Photograph by Daniella Thompson 

St. Joseph the Worker’s façade detail.

Hi, My name’s Matt and I’m a recovering general contractor. It’s not easy to talk about, but I know it makes it better to get it out in the open and discuss it. 

For those of us who share this affliction (and you know who you are) there are things we prefer to leave in the past. Denial is a useful, if hobbling tool. Our suffering need not perpetuate itself if we remember this simple word. No.  

When they want it both cheap and fast, just say no. When they want you to convert the garage into a “guest bedroom” while the local building inspector is having his gall bladder out, just say no. When they want you to hire their unemployed brother from Nome (“he only drinks after lunch”), just say no. And, when a client with one bathroom wants it remodeled just say no. Ah, how many times I wish I’d observed that one.  

Aside from the fact that people get irritable after you’ve been showing up at their house for a few weeks, taking someone’s bathroom away eventually begins to cramp the relationship. I’m not so very different. Take my bathroom privileges away and I get increasingly anxious. Eventually, I leave and go stay somewhere else (I hope my wife doesn’t read this). Actually this is no joke. If you’re a contractor or a client, there is almost nothing you can do that’s more likely to lead to a client/contractor breakdown than the remodeling of the only bath in the house. 

Therefore, I propose one of two alternatives, go away on vacation and come home to your newly completed bath or add a bath. Either has great merit, when compared to the original extremely bad idea.  

Starting with idea #1 (going away), there are a few provisos one should observe. First, hire someone really good. When you don’t get a chance to check on work in progress and interact with the project, you must feel the quality of the workmanship is, at least somewhat, guaranteed. This means not hiring the cheap guy or gal. You’ll just have to hire a little higher on the price scale to feel assured that you’ll come home to your dream bath. Second, plan everything out as fully as possible. You should possess the permit and the drawings should be very detailed and clear. You should also, ideally, have everything that will go into the project at your home before you leave. The faucets, the tile, the sink, the lighting; everything. The idea is to minimize surprises.  

Here’s a 21st century tip that you might try if you go this route: Set up a website for the bath remodeling job and have your contractor snap a few digital pictures every day or two and you can check on the progress of the job from your ski chalet in Switzerland. You could even blog your responses or post responses and requests on the website. Or, you could just have a nice time and come back to your bath. In any event, plan, plan, plan. That’s the way of success. 

Now for idea #2, which, I confess, I much prefer. Adding a bath, as any realtor will tell you, is one of the best ways to increase value in your home, even if it’s tiny and poorly placed. As a family man, I can also say that there are few routes to domestic concord less circuitous than through the addition of one more toilet. While a second shower may speed the morning and make for happier campers, a second toilet has a more religious quality (if you get my genuflection). 

Again, even a very small bath made out of a former closet can transform your household. Also, your contractor will thank you. They may be far more willing to do the job in the first place but may even do this job at a lower cost and if problems present during the addition of the second bath, you (or the crew) won’t end up doing the bathroom dance.  

You won’t need a port-a-potty on the lawn (nothing say “trailer park” quite like a port-a-potty, don’t you think?). By the way, if you just happen to be installing an extra half bath without city approval, it might be best not to have that big green thing out in front of your house. Only a dumpster declares more loudly that you’re in the middle of a remodeling project. I’m not promoting the idea of work without permits, I’m just not blind. A large percentage of these projects are done in this way and to ignore this would be foolish. 

If you’re a contractor being approached by Ms. Jones to remodel that single bath, get up, take a walk around, stroll in the largest closet and repeat after me “I’m terribly sorry. I could never remodel your only bath, but let me propose something else ...” 

FRIDAY, DEC. 28 

CHILDREN 

“Habari Gani?/What’s the News?” Kwanzaa stories with April Armstrong for ages 5 and up at 3 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 981-6223. 

THEATER 

Encore Theatre Company & Shotgun Players “The Shaker Chair” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m., at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Jan. 27. Tickets are $20-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

Paul Mooney Comedy Show at 8 and 10 p.m. Through Dec. 31, at Black Repertory Group, 3201 Adeline St. Tickets are $25-$100. 652-2120. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Wild Music: Sounds and Songs of Life Percussion discussion with Ken Bergman at noon and 1:30 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. Cost is $8-$10. 642-5132. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mack Rucks Group at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Moodswing Orchestra at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Swing dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $11-$13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

David Grisman Bluegrass Experience at 5 and 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $30.50-$31.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Ali Weiss and Cris Kelly & Manda Bryn at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Musiciens sans Frontiéres, Talons of Peace at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $8. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Albino, heavy afro-beat, at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $10. 548-1159.  

Space Heater at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 29 

CHILDREN  

Folksongs with Chris Molla for ages 3-7 at 10:30 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, West Branch, 1125 University Ave. 981-6270. 

Music with Melita and Friends at 11 a.m. at Studio Grow, 1235 Tenth St. Cost is $7. 526-9888. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Otro Mundo at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Lady Bianca Blues at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $12. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

The Zydeco Flames at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cajun/Zydeco dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $13. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com  

James Brown Tribute at 9:30 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7-$15. 548-1159. www.shattuckdownlow.com 

Jenny Kerr and Kenny Schick at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

The Bobs, a cappella, at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $20.50-$21.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

The Unreal Band, Lucky Dog at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Justin Hellman Quartet at 8 p.m. at Jupiter. 843-8277. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 30 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mon’s Music Trio, featuring Si Perkoff, at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Evie Ladin at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Creation at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Lyrics Born at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $35. 548-1159.  

Dani Torres, flamenco,, at 5 p.m. at Caffe Trieste, 2500 San Pablo Ave. 548-5198. 

MONDAY, DEC. 31 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Bobi Cespedes Quartet at 8 and 10 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Reservations recommended. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Balkan Bash with Édessa, Brass enazeri, Joe Finn at 8 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Jesus Diaz’s The Cuban Connection at 9:30 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $25-$27. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Montana Slim at 9:30 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $10. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

New Year’s Eve Jazz Service with Dan Damon, jazz pianist, poetry and reflection at 5 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. 524-2921.www.epworthberkeley.org 

Medicine Ball Band featuring Pee Wee Ellis and Lady Bianca at 8:30 p.m. at Plymouth Church 424 Monte Vista, at Oakland Ave. Cost is $24-$30. 444-2115. 

High Country, Dix Bruce & Jim Nunelly at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage Coffee House. Cost is $26.50-$27.50. 548-1761 www.freightandsalvage.org 

What It Is at 9 p.m. at Jupiter. Cost is $10. 843-8277. 

Flamenco Fiesta at 5:30 and 8:30 p.m. at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $55-$85. 287-8700.  

Spanish Harlem Orchestra at 8 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $100. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

TUESDAY, JAN. 1 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Benefit for the Birds” with pianist Matt Herskowitz and flutist Carol Alban and others in a benefit concert to raise money for local and international bird rescue efforts, at 7 p.m. at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$20. 542-7517. 

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 2 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Whiskey Brothers, old-time and bluegrass at 9 p.m. at Albatross, 1822 San Pablo Ave. 843-2473. www.albatrosspub.com 

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

Moh Alileche & Ensemble with Danse Maghreb at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $10-$12. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Ledisi at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, thruogh Sun.. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

THURSDAY, JAN. 3 

CHILDREN 

Clown Around with Mr. Yoo Who at 4 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, South branch, 1901 Russell St. 981-6260. 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Wildly Colorful, Whimsical” Drawings by Eva M. Schlesinger on display at the Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut St., through Jan. 848-0237. www.jcceastbay.org 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Adam David Miller will read from his recently published memoir, “Ticket to Exile” at 7 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. at Masonic, Albany. 526-3720. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Ray Bierl at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

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

The General Jones, Last One Picked, The Happy Clams at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082 www.starryploughpub.com 

FRIDAY, JAN. 4 

THEATER 

Encore Theatre Company & Shotgun Players “The Shaker Chair” Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m., at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Jan. 27. Tickets are $20-$30. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Big Bang: New Work at Mercury 20” Artist’s reception at 6 p.m. at Mercury 20 Gallery, 25 Grand Ave. at Broadway, Oakland. 701-4620. 

MUSIC AND DANCE  

Latin Jazz Youth Enemble of San Francisco at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

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

Sukhawat Ali Khan with Sacheko Kanenobu at 9 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $12-$15. 525-5054. www.ashkenaz.com 

Bluegrass Buffet with the Earl Brothers, The Whoreshoes, Five Dollar Suit at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $15.50-$16.50. 548-1761. www.freightandsalvage.org 

Mere Ours, Marianne Barlow at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344. www.nomadcafe.net 

Skribble Violent Insight, Beyond Oblivion at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $7. 841-2082. www.starryploughpub.com 

Trainwreck Riders, Tinktures, Di Di Mao at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $6. 525-9926. 

Valeria Troutt at 9 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $7-$15. 548-1159.  

Ledisi at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square, thruogh Sun.. Cost is $22-$26. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com 

SATURDAY, JAN. 5 

CHILDREN  

“Marina’s Capoeira Countdown” with author Oscar Wolters-Duran, followed by an art activity, at 1 p.m. at The Museum of Children’s Art, 538 9th St., Oakland. 465-8770. 

Fratello Marionettes “Peter and the Wolf” at 10:30 a.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. For ages 3-8. 981-6223. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Poetry Flash with Justin Chin and Cynthia Cruz at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books. 559-9500. 

Bay Area Poets Coalition Open Reading from 3 to 5 p.m. at at Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison St. Park on the street, not in Lodge parking lot. Free. 527-9905. poetalk@aol.com  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Mario Lavista Quinteto Latino at 8 p.m. at Trinity Chapel, 2320 Dana St. Tickets are $8-$12. 549-3864. www.trinitychamberconcerts.com  

Alex Pfeifer-Rosenblum at 8 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$12. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Macy Blackman & The Mighty Fines at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $15. 841-JAZZ. www.AnnasJazzIsland.com 

Lakay featuring Mystic Man, King Wawa and Alexa Weber Morales Band, Haitian and Afro-Brazilian at 9:30 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Kompa dance lesson at 8 p.m. Cost is $15-$12. 525-5054. 

Sotaque Baiano, Brazilian, at 8 p.m. at Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck Ave. Cost is $5-$10. 548-1159.  

Kate Isenberg, Golden Loom at 7:30 p.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

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

Julian Pollack Three-O “Sea of Stories” at 8 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $12. 845-5373. www.jazzschool.com 

7th Direction, Crooked Roads, Ten Ton Chicken at 9 p.m. at The Starry Plough. Cost is $5. 841-2082.  

Dangers, Graforlock, Wait in Vain, Owne Hart at 8 p.m. at 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, member-run, no alcohol, no drugs, no violence club. Cost is $7. 525-9926. 

SUNDAY, JAN. 6 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Tree Spirit” Landscape paintings by Betsy Kendall, black-and-white and painted photographs by Gerry Keenan, and organic materials sculptures by David Turner, on display at the Community Art Gallery, Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, 2450 Ashby Ave. through Feb. 28. 204-1667.  

MUSIC AND DANCE 

“Tribute to Max Roach” with young musicians performing in two groups led by drummer Kamau Seitu and by Bay Area keyboardist Rudi Mwongozi, from 4 to 7 p.m. at Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland. Tickets are $15-$20. 836-4949 www.blackmusiciansforum.org 

Trio Mopmu & Brass Menagerie at 8 p.m. at Anna’s Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way. Cost is $10. 841-JAZZ.  

Pete Madsen at 11 a.m. at Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. 595-5344.  

Don Neely’s Royal Society Jazz Orchestra featuring Carla Norman at 5 p.m. at Ashkenaz. Cost is $20. 525-5054.  

Kaz George Quintet at 4:30 p.m. at the Jazzschool. Cost is $10. 845-5373.  

Adrian Legg at 8 p.m. at Freight and Salvage. Cost is $17.50-$18.50. 548-1761. \ 

MONDAY, JAN. 7 

EXHIBITIONS 

“Photographs of Life in Kabul, Afghanistan” by Mojhgan (Mo) Mohtashimi opens at The LightRoom, 2263 Fifth St. 649-8111. 

NIAD Faculty and Artists 25th Anniversary Show opens at the National Institute of Art & Disabilities, 551 23rd St., Richmond. 620-0290. 

READINGS AND LECTURES 

Actors Reading Writers “Moments of Clarity” stories by W. Somerset Maugham and Alice Munro at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. 932-0214. 

Edie Meidav will read from her novel “Crawl Space” as part of the Jewish Writers in the Bay Area Series at 7 p.m. at JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St. 655-8530. 

Poetry Express with Michael Hardy at 7 p.m. at Priya Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. 644-3977. 

MUSIC AND DANCE 

Le Jazz Hot at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s at Jack London Square. Cost is $6-$12. 238-9200. www.yoshis.com

This New Year’s Eve, for the 23rd year in a row, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra kicks off its new season with a free concert in Berkeley. In fact, remarkably, all of their concerts are free. The concerts are subsidized by grants and membership, which guarantees you the best seats. The theme of this year’s New Year’s Eve concert is Prodigies with music by Mozart and Mendelssohn as the examples.  

Between the ages of 12 and 14, Felix Mendelssohn composed 13 symphonies for strings that were performed by members of the Berlin court orchestra at Sunday concerts given in his parents’ home. Thinking of them as student work, exercises, he never published them. In fact, they were virtually ignored until after World War II. The String Symphony No. 9 in C Major from 1822, which will be on the New Year’s Eve program, was written when Felix was fourteen but not published in a practical edition until 1962. It is known as the Swiss Symphony because of the yodeling that can be heard in the trio of the scherzo, the symphony’s third movement. The Mendels-sohn’s had gone on holiday to the Swiss hinterlands in July of 1822 and young Felix remembered and used the sounds he had heard during that vacation when he returned to Berlin. 

The Mendelssohn string symphony gives us insight into the mind of a young genius while it was still budding. By way of contrast, the two Mozart pieces on the program reveal a former child prodigy as a full-blown talent. The Horn Concerto No. 2 (actually the first) in E-flat major, was one of four concerti Mozart composed for his friend, and the butt of many of his jokes, Joseph Leutgeb.  

Leutgeb had been a successful horn player in Vienna, Salzburg, Frankfurt, Paris and Milan and was an old friend of the Mozart family when Mozart began composing pieces for him in Vienna in 1783. By that time, Leutgeb had fallen on hard times. Instead of working as a full-time musician, he had taken over his late father-in-law’s cheese and sausage shop. He borrowed money from Leopold Mozart and Wolfgang, who had recently moved to Vienna and married Constanze, urged his father not to press the already hard-pressed Leutgeb about the loan. Mozart occasionally stayed at Leutgeb’s home when Constanze was taking the waters at Baden in the summer of 1791. They remained friends until Mozart’s death later that year. 

At the same time, Mozart could not resist having fun with Leutgeb. Mozart’s autograph score is headed, in red crayon, “Wolfgang Amadé Mozart has taken pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox, and fool, at Vienna, 27 May 1783.” The second horn concerto Mozart wrote for Leutgeb has a running commentary of insults written in four colors of ink above the horn parts. 

Also on the program is the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major, an early Mozart masterpiece from his 23rd year, featuring violinist Robin Sharp and the Orchestra’s conductor Benjamin Simon doubling on viola. The back and forth movement and weaving interplay between the “male” violin and the “female” viola, like twisting strands of DNA locked in a helical embrace while performing a cosmic pas de deux, is one of the most ravishing achievements of any music ever composed anywhere in the world. With two prodigies, two concerti, a sinfonia concertante for two string soloists and a conductor doubling on viola, this should be a delightful way to open the double-faced doors of Janus on New Year’s Eve. 

The San Francisco Chamber  

Orchestra  

Sunday, Dec. 30, at 3 p.m. at Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco;Monday, Dec. 31, at 8 p.m. at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley; and Tuesday, Jan. 1, at 3 p.m. at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 600 Colorado Ave., Palo Alto. Free. 

For more information on membership, reserved seating and CDs, call 415-248-1640 or visit www.sfchamberorchestra. org. 

Following a year that unfolded with more than a few surprises on East Bay stages, 2007 opened up with a bang and never really settled back. Big and small companies alike put on memor-able shows, and the overall level of theatricality appeared a couple notches higher than in the past. 

There were the completely original productions, homegrown by the little, labor-intensive troupes, like Clown Bible, Ten Red Hen’s musical comedy circus from Scripture, at the Willard Metalshop Theatre, and George Charbak’s TheatreInSearch staging of his wry retelling of Gilgamesh (“With a Long Prologue”), the oldest chestnut of all, at Ashby Stage—both innovative and unique.  

Russian actor-director Oleg Liptsin adapted Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground” as Apropos of the Wet Snow, also at the Metalshop, with excitingly theatrical interactive video meshed with phenomenal performances by Liptsin and Ai-Cheng Ho from Taiwan. (We’ll see more of Liptsin’s splendid stagecraft in 2008.) 

At the professional theaters—those abiding by Actors Equity contracts—there were such successes as the brilliant black comedy Pillowman at Berkeley Rep (and an interestingly operatic To the Lighthouse), as well as Pinter’s Birthday Party and seldom-performed (in America, at least) Terry Johnston’s Hysteria at the Aurora. CalShakes (just past the tunnel) came on strong with a bright version of Marivaux’s Triumph of Love and a gripping, modernized King Lear.  

Shotgun Players continued to perfect a stylish house look with Berkeley’s Lorin District-born Eisa Davis’ Pulitzer-nominated Bulrusher, as well as staging David Mamet’s intriguing Cryptogram at Ashby Stage and a swashbuckling Three Musketeers outdoors in John Hinkel Park.  

After a splendid season, including unusual stagings of Lessing’s pioneering parable of tolerance, Nathan the Wise, and a fabled postwar classic, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, never staged before hereabouts, TheatreFIRST, Oakland’s only resident company, lost its Old Oakland storefront stage and at present is still searching out a new home, meanwhile valiantly producing staged readings. 

Ragged Wing Ensemble put on a kinetic, exhilarating show of Andre Gregory’s (the Andre from My Dinner with ...) Alice in Wonderland, with Amy Sass’ fine direction.  

San Francisco’s A Traveling Jewish Theatre ended a Bay Area tour of (Berkeley’s) Aaron Davidman’s brilliant staging of Death of a Salesman, finely acted by all, including company cofounder Corey Fisher as a vernacular old shoe of a Willy Loman, at the Julia Morgan Theater. 

Central Works, the stalwart residents of the (Julia Morgan-designed) Berkeley City Club, continued their own special chamber theatricality with Lola Montez (Louis Parnell as a charming, if deluded, Ludwig of Bavaria), Anne Galjour’s Bird in the Hand and a reprise of Every Inch a King with the original cast (except original director, cofounder Jan Zvaifler taking on the role Claudia Rosa premiered). 

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Berkeley Rep or CalShakes, the community theater companies were running strong. Berkeley’s Actors Ensemble, resident in Live Oak Theater, celebrated their half-century mark with a string of productions, including one site-specific—Strindberg’s great A Dream Play, directed by David Stein—performed in and around the Berkeley Art Center, just across the street. 

Altarena Playhouse in Alameda also had an anniversary, producing a comedy of their own late ’30s vintage: Morning’s at Seven, well played by an ensemble under the fine direction of Sue Trigg. The Masquers in Pt. Richmond staged Anouilh’s charming and slightly mys-terious Ring Around the Moon (in Christopher Fry’s translation) and a finely-done staging by Phoebe Moyer of Michael Cristofer’s Shadowbox. Contra Costa Civic Theater in El Cerrito put on a refreshing Meet Me in St. Louis, directed by Tammara Plankers of The Masquers. 

Small companies put on shows like Helen Pau’s surrealistic Viaticum at Live Oak, Cocteau’s The Human Voice—a predecessor of the solo show—produced by Antares Ensemble with Shruti Tewari at the City Club, an ambitious Brecht piece (once titled Private Life of the Master Race when done in Berkeley at the time of the U.N. Charter convention; this time by Oakland’s Eastenders at Berkeley JCC), a feisty pirate musical (by Starlight Circle Players) at the Unitarian Fellowship on Cedar, and Noises OFF was one of a series of collaborations between Shift Theatre and Berkeley High Drama. 

SubShakes (Subterranean Shakespeare) put on a briskly dramatic rendition of The Bard’s “Scottish Play”--and released “Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits,” a fun CD of songs featuring some old troupers from various Berkeley walks of life. Wilde Irish staged THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN by the author of PILLOWMAN at the City Club.  

Woman’s Will plays all-female Shakespeare in the parks, staging an ambitious ANTIGONE (Mac Wellman, not Sophocles) at the Temescal Arts Center, site of much performing arts activity. And Virago in Alameda put on ORPHANS, starring Robert Hamm, as well as work he’s written for the stage. In the basement of LaVal’s, Impact continues to mount its series of burlesque reviews and theatrical entertainments to enthusiastic audiences. 

The Marsh sadly pulled out of its Berkeley base in the Gaia Building, but continues to produce solo pieces by locals like Mark McGoldrick, as well as family shows—(Berkeley’s) Emily Klion’s SIDDHARTHA, THE SHINING PATH (ongoing, with music in part by her husband, jazzman George Brooks) at their Mission Distrist San Francisco center.  

The S.F. Playhouse hosted Berkeley favorite, director Joy Carlin again. Golden Thread, comprised of many East Bay artists, has put on many of its ReOrient festivals and other Middle East-focused work at the Thick House and the Magic Theatre. And Robert Ernst, cofounder of Berkeley’s Blake St. Hawkeyes, found a stage for his play with music, CATHERINE’S CARE with AlterTheater in San Rafael. 

UC’s Drama Dept. produced ambitious shows, and is set to stage Euripides’ THE BACCHAE, directed by Aurora founder Barbara Oliver. CalPerformances continues to bring in top world theater, most recently the Bunraku, Japan’s extraordinary national puppet theater. 

This grab-bag doesn’t even to mention stage entertainments under other categories thatare plenty theatric—from opera to Oakland Magic Circle’s ongoing banquet performances. From pure fun to aesthetic or ethical contemplation, East Bay theater in 2007 had it all.

I first read Oscar Wilde in 1954 at age 10. This was in an exceptionally cheap and poorly printed edition of his collected works published by Walter J. Black & Co. My parents, knowing I was an insatiable reader (the first full-length book I recall having read was David Copperfield when I was eight) dutifully subscribed at my request to Black’s series of classics, which included the works of practically everybody of note in English literature, including those bête noirs of highbrow snobs Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling. 

Throughout most of the 1950s we lived in a government camp in Palisades, Idaho where my father, a civil engineer, worked on constructing what became Palisades Dam. The nearest public library was more than fifty miles away in Idaho Falls and, although we used the library regularly, we also subscribed to books and magazines that were delivered once a month to our post office box—the Landmark books on American history and biography for me, the complete works of Zane Grey for my dad, and the Book of the Month Club monthly selection for my mom. Of course, I also read Zane Grey and the Book of the Month Club selections but (aside from the monthly Donald Duck comics) nothing gave me as much pleasure as Black’s classics.  

How I looked forward to the monthly arrival of the latest volume which I would immediately unwrap before stealing away to a secluded place to devour in one gargantuan gulp. And, although I adored Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and Mark Twain, I was overwhelmed by Oscar Wilde. 

The Black edition contained nearly everything—all the plays, including Salomé, most of the essays—“The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” “The Critic as Artist,” “The Decay of Lying,” and “Pen, Pencil, and Poison.” Also The Picture of Dorian Grey and a wide selection of Wilde’s poetry, including “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which I promptly memorized and declaimed to whoever had the patience to listen.  

I did not understand most of what Wilde wrote, but I knew I had found an author who could construct a perfect English sentence at will and was endlessly witty and always subversive. Like Stephen Fry, who wrote a marvelous essay on reading Wilde as a young gay boy for The New Yorker (and, of course, played him to perfection in the movie Wilde) Wilde’s epigrams and witticisms thoroughly undermined the conformist culture of the age (although the ‘Fifties were not nearly so conformist as many believe) and provided me with my first experience of intellectual and emotional liberation.  

Unlike Stephen Fry, I’m not gay, but like Fry, I literally worshipped Oscar Wilde. Naturally, I wanted to learn all about him, but the only biography available in the Idaho Falls public library was the thoroughly entertaining Oscar Wilde, His Life and Wit by Hesketh Pearson, which passed rapidly over the trials and was singularly unhelpful about what crime Wilde was charged with. I assumed he had run afoul of a government-appointed literary censor. Since I knew little about heterosexuality (and what I thought I knew was almost entirely erroneous) homosexuality was well beyond my ken. I could not find “somdomite” (Queensberry’s misspelling) in the dictionary and even after I got my parents to buy The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, superbly edited by H. Montgomery Hyde, I remained confused by the testimony regarding stained bedsheets and gifts of cigarette cases to lower-class boys. I understood only that Wilde was accused of corrupting youths and, since by that time I knew that Socrates had been similarly charged, I came to view Wilde as a martyr to free speech and thought. 

After I finally figured out (with the aid of more explicit biographies) what the sordid details brought up in the trials meant, my opinion of Wilde did not change. And, after having taught European history and literature for more than 30 years, Wilde has remained (along with Tolstoy) my favorite author. I have always been angered by critics who have denigrated him as superficial and second-rate. Fortunately, the definitive answer to all such ill-considered criticism is the brilliant biography of Wilde by Richard Ellman, which makes the unanswerable case that Wilde’s plays are more intricately structured than previously recognized and that beneath the surface cleverness lies considerable profundity. 

I have also long been struck by the fact that, as fascinating as Wilde was in print, he was evidently even more so in person. Almost everyone who knew him, including George Bernard Shaw, considered Wilde the most brilliant talker they had ever met. And this was in age of remarkably witty and engaging talkers including James McNeill Whistler, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Henry Labouchere, and Shaw himself. 

When asked what person from history I would most like to have known, I find it a tossup among Jesus of Nazareth, Abraham Lincoln and Oscar Wilde (closely followed by Churchill, Jane Austen, Disraeli, Sheridan and Byron). I have no doubt that each would be hugely interesting and even entertaining but I am absolutely certain that Wilde would make me laugh more than all the others combined.  

ALL IN MY HEAD  

(An “encounter” on the corner of Allston & Harold Way, Berkeley) 

She said:  

You know—  

it may be all in your head 

She spoke this  

not directly at me  

but into her cell phone 

though I couldn’t help  

but recognize  

as she walked on by 

how right she was  

no matter who  

she was talking to  

and while appearing  

not to be, no doubt  

that message was for me 

I heard it loud and clear  

like the most recent thoughts  

all in my head 

SECOND SISTER 

At the Berkeley Farmers’ Market  

I choose a few  

fresh zucchini, yellow squash. 

The woman takes 

and weighs my bag.  

Receiving my money, she says  

“You look like my  

brother—  

He lives in Atlanta  

but his presence is here 

standing before me.”  

She doesn’t look like  

the one sister I have 

but her warm face is  

familiar.  

If I had a second sister  

it could be she. 

She thanks me.  

I thank her in return  

and walk away,  

heading home to Georgia  

where I’ve never been. 

NOTHING’S LOST 

Since I have nothing to worry about  

I do worry about nothing 

I have nothing to lose  

and sure enough  

nothing does come up missing  

time and time again 

Every time nothing's lost  

I have nothing to find  

and that means another wasted day  

looking around the house—  

under sofa cushions,  

piles of papers and mail— 

searching for nothing.  

Then I realize that I’ve left a window open,  

so I put my shoes on, go outside  

and start hollering for nothing:  

Nothing, Nothing!!! 

Can you understand  

the predicament I’m in?  

I should never have let myself  

get so attached to nothing. 

WITH ANY LUCK 

As I’m passing by corner market,  

heading two doors down to laundromat,  

heaving loads of my dirty clothes,  

the owner bellows through doorway:  

“14 million!” I stop in my tracks.  

He points up toward Super Lotto sign— 

knows I’ve played before. 

In a timeless moment I imagine  

everything around his pointed direction  

begin to disappear, one by one:  

the Lotto banner, stacks of newspapers  

and copies of TV Guide’s latest edition,  

wilting lettuce in his meager produce section,  

Twinkies and Ding Dongs  

gone 

until whole store fades out 

as does rest of his body,  

leaving only a finger’s  

illuminated trajectory  

guiding my vision into night sky numbers  

far beyond millions. 

Way out there my mind speeds  

through billions and billions of stars and galaxies,  

reaching other side of  

infinite universe. 

Back on Earth, I tell him  

I’ll likely buy a ticket next week— 

there’s decent chance the jackpot  

will be over 20 million by then. 

Right now I have just enough in my pockets  

for the washers and dryers.  

I want to get these loads done as quickly as  

possible— 

counting on some free time at end of the evening. 

With any luck,  

I’ll leave with everything I came in with— 

clothes now clean, folded  

and not having lost a single sock. 

Whenever I pass the site now, I instinctively glance at that little sentry booth, and it’s never occupied. I wonder whether it’s been that way ever since that day in 1984, when the lawyer deposited two big cartons of documents on the floor of our office. Selina, chemist, toxicologist, and my wife and professional partner, offered him one of the chairs surrounding her cluttered desk, and he wasted no time coming to the point. 

“The guards on both shifts have come down with cancer, and I’m representing a widow. Most of this stuff,” he gestured in the general direction of the boxes, “I got hold of through the discovery process. We’re not allowed to disclose any of this information except as necessary for this case. There are also copies of pages from the log books the guards had to keep, and they recorded every time noxious odors came from the chemical plant. I leave it to you to figure out what is useful and how it can be used.” 

The problem with the discovery process is that the other side is liable to bury you under paper—and nowadays under hard disks with e-mail messages. Plowing through everything from purchase orders to laboratory notebooks, the objective was to find something that correlates with the odors described in the guards’ log. Most of this work belonged to Selina, but, as it happened, I knew one of defendant’s retired engineers, and my contact was willing to talk. 

“Oh yes,” he confirmed, “not only did they release all of that stuff to the atmosphere, but they also dumped a lot of hazardous wastes on the ground.” He then proceeded to give me a pretty good idea about what we should be looking for in those boxes of papers. 

This was literally a smoking gun case—or rather a smoking chimney case. For many years, the guards had entered into the log every incident of detectable fumes emanating from defendant and every telephone call to defendant complaining about the odors. Odorous substances are not necessarily toxic, and many non-odorous substances, such as carbon monoxide, are deadly, but there were enough descriptions of the odors in the logs to give us a fair idea of at least some of the gases the guards had inhaled. 

Unlike in some of our cases, everything came together quickly. The attorney was efficient and got us everything we needed, from weather data to medical records, without delay. Since we’re all exposed to so many carcinogens, it’s seldom possible to definitely link a cancer to a specific causative agent, but, given all the information at our disposal, it did not take us long to make a convincing case for the guards’ cancer being probably caused by releases from defendant’s premises. 

The attorney took our report to defendant’s lawyers and, very few days later, was back in our office to pick up all of the records and to admonish us that our lips were sealed.  

Defendants had immediately decided that they did not want this case to go to court and our report to become public, and plaintiff’s attorney had to do what was in the best interest of his client, even if that was not in the public interest.  

Since plaintiff’s lips were sealed, we were never told the amount of the settlement, but we knew that the widow was well satisfied. And so were we. Financially. 

While attorneys are normally paid a percentage of the settlement, experts are paid an hourly rate, which is supposed to prevent avarice from clouding their professional judgment.  

So Selina and I were paid—by the hour—for doing honest work. Still, I couldn’t get away from the fact that our fee for doing that work came out of the hush money the widow had received. 

Yes, as I drive by that now-empty guard booth at the entrance to the Richmond Field Station, there’s a feeling of satisfaction about the widow having received what was her due without having to relive her past agony on the witness stand, but there’s also the feeling of guilt for having been part of a cover-up. 

Twenty years later, the silence was broken, and the notoriety the site achieved was beyond anything I could have hoped for but by then others had been injured.  

As I listened on Nov. 6, 2004 to the many citizens vent their outrage during the Assembly committee hearing on Campus Bay called by Loni Hancock, I felt both relieved at the truth emerging and grieved at the additional damage caused by 20 years of sealed lips. 

For Jesse 

All armies seem the same— 

They strut with the chins of dullards 

In a sentimental vise of duty,  

A synchronous mating of unripened men 

While the elders watch, saluting— 

In China, in North Korea, all over the planet 

The dead seriousness of patriotic 

Stupification, the vulgar sentiment 

To protect family, Country, and some God. 

All armies seem the same—the elders 

Salute, are proud, know that the ranks  

Emptied of anonymous cadavers 

Will again be filled by the raw youth 

Who vibrate in their chains with images 

Of heroism, never imagining the  

swimming 

Of bloody limbs before them.  

These are the gifts of mothers and family 

A gift returned with metal or casket— 

These are the ceremonial rites  

Which make the deepest evil into virtue. 

All armies seem the same to me,  

They beat to a metronome of a false blessing,  

They march to a symphony of  

blaming. 

All armies seem the same to me: 

The elders salute, promise is impaled. 

It’s still the same, Tom Joad, 

“everybody might be just one big soul” 

and people need food for their bellies 

and clothes on their backs 

and a safe place to sleep 

and this morning I wondered 

just how far we’ve come since 

the 1930s when the dust storms 

and the banks 

drove people off the land 

and the Okies and the Arkies 

were the immigrants 

lured by handbills that promised 

work for good wages 

picking peaches and harvesting grapes 

families of three generations  

a fourth on the way 

lived and died and gave birth 

in jalopies and jungle camps 

along Route 66 

chased by vigilantes with clubs 

“keep moving, you can’t stop here...” 

crossed the dry desert  

made it to the California line 

turned back by border guards 

outlaws in their own land 

desperate, hungry 

willing to take any kind of work 

pitted against each other 

by unscrupulous contractors 

hired by the big landowners 

to keep wages down 

keep people from organizinG 

to fight for their rights 

feed their families 

hold onto their pride and  

self-respect... 

These days, Tom Joad, it ain’t much  

different. 

In Eureka California county officials 

evict homeless families and demolish their encampment 

inventing a health crisis to win public sentiment 

(in the 30s vigilantes burned down  

roadside camps) 

In Palo Alto “creek dwellers” are  

rousted  

by the police from under a bridge  

their sleeping bags and few belongings 

thrown into dumpsters as so much trash 

(deputy sheriffs clubbed Preacher 

Casey under a bridge) 

In Santa Cruz sleeping under a blanket is a crime 

(like they told the Joads, “don’t let us 

catch you here after sundown”) 

In San Francisco homeless veterans fight  

for housing in The Presidio, former home of the military 

and elder tenants are evicted  

as building owners use any means  

necessary  

to increase profits 

and people who’ve paid many  

thousands  

of hard-earned dollars in rent 

have nowhere to go... 

...and this morning in Berkeley  

California 

on the main street in rush hour 

while well-dressed people  

on their way to jobs 

hurried into the coffee shop 

and back to their cars  

an old white man in tattered pants 

ragged shirt and mud-caked shoes 

shuffled in for his cup of coffee  

and shuffled off silently 

bearing his bundle of earthly goods 

(people reading their morning paper 

turned their eyes away) 

and a homeless black woman  

took up her corner position 

as rain clouds threatened 

and a rainbow filled the sky 

with no pot of gold at the other end 

I lent her my umbrella 

and drove my old Chevy  

back to my apartment 

to look for work... 

...and I don’t have a farm to lose 

or even a house 

I’m one step over the line 

from being out on the street 

afraid to let my daughter know 

my friends know 

how close to the edge I live 

how much I feel in common 

with Tom Joad and his Ma  

and little Muley and Preacher Casey 

and how good that WPA camp looks 

and what a struggle it is to pay the bills 

and take care of my health needs 

and how scary it is to get old 

where there’s no place to fall 

and all those years I worked to support 

myself and my daughter 

and marched and sang out  

for human rights and liberty and justice 

and like Karl Marx said 

all I have is my labor power 

in this land of the brave 

where freedom does not include 

the right to a roof over your head 

or health care for all who need it 

or dignity and security in your old age. 

Woody Guthrie, it’s like you wrote 

after Steinbeck’s big American saga  

when Tom Joad says goodbye to Ma: 

“Everybody might be just one big soul 

Well it looks that way to me 

Everywhere that you look in the day  

or night 

That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma, 

That’s where I’m a-gonna be. 

Wherever little children are hungry  

and cry 

Wherever people ain’t free 

Wherever folks are fighting for their life 

That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma, 

That’s where I’m a-gonna be.”

For thirty miles a black car had followed her closely at the posted maximum speed—by dark night on a lonely two-lane road. 

And for the past ten minutes the driver behind had switched on his inside dome light and frantically hand-signaled her to move to the right, as if he wanted to pass—very unsafe on the hairpin turns coming up ahead. 

But it was Saturday night. The man might be hurrying to a party. To be rid of him she signaled, turned off onto the narrow shoulder, and stopped. If he wanted to pass he would proceed. 

He did not, but halted close behind her. 

Watching as he left his car, she checked her door and window locks and reached to her glove compartment for the small pistol she had recently bought and licensed. 

When the man’s face appeared by her window she raised her gun and loudly demanded: “What’s the matter with you?” 

The man’s eyes dilated with fear; his arms flew up and he stammered “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I just want to warn you: Your tail lights are out. You could have a bad rear-ender in town!” 

“Oof!” 

She should have laughed, but all she felt was enormous relief, and her hands shook as she lowered her gun and opened her window an inch to apologize. 

She was not a timid woman, but in her position she had to be careful, especially when traveling alone at night. Not quite a year ago one of her coworkers was ambushed and killed on this same deserted road. Like her, he had been one of the increasingly small number of physicians still offering legal abortions. In the north of the state, she was, after his death, one of only two remaining. Threats and fear for the safety of their families had driven off all the others. 

Now she saw that her friends were right: She was evermore greatly needed, but she also needed a vacation, for even she was becoming paranoid. She must escape from this fear for a time—go somewhere far away, to where no one knew her, or of her work ... 

For her sixth birthday this year, first-grader Casey Lane decided that she didn’t want a “typical” party. She wanted to have fun with her friends AND help homeless kids while she was at it—even if it meant not receiving presents from her friends (pictured with all the gift bags).  

“As long as I can open one from you and dad and grandma and grandpa, it’s OK,” Casey told her mother, Suzanne.  

Suzanne and Casey heard from a friend about an organization that provides small canvas bags (at $3 each) to fill with a few essential comfort items for homeless kids to feel safe and secure: a blanket, a stuffed animal, and a book. Suzanne learned how meaningful it is for young, homeless children to count on these items and to call them their own.  

They also provided Suzanne and Casey with a list of the various shelters in our area that need the bags: Casey chose the Berkeley Food and Housing Project (BFHP) on Dwight Way. (virtual tour www.bfhp.org).  

Twenty bags were purchased by the Lanes—one for each young party guest and a few extras. Each child was asked to bring a gently used stuffed animal to the party instead of a traditional gift for inclusion in the bag. Many of Casey’s family, neighbors, and friends wanted to pitch in and help purchase the blankets when they heard the great idea.  

After explaining a little about the project to Casey’s party pals, each one excitedly assembled their bag and finished it off with their own hand-drawn hang tag designating boy or girl and age group. The busy elves were all smiles as the spirit of giving took hold.  

A few days after the party, Casey was able to visit BFHP with her mom and dad to drop off the filled “goody bags” and to see where the formerly homeless kids and their families stay. Casey enjoyed the tour except for one thing: “All the kids were at school so I didn’t get to meet them!”  

The shelter staff was delighted to receive so many lovingly filled bags and assured Casey that the kids would love getting them. When we asked Casey what her favorite part of the experience was, she said, “I liked going to the shelter, and getting a tour from the director was fun.”  

Then she added cheerfully, “I will do it again next year!”  

If you would like to support BFHP’s “Gifts for the Forgotten” for homeless men and women, a $15 donation will buy: thermal socks; a woolen hat and fleece scarf; inner and outer gloves—all in a festive holiday bag. Checks can be sent to BFHP, 2140 Dwight Way, Berkeley CA 94704, on-line at www.bfhp.org or call BFHP 649-4965.

In the late 1970s, when we were about 19 years old, my friend Russ and I got jobs as teachers at a before-and-after-school program that was housed in a separate bungalow from the school. Largely left to our own devices, we made up the day’s activities as we went. After several months we had our routine down with circle-time, drawing-time and outside playtime being everyone’s favorites. 

From that very first day we found out how exhausting being a teacher can be, yet at the end of each day we felt richly rewarded for our work. Being around six- to nine-year-olds for that brief period taught me more about others and myself than I could have imagined. Their insights and wisdom belied their ages, and when the social atmosphere was hovering at their peer level, I could close my eyes and listen to the conversations going on and imagine they were in their late teens having the same conversations. Those days with “my kids” were ones I will always cherish, and I hope someday I will come across some of them in my life travels. 

My story revolves around one particular day. It was Russ’ turn to take the boys out to play ball. The girls and I sat around a large round table, drawing with crayons and pens and talking about anything and everything. The conversation along with their body language spoke volumes about their individual worldviews and where the power relationships resided within their group. I was totally aware of my roll in keeping those relationships on a level playing field, and what abilities I had were put to the test. 

Talking commenced along with the drawing, and as I listened to their voices, I found myself in a mild trance while drawing what was shaping up to be a flag with a peace sign on it, with lots of colors wafting all over the page. Unbeknownst to me, the girl on my right was closely copying my drawing. I suddenly became aware of this when she loudly accused the girl next to her of copying her picture. 

“Well, hold on there, Danielle,” I interrupted. “What’s the problem with that?” 

“She’s copying me, and that ain’t right!” she retorted. 

“I am not!” came the weak response from the accused. 

“Yes you are! Look!” 

And yes, by gosh, the similarities were clearly evident. “Well, wait a minute.” I ventured, “It looks to me like your picture is very much like mine, is it not?” A sudden silence came over the group. Danielle was top dog among them, and was known for her temper. This situation had made everyone nervous. Most kept their eyes to their drawings, and those that looked up did so cautiously. I too was nervous about how to handle what was brewing to be a volatile situation. I took the plunge. 

“Why get upset over someone’s liking your drawing enough to copy it? As you can see, I have no problem with you copying my peace flag. In fact, I’m pleased that you like it enough to draw it for yourself. It makes me feel good to know you like it that much. I’m totally cool with that.” After a moment, Danielle slowly nodded her head and a smile emerged from the scowl of just a moment before.  

With this sudden end to the “situation,” a flush of victory came over me. Just as quickly as the brouhaha had started, it was history and the chatter flow at the table resumed as if nothing had happened. 

Then, in the midst of a silent moment at the drawing table, one of the girls asked me, “Joey, what’s a peace flag?” “Well, a peace flag is a flag that speaks for a vision of peace. It’s a flag with a peace sign on it. Maybe you’ve seen them somewhere?” Silence ensued. Then Danielle, in a perfect moment of irony, asked, “What’s peace?” “What’s peace? Can any of you tell us what the word peace means?” I asked gently, trying not to create a hint of competitiveness at the table. All heads shook in unison. I was stunned.  

“Okay, peace is . . . peace is . . . well, peace is the opposite of war,” I lamely coughed up. It was a new one on me and I was dumbfounded for a decent description. Again, silence greeted my definition. I could tell they were all thinking hard about what I had said. “Um, do you guys know what opposites are?” All shook their heads as one. 

Okay, I thought, here we go! I felt the moment expanding somehow, like big light bulbs were poised to go off if I called the right shots. I went to the blackboard, and everyone stopped drawing and watched without a sound. I wrote the word “opposites” on the board, and turned to address their curious faces. “Opposites are like, um, like two things that are very different from each other.” OK, bro, don’t get lame on me! Their attention span wasn’t to be messed with — my time was precious.  

“Like this,” I said finally. I went to the board to write examples. “The opposite of hot is ... cold. The opposite of up is .. .” “Down!” came the reply. Everyone was on it pronto. “Here ...” “There!” came the chorus. Yes! “There you go—opposites!” I was stoked. And now to make the Big Connect.  

“Now you all know what war is, right?” “Oh yeah, of course, everybody knows that,” they replied. “Well then, peace is the opposite of war.” “OOOOOOH...” The collective recognition made my hair stand on end. A triumph of learning had just taken place and I felt humbled by the experience. I wondered how old I was when I learned what opposites were, let alone what the word peace meant.  

The concept of war was well known to all my young charges. It’s all over the TV, movies, everywhere you look. You couldn’t miss it if you tried! Yet the word that symbolized the deepest hopes of the community was unknown to them. How could anyone appreciate the concept of peace if that very word is missing from his or her vocabulary? 

After this "breakthrough," the kids and I had several spirited discussions about what peace stood for, chose names of those dedicated to a peaceful world and, most importantly, brainstormed on what each of us could do to help bring peace into our own lives. No doubt about it, the word was a hit! 

Ever since that day, I’ve marveled at how powerful a word can be. A small group of children dramatically illustrated to me how important it is to know words that ultimately can make or break a society’s ability to progress into what we all dream of it becoming: a world without war, a world dedicated to peace. 

It all starts with a word. Let the word Peace be one you pass on to those still wondering what opposites are. Trust me, they’ll get it big time!

[after Basho’s longing for Kyoto] 

Even in Berkeley 

Touching its plum blossoms 

I long for Berkeley

In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the East Bay population ballooned practically overnight, absorbing 200,000 refugees of which three-quarters remained permanently. To accommodate their burgeoning communities, Berkeley and Oakland acquired new housing developments, factories, and transportation routes, as well as a good number of churches. 

Three of the earliest churches to be constructed after the earthquake were completed one hundred years ago this month. One of the three—First Presbyterian Church at Dana St. and Channing Way—was demolished in 1973. The other two—St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church at 1640 Addison St. and Shattuck United Methodist Church at 6300 Shattuck Ave.—are still standing. 

The current St. Joseph’s (an earlier Gothic Revival church had been used by the parish since 1883) was the brainchild of Father Francis Xavier Morrison, D.D. (1869–1924), who became pastor in September 1905. For the design of the new church, Morrison turned to the San Francisco architectural firm of Frank T. Shea and John O. Lofquist. 

An alumnus of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Frank T. Shea (1859–1929) was best known for the Catholic churches he designed throughout California, employing a wide range of styles, from Romanesque and Gothic to Classical and Mediterranean.  

Shea’s San Francisco churches include St. Brigid’s at Van Ness Ave. and Broadway (altered); St. Vincent de Paul in Pacific Heights; St. Paul in Noe Valley; St. James and Mission Dolores basilica (altered) in the Mission district; Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe on Russian Hill; St. Anne’s in the Sunset district; Holy Cross in the Western Addition; and Star of the Sea and St. Monica in the Richmond district. In Oakland, Shea designed St. Augustine’s Church on the corner of Alcatraz and Colby. Many of Shea’s churches were constructed under the aegis of Archbishop Patrick Riordan, for whom the architect built a mansard-roofed château at Alamo Square in San Francisco. The mansion is now a tony hotel. Other prominent Shea buildings include the 8-story Bank of Italy (later Bank of America) at 552 Montgomery Street, and the Sacramento Hall of Justice. In Berkeley, Shea also designed the Brasfield (now Beau Sky Hotel) on Durant Avenue. 

Shea’s plans for St. Joseph’s had to be drawn twice, the first set having perished in the 1906 fire. When the second set was ready, a shortage of materials and workers delayed the start of construction by several months. The cornerstone was not laid until June 16, 1907, in a ceremony that was attended by a throng of several thousand, yet the contractors, Kidder and McCullough, expedited the work, enabling the church to open for its first service on Christmas Day of that year. 

St. Joseph’s architectural style is an amalgam of Neoclassical and Italianate, at the time described by the press as “later Roman style, with concrete foundation and superstructure of wood.” Its most prominent external feature are the soaring twin towers that at one time were the tallest in Berkeley. 

The large interior seats more than 900 and boasts many fine stained-glass windows. Particularly notable are the 14 windows manufactured in Munich by the firm of Franz Mayer, purveyors of stained glass and artistic mosaic since 1847. Still in operation today, the Mayer’sche Hofkunstanstalt has installations in over 100 cathedrals—St. Peter’s in Rome being one—as well as in countless public, institutional, and corporate locations around the globe. 

Ten of the Mayer windows—eight in the nave and one at each end of the transept—depict scenes from the life of Christ. Above the two transept windows are large rose windows. A third rose window graces the choir loft on the north side. Below the choir, a transom window displaying a crown and a cross is positioned above the main entrance to the nave. 

The Mayer windows were donated by parishioners and installed between June 1911 and December 1912. They retain their brilliant colors to this day. Above the rectangular Mayer windows in the nave is a set of eight arched clerestory windows created in 1965 by Carl Huneke (1898–1972), the German-born founder of Century Stained Glass Studio in San Francisco. Over the 30-year existence of the Century studio, Huneke made about 1,200 windows for 80 churches, at least one of which was designed by Shea and Lofquist—St. Vincent de Paul in San Francisco, which contains more than 40 Huneke windows, most of them installed in the 1940s. 

Representing concepts such as Wisdom, Fortitude, and Piety, Huneke’s windows for St. Joseph’s, also donated by parishioners, were part of a major remodel of the church, completed in 1966. Prior to their installation, the clerestory windows had contained plain translucent glass. 

Alternating with the windows on the nave and transept walls are beautifully carved sculptural ensembles representing the Stations of the Cross. Four massive oak confessionals, no longer in use, are clustered along the northern side of the nave. They feature dentiled broken pediments, scrollwork, and arched doors flanked by smooth columns crowned with Ionic capitals. 

The church was completed at a cost of $65,000. 

Three days after the Christmas opening of St. Joseph’s, local newspapers were announcing the imminent completion of the Shattuck Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, which was to be dedicated in early January 1908. 

Much was made of the church’s architect, 24-year old Minnie M. Jackson, who at that time was the only woman to have graduated from the Wilmerding School of Industrial Arts in San Francisco. Opened in 1900 as a branch of the University of California, this boys’ school offered training in carpentry; cabinet making; wood carving; forging; clay molding and art; mechanical and architectural drawing; and mathematics and geometry. 

Minnie Jackson’s father was a mechanical engineer and her brother was a machinist. Both worked for the Byron Jackson Machine Works in West Berkeley but were unrelated to Byron Jackson. The family lived at 1634 Oregon Street. 

In July 1906, Bishop John W. Hamilton of San Francisco secured $50,000 for the reconstruction of Methodist churches in the area. Rev. Kennedy of the Shattuck Avenue Methodist Church requested $5,000 toward the building of a $11,500 church. A month later, the San Francisco Call reported that the church had “decided to change its name to the Hamilton Church and will build a new church edifice at Sixty-third and Dover streets. The building will be of the Mission style of architecture and will cost $12,000.” 

The name change did not take place, nor the building on Dover Street, the architectural style, or the price tag. After some legal entanglement over two lots, the congregation settled on its current location and turned to Minnie Jackson, a member of the church, to design and supervise construction of the new church. Miss Jackson had never practiced architecture since graduating in 1903, but she accepted the task with equanimity. The result was eclectic, combining Colonial Revival style with Gothic arches and Art Nouveau stained-glass windows. The final cost was $16,000. 

Innovative features designed by Miss Jackson included a moving pulpit platform that could be made larger or smaller according to need and a pressed steel ceiling with unusual groin vaults. Of these features, only the charming vaults remain, but now in plaster. Also gone is the steeple over the entrance turret. 

The stained-glass windows bear floral motifs, with an identical iris in all but the rose window. Windows donated by church members display their names in a red glass panel. The stained glass is not original, since all the windows were reported smashed in June 1910, when a gang of boys aged 8 to 13 broke into the church and vandalized the sanctuary. Nevertheless, one can assume that the original pattern was replicated at that time. 

Minnie Jackson used a mirror image of her plans for another Methodist church dedicated in Bishop, Inyo County, in August 1908. That church still retains its steeple and pressed steel ceiling. 

At the dedication of the Shattuck Avenue Methodist Church on Jan. 12, 1908, Bishop Hamilton focused his remarks on women’s equality, no doubt as a gesture of respect toward the young woman who had played such a decisive role in the building of the church. 

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

Photograph by Daniella Thompson 

St. Joseph the Worker’s façade detail.

Hi, My name’s Matt and I’m a recovering general contractor. It’s not easy to talk about, but I know it makes it better to get it out in the open and discuss it. 

For those of us who share this affliction (and you know who you are) there are things we prefer to leave in the past. Denial is a useful, if hobbling tool. Our suffering need not perpetuate itself if we remember this simple word. No.  

When they want it both cheap and fast, just say no. When they want you to convert the garage into a “guest bedroom” while the local building inspector is having his gall bladder out, just say no. When they want you to hire their unemployed brother from Nome (“he only drinks after lunch”), just say no. And, when a client with one bathroom wants it remodeled just say no. Ah, how many times I wish I’d observed that one.  

Aside from the fact that people get irritable after you’ve been showing up at their house for a few weeks, taking someone’s bathroom away eventually begins to cramp the relationship. I’m not so very different. Take my bathroom privileges away and I get increasingly anxious. Eventually, I leave and go stay somewhere else (I hope my wife doesn’t read this). Actually this is no joke. If you’re a contractor or a client, there is almost nothing you can do that’s more likely to lead to a client/contractor breakdown than the remodeling of the only bath in the house. 

Therefore, I propose one of two alternatives, go away on vacation and come home to your newly completed bath or add a bath. Either has great merit, when compared to the original extremely bad idea.  

Starting with idea #1 (going away), there are a few provisos one should observe. First, hire someone really good. When you don’t get a chance to check on work in progress and interact with the project, you must feel the quality of the workmanship is, at least somewhat, guaranteed. This means not hiring the cheap guy or gal. You’ll just have to hire a little higher on the price scale to feel assured that you’ll come home to your dream bath. Second, plan everything out as fully as possible. You should possess the permit and the drawings should be very detailed and clear. You should also, ideally, have everything that will go into the project at your home before you leave. The faucets, the tile, the sink, the lighting; everything. The idea is to minimize surprises.  

Here’s a 21st century tip that you might try if you go this route: Set up a website for the bath remodeling job and have your contractor snap a few digital pictures every day or two and you can check on the progress of the job from your ski chalet in Switzerland. You could even blog your responses or post responses and requests on the website. Or, you could just have a nice time and come back to your bath. In any event, plan, plan, plan. That’s the way of success. 

Now for idea #2, which, I confess, I much prefer. Adding a bath, as any realtor will tell you, is one of the best ways to increase value in your home, even if it’s tiny and poorly placed. As a family man, I can also say that there are few routes to domestic concord less circuitous than through the addition of one more toilet. While a second shower may speed the morning and make for happier campers, a second toilet has a more religious quality (if you get my genuflection). 

Again, even a very small bath made out of a former closet can transform your household. Also, your contractor will thank you. They may be far more willing to do the job in the first place but may even do this job at a lower cost and if problems present during the addition of the second bath, you (or the crew) won’t end up doing the bathroom dance.  

You won’t need a port-a-potty on the lawn (nothing say “trailer park” quite like a port-a-potty, don’t you think?). By the way, if you just happen to be installing an extra half bath without city approval, it might be best not to have that big green thing out in front of your house. Only a dumpster declares more loudly that you’re in the middle of a remodeling project. I’m not promoting the idea of work without permits, I’m just not blind. A large percentage of these projects are done in this way and to ignore this would be foolish. 

If you’re a contractor being approached by Ms. Jones to remodel that single bath, get up, take a walk around, stroll in the largest closet and repeat after me “I’m terribly sorry. I could never remodel your only bath, but let me propose something else ...” 

FRIDAY, DEC. 28 

“What is Happening in Venezuela?” The referendum and the limitations of the Bolivarian Revolution, a discussion with Raymond Lotta at 7 p.m. at Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way. 848-1196. 

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. 

SATURDAY, DEC. 29 

Open The Farm Meet and greet the animals at the Little Farm in Tilden Park as you help the farmer with morning chores, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. 525-2233. 

Monarch Butterfly Walk Take a short walk to view clusters of monarchs, learn about their life cycle and migration. At 10:30, 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. at Mulford-Marina Branch Library, 13699 Aurora Drive, San Leandro. 577-6085. 

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.  

Peace and Freedom Party End of Year Party from 5 to 10 p.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph/Alcatraz, Oakland. 527-9584. 

SUNDAY, DEC. 30 

Family Workshop: New Year’s Party Make noisemakers and party hats from 1 to 4 p.m. at Mocha, Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7. 465-8770.  

Reptile Rendezvous Learn about the reptiles that call Tilden Park home at 1:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. 525-2233. 

“Leopard Shark Feeding Frenzy” Feed our resident leopard sharks and learn more about them and our other aquatic inhabitants at 2 p.m. at Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center, 4901 Breakwater Ave., Hayward. 670-7270. www.haywardrec.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 Olivia Hurd on “Buddhist Stories of Compassionate Wisdom” at 6 p.m. at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute, 1815 Highland Pl. 809-1000 www.nyingmainstitute.com 

MONDAY, DEC. 31 

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 

TUESDAY, JAN. 1 

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992. 

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org 

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 2 

Meet Some Musical Animals from Wildlife Associates at noon and 1:30 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. Cost is $8-$10. 642-5132. 

“Learn How to Tune and Wax Your Skis/Snowboard” at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140. 

Teen Chess Club from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the North Branch Library, 1170 The Alameda at Hopkins. 981-6133. 

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840. 

Berkeley Peace Walk and Vigil at the Berkeley BART Station, corner of Shattuck and Center. Sing for Peace at 6:30 p.m. followed by Peace Walk at 7 p.m. www.geocities.com/vigil4peace/vigil 

THURSDAY, JAN. 3 

Babies & Toddlers Storytime at 10:15 and 11:15 a.m. at Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Ave. 524-3043.  

Avatar Metaphysical Toastmasters Club meets at 6:45 p.m. at Spud’s Pizza, 3290 Adeline at Alcatraz. namaste@ 

avatar.freetoasthost.info  

FRIDAY, JAN. 4 

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 

Circle Dancing in Berkeley Simple folk dancing in a circle, each dance taught before we do it. No experience or partners needed. From 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Finnish Brotherhood Hall, 1970 Chestnut, at University. Donation $5. 528-4253. www.circledancing.com 

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. 

SATURDAY, JAN. 5 

New Year Waterfront Walk Join Berkeley Path Wanderers and Friends of Five on an easy, level walk exploring waterfront history, effects of the recent oil spill, and possibilities and plans for the future. Meet at 10 a.m. at Shorebird Nature Center, 160 University Ave., south side of University west of Adventure Playground; AC Transit 9. Dress in layers. 848-9358. www.berkeleypaths.org 

Explore Bird Songs with Steve Beck from noon to 1:30 p.m. at Lawrence Hall of Science, Centennial Drive. Cost is $8-$10. 642-5132. 

Benefit for Revolution Newspaper’s Expansion with Larry Everest and Luciente Zamora from 2 to 5 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar St. Donation $10-$25. 848-1196.  

“Dafur: The Crisis and The Tragedy” A discussion of the work by Fathi M. El Fadl of the Communitst PArty of Sudan at 10 a.m. at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Libary, 6501 Telegraph Ave. 595-7417. 

Frame Your Masterpiece Workshop, Sat. and Sun. from 1 to 4 p.m. at Museum of Children’s Art, 528 9th St., Oakland. 465-8770. 

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.  

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, JAN. 6 

Berkeley Rep’s Family Series, a monthly theater workshop for the entire family at 11 a.m. at Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, Nevo Education Center, 2071 Addison St. Free, but bring a book to donate to the library at John Muir Elementary School. 647-2973. 

“Birth is a Miracle” A documentary, followed by discussion, at 7 p.m. at La Peña Cultural Center. Cost is $10-$20. 849-2568. www.lapena.org 

Free Garden Tours at Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park Sat. and Sun. at 2 p.m. Call to confirm. 841-8732.  

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 

MONDAY, JAN. 7  

Contra Costa Chorale rehearsal at 7:15 p.m. at Hillside Community Church, 1422 Navallier St., El Cerrito. New singers welcome. 527-2026. www.ccchorale.org 

CITY MEETINGS 

Landmarks Preservation Commission meets Thurs., Jan. 3, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-7419. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/landmarks 

Public Works Commission meets Thurs., Jan. 3, at 7 p.m., at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-6406. www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/commissions/publicworks 

Council Agenda Committee meets Mon., Jan. 7, at 2:30 p.m., at 2180 Milvia St. 981-6900. 

www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/citycouncil/agenda-committee