Transcript: Mary Judith Robinson (1939 - )

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of interviews with Mary Judith Robinson on July 17, July 24 and August 14, 2025. The interview was recorded at Judith’s home at 562 B Lombard Street in San Francisco, California. The interview was conducted and transcribed by John Doxey, manager of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Oral History Project.

Format

Originally recorded on an Olympus digital voice recorder. Duration is approximately 225 minutes.

Attribution

This interview transcript is property of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers. Quotes, reproductions and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Mary Judith Robinson, July 10, July 17 and August 14, 2025, Telegraph Hill Dwellers Oral History Project.

Summary

Mary Judith Robinson was born in 1939 into a prominent Kansas City family that pioneered settling of the Midwest, including the co-founding professor of the University of Kansas, physicians, engineers, business and civic leaders. 

Despite Midwestern roots, Judith’s family had many Bay Area connections – starting with her great-great-grandfather The Right Reverend William Ingraham Kip, who came to San Francisco in 1854 to establish the Episcopal Church in California and became its first bishop.  Judith’s mother also attended Mills College in Oakland in the 1930s. Judith’s first visit to San Francisco was in 1945 when her physician father, who had served as chief surgeon aboard the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier in the Pacific in World War Two, was posted to the Naval Receiving Hospital in Crocker Amazon Park and the family moved from Kansas City to join him.

Judith returned to the Bay Area in 1957 as a student at Mills College, before transferring in 1958 to UC Berkeley from which she received a B. A. in English Literature in 1961. Her interests includes theatre, poetry and live jazz at legendary clubs in San Francisco like the Black Hawk and Jazz Workshop in North Beach, where she tapped into bohemian circles and encountered many artists and writers. On one memorable evening, she dined at Vanessi’s restaurant with musician Miles Davis between sets at the Jazz Workshop across the street. In 1960 she joined Timothy Leary at Cuernavaca, Mexico, where a group took psilocybin “magic” mushrooms, an experience that opened her mind to new ways of thinking.

After taking LSD, she seemed to relive her birth and learned that she had been nearly strangled to death by the umbilical cord. After graduating in 1961, she and her younger brother John Kip traveled to Europe for a year.

Driven by a desire for independence and the need to earn a living, Judith worked for The Associated Press in New York in the mid-1960s before jumping to United Press International (UPI), where she was posted to the Portland, Maine, bureau. Working for UPI exposed Judith to national political figures as she covered the 1968 presidential election campaign in Maine when its Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie ran for vice president with Hubert Humphrey. She next went to Washington, D. C., where she reported for the National Journal before going to work in 1971 as a legislative aide for Senator Gaylord Nelson (D.-Wisconsin).  A progressive Democrat and environmentalist, Nelson was known as the founder of Earth Day (in 1970) as well as opposition to the Vietnam war and advocacy for civil rights reforms.

During her nine-year tenure with Nelson, Judith developed legislation that increased consumer protections, regulation of prescription drugs and medical devices, banned harmful good additives, and promoted food labeling and funding of biomedical research.

Judith left Nelson’s office as the “Reagan Revolution” was taking hold and returned to San Francisco in 1979, where she was an editorial writer for the San Francisco Examiner. Living in North Beach, she developed friendships with poet-bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, with whom she sailed her 1910 canoe on Bay inlets, and with Ed and Mary Etta Moose, proprietors of the Washington Square Bar & Grill, from whom she bought a house on Lombard Street in 1980.

Long-desiring to write historical biographies, Judith’s first published book was The Hearsts – An American Dynasty in 1991. She produced 11 books or privately-printed family histories including biographies of Congressman Phillip Burton (D.-California), U. S. Senator Alan Cranston (D.-California), Florence Mahoney, influential in building up the National Institutes of Health, Bishop William Ingraham Kip, and in 2024 an autobiography, Memoir of a Reluctant Debutante – Or, When in Danger, Breathe.

In 1987-90, Judith returned to Washinton as a legislative aide to Rep. Dave Obey (D.-Wisconsin), where she worked on a variety of health-related issues. In the 1990s, she conducted a series of oral histories of Italian-Americans in North Beach for the UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. She joined the Telegraph Hill Dwellers and was active in advocating for preservation of historic structures and public policies benefitting the neighborhood character of North Beach including aspects of the 19th-century Bauer-Schweitzer Malt Factory on Chestnut Street as it was converted to residential apartments. “There are futurists and pastorists,” she would say, “and I am definitely the latter.”

Judith has had opportunities to review the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should keep in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

JOHN: This is John Doxey with Judith Robinson. Today is July 17th, 2025. And we're sitting at Judy's home, 562 B Lombard Street. And Judy, you've done so many things in your life that we couldn't begin to cover them all [laughter] in a palatable amount of time, I think. So today I think we'll focus largely on your time as your life has intersected with San Francisco, which it has in many ways over the years. And just to get some data point in, you were born in 1939, is that correct?

JUDITH: April Fool's Day.

JOHN: April Fool’s Day, OK. And your family, which is quite an illustrious family, we'll talk about that a little bit later, but … has ties to California going way back. One of whom was William Ingraham Kip. Am I pronouncing that right?

JUDITH: Actually, I think we pronounce it “Ingram,” but they added an extra … what do you call it in the word. So it's [pronounced] Ingraham or Ingram. [Transcriber’s note: William Ingraham Kip (1811-1893) came to San Francisco in 1854 as a missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church. Per Wikipedia, Kip had only two congregations under his charge when he arrived, but the Episcopal population soon began to grow as immigrants from the East streamed into California during the Gold Rush period, and when California became a diocese in its own right in 1856, Kip was elected as its first bishop. He continued to serve as Bishop of California until his death in 1893. His last act in office was the ordination of his grandson, William Ingraham Kip III. Kip was noted for his Episcopalian Catholicism, and he also promoted the idea of “Grace Cathedral” for San Francisco, which was also advanced by his successor, William F. Nichol.]

JOHN: And he was the first … Episcopal bishop of California. What were the years?

JUDITH: The whole state of California.

JOHN: For the whole state of California.

JUDITH: And he was selected as a missionary bishop in 1853. And he came to California January 29th, 1854 after a terrible struggle. And he was bishop until he died. In those days … he was consecrated a bishop about a year later after getting here. He started, as I say, as a missionary, and then the church ordained him as a full bishop. And he was a bishop until he died in 1891.

JOHN: Did the church send him here because of all the activity in the goldfields, and the need to have somebody here?

JUDITH: The need was made manifest to the people in the East by early gold rush seekers, who had started two Episcopal churches in California in San Francisco. One of them was Grace Church, and the other was Trinity. And both of them were in what is core Chinatown now. And those were the only two Episcopal churches in the state when the bishop arrived. They … started in 1849. And the people who started them, the Episcopalians who were gathering here, finally had sent word several times saying, “You've got to get a bishop out here.” Because it's only bishops who can marry, baptize and bury people in the Episcopal Church. And they said, “we've got to get somebody out here to do that.” And we have to remember that this town went from 300 people in 1848 to 50,000 in 1850. [Transcriber’s note: Grace Church in San Francisco started as a small chapel in 1849 near Powell and Jackson Streets, grew into a larger church at California and Stockton streets, and after being destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, evolved into the current Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill (California & Taylor), built on donated land from the Crocker family.  Trinity Church has also had several locations, starting in 1849 at Pine and Kearny streets before moving to a large stone church at Post and Powell streets, and then in 1893 to its well-known Norman-style building at Bush and Gough Streets, which survived the 1906 earthquake and fire.]

JOHN: That’s amazing.

JUDITH: Yeah, it is amazing. But those two churches were in Chinatown. And both of them still exist in 2025, 175 years on. And they're in their fourth generation.

JOHN: I guess they both relocated after...

JUDITH: Yes, they went through four churches. Well, the first … ones burned down in one of the three major fires that destroyed the city. And then there was a second one. And then the third Grace church was originally on Nob Hill on the side slope, where the Ritz Carlton Hotel stands today. And the fourth Grace is Grace Cathedral now up California Street on the top of the hill. And Trinity went through several locations, and it still stands in the fourth church at the corner of Gough and Bush streets.

JOHN: And there's another Kip who was an Episcopalian in San Francisco for whom the Canon Kip Center is named. Is that? [Transcriber’s note: Operated by Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco (ECS), the Canon Kip Senior Center at 705 Natoma Steet provides community services for seniors and adults with disabilities, including caregiver support, case management, in-home care, financial planning, medical care and housing. Per its website, ECS traces its origin to the Mission of the Good Samaritan, the first community welfare undertaking of the Episcopal Diocese of California. Under the leadership of the Rev. William Kip III (grandson of William Ingraham Kip  discussed above), the center offered services for San Francisco’s most vulnerable residents and a boys’ night school. When Rev. Kip died in 1902, the center was renamed Canon Kip Memorial Mission in his memory.]

JUDITH: That's the bishop's grandson.

JOHN: That was his grandson?

JUDITH: Yes, my great uncle, my grandmother's brother.

JOHN: What was his first name?

JUDITH: It was William Ingraham Kip III.

JOHN: Ah, the third, OK.

JUDITH: And this is William Ingraham Kip, Jr., the bishop's son. My great-grandfather.

JOHN: And I should just note Judy is pointing now to a painting in her living room, which we will certainly feature in the oral history. And Canon Kip, tell me a little bit about him. [Transcriber’s note: A painted portrait of a figure thought to be William Ingraham Kip, Jr. hangs on Judith’s living room wall.]

JUDITH: Oh, well, Canon Kip, the Reverend William Ingraham Kip III, the bishop's grandson, was the first one since the bishop to go into the church. And interestingly enough, you see, because they were Dutch … why Bishop Kip became an Episcopalian was somewhat of a mystery. And in my researching a biography of him, I never found a reference in his writing to why he elected to become an Episcopal priest. Because, of course, the Dutch were all Dutch Reformed protestants. And Kip's family, going back to the 1630s, settling Manhattan with the Dutch West Indies Company, were all in Dutch Reformed. But Kip perhaps saw that the coming more socially active Protestant church of that genre would be Episcopal. And so he chose that. And his grandson was the only one … of his descendants. And since then, no one else has gone into the church. And that became … he got an honorary canon when he died very young. But he particularly wanted to serve the poor. And he built a mission, an Episcopal mission, to help the poor South of Market, which is where all the factories, the businesses, the working people lived. And it was very much subscribed to. I think he had, you know, several hundred people participating in his mission that he founded, and people supported. And sadly, probably because of associating with that population, he got TB and died very young of tuberculosis. And that's why the Canon Kip Episcopal Housing Center is named for him, and he was given an honorary canon. And, of course, Canon Kip Center, and I was present at their opening as a representative of the family, is one of the first homeless shelters to concentrate on housing and … curing them of any addictions and reestablishing them in society with jobs. It has a chef's program, it's well known. And since Canon Kip, we now … Episcopal Community Services has something like five or six large buildings, mostly South of Market. One is named for one of our recent bishops, Swing, with whom I worked closely in a history of the diocese. And Episcopal Community Services, growing out of Canon Kip's work, now houses more homeless people than anybody in the whole Bay Area. It houses four or five thousand people a night. [Transcriber’s notes: The Dutch Reformed Church refers to Protestant churches with roots in the 16th-century Reformation, emphasizing Calvinist theology and doctrines like predestination, established in the Netherlands and spreading globally.; William Edwin Swing, now retired, was the Episcopal Bishop of California, based in San Francisco, from 1980 to 2006. During his time as bishop, Swing was a pioneer in responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and homelessness.]

JOHN: Yeah, I'm familiar with their work as well. We could go on and on, but I wanted to move on to another family member, a Mary Kip, who also had a San Francisco connection.

JUDITH: And that's Canon Kip's sister, my grandmother.

JOHN: Ah, OK!

JUDITH: Mary Burnet Kip, and she's the bishop’s, the first bishop’s, granddaughter. My grandmother, and my dad's mother. And I'm named for my grandmother Mary Kip. Mary Judith Robinson. And I never met her because she, too, sadly died young of cancer in 1922 I believe. And she was only 42 years old. And my dad was just going to college, and he always told us he was devoted to his mother, and I can show you photographs of him. He was the oldest of three children that Mary Kip had with Dr. Ernest Franklin Robinson, my grandfather Robinson. And Mary Kip … well, father became, as a result of her dying so young of cancer … my father became a specialist in cancer surgery. And he was a pioneer in the use of radium to start treating it in the 1930s. And so, as I say, he was devoted to his mother. And his dad, it was a proper old Edwardian, Victorian-Edwardian, Grandfather Robinson. Grandfather Ernest, we called him. Dr. Ernest. He had father wear a black armband when Mary Kip, his mother, died … going back up to the University of Kansas as an undergraduate. And the boys commented on it, not disparagingly. But it made it worse for father to have to display this sad loss in his life in his 20s. And he asked his father if he could please take the black arm band off, and grandfather said yes. And that's who Mary Kip was. I sadly never met her.

JOHN: I should say for the listeners that I have gleaned some of the information for the questions I'm asking not only from multiple conversations with Judy, but also from her recently published Memoir of a Reluctant Debutante – or, When in Danger Breathe, which is really a great read and covers her family history in detail.

JUDITH: There's a wonderful photo of Mary Kip in that, by the way, taken by the very famous San Francisco photographer Arnold Genthe. And I can show you the original on my wall in the other room. And Genthe, it turned out, from letters that we found of Mary Kip's to Grandfather Robinson, in effect courting him from San Francisco to Kansas City, Missouri after the Spanish-American War, where they met. And she was quite, she and her family were very friendly with Genthe. And they were obviously involved in the cultural activities of the city in the 1890s. Well, all the years since Bishop Kip arrived in 1854, the Kips were prominent members of society here. But having a real Genthe of my grandmother is fun. [Transcriber’s note: per Wikipedia, Arnold Genthe (1869-1942) was a German-American photographer, best known for his photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the 1906 earthquake and his portraits of noted people, from politicians and socialites to literary figures and entertainment celebrities.]

JOHN: And then, moving forward, your mother had a Bay Area connection. She attended Mills College, is that correct?

JUDITH: That's right, in the 1930s, class of 1934. And she loved Mills. She was from Wichita, Kansas. She was a Clapp. C-L-A-double P as in Peter. My tenth grandfather, Roger Clapp, was a founder of Boston. But mother ended up out here during the Depression at Mills College. But she didn't stay here, she went back to the Midwest. [Transcriber’s note: Roger Clapp (1609-1690) was an early English colonist who settled in Dorchester, MA and served as a military and political leader in early colonial Massachusetts.]

JOHN: Mm-hmm. She didn't complete her studies?

JUDITH: Oh yes, class of ’34 … I mean B.A. in whatever, history actually. That's one of the sources of my devotion to history and preservation, is our family's devotion to it. And my mother, I believe her major at Mills was history.

JOHN: And I read in your memoir some interesting stories of her time at Mills. She sounds like she enjoyed life in the Bay Area.

JUDITH: She had a ball at Mills, she loved Mills. And she was delighted when I elected to come out here. But as we’ll get to, I came not for Mills so much as the jazz clubs of San Francisco in the 1950s.

JOHN: [chuckles] And then during … toward the end of World War Two, there was another intersection of your life in San Francisco, 1945. Can you tell me about that?

JUDITH: Absolutely. That was very, very special. My father served as the chief surgeon on the great Essex-class aircraft carrier Intrepid, now a multi-million dollar museum in Manhattan on the Hudson River. And the sick bay there today honors my father for his 19 months out in the worst of the Pacific Theater. And he was in... and the Intrepid, by the way, and I'm going to visit Hunters Point in a couple of Saturdays to revisit it, the Intrepid was the most bombed, kamikazed and torpedoed ship in the whole war, South Pacific Theater. And she was repaired three times at Hunters Point in San Francisco, at which times my father would suddenly appear in Kansas City because he could hop on a … he could hitchhike on a plane from Oakland or San Francisco to Kansas City, and then surprise us. And, oh, I get goose bumps thinking about the door opening and seeing my father standing there in his uniform. But on the third repair of the Intrepid at Hunters Point [chuckles] just as Daddy was about to ship out and go back out to the South Pacific in December of 1944, the skipper came to him and said, “Doc, we just found a replacement. Would you like to get off?” Father said, thought quickly, said, “yeah, he would.” And so he ran and got his duffel bag, and he leapt onto the gangplank as it was pulling away from the ship, and she was about to float back out into the Pacific. And we came, all of our family, my little brother, age three, I five, and mother drove out from Kansas City, Missouri to San Francisco. And we spent 1945 here. And I turned six in San Francisco, and I remember it all very vividly. [Transcriber’s notes: The USS Intrepid is an Essex-class aircraft carrier, commissioned in 1943, that served in World War Two and into the Vietnam War. It earned nicknames like "The Fighting I" for its wartime bravery, including surviving numerous kamikaze attacks. The Intrepid was decommissioned in 1974 and now serves as the centerpiece of the Intrepid Museum in New York City.; San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was a crucial West Coast hub for building, repairing and outfitting U.S. Navy ships during World War Two, rapidly expanding to support the Pacific theater and employing thousands of wartime workers who migrated to the area.]

JOHN: Where did your family live?

JUDITH: And we lived at Parkmerced. We were the first tenants of that newly finished, in 1941, housing development. And of course, it was a huge change for us because we lived in a single family house with a yard and a sandbox in Kansas City. And here we were, all living chock-a-block, you know, apartment, apartment. And it was wonderful adventure because we could run up and down steps. And I played house on the steps under an arch or something. And so there we lived in this new environment for a year. And we had lots and lots of adventures, and my parents took advantage of making sure that we children saw a lot of things. Including father, for example, sometimes he'd look out the window, and we were right on the Pacific end of Park Merced. So there was just that little marine mountain range, and there was the Pacific Ocean. And father'd look up from the dinner table sometimes and say, “Look at that beautiful sunset. Let's go out there and watch the sun set over Tokyo.” [chuckles] And that's what we would do. And we'd hop in the old Plymouth and pop over the hill and sit there on the beach. And of course, I know right where it is now. And when I came to college, I went back and found our apartment on Garces Drive in Parkmerced. And it was there, of course, that I started being sent to school, age five. And then on April 1st I turned six. And so I must have gone to kindergarten in the spring, and in the fall I went to first grade, I expect, right? And I would be walking to school. Mother didn't, we were not pampered … she'd walk us to school once and say, “OK, there's how you go, children.” And pack us off every morning with our lunch and little lunchboxes. So I'd be walking school, and I'd stop and look. And I remember watching snails coming out of their shells and flowers blooming in January. We had left snow, you see. And here we were, walking in sunshine with flowers blooming. And Judy made a mental note: “When I grow up, I'm coming back to San Francisco, where the flowers bloom in January.” [Transcriber’s note: Parkmerced is a planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low-rise garden apartments near San Francisco State University in southwestern San Francisco designed in the early 1940s.]

JOHN: [laughter]

JUDITH: And there they are out in the garden there. Well, it's July now, but I did. But it changed my life.

JOHN: One interesting story …  I think V-J Day happened while you were in San Francisco.

JUDITH: Oh, yes.

JOHN: Can you tell a little bit about that?

JUDITH: Oh, good, that's a good story. I remember it, of course, ‘cause I had turned six and I was in … we knew … of course it was September … September 1 is V-J Day … I forgot to check that today. But after the bombings in August of Japan, sad though they were, we knew the war was over. And then V-J Day was declared in San Francisco. And everyone was celebrating. You could almost hear the noise all over the city of people celebrating. And my parents were at a party of friends of my mother's from Mills up on Pacific Heights. And mother would have been all dressed up and had a big hat on. She loved wearing leghorn hats. She always looked smashing and there with father, and everybody had been having a party and drinking and carrying on … and Daddy always told the story, he got a call, he had to leave a call from the hospital. He was transferred from the ship to the Naval Marine Hospital here in San Francisco, which was over on, I think, Geneva… [Transcriber’s notes: Victory over Japan Day (also known as V-J Day) is the day on which Imperial Japan surrendered in World War Two. The term has been applied to both of the days on which the initial announcement of Japan's surrender was made (August 15, 1945) in Japan, as well as to September 2, 1945, when the surrender document was signed, officially ending World War Two.; A leghorn hat is a classic, fine straw hat named after Leghorn, Italy (Livorno).; The U.S. Navy set up a Naval Receiving Hospital in Crocker Amazon Park (Geneva Avenue at Moscow Street) that operated from 1944-1945, using prefabricated buildings that were later repurposed as post-war veterans’ housing before the park returned to recreational use in 1957.]

JOHN: Crocker Amazon, I think.

JUDITH: Crocker Amazon area. It's now a park actually. [laughter] And he joked that he got a call at the party saying, “Doc, you got to get down here. The Army and Navy are beating each other up over who won the war.” [laughter] And that was exactly true. They were hitting each other with beer bottles on Market Street. All recorded, I found, in Chronicle photographs by a woman, it turned out. And so Mother always jokes that she spent V-J Day sitting in the Plymouth in front of the hospital ... But that's a good story … and after that we knew that we'd be going back to Kansas City in due course.

JOHN: So just skipping ahead … after your time in San Francisco, you … the family returned to Kansas City…

JUDITH: Oh, yeah.

JOHN: …and it was there that you really grew up and attended schools and so forth. And … that takes us really, I'm sure there's many great stories along the way, but all the way up ‘til the time you left home to go to university, right?

JUDITH: Right.

JOHN: And so tell me where you decided to go.

JUDITH: Before I do that, I just will quickly add a connection to California. My dad was fairly renowned for his service work on the Intrepid, and he got a reputation. And he was offered a job with Dr. Russel Lee, who was starting a new health … new doctor's office program down in Palo Alto. And Daddy and Mother sat up all night and talked about it. And they decided father had grown up in Kansas City, our family had founded Kansas City, Lawrence, Kansas. My great-grandfather was a founding professor [at the University of Kansas in Lawrence]. Father said, “Well, I have to start a new practice. I might as well go back and pick up the practice” that he and his father had had, although his father had died. And they decided to go back to Kansas City instead. And I always thought when he told me that years later, “Oh my god, I could have grown up in California.” And Russell Lee, of course, started that wonderful practice down in Palo Alto. Out of that family came Dr. Philip Lee, who was an Assistant Secretary of Health. And I knew Phil Lee very, very well when I worked in the Washington years in Washington in the U.S. Senate. So it was a small little ... another connection to California … But I went to a girls' school in Kansas City and had very good grades and could have gotten into any college I wanted to go to. In fact, there's … two of my scholarship cups right over there. And I was valedictorian in my class and so on and so forth. And, you know, I applied to all the “big sisters,” as we called them, Smith and Wellesley and those places … but in Mademoiselle magazine one day, and I was starting to write, and I even sent a short story to Mademoiselle one time. It was a favorite magazine of ours in those days, it was a very good one. And it carried short stories, by the way, by very reputable writers. And one day I opened it up, and there was a page with a whole lot of little photographs that said “San Francisco Renaissance.” So I started looking at those pictures, and there … were guys reading poetry to jazz, and some guy named Ferlinghetti was reading his poetry. And I looked at those pictures, and then one caption said, “Former prostitute reading poetry to jazz.” I said, “Well, that's for me. I'm not going to go back East to those schools and live in the winter for god's sake. I'm going to go back to California where they read poetry to jazz and the flowers bloom in January.” And so my mother was not pushing me to go to Mills ‘cause she had loved it so much. And in her day she could ride horses all over the hills behind Mills. We didn't have that same campus when I was there. So I applied and, of course, I was accepted at Mills and Mother was over the moon. So off I come to California. Now, do you want me to tell you about the trains? [Transcriber’s notes: Dr. Russel V.A. Lee (1895-1982) was a physician who helped make group practice an important part of American health care. Dr. Lee became known as a champion of such controversial causes such as pre-paid medical care, abortion, population control and free drugs for addicts. He was a founder of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic, one of the nation's first group practice clinics.; Dr. Philip R. Lee was a prominent American physician and health policy leader who served as the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health under President Lyndon Johnson and again under President Bill Clinton, overseeing major health initiatives like Medicare implementation and desegregation efforts in hospitals.; the "Sisters colleges" usually refers to the Seven Sisters, a historic group of elite women's liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern U.S. (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley) formed as female counterparts to the Ivy League.; Mademoiselle was a women's magazine first published in 1935 by Street & Smith, and later acquired by Conde Nast Publications. Though primarily a fashion magazine, Mademoiselle was also known for publishing

Short stories by popular authors; the “San Francisco Renaissance” is the name given to the emergence of writers and artists in the Bay Area at the end of World War II. It was not a single movement, but rather a collage of many different communities that migrated to San Francisco during the postwar era seeking out the remnants of bohemian culture in America.; Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism and film narration, Ferlinghetti is perhaps best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958).]

JOHN: Sure.

JUDITH: Well, in 1957 when I graduated high school, there were no jet planes in America yet. Commercial. And you traveled, as Mother had, from Wichita on the great transcontinental trains: the Santa Fe Super Chief, the Union Pacific, the unbelievable trains. And that's the way I came and went. And I get goose bumps again thinking about it. And I'd actually been put on a train when I was three years old. I think I was even a little younger when my little brother Kip was born, I have now figured. And I was sent from Kansas City to my grandparents in Wichita, Kansas, with a tag around my neck saying, “Deliver to Mark Clapp, Newton, Kansas.” Which was where the station was outside of Wichita. And I loved trains from that moment on. I was about two and three-quarters years old. And so the idea of riding a train halfway across the continent was just more than... [Transcriber’s notes: The Super Chief was the flagship passenger train of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The diesel-electric powered streamliner was touted in its heyday (the 1940s to late 1950s) as "The Train of the Stars" because it often carried celebrities between Chicago and Los Angeles.; Judith had two younger brothers, John Kip and Marc. John Kip died in 2003, and Marc now lives in Connecticut.]

JOHN: Wait, are you saying that you rode by yourself?

JUDITH: Yeah, they put me on the train … they handed me … to the arms of the porter on a car.

JOHN: Under three years old? Wow!

JUDITH: Yes! Isn't that wonderful to think about?

JOHN: It is, yeah.

JUDITH: And I rode and sat the seat … and the wonderful Black porters would check on me and say, “You doing all right?” I'm looking out the window and we're going by and across the great Kansas plans. And then we arrived in Wichita, Kansas, and the porter lifts me off the seat and hands me out the door and into the arms of my grandfather. Imagine doing that today! It was a wonderful experience. And we rode the train up and down to Wichita all the time. And those were just shuttle trains. But these transcontinental beauties, oh, my God, I'd give anything. And I have sat in cars of the Santa Fe, the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific that are in the train museum in Sacramento, which is second only to the one in New York, England. And that's the greatest train museum in the world. And the Sacramento one, I tell you, is the second greatest. And I'm sure I was on those very cars. And the Union Station in Kansas City was the third largest in the nation. Because every train in America went through Kansas City, crossing the nation. And we had huge tracks, numbers of tracks. And the Union Station was saved. It was going to be torn down. And my parents subscribed to help save it, bought a brick, you know, and got their name on it. And they saved it. And the Halls, as in Hallmark Cards, did a lot to save it, too, I might add. Halls are a wonderful philanthropist in Kansas City. And so we went down to the station there in September, and I shipped a trunk. You know, in those days you shipped trunks by railway express, and then you rode on the passenger trains. So I got there in three days and three nights. It was like three days, and two nights, or three nights and two days. But it was basically three days to cross half the nation. And you stood at the top of a very high series of steps that led to the tracks. And you'd be sitting in this beautiful big station. They'd call out, “Los Angeles Super Chief, track number one.” And you’d go through this door and stand at the top of steep steps, [chuckles] no handicapped exits then. And look out, and there would be row upon row upon row of tracks full of these huge, long silver trains, passenger trains. With two engines, two diesel engines, always two, and sometimes three. And those trains, I don't know, they were maybe 10 cars long. And they hauled a lot of weight … and beautiful cars, all shiny and silvery. And you walked down those steps, and the luggage guy took your bag, your trunk having been shipped, bags to your room. And I shared a roomette the first year with another gal coming to Mills. And we got on that train, and it pulled slowly out of that station and off we went as it gathered speed across the Kansas plains, and we were headed West. And by golly that was a fabulous … and I did that for three years, the first three years of my college. [Transcriber’s notes: The California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento features restored historic locomotives and railroad cars.; Kansas City Union Station opened in 1914 as the third-largest train station in the United States. Union Station served a peak annual traffic of more than 670,000 passengers in 1945, but traffic quickly declined in the 1950s, and the station was closed in 1985. In 1996, a public–private partnership undertook a $250 million restoration, funded in part by a sales tax. By 1999, the station had reopened as a cultural and event hub, and in 2002, train service returned when Amtrak began public transportation services.; the Hall Family, founders of Hallmark Cards, have a deep connection to Kansas City's Union Station, with the Hall Family Foundation providing significant support for its renovations and operations.]

JOHN: You'd go home in the...?

JUDITH: I went home in the summer, I didn't go home … oh, yeah, no, I went home … I went home at Christmas … so I would have ridden it four times a year. Yeah. And we rode the southern route to Santa Fe in the fall when the snow was starting in the mountains, and then connected to the California train up to Oakland. And then later the next year I went to Berkeley.

JOHN: How many days would it take you to get between Kansas City and...

JUDITH: Three. It was three days and three nights to the end … to the Pacific coast. And in the spring, when the thaw was on, we went on the … Union Pacific on the northern route. We went out through the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado Rockies and down the great slopes across the plains. And I've got a picture right there in the hallway that I'll show you of when I knew we were coming into Kansas City, ’cause you went over what we called a trestle. And it was a metal bridge. It wasn't for cars or anything else. It was just a train bridge. And it crossed the intersection of the Missouri River when it connects with the Kansas or Kaw River, where Kansas City is located right at the junction those two rivers. And as soon as you heard the train rattling over that trestle, you knew the porter was going to come through saying, “Kansas City Union Station next.” And it was a wonderful experience. [emotional]

JOHN: Yeah. Sounds very nice … so you came to Mills College initially, and as your memoir says you majored in E.E. Cummings, jazz, and...

JUDITH: …sailing and tennis…

JOHN: …other things besides going to school.

JUDITH: Oh, yeah

JOHN: Tell me some of the things that you did.

JUDITH: Well, the first thing I did was to put on my white gloves and my raincoat and probably my round virgin pin and get on the Key System from Mills College. It was a bus that connected to a train that came over the Bay Bridge. It was wonderful system. And the trains ran on the lower deck, you see, and the cars ran two ways on the top deck. So I... figured that out very fast and got on that first train to come in as soon as I got my bag unpacked. And came into San Francisco all alone, one afternoon, late afternoon or something it must have been, and got off at Second and Mission, we now know, where the bus station is. It's Second and Mission, right? [Transcriber’s notes: In the 1950s and ‘60s, many young American women wore a circular brooch that was widely believed to symbolize virginity, often with placement indicating her status, but was also gifted to represent love and friendship.; the Key System (or Key Route) was a company that provided mass transit connecting the East Bay and San Francisco from 1903 until 1960, when it was sold to newly formed AC Transit. The Key System consisted of streetcar and bus lines in the East Bay, and commuter rail and bus lines connecting the East Bay to San Francisco by ferry and later via the lower deck of the Bay Bridge.]

JOHN: Around there, yeah.

JUDITH: And the Key System ended there. The next year, the Key System itself ended and they only had buses. But I got off there, and the first thing that struck me was the difference in the people I observed. You see, I suddenly came out of that train and looked at all the people milling about this big, busy bus station, and there were Asians and dark-skinned people. I was hearing tongues I had never heard, Chinese and Mandarin and Spanish and gosh knows what all. And I had not seen people like that in Kansas City. We were pretty much a white and black community. And there I was in the middle of this hugely worldly, international group of people. Well, I had a map. I've always been a great one for carrying a map. I had map in my hand, and I figured out where Turk and Hyde was. And that's where Dave Brubeck's great club, jazz club, was. The Black Hawk, the Black Hawk Club. And I walked from Second and Mission to Turk and Hyde, and went in to the Black Hawk Jazz Club. And that was my introduction to San Francisco as a young adult. [chuckles] And that was a big part of my life in my college years. Jazz in the ‘50s was just fabulous. It was all changing and all evolving. And of course, I was from Kansas City, which had a huge number of jazz bands. In fact, the Basie band came from there, although they were headquartered in New York by the time I was coming up in the ‘50s, but … sometimes members of the Basie band would play at our high school dances, you see, for extra money. [Transcriber’s notes: The Black Hawk was a San Francisco nightclub that featured live jazz performances during its period of operation from 1949 to 1963. It was located on the corner of Turk Street and Hyde Street in the Tenderloin.; In 1951, jazz musician Dave Brubeck organized the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, which took up residency at the Black Hawk.; the Count Basie Orchestra, founded in 1935 and based in Kansas City, was one of the most prominent jazz groups of the swing era.]

JOHN: So you already had an interest in jazz?

JUDITH: So I had already … jazz was a big motivation for my coming here. And this place was one of the places in the whole world where all the musicians came. And that was the era when we were starting to do modern jazz mixed with wonderful, the Basie sounds. And I never saw the Kansas City native Charlie Parker, he had died in the early ‘50s just before I started going to jazz clubs. But I saw all of those bands, the Adderley Brothers, the MJQ Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan. I fell in love with him and … oh, there's a funny story about going to the first jazz concert in Monterey and hoping I was going to … meet Gerry Mulligan. People like that. I mean, it was just unreal.

JOHN: You had Dave Brubeck and...

JUDITH: Oh, God. And Brubeck, of course, taught at Mills College. You see, Brubeck was still teaching at Mills at the time. And Darius Milhaud was there, the famous French musician and writer of music. And his wife taught there. And Diebenkorn, Richard Diebenkorn, was at Mills when I was at Mills. And a wonderful potter named Anthony Prieto. And Mills was a wonderful college for cultural and the arts. But they didn't know what to do with this independent co-ed. I wanted to be a coed. Mind you, I'd been in a girls' school for years, and the hormones were kicking in big time. [Transcriber’s notes: Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. He is considered one of the key modernist composers, and he taught many future jazz and classical composers. Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck became one of Milhaud's most famous students when Brubeck studied at Mills College in the late 1940s.; Antonio Prieto (1912-1967) was a ceramic artist and art professor at Mills College.]

JOHN: [laughter]

JUDITH: And I was on my own finally and boy I was out and about. And I never did anything illegal or bad, but I did have a fake ID. And I even found in my files, so extraordinarily thorough, the communication from the man in Kansas City who altered the date of my birth by one numeral. So I was just old enough to be 18 or 19 to qualify for going into a bar. But I was a little under in person.

JOHN: That was the age, the age was 18?

JUDITH: I think it was 18, and I must have been 17 when I first came out. But, well, I was born in ‘39 and I came out in ‘57, so I was 18, I think … but I was big, you see. I was tall, I have always been tall. The Kip, we get that from our Dutch ancestors. And so they just assumed, you know, that they'd checked my ID and they said, “Well, we're not going to worry about her.”

JOHN: And did you also start going to North Beach in those years?

JUDITH: Oh, well, North Beach was the center of a lot of this jazz. That was part of the whole thing about this area. That's when I first came to North Beach in 1957. And people often will ask me, “Well, the city must have changed a lot since you first came.” And I thought about it the first time I was asked. I said, “You know, it has not. Thank God it has not.” And that's in large part, we now know, to people like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers and the preservationists and the historians who said, “Wait a bloody minute here, we're not going to ruin this.” And there are to this day, 65 years on, a few places in North Beach that were here when I was in college. Tony Nik’s being one of them. Well, I never went into Tony Nik’s. It was a smoky dive bar full of drunken old men, you know, and you kind of ran by it because the smoke poured out into the street... [Transcriber’s note: Tony Nik’s at 1534 Stockton Street is one of North Beach’s oldest bars.]

JOHN: [laughter]

JUDITH: But it was there. And some restaurants. I mean, the North Beach Restaurant was here, I believe. [Transcriber’s note: North Beach Restaurant is located at 1512 Stockton Street.]

JOHN: Was Vesuvios around?

JUDITH: Vesuvios was very much a part of my life. Huge part of my life! [Vesuvio Café is located at 255 Columbus Avenue.]

JOHN: Yeah, why don't you just tell us some of the different places that you went in North Beach in particular and some of people that you encountered.

JUDITH: Oh yeah, I encountered some wonderful people. Well one of them was, in fact I was just talking with a girlfriend last night at dinner at Fior d’Italia … Fior d’Italia was around … and we both knew a lot of these people. She, this girl, married a real jazz musician, Dean Reilly by name. And I remember my friends, he said, “Wow, you know a real jazz musician,” you know? And we knew this fellow, his name was Jimmy Jones, and he was a very handsome Black man, and he wore J. Press suits, he always looked just fabulous, and he would escort me around. We never had anything more than a very nice friendship. But … I met him in a bar in North Beach, I guess, or somewhere. He drove a taxi. He was very bright. I mean, we always joked later there are more PhDs driving taxis in San Francisco than anyplace in the world. But Jimmy Jones, and he's the one who arranged for me to have dinner with Miles Davis... [Transcriber’s note: Bassist Dean Reilly was a longtime fixture of San Francisco’s jazz scene.]

JOHN: Wow!

JUDITH: And wow! It was a wow for me. I put on my best black dress and my pearls…

JOHN: Where did you have dinner? Do you remember?

JUDITH: And we, and he was playing at the greatest jazz club in the city at the time, the Jazz Workshop, across Broadway from the great restaurant Vanessi’s. And … Jimmy knew Miles, and he invited him to come out between sets, the first and second set, and have dinner with this white girl. And we went to Vanessi’s, and we sat in a window seat, I remember. And Miles was absolutely true to form. He hardly said a word or a sentence. Jimmy would prod him, and say, “How are you doing, Miles? What are you…? “Da-da-da, humph, rump, rum, nope, yep, yum.” And he had Joe’s Special, I remember that. It was easy to eat, you see. It was soft, and it went down easily. Jimmy Jones, the taxi driver, paid the bill as I recall. Miles didn't even pay the bill. And that was a very moving experience, but one of the … the most moving part of it was realizing that here was this brilliant man, obviously mentally brilliant and an unbelievable musician, innovative and creative, a dentist's son, upper middle class Black man, and here he was being treated in the ‘50s like second class citizens. And that … I had never been prejudiced. We had not grown up that way, but we were segregated in Kansas City. But we were taught to be very openly, you know, warm to other people, especially Blacks. Because we had a Black maid working and living with us for all of my youth life. And we were very respectful of Blacks. And Mother worked for charities to benefit them. And I just, it just suddenly hit me that night that that's why this man is so angry. He was clearly angry. He was … was pissed off. And he, we finished dinner rather quickly, and he walked back across Broadway and had to change suits, you know, those guys get so sweaty. They’d change suits between sets. So he had changed into a dry suit, and off he went and blew his horn for another hour and a half or so. [Transcriber’s notes: In the late 1950s and ‘60s, the Jazz Workshop was a legendary nightclub at 473 Broadway that hosted Miles Davis, John Coltrane and other jazz greats.; Vanessi's was a North Beach restaurant at 498 Broadway from 1936 to 1997, famous for its lively atmosphere, piano bar and late hours.]

JOHN: Wow, that's a great story.

JUDITH: Isn't that a great story?

JOHN: I think you've met several of the literary set...

JUDITH: Oh, yes. Yeah, Bob Kaufman, there's a couple of his books right up on my shelf. And Kaufman was a very sad poet, also half-Black, and I remember seeing him looking very morose in the bagel shop that was … what was it called?  [Transcriber’s note: Robert Kaufman (1925-1986) was a Beat poet and surrealist, as well as a jazz artist.]

JOHN: Coexistence?

JUDITH: Coexistence Bagel Shop. And I would go there. I didn't drink coffee ever, but I would go there just to watch people and see people. “Cause people said that's where the poets come, Judy, if you want...” And I wanted to meet poets and authors and artists and writers, you know. And I had been a great voracious reader. And my family all was. We had huge libraries. And I read everything put before me. So I had read a lot. And I was already aspiring to be a writer myself. And so that's the kind of … and I was an English major. And that's a kind of society, as it were, that I was seeking out in college. Bob Kaufman was one of them. And I got to chatting with him. And let's see, who were some of them … I did not meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti then. I came to know Ferlinghetti when I moved back to San Francisco in 1979, and got to know him very well, and he was a neighbor. But I didn't know him then. But he had just started the bookstore, so I knew about the bookstore and his partner at the time. Right down the street from Vesuvios. And as I say, we used to go to Vesuvios to get ready to go the jazz club. [Transcriber’s notes: The Coexistence Bagel Shop was a cafe at the corner of Grant Avenue and Green Street famous as a Beat hangout in the late 1950s; Judith is referring to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore.]

JOHN: [laughter]

JUDITH: And Vesuvios was a place where you often met people. And I got, you know, I had a hello, greeting with a lot of people up and down Grant Avenue. That was the center of the Bohemian part of the city.

JOHN: Was Richard Brautigan another person?

JUDITH: Brautigan I met, yeah, I got to know Richard Brautigan. Another very sad man. I seemed to have gyrated and felt sorry. Well that's true, it's a theme of my life. I felt sorry for people a lot and took pity on them. And, of course, we lost Brautigan by his own hand. And, oh gosh, who are some of the others? Well, they're in my memoir. [Transcriber’s note: Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) was a novelist, poet and short story writer who spent much of his adult life in San Francisco. He wrote throughout his life and published ten novels, two collections of short stories who is perhaps best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America.]

JOHN: Joe Rosenthal? [Transcriber’s note: Joseph Rosenthal (1911-2006) was an Associated Press photographer who shot the iconic World War Two photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. He later worked as a San Francisco Chronicle photographer for 35 years, before retiring in 1981, and was a well-known North Beach figure.]

JUDITH: Oh, I met Joe Rosenthal. That was great, yes. And I met Imogen Cunningham, too, the great photographer. Another photographer, just to meet her. And I met a famous artist that I mentioned … the small, petite lady, a wonderful sculptor.

JOHN: I think that was … was that Mary Frackenbach?

JUDITH: Yes, Erckenback.

JOHN: Erckenback.

JUDITH: Erckenback. E-R-C-K-E-N-B-A-C K, I think. And she was a lovely woman, came from a good family, I think up north. But people like that … but, yeah, what was the one you were just asking me about? [Transcriber’s note: The correct spelling for this name is Erckenbrack. Mary E. Erckenbrack (1910–1992) was a Seattle-born artist who moved to San Francisco in 1935, attended the School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) and became a prominent figure in the North Beach art scene. She operated Mary E's Mud Shop on Clay Street, creating ceramics for retailers like Gump's, Marshall Field's in Chicago and New York specialty shops. Her work includes oils, watercolors, metal work, and block prints, and she produced several public art works, including a mural for the Ping Yuen Housing Project and a fountain at Shriner's Hospital.]

JOHN: Oh, about Joe Rosenthal?

JUDITH: Rosenthal. Somebody introduced me to him one night. ‘Cause I had mentioned, somebody said, “You know, he works for the Chronicle.” And I said, “Oh, my God. My dad was out there in the South Pacific. And he wasn't at Iwo Jima, but he was at all the other islands’ assaults and batterings, and I sure would like to shake his hand.” And one day somebody said, “Judy, there's Joe Rosenthal.” And they introduced me to him. And he was a little small man, nicely dressed, very unassuming. And he'd already become famous for that photo of the flag being raised on Iwo Jima. But he was just … and he lived in North Beach. He lived here on Telegraph Hill … and we learned how to get in and out of Telegraph Hill buildings when there were parties and the police would come. Somebody’d be smoking dope, you see.

JOHN: They'd come in the front, and you’d go out the back?

JUDITH: Yeah, they'd come In the front. And I got so I whenever I went in an apartment building in North Beach, on Telegraph Hill, I checked out the back door to be sure there were back stairs. And not a few times did we hear the police banging on the front door, and my girlfriend Patty and I had to go. “Come on, Patty.” And we'd shoot down the back stairs.

JOHN: Did somebody call the cops? Is that how…?

JUDITH: Yeah, somebody would call the cops and say, “We smell marijuana, they're making too much noise.” And they'd be playing jazz on the record player, and, you know, people would be coming and going.

JOHN: Yeah … you met Henri Lenoir?

JUDITH: Oh, yes, I knew Henri very well.

JOHN: Can you say a little bit about Henri?

JUDITH: Well, he was a fixture in North Beach. And I arranged, by the way, to get his papers to the Bancroft Library, which was a good thing. And he had quite a story to tell, which is his own story, I won't go into too much. But he came from Europe, and he claimed, I think rightly, that he was the nephew of a famous English musician. And his mother, I don't know, his mother and father had separated, and he'd come to America kind of illegally, quasi-legally. And he was a bit of a hustler, if the facts were true. But he got himself jobs. He started selling silk stockings, I remember when I oral history'd him for Bancroft. And he sold stockings, and he worked his way to California and to San Francisco. And when I was in college, he was a maitre d down at the Iron Pot restaurant on Montgomery, which is in the block opposite, exactly opposite, what is now the Transamerica Building. And he would put up artwork by famous artists. In fact, there are several pieces hanging right there on the wall that I bought from Henri. Those on the left are all things I bought from Henri Lenoir of artists, San Francisco artists. [Transcriber’s note: According to UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Henri Lenoir (1904-1994) was born Silvio Velleman in Zuoz, Switzerland. Despite having no formal secondary art education, Lenoir had an eye for talented artists, and while working at the Iron Pot in the 1940s he began hanging and promoting art work that boosted the restaurant’s clientele. In 1949, Lenoir bought the Vesuvio Café, which quickly became a center of bohemian activity and was a favorite spot of Beat poets and artists. Lenoir owned and operated the Vesuvio for nearly two decades until he sold it in 1968 amidst rising rent prices and a general decline of artistic activity in the area. Lenoir continued to promote art throughout the rest of his life and was known to friends and tourists alike as the “King of Bohemia.”]

JOHN: This was at the Iron Pot? [Transcriber’s note: Opened in 1934, the Iron Pot was a long-time fixture in San Francisco’s dining world. Located at 639 Montgomery Street, across from the Transamerica Pyramid, the restaurant apparently closed in the early 1980s.]

JUDITH: The Iron Pot. But then he eventually somehow got enough money, and I think a partner or backer, and he bought Vesuvios. And I believe he actually did own it for a long period of time, or was a part owner … ‘cause he was a terrible businessman. But he owned Vesuvios, so I got to know him when I came back to San Francisco in ‘79, 80s, better. And he was still running Vesuvio’s. So he was wonderful with his beret. And Enrico Banducci. I got to know Enrico and people like that. Yeah, I got to know a lot of the… [Transcriber’s note: Enrico Banducci (1922-2007) was a long-time North Beach personality. He operated the hungry i nightclub, which helped launch the careers of many famous comedians and entertainers in the 1950s and ‘60s. Banducci also started the Clown Alley hamburger stand, as well as Enrico's Sidewalk Café at 504 Broadway, a restaurant and jazz club opened in 1959.]

JOHN: You got to meet Millie?

JUDITH: Oh, and Millie who took photos. Yes, Millie … and I went to her … Aaron Peskin put together a wonderful gathering for Millie, and I spoke there briefly. And it was right opposite...

JOHN: Do you want to say first a little bit about who Millie was?

JUDITH: Oh, Millie…

JOHN: Millie Gardiner? Is that her name?

JUDITH: What was her last name? Yeah, something like that. Millie was a fixture in North Beach when I was in college in the ‘50s, and she was still doing it when I came back in the ‘80s. And she looked the same … little old lady in the ‘80s that she looked in the ‘50s. She would go around and take … first of all she sold roses. She would get used roses from somebody, and go around the restaurants and sell you a rose for might have been $5, or maybe $1 in the 50s. And everybody felt pity on her and bought a rose, you know, and got to know her and “Hi, Millie, how are you today?” And she only had a few things. I've got a picture of her in the hall, by the way.  [Transcriber’s note: Mildred Fishman Gardiner (1923-2017) was a well-known North Beach resident who spent decades selling cigarettes, flowers and later taking Polaroids of people in cafes and restaurants.]

JOHN: She was a memorable person…

JUDITH: Very memorable.

JOHN: …very short as I recall.

JUDITH: Very petite, and had an old raggedy, dirty raincoat and an old flopped hat. But she just managed, somehow, to get by. And people took pity on her. It was like what they did with Emperor Norton. They took pity upon him, remember, in the Gold Rush. And Millie was our Emperor Norton. And at the sendoff for her that Aaron arranged, I looked across the street and there was the Iron Pot … not the Iron pot, not the Bagel Shop … Dante Benedetti's first New Pisa. And I said, “That's where I first met Millie, right over there in 1957.” And everybody at the memorial howled because I was the oldest person there and nobody had known her that long. But oh, yeah, Millie. What a character. Wonderful characters. I mean, the very characters I met enticed me back to San Francisco. I forgot the punchline for Millie’s service. I said, “Boy, when I saw Millie, I realized I wasn't in Kansas City anymore.” [laughter] We never saw anything like that in Kansas City, Missouri.

JOHN: Did Vesuvio’s look then in the late ‘50s as it is now? The same ambiance.

JUDITH: Yes, very much. Very same. With the wonderful sign around the outside saying, “I'm dying to get away from Portland, Oregon.” And they had that wicker basket chair and...

JOHN: You alluded to something a couple minutes ago that I think was one of the attractions for you of San Francisco or maybe of California more broadly … of this kind of feeling free of social constraints and ability to express yourself in ways that maybe you can't in other parts of the country. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

JUDITH: Oh yeah, San Francisco and I took to each other like duck to water. Because I was just bursting out with energy and curiosity. And stupidity in a lot of ways, but at the time you don't know that when you're 20 years old, 19, 20 years old. But fortunately nothing terrible ever happened to me … but, yeah, I met all these interesting people. You know, like the woman painter who I spent a night with one time and realized she was doing things that I didn't want done. Touched and I got up and fled. And that was my first encounter with … gay people. But she was a wonderfully interesting woman in her own way. And then I, you know, I could, but I could hang out with these people. They certainly were not the kind of people I met at the Kansas City Country Club. They were all sizes, shapes, you know, types. Some of them mad as hatters, some them very brilliant.

JOHN: Speaking of interesting people, I think it was in this period of the late ‘50s … and you finished Berkeley I think in ‘61, right? It was in those years that you met Timothy Leary, is that correct?

JUDITH: Oh yes, yes.

JOHN: And can you say how you met him, and…?

JUDITH: Well, first of all I left Mills. I realized I'd been constrained there. So I went over and got myself into Berkeley. And I spent the rest of the three college years at Berkeley. And not in a sorority. I had my own flat. And I met a whole lot of interesting people over there, including Pauline Kael, by the way, the great film director. [Transcriber’s notes: Pauline Kael (1919-2001)  was one of the most influential American film critics of her era, who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991.]

JOHN: Oh, yeah.

JUDITH: But in my junior year at college, I was going … I knew a fellow, Frank, Dr. Frank Barron. Who became a famous psychologist, world famous psychologist specializing in creativity. And he did a study of twins, for example, to see which one was creative or not, and things like that. Well, Frank and I, again, were just very good friends. He was older than I. A thoughtful man. I could meet all these people over at Berkeley because I was on my own. And I went to parties and group things where I met people. I went the theater over here. And I majored in English, but I minored in theater. So I was always over in the city here going to theater, all the new modern theater, you know, Waiting for Godot and all these fabulous things. And one, in my junior year, just as spring was coming on and we were getting ready to go home for the summer, Frank came to me and said, “Judy, I'm going to be in Mexico in August, and I'm gonna see an old friend of mine down there. And why don't you think about going down and going to summer school, and I'd see you down there.” And I was sweet on Frank to be candid. But he was older than I and I didn't have any hopes of permanency at that time. I was 19 years old or so. And … but I liked Frank and he was very … and I forgot to mention, he had come back from another trip to Mexico and he had brought a bag of magic mushrooms. And one night he came to my house and he had taken some of the mushrooms and he told me the story. I've taken these mushrooms and I've had this amazing thing happen in my head. I've cleared my wits. I've burned all this stuff from the past. I'm starting a new life. And he wasn't high when he came to me, he was relating this account of taking this. So anyway, then he told me he was gonna go down there and meet a friend and would I like to go to … and so I set about convincing my father to pay my way for summer school in Mexico. “Oh no, we don't go to Mexico. Nobody goes to Mexico,” which was not a favorite place. Although a lot of Kansas City-ans went there because it was cheap and it was also warm in the winter and they went down there. So … but our family didn't have any truck with Mexico. Well, it turned out one of Daddy's … in fact, my godfather, Dr. “Chick” McAllister's daughter, Jane, was gonna go to Mexico herself. And I said, “Well, Janie's going to Mexico.” “Well, all right.” So off I went to jolly old … well, not jolly old Mexico, for summer school. And then I had this extraordinary experience where Frank came down and called me up. I let him know where I was. And that I was in the … I actually had a room… [Transcriber’s notes: per Wikipedia, Frank Barron (1922-2002) was a psychologist and philosopher who is considered a pioneer in the psychology of creativity and in the study of human personality. Barron was at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) in Berkeley and one of the first contemporary psychologists to study effects of psychedelic drugs, and in 1960 he was a co-founder of the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research.]

JOHN: Were you in Mexico City?

JUDITH: Mexico City … off Insurgentes, the great roadway through it to up to the university. And I was taking courses there, art history and Mexican history and Spanish, Mexican history, and so on, and learning Spanish. And I stayed in a little old lady's house who had been a German Jewish refugee, and survived by escaping to Mexico. And the irony of her location was that right across the fence, ‘cause I could see over it from my second floor room, was an ex-Nazi. And he had a big, black Mercedes. And every morning, about nine o'clock, the Mercedes would pull up. And two guys would stand outside and fling two doors open on each side with guns in their hands, rifles I think. And this man would race out of his house and jump in the Mercedes and they would slam the doors and race off. And he was a Nazi. And here he was living right next to this Jewish refugee. One night she called me up in her rudimentary Spanish and said, “There's somebody on the phone for you, Judy.” It was Frank Barron. “Judy, I'm coming down to Mexico City. We're gonna come down on Saturday with my friend and … we'd like to take you to dinner.” Oh, boy, that sounded good because I was poor as a church mouse. So I got ready and washed my hair and put on my prettiest Lanz linen dress. It was aquamarine and green. Boy, it was a knock out. And I was a long drink of water in those days. And was looking pretty good. My hair hadn't dried when the lady called up and said, “Your friends are here, Judy.” And I went down the stairs of this little house. And in through the front door came Frank Barron with his ruddy, wonderful Irish face, and behind him a tall, handsome man. And he said, “Here's my friend, Timothy Leary, Judy.” And that was the beginning of the change in my life. [chuckles]

JOHN: That is quite a lead in.

JUDITH: Yeah. And that led, of course, to my taking magic mushrooms with Tim in the very first taking of... [Transcriber’s note: Timothy Leary (1920-1996) was a psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During the 1960s and ‘70s, Leary was a leading counterculture figure whom President Richard Nixon once called "the most dangerous man in America.” Per Wikipedia, as a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project after an experience with magic mushrooms he had in Mexico in 1960. He also experimented with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which was also legal in the U.S. at the time. Other Harvard faculty questioned his research's scientific legitimacy and ethics because he took psychedelics himself along with his subjects and allegedly pressured students to join in. Harvard fired Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) in May 1963. Leary is credited with popularizing such counterculture catchphrases as popularized "Turn on, tune in, drop out” and “think for yourself and question authority.”]

JOHN: Was this all on the same trip?

JUDITH: No, no. That was some weeks later

JOHN: I see.

JUDITH: I started going up to Cuernavaca.

JOHN: Mm-hmm.

JUDITH: Cuernavaca on the weekends.

JOHN: Mm-hmm.

JUDITH: They … Tim had taken a house there and brought his children back from Italy where he had gone after his wife had taken her life. Because Tim had taken … was having an affair with her best friend. And he had left being a professor at Berkeley in psychology, and he had new techniques that everybody was admiring. But it was too much for him. So he went off for a year to Italy and with his two young children, who were about eight and 10. And Jackie and Susan ... and he'd come back and he’d been offered a job at Harvard University by a mutual friend and the head of the psychology department at Harvard. Whom I met eventually, and a lovely man. And so before he went to Harvard, he decided to go to Mexico and spend the summer at this villa he'd rented. And he invited several people down there. One … the other important man who came down there was Dick Dettering, who was a very famous semanticist from Stanford and his wife who was pregnant. And … anyway in the about in the middle of August… [Transcriber’s note: Richard Dettering was an academic associated with the field of general semantics who interacted with and wrote about Timothy Leary during the 1960s.]

JOHN: About what year would this have been?

JUDITH: It was 1960, just the year before I graduated. Between junior and senior year, summer of ‘60, ‘cause I was class of ‘61 graduate … and then they invited me, Tim invited me to come up anytime whenever I wanted. And he got kind of sweet on me. And he was a very attractive guy, and I was easily enchanted by having a man of that … as I knew he was distinguished man, you know. And he took to me, and he was like a child in so many ways. He was full of energy and fun and witty and “Let's go do this, let's jump in the car and go do that.” And I was, “Oh, boy.” Judy will come. Oh yeah, I was always ready for the adventures. And then one weekend they said, “Now we're gonna have a” … well, I'll say “doings” now as the Clampers call it … They were going to get some magic mushrooms, would I like to participate in maybe taking ‘em? And I said, “Well, I might.” I was hesitant. Well, everybody was. So… [Transcriber’s notes: Clampers refers to members of the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus (ECV), a fraternal organization dedicated to the preservation of the heritage of the Western U.S.]

JOHN: Because this was still very, kind of, experimental...

JUDITH: Oh, nobody knew. I mean, there’d been a book by the Mexican sociologist, American sociologist, about the Mexican poor. And he knew about the mushrooms. But …. what was his name, Wasser, the banker, famous banker, had taken the mushrooms and written a feature story about that was in, might have been Life magazine. It's in the memoir. And that was the thing that brought it to the attention of scientists and doctors and people worldwide. If this important man is taking this magic juice, what's it about? Let's look into it. So Tim got hold of a fellow who knew where to get the mushrooms, how to do it. He was an archeological student, as I recall. I didn't know or meet him. And Tim told the story about how they went up into the hills outside of Cuernavaca. And he had been told, and he said, “Well, how will I know?” He said, “A little old lady will be selling them.” “Well, how I know which one she is? They all look alike in the markets of Mexico.” Which they did, and they all squatted down amongst their potatoes, you know, and how could you … and the person had said, “Look into her eyes and you will know.” And that's what happened, Tim said. They kept looking into old women's eyes amongst the potatoes. And they looked in this one lady's and she reached around behind her and handed them a paper bag. [Transcriber’s note: R. Gordon Wasson (1898-1986) was a vice president for public relations at JP Morgan & Company who later in life turned his interests to the study of hallucinogenic mushrooms, religion and ethnomycology. In 1955, he took magic mushrooms in Oaxaca, Mexico and documented his experience in a May 1957 Life magazine essay titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” which introduced psychedelic mushrooms to a wide audience for the first time.]

JOHN: She was expecting them, perhaps?

JUDITH: Yeah. Well, she was the contact that people knew about.

JOHN: So how many of you were gathered then in this villa?

JUDITH: Only six of us at the table for the mushroom-taking.

JOHN: And there was always somebody who was not taking them...?

JUDITH: We made certain that Dick Dettering's wife, who was pregnant … she wouldn't take him anyway.

JOHN: She was a nurse?

JUDITH: She was an RN. So I felt much more safe when I realized we had an RN present. Being a surgeon's daughter, I was big on medical care, and that made me more relaxed. So we all had a very stiff tequila with that wonderful hot tomato sauce. And … they said, “Come and look at them and decide,” you know. And they were in a … they’d put them in a basket and decided not to wash them. They decided not to wash them, but they wiped the mud off of them because they came out of the mud. They wiped the mud off, and they brought the basket into a table. And there was a great umbrella, a sun umbrella over the round table. And there was Tim and I and another and Dick Dettering and another couple whom I didn't know and never met and never got to know. And that was it, I think. It was that six of us. And there were no more than five or six of us. And we all agreed that we would try a mushroom and see what happened. And so I ate one. And I promptly evacuated the tequila and tomato juice. The body was so tense, didn't want any of that garbage in it. So out that went over the side into the flower pot. And the flowers were blooming around, and we were on a deck that looked down over a lovely long swimming pool. It was a very pleasant, paradisical kind of place. Warm, a lot of sun. Tim just had on shorts. He was very proud of his body, and he was fond of running around in his swimsuit shorts and everything. And so we took one and nothing happened, nobody felt anything. So then we took another one. No, nobody felt anything. So finally Tim said, “Well, you want another one?” And I … “Well, I don’t know.” He said, “Well, if you don't want it, just toss it in that potted palm over there.” Actually, I think he said potted plant. And we all turned around and looked, and there was no potted plan there. And we started to laugh. And that was the beginning of the psychedelic…

JOHN: It takes a while to kick in.

JUDITH: Yes. It took about, oh, maybe 30, 40 minutes or more.

JOHN: And so you spent an afternoon there?

JUDITH: Yes, yes. And it kicked in. But the laughing … everyone always comments about the laughing. Both with acid and marijuana, and all the psychedelics have that. And it makes your body relax, you see. That's the first thing you need to do is just so relaxed that you just let it all come flowing out. And that's what happened. And then at one point I went and lay down in a room. And I looked around the top of the room, and there were swastikas. Well, the swastika is a very old design. It had nothing to do with the horrible German man Hitler … and I remember thinking, “Well, isn't that interesting, that's an old pattern” … and Tim came in and sat with me, talked to me for awhile. And in his biography account he calls me Betty. Which is interesting because that's my mother's name. And I talked about my family very openly, and I was very fond of them. I was close to my parents. And so he calls me Betty in the book. And he has several accounts that are embellished one way or the other. But his account is accurate, and my account is very vivid in my memory. And that was the beginning of our learning about psychedelics.

JOHN: Which has really changed your life.

JUDITH: It changed my life, yeah. It definitely changed my life. And I realized that … fortunately, I had no bad trips. I had … I then took later acid three or four times. And then at one point I didn't follow Tim Leary's rules … because if you want me to go into more detail, I was very careful to follow Tim's rules, which followed the rules of the ancients. From the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is sitting over there. And, you know, I did everything as Tim said, because he was very respectful of the power of these things changing people's heads. And I have no and never had any respect for that Ken Kesey running around dropping acid and had people going mad. And he was the one who should have been criticized. Not Tim Leary, who was absolutely right on, spot on and caring. About taking these things with rules and following the rules. But Tim got blamed for it, sadly. [Transcriber’s notes: Kenneth Kesey (1935-2001) was a novelist, essayist and countercultural figure who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In the mid-1960s, Kesey, Neal Cassady and others in a group of friends they called the Merry Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around the Bay Area. It is to this activity that Judith is referring.]

JOHN: I think we're going to have to end there for today, Judy, and this is probably a good segue time anyway, and always good to like pick up fresh again too, I think. So let's meet again soon and finish the story.

Second Interview Segment Begins Here:

JOHN: You mentioned that your family was pretty moderate Republican. But I think maybe the, if I'm pronouncing the name right, the Koch…

JUDITH: Koch, like Coca-Cola.

JOHN: KOCH, K-O-C-H. Fred and his wife Mary, I believe, right?

JUDITH: Yes, my Aunt Mary, my father’s...

JOHN: They were a little more on the … right side of things.

JUDITH: Yes. But I'd like to just make that very clear … the Koch brothers, as they came to be known, are my first cousins. They are the sons of my dad's mother, Mary Clementine Robinson, who was seen by Fred Koch, who came up from Wichita, Kansas, where he was inventing a new method to extract oil and gas from the tundra … and had been invited by the Russians to go over and teach them how to do it. Fred Koch owes the Russians a huge medal in heaven because he taught ‘em how to get gas and oil out of that winter … that hard land. And in the course of his … he invented this himself. He's an MIT graduate, the son of a first immigrant to America. Fred Koch's father was a Dutch man who immigrated himself and ended up in Texas running a small newspaper in West Texas, and had enough money to send Fred Koch, I think, on a scholarship to MIT in the early ‘30s, or late ‘20s. And Fred Koch got a degree, and he went back to Kansas where his father's paper was, outside of Wichita. Well, Fred Koch's father was in Texas … Fred ended up in Wichita, I never quite knew why. And he would come up to Kansas City regularly ‘cause he played polo. And he was a wonderful horse man and a wonderful hunter, and he was a big man. As Dutch are, that's where we get our height … the Kochs have it on double Dutch: their father's line and their mother's line. But I have it only on my … paternal grandmother's line, Bishop Kip … he was our Dutch, Bishop Kip. And anyway, Uncle Fred came up to Kansas City to play in a polo match, because we had a big polo field that became the Kansas City Country Club. And he spotted Aunt Mary, who was a tall and very, very handsome woman, beautiful woman, just graduated from Wellesley College in the mid-‘30s. Grandfather Ernest had been able to send his daughter to Wellesley, even though it was the Depression. And she was standing on the sidelines, and Fred Koch was smitten. And three months later, he would drive up to Kansas City in a big black Cadillac. And he'd bring Aunt Mary two dozen yellow roses. Well, that's pretty impressive in that Depression. And he was courting her big time ... Well, anyway, Fred married Aunt Mary very quickly, and they had four sons. The first born, Frederick Robinson Koch, was the artist, intellectual, cultural man. And we know now, and I will say openly, that he was gay. And my father and mother knew it. And we... they made allusion to it, they taught us about it. We never had any prejudice against gay people as a result. Because Freddy, our first cousin, was. And he had to live in those awful years when they were so … ousted in society. But Fred had money, and he became a great collector of houses, among others, including a castle in Austria. And a house, a Tudor house built in the … 1500s in England. [Transcriber’s note: The Koch brothers, primarily Charles G. Koch and the late David H. Koch (1940–2019), were influential libertarian billionaires who inherited and expanded Koch Industries, a private conglomerate involved in oil refining, pipelines, chemicals, paper, fertilizers and more, using their immense wealth to fund a powerful network of conservative political groups such as Americans for Prosperity to advocate for lower taxes, deregulation and limited government, heavily influencing Republican politics and helping shape opposition to Democratic positions on climate change, the Affordable Care Act and tax policy. Their father, Fred C. Koch (1900-1967) was a chemical engineer and entrepreneur who founded the oil refinery firm that later became Koch Industries.]

JOHN: Is this the same Fred who married Mary?

JUDITH: No, it's his son … His firstborn of four sons, Frederick. Well, Uncle Fred didn't take to an effeminate son, let me tell you. And then later in life, he cut him out of his will, as it were. But he made a stipulation for him. So Freddy, cousin Freddy, never had any problems financially. But that was a nasty piece of work. My dad and all of us never liked Uncle Fred. But we admired and respected him for what he had done. And then his next son is Charles Koch. And Charles is still with us; Frederick died about four years ago. And Charles is the one who runs Koch Industries now, which started out as Rock Island Oil. Rock Island being the train that, among others, like the Santa Fe, went out west from Kansas City, the Rock Island. And he called it Rock Island Oil, Uncle Fred. And then it changed to Koch Oil, and … now it's Koch Industries. Multinational, huge corporation. And then Aunt Mary had two twins. And that's William Ingraham Koch, named for the bishop, and David Hamilton Coke. And David and Charles were the ones who came to be identified as the Koch brothers and with very right-wing political interests. But the Koch brothers' interests are the same as all Americans: Do the best you can with what you have to work, and use the freedoms that Americans have. It's what every American believes. And it's been distorted, and they've been distorted. And there was a terrible smear piece by a woman named Janet somebody … in one of the big magazines like Vanity Fair or something, and smearing them. And I've never forgiven her. And it was also full of misinformation, ‘cause she didn't check sources. There's a book about them, and the man who wrote it begged me four or five times to “come and talk to me.” I said, “I absolutely will not talk to you. You can find it all in your newspapers.” And all the entire book about him is, I checked all the sites and they're all newspaper clippings. Nobody would talk to him. Because those of us who know the Kochs and what they believe in, and what they've done, a wonderful, good, great philanthropy that you'll never match in America, except with the Rockefellers and that lot … it's just unfair. They've been treated very unfairly. [Transcriber’s notes: Billy refers to William Ingraham Koch, a billionaire sailor and collector. His boat was the winner of the America’s Cup in 1992.; Judith refers here to a 2010 article by Jane Mayer, a writer with The New Yorker, about the brothers David and Charles Koch and their role in promoting the power of the Tea Party movement.]

JOHN: I want to ask you, too … getting back to sort of political awakening and maybe transformation from a more, you know, the politics that you grew up with in Kansas City toward … your own vision … whether the experiences with psychedelics had any impact in sort of opening your mind to different things. Or maybe that came later, maybe I'm jumping ahead of myself?

JUDITH: That's a very good question. And in fact, yes, it did. It expanded my mind and … the use of psychedelics expanded my mind in every possible direction. But remember, I was also … I was raised in a family to do good for less fortunate people. And that prevails still in my family today. We are a family who's very devoted to our community, to helping people. So I immediately … the first registration I really did as an adult, I registered as an Independent. Because I realized I was a little on both sides. And everybody is. You see, I've realized now, in the whole world everybody is basically at heart a moderate. We just want to be born, live, raise our families and die in some kind of reasonable comfort. So I registered Independent right up to just a year or two before I went to the United States Senate. And then after that I realized I was thoroughly on the Democratic side of policies and was going over to that side. But I came from a family that had this tradition of doing that kind of … participating to help the poor. And that was very much leaning toward the Democratic side. And certainly … and remember I also was raised at a time when the Southern Democrats were really the right-wing Republicans. They were the rightest wing of all of America. I mean, I was in the Senate with people like Senator Eastland of Mississippi, and all these men from Georgia and Alabama and Arkansas. Oh, my goodness, they were terrible right-wingers. They were still pro-slavery in a way. They were not for civil rights,  they were … not for Social Security for God's sake. Look what Roosevelt had to do to persuade them. And thank God, thank you, Lyndon Johnson and people like that who came out of the Deep South and said, “No, this is not right. They deserve all the rights they should have in America.” So I saw that very clearly as I got older. And then, of course, it came … in the early ‘60s, we had the Vietnam War. And that awakened you pretty fast, especially when you've got a younger brother who’s draft age. That brother is 11 years younger than I, and he's coming to visit me this 1st of September. And if he had been drafted, let me tell you, he would not have survived the Army, let alone Vietnam. Fortunately, he wasn't called up, because it was still a crapshoot, as it were. So I came up with that upbringing, and it swung very much to the Democratic side. But that's because the parties changed, too. [Transcriber’s note: James Eastland (1904-1986) served as Democratic senator from Mississippi in 1941 and again from 1943 until his resignation in 1978. Eastland was a segregationalist who led the Southern resistance against racial integration during the civil rights movement.]

JOHN: So when you finished, you graduated from Berkeley in June of ‘61, and then went on a year or so sabbatical, you might say, in Europe. Is that correct?

JUDITH: Well, it wasn't a sabbatical because I wasn't leaving any work, I'll tell you that. I hadn't started any kind of work. My father surprised me … the night of my graduation when we went to Ernie's … wonderful Ernie’s. I don't know if you were here when Ernie’s was still here, with its red velvet walls and its delicious steaks. [Transcriber’s note: Located at Montgomery Street, Ernie's was a landmark restaurant (1900-1995) known for its French cuisine, elegance and bordello-like decor with plush red wallpaper, heavy drapes, white linen and formal waiters in black tuxedos. The restaurant was featured in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo.]

JOHN: Made famous in Vertigo, among other things.

JUDITH: Yes! In Vertigo, it's in Vertigo. And you know, right up here on Lombard Street, at the corner of … Jones. [laughter]

JOHN: It's where the house is...

JUDITH: The house was there, and the front door was red. And the owners were exhorted to keep it red for years by the neighbors because of that film. And finally an owner about 25 years ago … just took it away, which is a shame … But yeah, we went to Ernie's, and my dad announced to me, “Judy” … after all the years I've been trying to go elsewhere … I had managed that Mexico summer, but that was the farthest I’d been … but I wanted to see Paris and London and Europe and maybe the Orient, I didn't know. And father announced, “Judy, as your graduation present, I'm going to send you to Europe.” Well, I get goosebumps thinking about it now. Well, he didn't plan on my spending the whole year. He was thinking a month, you know. And then my brother had a personal problem, and so we decided that Kipper, my John Kip, my brother, would come with me … two and a half years younger … and off we went to jolly old Europe. [Transcriber’s note: In the film Vertigo, the protagonist Scottie lives on Russian Hill, and the home's exterior scenes were filmed at 900 Lombard Street at the corner of Jones Street.]

JOHN: And among other things you did … your book chronicles all kinds of adventures.

JUDITH: Oh, my God!

JOHN: But you taught English at the Berlitz School in Paris. [chuckles]

JUDITH: The main headquarters, yeah. And I was in great demand as an American. Because, you see, Europe was still in post-war status, and all the corporation heads and staff wanted to learn English with an American accent, not British. And so I was the only one at the time in 1961 that was an American that had qualified. And it's a great system to teach. It's the same system the U.S. Foreign Service and State Department use. It's still the best system, Berlitz invented it. But I was in great demand. And I got called out to do special private visits, which was fun. And I went up to these Beaux-Arts, huge buildings that mercifully had not been bombed in Paris. And one of them was the head of Martini and Rossi, and other people. And the great long velvet curtains and paneled walls, and he'd be behind a great 19th century or 18th century desk. And I was teaching him English with an American accent. So that was a big deal for a 22-year-old girl, let me tell you.

JOHN: Yeah. So after you were maybe called back, is one way to put it, your father said, “Judy, when are you coming back?”

JUDITH: Oh, yeah.

JOHN: …you returned to Kansas City.

JUDITH: Yes!

JOHN: And I think the expectation was what? That you would get married and settle down and have children and join the Junior League and live that kind of a life?

JUDITH: Absolutely. “Now Judy's going to finally settle down.” And I went back. I made the stipulation from Europe, I said “Alright, I'll come back.” Well, I knew I couldn't make a living over there. I was too young and inexperienced, and I had to do something. But I wasn't gonna live in Kansas City, Missouri. By then I knew there was a whole bigger world. So I made a stipulation. And I have the letter to my family saying, “Alright, I'll come back, but on the stipulation that I will spend six months there. And if you have me join the Junior League, I'm happy to do it. That's a very good cause. Women's organization's still going quite strong. And I was quite keen on that kind of volunteer work. But it wasn't for my life. And I said, “After six months, I'm going to go back to California.” And they had to agree, ‘cause by then they said, “Well, I guess we have no...”

JOHN: Oh, so you already had it in mind?

JUDITH: I already had an agreement before I got on that plane.

JOHN: I see.

JUDITH: Well, they came over in effect to get me. And they took the opportunity to come over and see me. And that's when we went to Paris and Rome, and went all around Rome and all these places. And it was a wonderful trip. My mother wrote it up in great detail, and we had wonderful experiences. It was a very happy time with my parents, to be also a person who knew more than they did. And I was their guide, you see. I took them to Fontainebleau. I took to the Luxembourg Gardens … they didn't know anything about it. And so I was the one who, for once, was the knowledgeable person whom they had to call … and we just had a really nice time. And after that, I said, “OK, I'll come home. And I'm going to go home by the south of France. And go to Monaco and see the races, the great car races.” Because I had been such a fabulous fan of the classic racing cars. “And then I'm gonna go and end my trip, as I had begun, with John Kip at Pamplona in Spain. And I'll come home from Spain.” And that's what I did.

JOHN: You flew home?

JUDITH: Oh yeah, I had flown over, Kipper and I had flown over … and Kipper took a ship back. I put my brother, Kip, on a ship in England to come back after two months. We went all around Europe together in a van. And, oh, we had a great time. We had a wonderful time. And he did come back on a ship. And I saw him last … and then it was, oh, my God, it was almost 10 years before I saw him again. Because he married and had a family, and we didn't live in the same area. 

JOHN: Let's return to the U.S. You come to Kansas City for six months, as stipulated. And then back off to California. Took the train again, as…?

JUDITH: I don't know if I took the train when I came back. By then we were flying. But maybe still flying Constellations, prop planes, not jets. But no, jets had come in in the ‘60s, so I was flying jets. And, of course, I had that wonderful trip back from Spain in a jet to New York. I think we went all the way to San Francisco, maybe it was. And the pilot put out the word saying, “Anyone who wants to come up to the pilots’ cabin, we're allowing people to come visit us.” Imagine now, you see since 9/11.

JOHN: Right.

JUDITH: And I immediately raised my hand! Oh, boy, do I like to be in a pilot's cabin on a jet plane going over the Atlantic Ocean, my God! So, I went up there and I spent a long time in that cabin, ‘cause not very many people did. They were shy, they were afraid, but I wasn't. So I sat there in the third chair where I guess the … sub-pilot sat. He had to stand all the time. And there was this dashingly handsome TWA pilot. So we were having a fine time, and they gave something to visit because they had this long-haul flight, you know. And when we got back to … so I got to see all how a jet plane works. And when we landed in San Francisco, he ... the pilot came to me and handed me his card and said, “May I call on you?” And he wanted to date me. Isn't that something?

JOHN: It seems to be a common theme in these stories.

JUDITH: [laughter] So I had … well, I knew better than that, that he probably had … and I said, “Thank you, but no thank you. But I've had a wonderful time.” So we exchanged a few letters, you know. He'd say, “Well, I was back in Spain or I went to Morocco, or you know” … it's kind of fun to know an international TWA pilot.

JOHN: So, tell me how you then ended up working for AP and then...

JUDITH: …Oh, well, yeah, I decided I had a boyfriend, a Jewish boyfriend … and that was another thing we had to work through with the family, and that's a whole other story. But I went back East to meet his family in Scranton, PA. And meanwhile, I tried several things out here to get out of being a shop girl, although I was perfectly good at it. But that wasn't what I wanted to do … And so I followed him back there. And as I say in my book, the Jewish family wanted no part of this shiksa. And literally threw me out of the house. I mean, I fled before they threw my bags out on… but it was almost … And I went in New York and said, “Alright, Robinson.” And I took my first LSD in New York, thanks to having met Odetta. Odetta's husband, a handsome Black man, had taken up with my Jewish gentleman friend. And they were going to promote rock and roll stars like the … oh, famous groups, you know. And hold a concert in Scranton, and they had a couple of others they thought they'd lined up. It was all pie in the sky, as I quickly began to realize. So I went scrambling out of Scranton up to New York. And I had a girlfriend from Kansas City who lived there and put me up for a little bit. And I said, “Now, Judy, after that LSD trip, you've got to” … you know, that really cleared my wits about taking care of myself. “Get with it. You can't live on your father or your parents. If you want to live this life, you can't take money from them. You've got to do it yourself.” So I went around to employment agencies. And because I could type … I was a good typist because when I took the test, it was very fast, secretary. They sent me as a secretary, Girl Friday, to … thank God because … well, I picked it out of options, The Associated Press, 50 Rockefeller Center, top floor. To work in the promotion department. Well, that's where they put soon-to-retire old, deadbeat reporters. And my promotion department head guy, Ted so-and-so, was just killing time before he retired. And so I became a secretary, and I had big stacks of files to file … and I didn't like it very much, but I kept thinking, “This is an entree, Judy. This is an entrée into the news business.” So I kept looking for ways to start writing stories. And a bunch of the guys at AP took a look at this long, lanky girl with a ponytail down to her waist and thought she was all right. And they started to help me, you see. They started to mentor me, as well as making overtures. But I managed to keep things at hand. I was sharp enough and big enough that I could handle those things. [Transcriber’s note: Odetta Holmes (1930-2008) was an American singer, often referred to as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement.” Her musical repertoire consisted largely of folk, blues, jazz and spirituals.]

JOHN: [chuckles]

JUDITH: But I had the most wonderful help from mentors like Bernie Gavzer. He was a Pulitzer winner. Relman Moran, I had his book for years. He had been twice a Pulitzer winner, and once he had imprisoned in Vietnam … or no, maybe in China briefly. I mean, he was a real … these guys were real reporters. They were old-time journalists. Foreign journalists, reporters, correspondents, award winners. And several others … a guy from Kansas City, a famous columnist, humorist. Turned out my dad was his father's doctor. And he took an interest in me. And often they were just genuine helping interests. And then at the AP, I kept going, “Could I get into the news business?” And they said, “Well, you gotta go to the library first.”

“Well, I don't want to go to the library, I want to be a reporter.” “Well, you got to start in the library.” And finally Bernie Gavzer said … I said, “I’m not going to go to the library, I want to get into reporting.” Bernie said, “Well, you can't write can't you?” And I said, “Oh, yeah. I got As and I can write.” So he said, “What are you interested in? What do you know about?” That's what he said. “What do know about?” I thought for a minute, I thought, “You know, I don't know much about a god damn thing. I know a little about a whole lot of stuff.” And then I said, “Well, I know a lot about sports cars.” Sports cars? Well, it turned out it was spring, and the Daytona Beach classic sports car races were coming up … in Florida. Well, while I lived in Berkeley, I had seen … in the filling station, as I still call them, a beautiful Ferrari with a handsome man in it one day. And I went over to the car, and the man getting his gas. And I admired it and da da da, and we got to talking. I think I had met him, maybe at a race or something, because I I wouldn't have gone up to a stranger like that. So I’m pretty sure I recall meeting him. And I said, “Hi, I'm Judy, da da da.” “Oh, yeah. Hi, nice to see you again. What are you doing?” And he said, “Well, I’m going back to Florida, and I am gonna be at my mother's.” He said, “If you are ever around Daytona, call me.” And he gave me his contact. Good all-American friendliness, you know. There was no making out stuff. I mean, it was just a friendly … so, boy, I kept that name. And here I was at The Associated Press in 1965 about, and I was going to Daytona, Florida. And I wrote the fellow a note. Said, “I'm coming down to the races. I'm with the Associated Press, and I'm gonna write a story.” The AP News features took this idea and said, “Ruff, ruff. We'll pay you $25. But we won't pay your way up and down, and we won't pay your lodging … and if we take the story, we'll pay you $25.” So I said … off I went. And this nice young man put me up in his family's beautiful …. he was a wealthy young man, as it turned out, and put me up in the house. And the mother was very welcoming. Well, I was presentable, you know, and they knew I was …  And off I went to the track. And I had on a beautiful knit, yellow knit dress, and I looked pretty good, if I did say so myself. [Transcriber’s notes: Relman “Pat” Morin was a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the AP. Bernard Gavzer worked for the AP in the 1960s and '70s, then went on to become a producer for WNBC News 4 New York. Gavzer also was a columnist for Parade Magazine.]

JOHN: [chuckles]

JUDITH: So when I went into the pits, boy, there was a lot of looking around. And the same thing happened as in Italy, the Italian guys in the Ferrari pit, the sucking sound they would make, the whistling sound. Well, anyway, I got wonderful interviews with some … and one very famous driver.

JOHN: Is this the Daytona 500?

JUDITH: No, no, no. This was classic cars. These were Ferraris and Alfas and Aston Martins and Lotuses. These were my kind of cars. I don't have any truck with that Daytona 500 stuff. And no, this was a classic, but it was at the Daytona track, I'm pretty sure. Anyway, I went back to AP, and by God, they took the story. And they paid me $25. And I called Father up, I was so proud. It was the first money I'd ever made as a reporter. And they paid me $25. He said, “My God, you should frame the check.” I said, “I already spent it.”

JOHN: [laughter]

JUDITH: So that was that. And after a little bit longer … oh, and I met the head of AP. And he actually smiled in an elevator to me once. Wes Gallagher, a wonderful man. And he had huge eyebrows. And we were in the elevator together all alone one time, I'm the secretary at the promotion department, he's the head of the Associated Press. So I wanted to make a little conversation, he was silent. I said, “Mike,” and I blurted it out, “Mr. Gallagher, you have the most amazing eyebrows.” And for the first time, maybe in weeks, he smiled. And I knew that he then knew who I was. He would recognize me after that. I thought, “Well, at least he knows who I am.” Well, he had nothing to do … with my career. But my friends started saying, “Judy, you know, there is an opposition wire service, the United Press International.” So I went down the street to UPI and walked in there and applied for a job. And a guy named Jesse Bogue, the managing editor of the bureau, said … he wore bow ties and he was a smoker and skinny and smart and funny. And he said, “Can you type.” “Yeah. “You're hired.” He said, “When can you start? Yesterday?” And that became a famous UPI line. [Transcriber’s notes: James Wesley Gallagher (1911-1997) was an Associated Press reporter who later served as the AP’s general manager and president from 1962 to 1976.; Jesse C. Bogue (1912-1983) had a 42-year career  with United Press International that included serving as UPI’s assistant managing editor.]

JOHN: And when do you want your vacation?

JUDITH: And “when’s your vacation? There's no vacation.” And Jesse Bogue said, “We're going to send you to Boston. BH, call numbers. And then they're going send you out to a line bureau.” And that meant the bureaus under the aegis of the larger bureau, Boston. So I get up there, and … do you want me to tell about my starting at UPI now or not?

JOHN: Yeah. Well, I think … you ended up in Maine, is that right?

JUDITH: Yeah.

JOHN: And you were there from ‘66 to ‘69? Do I have the dates right?

JUDITH: Just about. I don't know if that’s exact, check the book. But it was about that. But how I got to Maine is pretty funny…

JOHN: Tell the story.

JUDITH: …because I'm in Boston. I quickly had to learn that Baston accent. And they're teaching me how to punch a teletype machine by the way. You know, nobody knows what a teletype machine is. You know because you saw them probably still when you were starting out in the news business. But there I was learning how to punch the tape on a teletype. So you gotta learn how to bunch a tape. Alright, I'm sitting there every day practicing, learning. Because you have to learn it. And I'd only been there about three days when the bureau chief, Stan Berens, he had a bent frame. He literally had a hump back … 20 years of dictation and cigarettes. And Stan called me in, and he said, “Alright, Robinson, we gotta get you out to your line bureau.” And that's the way he talked, you know. “Where do you want to go: Springfield, Hartford, Montpelier or Portland, Maine?” Well, I didn't know where any of those places were. I'm out of Kansas City via Berkeley, California, out of San Francisco. I said, “Where is Maine?” [laughter] And he pulled a map down on the side of his glassed-in case, so he couldn't hear the racket from the teletype machines all day. And he said, “Shit, I don't know. It's up there that way,” pointed north. I said, “How do you get there?” “Oh, I don't know. The trains don't run. Margaret J. Smith, senator, took the planes. I don't know how to get there.” I remembered my dad had been at a camp there in the ‘20s and always said how beautiful the coast of Maine was. Well knowing nothing about any of those other places, all inland, I said, “Would you rent me a car?” And I saw him … shape N-O in his mouth. And then he thought … and then I saw him think, “My God, this girl is so naive. She thinks she wants to go to Maine in January,” which is the slowest news bureau in the whole Northeast? “Yes,” he said, “I'll rent you a car.” So I went over and rented a big station wagon, that’s all they had, and drove up to Maine on the main highway from Baston to Potland. And halfway up there, as you come into New Hampshire, there is a sign over the highway there, the main... interstate. And it's still there I'm told, because I asked somebody recently, and it says “Maine, New Hampshire and points north.” Like you're going to the end of the earth. And I pedaled down and whipped up there and went into Portland. And I went to the Chamber of Commerce. I thought, “This is pretty smart, Judy, you find out … get all the brochures you can.” And I did. And then I said, “Now, how do you get to the coast?” “Well, you go down Congress Street, and you go left there, and you go down the hill, and you go over the bridge. You go out there, and then you'll be over there on the coast.” So I did. And there was nobody there. And it was afternoon in January, and the gray Atlantic is roiling in on the coast. And it's cold, and I'm sitting there at this little, beautiful inn. I think it's no doubt still there. It was an old inn, very popular place. But at that hour there was nobody there. And I actually ordered a martini. I didn't even drink martinis, I never did. But I had a martinis and some oysters. I thought that was rather sophisticated. And I thought, “Judy, you can't tell about a place on a visit like this. Either decide or not.” And I went back to Baston, and I said, “I'll take it.” And Stan Berens thought he’s died and gone to heaven. Best decision I ever made in my life. I was a single reporter in a small bureau in a big state, was on the Two to 11 p.m. shift, learned everything I ever knew about reporting. It's the best way to learn to be a journalist. Go get a job in a small bureau. Wire service is the best way to start ‘cause you cover everything. You know, from … well, when the snow would fall, we'd have to send wire stories down to Florida where they'd all fled saying, you know, “the snow on your roof is two feet high, you’d better get the guys in to clear it.” We'd send the stories down to Florida, you know. But then we had big stories, too. And of course, I was there for the ‘66 election. And that was Humphrey-Muskie versus Nixon again, I guess. Was that Nixon or was that… [Transcriber’s notes: J. Stanton Berens was long-time reporter and editor for United Press International in New England.; Margaret Madeline Chase Smith (1897-1995) was a U.S. senator from Maine from 1949-1973.]

JOHN: That would have been ‘68, I guess.

JUDITH: Oh, ’68, yeah. Then I covered the ’68 … ‘cause Muskie was the Veep, the candidate to Humphrey. And that big doings. By then, I was a third-year newsman, and I knew my way around. But I learned all how to do it, sitting there alone in the bureau. And I'd call up all the sheriffs. First thing you do is call all the sheriffs … to see what's on the bookings. “What do you got today?” And first time I called up, especially up north in those towns and cities up north, and there'd be a pause. And they'd say, “Are you a girl?” [Transcriber’s note: Vice President Hubert Humphrey ran for president in 1968 after incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew his bid for reelection to a second full term. He selected Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as his running mate.]

JOHN: [chuckles]

JUDITH: And I say, “Yup, I'm a girl.” “Well,” they'd say, “you come on up here, honey, we'll take you out in our snowmobile.” They'd just gotten snowmobiles. A wonderful invention, by the way, for places like Maine. For getting places you couldn't otherwise get. So I spent three and a quarter years there. And boy, did I learn from that.

JOHN: And what was it, just to conclude, so we can move on … your time as a journalist, what prompted you to decide, maybe I need to look for the next step in my life?

JUDITH: Well, I wanted to go to a bigger bureau, a bigger venue. A big newspaper, or a bigger bureau, wire service bureau. And I kept applying … because I spoke French quite well, and Italian and Spanish to some extent. I kept applying to the UPI Maine … New York-Maine, and saying, “Look, I'd like to move to a different bureau, and I’d like to be a foreign correspondent. I speak French, can you send me to Vietnam?” Well, they knew I didn't have the experience or the age or the, you know … I wasn't ready for those kinds of things, absolutely. And I knew that. But I thought, “Well, if I could just get into a bigger venue where I would have a chance to move up.” Because I, by then, was an accomplished and an experienced newsman. I was getting on to be a fourth year newsman by that time, and we called us men. And no, no. Thank God they didn't send me to ‘Nam. That would have been the end. That was awful duty. But several women had gone, and one had died. And I knew who these famous women were, and there were only two or three of ‘em in the whole news business of any consequence. And you never saw a woman talking on television in the ‘60s, for God's sake. And finally, during the ‘68 election these planes started rolling in from Washington, D.C., full of guys in pinstripe suits and carrying bulging briefcases. And they were the advance men for the politicians, you see, for Humphrey and Muskie and all the people. My God, I meant Lyndon Johnson, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson. I mean, people came in to campaign for Humphrey. So I would be in the news crowd that would sent over to cover the events, and I met all these people. And got to know Muskie, and have my famous story about seeing him holding a glass of brown milk at one of the events he was at. My dad had taught me, ‘cause father had an ulcer … and I had had a terrible ulcer in my 20s and I was convinced that acid had cured it. That's before we knew it was really a disease not a stress thing. But anyway, mine had cleared up and I kind of attributed it to relaxing so much, which probably was a factor from acid … but I knew from Daddy that you could still drink your scotch if you put it in milk if you had an ulcer. He'd taught me that early on when he had one. So I went up to Senator Muskie at this event and I said, “Senator, are you having scotch and milk?” And he scowled down at me from his 6 foot 5 and said, “How did you know?” And I told him the story about my dad. And he laughed, and he said, “Don't tell anybody.” And I didn't. In those days if it didn't affect your work and your public service, you didn't report things like that. But it's a great story. And Muskie always knew me very well. We worked very closely in the Senate when I ended up, you see working in the Senate on the same issues. 

JOHN: So concluding your time as a UPI reporter, your next step was the U.S. Senate, if I'm correct. How did you end up there? And as I understand, you worked from 1971 to ‘79 with Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin? How did you meet him, and how did you end up in that position? And then we'll go through some of the legislation that you that you worked on. [Transcriber’s note: Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005) served as governor of Wisconsin from 1959 to 1963 and later as a U.S. senator from Wisconsin from 1963 to 1981. Senator Nelson founded Earth Day, which began as a teach-in about environmental issues on April 22, 1970. Although known primarily for his environmental work, Nelson also was a leading consumer advocate, strong supporter of civil rights and civil liberties, and one of the early outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War.]

JUDITH: OK. Well, that was a very exciting and the most productive time of my life. But again, I was in a position … I had gotten a job … one of the fellows coming up to Maine took a liking to me and I to him. And so he said, “Well, Judy, come on down to Washington. We'll find you a job.” And in the ‘60s, you could get jobs much more easily. There wasn't as much competition.

JOHN: Was this one of the advance men?

JUDITH: Yes, he was an advance man for Muskie … for Humphrey actually. And he was a very bookish fellow. He produced a literary magazine and was in with the arts and stuff. And that was for me, and he highly intelligent. So he said, “Come on down to Washington and I'll introduce you to some people and we'll get you a job.” So by that time I was realizing that I wasn't going to be promoted at UPI. So I went down to Washington and, sure enough, I got a job briefly with a private agency that was just taking advantage of the first USAID money. Aid, foreign aid. See this is after ‘Nam, or it was during ‘Nam actually, we were still going through that. But it was the first time we were actually doing a whole lot of … we're starting our foreign aid program that this present president is killing. So, well, not bad for, what, 60 years almost, 58. And I hope it is reprieved, of course. And this was one of the companies that started up … these outfits were very smart. Said, “Oh, my God, we can get federal money to go do stuff in foreign countries and do projects.” And so they hired me because I had good news experience and it was professional. And I was to write grants. That was what it was, grants to get money. Well, I realized quickly that wasn't my forte and I didn't want to do that. So I soon got a job with the National Journal, a weekly news magazine that had started by people who split off from the Congressional Quarterly, which was a daily report of Congress's activities. And it was absolutely invaluable to Congress and lobbyists and companies and everybody following what was going on in Congress in great detail. But the National Journal had been started by a clever fellow who said, “Well, why don't we go do a more in-depth recording weekly” … or I think it was weekly, yeah … “of what's going on. And we'll do stories about the main issues of the week.” And that was definitely for me, and they hired me. My God, they couldn't believe they got … a skilled journalist. Because the guy who started it was a Yale guy, the bankroller. And he brought in a bunch of his chums from Yale, college classmates who hadn't ever seen a ticker tape and wouldn't know how to report their garden … But they did hire a large staff of qualified reporters. And all of us women, by the way, and there were about four or five of us, interestingly enough … I was interested to see how many there were. There were about 20, well, maybe 12 news people, 10 or 12 of us. But about four of us were women, professional reporter women. And I went to work for that outfit. It was headed by a former UPI reporter. So he knew my credentials, and I was perfectly qualified. So I was assigned all kinds of beats from education to consumer issues to agriculture. It was quite a variety, and I got a lot of knowledge about how the government worked and lobbyists worked and bills were moved through Congress. So, I got very good knowledge from that couple years at National Journal. But then... I was ready for another … I wanted a more meaningful and better-paid reporting job. And somebody said to me, by this time I knew quite a lot of people in Washington. I mean I'd met a lot of newsmen … a famous talking head on ABC was a friend and he'd refer me to people. And so people were nice, you know. They knew that I was qualified, and they knew that I wanted to move up. And by this time I'm in my 30s, I'm coming on to my 30s, and it was pretty clear that I wasn't at that moment in the marriage market. Although I was certainly looking around and wishing and thinking and hoping that some fellow with like-minded … the chap I went down to be with didn't work out. He kept disappearing over the hill. So I knew that wasn't going to work. So I … somebody, gosh, I wish I could remember who it was. Thank you, whoever you were, said, “Judy, there's a member of the U.S. Senate who wants to hire a legislative assistant who knows the health beat.” And that was one of my principal beats for the National Journal. And I had to ask what a legislative assistant meant, which is the staff person who does all the leg work and... crafting, drafting, conceiving and promoting bills in Congress. Laws. The one who does all the research. Well, that was for me. Because I realized I was a very good researcher, and I could ferret out information. And I knew people now enough to contact people in the agencies and in the Congress and in the news business … I had a lot of friends in the news business by then. And I said, “Well. He said, “You ought to go up and talk to him. He says he hires reporters.” So I said, “Well, I'll go up there. And if something happens, it'd be like going to a civics course for a couple of years, and then I can come back to being a reporter.” Which is what I wanted to do, I thought, be a journalist. And I also had in the back of my head write books. But I thought, “Well, as a journalist, you can write books on the side.” So I went up to the Hill and walked into Senator Gaylord Nelson's office. A nicer, more brilliant man I never met in my life. And he took one look at my CV, and he took a look at me, and he basically said, “You're hired.” And he did indeed hire reporters. He didn't hire lawyers, as most congressional members, do for legislative work. Gaylord Nelson very smartly hired reporters, because we could work fast, we could interpret information, we could explain it quickly, we could do a whole lot of tasks at the same time. And he knew that we could do these jobs better, and we could research. And lawyers took forever, wrote forever, and were terrible writers, which is all true. And by golly, he hired me on the spot. And I went back to the National Journal in one of the greatest memorable moments of my life. And I went to the head of the magazine, the UPI guy, who was a crusty old reporter … I just momentarily forget his name … and he was well-known, Milligan I think, he was well-known in his field … and he had a swivel chair with his back to me. And I said, “Mr. Milligan,” or whatever. I said, “You know, I'd like a raise. I can't even pay my gas bill.” And he just grumped with his back to me. He said, “No, we can't give you any raises.” By that time I'd learned, by the way, that the four women on the staff were being paid about one-fourth what the guys from Yale were getting, and they weren't doing any work. And the other men on the staff who were reporters. So I knew that was a big discrepancy there, and that didn't sit right at all. ‘Cause I had more experience than most of them, and in fact all four of us women had more experience than most of the guys on the staff. And I said, “OK, I quit.” And the guy turned, swirled around in that chair and looked at me, and said, “You can't quit.” And I said, “Yes, as of such and such a day.” And I walked out, and I took the job on the Hill. Of course, I knew I had the offer, so I had it in hand. But I wasn't sure that I wanted to leave journalism. And boy, was that a moment of truth. And not a week or so later, I left. And I cleared out my desk, and stood up to leave the office about noon. And do you know what? Every journalist, non-Yaleys, in that office stood up and walked out with me and took me to lunch. And I had tears in my eyes. Nobody had ever done that for me before. And they all stood up in support of me. And do know what, a few months after that the women got pay parity. So that was a moment of truth. And I went up to the Hill, and I took to that like a duck to water. But it was the research side that I love. I wasn't into the political side. But I was very tuned into it and what we were doing. But Senator Nelson, the man who invented Earth Day in 1970, still going 60 years on … he thought it would be like a Vietnam teach-in where a couple hundred students and campuses would come out. Two million people turned out that day, and it's still going 60 years later. Grace Cathedral spends a whole week doing Earth Day events. It's just fabulous. And young people don't even know his name, but he started it all. And that was just one of his issues. As the governor of Wisconsin, he's the guy who figured out the tax, sin tax idea, to help build parks in his state. He's the first man, first political, who said, “Look, let's tax cigarettes. We'll add a penny or a nickel to the package of cigarettes and we'll put it into a parks fund.” Wisconsin is full of parks paid for thanks to Gaylord Nelson’s sin tax. And every other state started adopting that bang on. And he had all these other wonderful things that he did. And so the environment was his main theme, but he also was the first man, just to finish, in the whole Congress who had ever been on both the authorizing and appropriating committees for major health issues like Social Security and Medicare, which had just been enacted in 1965. And good old southern Louisiana, Russell Long, senator, who Gaylord Nelson held his hand when he was an alcoholic for years, and Russell Long admired and respected him so much and was so grateful that when he was finally forced into putting a liberal on the Senate Finance Committee, the senate committee that handles the financing of all those things, tax-supported things ... whom did he pick but wonderful Gaylord Nelson, who was also a long-time member of the authorizing committee, then called Labor and Public Welfare … and they authorized all the money for HEW, Health Education and Welfare department and so on. There was no Environmental Department at that time, and there's no Education Department at that time. Education was in HEW.

JOHN:  So I think some of the legislation that you were involved with authoring or promoting included consumer bills of different kinds, consumer protection…

JUDITH: Oh, many, many consumer issues.

JOHN: Food additive-related…

JUDITH: Oh, man, a lot of food additives. Red Dye 2, Yellow 5, something green. And, of course, the FDA loved us because we were, Gaylord and I were the ones who were holding the hearings and saying this stuff is causing cancer, get it out.

JOHN: Interesting that that's back in the news.

JUDITH: Oh, it is. It's unbelievable.

JOHN: Medical devices.

JUDITH: That was the toughest thing I ever worked on, and we did lose a major part of that which was pre-market testing of the devices in bodies. Ergo, everybody's hips, shoulders … and heart pieces were still collapsing, and people were still dying of it because the industry refused to accept that part of the bill. And I was a major, major player, the major point person on that.

JOHN: Food labeling was another.

JUDITH: Oh, that was another one. All the industry went nuts. “Oh, it'll cost you. Food will cost all this money.” Now what would people do with labeling on their food?

JOHN: And you worked with, maybe in conjunction with or on the same side with, Ralph Nader on some of these issues?

JUDITH: Oh, very closely with Ralph. Because they were proposing a lot of these things, and Nelson was right on their wavelength. So we were a major point person for Ralph, if not the major one, in the Congress. In the House and Senate. And so we carried a lot bills for the consumer movement, and it was then, of course, that they were, those organizations were just starting out, you see. The environmental and the consumer movement organizations and non-profits were just starting out in the ‘70s to foster public support for a lot of these changes. [Transcriber’s note: Ralph Nader is a lawyer and political activist involved in consumer protection, environmentalism, and government reform causes. In the 1970s, Nader leveraged his growing popularity to establish a number of advocacy and watchdog groups including the Public Interest Research Group, the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen.]

JOHN: I'm wondering whether your own, if you don't mind talking about it a little bit … but you had some health problems of your own. I believe you had polio.

JUDITH: Ah!

JOHN: …whether this influenced your or made you more conscious of and interested in health-related issues.

JUDITH: Well, I was very interested in them, among other things, because I'd been raised in a surgeon's doctor's family, and had came from a long line of surgeons. My dad wanted me to be a nurse, and my mother famously rose up at the end of the table and said, “No daughter of mine's changing bedpans.” So that was the end in my medical career, as I say. But that was not my milieu, anyway.

JOHN: How did you come to meet James Watson?

JUDITH: Oh, the Nobelist! Well, that was a major issue. The first major bill that I worked on … although the first one that I authored was a national school bus safety act that required states to have safety standards for school buses. But the next one was the biggest health issue at the time, and it was Nixon's effort to have a moonshot to find a cure for cancer. And I got right onto that, because my Grandmother Kip had died of cancer, and my father as a result had become a pioneer in the use of radium and a pioneer surgeon in cancer. So I was very, very close to that subject and knew a lot about how it was treated and what it was about. And Father taught us it takes 25 years for things to show up. I knew … Father taught us many, many, things as a doctor that were very helpful in our lives. As I tell people at the hospital now, I know more than I'd like to know, but unfortunately I know all about it. Besides working on health policy for 20 years. So the moonshot was basically a move by a lot of for-profit hospital people like Sidney Farber and a guy in Texas who wanted to get more federal money into applied cancer research. I.e., start giving pills, and ointments, and da-da-da's, and surgeries. “Let's cure this stuff. Let's not spend so much money on basic.” There's basic and applied research in medical science. Basic research is to find out the root, the heart of the cause of things. What makes it tick. That's why DNA was such a breakthrough. Discovering what … because that's the root of the whole of life. That's the heart of life. And I had read Watson's book, of course. I was just fascinated by that discovery. I've always been fascinated.

JOHN: Double Helix?

JUDITH: The Double Helix. Which is what they realized … they got to the DNA discovery by doing this double helix. And he worked with three very famous British biomedical scientists. Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and a woman who sadly died of cancer in the course of their research in the 1950s, I think. And so we got James Watson down to testify about the vitalness of keeping funding for basic research. And what could you do better than to get a Nobel Prize winner who’s figured the whole bloody thing out with his colleagues than Jim Watson? And Nelson figured out a way to get him to testify before … he was chairman of the small business committee, but we found ways to find the niche that had a connection. There were companies, and one of them was, and you see it advertising public media now, Genentech. Two guys had founded Genentech. A funding guy and a scientist, the guy backing the scientists, just at that time. And they were just starting out, and they didn't have any money but they had an idea. And the scientist had figured something out that was very vital. So we linked this small business connection to the fact that this is something that would benefit the industries and businesses and so on. And we got Jim Watson down there. And oh he loved to testify. His ego was bigger than anything you ever saw in your life. And he comes down to Washington from Woods Hole, where he does all his scientific research. And he comes into the Senate office, and here's the famous Nobelist, he was all alone. And so I was called. “Get the girl.” The Senator would always say, “Get the girl.” So I put on my … you know, I wore high heels in those days. I went over these colonial stones from an office off the Hill, the top of that, to hobble … over the stones of the Senate office building. I went in there and said, “Senator, Dr. Watson's here, and he's going to testify, and will you take him to lunch in the dining room?” Senator just said, “Oh no, I'm too busy. You take him.” “I take him?” Well, the senators had to call down to the dining room to let anybody but a senator in there, least of all a girl staff. But he called down there, the secretary called and said, “Judy's bringing down a man guest.” So there we were in the Senate dining room. I with Dr. James Watson. And he had white hair. And every time he had a kind of an idea, his eyes would brighten. And I swear to God, his hair would stand up on his head. And I thought there's something that happens, some energy goes into his scalp. And so I know what they mean when they say his hair stood on end because I have seen it on the head of that famous scientist. And now and again, he was quite funny and he did all the talking, I was just nodding, yes, yes and doctor this and that. And he would crack a joke, and then he would laugh. And he had a mad scientist laugh that literally was like a cackle. He’d go, “hah-hah-hah-hah!” And all the old senators with their heads down in their bean soup would raise their heads up and look over and see “what's this girl doing here with that old man?” And they had no idea that it was the guy who had figured out DNA by which they were all alive. Anyway, it was one of the greatest moments of my life taking Dr. James Watson to lunch. And there's my book, which I carefully took with me that day, and had him sign. So that book was signed in the U.S. Senate dining room by Dr. Jim Watson. And we had him down several times, and he got to know me … same with Pete Seeger, you see. I got to know Pete Seeger like that. People would get to know me, and they'd call me up, you know, because I was a contact they could call on the phone. And they'd call me up. Pete Seeger came down several times and I got to know him. And we got him to testify on some environmental thing. And, yeah, you got to now these people. And you realize very quickly that everybody puts their pants on the same way, you know. [Transcriber’s notes: James Watson (1928-2025) was an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. In 1953, he and Francis Crick co-authored an academic paper in Nature proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, building on research by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.; The Double Helix is James D. Watson's 1968 autobiographical account of the discovery of the DNA double helix structure detailing the competitive race against other scientists like Rosalind Franklin.; Peter Seeger (1919-2014) was a singer, songwriter, musician and left-wing social activist. In the 1960s, Seeger emerged as a prominent singer of protest music in support of civil rights, anti-war and environmental causes.]

JOHN: It became clear to you, I think at some point, that maybe the tide was turning politically, that Nelson might have a tough election race in 1980 the…

JUDITH: No, I never thought he would … though the tide was definitely changing.

JOHN: You left the Senate in 1979, and you left why?

JUDITH: I realized Nelson was coming up for another election. It would have been his third term. And he was very, very popular in Wisconsin. And he was such a nice guy that he had never bothered to look into an opponent that had been put forward by some new right wing-ish Republican groups. A guy named Bob Kasten is his name, who was a banker, he worked in a bank. And Nelson had never taken the trouble to look into his background, whether he paid his taxes and all that. Turned out the scoundrel hadn't paid taxes and all kinds of things. And Nelson didn't badmouth him, as it were. And this guy won on the so-called Reagan sweep. Because ‘80 … ’79 was the year Reagan ran and became president in ‘80. And all these Republicans started flooding into Congress, and they were of the right wing stripe. And in fact, I think we lost the Senate then … I'm not sure exactly. But it was Reagan. And, of course, I was there during the first part of Reagan … We knew that he had Alzheimer's, you know. People in Washington knew, but it was not publicized. And we also knew that George H.W. Bush had a mistress. I have a great story about that in the book, too. That I was during my Senate years. And, you know, you knew all these things in Washington, inside the Beltway. But they didn't get outside the Beltway very well. Because reporters, you see, wouldn't badmouth them if it didn't affect their work. But I realized that I didn't … because I was into the research and the substance, the substantive part of legislating. I was not into campaigning and campaigns and the political maneuvering. And I decided I wanted to see if I seriously could start writing books. And I would like to go back to California and see if I could get a job where I could start writing books on the side. And I had researched a few book ideas, and I had some … all of which I discuss in my book. And so I decided to come to California and see If I could get a job. And, by golly, I got hired as an editorial writer on the Examiner. [Transcriber’s note: Robert Kasten Jr. is a Republican politician from Wisconsin who served as a U.S. Representative from 1975 to 1979 and as a U.S. Senator from 1981 to 1993.]

JOHN: So ‘79 you returned to San Francisco, and you had the job at the SF Examiner lined up in advance?

JUDITH: Yes, I came out here first and got a job. I wasn't going to go anywhere without a job. I also applied to the Miami Herald, which was a great paper. And they asked me to take a psychological test. That was a kind of a new thing that employers were doing. And the Miami Herald’s a Knight newspaper, a very big chain. And so it was like doing this corporate thing. And I said … they hired me, you know, they hired be to be an editorial writer on the Miami Herald. But there's just one little thing, you have to take this psychological test. Well, I didn't think there was anything wrong with me psychologically, and I don't think there was. Basically, I was hard working, honest. You know, never been in jail or any nuthouse or anything. And I said, “I'll think about it.” And I did overnight. I gave it a lot of thought. And I thought, “Oh, God, you'll probably lose the job if you won't take the test.” I knew that. And then I felt, “Well, also do I really want to go to Miami? I don't know Miami. You know, it's hot down there, I don't really like the people there. And I don't like the idea of this invasion in my personal life.” And the next morning, I said, “No, I won't take the job.” And he called back and said, “Well, it was withdrawn.” And it was just, thank God. And so I came out here and I got a job on the Ex. So they hired me on the spot, because the managing editor was Reg Murphy, who had just come from the Atlanta Constitution, was very well-respected. He knew what I was about, he was on my side politically I can tell, although we were nonpartisan in a way. And he hired me on the spot. [Transcriber’s note: John Reginald “Reg” Murphy (1934-2024) worked as an editor at The Atlanta Constitution and was publisher for both The San Francisco Examiner and The Baltimore Sun. He additionally served as president and CEO of the National Geographic Society from 1996 to 1998.]

JOHN: So as you write in your book, you drove across country. And as you crossed the bridge, you wept with joy to see the fog...

JUDITH: Oh, did I ever.

JOHN: To hear the fog horns and see the cable cars. Were you happy to be back in San Francisco?

JUDITH: Oh, yeah. But remember, coming out into the country was interesting. Because as I would stop overnight … and I took side roads because I wanted to do that. I wanted to drive in the side roads of America, across this great continent. And I would pull in, and I'd be going to a cafe for dinner. And I’d see all the men sitting at one table, and the rest of the people around. And I would listen and overhear what they were talking about. And they were not talking about the same thing we were talking inside the Beltway. And I realized there was a whole other world outside the Beltway. So that in itself was a very educational trip. But when Mother and I … and then I, you know, I'd helped very strongly get the access, the handicapped access law enacted … and going down to Wichita out of Kansas City coming west in the winter … I had so sprained my right ankle that I couldn't drive. And I had to get my mother to come down to Oklahoma City and pick me up. But when we rolled in coming in from Bakersfield and came up that slope from Oakland and I could see the fog coming across the Pacific and the towers of San Francisco and the, you know, the Coca-Cola sign, or the coffee, there was a coffee company.

JOHN: Mills, I think.

JUDITH: Mills coffee or something. [Transcriber’s note: Hills Bros. Coffee moved its operations to 2 Harrison Street in 1926, a Romanesque revival building that has since been converted to other uses. The Hills Bros. sign was historically a highly visible landmark for drivers on the Bay Bridge, and the company’s roasting operations once made the surrounding area smell like coffee.]

JOHN: Hamm's beer, Hamm's Brewing.

JUDITH: Yeah, the Hamm's, there was also Hamm's. And I knew this is where I wanted to be. And here I am today, 46 years later... [Transcriber’s note: Hamm’s Brewery was a significant landmark at 1550 Bryant Street, known for its giant neon beer glass sign that filled with light, visible across the city, operating from 1954 until closing in 1975.]

JOHN: So when you came back, San Francisco had just been through some pretty dark things with the Moscone-Milk assassinations and the Jonestown… what was the mood like in San Francisco?

JUDITH: It was very, very dour. And you could feel it. It permeated. It permeated the city. And, of course, we had to write, not only news stories, but editorials about these things. And the editorial page editor, ironically … the fireman, the deranged fireman who had murdered the Mayor Moscone and … Harvey Milk … he got off on what was called the Twinkies case. They said he was mentally disturbed, he'd been eating too many Twinkies, too much sugar. [Transcriber’s note: the so-called "Twinkie defense" refers to the controversial legal strategy used in the 1979 trial of Dan White, who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. His lawyers argued that White suffered diminished capacity as a result of his depression, a symptom of which was a change in diet from healthy food to Twinkies and other sugary foods. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder and served five years in prison.]

JOHN: Sugar high.

JUDITH: And my editorial page editor was so plump that his buttons literally were popping off of his shirts. And I thought, “Talk about eating too many Twinkies.” He and I did not get along because he, I realized quickly, had never worked with a woman.

JOHN: This was not Reg.

JUDITH: Not Reg Murphy, but the editorial page editor, who had been brought out from the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette. Well, what did he know about one San Francisco, California, or strong women who’d worked in the U.S. Senate writing the nation's laws for 10 years. And he kept assigning me these dumb stories. And I was full of things to write about. And I said, “Let's write about all these wonderful things we've been doing the last 10 years in the Congress, you know, all these laws and then, you know, advertise them to people and promote them so they get used to them. And finally [chuckles] I would come home from work a couple of times, and he insulted me publicly in staff meetings, you know, and insulted me because I spelled Dianne Feinstein with one N first. And I thought, “This is not a way to treat a colleague, a professional colleague, a woman.” I'd never been treated like that … So I knew that it wasn't going to work, and I was very disappointed because it was a great job, as I said, if you own the newspaper. And so I started putting the word out about doing something else, and came home a couple of nights in tears. And I had formed a rule years ago as a young woman, “If you don't like what you're gonna do that day when you get out of bed, it's time for a change.”

JOHN: Tell me … when you, getting away from work for a minute, to where you lived when you came back to San Francisco.

JUDITH: Well, that was fun because of the coincidence of meeting a famous person. I lived at the corner of Midway Alley and Francisco in the heart of North Beach, on the Bay slope side of Telegraph Hill. And I had funny situations ‘cause I had sold a little house in Virginia, and I had a little cash which had to be turned over. Well, I had a nice chunk of cash because … not in today's terms, but it was enough for me to buy another property. But you had to turn it over within a year or pay capital gains. So people … the realtor said … I said, “I wanted to get a little spot,” and I preferred to have one with a rental unit. Because I already had started to anticipate that I was probably gonna be on my own for the duration of my life. And I would need something when I had to retire. And I'd had a hard enough time in my life making a living, so I wanted a little sort of guaranteed income. Well, they started taking me all around. “Oh, you can't live in North Beach. The price is going to be too unaffordable. We're going to Noe Valley.” And I said, “Where is Noe Valley?” I'd never been there, I didn't know where it was. Well, we went over there and looked around. “No, no.” So finally, after about a couple of weeks of this, I told the realtors, “I didn't move 6,000 miles and change my life to live in Noe Valley. It's North Beach or nothing.” And, by golly, that was it. So I got very determined. And then I met, of course, the famous Ed Moose, who with Sam Deitsch owned the Washington Square Bar and Grill. [Transcriber’s note: Ed Moose, his wife Mary Etta and business partner Sam Deitsch opened the Washington Square Bar & Grill in 1973 and for the next 17 years it was a favorite gathering place for writers, journalists, politicians and musicians. The restaurant, located at Powell at Union streets, was sold to new owners in 2000.]

JOHN: Why don't we tell that story?

JUDITH: And I went in there one day, my newsman, Kansas City chum from high school, who was by then a well-known newsman in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said, “There's a bunch of people from St. Louis, Judy…” 

JOHN: Tell me just about like the Wash Bag, the Washington Square Bar and Grill.

JUDITH: Don't call it the Washbag first of all.

JOHN: [chuckles]

JUDITH: Oh, God, that's the most disgusting thing. And Caen, Herb Caen, called it that once, and everybody rose up in arms and said, “Never call it that.” Sam Dietsch, who was the son of a New York Garment District merchant and had money, and Ed Moose, who was a social worker out of St. Louis and loved sports, and Mary Etta, Italian maiden name Moose, had come out together because she was kind of hanging out, hoping for Ed. And the three of them came out here in, God, the early 1970s, to see what San Francisco was all about. Because it was cooking. I mean, from the jazz age, it had boomed. Art, entertainment, everything. It was a lovely place, weather was great, and it was hotter than hell in St. Louis, I can tell you that. They all tootled out here to check it out and said, “Ah, this is for us.” So they were here, and Ed was working as a social worker, Mary Etta was working with the famous, the guy who started Ramparts … that had a blind...

JOHN: Hinckle, Warren Hinckle. [Transcriber’s note: Warren Hinckle (1938-2016) was a San Francisco-based political journalist who is remembered for his tenure as editor of Ramparts magazine, turning a sleepy publication aimed at a liberal Catholic audience into a major galvanizing force of American radicalism during the Vietnam War era. Hinckle wore a black patch to cover an eye that was lost in his youth due to an archery accident.]

JUDITH: … Hinckle. And, you know, he lost an eye. And Warren had a basset hound, by the way, and I had a basset. So I had great fondness for Warren. He was a troubled man, but he had a wonderful basset hound … And she's working, and Sam's looking around where to spend some money. He, Sam Dietsch, owned a very famous bar in St. Louis called the Golden Eagle. And I was there several times, and they were bringing in entertainment. They gave the first hearings to people like Woody … the comedian Woody Allen, the filmmaker. When he was a comedy stand-up. Mary Etta had to put him up and feed him one time when he would perform at the Golden Eagle. And he was shy and scared. He was out of New York, he didn't know what the Midwest was. And Mary Etta said, “Well, we'll put him up.” And then she called her mother and said, “What do I feed them? I've got to have some people.” She said, “Chili. It's cheap.” So she cooked a big pot of chili, and Woody Allen arrived and said, “I don't eat chili.” So she gave him some crackers. She would tell this story. It's in my oral history of her, which is now in the archives. And, you know, people like that … Dillinger, the woman, the famous woman comedy gal…

JOHN: Phyllis Diller. [Transcriber’s note: Phyllis Diller (1917-2012) was a stand-up comedian, actress, author, musician and visual artist, best known for her eccentric stage persona, self-deprecating humor, wild hair and clothes, and exaggerated, cackling laugh. Diller made her professional stand-up debut in 1955 at The Purple Onion club in North Beach.]

JUDITH: Phyllis Diller. And Sam and Ed were sitting at a coffee shop in North Beach one day, and they had noticed this little apparently bar across the street from Washington Square on a side street, Mason, opposite a little triangular park. And it always was dark on the outside, but they’d see people coming and going in it. So they'd gone in it. And there was a pool table in there, and a long bar and they could get a cheap drink. And it had a small window. And the window was where the owner during Prohibition would look out the window to see who was there to be sure it was safe for him to come in. So the Italians could get through Prohibition ‘cause they were allowed to have and make wine … allegedly, for church use only. That's why all these houses like mine have basements with mud in them, so they could make one.

JOHN: Dirt floors to absorb the grape juice.

JUDITH: Well, anyway, they finally went in there, and the guy who owned it was called Pistola because he always had a pistol under the drawer, in a drawer under the bar. And they said … and the wife always, once a week she'd cook spaghetti, and they'd it off the pool table. And it was just a real old Italian dump. And they went in there one day and said, “Are you guys ever thinking of selling this place?” And the wife immediately spoke up and said, “Yes, we are. We're tired of it. How much would you want for it?” And they said … well, they didn't think very long. They said, “Well, $25,000.” This is … well, the early 1970s. And they, Sam and Ed, went down to the bank and borrowed immediately … well, Sam had credit, $25,000, and walked back and bought the joint. And they immediately cleaned it out and opened it up. “What do we call it?” And Sam was New York, he said, “I want to call it a bar and grill, let's call it the Washington Square Bar and Grill.” It became what my friend in St. Louis, who referred me said the Sardi’s. He said, “Gee, they're running a bar there, it's like the Sardi’s of San Francisco. Which, you know, Sardi’s was a famous … well, much fancier … and, by golly, it was where everybody went. I mean, you could sidle up to the bar and there'd be Tom Brokaw. Or there might be Walter Cronkite or Herb Caen. I mean, you know. Reporters loved it, so it was full of journalists. Politicians loved it ‘cause it was a full of people. People loved it cause it was jolly. Ed was a perfect publican. Glad-handing only if you were famous, I might add. So when I tottled in there the first time to introduce myself, I made it clear right off the bat that I was an editorial writer on the Examiner. And so Ed Moose, instead of staring off over to see who else was coming through the door, looked down at me from his 6 '5” height, said, “Oh yeah, you're a friend of Harper's, you know, blah-blah.” So he became friendly. And I told him I just moved there and that I was looking for a house and at some point I wanted to buy a house. And he said, “Well, we're going to sell ours one of these days…” “Well, could you let me know.” “Yeah, yeah.” And then I didn't hear. But I became a regular there because it was a great place to go, and it was very friendly and... [Transcriber’s note: Located at 234 West 44th Street since 1927, Sardi's is a legend in New York’s Theatre District. The restaurant is known for the caricatures of Broadway celebrities on its walls, of which there are over a thousand.]

JOHN: You were living in the neighborhood?

JUDITH: I was living and renting a place down in the corner of Midway and Francisco. Across the street from whom, to finish that part, lived Lawrence Ferlinghetti. And that's how I got to know Lawrence very, very well. We became good friends and we were close neighbors, and I knew him all through the rest of his life. And became very close to him … That was one of the things I was going to show you. I have his signature, and there's a whole, everything up there of his is signed. And all of my private notes from him to me are at the Bancroft … are in my papers at the University of California. I mean Kansas now. But anyway, a year later I still hadn't found a place. And I just knew there was something around here that would be affordable that my money would cover. And so I went back to Ed in the Washington Square, and I said, “Ed, I'm running out time to, you know, turn over my money. Are you still interested in selling your house?" And coincidentally, he said, “Yes, we're just moving around the corner to Powell.” They bought the building, three-story building opposite Washington Square … the playground. Just one door in from Lombard on Powell, facing west. “Yes,” he said. And then he looked back down at me, and he said, “And there'll be no realtors, and no this, and no fees, and no that and no that.” And I looked back at him and smiled and said to myself, “Ed Moose doesn't think girls can buy houses.” He said, “Come on Friday morning at 10 o'clock.” So that next few days later, I come over here and come up these stairs and into this room. There was a wall here. This is a 1907 immediate post-quake house, from the 1906 earthquake. There was four small rooms, two layers of curtains, an oversized stove with a big hood on it. Because Mary Etta fancied herself a great cook. And there was a, I'm sending it away this week, a window seat here … and things crowded literally to the ceiling. They had bought it in 1974, I think, and owned it for, what, those six years. And Sam Dietsch lived downstairs. He’d had the wisdom to take the wall out between the living room and the kitchen area. And I walked through it, and the sunlight now still penetrated through the curtains. It was the perfect size. It had a rental unit. It had a garden. And I said, “I'll take it.” And a week later, I owned the joint. It was one of those happy coincidences in which everything worked out fine. And Mary Etta and I became lifelong friends. And some years later, when I was walking with her up the street, I said, “You know, Mary Etta, I'm going to tell you, I don't think Ed thought I could buy this house.” She said, “You were right, Judy, he didn't.”

JOHN: [chuckles]

JUDITH: And when they walked in here the first time after I'd cleared it all out and had that … and I said, “Now, that's changed quite a bit, Mary Etta. I know it's your first nest when you married and everything.” “Oh, we want to come see it.” They walked upstairs, short little Mary Etta and six-feet-five Ed. And they just walked in and looked out where the wall had been at the view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay. And Ed looked out at her and laughed and said, “Mary Etta, do you think we should have taken that wall out?” Because she'd been aggravating for it the whole time. And he wouldn't move it because he wanted to sit in his room and read the paper while she was cooking in the kitchen. Isn't that a tale?

JOHN: [chuckles] Did Sam continue living downstairs?

JUDITH: He lived downstairs for about three months while he finished restoring the apartments in the building they bought.

JOHN: Oh, he bought the building with the Mooses?

JUDITH: Oh yeah, he was a partner in that. And he was partner in their second enterprise, which became Moose’s. And Sam was one of the partners there, as was Tom Brokaw, by the way, the great newsman. He was a partner, a silent partner in that episode. [Transcriber’s note: after selling the Washington Square Bar & Grill in 1990, Ed Moose, Mary Etta Moose and Sam Dietsch opened Moose’s across the park at 1652 Stockton Street. Famous for its high-quality food and lively atmosphere, Moose’s remained a popular destination until it closed around 2005. According to Judith, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, a regular visitor at the Washington Square Bar & Grill, was an investor in Moose’s. Ed Moose died in 2010 and Mary Etta died in 2023.]  

Third Interview Session Begins Here:

JOHN: Alright, this is Judith Robinson and John Doxey, session three. Today is August the 14th, 2025. Judith, you know, in one of our … I think it was the last session when we were talking about your period as a … on the editorial staff at the Examiner, San Francisco Examiner, I think we didn't talk about some of the folks that you had met in your … or got to know during that period. And in your memoir, you mention Kevin Starr and his wife becoming friends. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? [Transcriber’s note: Kevin Starr (1940-2017) was a historian and California’s state librarian from 1994 to 2004, best known for his multi-volume series on the history of California, collectively called Americans and the California Dream. From 1989 until his death in 2017, he was a professor at the University of Southern California.]

JUDITH: Well, that was a real treat because Kevin was writing a column for the Examiner. And here was this new girl and a woman who was on the…

JOHN: Maybe we should just go back and say who Kevin Starr was.

JUDITH: Oh, good point. Kevin Starr became the state librarian of California. But at the time, he was a professor of history, which he was for many, many years, but in Southern California. I think at UCLA, wasn't he? And he was highly, I think he might have written the first of what became a series of books of history about California, of California history. I have a couple of ‘em, I have all of his books. And he came down to the editorial … or up to the editorial page one day and he introduced himself. Or down in the newsroom. He said, “Oh, you're the new person” and everything, and we started chatting. And he was very warm, Kevin, a very warm person. Very friendly, and clearly bright as a dollar. And I was quickly apprised of who he was, that he was this well-known historian who did a column and all this. And somehow I mentioned my great-great-grandfather Bishop Kip, William Ingraham Kip, the Episcopal founding bishop of California in the Gold Rush. And Kevin just popped right out with he “knew all about Bishop Kip because he had included him in his first book of the history of California.” And he has a nice section, even though Kevin was a devout Catholic, but he certainly knew about Protestant Bishop Kip. And we just became instant friends. And that friendship went on for the duration of his too-short life. Because he became unfortunately obese and … developed accordingly heart problems, and we lost him too soon. But he and Sheila, his wife, would come over, and I'd invite ‘em for drinks. And often they would call me and say, “Can we come over and visit?” I was, of course, honored and delighted to have them. As Kevin got heavier, I have to say, I had to make sure he was sitting … because I had him to dinner a couple of times … I had make sure that he was in a very solid chair.

JOHN: [chuckles]

JUDITH: Because I didn't want the furniture collapsing under him. But it was quite funny. But we became really good close friends.

JOHN: Did he move up to San Francisco then at some point?

JUDITH: He always lived here, I think. He flew down to teach. As long as I knew him, for most of the time, I knew him they lived here. And they had two daughters. They were young girls at the time. And Sheila and he lived here, I don't remember where they lived. They ended up, when the girls were out of the nest and were married, they ended up in an apartment on Franklin Street, just a block up, I think, from the Haas-Lilienthal House. And I visited there. They had me to dinner there several times, and I would go there and visit with them. And anyway, we just became good friends, friends in history. And he mentored me and was complementary of the work I did, and was encouraging of me. So I treat him in my memory as a wonderful mentor and friend who was really very special. [Transcriber’s note: Located at 2007 Franklin Street, the Haas–Lilienthal House is a Victorian mansion built in 1886 for William and Bertha Haas. The building is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, and now serves as headquarters of the nonprofit San Francisco Heritage.]

JOHN: Did you cross paths at the Bancroft Library?

JUDITH: No, no, he was the state librarian.

JOHN: Yeah, but I assume he might have used that as a research…

JUDITH: Oh, yeah, he did. But we weren't sitting in the reading room together at any time. No, we didn't share doing those tasks. We shared an interest in those things. And of course, Kevin, who loved to hear himself talk, and he fortunately was wonderful to listen to, was just a font of information. So it was great to be around him. 

JOHN: Another person that you, I believe, got to know when you were at the Examiner is the former architecture critic, Allan Temko. [Transcriber’s note: Allan Temko (1924-2006) wrote architectural criticism for The San Francisco Chronicle from 1961 to 1993. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990.]

JUDITH: Oh, Allan! Allan was wonderful. Yes, Allan took a great interest in me, too. And … well, you know, I was kind of a novelty. And I think I was, as I said then, the first, last and perhaps only up ‘til then female editorial writer. So that was kind … and the fact that I'd worked in fact in the United States Senate for 10 plus years writing the nation's laws was impressive to these people. And they thought, “Well, she's the real deal, you know. We got something live from Washington, DC here, and we can see a little more of the world.” Because I realized right away when I moved back here in … 1979 that San Francisco was very islandic. In the sense California was a different country, and San Francisco a pocket in another world. And I had some very strange experiences … But Allan took a great interest in … he just loved to take me out to lunch and chat. And, of course, he also loved the sound of his own voice. But again, he was one of the most delightful, funniest, brightest people I ever met. So I was lucky in meeting people like that. Because the one thing I've often said when I left Washington, and I miss the most, was good intellectual conversation. And I wasn't getting that in San Francisco. I was kind of surprised at it. But people want to talk about their house in Tahoe and skiing and sailing, and they didn't have any interest in the rest of the world and how the nation was run. So it was quite an evolution. But Allan was great. And I have a lot in the book about him, because … he was very open about his life, and he wasn't the best of husbands. And he confessed it to me, you know, and his wife candidly, when he confided to her … as she or he was in their old age. And [s]he said, “Well,” he said, “I know I wasn't a very good husband.” She said, “Well, you were good enough.” I thought that was Allan all over, telling that story on himself. And they had a wonderful memorial for him. And I went to it. And, oh, man, there's a great story about him going with Ansel Adams down to Henry Miller's house in Big Sur. It's all in my memoir. That's a hilarious story, and how he got a photograph of Henry and deflated Henry Miller's ego big time. But, yeah, that was a special person that I met through the Examiner.

JOHN: It's a shame that things didn't work out there. So you mentioned ‘79, the year you came here from … after working in in the Senate for all those years. I believe it was ’79 … I mean many things happened as you reintroduced to San Francisco. But that's the year that you became connected to Telegraph Hill Dwellers, am I right?

JUDITH: Yes, yeah.

JOHN: You want to talk a little bit about that?

JUDITH: [here Judith repeats story of how she purchased her current home from Ed and Mary Etta Moose in 1980.] And one of the first things I did, the cottage house being, I'm fairly certain, on a Gold Rush site … on the west side of Telegraph Hill, right in the North Beach Telegraph Hill area, was somebody recruited me quickly to the Telegraph Hill Dwellers. And I immediately joined being an activist. But I'd never been active in a community. I'd been working nine-to-five jobs all of my life, and I had never been involved in a community the way the Dwellers were.

JOHN: Do you remember who it was?

JUDITH: Who recruited me? I don't. Because I was just starting to meet new people, and people were introducing me to people. So I just don't. But somebody said, “You know, Judy, there's this organization.” And I immediately joined, and they immediately made me secretary. I found out that was what they did. But it was the way to make you learn about the organization, and it was a good way to break you in. So for my first membership year I was secretary of the Dwellers. And we met often, always at people's houses. And one of them was an architect up the hill here on Chestnut named Herb Kosovitz. And it turned out that Herb and I had grown up a block from each other in Kansas City, Missouri. [Transcriber’s note: Herbert Kosovitz (1928-2014) grew up in Kansas City, came to UC Berkeley School of Architecture in 1952, and moved to San Francisco in 1956, where he practiced residential architecture until his retirement in 2008. He lived at 340 Chestnut Street on Telegraph Hill, and was active with neighborhood preservationist groups.]

JOHN: Wow.

JUDITH: Isn't that a coincidence? Herb was an architect. But his father worked for Standard Oil for many years, and they lived in Kansas City when he was growing up. And he'd gone to the neighboring public school to the one I went to, so we immediately had a good rapport. But I started meeting a whole lot of other people who were leaders in this organization, and I got very active in it. And over time I served in several positions. I was co-chair of the planning committee. I think I was sort of co-president, yes, I think that was it, with another man, and we shared duties. So I was quite active for it. Or for maybe 10 or 15 years.

JOHN: They probably benefited from your legislative experience.

JUDITH: Well, that was one of the reasons that they were so glad I was a part of it. But yes they did. And there's a very nice tribute to me that Herb Kosovitz's partner, by the way, John Dolan by name, wrote for the Semaphore of me, and how my legislative experience did help. ‘Cause I found myself going often down to City Hall, the planning committees and other committees and testifying on our behalf and the Dwellers. And it was all very amusing. And one of ‘em is the helping save the Malt Factory and keep the architectural...

JOHN: Yes, I would like to hear about that...

JUDITH: Oh, that's a really big…

JOHN: I believe you were on … was there a preservation committee or something that you were on…?

JUDITH: The planning committee, I think, was … that the Dwellers. But when I bought the house, you see, I was faced … this house that I have between Powell and Stockton is high enough that I can see the old malt factory, Bauer & Schweitzer malting house right in my view. And after about two years, about 1981 or ‘82 … I bought the house in 1980 … and there was a proposal to close the malt factory. Well, it actually would have been at least ‘82 because I remember the hop trains coming in and leaving the hops. And smelling them, being brewed in the malt factory, stewing up the juice that … they were selling and giving to Anchor Steam and all the beer companies...

JOHN: That's when there was still an active train coming along the…

JUDITH: Yes, it was a train that came down the Embarcadero. It turned left on Mason and right on Francisco, and then it backed down, and they let it … back down the Embarcadero. Those were bringing something like hops or whatever it was from the South, from Kentucky and places like that. And I would smell it every morning, and I could hear the trains come at 6 a.m. And then smell the brewing starting up, and these great, beautiful, fabulous, huge vats that were, in my view, in the rear. And they had, Bauer Schweitzer had a beautiful, huge bronze entryway door that was just magnificent. So a lot of us got together in the Dwellers and said, “My God, we've got to save some of the old, historic part of this malt factory.” [Transcriber’s note: The Bauer & Schweitzer Malting Company is a historical landmark building located at 530-550 Chestnut Street. After sustaining damage in the 1906 earthquake, owner George W. Bauer rebuilt the malt house in 1908 using concrete and steel girders. His company, Bauer & Schweitzer, continued to provide malt to Anchor Brewing Company and other Bay Area breweries until the 1960s and then supplied grain to nearby breweries until 1981. Following its closure in 1981, the building fell into disrepair and the site was converted into condominiums called North Beach Malt House, which hit the market in the early 2000s. Although some of the original structure was preserved, Judith points out that some of the two-story grain silos were removed.]

JOHN: So what was the plan that was threatening the...?

JUDITH: Oh, well, they were going to build high-end, which is what they did, high expensive condos. But they wanted to tear down the rather picturesque tower, as I recall. And I realized when I looked at the design, you know, I called it Moscow high-rises. It was going to be a big square, ugly building.

JOHN: Another Fontana Tower.

JUDITH: Yes, which, you know, that's what started they put the height limit on. Now, of course, the mayor is trying to take it off, and we're once again faced with a really horrendous fight. It's gonna be a duel to the end. But at the time … we, of course, did have the 40 feet height limit. But the Bauer & Schweitzer malt factory was taller because it had been there … well, it originated in the 1870s, I believe. And anyway, so we went … we got testimony, and I wrote it probably, and went down to the planning commission for the first hearing on preservation of the historic aspects of the malt factory. Put on my blue blazer and blue skirt and uniform as I called it to go testify. And in the Senate, we always required copies of testimony by every member, enough for every member of the committee. So you had to submit before you testified your testimony. So every committee member, every member of this Senate and the committee, would have the testimony on his desk right there when the testifier came up. And so I took 12 copies of it, or whatever they told me there was a number. And I had them all in my briefcase. And I walked into this room where I was directed in City Hall somewhere, and there was a table, a small table, with spilled coffee all over it, paper cups. A couple of people there in between things, and there were people milling about and pushing chairs and tables around. And there was no amphitheater effect or anything like that. It was … a messy-looking room, small. And someone looked up at me, and I was the only one in a jacket and skirt, and said, “Who are you? And why are you here?” And I said, “Well, I was Judith Robinson, and I'd come testify on behalf of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers about the malt factory.” And one of the fellows in the room said, “Oh, you were supposed to call me and have lunch with me.” Well, I considered that very unethical. It certainly wasn't … in the U.S. Senate, you didn't, you know, I never would do anything like that in the Senate ‘cause it was bordering on that being bought and sold by the advocate of some position. And anyway, I suddenly realized, “My God, this is the Planning Commission for one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” And I knew what I was in for after that. But that was my introduction to testifying before decision-makers in San Francisco.

JOHN: Were you able to testify that day?

JUDITH:  Yes, I made a persuasive … and we prevailed by the way. And we got historic preservation aspects of that thing, and they couldn't build a Hong Kong, or rather Moscow high-rise. They had to keep some of the old architectural integrity. Including the eight vats. But in the early 1990s … I went back to Washington and worked in the House for about … and lived in Washington three years. And when I came back, the malt factory had been sold, and all but two of the vats were gone. Because they had revisited the Planning Department, and they had allowed them to remove … six of them.

JOHN: You weren't there to jump in.

JUDITH: And nobody was looking after it, because I was the point person on that.

JOHN: Tell me about … who was Charlie Starbuck? [Transcriber’s note: Charlie Starbuck (1937-2021) was a Russian Hill tax attorney who became well-known for his prolific voluntarism, including planting trees for decades with San Francisco’s Friends of the Urban Forest and a term on the city’s planning commission in the 1970s under Mayor Moscone.]

JUDITH: Oh, Charlie was an absolute gem. He was out of Vermont, and he had a craggy face, and he looked like a Vermont New Englander. And he was brilliant, bright as a dollar. He was an accountant by trade and a lawyer. I think he also had a law degree. And he was on the Planning Committee, having been appointed by Mayor George Moscone. And, of course, the mayor had been murdered by the deranged fireman. And when I arrived in San Francisco, all these horrible, sad things were hanging over us, including the Jamestown and the death of all these people by this madman. And anyway, Charlie was the great preservationist of the Planning Committee. But he was so persuasive that he had influence on the committee, although he was often a lone voice. He had a license on the back of his bicycle. He was very environmentally involved and supportive. So he only rode a bike; he didn't drive a car emitting gas emissions. And on the back of the bike was something about … I’ve forgotten and it's a famous thing, it's in my book. But his license plate was something about smog free. [laughter] And he had a great sense of humor. So I got to know Charlie very well. And since I no longer was … and then, of course, I quit at the Examiner after about three years, and went off on my own and went to the San Francisco Foundation. So then I felt I no longer had to adhere to being nonpartisan, and so that's why I could become personal friends of people who had a point of view. And I let my point of view be known. So I was a great supporter of Charlie's, as the Dwellers were. He was he was our point person on the Planning Commission. Well, of course, when Mayor Feinstein replaced Moscone, she … as soon as his term ended, she threw him right off the board, and we knew what her stripes were. But I sometimes referred to Mayor Feinstein as a Republican in drag. But she on balance was right on the issues in the Senate anyway. But Charlie and I went … this is a good story about North Beach … he invited me to go a house right down the street here between Chestnut and Francisco, an apartment house, for a party where a famous … not cartoonist, artist, who painted psychedelic covers for records, he had a reputation, and I'm blanking on his name, he was of foreign extraction, German or something … and Charlie knew him. Charlie was a character, and he knew a lot of characters. And so he invited us, and I said, “Oh, that'll be interesting.” Because I had seen these record covers, and they were very psychedelic and beautiful. I thought, “Oh, how neat to meet the artist.” Well, we got over there, and we went into the ground floor of this apartment building, mid-block between Chestnut and Francisco. And somebody at the door said, “Well, you … go back there.” And then he said, “I think you want to take your shoes off. ‘Cause you're going to go down this ladder." And we said, “Why should we take our shoes off?” And he said, “You'll find out.” We took our shoes and climbed down a ladder and put our feet in the sand of North Beach. It was in the cellar, and still is, of that building.

JOHN: As it is in your building, too, isn't it?

JUDITH: Well, it's not the sand of North Beach, it’s the rock of Telegraph Hill. But, yes, I have a soft basement … so the Italians could make wine and not spill it on rugs or anything. Just soaks into the mud. But that literally is the sand of the beach. And half a block down is Water Street, and that's the water line.

JOHN: Right.

JUDITH: So that really brought that home about Telegraph Hill and North Beach. And you can probably still go in there and go down in that basement and put your feet in the sand of North Beach.

JOHN: That's a great story.

JUDITH: Isn't that a great story?

JOHN:  One other thing, since we referenced the year 1979, I believe that's the year that you began to get to know Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

JUDITH: Oh, yes, ‘cause I lived on Midway Alley across the street from him in the first year that I moved back. And that was very special.

JOHN: So he was a neighbor of yours?

JUDITH: Yeah, absolutely. He was right across the street at the corner of Midway Alley and Francisco. He lived there for years, and he lived there ‘til he died. At the age of 101, I think. Anyway … and I just finished reading his Little Boy, his last book that he actually dictated because he went blind, you see, in his last 10 years. But Lawrence, yes, lived across the street. And we just began to nod at each other, started talking and became friends right off the bat. And I hadn't known him in the ‘50s when I was in college because that wasn't my scene, and I just knew about the bookstore [City Lights]. But I had followed it with great interest because of it’s being this first paperback and all that I'd known in college. So that was an extra dividend, as my dad would say, in returning to San Francisco. And I actually … we became very well personally acquainted. I had him … we turned out to both be Aries birthdays, April birthdays. And I had him over to my apartment for a birthday gathering. I have pictures of him with kind of putting on funny hats and things. And he was very friendly and very nice to me. Obviously older, but very respectful of me. And then through my career, he was very supportive, he and Nancy Peters, who managed City Lights, of my books as I started. And several times they had book signings there, including the one I did for Phil Burton. And Willie Brown showed up for that, Mayor Brown, Assembly Speaker Brown, and things like that. And they were very supportive of my work. And Lawrence was always very respectful of me in that way. And we just became good personal friends. And I took him sailing in my sail canoe several times. That very one in the photograph up there on the far left, that's I with the 1917 E.M. White sail canoe. Probably the only one extant in the world now because E. M. Whites were made in near Bangor, Maine, or … Maine, and often by Indians. And that's a wooden canvas canoe, and it's an original E.M. White, and it’s dated 1917. It's now in the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. [Transcriber’s notes: Nancy Peters is a publisher, writer and co-owner with Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights.; The E.M. White Canoe Company was founded by Edwin White, who produced wood and canvas canoes from 1889 into the 1940s. White is considered one of the pioneers of wood and canvas canoe building and one of several prominent canoe builders in Maine.]

JOHN: Oh, really?

JUDITH: In the small boat collection … And the reason it's there, because when I called the small boat person whom I knew, Bill Doll by name I remember, and said, “Listen, I have … not gonna canoe anymore, and I've got a classic old American Indian-made, Maine-made E.M. White canoe. “Oh, that's great, Judy, but it's Maine, it's New England and it's not in California and it isn't relevant to our history.” And I suddenly thought, and then I said, “I took Lawrence Ferlinghetti sailing and it several times.” Pause. “I'll get back to you, Judy." Ten minutes later, he called back and said, “We'll take it.” And it's documented with some pictures of us in the canoe.

JOHN: Where did you go sailing?

JUDITH: Well, sail canoeing you have to be very careful around here. Because the winds would topple you over. We went close by here. Once we were … well, I would take it down to Aquatic Park and stay within the confines of the park, which is bounded. And with Lawrence, I think we sailed along the Sausalito waterfront one time. And then maybe … I took him out one time to Tomales Bay. I used to go over to Tomales Bay quite a bit and sail over there. That was a good place to sail ‘cause you could keep close to the shore and not have too much wind. It was hard to find places around the Bay here to sail ‘cause there was too much wind.

JOHN: Since you mentioned it, and since we're … doing a history right now for the THD Oral History Program, let's talk about your work first with Bancroft, and then also with the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Oral History program. I'm following in your footsteps, Judy. [Transcriber’s note: In the 1990s, Judith Robinson recorded a series of oral history interviews with aging Italian-Americans from North Beach in a project sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.]

JUDITH: Well, you sure are. And I'm very grateful and honored to be … to participate in it. I decided, having done by that time several histories of people in California, starting with the Hearst family, and then Phil Burton and Alan Cranston and my own grandfather … great-grandfather Bishop Kip, that you've got to … if anybody knew the subject of your biography personally, they had to be of an age. And in the case of Phoebe Hearst [chuckles] there were a few people alive when I started that biography in the early 1980s, who had known her. She died in 1917. But there were women students, for example, whom she had helped to pay for college for. And I found several of them. They were all, invariably, professionals: doctors, dentists, lawyers. And I found one was … a professor down at Stanford … and then I wanted to get her cousin. And I looked at the Chronicle newspaper, the Examiner one day and saw that her cousin who had managed her properties, and I knew he was still alive, had just died. I said, “Oh, my gosh, you lost that one.” And that would have been a big, big interviewee for her history. And I looked at the list of people I had to interview for her, and I said, “Start with the oldest one first.” And I called up a couple of these women … said I was “doing a biography of Phoebe Hearst and the family, would you be willing to talk to me?” “Oh, yes, deary. That'll be nice. You come around one day and have tea.” I said, “How about tomorrow morning at 11 a.m?” And I got ‘em all. And so that brought to my consciousness the importance of getting older people while they're still compos mentis and before they're gone forever. And I realized that North Beach had all these fabulous old Italians who had come here largely as immigrants themselves and built a life for themselves and now had families. And I thought, “Wow, what a colorful history.” And so I proposed to Bancroft Library that we do a series of oral histories of the Italians in North Beach. And they loved the idea, and they got a little stipend for me. And I made up a list, with the oldest first. And I started going through the list and doing these interviews. And I did almost 17 of them, starting with Thomas Cara, the man who brought to the West Coast anyway, and really largely to America, the first … coffee makers. What do you call them then, from Italy?

JOHN: The espresso maker.

JUDITH: The espresso machines. And he then had that wonderful shop on Pacific Avenue. And then I did Peter Macchiarini, who …I just found that picture of him yesterday … who proposed and started the North Beach Fair in the ‘50s. I did the man who had the wonderful clock on Columbus Avenue. The jeweler there. I did the woman, one of the first women bartenders, a gay woman here … in California. She was very much alive, and she lived right down the alley there off Stockton, behind the Bank of America. And I did a great furniture upholsterer. His family is still down on...

JOHN: Pisciotta.

JUDITH: Pisciotta. I did that family. And several other people. A woman who had gone to school and grown up with Joe DiMaggio. Tried to get DiMaggio, wrote him on Bancroft stationery. I privately got an address for him. He lived in Florida at the time … and this was in … I started these in the 1990s … I think mid-1990s, about ‘95 or ‘4, about that time. And Joe wasn't well. And … through my old news pals … and you keep that network going all your life, let me tell you … so a friend found a guy who had been a sports reporter and knew how to reach, kind of had an address for him. He said, “Don't tell where you got it.” So I wrote him a letter on Bancroft … you know, I made it very clear it was not to be about Marilyn Monroe. It was about his life. And then I got a call a couple of days later after he got the letter. And a nasty, nasty message. “This is Dominic DiMaggio,” his brother. “Who do you think you are? How'd you get this? Da-da-da-da-da.” Thinking that was a real invasive part of his privacy. And it was all very clear that that was not what was intended. Well, Joe then soon was gathered. And the city promptly named the playground for him. And do you know, I heard that Dominic tried to shake the city down for money to name the playground for Joe. So it was an interesting little sidebar.

JOHN: What a piece of work he was.

JUDITH: Yeah. But I did all of these wonderfully interesting oral histories, but nobody … Oh, the guy who has the Cavalli's bookstore, John Cavalli. It's a wonderful list, as you know.

JOHN: Dante Benedetti.

JUDITH: Oh, and Dante. Oh, my gosh, Dante was a wonderful … interviewee.

JOHN: Well, I feel like I know these same interviews very well because … and your voice is in my head, Judy, because I transcribed these.

JUDITH: I know and I'm very grateful.

JOHN: For a long time, these interviews were really just gathering dust…

JUDITH: Yeah, absolutely.

JOHN: …untranscribed. And so I'm glad that we have them now.

JUDITH: So then the Dwellers picked up on that, thank goodness, and maybe independently or whatever. And then they found out I had done all of these. But they agreed, and people like you volunteered, to transcribe … and mind you, mine were on tape, literally tape. And so you all had to transcribe ‘em. But you did get them converted, I think, to disk, and then more easily into computers.

JOHN: Correct.

JUDITH: I mean … transcribing takes twice as long as the interview, that's the real problem.

JOHN: At least twice as much.

JUDITH: At least. And so … I was very, very … and Bancroft, too. And now those oral histories like … the THDs are available in the public library and at Bancroft. And … we're getting wonderful preserved oral history of this area.

JOHN: Little by little.

JUDITH: Yeah, and I'm very proud to be a part of it, and I thank you for asking.

JOHN: We are happy to have you. What else? … I mean, we really should launch in soon to your writing projects. You've referenced them in pieces, but I mean you have now authored, I think, six books in total?

JUDITH: Eleven.

JOHN: I'm looking at your bookshelf now…

JUDITH: Yeah, they're not all up there.

JOHN: They're all not up there, so do you want to tell me what they are? Well, yeah.

JUDITH: Well, yeah. They're The Hearsts - An American Dynasty.

JOHN: And that was the first book?

JUDITH: That was my first book. I was the first one to go through Hearst papers that were coming into Bancroft Library. And that was very special. And it's still in print. I bought the copyright back from … in the end from the University of Delaware Press that … associated presses of that area published in hardcover. And then Avon Books published it in softcover, which was owned by the Hearsts. But a good publishing firm, very reputable. And I didn't … go through the file that much, but I think it sold 75 or 100,000 books in softcover.

JOHN: Great.

JUDITH: So that was a nice run. And then I bought the copyright, and I produced it under my imprimatur, Telegraph Hill Press. And I sold all of them, basically, to the Hearst San Simeon State Park. And they were still … every time somebody goes there, they tell me they still see the book there being sold. And that was published … I started in the early 1980s. It was published in 1991. And that's a funny story because...

JOHN: I think that involved a trip to Spain, didn't it?

JUDITH: Yeah, that did. I went to Spain to finish it because I realized you can't write books and do odd jobs at the same time. It just doesn't work. You have to concentrate. So I was halfway through it. I took a suitcase of clothes, a suitcase of files, and a manual typewriter, Hermes, and went to Spain where I had friends, and lived there for the better part of a year and finished the Hearst book over there. And I'd been … a mentor who helped set up the Institute for Historical Study, in which I became a founding member, said, “How long do you think it'll take you?” Well, as an old wire service newspaper person I said, “Oh, two years maybe.” I thought that was a long time. She said, “Come back to me in 10 years, Judy.” Ten years later the book was published … But I worked and, you know, I couldn't work every day consistently. You have to do that when you're doing a research project like these biographies I did. So then I got the hang of it, and then I did a biography of Phil Burton when he died. I was standing up there on where his statue now is. They flew two planeloads of … Members of Congress out here when he died to pay tribute…

JOHN: To Fort Mason where the statue is?

JUDITH: Where the statue is now. But it wasn't there then. Two planeloads of Members …  uppercase M … of Congress came out here to pay tribute. And Richard Conlon, I think, who was a Democratic … very big Democratic national party leader said, “Half of him, and the other have to be sure he's dead.” [laughter] Which I thought was appropriate because that was right. [Transcriber’s notes: Phillip Burton (1926-1983) served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1964 until his death in 1983, representing California’s 5th congressional district. During his time in Congress, Burton was known for his liberal views and his strong support for civil rights, environmental protection and social welfare programs. He played a key role in the creation of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) and was involved in the establishment of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Burton was a powerful figure in California politics, and he was known for his ability to build coalitions and get things done. Burton died in office in 1983, and was succeeded in Congress by his wife, Sala Burton, who served until her own death in 1987.; Richard P. Conlon was executive director of the Democratic Study Group in the House of Representatives.]

JOHN: What was it that gave you the impetus to do a book on Burton?

JUDITH: Well, this is it. I was standing there in this crowd and I had a lot of old friends there. Members of Congress and staff people and everything, and I was going around and I looked up and I thought, “Somebody ought to write a book about this guy.” ‘Cause I knew him very well in Congress...

JOHN: That’s what I was going to say. When you were working for Senator Nelson, you knew him...

JUDITH: I knew Phil very well. He was one of the cadre of hardcore liberals. Including Bob Kastenmeier  of Wisconsin. Fritz Mondale of Minnesota, Frank Church of Iowa. Oh, great guy, Birch Bayh. There was a wonderful, wonderful group of hardcore liberal Democrats. And a lot of us, the members of both houses, after hours people would go and have drinks with the Member and staff. And I, more often than not, was with a group of people, including Congressman Burton himself. And sometimes we'd repair to one of his staff … women's apartments down the street when they didn't want to sit at the Rotunda bar any longer or the Democratic Club, which was kind of seedy. And Phil would always take his shoes off. It was a famous thing he did. And I have a funny story in my book about it. But I knew Phil very well, and as you got to know members … and, you know, they called you Judy, and I called them Senator or Congressman. But I got to know Ted Kennedy very well. He got to know … he called me Judy, and we worked together. And so Phil was a character of great renown, and much admired by his admirers. And, of course, they're talking about gerrymandering now. Well, Phil was the master, not of gerrymandering but of getting it right, but very right. And he also tripled the size of the national park numbers … in America, beyond what Teddy Roosevelt had done. And people didn't realize he was a wonderful legislator. He knew how to negotiate. And I had admired him up close and personally. So that's what happened. Standing there on the grass, I can see it clear as day, listening to people's feelings, thinking somebody ought to write a book about … “Why not you, Judy?” And I had finished the first book, and I wanted to write another book. And that just dropped into my lap. And so I started doing it on my own. I didn't have a publisher or an agent or anything. And finally I got a publisher. Getting close to finishing it. Then I went back to Washington to help finish it, to get money, ‘cause I was running out of money. I went to work on the House side for Dave Obey. And the publisher went broke, the little publisher I had lined up. And Ab Mikva, congressman from Chicago, also a very good personal friend of mine, lived up the street from where I lived when I worked in the House. He called me, he was a judge, a superior court judge by then … he called me up and said, “Judy, there's some guy going around here saying he's writing a book about Phil.” My heart dropped, ‘cause I thought I was the only one doing it. And I had submitted it to Chronicle Books, and they had said, “Yes, this is something we're very interested in.” And then I didn't hear and I didn't hear and I didn't hear. They took my idea and gave it to a young reporter. And he was going around...

JOHN: The Chronicle did?

JUDITH: The Chronical Books, publishing arm...

JOHN: Did you know John Burton?

JUDITH: Oh, of course I know John very well. [Transcriber’s note: John Burton (1932-1925) had a long career in Democratic politics. He served as chair of the California Democratic Party, and also served in both houses of the California State Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives representing San Francisco-based districts. He is the brother of Phillip Burton.]

JOHN: You think he would have helped move things along?

JUDITH: No, no, John is not that sort of thing. He didn't do that kind of thing. But they were very cooperative. So anyway the upshot of it is that I ended up publishing it myself, and hundreds of copies sold out within six months. And I've never reprinted it but it's … now you can get a tidy sum of money for it if you want to because it's kind of rare. [chuckles] So that was a wonderful experience. And then Alan Cranston, because of the Phil Burton book … and by the way, the last line in the Phil Burton book … you see Phil's widow, Sala, succeeded him. And I had these wonderful interviews, including with Congresswoman from San Francisco Nancy Pelosi. And it was right off the floor of the House one day, and it went on for some hours. Because she kept running back and forth onto the floor, and then she'd come back and off we'd go again. And so I know Nancy very well, and I've been invited to her house to do for a book party with Joe Califano, former secretary of HEW, Health Education and Welfare. And she knows me personally. And she was appointed, basically, by Sala to succeed her when Sala was dying sadly of cancer. And the last line in the Phil Burton book is Sala telling Nancy Pelosi, “If you ever want to get attention, wear red.” And that’s … and I often would see Nancy when things were going badly or something, and she'd be wearing a bright red suit. And a couple of times I'd call up to leave a message saying, “I see you're wearing red.” Anyway, it was a little sidebar. But, yeah, it was … and see, as an editorial writer I met a lot of these [people] because they'd come to be interviewed and see if we'd endorse them. And I was a big advocate of a lot of ‘em. And they liked that from me, that there was an advocate on the editorial page of that … major other big paper here who understood their point of view. So they got to know me, and they'd call me up, you know, and say, “Judy, any possibility?” and stuff like that. So I got to know all the local pols pretty well.

JOHN: The Cranston book followed Phil?

JUDITH: Yes. Alan came to me, the Senator came to me. I knew him, you see, because of working with them in the Senate. He was one of the liberal gang, but not as much. And he didn't drink very much, so he wasn't part of our after-hours cocktails … as Phil Burton had been, and Gaylord sometimes … my Senator, Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day and all that. But...I’ve lost my train… [Transcriber’s note: Alan Cranston (1914-2000) was a Democratic politician who served as a U.S. Senator from California from 1969-1993.]

JOHN: Oh, yeah, the next book was when…

JUDITH: Oh, Alan Cranston’s book…

JOHN: What followed Alan? Was it NIH?

JUDITH: Yes. But Alan came to me and hired me to do it. And I said, “I'll only do it if you agree that it will be nonpartisan and that things will stay and” ... Alan did sadly die before the book was issued. And Stanford Press wanted it. They really wanted it ‘cause he had graduated from Stanford, and I thought, “Oh, that'd be great, a university press.” Well, they wanted me to literally cut three quarters of the book. And I thought, “I can't do that. It just will ruin it.” Because it was the only, and still is the only, biography of Alan. I went through all of his … I helped get his papers, and Burton's papers, to the Bancroft Library by the way. Because I knew their staffs. So when they both died, I was on the phone like bang-on saying, “Listen, get thy papers over there to Bancroft.” Where there's a huge cache of political papers, including Republicans like Nolan, Governor Knowland, and so on. And they all did that. Stanford wanted Alan's papers, but Bancroft pushed for ‘em because I put them onto it. And Bancroft got them. So they're over there at Bancroft with all those political papers. So I felt very proud of that. But anyway, I ended up having to publish that myself. And that was a bit of a do because I got no support from the Democratic Party. Unbelievable. Nobody helped me. Nobody promoted it. And I have had sales for years coming in, but I ended up giving a copy to every library in California and others. So that was not a good result commercially for me. Not that any books are. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti told me, “There's no money in books, Judy.” Boy, he's right about that ... Well, anyway, so then … I was hired to do the book about the National Institutes of Health being built up around the life of a woman named Florence Mahoney. And that's a heck of a story, and that got very good reviews in Washington. And that was published by an independent press fellow. And it sold out, and it had a good run. I don't know how much, many … but it got very good reviews from all the health reviewers, most all. [Transcriber’s note: Florence Stephenson Mahoney (1899-2002) was an unwavering advocate for national health research and programs who was instrumental in the growth of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services through which the federal government finances medical research.]

JOHN: Has it been re-issued…?

JUDITH: No, no, the poor chap who published them sadly died unexpectedly. And they closed the press down, and it was never reviewed. But I think the book is up there, Florence S. Mahoney and the Rise of the National Institutes of Health. The Francis Press. And then I did a series of histories, very detailed, about our family. And those … a couple of those are spiral-bound now, so they're not with the ones here on the shelf. But those are very viable histories of the Kip family, for which Kip’s Bay in Manhattan is named. That was our family farm in the 1600s. And the house stood on the corner of about 23rd and 3rd Avenue for 200 years, from 1650 to 1850. That was the Kip house. And I did a history of the Robinson family settling the Midwest. And the history of my New England ancestors is very full because it includes … well, 10 direct ancestors who were buried in King's Chapel Churchyard, Boston. Ingrahams, Lawrences …  well, Lawrences are buried in Long Island. But Ingrahams, and Greenleafs and Clapps. My mother's … what I came into the Colonial Dames is a Clapp line. Roger Clapp was a founder of Boston. So those are wonderful family histories, and I've written them up in a narrative form. And they're all in archives and museum libraries and that sort of thing. And then I went back to doing some publishable books, including … and then I did books for the Diocese of California. I did history of the Diocese of California. And then I did a whole biography of Grandfather Kip. And that's a good one, too, and gets into the family. The family had wonderfully interesting ancestors, including a great-great-grandmother who … it was her daughter who married Bishop Kip's son. This little boy over my head in the … we think that's Bishop Kip's son, William Ingram Junior. Kip Junior ... And then I've done the memoir.

JOHN: Right. Which came out, what was it last year, 2024?

JUDITH: ’23. ‘24, yeah.

JOHN: Speaking of family, it's an interesting kind of side note, I guess, that your relations, the Koch brothers and the America's Cup story. You want to tell that story?

JUDITH: Oh, yeah. I’m proud to be associated with them. And anybody who thinks badly of the Koch brothers I hope will rethink it because all four of them were absolutely brilliant, and they believed the same things that all Americans believe. We should be able to do the best we can with what we've got to work in America and take advantage of these freedoms. So I immediately stop people who start denigrating them. You don't have to agree with their political views, perhaps, but you can certainly agree with the basic bottom line is with their views. The so-called “Koch brothers,” in quotes, actually referred to two of four. And they were the boys that my father's sister had with the great oil inventor, oil man Fred Koch, who courted and married Aunt Mary Clementine Robinson in the ‘30s, driving up from Wichita to Kansas City in his Cadillac having invented a method for extracting oil and gas from the tundra, which he was hired by the Russians to teach them how to do it. And they're still doing it over there, by the way. And Aunt Mary told me great stories about living in Russia and what I should do. Even … she'd been there in the ‘30s, and when I went in 1974 they still applied. You know, she said, “Take chewing gum, the children love chewing gum.” It was OK to give them chewing gum. Things like … and “Take scented soap, and take something to put next to your nose for the stench.” And I did all of that, and the same things. And it absolutely saved my life a couple of times in a crowded...

JOHN: Did you grow up then with the Koch brothers?

JUDITH: Yes, yes, I grew up with them.

JOHN: Were there family events and so forth?

JUDITH: Oh yes, yes, we visited them regularly. They lived in Wichita. We lived in Kansas City. It's not that far. We went … Mother’s from Wichita, so there were double reasons. The Clapps lived in Wichita, and Aunt Mary and Uncle Fred lived there as well, ‘cause Fred for some reason settled there, I never quite understood why there, ‘cause he came from Texas, West Texas. But he built the firm there in Wichita. And, uh, she had four sons: Frederick Robinson Koch, who was actually gay but never came out. And he was the arts and intellectual one, and … restored hugely wonderful buildings in New York, Pittsburgh and Surrey, England. A Tudor mansion in Surrey, England that he restored. And a castle in Austria … [laughter] in Salzburg, Austria. And he was a great benefactor to things like the arts fairs in North Carolina, and the big one at Bayreuth in Germany and things like that. He was a great supporter of the arts and humanities. The second son was Charles, is Charles. Frederick we've lost. Now he was born … he was about four or five years older than I. And Charles, the second son, is the one who still runs Koch Oil or now Koch Industries. And he's two years older than I. And then she had twins, David and Bill. David Ganahl Koch and David Hamilton Koch and William Ingraham Koch. And Bill Koch, William Ingraham, won the America's Cup in 1992-3. There's a picture of me up there on the shelf and Billy, at the very moment the cup came onto the compound that day in San Diego, and they unlocked it from the courier's hands. They literally, the couriers who carry that 100-Guinea cup, they call it, it's not very big. It's about three feet tall, but it comes in a box and it's padlocked to the courier's arm. And they had just unlocked it and opened the box. And I handed the camera to a Blue Angel pilot, Navy pilot, and I have film, I've always taken film, said, “Take this picture.” And that's the very moment we opened the cup box up. And you can see how happy we were. [chuckles] But there we are, two cousins, first cousins.

JOHN: Was he actually on board?

JUDITH: No, no, he was sponsor of it. But he had the fabulous...

JOHN: He wasn't a Ted Turner type, who was actually at the helm?

JUDITH: No, no. Billy was not that kind of a … but he had the money to get the technology together that nobody else had done. He actually invented some carbon fiber cells ... But the Kochs were very good friends. Yes, we would go down in the summers. We'd go out to their … they had a small farm outside of Wichita and then a huge ranch in Montana, which Billy then inherited and built up. And father would go fishing and hunting in the ranch in Montana. And we'd go spend two weeks down in Wichita, you know, and go out to the Koch … ranch for a week or so. And they had a very lovely house in Wichita with a pool. They had swimming pool. And a full Tudor house, Charles still lives in it. So that was a lot of fun for us to go down to the Kochs ‘cause they had a nice little pool to play in.

JOHN: One thing we haven't talked about, Judy … I'm sorry, switching gears, just moving things along. But your re-entry to Congress. 1987, I believe it was?

JUDITH: Yes. No, it was ‘89.

JOHN: “89, OK. So you were in San Francisco, you were comfortably ensconced in your home that we're sitting in right now, and doing all these interesting projects. I don't know if we'll have a chance to talk about things like San Francisco Foundation and TURN. And you were involved very … you had your fingers in a lot of things. And meeting a lot of interesting people. But then what prompted you, what drew you back to Washington at that point?

JUDITH: Well, I needed to have a better, steady income.

JOHN: Ah, OK.

JUDITH: I needed to work. I needed an income. I wasn't making enough money freelancing. But I was working for things like … all good guys. TURN, with Sylvia Siegel who founded it and was a wonderful woman. The great consumer organization for … in fact, I'm being in touch with them on this dastardly effort that ATT is pushing to cut off our landlines. I still have a landline. And I worked for them and did a newsletter for them. And then I worked, yeah … for a brief time I … well, for about three years I worked with the San Francisco Foundation. And that was interesting in itself. I left the Examiner because I was tired of being insulted by the editorial page editor with his fat stomach buttons popping off who’d come from Little Rock and never dealt with a strong woman before in a professional way. So I went to the foundation and thought, “Well, this will be nice. I'll go see, give money to some of the causes that I helped write laws and created.” So that was very enlightening. And I did other freelance stuff like that. But I had to make money. So I went back. And Dave Obey of Wisconsin, great liberal guy and I had known well, personally as well, and … needed an L.A. And the time was right, so he hired me. [Transcriber’s notes: Sylvia Siegel (1918-2007) was a tireless crusader who founded the utility-battling consumer group TURN in 1973.; L.A. stands for legislative aide.; Dave Obey is a former politician who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Wisconsin’s 7th congressional district from 1969 to 2011. He is a member of the Democratic Party, and was one of the most liberal members of the House, viewing himself as a progressive in the tradition of Robert La Follette, per Wikipedia.]

JOHN: There was an opening on his staff?

JUDITH: Yeah, and to be an L.A., legislative assistant. But I found quickly that I was far too old for the staff by that time. I was about 10 or more years older than they. And they were just starting to use computers. They didn't like the idea of a typewriter in the room, it made noise. And they had no idea what I had done and what had gone on. And they said, “Well, there's a new health insurance thing they're going to propose here.” I said, “We did that in 1972.” They had no history about the … so I realized that didn't work out. And then I, you know, finally saw a psychologist. Because that was kind of a blow to me. And she says, “Not your fault, Judy. You did, you've done very well for yourself.” But she said, and then she finally said, “You know, I think you might be sun-deprived.” [chuckles] And I perked up my ears. I said, “You know you're right. I'm going back to California.”

JOHN: After how many years with Obey?

JUDITH: I was only with him two years about...

JOHN: In that time, though, I think you worked on some interesting legislative issues...

JUDITH: Oh, yeah. I did a couple of interesting things with them.

JOHN: Do you want to tell us about…?

JUDITH: Well, one of them that I remember vividly was I got a GAO report going. Members of Congress have to ask the Government Accounting Office to do these reports, but they willingly agreed. I realized that for years when I flew for the senator, for example, I often got sick. And I began to attribute it to airplanes, because it was always connected to an airplane trip. And I would get these lung infections. I was prone to ‘em. And so I finally thought about this thoroughly. And I said, “Why don't we do a GAO report on airline cabin pollution?” Wonderful idea. GAO loved it. Started in, got going. And they were working away at it. And of course, the airline stewardess unions were over the moon that somebody had finally taken an interest in this because they were sick all the time. And cheering me on and … the airlines got knowledge of it. I mean they were being interviewed by the Government Accounting. They knew something was up and bad. Well, they were told, you know, “We're doing this study of your cabin pollution.” And they got with it and began to deal and work with the FAA. So the GAO study was never published because the airlines made changes … major, major changes. Cleaned up the pipes, started putting more … they were saving money on gasoline by not putting fresh air through the cabin regularly, and things like that. So they completely changed the ventilation systems, the cabin circulation, air circulation. And the whole thing changed. But I was very proud of that.

JOHN: That's great. Such a big thing.

JUDITH: Yeah.

JOHN: I worry, though, that without having a GAO report that the airlines could backtrack at any time.

JUDITH: Oh, well. Of course, the FAA loved it, too. Because they were trying to force the airlines to clean up their act and weren't getting any cooperation. But the GAO report threatened them so severely that … well, the GAO report will be in the files. They just … it just didn't come out as a published report.

JOHN: When you went to Washington, back to Washington, did you find a renter for your home?

JUDITH: Yes. Yeah, I rented this house. And then I rented an apartment down the hill from the Capitol.

JOHN: So you came back to San Francisco in the early ‘90s?

JUDITH: Yes, ’91 about.

JOHN: And you've been back ever since.

JUDITH: Oh, absolutely.

JOHN: And you mentioned it a few minutes ago, and I don't know if this is something ... I know it's in your memoir ... I don't know if you're comfortable talking about it, but you did have a love interest.

JUDITH: Oh, I had a wonderful beau, yeah. Finally in my life I had a fellow that we were really compatible. He had a great sense of humor and was very witty. And I met him through the Westerners History Association, of which I am still a devoted member. But we are a very diminished band, to the point I don't know that we'll survive. But somebody said, “Judy, you know there's a Westerners Association, so you might want to come to the meeting.” And I did, and took on, joined them right away. And I met this young man. Well, he was my age, a little younger than I, five years I guess. And he was just great fun. And he was a member of E. Clampus Vitus, which is a men's organization and started in the Gold Rush. And I did research on newspapers in the 1850s, ‘51, ‘52, and E Clampus Vitus is mentioned. So it's all verified. But they were the contrarian men's group, mocking and making fun of things like the eagles and the beagles and the Masons and the bulubliwups and the woolywups. And the movie … my friend's nickname was Bud … the movie … Something your wagon. Count Your Wagons… [Transcriber’s notes: The Western History Association is a nonprofit organization founded in 1961.

The Western Historical Quarterly is the official journal of the WHA, presenting original articles dealing with the North American West—expansion and colonization, indigenous histories, regional studies (including western Canada, northern Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii), and transnational, comparative, and borderland histories.; The Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus (ECV), as mentioned earlier, is a fraternal organization dedicated to the preservation of the heritage of the Western U.S., especially the history of the area’s Mother Lode and gold mining regions.]

JOHN: Is that the one with Clint Eastwood in it?

JUDITH: Yes, that's his first movie.

JOHN: Gather Your Wagons? I know the one you’re talking about… [Transcriber’s note: Paint Your Wagon is a 1969 Western musical film starring Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg. The film was adapted from the 1951 musical of the same name by Lerner and Loewe.]

JUDITH: Well, anyway. It's a kind of a quasi-musical. But it it's about the Clampers. And the opening picture is “Nevada City, population drunk.” And Bud just loved that. And he was a devoted member of this band, which included in this chapter in the city professors at Berkeley and … oh, my God, a scientist Deke Sonnichsen. And he had been in the 82nd Airborne and jumped out of … planes in the war. And then he became a NASA scientist, and he helped fix the O-ring problem for the Space Shuttle. I mean that level of men. These were not just fellas sitting around drinking beer, I can tell you. They were all brilliant men. There are chapters all through California, and I can assure you the others are a different kind of cloth. They're mostly drinking beer in the Gold Country. But our … this chapter … and so Bud and I took up, and I would … and he'd take me to their … to their doings, they called them, doings up in Mariposa and Sonoma County. And they were just great fun, wonderfully interesting people and got me … it was another like Western Association. And the Clampers put plaques all over the state. And in fact, in North Beach, there's one on the old Saloon, right on Grant, just off Columbus. There's one down at the saloon at Pacific and Battery. [Transcriber’s note: per his obituary, Darrell (Deke) Sonnichsen (1931 – 2022) served in the 82nd Airborne Division in World War Two. He worked at Lockheed Missile & Space Company as an engineering coordinator for satellite projects from 1959 to 1992. He was a member of E Clampus Vitus, and in the mid 1980s he Deke became involved in anvil firing to the delight of onlookers on Memorial Day and Fourth of July celebrations.]

JOHN: Oh, the Old Ship Saloon? [Transcriber’s note: The Old Ship Saloon is a historic bar dating back to 1851, when it operated out of the side of a ship run aground until the wreckage was buried and the current structure was built on top of it. It is located at 298 Pacific Avenue in the Jackson Square neighborhood.]

JUDITH: The Old Ship. There's half a dozen through Chinatown … one is in Chinatown where the first pinball machine was invented. Things like that. And they have to be vetted by the people who allow them to be installed. And the state and the preservation people and … they look like state bronze plaques.

JOHN: Oh, I've seen them.

JUDITH: But the Clampers pay for them. And the latest one in the city that I know of is right on the ground at the very entrance … you walk over it to Sam's Grill on Bush Street. So next time you go to Sam’s Grill, look down and you'll see a marvelous little historic…

JOHN: It’s on the sidewalk?

JUDITH: It's on the sidewalk in that case. But Bud was just involved in it. And he was the so-called president, which they called the humbug, at the time I met him … of this chapter. And his … the humbugs pick two plaques. And … one of his was for San Quentin, which is a very historic … the plaques are about little-known people and events that aren't often well-known historically to people. So … Bud's plaque is at San Quentin. And the other one he picked was at the Cliff House. And that was for the ship Parallel that was sailing out the Golden Gate full of dynamite and lost wind. And they couldn't control it, and it had no engine. And I'm not sure exactly when, but it was late 19th century, I think. And it washed up on the rocks where the Cliff House was and blew up. And they heard it all the way to Stockton, California. [Transcriber’s note: Per Western Neighborhood Project, in the early morning of Sunday, January 16, 1887, an explosion occurred at Lands End that was so powerful it was felt as far away as Sacramento, Vacaville and San Jose. The source was a two-masted schooner named Parallel, that had been illegally packed at a San Francisco wharf with a dangerous cargo that included 40 tons of dynamite powder. Parallel was caught in a heavy swell and heading towards the shoreline near Lands End, and the crew, deciding that their ship was doomed and fearing detonation of its cargo, abandoned ship and hastily set off for shore in a rowboat.]

JOHN: Wow!

JUDITH: And Bud just loved that shit.

JOHN: Yeah, that's a good one.

JUDITH: And they would do things like fire anvils. That was a Gold Rush thing they'd do on holidays, like the 4th of July or Christmas. They'd put a stick of dynamite under an anvil and fire it. Well, you've gotta get a license to do that. And Deke Sonnichsen, the NASA scientist, had a license not only to blow up anvils, but to be a balloonist. Deke was a balloonist. And things like that. So I would go to these events and just see and hear all these wonderful stories. So, sadly, Bud had a congenital heart condition and died exactly the age of his father, 50. So I lost my pal.

JOHN: Aw. Yeah.

JUDITH: Yeah. But I sure had a good time.

JOHN: How long were you together?

JUDITH: Less than a year, and we lost him. But it was a fulsome year…

JOHN: Yeah.

JUDITH: … [chuckles] with wonderful memories.

JOHN: Well, we've covered a lot, Judith. It's been wonderful … maybe we should close with the title of your book, which is Memoir of a Reluctant Debutante...

JUDITH: [chuckles] Or?

JOHN: Or When in Danger Breathe. Would you like to describe what that refers to?

JUDITH: Yes, I will. That refers to my being a reluctant debutante out of Kansas City who had a very, very interesting life and went all over parts of the world just fulfilling amazing dreams. But the subtitle … the other part of the title, “Or When in Danger Breathe,” refers to taking LSD. And I had the great, as it turned out, privilege of being with Timothy Leary and taking magic mushrooms, the first time any of us took them up here in North America basically, in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1960 when I was a junior at the University of California, Berkeley. And that's a tale that is told in the book. But the breathing actually was mushrooms that Tim and I took then, and then I later took psilocybin and LSD. Following Tim's rules very carefully. Not the way that awful Ken Kesey did was dropping acid running around in a bus. And that's not the way to expand your mind. And he realized that this was a powerful, powerful thing, drug, and that the ancients had known about … all these many years. And so Tim and his immediate sidekicks when at Harvard, wrote a very good book, which is right there to your left, Psychedelic Experience. And that tells you the rules you should follow when you take mind-expanding drugs, and I have adhered to them. I took acid about four times … but in the first trip I took, I held my breath for a very … and I had a companion. One of the rules that the ancients tell you is you have to have a companion on this journey. You're taking a trip journey. You've got to have liquid, water and some sustenance and a quiet and peaceful environment. And I had a companion watching me who was not taking anything, and following Tim's rules very thoroughly. And I held my breath for such a long time that he afterward told me, “I was just about to touch you and see if you were alright.” And I let out this long deep breath. Well, I'm convinced, and I'm sure that I was reliving my birth experience, I was going down the birth canal. And when I came out into the light, I let out this breath. And I afterwards called my mother, and I said, “Mother, can you tell me about my birth?” And she just blurted out, “Oh, no, we don't talk about that.” So that piqued my curiosity right then. And I said, “Well, just tell me a little something, just a little something. Because people didn't talk about these things openly in the 1940s, ‘50s. Mind you, I was born in 1939. And finally she said, “Well, you were a blue baby, and you nearly died.” And that's what I... [Transcriber’s note: The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (commonly referred to as The Psychedelic Experience) is a 1964 book about using psychedelic drugs that was coauthored by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert. All three authors had taken part in research investigating the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin and mescaline in addition to the ability of these substances to sometimes induce religious and mystical states of consciousness.]

JOHN: Meaning the umbilical cord was around your neck…?

JUDITH: Yes. And they saved me, and I got through it fine. And here I am 86 years on and doing very nicely, thank you. But that's what the breathing refers to. “When in danger.” So after that, I always said, “Well, when in danger breathe.” Always … and I tell people, “Drop your shoulders and take deep breaths.” It's the most wonderful way to relax … you can do. But that’s what the other part of the title refers to. [laughter]

JOHN: I'm glad you didn't become a … that you didn’t follow the debutante path that had been laid out for you.

JUDITH: No, it was not to be. It was not be. But I have only the greatest gratefulness for the life that I was born into and privileged to enjoy. With wonderful parents. Patient, loving, forgiving, tolerant parents. Although … and an environment that was peaceful. There was never any quarreling, no fighting, the family got along. And then to have wonderful education, from kindergarten through university. So that's the greatest thing. And I fathomed … a rule very early on: if everybody's educated, you at least have a shot at getting through life reasonably well. You've got to be educated. And that's why it doesn't matter what color, size, shape or whatever you are, you've got to be educated. And I deplore the lack of proper education now, as I told you. And that's the bottom line. And I've learned … you know, I have stipulated in my legacies that money will go to programs, particularly for Blacks, to encourage them to go on to college. Because that's the way you do it, you get educated. And I have a wonderful thing that a cousin, Dr. Art Robinson, gave me, and he had on his desk all his life: “I am still learning.” That's Socrates, of course. But that's it. Every day, I just love if there's something new. You know, if you learn something new every day, “Boy, what a day!” Go to bed with a smile on your face.

JOHN: Do you have any more projects or things you'd like to do?

JUDITH: Yes, I want to write my Clapp family history in detail. I've done masses of research. I'm terribly fearful I may not get to it. But I've cleared out my house so thoroughly now I don't have any more excuses. But I want do it. I mean, I've never had a problem with writing. I go to the desk and do it. And I always tell people, you know, “Just go write it down and worry about editing it later. But put your fingers on the keys.” And the Clapp family is just a fascinating story. I've done all the research in Massachusetts and England ... So it's just been a wonderfully interesting history, my family history. As I say, I used to open talks and said, “They are futurists and pastoralists, and I'm definitely the latter.” [laughter]

JOHN: Well, it's been terrific, Judy. Should we call it a day? Call it a wrap?

JUDITH: I'll wrap.

JOHN: OK.

[END]