Education & Job History
Ray School kindergarden-8, Hyde Park High 9-12 grade, U. Of Wisconsin Madison, Economics with a speciality in City Planning, summer camp counselor, City Planner and then Case Worker for Westchester County, 1965-67, CUNY Hunter College 1967-9 MUP and worked as a City Planner part-time. 1970-80 Santa Clara County, classes in carpentry 1970-71, drove a school bus, handy person, Marin County 1971-2 & SF 1973-5 as a planner, + re-license 13 Head Start sites as a contractor 1976. 1977-1980 a variety of jobs including + calculating the lost income from a VW having hit a cow, canvassing for a good cause, doing a fund raiser to secure the Berkeley Oakland women’s center, census taker, handi-person. Choose carpentry as my second career. Did small maintenance and remodeling jobs 1980-1984, and took classes in carpentry 1980-82, added an employee 1984, then continued doing remodeling projects as a building contractor 1987 – 2014
Here is additional information that is not integrated into the Autobiography above.
Arlene Slaughter offered to be my mentor. In the early 1950’s she had taken on challenging the racial based restrictive covenants still being enforced by the local realtors. In the late 1970’s she purchased a house with a swimming pool, offered me access, and then we would hang out when I was there. This went on for over 10 years.
Arlene Slaughter, realtor, got 5 buildings purchased by women’s communities –
BWHC (Berkeley Women’s Health Collective), the
Berkeley/Oakland Women’s Shelter,
the bar and entertainment center (Ollie’s at 41st and Telegraph),
Pacific Center for LGBT people, and
The residence of the two women who owned the Women’s Bookstore, a Women’s Place.
It took many negotiations, and good math to convince the former owners of these buildings that it was financially viable to sell them to her non-traditional clients. I regret that I had not arranged to tell this story at her memorial, because no one else told it.
It turns out out that the down payment for the Berkeley/Oakland Women’s Shelter on Shattuck and 65th St. was a temporary loan. So Arlene found a conservative leader in the community, Carol Sibley, who was willing to be honored, as well as herself, in a fund-raising dinner. Then she recruited me, Spring, and I found a second woman, Linda Goldman Laviolette, to raise money to repay the woman who had made the temporary loan. We had a successful event, and the building was secured for the long term. Over 400 people attended the event at Goodman Hall in Jack London Square on November 8, 1979. In addition, there were about a dozen corporate sponsors of the event.
The women and children served were victims of domestic violence.
Much to all our surprise, having a women's shelter for victims of domestic violence turned out to be relevant to Arlene at the end of her life. She died in 1988, killed by her boyfriend. She had functioned as my mentor, had moved to a new house to have a swimming pool so she and I (Spring F.) could swim there. When I hung out with her for a few minutes the day before her death, before swimming in her pool, it felt like she had given up wanting to live. She had been in deep chronic physical pain and she needed to protect herself from her former lover.
She had a restraining order to keep him away from her. She had stayed in my house for a week and then friends had stayed with her at her own house the next week, which was her last. But she turned them down on that fateful night, and her former lover managed to get in and then killed her with an ax.
Arlene was a Jewish woman once married to a Black man; they had two bi-racial daughters together. When she could not buy a house in North Oakland due to mixed race laws in the mid 1950s, she decided to take on the obsolete protective covenants.
What follows is additional information about me that I pulled out of an earlier draft of my Life Story
Then lower down I have also cut and pasted in the text about my uncle Daniel Friedlaender (the ae is correct) who was gay and killed himself at 18, and Bisexual in 70’sSpringF from an interview with Carolyn Arnold.
How I used to describe myself:
I am an international cosmopolitan person. My cosmopolitan sensibilities evolved from the European progressive and Jewish values imbibed in me by my parents, and my own moving to a variety of American cities and traveling abroad enough to get a deep sense of the varieties of cultures.
I have been tracking current news by reading “The Week” for decades. I moved from Chicago (the Hyde Park neighborhood – the only non-machine political district out of 50 in the corrupt political run city), to Madison, Wisconsin (with a tradition of struggle between the Right and the Progressives) to Manhattan, where I enjoyed the quick pace, but acknowledged I could not keep it up long-term and I wanted more of a community base that legitimized shared access to the expansiveness of urban/wilderness outdoor spaces. I settled down in moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland, CA., in the East Bay.
I would also describe myself as a Burning Soul who has engaged in, nurtured, and supported collective housing. I have also been described as a Jewish progressive, “green” house remodeler, local activist, a feminist, active networker, employer, job-sharer, and a walker in nature with a healthy lifestyle. I have been involved in movements all my life evolving from peace, to folk, civil rights, anti-war, feminist, bisexual, right livelihood, trades women, and sustainable movements.
I am an international cosmopolitan person. My cosmopolitan sensibilities evolved while living in a variety of cities and traveling abroad enough to get a deep sense of the varied values available in a culture. I moved from Chicago :Hyde Park – the only non political machine ward out of 50 in the machine run city: to Madison, Wisconsin, with a tradition of struggle between the Right and the Progressives; to Manhattan, where I enjoyed the quick pace, but acknowledged I could not keep it up long term, and I wanted more of a community base that legitimized shared access to the expansiveness of urban/wilderness outdoor spaces; to the San Francisco Bay area.
I have described myself as a Burning Soul who engages in, nurtures, and supports collective housing development. I have also been described as a Jewish progressive old-timer, “green” house remodeler, local activist, a feminist, active networker, employer, job-sharer, and a walker in nature. I have been involved in peace, folk, civil rights, anti-war, feminist, bisexual, right livelihood, trades women, and sustainable movements.
As a Jew the Last Monday Club, an Oakland based business women’s group, helped me shift my image from being the other to being included in “white” society during my lifetime. I got it when Robbie Kingston had her sister speak on the Holocaust in 1987 and I reached out to the other Jews who had attended from synagogue based groups to say that LMC had fully included me. My father’s warning about needing to protect myself by expecting anti-antisemitism was no longer true, at least here in the San Francisco Bay Area as explained in the 2013 movie “American Jerusalem”. My view of and how I function in the world is very influenced by my Jewishness. I continue to be both consciously anti-racist and anti-classism.
What follows is information relevant to who I have been from an interview with Rose Tully in 2011: She interviewed me but did not use this information to modify my chapter titled “My choices --- herstory creating family/relationships” on being bi. for a book published by the lesbian writers group. “The (In)Visible Memoirs Project, Voices from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,and Transgender Women Writers of Strawberry Creek Lodge and Openhouse, Volume 7: My Heart Is A Plum And I know Freedom, 2011 ISSN 2150-0819 (print) ISSN 2150-3346 (on line)
Rose Tully: So what specific exercises do you do to manage your ADHD?
Spring Friedlander: Exercise efficiently. Walking with trekking poles, or swimming, or bicycling outside are my three main exercises. Most of these involve nature. Since I like company, I take the effort to meet up with somebody and make sure we’re rendezvousing. I’ve never explored medication. ADHD wasn’t diagnosed in adults until ‘96, I was born in ‘43.
RT: What is great about your house?
SF: Can’t walk in the front door without people saying it’s great. We have streams 200 feet down; the house wasn’t remodeled before I got my paws on it, so it didn’t have a lot of features that had to be recreated. It was a physically intact house that has been improved by yours truly. It still feels like a craftsman, which is an accomplishment. This whole district is semi-designated by the City of Oakland as a historic district.
RT: What do you love most about your house?
SF: The people in it. The fact that we’re intergenerational. We have someone from every decade between 0 and 60s in our house and we’re all here to function as an intentional family. We find people these days on Craigslist.
RT: One of the things you talk about with your house is that you eat excellent food.
SF: It’s organic, fresh, well-flavored, well-presented. We share eating it. If we’re coherent enough, we do a yum, as opposed to an om, in order to resonate with each other, led by the six year olds, and then we harmonize, and then we have a custom-made lazy-Susan in the center of the table and serve ourselves and each other depending upon the nature of the food and how many are at the table, and then we eat and we usually have a flow between one conversation and several, and when we’re real together, we do things like what we call the green box which is who’s is this does anyone want it box, and we do roses and thorns, and we tend to do that, which is things you like or don’t like about your day, we tend to do that about ¾ through the meal, when the kids have eaten enough and getting distracted isn’t too serious, but it’s still there. And then we clean up and the cooks are exempt but everybody else chips in. We get most of our food from the Berkeley Bowl and our backyard. We grow fruit trees, rosemary and blackberry patches, and then whatever seasonal vegetables are in good supply. Right now it’s kale, collards, spinach.
RT: Tell me about your parents.
SF: My father was very involved with the family and involved with us as children. “My Life on Three Continents” is the book my father Ben M Friedlander wrote about his life. Mother was involved in the local school and in politics. “The role of the younger generation is to keep the older generation up to date.” That is a quote, said regularly at appropriate moments when we were growing up. My whole being bisexual is like, “All right, we’ll deal with it.” They didn’t do a very graceful job of it, but it turned out that this was due to family dynamics around my gay uncle who jumped to his death as much as me. Generally, they were accepting of my dating women. (met a few of the women I dated, went on vacation with me and one of my lovers, let me talk about being bi.) But they were not willing to lobby his family to accept me as bi-sexual.
In terms of just day to day what it takes to run a household, my father was competent, and my mother was slightly incompetent, and so I got to have a model of the man chips in and the model of as a woman you have choices of what you do or don’t do when it comes to the household.
RT: When did you come out? SF: ‘71.
RT: So 1971 was a very big year for you?
SF: It was after a women’s studies class I solidified my choice as a single woman who dated people. I went click. I was at a party for San Francisco Sex Information which was called Fort Help, a big warehouse in the SOMA area of San Francisco, back in the day when people were taking over warehouses to live in, and this lesbian was there speaking and she said, “Well you know what the logical conclusion of love is ?” and I go, “Bong, oh, that’s right. It’s me.” I was clearer than a flash that I would have been bi from the beginning. There was a certain line that you wouldn’t go over if you wanted to be a part of society. I went to my mother while in Highschool and said what’s going on, and she said, well you’ll get around to liking guys, and I did, which made me heterosexual. San Francisco Sex Information, sex positive community, which you may be familiar with. It’s one of the two sex switchboards that remains nationally. There were a lot of switchboards to answer people’s questions about sex. Because one of the ways we can empower ourselves is sex, the other being money, it’s the two forbidden topics in this culture.
I was 13 and walking home from school with my girlfriend and we were holding hands and clearly bonded, there was an apartment building we were walking past in my neighborhood, it’s probably still there. I remember getting this psychic verbal message from this unseen person who’s clearly female, saying if you were in any other neighborhood, you couldn’t do this. So I got that clue at that age, so that same woman who I’d been holding hands with, we stayed good friends and when I was 19, she’d gone off to Oberlin and I’d gone to the U. of Wisconsin. Long before I came out, she comes to me and sets me up in this totally romantic setting on the lake, Lake Michigan, on a rock in the lake, to propose to me. Well, by that time I started dating guys. And so I was babbling about these guys I was dating and so she never proposed to me. And she went off and became the female version of a monk in Germany.
RT: What would you have said?
SF: I probably would have said no. It never occurred to me that she would be proposing to me as partner/lover until I came out, so I missed the message behind it on some level even though I got the basic essence of it and it wasn’t until I came out that I said oh shit, from 13 until 19 I had this person in my life who if times had been different, I would have been partnered with. She never did say it, I was trying to get it out of her, it was clear she had something to say, but she didn’t say it.
And before I came out, there was a psychodrama group through the free university in Palo Alto. At the time I was living in San Jose and I would go up to Palo Alto for my social life. It would be like 45 of us for the weekend, doing sleep deprivation to really get down to what your feelings were. So at the end of the weekend, we’re laying around debriefing, and this couple, heterosexual, is lying in each other’s arms and the woman is saying You’re in danger of making a decision. She said, So what’s behind your decision to be a career woman as opposed to a wife? And I hadn’t fully made the decision yet. And she was clearly warning me about this decision.
I went to where an affinity group was being formed around fighting nuclear power plants in the late 70s. It felt like it was time for me to return to having men in my life other than at work. I thought. I go to the Unitarian church in San Francisco and they’re forming affinity groups, and the leadership team is a man on one side and a woman on the other side. Their verbal instructions are for each of us to take a minute to introduce ourselves. Their actual behavior is that the woman takes one minute, the man takes two and a half minutes. I time each person and each woman took a minute and each man took 2 1/2 minutes. Come time for lunch, I say excuse me I’m not coming back and this is why, and they gave me the time to say why. Years later, I’m in the shower at my local swimming pool, this woman comes up to me and she says, “Are you that woman?” And we figured out that I was. It turns out the group spent the rest of the time talking about what I had told them. My statement was I’m not willing to struggle on this level. I’m beyond this. This is not my issue. But my sharing my observation transformed the group.
In Oct of 1980, I decided to become a tradeswoman. I’d been looking for another career for four years and realized in a flash of light, that I had been drawn to the trades for my whole life, had enough experience doing the work to know that I was decent at doing it, I would not have to sit at a desk, which was hard for me to do, I could get paid for using some of my excess physical energy, it was well paid, and by age 37 I was confident enough to handle the discrimination expected as a woman in a man’s field. I had some idea of what was required to get into the union from my having shared office space with Women in Apprenticeship. I enrolled in a Community College class on estimating. I joined the Skilled Workers Resource Network, a support group for us who were beginning self employed construction workers. When I showed up, they made sure I was having a good time. A few months later other women informed me that all the women had walked out a few minutes before I arrived. This was in response to being tired of doing all the grunt work of keeping the organization going. And they felt that the best way to do that was to just leave. Struggling wasn’t working. So I got to be the token woman. So I felt welcomed which felt wonderful. I in turn welcomed women who joined later.
RT: And yet your parents still felt challenged when you came out, so it wasn’t sexuality- based; it was more gender-based?
SF: No, they were more concerned about their relatives and what it would do to me in terms of choices. Just before my father died, he revealed that my uncle who had died and was so honored had probably been gay, and that this was a family secret, that made it harder for his family to deal with the gay issue for my generation.
In 1973 there was a lesbian conference in LA that I went to. That was a turning point conference for a lot of people. The big issue was can we lesbians be accepted in society or are we going to be rejected. Two of us in the whole goddamn room thought we could be accepted in our culture, the rest of them thought we couldn’t. And they were vehement about it; it wasn’t casual conversation at all. But, I came out consciously at that point to test how much it was acceptable, and it was acceptable. I was right there at that moment of change.
RT: What is your vision of love?
SF: People who are happy to be there for each other, it’s mutual and therefore a commitment. We’re each independent people as opposed to two people making each other whole.
RT: Do you have any visions of sitting on a porch swing with somebody and growing old or anything like that?SF: I actually have fair hopes that I will create that in my life. One of the nice rewards of working for myself so much is that I’m doing so much better being close to people, so maybe I’ll find myself in this process.
RT: Could you see spending the rest of your life with a guy?
SF: Oh yeah, I see that as more likely than with a woman.
RT: Why?
SF: Cause that’s who I am. It’s far easier for me to hang out with guys than with women in terms of dating, so. But it’s a very narrow difference, so I’m truly open. Because I’m someone who’s quite androgynous in a lot of ways, it’s always mystified me that there’s the bell curve, and if we didn’t have all the socialization issues there’d still be a bell curve. A lot of us could potentially be bisexual. So it’s always mystified me that such a high proportion of the people who feel in the middle feel the need to choose one or the other.
RT: What is your current life with dating women?
SF: I dated women for 10 solid years 1971-81 but rarely since then. I’m looking. One of the reasons I’ve been hanging out in OLOC is because I’m looking for someone to date. It’s hard for two women who connect and seem compatible to make it clear that we’re interested in each other. It’s a combination of unwillingness to endure rejection, lack of willingness to take initiative, unclear who is available, etc. It’s also a slower wooing process I think for women. And our flirting skills for my generation tend to be weak. I actually took a class in flirting at one point, I thought, God, I gotta send some messages out here. It’s helped a. The idea of legitimizing that as an activity was by itself helpful, because actually, you remember, I mean being tall and proud and then reaching out is all counter to what we are expected to do in our role and culture.
The flirting class taught me how to connect non-verbally. Make eye contact, open up your chakras, focus on the other person and yourself simultaneously, feel attractive. It’s a way to connect positively.
Some of the construction jobs I did
In 1988 I helped Marty Bragen ready his family home for sale as his son, Lawrence, turned 18. I removed the lower portion of a double garage door damaged by dry rot and replaced it with soluble sill plate of pressure treated wood and rebuilt the studs, prepared replacement sheathing, caulking and flashing. I also helped with estimate and advice on preparing the house for market, including dealing with the termite inspection.
In 1984-5 I spent a 1 ¾ years upgrading a 4 floor 6 unit house in Berkeley under the supervision of the owner, who was an Architect and Engineer with her own business. We slowed the project from 8 to 3 workers, so I could return to working with my tools.
Right after the earthquake in 1989, while I was teaching carpentry at Laney, I did a seismic upgrade of the foundation and ground floor of a craftsman house with City of Oakland financing.
From 1989 – 1991, I taught carpentry half time and functioned as the administrator for the Carpentry Program at Laney College, and taught a class of women being trained to ender construction. The students completely remodeled a gutted duplex that was sold to finance the program. The students were well instructed by me, as confirmed by their next teacher, Cynthia Correia, who was hired as the first tenured tradesperson.
In 1995, I worked very briefly as a Maintenance Mechanic for the City of Oakland. I cleaned up a warehouse and provided my own respirator when I smelled mold in the room. Then I got offered $15. to see if I had damaged my lungs from the mold, but I informed them that I had provided my own respiratory filter. The City’s respirator had been delivered after a few days but with no filters.
In September, 2001, I completed the Electrician Certification Class, “Electrical Theory National Electrical Code Training.”
In 2003, I was certified as a Green Remodeler, active in the Green Remodelers Guild. It evolved into Build It Green, stopwaste.org, and the Organization of Women Architects.
On a personal level, I lived in a collective household that included three generations, from young child / baby to senior.
THE IMPACT ON ME OF LIVING IN OUR/MY SHARED HOUSE
Looking back, living in our shared 8 bedroom house at 434 66th St. Oakland, worked for me less and less as the years passed.
I found myself drained more and more by living in the house that had worked fairly well for me for the first 30 years. In 2002 I became the sole owner occupant in, due to the death at 85 of my co-owner
I ran into the predictable problem that it’s almost impossible to be a landlord living with tenants. And it made it even harder that I was living out my decision to live with others as a lifestyle, and that decision was over identified in my head with the house. An additional factor was that I my aging lead to me having less bountiful energy.
I contributed to my difficulty of being able to relax and enjoy myself in the house, by too often putting work before pleasure. Also I did not expect other people to carry their share. I was warned that just one of these issues, living as a landlord with tenants, was enough to doom my efforts at being part of a community that worked for me.
The four roles I filled in my household prior to relaxing were.
I cared most about the systems, and was willing to lobby for the maintenance of sometimes overly complex systems
I was the land lord / rent collector
I was the maintenance person / project manager / house improver
I was the old timer with the history of the social and physical background of our house, as well as other shared houses.
My housemates did persuade me to kick back more earlier, to some effect. But I kept running into limitations from living there.
Once I decided to give up on trying to make it work, and sell the house, I was flabbergasted at how much stuff I owned. I figured that I had two rooms full of stuff. I did not realize how much stuff I had in the common spaces, the garage and the sheds. So moving out turned out to need more culling than I had and concept of how handle. It did not help that I had lived in the same place for 44 years.
At my birthday party in 2009, people shared how they experienced me. Brian Laniel saw me as weird, unabashed, courageous, refreshing, resourceful, flexible and inflexible, a walker and biker locally, inspiring, diversely connected, always working on herself and learning. I perceived my creative gift is to be an organizer, but it does not always serve me as a person. Abigail Laniel saw me as resilient, does not hold grudges, moves relationships through and forward, remarkably open to feedback, works with alternative health to work through various health issues. At this time, I was experiencing my third occurrence of cancer. Optimistic: Lisa Vance did not believe I was so up all the time in 1977, so I promised to call her the next time I am down – which is the best remedy for being down. We became good friends after that. Karen says I have an active frontal cortex. Josh Beth sees me as eccentric, good-hearted, organized, principled, committed, thoughtful. Steph wrote inside homemade fortune cookies: “You are a bundle of energy, always on the go.”
WHERE I EXPECTED SUPPORT BUT DID NOT GET IT
A contributing factor to my back going out in 1971 was I did not feel understood and supported in developing my own unusual lifestyle at the time. The only place I expected support did not provide it, which was from the most progressive women in the movement. The final connection got made by Ruth Mahaney who I had asked twice while attending Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, OLOC gatherings. “We did not support women who acted too powerful in the 1970s.” and “We did not know how to deal with the issue of women who were strong, so sometimes we mistreated people.”
In 2011, I described myself as “a “green” house remodeler, employer, and job sharer, a secular Jew, a feminist, an active networker, walker in nature, local activist in my Oakland, CA neighborhood, and living in a stable diverse three generation collective household since 1972. I am also one of the early adopters of green building techniques in the market.
Over the course of my career in construction, I was involved in rough construction, foundations, electrical, decks, framing, termite repair, sound attenuation, insulation, shear walls, stairs, finish construction, doors and windows, storage systems, sheetrock, linoleum, siding, shingling, administration, estimating, obtaining permits and change orders, billing, payroll, employee supervision, purchasing supplies, staging, and trade seminars.
On April 25, 2012, I wrote: “I am happy due to having a secondary relationship
Professionally, I had a career transition and hoped to use my extensive experience as a Green House Remodeling Contractor, City Planner, Teacher and Activist in a socially productive way.
Organizationally/politically, I am today still involved with several groups, including Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) and the Older Women's League.”
In 2012, while on a tour of the partly completed new Oakland Kaiser hospital building for local contractors, I raised my concerns and I believe I got Kaiser to use dry, not pre-mixed sheetrock mud. The anti-mold pre-mixed joint compound is toxic.
By 1980 I started being in touch with my phobias and fears, and keeping them at a distance.
My response to my mother’s overwhelming fears and phobias during the McCarthy era of the 1950s when leftists and Jews were targeted, was to not let any in. In my late 30’s, I accepted that sometimes fear is an appropriate response to a situation, and finally when I reached 60 years of age, I was in touch with my fears and negative feelings as events unfolded.
I have made incredible changes in how I live my life, and the positive feedback I have gotten from others is a strong incentive to me to continue taking care of my body, my social interactions, my finances, etc.
Steve Nickels, at the end of the Splinter Group annual non-directors meeting in January 2013, said he wants me to keep being feisty.
Neighbor, Ardys, said I am didactic, especially excessively, on my telling her that it is a problem for her compost bin to touch her garage.
I have also been described as “Intrepid.” What does this mean, I wondered. Then looked it up – adventurous explorer, forthright, energetic, persistent. Me? Resolute fearlessness, fortitude and endurance, an intrepid explorer. Also bold, courageous, dauntless, fearless, gallant, greathearted, gutsy, brave, lionhearted, manful, stalwart, stouthearted, undauntable, undaunted, valiant, valorous.
My core values:
My being pivotal
Eco-village
Hands on work
Living collectively
As a planner/contractor
In 2014, I retired as a contractor, carpenter, house remodeler, after 34 years.
I left my house to relax about every 6th weekend for decades. I would go to nature, either by visiting a friend, back-packing or attending a retreat. I flew to vacations with my parents as well as to relatives in Israel.
One of the more memorable was that in June 1991, Bari, Tanis and I flew to Juneau, Alaska to celebrate Bari’s 75th birthday. This was followed by a cruise in the inner passage of Alaska, staying on shore each night. This was followed by 10 days in Seattle where I stayed with my mother’s sister, Aunt Charlotte, and visited Rae of the Bi Community.
Another was in June 1986 when Lisa Vance, Tanis, Chude (Pam Allen), and one other woman backpacked to the Crabtree Camp in Emigrant Wilderness for five days. We had the special experience of surfing down the waterfall on the moss, which I now realize was ecologically incorrect.
Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty:
Gratitude From A Stranger for a Ride Home
Tuesday night after an Human Awareness Institute (HAI) Support Group meeting in early 2019, I was coming from a full heart space. I spotted a little old lady going into TJ's just as it started to pour. So as we both prepared to exit, I offered her a ride home. After entertaining me with her current life situation, she gave me the following take away: It is nice to be an old lady. Now even total strangers offer to help her, and she feels safe enough to accept. For decades she relied on her husband, but he died a year ago.
Another example of institutional barriers to Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty:
When my friend commuted over the Dumbarton Bridge in 1982, the person in the car ahead of her paid her toll fee, so she told the toll taker she was paying for the person behind her and went on her way. The next day at the toll taker's booth, as she talked to the same toll taker, she was informed that “the person behind her did the same for the person behind them and it continued for most of the prior day. This was a series of gifts from and for total strangers who would never meet. About a year later, my friend had another day when helping someone else seemed right, so she offered to pay for the driver behind her. The same toll taker informed her that a policy had been adopted which prevented her from accepting payment for the next person.
It felt so good to receive the gift of another person paying having paid for one’s bridge toll.
It is sad that spontaneous acts of generosity are so difficult for policy makers to leave alone.
The Grateful Dead may have modeled this option. For many years, DeadHeads leaving New Year's Eve shows in Oakland, (earlier years at Kaiser auditorium, later years at Oakland Coliseum) who crossed the bridge, driving back to San Francisco, would pay the toll for the car behind them. The Grateful Dead were a San Francisco Bay area based band that performed all over the Bay area, and later, the US, Europe and Egypt, from the 1960s to 1995.
Recently, I have been dealing with the third phase of my life, which is post retirement, both
In July of 2018, I attended an all day meeting of the Old Lesbians Organized For Change (OLOC), where we shared times when what we did involved overcoming being scared.
Bridget Basham and I put together the agenda for the Organization of Women Architects and Design professionals held in San Francisco, July 14th this year. There were breakout sessions in which stories of harassment were shared, as well as celebration of male champions of change, and a workshop on how to disrupt an entrenched workplace culture. I shared my background as a city planner, a housing remodeler, and having taught construction at a high school and at a college as well as reconstructing of my own shared house: the plumbing, heating and gas systems, storage areas, etc.
I pointed out my wearing overalls to the conference, represented my real work outfit.
I stated, “I am proud of having done my part to create a niche in the construction industry for women while weaving a balanced life.”
I also shared growing up in Chicago in the 40s, 50s. At that time the land along the Chicago river, referred to as “the slums” were demolished the summer of 1959 by the City Urban Renewal Project. No replacement housing was provided so the displaced people, mostly African-Americans, doubled up to accommodate their relatives. Most whites moved to the suburbs. My family stayed.
Now when buildings are demolished, the plan, but not the reality, is to build mixed income housing, not just displace to nowhere, building intentionally, as in San Francisco, real diversity on the ground, revitalizing the neighborhoods.
I started my own firm partly because of the difficulty for women getting career ladders within existing firms. In the 1970s, even the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club was men only. In 1980s it opened up to women in Oakland.
On July 24th 2018, I celebrated my 75th birthday, at my cousin Michael's house in Marshall, along with five close friends of many years: Tanis, Yehudite, Patrice, Charlene, and Carol Ruth.
Yehudit, Tanis, and I talked about the many meals and chores we shared over our many years in communal housing. Tanis and I had also camped together on the Straus farm in Marin County. It brought back memories of when I worked for Marin County Planning Department, and how my information about Land Trusts contributed to the concept of Marin Agricultural Land Trust paying farmers for their development rights so the farmers could afford to continue in agricultural.
Lots of memories:
One random memory was that one of the first McDonald’s was in our neighborhood in inner Chicago in 1961. At the time, easy, inexpensive take out food was progress.
I also remember how I swam in the San Francisco Bay off Emeryville, checking the tides beforehand. This was part of my avoiding the chlorine in pools, because it contributes to cancer.
Carol Ruth Silver shared her recently published a book about her experience as a Freedom Rider, including her smuggled notes from Parchman Prison in Mississippi in 1962. The book is “Freedom Rider Diary.” After Carol became an attorney she was hired by the People’s Law Project to spend years providing legal services for the poor. Then she moved to San Francisco and was elected to the Board of Supervisors to form a progressive majority under Mayor Masconni, until Dan White killed him and Harvey Milk.
Yehudite retired from being a professional violinist for the San Francisco Ballet.
Charlene, the youngest of our group, became an RN and is a wonderful resource for her extended family, now that she is established in her career.
Tanis, a former housemate of mine, now spends her time growing fruits and beautiful flowers on the land around her house in the rural setting that she so loves at Pt. Reyes Station.
Patrice Woepple, since retired as a hospital, health care exec, wrote a book on the disaster of the workers' compensation system, entitled, “Depraved Indifference: the Workers' Compensation System.”
We all had a wonderful time together, celebrating my birthday, and great food -within all our dietary restraints, I might add.
On August 7th of 2018, I met with my friends who met through the recently defunct in the Older Women's League (OWL). It's a small group of us, but most of us have known each other a long time. We rotate meeting at member's houses in Berkeley and Oakland and share what is going on in our lives, and some of our history. The purpose of the group is to share ideas about growing older, and what's best for each of us. Jackie was a Gray Panther. Chris's father was a realtor who helped Japanese-Americans. Her mother was one of the original members of OWL. Yvonne who worked for Arlene Slaughter took on getting rid of red-lining. I talked about my 75th birthday celebration soon to come at The Smokehouse. The question also came up of how many of us date. I shared that I am working on my memoir. Yvonne shared that while she lives alone, she is the “greeter” in her community. Chris and Yvonne are neighbors.
I grew up with three agendas that it has taken me till now to partly solve:
Being in contact with my feelings and learning how to act on them in a caring way.
Being on time.
Having my possessions serve me instead of running me.
On my Bucket List from 2015 was to “Meet the love of my life. Love deeper. Help others till the day I die. Work on good healthy living. To fall in love and let it be forever.”
In July of 2018, I attended an all day meeting of the Old Lesbians Organized For Change (OLOC), where we shared times when what we did involved overcoming being scared.
Bridget Basham and I put together the agenda for the Organization of Women Architects and Design professionals held in San Francisco, July 14th this year. There were breakout sessions in which stories of harassment were shared, as well as celebration of male champions of change, and a workshop on how to disrupt an entrenched workplace culture.
I shared my background as a city planner, a housing remodeler, and having taught construction at a high school and at a college. I also did the reconstruction of my own co-housing house: the plumbing, heating, gas system.
I pointed out my wearing overalls to the conference, representing my real work outfit.
I stated, “I am proud of having done my part to create a niche in the construction industry for women while weaving a balanced life.”
I also shared growing up in Chicago in the 40s, 50s. At that time the land along the Chicago river, referred to as “the slums” were demolished the summer of 1959 by the City Urban Renewal Project. No replacement housing was provided so the displaced people, mostly African-Americans, doubled up to accommodate their relatives. Most whites moved to the suburbs. My family stayed.
Now when buildings are demolished, the plan, but not the reality, is to build mixed income housing, not just displace to nowhere, building intentionally, as in San Francisco, real diversity on the ground, revitalizing the neighborhoods.
I started my own firm because of the difficulty for women within firms. In the 1970s, even the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club was men only. In 1980s it opened up to women in Oakland.
I grew up with three agendas that it has taken me till now to partly solve:
Being in contact with my feelings and learning how to act on them in a caring way.
Being on time.
Having my possessions serve me instead of running me.
I concluded that both of my parents were raised as upper middle class. This was partly because both of them had household help with cooking, washing, serving meals and entertaining when they were being raised. Neither of their fathers helped with domestic responsibilities and their mothers had two or more women helping. It was much more common in the early 1900’s for households to have full-time servants or domestic help.
I was lucky to be able to stay close to both my parents for most of my adult life until they passed.
They visited me many times in my house, and shared in parties I threw for them. I took a 3 year break from our visits 1976-9 while my mother started taking lithium and then we resumed our close relationship. We took vacations together, and then I spent the last 19 years of Benny’s life visiting them for 3 - 5 days in their winter home in Green Valley AZ.
My father spent the last two years of his life writing an autobiography of his life “My Life on Three Continents” I have what he wrote, and my edited version of what he wrote in this computer. I shipped all the originals to David Friedlander and Roberta Louis Goodman, RJE, Education Director, (847) 721-5479 cell, (847) 835-5478 home, 710 Woodridge Lane off Forest Way. RobertaG@nsci.org because they are the only biological relatives who are interested.
Eva Straus Friedlander, Nov. 4,1913 - May 6, 1999
My experience was that both of my parents really cared about me and my brother.
My mother had us because she wanted us to feel loved. She succeeded with me but not my brother.
My brother, Daniel's final letter, which was written to be sent out to his relatives after he died in 2012, states “I will miss a great family. My father gave me wisdom. And perhaps too much tolerance. My mother had strong European values. And little tolerance. But out of this, I emerged. Stronger and Better.”
She was a full time home-maker and volunteer until I was 10 when she returned to working.
My father had a full time professional job and did his share plus of the household work.
They were both firmly committed to a family based life. My father’s autobiography does not reflect the depth of his involvement with the daily life of raising us, and doing his share to keep the household functioning.
They enjoyed nature and traveling.
They believed in politics as a way to shift things and did their share.
I was impressed when I found out at Ben’s memorial that the two precincts they had were the highest vote getters in Hyde Park. They made sure to be available to go door to door and staff tables between and during every election. I knew enough to cry with joy for my parent’s achievement when Mayor Washington (the first Black Mayor of Chicago) was elected.
Their dynamics between them was both good and bad. They shared lots of values. But their interpersonal dynamics lacked.
A few historical details about my mother, his wife of 58 years, and her escaping Germany and immigrating to the USA. Also about how our family responded after Benny died.
She was born in Berlin, grew up in Germany, the US (while her father was interned for lobbying the US to not declare way against Germany) Switzerland for 3 years, Germany, 3 years in Palestine, Munich Germany, Vienna Austria, France (to learn farming 1935), Switzerland, Palestine when she picked strawberries, USA 1936 on a student visa, and then as an immigrant after earning her BS in design from Pratt in 1937 which she managed to convert to immigrant status after earning her BS in design from Pratt in 1937.
She and her family took a train out of Berlin Germany 10 days after her father died of a blood clot and the last day Jews were allowed to leave with their possessions. She took the train with her Mother Edith Straus, her sister Lotta who was born in the USA and her brother George. Her fourth sibling, her brother Emanuel, succeeded in being allowed over the border to Switzerland when he took the risk to ski over the Alps with some important papers. Edith managed to get the life insurance policy that they all lived on past the inspector on the train. Instead of letting it lapse, her father’s brother had made the last few payments for this policy and therefore claimed half of it’s value, but that still left $100,000 for them to live on.
Spring and Summer of 1934 Eva was in France (Chateau de la Borde in Jore-lesTours, T.et L. for about six months. She was with a group of young people who were learning agricultural skills in preparation for immigrating to Palestine. Her mother visited her there and removed her because she was losing too much weight due to insufficient food.
1935 She managed to get a student visa to travel from Vienna (6/36) or Tel-Aviv to NY USA in 1936
August 1936- July 1937: 120 St James Pl. Brooklyn NY, while she attended Pratt Institute on Ryerson St. in Brooklyn, NY.
A teacher from Biet Raeli in Haifa introduced Ben and Eva to one another, and they got married 11 weeks later with Carmel Forsythe being their witness in 1938. P. 56-57 of Ben’s Autobiography.
Eva worked at a variety of jobs until I was born. Then she was a full time mother and volunteer until I was 10 years old. After one year of taking a job doing clerical type work in an office, she enrolled in and graduated with a certificate in recreational therapy. She taught arts and crafts to old folks as long as her mother was alive. Then she shifted to teaching arts and crafts to young children at the local community center. She deeply enjoyed this work and was good at it. This she did till she was 75. She was sort of lost after they forced her from this job by lowering the salary to below what she felt she was worth.
In 1976 my mother flipped out and was hospitalized over the Xmas holidays. She was diagnosed as being manic depressive. It turned out that their prescribing lithium worked for her. Our whole family became a healing family system as she evened out her manic and depressive cycles. Later Dan figured out that he needed to stay on lithium and could not keep going on and off it. Both my nephews also have the issue of being manic depressive.
Just before Benny died in April of 1997 Eva wrote the following to claim credit for the work she did to raise the two of us. Eva did all the laundry, made the beds, changed sheets when they were wet when we were babies, took care of us two kids when we were sick, took us to the pediatricians, took us to the playground and baby lake, bought stuff (cloths, etc.) from Sears, sewed and mended, bought toys and baby furniture and encouraged our drawing and painting by installing a gate for privacy in our apartment, decorated the places we lived, visited schools and teachers and arranged private tutoring for Ruth to learn to read when I was 9, volunteered in the playground at our elementary school, etc. Eva cooked most of the meals which took 20 minutes to cook. Benny did the weekly grocery shopping.
Eva had modeled being an independent woman during her 58 year marriage. After Ben died overnight unexpectedly, she moved to Creekside Lodge in San Pablo north of Oakland, independent living, where I visited her for a full day every week, and Dan took care of her financial affairs and visited regularly from Boulder. My, Spring’s experience was that Eva “grew-up” at a deeper level during these last 2 ½ years of her life, despite the limitations of being in the 8-10th year of having Parkinson’s Disease (PD) at a time when the medication for PD became ineffective after 10 years.
I have been surprised that ending my life while still somewhat functional
When my parents were in their late 60's, (each of them worked till they were 75) my father complained that she was saving all the money she earned as her own money. He wanted her to pay part of their shared basic household expenses despite her income being much smaller than his. I supported him in this request by offering the model of couples who share house holds each paying the same % of their income for basic expenses. Soon afterwards, they agreed that she would pay their monthly homeowners fee.
I sympathize with the sources of my parents attitude toward having money. Their early world was one where everything was to be saved and discretionary expenditures were limited to education and travel. Both my parents were affected by the Depression and the scarcities of WWII. My mother was also affected by the German inflation of 1922. Both of them had access to some of the fixed amount of money their mothers received when their fathers died, and did their best to minimize how much money they received from their mother’s endowments.
But I ended up taking a different path, and after my mother was widowed, she paid more attention to what I was offering her in the financial department.
Being Bisexual in the Lesbian Community - Bay Area in the 70s
Interview with Spring Friedlander by Carolyn Arnold 1/12/18 with additional edits made by Spring since then
Spring Friedlander, Jan 12, 2017 Born in July 24, 1943
Her experiences as someone who came out as a bi person in Oakland.
Context
1) Cultural history – what kind of family and childhood did you have, financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually, sexually?
Raised by stable set of parents who were 3rd gen feminists, raised in progressive comm. In the City of Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood around the U. of Chicago. It was an multi-class / etc. neighborhood in the 1940’s and 1950’s, as a 1st gen American I was taught that Am consumer values are not great,
My father was raised in the USA, England, and Israel. My mother was German and was raised in Germany, Switzerland, Israel and the USA: She was half Jewish, and he was 100% Jewish
I had one brother who was a year and a half younger,
We were raised with 2 other families in Chicago – one Uncle and one Aunt of my fathers, their spouces and their children
My mother’s family was in SF area.
All my mother’s family got out before the Holocaust took over, but it had more impact than I was told about.