When I think of my Uncle Jim, I often remember him as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Jim Mathews, who died earlier this summer at age 77, loved to perform in community theater productions near his home in San Mateo. He sang in many shows and took on many roles, but his signature was playing the former president in the musical Annie, that classic Depression story about an orphan girl taken in by a rich capitalist, Daddy Warbucks.

Late in the show, Annie and Daddy Warbucks go to the White House, where FDR is considering a new program of social supports for struggling Americans. “I want to feed them and house them and pay them. Not much, but enough to send home to their parents,” Jim, as the president, would declare.

Through the song “Tomorrow,” Annie convinces FDR to go forward with this New Deal. Then, in the best moment of Jim’s performance, he would rise and start a solo.

When I’m stuck with a day

That’s gray, and lonely.

 I just stick out my chin and grin, and say…

Then he’d pause, turn to the audience and add, “Now sing with me! Republicans too!”

I share this memory with you now because so many of us are stuck in gray days. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, even here in friendly, bright California. The world’s awfulness often stops us in our tracks.

Jim had more than his share of gray days. He was injured at birth, and his parents (my grandparents) were told he never would walk (he did, with a pronounced prancing style, after a lot of therapy). He never married or had children (though his niece and two nephews, including me, treasured him as a quasi-parental figure). He never achieved any particular renown (though I’m trying with this column).

Far too often in the Golden State, and especially in Silicon Valley, where Jim spent almost all his life, the conventional wisdom is that you need a big and well-known technology, with venture funding and a giant brain, to shape the future. Jim’s example puts the lie to that thinking. He had a wonderful life, in a Frank-Capraesque way. Because he understood that life and technology, a subject he made a career teaching, are built out of small things. So are better tomorrows.

James Mathews was born in 1946 in Long Beach, one of Southern California’s bigger cities. His parents—a civilian U.S. Navy employee and a teacher—moved him to San Mateo when he was in elementary school.

San Mateo is a smaller city, of 100,000, but whenever I visited him there—which was often—he made the place seem grand. Wherever you went with him became enchanted. The little train and the big trees in Central Park. The playgrounds and fields at Hillsdale High and Laurel Elementary. The little branch libraries. His beloved College Heights Church, a highly democratic and informal place where almost every member of the congregation, adult and child, would talk during the service.

The church sat atop a windswept hill, with bay views so glorious that I sometimes wondered: Who needs heaven?

Jim’s magic was that he paid attention to little things. “Don’t step on those—they’re California poppies,” he once advised. “Those are the state flower!” And he engaged with everyone, even people who were scary. At Hillsdale High, Jim was no jock, and the 25-year-old football coach had intimidating intensity.  But instead of backing away, Jim volunteered to be the team manager and learned lasting lessons about teamwork from that coach, the future Super Bowl winner Dick Vermeil.

If you thought like Jim, everything seemed like an opportunity. Jim, who graduated from San Francisco State, eventually got a low-profile job at the College of San Mateo, a community college. Over 21 years, he and his colleagues found ways to add the best new computers and technology, ultimately creating a dynamic media lab. From there, he went to Baywood Elementary, where he created not one but two tech labs. He designed them to teach not just students, but teachers and parents. Jim insisted that students fix the computers themselves.

“Grandpa Geek,” they called him.

Technology, Jim would say, was not this big force to be feared or celebrated. Technology was really just a lot of little things, and the fun was to be had in tinkering, and figuring out how to use them together.

Speaking of fun, the most fun I ever had in my life was when Uncle Jim would visit Southern California and take my brother and me to Disneyland. I’d gone to Disneyland with other relatives, but it was boring—you’d wait in long lines for the biggest rides. But Jim took us to everything and emphasized the little treasures: the Enchanted Tiki Room, the rock formations on Tom Sawyer Island, the real-world potential of the automated People Mover in Tomorrowland, which he considered the best land. (He was right about the People Mover—they are installing a new one at LAX now.)

The little things that mattered most to Jim were charity. He looked for ways to help. He donated to the people at the door. And to the people who called on the phone. I once asked Jim if he was a soft touch. His answer: What’s wrong with being a soft touch?

Jim didn’t like it when people tried to take care of him, but he loved to help take care of other people.

Eight years ago, Jim, feeling a bit lonely after retiring and moving back into his deceased parents’ home, heard at church about a woman and her two young sons who were unhoused and needed a place to stay. He invited them to move in with him. They stayed for five years. He didn’t see it as an act of generosity. He was benefiting from this “house sharing,” from the companionship and help of his roommates.

Once, when I had dinner with all of them, Jim said he felt like a fool—for not having shared his home with people in similar circumstances many years earlier.

But Jim didn’t dwell on regrets. He was determined not to get bogged down with today’s problems. Because a new opportunity to help someone else will always present itself. And soon. Maybe even tomorrow, which is only a day away.

The post My Late Uncle Jim’s Life of Tomorrows appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If Dickens were to rise from the grave tomorrow, I bet he’d head straight to the East Bay.

Because we are watching a tale of two Oaklands.

One Oakland is advancing on this country’s greatest political prize. The other Oakland is circling the urban drain. The two Oaklands demonstrate just how little space there is between top and bottom, between power and powerlessness.

Read the headlines, and in Oakland it is the best of times, the epoch of belief, the late summer of light.

A proud daughter of Oakland has emerged unexpectedly as a close contender in the race for president.

She has made history, in California and everywhere. She’s the first Democrat from the Golden State to win the party’s nomination, the first Black woman, the first Indian American woman, even the first major party presidential nominee to have worked at McDonald’s.

And if she can win—hold your breath—she’d be the first Northern Californian ever elected president. Oh, yes, and the first woman president too.

Oakland would be on top—of government, of American politics, of the free world. And that wouldn’t be its only conquest. Oakland is a democratic innovator, adopting a novel way of funding campaigns and allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote for school board.  “O-Town” has also become a cultural capital, a citadel of Black excellence to rival Harlem or Chicago’s South Side. Hollywood luminaries Zendaya, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, all hail, proudly, from Oakland.

And yet, if you go to Oakland today, it is the worst of times, the epoch of foolishness, the season of darkness and despair.

Oakland and its government have hit rock bottom.

Downtown is dead. East Oakland’s streets are a mess of trash, busted cars, and broken glass. Homelessness, that never-ending California pandemic, is rising faster in Oakland than just about anywhere else.

And while violent crime falls across most of the rest of America, it increases in Oakland. Property crimes are commonplace. Last year, one car was stolen for every 30 Oakland residents, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The police department, in constant turmoil, lacks the leadership and personnel to do much about it. Cops all but ignore robberies and burglaries.

The city budget is in crisis. Political leadership is paralyzed, with Mayor Sheng Thao consumed by a corruption investigation that included an FBI raid. Thao maintains her innocence but in November faces a recall vote, brought before the raid, because of crime and other governance failures.

There’s also a recall against Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, who runs the office where Kamala Harris started her own career as a prosecutor. Price is a parody of a progressive prosecutor, lashing out at critics and journalists and offering rationalizations for not pursuing offenders. Her former spokeswoman, now a whistleblower, claims that Price ignored laws on public records and disclosure.

With law enforcement on the sidelines during a public safety crisis, the state has tried to fill the void. The state took over Oakland’s schools in the first decade of the century; today, the city is a protectorate in matters of policing. Gov. Gavin Newsom has sent in the California Highway Patrol to try to get a handle on car thefts and other property crimes, making arrests where Oakland police have failed to act. The governor also dispatched California National Guard prosecutors to handle Oakland cases.

The population is declining, as housing prices stay high even as conditions deteriorate. Businesses are fleeing, including businesses that never flee. In-N-Out permanently closed its restaurant in Oakland—the first such closure in company history—because of robberies of customers and staff. Denny’s closed its one restaurant in Oakland, too, citing similar safety concerns. Kaiser Permanente warned employees to stop leaving their Oakland offices to eat lunch. All three of Oakland’s major pro sports teams—basketball’s Golden State Warriors, football’s Raiders, and now baseball’s A’s—have left the city in the past five years.

“I’ve been in Oakland 58 years. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Ken Chambers, a West Oakland pastor, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

In Oakland residents you’ll find despair and resignation, mixed with a hope that the city’s tough people and resilient communities will climb out of this hole. You’ll also find conspiracy-mongering—a sense that Oakland is being targeted by larger forces that would discredit its progressive politicians and policies.

There’s some truth behind this conspiracy. It’s not fair for Trumpians to point to Oakland’s failures to discredit Harris, who left town decades ago. But it is fair to criticize her for not doing more for her hometown now. Harris’ meager campaign policy proposals offer some benefits for children and small businesses, but nothing to empower cities to fix their governments and finances.

What Harris offers Oakland is the promise of symbolic triumph, of a bit of representation. Those are nice, but will they make the cops come when you call?

In borrowing Oakland’s reputation for toughness and the underdog credibility it provides—she doesn’t much mention Berkeley, where she lived as a child—Harris is giving the American mainstream the sort of story it cherishes. We love to celebrate winners who escape rough places, but we don’t much care about supporting such places, and changing the systems that make living there so hard.

Instead, we try to take heart from the hard places and hard times we left behind.

In his book Wandering Stars, the indigenous author and Oaklander Tommy Orange writes, “You get a light behind you when what feels like the worst that can happen to you happens to you. It never goes away. It lives behind you. It’s there whenever you need it. The light shoots through, bright and wide and says: At least I’m not there. Back there when we thought the lights went out forever. At least this is not that.”

The post It’s the Best and Worst of Times in Oakland appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve never much cared for San Francisco International Airport—until SFO decided to take a courageous stand for truth and accuracy in airport names.

Last month, SFO’s leaders filed a lawsuit to stop the Port of Oakland from changing Oakland International Airport’s name to “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.”

Author and Oakland native Gertrude Stein famously said “There is no there there” of her hometown. Which is perhaps why the Oakland Port Commission justified the name change by saying it wanted to educate travelers unfamiliar with California that Oakland is an actual place that sits on the bay. I also believe that Oakland may have been combating a widespread misperception among Star Wars fans that it’s on Planet Tatooine; after all, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) was a native Oaklander.

Fortunately, SFO saw through the Oakland’s airport Jedi mind trick. The lawsuit accuses its East Bay competitor of trademark infringement as part of a grab for more air traffic. SFO also alleges that the name change creates the impression that Oakland is in San Francisco, which it is not.

I admire SFO’s bold commitment to defending geographic integrity. Which is why I’m so excited to see the airport take the next logical step in advancing the same principle, by changing its own inaccurate name.

I can hear it now: My Southwest Airlines pilot asks me to return my seat back to its full upright position—and then welcomes me to San Mateo County International Airport.

Because SFO, just like Oakland, isn’t in the City or County of San Francisco. It’s in an unincorporated corner of northeast San Mateo County, south of San Francisco.

As a lifelong SFO passenger, I can testify that taking San Francisco out of SFO’s name would be a service to the flying public.

Because it’s actually quite difficult to get into or out of San Francisco via the airport with San Francisco in its name.

SFO’s problems start with flight delays. For years, it’s had among the highest rates of delayed flights in the United States. Other badly delayed airports typically have snow or severe winter weather. Of course, SFO has fog, but fog alone doesn’t make so many flights late. It’s the poor organization of the airport itself. Its two main, parallel runways are too close together to permit landings at the same time. So, when visibility is low, there are delays. This year, a construction project has been creating still more backups.

And if fog and poor organization don’t trap you at SFO, the airport’s design will. Today’s SFO was largely created 20 years ago, via an expansion that was hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. The project left the airport feeling overbuilt and bloated, with too much distance between ground transportation and gates.

Today, getting to your flight at SFO requires taking slow rides on an internal Air Train (whose construction was dogged by corruption allegations) and taking long walks through large, glassy, and often empty halls. Even when security lines are short, walking alone can add 20 minutes to your trip. Travel websites routinely advise SFO passengers to arrive at the airport two or more hours early.

And the transportation options outside the airport are no picnic, either. SFO sits at a traffic chokehold point, with crammed freeways and dead-end streets. Public buses stop at the terminals, but the main line, SamTrans 292, only shows up every 30 minutes or so. And Caltrain, the peninsula commuter line, doesn’t stop at the airport.

BART trains have a station inside the airport, which is nice. But many trains on that line don’t go into the airport, ending their routes four stops earlier at Daly City instead. And there are so many BART stops along the 13 miles between SFO and downtown San Francisco that the trip can take nearly an hour.

When I need to go to downtown San Francisco, I fly into Oakland. It’s faster, less likely to experience delays, and more reliable. And the airport’s two terminals are small and efficient, so that it’s just two minutes from my gate to ground transportation. The airport also has a connector train to BART that can take you into San Francisco in just five stops, or down to Fremont and San Jose with ease.

You might even say that Oakland is a better San Francisco airport than San Francisco’s airport.

Of course, I would never say that. No way. Because your truth-telling columnist is 100 percent behind SFO’s righteous defense of geographic accuracy in airport names.

But I will say this: Until this cross-bay airport dispute is over, and until SFO follows its own principle and changes its name to San Mateo County International, I am changing my own name to honor the Bay Area airport I actually enjoy flying into.

So, for the time being, you can call me San Francisco Bay Joe.

The post Can the Real San Francisco Airport Please Stand Up? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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I found out about the restaurant from my brother, who was supposed to work there but had another job. It was only going to be for one day but the owner asked if I could work all week. After that, she hired me and I started working with her regularly as a prep cook in her San Francisco restaurant.

At first, the owner was kind, and there weren’t any issues. But, after about a year of working with her, I noticed things changing. She would yell at me for nothing. There were times when I didn’t receive my breaks and I had been working all day.

Then, she stopped paying us.

That was hard. But trying to get wages that are stolen from you turns out to be even harder.

Initially, the owner started delaying our checks. Supposedly, she was going to give them to us on Mondays, then she changed it to Wednesdays and then to Fridays. Then she started saying, “I’ll pay you the next week,” but it didn’t happen. Still, she kept saying that until it accumulated.

My co-workers and I—there were four of us in the kitchen—kept asking her for our payments and she kept saying she would pay us but she never did.

I thought about leaving but it was the pandemic and there wasn’t much work available, so I stayed. But the whole situation was very stressful. I was very frustrated because, if I already worked for the money, why was I not getting paid?

In October 2021 all of us workers decided we’d had enough. We joined together and told the owner that if the checks did not arrive that day, we would not show up for work. She still did not respond. At this point she stopped coming to the restaurant. At one point, she promised to send the checks with someone else, but we never received them.

We called her and her husband and they didn’t answer us. At one point, the owner’s husband offered to pay a portion of what was owed to us but we declined. We wanted to be paid in full and we were not willing to negotiate that. The owner owes me $12,157.90 in wages, plus penalties for not paying me when I was working for her.

That was when she closed the location, without notice, in December 2021. We kept trying to contact her but neither she nor her husband responded.

It affected me greatly because it was the last few months of the year. I got depressed, I got frustrated, my blood pressure went up, I couldn’t sleep. I was very angry with the owner.

That year was the saddest Christmas I ever had. Christmas without money is very sad. It’s a time of year when you try to send a little extra money back home. I’m 34 years old now. And, in my 10 years of living in the United States, that was the first time I was not able to send a dollar back home to Guatemala.

I send money to my sisters and grandparents, who raised me. I fully support them and the money I send is for everything they need—but in 2021, I couldn’t. My good friend had to lend me money just to be able to settle my bills. I couldn’t do anything and I felt tied by the hands.

My co-workers and I kept looking for someone to help us. We didn’t know what to do. We went to local organizations that can help workers, but they were closed due to COVID-19. Eventually, I came across a church and that’s where someone gave me the phone number for Trabajadores Unidos Workers United.

TUWU, as it’s known, is a worker center, funded by grants and grassroots donations. It finds itself at the intersection of economic justice and immigrant rights—all while holding companies and bosses accountable.

A TUWU organizer talked to me that same day I first called. My co-workers and I were able to share our situation. In time, TUWU helped teach us how to organize.

TUWU helped me prepare a case seeking the wages stolen from me. I filed the case with the San Francisco office of the state’s Labor Commission in February 2022. I wish I could tell you that my case was quickly processed and that I got the money I was owed.

But that’s not how things work.

The Labor Commission, at least its office in San Francisco, has huge backlogs of cases. So, the only thing I’ve received since my filing is the news that the commission has approved my case for a hearing.

That’s right—all I know is that I’ll have a hearing, someday. I haven’t received a date for the hearing. I haven’t been informed if the commission will investigate my claim. This is not uncommon. It typically takes years to receive the money lost in wage theft cases in California.

So, I don’t know if I’ll ever be paid the money I’m owed. But I do know that I’m not going to sit and wait in line for my case to be heard.

I’m continuing to fight for the restaurant owner to pay me back. It’s not easy. She continues to hide from us, even though she still owns a pop-up restaurant in San Francisco, and sometimes appears on TV cooking shows.

Since I became a member of TUWU, we’ve had many meetings and tried many different strategies on how to make the owner accountable. I’m hopeful that some of those will work.

I also learned the word “organize” at TUWU. Along with the word, I’ve learned that, since getting justice takes years, it’s important to organize other workers so that they are aware of their rights and how to move quickly when an employer doesn’t honor those rights.

Now, I know how to advocate and organize with my co-workers. I also feel like a part of the community now and I am able to support other workers experiencing the same situation.

It’s still very discouraging. But I hear from other workers who have had cases with the Labor Commissioner’s Office and eventually had their stolen wages paid.

If I get paid, or I should say when I get paid, I’m going to send money to my grandparents and sisters. I will also save the rest for emergencies because you have to be able to cover any situation that may occur. There are times I worry it could happen to me again.

Early in this process, when I thought of what had happened to me at the restaurant, I would feel like crying. Now, I say that it’s like a mountain and I’m going to keep climbing as high as I can. Why would I not try to reach the peak and get my reward? Now, I share my experience with other workers.

The post My Boss Owes Me Over $12,000 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It worked for Czesław Miłosz, who entered the pantheon of Polish poets thanks to works he wrote mostly in Berkeley.

The poet’s story—told by humanities scholar Cynthia L. Haven in a surprising and thought-provoking recent book, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life—reminds us how our state allows people to move both further from and closer to home, often at the same time.

Miłosz, while famous in Poland and in poetry circles (Joseph Brodsky called him the greatest poet of our times), is a name unfamiliar to most Californians. But he remains the only affiliate of the University of California system, where he taught Slavic languages and literature, to win a Nobel Prize in the humanities.

“The irony,” writes Haven, “is that the greatest California poet—and certainly one of America’s greatest poets too—could well be a Pole who wrote a single poem in English.”

Born in Lithuania in 1911 to Polish-speaking gentry, Miłosz pursued a literary career in Warsaw. There he witnessed some of the worst bombing and violence of World War II—an experience that was foundational to his work and worldview. He served as a diplomat for Poland’s Stalinist government, before defecting in Paris in 1951. In 1960, he accepted a teaching post at Berkeley.

He would stay for 40 years, living in and writing from a cottage on Grizzly Peak, looking down over the whole Bay Area.

At first, California seemed irrelevant to his work. The state stood apart from history. His students didn’t understand good and evil, or the horrors of even the recent past. He was ambivalent about California, and horrified by a visit to Los Angeles. Even the beautiful landscapes seemed too immense and unforgiving.

“If California is not a separate planet, it is at least a separate colony of planet Earth,” one of Miłosz’s friends recalls him saying, according to Haven.

But it was the 1960s, and history and social turmoil soon arrived in California—and especially in Berkeley. This time, Miłosz engaged with it, and other changes that came through the state, including the arrival of Silicon Valley. He learned California’s history (he seemed particularly interested in the Donner Party).

Soon, the state seeped into him and his work.  His autobiographic Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition often compares Eastern Europe and the Bay Area. So too did his 1969 poem, “Reading the Japanese Poet Issa (1762-1826),” which moves in just a few lines from the West Coast…

The invisible ocean,
fog until noon
dripping in a heavy rain from the boughs of the redwoods,
sirens droning below on the bay.

to southern Poland:

…whether this is the village of Szlembark
above which we used to find salamanders,
garishly colored like the dresses of Teresa Roszkowska

California, Haven shows, broadened the poet’s perspective, and allowed him to put the horrors of his earlier life in Lithuania and Poland in a global context. His experiences here “transfigured him from a poet writing from one corner of the world to a poet who could speak for all if it, from a poet focused on history to a poet concerned with modernity and who always had his eyes fixed on forever.”

Haven recounts that Bells in Winter, the collection of poems that effectively earned Miłosz the Nobel in 1980, was originally supposed to be called Berkeley Poems. In that book, he imagines his spinster sisters (“two parakeets from Samogitia,” a region in Lithuania) visiting him in the desert, amidst the Joshua trees.

“The majestic expanse of the Pacific Seacoast has imperceptibly worked its way into my dreams, remaking me, stripping me down, and perhaps thereby liberating me,” Miłosz would write.

Miłosz never would have become the great poet of Poland if he hadn’t come to California. If he had stayed in Soviet Poland, he might have been censored or persecuted. Without exile in such a faraway and thought-provoking place, could he have “explored the margins of loneliness, alienation and abandonment?” Haven asks.

Miłosz eventually did go back to Poland, with his second wife, an American university administrator. He died in Krakow in 2004.

His work remains relevant today, in a time of catastrophes, political and environmental. Haven suggests that Californians in particular have much to learn from Miłosz, through his “twinning of vision and historical consciousness.”

In Bells in Winter, Miłosz wrote:

For me, therefore, everything has a double existence
Both in time and when time shall be no more.

Miłosz was both European and Californian. He was both a man of the past and the future. Like so many Californians, he struggled with the dualities of place and identity and home.

In his one English poem, “To Raja Rao,” Miłosz wrote:

For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
I felt I should be somewhere else….

I learned at last to say: this is my home
Here
Before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets
On the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,
In a great republic, moderately corrupt

The post How California Made a Polish Poet Great appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That spin on the old song, made famous by Dionne Warwick, might be the most important question facing the state’s transportation system. Because plans to bring trains and transit into the 21st century depend on transforming the Bay Area city of 1 million people into our state’s rail capital.

But, in dysfunctional California, can all these plans stay on track?

Transportation expectations for San Jose are a function of the economy—it’s the capital of Silicon Valley—and of geography. San Jose sits about halfway between California’s northern and southern borders. On the sound side of our richest region, the Bay Area, it boasts longstanding rail links to the Central Valley and the Central Coast.

Diridon Station serves as a major hub for Caltrain, Amtrak, BART, and San Jose’s VTA light rail system. Courtesy of Jim Maurer/Flickr.

It’s also home to Diridon Station, a Renaissance Revival rail hub where California’s transportation past, present, and future converge.

Most transportation dreams in the state now include Diridon. The high-speed rail plan envisions Diridon as perhaps its most crucial junction, where regional rail lines to San Francisco meet bullet trains going down to Fresno, Bakersfield, and one day, Los Angeles. Diridon is already the western terminus of the ACE train, which provides rail service to Stockton and is slated for expansion throughout the Central Valley.

Diridon is also a regional connector. It’s a major hub for Caltrain service that extends from San Francisco down the peninsula to Gilroy. It’s the southern terminus of Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service to Sacramento. It’s a key stop on San Jose’s own VTA light rail system. And it’s a destination of the decades-long, multi-billion-dollar effort to bring Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to downtown San Jose.

Add on Google’s massive development plan for the area around Diridon—a downtown village of parks, thousands of housing units, millions of square feet of office space, and a community center—and the ambitions for the place are heavy.

One problem is that San Jose, and California transportation agencies, don’t seem able to carry the weight. With so many different interests and constituencies hanging hopes on Diridon, multiple failures of governance are converging there, too.

The high-speed rail plan is such a mess of delays, consultants, and overspending that state officials are focused only on a small segment of the project: Bakersfield to Merced. The most optimistic plans have high-speed rail reaching San Jose in 2031. It’s a better bet that the whole project will be mothballed by then.

There are reasons to worry about regional lines, too. Plans are proceeding for extension of the ACE trains into Sacramento and beyond Stockton into Modesto and Merced. But the BART extension to downtown San Jose keeps getting more time-consuming and expensive.

Originally approved by voters way back in 2000, this six-mile, four-station project is shaping up to be one of California’s largest and most difficult infrastructure efforts. Its main problem is local officials’ insistence using an expensive and less proven method to build one of the largest subway tunnels in the United States. What once was described as a $4 billion project to be completed by 2026, is now a $9 billion-plus project that won’t be finished until 2034.

Train platform at Diridon Station, which is at the center of a debate around integrating the Bay Area’s—and California’s—rail networks. Courtesy of Niall Kennedy/Flickr.

The debate over the troubled BART extension has become divisive, distracting San Jose from what should be a focus: integrating transit at Diridon. Various agencies involved in planning—from Caltrain, to the high-speed rail authority, to the city of San Jose—don’t seem to be on the same page in terms of how to remake the station to improve links. And beyond Google’s plan, there’s no clear vision for making Diridon and its surroundings a true destination. The station will need to be a beautiful and distinctive place in itself in order to help draw Californians there.

More disconcerting than the planning troubles is the current state of transportation in San Jose. Newer BART stations in San Jose are ghost towns, left empty because of pandemic shifts to remote work.

And San Jose’s light rail, which was shut down for months last year after a mass shooting, has been called “a colossally bad system” by the city’s own mayor, who has smartly suggested replacing it with electric buses.

When I rode the different VTA lines over the course of a recent weekday, the few passengers I saw appeared to be unhoused people living on the train. At several points, I was the only passenger on board. That made sense. The trains are so slow, and make so many stops, that driving is more than twice as fast as riding.

If it’s going to happen, the transformation of San Jose into a transportation capital can’t be that sluggish. All Californians have a stake in San Jose connecting us, especially by rail.

The state needs to step in, take charge, and remove regulatory barriers. The remaking of Diridon Station should get the same exemptions from environmental and other laws that the state granted to new sports stadiums. The state should establish a single governing authority to take over the San Jose transportation hub, and require high-speed rail and local agencies to defer to its decisions.

Timelines must be accelerated and plans simplified so that a new Diridon, with all connections humming, is in place before the end of this decade.

Let’s clear out the obstacles blocking our way to San Jose.

The post Is San Jose Destined to Be a Train Wreck for California Transportation? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Though it is 1967’s Summer of Love, the student-led strikes at San Francisco State College of 1968, and the Indians of All Tribes’ 18-month occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971 that made the San Francisco Bay Area a famous hub of 1960s and ’70s countercultural radicalism, this lesser-known, coalition-based effort also left an important mark. Now, as San Francisco once again becomes a hub of coalitional organizing, labor and community activists are revisiting the boycott’s innovative movement-building approach to take on a present-day corporate goliath: Amazon.

What initially united the diverse activists of the 1970s Coors boycott was antagonism for the Coors Brewing Company’s labor practices, but as the boycott grew, the Coors family’s politics became its focus. Third-generation executives Joseph and William Coors were closely linked to conservative politicians and generously funded right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation. By challenging Coors, boycotters saw themselves as fighting “conservatism, anti-unionism and racism,” as a Bay Area Teamster publication put it.

But these coalitions required more than a shared enemy; cementing a movement required the perseverance of organizers who moved in and out of LGBTQ, labor, and other activist circles in the Bay Area. One key leader of this work was Allan Baird, a Korean War veteran, musician, and Teamster who organized pickets and boycott actions out of his home in the Castro District. With the help of a Latvian refugee, Andris (Andy) Cirkelis, and dozens of other Teamsters, Baird dispatched striking beer drivers to the area’s grocery stores. Using picket signs, leaflets, and a red-and-white bullhorn, they managed to get many stores to remove the offending cans from their shelves.

As these pickets fanned out in San Francisco, Oakland, and beyond, Baird and his team worked to build meaningful connections with communities outside of the labor movement. Baird had only to go around the corner from his home to spark one such connection—with camera store owner, aspiring politician, and gay activist Harvey Milk. As the two became fast friends, Milk emerged as a key supporter of the boycott, on the condition that Baird and the Teamsters guaranteed jobs for LGBTQ drivers. With Milk on board, other LGBTQ activists joined the fray, such as Cleve Jones, Milk’s assistant and future union leader, and Howard Wallace, the co-founder of a radical organization called the Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL). BAGL meetings became hotbeds of Coors boycott organizing—after meetings, members would hit local gay bars to convince patrons and owners alike to join the fight.

Baird and Cirkelis also forged alliances and collaborated with other activist communities, from radical Chicanos to Black civil rights leaders. In November 1974, a coalition of over a dozen organizations, including the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers, endorsed both the boycott and a ground-breaking Teamsters affirmative action plan that prioritized LGBTQ and applicants of color for open beer driver positions. Shortly thereafter, Milk editorialized in the Bay Area Reporter that “the union of beer drivers, blacks, Chicanos and Latinos and gays fighting together” had planted “the seeds of joint battles.”

Eventually, after a decade of active boycotting that stretched all the way to the East Coast—where Fenway Park ousted Coors Beer from its concession stands—most of the boycott coalitions broke up. The movement’s success in prompting changes in Coors’s employment practices, as well as company efforts to infuse hundreds of millions of dollars back into boycotting communities, made the urgency of rejecting the beer fade.

Original boycott organizers still take pride in the fact that Coors beer has never touched their lips. And now, nearly 50 years after the boycott got its start, a new generation of activists is studying its success. For young Teamsters in particular, the inspiration is not just sentimental or symbolic—it is a blueprint for their own efforts to build solidarity and union power. Under the leadership of a progressive slate of national organizers, the Teamsters have set their sights on the “massive long-term task” of organizing Amazon’s fast-growing and highly precarious workforce.

Coalition-building is integral to these efforts. In San Francisco, in response to plans to build a new Amazon distribution center southeast of downtown, Teamsters have partnered with a diverse group of community organizations—from other union locals to transit riders, nonprofits, and neighborhood advisory boards—to create the San Francisco Southeast Alliance (SFSEA). Founded in 2021, the SFSEA seeks not to stall the Amazon project but, rather, to guarantee that the company make a “meaningful long-term investment” by investing in affordable housing in the area, committing to environmental standards, and guaranteeing union jobs. The coalition and its partners have also worked closely with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to place an 18-month moratorium on new parcel delivery facilities, to give time for thorough studies of environmental and community impacts. After a unanimous vote in favor of the moratorium in March 2022, Amazon announced it would pause construction on this new facility to reevaluate long-term priorities and work with community partners.

As activists across the country work to contain Amazon’s expansion and unionize its warehouses—from the long-running organizing campaign in Bessemer, Alabama, to the most recent victory on Staten Island—Bay Area activists are looking back at their own playbook. The rank-and-file organizers taking on the herculean task of fighting—and organizing—Amazon are following in the footsteps of Baird and other Coors boycott organizers.

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Samuels had been a district attorney, a police court judge, and a Superior Court judge in Alameda County, serving continuously from around 1903 until his death in 1925. The famous author had appeared in his court as a defendant several times. Apparently, the encounters produced hard feelings in London. My aunt, prone to exaggeration, bragged that London had threatened to set off a bomb under my great-grandfather’s house.

My questions about this were deflected—when I asked my dad if the family had known London socially, he told me, “Oh, no. We wouldn’t have known him; he was a drunk”—and so my curiosity took a back seat for 40 years. Until a hotel manager paid me a visit.

I’m an artist who creates murals, often grounded in history. Nearly 30 years ago, I was creating a mural about Amelia Earhart for Hilton, when a manager from a hotel at Jack London Square came by for a visit, and inspired something London-related in me. I’m one of those artists who lets ideas gestate for years and then finds someone to pay me to do what I want. Five years later, in 1996, that Jack London Square hotel manager called me, saying he had 84 linear feet of blank wall.

I’d never even read London, but I had that curiosity grounded in family lore. I started researching London, who like me, was a California kid, and was quickly hooked. I have a history degree and have always been attracted to locations that connect with a subject. In my work, I try to ask, what was the meaning of a subject, and a location, in the past and now. To that end, I often combine the dead with the living, or place characters together who were never actually in the same place at the same time.

Trying to figure out how to do that with London, I read more by and about London, and realized that his experiences and his passion for issues in the early 20th century were the same issues still plaguing us a century later. I also investigated the nature of London’s antagonism towards Samuels and found myself reckoning with a relationship that reveals quite a bit about the economics and culture of the Bay Area, and the country, then and now.

London’s own words, in books and in news reports, and the accounts of witnesses provide a good picture of what happened on June 21, 1910, and after.

On that date, Jack London paused at the entrance to his neighborhood bar and argued with himself. He felt defeated and devastated, having just left his wife in the hospital. Their newborn daughter, Joy, was dead. He needed a drink.

He carried copies of Jim Jeffries’ autobiography, which he planned to read and share with his fellow reporter, to prepare for “The Fight of the Century.” In 12 days, Jack Johnson, a Black man, would meet Jeffries, “The Great White Hope,” for a heavyweight championship. London was to cover the event in Reno; he would bet on the superiority of white men and lose a lot of money.

As London stepped inside the bar, the saloon’s manger Muldowney, knowing Jack’s reputation, grabbed his arm and yelled, “Get outa me bar, you ruffian.” Fists flew; police arrived.

Was London drunk? “Nah,” he declared, “I’ve only had two drinks all day.”

“You butted me,” declared Muldowney, while London claimed, “I was just trying to get away.” Both were taken to jail, each proclaiming his own innocence and declaring the other the villain.

In court, Judge Samuels regarded both men. “I didn’t strike a single blow,” London explained, though Muldowney’s face was red, swollen and lacerated, while Muldowney insisted that “London hung one on me fore I came across with my wallop.” London’s swollen right eye, puffy nose, and discolorations contrasted with his elegant light grey suit, soft white shirt, flowing knotted tie, and the Panama hat in his hands.

The judge asked London, “Were you drunk?”

“There is no way a man may judge the state of his thirst until he has taken at least one drink, and then he can determine whether he wants another or not,” London argued, to the laughter of the entire room.

Samuels reasoned, since no witness could say who punched first, and both appeared equally battered, he’d give them the “benefit of the doubt,” and dismissed the charges. London seethed.

Why was he so angry? London had little tolerance for what he considered injustice—as a result of a childhood scarred by injustice, bigotry, poverty, starvation and hard labor. He’d also had a traumatic experience with the justice system.

In 1894, at 18, London had joined a march across America, a protest of the unemployed. Walking along an empty street in Niagara Falls, a cop approached. Unable to name a hotel, London was forced directly to a jail courtroom filled with other hobos. As each was casually sentenced without a trial, Jack resolved to “expose their mis- administration of justice.”

With a sentence of 30 days, the chain-ganged prisoners were delivered to the Erie Penitentiary. Stripped and shaved, London found his prison garb became his “insignia of shame,” and he felt the “rushing tides of fear.” In that imposing cell block, he learned that to survive starvation, beatings and monstrous depravity, he must become one of them.

“When one is on the hot lava of hell, he cannot choose his path,” he would later write.

That observation came in The Road, London’s 1907 recounting of his prison experiences—but only those, he wrote, “that weren’t unspeakable.”

So, three years later, as London regarded the black-robed man sitting behind his elevated bench in an ornate courtroom, he plotted revenge against this judge: against a non-Christian (Samuels was Jewish), against the inequities of capitalism, and against an unjust prison system built upon the exploitation of men.

London discovered that the judge owned the land under the tavern and accused Samuels of the kind of graft he’d witnessed all his life. The judge denied this, saying that while he owned the land, he had no other connection.

Having sworn to expose misadministration of justice back in Niagara Falls in 1894, London took his vendetta to the press.

“Oh, we were wolves,” he recalled, “just like the fellows who do business in Wall Street.”

Here is what Jack London couldn’t have known about Samuels: that his family had left Prussia before his birth in 1859 and had arrived in America when he was 3 years old. That Samuels studied for and passed the bar exam in 1899 while selling shoes in Oakland, and then went to work as a lawyer, then an assistant DA. That he was deeply involved with the Jewish community and philanthropic efforts. That Samuels’ son participated in a debate in high school, judged by London.

Shortly after the June 1910 barroom incident that ignited London’s vendetta, the author dashed off a story called “The Benefit of the Doubt,” published in the Saturday Evening Post. It’s a misfire, apathetic attempt at irony, a slur against “Judge Witberg,” and a self-portrait of the author as more physically vengeful and more humiliating than London was in real life. There is little of the passion for social justice in London’s greater works, including The Star Rover, The Iron Heel, and The Valley of the Moon.

This certainly wasn’t the only blast my great-grandfather faced—it turns out that my aunt’s bomb threat story involved not London but a different case in 1908. And London didn’t hurt his reputation. When the judge died in 1925, the courts shut down, and flags flew at half-mast.

None of this soured me on London. I went on to create murals at Jack London Square, called “Jack & Friends,” a literary history of the Bay Area. The sad end of the story came around 2009 when a developer decided to install tile over my murals.

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As the ACE Train pulls into the Santa Clara station, the conductor pops out—and begins apologizing for his train.

“I’m sorry, but this is not the Amtrak!” he bellows, loud enough to be heard by all boarding passengers on the long platform

“And this is not Caltrain! If you want the Caltrain to San Francisco, do not board this train!” he yells.

This warning is useful: The ACE Train uses some of the same tracks but doesn’t go the same places as Amtrak and Caltrain. It’s also fitting: The ACE Train is important to California because of what it is not.

It’s not a service that operates around the clock, like L.A.’s Metro. It’s not charming and tourist-friendly, like San Diego’s trolley, and it doesn’t connect our fanciest precincts and companies like BART. It’s not expensive to construct, like the high-speed rail project. And it’s not losing riders, like so much transit these days.

Here’s what the ACE Train is: a real, live, and unappreciated story of successful transportation in California. And while its story is modest and narrow for now, it is planning expansion in ways that—if Californians can move past the brain-dead populist politics of the gas tax—should point the way to a future in which Californians can move around more easily.

The ACE—for Altamont Corridor Express—is modest. Its service consists of just four round trips each weekday—limits that reflect the fact that it shares tracks with Union Pacific. ACE sends four trains from Stockton to San Jose, via the East Bay in the morning, and sends four trains back from San Jose to Stockton at the end of the day.

The ACE Train works because it is pure commuter rail, addressing the mismatch between where the jobs are in the Bay Area and where people can afford to buy homes. Every morning ACE takes residents of places like Livermore, Lathrop, Tracy, and Manteca to their jobs in the East Bay and Santa Clara County, and returns them home in time for prime time television. In the process, it keeps them off the madness-inducing parking lot that is the 580 freeway.

ACE started 20 years ago with just two daily round trips, backed by a joint powers authority and funded by a sales tax increase in San Joaquin County, whose residents suffer from some of America’s longest commutes.

The last six years have seen the ACE Train double its ridership to more than 5,000 people per day and more than 1.3 million people annually. At a time when transit use has been flat in major metros, ACE is one of the fastest growing train lines in the country.

ACE’s success suggests that California needs a conversation about inter-regional transit that is more thoughtful than our current one, which focuses almost exclusively on the costs of the high-speed rail project. What we should be talking about is whether high-speed rail will offer smart and seamless connections to other modes of transportation, making it easier for Californians to get where we need to go. The example of ACE suggests that by smartly expanding our lesser-known commuter rail lines—like the Metrolink in Southern California, the Coaster in San Diego, the SMART Train in the North Bay, and the aforementioned Caltrain on the Peninsula—we could build an integrated web of transit that would make our daily lives easier.

One of Joe Mathews’s sons savors the view, and his dining experience, aboard the ACE train. Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The ACE train is an example because it has improved thoughtfully and incrementally, keeping the needs of its riders in mind. Right now, ACE is expanding service on its existing route by buying cleaner-burning locomotives that allow it to expand from trains that are currently seven cars to 10-car ones. It could add Saturday service in 2019.

In the next few years, the service is scheduled to expand its geographic reach. Under the mantle of creating “Valley Rail,” ACE will push in two different directions at once. In the 2020s, one new branch of the service will head up to the state capital, with new stations in Lodi, Elk Grove, Sacramento, and Natomas, ending with a shuttle to Sacramento International Airport. The other branch will extend south to the cities of Modesto and Ceres before eventually connecting to Merced. In that way, ACE, in combination with expanded service on Amtrak’s San Joaquin line, would form a triangle between three regions—the Bay Area, the Capital Region, and the San Joaquin Valley.

This will also put ACE at two of the most important new transportation hubs of 21st-century California.

The first is San Jose’s Diridon Station, which already links together Caltrain, Amtrak, and Santa Clara’s VTA light-rail system. High-speed rail’s first phase would end there, and the station is also next door to the site where Google wants to build a massive new “village.”

The second hub is downtown Merced, which would be both an ACE terminus and a stop on high-speed rail. That old downtown is already transforming, as the University of California’s newest campus, which was built in the fields outside Merced, expands into its downtown.

Unfortunately, this second extension—to Merced and Modesto—is endangered because it is funded by the controversial gas tax increase that Proposition 6, on this November’s ballot, would repeal.

The gas tax is a statewide political battle, but the geographic center of the fight is the ACE corridor. Two lawmakers from there—State Senator Anthony Canella, a Republican from Ceres, and Assemblyman Adam Gray, a Democrat from Merced—provided their votes in favor of the gas tax in exchange for $400 million for the ACE expansion to serve their communities.

If Prop 6, which is popular among Republicans, passes, the ACE expansion will be threatened. Democratic congressional candidate Josh Harder has cynically come out in favor of Prop 6, even though it would hurt his hometown of Modesto, to create political problems for the area’s incumbent Republican congressman, Jeff Denham, who is heavily funded by transportation lobbies. Denham was previously such a champion of ACE that he held a town hall on the moving train. Now Denham is trying to play the issue both ways: He has quietly endorsed Prop 6 to appease his tax-hating GOP base, while also refusing to give the measure money or vocal public support.

Fortunately, riding the ACE is less complicated than voting on it. One recent afternoon, I boarded the train at its origin, Diridon in San Jose, and then marveled at the big crowds that embarked at the next two stations. The first, Santa Clara, has a shuttle bus to San Jose’s airport, while the second, Great America, is next to the 49ers’ new stadium. The platform there was mobbed with employees of Cisco and other tech firms that run company buses between their offices and ACE.

By the time the train had passed a beautiful stretch along the southeast edge of the bay and stopped in Fremont, there was no longer a seat to be had. A group of Cisco engineers held a business meeting around one table on the second floor of the rail car. At the Pleasanton stop, new riders, who use a shuttle bus connecting with the BART system there, squeezed on.

The train slowly emptied out over the next four stops—at Livermore, Vasco Road, Tracy, and Lathrop/Manteca—as people poured into jammed parking lots to retrieve their vehicles. Some had brought bicycles and rode off on them. ACE riders told me that the traffic jams getting into these station lots is the most difficult part of their whole trip. The crowding might get worse: New construction of housing and retail was visible near most stops. The other complaints I heard were about the strength of ACE’s Wi-Fi, and the cost of the train (monthly passes can run more than $300, and round-trip tickets can exceed $20). But the trip is still cheaper and easier than driving.

My train was mostly empty on the last leg to the lovely Cabral Station, on the edge of Stockton’s downtown. From there, I would walk to a dinner interview at Angelina’s Spaghetti House, a great and unfussy old Italian restaurant. And I didn’t have to hurry—the ACE had arrived five minutes early.

Let’s hope California’s rail future has similar timing.

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