Community Guide 2017
speed-reading, ballet, modern dance, filmmaking, archery, clay animation, and crochet. For adults we added yoga, carpentry, T’ai Chi, nuclear survival, bagpiping, drama, a car engine in the Resource room for an auto mechanics class, and life drawing (when kids discovered what “life drawing” was and learned there were no curtains on the windows, we had a mini-crisis). We signed leases for a Val- ley Family Preschool, Day Care, and clay program. Special events included, Flea Markets, Ali Akbar Khan concerts, An Evening of Erotic Poetry, Valley Player drama produc- tions, a Roach Clip Art Show and much more that space doesn’t allow. The first 1969 Holiday Festival fundraiser had over 100 artists and hundreds attending! Tables bent under the weight of home cooked food. The aroma of bread baking filled the Valley (I’m not kidding). We talked Fred Berens- meier, Sr., into being Santa Claus and discovered an unfor- gettable gift—he WAS the real Santa Claus. Ask anybody. These were fun, heady, creative times. But the Festival proceeds covered only insurance and utility costs and the building was rapidly deteriorating. Fuses blew, the roof leaked, the temperamental heater was given an affectionate, but unprintable name, and we pushed membership with pink Survival Cards and . . . survived. The Community Center—1980s 1980 brought us a $200,000 federal Community Devel- opment Block Grant, $35,000 from the SF Foundation, donations for a reader board and a county grant to partly restore the historical 1933 WPA mural. Additional grants provided funds for a new heating system, parking lot pav- ing and a small bathroom off the lobby. The Art Center closed down to make major repairs and upgrades, which included converting the huge boys bathroom into a boys and girls bathroom and then converting the girl’s huge bathroom into a meeting room, now the West Office. We reopened in 1981 as the Community Center with a Grand Celebration and flourished. There was a new landscape mural in the Valley room. We sponsored a Weatheriza- tion and Recycling Program, had art shows, teen dances, a Haunted House and showed anti-nuclear films. New users included a Food Co-op, Valley Alliance, the Planning Group, Housing Task Force, and Friends of the Valley. The January 1982 storm had an enormous impact on the Center. Overnight it became a focus where volunteers manned a hotline for weeks, matching helpers to callers with diverse emergency needs. This, along with a Flood Disaster Newsletter and Disaster Preparedness booklet, led to the hiring of Arnold Erickson, a law student inter- ested in Human Services. He instituted an Emergency Pantry, Senior Brown Bags, Compassion in Action, USDA commodities, holiday programs, and directed counsel-
Summer 2009 Community Center’s Literary Highlight Remembered by Marshall Krause
It was, perhaps, the highlight of the Community Cen- ter’s literary contribution to the community thus far. More than 300 people gathered in the courtyard on the evening of September 16, 1995, to hear famed poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure declaim poems and stories honoring their mentor, Kenneth Rexroth. Earlier the group had met at Devil’s Gulch in Samuel P. Taylor State Park to remem- ber Kenneth’s poems written there at Kenneth’s cabin during the 1950s. Rexroth became widely known in the 1960s as an originator of jazz and poetry readings for the North Beach Bohemian community of San Francisco as well as a distinguished and deeply learned artist and critic. All three poets acknowledged their deep connection with and respect for Kenneth’s work. The reading was organized by the Center’s President at the time, Marshall Krause, who had gotten to know the poets when, as the attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Northern California, he defended writers and artists accused of “obscenity” in exercising their artistic freedom. All three poets, still contributing their creativity in their elderly years, expressed them- selves as strongly committed to the artistic freedom guaranteed by our Constitution. A one-hour video of the reading made by poetry archivist Kush has been shown at the Community Cen- ter several times and an interpretive trail at Devil’s Gulch is still under discussion.
Marshall Krause, Lawrence Felinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, 1995
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