An Eye for the Strange and Wonderful: Remembering KQED’s Patricia Yollin

Charlie turned the family’s backyard into a mink farm. Pat said the animals were remarkable for their viciousness and stink.

Outside Pat’s household, there was serious trouble in the extended Yollin family. One of her much older half-brothers, Louis Yollin, had been placed in a Philadelphia psychiatric hospital after committing a series of crimes in the late 1940s. In one case, he had stolen a collection of replica diamonds and other gems from a museum in the city and been arrested after trying to sell them to tourists on the Atlantic City boardwalk.

Louis went on to a more sensational crime in 1952, when he was 28. Allowed to leave the psychiatric facility to visit his mother, he got his hands on a .25-caliber pistol and 50 rounds of ammunition and made his way back to Atlantic City. He held up a cab driver, who took him on a long drive to another town. There, Louis opened fire on random strangers, wounding three.

An Associated Press story carried by papers across the country the next day quoted Louis as telling arresting officers that he simply had “an urge to kill.” He was committed to a facility for the criminally insane, where he spent the next 16 years.

Did the case’s notoriety and the fate of Pat’s half-brother affect life in the Yollin household? I don’t know. But one other traumatic episode did.

One evening when she was six, Pat was eating nuts. One got stuck in her throat. She told her parents, who didn’t believe her and sent her to bed. The next morning, the pain was worse and Pat complained again. This time, her parents took her to a doctor, who told them Pat needed an emergency tracheotomy.

She remembered the date of that operation, Oct. 21, for the rest of her life. And after she fell ill last fall, she said she experienced the first symptoms of her cancer on Oct. 21, 2019.

P

at went on to be the woman and journalist she became because of her own innate intelligence and curiosity. But she also got a hand from her Aunt Katie, Veronica Dugan’s older sister.

Catherine Dugan, who was unmarried and had no children, paid for Pat to attend Catholic schools from the first grade on.

Pat said later her aunt’s generosity was not entirely selfless. Katie, a Catholic, also wanted to “counteract” the influence of Charles Yollin, who was Jewish.

Pat finished her schooling at Gwynedd Mercy High School, a highly regarded all-girls school in the Philadelphia suburbs. From there, Pat went on to Northwestern University, graduating with a bachelor’s in politics and government in 1972. She attended UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and earned her master’s in 1976.

She worked for the Hayward Daily Review from 1978 through early 1983. With a bent for feature reporting, she also proved adept at breaking news coverage. Among the stories she reported was the 1982 retrial of Sacramento Valley serial killer Juan Corona.

That coverage brought her to the attention of Jim Wood, a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner also assigned to the retrial. Wood persuaded his editors to hire Pat, and she joined the Examiner in 1983.

In the next 26 years — first for the Ex and later for the San Francisco Chronicle — Pat covered an extraordinary variety of stories and filled many different newsroom roles.

From 1983 through 1987, she covered transportation issues for the Examiner and took over writing the paper’s “Phantom Commuter” column.

In Pat's hands, the Phantom was a feature that combined her sense of fun with her interest in providing a useful reader service. She would ride transit in the Bay Area and well beyond and report the good, the bad and the ugly she encountered.

Every bus and train ride she wrote about was memorable. Here’s her impression of one Muni line, the 27-Bryant, that readers had told her was beset by interminable delays.

“The caped commuter finished her round trip an hour and 35 minutes later, struck by two things: The 27-Bryant makes more turns than bumper cars manned by hyperactive children, and the rather nondescript route provides one of the most spectacular views in the city when it reaches 30th and Castro Street at the end of the line.”

Later, she wrote a two-part report on how the region’s transit services were serving people with disabilities. The story featured a Berkeley woman who struggled to ride transit in her wheelchair. The twist: In doing the piece, Pat rode in a wheelchair, too. Her description of boarding one bus:

"The Phantom enjoyed a flawless lift ride, but then struggled to negotiate a tight right turn past the driver. She had never given much thought to the considerable difficulties of backing down the narrow front of a crowded bus while attempting to slalom between old people’s feet."

Her coverage made enough of an impression that Pat was invited in July 1984 to participate in a KQED-TV show, “Damn This Traffic Jam,” that focused on the Bay Area’s seemingly intractable transportation problems. (Sound familiar?). Here’s the segment, in which Pat appeared in full Phantom disguise: a cape, a floppy hat and a mask that left only her eyes uncovered.

Later in her career, Pat was part of an Examiner team that produced a wide-ranging, 16-day series on the lives of gay and lesbian people in the United States. For the Chronicle, she produced a series on the many issues facing organ transplant recipients.

Among topics she returned to repeatedly: zoos. She loved the animals, was concerned about their welfare and was fascinated by how people interact with them.

In a 2003 piece detailing boisterous mating behavior among Magellanic penguins at the San Francisco Zoo, she quoted the birds’ keeper, Jane Tollini: “For me, it's heaven. It's a pleasant time right now. A whole month of foreplay — what's more pleasant than that?"

After a Siberian tiger fatally mauled a visitor to the zoo and injured two others on Christmas Day 2007, Pat and colleagues at the Chronicle broke the story revealing the victims had taunted the animal before it escaped its enclosure and attacked.

O

ne last chapter.

Pat took a buyout from the Chronicle in 2009. She had little trouble finding freelance work, and did stories for UC Berkeley’s California Magazine and UCSF. She began work as a part-time editor for KQED in 2013, an arrangement that quickly became permanent. Her major contribution to the organization, to her coworkers and to our readers was to improve everything she laid her hands on.

Among her colleagues, Pat was known as a very clear-headed and constructive editor who treated reporters with respect and criticized their work with a level of tact that was well-beyond the abilities of most of us in the news business. Put another way, she could point out your shortcomings — even mistakes that were galling and nettlesome — in a way that made the point but didn’t make people feel stupid.

Beyond all that, Pat was generous with her coaching and encouragement. She was instrumental in setting up and continuing San Francisco State's Raul Ramirez Diversity in Journalism Fund, a scholarship created in honor of KQED's late executive director of news and public affairs. Advocating for the fund was a reflection of her commitment to opening our profession to voices that have been shut out in the past. Pat also took a personal interest in the success of the students who have come to work at KQED as part of the scholarship.

Tyche Hendricks, a colleague at KQED who was among the hundreds of people who responded to a Facebook post announcing Pat’s passing this past week, summed her up this way: “Her intelligence, curiosity, beautiful prose, journalistic instincts and ethics, her amazing ability to tell a story, her humor and pithy insights, her sense of justice, her quiet leadership … are irreplaceable and will be terribly missed.”

Besides her husband and partner Paul Chinn, Patricia Yollin is survived by two nieces — Jennifer Yollin of San Francisco and Julie Yollin Berk of London — and a nephew, Guy Yollin of Seattle.