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

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ften when Pat Yollin had to break bad news about a piece I had written — as when she had encountered a typo or missing word or some other gibberish in my copy — she’d preface it with a tongue-in-cheek apology.

“Not to be galling and nettlesome,” she’d say, “but there seems to be a word left out here.”

Her notes stopped just before Christmas, when doctors told Pat — a KQED News online editor for the past seven years — that she was suffering from an incurable cancer that had already reached an advanced stage. The cancer, complicated by infections and a stroke, rapidly overwhelmed her, and she died last Saturday in Berkeley. She was 69.

Pat’s illness also ended a 45-year career as a reporter, editor and mentor who was unendingly curious and eager to explore the world with all its quirks, oddities and wonders.

Pat told her longtime partner, San Francisco Chronicle photographer Paul Chinn, that she wanted no formal memorial or tributes after she died. She probably would have insisted that she didn’t want a formal obituary, either.

So now, it’s my turn to apologize to her for something she might well find galling and nettlesome: a look at her life and work.

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mong the many things Pat was known for — the precision and clarity in her writing and editing, her eye for detail, her empathy for the people she wrote about — was her sense of fun and love of the oddball story. So in her time editing for KQED, she’d sometimes make time to do pieces like one on the blooming of a corpse flower at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers or on the challenges a group of local entrepreneurs faced marketing a smart vibrator.

“There is no prouder parent than Sidney Price,” the corpse flower story began. “On Monday morning, he savored a private visit with his ‘baby’ at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers.

“ ‘I always thought she'd be an early bloomer,’ said Price, as he gazed at Terra the Titan, a 9-year-old corpse flower poised to unleash an overpowering stench that has been compared to decaying animal flesh, filthy socks, rotting garbage and human feces.”

But even knowing how enthusiastically she embraced the unusual, it’s surprising to dig through Pat’s earliest stories.

The very first piece I can find carrying her byline is from the summer of 1975 for the San Francisco Examiner’s old Sunday magazine, California Living.

The story tells the tale of a young woman named Magi (pronounced Maggie), recently hired as a barker for one of the North Beach strip clubs. Pat hung out for an afternoon with the new barker, whose job was to entice (or badger) male passersby to come see the show inside. Business was depressingly slow: The few people strolling down Broadway weren’t interested in Magi’s spiel. And then this happened:

“A short bespectacled white-haired man is approaching at a brisk pace, puffing on a cigar. He breezes past Magi’s pitch, and has almost reached the end of the block when Magi, still persevering, shouts, “Let me show you something really disgusting.” It works. His head whirls around. “Disgusting!” he yelps hopefully in a heavy German accent, and marches back to investigate. He’s on his way once again within a few minutes, but the encounter has revived Magi’s good humor.”

I laughed out loud at the line, “Let me show you something really disgusting.” It’s so unexpected, so funny and so Pat. And it’s a little astounding to me to see her, at age 24, showing such a refined eye for the detail that would make the story.

Where did she pick up the affinity for the strange and the knack for conveying it to readers? Pat didn’t talk much about her formative years — spent in and around Philadelphia. After she fell ill, I told her once I’d like to ask her about her family.

“Why?” she demanded, as if she knew what I might be up to. I let it drop. But maybe her past holds a few clues to her fundamental enthusiasm for life and her willingness to embrace and learn from whoever and whatever she encountered.

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atricia Leah Yollin was born Aug. 17, 1950, in Abington, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, the only child of Charles Yollin and Veronica Rita Dugan.

Pat’s father was Jewish, a native of Kiev, Ukraine, whose family emigrated to Pennsylvania during the last years of Czar Nicholas II’s reign. Charlie Yollin left high school after one year and worked as a salesman and electrician.

Her mother, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, was born at home in the town of Bristol, just up the Delaware River from Philadelphia. If census records are to be believed, she also dropped out of high school and worked for years as a stenographer at a local Elks Club.

None of that sounds way out there, but of course there’s a lot more to the story.

Charlie Yollin was 46 and had two sons from his previous marriage — they were already in their 20s — when Pat came along. Veronica had apparently lived at home into her 30s before marrying Charles. She was 42 when Pat was born.

Friends say Pat spoke seldom about her upbringing, but a couple of details stick out. Pat described her mother poring over the Daily Racing Form, the horse players’ bible, as she sipped Schmidt's beer. Veronica, whom Pat described to some as “a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-gambling woman,” would sometimes take her daughter along on her outings to the track.

Her father? My eye is drawn to one particular about him. In the early ‘50s, soon after Pat was born, Charles advertised for a business he had started — raising minks — at the family’s home in the outlying Philadelphia suburb of Ambler.

“Attention Mink Rancher,” the ads were headlined. “We are looking for live stock. If you have 300 minks or less and would like to sell out before pelting season, call or write. …”

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.

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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.

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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.