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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003cbr>\nFounded in 1885, Stanford University is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities, not to mention its 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003cbr>\nThis manicured institution on the San Francisco peninsula isn’t necessarily the kind of place you’d expect to harbor a century-old murder mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But 120 years ago this year, the university’s co-founder, Jane Stanford, died suddenly one winter evening. And although the official verdict was natural causes, the original coroner’s report indicated something far more sinister: poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what really happened to Jane Stanford in 1905? It’s a question that preoccupies Richard White, Stanford University history professor emeritus and author of \u003ca href=\"https://history.stanford.edu/people/richard-white\">\u003cem>Who Killed Jane Stanford\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several years ago, White was teaching his students how to use the Stanford University archives. He asked them to research the curious history of Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061787\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1594px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061787\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1594\" height=\"2500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg 1594w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-160x251.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-979x1536.jpg 979w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-1306x2048.jpg 1306w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1594px) 100vw, 1594px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Portrait of Jane Stanford with her son, Leland Jr., before he died of typhoid in 1884. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When his students kept hitting roadblocks in the archives, an intrigued White couldn’t resist looking into the story himself — and soon found himself baffled that the death of Jane Stanford wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially since Stanford Medical School physician Robert Cutler had \u003ca href=\"https://www.sup.org/books/history/mysterious-death-jane-stanford\">already published a 2003 book\u003c/a> concluding that she did not die of natural causes, but had instead been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack,” White said. “And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university — but it hadn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.stanford.edu/about/history/\">The university’s history webpage\u003c/a> doesn’t mention the death of Jane Stanford at all, let alone the fact that she may well have been murdered. (Stanford University didn’t respond to our request for official comment on their co-founder’s death.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But one thing is certain: strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die. When this white powder gets into the body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to a person’s muscles, inducing waves of painful spasms. The jaw locks tight and the limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but is odorless, making it a notoriously popular way to poison a person in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also an ingredient in rat bait — and even some medicines — making it easy to obtain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence,” White said. And after much research, he has a theory about who ended Jane Stanford’s life.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A ‘personal fiefdom’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was born Jane Lathrop in 1828 in upstate New York. At the age of 22, she married Leland Stanford, a railroad baron, who briefly served as governor of California from 1862 to 1863, and then a U.S. senator for almost a decade starting in 1885.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 39, Jane Stanford gave birth to \u003ca href=\"https://stanfordmag.org/contents/about-a-boy\">her only child, Leland Stanford Jr\u003c/a>., but Leland Jr. died from typhoid in his teens. “She never gets over that,” White said. “She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.”[aside postID=news_11893685 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/10/RS39771_4.34-qut.jpg']In their grief, the Stanfords sought ways to honor Leland Jr.’s memory. At this time, “California has great ambitions beyond just being a sort of outpost of wealth in the West,” White said. “It wants to become a cultural leader, an industrial leader. And so, founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened their university on the San Francisco Peninsula, called Leland Stanford Junior University. But Leland Stanford Sr would only live two more years before he too died, in 1893.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 65, Jane Stanford found herself in charge of the new university — a heavy responsibility compounded, White said, by Leland Sr’s financial mismanagement of both the university’s funds and the Stanfords’ own money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the next several years, Jane Stanford was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t further tank her considerable fortune. But her methods of managing the university’s affairs swiftly made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once she gets power, she uses it ruthlessly,” White said. “She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power — so much so that she makes a great many enemies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but then treated those same students poorly. The women in her personal life found this out firsthand — chief among them her longtime companion and secretary, Bertha Berner, “who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061782\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061782\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1387\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-1536x1065.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Stanford women’s basketball team circa 1896. Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, insisted that women be admitted from the school’s inception in 1891. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While running the university as what White called “a personal fiefdom,” Jane Stanford butted heads often with the institution’s president, David Starr Jordan. While “devoted” to the university, Jordan knew “that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford’s religious beliefs were also a major headache for Jordan. She was a Spiritualist: a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. Like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Stanford was motivated by the losses in her own life: the death of her son and husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in the Victorian era, the sheer prevalence of death through disease and infant mortality meant that virtually everyone was surrounded by tragedies like Stanford’s. But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time, and quite another for the leader of a major university. Not least because Stanford told people that she was using those seances to receive instructions on how to run the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan and his Stanford University colleagues lived in fear of their boss’s Spiritualism becoming common knowledge, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s going to endanger all the legal documents she signs,” he said. “It’s very hard to uphold a legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for Jordan, things soon got even worse, White said – when he realized “that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this leads us to 1905, when 76-year-old Jane Stanford was poisoned not once but twice. She did not survive the second attempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A cover-up across an ocean\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first poisoning attempt in January 1905, inside Jane Stanford’s San Francisco mansion, was unsuccessful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of Poland Spring water and called out for her household staff, including her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner. After vomiting, Stanford recovered — and when the water was tested, strychnine was found.[aside postID=news_11700225 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/10/RS33251_composite_2-qut.jpg'] However, it wasn’t a pure form of the poison in the bottle. “Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people had dumped rat poison in it,” White said. Other ingredients in the rat poison had caused Stanford to vomit, which saved her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford’s inner circle advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal that could taint the university, and to get far away from San Francisco and a poisoner who might try again. So just over a month later, Stanford departed for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her attempts to evade her poisoner proved unsuccessful. On February 28, 1905, Stanford woke up in her Oahu hotel in the middle of the night and screamed out for Berner. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in,” White said — and the medical evaluation swiftly concluded she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. “Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was the story reported by the earliest newspaper accounts, like that of \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=BT19050304.2.29&srpos=10&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">the Oceanside Blade in Southern California\u003c/a> on March 4, 1905, which noted the “suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine.\u003cstrong>”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061783\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2047px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061783\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2047\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg 2047w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-2000x2501.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-160x200.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1228x1536.jpg 1228w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1638x2048.jpg 1638w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2047px) 100vw, 2047px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University and butted heads with Jane Stanford often. He died in 1931, outliving Jane by more than 20 years. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While Stanford’s household fell under suspicion, another person absolutely had the motive, White said: Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan. Just a few weeks before the first poisoning attempt, Jordan had not only discovered that Stanford intended to fire him, but had been working with colleagues to try to take control of the university’s finances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the news of Jane Stanford’s death, Jordan jumped on a boat to Oahu: “Ostensibly to bring her body home,” White said, “but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On arrival in Honolulu, Jordan hired another doctor to deliver a verdict on the death, one who contradicted the earlier account of strychnine poisoning, “though he has not examined the body,” and “doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, an inquiry which neatly concluded that rather than being poisoned, Stanford had instead died of a heart attack. \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SRPD19051231.2.17&srpos=5&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">He also used the local papers\u003c/a> to discredit the Hawaii authorities, creating a general air of — as White put it — “There’s nothing to see here, there’s nothing to look at, let’s get on with things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University: That she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A suspect in plain sight\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>While Jordan certainly acted suspiciously, White said that “the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan may have had several reasons to want Jane Stanford out of the picture, but he wasn’t actually present at either poisoning attempt. He lacked the opportunity to poison her himself. “Sometimes you just get really lucky,” White said. “He wanted her killed, and she was killed.\u003cbr>\n[aside postID=news_11894939 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/3738571926_99e9526967_o-1020x683.jpg']For White, there’s a far more persuasive suspect hiding in plain sight: Stanford’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Berner had been in Stanford’s service from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Leland Junior. She was, by all accounts, “a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman,” White said — and he believes Berner’s decision not to marry was a strategic, practical move.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not only would marriage have meant giving up traveling the world with Jane Stanford and access to high society, but Berner was also the sole caretaker for her sick mother. “She really cannot afford to give up this job,” White said. And Stanford knew it, even going so far as to sabotage any romantic relationships Berner dared to have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The relationship between the two women became “incredibly rocky,” White said, to the point where Berner quit Stanford’s employ several times. “But she always comes back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not convinced? How about this for motive — Berner was a beneficiary in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And at the time of the second poisoning attempt, Berner’s mother became even sicker. Berner even declined to join Stanford on her Hawaii trip due to fears about her mother’s ailing health, but her employer insisted that Berner make the trip if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Stanford clearly did not harbor any suspicions that her trusted companion and secretary of many years had anything to do with the first attempt on her life, she was nonetheless aware that Berner was romantically involved with Stanford’s own butler — and that the pair had been “embezzling money from her,” White said. “She can hang that over Bertha Berner’s head.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A killer walks free?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To White, when added together, Berner’s motives are convincing. Her trusted position meant she also had the opportunity to poison Stanford, and she was present at both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White’s research shows Berner also had the means to kill Jane Stanford. By the time Berner left for Hawaii, she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist. This association provided “a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine,” White said. “Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061780\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061780\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1362\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-160x109.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-1536x1046.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, bats in a faculty versus student baseball game, a tradition on campus. Jordan often butted heads with Jane Stanford over how to run the university and covered up her death by poisoning in 1905. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>White suspects that university president Jordan may have suspected Berner at the time, and that he may have actively protected her after Jane Stanford’s demise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He does it in writing,” White said: “He reassures her that, ‘we know you didn’t do it; we’re going take care of you; you have nothing to worry about.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And even if other people close to Jane Stanford suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, nobody wanted to bring that kind of scandal upon Stanford University, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University, next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to its final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The man who led the cover-up of her murder now led the walk from the church to her tomb. And walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" data-testid=\"embed-iframe\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/63j9eNYdy78nVPUzUJ791e?utm_source=generator&theme=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Stanford University is undeniably a Bay Area icon with the pedigree to match.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Founded back in the late 19th century, this private institution sprawling over 8,000 manicured acres on the sunny San Francisco peninsula is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities. It has 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short: not the kind of place you’d necessarily expect to harbor a century-old mystery full of skulduggery, lies and poison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s exactly what lies beneath Stanford’s history. Because the woman who co-founded this place, Jane Stanford, died in very strange circumstances in 1905. And although the official verdict was natural causes, some suspect something far more sinister happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today on Bay Curious, we’re following the historic breadcrumbs to discover who might have been responsible. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> What really happened to Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, who died suddenly in 1905?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED’s Carly Severn brings us the historic mystery — and dastardly cover-up — that a lot of people in the Bay Area still don’t know about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn:\u003c/strong> Death by poisoning is a nasty way to go. But strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When this white powder gets into your body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to your muscles resulting in overwhelming, painful spasms all over. Your jaw locks tight. Your limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill you within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but it doesn’t smell of anything. And as an ingredient in rat bait, and even some medicines in the 19th and early twentieth centuries, it was a very popular way to poison someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what if I told you that 120 years ago, the co-founder of Stanford University found this out first-hand. And almost nobody is talking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard White is a professor emeritus in Stanford University’s history department. Several years ago he was TEACHING students how to use the university’s own archives to investigate historical conundrums … and he asked them to find out what happened to Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard found there was a lot his students couldn’t uncover about this case, prompting him to turn historical detective after the class had long ended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he started looking into it he was baffled this wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially because a physician at Stanford Medical School had already written a book showing that Jane Stanford had 100% been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And the university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack. And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university, but it hadn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>To get to the bottom of this mystery, let’s wind back all the way to 1828 when Jane Stanford entered this world in upstate New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a young woman, Jane married Leland Stanford, a businessman and politician who made his fortune in the railroad business, and who briefly served as governor of California in the 1860s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane gave birth to her only child — also called Leland — when she was 39. And she doted on him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then tragedy struck in 1884, when that son died of typhoid. And in their grief, the Stanfords looked for ways to honor his memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And so, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened a university on the Peninsula calling it Leland Stanford Junior University, after their son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just two years later, Jane’s husband died. And at age 65, Jane found herself in charge of the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard says Leland Stanford had mismanaged University funds and his own fortune for a long time. So for the next several years, Jane was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t tank her considerable fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is really where the trouble began. Because Jane’s way of managing affairs at Stanford University made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White:\u003c/strong> Once she gets power she uses it ruthlessly. She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power, so much so that she makes a great many enemies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but treated those students terribly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And when it came to men, Jane particularly butted heads with the president of Stanford University: David Starr Jordan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford runs Stanford University as a personal fiefdom. David Starr Jordan is devoted to the university, but he knows that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford was also a Spiritualist, a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. And like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Jane was motivated by personal tragedy beginning with the death of her son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She never gets over that. She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time and quite another for the leader of a major university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane’s Spiritualism became a big problem for Stanford University and for its president, Jordan. Because Jane told people that she was using her seances to receive instructions from her dead husband and son on how to run Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The great fear of Stanford University is that they’re gonna discover that Jane Stanford is a spiritualist and that’s gonna endanger all the legal documents she signs. It’s very hard to uphold the legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane’s beliefs were a constant source of stress for Jordan. And their relationship deteriorated even further when Jane made him fire a professor friend of his, sparking a scandal about academic freedom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while trying to navigate all of this, Jordan made a discovery:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He also realizes that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>In 1905, when Jane was 76, someone tried to poison her not once, but twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first attempt, at her Nob Hill mansion, was unsuccessful. Jane complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of spring water and called for her staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>One of them was her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner, who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha and the maids helped Jane to vomit. And when that water bottle was tested, the verdict came back: it was strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it wasn’t pure strychnine. Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people, had dumped rat poison in it. The rat poison had caused her to vomit. She felt very sick, but she recovered from it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>The people around Jane advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal. And to get the hell out of dodge away from the poisoner who might try again with something even stronger than rat poison this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Jane left for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which leads us to the second poisoning. Just over a month after the first attempt, Jane woke up in the middle of the night in her Oahu hotel and screamed for Bertha. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Somebody obtained pure strychnine, put it in her water and she died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in. The doctors looked at her, she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And this was the story that was reported by the earliest newspaper accounts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reads newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Oceanside Blade, March 1905: Mrs. Jane Stanford of San Francisco … died at Honolulu Wednesday under suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine which had been mixed with bicarbonate of soda taken as a medicine … Mrs. Stanford had taken the medicine and retired but was soon afterward seized with violent convulsions dying in a few minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Naturally, Jane’s household was under suspicion. But another person absolutely had the motive — David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just a few weeks before Jane was poisoned the first time he’d found out that she was planning to fire him. And Richard says Jordan had also been trying to take control from Jane of those Stanford finances via some pretty shady means.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And now, Jane was dead and Jordan was on a boat to Hawaii.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Ostensibly to bring her body home, but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict. He hires another doctor. He says she didn’t die of strychnine poisoning, though he has not examined the body, doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning, and he discredits doctors who in fact are much more senior and well-known than him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, which neatly concluded that instead of being poisoned, Jane had died of a heart attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan also used the newspapers to discredit the Hawaii authorities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Press Democrat, December 1905: According to Dr. Jordan no strychnine was found in Mrs. Stanford’s room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>There’s nothing to see here. There’s nothing to look at. Let’s get on with things. And it is a conspiracy to cover up her death and the conspiracy worked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Because in 1905 — before widespread telephones, before the internet — covering up someone’s death like this across an ocean no less was in many ways a lot simpler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University, that she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So you’re hearing all this and thinking: well, it’s so clearly this guy right? David Starr Jordan’s the murderer? He’s the one trying to cover up her death! I mean, what more do we need??\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And that’s what a lot of people think, except that the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>For one thing, he’s not present at the scene of either poisoning attempt. And he definitely wasn’t anywhere near Hawaii the second time. So while he had the motive, he doesn’t actually have the opportunity to poison her himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>It’s one of those times where for David Starr Jordan, you just think sometimes you just get really lucky. He wanted her killed and she was killed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it wasn’t David Starr Jordan, who did kill Jane Stanford?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well if you’ve watched one murder mystery in your life, you’ve probably learned to watch out for that one “harmless” background character who keeps popping up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so you might be wondering, what about Jane’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary: Bertha Berner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bertha had been employed by Jane from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Jane’s son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And Bertha Berner, by all accounts, was both a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha never married, which wasn’t that unusual for the time, but Richard says that was a strategic, practical decision she made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>First of all, it would give up her job that she has with Stanford, traveling around the world, the access to a society which otherwise she would have no access to. And secondly, she becomes the sole support of her mother. She really cannot afford to give up this job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And Jane knew it. Richard says this gave her carte blanche to treat Bertha like a true “frenemy,” even going so far as to sabotage Bertha’s romantic relationships when she dared to have them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Their relationship becomes incredibly rocky. Bertha Berner refuses to put up with it. And several times, which rarely shows up until I started looking at it, she leaves Jane Stanford’s employ, sometimes for years at a time. But she always comes back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Another reason that Bertha stuck around through it all … she was in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is where we come to Richard’s theory about Bertha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the second poisoning attempt coincides with Bertha’s mother getting really sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>When Jane Stanford asked her to come to Hawaii, says, I can’t. My mother’s dying. I have to stay here and take care of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But Jane insisted she make the journey if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane clearly still trusted Bertha and harbored zero suspicions she’d been involved in the first poisoning. Although she did have some dirt on Bertha:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Bertha Berner has had an affair with Albert Beverly, who’s Jane Stanford’s butler at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Yup, there’s a shady butler in this mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford knows about that. And she also knows that both of them have been embezzling money from her. She can hang that over Bertha Berners head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>As all good mysteries show, a killer needs the means, the motive, and the opportunity. And according to Richard, Bertha had all three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She had the motive: anger at her years of mistreatment by Jane, fear that her embezzlement might be exposed, and financial incentive, from being in the will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>If she can get away with the murder, she will have money in the will. She will in fact be able to continue to take care of her mother and she can set herself up not comfortably, but well enough to last for the rest of her life, which she does do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>She also had the physical opportunity. All of Jane’s servants were suspects in the first poisoning, but Bertha was the only one who’d been present for both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the means. That first poisoning, with the rat poison, had been clumsy. But by the time Bertha left for Hawaii, Richard says she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He becomes a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine. Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Guess the Butler was out of the picture?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some time after Jane died, Bertha also did something really weird. She wrote a tell-all book about Jane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She doesn’t mention the affairs, she doesn’t mentioned the embezzling, but what she says is Jane Stanford had money and she knew the power of money. She used it like a queen. She dominated everyone around her. She got what she wanted and she forced people to do what she want them to do because she has control over her money. Which sounds very much like the reason why, in fact, in the end, she will kill her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it was Bertha, even if Stanford president David Starr Jordan wasn’t in on it, did he know?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richard says he’s pretty sure the answer is yes, given how Jordan treated Bertha after the murder:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>What he does, and this he does in writing, is he reassures her that we know you didn’t do it, we’re gonna take care of you, you have nothing to worry about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And even if other people close to Jane suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, they didn’t want to bring that kind of smoke to Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to her final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Starr Jordan — the man who led the cover-up of her murder — led the walk from the church to her tomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the final insult? Walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The woman I think, murdered her.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>When you made as many enemies in life as Jane Stanford not even your funeral is safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That was KQED’s Carly Severn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious has published many episodes over the years that get into the spookier side of Bay Area history. If you’re looking for a little thrill this All Hallow’s Eve, check out our spooky Spotify playlist linked in the show notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, don’t forget to grab yourself a ticket to our trivia night. It’s on Thursday, November 13 at KQED headquarters in San Francisco. Come alone or with a team. It will be a lot of fun! Tickets are at kqed.org/events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Christopher Beale, Gabriela Glueck, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween tomorrow. See you next week!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cbr>\nFounded in 1885, Stanford University is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities, not to mention its 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003cbr>\nThis manicured institution on the San Francisco peninsula isn’t necessarily the kind of place you’d expect to harbor a century-old murder mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But 120 years ago this year, the university’s co-founder, Jane Stanford, died suddenly one winter evening. And although the official verdict was natural causes, the original coroner’s report indicated something far more sinister: poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what really happened to Jane Stanford in 1905? It’s a question that preoccupies Richard White, Stanford University history professor emeritus and author of \u003ca href=\"https://history.stanford.edu/people/richard-white\">\u003cem>Who Killed Jane Stanford\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several years ago, White was teaching his students how to use the Stanford University archives. He asked them to research the curious history of Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061787\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1594px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061787\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1594\" height=\"2500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg 1594w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-160x251.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-979x1536.jpg 979w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-1306x2048.jpg 1306w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1594px) 100vw, 1594px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Portrait of Jane Stanford with her son, Leland Jr., before he died of typhoid in 1884. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When his students kept hitting roadblocks in the archives, an intrigued White couldn’t resist looking into the story himself — and soon found himself baffled that the death of Jane Stanford wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially since Stanford Medical School physician Robert Cutler had \u003ca href=\"https://www.sup.org/books/history/mysterious-death-jane-stanford\">already published a 2003 book\u003c/a> concluding that she did not die of natural causes, but had instead been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack,” White said. “And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university — but it hadn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.stanford.edu/about/history/\">The university’s history webpage\u003c/a> doesn’t mention the death of Jane Stanford at all, let alone the fact that she may well have been murdered. (Stanford University didn’t respond to our request for official comment on their co-founder’s death.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But one thing is certain: strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die. When this white powder gets into the body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to a person’s muscles, inducing waves of painful spasms. The jaw locks tight and the limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but is odorless, making it a notoriously popular way to poison a person in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also an ingredient in rat bait — and even some medicines — making it easy to obtain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence,” White said. And after much research, he has a theory about who ended Jane Stanford’s life.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A ‘personal fiefdom’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was born Jane Lathrop in 1828 in upstate New York. At the age of 22, she married Leland Stanford, a railroad baron, who briefly served as governor of California from 1862 to 1863, and then a U.S. senator for almost a decade starting in 1885.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 39, Jane Stanford gave birth to \u003ca href=\"https://stanfordmag.org/contents/about-a-boy\">her only child, Leland Stanford Jr\u003c/a>., but Leland Jr. died from typhoid in his teens. “She never gets over that,” White said. “She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In their grief, the Stanfords sought ways to honor Leland Jr.’s memory. At this time, “California has great ambitions beyond just being a sort of outpost of wealth in the West,” White said. “It wants to become a cultural leader, an industrial leader. And so, founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened their university on the San Francisco Peninsula, called Leland Stanford Junior University. But Leland Stanford Sr would only live two more years before he too died, in 1893.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 65, Jane Stanford found herself in charge of the new university — a heavy responsibility compounded, White said, by Leland Sr’s financial mismanagement of both the university’s funds and the Stanfords’ own money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the next several years, Jane Stanford was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t further tank her considerable fortune. But her methods of managing the university’s affairs swiftly made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once she gets power, she uses it ruthlessly,” White said. “She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power — so much so that she makes a great many enemies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but then treated those same students poorly. The women in her personal life found this out firsthand — chief among them her longtime companion and secretary, Bertha Berner, “who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061782\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061782\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1387\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-1536x1065.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Stanford women’s basketball team circa 1896. Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, insisted that women be admitted from the school’s inception in 1891. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While running the university as what White called “a personal fiefdom,” Jane Stanford butted heads often with the institution’s president, David Starr Jordan. While “devoted” to the university, Jordan knew “that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford’s religious beliefs were also a major headache for Jordan. She was a Spiritualist: a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. Like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Stanford was motivated by the losses in her own life: the death of her son and husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in the Victorian era, the sheer prevalence of death through disease and infant mortality meant that virtually everyone was surrounded by tragedies like Stanford’s. But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time, and quite another for the leader of a major university. Not least because Stanford told people that she was using those seances to receive instructions on how to run the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan and his Stanford University colleagues lived in fear of their boss’s Spiritualism becoming common knowledge, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s going to endanger all the legal documents she signs,” he said. “It’s very hard to uphold a legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for Jordan, things soon got even worse, White said – when he realized “that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this leads us to 1905, when 76-year-old Jane Stanford was poisoned not once but twice. She did not survive the second attempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A cover-up across an ocean\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first poisoning attempt in January 1905, inside Jane Stanford’s San Francisco mansion, was unsuccessful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of Poland Spring water and called out for her household staff, including her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner. After vomiting, Stanford recovered — and when the water was tested, strychnine was found.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> However, it wasn’t a pure form of the poison in the bottle. “Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people had dumped rat poison in it,” White said. Other ingredients in the rat poison had caused Stanford to vomit, which saved her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford’s inner circle advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal that could taint the university, and to get far away from San Francisco and a poisoner who might try again. So just over a month later, Stanford departed for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her attempts to evade her poisoner proved unsuccessful. On February 28, 1905, Stanford woke up in her Oahu hotel in the middle of the night and screamed out for Berner. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in,” White said — and the medical evaluation swiftly concluded she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. “Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was the story reported by the earliest newspaper accounts, like that of \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=BT19050304.2.29&srpos=10&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">the Oceanside Blade in Southern California\u003c/a> on March 4, 1905, which noted the “suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine.\u003cstrong>”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061783\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2047px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061783\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2047\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg 2047w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-2000x2501.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-160x200.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1228x1536.jpg 1228w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1638x2048.jpg 1638w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2047px) 100vw, 2047px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University and butted heads with Jane Stanford often. He died in 1931, outliving Jane by more than 20 years. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While Stanford’s household fell under suspicion, another person absolutely had the motive, White said: Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan. Just a few weeks before the first poisoning attempt, Jordan had not only discovered that Stanford intended to fire him, but had been working with colleagues to try to take control of the university’s finances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the news of Jane Stanford’s death, Jordan jumped on a boat to Oahu: “Ostensibly to bring her body home,” White said, “but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On arrival in Honolulu, Jordan hired another doctor to deliver a verdict on the death, one who contradicted the earlier account of strychnine poisoning, “though he has not examined the body,” and “doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, an inquiry which neatly concluded that rather than being poisoned, Stanford had instead died of a heart attack. \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SRPD19051231.2.17&srpos=5&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">He also used the local papers\u003c/a> to discredit the Hawaii authorities, creating a general air of — as White put it — “There’s nothing to see here, there’s nothing to look at, let’s get on with things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University: That she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A suspect in plain sight\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>While Jordan certainly acted suspiciously, White said that “the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan may have had several reasons to want Jane Stanford out of the picture, but he wasn’t actually present at either poisoning attempt. He lacked the opportunity to poison her himself. “Sometimes you just get really lucky,” White said. “He wanted her killed, and she was killed.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>For White, there’s a far more persuasive suspect hiding in plain sight: Stanford’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Berner had been in Stanford’s service from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Leland Junior. She was, by all accounts, “a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman,” White said — and he believes Berner’s decision not to marry was a strategic, practical move.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not only would marriage have meant giving up traveling the world with Jane Stanford and access to high society, but Berner was also the sole caretaker for her sick mother. “She really cannot afford to give up this job,” White said. And Stanford knew it, even going so far as to sabotage any romantic relationships Berner dared to have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The relationship between the two women became “incredibly rocky,” White said, to the point where Berner quit Stanford’s employ several times. “But she always comes back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not convinced? How about this for motive — Berner was a beneficiary in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And at the time of the second poisoning attempt, Berner’s mother became even sicker. Berner even declined to join Stanford on her Hawaii trip due to fears about her mother’s ailing health, but her employer insisted that Berner make the trip if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Stanford clearly did not harbor any suspicions that her trusted companion and secretary of many years had anything to do with the first attempt on her life, she was nonetheless aware that Berner was romantically involved with Stanford’s own butler — and that the pair had been “embezzling money from her,” White said. “She can hang that over Bertha Berner’s head.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A killer walks free?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To White, when added together, Berner’s motives are convincing. Her trusted position meant she also had the opportunity to poison Stanford, and she was present at both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White’s research shows Berner also had the means to kill Jane Stanford. By the time Berner left for Hawaii, she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist. This association provided “a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine,” White said. “Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061780\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061780\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1362\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-160x109.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-1536x1046.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, bats in a faculty versus student baseball game, a tradition on campus. Jordan often butted heads with Jane Stanford over how to run the university and covered up her death by poisoning in 1905. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>White suspects that university president Jordan may have suspected Berner at the time, and that he may have actively protected her after Jane Stanford’s demise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He does it in writing,” White said: “He reassures her that, ‘we know you didn’t do it; we’re going take care of you; you have nothing to worry about.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And even if other people close to Jane Stanford suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, nobody wanted to bring that kind of scandal upon Stanford University, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University, next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to its final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The man who led the cover-up of her murder now led the walk from the church to her tomb. And walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" data-testid=\"embed-iframe\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/63j9eNYdy78nVPUzUJ791e?utm_source=generator&theme=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Stanford University is undeniably a Bay Area icon with the pedigree to match.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Founded back in the late 19th century, this private institution sprawling over 8,000 manicured acres on the sunny San Francisco peninsula is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities. It has 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short: not the kind of place you’d necessarily expect to harbor a century-old mystery full of skulduggery, lies and poison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s exactly what lies beneath Stanford’s history. Because the woman who co-founded this place, Jane Stanford, died in very strange circumstances in 1905. And although the official verdict was natural causes, some suspect something far more sinister happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today on Bay Curious, we’re following the historic breadcrumbs to discover who might have been responsible. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> What really happened to Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, who died suddenly in 1905?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED’s Carly Severn brings us the historic mystery — and dastardly cover-up — that a lot of people in the Bay Area still don’t know about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn:\u003c/strong> Death by poisoning is a nasty way to go. But strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When this white powder gets into your body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to your muscles resulting in overwhelming, painful spasms all over. Your jaw locks tight. Your limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill you within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but it doesn’t smell of anything. And as an ingredient in rat bait, and even some medicines in the 19th and early twentieth centuries, it was a very popular way to poison someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what if I told you that 120 years ago, the co-founder of Stanford University found this out first-hand. And almost nobody is talking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard White is a professor emeritus in Stanford University’s history department. Several years ago he was TEACHING students how to use the university’s own archives to investigate historical conundrums … and he asked them to find out what happened to Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard found there was a lot his students couldn’t uncover about this case, prompting him to turn historical detective after the class had long ended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he started looking into it he was baffled this wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially because a physician at Stanford Medical School had already written a book showing that Jane Stanford had 100% been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And the university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack. And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university, but it hadn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>To get to the bottom of this mystery, let’s wind back all the way to 1828 when Jane Stanford entered this world in upstate New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a young woman, Jane married Leland Stanford, a businessman and politician who made his fortune in the railroad business, and who briefly served as governor of California in the 1860s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane gave birth to her only child — also called Leland — when she was 39. And she doted on him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then tragedy struck in 1884, when that son died of typhoid. And in their grief, the Stanfords looked for ways to honor his memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And so, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened a university on the Peninsula calling it Leland Stanford Junior University, after their son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just two years later, Jane’s husband died. And at age 65, Jane found herself in charge of the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard says Leland Stanford had mismanaged University funds and his own fortune for a long time. So for the next several years, Jane was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t tank her considerable fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is really where the trouble began. Because Jane’s way of managing affairs at Stanford University made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White:\u003c/strong> Once she gets power she uses it ruthlessly. She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power, so much so that she makes a great many enemies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but treated those students terribly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And when it came to men, Jane particularly butted heads with the president of Stanford University: David Starr Jordan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford runs Stanford University as a personal fiefdom. David Starr Jordan is devoted to the university, but he knows that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford was also a Spiritualist, a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. And like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Jane was motivated by personal tragedy beginning with the death of her son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She never gets over that. She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time and quite another for the leader of a major university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane’s Spiritualism became a big problem for Stanford University and for its president, Jordan. Because Jane told people that she was using her seances to receive instructions from her dead husband and son on how to run Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The great fear of Stanford University is that they’re gonna discover that Jane Stanford is a spiritualist and that’s gonna endanger all the legal documents she signs. It’s very hard to uphold the legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane’s beliefs were a constant source of stress for Jordan. And their relationship deteriorated even further when Jane made him fire a professor friend of his, sparking a scandal about academic freedom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while trying to navigate all of this, Jordan made a discovery:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He also realizes that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>In 1905, when Jane was 76, someone tried to poison her not once, but twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first attempt, at her Nob Hill mansion, was unsuccessful. Jane complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of spring water and called for her staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>One of them was her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner, who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha and the maids helped Jane to vomit. And when that water bottle was tested, the verdict came back: it was strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it wasn’t pure strychnine. Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people, had dumped rat poison in it. The rat poison had caused her to vomit. She felt very sick, but she recovered from it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>The people around Jane advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal. And to get the hell out of dodge away from the poisoner who might try again with something even stronger than rat poison this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Jane left for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which leads us to the second poisoning. Just over a month after the first attempt, Jane woke up in the middle of the night in her Oahu hotel and screamed for Bertha. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Somebody obtained pure strychnine, put it in her water and she died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in. The doctors looked at her, she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And this was the story that was reported by the earliest newspaper accounts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reads newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Oceanside Blade, March 1905: Mrs. Jane Stanford of San Francisco … died at Honolulu Wednesday under suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine which had been mixed with bicarbonate of soda taken as a medicine … Mrs. Stanford had taken the medicine and retired but was soon afterward seized with violent convulsions dying in a few minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Naturally, Jane’s household was under suspicion. But another person absolutely had the motive — David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just a few weeks before Jane was poisoned the first time he’d found out that she was planning to fire him. And Richard says Jordan had also been trying to take control from Jane of those Stanford finances via some pretty shady means.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And now, Jane was dead and Jordan was on a boat to Hawaii.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Ostensibly to bring her body home, but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict. He hires another doctor. He says she didn’t die of strychnine poisoning, though he has not examined the body, doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning, and he discredits doctors who in fact are much more senior and well-known than him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, which neatly concluded that instead of being poisoned, Jane had died of a heart attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan also used the newspapers to discredit the Hawaii authorities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Press Democrat, December 1905: According to Dr. Jordan no strychnine was found in Mrs. Stanford’s room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>There’s nothing to see here. There’s nothing to look at. Let’s get on with things. And it is a conspiracy to cover up her death and the conspiracy worked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Because in 1905 — before widespread telephones, before the internet — covering up someone’s death like this across an ocean no less was in many ways a lot simpler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University, that she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So you’re hearing all this and thinking: well, it’s so clearly this guy right? David Starr Jordan’s the murderer? He’s the one trying to cover up her death! I mean, what more do we need??\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And that’s what a lot of people think, except that the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>For one thing, he’s not present at the scene of either poisoning attempt. And he definitely wasn’t anywhere near Hawaii the second time. So while he had the motive, he doesn’t actually have the opportunity to poison her himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>It’s one of those times where for David Starr Jordan, you just think sometimes you just get really lucky. He wanted her killed and she was killed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it wasn’t David Starr Jordan, who did kill Jane Stanford?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well if you’ve watched one murder mystery in your life, you’ve probably learned to watch out for that one “harmless” background character who keeps popping up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so you might be wondering, what about Jane’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary: Bertha Berner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bertha had been employed by Jane from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Jane’s son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And Bertha Berner, by all accounts, was both a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha never married, which wasn’t that unusual for the time, but Richard says that was a strategic, practical decision she made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>First of all, it would give up her job that she has with Stanford, traveling around the world, the access to a society which otherwise she would have no access to. And secondly, she becomes the sole support of her mother. She really cannot afford to give up this job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And Jane knew it. Richard says this gave her carte blanche to treat Bertha like a true “frenemy,” even going so far as to sabotage Bertha’s romantic relationships when she dared to have them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Their relationship becomes incredibly rocky. Bertha Berner refuses to put up with it. And several times, which rarely shows up until I started looking at it, she leaves Jane Stanford’s employ, sometimes for years at a time. But she always comes back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Another reason that Bertha stuck around through it all … she was in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is where we come to Richard’s theory about Bertha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the second poisoning attempt coincides with Bertha’s mother getting really sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>When Jane Stanford asked her to come to Hawaii, says, I can’t. My mother’s dying. I have to stay here and take care of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But Jane insisted she make the journey if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane clearly still trusted Bertha and harbored zero suspicions she’d been involved in the first poisoning. Although she did have some dirt on Bertha:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Bertha Berner has had an affair with Albert Beverly, who’s Jane Stanford’s butler at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Yup, there’s a shady butler in this mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford knows about that. And she also knows that both of them have been embezzling money from her. She can hang that over Bertha Berners head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>As all good mysteries show, a killer needs the means, the motive, and the opportunity. And according to Richard, Bertha had all three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She had the motive: anger at her years of mistreatment by Jane, fear that her embezzlement might be exposed, and financial incentive, from being in the will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>If she can get away with the murder, she will have money in the will. She will in fact be able to continue to take care of her mother and she can set herself up not comfortably, but well enough to last for the rest of her life, which she does do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>She also had the physical opportunity. All of Jane’s servants were suspects in the first poisoning, but Bertha was the only one who’d been present for both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the means. That first poisoning, with the rat poison, had been clumsy. But by the time Bertha left for Hawaii, Richard says she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He becomes a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine. Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Guess the Butler was out of the picture?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some time after Jane died, Bertha also did something really weird. She wrote a tell-all book about Jane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She doesn’t mention the affairs, she doesn’t mentioned the embezzling, but what she says is Jane Stanford had money and she knew the power of money. She used it like a queen. She dominated everyone around her. She got what she wanted and she forced people to do what she want them to do because she has control over her money. Which sounds very much like the reason why, in fact, in the end, she will kill her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it was Bertha, even if Stanford president David Starr Jordan wasn’t in on it, did he know?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richard says he’s pretty sure the answer is yes, given how Jordan treated Bertha after the murder:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>What he does, and this he does in writing, is he reassures her that we know you didn’t do it, we’re gonna take care of you, you have nothing to worry about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And even if other people close to Jane suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, they didn’t want to bring that kind of smoke to Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to her final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Starr Jordan — the man who led the cover-up of her murder — led the walk from the church to her tomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the final insult? Walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The woman I think, murdered her.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>When you made as many enemies in life as Jane Stanford not even your funeral is safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That was KQED’s Carly Severn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious has published many episodes over the years that get into the spookier side of Bay Area history. If you’re looking for a little thrill this All Hallow’s Eve, check out our spooky Spotify playlist linked in the show notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, don’t forget to grab yourself a ticket to our trivia night. It’s on Thursday, November 13 at KQED headquarters in San Francisco. Come alone or with a team. It will be a lot of fun! Tickets are at kqed.org/events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Christopher Beale, Gabriela Glueck, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween tomorrow. See you next week!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Proposition 50: Redistricting in California, Thoroughly Explained",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California voters have one proposition on the ballot this November: Proposition 50. It’s supporters want California to adopt a new congressional map that could give Democrats five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a counter to similar actions taken in Texas. Opponents say it’s a step in the wrong direction for good governance, or are upset at the potential loss of Republican seats. We wade into the debate with KQED’s Guy Marzorati.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4282397539&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Right now, voters are being called to the polls or in the era of mail-in ballots to their dining room tables to cast a vote in one single statewide election, Proposition 50. And the political ads are everywhere… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>President Obama in advertisement: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">California, the whole nation is counting on you. Democracy is on the ballot Nov. 4. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">California voters stopped rigged elections with an independent commission run by citizens. Prop 50 cancels this historic reform. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Vota sí a la proposición cincuenta.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Proposition 50 would redistrict California with an eye towards the upcoming midterm elections. And its sponsors don’t mince words. It’s designed to give Democrats the best chance possible to pick up seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today on Bay Curious, we explore the ins and outs of Proposition 50. By the end, you’ll understand how district maps are drawn, the impacts this proposition would have on the Bay Area, and how this singleton proposition got on the ballot in a year when normally we’d have a break from propositions. Stay with us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SPONSOR\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Today we’re shedding light on California’s Proposition 50. On your ballot, it reads like this. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Authorizes temporary changes to congressional district maps in response to Texas’s partisan redistricting. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Joining me today is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. He’s been covering Proposition 50 for KQED. Welcome, Guy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Thanks so much for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I want to start with a quick refresher for folks on a few basic concepts related to Proposition 50. First off, what is redistricting? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So redistricting is the drawing of political maps to reflect changes in population. So we know that every state gets divided into congressional districts. These congressional districts have equal size. So California is a big state. We have 52 congressional districts. What happens is we take a measurement of the population, that’s the census, and then when the population changes, people move around. So districts have to change too to make sure they’re still equal sizes. And there’s a couple of different ways you can do redistricting. In a lot of cases, it’s the state legislatures that are drawing maps. And they sometimes have a couple different goals. One is: help whatever party’s in power. That’s called gerrymandering. Basically, when the lines are being drawn to either help Republicans or help Democrats, or in some cases to help everyone who’s in office just stay in office. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So that’s one path. But then there’s another way to do redistricting, which is how we have it in California. And we have a commission of average citizens who get together, take input from residents, and draw districts based on what they’re hearing from people who are living here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What’s really changing right now in 2025 is we’re seeing this battle over redistricting break out across the country in the middle of a decade, right? We haven’t taken a new census. This is simply different states that are trying to gain partisan advantage in their political maps, either by helping Democrats or helping Republicans. And Prop 50 is in the middle of this national redistricting fight where Democrats in California are trying to redraw the maps to help their party win more seats in Congress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And this acceleration of gerrymandering is in part because of some rulings from the Supreme Court that really set the stage for more gerrymandering, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s right. The Supreme Court has said they don’t really want to wade into fights over partisan redistricting. So they’re not gonna take up challenges to maps that are unquestionably biased towards Republicans or biased towards Democrats. And so what we’ve seen is states continue along this path of doing gerrymandered maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes, it’s been practiced for decades by both political parties. But what we’ve seen this year is President Trump take the unprecedented step of actually going to states and saying, I want you to redraw your lines to help Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So it started in Texas – Trump you know, went and asked the Texas legislature to redraw their lines to give Republicans five additional seats in Congress. But this just keeps escalating, beyond Texas, beyond California. Republicans are pursuing seats through a redraw of maps in Missouri, in redistricting in Kansas, in North Carolina – Democrats have introduced plans to pick up a seat in Maryland. And the Supreme Court is also considering a case about the use of race in drawing congressional maps that could potentially change how gerrymandered maps are challenged in the future.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So in the language of the proposition, it states that this is in response to actions taken in Texas. Can you walk us through what happened in Texas and why it matters here in California? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The House is very closely divided right now, and any alteration to the map, any kind of change to the district lines could really decide the control of Congress in 2026. So Trump went to Texas, pressured them to take this move. Texas responded, redrew their map to help Republicans. As this was happening, Governor Gavin Newsom in California, other Democrats in California, started having meetings and discussing, ‘okay, what can we do to respond to this?’ And ultimately that resulted in Proposition 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The legislature voted to put this on the ballot. The key difference between California and Texas is: in California, this change has to happen only with the permission of voters. California has this independent commission that draws district lines. Voters created that system. So it has to be taken to voters if any change is going to be made to that. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Music break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so let’s dig in on what exactly the proposition would do. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This would redraw California’s congressional maps. And it’s worth noting, the commission also draws lines for the state legislature. Those are not being affected at all by Proposition 50. This is just for US congressional maps, House districts. So it’s estimated that these new maps would favor Democrats by helping them pick up up to five new seats that are currently held by Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In doing so, it puts a pause on the current maps that we have that were created by the Independent Commission back in 2021 and that were really regarded as fair, I think, by a lot of election analysts and that have really created very competitive elections, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you draw maps in order to favor one party or the other, you’re gonna result often in fewer competitive elections. And if you compare California to other large states such as Texas, such as Florida, just in the last decade, we’ve had far more competitive House elections than these other states because our lines are not drawn to protect political incumbents. They’re not drawn to help Democrats or Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And so what this Proposition 50 is saying is let’s set aside the independent maps for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections and put in place these maps favoring Democrats. The way the measure is written, we’d go back to the citizen redistricting process after 2030 — that’s because there would be a new census in 2030, the commission meets after that and draws new lines for the 2032 elections.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So How exactly does the California Citizens Redistricting Commission create these fairer maps? Like how are they made up? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So the commission itself is made up of 14 members. You have five Democrats, five Republicans, and then four who are not registered with either political party. And so this commission, it’s citizens from around the state who apply, who get chosen to be on the commission. And one of the key metrics or key things that the commission really focuses on is this idea of communities of interest. And I talked to Pedro Toledo, who’s the current chair of the independent commission, and he explained kind of how commissioners think about these communities of interest and why they matter when you’re drawing political maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Pedro Toledo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Every community is different. The issues that a community in the Central Valley might care about, maybe water or some of the healthcare issues that are prevalent out there, some of the lack of healthcare, the lack of infrastructure, might be very different in a more urban settings. And that matters because one would hope that the elected official that a community elects would represent those issues in Congress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And I’ll note, you know, Princeton University rates the different redistrictings in each state. They gave California a B score on partisan fairness. But if adopted, they say the Proposition 50 maps would get an F. So it gives you a sense of the direction California would be going when it comes to nonpartisan maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In theory, you know ,Proposition 50 would replace the work of the commission until 2030. But there is a lot of skepticism, I think, from opponents of this who feel like when is the deescalation going to happen, right? We see states just competing, competing, trying to change their maps in more and more partisan ways. Is California really gonna step away from that and go back to more of an independent system? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So this is really a departure from what was a fairly non partisan way of redistricting to one that is overtly partisan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Yeah, that’s right. And I think look, even like supporters of Proposition 50 realize that in a vacuum, doing away with citizens drawn maps is unpopular. What I think they would argue is this is not happening in a vacuum. This is happening as part of a wider fight across the country. This battle for control of the House of Representatives, and Democrats who are supporting Prop 50 say: ‘The stakes are too high for us to just simply be focusing on good governance. We need to retake the House of Representatives.’\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> What kind of local impacts could this have on the Bay Area? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> One is in Sonoma County, where Sonoma is now gonna be paired with communities in the northern part of the state: Butte County, Tehama County. And really the point there is to take a district, currently the first district that’s controlled by a Republican, and dragging the lines down south into Sonoma County and therefore picking up all of these Democratic voters who live in Sonoma. So that’s a key part of redistricting when you’re trying to do it for partisan gain. You’re trying to bring voters from one party into a new district in hopes that they’ll change the outcome of it. And really the hope is that district would go from currently represented by a Republican to being represented by a Democrat in 2026. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There’s another change that that’s happening in eastern Contra Costa County, where you have a lot of communities around the Carquinez Strait, the northern waterfront – from Martinez, Pittsburgh, Antioch, even across into Solano County, Vallejo that are currently grouped in this district that the commission created back in 2021 with the explicit goal of putting together working class communities that are racially diverse. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They got a lot of input from residents who felt like, you know, communities like Richmond, Vallejo, Pittsburgh, Antioch have a lot in common and should be included in one congressional district to kind of maximize the voice of people living there. So their shared concerns about living around refineries, their shared concerns about means of transportation. If all those voters would be in the same district, whoever wins that seat would have no choice but to listen to the concerns of the community. So that was what the commission thought when they’re creating this 8th district. That district would be broken up under the Proposition 50 map. And the reason is because voters in Antioch and Pittsburgh would be moved into a Central Valley district. The strategy behind that is these are heavily Democratic voters in Pittsburgh and Antioch. They’d be moved into a Central Valley district to help a vulnerable Democratic incumbent have an easier path to re-election. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So there’s two kinds of things at play here with Proposition 50. There’s targeting seats that are currently held by Republicans, trying to flip them to Democratic seats. There’s also seats that Democrats currently hold, but they’re a little bit tenuous. They’re kind of close competitive seats. Proposition 50 would make them less competitive. So give those Democrats an easier path to re-election. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those local impacts are actually really, really interesting, but we don’t actually hear people talking about the local impacts that much. I would say most of the campaigning for this proposition has been about the balance of power in Washington. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Absolutely. And that’s by design. Look, the supporters of Proposition 50 are really framing this as part of the national fight over the House of Representatives, over gerrymandering that’s breaking out in Republican states. And they want to talk about the need to win these House seats for Democrats in order to break Republican hold on power in Washington. And that’s really the argument that you’re hearing coming from the Yes on 50 campaign. The phrase they love to use is ‘you have to fight fire with fire.’ Some of the ads for Proposition 50 don’t even mention redistricting. They highlight a lot of the actions the president have t has taken that are unpopular in California and are basically saying to voters, look, you need we need to stop this, vote yes on Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> It’s worth noting though that just because you redraw the districts doesn’t mean that somebody automatically wins. I mean, these candidates still have to run. They still have to convince voters to vote for them. So let’s just, you know, slow our roll a little bit, you know. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> That’s a great point. You still actually have to have the campaigns, right? When we talk about redistricting, the end result is just okay, ‘how many Democrats live in this district and how many Republicans.’ But to your point, there still needs to be candidates that are running. There’s still everything that’s happening in the world that influences how people vote in an election. So all of that will still have to play out no matter how Proposition 50 fares. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so we’ve heard a lot about what the yes side is doing. What argument is the no side making? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Well, the no side is really making a good government argument against gerrymandering. They’re supporting the system that we currently have right now, these maps drawn by citizens that are not focusing on helping Republicans or helping Democrats, and they say they want to keep the system that way. Now, that’s not to say that the opponents of Prop 50 don’t have partisan interests in mind. A lot of Republicans are opposing Prop 50 because if this passes, they will probably lose seats in Congress. So there is a lot of partisan interest in the opposition, but the messaging they’re putting out there is really about maintaining this system of good governance that we have. And a key messenger in that is former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator in advertisement:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> The politicians want their power back.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in political advertisement: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s what they want to do is take us backwards. That is why it is important to vote no on Proposition 50. Democracy. You’ve got to protect it and we’ve got to go and fight for it. \u003c/span>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Schwarzenegger was the one who helped create the Independent Commission back in 2008. And he has actually spoken out against Proposition 50. He said he opposes it, basically along the lines of two wrongs don’t make a right, just because Texas and Republican states are gerrymandering, California shouldn’t go down this path. But I’ll say it’s interesting the way in which Schwarzenegger has come out and talked about this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He spoke at an event at the University of Southern California. He said he’s against Prop 50. He encouraged the no vote. And it was actually the ‘No on 50’ campaign was in the crowd. They were filming it, and they used that video for an advertisement. They scrubbed out the background so it doesn’t say USC anymore, it says No on 50. But that’s interesting because Schwarzenegger himself has been a little bit hesitant to actually engage in the campaign. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He didn’t, you know, meet up with the No on 50 campaign and create that ad. He hasn’t been out barnstorming against Prop 50. And I think that’s because he feels perhaps a little bit uncomfortable in that this has really become a Democratic versus Republican fight. Schwarzenegger does not like President Trump, not a big fan, and he’s always tried to keep a little distance from the Republican Party establishment, especially now. So he probably feels maybe caught in the middle in some way, even as he opposes Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, let’s talk about campaign finance. What kind of money is being spent on the race and by whom? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Lot of big money pouring into this campaign. There’s been more money in support of it than against Prop 50. The yes side has like a two to one financial edge. And you’ve really seen Governor Newsom rally the Democratic establishment to give to Prop 50. We’ve seen major Democratic donors like George Soros, Tom Steyer spend a lot to support Prop 50. We’ve also seen a lot of grassroots energy. There have been small dollar donations from every single state in the country supporting Prop 50, which I do think speaks to like, yes, this is a state ballot measure. But we’re in a year where there’s not much else on the ballot. And this has gotten a lot of attention, I think, from Democrats across the country who again want to feel like they’re a part of something that’s pushing back against the administration. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the no side, it’s really been one big donor opposing Prop 50. That’s Charles Munger Jr. He’s a philanthropist, big Republican donor in the Bay Area. He bankrolled the measures that created the Citizens Commission back in 2008. So I think he feels this is his baby to some extent. He really supports this idea, and he’s putting a lot of money, at this point more than $30 million, to oppose Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk, thanks for breaking this down for us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Thanks for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In a nutshell, a vote yes on Proposition 50 means you want to adopt a new legislatively-drawn districting map that could make it easier for Democrats to win seats in the House of Representatives through 2030. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A vote no on Prop 50 means you want to keep our current map and keep redistricting in the hands of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s it for our episode on Prop 50. You can cast your vote in person or by mail. Registered voters should have received their ballots by now, and those must be filled out and postmarked on or before November 4th. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our show is made in San Francisco at Member Supported KQED. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz, with extra support Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Katrina Schwartz. Have a great week. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "Proposition 50: Redistricting in California, Thoroughly Explained | KQED",
"description": "View the full episode transcript. California voters have one proposition on the ballot this November: Proposition 50. It's supporters want California to adopt a new congressional map that could give Democrats five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a counter to similar actions taken in Texas. Opponents say it's a step in the wrong direction for good governance, or are upset at the potential loss of Republican seats. We wade into the debate with KQED's Guy Marzorati. Episode Transcript This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors. Katrina Schwartz: Right now,",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California voters have one proposition on the ballot this November: Proposition 50. It’s supporters want California to adopt a new congressional map that could give Democrats five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a counter to similar actions taken in Texas. Opponents say it’s a step in the wrong direction for good governance, or are upset at the potential loss of Republican seats. We wade into the debate with KQED’s Guy Marzorati.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4282397539&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Right now, voters are being called to the polls or in the era of mail-in ballots to their dining room tables to cast a vote in one single statewide election, Proposition 50. And the political ads are everywhere… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>President Obama in advertisement: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">California, the whole nation is counting on you. Democracy is on the ballot Nov. 4. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">California voters stopped rigged elections with an independent commission run by citizens. Prop 50 cancels this historic reform. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Vota sí a la proposición cincuenta.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Proposition 50 would redistrict California with an eye towards the upcoming midterm elections. And its sponsors don’t mince words. It’s designed to give Democrats the best chance possible to pick up seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today on Bay Curious, we explore the ins and outs of Proposition 50. By the end, you’ll understand how district maps are drawn, the impacts this proposition would have on the Bay Area, and how this singleton proposition got on the ballot in a year when normally we’d have a break from propositions. Stay with us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SPONSOR\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Today we’re shedding light on California’s Proposition 50. On your ballot, it reads like this. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Authorizes temporary changes to congressional district maps in response to Texas’s partisan redistricting. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Joining me today is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. He’s been covering Proposition 50 for KQED. Welcome, Guy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Thanks so much for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I want to start with a quick refresher for folks on a few basic concepts related to Proposition 50. First off, what is redistricting? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So redistricting is the drawing of political maps to reflect changes in population. So we know that every state gets divided into congressional districts. These congressional districts have equal size. So California is a big state. We have 52 congressional districts. What happens is we take a measurement of the population, that’s the census, and then when the population changes, people move around. So districts have to change too to make sure they’re still equal sizes. And there’s a couple of different ways you can do redistricting. In a lot of cases, it’s the state legislatures that are drawing maps. And they sometimes have a couple different goals. One is: help whatever party’s in power. That’s called gerrymandering. Basically, when the lines are being drawn to either help Republicans or help Democrats, or in some cases to help everyone who’s in office just stay in office. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So that’s one path. But then there’s another way to do redistricting, which is how we have it in California. And we have a commission of average citizens who get together, take input from residents, and draw districts based on what they’re hearing from people who are living here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What’s really changing right now in 2025 is we’re seeing this battle over redistricting break out across the country in the middle of a decade, right? We haven’t taken a new census. This is simply different states that are trying to gain partisan advantage in their political maps, either by helping Democrats or helping Republicans. And Prop 50 is in the middle of this national redistricting fight where Democrats in California are trying to redraw the maps to help their party win more seats in Congress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And this acceleration of gerrymandering is in part because of some rulings from the Supreme Court that really set the stage for more gerrymandering, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s right. The Supreme Court has said they don’t really want to wade into fights over partisan redistricting. So they’re not gonna take up challenges to maps that are unquestionably biased towards Republicans or biased towards Democrats. And so what we’ve seen is states continue along this path of doing gerrymandered maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes, it’s been practiced for decades by both political parties. But what we’ve seen this year is President Trump take the unprecedented step of actually going to states and saying, I want you to redraw your lines to help Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So it started in Texas – Trump you know, went and asked the Texas legislature to redraw their lines to give Republicans five additional seats in Congress. But this just keeps escalating, beyond Texas, beyond California. Republicans are pursuing seats through a redraw of maps in Missouri, in redistricting in Kansas, in North Carolina – Democrats have introduced plans to pick up a seat in Maryland. And the Supreme Court is also considering a case about the use of race in drawing congressional maps that could potentially change how gerrymandered maps are challenged in the future.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So in the language of the proposition, it states that this is in response to actions taken in Texas. Can you walk us through what happened in Texas and why it matters here in California? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The House is very closely divided right now, and any alteration to the map, any kind of change to the district lines could really decide the control of Congress in 2026. So Trump went to Texas, pressured them to take this move. Texas responded, redrew their map to help Republicans. As this was happening, Governor Gavin Newsom in California, other Democrats in California, started having meetings and discussing, ‘okay, what can we do to respond to this?’ And ultimately that resulted in Proposition 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The legislature voted to put this on the ballot. The key difference between California and Texas is: in California, this change has to happen only with the permission of voters. California has this independent commission that draws district lines. Voters created that system. So it has to be taken to voters if any change is going to be made to that. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Music break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so let’s dig in on what exactly the proposition would do. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This would redraw California’s congressional maps. And it’s worth noting, the commission also draws lines for the state legislature. Those are not being affected at all by Proposition 50. This is just for US congressional maps, House districts. So it’s estimated that these new maps would favor Democrats by helping them pick up up to five new seats that are currently held by Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In doing so, it puts a pause on the current maps that we have that were created by the Independent Commission back in 2021 and that were really regarded as fair, I think, by a lot of election analysts and that have really created very competitive elections, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you draw maps in order to favor one party or the other, you’re gonna result often in fewer competitive elections. And if you compare California to other large states such as Texas, such as Florida, just in the last decade, we’ve had far more competitive House elections than these other states because our lines are not drawn to protect political incumbents. They’re not drawn to help Democrats or Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And so what this Proposition 50 is saying is let’s set aside the independent maps for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections and put in place these maps favoring Democrats. The way the measure is written, we’d go back to the citizen redistricting process after 2030 — that’s because there would be a new census in 2030, the commission meets after that and draws new lines for the 2032 elections.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So How exactly does the California Citizens Redistricting Commission create these fairer maps? Like how are they made up? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So the commission itself is made up of 14 members. You have five Democrats, five Republicans, and then four who are not registered with either political party. And so this commission, it’s citizens from around the state who apply, who get chosen to be on the commission. And one of the key metrics or key things that the commission really focuses on is this idea of communities of interest. And I talked to Pedro Toledo, who’s the current chair of the independent commission, and he explained kind of how commissioners think about these communities of interest and why they matter when you’re drawing political maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Pedro Toledo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Every community is different. The issues that a community in the Central Valley might care about, maybe water or some of the healthcare issues that are prevalent out there, some of the lack of healthcare, the lack of infrastructure, might be very different in a more urban settings. And that matters because one would hope that the elected official that a community elects would represent those issues in Congress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And I’ll note, you know, Princeton University rates the different redistrictings in each state. They gave California a B score on partisan fairness. But if adopted, they say the Proposition 50 maps would get an F. So it gives you a sense of the direction California would be going when it comes to nonpartisan maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In theory, you know ,Proposition 50 would replace the work of the commission until 2030. But there is a lot of skepticism, I think, from opponents of this who feel like when is the deescalation going to happen, right? We see states just competing, competing, trying to change their maps in more and more partisan ways. Is California really gonna step away from that and go back to more of an independent system? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So this is really a departure from what was a fairly non partisan way of redistricting to one that is overtly partisan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Yeah, that’s right. And I think look, even like supporters of Proposition 50 realize that in a vacuum, doing away with citizens drawn maps is unpopular. What I think they would argue is this is not happening in a vacuum. This is happening as part of a wider fight across the country. This battle for control of the House of Representatives, and Democrats who are supporting Prop 50 say: ‘The stakes are too high for us to just simply be focusing on good governance. We need to retake the House of Representatives.’\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> What kind of local impacts could this have on the Bay Area? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> One is in Sonoma County, where Sonoma is now gonna be paired with communities in the northern part of the state: Butte County, Tehama County. And really the point there is to take a district, currently the first district that’s controlled by a Republican, and dragging the lines down south into Sonoma County and therefore picking up all of these Democratic voters who live in Sonoma. So that’s a key part of redistricting when you’re trying to do it for partisan gain. You’re trying to bring voters from one party into a new district in hopes that they’ll change the outcome of it. And really the hope is that district would go from currently represented by a Republican to being represented by a Democrat in 2026. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There’s another change that that’s happening in eastern Contra Costa County, where you have a lot of communities around the Carquinez Strait, the northern waterfront – from Martinez, Pittsburgh, Antioch, even across into Solano County, Vallejo that are currently grouped in this district that the commission created back in 2021 with the explicit goal of putting together working class communities that are racially diverse. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They got a lot of input from residents who felt like, you know, communities like Richmond, Vallejo, Pittsburgh, Antioch have a lot in common and should be included in one congressional district to kind of maximize the voice of people living there. So their shared concerns about living around refineries, their shared concerns about means of transportation. If all those voters would be in the same district, whoever wins that seat would have no choice but to listen to the concerns of the community. So that was what the commission thought when they’re creating this 8th district. That district would be broken up under the Proposition 50 map. And the reason is because voters in Antioch and Pittsburgh would be moved into a Central Valley district. The strategy behind that is these are heavily Democratic voters in Pittsburgh and Antioch. They’d be moved into a Central Valley district to help a vulnerable Democratic incumbent have an easier path to re-election. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So there’s two kinds of things at play here with Proposition 50. There’s targeting seats that are currently held by Republicans, trying to flip them to Democratic seats. There’s also seats that Democrats currently hold, but they’re a little bit tenuous. They’re kind of close competitive seats. Proposition 50 would make them less competitive. So give those Democrats an easier path to re-election. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those local impacts are actually really, really interesting, but we don’t actually hear people talking about the local impacts that much. I would say most of the campaigning for this proposition has been about the balance of power in Washington. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Absolutely. And that’s by design. Look, the supporters of Proposition 50 are really framing this as part of the national fight over the House of Representatives, over gerrymandering that’s breaking out in Republican states. And they want to talk about the need to win these House seats for Democrats in order to break Republican hold on power in Washington. And that’s really the argument that you’re hearing coming from the Yes on 50 campaign. The phrase they love to use is ‘you have to fight fire with fire.’ Some of the ads for Proposition 50 don’t even mention redistricting. They highlight a lot of the actions the president have t has taken that are unpopular in California and are basically saying to voters, look, you need we need to stop this, vote yes on Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> It’s worth noting though that just because you redraw the districts doesn’t mean that somebody automatically wins. I mean, these candidates still have to run. They still have to convince voters to vote for them. So let’s just, you know, slow our roll a little bit, you know. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> That’s a great point. You still actually have to have the campaigns, right? When we talk about redistricting, the end result is just okay, ‘how many Democrats live in this district and how many Republicans.’ But to your point, there still needs to be candidates that are running. There’s still everything that’s happening in the world that influences how people vote in an election. So all of that will still have to play out no matter how Proposition 50 fares. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so we’ve heard a lot about what the yes side is doing. What argument is the no side making? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Well, the no side is really making a good government argument against gerrymandering. They’re supporting the system that we currently have right now, these maps drawn by citizens that are not focusing on helping Republicans or helping Democrats, and they say they want to keep the system that way. Now, that’s not to say that the opponents of Prop 50 don’t have partisan interests in mind. A lot of Republicans are opposing Prop 50 because if this passes, they will probably lose seats in Congress. So there is a lot of partisan interest in the opposition, but the messaging they’re putting out there is really about maintaining this system of good governance that we have. And a key messenger in that is former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator in advertisement:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> The politicians want their power back.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in political advertisement: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s what they want to do is take us backwards. That is why it is important to vote no on Proposition 50. Democracy. You’ve got to protect it and we’ve got to go and fight for it. \u003c/span>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Schwarzenegger was the one who helped create the Independent Commission back in 2008. And he has actually spoken out against Proposition 50. He said he opposes it, basically along the lines of two wrongs don’t make a right, just because Texas and Republican states are gerrymandering, California shouldn’t go down this path. But I’ll say it’s interesting the way in which Schwarzenegger has come out and talked about this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He spoke at an event at the University of Southern California. He said he’s against Prop 50. He encouraged the no vote. And it was actually the ‘No on 50’ campaign was in the crowd. They were filming it, and they used that video for an advertisement. They scrubbed out the background so it doesn’t say USC anymore, it says No on 50. But that’s interesting because Schwarzenegger himself has been a little bit hesitant to actually engage in the campaign. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He didn’t, you know, meet up with the No on 50 campaign and create that ad. He hasn’t been out barnstorming against Prop 50. And I think that’s because he feels perhaps a little bit uncomfortable in that this has really become a Democratic versus Republican fight. Schwarzenegger does not like President Trump, not a big fan, and he’s always tried to keep a little distance from the Republican Party establishment, especially now. So he probably feels maybe caught in the middle in some way, even as he opposes Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, let’s talk about campaign finance. What kind of money is being spent on the race and by whom? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Lot of big money pouring into this campaign. There’s been more money in support of it than against Prop 50. The yes side has like a two to one financial edge. And you’ve really seen Governor Newsom rally the Democratic establishment to give to Prop 50. We’ve seen major Democratic donors like George Soros, Tom Steyer spend a lot to support Prop 50. We’ve also seen a lot of grassroots energy. There have been small dollar donations from every single state in the country supporting Prop 50, which I do think speaks to like, yes, this is a state ballot measure. But we’re in a year where there’s not much else on the ballot. And this has gotten a lot of attention, I think, from Democrats across the country who again want to feel like they’re a part of something that’s pushing back against the administration. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the no side, it’s really been one big donor opposing Prop 50. That’s Charles Munger Jr. He’s a philanthropist, big Republican donor in the Bay Area. He bankrolled the measures that created the Citizens Commission back in 2008. So I think he feels this is his baby to some extent. He really supports this idea, and he’s putting a lot of money, at this point more than $30 million, to oppose Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk, thanks for breaking this down for us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Thanks for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In a nutshell, a vote yes on Proposition 50 means you want to adopt a new legislatively-drawn districting map that could make it easier for Democrats to win seats in the House of Representatives through 2030. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A vote no on Prop 50 means you want to keep our current map and keep redistricting in the hands of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s it for our episode on Prop 50. You can cast your vote in person or by mail. Registered voters should have received their ballots by now, and those must be filled out and postmarked on or before November 4th. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our show is made in San Francisco at Member Supported KQED. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz, with extra support Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Katrina Schwartz. Have a great week. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "the-return-of-mabuhay-gardens-the-punk-club-that-changed-san-francisco",
"title": "The Return of Mabuhay Gardens: The Punk Club That Changed San Francisco",
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"headTitle": "The Return of Mabuhay Gardens: The Punk Club That Changed San Francisco | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Few places are as legendary in San Francisco’s punk scene as Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Located on Broadway, at the edge of North Beach and Chinatown, it was ground zero for the city’s emerging punk movement in the late 1970s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hybrid Filipino restaurant and music venue hosted bands like the Avengers and the Dead Kennedys — even punk rock icon Patti Smith took the stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When it closed in 1987, much of the city’s punk history seemed to fade with it. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13980619/mabuhay-gardens-reopening-sf-punk-club-north-beach\">But nearly 40 years later, a group of investors and enthusiasts is working to bring the so-called “Fab Mab” back to life.\u003c/a> We dig into the history and legacy of Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are few places as revered in the San Francisco punk music scene as a place called Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12060034\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12060034\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"670\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg 1000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience-160x107.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Punk band with Zippy Pinhead performing at Mabuhay Gardens; includes Vince Deranged of Animal Things in the audience, 1978. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Mindaugis Bagdon, San Francisco Punk Archive, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To play, you need a place, be it where you live, the street, a venue. For unrestricted play, you need an unrestricted playground. Dirk Dirksen envisioned the Fab Mab just as such a playground. Without him and the Mab, there might not have been the great punk scene in the late 1970s in San Francisco. The San Francisco punk scene was fun. I miss it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Located on Broadway, right on the edge of North Beach and Chinatown, Mabuhay Gardens, actually a nightclub, was ground zero for a nascent punk scene in late 1970s San Francisco. Bands like the Avengers, Dead Kennedys, The Nuns, and Patti Smith played there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Announcer:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s gonna part for a woman. I think Patti died. I’m gonna get her for this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Originally a Filipino supper club, Mabuhay Gardens was part of the small but vibrant community known as Manilatown. Redevelopment, gentrification, and other factors in the late 1970s forced many of the Filipino residents of Manilatown out. They moved to other neighborhoods or out of the city entirely. But Mabuhay Gardens remained and took on a surprising new life as a punk club.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Audio from Mabuhay Gardens:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Are you ready for some breakdancing right now?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Katrina Schwartz, and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Today on the show, we’re transporting you back to the epicenter of San Francisco’s ’70s punk scene. And we’ll learn why Mabuhay Gardens was such an important place to so many people. Stay with us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor message\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Legendary punk music venue Mabuhay Gardens, known to fans as the Fab Mab, has been closed since 1987. But it reopened this month to great fanfare from local music lovers. To understand what this place meant to San Francisco’s punk scene, we’re immersing you in 1970s North Beach. Producer Brandi Howell brings us this story, which first aired on the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_98_b3e69dbd-c23d-498a-9e79-6ea56ec10ad7&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.fugitivewaves.org%2Ffugitivewaves\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kitchen Sisters Presents podcast.[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The Mabuhay was not your average rock club.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here was this little club all of a sudden attracting the energy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Dills, Negative Trend, The Avengers…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, of course, you are going to say, “Oh, what is going on over there?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More and more people started coming to town. The Ramones played there. Blondie played there. It just became the punk mecca.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I was real young, I would go by and see this place. It was there for years.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The music itself was nothing really developed yet in the very beginning. It was just a supper club. People would do the Mabuhay dance and stuff like that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Dirk was helping Ness with the Amapola show. Amapola was this Filipino night club singer, and she was popular within the Filipino community and had a TV show on Channel 26 and a number of characters from The Mab had performed there. My name is Denise Demise Dunne. I was Dirk’s assistant at the very beginning of The Mab.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hi, welcome to The Counter Culture Hour. I’m your host, V Vale, and I published starting in ‘77 Search and Destroy, the punk publication chronicling the rise of the punk rock cultural revolution. My guest tonight is Dirk Dirksen, the impresario of The Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We were open for 10 years, did 3,600 plus concerts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The thing was at the time, things were so conservative that no club wanted anything to do with punk rock until Dirk Dirksen showed up and made The Mabuhay Gardens available.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ness downstairs at The Mabuhay was having a tough go of it, so I came in and said, Look — how about if you give us Monday nights because that is your dark night. Let me try that, and I will guarantee you $175 a night at the bar. I didn’t have $175 at the time, but I figured there are enough people I know that if I say, “Hey, c’mon down,” and if they each drink two beers, we’ll meet the guarantee. And within a very short time, we were grossing more on the Monday than he was grossing on the weekend with name Filipino acts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My name is Mindy Bagdon. My film’s name is “Louder Faster Shorter”. At one point on Mondays, which was a dead period on the Broadway strip, Dirk convinced Ness Aquino, who owned the club, to let him put on different acts. Little by little, it went from sort of vaudevillian variety acts to where The Nuns, who were one of the first groups to play there, apparently, they went up to Dirk and they found out this venue was available and they said, Well, can we put on a show? And I remember I was walking up Grant Avenue and Vale’s then girlfriend was coming down, and proceeding me was the drummer for The Nuns and he was handing out flyers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My girlfriend who looked like a rocker — I guess I looked like one too, you know with platform shoes and spiked hair and all that junk, just superficial style — my girlfriend was walking down the street and a really short guy said, Hey…feel like coming to our band’s debut at The Mabuhay Gardens, which none of us had heard of because it was Filipino. I’ll put you on the guest list! Those are the magic words for any so-called real punk rocker. So we went, and then the rest is history.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The first time we went to The Mabuhay, there were more people on stage than there were in the audience, because it hadn’t gotten around. But within two weeks, it was packed. I mean, word got around town. Don’t forget this is before the internet, before smartphones; it was literally person-to-person or on the telephone or snail mail to say this venue was doing this. And like I said, within two weeks, it was jammed. The joke was Bruce Conner, the famous artist, said — You’d be watching a band and you said, well, I can do this too. So you’d go home and learn at least one chord on your bass and you’d get on the stand and you were the audience one week and now you are on the stage.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m Kathy Peck, bass player for The Contractions and the co-founder and executive director of H.E.A.R., Hearing Education Awareness for Rockers. I came here with Don Peck and he was playing drums with Mary Monday. She actually started the punk scene at The Mabuhay Gardens. She was like the first one. There were other people that played there, but she was the one that really…she was amazing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> She came from a dancer background, but she was really punk. She was just wild! And I would hear stuff at The Mab and see it being played. I loved the music. I got inspired by Mary, and I had a bass — a Hofner Beatle bass. I was learning to play. I was self-taught. Yeah, it was really exciting. People were like, they call it pogo-ing or whatever, slam dancing. It was like very crowded and electrifying.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Dirk at that point asked me to be his assistant, and it was like, Yeah, but I can’t type. Because I basically avoided typing because as a female you get pigeoned-holed into being someone’s assistant. And he said, Well, you don’t have to type that much, and you get to do a lot of things around there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pretty often during the evening, he would be wearing what looks like the Groucho Marx nose with the glasses and eyebrows, except this one had a dildo instead of a nose. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Mustache, glasses, a bit overweight. I remember the beige jacket, the beret on his hair, and the poodle in his arms. The was the first time I met Dirk.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> At the end of the evenings, of course, he’d come out on stage and tell everyone to get out, which no one is ever paying attention to. So he had a real police whistle which he would blow as hard as he could through the PA til people would leave. His favorite line was “We can’t make any more money off you, so get out!” I’m John Seabury. I started out playing in a band, Psychotic Pineapple, back in the ’70s, and I’m a graphic artist. I did all of the graphics for the band. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I went to this nightclub called The Night Break, I guess you go downstairs on Columbus. This guy walks up to me. This big eye ball T-shirt and this big chicken hawk hair, red flaming hair, and he looks at me and says, Do you play guitar? And I say yeah. And so we talk for a little bit, and within 30 days, we each get Marshall stacks. That’s how quick it was. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Before we were Crime, we were the Space Invaders. Ron Greco, Ron “The Ripper” Greco. I had a Gibson Ripper Bass and everybody goes — Man, you rip a lot! Ripper!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I took the job and would come in and help him go through all the paperwork. Listen to some of the demo tapes of the bands that came in. Get their press announcement, like Devo. I still remember it saying, Achtung, De-Revolution has begun!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I got the band members together and said, Let’s walk in and talk to the owner. We had a good time there talking to him, and so we arranged a show to play.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In 1977, I moved down to San Francisco to go to the Art Institute in North Beach. And after I got there, I started to see these posters around town for this band called Crime. And they were really intriguing posters and they weren’t like anything I’d ever seen. They were at a club called The Mabuhay. I was 19 at the time, but they let people in 18 or older, but they let people in because it was also a Filipino restaurant, so they were able to let minors in. My name is Penelope Houston, I’m in a band called The Avengers. We started in 1977. That was my first band. I’d been going to these shows and ran into Danny Furious, who ended up being The Avengers drummer. He had a friend in Los Angeles, Greg Ingraham, and he brought Greg to SF to be in a band with him. Danny had rented part of a warehouse out in Dogpatch, and they had a PA set up for their rehearsals. I was staying over there one day, hanging out, and everybody was gone, and I put on some records and started singing through the PA. I just fell in love with the power of amplification. I was like, this is so awesome. I’m so loud, and then when they got back, I said, I’m going to be your singer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When I found the club, I felt at home. I could be exactly who I was and still be part of it. I was freed. My name is Liz Keim and along with Karen Merchant, we created the film, In The Red. It’s a punk document of the late 1970s, mostly filmed at The Mab. For the last 40 years, I’ve also been working at the Exploratorium. I’ve been the director of the Cinema Arts program, and I’m one of the senior curators. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Oh, it was fabulous. There were people that came in for the first time to explore and they were still looking hippie. Then there were folks who had taken on the persona. Leather jacket, jeans, black pants, ripped T-shirts. You’d walk down the corridor, and there were all these little crevices with people hanging out there. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You’re a night creature, looking for that place to be that feels like home.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was one of those creatures cuz you’re just kind of there and you’re watching. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I went up to UC Davis to study art and that was a kind of isolating experience, when I came back into San Francisco I was looking for an intimacy in some ways. Looking for those smaller landscapes. I started filming. I prefer observing and critically assessing where I’m at, and I was drawn to the experimental film genre, so I wasn’t looking for something that followed a bell-curve narrative or, you know, was scripted outside of any experience I was living in. So for me, it was just capturing a kind of way of being in San Francisco. There were all kinds of relationships that didn’t have to feel permanent, where you didn’t have to have names, there was just something about a recognition.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There was just this excitement. There was the energy back to that word. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was about being in the mosh pit. It was about hanging on to someone I didn’t know just for counterbalance, and it was fine because my counterbalance was as into me as a counterbalance as I was into him or her as a counterbalance. You didn’t have to talk. You know, in some ways, we just talked through our bodies. Maybe The Mab was an analog experience for me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was at KSAN at that point, and Lou Reed came in for an interview; he was playing at the Old Waldorf. And he brought this guy in with him, and the DJ didn’t want to deal with him and said, Well, show him around. So we are talking and I’m showing him around and I’m telling this guy about The Mab and what’s going on cuz Lou has his show and I said, Oh, I’ll take you there. You know, and this was Jim Carroll. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Once we got in the Mabuhay, Dirk was really good to us. He had the sense of humor, he kind of got us. So sometimes he would have us open for someone really inappropriate, like the Jim Carroll Band or somebody like that, just because he was being perverse about it. We opened for Jim Carroll twice. And the second time word was out that Patti Smith was in town playing the old Waldorf and she is probably going to show up and jam. So the Mabuhay was double-packed that night. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patti Smith, Patti Smith, Patti Smith!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After the set, we were backstage and Dirk comes up and goes, Hey, you know, Patti Smith is coming. We were like, Yeah yeah, we heard. Well, she needs to borrow a guitar and we were like — No! Because we know she is going to break the guitar.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When Patti played the Mab, it was mesmerizing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Of course, most of the players in the scene at the time would have run home and gotten a guitar just to give to her to smash. Dirk goes off, and he comes back 10 minutes later and goes, Please guys, please….really, just one guitar for Patti. And we were like, No — forget it! So the band was on and Patti did show up, and it was really mobbed and all I could see of the band was the tops of their heads and then I just see the guitar overhead going smash, smash, smash and that was it. And it’s probably in a museum somewhere now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was awestruck. Like, wow! I mean, these are stupid words to come up with because it was just there and here’s this persona mixing this punk with poetry. It was like, yeah, this is it. This is just taking it to a whole different level. Because there were so many levels. There was the fun part, there was the political part, and here is the poetry — here is the art. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hanging outside was like the preamble or whatever. You got your sense of whether it was going to be crowded and what the energy was like. You didn’t just rush in. It was a lingering. The kind of slow meander and then you would hope to just squeeze in and get by admissions. And maybe having enough money for a beer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Early on, people would throw beer bottles at the stage and that was very dangerous. So they actually thought maybe we will put a screen up between the band and the audience but that didn’t sound like a good idea. So then he got the idea, Ah ha — I’m going to make 55-gallon drums of popcorn!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> All the super salty popcorn you could eat. I realize later the theory is that this makes you buy drinks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Free popcorn on the tables. It was really old popcorn and it wasn’t for eating — it was for throwing at the bands.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There would be this big mess of popcorn and jumbled chairs and tables knocked over and it was kind of like a disaster zone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I remember being in my house and all of a sudden just having this paradigm shift. The music was playing and all of a sudden, WHAP! Like — reality is not the same anymore. All of a sudden something woke up inside of me. I didn’t even know what it was called at that time, but it was like, Oh, something — something just changed here.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Not having much money, it was like, how to get into these places without it. You could sometimes climb in through the front window at The Mab and one time someone came and grabbed me and said, Dirk wants to talk to you in his office. So he goes, You don’t think I see you sneaking in all of the time! You know, no more of that. But it didn’t stop you. It was part of the culture. We were there to just get it however we could.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The first show we played at The Mab, we had been asked two weeks before if we would play this show — an after-party for The Nuns. Between when we heard about the gig and when we played it, we went to LA and were visiting with friends of mine from Seattle, The Screamers. Tomata du Plenty and Tommy Gear. And I remember Tommy and Tomato saying to me, Oh, you can’t do cover songs. You guys need to write your own songs. So we got back from LA and we had about a week to go and were like, all right, let’s write some original songs. So we sat down and wrote “Car Crash”, “I Believe in Me”, “Teenage Rebel” — maybe six songs, original songs, in that week. Then, when we got up to play our first time on a real stage in front of a real audience — for me anyway — and someone had written the setlist wrong and so the guitar player was playing a different song from the bass player and the drummer. And when the music started, I was like, Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t do this. I don’t even know what song this is. It just sounds like a big mish-mash. I can’t remember the lyrics and I was so confused and we stopped playing a few seconds later and was like what? What song are we playing? And then they figured it out, and we started playing the same song and I was like, All right, OK. Here’s how it goes and I can actually do this. But for 10 long seconds there, I thought, Oh, it’s all gone out of my head. I can’t do this. This is a nightmare. So then we just piled through the set and some people who were there were like, that was really amazing. And we were like, Oh my god. That was such a car crash. Jan. 14, 1978, we’d been invited to support the [Sex] Pistols. We got there and the place was absolutely sold out. Between 5-and-6,000 people. The biggest show The Sex Pistols ever played and like 10 times bigger than the biggest show we’d ever played. So when The Nuns were up there performing the stage got covered in things people were throwing, and spit, it was just pretty rough. So we walked out after they were done to take our place on stage and the first thing that happened to me was I slipped on the stage because there was so much spit. And I almost hit the ground but I kind of caught myself and made my way carefully to my microphone. There is a video of the whole night. And you can see how when we start we were a little frightened and shaky and scared. And then as are set progressed we just got more and more confident and got stronger til at the end we were feeling pretty awesome. It was crazy because there were so many people there and they were all mashed together. People were getting squeezed out of the audience like pimples. And passed overhead like they were passing out. You’d look out at the sea of faces and see someone you knew and make eye contact with them and a second later they would disappear into the crowd. So it was intense, especially for us. We were used to seeing a lot of our friends right up front singing along with us and this was like a huge number of people who had never seen punk before and were there for the spectacle. You know, the circus. A lot of people out there, it was a pretty intense experience. I think the throwing of things increased when the Sex Pistols got out there because Johnny Rotten egged them on. Someone threw a camera on stage. He was like, Oh, thank you. Like he was really egging them on to throw stuff. It started out terrifying for us and ended up feeling very good. There were rumors that Sid’s bass was not even plugged in for that set. And I guess I would have to go back and listen to it to see if I could tell, but I think the band was pretty used to making their way through the set without counting on him. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Janet Clyde. I am one of the owners of Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach. I moved here in 1978 when I was 21. I got my first job in San Francisco at The Mabuhay Gardens. I knew how to waitress, I knew how to cocktail, and so it was basically pick up a tray. Dirk right there, he would be at the front, insulting people — What are you wearing, rat fur? He was just the funniest guy. Never took himself or anybody too seriously. And really good to the bands, like really good. You’d come in and it was this long, rectangular room with a low ceiling. Dark, cave-like — really dark — barebones, tables and chairs, bar in the back. You’d walk in and in the front a stage that was only a few feet high. And there was a back seating area that was raised a little bit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After they removed all of the tables and chairs and seating and all that junk then a lot more people could fit in. Legally, you could maybe cram in 200 people. The most crowded night I remember was some show with both Iggy, Blondie, and David Bowie were there in the audience. And somehow everyone found out about it, and that was the most crowded I’ve ever seen The Mabuhay.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’d go in at 10. There would be no one there at 10 at night, nobody there. But by 11–11:30 it would be packed! And I saw 999, Lene Lovich — I mean, more people than I can count — SVT! It was so much fun, so much fun! Two people stand out — waiting on Bill Graham, who terrified me — and waiting on The Clash, who also terrified me! The Clash, though, when Joe Strummer is asking you for a beer and you are just like, OK, and giving you money and you are trying to think about how to make change for this. Like, my brain has just disappeared. It was amazing! He gave me a $50 bill for the beers. I gave him back like $150 in change. I just could not count — I could not think! And the manager, I will never forget, he just took the money out of Strummer’s hand, put the money back into my hand. And then like you would with a child, counted back the change. Like, how much are the beers? They are this…OK then…here’s $12, $13, $14, $15, $20, $30, $50, boom. I will never forget that, it was the funniest thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Well, what happened was Dirksen started to do some gigs upstairs at the On Broadway. That was pretty successful for a while.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was when MTV was coming in, so there was a whole new chapter.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When the big earthquake and the freeway collapsed, that really cut people off from coming there really quickly.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I left The Mabuhay after a few years, and time changed on Broadway and they moved the clubs off Broadway.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Venues like [924] Gilman Street in Berkeley developed around that time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I don’t really know what it was like at the very end. I think it just got harder, it just got harder for them. And you know, the scene just changed. And so do we, so do we.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If it wasn’t for Dirk, punk rock would have started in San Francisco at some point or other anyway, but Dirk really facilitated its rise. He understood what was happening, you know, and he knew how to let it be free.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It felt intimate to me. I just remember being excited. And that’s a good place to be sometimes when you are that young. Longing and driven — wanting to be nowhere else — and then also just wanting to go crazy, in whatever way that was. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In America, when you get to a certain age, you’re suddenly told by the urban environment, What are you doing there pogo-ing? You are 45 years old, you should be at the PTA meeting. You have to want to find out something about your life to go to these scenes. I have a Philippine friend and it turns out that “Mabuhay” means “welcome”. And it also means “good life”. So it’s funny in that context because that’s what really happened at The Mabuhay, you know. You were welcome — and it was a good life! When Dirk died, I called Bruce (Conner) and told him because the three of us were going to make a film about the totality of the punk scene in San Francisco. That died with both Bruce and Dirk dying. It was very sad for me. I have not recovered from that to this day because Bruce was a very creative artist and Dirk had every connection necessary in the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think a lot of people and musicians and artists and everyone contributed. It was a community, even though it was a misfit community. Dirksen was like an entertainer really, definitely the emcee. He was the ringmaster. I had seen that they had named a street in North Beach after the Beat people, so I thought — Well, punk rock man. It was amazing that the punk rockers got a street named. It was right on Broadway and Rowland, like, who is going to get that done with no money? I wanted it to be Dirk Dirksen Alley. Joel Selvin from the [San Francisco] Chronicle helped. It’s a historic plaque. It’s in the ground right in the alley, so they can’t really ever take it out. It talks about Dirk and Ness and The Mabuhay Gardens. It says, Shut up, you animals! He’d be thrilled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You have approximately 290 seconds in which to absorb our Filipino family supper club in the…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was Kitchen Sisters producer Brandi Howell. The reopening of the Fab Mab is still in its early stages, so stay tuned for more shows at the venue. Special thanks to Denise Demise Dunne, Liz Keim, Penelope Houston, Ron Greco, John Seabury, V Vale, Janet Clyde, and Kathy Peck. The archival interview with Dirk Dirksen is from Vale’s Vale’s RE/Search Conversations 13. Production support from Mary Franklin Harvin. Bay Curious is produced at Member Supported KQED in San Francisco. Our show is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Few institutions in San Francisco are as crucial to punk as Mabuhay Gardens. A group of dedicated investors, nightlife veterans and North Beach neighbors is trying to bring the venue back. \r\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Few places are as legendary in San Francisco’s punk scene as Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Located on Broadway, at the edge of North Beach and Chinatown, it was ground zero for the city’s emerging punk movement in the late 1970s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hybrid Filipino restaurant and music venue hosted bands like the Avengers and the Dead Kennedys — even punk rock icon Patti Smith took the stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When it closed in 1987, much of the city’s punk history seemed to fade with it. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13980619/mabuhay-gardens-reopening-sf-punk-club-north-beach\">But nearly 40 years later, a group of investors and enthusiasts is working to bring the so-called “Fab Mab” back to life.\u003c/a> We dig into the history and legacy of Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are few places as revered in the San Francisco punk music scene as a place called Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12060034\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12060034\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"670\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience.jpg 1000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/Punk-band-with-Zippy-Pinhead-performing-at-Mabuhay-Gardens-includes-Vince-Deranged-of-Animal-Things-in-the-audience-160x107.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Punk band with Zippy Pinhead performing at Mabuhay Gardens; includes Vince Deranged of Animal Things in the audience, 1978. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Mindaugis Bagdon, San Francisco Punk Archive, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To play, you need a place, be it where you live, the street, a venue. For unrestricted play, you need an unrestricted playground. Dirk Dirksen envisioned the Fab Mab just as such a playground. Without him and the Mab, there might not have been the great punk scene in the late 1970s in San Francisco. The San Francisco punk scene was fun. I miss it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Located on Broadway, right on the edge of North Beach and Chinatown, Mabuhay Gardens, actually a nightclub, was ground zero for a nascent punk scene in late 1970s San Francisco. Bands like the Avengers, Dead Kennedys, The Nuns, and Patti Smith played there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Announcer:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s gonna part for a woman. I think Patti died. I’m gonna get her for this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Originally a Filipino supper club, Mabuhay Gardens was part of the small but vibrant community known as Manilatown. Redevelopment, gentrification, and other factors in the late 1970s forced many of the Filipino residents of Manilatown out. They moved to other neighborhoods or out of the city entirely. But Mabuhay Gardens remained and took on a surprising new life as a punk club.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Audio from Mabuhay Gardens:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Are you ready for some breakdancing right now?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Katrina Schwartz, and you’re listening to Bay Curious. Today on the show, we’re transporting you back to the epicenter of San Francisco’s ’70s punk scene. And we’ll learn why Mabuhay Gardens was such an important place to so many people. Stay with us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sponsor message\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Legendary punk music venue Mabuhay Gardens, known to fans as the Fab Mab, has been closed since 1987. But it reopened this month to great fanfare from local music lovers. To understand what this place meant to San Francisco’s punk scene, we’re immersing you in 1970s North Beach. Producer Brandi Howell brings us this story, which first aired on the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_98_b3e69dbd-c23d-498a-9e79-6ea56ec10ad7&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.fugitivewaves.org%2Ffugitivewaves\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kitchen Sisters Presents podcast.\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The Mabuhay was not your average rock club.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here was this little club all of a sudden attracting the energy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Dills, Negative Trend, The Avengers…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, of course, you are going to say, “Oh, what is going on over there?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">More and more people started coming to town. The Ramones played there. Blondie played there. It just became the punk mecca.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I was real young, I would go by and see this place. It was there for years.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The music itself was nothing really developed yet in the very beginning. It was just a supper club. People would do the Mabuhay dance and stuff like that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Dirk was helping Ness with the Amapola show. Amapola was this Filipino night club singer, and she was popular within the Filipino community and had a TV show on Channel 26 and a number of characters from The Mab had performed there. My name is Denise Demise Dunne. I was Dirk’s assistant at the very beginning of The Mab.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hi, welcome to The Counter Culture Hour. I’m your host, V Vale, and I published starting in ‘77 Search and Destroy, the punk publication chronicling the rise of the punk rock cultural revolution. My guest tonight is Dirk Dirksen, the impresario of The Mabuhay Gardens.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We were open for 10 years, did 3,600 plus concerts. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The thing was at the time, things were so conservative that no club wanted anything to do with punk rock until Dirk Dirksen showed up and made The Mabuhay Gardens available.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ness downstairs at The Mabuhay was having a tough go of it, so I came in and said, Look — how about if you give us Monday nights because that is your dark night. Let me try that, and I will guarantee you $175 a night at the bar. I didn’t have $175 at the time, but I figured there are enough people I know that if I say, “Hey, c’mon down,” and if they each drink two beers, we’ll meet the guarantee. And within a very short time, we were grossing more on the Monday than he was grossing on the weekend with name Filipino acts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My name is Mindy Bagdon. My film’s name is “Louder Faster Shorter”. At one point on Mondays, which was a dead period on the Broadway strip, Dirk convinced Ness Aquino, who owned the club, to let him put on different acts. Little by little, it went from sort of vaudevillian variety acts to where The Nuns, who were one of the first groups to play there, apparently, they went up to Dirk and they found out this venue was available and they said, Well, can we put on a show? And I remember I was walking up Grant Avenue and Vale’s then girlfriend was coming down, and proceeding me was the drummer for The Nuns and he was handing out flyers. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My girlfriend who looked like a rocker — I guess I looked like one too, you know with platform shoes and spiked hair and all that junk, just superficial style — my girlfriend was walking down the street and a really short guy said, Hey…feel like coming to our band’s debut at The Mabuhay Gardens, which none of us had heard of because it was Filipino. I’ll put you on the guest list! Those are the magic words for any so-called real punk rocker. So we went, and then the rest is history.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The first time we went to The Mabuhay, there were more people on stage than there were in the audience, because it hadn’t gotten around. But within two weeks, it was packed. I mean, word got around town. Don’t forget this is before the internet, before smartphones; it was literally person-to-person or on the telephone or snail mail to say this venue was doing this. And like I said, within two weeks, it was jammed. The joke was Bruce Conner, the famous artist, said — You’d be watching a band and you said, well, I can do this too. So you’d go home and learn at least one chord on your bass and you’d get on the stand and you were the audience one week and now you are on the stage.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m Kathy Peck, bass player for The Contractions and the co-founder and executive director of H.E.A.R., Hearing Education Awareness for Rockers. I came here with Don Peck and he was playing drums with Mary Monday. She actually started the punk scene at The Mabuhay Gardens. She was like the first one. There were other people that played there, but she was the one that really…she was amazing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> She came from a dancer background, but she was really punk. She was just wild! And I would hear stuff at The Mab and see it being played. I loved the music. I got inspired by Mary, and I had a bass — a Hofner Beatle bass. I was learning to play. I was self-taught. Yeah, it was really exciting. People were like, they call it pogo-ing or whatever, slam dancing. It was like very crowded and electrifying.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Dirk at that point asked me to be his assistant, and it was like, Yeah, but I can’t type. Because I basically avoided typing because as a female you get pigeoned-holed into being someone’s assistant. And he said, Well, you don’t have to type that much, and you get to do a lot of things around there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pretty often during the evening, he would be wearing what looks like the Groucho Marx nose with the glasses and eyebrows, except this one had a dildo instead of a nose. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Mustache, glasses, a bit overweight. I remember the beige jacket, the beret on his hair, and the poodle in his arms. The was the first time I met Dirk.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> At the end of the evenings, of course, he’d come out on stage and tell everyone to get out, which no one is ever paying attention to. So he had a real police whistle which he would blow as hard as he could through the PA til people would leave. His favorite line was “We can’t make any more money off you, so get out!” I’m John Seabury. I started out playing in a band, Psychotic Pineapple, back in the ’70s, and I’m a graphic artist. I did all of the graphics for the band. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I went to this nightclub called The Night Break, I guess you go downstairs on Columbus. This guy walks up to me. This big eye ball T-shirt and this big chicken hawk hair, red flaming hair, and he looks at me and says, Do you play guitar? And I say yeah. And so we talk for a little bit, and within 30 days, we each get Marshall stacks. That’s how quick it was. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Before we were Crime, we were the Space Invaders. Ron Greco, Ron “The Ripper” Greco. I had a Gibson Ripper Bass and everybody goes — Man, you rip a lot! Ripper!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I took the job and would come in and help him go through all the paperwork. Listen to some of the demo tapes of the bands that came in. Get their press announcement, like Devo. I still remember it saying, Achtung, De-Revolution has begun!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ron Greco:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I got the band members together and said, Let’s walk in and talk to the owner. We had a good time there talking to him, and so we arranged a show to play.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In 1977, I moved down to San Francisco to go to the Art Institute in North Beach. And after I got there, I started to see these posters around town for this band called Crime. And they were really intriguing posters and they weren’t like anything I’d ever seen. They were at a club called The Mabuhay. I was 19 at the time, but they let people in 18 or older, but they let people in because it was also a Filipino restaurant, so they were able to let minors in. My name is Penelope Houston, I’m in a band called The Avengers. We started in 1977. That was my first band. I’d been going to these shows and ran into Danny Furious, who ended up being The Avengers drummer. He had a friend in Los Angeles, Greg Ingraham, and he brought Greg to SF to be in a band with him. Danny had rented part of a warehouse out in Dogpatch, and they had a PA set up for their rehearsals. I was staying over there one day, hanging out, and everybody was gone, and I put on some records and started singing through the PA. I just fell in love with the power of amplification. I was like, this is so awesome. I’m so loud, and then when they got back, I said, I’m going to be your singer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When I found the club, I felt at home. I could be exactly who I was and still be part of it. I was freed. My name is Liz Keim and along with Karen Merchant, we created the film, In The Red. It’s a punk document of the late 1970s, mostly filmed at The Mab. For the last 40 years, I’ve also been working at the Exploratorium. I’ve been the director of the Cinema Arts program, and I’m one of the senior curators. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Oh, it was fabulous. There were people that came in for the first time to explore and they were still looking hippie. Then there were folks who had taken on the persona. Leather jacket, jeans, black pants, ripped T-shirts. You’d walk down the corridor, and there were all these little crevices with people hanging out there. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You’re a night creature, looking for that place to be that feels like home.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I was one of those creatures cuz you’re just kind of there and you’re watching. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I went up to UC Davis to study art and that was a kind of isolating experience, when I came back into San Francisco I was looking for an intimacy in some ways. Looking for those smaller landscapes. I started filming. I prefer observing and critically assessing where I’m at, and I was drawn to the experimental film genre, so I wasn’t looking for something that followed a bell-curve narrative or, you know, was scripted outside of any experience I was living in. So for me, it was just capturing a kind of way of being in San Francisco. There were all kinds of relationships that didn’t have to feel permanent, where you didn’t have to have names, there was just something about a recognition.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There was just this excitement. There was the energy back to that word. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was about being in the mosh pit. It was about hanging on to someone I didn’t know just for counterbalance, and it was fine because my counterbalance was as into me as a counterbalance as I was into him or her as a counterbalance. You didn’t have to talk. You know, in some ways, we just talked through our bodies. Maybe The Mab was an analog experience for me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was at KSAN at that point, and Lou Reed came in for an interview; he was playing at the Old Waldorf. And he brought this guy in with him, and the DJ didn’t want to deal with him and said, Well, show him around. So we are talking and I’m showing him around and I’m telling this guy about The Mab and what’s going on cuz Lou has his show and I said, Oh, I’ll take you there. You know, and this was Jim Carroll. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Once we got in the Mabuhay, Dirk was really good to us. He had the sense of humor, he kind of got us. So sometimes he would have us open for someone really inappropriate, like the Jim Carroll Band or somebody like that, just because he was being perverse about it. We opened for Jim Carroll twice. And the second time word was out that Patti Smith was in town playing the old Waldorf and she is probably going to show up and jam. So the Mabuhay was double-packed that night. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patti Smith, Patti Smith, Patti Smith!\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After the set, we were backstage and Dirk comes up and goes, Hey, you know, Patti Smith is coming. We were like, Yeah yeah, we heard. Well, she needs to borrow a guitar and we were like — No! Because we know she is going to break the guitar.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When Patti played the Mab, it was mesmerizing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Of course, most of the players in the scene at the time would have run home and gotten a guitar just to give to her to smash. Dirk goes off, and he comes back 10 minutes later and goes, Please guys, please….really, just one guitar for Patti. And we were like, No — forget it! So the band was on and Patti did show up, and it was really mobbed and all I could see of the band was the tops of their heads and then I just see the guitar overhead going smash, smash, smash and that was it. And it’s probably in a museum somewhere now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was awestruck. Like, wow! I mean, these are stupid words to come up with because it was just there and here’s this persona mixing this punk with poetry. It was like, yeah, this is it. This is just taking it to a whole different level. Because there were so many levels. There was the fun part, there was the political part, and here is the poetry — here is the art. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hanging outside was like the preamble or whatever. You got your sense of whether it was going to be crowded and what the energy was like. You didn’t just rush in. It was a lingering. The kind of slow meander and then you would hope to just squeeze in and get by admissions. And maybe having enough money for a beer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Early on, people would throw beer bottles at the stage and that was very dangerous. So they actually thought maybe we will put a screen up between the band and the audience but that didn’t sound like a good idea. So then he got the idea, Ah ha — I’m going to make 55-gallon drums of popcorn!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> All the super salty popcorn you could eat. I realize later the theory is that this makes you buy drinks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>John Seabury:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Free popcorn on the tables. It was really old popcorn and it wasn’t for eating — it was for throwing at the bands.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There would be this big mess of popcorn and jumbled chairs and tables knocked over and it was kind of like a disaster zone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I remember being in my house and all of a sudden just having this paradigm shift. The music was playing and all of a sudden, WHAP! Like — reality is not the same anymore. All of a sudden something woke up inside of me. I didn’t even know what it was called at that time, but it was like, Oh, something — something just changed here.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Not having much money, it was like, how to get into these places without it. You could sometimes climb in through the front window at The Mab and one time someone came and grabbed me and said, Dirk wants to talk to you in his office. So he goes, You don’t think I see you sneaking in all of the time! You know, no more of that. But it didn’t stop you. It was part of the culture. We were there to just get it however we could.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Penelope Houston:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The first show we played at The Mab, we had been asked two weeks before if we would play this show — an after-party for The Nuns. Between when we heard about the gig and when we played it, we went to LA and were visiting with friends of mine from Seattle, The Screamers. Tomata du Plenty and Tommy Gear. And I remember Tommy and Tomato saying to me, Oh, you can’t do cover songs. You guys need to write your own songs. So we got back from LA and we had about a week to go and were like, all right, let’s write some original songs. So we sat down and wrote “Car Crash”, “I Believe in Me”, “Teenage Rebel” — maybe six songs, original songs, in that week. Then, when we got up to play our first time on a real stage in front of a real audience — for me anyway — and someone had written the setlist wrong and so the guitar player was playing a different song from the bass player and the drummer. And when the music started, I was like, Oh my god. Oh my god. I can’t do this. I don’t even know what song this is. It just sounds like a big mish-mash. I can’t remember the lyrics and I was so confused and we stopped playing a few seconds later and was like what? What song are we playing? And then they figured it out, and we started playing the same song and I was like, All right, OK. Here’s how it goes and I can actually do this. But for 10 long seconds there, I thought, Oh, it’s all gone out of my head. I can’t do this. This is a nightmare. So then we just piled through the set and some people who were there were like, that was really amazing. And we were like, Oh my god. That was such a car crash. Jan. 14, 1978, we’d been invited to support the [Sex] Pistols. We got there and the place was absolutely sold out. Between 5-and-6,000 people. The biggest show The Sex Pistols ever played and like 10 times bigger than the biggest show we’d ever played. So when The Nuns were up there performing the stage got covered in things people were throwing, and spit, it was just pretty rough. So we walked out after they were done to take our place on stage and the first thing that happened to me was I slipped on the stage because there was so much spit. And I almost hit the ground but I kind of caught myself and made my way carefully to my microphone. There is a video of the whole night. And you can see how when we start we were a little frightened and shaky and scared. And then as are set progressed we just got more and more confident and got stronger til at the end we were feeling pretty awesome. It was crazy because there were so many people there and they were all mashed together. People were getting squeezed out of the audience like pimples. And passed overhead like they were passing out. You’d look out at the sea of faces and see someone you knew and make eye contact with them and a second later they would disappear into the crowd. So it was intense, especially for us. We were used to seeing a lot of our friends right up front singing along with us and this was like a huge number of people who had never seen punk before and were there for the spectacle. You know, the circus. A lot of people out there, it was a pretty intense experience. I think the throwing of things increased when the Sex Pistols got out there because Johnny Rotten egged them on. Someone threw a camera on stage. He was like, Oh, thank you. Like he was really egging them on to throw stuff. It started out terrifying for us and ended up feeling very good. There were rumors that Sid’s bass was not even plugged in for that set. And I guess I would have to go back and listen to it to see if I could tell, but I think the band was pretty used to making their way through the set without counting on him. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Janet Clyde. I am one of the owners of Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach. I moved here in 1978 when I was 21. I got my first job in San Francisco at The Mabuhay Gardens. I knew how to waitress, I knew how to cocktail, and so it was basically pick up a tray. Dirk right there, he would be at the front, insulting people — What are you wearing, rat fur? He was just the funniest guy. Never took himself or anybody too seriously. And really good to the bands, like really good. You’d come in and it was this long, rectangular room with a low ceiling. Dark, cave-like — really dark — barebones, tables and chairs, bar in the back. You’d walk in and in the front a stage that was only a few feet high. And there was a back seating area that was raised a little bit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>V Vale:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After they removed all of the tables and chairs and seating and all that junk then a lot more people could fit in. Legally, you could maybe cram in 200 people. The most crowded night I remember was some show with both Iggy, Blondie, and David Bowie were there in the audience. And somehow everyone found out about it, and that was the most crowded I’ve ever seen The Mabuhay.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’d go in at 10. There would be no one there at 10 at night, nobody there. But by 11–11:30 it would be packed! And I saw 999, Lene Lovich — I mean, more people than I can count — SVT! It was so much fun, so much fun! Two people stand out — waiting on Bill Graham, who terrified me — and waiting on The Clash, who also terrified me! The Clash, though, when Joe Strummer is asking you for a beer and you are just like, OK, and giving you money and you are trying to think about how to make change for this. Like, my brain has just disappeared. It was amazing! He gave me a $50 bill for the beers. I gave him back like $150 in change. I just could not count — I could not think! And the manager, I will never forget, he just took the money out of Strummer’s hand, put the money back into my hand. And then like you would with a child, counted back the change. Like, how much are the beers? They are this…OK then…here’s $12, $13, $14, $15, $20, $30, $50, boom. I will never forget that, it was the funniest thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Well, what happened was Dirksen started to do some gigs upstairs at the On Broadway. That was pretty successful for a while.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Denise Demise Dunne: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was when MTV was coming in, so there was a whole new chapter.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When the big earthquake and the freeway collapsed, that really cut people off from coming there really quickly.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I left The Mabuhay after a few years, and time changed on Broadway and they moved the clubs off Broadway.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Venues like [924] Gilman Street in Berkeley developed around that time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Janet Clyde:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I don’t really know what it was like at the very end. I think it just got harder, it just got harder for them. And you know, the scene just changed. And so do we, so do we.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If it wasn’t for Dirk, punk rock would have started in San Francisco at some point or other anyway, but Dirk really facilitated its rise. He understood what was happening, you know, and he knew how to let it be free.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Liz Keim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It felt intimate to me. I just remember being excited. And that’s a good place to be sometimes when you are that young. Longing and driven — wanting to be nowhere else — and then also just wanting to go crazy, in whatever way that was. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mindy Bagdon: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In America, when you get to a certain age, you’re suddenly told by the urban environment, What are you doing there pogo-ing? You are 45 years old, you should be at the PTA meeting. You have to want to find out something about your life to go to these scenes. I have a Philippine friend and it turns out that “Mabuhay” means “welcome”. And it also means “good life”. So it’s funny in that context because that’s what really happened at The Mabuhay, you know. You were welcome — and it was a good life! When Dirk died, I called Bruce (Conner) and told him because the three of us were going to make a film about the totality of the punk scene in San Francisco. That died with both Bruce and Dirk dying. It was very sad for me. I have not recovered from that to this day because Bruce was a very creative artist and Dirk had every connection necessary in the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kathy Peck:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think a lot of people and musicians and artists and everyone contributed. It was a community, even though it was a misfit community. Dirksen was like an entertainer really, definitely the emcee. He was the ringmaster. I had seen that they had named a street in North Beach after the Beat people, so I thought — Well, punk rock man. It was amazing that the punk rockers got a street named. It was right on Broadway and Rowland, like, who is going to get that done with no money? I wanted it to be Dirk Dirksen Alley. Joel Selvin from the [San Francisco] Chronicle helped. It’s a historic plaque. It’s in the ground right in the alley, so they can’t really ever take it out. It talks about Dirk and Ness and The Mabuhay Gardens. It says, Shut up, you animals! He’d be thrilled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dirk Dirksen:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You have approximately 290 seconds in which to absorb our Filipino family supper club in the…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was Kitchen Sisters producer Brandi Howell. The reopening of the Fab Mab is still in its early stages, so stay tuned for more shows at the venue. Special thanks to Denise Demise Dunne, Liz Keim, Penelope Houston, Ron Greco, John Seabury, V Vale, Janet Clyde, and Kathy Peck. The archival interview with Dirk Dirksen is from Vale’s Vale’s RE/Search Conversations 13. Production support from Mary Franklin Harvin. Bay Curious is produced at Member Supported KQED in San Francisco. Our show is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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},
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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},
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"info": "Inside Europe, a one-hour weekly news magazine hosted by Helen Seeney and Keith Walker, explores the topical issues shaping the continent. No other part of the globe has experienced such dynamic political and social change in recent years.",
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},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
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"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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},
"live-from-here-highlights": {
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"title": "Live from Here Highlights",
"info": "Chris Thile steps to the mic as the host of Live from Here (formerly A Prairie Home Companion), a live public radio variety show. Download Chris’s Song of the Week plus other highlights from the broadcast. Produced by American Public Media.",
"airtime": "SAT 6pm-8pm, SUN 11am-1pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Live-From-Here-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.livefromhere.org/",
"meta": {
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"link": "/radio/program/live-from-here-highlights",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/a-prairie-home-companion-highlights/rss/rss"
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"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
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},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
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"order": 13
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 12
},
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"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
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},
"our-body-politic": {
"id": "our-body-politic",
"title": "Our Body Politic",
"info": "Presented by KQED, KCRW and KPCC, and created and hosted by award-winning journalist Farai Chideya, Our Body Politic is unapologetically centered on reporting on not just how women of color experience the major political events of today, but how they’re impacting those very issues.",
"airtime": "SAT 6pm-7pm, SUN 1am-2am",
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"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/our-body-politic",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9feGFQaHMxcw",
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},
"perspectives": {
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
"meta": {
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/perspectives",
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"planet-money": {
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"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
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"politicalbreakdown": {
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"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
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"order": 6
},
"link": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5Nzk2MzI2MTEx",
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"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
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