A View From The Brink ... the beach is backwards

Former USF radio station going back on SF Bay Area airwaves

     

Radio personalities Gage “D.J. Gage” Kenady (left) and Henry “Hank” Wimmer are volunteer radio DJs at the station studio of KXSF in San Francisco.

 

Story and photo by Thomas K. Pendergast

       

After a seven-year exile, KXSF radio will be launched back onto the airwaves at 102.5 FM, on July 10, to bring its free-format, non-commercial programming to San Francisco.

Formerly known as KUSF, the entire staff was booted from the University of San Francisco (USF) in 2011, when the Federal Communications Commission license for their spot at 90.3 FM was sold by the university to a corporation owned by the University of Southern California, which operates classical music stations. According to media reports, USF received $1 million for the license, the programming was changed and the station was rebranded KDFC.

The former KUSF launched in 1963 as a campus-only, student-run AM station. Ten years later, it was offered an FM slot on the dial and became a non-commercial educational station. In 1981, it began 24-hour programming. Over the years, it received several awards for broadcasting excellence.

Now renamed as San Francisco Community Radio (SFCR), with the new call letters KXSF, the station will operate for 12 hours of the day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and then from 10 p.m. until 4 a.m.

The organizers at the station plan to share the new frequency with the San Francisco Public Press (SFPP), a local newspaper published quarterly, but SFPP staff said they are not ready to go on the airwaves quite yet.

     

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Fort Scott planners seek social justice partners

     

Rob Thomson, a federal preservation officer for the Presidio Trust, describes the stockade at Ft. Scott standing behind him.

        

Story and photos by Thomas K. Pendergast

       

It was once a place dedicated to war, with the prospect of death, but now the Presidio Trust is hoping to turn Fort Scott into a campus committed to peaceful change and social justice.

Mostly built from 1909 to 1912 and used as barracks for soldiers assigned to fire the big artillery guns that once guarded the San Francisco Bay, Ft. Scott is one of the last remaining relatively unoccupied places in the Presidio.

The 30-acre site has 20 Spanish Revival style buildings in need of renovation, and the Presidio Trust is looking for developers and organizations to help remodel and lease them.

Two other buildings have already been renovated, with one building alone costing $11 million to renovate over a five year span.

But that is only part of the challenge, because the Trust is not looking for just anyone with money to become tenants.

“We’ve been contemplating this for a long time,” said Jean Fraser, the Presidio Trust’s chief executive officer. “We’re now at a point where we have the financial wherewithal to manage the rest of the Presidio and we’re really interested in seeing whether there are organizations out there that want to make Fort Scott a really special place, serving a higher purpose.”

    

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SFUSD's Frank McCoppin School gets $10 million overhaul

Standing in front of the newly-remodeled Frank McCoppin Elementary School on the first day of school are (left to right) PTO co-chair Hannah Wright, Principal Bennett Lee, PTO treasurer Brielle Neilson and parent-volunteer Breana Wheeler.

   

Story and photos by Thomas K. Pendergast

         

While most people across the country obsessed about the solar eclipse traveling from coast to coast on Aug. 21, students at Frank McCoppin Elementary School lined up for their first day of school under a grey, overcast sky.

Principal Bennett Lee stood before the students in a blue suit and tie to begin the new school year. Holding a microphone, he addressed the school community through a pair of portable loudspeakers.

“I don’t believe we will see a solar eclipse,” he said. “Here’s a solution. Teachers, if you have a laptop, or you’re able to get online and hook it up to your screen, watch it from National Geographic.com. That will give you a nice idea of what an eclipse looks like. It doesn’t come along often, so we don’t want to miss the opportunity.

“We are going to have a wonderful day. boys and girls. Enjoy your first day. Close your eyes for a second. Pretend you’re a camera. Take a picture of this. Remember this for the rest of your lives,” Lee said.

And there was plenty of new stuff for the youth to remember, like a freshly remodeled and modernized campus. Throughout the summer, construction crews had taken out the portable temporary classrooms that lined the Seventh Avenue side of the school and completely renovated the permanent buildings.

The $10.1 million project was funded by the $531 million Proposition A bond measure that voters passed in 2011, and featured the complete elimination of asphalt blacktop in play areas, which was replaced by a more forgiving acrylic surface.

  

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Lynch elementary schools will lose the 'Lynch' due to racial implications

       

Photo by Eric Apalategui, Special to the Oregonian     

 

The national movement to change racially offensive names of buildings, sports teams and landmarks will soon touch a group of schools in southeast Portland. Lynch Meadows, Lynch Wood and Lynch View elementary schools will shed their "Lynch" before the upcoming school year in response to growing concern about the word's racial connotations.

Janika Chada reports in the Oregonian newspaper that the schools, part of the Centennial School District, were named for the Lynch family, which donated land over a century ago to build the first of the schools. But Centennial Superintendent Paul Coakley says many newer families coming into the district associate the name with America's violent racial history.

   
       
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San Francisco aims to build teachers’ housing

     

Francis Scott Key Annex site in Outer Sunset chosen

        

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee spoke about teacher housing at Francis Scott Key Elementary School as District 4 Supervisor Katy Tang and SF Planning Director John Rahaim listen, during a June 21st meeting. Photo by Thomas K. Pendergast

   

By Thomas K. Pendergast 

 

(Originally published in the July, 2017, issue of the Sunset Beacon newspaper, a community newspaper serving the Sunset District of San Francisco.) 

 

A plan to turn the Francis Scott Key Annex in the Outer Sunset District from a dilapidated surplus school property into new housing for teachers is moving forward, as city officials seek ways to keep educators from leaving for less expensive towns.

District 4 Supervisor Katy Tang and SF Mayor Ed Lee announced that somewhere between 135 and 150 apartments will be built on the property, a 1.25-acre site between 42nd and 43rd avenues, and Irving and Judah streets.

“We do have a housing crisis in the City,” Lee said at a recent community meeting. “We’ve started getting better in building low-income housing, and we certainly use money from market- rate housing, but we never really did anything for working class folks. This is our chance because we have a strong economy now.

“Our affordable housing levels are too low for those who are teachers. Maybe some of our educators in the system can qualify, but most of our teachers make just a little bit more than that. They don’t make enough to afford market rate housing,” Lee said.

     

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Indian literature comes to the "temple of knowledge."

    

     

By Thomas K. Pendergast
    
 

The Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt held one of the greatest collections of written works in the ancient world until it burned down, depriving humanity of knowledge that is gone forever.

Today in San Francisco there is a temple at the corner of Clement Street and Funston Avenue that is not dedicated to any deity or philosophy, but instead is committed to collecting knowledge from the Internet.

The Internet Archive has taken up the grand challenge of providing universal access to all knowledge with an Internet Library that will provide free public access to collections of digitized materials like books, movies, software applications, games and music.

Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive collects most of its data through web crawlers -- which is a type of software that captures and records web pages, including original source code from websites no longer available on the Internet – and also through digitized books from 33 scanning centers in five countries.

On June 14, 2017, they celebrated a significant addition to their collection. The Internet Archive will host a mirror site of the Digital Library of India, which includes a collection of 463,000 books in 50 languages, including 45,000 books in Hindi, 33,000 in Sanskrit, and 30,160 in Bengali, among others.

     

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San Francisco Police Make Arrest in 2016 Sex Crimes Investigation

 

Booking photograph of Donovan Harper courtesy of the SFPD

  

Yesterday the SFPD announced the arrest of Donovan Harper, 35, of Novato, Calif., on two felony counts, one of committing a lewd act upon a child under fourteen years old and one of committing a forcible lewd act upon a child under fourteen years old.

Police say that they started investigating Harper in Oct. 2016, following a report of sexual battery upon a minor at a middle school in the Bayview District. They say school officials contacted the SFPD and the families to inform then an investigation was underway "encouraging students and families to report any concerns" according to an SFPD press release.  

On June 8, 2017, the Novato Police Department served a warrant and took Harper into custody "without incident."

Police say Harper is a former employee of the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and has worked on multiple school campuses. They ask that anyone with additional information contact the SFPD.

  

UC Berkeley cancels right-wing provocateur’s talk amid violent protest

A protester dances near a burning portable light unit after a demonstration forced the cancellation of a talk by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley, Calif., on Wednesday, February 1, 2017. Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle
    

A protest at UC Berkeley over a scheduled appearance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos turned fiery and violent Wednesday night, prompting police to cancel the event and hustle the Breitbart News editor off campus.

Michael Bodley and Nanette Asimov of SFGate.com reported that even after the event’s cancellation, hundreds of protesters spilled off campus into the city streets, where the violence continued as they confronted drivers, engaged in fights, smashed storefront windows and set fires.

Protesters decried President Trump’s policies as much as they did the visit by Yiannopoulos, a gay conservative who has been making the rounds at college campuses across the country with his “Dangerous Faggot” talks, specializing in remarks meant to insult, offend and disgust liberals who disagree with his ideas.

The trouble began around 6 p.m., two hours before Yiannopoulos was to begin his speech inside the student union building on Sproul Plaza. Protesters outside the building began throwing fireworks and pulling down the metal barricades police set up to keep protesters from rushing inside. Windows were smashed and fires were set outside the building as masked protesters stormed it. Police quickly evacuated Yiannopoulos for his own safety.

Berkeley police said five people were injured and some people, including a man who said he had hoped to see Yiannopoulos speak, were seen with their faces bloodied. There were no arrests.
   
    
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Former radio station KUSF gets new license

Henry Wimmer, an SFCR board member and DJ at the station with his 17-year-old pet Augie Doggie. 

 

Story and photograph by Thomas K. Pendergast

   

A radio station that the University of San Francisco drop-kicked off the airwaves back in 2011 is hoping to bounce back, after the Federal Communications Commission awarded it a new lower-power frequency last June.

Formerly known as KUSF at 90.3 FM on the dial, the resurrected online streamer still faces a major financial hurdle: raising about $50,000 to buy a new transmitter and related gear, which it has to do over the next year.

Operating as San Francisco Community Radio (SFCR) at the moment, they will be sharing the 102.5 FM frequency with the San Francisco Public Press (SFPP), a local newspaper published quarterly, splitting the day into four shifts of six hours each. The current plan is for SFCR to take over broadcasting twice each day, between 10 and 4, with SFPP filling in the rest of the air time.

“It seems like it could be a really good partnership of them doing news content and more spoken-word stuff and we’re more musically oriented, although we have a history of being community-oriented as well,” said SFCR board member and DJ Henry Wimmer. “We thought that might be best for both entities because a lot of people get their news as they are driving into work and that would allow Public Press to reach their people. And a lot of our listeners are late-night listeners. We’re hoping that’s a win-win and works best for both of us.”

But first, SFCR has to come up with money to buy the gear it needs.

   

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Wayward puppet turned around by Disney' creators

John Canemaker talking about the legacy of "Pinocchio." 

 

    

Story and photo by Thomas K. Pendergast

  

Walt Disney and his crew of animation artists faced a big challenge in 1938, the year after their first blockbuster hit, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," made his studio a household name.

Their sophomore effort had to be as good or better, if their future as a studio were to become brighter.

They had a very popular story in mind because it would help if everyone already knew it. Snow White was a charming and attractive character, however, the protagonist in the new story was a mean, rude little prankster boy named Pinocchio.

“People know the story but they don’t like the character,” Disney told his crew when discussing the project early on. He ended up scrapping the first animation entirely, so his writers and artists spent months reworking the personality and design of the lead character, which in turn profoundly affected the film’s story.

“This was a major problem for Disney because they had to transfer this and visualize this rambling story,” said John Canemaker, an award-winning animation artist, professor at New York University, and animation-history author. “The problem with Pinocchio in the book is that he’s a monster. He’s a brat. He’s cruel. In fact he takes a mallet and he kills the cricket, the unnamed cricket in the book, within the first few pages of the book. So, what kind of a character is this and who’s going to love this character?”

A new exhibit at the Walt Disney Family Museum shows just how they went about transforming this puppet-boy from a rotten trickster to the adorable, innocent and above all, lovable little boy that is known today.

Wish Upon A Star: The Art of Pinocchio is on view from May 18 to January 9, 2017, at the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Diane Disney Miller Exhibition Hall, and features more than 300 objects.

    

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