Threats averted and shocks absorbed
A fateful interview, how Bimbo got his name, and an art deco duck.
ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM
A short, tense, and revealing interview with a San Francisco powerbroker
DON FISHER DID NOT want to talk to me. He was one of the wealthiest men in San Francisco and was known to dislike reporters. Unlike many high-profile CEOs, the Gap founder shunned publicity. But Fisher was an especially powerful board member of the Presidio Trust, the main administrator of the historic fort-turned-parkland that occupied fifteen hundred acres on the southern end of the Golden Gate. I’d been looking into the Trust and its executive director for six months for San Francisco magazine.
As expected, Fisher turned down my initial interview requests. He changed his mind only after being coaxed by the Trust’s board chair to grant me fifteen minutes. I’d interviewed the chair at length and he was convinced I was a fair reporter, which I strove to be. But what I had subsequently uncovered about the Trust’s executive, often with the help of unhappy staff members, was disquieting.
When the Army transferred the Presidio to the National Park Service in 1994, the Gingrich Republicans who won the House that year wanted to put the place up for private auction. Nancy Pelosi prevailed in the battle to save the park by securing an agreement to create a public-private partnership, the Presidio Trust. She promised the park would pay for itself in sixteen years by leasing its hundreds of buildings. The coastal areas remained under the jurisdiction of the park service.
These buildings, some dating back to the Spanish era, needed hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs. The board members, all business and civic leaders, were determined to meet the deadline. They resolved to hire an aggressive developer who could turn a profit and resist pressure from the many community groups who were skeptical of private development in a national park.
The man they hired, James Meadows, was certainly aggressive. Before going into real estate development, he had joined the Air Force and dropped napalm in Vietnam. Through multiple public and personal accounts, I learned that he was a tenacious developer in Phoenix and elsewhere—and that he had left a trail of bankruptcy and woe. After Meadows began worrying about the direction of my reporting, one of his military buddies called me at home to threaten me off. In my final interview with him, he slicked back his hair, wore ninja-black, and paced the room around my chair.
MY ESCORTS greeted me at the front desk of Gap headquarters. The decor conveyed a vibe the Bay Area cultivated in the dot-com era, a veneer of laid-back informality overlaying fierce corporate ambition. The head of public relations for the company and a well-dressed young man who was apparently a security guard guided me to the executive elevator. The young man inserted a key to access the C-suite.
Exiting the elevator, I was pleasantly surprised to find a sizable gallery displaying modernist paintings and sculptures from the Fisher art collection, which now occupies a specially built wing of SFMOMA. On the way to Fisher’s office, I passed works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and many others. His spacious, light-filled office occupied the sixth floor’s eastern end, which overlooked the Bay Bridge and a Claes Oldenburg sculpture on the waterfront that Fisher had commissioned, a giant bow and arrow entitled Cupid’s Span.
He sat at a large blonde wooden table with an equally large Sol LeWitt painting on the wall behind. A multi-piece ceramic sculpture by Robert Arneson—of the artist swimming against the tide—occupied a corner of the office floor. Fisher wore a casual shirt, Gap khakis, and a look that suggested I was an unwelcome interruption to his day. I introduced myself and we lightly shook hands. I sat down and turned on the tape recorder.
My time was short, so I was direct. “Mr. Fisher, when you hired James Meadows as executive director of the Presidio Trust, were you aware that he had over forty lawsuits against him in Maricopa County, nearly all from subcontractors he had failed to pay?”
Fisher was apoplectic. He raised his voice, exclaiming that people get sued all the time for all kinds of things. He wanted to kick me out. The PR guy placated him. But the damage was done. He didn’t know. The Trust board, which hired Meadows to oversee one of the most valuable landscapes in the world, didn’t know.
Two weeks after my article ran, Meadows was fired. It probably wasn’t the Maricopa lawsuits alone or the hiring of multiple family members or the many reports of mistreating staff that doomed him. He had hidden enormous cost overruns from the board and I’d obtained the paperwork showing the real numbers. Afterward, the board chair insisted to the San Francisco Chronicle that my article had nothing to do with their decision.
Postscript. The late Mr. Fisher was the friend of a friend and I saw him a few years after the interview in a different context. I was curious whether he would be hostile, but as a far as I could tell, he didn’t remember me. Under a new director, the Presidio Trust met its financial goal. The article was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2002.
TALES FROM ALABAMA
Boots & Panties
By Barbara Ramsey
HER REAL FIRST NAME was something southern and multiple, like Betty May or Lula Belle, but no one ever called her that, not even her own mother. Boots was just Boots. She had a maiden name, then she took her first husband’s name, and finally she married Irwin Misrok and that was that. Boots Misrok.
I knew Boots through my mother who met her through a land deal, a time-honored way of meeting people in Alabama. My parents sold a small piece of their land to Boots’ mom, making them neighbors. That was reason enough for Boots to stop by to see my mom when she stopped by to see her mom. Soon enough, she was stopping by to see my mother more often than she saw her own. Boots and my mother were both unconventional, both smart and mouthy, and they became fast friends.
As a young woman, Boots began working in the small textile industry in southwest Alabama where the Tombigbee River heads south to meet the Alabama River. It was nothing on the scale of the old textile towns in Massachusetts and New York, but nonetheless vital to the state’s economy. Boots worked her way up through the ranks at a clothing plant, from seamstress to supervisor to manager. In the head office, she met Irwin. He owned the factory but Boots ran it.
Irwin had a winning smile and a nice car and thought the world of Boots. After she split from her first husband, Irwin proposed, but on the condition that she convert to Judaism. She met with a reluctant rabbi and charmed the yarmulke off him inside of twenty minutes. After that, she was never seen without a star of David around her neck. Her steadfastly Baptist family accepted the deal.
Boots was broad minded, shrewd, and keen to learn. She was also knockdown gorgeous, easily the most glamorous woman from Choctaw County to the Gulf of Mexico. She could dress up like a New Orleans Mardi Gras queen when need be or dress down to Ellie Mae Clampett as required.
She could also be surprisingly naive. Despite her sophistication, she was largely unfamiliar with the world beyond southern Alabama. With her first husband she had a son whose favorite book was the story of a baby elephant named Bimbo—a Dumbo knockoff. Boots thought her little son resembled the cartoon elephant, with his big ears and the ambling way he walked, so she started calling him Bimbo. The name stuck. Boots had no idea what the word “bimbo” meant until her son found out in high school. By then, it was too late. Hundreds of people across three counties knew him as Bimbo, and Bimbo he remained. He went on to local prominence as the owner of a catfish camp, an eating establishment that specialized in fried seafood, hush puppies, and guys in XXL overalls. You can guess what it was called.
BOOTS ALSO HAD a younger daughter, Pia, who couldn’t have been less like Bimbo. She left Alabama after high school, married an American entrepreneur of some kind, and moved to Indonesia where she ran a party-planning business for expats. Pia never was fond of southwest Alabama, but she did like her mom and the beach, so they met frequently over the years on the Gulf Coast. Pia had two daughters who looked forward to their visits with grandma. They loved her way of talking, her outrageous stories (an Alabama clothing factory can be crammed with intrigue), and their Uncle Bimbo. They were even happy to spend some of their vacation time north of the Gulf, past Mobile, up Highway 17, to Boots’ house in Yarbo. They’d stay in her guest room and hang out with various colorful relatives.
In the late 1990’s when the granddaughters were in their teens, they flew down to see Boots while their mom went to New York on a shopping trip. One day they went out to a local swimming pool while their grandma stayed home and tidied up. When taking the girls’ clothes out of the dryer, she noticed several strange fabric scraps mixed in with their clothes, maybe a dozen of them. At first she thought some poorly made garment had snagged on the agitator and shredded into pieces. On closer inspection, she decided that they might be some kind of underwear that had shrunk to tiny bits in the dryer.
When the girls returned, Boots showed them the scraps and apologized. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I think I jes’ ruined some of your clothes!” The girls looked at them, held back their laughter, and reassured their grandmother that everything was fine, that the “scraps” were their thong underwear.
Boots was aghast. “You wear them? Lakh that?”
“Oh course,” one replied. “You can’t expect us to wear granny panties.”
Boots, always fashion conscious, was mortified. Then in her sixties, she wore what she considered stylish bikini-cut underwear. When she realized her granddaughters considered them “granny panties,” she suddenly felt old.
Early the next morning, Boots strolled into the guest room, combing her hair and humming to herself. “Time to rise and shine, dumplins!” she called. She was wearing just a thong and a very short T-shirt, nothing else. The girls opened their eyes and a second later two piercing cries were heard all the way down Highway 17: “Grandma!!”
BIRDS-OF-A-TYPE CARD SERIES
Art Deco Duck
I PHOTOGRAPHED this male Redhead in a nearby pond as it was displaying courting behavior toward another duck. I used a filter to create the multicolored geometric pattern. Pleased with the result, I then asked Chat GPT to create an Art Deco border in muted colors and whittled down the resulting image, which was quite intricate, to a simpler border.
The typeface, Modula, was designed by Zuzana Licko in both serif and sans serif iterations. Licko and her husband Rudy VanderLans are immigrants—she is Slovakian and he is Dutch—who landed at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and soon created a buzz in the design community with their magazine, Emigre. I am a little embarrassed that I never met them since their studio is not far from where I lived for many years. The pair were among the first to see and exploit the potential of Apple MacIntosh in design and the striking fonts they created and used were a major part of their impact.
VanderLans and Licko are in a long tradition of Europeans—from the earliest French, English, German, and Italian printers to the Bauhaus and beyond—who have molded American design practice. Modula, here slightly condensed with added shading, was the first high-resolution font designed by Licko and one of the first designed completely on a computer. Licko has since created dozens of font families, including a remake of Baskerville, a typeface designed in the 1750s by printer John Baskerville of Birmingham, England. She calls it Mrs Eaves after Baskerville’s assistant, Sarah Eaves, who became his mistress and later his wife.
Birds-of-a-type has evolved into a regular feature that combines two of my obsessions—birds and typography. It’s a blast for me to design these cards and I hope you enjoy them.
THE ILLUSTRATION depicting an old-school math professor in the last issue rekindled some unpleasant memories for our friend Bill Curtsinger.
It looks to me like every high school math teacher I ever had looking disapprovingly at me, disgusted that I didn’t get it, and judging me. One, Mr. Osborne, actually told me that I would fail in life if I failed to get Algebra I. True story.
There were, however, no comments on the gobbledygook math on the blackboard, suggesting that maybe a lot of our readers had bad math teachers.
Posted with permission from Anne Schneider:
Barbara, I enjoyed the story and conclusion. I must admit that I had been a bit critical about our granddaughters wearing the latest ripped jeans fashion, if you can indeed call that fashion. Their moms told me that the girls either would not wear them around me, or would wear them just to hear what I would say.
As a way to let them know I indeed could be “hip too” , and to see their reactions, I bought a pair of modestly ripped jeans, on sale, of course. The looks and words when they saw what I was wearing rivaled Boots granddaughters scream! Thanks for the memories.
What I like about this article (which I read aloud to my husband) is the reminder of how important journalists are to our well-being. Unsung, underpaid, watchful, informed, they just do their jobs. I know there are a range of journalists now and that the term has loosened a bit, but the ones I like and admire are the ones such as yourself. Thanks for the reminder!