Executive Producer: Khari Johnson
Producer and writer: Christopher R. Laddish
Photography: Eric Lawson

By Chris Laddish

In the early 1960’s, there was no such thing as “Rock Journalism.” People barely knew what rock-and-roll was. It wasn’t until 1967 that Rolling Stone Magazine was created and iconic writers like Ben Fong-Torres came on the scene to change the game.

Long before gracing the pages of Rolling Stone or studying at San Francisco State University, Fong-Torres lived life dreaming of the day he would become a journalist. Whether it was setting up an imaginary radio station in his bedroom as a child or volunteering to DJ a school dance in middle school, it was clear from a young age that Fong-Torres had a passion.

“People are constantly asking, why, how did I become a journalist or writer, and also, how I got into broadcasting…” Fong-Torres said. “And the answer is as simple as being a kid, enjoying music on the radio, enjoying hearing baseball games on the radio.”

Much of Fong-Torres’ early life was centered around the family restaurant, New Eastern, in Oakland’s’ Chinatown where he grew up. Each day he came in after school to help peel prawns and vegetables, roll won tons and refill the beer coolers.

“So radio was like an escape for us,” he said. “It was our moment of pleasure. Of hearing the Oakland Oaks, or the San Francisco Seals baseball games and hearing music at the beginning of rock and roll”.

Fong-Torres formal education to be a journalist started at then San Francisco State College with experiences at both the on-campus radio station and the college newspaper The Daily Gator, resources to enter the professional world after college.

Soon after graduating in 1966 Fong-Torres went to work for the Bay Area radio station KFOG, playing a mix of light classic and easy listening type music, what he described as “elevator music” meant for the background of “doctor’s offices and shopping malls.” Working the night shift, Fong-Torres made regular station identifications every half-hour then read the latest news and monitoring tapes being played.

As a young writer, he never dreamed of meeting great musicians and celebrities or performing exclusive backstage interviews.

“If I had a dream or ambition back then, it was to write a column for a large newspaper. But I didn’t really have it in my head what I would be doing.”

Fong-Torres did well in an era when Asian Americans were largely unseen in American media. There were few if any articles written by Asian Americans in national publications and very few Asian Americans on the radio or TV.

“Back then, I wouldn’t say the door was necessarily closed. It just hadn’t been opened yet.” Fong-Torres said. Fong-Torres started as an avid Rolling Stone reader before realizing that he too could write for the magazine. Things began in 1968 when he came on as a freelance writer. As a fan of rock music and writer he was captivated by his title right away, though his editors didn’t really care who he was.

“And so you come up with a story idea, and you call, and you find out where their offices are. You call and suggest the story idea – they didn’t have it. So they said ‘Oh sure, go ahead and write it.’ They didn’t even care about your background.”

After freelancing for about a year, Fong-Torres was hired as an editor and in-house writer. Over 12 years at Rolling Stone Magazine, Fong Torres interviewed a laundry list of famous musicians, including Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead and the very last interview of Jim Morrison’s life.

Since then, Fong-Torres has appeared in many national magazines, including GQ, Playboy and Esquire. In 1983, he fulfilled the dream of writing a column for a major papers, writing his “Radio Waves” column for the San Francisco Chronicle which continues today.

Fong-Torres has authored several books, including his personal memoirs “The Rice Room: From Number Two Son to Rock and Roll.”

In 2000, Fong-Torres beginnings as a journalism was immortalized in the film Almost Famous directed by Cameron Crowe and based on his book of the same title. While the film introduced Fong-Torres to a younger generation, the writer points out it is largely a work of fiction and based loosely on actual people and events.

Currently, Fong-Torres hosts a radio program “Backstage, with Ben Fong-Torres” ironically, on a San Francisco oldies station KFRC. He is also involved with the websites myplay.com and asianconnections.com.

Fong-Torres, like other prominent alumnus of San Francisco State University, remains close to the school that gave him his start. For a short time, he returned to campus as a guest lecturer for a magazine editing course. He is no longer an instructor but sometimes speaks to students in the same Journalism and Broadcasting courses- in the same rooms and buildings where he sat 40 years earlier.

Executive Producer: Khari Johnson
Producer and writer: Juliet Blalack
Photographer: Sandra Garcia

By Juliet Blalack

California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano entered the political spotlight long before authoring a controversial bill to legalize marijuana.

He would become known as a stand-up comedian, city supervisor and now state assemblyman but first Tom Ammiano was a teacher. A gay teacher. And the press outed him before his parents knew.

“Kind of a shock to see your picture on the front page with the title ‘gay,’” said Ammiano about a June 1975 San Francisco Examiner article.

“Then, I thought it’s good to call home right now and tell them what’s happening,” he said laughing.

Ammiano spoke about teaching while closeted and stigmatized at a press conference put on by the Gay Teacher’s Coalition. 

The press conference was one of many actions the Gay Teacher’s Coalition took to get the school board to ban discrimination against gay teachers.  Hank Wilson, a founding member, said they also organized a picket line and lobbied individual school board members to vote for adding “sexual orientation” to a clause against discrimination.

The night before the school board was scheduled to vote on the matter, Catholic priest Father Thomas Reed called Wilson to declare his support.  Reed was the only board member Wilson did not approach for help because he assumed Reed’s religious beliefs would preclude backing gay rights.

The next day, after board member Eugene Hopps suggested adding sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination clause, Father Reed made a strong plea in favor of the motion.

Reed referenced a hate crime that happened in 1961 while he was principal of St. Ignatius High School. A group of boys beat up a teacher who they thought was gay and left him unconscious on streetcar tracks. After the teacher was killed by a streetcar, three boys confessed to the crime—including St. Ignatius varsity swimmer Larry Magee, according to The San Francisco Chronicle’s May 5, 1961 edition.

“The whole thing turned my stomach that students should think that they had some right to attack their brothers simply because they had a different sexual orientation,” said Reed at the school board’s meeting, according to The Examiner.

The school board voted in favor of protecting gay and lesbian teachers and Ammiano became a known activist for gay rights.

Settling in San Francisco
After teaching English in Vietnam for a year, Ammiano returned to San Francisco State Unviersity to earn his teaching credential. Originally from New Jersey, he moved to San Francisco to earn his master’s degree in special education from SF State. He described the college at the time as lacking support for students who wanted to come out, especially teachers.

He would later teach at SF State himself, where his daughter Annie Jupiter Jones went to study for both her bachelor’s degree and teaching credential.  

“[I] was looking at some of the professors and going ‘Didn’t I know you in the 70’s? Weren’t you a student teacher?”” said Ammiano about going back to SF State during his daughter’s time there.

Jones now works for a community theater group and lives in the Mission District.  She grew up with two moms and, after she met Ammiano and his partner, two dads as well. 

Ammiano was originally an anonymous sperm donor, but Jones’ birth mother was able to contact him when Jones was 10.  It turned out they had all met before and lived within walking distance of each other.

“His partner Tim was a first grade teacher and just really knew how to work with kids,” said Jones, recalling the first times she met Ammiano and his partner.

Tim Curbo and Tom Ammiano were in a domestic partnership for over 15 years, until Curbo died of AIDS in 1994.

“When you talk about the ideal soul mates, that was it,” said Jones of Curbo and Ammiano’s relationship.
 
Now Jones has two daughters herself who call Ammiano “Nono”- the Italian word for grandfather- and visit him frequently. Justice, who is now eight, was featured in Ammiano’s speech when he was sworn in as president of the board of supervisors.

“He said, ‘This is my granddaughter Justice, justice has come to City Hall,” recalls Jones, laughing. “That was when I first realized how really into being a grandfather he was,” she said. 

Run, Tom, run!
In 1999, a powerful grassroots campaign — and the possibility of an openly gay mayor in a big city — got The New York Times, CNN, and NBC to cover Ammiano’s mayoral campaign.

His run for San Francisco mayor shored up political consultant Clint Reilly, who Salon.com estimated spent nearly $4 million trying to get elected. This was around 250 times what Ammiano’s campaign spent during the run-offs, according to activist Hank Wilson.

“Tom was in his glory,” said Wilson, who worked on Ammiano’s mayoral campaign.
 
 A website imploring “Run, Tom, run!” popped up before Ammiano decided to campaign.  Wilson then told Ammiano he would be tabling for him at the Folsom and Castro street fairs.  After around 200 people signed up to volunteer for the Ammiano for Mayor campaign, Ammiano finally threw his hat in the ring.
 
The headquarters of the campaign was Josie’s, a comedy club that regularly featured gay and lesbian performers.  Here the campaign collected around $15,000 in piecemeal donations, and thousands of people dropped by to get signs, said Wilson.

“We’d never done this before,” he said. “It was very historical.”

Ammiano came second in the run-offs, beating two well-established and well-funded politicians.  Willie Brown was still re-elected, but sev­eral Ammi­ano sup­port­ers were elected to the Board of Super­vi­sors. Cur­rent super­vi­sor Chris Daly and former supervisors Aaron McGoldrich and Aaron Peskin all helped Ammiano’s may­oral campaign.

Ammiano stayed on the board of supervisors for five terms, and was elected to the California State Assembly last November.

From San Francisco to Sacramento
This January, Ammiano promoted his last piece of city legislation by being the first resident to pick up a San Francisco city ID card, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. The same article describes a line of hundreds of people waiting to get their ID cards.

The San Francisco city ID primarily benefits undocumented immigrants who cannot otherwise report crimes, use the library, or identify themselves to authorities. Although three San Francisco residents brought a case against the IDs to The San Francisco Supreme Court, the court ruled in October 2008 that the cards did not amount to aiding illegal immigration. Currently, the City of Oakland is considering issuing similar cards. 

The newly-elected assemblyman is now attracting attention as the author and sole sponsor of a state bill that would decriminalize and regulate marijuana. He wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, and that decriminalizing the drug would bring much-needed revenue into the State of California.

“It’s an interesting expression of a political career. I didn’t start until I was 49 or 50 and never knew that I’d be in elected politics this long,” said Ammiano.

“The interesting thing is that the opportunity was there. That sixth sense I had about if anything good is going to happen to you, it’s going to happen in San Francisco, that’s turned out to be true.”

Wesla Whitfield has accomplished a lot since she started singing with her sisters at four-years-old. The SF State graduate has played Carnegie Hall, sang for First Lady Hillary Clinton and performed more than 10,000 shows but today the 63-year-old counts still being able to project her voice across a room with no microphone as a major accomplishment.

“I keep paying my dues,” she said.

Whitfield grew up in a solid redwood California bungalow in the small central California beach town of Santa Maria. Her mother was a housewife and her father worked in the oil fields and getting training for a life in entertainment wasn’t always easy.

When her father broke his back working in the fields, her mother and two sisters got jobs to support the family. A lack of money meant one piano lesson to go around between the three girls so her older sister gave her piano lessons to Wesla, something she didn’t fully appreciate since it was at 7:30 in the morning but something she says she didn’t fully comprehend at nine-years-old.

“I’ve never ever failed to thank her for that,” she said. “I’m sure it was much harder than I realized as a little child for my parents to keep doing that.”

Whitfield would develop her talents through plays in middle school and high school and after a few years at Pasadena Community College, came to then San Francisco State College in the fall of 1968.

That same semester school faculty, the Black Student Union, the Third World Liberation Front and other campus organizations would begin the longest student strike in American history. They wanted to create the first college of Ethnic Studies in the nation – and she had no idea what was going on.

“It was an interesting time for me because I was screaming right-wing and so I never found out really what the strike was about,” Whitfield said, who was a Nixon supporter or Nixonette in high school.

“ …they [students] started coming into the classrooms and they would surround the whole class and we would stop cause it was really scary. And then after that the SWAT team came in and the main path was all lined with these guys in full battle gear. It was scary.”

The strike ended March 22, 1969 but it was still a time of struggle for civil rights as well as anti-war and women’s movements but Wesla stayed away from all that, instead focusing on the development of her talents and “a tiny little voice” with Drama and Dance majors.

With an era of revolt the backdrop, she says marijuana helped her realize the truths of war.

“I was so close minded. I was for the Vietnam war. My God. And I started smoking marijuana and seeing things in a different way.
And one day I was looking at Time Magazine and here was this dead body hanging off the back of a truck, it was a United States soldier and I looked at it and I finally made a connection, cause at the time I was in love with a man just about that same age and it finally came to me: war is killing people. I’m only looking at the Americans but there’s all those other people. This is wrong.”

“That was the end of my Republican days and I stopped wearing little wool plaid skirts that I made myself and here I am. That’s what dope did for me.”

“Shortly after that the light dawned on me and I went far to the left and I’ve been there ever since. I’m sorry that I don’t know what was going on.”

The end of the 1960s would also signal the opening of new on-campus dorms. Wesla moved into Verducci Hall, demolished in 1989 after sustaining considerable damage in the Loma Prieta earthquake.

“I had everything I needed.”

“…and I could see the sun set over the little bridge by the lake. It was a wonderful existence.”

Her two majors would be her main focus but in her off time, Whitfield made trips with friends to the opera or symphony.
“I had season tickets for the nosebleed sections of the opera house and I saw every opera, every season.”

After school, Wesla began working for the San Francisco Opera as a salary chorister, then a singing cocktail waitress and other part-time work to keep afloat until she could sing full-time.

In 1977, while walking home from a rehearsal Wesla was shot several times by a 10 and a 12-year-old, paralyzing her from the waist down.

A year later, her first gig back from “being laid low” was to perform between sets at the Empire Plush Room’s New Years Eve celebration. Throngs of local media would show up to see her return to form, though she says it was a struggle, with no lights, no microphone.

“Everybody kind of listened for a minute and just went on talking. It was horror.”

The Plush Room would become her favorite venue and she would perform the New Years Eve show the next 28 years straight until it closed shortly after New Years in 2008.

Last year she marked a noteworthy milestone, spending half her life in a wheelchair and half walking, something thats brought both pain and lessons.

“I have learned through becoming disabled to see people beyond the superficial in terms of the first impression. I’ve learned that it’s going to be there.

I still have to go through all the hoops and all the things I had in my brain for the first 30 years but once I manage to put them aside I think I see people much more easily and I connect with them much more easily than I ever would have if I hadn’t become disabled.”

Her partner along the way through the shows and 18 albums has been Michael Greensill, who she met in 1982 when she needed a piano player and he needed work.

“We were very proper cause he was still married so we just did nothing about that but it was too great, he couldn’t fight it, cause I’m such a catch,” she said in a sarcastic tone. “And so he left his wife for me. It was just extraordinary.”

The two have now been married more than 26 years.
Greensill’s background in jazz has had an influence on her but Whitfield only performs songs from the Great American songbook, the kind of music you heard from artists like Cole Porter, Frank Sinatra, Billy Holiday and Nina Simone.

“We are dinosaurs,” she said, something she is proud of. Because all the songs are about the story and the human condition, she said, they are timeless.

“People still fall and love. People still get their heart broken. People live happily ever after.”

They have hopes and dreams and goals and ambitions that are met or not met and the great american popular song deals with those things.”

These days, Whitfield and Greensill don’t perform shows all over the world but spend the majority of their time marketing weekend shows at Silo’s at the Napa River Inn in Napa.

By Tim Henry
Executive producer Khari Johnson

Spending summers on his grandparents farms in Oklahoma, Paul Ash got a glimpse of the agrarian life his family lived for generations. There his family grew, ate and stored it’s own food. They would sell part of the crop to purchase supplies for the farm, but mostly worked to sustain an existence.

“Spending time there certainly takes the glamour out of farming,” Ash said.

He would choose a different life than generations before him, but keeps an interest in how people feed themselves. Before becoming executive director of the San Francisco Food Bank, he would study agriculture and economics at the University of California Davis, then get his Masters in business administration from SF State in the early 1980’s.

As the leader of the San Francisco Food Bank (SFFB) for over 20 years, the SFFB has gone from distributing one million pounds of food a year to over 30 million, working with local organizations and food pantries to find and feed people in need.

He’s confident when talking about hunger and believes it’s only a matter of efficiency and organization, a problem that can be solved.

“One way to think about the job of the non-profit sector,” Ash said, “or the human-services sector is to try and correct some of those real problems of capitalism. “Low-income people often don’t have the where-with-all or the resources to push back,” Ash said. “So in a way, that’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to push back on behalf of our clients.”

Part of their work, through lobbying and trying to cut red tape for their clients, is to not let capitalism go to an extreme. “Because if it does go to that extreme I think it will blow up on itself, I don’t think people would stand for that forever. When 20% of the people live below the poverty line… how much more can you tolerate?”

According to SFFB statistics, nearly one in ten San Franciscans are at risk of going hungry.

[ACCORDING TO THEIR LITERATURE]
“Hunger touches people of every age, race, ethnic group and neighborhood. In some families, hunger occurs when a sudden emergency or crisis hits, but for most low-income San Franciscans, hunger has become a long-term condition of poverty.”

***
School

Like so many Californians, Ash didn’t grow up here. His father worked in construction and Ash went to eight different schools between kindergarten and 12th grade, before the family settled the Bay Area in 1969.

Ash was late to determine what he wanted to be but has always gravitated towards large scale food production and issues of hunger.

“Maybe I had a better idea of what I wanted to do than I thought,” Ash said. When he decided to get his Masters, his parents were no longer paying for his education and would join the ranks of SF State’s working class students. To pay the bills, he worked in the accounting department of a small business.

“The Cal program was very expensive,” Ash said. “The fees were just astronomical. I think they assumed that some company was paying your tuition if you were taking classes at night. The SF State program was affordable, and it was very hands on. Most of the educators were working In the field, so for an accounting class you would have a partner from an accounting firm, and so on.”

While at SF State he called the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood home but “it was no longer the hippy hang out that it was In the 60’s.” Don’t think tie-dye and dope smoking. Think Ben and Jerry’s, no parking and gentrification.

He didn’t live much of a life on-campus but made little difference since he only had time for night classes.

“It was very quiet,” Ash said. “You could walk from the old business department to the student union, and not see anyone. I was just out on campus a month ago,” he said, “and it definitely feels more like a community than it did then. It didn’t feel like a full college experience when I went there.”

Like many students working and taking classes at SF State at night, it was simply a pragmatic relationship, school was only about school – no frat parties, no homecoming games, just work and class.

And skiing. Most students seem to find a way to have fun, even on a tight budget. Ash would find a way to balance classes and skiing, and snuck up to Squaw Valley in north Lake Tahoe as often as he could. Today he skis with his two young children.

***

The Food Bank

After finishing school, Ash was hired as the director of the San Francisco branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in 1984, a post he found interesting, but one he wasn’t especially passionate about. He spent five years there before a friend told him about
the Food Bank.

“I heard that it was an interesting organization,” Ash said, “but that they weren’t doing very well.”
The director of the Food Bank had just left, and Ash was hired to take his place. “It was like something out of a novel. They just handed me the keys and I started on Monday.”

Knowing something about the SFFB and Paul Ash means knowing something about hunger. Most Americans, and indeed, most San Franciscans probably don’t think there are hungry people in their communities, or that hunger is not just something you see plague people in war torn countries in scenes from the TV news.

“If you walked down the street today,” Ash said, “or if you ate in a restaurant today and you were looking across the counter” you would see people “who were technically in poverty. And in an expensive city like San Francisco, it’s exacerbated by the cost of living.”

“So our job is to try and get food to people,” Ash said. “It’s a very achievable problem to solve, we just need to organize ourselves better.”

Ash said he realized how much food the United States is capable of producing when he studied economics and agriculture at UC Davis. “We could almost feed the world based on what we could produce, if we produced all out, as they say.”

Ash approaches hunger scientifically.

“A Masters in Business has a lot to do with logistics, timing, getting things to the right place at the right time,” Ash said. “We have a lot of trucks out there and that have to pick things up and drop things off at exactly the right time, so there’s a lot of planning involved.”

“I think society has become more bifurcated,” Ash said. “There’s fewer people in the middle classes, and fewer people at the very top, and many more sort of at the bottom income range.”

Hunger is a hidden problem, according to the Food Bank’s literature. “Among the vast majority of hungry people who live in San Francisco, hunger is a hidden problem. It strikes individuals and families with children, as well as the elderly poor. Many of the people who need food assistance have full- or part-time jobs. Low-income people are constantly making difficult choices among food, health care and rent; food is often the first thing to go.”

One thing the SFFB has implemented in Ash’ time there is to distribute food in a farmer’s market style – the products are placed on a table and people pick and choose according to their
tastes. This style is not only a more efficient use of food, Ash said, but it allows its clients to keep their dignity.

“It feels much better to choose your own food than to be handed a bag that’s already been prepared,” Ash said. “And then people don’t get things that they don’t want. If someone doesn’t want a watermelon, that’s fine, somebody else will want two, and they can have more bread.”