Michael Tilson Thomas, who served as music director of the San Francisco Symphony for 25 years and became a preeminent figure in the global classical music scene, has died at age 81.

Thomas died Wednesday of complications from brain cancer, five years after he was diagnosed with an aggressive form, glioblastoma multiforme. The death also comes less than two months after the unexpected death of his husband, Joshua Robison, who died from complications due to a fall in their Pacific Heights home.

MTT, as he was known, conducted his final concert at Davies Symphony Hall almost exactly one year ago, celebrating his 80th birthday and presenting works by Benjamin Britten, his mentor Leonard Bernstein, and several of his own works. In February 2025 he had announced that his cancer had returned, and that he would be winding down his public appearances, culminating with concerts with Miami's New World Symphony, which he co-founded, and the final concert at Davies.

During his long tenure at the SF Symphony, Thomas's name and San Francisco became "synonymous in the world of classical music," as the Chronicle notes today.

"MTT didn’t just lead the Symphony," says Board Chair Priscilla Geeslin in a statement to the paper. "He became part of the cultural fabric of San Francisco itself, expanding what it meant to be an orchestra in a city like ours. His impact reached far beyond the concert hall, touching the life of the city in ways both visible and deeply personal. We were, quite simply, so lucky to have him."

Thomas was born in Los Angeles on December 21, 1944 to an entertainment industry family. His father worked in movies and television in Hollywood, and had been a producer at New York’s Mercury Theater Company — founded by Orson Welles and most infamous for "The War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. Thomas's mother, Roberta Thomas, was the head of research for Columbia Pictures, and his grandparents Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky had been big in the Yiddish theater world.

Thomas met Robison when they were in a junior orchestra together, at ages 11 and 12, and spent 70 years at each others' side.

Thomas was considered a piano prodigy from a young age, attending the USC Thornton School of Music, and becoming an Assistant Conductor of the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in his 20s, as well as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and winning the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood in 1969, at age 24.

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who was a mentor and friend of Thomas, told the New York Times Magazine in 1971, "I don’t fling the word genius around lightly, but I fling it around about Michael. He reminds me of me at that age, except that he knows more than I did. Not only music, but things like the functions of the brain, cerebrology, physics, biochemistry."

After founding the New World Symphony in 1987, to serve as an orchestral academy for gifted young musicians and prepare them for leadership roles in symphonies around the world, Thomas took on the role of principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1988 to 1995.

Thomas maintained ties to San Francisco throughout his life, having first conducted Mahler's 9th at the SF Symphony when he was 29 years old, in 1974. But once he landed in the role of music director in 1995, he became completely attached to and of the city for the remainder of his life.

He was known as a champion of Mahler as well as American composers like Charles Ives and Henry Cowell, and contemporary composers like Steve Reich, John Cage, Steve Mackey, and Mason Bates.

Speaking to the Associated Press in 2004, Thomas said of classical music, "It’s meant to have various intriguing and alluring, questioning things that you hear on first hearing. But by its very nature it’s holding a lot of other secrets or a lot of other perspectives much closer to its chest, which only with repeated hearing you start realizing are there."

A planned celebration of Thomas's 25 years at the SF Symphony had to be moved online due to the pandemic in 2020, after which he formally stepped down as music director.

As he told the Chronicle that year, "I’m happiest when I feel the music gets to a place where no one is really quite sure who is making the music. It just seems to be happening wonderfully, miraculously, rather than as a result of someone who’s saying, ‘Follow me.’”

Below, a CBS Sunday Morning segment in which Lesley Stahl spoke to Thomas last year, on the occasion of his 80th birthday and his "final bow."

As he said when he made his farewell statement of sorts last year, "A coda can vary greatly in length. My life’s coda is generous and rich. Life is precious."

Previously: Michael Tilson Thomas Conducts Final SF Concert, Takes the Applause For His 80th Birthday

T0p image: Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is honored during the 11th Annual California Hall of Fame ceremony at The California Museum on December 5, 2017 in Sacramento, California. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

A week ago we lost Joe Kukura. He was the associate editor of SFist and a longtime contributor to this site and others, but he was also a great friend to many and a true bon vivant of San Francisco.

A celebration of life for Joe is being planned, it will likely occur in the Mission District in the coming weeks, and you can check back on this page to find details about the date, time, and place. Update: That celebration is now planned for May 17 at New Farm (10 Cargo Way) in the Bayview.

Below, we have collected memories of Joe that have been coming in over the last week. If you have one you'd still like to have added here, email it tips@sfist.com with the subject line "Joe Kukura Memories."

From Todd Golling:
I am writing to share some memories of Joe Kukura and to express my deep appreciation for the person he was.

Joe and I met in the 7th grade and attended junior high together. I’ll always remember him for his Hawaiian shirts, his love for Weird Al Yankovic, and his accordion playing. We even started a band together called DPZA (Dead Petting Zoo Animals). In high school, Joe played the tuba in the marching band. I remember when he broke a weld on his instrument after practice; my dad was able to take it home and solder it back together. Joe never forgot that gesture and always spoke so highly of my father.

Although we lost touch after high school, I felt a sudden urge to reach out to him last September after my father, who is now in hospice, asked about him. Despite not having spoken for nearly 30 years, I found Joe on Facebook and relayed the story. Even while Joe was privately battling cancer, he took it upon himself to call my father several times. He spent 45 minutes on the phone during each call, patiently speaking with a man dealing with hearing loss and dementia. He had no obligation to do so, but he treated it as a priority. I am grateful that fate brought us back together, even briefly, to remind me of the immense kindness he possessed. Rest in peace, Joe.

From Brian Grinnell:
I went to high school with Joe (West Geauga High School in Chesterland, Ohio, Class of 1989), and at the time he was one of my closest friends. Although we lost touch during/after college, I still very much value that friendship, and appreciate the lasting impact it had on my life. Reading the remembrance [on SFist], it is clear to me that the people who shared their lives with him in recent years would immediately understand why — from that description, it seems he remained the same warm, fun, smart, exuberant, goofy, creative person, the same reliable friend I knew almost 40 years ago.

Joe had a big influence on the music, books, and movies that mattered to me, from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Catch-22, They Might Be Giants to Camper Van Beethoven, Buckaroo Banzai to Midnight Run. I remember going to the 24-hour Sci-Fi Marathon at Case Western with him and heckling the slow pace of 2001 in the early hours of the morning. He always had a great sense of humor (one of my first conversations with him, around Thanksgiving in our 8th grade year, was about a wickedly dark and funny story he had written for English class about turkeys rising up and wreaking bloody vengeance) and could appreciate the fun available in almost any situation.

I remember an AP English class in high school where, being forced to read aloud the Arthur Miller play, The Crucible, we wrote alternative dialogue to derail the proceedings and take the death of Giles Corey in a new, absurdist direction. On many of the bus trips back from marching band performances (where Joe played the tuba, of course) at away football games, we would amuse ourselves by singing, as loudly as we could manage, a medley of TV theme songs — Gilligan’s Island, Silver Spoons, The Greatest American Hero, The Jeffersons, and crowd favorite, The Love Boat. For his friends, I am sorry for your loss. Joe was exceptional, and I’m glad I had the chance to know him.

From Elizabeth Steiner:
I first met Joe in Ohio in the 90s. He was known as Elvis then, had huge sideburns, and worked at the worker-owned hippy Mexican place in town. He would come into the coffee shop where I worked and we would talk about his students as he was studying to be a special education teacher at the time. He was charming and kind of crazy and oddly our friendship grew after we both left Athens. I moved to New York. He sent me postcards from his hitchhiking to California. We stayed in touch as we were sweet on each other a bit and Joe had a way of looking at you like you were the only person in the room.

When he invited me to visit for Thanksgiving one year,  he introduced me to San Francisco and I knew I had found my new home. I stayed with Joe while I got settled and he introduced me to his large circle of friends who immediately accepted me with the same generosity that Joe had. He was caring and thoughtful and kooky as hell. He loved San Francisco like it was a living breathing being and embraced every opportunity to explore its culture. When I started The Cock-Ts, a burlesque cheerleading squad in the 2000s, I knew immediately that we needed Joe to be our emcee. He was a natural showman, created his character, wrote his own material, and when we performed, God only knew what would come out of his mouth for the intro. He cracked me up. He had a great delivery style when telling a story.

He loved making appetizers with Ritz crackers. He surprised me by sending me a new skirt and blouse after I had lost my clothing in a fire. We shared a love of Freddie Mercury’s and Montserrat Caballé’s duet “Barcelona”. His David Hasselhoff with cheeseburger burlesque number to the Knight Rider theme was epic. At a 2005 New Years Eve party he ran into the room at the stroke of midnight dressed as a baby. He was so smart and a great writer. He could work a pun or double entendre into any headline. We fell out of touch after I left San Francisco, but I’m grateful that I got to visit with him this past December. I spoke with him two weeks ago and while he was struggling, he was fighting. Joe was a lover and a fighter and he changed the trajectory of my life. I’m sure I’m not the only one. I am forever grateful for his friendship. Love you, Joe.

From Carli McGovern:
My buddy, Elvis. Love you always.

From Tiffany Sherman:
“Elvis” Joe Kukura and I were worker-owners at Casa Nueva in Athens, Ohio. (Look it up.) Everyone there shared all responsibilities — we washed dishes (by hand at the time) we cooked, we stripped chicken from local farmers, we served customers, we cleaned. We created handmade salsas, meticulously. Everything was by our hand. It depended on the shift. We had a bar with open-mic night. It is still a mainstay in our sleepy college town. (Not so lax as before.)  It is a hub in our little  community of radical community endeavors. Elvis would light up the room every time he showed up to a party. He would wear glorious costumes and light up the room with his PURE joy and laughter. His love and light will never be forgotten.

From Kat Robichaud:
Joe was the kind of person you would be relieved to see at a party or community event — you knew you'd be safe with him, that you didn't have to put on airs, that you could anchor yourself to him to stave off social awkwardness or feeling alone. He was always kind, always charming, and always colorful. I feel lucky to have known him. Joe, you will be missed.

From Eveline Darroch:
Joe was the best. He was an Ohio school teacher who headed west and landed in SF at the same time as me. He became a journalist that had a good bit of sway, yet, always represented the arts scene, the working class folks, and he even celebrated them.

He held Thanksgiving dinners at his house, and he had a Billy Carter annual 4th of July softball tournament, with a bar set up in the outfield and noise musicians and a band set up on the side lines. He was so proud to share that this past summer, the teenagers playing were all kids of the people who had met at the annual Billy Carter tournament and became couples.

He hosted a live stream watch party of the Greatful Dead show in Golden Gate Park with lots of friends one day then the next it was me and him sharing stories of being in the same place at the same time and taking decades later to meet across the country. He called it that Bob Weir may be on his last show. Sadly, he was right.

We went to see Godzilla on Christmas Day a year or so pre-Covid with Bob Evil at the Metreon. Joe had a goofy Walgreens Christmas lights head band on and the disco ball jacket. Yeah, “THEE” Disco Ball Jacket. The one he got off of Amazon for twenty bucks, that had seen more parties in its lifetime than some small town populations in middle America would ever see. That one. Joe Kukura was my friend...

A few years back, I had become quite ill and I didn’t know if I was going to make it through. I had asked if he would write a nice article so my neices and nephews would have something to remember me by. He agreed. I didn’t expect to write my recollections of Joe in his passing.

From Jennie Kay:
Two years after the first time we met, where his reporting grossly misrepresented my words in a very public forum, I moved to the Bay Area, and he is one of the first guests in my home, at a potluck I was hosting. Not only does he shock me when he shows up, he shows up with something like twenty jars of apple butter for everyone there. Granted, he didn't can them right and half of them got mold, but for some reason, that detail feels equally as Joe as the action of him walking through the door announcing this was a peace offering and letting everyone in the room know "We met because she told me I was wrong! I love this woman!"

What I loved about Joe was his curiosity, willingness to be wrong, and thirst to always learn more. When his storytelling took a sideways turn, he heard me with an open heart, and corrected the error. He didn't argue. He didn't fight back. He was genuinely humbled in the wake of what he misunderstood in the moment, and offered questions over accusations. This humility and shared sense of finding common ground led us to develop a personal relationship, where I eventually found him in my home passing out apple butter, and making sure no one left a stranger. Our last text exchange was ironically a few days before one of my own best friends passed away from a terminal illness, and his upbeat attitude and hopeful optimism of his own diagnosis brought me great peace at a critical time.The Bay Area lost a legend in Joe, and I'm sure there are countless people today who lost a treasured friend. Rest in Power, Joe. You are loved, and you will be deeply missed.

From Justin Neisuler:
I have so many memories of JoeK, he really was the bridge between different worlds and could hang with anyone, any time.

He’s the only guy that I, a straight man, ever kissed — with tongue anyway — on E on New Year’s Eve sometime around Y2K. To know Joe is to know he was the perfect man for this kind of gambit. Also... he was a die hard the-more-they-suck-the-more-I-love-them fan of Cleveland teams — the Browns and the Indians (Guardians now but when I lived in SF they were the Indians). And he knew EVERYTHING about sports and saw them through a satirist’s eye. Like, he could have 100% written Why Your Team Sucks if Drew Magary hadn’t gotten there first, or MMBM if they hadn’t turned totally MAGA. He dies without either team winning a championship in his lifetime, which sucks.

From Deborah Neisuler:
Joe was the oddest sweetheart. You could count on him every year to drop the Dlisted birthday sluts list on your Facebook page. He did the SF AIDS Walk every year, often walking in memory of my uncle, who he never met. I also just found out today that Joe is the only guy my husband I both kissed. How’s that for “kiss-met"? It’s so Joe. I feel like I don’t deserve that parting gift from him.

From Tara Ramroop and Muni Diaries:

The Muni Diaries crew is incredibly sad to hear of Joe's passing. He was a wonderful writer and performer who embodied so much about what we love about the city. We know he fought hard to the end.

Above is a photo of Joe at Muni Diaries Live in 2018. He told a story and participated, with his signature flair, in our Muni Haiku Battle.

Fun fact, Joe was also at our second Muni Diaries Live in 2009 at the Make Out Room as the creepy coach in a burlesque cheer squad called the Cock-Ts.

From Eve Batey:
A couple years ago, I was rolling out my trash cans when Joe appeared on the sidewalk in front of my building. He knew I made custom iron-ons for t-shirts, and he was hoping I could quickly make him one to wear at Bay to Breakers, which was the next day. Earlier that week, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn abortion rights had been leaked, and he was ticked. "I want to wear something that shows women we’re not giving up, that we’re not forgetting them," he said. We iterated a couple messages that would work on a shirt, before he paused and said, "Wait, do women need another man telling them things? Maybe we scratch this. There are other things I can do."

That’s Joe, often overtaken by enthusiasm and passion, so strongly that he felt compelled to make an immediate and flashy statement. But after a beat, he’d often start to redirect his energy into resistance that was more sustained. Here’s hoping there are other fighters rising up to take his place.

From Doug and Heather Brown:
We first met Joe in 2007, around his birthday, watching Cleveland football at the Kilowatt. Since then, we have watched the weekly games together (all of us die-hard Browns fans). At the Kilowatt, you had to be there by 10 am to get a TV. No one wanted to watch the Browns besides us, Ohio transplants. The owner, Peter, would always reserve our spot on the stage, which we referred to as the kennel club, aka dog pawnd. We were a loyal group until the ill-fated day that the Browns acquired a rapist, sexual predator as their franchise QB. Joe denounced the Browns and swore off professional football for good.

The last time we saw Joe was in Dec. for his 55th birthday at the Teeth bar watching Ohio State football. Lots of his friends were there, and he made chocolate peanut butter buckeyes, an Ohio ritual. It's hard to believe that would be the last time we saw him, but it was a joyful time, and Joe was definitely in his element.

From Rosie Atkins:
Joe loved wearing his signature Christmas suit to our annual holiday party. We could count on him to entertain everyone in his path with a dirty joke and an arcane San Francisco fact. He turned up one year bleeding profusely from what he claimed was a shaving accident. "At least the blood stains match my suit," he shrugged as I patched him up in the bathroom. He prided himself on being the last person to leave every year. One year, he returned an hour after his departure looking for his lost wallet. We found it and he made me fix him another drink before he'd leave again.

From Stacey Corso:
Joe wasn't just a member of our community; he was a creator of community. He always stood up for the rights of the marginalized, oppressed and underrepresented, often in the face of adversity. That's one of the reasons I loved him. (Well, I also loved him because he was an outspoken feminist and die-hard Cleveland fan!)

We met in the early 1990s at Ohio University during a Casa Cantina LGBTQIA dance. Those weren’t easy times for queer folks living in Athens, Ohio: We were struggling to make our voices heard in a rural area. Joe deeply empathized with our struggle, embraced it, and did everything in his power to support us. After graduating from college, we went our separate (but coastal) ways: Joe moved to San
Francisco, and I headed to New York. But a combination of community-making ethos and a mutual adoration of Cleveland sports led us to each other again — more than a decade later in San Francisco.

It happened one Sunday morning in the Mission when I was looking for a place to watch the Cleveland Browns game. I certainly found it – and much more – when I randomly bumped into Joe at the Kilowatt. That chance meeting rekindled a friendship that lasted decades. It also sparked new friendships with Heather, Jessica and many others. Together, we spent Sundays in the "Kennel Club" at the Kilowatt, commiserating over the Browns’ horrendous on-field performance, and growing our community.

One of my fondest memories of Joe was the day in 2016 we spent watching Game 7 of the NBA championship game (at my apartment in Oakland)! For the first time in history, the Cleveland Cavaliers knocked off the Golden State Warriors to earn the title of NBA Champions. It was hard to be a Cleveland fan in the middle of Oakland, but we were brave. We risked life and limb to douse each other with a bottle of cheap sparkling wine outside my apartment building while Warriors fans shut their doors and windows, shut their eyes and crawled back under their covers. That’s a memory I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Thank you for sharing so much joy, love, creativity and community with all of us. Having you in our lives made us all better humans. I love you, Joe! Go Bobcats, Go Cavs, Go Guardians and Go Browns!

From Leanne Maxwell:
The synchronicity with Joe and me is far-reaching. We were both born on Pearl Harbor Day — 3 years apart — we both grew up in the Midwest and attended Big Ten universities, and we both moved to SF in our late 20s. I don’t remember exactly when I met Joe in person — at a happy hour I’m sure, but for a long time before that I strictly knew him through his avatar in the SFist comments back when he went by DJ Tennessee. The icon was a screenshot from the infamous video of a drunk David Hasselhoff eating a hamburger while lying on the floor.

Once I had my kids, I became a bit of a hermit and lost touch with a lot of people. Fast forward a decade, and I’m venturing out  in 2022 after a divorce. Somehow the one person I seem to encounter throughout my adventures is Joe, including on the dating apps. For anyone who’s been on those things, it can be mortifying seeing people you know, but with Joe, it didn’t feel like a big deal.

In 2023, I was at an illegal warehouse party at a former trophy shop near Balboa Park — a rarity these days!, and lo and behold, there was Joe, because of course! I’m so glad I got the chance to work with Joe over the past year, and I’m honored to carry on his legacy of sniffing out quirky, feel-good, human interest San Francisco stories.

From "Broke-Ass" Stuart Schuffman:
Joe was a maniac in the absolutely best way possible, and we had so many shenanigans together. I first met him in 2014 when he popped by the bar when I was working at Monarch and told me, "Hey, I'm writing for you now" and for the next 7 years he was one of the best, most consistent, and cleverest writers we ever had. While he wrote for many publications he spent most of his writing years with SFist and contributed to them until the very end.  

Beyond that though, he was a great friend. He always showed up in an insane outfit for any event, from birthdays to Folsom Street Fair, whether it be in little tutu and a tiara, or a ripped wedding gown.

He was naughty, randy, hilarious, loquacious, extremely smart, and down for anything. He always posted on your FB wall on your bday letting you know which other "birthday slut" you shared the day with. And after a few drinks he would invariably brag about how nice of chest he had like "I may be in my 50s Stuart, but I've still got this great chest" while showing it off.

No event we threw was complete without Joe showing up on the early side and staying till he was one of the dwindling few.

Joe Kukura was my friend. I loved him very much. Almost as much as he loved Ohio sports teams. I already miss him deeply. San Francisco will never be the same without him.

Top image: Photo courtesy of Pat McAvoy/Facebook

Scott Adams, the comic-strip satirist of office culture who later fashioned himself a self-help guru and anti-woke crusader, has died of the aggressive form of prostate cancer that he revealed he had last year.

Adams will, likely, largely be remembered for the legacy of Dilbert, the comic strip that at one point was syndicated in 2,000 newpapers, and that cleverly skewered the ironies and frustrations of cubicle-dwelling office culture of the 1980s and 90s. The central character, Dilbert, an engineer, seemed to be a foil for Adams himself, a frustrated cog in a larger corporate wheel — Adams worked for Crocker National Bank and then Pacific Bell in San Francisco, before he ultimately became one of the most successful cartoonists in the country.

He said that Dilbert was based on doodles he drew while in meetings at the bank of a particular "potato-shaped" coworker who was "fun to draw."

"I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist from the time I was 5, when I first learned that cartoonists existed," Adams wrote in a New York Times essay in 2003. "I wanted to get paid for drawing pictures all day long. But when you reach an age where you understand likelihood and statistics, you lose that innocence that anything is possible. In high school, I realized there was only one Charles Schulz and a lot of lawyers."

Adams's knowing nature about the ways of corporate life, and his penchant for critique, led to a book deal with the Wall Street Journal that led to The Dilbert Principle, a bestselling book of 1996 which promoted the "principle" that "the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management."

While continuing the comic strip and pumping out multiple other books with titles like Loserthink, and Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success, Adams also was clearly taking a turn toward far-right politics and perhaps even conspiracy theories, holed up in his home in Pleasanton.

Adams also took on religion in a couple of books, which The Baffler likened to the work of "an over-confident first-year philosophy student."

Back in 2006, on his blog — where controversies about him as a public figure began — Adams picked up a white supremacist talking point in questioning whether the Holocaust death toll of 6 million was a real figure or one "that someone pulled out of his ass." He angered many with another blog post in which he wrote "women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. Its just easier this way for everyone.”

In 2015, Adams made headlines for predicting with "98 percent" certainty that Donald Trump would win the presidency, based on  Trump's power of persuasion and ability to distill all conversation down to simple talking points.

And in 2019, Adams spurred local ire when he appeared to use the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting as a means to promote a for-profit news-gathering app he had launched.

Adams claimed he sacrificed his social life and monetary gain for the cause of supporting Donald Trump. But Adams's final major controversy, which got him fully canceled, and his syndication deals fully erased, came when he mouthed off particularly offensively on a topic he'd railed about for years: race. In a 2023 podcast, his daily Real Coffee With Scott Adams, he went on a racist rant, based on a single poll, in which he deemed all Black Americans as "a hate group," and saying further, "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away."

Adams would later try to walk these comments back, but they came after years in which he'd bemoaned that he'd lost jobs because of his race, and in which he had staunchly supported the obviously, virulently racist Donald Trump and his policies.

He would subsequently take to the airwaves of his podcast — which apparently had nearly 200,000 subscribers — and discuss how he'd "thrown away" his career and his social life all for the cause of Trump, and say bizarrely unhinged things like "welcome to the highlight of human civilization," and blaming all the trouble in the world on Democrats.

Last May, Adams claimed on the podcast to be suffering from the same form of metastesizing prostate cancer as Joe Biden.

"I'd like to extend my respect and compassion for the ex-president and his family because they're going through an especially tough time," Adams said at the time. "It's a terrible disease."

He also said that he likely only had a few months to live, and in November, he made a plea directly to President Trump, which Trump responded to, at least in tweet form, asking for help getting access to medication for his cancer.

As the Chronicle reports, Adams had discussed plans to end his own life through physician-assisted suicide this June, if he made it that long. He was, reportedly, in hospice care.

Adams's death was announced by his ex-wife, Shelly Miles, via the podcast. She read from a letter dated January 1, in which Adams wrote, "If you are reading this, things did not go well for me. If I got any benefits from my work, I’m asking that you pay it forward as best as you can. That’s the legacy I want. Be useful and please know I loved you all to the very end."

Doug LaMalfa, who has represented California's 1st Congressional District for the last 13 years, died suddenly on Monday at the age of 65. No cause of death has been announced, but LaMalfa's death will further constrain Republicans' narrow majority in the House.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa's death was announced on the House GOP's official X account Tuesday morning. "A lifelong resident of Northern California and a fourth-generation rice farmer, Congressman LaMalfa spent more than two decades in public service. He proudly represented California’s 1st Congressional District from 2013 to 2026, serving as Chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus," the announcement said.

Born in Oroviille in 1960, LaMalfa attended Cal Poly and received a degree in agricultural business, ultimately taking over his family's rice farm.

LaMalfa was elected to the seat in 2012 following the retirement of longtime Congressman Wally Herger, after previously representing a similar district in northeastern California in the state Senate.

In the state Senate, and earlier in the Assembly, LaMalfa was a fervent supporter of gun rights and advocated in favor Prop 8 and the previous anti-gay-marriage measure, Prop 22.

Redistricting in 2021, along with an influx of more liberal residents in the district, have meant that LaMalfa's tenure in Congress was less secure, and Prop 50 redistricting would also have likely put Republican control of the district in jeopardy in the midterms.

President Trump spoke about LaMalfa's death Tuesday calling him "a great, great, great member" of Congress, and clearly reading from a teleprompter but also trying to pretend like he really knew the guy, he called LaMalfa "a true defender of America's children" and "a defender of everybody," and he spoke about LaMalfa's advocacy in California water fights, "'Release the water!' he'd scream out."

The death leaves a fourth vacancy in the House, and leaves the Republicans with a tight 218-213 majority, meaning that if three Republicans defect or are absent from a party-line vote, they would lose it.

Update: Governor Gavin Newsom, in a statement, called LaMalfa "a devoted public servant who deeply loved his country, his state, and the communities he represented."

"While we often approached issues from different perspectives, he fought every day for the people of California with conviction and care. He will be deeply missed," Newsom said.

Top image: U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) speaks during a hearing at the Heritage Foundation June 21, 2022 in Washington, DC. House Republicans held a hearing to discuss what they are calling “Bidenflation” and “President Joe Biden's energy crisis.” (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

From her days as San Francisco's "Golden Girl" about town, to her high-profile marriage to and divorce from Al Wilsey, to her third act as a philanthropist and peace advocate, Pat Montandon led a unique and sometimes glamorous SF life.

Pat Montandon, who was once a regular in San Francisco's society pages and who gained a certain amount of unwelcome, late-in-life notoriety as a character in her son Sean Wilsey's bestselling memoir Oh, the Glory of It All, has passed away at age 96.

Patricia Montandon was born in 1928 to an itinerant preacher in Texas, and was raised in Depression-era Oklahoma before escaping into a series of less than successful marriages, and ultimately landed in San Francisco in the tumultuous 1960s.

Back in 2012, Montandon shared some of her recollections with SFist in a memoir series, including how she became one of the city's "it" girls as a manager at I Magnin; how she inadvertantly angered a group of topless dancers in North Beach (by giving some moralistic comments to a reporter) who then protested outside her Lombard Street home, topless; and how she kind of missed out on the peace-and-love hippie era because she was a little old to be a hippie at that point, and was already a society gal.

"To me, the city was a fairy land in every way. It was magical," Montandon said, recalling the 60s. "I loved the fog rolling in. I loved the hills, even though I had to walk a lot, which was very hard for me because I always wore high heels, like an idiot. And everywhere we'd go, we'd get dressed up. It was really a dressy city. I liked that. Hats and gloves. High-heeled shoes."

Montandon also established herself as a writer in these years, penning the 1968 bestseller How to Be a Party Girl, in which a blurb described her as "queen of California's jet set."

Montandon compiled many of her recollections in a 2007 memoir titled Oh, the Hell of It All — a direct response to her son's book, in which she was able to tell her side of the story. Married to businessman Al Wilsey in 1969 — her fourth marriage — Montandon gave birth to her only child, Sean, in 1970.

Montandon became known for her roundtable luncheons in the 1970s which featured celebrity friends including Danielle Steele and Frank Sinatra.

Wilsey would end up cheating on her with her best friend, Diane Dow Traina, aka Dede Wilsey, and Wilsey and Montandon would then divorce in 1980 — with Sean Wilsey casting all the adults in a fairly negative light in his memoir.

Chronicler of a slightly fictionalized San Francisco in Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin would satirize Montandon as the society columnist Prue Giroux (Montandon had an Examiner column as well as a morning segment on KGO), and Dede Wilsey became Dede Halcyon.

In her latter years, Montandon would leave San Francisco, move to Beverly Hills, and found her charity based on spreading messages of peace through children — known since 2018 as Peace To The Planet.

Sean Wilsey announced his mother's death on Facebook, saying she had been living for the last few months at a facility in Palm Desert. She was surrounded by family at Thanksgiving, he says, and he writes, "As we all sat together telling stories on Thanksgiving, my mother, who’d mostly been listening, suddenly spoke. 'I want you to carry on as if you weren’t afraid,' she said, and there was no arguing with that. We will."

The "pride of Richmond” Betty Reid Soskin, who reigned as the nation’s oldest National Park ranger past the age of 100, died Sunday morning, leaving an incomparable legacy on the East Bay and the National Park system.

We’ve many times admired the legacy of the "oldest US National Park ranger” Betty Reid Soskin, who retired in 2022, though was already 100 years old at that point. Soskin was pivotal in the creation of the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond that opened in the year 2000, and her namesake remains on the Betty Reid Soskin Middle School in El Sobrante.

But the Bay Area lost its famed park ranger over the weekend, as the Chronicle reports that Betty Reid Soskin died on Sunday at her home in Richmond. She was 104.

“This morning on the Winter Solstice, our mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, Betty Reid Soskin, passed away peacefully at her home in Richmond, CA at 104 years old. She was attended by family. She led a fully packed life and was ready to leave,” Soskin’s family announced in a Sunday Facebook post. “In lieu of flowers we suggest two ways that you can express your love and respect for Betty. You might send donations to Betty Reid Soskin Middle School (link to follow) and to support the finishing of her film, "Sign My Name To Freedom."

Soskin’s primary legacy will be her consultancy into curating that Rosie the Riveter museum in Richmond that opened in 2000, seeing to it that the stories of women and people of color made it into the narrative.  “Being a primary source in the sharing of that history — my history — and giving shape to a new national park has been exciting and fulfilling,” Soskin said at the time. “It has proven to bring meaning to my final years.”

She was born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit on September 22, 1921, though her family moved to Oakland when she was six years old. She and her first husband Mel Reid were among the first Black families to move to Walnut Creek, which was not particularly well-received at the time. Soskin’s activism working to support outlaw Black Panthers activists Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver did not help matters, though she raised four children there.

But the Betty Reid Soskin we most remember got her start in 1942, when women were drafted into the Bay Area WWII effort a la “Rosie the Riveter.” Soskin was part of the boilermakers’ union, which helped in the production of ships from the Richmond factory facility. But Soskin was relegated to just sorting index cards in her duties with the union, which was was racially segregated at the time.

In 1945, she and Reid would open Reid’s Records, one of Berkeley's first Black-owned record stores, featuring gospel, jazz, and R&B music. That’s when Soskin got more politically involved with the City of Berkeley, helping spearhead a cleanup of the shop’s Sacramento Street location that has become something of an outdoor drug den.

She would go on to work asa staffer for Berkeley City Council Member Don Jelinek in the 1980s and 90s, and for California Assembly Member Dion Aroner in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That’s where she was drafted to be on the team that created the curriculum for the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park.

“I was the only person of color in the room,” Soskin told Newsweek in a 2020 interview. “And as I began to introduce my part of the work, it was very clear that many of the stories of Richmond during the war were not being told.”

Soskin is survived by her son Robert, daughters Diara Melitte Kitty Reid and Dorian Leon Reid, plus five grandchildren, three nieces, and one great-grandchild.

Related: 100-Year-Old National Park Ranger Betty Reid Soskin Has Retired [SFist]

Image: RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 15: Betty Reid Soskin, the oldest full-time National Park Service ranger in the United States, looks on during a news conference announcing her retirement at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park on April 15, 2022 in Richmond, California. Betty Reid Soskin retired on March 31 after a decade and a half of serving as a National Park Ranger at the Rosie the Riveter/World War ll Home Front National Park where she shared her personal experience with other women who worked on the World War II home front. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

SF’s most Instagram-famous dog, 12-year-old golden retriever Brixton, passed away on Monday, after a long career as an SFO therapy dog, doing Opening Day appearances at Giants games, and looking dapper at SF events.  

Over the last decade and more, San Francisco has come to know and love the nearly 13-year-old golden retriever therapy dog Brixton, as evidenced by his more than 6,000 Instagram followers. Also known as the Doggi Lama, Brixton has served as an SFO Wag Brigade therapy dog, frequently turned up in SFist event photosets, and has even been the guest of honor at Giants Opening Day.

But Brixton died on Monday, spending his final moments at Crissy Field, as seen in the multi-image Instagram carousel below.

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Brixton seemed to know what’s coming in his final moments at Crissy Field, where he passed to the great beyond while woofing down Mishka dog cakes. “In the blink of an eye a whole chapter of an amazing life closed without any warning on Monday," his human companion Linda Gordon said on Instagram. “The most beautiful mystical being that ever touched down on earth was spirited away by a bevy of angels."

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“Because he was such an incredible golden light it was so important to honor him in the most loving way as he exited this realm at Crissy Field, his happy place. With the water + bridge glistening as gorgeous as ever.”

It was well-known that Brixton had been battling lymphoma for at least the last six months. And living to nearly 13 years old is a pretty high-end life expectancy for a golden retriever. But Brixton’s legions of fans could not fathom a world without his snuggling presence, and they raised nearly $35,000 to support his medical care in these final months.

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Those legions of fans were able to say their last goodbyes, though, as KPIX reports there was a final meetup of Brixton and his fans last Thursday at Union Square. Many had received Brixton's attentive therapy over the years, as he has been a therapy dog since the age of only eight months old.

"That's a long time of touching people's lives. Just knowing how much good and love he's put out to this universe — it's a lot,” Gordon told KPIX. "He's had the most beatific smile on his face for the last two days while he is just embraced and showered in that beatific love. I just, I keep repeating, but he looks like an angel."

Related: Beloved Albino Alligator Claude, Mascot of the Academy of Sciences, Has Died [SFist]

Image: Goldie Palooza via Facebook

The first espresso house on the West Coast, North Beach's Caffe Trieste, has lost its grande dame. The cafe’s co-founder Ida Giotta recently passed away, barely a month after her 101st birthday.

North Beach’s Caffe Trieste at Grant and Vallejo streets  has held free Saturday afternoon concerts weekly since the early 1970s, and for years, the main event of those variety shows was the vocal performance of the 69-year-old cafe’s co-founder Ida Giotta. One Saturday this past October, at the age of 101, Ida Giotta came out on her birthday to perform at Cafe Trieste once again, singing all of the words to “La Vita Tutarosa” from memory despite suffering from dementia.

It would be her last performance. The Chronicle reports that Caffe Trieste co-founder Ida Giotta has died. She actually passed two days after Thanksgiving, though her memorial services were Tuesday at Washington Square’s Saints Peter and Paul Church. She was 101.

“For decades, Mamma Ida’s gentle spirit and unwavering love were a quiet yet guiding light behind Caffè Trieste,” the cafe said in a Facebook post after she passed. “A devoted mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, she cared deeply for her family, her community, and every friend who crossed our threshold. Many will remember her for her beautiful voice — a voice that brought joy, comfort, and elegance to the café and to all who heard it. Her kindness, grace, and music touched countless hearts, and the warmth she carried will forever echo through the soul of Caffè Trieste.”

Born in 1924 in Rovinjo di Istria, Italy, Ida met and married 19-year-old fisherman Gianni Giotta in 1940, when she was 15. The two were often refugees bouncing around fascist-occupied Italy before and during World War II. They arrived in the US in 1951 speaking no English, with Gianni finding work as a janitor and window-washer, and Ida as a seamstress.

They opened what we now call Caffe Trieste in 1956 with another Italian couple, though it was originally called Il Piccolo Caffe. The Giottas bought out the other couple and renamed it Caffe Trieste, giving it the namesake of a US-occupied city in Italy where they had once lived.

The place would of course become legendary. It’s hailed as the West Coast's first espresso house, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg were all regulars in the 1960s. It is said that Francis Ford Coppola wrote a great deal of the screenplay to The Godfather at Caffe Trieste.

Caffe Trieste is still owned and operated by successive generations of the Giotta family, and the cafe will be celebrating its 70th anniversary on April 1, 2026.

Related: Joe Betz, Longtime Owner of SF's House of Prime Rib, Dies at 86 [SFist]

Image: Caffe Trieste via Facebook

All the big local news outlets were live-streaming today’s memorial service for the West Coast’s first Black female TV reporter, Belva Davis, after the trailblazing 92-year-old’s death in late September.

If you’re a fan of Belva Davis, the first Black woman TV reporter on the West Coast who died on September 24, listen up: Davis’s epic memorial took place Monday at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. And you can watch the full video now, via KTVU.

Davis had worked for KTVU in the late 1960s, and for KPIX and KRON4 (when it was an NBC affiliate), before her epic 35-year stint at KQED.

Davis started as a freelancer for Jet magazine in 1957, getting $5 an article and receiving no byline on her work. By the 1960s, she was writing and editing for Bay Area Black newspapers Bay Area Independent and the Sun Reporter. She bounced around as a reporter for several AM radio stations, until KTVU hired her as a TV reporter in 1963. Her first assignment was to cover a beauty pageant.  

But that made Davis the first Black female TV reporter on the West Coast. Her first big assignment came in 1964 when she covered the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace. According to the New York Times, followers of the nominee Barry Goldwater threw garbage at her, and a glass soda bottle hurled at her nearly hit her in the head.

Undaunted,  Davis would move on to KPIX, and became their main evening news desk anchor. She moved to that same position at KRON4, and then to KQED in 1977, where she hosted A Closer Look, Evening Edition, and This Week in Northern California, until her retirement in 2012.

Over that time, Belva Davis won eight Emmy Awards, and in 2008 was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Hall of Fame.

Related: Beloved Longtime KTVU Anchorman Dennis Richmond Dies at Age 81 [SFist]

Image: BEVERLY HILLS, CA-OCTOBER 14: Journalist and award recipient Belva Davis speaks at the International Women's Media Foundation's 15th Annual Courage in Journalism Awards on October 14, 2004 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Vince Bucci/Getty Images)

Former Cafe Flore owner Terrance Alan started as a member of the “gay weed mafia” that won medical marijuana legalization in 1996, and co-founded the SF Entertainment Commission. And the Flore Dispensary owner has just passed away at age 73.

If there were a Mount Rushmore honoring the four San Franciscans who are most responsible for legal marijuana, Terrance Alan’s face would be on that Mount Rushmore, along with Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary.

In the 1990s, the SFPD described Terrance Alan as part of “Dennis Peron’s gay weed mafia,” and often busted Alan’s parties. But once Peron, Alan, and Brownie Mary worked to legalize medical marijuana in 1996’s Prop 215, Terrance Alan co-founded the nation’s first ever nonprofit cannabis dispensary CHAMP (Californians Helping to Alleviate Medical Problems) right here in San Francisco. Alan has most recently been the owner of the Castro’s Flore Dispensary, and co-founded City Hall’s SF Entertainment Commission in 2009.

But as noted in the above post from SPARC dispensary CEO Erich Pearson, Terrance Alan has died. SFst confirmed the sad news with staff members at the Flore Dispensary. He was 73.

“Terrance always rose to the occasion,” Pearson told SFist on Monday. “Every time I ever talked to Terrance or was around Terrance, there was always some community project he was working on. He was a tireless advocate for the community. He always put the community first.”

Any of us would do well in life to earn the kind of writeup Alan got in this 2009 New York Times profile. As the Times described, “Terrance Alan has worked in construction and owned strip joints, taught handicapped children and peddled low-budget gay pornographic movies, mostly starring Terrance Alan.”

These days Alan is best known as the founder and owner of the Castro’s Flore dispensary, and was also the co-owner of the famed Cafe Flore across the street from 2016 to its then-closure in 2020. (Cafe Flore became Fisch & Flore under new ownership last year, but that too has since closed.) And when he was co-owner of Cafe Flore, Alan tried to start serving infused cannabis drinks, until the law told him he could not do that.

But Terrance Alan did many other things that law said he could not do, because he got the laws changed. “It was Cafe Flore where Dennis Peron and Brownie Mary met and came up with the idea of Prop 215,” Alan told me in 2018.

He then worked to help pass Prop 215, and after its passage helped establish the SF dispensary CHAMP. Once recreational cannabis arrived in late 2016, Alan co-wrote what would be SF’s legal marijuana laws on the San Francisco Cannabis Legalization Task Force and the state-level California State Legalization Task Force.

“When [legal] cannabis came around and there was a void on the cannabis task force, Terrance was the one who stepped up and just put voluminous amounts of work and volunteer hours to building a task force that worked for the cannabis industry,” Pearson tells us.

You may also remember Alan’s work establishing the Love Parade that used to happen in the mid-2000s. Alan also founded the advocacy group SF Late Night Coalition, which became legitimate and turned into the official SF Entertainment Commission that still meets at City Hall today.

“When it was late-night issues in the neighborhoods, and the conflict during the [Mayor Willie] Brown days between entertainment and neighbors, Terrance was the one along with some others were quite the force in City Hall, forming the SF Late Night Coalition, and the SF Entertainment Commission came out of that too,” Pearson says.

Terrance Alan’s cause of death is unclear, though associates tell us he has recently been in an ICU. We may learn more in time for the many, many remembrances and memorials that San Francisco will hold for him in the weeks to come.

Related: Legal Pot Turns 25: The Sticky Road from Medical Marijuana Raids to a $4 Billion Industry [SFist

Image: Terrance Alan via Facebook

San Francisco has lost one of its longest serving restaurateurs, as we learn Wednesday that House of Prime Rib owner Joe Betz has passed.

The Chronicle reports that Betz, born Josef Betz, has died at age 86. Betz has been in the restaurant business in San Francisco since he first arrived here in 1962, at age 22, and worked his way up from being a waiter to being a restaurant and nightclub owner, and ultimately to owning one of the city's most iconic and long-lived restaurants, The House of Prime Rib.

The restaurant, which opened in 1949, has been under Betz's ownership for 40 years, since 1985, when Betz purchased it from founder Lou Balaski. And so we have him to thank for maintaining the menu, customs and traditions of the restaurant, which are a throwback, preserved intact, from the mid-20th Century.

Betz retired some years ago from the daily operation of House of Prime Rib (even though he had previously pledged "I won't retire, I'll expire"), and his son Steven has been in charge ever since.

Still, it was Betz who made the video below to announce the House of Prime Rib's big pandemic reopening in the fall of 2020 — albeit premature, as the restaurant would be forced to close again and reopen again. The video is a somewhat spooky reminder of the mid-2020 paranoia about COVID-19, showing all the cleaning products they were using, and new plastic partitions that were installed between booths.

Betz, born in Germany in 1939, said he was on his own by the age of 14 and started waiting tables just to survive.

"Things were different then," he said in a 2011 interview. "The war was ending. I got a job in a restaurant because that's all that was available." And, he added, "In the restaurant industry, if you do a good job, there's always a job."

He was a server in Switzerland at the age of 18 when got a job on a cruise ship, which he used to emigrate to the US. As the story goes, he arrived on the East Coast and worked "up and down" the coast, then worked his way across the country, taking a job in 1962 at another historic San Francisco restaurant that's no longer standing, Hoffman’s Grill.

"Hearty German fare, salty waiters, generous drinks and authentic atmosphere of stained glass, murky paintings and slow fans — that was Hoffman's," said the Chronicle upon its closing in 1984.

Betz would end up owning the place by 1968, becoming one of the city's youngest restaurant owners, and he saw it through to its end, when the building was demolished to make way for a 19-story office building at 619 Market Street. (Betz reportedly walked away with a $3 million settlement, on top of the furniture and fixtures, which likely helped him purchase House of Prime Rib a year later.)

The Chronicle notes that Betz had a stint as a nightclub impresario as well, opening the Park Exchange in the late 1970s, a "supper disco" next to the Transamerica Pyramid — a vintage ad for the place describes it as "a glass gazebo situated in a redwood park in the heart of the financial district."

To the end, Betz was focused on customers, and creating the kind of old-world, welcoming, and ultimately affordable dining experience that was his ideal.

As he said in 2011, "I don't want people coming in and thinking, 'Gosh, how much money will this cost me?'"

Still, he was exacting in his standards at the restaurants, and always ran a tight ship.  As local radio host and longtime House of Prime Rib customer Ronn Owens told the Chronicle, Bets was "the easiest guy in the world to work for, as long as you do everything perfectly."

And the restaurant has not been without its legal issues, being hit with two lawsuits from current and former employees in recent years, alleging labor law violations like denying servers any breaks.

Betz is also remembered for a philanthropic tradition he launched from the restaurant, donating thousands of pounds of prime rib — it was said to be 3,000 pounds in 2023 — for an annual Christmas Eve brunch feast at Glide Memorial Church.

As Betz said of the Christmas Eve feast, "We’re not just donating it, but my sons and I and my grandchildren are there serving it because I want my grandchildren to see there are two sides of the world — and people work very hard."

Related: Glide Primes Up to Serve House of Prime Rib Christmas Eve Feast, and Give Out More Than 2,000 Toys

A titanic figure in the California Democratic party in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and co-architect of the “Willie Brown-John Burton political machine,” former statehouse leader and US Congressman John Burton has died while in hospice care.

If you weren’t observing California politics in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, it’s hard to overstate the power and influence of John Burton, who held SF’s seat in Congress — now long-held by Nancy Pelosi — in the early 70s, and went on to both the California state Senate and state Assembly, eventually beoming chair of the California Democratic Party.

Burton is credited with convincing Pelosi to run for his former seat in Congress, and with launching the political career of his one-time staffer Barbara Boxer. Burton is also the co-architect of the famed “Burton-Brown political machine” with Willie Brown, who had been his roommate at SF State in the 1950s.

But John Burton died on Sunday in a hospice facility in San Francisco, after years of poor health, according to KRON4. He was 92.

“Today, working families have lost one of the most outspoken, ferocious and unyielding champions our nation has ever known. John Burton was a towering progressive warrior, who for half a century never pulled a punch in his dogged fight for a fairer future for our children,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said in a Sunday statement. “All who knew John knew that behind his profanity-laden language was a profound progressive vision for how to make real the promise of America.  As I wrote in the forward to his memoir, I Yell Because I Care, John yelled a lot because he cared a lot — especially about our most vulnerable neighbors.”

A Cincinnati, Ohio native, Burton and his family moved to SF when he and his brother Philip were in their boyhoods. Philip Burton would end up running for the state Assembly, and John would win that seat in 1964 when his brother was termed out. John Burton then successfully ran for Congress in 1974, though resigned from his seat in 1982, to address his cocaine and nitrous oxide addiction. It was the 1980s, and things were wild, man.

He was succeeded in the seat by his brother Philip, who died of a heart attack a year later. Philip's wife Sala Burton took over the seat until her death from cancer in 1987, after which it became Pelosi's.

But John Burton's political comeback was the stuff of legend. He was back in the state Assembly in 1988, and then served two terms in the California Senate from 1996 to 2004. That’s when the famed “Brown-Burton machine” was formed while Brown was SF mayor, as the two hand-picked candidates, including for SF ayor, who would always seem to go on to win. (Or in the case of Burton’s daughter Kimiko, Willie Brown just appointed her as SF Public Defender.)

And Burton was famed for his dirty mouth and constant use of profanity. The also illustriously foul-mouthed SF political operative Rose Pak said that when she was a Chronicle reporter early on in her career, John and Philip Burton taught her how to swear, and "called everybody under the sun ‘motherfucker.’"

"I thought it was a term of endearment," Pak said.

Burton’s family asks that in lieu of flowers, that donations can be made to the John Burton Advocates for Youth, a charity that benefits young people in foster care or experiencing homelessness.

Related: Rose Pak Once Thought 'Motherf***er' Was a Term of Endearment [SFist]

Image: President Pro-tempore of the California State Senate, John Burton, speaks at a conference called, "Our democracy after 9/11: can we save it?" February 17, 2002 in Los Angeles, CA. The conference focused on the alleged lack of democracy in the U.S. after the terrorist attacks. (Photo by J. Emilio Flores/Getty Images)

A melancholy note is coming from the legendary Jack London Square jazz club Yoshi’s, as the club’s founder Kazuo ‘Kaz’ Kajimura passed away Sunday after a bout with Alzheimer’s disease.

If your only impression of the live jazz club Yoshi’s is the ill-fated San Francisco Fillmore Street location that had the bad fortune of opening during the Great Recession, that is not a complete impression. Yoshi’s in Oakland is one of the more prominent jazz venues on the West Coast, albeit one that has moved a few times. One constant throughout Yoshi’s prolific 53-year run has been co-founder Kaz Kajimura, who helped start the place from humble beginnings in Berkeley.

But Kajimura is no longer a constant at Yoshi’s, as the Chronicle reports that Yoshi's co-founder Kaz Kajimura died Sunday after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 81.

“With heavy hearts, we are sharing that the great San Francisco Bay Area has lost one of its legends. On June 15, Kazuo ‘Kaz’ Kajimura joined his mother Yoshi Kajimura & father Noriyuki Kajimura in heaven,” the nightclub Yoshi’s said in an announcement. “Kaz was a local icon, and founder of Yoshi’s Claremont, Yoshi’s San Francisco and Yoshi’s Oakland. Since 1972, Yoshi’s became Kaz’s passion, and his life’s dedication. Those that had the privilege to work with Kaz, knew he was no stranger to working 10 to 16 hours days, 6 days a week…for over 50 years! Kaz invested his whole life and his whole family inheritance to navigate Yoshi’s through both different locations, and really tough times. Yoshi’s Oakland wouldn’t exist without him.”

Kajimura was born in Japan and attended grad school in China before moving to Berkeley in the early 1970s and co-founding the original Yoshi’s there in 1972. It was just a sushi and Japanese cuisine restaurant.

But its popularity grew, and the venue moved to a much larger space on Claremont Avenue in 1979, adding live music and dancing to the mix. It gained great prestige as a jazz nightclub, and moved yet again in 1997 to its current Jack London Square location. As KTVU notes, Yoshi's was one of the first live music venues to reopen after the pandemic in 2021, with a show featuring Sheila E’s father, percussionist Pete Escovedo.

Yoshi’s says they will be throwing a free live concert in Kajimura’s honor on Monday, July 14 at the venue. And in something of a nice coincidence, there will be a series of concerts for Pete Escovedo’s 90th birthday at Yoshi’s on July 25-27.

Related: Sheila E. and Father Pete Escovedo Get Street Named After Them In Oakland [SFist]

Image courtesy Yoshi’s

The founder of Sly and the Family Stone, a one-time San Francisco DJ who started the groundbreaking funk band that’s now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, died Monday morning in Los Angeles from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

There was already likely to be a revival this summer of the music of the chart-topping 1960s and 70s funk band Sly and the Family Stone. One of their first concerts ever, recorded in Redwood City, was a lost recording that was recently found and will be released as a live album this coming July. But now that inevitable revival is going to happen earlier, and for a much sadder reason, as NPR reports that the group’s founder and frontman Sly Stone died Monday morning from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 82.  

“Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,” Stone’s family said in a statement picked up by the Chronicle. “While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come.”

Sly Stone was born as Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas in 1943, but has family moved to the East Bay town of Vallejo while he was still an infant. It was Vallejo where he acquired the nickname “Sly,” when a schoolteacher misspelled his name as “Slyvester,” and also where he formed his musical chops in teenage gospel choirs and doo-wop groups.

This 2023 Broke-Ass Stuart article on Stone’s Bay Area DJ career details how he grew to fame at San Mateo’s KSOL (still exists, now a Spanish-language station) and Vallejo’s KDIA (now a Christian talk show station). Stone would mix Black artists with tracks by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, similar to how his newly formed group Sly and the Family Stone was one of the first race- and gender-integrated groups to gain widespread mainstream popularity.  

They had their first Top Ten hit in 1967 with "Dance to the Music.” The following year, they released the album Stand!, from which "Everyday People" hit number one on the Billboard chart. That album also produced the Top Ten tracks “Stand!,” "I Want to Take You Higher" and "You Can Make It If You Try" (as well as the single "Don't Call Me N*****, Whitey", which did not chart). They also played Woodstock and the Harlem Cultural Festival (memorialized in the Questlove documentary Summer of Soul) in 1969, popularizing the track “Hot Fun in the Summertime."

But drugs and tumult tore the band apart, and Stone reportedly had a habit of traveling with a violin case full of cocaine and PCP. Band members who were not addicts would quit, Stone simply replaced them with addicts he could better work with. That led to Sly and the Family Stone frequently pulling no-shows or incredibly brief performances, and some painfully awkward TV appearances on the Mike Douglas Show and The Dick Cavett Show. Even as recently as 2008, at a show in Santa Rosa, Stone told the audience 22 minutes into the show, “I gotta go take a piss. I'll be right back.” He did not return to the stage.

In 2011, the New York Post reported that Stone was living in a van in Los Angeles.

A separate Questlove documentary called Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+. And as far as Sly Stone’s musical legacy, consider that Sly and the Family Stone’s music was sampled by the LL Cool J (“Mama Said Knock You Out”), Janet Jackson (“Rhythm Nation”), Cypress Hill (“Insane in the Brain”), the Beastie Boys (“Egg Man”), Beck (“Sissyneck”) and KRS-One (“Sound of Da Police”).

Also very significantly, Dr. Dre’s 1991 track “Deep Cover,” which samples Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song,” was the very first recorded track on which we heard a rapper who at the time called himself Snoop Doggy Dogg.  

Related: Tony! Toni! Toné! Co-Founder and Oakland Native D'Wayne Wiggins Has Died [SFist]

Image: American musician Sly Stone and model-actress Kathy Silva laugh during their wedding reception at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, New York, June 5, 1974. (Photo by Oscar Abolafia/TPLP/Getty Images)

This week: Filmmaker Joslyn Rose Lyons spotlights Oakland stories; Dr. Veronica Jow bridges dance and medicine; softball star Nina Pototo shines; and we honor lives well lived — Federal Glover, Rob Reich, and Dorothy Fisher Anderson.

Ahead of the big weekend headlines, we’re shining a light on Bay Area people making an impact — through creativity, service, leadership, everyday care, and now, in a new addition, through the legacies they’ve left behind.

Spotlight: Joslyn Rose Lyons

Born and raised in Oakland, Joslyn Rose Lyons is an award-winning director, writer, and producer known for telling powerful stories grounded in community, culture, and resilience. Her work includes the Emmy-nominated Showtime Sports documentary STAND and music videos for Bay Area legends like Too $hort and E-40, as recently reported by NBC Bay Area.

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Her newest film, The Masquerade, features an all–Bay Area cast and crew and explores how time changes a community — and how people hold on to their dreams through those changes, according to KQED. “It’s a love letter to time,” Lyons says, “and to the resilience of Oakland.”

She’s also a founding member of Make It Bay, a film collective focused on uplifting Oakland’s culture and economy through local storytelling. Other members include Kamau Bell, Rafael Casal, Ryan Coogler, and Stephen Curry.

As the site Canvas Rebel reports, Lyons says she’s driven by a simple idea: storytelling matters when it helps people feel seen. “Success,” she says, “isn’t just about the spotlight. It’s about what sticks with you. It’s about what you pass on.”

Through her films, her collaborations, and her community work, Joslyn Rose Lyons is helping shape what’s next for Bay Area arts — and doing it her own way.

Also Notable:

Dr. Veronica Jow, "Rave Doctor"

Dr. Veronica Jow is a Bay Area physician who combines her medical expertise with a deep passion for movement. As the official doctor for the San Francisco Giants and a longtime raver and festival-goer, she brings a unique perspective to injury prevention and performance care. After noticing the toll dancing was taking on her own body, she began developing resources to help others stay healthy — from online warm-ups and injury prevention classes to personalized fitness plans. Today, Jow is known for her work supporting both elite athletes and the city’s dance community, helping people stay active, resilient, and injury-free. [Broke-Ass Stuart]

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Nina Pototo, Lowell High Softball Standout

Since joining the city’s free Softball Academy program, Lowell High School sophomore Nina Pototo has become one of the city’s rising athletic leaders. A three-year participant in the academy’s year-round programming, she earned a varsity spot as a freshman and led her team with a .432 batting average. Off the field, she advocates for equity in sports through leadership and mentoring. This summer, she’ll represent San Francisco at the Elite Development Invitational in Kansas City — training alongside top athletes and coaches from across the country. [SF Recreation and Parks]

Lives Remembered

Federal Glover (1955–2025)

Federal Glover, the first Black supervisor in Contra Costa County’s 150-year history, died on May 18 at age 69. A lifelong Pittsburg resident and former city councilmember, Glover was elected to the county Board of Supervisors in 2000 and served District 5 for nearly 25 years. He was known for his steady leadership and deep commitment to equity, directing resources toward underserved communities in East County and the Carquinez Strait. Glover championed youth programs, public health, and transportation access, and helped guide the county through periods of major demographic and environmental change. After a life-threatening illness in 2015, he returned to office with characteristic quiet resolve. Glover died at a hospital in San Francisco following a brief illness. His legacy is visible in the civic fabric of the region he served with devotion and care. [SF Chronicle]

Rob Reich (1977–2025)

Rob Reich, the beloved Bay Area composer and multi-instrumentalist known for his accordion and piano performances at Zuni Café, died unexpectedly on May 15 while visiting Orr Hot Springs in Ukiah. He was 47. A cornerstone of San Francisco’s live music scene, Reich was the longtime bandleader for Circus Bella and a regular at venues from Davies Symphony Hall to Bird & Beckett Books. Equally adept at jazz, klezmer, chamber music, and experimental sounds, he was known for his warmth, versatility, and deep musicality. His final Circus Bella score will debut posthumously in June. [SF Chronicle]

Dorothy Fisher Anderson (1925–2025)

Dorothy Fisher Anderson, who died in March at age 100, lived a life defined by service, art, and intellectual curiosity, as Palo Alto Online reports. Born in Madeira and raised in New York City, she was shaped by Depression-era resilience and a progressive Jewish upbringing. After earning degrees in sociology and social work, she became a clinical social worker, supporting WWII veterans and at-risk children in the Bronx. A longtime Palo Alto resident, she raised three children, traveled widely, and returned to psychotherapy later in life, including play therapy from her home office. A sculptor, opera lover, and avid tennis player, Anderson celebrated her 100th birthday surrounded by family on the Stanford campus, where she had lived since 1968. [Palo Alto Online]

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Previously: Notable Humans: How Lisa Truong’s Help a Mother Out Changed Public Policy