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

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)

A year-long bout with bladder cancer has taken the life of Tony! Toni! Toné!'s D'Wayne Wiggins, who had three Top 10 hits with that group, and helped launch the careers of Destiny's Child and Beyoncé.

The legendary 90s R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné! came out of Oakland, and charted 14 Billboard hit singles in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, three of them making the Top 10. After that group disbanded, Wiggins wrote and produced for Destiny’s Child, launching the career of Beyoncé. But on Wednesday, Wiggins’s family posted to Facebook that he was “experiencing medical complications” and “working through it one day at a time.”

And on Friday, NBC Bay Area reported that D'Wayne Wiggins had died from bladder cancer. He was 64.  

“With broken hearts, we share with you that our beloved D’Wayne passed away this morning surrounded by family and loved ones,” Tony! Toni! Toné! posted to their various social media accounts Friday morning. “Over the past year, he has been privately and courageously battling bladder cancer. Through this fight, he remained committed and present for his family, his music, his fans and his community.”

Wiggins was born in Oakland, attended Castlemont High, and founded Tony! Toni! Toné! in 1986 with his brother Charles Wiggins (better known as Raphael Saadiq) and their cousin Timothy Christian Riley. They would go on to sell six million albums, and made the Billboard Top 10 three times with their singles “Feels Good,” “If I Had No Loot,” and “Anniversary.”

Tony! Toni! Toné! disbanded in 1996, but Wiggins was nowhere near finished making his mark on contemporary music. In the late 1990s, he mentored Keyshia Cole, who lived for a spell in his Oakland recording studio. He produce tracks for Alicia Keys, and was nominated for a Grammy for his sitar performance on her track “If I Was Your Woman.” And yes, wrote and produced for Destiny’s Child, who would go on to sell 60 million records.

Locally, Wiggins’s San Francisco performances have certainly made news in recent years. He performed at 4/20 in Golden Gate Park in 2023. And yes, the infamous London Breed partying maskless at a club incident in 2021 was at a reunion show of Wiggins and Raphael Saadiq at SF’s Black Cat. That incident made national news, and gave birth to Breed’s notorious sound bite “We don't need the fun police to come in and micromanage and tell us what we should or shouldn't be doing.”

Oakland Mayor Kevin Jenkins put out Friday a statement saying “D’Wayne helped shape the sound of a generation, putting Oakland on the map in the world of R&B and beyond.”

Related: Longtime Grateful Dead Bass Player Phil Lesh Has Died at 84 [SFist]

Image: OAKLAND, CA - MAY 12: (L-R) D'Wayne Wiggins and Fantastic Negrito perform at the GRAMMY Pro Songwriters Summit at The Uptown on May 12, 2016 in Oakland, California. (Photo by Steve Jennings/WireImage)

One of SF’s famed street food pioneers Curtis Kimball, first known as the Crème Brûlée Cart Guy and later as the Pancake Party Guy, died last week from an aortic aneurysm.

If there was some sort of San Francisco food Hall of Fame, it would likely have inducted Crème Brûlée Cart Guy Curtis Kimball. Kimball was not a chef (though he wore a chef’s hat), but a laid-off construction worker when he launched the Crème Brûlée Cart in 2009. His crème brûlée was a craze, often infused with Grand Marnier or Baileys Irish Cream, in the early Twitter era when he'd just tweet out his roaming locations, and throngs would come.

Kimball joined the food cart and truck mania of the late aughts and early 2010s, and even helped establish the wildly popular Off the Grid food truck rallies where his Crème Brûlée Cart remained a staple until 2016. But Mission Local reports that Kimball died last week of an aortic aneurysm. He was 46.

Sadly, Kimball is survived by his seven-year-old daughter Harper, four-year-old daughter Eloise, and even more sadly, his son who is expected to be born this summer. He also leaves behind his spouse Nicole Belanger.

“He was always so eager to put on a party for people without any expectations of getting anything in return,” Belanger says in the Chronicle’s obituary for Kimball. “He just had a desire to connect with people and to be a force for others to connect with each other.”

A GoFundMe for Kimball’s family has raised nearly $42,000 since this weekend.

Curtis Kimball was born in Prescott, Arizona in 1978, and moved to the Bay Area after high school. Aside from his seven-year run with the Crème Brûlée Cart, he also threw a series of virally popular Pancake Parties in Bernal Heights during the difficult days of the pandemic, serving free pancakes in his signature chef’s hat.

“You don’t know the good things that might happen from putting yourself out there, but you know some good things will happen,” Kimball told the Chronicle during one of those events. “If you spread good vibes to people, good stuff happens.”

A memorial service for Curtis Kimball will be held on Friday, February 28 beginning at 2 pm in Sebastopol. RSVPs are highly encouraged.

Related: Creme Brûlée Cart Guy Throws Free Pancake Party, Bernal Heights Flips Out [SFist]

Image: @hoyhoy via Twitter

Pete Doolittle’s paintings of cartoon-version robots and animals have been hanging in San Francisco homes and bars for decades, but the longtime SF artist passed away Thursday morning at the age of 47.  

You might have known SF artist Pete Doolittle from his paintings of robots and other characters on salvaged old window panels, often sold at his makeshift sidewalk pop-up art bazaars near the Lower Haight. Or maybe you just followed Pete Doolittle’s artist page on Facebook.

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None of these would have prepared you for the news that Pete Doolittle died this past Thursday, January 2, as 48 Hills reports. He was 47.

“I regret to inform you all that Pete Doolittle passed away peacefully, and very unexpectedly, yesterday morning Thursday, January 2, 2025 at 10:30 am,” his partner Claudia Nicolas Pierce said in a Friday Facebook post. “He was the most fearless and authentic creature I’d ever come across. He was unapologetically himself, which is so rare in this world. I have a theory that he had a woo about him, where everyone he met, regardless of their gender, orientation, or age, just immediately developed some kind of dreamy crush on him. Because he was so fucking charming, quick witted, personable, and just funny as hell.”

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A GoFundMe in memory of Pete Doolittle has already raised nearly $15,000 in three days. “As you can imagine, when these things happen suddenly, there is no preparing for all the resources that are needed,” that page says. “Your generosity is deeply appreciated.”

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Doolittle’s art was often directly painted onto discarded windows. “I get most of my glass through contractors because it costs them to get rid of waste glass at the dump,” he told artist Pilar Clergue in a 2012 interview. “So by having them drop it off at my studio I save them money while saving money myself. When people realise I use windows for my art they bring me windows, it works well.”

A memorial for Pere Doolittle is scheduled for Sunday, February 2, Cafe International. Coincidentally, February 2 is Doolittle’s birthday.

Related: Fiancé of Shannon and the Clams’ Shannon Shaw, Joe Haener, Has Died [SFist]

Image: Pete Doolittle via Facebook

The Fillmore restaurant Nia Soul Cafe just opened last month after owner Pia Harris’s 15-year quest to make her catering business a brick-and-mortar restaurant. But Harris died from pancreatic disease complications just weeks after its grand opening.

Pia Harris opened her SF-based Afro-Caribbean catering business Nia Soul Food in 2009, all along hoping to grow the idea into a brick-and-mortar restaurant. That dream became a reality just last month, when Nia Soul Cafe finally opened in the former Scott's Chowder House location at Fillmore and Ellis streets.

But Harris was quietly suffering from non-cancerous pancreatic growths during the opening process, and was hospitalized for a procedure at CPMC Medical Center just a week later. She remained hospitalized, and now the Chronicle reports that Harris died from complications on December 3. She was only 46 years old.

“Everybody loved Pia. She had the sweetest smile,” Harris’s surviving mother Adrian Williams told the Chronicle. “Pia was always helping the underdog, that was her thing. She was patient with people and could help them define and implement their goals.”

Pia Harris was born in Daly City on Mother’s Day 1978, and attended both Galileo High and Washington High. She eschewed attending college because she hoped to become a restaurateur here in San Francisco, and climbed the ladder as a longtime manager at the now-defunct Gussie’s Chicken and Waffles in the Fillmore. But she was starting Nia Soul Food even while working that job.

Yet Harris accomplished plenty more during those years. She served as the chief economic development officer of the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation, and would co-organize the Fillmore Juneteenth and Western Addition Music festivals. She established the Minding My Own Black Business program which distributed  $1.2 million in grants to 90 Black entrepreneurs, and was the driving force behind the In the Black small business incubator in the Fillmore in 2022.

Her legacy will live on, besides just the continued operation of Nia Soul Cafe, now being managed by Harris’ daughter and her partner Ira Barker. The SF Housing Development Corporation will open a commercial chef training kitchen in her honor this coming year, and Harris had also already laid the groundwork for the reopening of the Peacock Lounge.

“It’s hard without her, but I feel great that we are pushing everything she wanted to do,” said Barker, now operating Nia Soul Cafe. “Keeping her dream alive is all any of us want to do.”

Services celebrating the life of Pia Harris are scheduled for this Saturday, December 21 at Third Baptist Church at 1399 McAllister Street.

Related: Napa-Based Celebrity Chef Michael Chiarello Dies at Age 61 [SFist]

Image: San Francisco Housing and Development Corporation

Grief will ripple through the Bay Area music community today, as the family of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh announced that he passed away peacefully early Friday morning.

Berkeley-born musician Phil Lesh is best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead, and co-wrote two of their most iconic tracks, "Box of Rain" and "Truckin'". And when the band broke up after the Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, Lesh kept playing in the bands with which he and Bob Weir kept the Grateful Dead legacy alive: Furthur, The Other Ones, and The Dead.

But KRON4 and the Associated Press have confirmed reports that Phil Lesh died Friday morning, from causes yet to be disclosed.

He was 84.

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“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning,” says a post from just past noon Friday on Lesh’s official Facebook page. “He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love.”

Lesh was born in Berkeley in 1940, and went to Berkeley High School, where he was a trumpet and violin player. He attended the College of San Mateo and then UC Berkeley, though dropped out of that school after not even one semester. But it was at that time that he met a banjo player named Jerry Garcia, with whom he would form a band called The Warlocks.  

That band would become the Grateful Dead. They didn’t really sell that many records (their only Top 10 hit was 1987’s “Touch of Grey,” recorded 22 years after the band was founded). But the Grateful Dead were one of the top-grossing concert acts in the world for nearly three decades, and effectively pioneered the “jam band” style of play.

As an interesting aside, Lesh was also a mail carrier with the US postal service in San Francisco in the early 1960s. In 2011, he opened a live music venue called Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, though that venue closed permanently during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lesh struggled with health issues starting in 1998, when a case of chronic hepatitis C forced him into a liver transplant operation. He was also diagnosed with colon cancer in 2006, and bladder cancer in 2015. All of these briefly sidelined him from touring. But after the liver transplant operation, he routinely took time during live shows to encourage the audience to be organ donors.

Phil Lesh is survived by his wife Jill and sons Grahame and Brian.

So fare thee well, Phil Lesh. We’ll leave you Deadhead readers out there with Phil Lesh and Friends’ full performance at the 2022 Stern Grove Festival so you can get your shakedown on.

While known for a stellar football career and a bizarre high-profile murder trial that gripped the nation, OJ Simpson was also a San Francisco native who attended Galileo High and City College. He died Wednesday of prostate cancer.

Former football star Orenthal James “OJ” Simpson will likely mostly be remembered for a  1994 low-speed chase when he was wanted for murder that CNN described as “one of the most-watched events in TV history,” and the resulting “trial of the century” in which he was found not guilty of the killings.

But Simpson was also a San Francisco native: raised in Potrero Hill, going on to attend Galileo High and SF City College before transferring to USC, and eventually returning for a brief and highly unsuccessful stint with the 49ers (1978-1979).

Simpson's family announced this morning that he died Wednesday of prostate cancer, according to the Chronicle. He was 76.

Simpson’s stellar football career with the Buffalo Bills was highlighted by four NFL rushing titles and five Pro Bowls (though only one playoff game, a loss). He would still become a television and film star through rental car commercials, and his ironic-in-retrospect role as a hapless police detective in the Naked Gun movies.

But Simpson’s legacy will always be tied to the 1994 double-murder of Nicole Brown Simpson (his ex-wife) and Ron Goldman. Simpson surrendered and was arrested after an infamous low-speed chase that was broadcast live across the country. His trial was the most sensational legal proceeding of the 1990s, with Simpson's legal “dream team” of F. Lee Bailey, Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, and Robert Kardashian. These lawyers skillfully used gimmicky defenses and catchphrases (“If it doesn't fit, you must acquit”) to gloss over Simpson’s ugly history of domestic violence.

Two years after that trial’s shocking not-guilty verdict, Simpson lost a 1997 civil trial and was forced to pay the victims’ families $33.5 million. Simpson was later found guilty in a 2007 armed sports memorabilia theft, in which he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and served nine years.

It’s is not discussed much, but Simpson’s estranged father Jimmy Lee Simspon was openly gay, and was an SF drag queen in the 1960s and 70s known around town as “Mama Simpson.” The elder Simpson died of HIV/AIDS in 1986.

Related: O.J. Simpson Gets 15 Years In Prison [SFist]

Image: LOVELOCK, NV - JULY 20: O.J. Simpson attends a parole hearing at Lovelock Correctional Center July 20, 2017 in Lovelock, Nevada. Simpson is serving a nine to 33 year prison term for a 2007 armed robbery and kidnapping conviction. (Photo by Jason Bean-Pool/Getty Images)

Brother to the famed local defense attorney Tony Serra, internationally renowned metal sculptor Richard Serra may be best known locally for sculptures so huge that they blocked traffic in SoMa, but he passed away Tuesday in New York from pneumonia.

You’re likely familiar with notorious SF defense attorney Tony Serra, who’s defended the likes of Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow and Ghost Ship defendant Derick Almena. You may not be aware that renowned large-scale metal sculptor Richard Serra is his brother.

While Richard Serra is a San Francisco native, his local legacy is probably best remembered because of a 214-ton COR-TEN steel sculpture Sequence displayed in the public lobby of SFMOMA that was so large it blocked traffic on Howard Street while being installed in 2015, as part of the SFMOMA’s reopening after a three-year closure.  

According to Bay Area News Group, Richard Serra died from pneumonia Tuesday at his Long Island, New York home. He was 85.

Serra’s New York Times obituary explains that he was born in San Francisco in 1938, quickly had a fascination with the SF shipyards where his father worked, and started working in steel mills at the age of 15. This would influence the use of large metal works in his sculptures. He would go on to study at UC Santa Barbara with the likes of Margaret Mead and Aldous Huxley, and switched his interest from painting to sculpture, becoming one of the first Post-Minimalist greats.

Serra would gain notoriety in 1981 for the above-pictured work Tilted Arc, a site-specific work designed for a federal building in Lower Manhattan. The notoriety came because the employees at the building absolutely hated it, and petitioned the General Services Administration to have it removed. Serra sued to keep it there, but lost, and in accordance with Serra’s wishes, it was not displayed again anywhere else.

Serra would go on to have two acclaimed retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1986 and 2007), and saw eight of his works permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Following the temporary installation of Sequence at SFMOMA, it returned to the Stanford campus, where it sits outside the Cantor Arts Center. There is also a 60-foot-tall Serra piece titled Charlie Brown, owned by Gap founders Doris and Don Fisher, that stands in the atrium of Gap's Embarcadero headquarters.

You can also see a piece of Serra's permanently installed in the UCSF Mission Bay campus' east plaza, titled Ballast.

And SFMOMA houses a number of Serra sketches, paintings, and smaller metal pieces, like Floor Prop from 1969 — also part of the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection.

“Serra's work took abstract and invisible properties such as weight, balance, pressure, and gravity — all of which are traditionally associated with sculpture — and made them visible and visceral,” SFMOMA says in their bio page on Serra. “Examples of this practice include installations of thrown molten lead that use architectural corners as a mold, or metal plates and poles held in place by their own weight.”

The Times notes a representative story: A few years back, Serra was diagnosed with cancer in the tear duct of his left eye. Doctors recommended he have the eye removed. But as the Times notes, “Typically undaunted and determined not to compromise his vision or his work as an artist, Mr. Serra declined the surgery.”

Related: SFMOMA's Giant Richard Serra Sculpture Blocking Traffic On Howard Street [SFist]

Image: American sculptor Richard Serra at Museum Of Modern Art Sculpture Garden in New York with one of his sculptures on 17th April 2007. (Photo by David Corio/Redferns)