The Newspaper of the San Francisco Bay Chapter
Nov - Dec 2005
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Volunteer of the month
Jean King is the monarch of Livermore open-space defenders
Beneath the arbor shading Jean King's front door are boxes of brochures and campaign tee shirts - one box delivered in her absence, two more awaiting pick-up by other volunteers. Inside the entry way is an easel with a graphic presentation of the Vote-No-on-D campaign. Atop the grand piano in her living room are piles of more tee shirts, and tacked to the walls are posters of weekly meeting agendas. (Vote-No-on-D is the effort to block Pardee Homes from building 2,450 homes outside Livermore's current Urban Growth Boundary in North Livermore.)
The Friends of Livermore does have a more traditional headquarters, but at Jean's, activity bubbles, boils, overflows. Here local environmentalists devise strategy; here they celebrate victories. Here Jean even occasionally catches her breath between her innumerable appointments and engagements.
Jean learned about stewardship of land and resources in Southwestern Wisconsin, where she and her two sisters were raised on a family farm. "My father used land-preserving techniques, including crop rotation, contour plowing, and green waterways, to prevent erosion." When their father was injured and could no longer manage the farm, the family moved to Madison, where Jean attended the University of Wisconsin, studying mathematics (like both her sisters) and earning a BS and an MS. She also took an ecology course, but admits that when the professor talked about diminishing resources, she thought, "But there is so much land here!"
Armed with her math degrees in a world just starting to see the significance of computers, but lacking computer-science training programs, Jean considered job offers in Washington, New York, and Arizona, before settling on the Livermore site of Sandia Labs. Sandia offered her a handsome salary and five weeks of vacation, and one of her sisters lived in nearby Berkeley. She began a brand-new career as a computer programmer.
In 1962, when Jean arrived in California, Livermore boasted 17,000 residents. It didn't take her long, however, to see that, unlike rural Wisconsin, Northern California was rapidly losing its green spaces to an ever-increasing population. When she married, left Sandia, and was raising children, her volunteer jobs were mostly school and family-related - but in addition to working for the PTA and the League of Women Voters, she managed to chair an environmental study for the American Association of University Women and to support controlled-growth candidates in city elections.
During her husband's 10-year battle with cancer, Jean reduced her volunteer work. Her husband lost that battle four years ago, and Jean has resumed - and intensified - her involvement in what has become a full-time, unsalaried job. She estimates she spends at least 40 hours each week on volunteer activities. Her list of obligations is dizzying: She is the treasurer of Friends of the Vineyards, which has recently rewritten its mission statement to commit itself to protecting not only vineyards but also other agricultural land and open space in the Livermore, Amador, San Ramon, and Sunol Valleys. She is Livermore's representative on the nine-member board of the Tri-Valley Conservancy, where she serves, again, as treasurer. (Oh, those math degrees!) Her current title in the North Livermore development battle is "precinct coordinator". Every Saturday she and other "Keep Livermore Live-able" advocates don their campaign tee shirts (each emblazoned with an unfriendly Pardee bulldozer) and knock on doors. It's a lot of work to combat Pardee's multi-million-dollar budget - but Jean is optimistic about the November outcome.
If optimism is justified, according to Bob Baltzer, chair of the Friends of Livermore, it is in good measure because of Jean's work. "She is just about the most productive person in the current campaign," Bob says. The two worked together on the 2002 Livermore Urban Growth Boundary campaign too, during which, he says, she gathered more signatures than any other worker.
"Not only is she active on the political scene, she is also very involved in the music and arts venues," says Bob. She is vice president of the Livermore Symphony Association, secretary of the Livermore Cultural Arts Council, and past president of Del Valle Fine Arts.
These two interests work together. Jean favors more development in the now 70,000-person community - but it should be downtown. She is excited about the new performing-arts center that will be built there and about the 10-screen movie theater. Her objections to the Pardee initiative are that it would swallow up a major chunk of open space in North Livermore, increasing traffic congestion and pollution and moving the City Council-approved Urban Growth Boundary.
Dick Schneider, another long-time Sierra Club open-space champion, also remembers working with Jean in collecting signatures in the Urban Growth Boundary crusade. Dick recalls, first, her commitment - "countless, countless hours" of calling people up and getting them to work on the campaign, and, second, "her unbelievable organization skills - putting people into groups, teams, continually contacting them, making sure they had what they needed."
Diana Hanna, who first met Jean in 2000 when they both worked on that year's county Measure D to establish the county's Urban Growth Boundary, remembers Jean saying, "This is the last campaign I'm going to help organize." That was about five campaigns ago. Jean needs one of those tee shirts, Diana laughs, that says, "Stop me before I volunteer again!" But it wouldn't do any good. "Jean walks the walk and talks the talk," adds Diana. "She doesn't expect the worker bees to do everything; she is out there knocking on doors and making phone calls as well as organizing others to do those jobs."
Jean still has a (part-time) paying job. For about 23 years she has taught math classes - from basic through trigonometry - at nearby Las Positas College. When she does have a little leisure, she loves gardening because it is "so relaxing, mindless." She shares her home and garden with a 16-year-old, "very smart" tortoiseshell cat named Cleopatra.
And she loves to travel. In the past few years, she has explored Peru's Machu Picchu, Russia, Morocco, Vietnam, and Cambodia. She has floated down European rivers to Prague and Berlin. She hopes next to visit India.
Jean's conservation credo has been much affected by fellow-Wisconsiner Aldo Leopold's 1948 A Sand County Almanac. She paraphrases him in support of her tireless work for the environment: when we deface buildings, we call it "graffiti"; when we deface the land, we call it "development". When Jean is doing campaign work, she calls it life as usual.
© 2005 San Francisco Sierra Club Yodeler