Ruth Passen.

June 2008

Hill Women Help Create Stronger Community

By Lori Higa

Born in San Francisco’s Fillmore district, at Mt. Zion hospital, Ruth Passen née Elkind is a native San Franciscan and true progressive. Now 82 years old, the petite, spunky, silver-haired former View publisher lives on the top of Rhode Island Street, with a breath-taking view of Twin Peaks from her living room. Her cozy apartment, like her life, is chock full of tschotkes, awards, books and mementos of more than three decades of publishing San Francisco’s longest-running neighborhood newspaper, and being one of the Hill’s most dedicated community, peace and social justice advocates.

Passen attended John Swett Junior High School and Lowell High School, growing up in the neighborhood straddling today’s Fillmore and Western Addition neighborhoods. Her parents, originally from New York and descended from Russian, Jewish and Polish immigrants, ran a corner grocery store on McAllister and Webster streets, selling items such as chickens, cream and cheese, “imported from Petaluma,” Passen said wryly. The family attended an Orthodox synagogue on Webster Street.

The neighborhood had a significant Japanese-American population; during World War II Passen realized that her schoolmates “just disappeared one day.” They’d been incarcerated in one of the state’s many internment camps simply because they were of Japanese descent. It was “a very ugly feeling when we found out later where they went, and their treatment,” said Passen.

Passen attended San Francisco State University, but dropped out “because I just wasn’t ready.” It was there that she met her husband Joe Passen, a union organizer and longshoreman, “who worked on the waterfront until he couldn’t anymore.” The Passens shared a passion for progressive politics, helping to organize everyone from downtown office workers to taxi cab drivers. They rallied and marched until the McCarthy Era made things difficult for activists, driving them to move to Los Angeles to escape red-baiting, beatings and death threats.

After their son, Marc, graduated from high school, the Passens returned to San Francisco. In 1969 they settled on Potrero Hill near artist friends who’d migrated from North Beach.

Passen quickly sought out community groups to join. She found that all roads led to one person: Enola Maxwell, who’d helped stop the construction of a freeway through Golden Gate Park as a member of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council. Passen and Maxwell became fast friends, and together were a force to be reckoned with. They fought against the “worst kinds of white supremacists” to help install Maxwell as the “first black and first woman” director of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, known as the Nabe. Together they grew the Nabe into Potrero Hill’s hub and conscience. Passen’s son attended pre-school at the Nabe and later held his wedding ceremony there. When Passen’s husband, Joe, died in 1992 “there was a huge event at the Nabe, Nancy Pelosi came down. So much life takes place there, it’s the core of the community,” said Passen.

Passen has always been a news junkie. Inspired by Lois Lane she helped start Hills & Dales, the eight by 10 inch mimeographed predecessor to the View. An inherent organizer, Ruth overhauled the “bulletin” and helped turn it into a professionally printed paper, written and proofed by volunteers, many of whom were Hill residents who worked at the San Francisco Chronicle. With its new moniker the Potrero View came into its own, complete with investigative reports on development plans, crime, mom-and-pop businesses and even a gossip column called “The Nose Knows.” Simultaneously Passen was working at the Nabe, helping to create programs for children, youth, handicapped individuals and seniors.

The View served both as a neighborhood voice and as a galvanizing force for positive change and civic betterment. When the neighborhood needed more police to stem crime; a health clinic for addicts the elderly and the poor; new green space; or the library not to close down, the paper printed articles which lit fires under legislators, leading to solutions. Along with her friend Eve Milton, Passen helped to establish the Potrero Hill Health Center, also known as the Caleb Clark Clinic, after a beloved community activist. After only a year in its new incarnation, the paper won the Robert Krauskopf Memorial Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Passen’s involvement in organizations- from women’s peace and freedom groups and farmworker unions to the Potrero Hill Democratic Club- built friendships and gained respect from the City’s political movers and shakers, including the Burton family and Nancy Pelosi. She’s been honored often for her community work, receiving awards from the Koshland Civic Unity program, the Potrero Boosters’ Neighborhood Association, and even a commendation by Speaker of the House Pelosi in the Congressional Record.

Eve Milton: A Half-Century of Community Commitment

The wind howls eerily outside Eve Milton’s aging Craftsman-style bungalow home at the top of Carolina Street. “Do you know the wind has not stopped blowing hard like that for six days,” she said. “It means something, about what is going to happen, it’s an omen of sorts.” Perhaps the wind was wishing Milton a happy birthday: she turned 88 years old on May 14.

Milton, who’s lived with her children and relatives on Potrero Hill since 1959, is someone “people should know about, not only because she’s 88, but because she has done so much for the community,” said Passen. As a divorced, single mom with two young sons, Milton moved to the Hill nearly a half-century ago. It was a time when social activism had yet to enter the popular vocabulary, rabble-rouser was a dirty word and the Hill was a magnet for blue collar workers, Russian immigrants and African-Americans from the south, who worked in the nearby shipyards.

As a young woman, Milton was a labor organizer, taught literacy to coal miners’ children in poverty-stricken Appalachia and fought racism. She started out as an artist-weaver-writer, attending avant-garde Black Mountain College in North Carolina, before moving on to Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and laterSt. Louis where she and her husband, David Hepburn Milton, helped organize the meatpackers union.

One of three children born to Chaim Zhitlovsky, a Russian-born “Yiddishist,” scholar, and Trotsky contemporary and Indonesian-Dutch physician Nora Van Leeuwen, Milton was raised in a household full of intellectual achievement. Zhitlovsky’s socialist leanings led to his expulsion from a number of countries, including the United States and Holland; the family moved often and lived throughout Europe. They ultimately settled in New York, where, while living in an aunt’s Manhattan apartment, Eve met her husband-to-be, David.

Together they pursued their political passions as Communists and labor organizers. It was a dangerous period for anyone associated with Communism and unions; they were considered the “enemy,” frequently investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The local authorities tried to destroy us in every way,” said Milton. She and her husband lost jobs or couldn’t get work. In search of a more welcoming community they left New York, their marriage broke up, and they landed on Potrero Hill, where ex-husband David had family. He moved into one house on Carolina Street and Eve and sons, Christopher and Tagliaferro “Tolliver,” lived in another.

Among Milton’s many accomplishments was helping get the Hill’s first affordable, public health center built, known as the Caleb Clark Clinic. Milton was involved in the women’s peace movement, attending many anti-war rallies. She met Passen while helping to establish the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, and was instrumental in creating after-school mentoring, tutoring, breakfast for children and childcare programs. With other “activists who were Mexican, Chinese, you name it…we provided comfort to those who needed it. Poverty is expensive and time-consuming,” said Milton.

When Milton first arrived on the Hill, the community was home to a diverse, if segregated, population. “The Italians had the northwest corner, while the Russians held the southwest corner,” she laughs. “The projects were initially built as military housing before the war. After the war, blacks from the south and southwest who worked at the shipyards stayed and they turned into projects.”

These days, Eve doesn’t do much weaving, even though people have wanted to put her delicate loomed creations into museums. She is contacted every time an anniversary program at Black Mountain College is held; television crews regularly come by to film her and her friend, renowned Japanese-American artist Ruth Asawa. Milton readily admits to having survived six strokes and bemoans their effects: “You can’t imagine the damage that does to your memory.” She still has energy, though, spending her days reading newspapers, writing letters and designing wall hangings in her head that she plans to weave some day on the large loom in her bedroom by the window. Her dog, Sandy, a male Lab mix named “after the color of the sand on the beach between Belgium and England,” keeps her steady company.

Her son, Tolliver, a merchant seaman since he was 16 yearsold, said his mother “…is passionate about community; revered, loved and respected deeply by those who know her, for her art, her total commitment to people as a whole. She’s lived in this house for 49 years and taken care of many, when things were tough. She’s a mainstay, a pillar and helped make Potrero Hill what it is.”

Grandson Yoshi, derived from the Yiddish name Joshua – a name inspired by the doctor who delivered him – brings a plain, crumpled apron over for this reporter to examine. “This is my grandmother’s and it’s what she’s all about.” Written on the apron are the words, “My country, I’ll love it forever…but not all the time.”

June 2008

Hill Women Help Create Stronger Community

By Lori Higa

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