potrero view

Ruth Passen, Vas Arnautoff and Judy Baston help celebrate the View’s 20th birthday.

August 2010

Remembering Vas Arnautoff

By Judy Baston

For 20 years, many of them as feature editor, Vas Arnautoff brought his special blend of journalistic talent and insatiable curiosity to the stories that animated The Potrero View.  Vas died at age 72 in 1998, seven months after he suffered a massive stroke.  It’s hard to believe that it’s been a dozen years since he’s been gone, not only from the View’s pages and editorial board, but from the Hill as well. Many of us remember seeing his car, with the license plate “APHAYT,” pronounced “Arnaut” in Russian.  As Vas would often remind us, an Arnaut was a fearsome Mongolian strongman,

Vas’s knowledge was broad and deep.  He was frequently quiet, but when he had something to say he’d speak articulately, his comments often peppered with quotations from poetry.  “Writing for the View was an education,” he noted in an article he wrote for the paper’s 20th anniversary. “We learned about hops and wort from Fritz Maytag when the brewer brought Anchor Steam back to the Hill,” Vas wrote, “and we learned it was possible to fly a kite indoors when Rakesh Bahadur showed us his Kite World, Inc. We even learned how teddy bears get stuffed, which they do daily at Basic Brown Bear.”  The present tense Vas used two decades ago as he recalled the subjects of his feature articles would now need to be changed to the past tense in many cases.  Fritz Maytag recently sold his brewery, and Basic Brown Bear has been gone for years.

Vas graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1947.  He taught journalism for six years, and then worked on the waterfront as a longshoreman and active union member until he retired.  Throughout his life he was always a teacher, who took great delight in imparting his knowledge about the journalist’s craft.

While he had an innate grasp of journalism’s fundamentals – who, when, why, what, where and how – Vas also had a talent for turning what might be considered a routine job or obscure craft into rich and vivid prose, and for drawing readers into a story.  Consider, for example, what Vas wrote after he spent time with the Third Street bridge-tender in 1988:

“It’s not much as bridges go. It squats over a narrow bay channel, less than six feet above the water at high tide. Painted in no-nonsense Frisco Jeans black, unlike its gaudier and younger siblings spanning the Golden Gate and the Bay, its steel structural elements are in plain view and unadorned…Yet for all its workaday unpretentiousness and its clumsy designation, the Francis “Lefty” O’Doul Strauss heel-trunion single leaf bascule bridge is as graceful in motion as are the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges in repose. On an average of four times a day it gently and quietly lifts its 139-foot piece of Third Street almost straight up to allow water craft to pass.”

Or after his 1989 visit to confectioner Joseph Schmidt, whose chocolates are no longer part of the neighborhood:

“If you’re one of those whose idea of a great chocolate is the namby-pamby slab with almonds that drops out of a vending machine, these words are not for you. But if you have even an inkling about what a man means when he says, ‘chocolate is my obsession,’ read on.”

And in 1991, after the Oakland Hills firestorm, Vas shared this with the Hill:

 “When ashes came drifting out of the sky onto Potrero Hill that afternoon of October 20, we all knew something dreadful was happening. But the grey droppings were too small, gathering like celestial dandruff on steps and yard furniture, too impersonal for us to react to them on more than a superficial level.

“But then into this View staffer’s backyard on De Haro Street floated evidence that was less anonymous. It was a four by six inch pieced of charred paper with printing still readable on it, front and back, the ink having turned to gray on the charred paper’s black. It was a page from someone’s copy of The Great Gatsby, capriciously delivered as a message to this yard

“And the message that was suddenly and forcefully brought home to this staffer was that it was a human tragedy that was being played out in the East Bay, and the small gray bits of ash were not impersonal at all. They were fragments of people’s lives with no less an impact for being smaller than that page of The Great Gatsby.”

As former View staffers look back on the paper’s early years, we’re repeatedly struck by the paper’s low-technology production methods.  In this sense, Vas was indeed old-fashioned. He was a proud member of the Lead Pencil Club, whose slogan was “a pothole on the information highway.” In his 20 years of dedication to the View, Vas always wrote his copy in pencil.  I like to think, though, that if Vas had been around for the last dozen years, he’d eventually have made friends with the computer and the Internet, mostly because his insatiable curiosity about people and places might well have induced him to venture onto the information highway.  At least in the slow lane.

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