463 episodes

A weekly podcast about the artists, activists, and small businesses that make San Francisco so special.

Storied: San Francisco Jeff Hunt

    • Society & Culture
    • 4.8 • 38 Ratings

A weekly podcast about the artists, activists, and small businesses that make San Francisco so special.

    Mark DeVito and Standard Deviant Brewing, Part 1 (S6E11)

    Mark DeVito and Standard Deviant Brewing, Part 1 (S6E11)

    Mark DeVito, co-owner and COO of Standard Deviant Brewing, wouldn't last a day in a police lineup. But it might not be his curly handlebar mustache that gave him away. Mark has an outsize personality, to put it mildly. And back in December, I sat down with him and one of the SDB dogs, Beans, at the Mission brewery for what turned out to be quite the wild ride of a recording.
     
    In Part 1, we learn about Mark's upbringing in smalltown New Hampshire—Hopkinton, to be specific. It's still a town-with-no-stoplights small. The summers were hot and the winters cold and snowy.
     
    After hearing about two rather unfortunate stories from Mark's elementary school days, we move on to his teen years. He learned to play drums from a neighbor who taught music at his school. His parents placed him in a preparatory boarding school for high school, where he found an entire room full of instruments where he and his friends could play. And play they did. They formed a band that started playing around the area.
     
    We go back a little so Mark can share his Italian grandparents' story of migrating to the United States and landing in Boston, where his dad grew up and where Mark soon found himself after high school. The gigs, mostly Grateful Dead covers but eventually more like jazz improv with a Miles Davis influence, were stacking up for Great American (named after a grocery store chain and having nothing to do with 9/11).
     
    After his college years, some band members went their separate ways. But Mark and one of his buds decided to take a chance on San Francisco. Mark had visited and was blown away by the natural scenery and human creative energy here. Which, duh.
     
    And so, in 2004, he moved here. From 2005 to 2010, Mark would spend around five months a year touring the country from his new hometown. The story of how he found a place to live—where he's still at today with his wife—is remarkable only in the sense that it doesn't really happen that way anymore. He was walking around the Mission taking down phone numbers written on "for rent" signs in windows when someone leaned their head out one of those windows and asked Mark if he wanted to see the place.
     
    Check back next week for Part 2 with Mark and the story of Standard Deviant Brewing.
     
    We recorded this podcast at Standard Deviant Brewing in the Mission in December 2023.
     
    Photography by Jeff Hunt

    • 37 min
    Doug Styles, Denise Coleman, and Huckleberry Youth, Part 2

    Doug Styles, Denise Coleman, and Huckleberry Youth, Part 2

    In Part 2, we really get into the meat of what Huckleberry Youth is and how it got started. You know, I keep finding out ways in which our city pioneered things for the nation. I recently saw the upcoming Carol Doda documentary and learned that she was the first topless dancer in the US. And in this episode, we hear from Doug and Denise something very important that Huckleberry Youth did before anyone else. And of course, at the time they did it, it was illegal.

     
    1967 is also known as the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco. And that meant young people from all over the country and world flocked to our city to find whatever it was they were looking for. Not all of them were lucky. Many faced hardship, having trouble finding shelter, making friends, and getting sick or addicted to drugs. A group of faith-based organizations and folks in the nonprofit world got together to do something about it, and Huckleberry House was born.
     
    But back then, both being a youth runaway was illegal, and, if you provided shelter for a runaway, it was considered aiding and abetting. Huckleberry House was the first such shelter for runaway youth in the country.
     
    But all it took was one complaint from a parent. SFPD raided the house and arrested youth and staff alike. Now they needed a lawyer, and they found one in a young man named Willie Brown. The future mayor got the charges dropped, and Huckleberry House reopened in February 1968. It has been in legal operation ever since.
     
    Denise and Doug talk about several programs that Huckleberry Youth has established over the years. One such program was HYPE, established in the 1980s to help young people with HIV/AIDS. They give thanks and respect to Huckleberry's own Danny Keenan—the first to say, in effect, "We need to have kids talking to kids" to address problems like young people who are sick.
     
    I bring up the fire at their Geary Boulevard administrative offices back in 2019 because I witnessed it (I live not too far from there). The office had been at Geary and Parker for more than 30 years. The fire in front of Hong Kong Lounge 2 destroyed memorabilia and photos at Huckleberry's office, but they were able to save a lot too.
     
    During COVID, Huckleberry House stayed open and even took in new youth. Partly because of the fire, they had been moving a lot of admin stuff online before the pandemic, so they were able to make that transition.
     
    The conversation then shifts to kids who come to them addicted. Huckleberry gets those youth into its justice program, known as CARC (Community Assessment and Resource Center). Denise tells this story, because she was at Delancey Street when the program started in 1998 (see Part 1 of this podcast). It turned out to be too much for that nonprofit, and so they handed it over to Huckleberry 2000. Doug and Denise estimate that the program has helped at least 7,000 individuals, and possibly as many as 10,000.

     
    We end this episode with Denise and Doug responding to our theme this season: "We're all in it."
     
    Go to Huckleberryyouth.org to donate and learn more about all that they do to help underserved youth in San Francisco.
     
    Photography by Jeff Hunt
     
    We recorded this podcast in December 2023 at Huckleberry Youth's administrative offices on Geary.

    • 36 min
    Denise Coleman, Doug Styles, and Huckleberry Youth, Part 1 (S6E10)

    Denise Coleman, Doug Styles, and Huckleberry Youth, Part 1 (S6E10)

    Huckleberry Youth, the non-profit providing care and housing for underserved youth, celebrated 50 years back in 2017. In Part 1 of this episode, we meet Huckleberry consultant/advisor Denise Coleman and the organization's CEO/executive director, Doug Styles.
     
    Denise was born at what is now Kaiser's French Campus on Geary. Denise, who is Black, shares the story of the hospital making her dad pay cash for their labor and delivery services, while it was obvious that white folks were allowed to make installment payments.
     
    Born and raised in the 1950s and Sixties, Denise and her family lived in the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood, as it was known then (now we call it Cole Valley) on Belvedere Street. She has three sisters and a brother, her dad worked two jobs usually, and her mom stayed home. She describes a childhood that was fun, filled with activities like roller skating, skateboarding, and homemade roller coasters.
     
    Denise was a teenager during the Vietnam War and took part in protests. She describes a history of friction with her mom. When Denise was 16, one of her sisters OD'd on drugs. Still, despite the trauma that came with that, she graduated high school from St. Mary's in 1973. At this point in the podcast, Denise rattles off the San Francisco schools she went to.
     
    After high school, she joined some of her cousins and attended the College of San Mateo. Denise never thought about or wanted to leave the Bay Area, she says. In an apartment on the Peninsula, she and her cousins had "the best time." After obtaining a two-year associate's degree, Denise says she wanted to go to SF State, but didn't connect with it, and so she started working instead. For two years, she flew as a flight attendant for the now-defunct Western Airlines. After that, she collected debt for a jewelry store, then worked as a credit authorizer for Levitz Furniture in South San Francisco.
     
    Denise says she got hung up in the crack epidemic in the Eighties. She started with cocaine, and that led to crack. She was an addict for eight years. She got herself into a rehabilitation program at Delancey Street and stayed in the program for seven years. Her time started in SF, then took her to Santa Monica, North Carolina, and New York state.
     
    In 1998, Denise decided to leave Delancey Street. She got a call from Mimi Silbert, the Delancey founder, with an offer to work at their new juvenile justice program in San Francisco. Denise said no at first, partly because she wanted to stay in North Carolina. But after some persistence from Silbert, in 1999, she said yes and came back to her hometown. After seven years away, The City had changed.
     
    And so Denise helped to establish Delancey Street's Community Assessment and Referral Center (CARC). After its first year, the organization realized that they didn't have the capacity to run the program. Delancey Street asked Huckleberry Youth to take it over, and this is how Denise ended up at Huckleberry.
     
    Doug Styles was born and raised in the Richmond District. He was too young to remember the 1960s and mostly grew up in the Seventies. Doug says he had a lot of fun as a kid, describing riding his bike to the beach and back by himself. He shares the story of going to a late movie in the Mission, so late that when he got out, there were no buses. And so he walked home through the Mission, through the Fillmore, to his home in the Richmond.
     
    He also rattles off San Francisco schools he went to, including Lowell. Doug was in school when the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst. He was at Everett Middle School when Dan White assassinated George Moscone and Harvey Milk. He speaks to tensions in The City around this time, and Denise joins in to talk about the day of the assassinations.
     
    Doug graduated high school in 1983 and went to UC Santa Cruz, where he majored in theater. He moved to Massachusetts, where he found work in a theater. After a short time out east, he came back to San Francisco and tri

    • 36 min
    Lester Raww and Anita Beshirs, Part 2

    Lester Raww and Anita Beshirs, Part 2

    We begin Part 2 where we left off in Part 1. Anita had been away from their Arkansas college town and missed Lester. Upon her return, she went to see him and they soon shared their first kiss.
     
    Soon after that day, Anita had a pregnancy scare, and so Lester asked her, "Would you marry me if you are?" She said yes, but ended up not being pregnant. It didn't matter. They got married anyway. It was 1990 and they were both 22.
     
    Lester had a semester to go in college, which meant that the young couple couldn't live together or he'd get kicked out of the Christian school.
     
    He had started his first serious band—Cosmic Giggle Factory. Anita worked at Captain D's, a regional seafood chain fast-food joint, and then at a hotel. They moved to Little Rock a few years later. ​Eventually, she landed a job at Spectrum Weekly, an alternative paper in the Arkansas capital. Looking back, they say that they really loved their community there.
     
    After four years in Little Rock, and after Bill Clinton got elected, they decided to leave before they would begin to hate it. Spectrum Weekly closed and Lester's band broke up. They took these as signs to leave.
     
    Neither of them had ever been to San Francisco, but knew that they wanted to be in a city and many people they knew and trusted had good things to say about SF. Anita was working with an ESPN producer and through them met a person who lived here and offered them a place to live. So they packed up their Geo Prism, sold a lot of stuff, and maybe had $500 between them. It was November 1994.
     
    Upon arriving in the Bay, Lester worked at Tower Records and Anita found work at a temp agency. She had "toyed" with art while living in Little Rock and picked that up again in SF. But she says she didn't take it too seriously until around 2015. She worked several academic and corporate jobs that she didn't like until around that time, when Annie at Mini Bar gave her a show there. She ended up being in a show at Mini Bar every year for the next four years.
     
    One day in 2018 or so, Anita was at Fly Bar on Divisadero and learned that the owner needed someone to do art shows there. "I wanna do that!" she told them. Her first show at Fly was based on travel photography. Anita ended up curating shows at Fly until the pandemic, and had become involved in the Divisadero Art Walk. When COVID hit, the other Fly curator left town and Anita took over. She also did shows at Alamo Square Cafe, which stayed open during the pandemic. As other places started to open, she expanded her venues.
     
    When Annie left Mini Bar and Erin Kehoe took over, Anita reached out and they decided to alternate curating art shows at the bar (where we worked with Erin to do Hungry Ghosts in summer 2023). Anita has since added even more venues, including Bean Bag Cafe, and says she has moved around $50K of art in five years.
     
    This leads us to Anita's newest thing: KnownSF, which will officially launch later this year. For her shows, she likes to have one artist whose first show it is and one artist 50 or older. She says she wants to stick with the venues she's already showing at. Stay tuned and follow KnownSF on Instagram.
     
    Then we get to Lester's band, The Pine Box Boys, who recently celebrated 20 years of existence.
     
    When he first moved to The City, Lester had a hard time getting music going. He was dealing with confidence issues, which didn't make anything easier.
     
    He enrolled at SF State, got a degree, went into a teaching credential program, and started meeting people. Through some of these new teacher-to-be friends, he started playing with a band that was already established. He says he was stoked to play a show in San Francisco, but that band fizzled out and broke up.
     
    But Lester and another member kept playing together. It was a noisy, abstract band called Zag Men. As Lester tells us, the saying went, "If the Zagmen are playing, nobody's getting laid." He started creating soundtracks

    • 54 min
    Anita Beshirs and Lester Raww, Part 1 (S6E9)

    Anita Beshirs and Lester Raww, Part 1 (S6E9)

    Anita Beshirs was born in Batesville, Mississippi, because the small Southern town her family lived in didn't have a hospital.
     
    Welcome to our Valentine's 2024 episode all about Anita and her husband, Lester Raww. In Part 1, we'll get to know Lester and Anita through the stories of their childhood and early adult years.
     
    Anita's dad was a Church of Christ minister who, along with her mom, never drank or even took medicinal drugs. Anita is the third child in her family (she has two older brothers) and when she just two years old, their parents moved them to the Cameroon jungle on missionary work.
     
    The family lived in Africa in a house made of concrete blocks and with a tin roof. Anita spent the first six years of her life with no TV or radio and so she was forced to make her own fun. She was home schooled by her mom because her dad was busy doing his church work.
     
    After four years, the family returned to Mississippi, now in the college town of Oxford, where Anita started grade school. She says she didn't want to go to college right away because she didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. But her parents insisted that she go to Christian college, which meant a school called Harding University in Arkansas. This is where Lester and Anita met, but more on that after we hear the story of Lester's early life.
     
    His mom grew up in Florence, Alabama, near the Tennessee River and not far from Muscle Shoals. She moved to Florida and met his dad, who was a fighter pilot in the Navy. Lester has one older brother, born not long before him. Their dad was in and out of Navy and the family moved around, first to San Diego, then back to Flordia, and finally to Virginia, where Lester finished high school.
     
    Because his family was also in the Church of Christ and his brother had gone to Harding, Lester chose the school, mostly as a way to escape life in Virginia. He had grown apart from the church when he was 13 and a friend introduced him to things like books by Robert Anton Wilson and William S. Burroughs, marijuana, and prog rock. Lester started playing guitar around this time, but we'll get more into that in Part 2.
     
    Anita and Lester remember first meeting in their first year at college in the campus quad. Anita's first impression was, Oh god, this guy is such a freak. They didn't date for another four years, but hung out with a lot of the same people. Then, in her sophomore year, Anita spent a semester abroad in Florence. She came back a changed person.
     
    At this point in the conversation, we hear them each describe was they were like as young adults. Anita says she was a bit of a prankster, but Lester's stories take pranks to another level. Because of their respective shenanigans, they were each "dormed" at Harding, which was the school's form of detention punishment. We all share a hearty laugh over this.
     
    Anita says that at Harding, it was the first time in her life that she was popular. She was recruited into a social club (their version of Greek sororities) and was a rising star in Christian leadership. She liked it enough, but again, Italy changed her. Slowly, she stopped believing in god and Jesus.
     
    Lester shares stories of how they and others would sneak in drinking and smoking cigarettes while at Harding. Slowly, Anita was finding a new identity and crowd of friends, including Lester. She left Harding for Ole Miss but went back because she figured out that she could graduate faster at Harding. The couple really started hanging out regularly in their fourth years of college. Both had dated others and in fact, Anita set Lester up with some of her friends. Lester had never got serious with anyone at Harding, though.
     
    It was Anita's goal to get out of Harding unmarried. Her future husband wanted to move to New York to pursue a music career, and she was just ready to live a little, wherever. She broke up with her boyfriend in early 1990 and soon after this, the two got together.
     

    • 46 min
    Vandor Hill of Whack Donuts

    Vandor Hill of Whack Donuts

    Something awesome happened near the Embarcadero.
     
    In Season 4 of this show, back in 2022, we featured SF born-and-raised vegan donut maker Vandor Hill. His pop-up (at the time), Whack Donuts, was gaining some new fans and new spots for him to sell his delicious sweet treats.
     
    But now ..
     
    Now Whack Donuts occupies a corner spot of EMB 4, just across the walkway from Osha Thai and near the padel courts and water fountain of recently renamed Embarcadero Plaza. How did this happen?
     
    Well, Vandor got himself into two city programs: Vacant to Vibrant and Ujamaa Kitchen. And it was his acceptance to Vacant to Vibrant that helped him to get and keep his nook in EMB 4.
     
    Vandor and I hung out one day in January to catch up on life since April 2022. This bonus episode comprises our conversation that day.
     
    Whack Donuts is open 8 a.m. - 2 p.m., Tues.-Sat. Vandor often does special drops and monthly flavors. But if you're looking for sweetness for your sweetie (or yourself, let's be real), he'll have a red velvet cake vegan donut for Valentine's as well as a special "Love in a Box" 3-pack or half-dozen.
     
    Follow Whack Donuts on Instagram.
     
    Photography by Jeff Hunt
     
    We recorded this podcast at Whack Donuts in the Embarcadero in January 2024.

    • 20 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
38 Ratings

38 Ratings

79Samuel ,

Touched my heart

I rarely write these things. Your latest episode with Vander Hall really hit me close. Not every episode is a home run for me but each episode is very much 100% genuine SF. Thank you for doing this podcast I look forward to hearing each one.

J.L. Braswell ,

Best San Francisco podcast chronicling life.

This is my most favorite podcast talking about San Francisco, my favorite city for almost 20 years now since 2003. I previously lived in Syracuse, New York and Houston, Texas. I came to the Bay Area in 2003 from Houston with my family and instantly fell in love with San Francisco. It was the final year of Junior High School that time. I live in the East Bay, but really love San Francisco and enjoy visiting the city. I hope to live there one day. Every day 24/7, 365 days a year, and 52 weeks a year, San Francisco remains on my mind, especially during these challenging times with the pandemic, the election, the insurrection, and much more. That is how much I love the city. This podcast does a fantastic job chronicling life in San Francisco through conversations with locals that reside in the city about how they ended up in San Francisco, what got them here in the first place, memories of their first visits to the city. Jeff does a great job interviewing these folks and asks great questions. With every episode I have listened to, it’s always fun hearing from the people that Jeff has conversations with share these experiences and memories through their stories, what they have to say about San Francisco, what they like about it, and what they currently do in the city. I really like how this season with the pandemic that Jeff came up with the theme “We’re Still Here” and asks the people he interviews what it means to still be here in San Francisco and they foresee in the future with the city coming out of the pandemic. I highly really recommend this podcast to those who are passionate about San Francisco like I am, and especially to those that don’t live in San Francisco or the Bay Area, or have never visited San Francisco, or have been meaning to visit the city.

DaddyGameBoi ,

Ed Wolf

Loved the Podcast with Ed. He really gives an intimate look at such a sensitive and heartbreaking time in our nation. Thank you for having him on your show.

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