Jerry F. Schimmel
1933-2021As a new householder 65 years ago at the crest of Bernal Heights, the young social worker found his one-of-a-kind San Francisco neighborhood to be an "interesting if haphazard mix of the poor, radical, colorful and oddball." Then came years of unwanted gentrification, hot real estate and the piecemeal disappearance of working-class families, minorities and most of the eccentrics.
By then he had adopted the perspective of a historical researcher.
"We have struggled," he said, "with the rising tide of neighborhood betterment."
Jerry Francis Schimmel died in his sleep in Pacifica on August 20. He was 88. His adult life had been invested in community activism, professional social work, and New Orleans jazz (stride piano, ragtime and banjo). In retirement, his greatest satisfactions came from the solitary thrills – as he put it – of investigating, writing, and self-publishing books and articles. He was fascinated by San Francisco saloons, brothels, and their bar tokens in the era of a dance called the turkey trot.
His greatest regret was the transition of his unique community from blue collar to white collar.
"Once a raging mixture of all incomes, Bernal Heights is more and more for the affluent, professional and sedate," he wrote in his spiral-bound Bernal Hill Memoir. (A copy is available at the Bernal Heights Branch Library.) In a neighborhood blog, he adds, "It's hard seeing my friends leave when the big bucks people come in and simply elbow them out of the way just because they can."
* * *
Jerry was born in Spokane on May 10, 1933, at the nadir of the Great Depression. His father, Robert F. Schimmel (1909-1990), a native of Porterville, worked as a railroad traffic manager or rate clerk in Spokane, Vallejo, Pittsburgh, and other stops. His mother, the former Geane Winifred Ziemer (1915-1995), born in San Francisco, would later prefer Jean or Gene. After a succession of jobs, she would become a portrait photographer and artist.
Jerry was 9 when his parents split up. Bob Schimmel moved in 1943 to Pittsburgh, Pa., home of his new wife, Rose Marie Lesjak. Gene moved from San Francisco's Mission District to Sausalito and lived a life of independence. Jerry reveled in a boyhood spent among the wharfs and the byways of the former fishing village being transformed by World War II. In the north Sausalito yards of Bechtel's enormous pop-up Marinship, his gorgeous mom painted boilers in Liberty cargo ships. She bought a creaky old house on South Street above Sausalito's scenic Shelter Cove. She changed her name to Perry.
Jerry lettered in swimming at Tamalpais Union High School in neighboring Mill Valley, but most of his spare time went to leadership roles in after-school programs and camps of the YMCA and the Explorer Boy Scouts.
He snuck into Hambone Kelly's club in El Cerrito to listen to Lu Watters's Yerba Buena Jazz Band. Jerry was hooked for life. With an old plectrum banjo, he taught himself the difficult chord inversions of solo pieces like "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise." He did the same with his piano, perfecting "The Maple Leaf Rag," "Solace," and other Scott Joplin masterpieces. He never lacked invitations to perform at parties and fund-raisers, especially after he enrolled at San Francisco State College (then uptown at Laguna and Market streets).
Tito Patri, a landscape architect and another banjo-playing alumnus of Tam's Class of 1951, recalled fun times for pickup jams.
"In the Fifties Jerry used to join me and almost anyone we knew who played an instrument of some kind for jazz parties at my father's art school for adults in Jackson Square (the Patri School of Art Fundamentals)," he wrote.
"The 'performance' was more like undulating waves of musical cacophony."
* * *
Jerry left for Berkeley to earn a master's degree in social work at the University of California.
He took his banjo in 1955 to a folk music party. There he met Nancy Reynolds, a Cal undergraduate in psychology and literature. She played guitar. She was, and is, a singer with talent and tenderness. With Nancy was her mother, Malvina Reynolds, whose songwriting career would win worldwide success with "Little Boxes" (1959).
Married in 1957, Jerry and Nancy saved up for a six-month journey in 1959 from Machu Picchu to Argentina and Brazil and points between. Nancy sang "Careless Love" for exiled German pacifists in Paraguay. Jerry took his banjo to jam with charango-strumming Peruvians.
Nancy Schimmel: "I think Jerry's ability to make connections and to size people up made him a good social worker as well."
In addition to his MSW, he was certified as a clinical social worker in a variegated career that included child welfare services, adoptions, and a stint in the Psychiatric Clinic of the Juvenile Court. He worked as a community organizer, as a staffer for the Council on Mental Retardation, and as a caseworker for the Red Cross.
Nancy and Jerry bought their little house atop Bernal Hill. Then he took a job in 1967 as director of the small Precita Center.
"We have struggled," he said, "with the rising tide of neighborhood betterment."
Jerry Francis Schimmel died in his sleep in Pacifica on August 20. He was 88. His adult life had been invested in community activism, professional social work, and New Orleans jazz (stride piano, ragtime and banjo). In retirement, his greatest satisfactions came from the solitary thrills – as he put it – of investigating, writing, and self-publishing books and articles. He was fascinated by San Francisco saloons, brothels, and their bar tokens in the era of a dance called the turkey trot.
His greatest regret was the transition of his unique community from blue collar to white collar.
"Once a raging mixture of all incomes, Bernal Heights is more and more for the affluent, professional and sedate," he wrote in his spiral-bound Bernal Hill Memoir. (A copy is available at the Bernal Heights Branch Library.) In a neighborhood blog, he adds, "It's hard seeing my friends leave when the big bucks people come in and simply elbow them out of the way just because they can."
* * *
Jerry was born in Spokane on May 10, 1933, at the nadir of the Great Depression. His father, Robert F. Schimmel (1909-1990), a native of Porterville, worked as a railroad traffic manager or rate clerk in Spokane, Vallejo, Pittsburgh, and other stops. His mother, the former Geane Winifred Ziemer (1915-1995), born in San Francisco, would later prefer Jean or Gene. After a succession of jobs, she would become a portrait photographer and artist.
Jerry was 9 when his parents split up. Bob Schimmel moved in 1943 to Pittsburgh, Pa., home of his new wife, Rose Marie Lesjak. Gene moved from San Francisco's Mission District to Sausalito and lived a life of independence. Jerry reveled in a boyhood spent among the wharfs and the byways of the former fishing village being transformed by World War II. In the north Sausalito yards of Bechtel's enormous pop-up Marinship, his gorgeous mom painted boilers in Liberty cargo ships. She bought a creaky old house on South Street above Sausalito's scenic Shelter Cove. She changed her name to Perry.
Jerry lettered in swimming at Tamalpais Union High School in neighboring Mill Valley, but most of his spare time went to leadership roles in after-school programs and camps of the YMCA and the Explorer Boy Scouts.
He snuck into Hambone Kelly's club in El Cerrito to listen to Lu Watters's Yerba Buena Jazz Band. Jerry was hooked for life. With an old plectrum banjo, he taught himself the difficult chord inversions of solo pieces like "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise." He did the same with his piano, perfecting "The Maple Leaf Rag," "Solace," and other Scott Joplin masterpieces. He never lacked invitations to perform at parties and fund-raisers, especially after he enrolled at San Francisco State College (then uptown at Laguna and Market streets).
Tito Patri, a landscape architect and another banjo-playing alumnus of Tam's Class of 1951, recalled fun times for pickup jams.
"In the Fifties Jerry used to join me and almost anyone we knew who played an instrument of some kind for jazz parties at my father's art school for adults in Jackson Square (the Patri School of Art Fundamentals)," he wrote.
"The 'performance' was more like undulating waves of musical cacophony."
* * *
Jerry left for Berkeley to earn a master's degree in social work at the University of California.
He took his banjo in 1955 to a folk music party. There he met Nancy Reynolds, a Cal undergraduate in psychology and literature. She played guitar. She was, and is, a singer with talent and tenderness. With Nancy was her mother, Malvina Reynolds, whose songwriting career would win worldwide success with "Little Boxes" (1959).
Married in 1957, Jerry and Nancy saved up for a six-month journey in 1959 from Machu Picchu to Argentina and Brazil and points between. Nancy sang "Careless Love" for exiled German pacifists in Paraguay. Jerry took his banjo to jam with charango-strumming Peruvians.
Nancy Schimmel: "I think Jerry's ability to make connections and to size people up made him a good social worker as well."
In addition to his MSW, he was certified as a clinical social worker in a variegated career that included child welfare services, adoptions, and a stint in the Psychiatric Clinic of the Juvenile Court. He worked as a community organizer, as a staffer for the Council on Mental Retardation, and as a caseworker for the Red Cross.
Nancy and Jerry bought their little house atop Bernal Hill. Then he took a job in 1967 as director of the small Precita Center.
Jerry was all too familiar with drastic change in communities once valued for quaintness, charm, and creativity. He grew up in Sausalito, then noted for shipyard workers, fishermen, bohemian poets, and starving artists. His home town morphed over the years into (in his words) an expensive haven for flight attendants and newly divorced lawyers. He later spent five years in an apartment on then-affordable Potrero Hill with a reputation for Marxists, Slavic immigrants, and starving artists. Now Potrero's reconditioned Victorians fetch $2 million, eliciting (in his words) obligatory conversations about missed real estate opportunities.
Not on the Hill. "No one we knew talked about Bernal Heights or mentioned the spectacular views from the boulevard," he writes in his Bernal Hill Memoir. "The posted price of the house and the next-door lot downhill came to a low five figures, an amount inconceivable in today's market."
Back then, working-class Irish, German, and Italian families dominated the social and cultural life of the mini-neighborhoods that circle Bernal Hill. The old-timers have now been largely supplanted by white-collar workers and professionals of all ethnicities.
Bernal Heights wasn't always a cloistered village of well-paid Zoom introverts. One day on Gates Street, Jerry heard a young woman "screaming profanities" as she clobbered a parked car and smashed its windshield with a 2x4. And here's Jerry on a neighbor's hobby back then: "Besides being a middle-class corporate man, he organized witch covens on Banks Street… There they were, chanting in a circle, chanting the unknowable to sundry spirits and forest nymphs, all good middle-class leftovers from the late 1960s."
Discouraged by bureaucracy, ineffective leadership, and in-fighting among neighborhood groups, Jerry lasted four years at the Precita Center. Next came a gig researching and writing a comprehensive two-volume report on mental health issues in Union City.
"Nancy and I divorced in 1975," he said in his Memoir. "I have chosen not to remarry and retired from Social Work in the early 1980s after all the budget cuts, now taking my ease."
He turned his attention to his community.
"Jerry is Bernal Heights," writes librarian Vicky Walker. "And Bernal Heights is Jerry. That's it. Inextricably linked forever."
* * *
Jerry's lifelong interest in coin collecting shifted in retirement into a parallel pursuit, the buying and selling of tokens. He self-published a dozen books or booklets for collectors. He specialized in the non-coins dispensed to clients in the brothels and honky-tonks in the era of old-time jazz.
Whereas a coin seldom needs much history, Jerry learned that a good story will triple the value of a humble token. A prime example: "The Parisian Mansion and Frisco's forgotten resorts of ill-repute," published in the San Francisco Examiner on December 26, 1994.
* * *
Until the 1970s the grassy scalp of Bernal Hill was managed grudgingly by the city's Department of Public Works. Jerry called it "a large, open wasteland." "In the wee hours," he wrote, it became a lover's lane, party locale, unauthorized trash dump, and a "magnet for the unpleasant."
He spent a year as president of the Bernal Heights Association, "essentially a white, middle-class homeowner booster," he wrote, with a twist – a mission to support services for kids and the elderly.
They couldn't save Bernal Heights from the forces of gentrification. But they could try to save the top of what geologists call "the folded hill." Jerry teamed up with local activists Miriam "Mimi" Mueller, Beverly Anderson, Barbara and Roland Pitschel and many others to pressure politicians to transfer the title of Bernal Hill in 1973 to the Recreation and Park Department.
Nearly fifty years later, the Rec-Park website proudly celebrates the former wasteland: "Visitors hike around the hill's peaceful summit to escape from the complexities of urban life. As one of the few remaining natural refuges in San Francisco, Bernal Hill is a special place for the city's human and wildlife inhabitants."
The fights (and endless meetings) go unremembered by today's hikers and dog lovers. They flock in their dozens every day to the steep, grassy upland of purple needlegrass, red-tailed hawks (and 40 more bird species), an occasional coyote, and 360-degree views from the 475-foot ridge of chert and dirt.
When city officials needed a name for their new peaceful summit, Jerry voted for the first choice of the locals, "Nanny Goat Park," honoring the hill's bucolic history. Real estate brokers were appalled. Without a word, unsmiling Rec-Park poobahs came up with "Bernal Heights Park."
"You can't win them all," Jerry was known to say, "even when you're not trying."
Not on the Hill. "No one we knew talked about Bernal Heights or mentioned the spectacular views from the boulevard," he writes in his Bernal Hill Memoir. "The posted price of the house and the next-door lot downhill came to a low five figures, an amount inconceivable in today's market."
Back then, working-class Irish, German, and Italian families dominated the social and cultural life of the mini-neighborhoods that circle Bernal Hill. The old-timers have now been largely supplanted by white-collar workers and professionals of all ethnicities.
Bernal Heights wasn't always a cloistered village of well-paid Zoom introverts. One day on Gates Street, Jerry heard a young woman "screaming profanities" as she clobbered a parked car and smashed its windshield with a 2x4. And here's Jerry on a neighbor's hobby back then: "Besides being a middle-class corporate man, he organized witch covens on Banks Street… There they were, chanting in a circle, chanting the unknowable to sundry spirits and forest nymphs, all good middle-class leftovers from the late 1960s."
Discouraged by bureaucracy, ineffective leadership, and in-fighting among neighborhood groups, Jerry lasted four years at the Precita Center. Next came a gig researching and writing a comprehensive two-volume report on mental health issues in Union City.
"Nancy and I divorced in 1975," he said in his Memoir. "I have chosen not to remarry and retired from Social Work in the early 1980s after all the budget cuts, now taking my ease."
He turned his attention to his community.
"Jerry is Bernal Heights," writes librarian Vicky Walker. "And Bernal Heights is Jerry. That's it. Inextricably linked forever."
* * *
Jerry's lifelong interest in coin collecting shifted in retirement into a parallel pursuit, the buying and selling of tokens. He self-published a dozen books or booklets for collectors. He specialized in the non-coins dispensed to clients in the brothels and honky-tonks in the era of old-time jazz.
Whereas a coin seldom needs much history, Jerry learned that a good story will triple the value of a humble token. A prime example: "The Parisian Mansion and Frisco's forgotten resorts of ill-repute," published in the San Francisco Examiner on December 26, 1994.
* * *
Until the 1970s the grassy scalp of Bernal Hill was managed grudgingly by the city's Department of Public Works. Jerry called it "a large, open wasteland." "In the wee hours," he wrote, it became a lover's lane, party locale, unauthorized trash dump, and a "magnet for the unpleasant."
He spent a year as president of the Bernal Heights Association, "essentially a white, middle-class homeowner booster," he wrote, with a twist – a mission to support services for kids and the elderly.
They couldn't save Bernal Heights from the forces of gentrification. But they could try to save the top of what geologists call "the folded hill." Jerry teamed up with local activists Miriam "Mimi" Mueller, Beverly Anderson, Barbara and Roland Pitschel and many others to pressure politicians to transfer the title of Bernal Hill in 1973 to the Recreation and Park Department.
Nearly fifty years later, the Rec-Park website proudly celebrates the former wasteland: "Visitors hike around the hill's peaceful summit to escape from the complexities of urban life. As one of the few remaining natural refuges in San Francisco, Bernal Hill is a special place for the city's human and wildlife inhabitants."
The fights (and endless meetings) go unremembered by today's hikers and dog lovers. They flock in their dozens every day to the steep, grassy upland of purple needlegrass, red-tailed hawks (and 40 more bird species), an occasional coyote, and 360-degree views from the 475-foot ridge of chert and dirt.
When city officials needed a name for their new peaceful summit, Jerry voted for the first choice of the locals, "Nanny Goat Park," honoring the hill's bucolic history. Real estate brokers were appalled. Without a word, unsmiling Rec-Park poobahs came up with "Bernal Heights Park."
"You can't win them all," Jerry was known to say, "even when you're not trying."
* * *
Family: Jerry's relatives include Donna Jean Dion, his half sister, of Colfax, CA; her husband, James R. Dion; their children, Timothy Dion of Grass Valley, and Robert, Nickolas and Wendy Dion, of Colfax, and fifteen grandchildren. (Three of the close family's homes went up in flames when the River Fire hit the woodsy community on Aug. 4. Their fire insurance had been canceled a few weeks before without notification to the family.) Other kin: Roberta Mueller, half sister, in Centennial, CO; Michael Schimmel, half brother, in Fresno, CA; and Sally Soto, a cousin, in Windsor, CA.
A memorial service will be planned.
Online: Go to www.jerryschimmel.com for reminiscences by Tito Patri and Nancy Schimmel, a dream fantasy by Jerry, a sampling of token-inspired history articles for the Papers of the Pacific Coast Numismatic Society, and a republication of "Ribeltad Vorden."
Family: Jerry's relatives include Donna Jean Dion, his half sister, of Colfax, CA; her husband, James R. Dion; their children, Timothy Dion of Grass Valley, and Robert, Nickolas and Wendy Dion, of Colfax, and fifteen grandchildren. (Three of the close family's homes went up in flames when the River Fire hit the woodsy community on Aug. 4. Their fire insurance had been canceled a few weeks before without notification to the family.) Other kin: Roberta Mueller, half sister, in Centennial, CO; Michael Schimmel, half brother, in Fresno, CA; and Sally Soto, a cousin, in Windsor, CA.
A memorial service will be planned.
Online: Go to www.jerryschimmel.com for reminiscences by Tito Patri and Nancy Schimmel, a dream fantasy by Jerry, a sampling of token-inspired history articles for the Papers of the Pacific Coast Numismatic Society, and a republication of "Ribeltad Vorden."
Published by San Francisco Chronicle from Sep. 29 to Oct. 3, 2021.
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