Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley

Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

East Bay Regional Park District Oral History Project

Robin Freeman: East Bay Regional Park District Parkland Oral History Project

Interviews conducted by Shanna Farrell in 2017

Copyright © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California

Interview sponsored by the East Bay Regional Park District Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley ii

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Robin Freeman dated December 7, 2017. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://ucblib.link/OHC-rights.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Robin Freeman, “Robin Freeman: East Bay Regional Park District Parkland Oral History Project” conducted by Shanna Farrell in 2017 Berkeley, 2019.

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Robin Freeman, 2017 Photo by Shanna Farrell

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The Oral History Center would like to thank the East Bay Regional Park District for their generous support of this oral history project.

The Parkland Oral History Project is funded by the Interpretive and Recreation Services Department of the East Bay Regional Park District, coordinated by Beverly R. Ortiz, Ph.D., EBRPD Cultural Services Coordinator, and supported by staff at all levels of the Park District.

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Robin Freeman is a longtime Bay Area resident and educator. He founded the Berkeley Creators Association art studio and led educational programs in Tilden and Wildcat Canyon in the East Bay Regional Park District. In this interview, he discusses his early life, education, love for teaching, leading outdoors educational programs, working with the EBRPD, a 1989 creek restoration project, and creating meaningful environmental programs. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley vi

Table of Contents—Robin Freeman

Project History

Interview 1: December 7, 2017

Hour 1 1

Parents Elizabeth and Augusta Freeman: “They were a kind of a combination of risk takers by being, at that time, as a rare, intercultural marriage” — Moving from place to place often due to father’s profession as a doctor and researcher — Piqued interest in the natural world while driving to California with family during teenage years — Interviewing for a job at Yosemite and getting placed at Tuolumne Meadows in the High Sierra — Moving to Berkeley and setting up a nonprofit and the Berkeley Creators Association art studio — Choice to take community college classes: “Where they didn’t tell you what was good to build, they just told you how to build. And at the Ivy League, we were heavily told what’s good” — Sponsoring the Friends of High Sierra organization and scholarships through Berkeley Creators, encouraging various demographics to take part — Initial meeting with Tim Gordon at Tilden Park, discussing the environmental education center — Rearranging the trail at Tilden — Working with the childcare research center funded by Carol Sibley — Restoration of the Wildcat Creek bank with Tim Gordon and Friends of the High Sierra — Slowing down erosion and its debris in the 1989 creek restoration — Integrating more diverse student participation in restoration projects while teaching at community college

Hour 2 20

Interest in education programs and early community college course offerings as a professor — Premise of in-progress psychology book on decision making with Steve Rau — Former students who became East Bay Regional Park District employees — Influence of Carl Anthony in encouraging underrepresented demographics to get involved with environmental projects — Origin and development of San Leandro Creek Plan — Meaningful parts of working with the Park District — Support for the district to utilize the insights of local rangers more often than the views of outside consultants — Critical points of development needed for California parks — Early inspirational influences

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The East Bay Regional Park District Oral History Project

The East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) is a special regional district that stretches across both Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. First established in 1934 by Alameda County voters, the EBRPD slowly expanded to Contra Costa in 1964 and has continued to grow and preserve the East Bay’s most scenic and historically significant parklands. The EBRPD’s core mission is to acquire, develop, and maintain diverse and interconnected parklands in order to provide the public with usable natural spaces and to preserve the region’s natural and cultural resources.

This oral history project—The East Bay Regional Park District Oral History Project— records and preserves the voices and experiences of formative, retired EBRPD field staff, individuals associated with land use of EBRPD parklands prior to district acquisition, and individuals who continue to use parklands for agriculture and ranching.

The Oral History Center (OHC) of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley first engaged in conversations with the EBRPD in the fall of 2016 about the possibility of restarting an oral history project on the parklands. The OHC, previously the Regional Oral History Office, had conducted interviews with EBPRD board members, supervisors and individuals historically associated with the parklands throughout the 1970s and early 2000s. After the completion of a successful pilot project in late 2016, the EBRPD and OHC began a more robust partnership in early 2017 that has resulted in an expansive collection of interviews.

The interviews in this collection reflect the diverse yet interconnected ecology of individuals and places that have helped shape and define the East Bay Regional Park District and East Bay local history.

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Interview 1: December 7, 2017

01-00:00:06 Farrell: This is Shanna Farrell with Robin Freeman on Thursday, December 7, 2017, and this is an interview for the East Bay Regional Park Department Oral History Project. And we are in Oakland, California. Robin, can you start by telling me where and when you were born, and a little bit about your early life?

01-00:00:27 Freeman: I was born in the East Side Hospital in Manhattan, 1944, in May, 17. My father was off in the Second World War. Oh, he was a doctor in the Army, so he came back and forth, which was why I was born just before the war was over. My parents were both from New York State. My mother is from an elder family in upstate New York, Monroe, New York, and my father was a Jewish immigrant. I mean, his older siblings and parents were. He was born here, I think. But they were a kind of a combination of risk takers by being, at that time, as a rare, intercultural marriage. My father would create his own medical research career. (Then I see siblings here.)

01-00:01:44 Farrell: Can you actually tell me what your parents’ names were?

01-00:01:45 Freeman: Oh, right. My mother’s Elizabeth Freeman, Elizabeth Gignoux Hulse , and my father is Gustave Freeman.

01-00:01:56 Farrell: Okay. What was your mother’s occupation or, yeah, what did she do?

01-00:02:06 Freeman: She was a social worker. But like that time, then my father decided she shouldn’t work, which was probably a mistake. She started that again after we had all left the house.

01-00:02:24 Farrell: Okay. Did you have siblings?

01-00:02:28 Freeman: Yeah, an older brother, Jonathan, and a younger sister, Phyllis, who were— Jonathan was probably born in Chicago, and Phyllis was born in New York City.

01-00:02:50 Farrell: Okay.

01-00:02:50 Freeman: N.B. I asked my sister.

01-00:02:62 Farrell: So you were born in Manhattan, but were you raised there as well?

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01-00:03:06 Freeman: Just the first year, and then we went back to Chicago.

01-00:03:12 Farrell: To Chicago, okay.

01-00:03:12 Freeman: At the University of Chicago, where my father was doing research, and where they had met where she had been working as a social worker.

01-00:03:21 Farrell: Okay. So you were basically raised in Chicago?

01-00:03:23 Freeman: No, we just followed my father’s [job]—sort of like an Army brat, but it was like a research university brat.

01-00:03:35 Farrell: Okay.

01-00:03:36 Freeman: He would move from University of Chicago to Harvard or Johns Hopkins to Stanford, and stops in between. I just grew up in a series of places near those universities.

01-00:03:54 Farrell: Yeah, okay. When you were growing up, were there any hobbies or interests that you had, especially since you lived in different places that kind of carried through?

01-00:04:07 Freeman: Yeah. Well, I was involved in imaginative play and blocks and models and stuff, and then I started getting interested in photography and history, because of my mother’s family’s houses were still intact in Monroe, New York, in a rural town up north of Manhattan and west of West Point. They started a farm, and even had a family house, which was a log cabin from the seventeen hundreds. She would tell stories, you know, I got interested in history. All the stuff from generations are still around, so there are all kinds of things I got to learn, like bed warmers and stuff that aren’t used anymore.

01-00:05:07 Farrell: Yeah.

01-00:05:10 Freeman: When I was 13, I built a photo darkroom. Then I also got involved in woodworking, and through my father sailing. I liked bike riding as a kid, and science. I was, ironically, because I was a war protester, I was a target rifle champion. [laughs] So that’s kind of what I did.

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01-00:05:33 Farrell: Were you, at any point growing up, interested in the natural world or the environment? Or not quite yet?

01-00:05:42 Freeman: No. I mean, I liked the family farm and walking around in the fields, but it was not until I was a teenager and we migrated to California in ’59 on Route 66. My mother got the family to stop in national parks and Native American sites on the way out. We came into California through Tuolumne Meadows, so climbing on the rocks there, and the Tuolumne River and the ranger-led singing around the campfire seemed magical. What seemed like a lifetime later, I was back there, working. Of course it was only a few years.

01-00:06:33 Farrell: You said you were interested in science. Was there a part of science that interested you more than another?

01-00:06:42 Freeman: Well, I was just sort of following the family business, which was biology and medicine.

01-00:06:47 Farrell: Okay.

01-00:06:50 Freeman: Which did interest me, but I was actually more interested in building the lab equipment for my high school science fair project than in the results. But the scientific thinking interested me, the imaginative part.

01-00:07:06 Farrell: Where did you go to high school?

01-00:07:11 Freeman: Well, I started in prep school in Baltimore Friends School, which, except for the Quaker part, was competitive and unfriendly. Then we moved to Palo Alto for Stanford. That was a public school, and it was kind of a breath of fresh air. People were much nicer. That’s where I went to high school.

01-00:07:30 Farrell: So you finished in California?

01-00:07:31 Freeman: Yeah, I finished the last three grades in California at ‘Paly High’.

01-00:07:37 Farrell: Okay. Then aside from science, was there anything in primary or secondary school that you were gravitating towards?

01-00:07:50 Freeman: Well, looking back, I could see I was interested in what I began to follow later, architecture. But that wasn’t part of our family history, that didn’t get

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supported. I loved exploring, I think, like all kids, the creeks at the end of the subdivision roads and when we visited people in the country and stuff.

01-00:08:21 Farrell: Mm-hmm. At that point when you were pre-college, moving around to different areas, were you noticing differences in the environment or your surroundings?

01-00:08:34 Freeman: Not really. I mean, I started, you know, I noticed when I was older in Palo Alto, just because of my age I was paying more attention to stuff. I was in a science family, I was more in my head. There was also sort of a tense family situation, so I was not looking around that much. I was just thinking now how we were half a block from San Francisquito Creek, and no one paid attention to it. I’d go down there a couple of times, but there were no other kids there. It was just interesting that it wasn’t—it was just ignored.

01-00:09:31 Farrell: Yeah. That is interesting. Do you remember a point you started to become more interested in the environment?

01-00:09:39 Freeman: Well, yeah, big time. I went as a freshman in college that summer, I went up to Yosemite with a friend who was going to get a job there, and I was working in Palo Alto at a store. I took the weekend off, went up there. I thought it was a neat idea, interviewed for a job and got it. At the time I was disappointed to get placed at Tuolumne Meadows in the High Sierra, because I’d heard all the fun was in the valley. But actually, it was a really inspirational experience; living in the tents and running the, as it were, the tent cabin—it still is, the tent cabin, little hotel. We took off on our days off and hiked all over, and climbed mountains and hiked up, climbed Half Dome and went down to the valley, and then the next week took a day and went down the valley on the other side. Because of that experience, when I went back to Brown, everything looked upside down to me. The highest prestige jobs were things like nuclear physics, blowing up the world. The lowest prestige jobs were taking care of kids. At that point it seemed this whole thing is upside down, and the values of so many people at that time, at college, just seemed totally upside down.

I had taken an architecture class which, somehow, awoke me to the idea that people actually choose the way our environments look, you know, they’re not set in stone, literally you can draw where the stones go. Those things, too, together led to an epiphanal realization that I really wanted to figure out what makes the world tick, and why it looks like it does. Then I just came to Berkeley. Well, I went to Mexico City and lived in Mexico City, went to school there for a while. 01-00:12:19 Farrell: Oh, okay, so yeah. You had started off your college education at Brown?

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01-00:12:24 Freeman: Right.

01-00:12:24 Farrell: You went to Mexico City, and what were you studying there?

01-00:12:27 Freeman: By that time I got interested in architecture and the arts, so I took architecture and music, and Spanish.

01-00:12:40 Farrell: What university were you going to?

01-00:12:42 Freeman: It was called the University of the Americas. I was actually just looking for someone to drive back to California with in the middle of the semester, some guy who had been thrown out was looking for a ride, and he was going to go with me and then get off at the border or something, and he was going to go to this school. I waited around and he never came. I just set it up. [It] seemed like a good idea, so I just set it up going to that school myself.

01-00:13:16 Farrell: What made you stay there for a year and then transfer to Berkeley?

01-00:13:21 Freeman: Well, it was just a semester.

01-00:13:23 Farrell: Oh, it was a semester, okay.

01-00:13:25 Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. I was just curious what was going on in the world, you know. But I didn’t transfer. Well, I came back to Palo Alto and then moved to Berkeley. I started taking some—what do they call them—extension classes in philosophy and urban planning and psychology, but I decided not to go to Berkeley, but just set up this nonprofit and my own art studio called Berkeley Creators Association. Then I went and took hands-on drafting and building classes and art, and some history at Laney and Merritt Colleges, community colleges which seemed to have more actually useful information, where they didn’t tell you what was good to build, they just told you how to build. At the Ivy League, we were heavily told what’s good. I wanted to make up my own mind.

01-00:14:46 Farrell: Yeah, yeah, which I think is important, especially when people are learning and trying to come into the world in their own way.

01-00:14:52 Freeman: Yeah, exactly.

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01-00:14:54 Farrell: What drew you to Berkeley, to living in Berkeley?

01-00:14:59 Freeman: Because it seemed creative. It seemed like that it would be really an interesting place for people with—who are trying to develop their own ideas and be creative and imaginative. Of course, when I got to Berkeley, I found out, well, I must have had some fantasy about—the reality is that they didn’t put you in jail for having ideas, [laughs] but there wasn’t necessarily much support for it. That was the beginning of the hippie era.

01-00:15:43 Farrell: Yeah, I was just about to ask you, what year was this, about?

01-00:15:50 Freeman: I think I must have moved to Berkeley in ’64, because I celebrated—just about—I moved into Berkeley just about—just before my twenty-first birthday. So that would have been ’60—yeah, ’65, I guess.

01-00:16:14 Farrell: Okay, yeah, that’s mid-sixties.

01-00:16:15 Freeman: And then, of course the draft issues were there. I got interested in peace at that time.

01-00:16:23 Farrell: Yeah, and this was also kind of around the time where there’s the anti-nuclear protesting.

01-00:16:27 Freeman: That came a little later.

01-00:16:28 Farrell: It was later, okay.

01-00:16:29 Freeman: We got involved in that, but it was just a Vietnam War issue. It was right after the free speech movement. When I realized there was not much of an infrastructure for young artists or creative thinkers, at that time started the organization, it was for the arts and the environment at that point.

01-00:16:55 Farrell: Yeah, can you tell me a little bit more about that, about the Berkeley Creators Association?

01-00:17:00 Freeman: Well, I started it on a flat, on a 2500 square foot second floor above a laundromat, in an old building right on Shattuck Avenue, on Blake and Shattuck. I was essentially the building manager, and I just rented all the rooms out to artists or people involved in environmental stuff. I kept that

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going for thirty-nine years. That turned out to be tremendously valuable, having a very low-cost place to live where you’re amongst other creative people. Then—we started Friends of the High Sierra with my very first apprentice, who later became a friend and a colleague, Steve Rauh. Began this High Sierra backpacking camp for teenagers, called Friends of High Sierra. That was sponsored originally by the American Friends Service Committee, and then by Berkeley Creators. That’s where I got an interest in the effect the wilderness had—on all of us, on the kids and on the counselors, and that was sort of magical.

Then also that was the first time that we decided to add scholarships, because it was all kids whose parents had the money to send them away for two weeks. I said part of being at Berkeley Creators was to have a scholarship program. That was in 1974. That was one of the first of what later were called “inner city outings” by organizations like the Sierra Club. They changed the name again, but that’s pretty common now. But that was—well, of course we didn’t know what was going on all over the world at that time. We were only one in this area. We had a hard time getting kids referred on the scholarship program. Then I went to the Black Panthers Community School. The director came and looked at our slideshow, and she sent kids. That’s where we got our first scholarship kids. 01-00:20:01 Farrell: Who was the director at that point?

01-00:20:04 Freeman: Elaine Brown. I’m trying to remember if that is who it was. I think she was a poet.

01-00:20:11 Farrell: They were pretty receptive to the idea of inner city kids and this program?

01-00:20:17 Freeman: Yeah. Yeah, we’d go to the obvious places to start, the YMCA, YWCA and stuff, and they’d look at us and say, I mean, here are two guys in our twenties, saying—“You’re really going to send our kids up to the mountains with two white boys? I don’t think so.” [laughter]

01-00:20:40 Farrell: How did you convince them that this was—to go with you?

01-00:20:47 Freeman: Oh, we didn’t. We couldn’t. I had the same problem a little bit later when we started to try to get people—actually it was earlier than ’74, but we wanted to get kids from the Berkeley schools, when I was working with the Berkeley schools up into Tilden; it’s the same deal, there are snakes up there, or whatever. Elaine Brown and the Panthers were kind of visionary, and they just went for it.

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01-00:21:25 Farrell: Were there any leaders from the Black Panthers that went with you on these hikes? There was sort of like a liaison?

01-00:21:30 Freeman: No, it was just us two white boys and the other young counselors who didn’t really know what we were doing, in that race world. It worked out pretty well. There was one incident where there was some—a couple had been maybe cheerleaders, at Berkeley High, blonde girls. They were saying something racist. I had a fit, I mean, beyond what I should have had. Whatever I was, twenty-eight, that was the best I could do. It was really interesting because the richer kids got really upset, but the black kids, including the one from a professor’s family, they just figured I was telling it like it was, and getting mad. It was interesting to watch that.

01-00:22:43 Farrell: Yeah. You had also mentioned that you had seen the effect that these hikes had on these kids. Can you tell me a little bit about how you saw those experiences and hiking in the High Sierras changed students and impact their lives?

01-00:23:03 Freeman: Well, first of all, it would take them a while to get used to it. By the end of the trip, they were dirty. But they would start—some would start crying and they wouldn’t want to leave. We had—we ran it with a lot of talking and input, and had morning circles and morning readings. People got to talk based on the Quaker meeting model. We rotated all the jobs, everybody took care of everything. They would all come to some kind of realization about how the sort of city, civilized life compared with the values that they were experiencing. They wouldn’t talk about that exactly, but just their experience living together, but more just being in the wilderness. Then they wrote poetry, so we have some of the poems. One of them talked about this is a returning journey and coming home—same kinds of themes that Muir would write about. The Sierras and other mountains, I’m sure, have had the same influence on people.

01-00:24:25 Farrell: So I’m going to back up a little bit to when you met Tim Gordon in 1967. Can you tell me a little bit about how you met him?

01-00:24:37 Freeman: I think informally—so the naturalists at Tilden were in these little leftover work—WPA cabins. It was informal and friendly. I think Steve Rauh and I were just walking around and wandered in. He was there, we started talking to him. We became friends, then started to think about ways to involve—well, first just groups from Berkeley and then our Friends of the High Sierra kids, in the parks.

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01-00:25:35 Farrell: Just for the sake of context, Tim Gordon was a naturalist who worked in Tilden Park. What had brought you up to Tilden initially?

01-00:25:46 Freeman: Just it’s a local, wonderful park.

01-00:25:58 Farrell: Just exploring? Yeah.

01-00:25:59 Freeman: Exploring and going outdoors, and probably photography and being able to hike around.

01-00:26:13 Farrell: Mm-hmm. What were your first impressions of Tim when you met him?

01-00:26:15 Freeman: He had a great sense of humor. He’s a totally engaging storyteller, and had a similar innate view of what was going on, and bureaucracy.

01-00:26:39 Farrell: Do you remember what his view was? Or what made it unique, I guess?

01-00:26:47 Freeman: I remember one of the first things we were talking about was what’s now the environmental education center. I was interested in architecture and design. He took the model out of the shelf and put it down. They were just going to crunch all these old wooden cabins that had fireplaces, brick fireplaces, and build, right in the middle of this meadow, built this thing that looked like a space station, which was the cool architecture at the time. It had been designed, actually, for a different site. But somehow that didn’t work out, and they just took the same design and plunked it there. I think a lot of the naturalists weren’t particularly happy with it. I called it the “Man Against Nature Center,” because it was— [laughs] its first name was the Man and Nature Center, or something like that.

01-00:27:51 Farrell: That’s funny. What were some of the things about Tilden that makes it unique, I guess?

01-00:27:59 Freeman: Well, just that it was nearby, I think. But the personalities, and Tim’s particularly made it unique, because he’s a fantastic storyteller, and very astute about what’s going on in the landscape. We brought the kids from Friends of the High Sierra, because it occurred to me, why do we have to drive four hours to the Sierra when we have natural areas right here? We started off by deciding we were just going to hike from our office in Berkeley, coming with the kids from inside. I’d just go right up the nearest creek, which was Strawberry Creek.

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01-00:29:03 Farrell: Yeah.

01-00:29:07 Freeman: We just made our way up. We had to go along the chain link fence of the swimming and the Cal campus. It’s still exactly the same way. And the entrance to that trail is a dumpster. You can go up, and then finally there are some trails when you get up into Tilden. Then we—Tim said, how about if we worked on—at that time it was called “conservation,” we called it, but it was way ahead of the ecological restoration. At the parking lot in Tilden, people would just jump out of their cars and walk right across the lawn and down the bank of Wildcat Creek. There’s this huge swath of the bank that was just compacted and nothing growing, and eroding into the creek. Oh, and there used to be a bridge across to a trail, so they would be going to that bridge.

Tim had us build a narrower trail with a little fence made out of eucalyptus limbs, narrow ones that had been cut in the park. We made steps, what are called “water bars” to keep the erosion from happening. We went to the shoreline down here and got driftwood and made the steps out of the driftwood, you know, big chunks. Then Tim had us break up, really simple, with a pickaxe and stuff, just break up the soil and make a little fence around where it had been compacted. There was just this narrower path to the bridge. Then all the native plants that were around there just populated the broken up area; they didn’t have to plant anything, or anything. Then the little oak trees started growing there. Steve Rau and I have been going back and photographing ourselves in front of that oak tree. It was embarrassing, I don’t know, at thirty-five or thirty-eight years old, however old it is now, it’s still a young oak. 01-00:31:44 Farrell: Yeah, so you’ve been going back pretty much every year?

01-00:31:47 Freeman: Every few years when Steve—he lives in Canada now—when he comes to visit, we go up there and take a picture of ourselves in front of it.

01-00:31:51 Farrell: Oh, that’s fascinating. So you’re seeing it change over time?

01-00:31:55 Freeman: Oh, yeah, it even all filled out, and you’d never know that it had been compacted. The oak tree seemed like a big deal to us, but as things grew up around it, it was less and less prominent. Then at one point, a bay tree from the other side of the creek fell across onto the oak, but it missed the tree, where the limbs fell on each side of the tree.

01-00:32:27 Farrell: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow.

01-00:32:30 Freeman: Then you see us becoming old men, and this is still a young oak.

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01-00:32:39 Farrell: That’s so interesting. Did you get a sense from Tim that he was asked to make these trails? Or he was doing this on his own accord?

01-00:32:53 Freeman: Oh, no. He took the initiative and invented a lot of stuff, and he would, from time to time, get in trouble with the management because he’d just go ahead and do stuff. When I started—we started our ecological restoration major at Merritt College, geologist Gary Scott and I went up with a class and worked out having a class up there with Tim. Tim brought his adult volunteers. There were, like, fifty people turned up, but we designed a cascade to—what do you call it, a water—energy dissipater where a drainage underneath the dirt road up there had scoured out a huge hole the size of a house, and backed up kind of a marsh on the upside. This is typical all over California. On the downside, we built this stone cascade. I remember I went to some event where Mary Burke, who was a board member there, came up and said, “Well, a lot of people talk about stuff, you just do it.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. But later, dealing with top-down board issues, I understood what she was talking about, because what happened, it was very successful, and it worked beautifully. It was in the show that my wife Robbie Brandwynette put together. She thought of the idea of good news and worked with Tilden Naturalist James Wilson, they created the art exhibit she called “Celebration, an Illustration of the Successes of Conservation”. It included a photo of the Laurel Creek restoration cascade over the rock gabions. Bonnie Mager who was an oil painter in Oakland made a great painting from it which was in the show too. The Parks graphics office made a nice announcement poster out of her painting. I think this was 2012. This is the painting of it, an oil painting.

01-00:34:54 Farrell: Oh, cool! Perfect. It’s beautiful.

01-00:35:01 Freeman: But it didn’t get in the policy, it was sort of just was a one-off thing.

01-00:35:11 Farrell: Yeah. Then , so in 1970, you began putting together a project for a nonprofit. That was funded by Carol Sibley, who’s the wife of the founder of the Park District. That was for a summer camp program for early childhood learning. Can you tell me a little bit about the genesis of that project and what your visions for it were originally?

01-00:35:32 Freeman: Well, the school itself was in the research childcare center that you see Berkeley shared with the Berkeley School District, and it was just called Berkeley Summer, 1970. Carol Sibley’s husband was one of the founding directors, Sibley Park is named after him. Anyway, and that idea was to—it was an experimental childcare center, as I was working in the Berkeley schools, to have a teenager and adults learning the arts in the childcare center, different little workshops. The kids were left to kind of run free in between

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them; they weren’t told, “Now sit down,” “Now clean up,” whatever. We put food out and let the kids eat when they wanted, and they’d go to the bathroom when they wanted, we didn’t regulate them. It worked really well. That was what the summer program was about. Also, we did some community projects, design. I was part of the classes there. One of the things, as I tried to get a project going up in Tilden Park, we did something on the ship that went out to Alcatraz when the Indians were—

01-00:37:25 Farrell: Occupying it?

01-00:37:28 Freeman: Occupying it, yeah. We did some design for a clinic in a low-income area, so that was one of this—there’s a class in design. We tried to work up in the park. Carol Sibley arranged—she was at the top of the thing, Tim was there at the bottom. She said, “Oh, we’ll have lunch with Trudeau,” I forget his first name, who was the general manager at that time. We met at the Claremont Hotel and had lunch, and she introduced me. Then he had—I don’t know if Jerry Kent was his—I don’t think he was the assistant general manager yet. He was newly hired, but he was up there. So he had me meet Jerry Kent, who drove me around their trails in a jeep in Tilden.

01-00:38:30 Farrell: And Jerry was responsible for trail maintenance sites, is that correct?

01-00:38:36 Freeman: Well, at that time, the idea was that, yeah, that we would set up some kind of trail maintenance project.

01-00:38:44 Farrell: Oh, okay. What was Jerry Kent’s role?

01-00:38:49 Freeman: I don’t know what his actual job title then.

01-00:38:53 Farrell: Okay.

01-00:38:53 Freeman: He became the assistant general manager for a very long time. I can jump, I know one of your questions was about, what were these folks like?

01-00:39:11 Farrell: Yeah, I was just about to ask you what your first impressions of Trudeau were.

01-00:39:17 Freeman: Well, it was sort of an old Boy’s Club at that time. These were good old boys. Jerry Kent is very amiable, and he became kind of an expert later on fire, wildfires, and speaks on that still now, and gets them all—but that was part of

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the culture. That’s also how board members got chosen. They were vetted, and one of the—well, the Sierra Club, and then Sylvia McLaughlin, who now there’s a park named after her. She lived into her late 90s and was active all that time. I know I’m meandering time-wise, but they would invite potential board members up to be interviewed at her house, a big Spanish style house up in the hills. So that was part of the culture.

01-00:40:42 Farrell: At that point in time, what were some of the criteria that were involved in the board member selection?

01-00:40:49 Freeman: Well, that I didn’t know, you mean in the ’70s?

01-00:40:53 Farrell: Yeah, or I guess what types of people were on the board?

01-00:40:58 Freeman: Well, it’s generally retired nice, old white people, is the standard.

01-00:41:02 Farrell: Okay. [laughter]

01-00:41:06 Freeman: I got more aware and involved in the—when Whitney Dotson ran for the board. And it’s the board composition is changing now, so there’s younger people, and someone who actually worked in the parks.

01-00:41:36 Farrell: Okay. Yeah, we’ll [get to that].

01-00:41:39 Freeman: We’ll get to that?

01-00:41:37 Farrell: We’ll get to that. Yeah. Can you tell me about your first impressions of Jerry Kent?

01-00:41:43 Freeman: Well, he seemed really friendly, and eager. As I said, sort of amiable, good old boys. What I’ve learned from the sort of—he was near the top, was working for the general manager. What I learned later is that that’s true in the school district and everywhere in colleges, is that they don’t necessarily know that much about what’s going on, the ground, so it wasn’t particularly useful because neither one of us could figure out what to actually do. It wasn’t until we figured it out with Tim Gordon four years later, it would be back saying, here’s an actual project, here’s a physical location. Here are the tools, here is the day. We camped out there, Tim arranged so we could camp in some of the picnic areas up the hill. It was really interesting, because the park is supposed to close at 10:00, or wherever. Right about that time that we’d be in our

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sleeping bags, food on the tables covered with pots. Right about that time, the raccoons and the foxes, they’d all come out.

01-00:43:23 Farrell: They knew. [laughs]

01-00:43:23 Freeman: Yeah, and they’d be so mad that we were there.

01-00:43:28 Farrell: Was there ever a time where there was an incident where—

01-00:43:31 Freeman: No, no. I remember once having a dream, thinking there was an elephant roaring at me, and I woke up. There was this little tiny, red fox with huge ears, you know, about a few feet away, screaming at me, you know, what are you doing here? Get out of here, this is our campground! [laughs]

01-00:43:52 Farrell: Oh, that’s funny. That’s really funny. In 1974, the project with Tim Gordon and the Friends of the High Sierra campers to restore the Wildcat Creek bank got off the ground. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came together, and about the efforts with that project?

01-00:44:13 Freeman: Well, that was the result of thinking about nature in the city, and bringing the kids from Berkeley Creators and Friends of the High Sierra hiking right through the city, and going up. We talked with Tim and said, is there anything we can do? He said yeah, there’s this creek bank that needs attention. He arranged it. Steve and I set up, scheduled it with him, and we went up there several—repeatedly to work on it. I think we may have done some work on that bridge also.

01-00:45:04 Farrell: Can you tell me where Wildcat Creek is located, and then what about it needed to be restored?

01-00:45:13 Freeman: Well, it runs right through the front of the environmental education center. There’s a big watershed that starts up by the little train and goes all the way through Richmond, all through the hills, Richmond, and then out through Richmond to the bay. We worked on the section that I’d mentioned before, right by the parking lot, the same parking lot that’s there now.

01-00:45:55 Farrell: Mm-hmm. Then what needed to be restored?

01-00:46:02 Freeman: Well, as I mentioned, it’s the compacted—people had been running down to the bridge, and so there was a long part of the bank that was compacted earth

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from their running down the bank. It was causing erosion and no plants were growing, so that’s what we worked on the way, I said, by building that trail.

01-00:46:29 Farrell: Was the bridge also deteriorating?

01-00:46:32 Freeman: We did a little repair on the bridge, we replaced the two by fours on the handrail, and put natural limbs on there. That bridge has been removed since.

01-00:46:46 Farrell: Mm-hmm.

01-00:46:47 Freeman: They’ve closed the trail off entirely, because now there’s an official big restoration project, has been for a while on Wildcat Creek.

01-00:46:56 Farrell: How did you go about organizing the efforts to restore that area?

01-00:47:04 Freeman: Again, worked with Tim Gordon. He’s the one who had the idea.

01-00:47:08 Farrell: So you were working with him and Friends of the High Sierra, but are you sort of assigning people to do different tasks to restore it? Or kind of drawing on people’s strengths in certain areas?

01-00:47:20 Freeman: Well, these were kids. We would just go up there, set up camp, eat, turn up at the site and Tim would say, “Here, break this up, make a fence with this.” Steve and I would help organize it.

01-00:47:39 Farrell: Okay.

01-00:47:40 Freeman: Because we knew the kids and stuff. That was in ’74. It was ’89 when we were doing it with the college students, and that was a more sophisticated and complex design.

01-00:47:56 Farrell: I know this is kind of skipping ahead in the timeline, but can you tell me a little bit about the differences between that effort, the one in 1989 and the one in 1974?

01-00:48:07 Farrell: Well, by ’89, creek restoration had become a movement, had blossomed. We actually had a major—the first one in the country at Merritt College, that a colleague and I, several of us started. The very first creek was in the—oops— you know, in the Bay Area. It was the first major in the country, I think is a

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bit—was taught by Gary Scott, who is a geologist. As part of the class, Tim took us up, and we all looked at the erosion issue, and it was a major erosion issue, and all of that, because all of the erosion ended up in the detritus, the debris ends up dammed at Jewel Lake. Then they have to dredge Jewel Lake so it doesn’t just become a marsh. It has multiple impacts, and the creek banks fall in. What happens is that a tube culvert under the road focuses the water, and it’s like putting your finger on the end of a hose and aiming it at sand. It speeds up the erosion by factors of thirty-two and sixty-four.

01-00:49:41 Farrell: Wow.

01-00:49:39 Freeman: Just speeding the water up by a factor of two.

01-00:49:45 Farrell: Yeah.

01-00:49:47 Freeman: Together, we designed this gabions, wire baskets full of stones that were stacked up to catch the water as it came out of that tube. Then downstream, we made a wooden dam, it’s called a check dam that had a low cut in the top of it. What would happen is, the water would come cascading down and would hit the rocks and slow down, instead of scour out the sides. Then we planted willow waffles on the sides, and then the sides stabilized. Then the little dam that was made out of eucalyptus logs slowed the water even farther down, and the debris that was in the water already would catch behind there and drop there, and it would raise the bottom of the creek up, until eventually, the dam was about three and a half feet tall. It raised the bottom of the creek up three and a half feet.

01-00:51:04 Farrell: Oh, wow.

01-00:51:04 Freeman: Eventually the top of the dam disappeared.

01-00:51:09 Farrell: Yeah.

01-00:51:09 Freeman: It slowed the whole erosion down, and everything grew back instead of a big hole in the ground. It looked like a creek again with this cascade, when it was raining.

01-00:51:23 Farrell: What was causing the increased speed of water that led to the erosion?

01-00:51:27 Freeman: It was water running through a tube.

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01-00:51:30 Farrell: But I guess where was the tube coming from? Or how did it happen?

01-00:51:34 Freeman: Oh, the tube is the culvert that’s—they’re called “culverts,” but they’re just— it was instead of building a bridge, they just put a steel corrugated—I don’t know, it was, like, three-foot, two and a half-foot culvert, under the dirt road.

01-00:51:56 Farrell: Oh, oh. Got it. Okay. I see. I can visualize that now. So that was a man-made problem that you were [addressing]?

01-00:52:03 Freeman: Yeah, exactly.

01-00:52:03 Farrell: Okay.

01-00:52:05 Freeman: That’s the standard man-made problem all over the place.

01-00:52:08 Farrell: Yeah.

01-00:52:11 Freeman: It’s way cheaper to have a bulldozer just go in there, and grade the road, drop a culvert in, put dirt on top and keep going, rather than building a bridge and maintaining a bridge. Then it has that effect of squirting the water on the— you know.

01-00:52:26 Farrell: Yeah. Yeah. Then you also did a beach cleanup in 1975, so this is kind of backing up again back to the ’70s.

01-00:52:41 Freeman: Right. Well, this is just part of the same work with Tim and Friends of the High Sierra. He was moving us around. You know, it was an opportunity for the kids to go camping locally.

01-00:52:52 Farrell: Yeah.

01-00:52:54 Freeman: We would do work, so he arranged to have a campfire and clean up the beach out at Crown Cove.

01-00:53:07 Farrell: Where is Crown Cove?

01-00:53:08 Freeman: That’s in Alameda, so it’s on the bay. It’s the regional park. Well, I guess the whole beach is a regional park, but that’s the Nature Center there.

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01-00:53:23 Farrell: I know that you had mentioned previously about making connections with the Black Panthers in Oakland. But how did you see the program growing? How did you try to grow it over time? Tim’s keeping you busy and you’re doing more programs. Were you growing your membership base at that point, or your student base?

01-00:53:45 Freeman: Well, then I started teaching in the community colleges. After we started the ecological restoration and moved up to Merritt College, then I could bring the students we had work for us. They would learn in the real world, and we had places for field trips.

01-00:54:17 Farrell: Including your students, were you still going to—for some of the inner city kids, were they still going on these field trips and helping out with these programs?

01-00:54:31 Freeman: Well, by the time I was teaching with the community college, the community college does have a really diverse student body.

01-00:54:40 Farrell: Okay.

01-00:54:40 Freeman: I was hired on the tenure track when I was in my sixties. As Department Chair, I started hiring much more diverse faculty, and then our students got more diverse. Usually, restoration and nature and stuff is white people’s stuff. But our students got more diverse. More recently, we had kids from those neighborhoods where we’d been working.

01-00:55:16 Farrell: Yeah. It’s a good model to use for other places, too.

01-00:55:20 Freeman: Yeah.

01-00:55:21 Farrell: Did you have any memorable experiences from working on some of these restoration programs?

01-00:55:27 Freeman: Yeah, well, lots. I mean, one was just how much fun everybody had, moving rocks into those gabions. There were twenty tons of stones. We just lined up from the stone pile to a big, plastic tube that went down in the bottom of the hole, where the gabions were. We passed the stones along, and everybody’s singing, and they go down the tube. Then the people at the bottom would fill in the gabions. But also we had these Tree to Sea classes that one of our students, Josie Crawford, who now works for the California Native Plant

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Society—she suggested and named it. It’s called “Tree to Sea,” and we’d hike down all the East Bay watersheds, the whole watershed, and then go out in the water afterwards on a boat. You’ll have to tell me what you asked me again.

01-00:56:51 Farrell: Oh, if there are memorable stories or incidents that happened.

01-00:56:54 Freeman: Oh, yeah. We would bring high school kids along on that, because that was the beginning of training for—we eventually had a ranger naturalist major. That was the beginning of that. We would bring high school kids along so that the adult students would have a chance to interact with them. One day, we had this high school kid we had gotten recommended, who lived in a project near my house, and no phone. I’d have to go over there to talk to him. Really poor family. One of our other students was an executive with a big corporation. One of the things we do is go out sailing, or rowing or anything to get out on the water. There’s one time she offered her sailboat. She took groups out for the Oceanic Society.

We had a boat from the Cal sailing club and her sailboat. We went out in the bay and took depths and things, and talked about the bay ecology. But anyway, we come back and we’re on the dock, and I’m trying to count to make sure everyone’s there, and there were two missing. I look around and they’re down in the cabin of her boat. There’s this kid from the projects, and this corporate executive in her yacht, and they’re down there talking to each other, absolutely fascinated with each other, because they were both from a different planet. It was just so absolutely touching and wonderful to watch.

01-00:58:40 Farrell: Why were you interested in doing education programs, like, childhood education programs? What drew you to that?

01-00:58:54 Freeman: Well, I decided to go back to school after I left Brown and then went to these community colleges where I learned architecture and design and construction. I was also interested in psychology, and what’s the nature of human nature. I figured the easiest way to figure that out is to look at little native humans [laughs] and be with little kids. I got into education that way. But I also had, at the Berkeley Creators, I would run little seminars. I think a family is full of kind of natural teachers. I worked for the Berkeley schools in early childhood education. Then when I went back to Sonoma State, I got a degree in psychology and then a masters in early childhood education, and then learned a lot about—I mean, I had my own ideas about what could be done with education, but I learned a lot about how it can be a useful force in the world, from Professor Betty Halpern, who was there. That’s why I was always interested in education at every age level.

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01-01:00:31 Farrell: Yeah. Then, when did you begin teaching?

01-01:00:35 Freeman: Well, I began teaching at community college.

01-01:00:37 Farrell: At the community colleges, sorry.

01-01:00:38 Freeman: It must have been something like the ’70s, 1976 or something. I started teaching in what was environmental, an energy program at what’s now called Berkeley City College. At that time it was brand new, and it was called the Peralta College for Non-traditional Studies. Actually, the first class I taught was an arts career class, because I just wandered in and said I wanted to teach a class. I saw they had all these business classes, and this dean came out. That was before Proposition 13. They had a lot of money and they were trying to figure out what to offer that would satisfy Berkeley. I wanted to teach an art class, and I saw they had all these business classes, so I said right there, “Oh, the business of art.” He said, “Oh, great idea!” Anyway, that’s how I started.

01-01:01:44 Farrell: Oh, that’s funny. Then how did your course offerings develop over time?

01-01:01:53 Freeman: I would be teaching these career classes, and then I got involved with this energy—you know, I was designing and building in my own business. I started teaching classes related to that. Then my students were always way ahead of the faculty, way ahead of the administrators, so that they would come down and say, well, there’s this guy up in Merritt College who’s building a demonstration building. This is still in the late ’70s, I guess. Anyway, so I went up there, and we decided to merge the two programs and move them up to Merritt and make that an environmental center. I found myself using what I had learned about an early childhood education more and more in my adult classes; people don’t change. I don’t really give grades, I just give A’s. That takes out the—as one of my students said, “Oh, you’re not into obedience training.” I would just say any work that a student does, they do for their own interests, not just to please me. It’s not going to change their grade one way or another.

01-01:03:40 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:03:40 Freeman: They all have complicated lives. That worked out very well.

01-01:03:43 Farrell: Yeah.

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01-01:03:45 Freeman: Those were ideas that I had developed and wrote about in my master’s thesis in education, which is called—I have to pull it out to get the title—“Creating Peace: Education Integrated against Alienation.” That’s the theoretical background of what I’m working on, in a book we’re writing now with Steve Rauh, who is a psychologist.

01-01:04:17 Farrell: Oh, cool.

01-01:04:18 Freeman: Which is sort of the psychosocial environment for decision making, and how the environment and how the social environment affects the type and quality of decisions. We found that getting people involved in natural environments are doing hands-on things. Even we’ve done experiments by taking decision makers out to the Sierra, and it’s had a profound effect. I’ve used those same understandings, and I teach them in the classes and use the same understandings. That’s how we’ve got this project going on San Leandro Creek now. It took a long time to finally realize that just holding conversations and letting people make up their own minds about they would—we’d either take them up to see on site, or if you can’t do that, show photographs, but don’t say that we want you to do this, or what have you. People all respond very positively and just on their own say, “Oh, we can do this, I can do that. Let me help.”

01-01:05:30 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:05:32 Freeman: That’s a very different approach to a policy in politics than what’s taught in these organizational classes, in which you make demands and have an ask. I mean, you have to have that in mind.

01-01:05:49 Farrell: I want to talk about the San Leandro Creek plan in just a minute.

01-01:05:52 Freeman: Okay.

01-01:05:53 Farrell: Before that, so when you’re teaching, you’re also teaching and mentoring some students who went on to become East Bay Regional Park District employees. Do you remember any of those folks in particular? Or not really?

01-01:06:11 Freeman: Oh, no, I do. Well, some of them were employees and came, so we had Janet Gomes, who’s the supervising ranger still at Anthony Chabot, which is part of San Leandro Creek watershed. We had Eric Felmer, who was the president of the union at the time, and was a supervising ranger and retired.

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Then we had lots of students who go into the student—what do they call, there’s a student intern program, I forget the name.

01-01:07:10 Farrell: Like co-op program?

01-01:07:12 Freeman: No, they apply, and it’s well-known. It’s been going on for a long time. I can’t think of what it’s called in the parks right now. If you’re a college student, you can apply for a job for a trainee naturalist.

01-01:07:33 Farrell: Oh, interesting.

01-01:07:34 Freeman: We’ve seen Nancy Ceridwyn, who was a senior, older person, and she went through that. Terry—can’t remember her—was part of it. Then we had some of our African American students a long time ago, one of them got in—she got a full-time job. I’m having a senior moment. I don’t remember her name, I even knew her email address.

01-01:08:10 Farrell: We can also add this stuff in later, too.

01-01:08:11 Freeman: Yeah, okay. But there’s a naturalist Morgan Evans, now graduated from our program. She worked at Tilden as a student aide for a long time, then she actually got hired and is out at Big Break now. We’ll also place people at other park systems, so they can develop background and work in that kind of work.

01-01:08:40 Farrell: Yeah. Yeah. Was there any sort of most memorable experience working with somebody as a teacher, who either worked for or went on to work for the Park Department?

01-01:08:57 Freeman: Oh, that’s a good question. Well, one of our recent ones, we had this project in 2010 called Greenworks Development, where we worked on the Sobrante Park neighborhood, which is one of the most impacted low-income neighborhoods in Oakland, with lots of partners and city grant and Merritt College. It was a job training and education classes, college classes, for high school kids in that area. At that time, Jim O’Connor is the assistant general manager for operations, I guess. He was trying to diversify the workforce, and was looking for ways in bringing new applicants in. One of our kids, Jorge Valencio from that, who really stood out in that Greenworks Development Class, we got him to apply. He ended up getting a job, we worked with Human Resources at the district, make the entry requirements more appropriate for the population they’re trying to get in. Because typically the bottom rung of institutions is way above the top rung of the communities

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they’re trying to get involved in. They used to require essentially having a car and driver’s license, but kids from low-income communities certainly don’t have a car, and often don’t have a driver’s license. But anyway, they changed their requirements to make it more accessible. Jorge was the first one in that from our group, and that was—and we got to know him, and he took classes. That was really a nice thing to see happen. I would like to build on that and see that. That was just sort of a pilot.

01-01:11:18 Farrell: Yeah. It seems like you have a real interest in bringing in low-income or people of color into the Parks District and into the natural world. How do you think about that? How do you go about making that effort, aside from making connections with community liaisons? How do you make that engaging for people who don’t normally—aren’t the typical demographic?

01-01:11:45 Freeman: Well, everybody—well, not everybody—a lot of people like being outdoors. We try multiple things. I told you the story about getting the Panthers’ community school kids. Then sort of diversifying our faculty, then getting these grants to work with the schools in those neighborhoods, so we get to work with the kids and meet the kids there. Then I learned a lot from Carl Anthony, who’s one of the people that I helped get involved in environmental stuff. He was a leader of the environmental justice movement, and eventually got to be the grants manager for the International Environmental Program at Ford Foundation. I dragged him up as a guest lecturer to the Sierra Club lodge, as sort of a test on getting decision makers into that environment. That had a big effect on him. He’s African American, and he was one of the first people through Affirmative Action early on at Columbia actually, Columbia architecture.

01-01:13:20 Farrell: Oh, interesting.

01-01:13:22 Freeman: He’s brilliant. He would say he would be lecturing as a TA, and he’d look up, and there’d be all these faces at the door, and they were all looking in. The way he would say, “Look, a negro who can talk,” because just these assumptions of what people are like that you don’t even know.

01-01:13:42 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:13:43 Freeman: He taught me to bring race up. I mean, he would bring that up all the time. He would say, “You know, there’s never been a room that I’ve been in that there wasn’t a black person in it.”

01-01:13:56 Farrell: Because he brings race?

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01-01:13:58 Freeman: Well, because he’s the person. He’s the black person in it. [laughter] One thing, I just am honest and straight-forward with kids in high school, and say stuff like, we don’t know what we’re doing. You know, we’re trying something out. And they appreciate that.

01-01:14:20 Farrell: Yeah. Yeah.

01-01:14:22 Freeman: It’s not anything that’s unusual. Then you go out in the wild places and they just get totally engaged. We took middle school kids from Elmhurst out to Arrowhead Marsh. These were the kids that they were afraid were going to fail; it was an eighth grade science class, and their teacher was afraid they were going to fail and not graduate from middle school. We hiked them in a version of the Tree to Sea class from the hills down to the bay. They were totally involved and helpful, and kids who didn’t think they—hadn’t paid attention were suddenly just focused and getting the whole thing.

01-01:15:08 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:15:09 Freeman: It’s really rewarding.

01-01:15:10 Farrell: Yeah. What do you think some of the merits of site-based learning is? Or are?

01-01:15:13 Freeman: Well, all of that. That’s what my thesis is about, and our book is about, is that hands-on is how we are evolved to learn. Sitting in a row and desks and memorizing—you know, they’ve done learning, education research, and found, like, 10 percent of the population learn well with lecturing and books. But that’s the 10 percent who become teachers. You’re automatically leaving 90 percent of the people out. They see the real world, and that’s what we did with San Leandro Creek. We’d take the students out since 2008 and walk the creek, and go to the meetings and talk to people, and talk to planners and research, and get involved in restoration and cleanup. They learn a huge amount, and are able to figure out where they fit in the world. Then I do career classes, and a lot of it is just figuring it out what it is that you like doing, and then organizing your career search based on stuff you like doing. That hands- on stuff. In those classes, they’ll look at slides, they’ll look on all kinds of working venues. They’ll go online. But then we’ll go do stuff, and do stuff by hands and take tours. Then they just grade A, B, C if they like it, or don’t like it. Then I say, it’s not rocket science. Just get rid of the stuff you don’t like, except if you absolutely have to do something to get what you like, and focus on the stuff you do like. It works like a charm.

01-01:17:25 Farrell: Yeah. Yeah. Simple, but I’m sure super effective.

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01-01:17:32 Freeman: Yeah, and I tell people “this is science”. You’ve got a very sensitive instrument walking around with you, and it’s based on what you like and what you don’t like. You can tell, and you just record it.

01-01:17:49 Farrell: Yeah. Yeah. You did mention the San Leandro Creek plan, and you’ve been doing that since 2008. Can you tell me a little bit about that project, about, well, the genesis of that project? What brought you there in 2008?

01-01:18:09 Freeman: That was our Tree to Sea course. I was just hiking every watershed in the East Bay with my classes. We knew about them, because we’ve had this big Department of Water Resources Cal fed grant to start a watershed center at the college. Anyway, so we were just hiking, Tree to Sea, from the Hills to the bay. We would literally work on the rowing boats at Lake Merritt and put in wooden parts that were made from Douglas fir that was grown in the hills. But anyway, in 2008, that year, we went down the San Lorenzo Watershed, which is just south of San Leandro. Then we went down the San Leandro Watershed. I call it the “Voyage of Discovery,” some Europeans, white people like to discover stuff that’s been there. [laughter] The people have been living there for tens of thousands of years.

But anyway, it was the first time I had seen the whole thing, and I realized that it was open, all the way from Lake Chabot to Arrowhead Marsh, and Martin Luther King shoreline, the Bay Trail to the Ridge Trail, and the Ridge Trail connects the coast to Crest Trail up to the Mokelumne. Then that connects to the Crest—what is it called—the Pacific Crest Trail that goes from Canada to Mexico. So in theory, you could walk if we connect that—made the six-mile connection through the cities, or Oakland to San Leandro. You could walk from the bay to Canada or Mexico on trails or bike. He started with that sort of vision, and then he used this technique that I was developing of taking people out, or showing them slideshows, because we took a lot of photographs on these walks and just said, oh, look, here’s what’s there. Then they would start talking about what they’re interested in, and we got more and more people interested in, and organizations.

We just got two grants; one for 4.1 million and another one for $45,000 that we just heard about, to build the first part of the trail. We got this $200,000, $250,000 Cal Trans grant that I told you about earlier, that locates shows, the maps of where the trail could go on that six miles, so we’re doing the first 1.2 miles of that. This is what has the Ohlone history of living along that creek that Bev Ortiz got to write with the Ohlone tribal members. The consultants stuck it in at the end. It has been important to people reading it now. Now we’re trying to get the Regional Parks involved in managing and operating the trail after it’s built.

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01-01:21:34 Farrell: Phase two? Phase four?

01-01:21:37 Freeman: Phase four. Yeah, well, and we did this Greenworks Development, we did about $500,000 work before. The students have been involved in the planning all along. Yeah, so that, at the last minute we twisted the Flood Control District’s arm, and they were willing to take the grant on. Managing $4 million is a big project. They had the capacity. Their mission is to protect communities from floods, and protect their flood channels from the community. The idea of having the community involved in—they do have trails along their creek channels, but they’re operated by Parks Departments. So they want the Regional parks to take over, or the City of Oakland, and so we’re trying to negotiate that, because they definitely don’t want to build this thing and have to lock it up.

01-01:22:40 Farrell: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

01-01:22:45 Freeman: We’re trying to influence the staff and board at the Regional Parks to take on this mile. It’s just a direct continuation of the Bay Trail that they already manage, at Arrowhead Marsh.

01-01:23:04 Farrell: Over the course of your involvement with East Bay Regional Park District, can you tell me about what it’s been like to work with them?

01-01:23:16 Freeman: Well, as I said, working directly with the rangers and naturalists, front-line workers, has been very fruitful and engaging and interesting. Then I’ve had the opportunity, since I was from 1970 or whatever, when I worked with Carol Sibley, who was one of the founding members, I knew Sylvia McLaughlin. I’ve seen and know the people on the ground. I’ve seen the whole structure for however many years that is, something to get into the policy, where I was part of the North Richmond Shoreline Open Space Alliance, which created what’s now called Dotson Marsh. I got into that by meeting Whitney Dotson at the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, which, ironically, was formed by first graduates of Carl Anthony’s Urban Habitat.

Carl Anthony got involved in all that because we got him involved in the Sierra Club, and then the Earth Island Institute with Dave Brower. Sort of full circle. But anyway, I learned a lot from Whitney doing—you know, he says he sort of “finesses things;” he gets the conversations going and he just took people out to what was then called Breoner Marsh, everybody all the time, and got it on the newspapers. Then eventually, I watched how that worked, and the Park District was sort of hands-off. Then suddenly they said they were interested, and then just took over, and didn’t actually say what they were

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doing. They bought the land by eminent domain. That gentle persuasion, getting the conversation going, and then letting the staff and board figure out if and how they want to deal with something. Just pushing it doesn’t work, or it just makes people mad. So that’s what we’re doing. [laughter]

01-01:26:12 Farrell: What have been your biggest feelings of success while working with the Park District?

01-01:26:19 Freeman: Well, I guess watching this Dotson Marsh happen, and then helping with Whitney Dotson’s board, running for the board. Mostly it’s the working with the rangers and naturalists, and then looking back and seeing how much of the history of the parks that are involved. My wife and I had our wedding in the Brazil Room in 1978, in December. David Brower, who was one of the people,—and we had a lot of people at the wedding. As early as 1963, when I was working at Tuolumne Meadows, a friend of mine up and I there met James Roof, who started the Botanical Garden, where the California Native Plant Society was formed. Then the California Native Plant Society was the first organization that had an endangered and threatened species list, and that was the beginning of that kind of listing all over the country, for federal and local legislation. That’s behind a lot of restoration requirements. Coming full circle.

01-01:28:00 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:28:01 Freeman: He was an interesting character. As a nineteen-year-old and early twenties, I was looking for heroes and role models. We were up there, and he invited us into his VW camper. He was up there to collect samples, and invited us in for coffee. I was sort of impressed by his gruff, hands-on, honest vision of what could be done, even though everyone told him there’s no way you’re going to grow desert plants at a 900-feet elevation at Tilden Park. He managed to grow plants from all over California. I think that watching that sweep of history and then being able to pass it on to students and others is really fulfilling. It’s not any single victory, but just the long experience.

01-01:29:32 Farrell: Yeah. Is there any other ways that working with the Park District has been meaningful to you over time, that I guess you didn’t just talk about?

01-01:29:42 Freeman: Well, all of that, because it’s also my family history. We’re getting to reflections and hopes for the park for the future? Okay. [laughter]

01-01:30:21 Farrell: You got it.

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01-01:30:23 Freeman: Okay, well, to answer that question then, I’d like to say a couple of other things under the challenges and successes.

01-01:30:36 Farrell: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, please.

01-01:30:36 Freeman: Should I do that first?

01-01:30:38 Farrell: Yeah, please. Yeah.

01-01:30:38 Freeman: I think one of the major things that I’d like to see—oh, you’re going to ask that later, see what happened, but is—there’s a rich—it’s our intimate local knowledge that the rangers and naturalists have at every site, that the district owns. If the management were to use that information, they could significantly enrich and improve the whole system. Instead of bringing in outside consultants, or whatever, to actually spend more time finding out from the front-line employees what—not issues about union pay or anything, but just what’s going on in their parks, and with the visitors and what they would suggest happen. Those are the things that I would do with our classes, and they would work all the time—you know, they worked really well. Also, in one of my classes, I was fortunate to have Sharon Farrell—

01-01:32:20 Farrell: Not related, but—

01-01:32:20 Freeman: No? She’s one of the directors of the Conservancy for the Golden Gate National Recreation area. She worked both for the National Park Service and for the Conservancy. Luckily they were underfunded, so they depended on the volunteers and the citizens in San Francisco and Marin Counties to fund them. They have a very robust relationship with their staff and volunteers, and use them as consultants, actually, and will override other consultants, if the staff and volunteers say, “No, this is a better idea.” I think that would be a great way for the district to go and learn from them.

One example would be, I’ve worked both ends trying to develop a firewood training program in Merritt that would lower the costs of the fire management tree removal by splitting that wood, and using it for campfire wood that’s sold rather than paying to chip or haul the trees away and then boxing fire wood. They worked it out on the ground with the supervising ranger, and then talked about all this with the Diablo Firesafe Council. So we talked about these things that could happen with fire chiefs, and one of them was the Park District fire chief. I was at a meeting with management, and the fire chief said, “Well, we had some kind of thing that we were going to do with Merritt College that seemed like a really good idea.” What had happened is that the

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middle management between him and the supervising ranger had stopped the program. [laughs] There was no—the connection—I was the only person who knew what was going on at both ends.

01-01:34:38 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:34:41 Freeman: Those kinds of things could be—there’s a big opportunity for making things work really well.

01-01:34:52 Farrell: Mm-hmm.

01-01:34:57 Freeman: And I don’t know, you mention—oh yeah, just other opportunities as really involving more of the schools and colleges, universities, community organizations, churches, neighborhood organizations, especially ones that are near parks. And there’s not enough money or time—are we running out of—?

01-01:35:31 Farrell: No no, I’m just making sure, yeah.

01-01:35:32 Freeman: No? Oh, yeah.

01-01:35:33 Farrell: Because the lights are going down outside, so I’m just making sure.

01-01:35:35 Freeman: Oh, I see, it’s changing. Oh, okay. Who use and are adjacent to and look at the parks. They have more eyes on the acres, and they can help with restoration and fire management, and trail management, and could be trained and involved. The low-income communities pay taxes. Right now there’s a lot of money across the board, for helping low-income communities. I mean, that changes from time to time. It wouldn’t have to be just the Park District’s budget.

01-01:36:16 Farrell: Mm-hmm.

01-01:36:16 Freeman: That would reduce fire hazard and increase use and increase the protection and restoration.

01-01:36:31 Farrell: Yeah. Those are great suggestions.

01-01:36:36 Freeman: We wrote it up, we had a Cal fire grant, and we wrote that up in 2001, I guess. There has been a pilot up at Tilden, in Grizzly Peak, in a community group

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there, that one of our students was involved in. I knew about it that way. But that could become much more robust.

01-01:36:57 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:37:00 Freeman: Well, and that’s going to become more and more important. That’s a big deal with climate change. So at the shoreline, you’ve got sea level rise issues, which is what the San Leandro Creek plan can address. But in the hills, you’re going to have—that’s what we’re seeing right now—California, the sea level part is going to flood like Texas, and it’s going to burn at the other end. Even the informed people don’t—still seem to think that climate change is something that’s going to happen to the whole globe at once, and that there’ll be some devastating thing that’ll happen somewhere else, or on another planet. But that’s what’s happening in Santa Rosa and Southern California right now. That is climate change. Those—and it happened in 1991 in the firestorm here. It’s all the things that had been little fires; the winds are higher, there’s more vegetation from the rainy season, then it’s drier from the dry. It just gets more extreme. That’s why you get these devastating fire storms, and it’s just going to happen more and more. So getting all hands on deck is going to be really important to not burn down the parks and the cities.

01-01:38:37 Farrell: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Then were there any other sites of importance that you didn’t mention? Because I know we talked a lot about specific areas, but I don’t know if there’s any other places that you feel like are important?

01-01:38:47 Freeman: Well, obviously they’re all important. But for equity issues and sea level rise, the shoreline parks are really important, and getting access to those from the communities. Also, the east-west connector trails, so that you can be in the middle of the city and walk to a greenway, and walk either out to the bay or up to the hills, or ride a bike, and not have to get in your car.

01-01:39:26 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:39:28 Freeman: Or get on a real long bus ride. Of course, by, of course, near the shoreline. Not that near. Those are critical to develop. I think the general policy of buying— land banking that the district has, or buying land when you can, even if you don’t have the money to operate it as a park, I think that’s an important policy that they have, and should keep going. But also, there’s land which is more expensive, along the shoreline where that should be done. Then, my pet project right now, of course, San Leandro Creek and Arrowhead Marsh. Those are important for equity, because more than half the people who pay their taxes are people of color, for the parks. The parks are understanding that and trying to reach out. Then it’s very important for the healthy parks, healthy

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people. It’s very important for the health of those neighborhoods, and to share the beauty.

Another issue, it’s just more east-west connectors along the trails, along the watersheds. Creeks, there are eighteen major creeks, I think, in Western Contra Costa watersheds, and in Alameda County, where the Park District operates. Helping with that, I mean, it has to be in partnership with cities and flood control districts, and so on. But those pathways would be really important with linking neighborhood centers together, and trying to re-village the cities where people are being made paid attention to on a neighborhood scale. Urban planning right now looks at transportation corridors and engines of profit, basically. That’s it, those two things, and then public safety, in terms of police and fire. They don’t look at a broader sense of well-being, and health, mental health and physical health. That’s starting to leak in through public health agencies and stuff. But the parks could be a real—are and can be a huge asset in that area, of taking responsibility for that, because humans did not evolve to live in cities, and especially ugly ones.[A couple of summers ago I walked up San Leandro Creek from Arrowhead Marsh with Jeanny Wong. She is a hydraulic engineer. We climbed out after four hours of quiet down in the creek and we got disoriented by the busy city. It was what I felt like coming back from the two week trips in the Sierra Mountains. That is the magic parks provide; to find yourself while losing yourself with the bird calls and just the sky and meandering in the natural area with no roads or buildings or a sense of time. There is a sort of natural poetry to life which time spent in wild areas brings up in almost everyone. There is also a sense of appreciation of each other when we work together on our local lands. At the beginning of rangers and naturalists they said they were protecting the resource from the visitors and protecting the visitors from the resources. Making both of these things stronger is what I would like to see. These are special opportunities. We need more linked parks right in the cities.] 01-01:42:47 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:42:50 Freeman: We’re just, as a species, we’re just learning to live in cities. Because the first record of someone saying, “Hey, this city’s ugly, I want some nice plants in a park,” is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Is the king’s wife, who came from a rural area said, “We need some gardens.” So they actually put green roofs and pumped water up to them. That was 2500 years ago. But that was just for the court. Having what the Regional Parks do, it’s for everybody. That’s really important. So in terms of sites, that’s everywhere.

01-01:43:47 Farrell: Okay. Yeah. You’ve also given a lot of suggestions about your hopes for the park’s future. But is there anything else you want to add in that regard? Or even in your personal significance of working with the Park District?

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01-01:44:03 Freeman: Well, like I was saying, I guess it’s sort of a story of a landscape scale legacy, the Regional Parks. It has had thousands of often unknown and unintended positive consequences, wonderful consequences. It’s really a humane story. What I was saying, I think engaging robustly with a wide range of community organizations, and to be a force to connect the dots for even broader humane outcomes of urban living, because parks from literally being marginal on the outsides of the cities, and thought of as a secondary amenity, but not as important as a police department, that parks, hopefully in the future. The Regional Parks are a leader, they’re the oldest and one of the largest park districts in the world, that they move towards being the physical and spiritual connective tissue of urban places, that connects the dots.

01-01:45:32 Farrell: Is there anything else you want to add?

01-01:45:36 Freeman: I can look through my notes, see if I left stuff out. I think you had asked some about inspirations.

01-01:45:51 Farrell: Oh, yeah.

01-01:45:54 Freeman: I mentioned some of those people. I was taken by the arts and crafts movement, and architect Bernard Maybeck, who is an intellectual crafts person and a designer, and I wanted to sort of do that, responding to the natural environment and social responsibility, that whole movement was— you know, that’s where parks—interest in parks in the United States started with that group. Gandhi went through the arts and craft movement in England, and then took that to South America, and then India.

01-01:46:23 Farrell: Yeah. I did not know that.

01-01:46:30 Freeman: They had a big effect. I mean, it was educated classes, and then I had my own mentors, there was a potter, Jane Spangler; my first organization I was in was the Berkeley Art Festival Guild, that put art shows in parks in Berkeley.

01-01:46:53 Farrell: Oh, cool.

01-01:46:53 Freeman: Katherine Webb was a button maker. She lived in a magical house next to the forest on Albany Hill, Katherine Webb did. There’s a trail there named after her now. I was saying, oh, when I figure out how to get money, I want to do this and this and the other thing. She said, “Don’t wait for the money. Just start doing it, and the money will follow.” She was right. That’s what I tell my interns and staff now. I guess one of the successful things that, related to crafts

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festivals, and initiated this Berkeley Creator’s Association that eventually started Friends of the High Sierra and then ended up working in the parks was that we held crafts festivals on the U.C. campus on Lower Sproul Plaza, right after the free speech movement at the time of People’s Park, when Reagan was dropping tear gas on students.

01-01:48:20 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:48:22 Freeman: They were actually shooting people on the Telegraph, the sheriffs. We decided that we’d come in with a peaceful thing, because at that time there was the counterculture, and the hippies and the straight people, and establishment. I thought, well, the hippie crafts people can sell Christmas presents to establishment people working on campus, and that will be a peaceful interaction. It would also try to influence the city council to allow craftspeople to sell on Telegraph Avenue. It was right after the free speech movement. That did open up a campus, and then it opened up Telegraph Avenue, and then it worked. So I started seeing how you could influence boards and commissions.

01-01:49:30 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:49:33 Freeman: I think that it.

01-01:49:38 Farrell: Yeah, you were able to take that forward with you.

01-01:49:40 Freeman: Yeah, yeah. The organization we started there then supported the Friends of the High Sierra, and all that.

01-01:49:50 Farrell: Yeah.

01-01:49:52 Freeman: That was the Berkeley Creators, that. We became a nonprofit. I think that’s pretty much covers it.

01-01:50:09 Farrell: Okay. Well, yeah, you can always add some more stuff later, too, if you find that you feel like you left some stuff out.

01-01:50:16 Freeman: Okay.

01-01:50:19 Farrell: But thank you so much for your time, and for sharing all of your information.

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01-01:50:21 Freeman: Well, you’re welcome.

01-01:50:22 Farrell: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

01-01:50:23 Freeman: Thank you for sitting through it.

01-01:50:27 Farrell: Absolutely.

[End of Interview]