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University  of  California  •  Berkeley 


Regional  Oral  History  Office 
The  Bancroft  Library 


University  of  California 
Berkeley,  California 


David  E.  Pesonen 

ATTORNEY  AND  ACTIVIST  FOR  THE  ENVIRONMENT,  1962-1992: 
OPPOSING  NUCLEAR  POWER  AT  BODEGA  BAY  AND  POINT  ARENA, 
MANAGING  CALIFORNIA  FORESTS  AND  EAST  BAY  REGIONAL  PARKS 


With  an  Introduction  by 
Phillip  S.  Berry 


Interviews  Conducted  by 

Ann  Lage 
1991  &  1992 


Copyright  ©  1996  by  The  Regents  of  the  University  of  California 


Since  1954  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  indexed,  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  David  E. 
Pesonen  dated  February  12,  1992.  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.  No  part 
of  the  manuscript  may  be  quoted  for  publication  without  the  written 
permission  of  the  Director  of  The  Bancroft  Library  of  the  University 
of  California,  Berkeley. 

Requests  for  permission  to  quote  for  publication  should  be 
addressed  to  the  Regional  Oral  History  Office,  486  Library, 
University  of  California,  Berkeley  94720,  and  should  include 
identification  of  the  specific  passages  to  be  quoted,  anticipated 
use  of  the  passages,  and  identification  of  the  user.  The  legal 
agreement  with  David  E.  Pesonen  requires  that  he  be  notified  of  the 
request  and  allowed  thirty  days  in  which  to  respond. 

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


Dvid  E.  Pesonen,  "Attorney  and  Activist 
for  the  Environment,  1962-1992:  Opposing 
Nuclear  Power  at  Bodega  Bay  and  Point 
Arena,  Managing  California  Forests  and 
East  Bay  Regional  Parks,"  an  oral  history 
conducted  in  1991  and  1992  by  Ann  Lage, 
Regional  Oral  History  Office,  The  Bancroft 
Library,  University  of  California, 
Berkeley,  1996. 


Copy  no. 


David  Pesonen,  fishing  trip,  1963. 

Photo  by  Julie  Shearer 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS --David  E.  Pesonen 

INTRODUCTION- -by  Phillip  S.  Berry                                     i 

INTERVIEW  HISTORY  ill 

BIOGRAPHICAL  INFORMATION  vi 


FAMILY,  BOYHOOD,  AND  EDUCATION  1 


Influences  of  Parents  and  Places  1 


A  Boy's  View  of  the  Attack  on  Pearl  Harbor  and  its  Aftermath  4 

Father's  Career  with  the  Bureau  of  Reclamation  9 
Physics,  Poetry,  the  Outdoors,  and  the  French  Foreign  Legion: 

Youthful  Interests  13 

Firefighting  for  the  Forest  Service,  1953-1954  15 

Forestry  Student  at  Berkeley,  1955-1960  19 

II  EARLY  JOBS  AND  INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  ISSUES  AT  BODEGA  BAY  25 

UC's  Wildlands  Research  Center  and  Stegner's  Wilderness  Letter  25 
Staff  Member  for  Assembly  Fish  and  Game  Committee:  Counting 

Deer  Tags  for  Pauline  Davis  29 

Working  for  Dave  Brower  and  the  Sierra  Club,  1961-1962  31 
A  Summer  of  Waiting  and  Writing,  1962:  Security  Clearance 

Problems  for  United  Nations  Job  and  Atomic  Park  Articles  34 

New  Left  Philosophies  and  Bodega  Bay  38 

Public  Power  vs.  Private  Power  and  the  Bodega  Issue  40 

Sierra  Club  Representative  to  PUC  Hearings  on  Bodega,  May  1962  42 

Focusing  on  Seismic  Hazards  and  Quitting  the  Sierra  Club  Staff  45 

III  CAMPAIGN  TO  PRESERVE  BODEGA  HEAD  AND  HARBOR,  SUMMER  1962- 

FALL  1964  49 

A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park  49 

Rallying  Public  Opinion:  The  November  10  Forum  53 

Saint -Amand  and  the  Earthquake  Fault  58 

Relations  with  PG&E  62 

Role  of  Udall's  Department  of  Interior  65 

Keeping  Bodega  in  the  News:  Memorial  Day  Concert  and  Balloons  66 

Growing  Doubts  about  Site  Safety  and  PG&E  Pullout,  October  1964  70 

Stance  of  Governor  Pat  Brown  and  Democratic  Party  Officials  74 

The  Technical  and  Human  Problems  with  Nuclear  Power  77 

IV  MORE  REFLECTIONS  ON  THE  BODEGA  CAMPAIGN  AND  ITS  AFTERMATH  82 
Pioneers  of  Sixties-Style  Activism  or  Pragmatic  Campaigners?  82 
Some  Key  Figures:   Doris  Sloan,  Joe  Neilands,  Charlie  Smith, 

Sam  Rogers  85 

Attorney  Barney  Dreyfus  and  the  Use  of  Lawsuits  at  Bodega  89 

Rose  Gaffney:  A  Fearless  Volcano  94 

The  Role  of  the  University  of  California  96 

Speculations  on  Conspiracies  and  Phone  Taps  99 

Looking  Back:  The  Disembodied  Evil  of  Industrial  Civilization  101 


Influences  of  the  Bodega  Experience  on  PG&E  103 

Personal  Impacts  of  the  Bodega  Campaign  104 

Law  School:  UC's  Boalt  Hall,  1965-1968  106 

Defending  People's  Park  Activist  Dan  Siegel  108 


V  ATTORNEY  IN  THE  FIRM  OF  GARRY,  DREYFUS,  McTERNAN,  AND  BROTSKY  112 
The  Partners  and  Clients  in  a  Radical  Old-Left  Firm  112 
Peripheral  Role  in  Black  Panther  Defense  116 
Defending  Point  Arena  from  a  PG&E  Nuclear  Power  Plant,  1972-1973   119 

The  Svengali  of  the  Antinuclear  Power  Movement?  120 

A  Seismically  Interesting  Problem  122 
Unfavorable  Publicity  and  PG&E's  Swift  Abandonment  of 

Point  Arena  123 

The  Sierra  Club,  Ike  Livermore,  and  Nuclear  Power  126 

Defending  Public  Access  to  Beaches  129 

The  Widener  Case:  Another  Encounter  with  PG&E  130 

A  Libel  Case  in  the  Interests  of  Free  Speech  133 

A  Corrupt  Judge,  a  Sympathetic  Jury,  a  Final  Settlement  136 

Defense  of  Mount  Sutro  and  the  City  of  Davis  138 

The  Disturbing  Saga  of  Charles  Garry  and  the  People's  Temple  142 

First  Suspicion  of  Evil  in  the  Temple  143 

Garry's  Trip  to  Guyana,  November  1978  146 

A  Difficult  Decision  to  Leave  the  Garry  Firm  148 

VI  INITIATIVE  CAMPAIGN  FOR  THE  NUCLEAR  SAFEGUARDS  ACT,  1973-1976  152 

Presumed  Dead  152 

Genesis  of  the  Idea  for  Initiative  Effort  in  California  153 

A  National  Antinuclear-Power  Network  153 

Ed  Koupal  and  the  Art  of  Signature-Gathering  155 

Assemblyman  Charles  Warren's  Encouragement  156 

Early  Efforts  by  Koupal,  Duskin,  and  the  People's  Lobby  157 

Pesonen's  Emergence  as  Leader  of  a  New  Campaign,  1975  159 

The  Role  of  Creative  Initiative  in  Qualifying  the  Ballot  Measure   162 

First  Meeting  with  an  Extraordinary  Organization:  Funds 

and  Personal  Resources  162 

A  Sense  of  Uneasiness  169 

Organizing  in  Southern  California  170 

The  "Defection"  of  Three  General  Electric  Nuclear  Engineers  171 

Leadership  and  Nature  of  Creative  Initiative  173 

An  Intense  Political  Campaign  to  Pass  Proposition  15  177 

Safe  Nuclear  Power  or  No  Nuclear  Power?  178 

Effect  of  the  Warren  Legislation  on  the  Campaign  179 

Inspiring  and  Assisting  Efforts  in  Other  States  183 

Jerry  Brown  and  a  Debate  on  Nuclear  Power  in  San  Francisco,  1976   184 

VII  MANAGING  CALIFORNIA'S  FORESTS  IN  THE  JERRY  BROWN  ADMINISTRATION  188 
Serving  on  the  State  Board  of  Forestry,  1977-1979  188 

The  Redwood  Park  Issue  190 

Chairman  Henry  Vaux  and  Board  Members  192 

Regulating  Non-Point  Sources  of  Pollution  194 

Appointment  as  Director  of  the  Department  of  Forestry,  1979  199 


Secretary  for  Resources  Huey  Johnson  202 

Restructuring  the  Department's  Staff  and  Management  Systems  205 

Women  and  Minorities  in  the  Department  206 

Management  by  Objectives  209 

Renewable  Resource  Programs  211 
The  Fire  Fighting  Organization:  Acquiring  Air  Force  Helicopters   213 

Dismantling  the  State  Fire  Fighting  Program  in  Orange  County  217 
Sources  of  Tension  between  the  Director  and  Department  Employees  222 

Relations  with  Timber  Companies  and  the  Legislature  223 

Inspecting  Fire  Services  at  Diablo  Canyon  Nuclear  Power  Plant  229 

VIII  SUPERIOR  COURT  JUDGE,  CONTRA  COSTA  COUNTY,  1983-1984  236 
Midnight  Appointment  by  Jerry  Brown,  to  the  Wrong  Court  236 
Swearing-in  Ceremonies,  Sacramento  and  Martinez  240 
Preparing  for  the  Bench,  Hearing  Cases  243 
Two  Politically  Crucial  Sentencing  Decisions  247 
Putting  Together  a  Political  Campaign  250 
Serious  Illness,  Poor  Press,  Election  Loss  253 

IX  EAST  BAY  REGIONAL  PARK  DISTRICT  GENERAL  MANAGER,  1985-1988:  THE 
ORGANIZATION  AND  ITS  POLITICS  259 
An  Interim  Position  in  Sterns  Law  Firm  259 
Hired  by  the  Park  District;  Reorganizing  the  Staff  260 
Political  Controversies  and  the  Politics  on  the  EBRPD  Board  263 
Elected  Board  Members:  Intrigue  and  Interference  267 
A  Fatal  Mistake  and  More  Intrigue  269 
Leaving  the  Park  District  Position  274 
Conflicting  Views  of  the  District's  Mission  276 
Negotiating  the  Acquisition  of  Ferry  Point  in  Martinez  280 

X  LAND  ACQUISITION  AND  PARK  PLANNING  AND  MANAGEMENT  AT  EBRPD  284 
Financing  Acquisitions  with  State  Grants  and  Revenue  Bonds  284 
The  Regional  Park  District  and  the  Oakland  Zoo  288 
Ardenwood  Regional  Park  290 
Relations  with  Park  Field  Staff  and  Unions  293 
Quiet  Victories  in  Chabot  and  Sunol  Parks  294 
Reorganizing  the  Interpretive  Program  300 
Lack  of  Support  from  the  Board  for  Promoting  the  Parks  302 
Working  with  City  Officials  and  Environmental  Organizations  305 
Parks  for  the  People  or  "Nimby"  Preserves  307 

XI  RECENT  WORK  AS  A  PRIVATE  ATTORNEY  310 
Mediating  the  Dispute  between  the  Sierra  Club  and  the  Sierra 

Club  Legal  Defense  Fund  310 
The  State  Farm  Sex-Discrimination- in-Hiring  Case:  Managing  the 

Remedy  Phase  319 


TAPE  GUIDE  327 


APPENDICES  329 

A.  Karl  Kortum  letter  on  Bodega,  San  Francisco  Chronicle.  3/14/62  330 

B.  "The  Battle  of  Bodega  Bay,"  by  David  Pesonen,  Sierra  Club 

Bulletin.  June  1962.  331 

INDEX  332 


INTRODUCTION- -by  Phillip  S.  Berry 

The  familiar  chest  x-ray  taken  anterior-posterior--"A-P, "  fore  and 
aft,  straight  on  through  the  patient--is  usually  good  enough  for  most 
diagnostic  purposes.   Less  familiar  is  the  oblique  angle  shot,  not  so 
frequently  used  but  at  times  much  more  informative,  particularly  for  fine 
and  subtle  distinctions. 

That  my  own  thinking  more  often  follows  an  A-P  approach  is  probably 
one  reason  I  have  enjoyed  so  much  my  thirty-five-year  friendship  with  David 
Pesonen,  master  of  the  oblique  insight.  Always  catching  subtleties  others 
miss,  Dave  has  that  ability  to  see  the  unusual  angle  —  a  talent  much  needed 
by  those  who  start  public  movements  or  innovate  in  public  policy. 

In  the  early  1960s  serious  questioning  of  so-called  peacetime  uses  of 
nuclear  power  had  barely  begun,  and  Dave  was  one  of  those  few  who  kick- 
started  the  movement  to  test  the  safety  standards  (which  proved  dismally 
insufficient),  pop  the  balloons  of  the  industry  experts,  and  arouse  a 
quiescent  public  to  the  dangers  and  incredible  costs  of  generating 
electricity  with  atomic  power. 

Starting  with  the  Bodega  Head  fight- -which  without  him  would  have 
been  merely  a  skirmish  quickly  lost  by  environmentalists  and  nuclear 
doubters—Dave  pioneered  a  movement  which  has  ended  with  the  nuclear  power 
industry  on  its  knees,  the  victim  of  its  own  inflated  promises,  dangerous 
oversimplifications,  and  stupendous  costs. 

I  wish  I  could  say  the  Sierra  Club  was  fully  with  Dave  for  all  that 
battle,  which  started  when  he  was  a  lower  level  club  staff  member  seeking 
to  forestall  approval  for  a  PG&E  plant  at  Bodega  Head,  sited  directly  over, 
as  later  discovered,  an  active  earthquake  fault.   The  club  was  then  in  the 
process  of  change,  and  its  leadership  balked,  taking  the  now  (and  to  me 
then)  incomprehensible  position  that  nuclear  power— and  safety— was  not  a 
conservation  issue.   Dave  quit  his  club  job  and  continued  on,  with  a  few 
hardy  allies,  but  clearly  he  was  the  real  leader  against  the  plant.   He  saw 
every  angle  to  exploit  and  explored  every  weakness  of  his  utility 
adversary. 

It  was  almost  ten  years  later  that  the  club  board  of  directors,  in  a 
divided  nine  to  six  vote  on  my  motion,  adopted  the  position  implicit  in 
Dave's  early  views:   nuclear  power  could  be  approved  only  when, 
overwhelmingly,  safety  is  affirmatively  demonstrated  and  the  waste  problem 
permanently  resolved.   Both  these  problems  remain  unresolved  thirty  years 
later. 

Dave  brought  to  the  Bodega  Head  fight,  and  every  succeeding  effort 
which  spanned  many  conservation  matters  of  great  importance,  an 
overwhelming  sense  of  purpose,  a  keen  mind,  skill  at  guerrilla  fighting, 


ii 

and  a  doggedness  in  the  face  of  adversity  which  I  still  see  as  a  foremost 
trait  in  my  fishing  and  camping  companion  of  many  years  now. 

Dave  did  much  after  Bodega.   His  fault  finding  continued  with 
inadvertent  help  from  PG&E,  whose  engineers  seemed  to  have  an  unerring 
instinct  for  siting  proposed  nuclear  plants  directly  over,  or  too  close  to, 
theretofore  undiscovered  but  significant  geologic  faults.   He  quickly 
defeated  two  more  plant  proposals,  bringing  his  total  of  nuclear  "scalps" 
to  a  record  level. 

Dave's  years  as  California  Department  of  Forestry  chief  and  later  as 
head  of  the  East  Bay  Regional  Park  District  were  marked  by  the  same  ability 
to  see  and  do  things  not  obvious  to  others.   His  imaginative  legal 
strategies  to  save  old  growth  plus  a  buffer  for  expansion  of  Redwood 
National  Parks  succeeded  brilliantly.   The  loggers'  most  forceful  spokesman 
wrote  in  1983: 

By  the  early  sixties  the  Sierra  Club  was  completing  its 
transition  from  an  organization  primarily  concerned  with 
outdoor  wildland  enjoyment  to  environmental  activism.   The 
battle  of  the  Sierra  Club  vs.  the  California  Tree  Farmer  was 
begun.   It  was  a  battle  in  which  the  Tree  Farmer  was  outclassed 
and  out-maneuvered  and  he  never  won  a  single  skirmish.   Phil 
Berry  and  David  Pesonen  were  both  first  heard  in  1962  in 
testimony  representing  the  Sierra  Club  calling  for  stricter  and 
more  rigid  regulation;  a  song  they  continue  to  sing  up  to,  and 
including,  this  very  day. 

Who  else  but  Dave  would  have  suggested  that  the  State  Forestry  take  over 
the  task  of  preserving  the  great  elm  trees  lining  Sacramento  streets, 
simply  to  save  energy  through  the  cooling  shade  they  provided?  Who  else 
would  have  audaciously  proposed  that  the  park  district  join  an  Interstate 
Commerce  Commission  proceeding  to  oppose  a  major  rail  abandonment,  with  the 
result,  through  eventual  settlement,  that  the  old  right-of-way  became  a 
public  park?  A  few  examples,  and  I  can  give  many  more,  wherein  Dave  saw  a 
way  through  the  complex  maze. 

I  wish  at  times  Dave  appreciated  more  my  predominantly  "A-P" 
approach.   Then  I  might  not  so  often  have  to  correct  his  misreading  of 
topographic  maps.   He  might  even  give  up  insisting  that  we  delay  to  make 
coffee  when  the  fish  are  biting  early  in  the  morning. 

But  may  he  never  lose  his  trademark  "obliqueness."   It  has  served  him 
and  us,  the  conservation  movement,  very  well  indeed. 


Phillip  S.  Berry,  Esq., 

Sierra  Club,  Vice  President,  Legal 


Oakland,  California 
September  1996 


ill 


INTERVIEW  HISTORY 


Best  known  for  his  highly  visible  leadership  role  in  the  battle  to 
defeat  a  PG&E  nuclear  power  plant  at  Bodega  Bay  in  the  early  1960s,   David 
Pesonen  has  had  a  less  visible  but  much  longer  thirty-five  year  career  as 
environmental  activist,  manager,  and  attorney.   Because  of  his  importance 
to  the  history  of  the  environmental  movement,  the  Regional  Oral  History 
Office  urged  the  California  State  Archives  Oral  History  Program  to  record 
his  work  in  state  government;  we  then  expanded  the  project  to  a  full  oral 
history  documenting  his  varied  life  and  career. 

David  Pesonen 's  first  job  as  a  graduate  of  UC  Berkeley's  School  of 
Forestry  was  with  the  UC  Wildlands  Research  Center,  working  on  a  Wilderness 
Report  for  the  Outdoor  Recreation  Resources  Review  Commission.   His  brief 
stint  with  the  Center  resulted  in  a  lasting  contribution  to  wilderness 
literature.   Struggling  to  complete  his  section  of  the  report,  on 
wilderness  as  an  idea,  Pesonen  enlisted  the  help  of  Wallace  Stegner,  a 
writer  whom  he  did  not  know  but  whose  work  he  admired.   Pesonen 's  request 
struck  a  cord  with  Stegner:  the  result  of  his  entreaty  was  Stegner 's  famous 
Wilderness  Letter  (to  David  Pesonen,  dated  Dec.  3,  1960).   Stegner  later 
said,   "This  letter,  the  labor  of  an  afternoon,  has  gone  farther  around  the 
world  than  other  writings  on  which  I  have  spent  years." 

Not  long  after,  David  Pesonen  was  hired  as  conservation  editor  by 
David  Brower,  then  executive  director  of  the  Sierra  Club.   One  of  his 
assignments  was  to  represent  the  club  at  the  May  1962  hearings  of  the 
Public  Utility  Commission  on  PG&E's  plans  to  build  a  nuclear  power  plant 
north  of  San  Francisco  at  the  quiet  harbor  of  Bodega  Bay.   He  emerged  as 
leader  of  what  seemed  to  be  a  quixotic  campaign  by  the  north  coast  locals 
to  defeat  the  utilities  giant,  and  two  and  one-half  years  later  his  group, 
the  Northern  California  Association  to  Preserve  Bodega  Head  and  Harbor, 
celebrated  PG&E's  abandonment  of  the  Bodega  plan.   In  his  oral  history 
David  Pesonen  recalls  in  detail  the  decisive  moments,  strategic  decisions, 
publicity  efforts,  and  inspired  leadership  of  that  first  significant 
citizens'  battle  over  nuclear  power.   Jazz  concerts,  picnics,  "radioactive" 
balloon  releases,  picketing,  legal  action,  Sacramento  lobbying,  expert 
scientific  testimony—all  were  part  of  the  success  of  the  Bodega  campaign 
and  all  influenced  the  many  environmental  campaigns  to  come  later  in  the 
sixties  and  seventies. 

Motivated  by  the  Bodega  experience  to  become  an  attorney,  David 
Pesonen  attended  UC  Berkeley's  Boalt  Law  School.   He  then  joined  the  San 
Francisco  firm  of  Garry,  Dreyfus,  McTernan,  and  Brotsky,  a  radical  old-left 
law  firm  committed  to  political  causes.   During  this  period  he  continued 
his  work  in  opposition  to  unsafe  nuclear  power,  helping  the  Sierra  Club 
defeat  a  PG&E  nuclear  plant  at  Point  Arena  on  the  northern  California  coast 
and  running  the  campaign  for  the  Nuclear  Safeguards  Initiative  of  1976. 


iv 

This  latter  three-year  effort  was  defeated  by  the  voters  but  prompted 
strong  legislation  that  accomplished  most  of  its  aims.   It  was  another  nail 
in  the  coffin  of  the  nuclear  power  industry  in  California,  as  well  as  an 
early  and  imaginative  effort  to  use  the  initiative  process  to  further  the 
environmentalist  agenda.   The  oral  history  also  gives  his  perspective  on 
the  Charles  Garry  law  firm  and  Garry's  involvement  with  the  Black  Panther 
Party  and  the  tragedy  of  the  People's  Temple  at  Jonestown. 

In  1977,  Pesonen  returned  to  his  forestry  profession  as  a  member  of 
the  State  Board  of  Forestry,  then  chaired  by  UC  Professor  of  Forestry  Henry 
Vaux.   In  1979,  he  was  appointed  by  Governor  Jerry  Brown  to  head  the 
Department  of  Forestry,  leaving  at  the  end  of  the  Brown  governorship  to 
become  a  superior  court  judge.   Later  he  served  for  three  years  as  general 
manager  of  the  East  Bay  Regional  Parks  (1985-1988).   His  reflections  on 
these  two  managerial  positions  illuminate  the  complex  organizational  issues 
and  personal  dynamics  within  two  very  different  public  agencies,  as  well  as 
the  environmental  and  resource  management  issues  confronted,  from  fire- 
fighting  to  resource  renewal,  from  land  acquisition  to  interpretative 
programs. 

The  Pesonen  oral  history  also  contributes  to  legal  and  judicial 
history,  with  its  discussion  of  his  appointment  and  service  as  superior 
court  judge  in  Contra  Costa  County  (1983-1984)  and  his  work  as  an  attorney 
in  private  practice. 

The  eight  interview  sessions  were  conducted  from  December  1991  to  May 
1992,  a  total  of  fifteen  tape-recorded  hours.1  David  was  familiar  with 
oral  history  and  the  Regional  Oral  History  Office  because  his  former  wife, 
Julie  Shearer,  was  a  longtime  oral  historian  at  ROHO.   They  had  met  and 
married  during  the  Bodega  campaign,  which  Julie  covered  as  a  reporter  for 
the  Mill  Valley  Record.   Julie's  recollections  of  Bodega  and  later  events 
were  a  helpful  source  of  information  for  the  interviewer.   Preparation  for 
the  interviews  included  research  in  the  Sierra  Club  records  and  Joel 
Hedgpeth  papers  in  the  Bancroft,  several  ROHO  oral  histories  on  the  Sierra 
Club  and  forestry,  minutes  of  the  Board  of  Forestry,  records  of  the 
Department  of  Forestry,  and  a  number  of  published  and  unpublished  accounts 
of  the  Bodega  campaign  and  the  nuclear  initiative  campaign  and  other 
subjects. 

Interviews  were  held  most  often  in  David's  home  in  the  Elmwood  area 
of  Berkeley,  with  two  sessions  in  his  law  office  at  Saperstein,  Mayeda, 
Larkin,  and  Goldstein,  in  Oakland.   He  spoke  informally,  clearly,  and 
candidly.   He  was  modest  about  his  accomplishments,  displaying  a  notable 
degree  of  perspective  in  analyzing  these  seminal  events  and  his  role  in 


'Interview  sessions  5,  6,  and  7  (Chapters  VI-IX  of  this  volume)  were 
recorded  for  the  California  State  Archives  State  Government  Oral  History 
Program's  "Oral  History  Interview  with  David  E.  Pesonen",  1992. 


them.   His  transcribed  words  required  minimal  editing,  and  he  made  almost 
no  changes  during  his  review  of  the  transcript. 

The  selection  of  photographs  illustrating  the  Bodega  battle  come  from 
a  post-victory  scrapbook  prepared  for  him  by  his  grateful  co-campaigners 
Jean  and  Karl  Kortum,  and  Julie  Shearer.   David's  longtime  friend,  fishing 
and  camping  companion,  and  fellow  attorney  and  environmentalist  Phillip 
Berry  wrote  the  insightful  introduction  to  this  volume. 

In  December  1992,  David  Pesonen  married  Mary  Jane  LaBelle  of 
Berkeley.   Now  semi-retired,  he  divides  his  time  between  Berkeley,  serving 
as  a  private  judge  and  mediator,  and  his  Oregon  ranch  on  the  Sixes  River,  a 
fine  salmon  and  steelhead  stream  where  he  pursues  his  passions  for  fishing 
and  growing  things . 

The  Regional  Oral  History  Office,  a  division  of  The  Bancroft  Library, 
has  been  recording  first-hand  accounts  of  leading  participants  in  the 
history  of  California  and  the  West  since  its  founding  in  1954.   This  volume 
adds  an  important  perspective  to  our  on-going  documentation  of  the 
environmental  movement  and  natural  resources  management  issues. 

Researchers  interested  in  these  topics  may  wish  to  consult  Regional 
Oral  History  Office  interviews  with  David  Brower,  Richard  Leonard,  Wallace 
Stegner,  and  Phillip  Berry  in  the  Sierra  Club  series;  Henry  Vaux  in 
Forestry;  Francis  Heisler  in  legal  history;  and  Joel  Hedgpeth  in  the  Parks 
and  Environment  series. 


Ann  Lage 
Interviewer /Editor 


September  1996 
Berkeley,  California 


vi 


Regional  Oral  History  Office 
Room  486  The  Bancroft  Library 


University  of  California 
Berkeley,  California  94720 


BIOGRAPHICAL  INFORMATION 


(Please  write  clearly.   Use  black  ink.) 
Your  full  name  ^^  >/  t  '/  &  • 


Date  of  birth 


W  /  C 


Birthplace 


A/Offal  fiW<*  .    £> 


Father's  full  name 
Occupation 


/#/< 


<?* 


O^'ST 


Birthplace 


/*#.  fa/fe  . 


Mother's  full  name 

Occupation  t^'trrX?1^,  ^oS 

Your  spouse 


Birthplace 


Occupation  /^  <V 


Birthplace  fa  /&.'&'  <!  *^. 


Your  children 


Where  did  you  grow  up?  X/£ 
Present  community 
Education 


Occupation(s) 


-\sr 


Areas  of  expertise 


eC 


Other  interests  or  activities 


Organizations  in  which  you  are  active 


I   FAMILY,  BOYHOOD,  AND  EDUCATION 
[Interview  1:   December  17,  1991  HI1 

Influences  of  Parents  and  Places 


Lage:     Today  is  December  17th,  1991,  and  this  is  the  first  interview 
with  David  Pesonen.   We  were  going  to  start  by  looking  back  at 
family  influences,  boyhood  experiences,  that  kind  of  thing.  And 
I  know  your  father,  in  particular,  was  a  big  influence  on  you. 
Do  you  want  to  start  telling  something  about  your  parents? 

Pesonen:   Well,  my  mother  [Eleanor  Sarah  Barton]  was  more  of  an  influence, 
as  I  look  back  on  it  now,  than  I  thought  when  I  was  growing  up. 
Both  parents  were  a  good  influence—quite  different  influences. 
In  fact,  how  they  got  along,  I  don't  know,  but  they  did  —  they 
loved  each  other.   I  think  it's  because  my  father  [Everett  Alex 
Pesonen]  was  such  a  kind  and  thoughtful  person,  and  my  mother  had 
all  those  instincts,  too,  although  she  was  much  more  volatile .- 

I  was  born  in  Washington,  D.C.  on  April  6,  1934.   It  was 
during  the  Depression.  My  parents  were  married  in  1932,  and  my 
father  had  just  graduated  from  Michigan  State  in  landscape 
architecture.   My  mother  aspired  to  be  a  poet  and  a  writer,  and 
she  was  an  English  major.   I  don't  know  how  they  met,  and  if  I 
did,  I've  forgotten.   They  weren't  very  wealthy.   My  father  came 
from  an  immigrant  family  in  upper-peninsula  Michigan.   His  father 
had  come  from  Finland  to  work  in  the  iron  mines. 

Lage:     Was  it  a  Finnish  community? 


'This  symbol  (it)  indicates  that  a  tape  or  tape  segment  has  begun  or 
ended.   A  guide  to  the  tapes  follows  the  transcript. 


Pesonen:   It  was  a  Finnish  community,  and  he  had  gone  to  Finnish  school. 

He  was  the  eldest  of  five- -five  who  survived,  there  were  two  who 
died  in  infancy—and  they  moved  to  a  farm  when  he  was  very  young. 
So  he  grew  up  working  the  farm.   Since  he  was  the  eldest,  he  was 
the  one  who  could  go  to  college.   It's  a  holdover  from  peasant 
culture  in  the  old  country  that  the  eldest  inherited  whatever 
there  was  to  inherit.   None  of  his  siblings  went  to  college.  All 
but  one  are  still  alive—they're  a  very  durable  bunch  of  people. 
But,  in  any  event,  they  had  some  timber  on  the  farm.   They  sold 
the  timber,  and  that  helped  to  finance  my  father's  education. 
And  he  worked.   He  taught  school  when  he  was  right  out  of  high 
school. 

So  my  parents  met  in  college.   There  was  a  famous  Finnish 
politician  named  Emil  Hurja.   I  don't  remember  how  to  spell  that. 
Hurja  was  one  of  the  prominent  people  in  the  New  Deal.   He  was 
very  active  in  bringing  Finnish  immigrants  to  the  United  States. 
But  he  was  also  very  active  in  promoting  their  careers  and  he 
took  a  shine  to  my  father. 

Lage:     Now,  how  did  he  meet  him  in  Michigan? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know.  He  was  a  congressional  aide  from  that  area.   I 
don't  know  for  sure.   But  he  got  my  father  a  job  in  the 
Department  of  the  Interior,  in  the  National  Park  Service. 

Lage:     Did  he  know  William  Penn  Mott?   He  was  a  landscape  architect, 

too.  [Former  director  of  California  State  Department  of  Parks  and 
Recreation  and  of  the  National  Park  Service] 

Pesonen:   He  went  to  school  with  William  Penn  Mott. 
Lage:     Oh,  he  did? 

Pesonen:   They  were  classmates.   I  think  Mott  was  a  year  ahead  of  my 

father,  but  they  knew  each  other  in  college.   It  just  shows  what 
a  small  world  it  is.   In  fact,  I  saw  Mott  just  last  week.   In  any 
event,  my  father  got  a  job  somehow  as  a  minor  designer  in  the  New 
Deal  administration  in  the  Department  of  the  Interior  in  Parks, 
and  my  father  is  a  very  good  administrator—he's  very  good  with 
people.   He's  got  an  equanimity  about  him  that  people  like  and 
are  drawn  to.   So  he  moved  up  fairly  rapidly  in  administrative 
circles. 

For  reasons  I  don't  remember,  when  I  was  about  a  year  old, 
we  moved  to  Oklahoma  City.   He  had  some  position  with  the 
National  Park  Service  there--!  don't  know  what  it  was.  My 
brother  was  born  there  two  years  after  I  was  born,  on  July  4th, 
in  fact,  1936.   I  think  we  lived  in  Oklahoma  for  about  a  year  and 


then  moved- -the  first  place  I  really  remember  living  was  Santa 
Fe,  New  Mexico.   My  father  had  a  position  as  a  middle  manager  of 
some  kind  in  the  National  Park  Service  in  New  Mexico.   He 
traveled  a  lot,  visiting  parks,  supervising  the  design  and 
building  of  parks,  supervising  Civilian  Conservation  Corps  crews. 

Lage:     So  this  was  all  Depression  era  work  in  the  Park  Service? 

Pesonen:   There  was  a  lot  of  emphasis  under  the  New  Deal,  I  think  really 
the  result  of--who  was  the  Secretary  of  the  Interior? 

Lage:     Ickes. 

Pesonen:   Ickes.   Harold  Ickes.   Ickes  was  enamored  of  the  idea  of  putting 
young  farm  boys  and  city  boys  to  work  rehabilitating  the  country. 
So  there  was  a  lot  of  that  going  on  all  over  the  country, 
including  New  Mexico.   My  parents  loved  New  Mexico,  and  I  loved 
Santa  Fe. 

My  mother's  stepfather  died  while  we  were  there,  and  she 
inherited  some  money  which  was  supposed  to  go  for  my  college 
education.   Her  dream  all  her  life  was  to  own  a  bookstore.   So 
she  bought  the  Viagra  bookstore  in  Santa  Fe  with  that 
inheritance.   In  those  days,  Santa  Fe  was  a  kind  of  bohemian 
center  for  artists  and  writers—later  led  to  what  Taos  is  still 
today.   So  she  hobnobbed  with  all  kinds  of  people  who  were  in 
that  artistic  community  and  she  just  loved  it.   She  was  a 
bohemian  spirit. 

Lage:  Now  you're  still  very  young  at  this  point. 

Pesonen:  Yes,  but  I  remember  this. 

Lage:  About  what  year  would  it  have  been? 

Pesonen:  This  would  have  been  1938  and  1939. 

Lage:  So  you  were  just  four  or  five. 

Pesonen:   I  remember  it  very  vividly.   I  remember  the  smell  of  pinon  smoke, 
I  remember  the  hubbub  of  people  coming  through  the  house  all  the 
time,  visiting  my  mother's  bookstore--!  loved  the  smell  of  books. 
I  just  loved  the  whole  scene. 

Then,  in  1939,  my  father  was  appointed  head  of  the  Civilian 
Conservation  Corps  for  all  of  the  Hawaiian  Islands.  So  we  moved 
to  Hawaii  in  late  1939  or  early  1940. 


Lage: 


That  was  a  big  change. 


Pesonen:   That  was  a  big  change.   I  remember  getting  on  the  ship  at  Fort 

Mason  here  in  San  Francisco.   It  was  just  a  wonderful  time.   And 
my  mother  was  delighted. 

Lage:     Oh  she  was?  I  was  thinking  it  might  be  a  hard  move  for  her. 

Pesonen:   She  loved  people  and  she  loved  new  places,  and  Hawaii  was  another 
bohemian  center.   A  lot  of  expatriate-type  people.   We  got  to 
Hawaii  in  late  '39  or  early  "40  and  I  loved  the  islands.   I  never 
had  any  shoes,  climbed  the  mango  trees—it  was  just  a  playground. 

Lage:     Which  island  did  you  live  on? 

Pesonen:   We  lived  in  Honolulu.   Since  my  father  was  a  very  high  government 
official,  my  parents  got  invited  to  a  lot  of  parties,  and  there 
was  a  lot  of  activity.   It  was  a  happy  time.   It  was  a  happy  time 
for  me  and  my  brother.  We  just  loved  to  play,  go  to  the  beach--! 
learned  to  swim  there.  We  lived  about  a  block  from  Waikiki 
beach,  and  I  went  to  the  beach  every  day  I  think.   I  just  loved 
to  swim  and  play  around.   I  don't  remember  that  I  did  anything 
productive,  but  that's  where  I  started  school.   They  had  a 
program  at  the  University  of  Hawaii  for  a  teacher's  college  where 
elementary  school  kids  would  be  taught  at  the  University  by  the 
teachers — 

Lage:     Teachers  in  training? 

Pesonen:   --teachers  in  training.   So  I  went  to  the  University  of  Hawaii. 
My  brother  wasn't  in  school  yet  then.  All  I  remember  is  just 
that  it  was  a  lot  of  fun. 


A  Boy's  View  of  the  Attack  on  Pearl  Harbor  and  its  Aftermath 


Pesonen:  The  next  big  thing  that  happened  was  Pearl  Harbor. 

Lage:  So  you  were  there  at  the  time  of  Pearl  Harbor. 

Pesonen:  I  remember  that  very  vividly. 

Lage:  You  have  a  good  memory. 

Pesonen:   I  remember  some  things.   Some  things  I  don't  remember  at  all. 
have  a  visual  memory. 


Lage: 


And  olfactory. 


Pesonen:   Well,  before  I  started  smoking  I  had  an  olfactory  memory, 
[laughter]   I  remember  Pearl  Harbor  day  just  like  it  was 
yesterday.   It  was  fifty  years  ago  this  week. 

I  can  remember  waking  up.  We  were  thinking  about  Christmas. 
The  tree  was  up,  the  presents  were  in,  I  was  expecting  my  first 
electric  train.  The  first  thing  I  remember  is  going  into  the 
kitchen.  We  had  a  Japanese  maid  whose  name  was  Matsuko.   She  was 
weeping  and  my  mother  was  comforting  her.   The  radio  was  blaring 
"The  islands  are  under  attack,"  and  we  could  hear  explosions.   I 
got  dressed  immediately  and  went  up  on  the  roof  to  watch  the 
action.   We  had  a  roof  you  could  get  onto- -the  other  houses  you 
couldn't  get  onto  so  easily—so  all  the  kids  from  the 
neighborhood  came  and  sat  on  our  roof.   We  all  sat  on  the  roof 
and  watched.   You  could  watch  dogfights  in  the  air,  and  the  ack- 
ack,  and  the  airplanes  going  this  way  and  that,  and  bombs 
falling—it  was  very  exciting.   [laughter] 

Lage:     I'll  say--a  kid's  view  of  Pearl  Harbor. 

Pesonen:   But  we  weren't  scared.   It  was  all  just  a  big  show. 

Lage:     It  was  all  at  a  distance. 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  ways  away.   It  was  about  ten  miles  away.   There  were 
aircraft  going  over  Honolulu-- Japanese  aircraft.   The  sky  was 
full  of  action—little  black  puffs  of  ack-ack  smoke  all  over  the 
place  and  airplanes  going  this  way  and  that.   There  seemed  to  be 
no  pattern  to  it.   Lots  of  excitement. 

Lage:     You  didn't,  as  a  young  person,  have  the  sense  of  something 

building  that  other  people  who  were  there  seemed  to  have  had  in 
the  period  leading  up  to  Pearl  Harbor? 

Pesonen:   I  seem  to  remember  that  my  parents  would  listen  to  the  Sunday 

night  news.   Even  Drew  Pearson  had  a  radio  program.   Drew  Pearson 
and  a  reporter  named  Gabriel  Heatter— my  mother  called  him 
"Bleater  Heatter."   [laughter]   He'd  say  "There's  good  news 
tonight,"  or  "There's  bad  news  tonight."  That  was  how  he 
introduced  his  program.   And  there  was  some  talk  of  this 
impending  buildup  of  Japanese  antagonism,  and  then  there  was  lots 
of  news  of  the  war  in  Europe,  which  was  going  badly  for  the 
Russians  and  for  a  lot  of  people.   I  didn't  really  understand  it 
at  first.   I  was  seven  years  old  then,  but  I  did  understand  what 
was  happening  in  Pearl  Harbor. 

Well,  after  the  attack  was  over--.   My  father,  in  fact,  had 
been  out  at  Pearl  Harbor  fishing  earlier  in  the  morning.   He  had 


left  before  the  attack  started.   So  he  had  just  gotten  home.   I 
suppose  if  he  had  been  out  there  — 

Lage:     You  might  have  been  feeling  a  little  different. 

Pesonen:   Then  everything  changed.   They  closed  the  schools.   My  mother  had 
a  job  working  for  the  Army  Corps  of  Engineers,  and  immediately 
martial  law  was  declared  and  people  were  frozen  in  their  jobs. 
My  mother  couldn't  quit. 

Lage:     Couldn't  leave  her  job? 

Pesonen:   Couldn't  leave  her  job  and  look  after  us.   We  didn't  go  to  school 
then,  so  we  had  all  day  to  just  get  in  trouble.  And  we  did. 
[laughter]  We  got  bored  after  a  while,  I  think  after  a  couple  of 
weeks,  and  we  gathered  all--I  remember  this—we  gathered  all  the 
wastebaskets  in  the  house  and  piled  all  of  the  papers  in  the 
living  room  and  set  them  on  fire.   We  thought  that  would  be  very 
exciting—that  would  be  a  lot  of  fun. 

Lage:     That  might  bring  Mother  home  from  work! 

Pesonen:   Fortunately  a  neighbor  was  going  by  and  came  in  and  extinguished 
this  thing.   But  Mother  was  at  her  wit's  end- -what  was  she  going 
to  do  with  these  two  wild  kids  who  had  no  school  to  keep  them 
occupied.   She  couldn't  leave  her  job;  it  was  illegal.   She'd  be 
arrested.   There  was  rigid  martial  law:  lights  were  out  all  the 
time;  there  was  black  paper  on  the  windows;  we  dug  a  bomb  shelter 
in  the  front  yard. 

My  father  had  gone  out  to  various  camps  to  inspect  the 
damage  after  the  day  of  the  attack  and  had  brought  home  the  wing 
of  a  Japanese  zero  that  had  been  shot  down  and  crashed  near  one 
of  his  camps.   I  was  the  envy  of  the  neighborhood.   I  had  the 
wing  of  a  Japanese  airplane,  or  a  large  part  of  the  wing  anyway, 
to  play  with  in  the  front  yard. 

We  dug  a  bomb  shelter,  and  then  they  dug  big  bomb  shelters 
in  all  of  the  parks.   We  went  through  drills  to  go  underground 
whenever  these  drills  went  off—they  were  always  going  off.   You 
got  so  you  almost  didn't  pay  attention  to  them  after  a  while. 

Lage:     So  they  expected  more  attacks? 

Pesonen:   They  expected  a  real  invasion.   My  father  was  enlisted  into  a 
businessman's  training  corps.   I  still  have  a  picture  of  him 
somewhere  in  a  uniform;  he  had  a  .45  automatic  that  he  wore 
around  his  belt.   They  went  out  and  marched  him  here  and  there. 
They  never  got  into  anything.   [laughter] 


Lage:     I  don't  understand  the  closing  of  the  schools  too  well. 

Pesonen:   Well,  the  schools  weren't  safe,  and  until  they  built  bomb 
shelters,  they  wouldn't  reopen  the  schools. 

Lage:     And  most  women  didn't  work?  What  did  they  think  would  happen 
with  all  these  kids? 

Pesonen:   I  have  no  idea.   That  was  not  my  concern.   [laughter] 
Lage:     Of  course  not. 

Pesonen:   Well,  Mother  was  at  her  wit's  end.   She  threatened  to  send  us  to 
reform  school.   We  had  no  knowledge  of  what  that  was.   I  remember 
my  brother  and  me  packing  our  toys  up  in  a  little  yellow  box,  and 
we  went  out  and  put  it  in  the  car.   We  got  in  the  car,  and  my 
father  started  the  engine,  and  he  was  going  to  take  us  to  reform 
school.  Mother  just  didn't  know  what  to  do  with  us.   I  pleaded 
with  him  to  let  me  go  back  in  and  plead  with  her  one  more  time, 
and  she  relented.   Of  course,  she  didn't  have  any  idea  what  a 
reform  school  was—this  was  just  carrying  the  threat.   [laughter] 
Reform  school  was  one  of  those  things  that  was  like  hell  for 
Catholics.   It  was  a  place  where  you  went  and  never  came  back. 

Lage:     My  mother  used  to  threaten  military  academy  to  my  brother, 
[laughter] 

Pesonen:   Finally,  the  schools  reopened,  and  we  went  back  to  school.   Of 
course,  by  this  time  my  father's  job  had  ended  because  the  CCC 
[Civilian  Conservation  Corps]  was  a  make-work  program  for  young 
men,  and  the  war  took  care  of  that.   So  there  was  no  work  for  him 
in  the  islands.  We  stayed  about  a  year.  We  lost  our  house—we 
were  renting  it  and  the  military  took  it  over  or  something.   So 
we  spent  the  last  three  or  four  months  living  on  the  far  side  of 
the  island. 

My  brother,  who  was  very  gregarious,  had  walked  in  on  some 
neighbor—just  walked  in  and  started  talking.   He  had  a  way  of 
doing  that.   He  made  friends  with  this  family  and  they  had  a 
beach  cottage  on  the  other  side  of  the  island  which  they  let  us 
use  while  we  were  waiting  to  be  sent  back  to  the  States.   And 
that  was  a  wonderful  time.   It  was  an  isolated  little  house  way 
out  on  the  other  side  of  the  island.  There  was  a  little  cane 
railroad  that  ran  right  through  the  front  yard  and  a  big  empty 
beach. 


My  parents  still  had  to  go  to  work  every  day,  so  Bart  and  I 
just  walked  the  beach. 


Lage: 


You  didn't  have  to  go  to  school? 


Pesonen:   We  didn't  have  to  go  to  school.  We  just  played  on  the  beach.  We 
would  find  little  fish,  and  we'd  find  things  on  the  beach.   We 
just  had  a  wonderful  time.   I  remember  one  day  we'd  walked  way  up 
the  beach  and  we  were  walking  back  and  we  heard  a  huge  roar 
behind  us  and  we  turned  around  and  just  skimming  the  sand  were 
five  fighter  planes  in  training  on  low-level  flights.   I  mean 
just  right  at  the  surface.   They  were  P-40s  with  the  tigers 
painted  on  the  front,  over  the  cowling  of  the  engine.  We  just 
fell  flat  on  the  sand  and  the  planes  veered  up,  and  I  can 
remember  looking  up  and  seeing  the  pilot  laughing  at  us  out  of 
the  cockpit. 

Lage:     This  combination  of  the  idyllic  beach  setting  and  these  war-like 
maneuvers  going  on. 

Pesonen:   They  were  war  maneuvers. 

Well,  finally  we  were  sent  home,  and  we  were  sent  home  in  a 
convoy  on  the  Hunter-Liggett,  I  think,  was  the  name  of  the  ship. 
It  was  a  transport  and  we  were  crammed  into  a  very  small 
stateroom  with  the  bunks  stacked  up  along  the  side.   Two  days  out 
we  stopped  and  just  sat,  waiting  for  another  vessel  to  catch  up 
with  us.   It  was  the  battleship  California,  which  had  been  sunk 
on  December  7th  and  raised  and  patched.   But  it  wasn't  completely 
repaired.   It  still  listed  about  ten  or  fifteen  degrees  and  was 
very  slow.   They  were  bringing  it  back  to  the  states  to,  I  think, 
Bremerton,  to  be  completely  rebuilt  and  put  back  into  service. 
So  this  strange  convoy  was  finally  assembled  outside  Honolulu: 
the  battleship  California,  three  or  four  troop  ships  like  the  one 
we  were  on  bringing  people  back  to  the  states,  a  tanker,  two 
destroyers,  and  we  were  very  slow.   It  took  us  about  twelve  or 
fifteen  days  to  get  back. 

Well,  my  brother  got  the  mumps  right  out  of  Honolulu,  and 
swelled  up  like  a  chipmunk.  We  were  all  stuck  in  this  little 
stateroom  and  we  thought  we'd  all  get  it. 

And  then  it  got  stormy  and  we  had--I  can  remember  the  drills 
for  submarine  attack.  Well,  finally  we  did  have  an  attack  and 
the  drills  really  went  off.   The  drill  was  to  go  to  your 
stateroom,  put  your  life  jacket  on,  and  wait  for  further  orders. 
I  can  remember  all  of  us  huddling  in  this  stateroom  as  depth 
charges  went  off  where  destroyers  were  searching  for  this 
submarine  that  supposedly  had  been  spotted.   It's  a  sound  you'll 
never  forget.   It  must  be  horrible  if  you're  in  a  submarine  to 
have  that  sound,  but  it's  bad  enough  in  a  surface  ship,  because 
it's  this  huge  explosion  that  comes  in  at  you  from  all  parts  of 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


the  room.   The  ship's  hull  must  pick  up  this  enormous  explosion 
and  then  just  implode  it  into  each  little  space.  And  these 
explosions  kept  going  off,  one  after  the  other.   Finally  they 
stopped  and  the  order  was  given  to  get  in  the  lifeboats.   My 
brother  still  had  the  mumps,  and  it  was  freezing  cold.   I  can 
remember  sitting  in  a  lifeboat  with  Mother  holding  my  little 
brother  wrapped  in  a  blanket,  and  they  swung  the  lifeboats  out  on 
the  davits,  and  we  were  hanging  out  over  the  water.   And  then  we 
just  sat  there.   [laughter] 

What  an  experience! 

Finally  it  was  all  over,  and  the  lifeboats  were  swung  back  in— 
they  had  them  all  ready  to  drop  in  case  the  ship  was  hit  with  a 
torpedo  —  and  then  it  was  back  to  normal  life  on  the  ship. 


How  did  people  react? 

All  differently.  Mother  was  a  little  hysterical, 
was  a  wonderful,  exciting  experience. 

You  weren't  scared? 


I  thought  it 


No,  I  wasn't--!  don't  remember  being  frightened.   I  remember 
thinking  "This  is  just  a  great  adventure."  The  whole  thing  was  a 
great  adventure.   [laughter] 

In  general  was  the  tone  calm,  or  were  people  panicked? 

People  were  pretty  calm,  I  think,  generally  in  those 
circumstances.  As  long  as  there  seems  to  be  somebody  in  charge, 
and  things  aren't  falling  apart. 

You  had  a  routine,  you  knew  what  you  were  supposed  to  do- 
People  were  frightened,  I'm  sure,  and  maybe  suppressing  their 
panic,  but  there  wasn't  a  lot  of  hysteria. 


Father's  Career  with  the  Bureau  of  Reclamation 


Pesonen:   We  finally  got  back  to  the  States.   We  got  back  to  San  Francisco 
and  I  think  they  put  us  up  in  the  Mark  Hopkins—one  of  the  big 
hotels  downtown—for  a  couple  of  weeks.  My  father  then  got  a 
job,  or  maybe  had  it  already  before  he  left  the  islands,  with  the 
Bureau  of  Reclamation,  in  the  planning  of  Millerton  Reservoir 
outside  of  Fresno. 


10 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


You  mean  that  was  going  on  in  the  middle  of  the  war? 

Yes.   The  Central  Valley  Project  was  launched  in  the  late 
thirties  and  was  really  getting  started  in  the  early  forties. 

It's  surprising  that  it  continued  through  the  war  years. 

Lots  of  things  continued  through  the  war  years,  including  the 
Central  Valley  Project  which  was  a  huge  public  works  project  that 
reshaped  California.   My  father  was  a  Progressive  —  a  New  Deal 
Progressive—and  he  thought  it  was  wonderful.   He  believed  in  TVA 
[Tennessee  Valley  Authority],  he  believed  in  a  lot  of  things 
which  have  become  albatrosses,  economically,  now.  And,  of 
course,  people  didn't  think  about  environmental  consequences  of 
big  dams  and  great  transfers  of  water  and  irrigation  projects. 
It  was  all  making  the  desert  bloom. 

Right.   It  was  the  Progressive  thing  to  do. 

And  my  father  was  certainly  part  of  that.   We  lived  in  Fresno  for 
about  a  year.   I  can  remember  we  had  Christmas  there  in  1943,  I 
think. 

Was  your  father  of  an  age  where  he  was  too  old  for  military 
service? 


He  was  too  old  to  be  called, 
have  been  forty  years  old. 


Well,  he  was  born  in  1902,  so  he'd 


Fresno  was  fun,  too.   I  mean,  I  just  had--I  enjoyed  being  a 
kid.   [laughter]   There  were  a  lot  of  outdoor  things. 

Was  there  hunting  and  fishing?  Was  that  part  of  your  upbringing? 

My  father  would  take  us  to  Kings  Canyon  fishing,  and  since  he  had 
a  government  job,  he  had  a  car,  and  he  had  a  little  money,  and  he 
had  some  leisure  time,  and  he  spent  it  with  us.   He  spent  a  lot 
of  time  with  my  brother  and  me.   In  fact,  the  whole  family- -we 
did  a  lot  of  things  together.   My  mother  didn't  like  to  camp. 
She  wasn't  a  bit  interested  in  fishing.   But  she  loved  just 
looking  at  scenery. 

How  did  she  like  Fresno  after  Santa  Fe  and  Hawaii  and-- 

Well,  I  don't  know.  My  mother  was  a  pretty  jolly  person.   Jeez, 
I  don't  remember  her  ever  being  somber  or  sour  about  it.   She  was 
a  good  mother—she  took  good  care  of  us.   That's  all  that  I 
noticed,  you  know?  I  always  had  plenty  to  eat,  and  plenty  of 
clothes,  and  felt  loved,  and  my  parents  loved  each  other.   They 


11 


got  along  very  well.   I  don't  remember  any  family  strife  in  my 
life,  of  any  kind,  until  many  years  later.  That  probably  was  a 
very  important  influence.   I  was  a  secure  person  from  the  time  I 
was  born. 

Lage:     Despite  almost  being  taken  to  reform  school.   [laughter] 

Pesonen:   Well,  that  was  just  a  matter  of  asserting  authority.   You  need 
authority,  too,  when  you're  a  kid- -you  need  authority  and 
authority  figures.   I  don't  recall  any  unhappiness  as  a  child,  or 
any  sense  of  insecurity.   These  things  that  would  cause  —  like 
being  there  at  Pearl  Harbor  and  being  in  the  lifeboats  and  things 
that  would  be  traumatic  for  people  who  were  already  unsure  of 
where  they  stood  in  the  world  would  be  frightening  experiences, 
but  if  you  are  very  secure  about  who  you  are  and  where  you  are 
and  about  your  emotional  support  system,  then  you've  got  time  to 
think  of  them  as  adventures.   They  come  to  you  that  way.   And 
that's  the  way  I  look  back  on  that  part  of  my  life. 

Then  we  moved  to  Sacramento.   My  father  was  promoted  into 
some  higher  level  position.   I  think  he  ultimately  ended  up  as 
assistant  regional  director,  but  with  responsibility  for  all  of 
the  fish  and  wildlife  and  park  planning  and  recreational  planning 
of  the  Central  Valley  Project.   He  loved  that  job,  and  I  think  he 
was  very  good  at  it.   I  never  really  quite  understood  what  he 
did--I  didn't  pay  that  much  attention  to  it--but  he  had  to  go  out 
into  the  field  a  lot  to  these  projects,  like  Shasta  Dam,  the 
Delta  Mendota  Canal—all  kind  of  things.   And  he  would  take  my 
brother  and  me  with  him.  We  traveled  a  lot  of  the  time,  whenever 
it  was  possible,  to  go  and  see  what  was  building,  then,  at  the 
Central  Valley  Project.   Some  people  now  see  it  as  an 
environmental  disaster  for  California,  but  nobody  saw  it  that  way 
then. 

Lage:     It  was  totally  different-- 

Pesonen:   And,  of  course,  his  job  was  to  mitigate  the  environmental 
consequences  to  the  extent  that  they  were  understood. 

Lage:     They  wouldn't  have  used  those  terms-- 

Pesonen:   They  wouldn't  have  used  those  terms,  and  there  probably  was  an 

economic  reason  for  it.   I  think  in  justifying  the  cost  of  a  dam 
or  another  water  project  of  any  kind,  there  would  be  a  component 
for  electric  generation,  there  would  be  a  component  for 
irrigation  benefits,  there  would  be  a  component  for  recreation 
benefits,  and  some  of  these  projects  probably  weren't 
economically  feasible  unless  you  manufactured  a  recreational 
benefit  to  justify  them  to  Congress  for  the  funding.   So,  as  I 


12 


look  back  on  it  now--a  lot  wiser—a  lot  of  what  he  did  probably 
was  window  dressing  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  top  manager  of 
the  Bureau.   That  wasn't  the  way  he  saw  it. 

II 

Lage:     What  was  your  father's  perception  of  his  work? 

Pesonen:   Well,  looking  back  on  it,  he  was  mitigating  the  inevitable  side 
effects  of  the  great  social  experiments- -the  great  social 
projects.  A  lot  of  people  would  look  back  on  it  differently  now. 
I  gave  him,  a  couple  years  ago,  a  copy  of  the  book  Cadillac 
Desert  which  I  thoroughly  enjoyed,  and  that  retrospective  view  of 
the  wars  between  the  Army  Corps  of  Engineers  and  the  Bureau  of 
Reclamation  over  water  development  in  the  West  just  wasn't 
perceived  then. 

There  has  been  a  whole  social  awakening  in  the  environmental 
movement.  Maybe  somebody  saw  then,  but  even  Aldo  Leopold  didn't 
see  that- -didn't  see  it  coming.   We  just  know  a  whole  lot  more 
about  selenium  in  water,  about  the  effect  of  great  transfers  out 
of  the  Delta  and  the  Bay.  We  were  ignorant  then.  We're  still 
ignorant,  but  we  were  more  ignorant  then. 

Lage:     How  did  your  father  react  to  the  book? 

Pesonen:   Well,  by  the  time  I  gave  it  to  him,  he  was  suffering  from  the 
early  stages  of  senility,  and  I  don't  think  he  ever  read  it. 

Lage:     Had  you  discussed  these  changing  perceptions  of  the  big  water 
projects  with  him? 

Pesonen:   I  can't  really,  now.   He  doesn't  have  much  memory  left.   He'll  be 
ninety  next  year,  and  he's  really  fading  fast.   He  was  fading 
then.   So  you  can't  discuss  those  things  with  him  now. 

Lage:     Yes,  but  the  environmental  movement  did  start  raising  these 
issues  when  he  was  still  well.  Was  he  defensive  about  it? 

Pesonen:   No,  he  wasn't  defensive  about  it.   He  was  really  philosophical. 
He  did  what  he  thought  was  right  and  he  had  a  lot  of  integrity. 
He's  a  cheerful  person,  and  he  doesn't  torture  himself  with 
doubts  about  whether  he  did  the  right  thing.   He  did  what  he 
thought  was  right  and  if  it  was  wrong,  it  wasn't  because  he 
thought  he  was  doing  wrong.  And  so  he  doesn't  have  any  regrets, 
or  he  didn't  have  any  when  he  was  capable  of  having  regrets. 
That's  the  way  history  unfolded.   He  was  very  proud  of  what  I  did 
in  the  nuclear  movement.   I  think  he  thinks --he's  glad  I've  done 
what  I've  done;  he's  proud  of  me.   I  tried  to  live  up  to  his 


13 


expectations.   He  never  pushed  me  in  any  particular—neither 
parent  pushed  me  in  any  direction.   I  always  knew  I  was  going  to 
go  to  college,  and  I  always  knew  I  was  going  to  be  active  in  some 
socially  useful  way.   That  was  just  a  given.   It  wasn't  as  though 
it  was  expected  of  me  in  a  way  that  I  was  pressured.   That's  the 
environment  I  grew  up  in,  that's  what  I  expected  to  do. 


Physics,  Poetry,  the  Outdoors,  and  the  French  Foreign  Legion; 
Youthful  Interests 


Pesonen:   My  first  real  interest  was  in  being  a  nuclear  physicist.   I  got 
fascinated  with  nuclear  physics  when  I  was  a  teenager  in  high 
school.   I  read  everything  I  could  about  it.   That's  the  way  I  do 
a  lot  of  things. 

Lage :     Now  what  year  would  this  have  been? 

Pesonen:   That  would  have  been  1951  and  '52  and  into  '53  when  I  started  in 
junior  college.   I  get  interested  in  things,  and  then  I  start 
reading  all  I  can  find  about  them. 

Lage:     Do  you  know  how  that  interest  developed?  Was  it  a  teacher  or-- 

Pesonen:   No,  I  don't  know  how  that  developed.   I  think  that's  just  the  way 
I  was.   When  I  was  just  a  kid  I  got  interested  in  raising 
rabbits,  and  I  read  everything  about  rabbits,  and  I  built  rabbit 
hutches,  and  I  had  rabbits,  and  then  I  lost  interest  in  rabbits. 
I  built  model  airplanes,  I  built  all  kinds  of  model  airplanes, 
and  I  spent  a  year  or  two  doing  that.   My  brother  was  the  same 
way.   He  got  interested  in  collecting  butterflies.   He  had 
butterflies  all  over  the  place. 

Lage:     Was  this  with  the  parent  participation  or  just  tolerance? 

Pesonen:   With  parent  encouragement,  or  tolerance,  depending  on  what  it 

was.   I  got  interested  in  nuclear  energy,  and  I  read  everything  I 
could  about  it.   I  wasn't  a  brilliant  enough  mathematician  to 
really  ever  be  a  good  physicist  or  a  good  mathematician.   I  was  a 
mediocre  math  student.   I  was  fascinated  by  all  this  stuff,  but  I 
wasn't  brilliant.   And  I  knew  at  some  point  that  I  would  never  be 
a  great  physicist  if  I  went  into  physics.   And  there  were 
conflicting  interests.   My  mother  was  a  poet,  and  I  always  had  a 
literary  interest. 

Lage:     Did  you  read  a  lot? 


Pesonen:   I  wrote  a  lot.   I  always  had  an  interest  in  the  outdoors.   My 

father  was  very  active  in  the  Unitarian  Church  in  Sacramento.   He 
helped  to  found  it  and  keep  it  alive  and  raise  money  for  it  and 
was  president  of  the  board.   He  insisted  that  I  go  to  Sunday 
school  every  Sunday,  but  he  gave  me  a  choice,  I  think  when  I  was 
twelve--!  had  to  go  until  I  was  twelve,  and  then  I  could  decide 
for  myself.   As  soon  as  I  was  twelve,  I  quit  going  to  church, 
because  I  thought  if  there  was  a  God  he  was  living  out  at  the 
river.   [laughter]  And  I  wanted  to  go  out  and  play  around  the 
river.   I  loved  the  smell  of  willows  and  river  water  and  river 
banks  and  all  that  decaying  stuff  that  goes  on  around  rivers.   I 
loved  rivers.   So  Sunday  morning  I'd  go  to  the  river  and  go 
fishing,  and  we'd  play  up  and  down  the  river. 

Sacramento's  a  great  place  for  kids.   There  are  two  rivers 
there  that  come  together,  and  they're  both  wonderful  rivers:  the 
Sacramento  and  the  American.   They're  just  interesting  rivers. 
There's  a  lot  of  life  in  them—there  was  then,  anyway.   [pause] 

Lage:     We  have  you  in  junior  college  with  an  interest  in  nuclear 
physics. 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  wanted  to  go  to  the  University  [of  California].   I  didn't 
really  know  what  I  wanted  to  do.   I  knew  I  wouldn't  be  a 
physicist.   I  toyed  with  the  idea  of  being  a  writer,  but  I  didn't 
see  how  I  could  ever  make  a  living  at  that.   I  didn't  know  what  I 
wanted  to  do.   Then  I  dropped  out  of  school.   I  couldn't  get  into 
the  University  because,  despite  this  wonderful  background  of  an 
English  major  mother  and  my  father  was  a  very  good  writer  also,  I 
flunked  the  Subject  A  exam.   [laughter]   I  couldn't  get  admitted 
into  the  University,  so  I  had  to  go  back  to  junior  college  to 
make  up  my  English  requirements.   We  got  bored--!  had  some 
friends  there:  Neil  Jones  and  Bob  Connelly.   We  hung  out  and 
played  cards  and  pretty  soon  we  started  cutting  classes.   So, 
without  my  parents'  knowledge,  I  quit  school  entirely  and  got  two 
jobs.  We  decided  we  were  going  to  go  to  France  and  join  the 
French  Foreign  Legion. 

Lage:     More  adventure. 

Pesonen:  And  I  got  a  job  in  a  can  company,  the  Continental  Can  Company, 
making  tin  cans  during  the  daytime,  and  at  night  running  the 
computers  for  the  Department  of  Motor  Vehicles.  We  saved  all  our 
money,  and  I  told  my  parents  I  was  studying  at  the  library  every 
night . 

That  was  1953.   I  saved  up  enough  money  and  my  friend  Bob 
Connelly,  who's  now  chief  of  staff  for  the  Assembly  Rules 
Committee  in  the  legislature—a  very  old,  close  friend—he  took 


15 


off  ahead  of  me  chasing  a  girlfriend  of  his  who  was  working  in 
Pakistan,  and  then  he  and  I  were  going  to  hook  up  in  Paris  and 
get  on  to  Algiers  or  someplace  and  join  the  Foreign  Legion. 

Lage:     Was  that  really  an  option? 

Pesonen:  We  thought  it  was.   It  was  at  least  an  excuse.   So  I  told  my 

parents  what  my  plan  was  and  confessed  that  I  had  not  been  going 
to  school  and  that  I  had  saved  my  money  for  this  great  adventure. 
I  didn't  tell  them  that  I  was  going  to  join  the  Foreign  Legion,  I 
was  just  going  to  go  to  Europe  and  have  my  European  tour.   So  I 
hitchhiked  to  New  York--I  remember  my  father  taking  me  out  and 
dropping  me  off  and  shaking  my  hand  and  wishing  me  well  as  he 
dropped  me  off  with  a  little  pack  on  Highway  40.   I  hitchhiked 
all  the  way  to  New  York  City  and  hung  around  New  York  for  a 
couple  of  weeks.   I  had  a  ticket  on  the  Holland-American  lines 
for  $200  to  go  to  Europe.  When  I  picked  up  my  mail  at  general 
delivery,  there  was  a  draft  notice.  That  saved  me.   [laughter] 

Lage:     Saved  you  from  what? 

Pesonen:   If  I  had  gone  to  Europe,  I  really  was  going  to  join  the  Foreign 
Legion.   So  I  flew  back  to  California  and  went  down  to  the 
induction  center  on  the  appointed  day,  and  they  turned  me  away. 
They  said  "We  thought  you'd  gone  to  Europe,  so  you're  not  being 
drafted."  The  Korean  War  was  just  over  or  just  about  to  be  over, 
but  there  was  still  a  draft,  and  since  I  wasn't  in  school,  I  was 


classified  1A  and  ready  to  go. 
place  for  me. 


But  they  said  they  didn't  have  a 


Firefighting  for  the  Forest  Service.  1953-1954 


Pesonen:   So  I  heard  that  the  Forest  Service  had  a  job  fire  fighting  up  in 
the  Mendocino  National  Forest,  and  I  drove  up  to  the  headquarters 
in  Willows  and  told  them  I  wanted  a  job  as  a  fire  fighter.   They 
had  an  opening  up  at  a  little  place  called  Alder  Springs,  and 
there  was  one  captain  there  named  Julio  Silva,  and  he  hired  me. 
He  was  in  charge  of  the  station,  and  I  would  drive  the  fire 
engines.   I  had  driven  trucks  before  when  I  was  a  kid.   I  had 
worked  on  a  farm—the  Waegell  ranch- -through  high  school.   So  I 
knew  all  about  machinery  and  I  knew  how  to  work  it,  felt 
comfortable  with  it.   This  was  a  logging  camp  which  also  had  this 
crew  there.   Julio  lived  with  his  family,  and  I  lived  alone  in 
another  little  house. 


16 


When  I  had  been  there  about  a  week,  I  drove  down  to  Willows 
to  get  my  physical  exam  for  this  job,  and  on  the  way  back,  I  came 
around  a  corner  and  here  was  Julio  coming  down  the  hill  in  the 
fire  engine.   He  said  "Park  your  car,  get  in- -we've  got  a  fire." 
So  I  hopped  in  and  we  went  down  the  road  about  a  mile  and  around 
a  corner.   Here  was  a  huge  fire  just  taking  off  up  the  mountain 
side.   We  couldn't  possibly  do  anything  with  it.   We  called  for 
all  the  help.   This  was  my  first  exposure  to  fire- -I'd  been  on 
the  job  a  week- -no  training,  just  a  healthy  body  and  knew  how  to 
use  a  shovel.   It  turned  out  to  be  one  of  the  great  disasters  of 
all  fires  in  Forest  Service  history. 

That  night  one  of  the  other  fire  engine  drivers  disappeared, 
so  Julio  had  to  go  and  drive  that  engine,  and  I  was  left  alone 
driving  our  engine.   There  was  a  lot  of  confusion.   By  this  time 
many  forces  had  been  brought  in,  and  the  fire  was  racing  north 
into  the  timber.   It  was  called  the  Rattlesnake  fire.   I  think 
this  was  1953,  probably  July  or  late  June. 

Suddenly  I  heard  that  there  were  some  people  who  had  been 
killed.  A  crew  had  been  sent  down  into  a  canyon  to  put  out  a 
spot  fire  and  stopped  to  eat  their  lunch  there,  and  the  wind  had 
completely  reversed.   In  the  valley  on  the  west  side,  during  the 
day,  the  heat  from  the  valley  causes  the  breeze  to  go  up-canyon. 
But  at  night,  when  the  valley  turns  cold,  that  process  reverses 
itself,  and  its  almost  instantaneous.   It'll  happen  within  a 
minute  or  two.   The  fire  had  turned  around  and  run  down  into  this 
canyon,  and  there  were  nineteen  people  burned  to  death- -the  crew 
leader  who  lived  next  door  to  us  at  our  station,  who  was  a 
forester,  and  a  crew  of  eighteen  missionaries  from  a  little  camp 
up  in  the  Mendocino  forest  called  the  New  Tribes  Mission.   These 
were  born-again  Christians  who  were  training  to  go  to  Central 
America  and  convert  the  Indians  or  something.   They  made  extra 
money  by  fighting  fires  for  the  Forest  Service. 

So  I  was  diverted  from  fire  fighting  to  look  for  survivors. 
I  spent  the  night  driving  little  back  trails  in  this  four-wheel 
drive  wagon--in  a  fire  engine.  And  I  found  a  couple  of  people 
who  had  escaped  this  conflagration.   But  the  next  day  we  found 
the  nineteen  bodies  down  in  the  brush.   They  were  all  completely 
burned.   So  that  was  my  initiation  to  forestry  and  fires. 

Well,  I  stayed  the  summer  and  liked  the  work.  We  had  a 
good,  busy  fire  year.   Julio  and  I  went  to  a  lot  of  little 
lightning  fires  and  all  kinds  of  fires  and  I  loved  the  work.   I 
loved  taking  care  of  the  equipment,  I  loved  sharpening  the  tools, 
I  loved  being  out  there,  and  I  loved  fire  fighting.   Also,  I  got 
paid  well. 


17 


Lage:     And  that  first  experience  didn't  turn  you  off? 

Pesonen:   No,  it  didn't.   In  fact,  Julio  and  I  helped  catch  the  guy  who  set 

it. 

Lage:     Oh,  it  was  an  arson  fire. 

Pesonen:   Julio  had  spotted  a  car  turning  off  into  Grindstone  Canyon  when 
he  was  driving  down  before  he  had  met  me  and  picked  me  up.  We 
went  back  to  fire  camp  the  next  day,  and  as  we  were  going  through 
the  mess  line,  an  investigator  came  up  to  me  and  asked  me  if  I 
had  seen  anything.   I  said  "No,  but  Julio  may  have."  Then  he 
went  and  talked  to  Julio.  The  fellow  who  was  dishing  up  my 
mashed  potatoes  or  steak  at  that  moment  was  a  cook,  and  he  said, 
"Well,  they're  describing  my  car."   It  turned  out  he  had  set  the 
fire.   They  arrested  him,  and  he  was  sent  off  to  prison. 

Lage:     Did  he  just  get  the  job  after-- 
Pesonen:   He  had  set  the  fire  to  get  the  job. 
[tape  interruption] 

Pesonen:   I  loved  that  summer,  and  fire  season  lasted  until  about  the  first 
of  November,  so  I  decided  not  to  go  back  to  school  and  just  make 
a  lot  of  money.  You  could  make  pretty  good  money  then.   You  got 
a  lot  of  overtime.   If  you  went  on  a  fire,  you  were  on  overtime 
from  the  time  you  went  out  of  the  station  until  you  got  back, 
even  if  it  was  forty-eight  hours;  even  if  it  was  a  week. 

I  went  on  one  fire  that  was  way  back  in  the  Yolla  Bolly 
Wilderness  Area  above  a  place  called  Indian  Dick--a  little  old 
ranger  station  that  was  way  out  in  the  wilderness.   That  fire  was 
called  the  Yellow  Jacket  fire.   I  met  some  smoke  jumpers  on  that 
fire  who  had  jumped  into  that.   It  was  a  lightning  blaze,  and  it 
had  taken  us  a  day  to  get  in  on  horseback,  and  they  were  there-- 
they  had  parachuted  in,  and  they  had  gotten  a  line  around  the 
fire.   Then  we  stayed  a  couple  of  days  and  put  the  rest  of  it 
out  —  cut  down  the  burning  snags  and  extinguished  them,  and  did 
the  mop-up.   And  I  got  to  talking  to  these  smoke  jumpers  and  I 
thought  "Gee,  that  sounds  like  a  wonderful  job."   So  I  made  plans 
to  be  a  smoke  jumper  the  next  summer. 

I  went  back  to  Sacramento  and  went  to  work  for  the 
Department  of  Highways  just  temporarily  until  school  started  in 
the  spring.   I  remember  that  job.   It  only  lasted  a  couple  of 
months,  but  I  was  drawing  the  plans  for  the  freeways  in  southern 
California.   [laughter] 


18 


Lage:     How  you  got  into  that-- 

Pesonen:   Just  the  maps.   I  had  taken  drafting  in  high  school,  and  I  was  a 
pretty  good  draftsman,  so  I  had  a  draftsman's  job.   And  I  got 
very  bored  with  it.   I  remember  I  made  up  a  couple  of  little 
towns  and  put  them  on  the  map,  that  didn't  exist.   [laughter] 

Lage:     A  trouble-maker. 

Pesonen:   The  flyspeckers  in  the  department  caught  it,  and  I  either  got 

fired  or  I  was  asked  to  quit.   School  was  going  to  start  anyway, 
so  I  went  back  to  school  in  the  spring,  with  the  full  intention 
of  going  to  the  University  in  the  fall,  but  I  still  didn't  know 
what  I  wanted  to  study--!  didn't  know  what  field  I  wanted  to  go 
into.   Forestry  appealed  to  me  a  little  bit,  but  I  didn't  know 
very  much  about  it.   I  was  thinking  about  being  an  English  major. 
I  was  thinking  about  still  continuing  in  math.   I  didn't  know 
what  I  wanted  to  do. 

Lage:     Except  be  a  smoke  jumper. 

Pesonen:  Well,  that  was  just  to  make  money  and  to  have  a  little  adventure. 
So  I  went  back  to  school  in  the  spring  and  I  did  very  well—back 
to  junior  college,  to  Sacramento  Junior  College—finished  up  the 
year  that  I  had  let  collapse  when  I  went  to  Europe.   Then  I  got  a 
job  as  a  smoke  jumper  at  Cave  Junction,  Oregon,  that  next  summer. 

Lage:     Was  that  something  that  you  just  threw  yourself  into  or  did  you 
have  a  lot  of  training? 

Pesonen:   I'd  never  jumped  out  of  an  airplane  before.   So  I  went  through 
the  training.   I  was  the  only  one  who  wore  glasses.   I  had  to 
have  special  goggles  made  with  my  prescription.   I  loved  the 
training.   It  was  very  hard  work,  I  mean,  you  really  get  in 
physical  shape,  but  I  didn't  get  along  that  well  with  the  people 
there.   I  think  I  was  kind  of  an  arrogant  young  man.   I  had  some 
problems  with  some  of  the  other  people  in  the  station.   I  think 
it  was  just  immaturity  and  arrogance.   I  thought  I  knew  a  lot 
more  than  I  did.   [laughter]  And  then  I  got  hurt  in  the  practice 
jumps.   I  made  five  jumps,  and  I  loved  hanging  in  the  parachute. 
It's  an  experience  beyond  description;  you  are  just  up  there. 
They  were  the  old  kind  of  parachutes;  you  couldn't  steer  them 
very  well,  and  you  hit  the  ground  real  hard.   They  would  drop  us 
over  forested  areas  with  clearings,  and  we  had  to  steer  this 
parachute  and  land  in  the  clearing.   I  sprained  an  ankle  on  one 
of  those  jumps  and  so  I  was  off  for  a  while.   You  had  to  do  seven 
practice  jumps  before  they  would  send  you  out  on  a  fire,  and  I 
wasn't  able  to  do  the  seventh,  so  they  got  me  a  job  on  a  trail 
crew  over  on  the  coast  on  the  Chetco  River,  which  I  did  for  a 


19 


couple  of  weeks.   I  didn't  like  it,  and  by  this  time  my  friend 
Bob  Connelly  had  gotten  my  old  job  at  Alder  Springs,  driving  the 
fire  engine.   I  didn't  know  what  I  was  going  to  do,  but  I  didn't 
like  the  trail  crew  job,  so  I  just  quit  and  got  in  my  car  and 
drove  down  to  Alder  Springs  to  live  with  Bob.   It  turned  out  that 
there  was  a  new  position  there,  a  patrolman  position.   One  of 
these  young  missionaries  had  the  job  driving  a  jeep  around  to 
inspect  buildings  and  clean  up  campgrounds  and  do  fire 
prevention,  and  we  decided  to  find  a  way  to  get  rid  of  him,  and 
I'd  get  that  job.   [laughter]   Bob  didn't  like  him — they  lived  in 
this  little  house  together.   I  can't  remember  his  name  now. 

To  make  a  long  story  short,  we  persuaded  him  to  go  to  this 
remote  wilderness  ranger  station  called  Indian  Dick  because  he 
could  have  a  horse.   He  had  this  pioneer  imagery  in  his  head.   He 
had  a  hand-cranked  clothes  washer--he  loved  that.   He  loved  all 
kinds  of  things  that  didn't  need  any  electricity.  The  only  thing 
he  needed  to  have  power  for  was  a  radio  that  picked  up  short  wave 
broadcasts  from  the  missions  down  in  Panama  describing  how  they 
were  converting  the  Indians  and  singing  this  doleful,  doleful 
music,  and  he'd  play  it  loud,  and  it  was  just  awful.   One  day, 
when  he  was  in  town,  we  took  the  aerial  connectors  out  of  the 
casing  and  painted  them  with  rubber  cement  so  that  they  didn't 
work.   He  thought  it  was  a  change  in  the  atmosphere  that  was 
interfering  with  his  reception  from  his  pals  down  there  in 
Central  America.   He  strung  wire  all  over  that  camp--from  tree  to 
tree  —  trying  to  pick  up  that  signal  and  it  never  worked, 
[laughter]   Finally,  we  told  him  what  we'd  done  when  he  left,  and 
then  I  got  that  job.   So  Bob  and  I  spent  that  summer  working 
together,  and  we  just  had  a  wonderful  summer. 


Forestry  Student  at  Berkeley.  1955-1960 


Pesonen:   That  summer,  I  was  on  a  big  fire,  and  I  met  a  forestry  student 
from  Berkeley.   He  said  "Yeah,  I  go  to  forestry  school.   It's  a 
great  profession;  you  work  outdoors  all  the  time;  there's  lots  of 
jobs."  And  so  I  decided  that  was  what  I'd  do.  That  fall  I  went 
back  to  the  University  and  registered  in  forestry. 

Lage:     That  would  have  been  '55  or  '56? 

Pesonen:   That  would  have  been  '55.   I  think  it  was  '55. 


Lage:     So  you  were  attracted  mainly  to  the  outdoor  experiences, 
fighting- - 


fire 


20 


Pesonen:  Well,  no,  forestry  more.   Soils  and  silviculture. 
Lage:     You  had  a  sense,  then,  of  what  it  was  all  about. 

Pesonen:  Well,  I  spent  a  lot  of  time  sitting  on  the  fire  line  talking  to 
this  guy,  and  he  explained  a  lot  of  it  and  said  it  was  a 
wonderful  field.   I  didn't  know  what  I  wanted  to  do.   It  sounded 
like  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds.   1  never  really  bought  into 
the  philosophy,  of  course;  I  was  always  a  bit  of  an  outsider.   I 
took  a  lot  of  English  classes  and  a  lot  of  classes  in  other 
fields.   I  loved  the  University,  and  I  just  loved  going  to 
school. 

Lage:     It  was  unusual  to  take  a  lot  of  the  humanities  classes  as  a 
forestry  student,  wasn't  it? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Most  of  my  classmates  were  going  to  go  to  work  for  a 

logging  company  or  the  Forest  Service.   I  remember  when  they  were 
graduating,  and  we'd  sit  around  the  library  and  talk  about  the 
various  recruiters  who  had  come  from  potential  employers,  and  the 
talk  was  all  about  what  their  retirement  plans  were  like. 

Lage:     Even  at  that  age? 

Pesonen:   Yes--which  companies  had  the  best  retirement  plans.   I  couldn't 

believe  that  anybody  would  care  about  retirement  when  you're  just 
getting  out  of  college.   But  I  think  they  were  very  conservative 
people. 

Lage:     Conservative  in  personality? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Conservative  personalities  and  very  worried  about  security. 

Lage:     It  sounds  more  like  the  atmosphere  today  in  a  sense,  where  young 
people  seem  concerned,  maybe  rightly  so,  with  financial  security. 

Pesonen:   I  think  so.   They  were  people  who  had  come  out  of  the  war  and 

come  out  of  a  less-secure  economy.  Maybe  it's  because  my  father 
was  a  government  employee,  and  we  never  worried  about  that  sort 
of  thing.   It  was  a  secure,  middle-class  family.   That  was  the 
last  thing  on  my  mind.   I  wanted  something  that  was  going  to  be 
interesting  and  productive,  and  I  didn't  care  about  retirement. 
I  wasn't  sure  I'd  ever  live  that  long  anyway.   [laughter] 

Lage:     Did  you  find  that  there  was  a  forestry  student  "type"?   I  know 
when  I  interviewed  Henry  Vaux  [forest  economist  and  former  dean 
of  the  UC  School  of  Forestry]  he  talked  about  a  sort  of  a 
stereotypical  type  of  forestry  student,  a  little  less  people 
oriented  and-- 


21 


Pesonen:   Less  people  oriented? 

Lage:     Yes,  less  people  oriented.   Particularly  in  those  earlier  years 
than  later. 

Pesonen:   I  don't  remember  that,  but  then  I  didn't  think  in  those  terms 
then.   [pause]  Yes,  I  think  that  probably  they  were 
introspective,  or  maybe  not  so  introspective  as... shy.   It  wasn't 
a  very  social  group.   There  was  a  bond  among  men  that  do  anything 
together,  but  it's  not  a  deep  emotional  bond;  it's  a  bond  that 
fills  an  emotional  void  that  doesn't  have  anything  else  to  fit  in 
it.   It's  like  salesmen  when  they  get  together  at  conventions  or 
something.   A  little  camaraderie,  but-- 

Lage:     You  didn't  see  a  deep  camaraderie  among  the  students? 

Pesonen:   No,  and  I  didn't  feel  a  deep  camaraderie.   Except  that  we  had  all 
gone  through  a  kind  of  experience  together,  which  was  some  kind 
of  a  bond.   But  I  haven't  maintained  those  friendships  over  the 
years. 

Lage:     Were  there  women  in  your  class? 

Pesonen:   No.  Well,  maybe  there  was  one.   But  it  was  an  all-male  world. 

Lage:     That  was  very  different  from  the  University  at  large. 

Pesonen:   It's  very  different  from  now.   There  are  a  lot  of  women  in 
forestry.   Of  course,  there  isn't  much  of  a  forestry  school 
anymore . 

Lage:     It's  very  small  now. 

Pesonen:   It's  very  small,  and  it's  been  absorbed  pretty  much  into  another 
college.   But  then,  still,  it  was  a  residual  of  the  frontier  of 
logging.   There  were  lots  of  virgin  forests  left. 

Lage:     Was  the  emphasis  on  logging? 

Pesonen:   The  emphasis  was  very  much  on  growing  wood  to  be  cut.   We  took 

logging  engineering  courses.   We  took  a  lot  of  courses  on  how  to 
cruise  timber,  how  to  scale  timber,  how  to  scale  a  log.   It  was 
very  production  oriented. 

H 

Lage:     Which  of  your  professors  do  you  recall  as  being  influential? 
Pesonen:   Well,  Vaux  was  just  a  great  influence  on  me,  and  John  Zivnuska. 


22 


Lage:     Vaux  was  dean  at  the  time? 

Pesonen:   Vaux  was  dean;  he  also  taught  forest  policy.   Zivnuska  taught 
forest  economics.   There  was  Ed  [Edward  C.]  Stone  who  taught 
forest  ecology.   Those  were-- 

Lage:     So  these  are  the  broader  subjects. 

Pesonen:   Yes.   I  took  a  course  from  Starker  Leopold  in  wildlife 

management,  which  was  a  wonderful  course.   Probably  the  most 
influential  professor  I  knew  was  an  English  professor--Tom 
[Thomas  F.]  Parkinson.   He  had  a  great  influence  on  me. 

Lage:     Do  you  want  to  talk  about  that  a  little  bit? 

Pesonen:   Well,  he  was  just  a  fine  teacher.   He  made  literature  come  alive 
for  me,  and  poetry,  and  really  fine  writing.   I  loved  to  read, 
and  I  started  writing  poetry  around  that  time.   None  of  it  was 
ever  any  good,  but  it  was  a  good  discipline  because  it  is  very 
economical.   It  stood  me  in  good  stead  my  whole  life.  And  he 
encouraged  that.   Every  word  has  to  count  in  a  poem;  there's  no 
waste  in  a  poem.   So  I  think  I  write  very  economically  now.   I've 
sent  you  some  of  the  things,  and  I  don't  think  you'll  find  any 
wasted  words  in  there. 

Lage:     That's  interesting,  thinking  of  poetry  as  a  discipline  for 
general  types  of  writing. 

Pesonen:   You  look  for  ways  to  get  as  much  meaning  into  as  few  words  as 

possible.   I  practice  that  discipline  a  lot.   I  think  it's  been 
useful  in  my  writing,  too,  because  I  write  well  and  I  write  legal 
writing  and  stuff.   So  that  was  a  great  influence. 

Well,  I  never  really  thought  I  wanted  to  go  into  poetry.   By 
the  time  I  graduated—first,  there  was  two  years  off  for  the 
army. 

Lage:  Oh,  you  did  end  up  in  the  army? 

Pesonen:  I  ended  up  in  the  army  in  1957  and  '58. 

Lage:  So  that  was  a  break  in  the  middle  of  school. 

Pesonen:  That  was  a  break. 

Lage:  Was  that  a  choice  or  were  you  drafted? 

Pesonen:   I  was  still  draf table,  and  I  wanted  to  get  it  out  of  the  way 

before  I  graduated.   I  didn't  want  to  graduate  and  join  the  army. 


Lage: 


23 


I  wanted  to  graduate  and  go  into  whatever  else  I  was  going  to  do. 
I  still  wasn't  sure  I  liked  forestry  as  a  career,  so  I 
volunteered  for  the  draft.   I  knew  I  was  going  to  have  to  go  in, 
so  I  figured  "I'll  get  it  out  of  the  way  and  then  graduate  and 
then  I  don't  have  to  worry  about  it." 

I  was  just  an  enlisted  man.   I  was  sent  to  Texas  after  basic 
training,  for  a  year,  and  wangled  my  way  to  Europe  for  a  year.   I 
got  assigned  to  a  little  station  down  south  of  Ingrande  near  the 
Loire  Valley  in  France,  a  beautiful  place.   There  was  this  small 
station,  and  I  had  a  lot  of  freedom  to  leave  and  go  to  Paris, 
and  I  went  to  Paris  almost  every  weekend.   [laughter]   I  loved 
France;  I  just  loved  Europe.   I  spent  a  year  there.   I  met  a  girl 
in  Paris,  a  New  Zealand  girl,  and  she  and  I  started  travelling 
together.   We  traveled  all  over. 

This  was  while  you  are  still  in  the  army? 


Pesonen:   I  was  still  in  the  army.   1  would  take  leave  and  go  on  vacation 

with  her.  That  was  a  nice  time.  I  had  a  good  time  in  Europe.  I 
hated  the  army.  I  hated  the  discipline;  I  hated  the  boredom;  but 
it  was  a  good  experience. 

I  came  back  in  February  of  1959,  and  I  went  back  to  forestry 
school  and  graduated  in  1960.   I  didn't  graduate  with  all  of  the 
people  I  had  been  through  school  with. 

The  big  event  in  forestry  school  is  summer  camp.   You  have 
to  spend  one  summer  up  at  Meadow  Valley  near  Quincy,  learning 
field  techniques.   It's  the  bond  of  the  class.   The  class  goes 
through  school  together;  they'd  been  to  summer  camp  together. 
Well,  everybody  I  went  to  summer  camp  with  graduated  two  years 
ahead  of  me.   The  class  I  graduated  with,  I  hadn't  gone  to  summer 
camp  with.   So  I  was  always  a  bit  of  an  outsider.  That  didn't 
trouble  me.   You  look  back  on  it  now,  and  I  didn't  even  think 
about  it. 


Lage:     So  in  retrospect-- 

Pesonen:   It's  never  been  clear  what  class  I'm  in.   [laughter] 

Occasionally,  I  go  to  the  Christmas  reunion  party--!  did  this 
year,  as  a  matter  of  fact—and  they  make  everybody  stand  up  from 
each  class.   It's  never  clear  what  class  I  stand  up  with. 

Lage:     Do  you  stand  up  twice? 

Pesonen:   My  summer  camp  class  is  the  class  of  '58,  and  my  actual 

graduating  class  is  '60.   I  would  have  graduated  in  "59--I  had 
the  units—but  I  wanted  to  take  more  English.   I  wanted  to  take 


24 

English  criticism.   I  was  really  getting  interested  in  a  lot  more 
English  literature.   So  I  took  an  extra  year. 

Lage:     So  that's  how  you  were  able  to  fit  in  all  of  the  humanities,  by 
spending  a  little  more  time. 

Pesonen:   Yes. 

Lage:     And  you  had  your  junior  college  classes. 

Pesonen:   I  had  some  of  that.   That  was  credited  against  my  graduation 
units. 


25 


II   EARLY  JOBS  AND  INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  ISSUES  AT  BODEGA  BAY 


UC's  Wildlands  Research  Center  and  Stegner's  Wilderness  Letter 


Pesonen:   When  I  graduated  in  '60,  I  didn't  know  what  I  was  going  to  do.   I 
didn't  want  to  go  to  work  for  the  Forest  Service,  I  didn't  want 
to  go  to  work  for  a  logging  company.   I  interviewed  with  some  of 
the  employers,  and  it  just  didn't  interest  me.   I  guess  that  was 
when  I  started  working  for  the  Wildlands  Research  Center. 

Lage:     That  was  in  '60. 

Pesonen:   When  I  was  in  school  I  had  competed  in  some  essay  contests.   I 

put  myself  pretty  much  through  school.   I  got  a  little  help  from 
my  parents,  but  I  didn't  ask  for  a  lot  of  help.   They  were 
generous  whenever  I  needed  it.  But  I  lived  in  a  little  room,  and 
I  hashed  in  sororities  for  my  meals  and  for  a  little  spending 
money,  and  I  saved  money  during  the  summer.   But  one  summer,  when 
I  went  to  summer  camp  I  couldn't  make  much  money- -although  I  did 
get  a  job  part  time  working  up  there  for  the  Forest  Service. 

Lage:     Even  during  summer  camp? 

Pesonen:  Even  during  summer  camp.  I  worked  weekends  filling  in  in  a  fire 
station.  So  I  earned  my  way  through  school  pretty  much.  It  was 
a  lot  easier  to  do  then  than  it  is  now,  you  know. 

Lage:     It  was  easier  to  live  on  a  shoestring  then. 

Pesonen:   It  was  much  easier  to  live  on  a  shoestring.   I  had  a  reliable 
car,  and  I  didn't  mind  living  in  a  little  room  and  using  the 
library  to  study.   I  got  by  somehow.   I  never  felt  deprived.   I 
never  felt  poor  or  unable  to  support  myself.   And  I  always  had  my 
parents  to  fall  back  on  if  I  needed  it,  and  I  did  occasionally, 
and  they  were  always --my  father  was  always  generous,  too.   By 


26 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


this  time  my  brother  had  died,  so  I  was  an  only  child.  My 
brother  died  in  1952. 

An  accident  or  an  illness? 

No,  he  had  cancer.   That  was  the  beginning  of  my  mother's 
alcoholism.   My  brother  was  a  much  more  outgoing  person  than  I 
was,  and  he  and  my  mother  were  more  soulmates  than  Mother  and  I 
were.  My  mother  was  a  very  volatile,  emotional,  demonstrative 
woman,  and  that  kind  of  turned  me  off  for  some  reason. 

What  was  her  ethnic  background? 

Scotch-Irish.   She  was  very  neurotic  in  a  lot  of  ways.   She  had 
been  put  up  for  adoption  when  she  was  about  six  because  her 
mother  had  too  many  kids. 

She  didn't  have  that  secure  family  background  that  you  had? 

Well,  she  loved  her  adoptive  parents.   It  was  a  very  strict 
family.   Her  adoptive  father,  for  whom  I'm  named,  David  Wood, 
wanted  to  adopt  her,  but  had  a  very  strict  Victorian  wife  who--I 
think  Mother  told  me  once  that  she  was  molested  when  she  was  a 
little  girl  and  that  was  a  taint  on  her.   Somebody  had  fondled 
her  and  then  her  stepmother  was  always  very  disapproving  of  her 
after  that.   So  Mother  had  a  lot  of  emotional  problems  which  were 
pretty  much  under  control  as  long  as  my  brother  and  I  were 
growing  up,  but  really  got  out  of  hand  later,  when- -she  really 
began  to  drink  and  be  very  unhappy  after  my  brother  died.   That 
was  a  great  loss  to  her.  And  I  didn't  fill  the  void.   I  didn't-- 


You  were  out  of  the  house- - 

Well,  I  wasn't  emotionally  responsive, 
brother  had  always  been. 


either,  in  the  way  that  my 


That  was  going  on,  so  I  didn't  go  home  very  much.   I  didn't 
like  being  around  my  mother  when  she  was  like  that.  Anyway, 
since  I  had  done  some  writing  in  forestry  school,  they  recruited 
me  into  the  Wildlands  Research  project. 

You  started  talking  about  an  essay  contest.   That's  how  this-- 

There  were  a  couple  of  essay  contests.   One  was  called  the  Walter 
Lathrop  Pack  contest.   I  don't  even  remember  what  I  wrote  about, 
but  I  won  the  prize.  And  I  did  it  mainly  for  the  money, 
[laughter] 


Lage: 


Not  for  the  honors . 


27 


Pesonen: 


I  needed  the  money, 
significant  amount. 


It  was  only  $100,  but  back  then  $100  was  a 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


I  guess  because  I  had  done  some  writing  in  school,  they 
thought  I  was  the  perfect  candidate  to  be  on  the  staff  of  the 
Outdoor  Recreation  Resources  Review  Commission  Wilderness  Report 
under  Jim  Gilligan.   [pause]   We  split  the  project  up  into 
various  parts:  we  had  an  economic  component,  a  philosophical 
component,  and  an  inventory  component-- 

We  should  probably  just  step  back  and  say  what  the  project  was 
because  only  you  and  I  might  know. 

The  Outdoor  Recreation  Resources  Review  Commission  was  set  up,  I 
think,  in  '59,  funded  mainly  by  Laurance  Rockefeller,  to  do  a 
massive  study  of  all  recreation  resources  in  the  United  States. 
They  farmed  out  the  projects  to  various  institutions  and  the 
Wildlands  Research  Center,  which  was  a  non-profit  spinoff  of  the 
school  of  forestry—a  grant  application  entity  in  effect—got  the 
contract  to  do  the  report  on  wilderness.   I  think  it  was  mainly 
through  Jim  Gilligan 's  influence.  He  had  written  his  Ph.D. 
thesis  on  wilderness. 

At  Berkeley? 

No,  the  University  of  Montana,  I  think,  is  where  he  wrote  his 
thesis.   But  he  was  the  extension  forester  at  Berkeley,  and  he 
was  also  on  the  staff  or  the  board  of  the  Wildlands  Research 
Center.   How  he  got  the  contract,  I  don't  know,  but  he  got  it 
anyway,  and  I  thought  that  was  very  clever. 

Were  you  interested  in  wilderness  at  that  time? 

I  was  interested  in  wilderness  as  an  idea,  and  I  loved  the 
outdoors  and  I  always  fished  and-- 

But  had  you  read  Aldo  Leopold  and  other  wilderness  philosophers? 

No,  I  don't  think  I  had.  The  reading  that  I  had  done  that  had 
caught  my  interest  was  Wallace  Stegner's  Beyond  the  Hundredth 
Meridian,  which  my  mother  loved  and  then  encouraged  me  to  read, 
and  all  of  Bernard  DeVoto's  books  on  the  exploration  of  the  West 
--Across  the  Wide  Missouri.   There  was  a  trilogy  that  Bernard 
DeVoto  did  which  was  a  wonderful  history  of  the  exploration  of 
the  West.   And  I  had  read  all  of  those--!  had  read  a  lot  of 
western  history,  which  is  wilderness,  really,  and  that's  where 
the  idea  grew  up.   Not  so  much  from  the  philosophers  of  the 
wilderness  like  Aldo  Leopold- -and  I  had  read  Thoreau,  of  course. 
So  I  started  reading  all  of  these  things:  Aldo  Leopold  and,  well, 


28 


there  was  lots  and  lots  of  stuff,  I  don't  remember  what  it  all 
was—even  the  Bible  had  a  lot  about  wilderness. 

It  was  a  hard  time  writing  this  thing. 
Lage:     Now,  what  was  your  assignment? 

Pesonen:  My  assignment  was  to  write  about  the  wilderness  idea.   That  was 

part  of  my  assignment.   I  had  other  assignments,  but  that  was  one 
of  them.   And  I  struggled  and  struggled  with  that,  and  parts  of 
it  were  okay.   Parts  of  it  were  the  history  of  the  wilderness 
regulations  by  the  Forest  Service,  which  was  pretty 
straightforward.   But  there  was  this  notion  of  what  wilderness  is 
and  what  it  means  to  people  that  confounded  me.   I  mean,  I  could 
feel  it,  but  I  couldn't  say  it—couldn't  get  it  articulated. 
That's  what  led  to  Wallace  Stegner's  Wilderness  Letter.   I 
finally  put  down  what  I  was  trying  to  say  in  a  letter  to  Stegner. 
I  chose  Stegner  because  I  had  loved  Beyond  the  Hundredth 
Meridian,  and  I  knew  he  was  a  professor  of  creative  writing  at 
Stanford,  and  if  anybody  could  do  it,  he  could.   I  just  picked 
him  out  because  I  knew  who  he  was. 

Lage:     Did  you  contact  him  directly,  or  did  you  go  through  somebody? 

Pesonen:   I  just  contacted  him  directly.   I  just  asked  him  to  help  me.   I 
wrote  him  a  letter.   I  may  have  called  him  up  and  discussed  it  a 
little  bit  with  him--I  don't  remember  whether  I  did  or  not.   I 
did  this  all  on  my  own.   I  don't  think  I  even  talked  to  Gilligan 
about--!  might  have  talked  to  Gilligan,  but  I  just  sort  of--. 
The  idea  just  occurred  to  me. 

And  finally,  we  got  the  Wilderness  Letter.1  Stegner  sent  a 
copy  to  [David]  Brower.   Brower  by  this  time  was  the  towering 
figure  of  the  Sierra  Club.   He  had  launched  its  publication 
program,  he  had  fought  the  dams  in  the  Grand  Canyon  and  Glen 
Canyon  and  lost  one  or  two,  but  his  main  dream  was  to  get  the 
Wilderness  Act  passed.   The  Wilderness  Act  had  been  introduced  in 
Congress  each  year  and  defeated  by  the  mining  and  timber  and 
development  interests  of  the  West.   It  was  the  big  environmental 
legislative  battle.   It  had  been  going  on  for  several  years. 
Brower  saw  the  Wilderness  Letter  as  a  valuable  tool  in  lobbying 
for  the  Wilderness  bill.   This  was  now  1961--late  '60  or  '61. 
The  Wilderness  Act  wasn't  passed  until  '64. 


'For  a  copy  of  the  Wilderness  Letter  and  Stegner's  recollections  about 
writing  it,  see  Wallace  Stegner,   The  Artist  as  Environmental  Advocate,  an 
oral  history  conducted  by  Ann  Lage  in  1982  (Regional  Oral  History  Office, 
1983). 


29 


Lage:     The  campaign  had  been  going  on  for  several  years. 

Pesonen:   It  had  been  going  on  for  quite  a  few  years.   There  was  a  whole 

history  involved  with  that  that  we  don't  need  to  go  into.   It  was 
started  by  Bob  Marshall  when  he  worked  for  the  Forest  Service. 
He  got  the  regulations  SI  and  S2,  regulations  that  set  aside, 
temporarily  at  least,  parts  of  the  National  Forest  as  a  kind  of 
wilderness. 

Brower  immediately  wanted  to  publish  the  letter.   I  said 
"No,  it's  my  letter."   [laughter] 

Lage:     Was  that  your  first  contact  with  Brower? 

Pesonen:   That  was  my  first  contact  with  Brower.   I'd  heard  of  him,  but  I'd 
never  met  him.   We  had  a  little  argument  about  it,  and  Vaux 
mediated  it.   I  felt  a  little  possessory  about  that  letter--it 
was  my  idea,  you  know?   Brower  wanted  it  for  his  own  reasons. 
Vaux  recognized  that  we  couldn't  own  that  letter;  it  was 
Stegner's  to  do  with  what  he  wanted.   It  was  his  words,  and  it 
was  really  his  ideas,  and  I  had  just  stimulated  an  event  which 
was  probably  going  to  happen  anyway  in  one  way  or  another.   So 
that's  how  I  got  to  know  Brower. 

Lage:     It  ended  up  with  Stewart  Udall  [secretary  of  the  Interior]  using 
that  letter  as  part  of  a  speech. 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  don't  remember  that. 

Lage:     He  read  it  at  a  Wilderness  Conference,  and  then  it  became  part  of 
the  proceedings.   I  don't  know  if  Stegner  sent  it  to  him,  or 
Brower. 

Pesonen:   Well,  the  Sierra  Club,  by  that  time,  had  annual  or  semi-annual 

(biennial,  rather)  wilderness  conferences.   They  were  part  of  the 
campaign  to  pass  the  Wilderness  Act,  and  they  published  their 
proceedings  every  year.   I  guess  that's  how  it  happened. 


Staff  Member  for  Assembly  Fish  and  Game  Committee;  Counting  Deer 
Tags  for  Pauline  Davis 


Pesonen:   Anyway,  we  finished  the  report  and  the  report  incorporated  the 
letter,  and  then  I  didn't  know  what  I  was  going  to  do.   I  heard 
that  there  was  a  job  opened  as  staff  to  the  Assembly  Fish  and 
Game  Committee.   Well,  here  was  everything  I  wanted:  fishing, 
hunting,  making  policy,  changing  the  world  —  it  sounded  fine.   So 
I  applied  and  I  was  hired  by  the  chairperson  of  that  committee, 


30 


an  assemblywoman  from  Portola,  up  in  Plumas  County,  Pauline 

Davis.   I  had  no  idea  what  I  was  getting  into.   The  Fish  and  Game 
Committee  was  heavily  lobbied  by  the  commercial  fishing 

interests,  and  my  objective  was  to  get  some  kind  of  legislation 
through  to  limit  logging  and  its  effect  on  streams.   I  talked 

Pauline  into  putting  on  some  hear ings --some  interim  committee 

hearings --up  the  coast  on  logging  and  its  effect  on  anadromous 
fish. 

Lage:     Now  what  had  started  you  with  that  concern? 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  think  I  had  fished  up  there  a  lot,  and  I  had  seen  the 
horrible  damage  some  of  those  logging  operations  had  done.   I 
talked  to  people  in  Fish  and  Game  and  there  were  some  people  in 
the  Department  of  Fish  and  Game  that  had  written  widely  about  the 
effect  of  logging  on  streams  and  lakes;  they  were  concerned  about 
that.   Caught  my  interest,  anyway.   I  talked  Pauline  into  holding 
some  hearings  on  that. 

It  was  not  a  pleasant  job.   It  was  very  political,  and 
Pauline  was  a  very  changeable  woman.   She  had  succeeded  to  that 
seat  after  her  husband  died.   Her  husband  had  been  the 
assemblyman  from  that  district  before.   He  died  and  she  ran  for 
it-- 

Lage:     That  was  the  way  women  became  legislators  in  those  days. 

Pesonen:   That's  right.   She  was  a  great  big,  huge  woman  with  a  high 

bouffant  hairdo  dyed  bright  red—bright  auburn,  anyway,  and  very 
suspicious,  very  paranoid.  You  never  knew  where  you  stood  with 
her.   There  were  two  kinds  of  people  in  the  world  as  far  as  she 
was  concerned.   There  were  members  of  old  pioneer  families,  who 
were  good,  and  snakes-in-the-grass,  who  were  bad.   One  week  I'd 
come  into  the  office,  and  she'd  introduce  me  to  a  bunch  of 
lobbyists:  "I  want  you  to  meet  Dave  Pesonen.   He's  a  member  of  an 
old  pioneer  family,"  [laughter]  and  I  couldn't  do  anything  wrong, 
and  the  next  week  I'd  come  in  and  the  door  would  be  closed  and 
she'd  be  whispering  and  wouldn't  talk  to  me,  and  I'd  hear, 
"Mumble. . .mumble. . .snake-in-the-grass."  You  just  never  knew. 

Lage:     And  you  worked  directly  for  her? 

Pesonen:   It  was  still  a  little  office.   She  had  a  staff  of  two  women 
secretaries,  and  herself,  and  me.   The  two  secretaries  and  I 
shared  an  outer  office.   She  was  at  war  with  the  Department  of 
Fish  and  Game,  mainly  over  their  hunting  regulations  for  deer  in 
the  northeast  part  of  the  state.   She  didn't  believe  their 
statistics,  so  one  day  she  made  me  go  over  to  the  Department  of 
Fish  and  Game  and  collect  all  of  the  deer  tags  that  had  been 


31 


turned  in  by  deer  hunters  and  re-do  all  the  statistics  by  hand. 
Now  here  were  these  crumpled  pieces  of  cardboard,  you  know,  with 
entries  written  on  a  stub  pencil  in  the  headlights  of  a  truck 
someplace  out  in  the  woods  with  deer  hair  and  blood  all  over 
them,  with  how  many  points  the  deer  had  and  where  they'd  been 
shot.   Boxes  and  boxes  of  these  things,  and  I  had  to  just  sit 
there  and  count  them. 

Lage:     What  was  her  purpose? 

Pesonen:   She  believed  that  the  public  statistics  and  the  raw  data  were 
phonied  up. 

Lage:     Did  she  want  more  deer  hunting  or  less  deer  hunting-- 

Pesonen:   She  wanted  more  deer  hunting;  she  wanted  less  doe  hunting.   Well, 
my  numbers  came  out  practically  even  with  the  figures  of  the 
Department  of  Fish  and  Game.   Then  she  thought  I  was  in  cahoots 
with  the  Department  of  Fish  and  Game.   It  really  became  pretty 
intolerable. 

I  met  some  close  friends  there  in  Sacramento,  people  who 
remained  friends  for  a  long  time.  Dick  Patsey,  who's  now  a  judge 
out  in  Contra  Costa  County,  was  on  the  staff  of  the 
Constitutional  Revision  Commission.   Somehow  he  and  I  met  and 
became  very  good  friends,  and  we're  still  good  friends.   My 
friend  Bob  Connelly  was  still  around,  and  we  spent  a  lot  of  time 
together. 

Lage:     Is  he  the  one  who  put  you  on  to  the  job? 

Pesonen:   No,  he  didn't  put  me  on  to  the  job.   I  don't  remember  who  put  me 
onto  the  job.   I  think  it  was  Vaux  or  Starker  Leopold. 


Working  for  Dave  Brower  and  the  Sierra  Club.  1961-1962 


Pesonen:   One  day  Dave  Brower  called  up  and  said  that  he  wanted  me  to  be  on 
his  staff,  around  early  1962.   It  was  a  chance  to  get  out  of  this 
intolerable  situation  working  for  Pauline,  get  back  to  the  Bay 
Area,  live  in  San  Francisco,  work  down  on  Bush  Street  in  the 
Mills  Tower  with  this  towering  figure,  Dave  Brower.   It  was 
ideal;  it  was  perfect.   I  was  single  and  I  liked  San  Francisco. 
I've  always  had  this  ambivalence  about  cities.   I  think  cities 
are  a  wonderful  institution  when  they're  right.   I  loved--who 
wrote  The  City  in  History- -Lewis  Mumford.   I  loved  that  book. 
I've  always  been  a  bit  eclectic  in  my  interests.   I  wouldn't  want 


32 


to  go  out  and  just  live  out  in  the  woods  and  be  a  hermit.   I  like 
what  goes  on  in  cities.   I  think  cities  are  great  institutions. 
And  San  Francisco  in  the  fifties,  in  the  early  sixties,  was  a 
great  city.   A  great  city  if  you  were  a  young,  single  person.   So 
I  accepted  with  alacrity.   Well,  Brower  didn't  know  what  he 
wanted  to  do  with  me. 

Lage:     Did  Brower  know  you  other  than  from  that  one-- 

Pesonen:   I  think  only  from  the  Wilderness  Letter  and  that  whole  incident. 

Lage:     Interesting  that  he  chose  you  on  that  basis. 

Pesonen:   Well,  Brower  had  a  way  of  doing  that.   He  always  has.   Of  finding 
people  he's  real  simpatico  with,  young  people  in  particular,  and 
cultivating  them.   In  any  event,  I  accepted.   It  wasn't  clear 
what  my  job  was.   I  was  to  edit  books.   I  was  to  be  the  club 
spokesperson  at  the  Board  of  Forestry  meetings  on  revisions  to 
the  Forest  Practice  Act,  a  jack  of  all  trades.   Sometimes  I'd  be 
editing  books,  and  sometimes  it  wasn't  clear  what  I  was  supposed 
to  do. 

Lage:     But  were  you  busy  all  of  the  time? 

Pesonen:   Sometimes  I  wasn't.   Sometimes  I  was  a  little  bored.   But  it  was 
enough  to  just  be  in  the  penumbra  of  Brewer's  magic. 

Lage:     What  do  you  remember  that  you  could-- 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  remember  that  he  was  chimerical,  and  he  was  full  of 

spontaneous  ideas.   He  was  not  a  good  planner  or  manager  at  all, 
but  people  loved  him  because  he  is  who  he  is .   I  remember  him  as 
wanting  to  be  surrounded  with  young  people,  and  having  ideas.   He 
was  very  much  like  Jerry  Brown  in  a  way.   I  remember--!  was 
thinking  one  time  when  I  worked  for  Jerry  Brown  that  he  was  a 
successor  to  my  experience  with  Brower. 

Lage:     An  interesting  comparison.   It  seems  to  fit  when  you're-- 

Pesonen:   David  had  big  ideas,  but  he  had  a  hard  time  reducing  them  to 
operations.   He  needed  a  lot  of  people  to  do  that  for  him.   I 
guess  that's  why  he  surrounded  himself  with  people  who  could 
write,  who  could  speak,  who  could  think,  who  could  plan- -because 
he's  not  a  planner. 


Lage: 


Was  the  staff  very  large  at  that  point? 


33 


Pesonen:   No,  it  wasn't  very  large.   There  was  a  small  staff  in  the  Mills 
Tower  in  San  Francisco.   The  library  was  there;  the  whole  office 
was  there;  the  club  was  a  much  smaller  organization  then. 

Lage:     Bob  Golden  was  there? 

Pesonen:   Bob  Golden  was  there.   I  think  he  was  sort  of  the  chief  of  staff. 
I  don't  remember  who  was  the  head  of  finances --somebody  had  a 
financial  role  and-- 

Lage:     Not  Cliff  Rudden.   He  wasn't  there  yet-- 

* 

Pesonen:  Yes,  Cliff  Rudden  was  there.  These  are  names  that  are  coming 
back  to  me  now.  Bob  and  Fay  Golden.  I  haven't  seen  them  for 
years.  Cliff  Rudden,  Basse  Bunnelle-- 

Lage:     She  was  handling  club  outings. 

Pesonen:   I  think  she  was  doing  outings.   Who  was  the  editor  of  the 
Bulletin? 

Lage:     Nash?   Hugh  Nash? 

Pesonen:   No,  Hugh  Nash  came  later.   This  was  Hugh's  predecessor.   Tall, 
angular,  Ichabod  Crane  kind  of  person. 


Pesonen:   I  can't  remember  now.   It'll  come  back  to  me. 

Lage:     I  think  that  was  a  period  when  conflict  between  Brower  and  the 
board  of  directors  was  beginning.   Did  you  have  a  sense  of  that 
as  a  staff  person? 

Pesonen:   I  was  not  so  aware  of  that. 

Lage:     You  wouldn't  have  been  privy  to  all  that. 

Pesonen:   No,  I  wasn't  very  privy  to  that. 

And  I  still  didn't  know  what  I  wanted  to  do  with  my  life. 


A  Summer  of  Waiting  and  Writing.  1962;  Security  Clearance 
Problems  for  United  Nations  Job  and  Atomic  Park  Articles 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Did  you  think  of  it  in  those  terms? 
all  my  life?" 


"Whether  I  want  to  do  this 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Well,  I  didn't  know  what  career  I  wanted.   I  didn't  want  to  go 
and  work  in  traditional  forestry,  which  was  essentially  managing 
timberland  for  cutting.   I  had  studied  it,  but  I  didn't  practice 
it.  When  I  was  in  forestry  school,  I  worked  two  summers  with 
Southern  Pacific,  marking  timber  and  cruising  timber,  and  it  was 
wonderful,  healthy  work- -survey ing  of  property  lines  and--. 
Those  were  great  summer  jobs  in  college,  but  I  didn't  want  to  do 
that  all  my  life.   It  didn't  have  any  policy  implications;  it  was 
remote  and  I  liked  the  city.   It's  the  ambivalence  I've  always 
felt  about  cities  and  the  wilderness--!  like  them  both;  and  it 
was  too  much  of  one  thing.   It  didn't  have  any  intellectual 
excitement  to  it. 

So  it's  intellectual  excitement.   It  didn't  have  a  particular 
social  purpose,  which  you  mentioned  earlier- 
Well,  I  didn't  see  it  as  a  bad  social  purpose.   I  wasn't  against 
logging.   I  wasn't  against  cutting  timber;  it  just  didn't 
interest  me  as  something  I  wanted  to  do  with  my  life.   It  was 
very  limited  —  limited  scope.   There  was  no  vision  to  it.   So  I 
still  didn't  know  what  I  wanted  to  do.   I  think  it  was  Vaux  or 
Zivnuska  who,  while  I  was  working  for  the  club,  told  me  about  a 
position  as  a  forestry  advisor  for  the  Food  and  Agriculture 
Organization  of  the  United  Nations  in  what  was  then  Tanganyika. 
The  prospect  of  going  to  Africa  and  being  a  lone  forester  in 
Africa  was  just  so  exciting;  I  immediately  put  in  for  it.   The  UN 
even  then  was  a  huge  bureaucracy,  and  the  paper  work  was 
horrendous.   But  while  I  was  working  for  the  Sierra  Club,  I 
continued  to  process  this  application  to  the  FAO  and  to  get 
letters  of  recommendations  from  Vaux,  and  Zivnuska,  and  other 
people. 

And  I  started  flying  lessons,  because  I  understood  that  I 
would  have  a  little  airplane  in  Africa,  and  I  could  fly  all 
around.   I  had  started  taking  pilot's  lessons  when  I  was  in 
Sacramento,  and  I  had  soloed  by  this  time.   I  didn't  have  much 
money  to  pay  for  it,  so  I  was  going  out  to  Petaluma  to  some 
little  back-country  airport  which  had  old  airplanes  and  doing  my 
flying  lessons  up  there. 

This  UN  thing  just  dragged  on  and  on.   Then  along  came 
Bodega,  which  was  its  own  story--its  own  saga.   While  I  was  doing 


35 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 
Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Bodega,  which  we'll  come  back  to,  it  began  to  look  like  I  was 
going  to  get  the  FAO  job. 

Right  in  the  middle  of  your  Bodega  campaign? 
Yes.   And  I  quit  the  Club  over  Bodega-- 


We'll  get  into  that  more,  too. 


--and  took  the  summer  to  just  sort  out  what  I  was  going  to  do 
with  my  life  and  wait  for  this  FAO  thing  to  come  along.  Well,  I 
was  held  up  by  the  lack  of  a  security  clearance.   There  was  an 
executive  order  that  had  been  issued  by  Eisenhower  that  all 
American  citizens  working  for  the  UN  had  to  have  security 
clearances.   I  have  no  idea  why,  but  it  was  the  heart  of  the  cold 
war,  and  that  was  a  reflection  of  our  paranoia  at  that  time. 

The  paranoia  that  the  UN  was  actually  a  Communist  organization. 

Right.   And  I  couldn't  get  a  security  clearance.   I  was  held  up 
because  when  I  had  been  in  the  army  I  had  been  denied  a  security 
clearance.   That's  another  long  story. 

When  I  was  in  high  school,  good  family  friends  were  the 
Waegell  family.   They  had  a  ranch  outside  Sacramento,  where  I 
worked  on  my  holidays  and  summers,  starting  when  I  was  in  junior 
high  school,  I  think,  driving  tractors,  baling  hay,  digging 
fenceposts,  doing  everything  it  took  to  run  a  ranch.  The 
Waegells  were  Communists. 

Communist  farmers  in  Sacramento? 

Mrs.  Waegell  was  an  immigrant  from  England.   She  was  a  dyed-in- 
the-wool  Marxist,  subscriber  to  the  People's  World.   The  Waegell 
boys--two  twins,  Jim  and  George--and  their  younger  brother,  Jack, 
were  about  five  or  six  years  older  than  I  was,  and  so  they  would 
head  out  to  town  and  I  would  be  stuck  in  the  farmhouse  kitchen 
with  Mrs.  Waegell.   She  would  sit  me  down  and  read  me  the 
People's  World:  about  all  of  the  miseries  in  the  world,  about  the 
racism,  about  the  poor  people,  about  wars,  and  the  oppression  of 
capitalism.   And  I  ate  it  all  up.   [laughter]   Of  course,  I'd  go 
back  to  school  and  spout  it.   One  of  my  girlfriends  in  high 
school,  it  turned  out,  had  thought  I  was  a  dyed-in-the-wool 
Communist. 

Then  I  had  had  to  apply  for  a  security  clearance  when  I  was 
in  the  army,  because  I  was  in  a  headquarters  company  that  did 
training  maneuvers  and  had  access  to  classified  documents.   In 
Texas,  I  was  a  clerk-typist  for  a  corps  headquarters,  third  corps 


36 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


at  Fort  Hood,  Texas.   I  had  put  in  for  a  security  clearance 
because  I  had  to  for  that  position,  and  it  didn't  come  through  by 
the  time  I  went  to  Europe,  and  I  had  to  renew  it  when  I  got  to 
Europe.   One  day,  two  security  people  showed  up  at  this  little 
office  I  had  in  Ingrande,  France,  and  they  closeted  themselves 
with  the  warrant  officer  for  whom  I  worked.   Everybody  seemed 
very  serious  about  all  of  this.   I  wasn't  very  ideological,  you 
know;  the  thing  I  always  looked  forward  to  was  when  Time  magazine 
arrived  at  the  PX  every  week.   [laughter] 

Had  you  subscribed  to  People's  World? 

No,  I  hadn't.   But  they  had  done  a  thorough  background 
investigation  on  me. 


That's  frightening. 

My  parents'  friends  were  interviewed, 
their  hands  on  a  real  spy. 


They  thought  they  had 


And  when  this  girlfriend  in  high  school-- 

This  girlfriend  in  high  school  had  started  it,  apparently,  and 
then  it  had  grown.   You  know  the  paranoia  of  the  cold  war.   There 
was  a  dossier  on  me,  which  I  now  have  a  copy  of,  with  names 
redacted  so  I  don't  know  who  all  the  people  were,  but  it's  a 
paranoid  treatise.   I  was  called  down  to  Poitiers,  which  was  the 
headquarters  for  that  part  of  France,  to  the  central  headquarters 
of  this  security  arm  of  the  army,  and  put  through  an  awful 
grilling  about  all  of  my  background. 


Were  they  asking  you  about  beliefs? 
actual  action? 


Philosophical  beliefs,  or 


Beliefs,  people--!  don't  remember  it  all.   But  it  was  a  very 
unpleasant  experience.   I  would  have  to  take  the  train  down 
there- -a  couple  of  times  I  had  to  travel  down  there  for  this 
interrogation.  At  one  point,  I  remember,  I  was  put  through  an 
interrogation  right  out  of  a  television  show.   I  mean,  I  was 
stripped  and  one  guy  was  threatening  me,  another  guy  was  being 
nice  to  me--it  was  the  old  Mutt  and  Jeff  technique.  And  they 
wrote  up  a  statement  of  what  my  position  was,  and  it  was  full  of 
falsehoods,  and  I  refused  to  sign  it.   I  was  kept  there  for  a  day 
or  so,  and  finally  I  edited  it  down  and  signed  some  edited 
version  of  this  thing,  just  to  get  out  of  there.   I've  never  seen 
it;  I  don't  know  what  it  looks  like,  I  don't  know  what  it  said. 

My  father  was  a  government  employee,  and  his  job  could  be  in 
jeopardy  if  some  of  this  rubbed  off  on  him,  and  I  got  pretty 


37 


worried.   But  that  came  back  to  haunt  me  when  I  was  applying  for 
this  FAO  job.   Apparently  they  had  resurrected  all  of  this 
record,  and  I  couldn't  get  the  clearance. 

Lage:     That  is  really  bizarre,  but  probably  not  that  unusual. 

Pesonen:   Not  in  those  days.   So  that  summer  was  waiting  for  this  thing  to 
be  cleared  up- -that  summer  of  '62.   Since  I  didn't  have  anything 
else  to  do,  I  decided  I  would  write  up  the  Bodega  story,  and 
that's  what  led  to  that  pamphlet,  which  you  have  a  copy  of, 
Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park.1  I  just  closeted  myself  in  a  little 
old  room  over  here  on  Durant  Street  over  a  garage  and  got  a  night 
job  working  for  Joe  [John  B.]  Neilands  on  campus  making 
ferrochrome,  which  was  an  organic  compound  he  had  invented  which 
supposedly  had  wonderful  properties.   It  just  required  going  into 
the  lab  and  setting  it  up  and  starting  this  thing  bubbling  away 
and  then  tending  it  until  the  product  came  out  the  other  end. 

Lage:     Perfect  for  a  writer. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  it  was  a  wonderful  job  because  all  I  had  to  do  was  go  over 
there  at  night  and  tend  it  and  make  it  work.   But  I  got  paid  for 
all  of  that  time,  so  I  had  plenty  of  time  to  write.   I  got  into 
this  story  [of  PG&E's  plan  to  build  a  nuclear  power  plant  at 
Bodega  Bay] ,  which  is  another  story,  and  just  thought  that  I  had 
stumbled  onto  one  of  the  great  evils  of  all  time  and  that  the 
story  had  to  be  told.   I  worked  all  summer—well,  I  hitchhiked  to 
Colorado  and  visited  an  old  girlfriend  for  a  couple  of  weeks  and 
then  hitchhiked  up  to  Canada  with  some  people  I'd  met  on  the 
train  coming  back  from  Colorado,  went  up  to  British  Columbia  and 
just  saw  the  country,  and  then  came  back  and  decided  to  write 
that  story.   I  thought  about  all  this  all  the  way.   I  thought  ' 
about  that  FAO  job  and  about  Bodega  and  —  turning  it,  in  my  mind, 
to  something  that  had  to  be  dealt  with.   Finally  the  FAO  job  did 
come  through. 

Lage:     You  finally  got  clearance? 

Pesonen:   It  came  through  in  the  fall.   I  think,  maybe,  it  was  October  or 
November  of  '62,  and  by  that  time,  I  had  a  leadership  role  in 
Bodega  and  had  written  the  pamphlet .  This  great  evil  needed  to 
be  resolved  and  I  wasn't  going  to  leave  it.   So  I  reluctantly 
turned  down  the  FAO  job  and  never  did  go  to  Africa.   Sometimes  I 
wish  I  had;  sometimes  I  wish  I  hadn't. 

Lage:     Let's  stop  here  and  pick  up  Bodega  next  time. 


'David  E.  Pesonen,  A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park,  a  pamphlet  reprinted 
from  Sebastopal  Times  articles  on  9/27/62,  10/4/62,  10/11/62,  and  10/18/62, 
available  in  The  Bancroft  Library. 


38 

New  Left  Philosophies  and  Bodega  Bay 
[Interview  2:   January  23,  1992 ]ti 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


We  want  to  get  into  the  Bodega  story  today,  beginning  with  a 
sense  of  where  you  were  when  you  discovered  Bodega.   I  have 
brought  to  your  attention  this  newly  submitted  article  by  Thomas 
Wellock1  where  he  calls  you,  "...part  of  the  rising  radical 
sentiment  of  the  emerging  New  Left,"  and  he  refers  several  times 
to  the  Free  Speech  Movement  at  UC  Berkeley,  which  came  later  [in 
1964],  and  sort  of  implies  that  you  were  a  harbinger  of  that.   I 
wondered  if  you  could  tell  me  something  about  your  political 
beliefs  or  activities  at  that  time. 

Well,  I  don't  recall  that  I  was  very  political  at  all.   I 
certainly  didn't  have  any  coherent  political  theory,  left  or 
right.   I  was  a  liberal  and  my  parents  were  both  Democrats.   My 
father  had  favored  Henry  Wallace  in  the  1948  presidential 
elections,  and  Wallace  was  a  populist  and  a  liberal. 

Was  there  a  lot  of  political  talk  around  the  dinner  table? 

No,  not  very  much.  No,  I  don't  think  we  talked  politics  very 
much.   It  just  seemed  like--.  My  parents  were  brought  up  through 
the  Depression  and  there  were  a  lot  of  people  in  those  days  who 
were  brought  up  through  the  Depression  who  were  very  strongly 
Democratic  and  favored  government  intervention.   What's  called 
the  New  Left,  which  was  a  different  movement  entirely,  as  I 
understand  it,  was  not  a  term  that  I  knew  anything  about. 


It  wasn't  really  in  use  at  the  time. 
a  couple  of  years. 


He's  putting  it  back  on  you 


Yes.   I  was  very  excited  about  the  Free  Speech  Movement;  I 
thought  the  University  was  wrong,  but  I  never  went  to  any  of 
those  demonstrations.   I  was  particularly  interested  in  the 
Bodega  context  because  the  University,  in  my  view,  as  I  wrote  in 
A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park,  [1962]  had  caved  in  to  pressure  from 
PG&E  and  the  Atomic  Energy  Commission  with  whom  it  contracted  to 
run  the  labs  [the  Radiation  Laboratory  in  Berkeley  and  the 
Lawrence  Livermore  Laboratory],  and  [Glenn  T.]  Seaborg  was  a 
nuclear  physicist  who  was  chancellor  at  that  time  [1958-1961]. 


'Thomas  Wellock,  "The  Battle  for  Bodega  Bay:  The  Sierra  Club  and 
Nuclear  Power,  1958-1964,"  later  published  in  California  History,  Vol. 
LXXI,  No.  2,  Summer  1992. 


39 


Lage: 


That  made  it  fairly  easy  for  him  to  pressure  the  marine  biology 
faculty  to  mute  their  interest  in  Bodega  Bay.  So  I  thought  the 
University  was  a  culprit. 

So  it  made  you  sympathetic  with  the  Free  Speech  Movement  when  it 
came  around. 


Pesonen:   Well,  all  the  Free  Speech  Movement  did  was  expose  what  I  thought 
was  a  very  closed,  hierarchical,  reactionary  administration  in 
the  University,  which  I  hadn't  really  exposed.   So  I  thought  the 
Free  Speech  Movement  was  just  fine  and  the  principle  was  a  sound 
and  traditional  one:  the  right  of  students  to  have  views  and 
express  them  on  campus.   It  wasn't  a  very  complicated — 

Lage:     It  wasn't  something  that  came  up  while  you  were  on  campus,  was 
it?   That's  not  thought  of  as  too  lively  a  time,  politically. 

Pesonen:   It  wasn't.   It  wasn't  a  lively  time,  and  I  wasn't  politically 
active  on  campus.   I  didn't  join  any  clubs--.   I  was  too  busy 
getting  through  school.   I  had  to  work;  I  worked  every  summer  and 
I  worked  during  school.   I  am  a  slow  studier.   I  had  to  work  hard 
to  get  good  grades.   I  wasn't  interested  in  extracurricular 
stuff;  I  was  going  to  succeed  in  school,  get  out,  and  get  on  with 
my  life. 

Lage:     You  seem  to  have  a  habit  of  mind,  though,  of  being  challenging. 

Is  this  true?  In  fact,  Henry  Vaux  told  me  he  remembers  that  from 
school  as  well  as  later,  that  you  challenged  ideas  and  authority. 
Do  you  think  of  yourself  that  way? 

Pesonen:  Well,  I  think  of  myself  as  having  a  lot  of  confidence  in  my  views 
and  as  being  challenging.   Yes,  I  get  a  certain  amount  of 
amusement  out  of  it.   It's  recreational. 


Lage:     The  other  thing  that  I  think  ties  you  into  this  New  Left  mold  is 
your  interest  in  citizen  participation  in  government.  Was  that  a 
view  that  you  had  before  Bodega  or  did  it  come  out  of  your 
experience  with  what  happened  at  Bodega? 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  don't  think  I  ever  articulated  it  until  the  Bodega  case; 
it  was  just  a  given.   It  was  one  of  those  assumptions  I  had,  that 
I  hadn't  formulated  into  a  theory.   I  mean,  I  don't  think  that 
way.   There  are  certain  things  that  I  just  think  are  fair  and 
right. 

Lage:     So  the  situation  just  struck  you  as  something  that  wasn't  right? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Then,  I  suppose,  in  order  to  explain  my  position,  I  had  to 
articulate  that  view,  because  it  is  important  to  me  to  have  a 


40 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


reason  for  what  I  do.   If  I  don't  have  a  reason,  then  I  begin  to 
question  whether  my  position  is  correct.  And,  you  know,  I'm  an 
advocate,  too.   But  I  think  I  try  to  advocate  honestly,  and  I 
have  to  believe  it  first.   [laughter]   If  I  don't  believe  it,  I 
don't  expect  other  people  to  believe  it,  and  I  don't  think  I  ever 
said  anything  I  didn't  believe.   But,  you  know,  your  views  change 
as  you  get  older  and  wiser,  too.   I  was  young  and  the  views  I  had 
were,  today,  very  conventional.  Very  conventional  views  of 
civics.   Just  high  school  civics.   It  wasn't  anything  more 
complicated  than  that. 

Well,  I  sometimes  think  that  our  generation  tended  to  believe 
what  they  said  in  the  civics  classes.   Now  kids  are  much  more 
cynical.   That's  why  we  could  have  these  idealistic  bursts, 
because  we  really  believed  what  we'd  been  taught,  and  then  were 
horrified  when  it  wasn't  true. 

Exactly.  We  were  surprised,  disappointed,  and  angry  that 
everything  we  had  just  accepted  as  a  matter  of  faith  was  subject 
to  question.   It  was  very  threatening  to  some  people. 


Public  Power  vs.  Private  Power  and  the  Bodega  Issue 


Lage:     One  other  thing  that  comes  up  is  your  father  having  been  with  the 
Bureau  of  Reclamation- -that  this  would  affect  your  views  of 
public  power  versus  private  power. 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  did  believe  in  public  power. 

Lage:     Was  that  something  your  father  had  talked  about  over  the  years? 

Pesonen:   He  had  talked  about  it,  yes.   He  was  an  idealist,  and  a  very  fine 
man.   He  was  very  proud  of  what  the  Bureau  of  Reclamation  was 
doing  with  the  Central  Valley  Project,  and  he  believed  in  it.   He 
worked  hard  at  it,  and  he  devoted  his  career  to  it,  and  he 
involved  me  and  my  brother.   He  took  us  with  him  on  his  trips, 
and  he  told  us  about  California,  and  about  how  two-thirds  of  the 
water  fell  in  the  north  part  of  the  state,  and  two-thirds  of  the 
arable  land  was  in  the  south  part  of  the  state,  and  it  just  made 
sense  to  move  some  of  that  water  down  where  the  land  was .   I 
never  questioned  that  at  that  time.   I  have  grave  questions  about 
it  now,  but  it  made  a  lot  of  sense  then. 

We  would  go  to  Shasta  Dam,  we'd  go  to  Friant  Dam,  we'd  go  to 
these  big  federal  projects  underway,  and  it  was  sort  of  a  Woody 
Guthrie  view  of  life.   Here  was  electricity  being  made  available 


at  cheap  rates  to  the  public  generally,  financed  by  the  public, 
not  for  greed,  not  for  private  profit.   It  just  made  a  lot  of 
sense.   We  look  back  on  the  Central  Valley  Project  as  an 
ecological  disaster,  but  people  didn't  know  those  things  then. 

Lage:     But  he  was  talking  about  power  and  not  just  water. 

Pesonen:   He  was  talking  about  both. 

Lage:     About  public  power  and  the  benefits  of-- 

Pesonen:   Right.  We  lived  in  Sacramento,  which  was  a  public  power  city. 
In  a  bitter  battle,  Sacramento  had  purchased  the  distribution 
system  of  PG&E,  I  think  in  the  forties  or  late  thirties.   So 
public  power  was  the  kind  of  power  we  had;  we  had  the  Sacramento 
Municipal  Utilities  District,  and  it  bought  its  power  from  the 
Bureau  of  Reclamation,  and  it  was  cheap,  and  everybody  lived 
better.   It  was  that  view  of  the  world. 

Lage:     Do  you  think  that  had  any  effect  on  your  attitude  towards  PG&E? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  think  it  had  anything  to  do  with  my  view  of  PG&E  at 

Bodega  Bay.   I've  been  accused  of  that  a  lot,  but  I  didn't  see  it 
as  a  public  power  issue.   If  the  Bureau  of  Reclamation  had  been 
building  that  reactor  out  there,  I'd  have  been  just  as  dismayed 
about  it.   I  might  have  attacked  it  in  a  different  way,  but  I 
wouldn't  have  favored  it.   PG&E  accused  us  of  that,  and  there  was 
a  very  right-wing  publication  in  Berkeley  called  the  Toxin.   It 
was  a  real  product  of  the  cold  war.   It  saw  conspiracy  theories 
everywhere  and  reds  hiding  under  every  bed,  and  we  were  accused 
of  being  fronts  for  a  Communist  takeover  of  private  property;  all 
kinds  of  stuff  like  that,  and  it  just  rolled  off  my  back  like 
water  off  a  duck.   It  didn't  seem  to  deter  people  anymore.   The 
cold  war,  in  some  way- -McCarthy ism  was  over—it  took  a  long  time 
for  the  carcass  to  realize  it  was  dead  and  fall  over,  but  it 
didn't  have  the  sting  that  it  might  have  had  in  the  fifties. 

Lage:     Nobody  dug  out  that  record  of  yours? 
Pesonen:  My  record  in  the  army,  you  mean? 
Lage:     Yes,  the  security  report. 

Pesonen:  You  know,  I  seem  to  recall  that  somebody  published  something 
about  that,  but  I  don't  remember. 

Lage:     It  wasn't  a  major  thing.   I  don't  find  any  trace  of  it. 
Pesonen:   Yes.   I  don't  know  what  difference  that  would  have  made  anyway. 


Sierra  Club  Representative  to  PUG  Hearings  on  Bodega,  May  1962 


Lage:     Well,  shall  we  start  chronologically,  or  at  least  drop  into  the 
Bodega  Bay  issue  where  you  entered  it,  when  you  were  with  the 
Sierra  Club? 

Pesonen:   Okay,  we  can  do  that.   I  was  working  for  Dave  Brower,  and  my 

title  was  Conservation  Editor.   It  sounds  more  lofty  than  it  was. 

It  was  a  jack-of-all-trades  position,  mainly  because  Dave  Brower 
just  wanted  somebody  like  me  around  to  do  various  things. 

Lage:     Were  you  assigned  mainly  to  the  Bulletin? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  didn't  work  on  the  Bulletin  much.   He  was  promoting  the 

book  program  of  the  club  then,  it  was  just  getting  started.   So 
he  would  get  manuscripts,  and  he'd  want  me  to  review  each 
manuscript  and  give  him  an  opinion  on  them,  or  edit  them  if  he 
had  decided  that  the  club  would  publish  them.  And  since  I  had  a 
forestry  background  and  there  was  always  some  issue  with  the 
State  Board  of  Forestry  on  forest  practice  rules,  I  would  be 
called  upon  occasionally  to  testify  for  the  club  at  the  Board  of 
Forestry.   Then  anything  else  that  he  thought  I  had  a  talent  that 
he  could  address  to  the  problem.   Sometimes  it  had  to  do  with 
what  the  library  should  buy- -it  was  a  wonderful  job;  I  did  all 
kinds  of  things.   The  club  was  very  small  then.   The  staff  was 
very  small,  and  we  were  one-on-one  with  Brower,  who  was  a  very 
charismatic  person. 

So  one  day--.  You  know,  I  didn't  pay  any  attention  to 
Bodega,  I  didn't  know  anything  about  it.   I  was  a  young,  single 
guy,  living  in  San  Francisco  and  having  a  great  time.   I  wasn't 
politically  active  or  anything  else.   He  handed  me  the  Gilliam 
column  that  had  been  published,  I  think,  in  February  of  1962, 
lamenting  the  loss  of  Bodega  and  the  Kortum  letter  to  the  editor 
[see  Appendix  A],  and  some  notice  that  the  PUC  [Public  Utilities 
Commission]  had  reopened  the  proceedings  as  a  result  of  this 
attention,  and  he  asked  me  to  go  over  and  find  out  what  was  going 
on  and  to  give  him  a  report.   So  I  did. 

I  can't  remember  the  sequence  now,  but  it  was  right  about 
that  time  that  I  went  over  to  PG&E  to  do  a  little  research  and 
went  up  to  the  engineering  department,  just  cold,  and  talked  to 
some  clerical  person  and  said,  "I'm  from  the  Sierra  Club,  and  I'd 
like  to  see  your  file  on  Bodega  Bay."  They  handed  me  a  file  and 
I  sat  down  at  a  table  and  I  began  to  see  all  kinds  of  things  in 
this  file. 

Lage:     It  was  a  very  trusting  gesture  on  their  part. 


Pesonen:   It  was  a  very  small  file.   I  didn't  see  the  whole  file. 

Apparently,  1  was  not  in  the  engineering  department.   I  was  in 
the  land  department,  or  it  was  a  file  from  the  land  department 
that  ended  up  in  the  engineering  department,  but  it  had  the 
exchanges  of  correspondence  between  top  management  and  the 
political  arm  of  the  company- -the  public  affairs  department  and 
the  land  department—on  rounding  up  political  support  for  the 
plan  from  local  service  groups,  from  the  Board  of  Supervisors, 
from  the  planning  commission.   It  reeked  of  a  kind  of  arrogance 
that  it  was  a  foregone  conclusion  that  the  local  elected 
officials  were  going  to  do  whatever  PG&E  wanted  them  to,  and  were 
going  to  say  whatever  PG&E  wanted  them  to,  and  pass  whatever 
resolutions  PG&E  wrote  for  them.   It  was  that  flagrant.   It  was 
so  flagrant  it  was  unembarrassed.   [laughter] 

Lage:     They  believed  it  so  truly— 

Pesonen:   They  believed  it  too.   It  was  in  good  faith,  that  was  the  problem 
with  it.   [laughter]   Well,  I  made  some  notes  from  this  file. 
Some  of  them  were  extravagant  and  direct  indications  that  they 
had  local  government  in  their  pocket. 

Then  I  went  over  to  the  PUC  hearing  [May  1962]  and  talked  to 
the  people  who  had  come  down  from  Bodega  Bay:  Rose  Gaffney,  and 
the  Ruebels,  and  the  whole  cast  of  characters.   Ray  and  Marion 
Ruebel  ran  the  Chamber  of  Commerce  in  Bodega  Bay  and  had  a  little 
real  estate  business.  They  were  very  wonderful  people—they  're 
both  dead  now—you  know,  just  simple  midwestern  folk  who'd  moved 
out  here  to  kind  of  semi-retire  and  sell  a  little  real  estate, 
and  they  had  a  little  real  estate  office  right  there  in  town. 
They  were  outraged  by  the  history,  since  '58,  of  PG&E's  hiding 
the  ball  and  not  disclosing  what  kind  of  plant  it  would  be,  the 
destruction  of  the  harbor  from  the  road  [the  road  to  the  plant 
site  in  Campbell  Cove  was  built  in  the  tideflats  of  the  harbor], 
the  threat  of  power  lines  going  over  Doran  Park  and  being  a 
scenic  wall  on  the  harbor  entrance.  You  know,  they'd  lived  there 
for  its  tranquility  and  its  beauty.   The  fishing  community  was 
very  upset  that  the  traditional  way  of  careening  their  boats  on 
the  gentle  mudflats  on  the  west  side  of  the  harbor  would  be  taken 
from  them  by  the  riprap  along  the  road  PG&E  wanted  to  build. 

And  then  there  were  some  other  little  agendas  of  people  in 
town  who  were  going  to  get  a  good  deal- -who  were  going  to  get 
some  money  from  PG&E  and  build  another  marina  and  be  in 
competition  with  the  other,  existing,  marina  owners.   There  was  a 
lot  of  that  kind  of  thing  going  on  at  another  level  that  had 
probably  helped  to  stir  all  of  this  up.   As  in  a  lot  of  little 
towns,  people  find  amazing  ways  to  dislike  each  other,  and 
suspect  each  other,  and  feed  their  gossip  mill. 


44 


Well,  I  didn't  pay  any  attention  to  that  part,  but  this  was 
clearly  a  group  of  people  who  had  tried  very  hard  to  be  heard  and 
hadn't  had  an  opportunity,  or  hadn't  been  listened  to. 

Lage:     There  had  been  previous  hearings. 

Pesonen:   Oh,  there  had  been  a  hearing  before  the  Corps  of  Engineers  on  the 
road  that  had  been  held  at  the  grange  hall  up  in  Bodega  in,  I 
think,  1960  or  '61  [February  15,  1962],  and  that  had  been  a 
riotous  hearing  from  press  accounts.   There  was  Joel  Hedgpeth, 
who  had  watched  it  from  both  the  inside  and  the  outside.   Inside, 
because  of  his  acquaintance  with  many  of  the  marine  biology 
faculty  at  Berkeley  and  his  awesome  archiving  powers  and  his 
natural  suspicious  bent  of  mind.   There  was  Karl  Kortum  who  had 
grown  up  in  Sonoma  County  and  sailed  out  of  Bodega  Bay,  and  loved 
its  beauty  too.   There  were  just  a  mob  of  people  there. 

It  became  very  clear  to  me  that  they  didn't  have  a  plan. 
They  weren't  organized.   They  were  angry;  their  testimony  would 
be  focused  on  whatever  was  personally  of  concern  to  them,  but 
there  was  no  coherent  theory  as  to  what  they  were  doing.   So  I 
thought,  well,  here's  a  role  for  me--to  pull  this  together  and 
give  it  a  theme.   I  just  emerged  as  a  leader. 

I  went  back  and  reported  to  Brower,  and  he  said  keep  on 
doing  it.  Well,  then  it  started  to  hit  the  papers,  and  then  his 
board  started  getting  uneasy. 

Lage:     Didn't  you  testify  at  the  PUC  hearing? 

Pesonen:   I  did  testify. 

Lage:     Was  Phil  Berry  [Sierra  Club  activist]  involved  in  the  hearing? 

Pesonen:   Phil  didn't  testify.   Phil  was  a  recent  law  school  graduate  from 
Stanford,  and  he  came  over  and  helped  with  the  examination  of 
some  of  the  witnesses. 

Lage:     You  could  examine  witnesses  from  the  floor? 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  weird  proceeding.   Anybody  can  stand  up  in  the  audience, 
and  examine  a  witness.   The  hearing  officer  just  says,  "Okay, 
it's  your  turn;  okay,  it's  your  turn,"  and  points  at  people  in 
the  audience,  and  they  come  forward  to  the  podium.   They  are 
untrained,  make  speeches- -a  lawyer  would  be  horrified  at  the  form 
of  questioning,  but  that  wasn't  the  kind  of  proceeding  it  was. 
So  that  went  on,  and  I  testified,  and  I  also  examined  some 
witnesses. 


Lage: 


45 


Did  you  testify  based  on  some  of  the  things  you'd  found  out  from 
PG&E  files? 


Pesonen:   Yes.   By  this  time  we  knew  that  we  couldn't  win  this  case  before 
the  PUC;  we  had  to  win  it  in  the  newspapers.   So  I  set  it  up  for 
the  dramatic  moment  to  come  when  I  would  disclose  these  quotes  I 
had  plucked  out  of  this  file  that  had  been  shown  me  at  PG&E, 
about  their,  in  our  terms,  having  corrupted  the  local  government. 
I  was  being  examined  by  William  Knecht,  who  was  the  farm  bureau 
lawyer—the  California  Farm  Bureau  Federation  had  joined  with 
PG&E  as  sort  of  a  petitioner.   Knecht  was  a  lawyer  for  them,  and 
he  and  John  [C.]  Morrissey  both  examined  me  for  a  little  while, 
and  then  they  had  the  good  sense  not  to  ask  me  the  question,  "How 
do  you  know  that  PG&E  has  corrupted  the  Board  of  Supervisors?" 
because  they  didn't  want  the  answer. 

Well,  1  thought  they  might  not  ask  the  question,  so  I  had 
planted  the  question  with  one  of  our  cohorts  in  the  audience, 
[laughter]  Tony  Sargent,  who  worked  over  here  at  the  Lawrence 
Labs.  When  the  PG&E  lawyers—when  Morrissey  and  Knecht  didn't 
ask  that  question,  Tony  came  forward  and  asked  the  question.   I 
brought  out  my  black  briefcase,  and  I  put  it  up  there  next  to  the 
microphone,  and  I  snapped  the  snaps  on  it,  and  it  went  "click" 
throughout  the  room.   You  should  hear  Karl  Kortum  describe  it;  it 
was  a  high  moment  of  drama.   I  lifted  the  lid  on  this  little 
black  leather  briefcase  and  pulled  out  these  notes  and  then  began 
to  describe  the  circumstances:  how  I  had  gone  over  to  the 
building  at  245  Market  Street  and  got  in  the  elevator  and  pushed 
the  button  number  eleven,  or  whatever  it  was,  and  went  up  and 
asked  the  receptionist  if  I  could  see  the  file.   At  that  point 
there  was  a  flurry  like  somebody  had  thrown  a  fox  in  a  chicken 
yard  at  the  PG&E  counsel  table,  and  people  started  running 
around,  running  out  of  the  room,  grabbing  phones,  and  I  don't 
know  what  else  they  did,  but  it  clearly  had  them  all  excited.   I 
described  what  I'd  seen  and  got  some  quotes  into  the  record,  and 
that  was  a  big  moment  of  drama.   That's  all  it  was,  I  mean,  it 
didn't  go  to  the  merits  of  the  case  very  much  at  all,  but  it  got 
some  attention. 


Focusing  on  Seismic  Hazards  and  Quitting  the  Sierra  Club  Staff 


Pesonen:   As  a  result  of  that,  as  a  result  of  that  sort  of  sense  of  drama 
and  sense  of  the  need  for  coherence  in  approach  to  the  case,  and 
my  recognition--!  think  I  was  the  source  of  it— to  begin  focusing 
on  the  seismic  hazards-- 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


That's  when  you  decided  to  focus  on  seismic  hazards? 

I  saw  that  there  was  an  issue  there;  there  were  some  facts  to 
support  it;  there  was  a  reason.   There  was  a  geologist  from  the 
state  Division  of  Mines  and  Geology.   His  name  was  Koenig--! 
don't  remember  his  first  name—but  he  had  published  a  little 
paper  in  a  quarterly  publication  that  the  Division  of  Mines  and 
Geology  put  out  on  Bodega  Head.   The  cover  had  a  map  of  fault 
lines.   We  asked  Koenig  to  testify,  and  he  was  very  cautious  in 
his  testimony,  but  this  was  not  a  fabricated  issue.   This  was 
real,  and  it  was  a  serious  concern.   We  weren't  just  exploiting 
it  to  stop  the  plant—we  were  doing  that,  too— but  we  carried  it 
on  the  merits.   There  was  a  serious  question  here,  whether  the 
plant  should  be  built  there. 

The  PUC  was  the  first  place  where  we  started  to  open  that 
up,  and  it  was  my  perception  that  that  was  something  we  should 
focus  our  attention  on.   Through  that  process,  I  just  emerged  as 
the  leader. 


Through  the  process  of  these  hearings? 
occurred? 


Is  that  when  all  this 


Pesonen:  Yes. 

Lage:  But  you  are  still  with  the  Sierra  Club? 

Pesonen:  I'm  still  with  the  Sierra  Club. 

Lage:  And  what  happened  with  that  relationship? 

Pesonen:   Well,  that  fell  apart  later,  but  by  that  time  I  had  applied  to 

the  Food  and  Agriculture  Organization  for  that  job  in  Tanganyika, 
and  it  was  held  up  because  I  needed  a  security  clearance  and  I 
was  a  long  time  getting  it.   I  didn't  see  any  future  at  the 
Sierra  Club  for  me- -I  didn't  want  to  be  Dave  Brower's  flunky  all 
my  life. 

Lage:     I  had  the  impression  that  the  club,  or  some  members  of  the  club, 
were  disturbed  by  the  testimony  at  the  PUC  and  that  was  the 
reason  you  left.   Is  that  inaccurate? 

Pesonen:   That,  ultimately,  was  part  of  the  reason  I  left.  There  came  a 

point  where  Dave  asked  me  to  report  to  the  executive  committee  on 
what  to  do  next  on  Bodega  Bay.   Hearings  before  the  PUC  had 
concluded.   The  decision  had  not  been  entered.   This  was  probably 
June  of  1962. 


Lage: 


Those  are  the  minutes  I  can't  find.   [laughter] 


Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Are  they? 
meeting. 


Well,  there  probably  weren't  any  minutes  to  that 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 


You  think  that  was  more  of  an  informal  meeting. 

I  think  it  was  an  informal  meeting.   If  I  recall  correctly, 
present  were  myself,  Dave  Brower,  Lewis  Clark,  Dick  [Richard  M.] 
Leonard,  I  don't  recall  whether  Ed  Wayburn  was  there  or  not.   It 
wasn't  a  big  meeting.   It  was  in  Dave's  off ice--right  off  the 
library  there  in  the  Mills  Tower.   I  gave  a  report  that  wrapped 
up  what  we  had  learned  from  the  hearings .   I  said  there  was  a 
serious  question  whether  a  plant  at  Bodega  would  be  safe  because 
of  its  proximity  to  the  San  Andreas  fault.   I  firmly  believed 
that  if  we  continued  to  pursue  that  issue  we  could  stop  the  plant 
from  being  built,  but  if  we  didn't  pursue  that  issue,  we  couldn't 
stop  the  plant  from  being  built.   If  we  restricted  our  public 
statements  to  lamenting  the  loss  of  another  scenic  part  of  the 
coast  it  would  have  no  effect  on  the  AEC's  [Atomic  Energy 
Commission]  decision  or  the  PUC's  decision. 

At  that  point  Dick  Leonard- -if  my  recollection  is  correct, 
and  it's  not  very  bright  in  my  mind,  what's  bright  in  my  mind  is 
the  whole  setting  and  how  I  felt;  I  was  suddenly  under  siege  and 
surprised  by  the  antagonism  I  had  generated  with  some  board 
members- -Dick  Leonard  shook  his  finger  at  me  and  said,  "Don't  you 
ever  mention  atomic  power  or  atomic  safety.   You  can't  do  that  in 
the  name  of  the  club.   We  are  in  support  of  nuclear  power.   It's 
an  environmentally  wonderful  thing:  it  will  mean  that  we  won't 
have  to  build  any  more  dams  in  the  Grand  Canyon."  I  think  that 
was  a  genuine  view  on  his  part,  and  what  I  was  saying  was 
inconsistent  with  club  policy. 

It's  true.   They  had  suggested  atomic  power  as  an  alternative  to 
hydroelectric  for  years. 

So  I  was  in  a  position  where  the  people  who  made  policy  had  said 
that  I  couldn't,  as  an  employee,  make  a  public  statement 
inconsistent  with  policy. 

But  you  don't  recall  that  this  was  a  formal  vote  of  the  executive 
committee  or  anything  like  that? 

No.   I  don't  recall  any  formal  vote. 

Did  anybody  step  up  and  disagree  with  Dick  Leonard? 

Well,  no.  They  weren't  so  vigorous,  although  some  of  the  other 
people  present  were  more  conciliatory  toward  me  and  the  spot  it 
put  me  in.  Leonard  was  not  friendly  at  all  at  that  meeting. 


48 


Lage:     Somewhere  I  read,  and  I  can't  remember  what  I  read  this  in,  that 
he  read  you  the  so-called  "gag"  rule  —  they  passed  in  1959  to  keep 
Dave  Brower  from  maligning  public  officials. 

Pesonen:   Oh,  well  I  had  something  like  that,  but  I  don't  recall  attaching 
much  significance  to  that.   That  was  not  what  was  the  matter- - 

Lage:     The  thing  for  you  was  the  atomic  issue. 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Now  that  you  mention  it,  I  do  remember  something  about  that 
gag  rule,  but  that  was  just  procedural. 

Lage:     But  it  was  important  to  Dick  Leonard  and  others. 

Pesonen:  It  was  important  to  them,  but  what  was  important  to  me  was  that 
Leonard  was  focusing  on  the  substance  of  what  I  said.  I  wasn't 
maligning  anyone. 

** 

Pesonen:   I  guess  by  implication  the  AEC  and  the  higher  management  of  PG&E 
were  being  maligned,  for  doing  something  stupid  [laughter], 
that's  what  I  was  calling  it.   I  was  calling  the  whole  thing  a 
threat  to  public  health  and  safety  as  well  as  to  a  very  beautiful 
place.   But  that  wasn't  the  real  issue.   He  did  not  want  me 
talking  about  nuclear  safety.   That  troubled  me  a  lot,  and  I 
thought  about  that  for  a  while,  and  I  decided  that  I  didn't  know 
what  I  wanted  to  do,  but  that  was  not  a  tenable  position  for  me. 
So  I  quit. 

Lage:     Do  you  remember  when  you  quit? 

Pesonen:   I  quit  at  the  end  of  June,  I  think.   I'm  pretty  sure  that  it  was 
about  the  end  of  June.   I  didn't  have  any  clear  plan  of  what  I 
was  going  to  do.   I  was  still  waiting  for  this  FAO  job  to  come 
through.   I  had  saved  a  little  money,  and  I  hitchhiked  to 
Colorado  to  visit  a  girlfriend  and  I  just  kept  thinking  about 
this  thing.   I  was  gone  for  about  a  month- -spent  a  couple  of 
weeks  in  Aspen.   And  then,  on  the  way  back,  I  met  a  fellow  on  the 
train  who  was  going  to  British  Columbia  to  go  mountain  climbing. 
I  had  never  been  to  British  Columbia,  so  I  talked  him  into- -he 
was  going  to  meet  his  ride  in  Salt  Lake,  and  so  I  got  off  in  Salt 
Lake  with  him  and  drove  with  them  way  up  to  Revelstoke,  British 
Columbia,  and  then  I  hitchhiked  back  home. 


Bodega  Head,  Proposed  site  of  PG&E  Nuclear  Power  Plant,  from 
A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park 


49 


III   CAMPAIGN  TO  PRESERVE  BODEGA  HEAD  AND  HARBOR,  SUMMER  1962- 
FALL  1963 


A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park 


Pesonen:  All  of  this  time,  I  was  thinking  about  this  problem;  this  Bodega 
thing  was  just  eating  at  me,  and  it  began  to  sort  itself  out.   By 
the  time  1  got  back,  the  FAO  position  still  hadn't  come  through, 
and  I  was  broke,  so  I  moved  in  with  some  friends  down  the  street 
here  and  got  from  Joel  Hedgpeth  his  complete  clippings  file  on 
the  history  of  Bodega  going  back  to  '58,  and  I  just  sat  down  and 
read  every  thing  he'd  clipped,  and  every  note  he  made,  and  every 
letter  he'd  written  with  [Congressman]  Clem  Miller.   From  that, 
emerged  what  happened.   If  Hedgpeth  had  not  done  that,  I  think 
that  plant  might  have  got  built. 

Hedgpeth  was  a  meticulous  keeper  of  records.   Everything 
that  appeared  that  had  any  direct  or  tangential  relevance  to  what 
was  happening  at  Bodega  or  in  the  field  of  nuclear  power,  he 
pasted  up  in  bound  volumes.   [Joel  Hedgpeth 's  correspondence  and 
clippings  on  Bodega  are  available  in  The  Bancroft  Library.]   They 
were  about  two  inches  thick,  two  or  three  inches  thick,  of  old 
newspaper  clippings.   There  had  been  a  very  good  reporter  on  the 
Santa  Rosa  Press  Democrat,  Don  Engdahl,  who  had  covered  the  story 
well,  who  quoted  these  public  officials  saying  really  dumb  things 
like  ["Nin"]  Guidotti  saying,  "It's  so  beautiful  out  there;  it 
would  be  a  shame  not  to  build  something  on  it."   [laughter]   The 
kinds  of  things  that  just  skewered  themselves. 

I  made  up  my  mind  that  this  was  so  important  a  story  that  it 
had  to  be  told,  and  I  would  write  a  manuscript  about  it.   I  had 
no  idea  who  the  publisher  would  be,  I  didn't  really  know  who  the 
audience  was  going  to  be. 


50 


Lage:     And  you  weren't  hooked  up  with  the  association  [the  Northern 

California  Association  to  Preserve  Bodega  Bay  and  Harbor]  yet,  I 
mean,  officially? 

Pesonen:   During  that  summer  it  was  pretty  quiescent.   It  never  was  a  very 
formal  organization,  anyway.   It  had  a  name,  but  that's  all.   It 
didn't  have  a  letterhead,  it  didn't  have  a  formal  membership.   It 
was  a  small  group  of  people—Joe  Neilands,  Karl  Kortum,  Doris 
Sloan,  Harold  Gilliam,  Tony  Sargent,  Phil  Flint,  the  Ruebels  up 
in  Bodega  Bay,  and  certainly  Hazel  Bonneke--her  name  was  then; 
it's  now  Mitchell—she  was  a  waitress  at  the  Tides  restaurant. 
She  was  one  of  the  real  active  people,  and  still  is,  up  there. 
She  was  active  in  the  petition  that's  just  been  launched  a  few 
weeks  ago  to  prohibit  the  State  Department  of  Parks  and 
Recreation  from  imposing  entrance  fees  in  coastal  parks.   But  it 
was  a  very  loose  group,  and  it  wasn't  active  that  summer.   We 
kept  expecting  the  PUC  to  issue  a  decision  any  day,  and  so  I  was 
racing  against  the  clock.   I  wanted  the  story  told  before  the  PUC 
made  its  decision. 

I  rented  a  little  room,  and,  as  I  told  you  last  time,  Joe 
Neilands  gave  me  a  night  job  in  the  biochemistry  department  lab 
running  a  lab  procedure  that  he  had  set  up  as  part  of  his 
research— it  didn't  require  very  much  of  my  time.   I  made  some 
money;  I  had  enough  to  support  myself  and  pay  my  rent.   I  just 
buried  myself  in  this  material  and  writing  this  story:  what  was 
the  University's  role,  what  was  the  Atomic  Energy  Commission's 
role,  what  was  PG&E's  role,  what  was  the  role  of  the  Department 
of  Parks  and  Recreation  and  the  county  of  Sonoma?   How  could  this 
thing  happen? 

By  that  time  I  was  convinced  that  I  was  on  to  something  that 
was,  to  me,  almost  a  metaphysical  disaster.   It  was  so  wrong— it 
was  just  wrong  in  every  possible  way.   It  was  scientifically 
wrong,  it  was  morally  wrong,  it  was  politically  wrong;  it  was 
just  wrong.   I  didn't  feel  that  I  could  just  go  out  and  say  it 
was  wrong;  I  wanted  to  prove  it,  and  I  wanted  to  prove  it  with 
evidence.   This  clipping  file  that  Hedgpeth  had  pulled  together 
over  four  years  collapsed  the  story  into  one  place  so  that,  if 
you  had  read  all  those  clippings  over  a  period  of  four  years  you 
wouldn't  have  seen  the  story,  but  there  was  a  pattern— you  could 
see  what  had  happened  when  they  were  all  condensed. 


Lage: 


So  that  was  the  basis  of  the  article? 


Pesonen:   That  was  the  major  source  on  which  I  relied.   I  also  went  out  and 
interviewed  a  bunch  of  people . 


51 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 


I  finished  the  manuscript  and  I  sent  it  to  Karl  Kortum  to 
look  at,  and  he  was  enormously  impressed  with  it,  and  he  sent  it 
to  his  brother  Bill,  who  was  also  very  active—Bill  and  his  wife 
Lucy-- 

And  they  lived  up  in  Sonoma  County. 

And  they  lived  in  Petaluma.   Bill's  clients  were  mainly  dairy 
farmers  up  there. 

He  was  a  veterinarian? 

He  was  a  veterinarian.   He  was  afraid  of  the  contamination  with 
radioactive  iodine  of  the  dairylands.   There  had  been  an  accident 
in  Windscale,  in  England,  in  1958  at  a  plutonium  production 
reactor.  It  had  had  a  fire  in  the  plutonium  and  had  released  a 
huge  cloud  of  radio- iodine,  which  had  contaminated  most  of  the 
milk  in  that  part  of  England.   From  the  press  reports  anyway,  the 
milk  had  all  had  to  be  dumped. 


Between  that  accident 


Do  you  remember  who  made  that  connection? 
and  Bodega? 

I  made  that  connection. 
You  recalled  the  accident? 


In  all  the  research  I  did  to  prepare  this  manuscript  I  read  a  lot 
of  other  things.   Hedgpeth's  clippings  told  me  what  had  happened 
at  Bodega,  but  it  didn't  tell  me  anything  about  nuclear  power  or 
past  nuclear  accidents. 

Then  there  was  a  series  of  articles,  and  I  don't  remember 
how  I  came  upon  them,  in  the  Massachusetts  Law  Quarterly  by  a 
fellow  named  James  B.  Muldoon,  and  I  talked  to  Muldoon.   I  think 
Muldoon's  dead  now,  but  I  remember  carrying  on  a  long 
correspondence  with  Muldoon.   He  was  a  lawyer,  and  his  brother 
had  been  very  high  up  in  the  Eisenhower  administration.   His 
brother  had  leaked  to  him  a  lot  of  information  about  nuclear 
power.   In  the  late  fifties,  there  had  been  a  proposal  for  a 
nuclear  waste  disposal  facility  in  Massachusetts,  and  Muldoon  had 
taken  it  on.  He  had  taken  it  on  in  the  form  of  a  series  of 
articles  in  the  Massachusetts  Law  Quarterly  called  "Alice  in 
Nuclear  Energyland,"  and  they  were  ironic  and  funny  but  had  a  lot 
of  solid  material  in  them.   He  had  done  a  lot  of  research,  so  I 
relied  on  Muldoon's  articles  and  bits  of  pieces  of  things  I  found 
in  pamphlets  about  an  accident  in  Canada,  and  just  sort  of  odds 
and  ends  of  things  that  I  could  find.   There  wasn't  a  whole  lot. 


52 

There  was  a  trade  publication  called  Nucleonics,  a  McGraw- 
Hill  magazine.   It  had  a  lot  of  good  stuff—it  was  addressed  to 
the  nuclear  engineering  field.   I  went  over  to  the  engineering 
library,  and  I  just  spent  a  couple  of  months  researching  this 
thing . 

So  Kortum  sent  my  article  to  Bill,  his  brother  Bill,  and 
Bill  gave  it  to  Ernie  Joyner,  who  was  the  publisher  of  the 
Sebastopol  rimes.   Joyner  was  an  old  Texas  populist  who  had  come 
further  west  to  own  his  own  little  newspaper.   He  was  a 
curmudgeonly- -almost  a  movie  character—small  town  newspaper 
publisher  barely  making  ends  meet.   He  had  watched  what  had 
happened  at  Bodega  with  some  concern  from  his  populist  point  of 
view.   Not  nuclear  power,  he  didn't  care  about  nuclear  power  one 
way  or  another.   He  read  the  manuscript,  and  he  was  fascinated 
with  it;  he  wanted  to  publish  it  in  his  newspaper.   He  called  me 
up,  and  I'll  never  forget,  he  said  [in  Texas  accent],  "I  want  to 
run  that.   I  read  that  thing,  I  want  that  like  a  duck  going  after 
a  junebug."   [laughter]  Well,  I  didn't  want  it  just  published  in 
some  obscure  country  weekly  where  it  would  disappear;  I  wanted  it 
to  get  wider  circulation.   If  these  people  were  that  impressed 
with  it,  it  must  be  pretty  good.   I  mean,  I  thought  I  was  a 
pretty  good  writer. 

That  became  A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park.   Well,  by  this  time, 
Dave  Brower  was  feeling  that  he  had  let  me  down  by  not  standing 
up  for  me  with  the  Sierra  Club  board.   I  had  no  money  to  publish 
this  thing—to  get  it  printed  or  anything  else,  but  he  had  some 
chits  to  call  in  with  somebody  who  ran  a  printing  plant  in 
Berkeley.   I  made  a  deal  with  Joyner  that  he  would  let  me 
proofread  the  article  and  he  would  print  glossy  galleys  and  I 
would  use  those,  then,  as  the  camera-ready  copy  so  I  didn't  have 
to  pay  for  it  to  print  this  pamphlet.   If  you  look  at  A  Visit  to 
the  Atomic  Park,  you'll  see  it  is  three  columns  wide  per  page. 
Those  were  the  newspaper  columns  printed  by  the  typesetter  up  at 
that  little  plant.   And  then  Kortum  was  a  very  good  photographer 
and  had  taken  a  lot  of  wonderful  photographs,  so  I  just  spent 
evenings  down  at  this  fellow's  printing  shop  putting  this 
pamphlet  together.   I  did  a  lot  of  the  production  on  it,  too. 

Lage:  Somebody--!  forget  if  it  was  the  Wellock  article  or  Brewer's  oral 
history  interview— said  that  Brower  wanted  it  to  be  a  Sierra  Club 
publication.  Do  you  remember  any  discussion  about  that? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  recall  that  Brower  wanted  it  to  be  a  Sierra  Club 

publication.   I  don't  think  it  could  have  been  a  Sierra  Club 
publication. 

Lage:     That  surprised  me. 


53 


Pesonen:   Dave  may  have  harbored  some  notion  that  he  would  like  to,  but  he 
couldn't.   So  he  helped  me  get  it  published  by  having  this 
printer  pay  off  some  debt  he  owed  by  printing  the  pamphlet  for 
free  and  not  charging  me  for  it. 

So  I  got  it  printed.   I  got  a  thousand  copies  printed  for 
nothing.   Typesetting  by  the  Sebastopol  Times  layout  by  myself, 
and  production  by  this  guy  who  was  paying  off  an  old  debt.   It 
was  just  a  barter.  Then  I  went  out  and  started  peddling.   I'd  go 
to  bookstores  and  I'd  say,  "You've  read  about  this  in  the  papers; 
would  you  stock  a  couple  of  these?" 

Lage:     Did  you  get  a  good  response? 

Pesonen:   Sure.   It  didn't  cost  them  anything—it  was  just  on  commission- 
sell  it  for  a  dollar,  I  get  twenty- five  cents,  you  keep  the  rest. 
It  was  not  a  profitable  venture.   [laughter]   It  wasn't  done  for 
profit. 


Rallying  Public  Opinion:  The  November  10  Forum 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Well,  by  that  time  we  began  to  wonder  if  the  PUC  was  ever  going 
to  issue  its  decision.   Finally,  we  concluded  that  the  PUC  was 
waiting  for  the  election,  which  I  think  was  on  the  7th  of 
November  in  1962,  and  Governor  Pat  Brown  was  up  for  reelection 
and  this  controversy,  I  suppose  they  figured—this  is  total 
speculation,  I  have  absolutely  no  evidence  to  support  this  except 
for  timing— 

Except  for  timing,  right. 

--that  the  commission  had  decided  to  hold  off  their  decision 
until  the  election  was  behind  them.  You  know,  they're  political 
appointees  like  anybody  else,  and  it's  not  an  implausible  theory. 


I  see  they  issued  it  on  November  9th. 
election. 


Pretty  close  to  that 


Ninth  or  10th,  yes.   Within  two  or  three  days  after  the  election 
the  decision  was  issued. 

Confident  that  our  conspiracy  theory  was  right,  that  they 
were  delaying  the  decision  for  political  reasons,  we  organized  a 
public  forum  in  Santa  Rosa.   I  think  it  was  in  October--!  don't 
remember  the  exact  date. 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


I  have  November  10th. 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 
Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Maybe  it  was . 
been  issued. 


That's  right,  it  was  right  after  the  decision  had 


It  must  have  been  planned--. 

It  was  planned  well  before.  We  put  out  some  sensational 
publicity  about  it:  oysters  glowing  in  the  dark  in  Willapa  Bay  up 
in  Washington;  radioactive  debris  was  coming  down  the  Columbia 
River  from  the  Hanford  plant.   Some  of  it  was  pretty 
unscrupulous.   [laughter] 

I  was  going  to  say  unscrupulous.   [laughter] 

Well,  it  was  sensational. 

Sensational,  but  were  these  things  that  had  happened? 

Well,  everything  had  been  said  to  have  happened.   [laughter]   I 
doubt  very  much  any  oysters  ever  glowed  in  the  dark.   Not  in 
Willapa  Bay,  anyway.   And  then  we  publicized  Windscale  and  the 
dumping  of  the  milk,  to  appeal  to  the  dairy  farmers.   We  got  a 
big  turnout.   It  was  in  some  hall  in  Santa  Rosa. 

What  kind  of  people  came?  Were  these  just  ordinary--. 

All  kinds  of  people.   Mostly  dissidents  and  radicals,  farmers,  I 
think  a  whole  collection  of  people  from  all  over  the  county. 

From  the  inland  areas  too,  not  just  right  there--. 

Some  from  the  inland  areas.   I  didn't  know  most  of  the  people. 
We  put  together  this  very  boring  panel  discussion.   Phil  Berry 
was  the  moderator,  or  maybe  I  moderated  it,  but  Phil  was  a 
principal  speaker,  about  how  hard  it  was  to  appear  before  the  AEC 
and  how  unfair  it  was  that  the  proceedings  didn't  allow  you  to 
testify,  and  they  didn't  consider  environmental  matters  —  there 
had  been  no  environmental  legislation  passed  by  that  time,  by 
Congress  or  by  the  state. 

We  had  a  doctor  from  Washington  University  in  St.  Louis 
whose  way  we  paid  out  here.   He  described  a  program  to  collect 
baby  teeth  to  measure  fallout  of  strontium  901  from  all  over  the 
country.   There  was  a  rising  concern  about  radioactive 


'A  radioactive  isotope  of  strontium  with  a  half -life  of  28  years, 
found  in  radioactive  fallout. 


55 


contamination  from  atmospheric  tests  of  weapons.   The  atmospheric 
test  ban  treaty  had  not  been  adopted  by  then,  so  we  were  still 
blowing  off  nuclear  weapons  out  in  Nevada  in  the  air  or  in  the 
Pacific;  so  were  the  Russians,  so  were  the  French,  and  so  were 
the  English.   It  was  a  bomb  a  week  it  seemed  like,  with  mushroom 
clouds  sending  up  debris  that  was  going  around  the  globe  on  the 
jet  stream.  And  there  was  significant,  measurable  fallout  from 
this  atmospheric  testing  of  nuclear  weapons.  There  was  a  lot  of 
press  about  it. 

Lage:     So  people  were  aware  of  nuclear  matters? 

Pesonen:   People  were  beginning  to  be  aware  of  radioactivity  as  an 

environmental  contaminant  which  could  cause  horrible  diseases. 
And  we  played  on  that.   I  don't  deny  that  we  played  on  that.   It 
was  available  to  us,  and  it  was  not  false,  and  we  used  it. 

Well,  the  meeting  got  pretty  boring.   At  the  meeting  I 
handed  out  stacks  of  this  pamphlet,  A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park. 
The  show  was  taped  by  KPFK.   Joan  Mclntyre  went  up  and  taped  the 
whole  thing.   I  still  have  the  tape  of  it--I  haven't  listened  to 
it  for  twenty  years,  but--. 

Lage:     Who's  Joan  Mclntyre?  The  dolphin  lady? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  whales  and  dolphins.   She's  now  married  to  somebody  in  Tonga 
or  someplace  in  the  South  Pacific.   But  Joan  was  a  character,  and 
she  taped  the  program  and  then  edited  it  and  did  a  broadcast.   At 
the  end  of  the  meeting,  a  person  whom  I  had  mentioned  in  the 
atomic  park,  a  guy  named  Alexander  Grendon,  had  been  sitting 
quietly  in  the  back  and  demonstrating  more  and  more  agitation. 
His  body  language  showed  that  he  was  in  a  great  state  of 
unhappiness  over  what  was  being  said  by  the  panel.   He  probably 
saved  the  day  for  us,  because  his  position  was  Coordinator  of 
Atomic  Energy  Development  and  Radiation  Protection,  an  office 
that  Pat  Brown  had  created  right  in  the  governor's  office  as  a 
campaign  promise  in  1958. 

The  office  had  to  do  with  development  of  nuclear  power.   Pat 
Brown  was  a  great  advocate  of  nuclear  power.   He  had  gone  to  the 
dedication  of  the  Humboldt  plant  in  1958  and  made  a  speech  saying 
he  was  going  to  put  California  at  the  forefront  of  development  of 
nuclear  energy  during  his  campaign  in  1958.   He  made  the  speech 
in  San  Jose,  I  think,  at  the  headquarters  of  General  Electric, 
which  was  the  manufacturer  of  these  light  water  reactors.   As 
part  of  fulfilling  his  campaign  promise,  he  had  created  this 
office  and  appointed  Alexander  Grendon,  who  was  a  retired  colonel 
of  chemical  and  biological  warfare. 


56 


Grendon  couldn't  keep  his  mouth  shut.   So,  he  got  up  to 
speak.   He  didn't  come  forward--.   I  remember  this  just  like  it 
was  yesterday.   He  didn't  come  forward  to  the  podium  and  speak  to 
the  audience's  face;  he  stood  in  the  back  of  the  room,  and  I'm 
sure  the  psychology  was  wrong,  and  I  knew  it  was  wrong  at  the 
moment,  and  I  decided  to  use  it  to  fire  up  this  audience.   He 
talked  at  the  back  of  people's  heads.  And  he  was  arrogant.   He 
said,  "You  don't  know  what  you're  talking  about.   The  AEC 
shouldn't  have  to  spend  time  listening  to  what  you  have  to  say 
because  you're  not  experts..."  and  he  confirmed  everything  we  had 
said  [laughter],  and  speaking  from  the  governor's  office! 

Well,  that  was  wonderful,  because  it  enraged  our  audience. 
Lage:     You  say  you  used  it,  but  I'm  wondering  how. 
Pesonen:   I  just  let  him  go  on. 
Lage:     You  let  him  dig  his  own  grave? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   I  didn't  invite  him  to  come  forward.   I  just  said,  you 

know,  "The  floor's  yours,  Colonel  Grendon."  I  made  a  point  of 
calling  him  "Colonel  Grendon,"  too.   [laughter]    He  was 
wonderful.   So  that  woke  the  meeting  up.   People  said,  "How  can  I 
help?  Where  do  I  sign  up?"  and  they  scooped  up  those  pamphlets. 

Lage:     So  the  educational  presentations  that  you  put  forth  didn't  really 
capture  their  excitement? 

Pesonen:   That  wasn't  really  so  terrific.   The  people  were  just  dozing  off 
and  threatened  to  walk  out.   I  thought  the  meeting  was  getting 
away  from  us.   It  was  going  to  end  in  a  whimper,  until  Grendon 
got  up  and  saved  it. 

Lage:     So  then  were  you  ready  to  get  these  people  organized? 

Pesonen:  We  didn't  know  what  we  were  going  to  do;  you  know,  we  weren't 

very  well  organized.   But  we  clearly  had  a  solid,  small  amount  of 
people  who  were  determined  to  do  something  about  it. 

Lage:     Had  you  ever  run  a  campaign  before,  of  any  kind? 
Pesonen:   No.   I  had  no  experience. 

Lage:     You  seemed  to  think  you  knew  what  to  do,  though.   I  mean,  from 

the  way  you  talk,  you  talk  as  if  you  had  a  sense  that  they  needed 
the  organization,  they  needed-- 


57 


Pesonen:   Well,  I'm  giving  myself  too  much  credit.   The  idea  of  the  meeting 
was  Karl  Kortum's  I  think,  and  a  lot  of  the  publicity  was  Jean 
Kortum's  and  Bill  Kortum's.   Bill  was  politically  active  in 
Sonoma  County.  Doris  Sloan  was  a  shrewd  organizer.   She'd  been 
with  the  American  Friends  Service  Committee  for  a  long  time,  and 
the  ACLU,  I  think.   They  were  a  little  older  than  I  was,  and  they 
knew  something  about  organizing. 

We  were  all  very  innocent  about  it  in  those  days.   People 
are  sophisticated  these  days.   Even  political  campaigns  were  run 
without  campaign  organizers.   You  didn't  have  a  campaign  manager 
in  the  late  fifties  and  early  sixties.  There  weren't  any 
computers.   Presidents  and  governors  still  had  whistle  stop  tours 
on  trains.   You've  got  to  go  back  and  reconstruct  where  we  were 
historically  at  that  time.   That  was  thirty  years  ago.   So,  I 
didn't  do  all  this  myself,  by  any  means. 

Lage:     But  you  did  have  a  sense  it  needed  organizing,  you  said. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  and  I  had  a  basic  talent  about  handling  it  when  it  was  put 

together.   But  I'm  not  terribly  creative  about  those  things.   The 
Kortums  had  run  a  successful  battle  against  the  State  Department 
of  Highways  when  it  had  planned  to  put  the  highway  101  freeway 
through  the  Petaluma  area.   The  Department  of  Highways  wanted  to 
put  it  through  the  best  agricultural  land,  and  it  also  would  have 
come  very  close  to  their  house.   They  were  successful  in  a 
campaign  to  get  them  to  move  the  route  of  the  highway  further  to 
the  west  and  out  of  the  best  agricultural  land  and  up  on  the 
hill.   So  they  had  a  lot  of  skills  from  that  battle.   It  was  the 
first  time  the  Department  of  Highways  had  been  beaten  in  one  of 
their  freeway  routing  controversies. 

Lage:     That  was  the  beginning  of  a  trend  also. 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Well,  the  Kortums  know  how  to  make  trouble- -big  trouble. 
Karl's  involved  in  the  palm  trees  on  the  Embarcadero  right  now. 
[laughter]   Karl's  wonderful.   I  don't  know  if  you've  ever  talked 
to  Karl,  but-- 

Lage:     I  haven't,  although  he  contributed  some  to  the  Scott  Newhall  oral 
history,  so  I've  heard  his  name  batted  about. 

Pesonen:   He's  a  wonderful  story  teller,  and  he  and  Jean  both  are  just  a 
wonderful  team,  and  they  did  a  lot  of  this. 


58 


Saint-Amand  and  the  Earthquake  Fault 


Pesonen:   But  anyway,  after  this  meeting,  within  a  couple  of  days  after  the 
PUC  decision,  or  it  was  within  a  day  or  two  of  the  PUC  decision, 
and  we  were  cranking  up  for  the  AEC  hearings.   We  didn't  know 
exactly  when  they  were  going  to  be  held,  but  we  knew  they  would 
come  soon.   And  Joan  Mclntyre  had  this  program  broadcast  on  KPFA 
and  its  affiliate  in  Los  Angeles,  KPFK,  I  think.   And,  Pierre 
Saint-Amand,  who  was  a  geologist  for  the  Naval  Ordnance  Test 
Station  in  China  Lake,  happened  to  hear  the  program  on  the  radio, 
and  he  was  outraged. 

Lage:     So  he  wasn't  somebody  whom  you  found? 

Pesonen:   No!   He  found  us.   This  historian  who  wrote  this  piece-- J.  Samuel 
Walker--in  the  Pacific  Historical  Review*  makes  it  sound  like  we 
went  out  and  rounded  Saint-Amand  up,  but  that's  not  the  case. 
Saint-Amand  called  me  up--I  don't  know  how  he  found  me--and  said 
he  heard  this  program  and  he  thought  it  was  an  outrage  what  was 
happening.   He  was  Dr.  Saint-Amand,  a  nationally  known 
seismologist,  and  he  knew  something  about  the  geology  up  there 
and  would  like  to  help. 

Lage:     That  must  have  been  nice  to  hear. 

Pesonen:   It  was  wonderful  to  hear.  We  didn't  have  any  lawyers,  we  didn't 
have  any  experts.   PG&E  had  everything.   All  we  had  was  our 
voices.   So  I  made  arrangements  to  go  out  there  with  him,  and  by 
this  time  I  had  met  Julie  [Julie  Shearer,  Pesonen' s  former  wife 
and  a  colleague  of  the  interviewer],  I  think.   I  think  I'd  met 
Julie  by  this  time.   She  was  a  reporter  for  the  Mill  Valley 
Record  and  covered  a  little  speech  I  gave  over  there.   I  don't 
remember  whether  Julie  went  with  us  when  we  went  up  there  or  not, 
the  first  time.   Maybe  not.   Saint-Amand  and  his  assistant,  whose 
name  I  don't  remember  now,  drove  up  in  their  big  van,  and  we  all 
went  out  there,  and  we  spent  the  day  just  walking  along  the  ocean 
escarpment  on  the  west  side  of  the  head  [Bodega  Head], 
Saint-Amand  was  a  character.   He  had  a  big  beard  and  a  funny 
Peruvian  hat  and-- 

Lage:     Which  must  have  blown  off  a  few  times.   [laughter] 


1  "Reactor  at  the  Fault:  The  Bodega  Bay  Nuclear  Plant  Controversy, 
1958-1964--A  Case  Study  in  the  Politics  of  Technology,"  Pacific  Historical 
Review  (1990),  pp.  323-348. 


59 


Pesonen: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 
Lage: 
Pesonen: 


It  had  a  string  on  it  which  ran  around  his  chin.   He  was  a  great 
story  teller.   He  loved  the  site  and  found  it  technically 
intriguing  to  try  to  figure  out  what  the  geology  was  out  there. 

II 

And  by  the  time  we  finished  that  day's  walk,  he  said,  "They've 
got  a  real  problem  out  here."  He  said  he  would  go  to  work  on 
preparing  a  report,  which  took  quite  a  long  time  to  put  together. 
He  had  to  come  back  and  make  a  couple  of  trips. 

Did  he  tie  it  in  to  the  Point  Reyes  area,  or  did  he-- 

Not  the  way  the  USGS  did  a  year  later,  but  the  San  Andreas  is  so 
visible  on  an  aerial  photo,  I  mean,  you  can't  miss  it.   There's 
got  to  be  something  going  on,  seismically,  out  there.   You'll 
notice  that  picture  in  A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park  of  a  locomotive 
on  its  side,  knocked  over  in  1906.   Twenty-one  feet  of 
displacement  right  there  at  Bolinas,  or  north  of  Bolinas.   That 
was  a  big  earthquake,  and  it  wasn't  very  far  away,  and  here  this 
fault  runs  right  through  the  harbor.   So  what  happened  then? 

You  just  got  a  certain  verbal  lead  from  him  that  there  were 
problems  there,  but  had  no  report. 

No,  I  think  he  wrote  a  letter.   This  Walker  article  cites  a 
letter  that  he  wrote  shortly  after  that,  before  his  report  was 
done  [April  19,  1963,  Saint-Amand  to  Harold  Gilliam,  quoted  in 
Walker  article,  p.  331).   I  don't  remember  that,  but  I'm  sure  it 
happened. 

Walker  says  he  wrote  a  letter  to  Stewart  Udall's  office  [U.S. 
secretary  of  interior].   Maybe  this  was  during  the  time  when 
Harold  Gilliam  was  working  in  Udall's  office. 


I  don't  remember  that, 
was. 


I  just  don't  remember  what  that  timing 


Because  Udall  seemed  to  be  a  key-- 
Udall  was  a  very  key  person. 
Did  you  contact  him  at  all? 

That  was  all  done  by  the  Kortums  or  by  Gilliam,  not  by  me.   I 
don't  think  I  ever  talked  to  anyone  in  the  Department  of  the 
Interior,  and  if  I  did,  it  wasn't  for  very  much.   I've  never 
talked  to  Hal  [Gilliam]  about  that.   I'm  not  privy  to  his 
conversations,  but  it  makes  sense  he  would  have  spoken  with  Udall 


60 


about  Bodega.   He  was  part  of  our  organization.   We  had  a  plant 
right  there  in  the  secretary  of  interior's  office  [laughter]; 
that's  not  bad. 

Lage:     We'll  have  to  get  this  straightened  out. 

Pesonen:   It's  the  kind  of  thing  PG&E  used  to  do;  we  accused  them  of  it. 
[laughter] 

Lage:     Right.  Looks  very  conspiratorial. 
Pesonen:  Well,  it  was.   [laughter] 

That  spring  of  '63,  for  me  personally,  was  a  slow  period, 
had  to  have  a  job,  and  I  got  a  job  working  for  Henry  Vaux  and 
John  Zivnuska  in  the  UC  School  of  Forestry  on  a  report  on  the 
forest  products  industry  in  California.   It  may  have  been 
Agriculture  Extension  which  was  putting  it  together--!  think 
Zivnuska  was  the  lead  author,  and  he  had  asked  me  to  write  a 
couple  of  chapters  in  it,  do  research  and  write  some  chapters. 


Lage: 


Were  they  aware  of  all  of  this  controversy  at  Bodega? 


Pesonen:   They  were  aware.   I  told  them,  "Look,  I'm  involved  in  this  thing 
now,  and  I'm  not  going  to  let  go  of  it.   I  may  be  spending  some 
University  time  with  University  phones."  They  were  very  kind 
about  it,  very  understanding.   There  wasn't  any  Free  Speech 
Movement  by  this  time,  either.   I  think  they  just  liked  me,  and 
they  respected  what  I  was  doing,  and  they  respected  the  way  I  did 
it.   I  was  up  front  with  them;  if  I  was  going  to  take  this  job, 
there  would  be  times  when  I  was  going  to  be  working  on  Bodega, 
and  that  was  just  the  way  it  was  going  to  be,  or  I  wasn't  going 
to  work  on  that  job.   I'd  make  up  for  it.   I'd  put  in  hours 
elsewhere;  I'd  somehow  keep  the  books  straight,  and  I  think  I 
did,  but  I'm  sure  that  I  ran  the  University's  phone  bill  up. 
[laughter]   The  University  deserved  it.   And  I  had  met  Julie  by 
this  time  and  was  courting  Julie,  so  my  personal  life  was  busy 
and  this  employment  was  preoccupying,  and  Bodega  was 
preoccupying.  We  didn't  know  what  was  going  to  happen. 

PG&E  then  submitted,  to  the  Atomic  Energy  Commission,  as 
part  of  their  application  for  a  construction  license,  a  much  more 
comprehensive  analysis  of  the  site—geologic  analysis  and 
engineering  analysis—than  they  had  submitted  to  the  PUC.  Well, 
we  had  obtained  the  submission  to  the  PUC  and  we  had  the  AEC 
submission,  and  Sam  Rogers,  who  was  a  biochemistry  student  who 
worked  for  Joe  Neilands ,  took  these  two  reports  and  read  them  and 
made  a  comparison.   We  found  major  discrepancies  between  what 


61 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


they  had  told  the  PUC  about  the  site,  and  what  they  told  the  AEC. 
They  were  much  more  honest  with  the  AEC. 

They  didn't  think  the  AEC  would  care  as  much,  or  do  you  think 
they'd  found  out  more  in  the  meantime? 

Well,  the  AEC  had  more  expertise,  so  it  was  harder  to  pull  the 
wool  over  their  eyes. 

[tape  interruption] 

Julie  had  told  me  something  about  helping  you  get  a  crucial 
report.  Was  that  the  crucial  report  that  she  got  in  her  role  as 
reporter? 


No.   That  wasn't  it. 
report. 


It  was  a  very  crucial  report,  but  another 


PG&E  had  to  submit  what  was  called  a  "preliminary  hazard 
summary"  report,  which  they  filed  with  the  AEC.   It's  hard  to 
imagine  now,  with  the  Freedom  of  Information  Act  and  all  of  the 
environmental  statutes  that  have  been  passed  by  Congress  and 
interpreted  by  the  courts,  what  in  fact  was  the  fact  then,  that 
the  AEC  said  we  couldn't  have  a  copy  of  it.  We  could  go  in  to 
their  office,  and  under  a  guard,  sit  at  a  table  and  read  it,  but 
we  couldn't  get  our  own  copy.   Well,  of  course,  PG&E  had  a  copy, 
and  we'll  come  to  that  in  the  chronology  here. 

But  before  that,  Sam  Rogers  had  gone  over  and  read  the 
exhibits  that  had  been  submitted  on  the  seismic  question.   I 
think  they  were  exhibits  to  this  preliminary  hazard  summary 
report  or  part  of  the  application,  anyway.   They  disclosed  facts 
about  the  proximity  of  the  San  Andreas  fault  which  had  been 
denied  by  PG&E  at  the  PUC  hearings  and  which  had  not  been 
revealed  in  the  seismic  report  submitted  at  the  PUC.  We  saw 
this,  two  sworn  statements  that  were  in  conflict,  as  another 
opportunity  to  try  to  get  the  PUC  to  reconsider  their  decision. 
So  we  prepared  a  petition.   I  wrote  it,  but  Sam  Rogers  was  the 
one  who  found  it.   I  did  the  writing  and  the  analysis  and  the 
compilation  and  prepared  a  long  petition.   I've  forgotten  what  we 
called  it,  exactly,  but  it  was  a  petition  to  reopen  for  false 
evidence,  or  some  hysterical  title  like  that  [laughter].   We 
submitted  it  with  a  press  release  and  filed  it  with  the  PUC.  The 
PUC  deliberated  on  it  for  a  while  and  finally  issued  a  decision 
denying  our  petition. 

But  William  Bennett,  who  was  a  Pat  Brown  appointee  to  the 
PUC  and  who  had  political  ambitions  of  his  own--he  ran  later  for 
attorney  general  and  I  think  he  really  wanted  to  run  for 


62 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


governor—issued  a  dissent  and  held  his  own  press  conference  when 
he  issued  the  dissent.   The  dissent  seized  on  both  the  scenic 
issues  and  the  seismic  issues  and  was  a  very  eloquent  treatise  on 
Bodega  Bay  and  why  there  shouldn't  be  a  plant  there.   I'm  quite 
convinced  that  he  saw  this  as  the  opening  shot  at  his  own 
political  campaign. 

Why  are  you  convinced  of  that? 

Well,  I've  talked  to  him  since,  and  he's  pretty  well  conceded 
that  he  saw  this  as  part  of  his  building  a  campaign.   That's  the 
way  people  campaigned  in  those  days.  There  weren't  any 
television,  thirty-second  spots. 

He  could  build  on  the  interest  in  this  issue. 

Thirty  years  ago  you  campaigned  through  the  newspapers ,  and  you 
campaigned  on  issues,  and  they  weren't  negative  campaigns.   We've 
forgotten  how  far  political  campaigns  have  descended  since  then. 

In  any  event,  it  was  another  occasion  to  keep  the  issue 
alive,  keep  it  on  the  front  page  of  the  newspapers,  keep  the 
controversy  hot.  So  we  were  very  grateful. 


You  did  that  quite  well, 
time. 


really,  over  this  extended  period  of 


Well,  we  had  to  work  at  it.   I  mean,  you've  got  to  make  news, 
[laughter]   But  we  found  ways  to  make  news.   I  don't  think  we 
ever  made  news  that  didn't  have  a  real  factual  basis.   Something 
happened,  and  all  we  did  was  see  that  it  got  plenty  of  attention. 
I  don't  think  we  ever  manufactured  anything.   I  think  we  ran  the 
campaign  with  a  lot  of  integrity. 


Relations  with  PG&E 


Lage:     Does  PG&E  agree? 

Pesonen:   No,  they  didn't  agree  at  all.   [laughter]   They  were  dismayed. 

They  had  never  run  into  anything  like  this  before.   This  was  the 
first  time  that  anybody  had  ever  had  a  sustained  campaign  that 
didn't  quit.   About  this  time,  they  tried  to  talk  me  out  of 
pursuing  this. 

Lage:     Tell  me  about  that. 


63 


Pesonen:   That  was  Hal  Strube,  who  was  in  the  PG&E  public  affairs 

department.   He  was  the  person  assigned  the  responsibility  to 
handle  all  the  public  relations  and  see  that  it  ran  smoothly.   We 
were  driving  Strube  nuts,  and  Strube  made  the  mistake  of 
cultivating  Julie.   Here  was  a  reporter.   He  went  around  and 
talked  to  all  of  the  newspapers,  talked  to  the  reporters;  that 
was  the  way  he  did  his  job.   He  didn't  know  that  Julie  and  I  were 
romantically  involved.   So  he  thought  that  he  had  an  ally  in 
Julie,  and  Julie  was  a  good  spy.   She  said,  "Well,  I'd  like  to 
read  that  preliminary  hazard  summary  report."  So  he  lent  it  to 
her,  and  she  called  me  up,  and  we  ran  over  to  the  Sierra  Club  and 
turned  on  the  Xerox  machine  and  photocopied  the  whole  thing, 
[laughter]   That's  the  report  that  Julie  was  talking  about.   Then 
she  gave  it  back  to  Strube  and  said  it  was  very  interesting. 
Then  Strube  learned  a  month  or  two  later  that  we  were  getting 
married.   [laughter] 

Lage:     He  must  have  been  dismayed. 

Pesonen:   Poor  Strube.   [laughter]  He  knew  he'd  been  had. 

Strube  then  invited  me  to  go  out  to  the  little  reactor  that 
they  had  out  in  Pleasanton.   It  was  an  experimental  reactor  that 
PG&E  ran  in  conjunction  with  General  Electric.   It  was  a  test 
reactor.  They  had  hooked  up  a  small  generator  that  they  had 
retrieved  from  an  old  ship  and  declared  that  this  was  producing 
electricity.   Well,  it  never  made  any  money,  and  it  didn't 
produce  much  electricity,  but  it  was  a  public  relations  coup: 
PG&E  was  now  generating  electricity  from  nuclear  power  in  two 
places,  Humboldt  Bay  and  Pleasanton. 

Lage:     Was  Humboldt  Bay  a  legitimate  nuclear  plant? 

Pesonen:   Humboldt  Bay  opened  in  1962,  I  think. 

Lage:     Was  it  as  big  as  what  they  planned  for  Bodega? 

Pesonen:   Oh  no.   Humboldt  Bay  was  sixty  megawatts,  and  Bodega  was  planned 
to  be  three  hundred  megawatts.   That's  small  by  today's 
standards.   They  build  them  two  thousand  megawatts  now;  Diablo 
Canyon  is  two  thousand  megawatts.   But  Bodega  was  the  biggest 
then,  and  Humboldt  was  as  big  as  the  only  one  or  two  other 
reactors  that  were  operating  in  the  West. 

Lage:     So  this  was  very  experimental. 

Pesonen:   Very  experimental.   Well,  the  theory  wasn't  experimental,  but 
each  design  was  a  unique  design,  designed  for  its  site. 


Lage: 


I  interrupted  you.   Strube  took  you  out  to  Pleasanton. 


Pesonen:   Strube  invited  me  to  go  out  to  Pleasanton  and  see  the  reactor. 

He  thought  maybe  this  would  assuage  my  concerns.   I  agreed  to  go, 
and  I  asked  Frances  Herring  to  go  with  me.   I  think  Frances  is 
probably  dead  now;  I  haven't  heard  from  her  for  years.   She  was  a 
wonderful  woman,  and  she  was  a  friend  of  Barney  Dreyfus,  who  had 
handled  one  of  these  little  lawsuits  we  brought  against  the 
county—unsuccessful  lawsuits  —  and  she  worked  at  the  Institute 
for  Governmental  Studies  on  campus.   She  was  an  older  woman,  a 
good  writer  and  a  really  fine  person,  and  she  was  very  interested 
in  the  Bodega  case,  interested  in  it  as  a  social  event,  I  think. 
She  went  with  me,  and  we  went  with  Strube. 

It  was  a  rainy  day,  I  remember.   This  must  have  been  in  the 
early  spring  or  late  winter  in  '63,  and  I  was  living  in  a  rooming 
house  over  here  on  Durant.   The  guy  who  ran  the  rooming  house  was 
a  little  technical  wizard;  he  liked  to  play  with  electronics.   He 
had  made  a  little  radiation  detector  that  would  fit  in  the  inside 
of  your  coat  pocket,  and  it  made  a  little  "beep"  on  exposure  to 
radiation,  and  I  took  it  along  and  stuck  it  in  my  pocket.   We 
walked  into  this  room  out  at  Pleasanton  where  they  were 
manipulating  plutonium  in  one  of  these  big  boxes  with  the  rubber 
gloves,  and  that  detector  just  went  crazy.   It  was  tripping  away 
in  my  pocket  and  I  couldn't  shut  it  up,  and  I  was  afraid  Strube 
would  hear  it.   [laughter] 

Lage:     He  must  have.   [laughter] 

Pesonen:   There  was  a  lot  of  debris  around  that  place.   It  was  dirty.   So  I 
was  unimpressed.   Nobody  was  being  fried  alive  in  this  place  or 
anything--   [laughter] 

Lage:     I  wonder  what  he  thought  would  impress  you  so  much  about  it? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know  what  he  had  in  mind  except  that  maybe  seeing  the 
awesome  technology,  and  the  care  with  which  you  had  to  walk 
through  a  radiation  detector  when  you  went  into  the  room  and  when 
you  came  out,  had  to  wipe  your  shoes  and  wear  a  smock,  and  stuff 
like  that. 

So  we  dropped  Frances  off,  and  we  pulled  into  the  parking 
lot  of  the  place  where  I  was  living,  and  Strube  wanted  to  talk. 
It  was  driving  rain  outside,  and  he  shut  the  engine  off,  and  the 
windows  got  all  fogged  up.   He  started  to  tell  me  that  he  was 
very  concerned  about  what  was  going  to  happen  to  my  life  ;  that  it 
would  be  very  hard  for  me  to  find  a  job  after  this  prominent  role 
I  had  taken;  that  my  politics  was  being  questioned;  that  there 
was  no  future  in  what  I  was  doing;  and  had  I  thought  about  that? 


65 


Lage: 


Here  was  this  slimy,  PR  type  giving  me  a  fatherly  lecture  about 
What's  going  to  happen  to  my  life?   I  was  infuriated,  and  I  was 
depressed.   And  I  got  the  sense  that  he  was  on  the  edge  of 
offering  me  a  bribe.   He  never  did,  and  I  can't  accuse  him  of 
that,  but  I  had  this  overwhelming  nausea,  almost,  that  I  was 
being  offered  something  if  I  would  stop  doing  what  I  was  doing. 
I  thanked  him  and  got  out  of  the  car  and  never  talked  to  him 
about  it  again,  but  I'll  never  forget  it. 

But  you  did  remain  cool. 


Pesonen:   Oh  yes.   I  didn't  say  "I'm — ."  No,  I  didn't  blow  up  for  him  or 
anything.   I  thanked  him  for  the  trip,  said  it  was  very 
interesting.   But  inside,  I  was--.   I  wasn't  seething;  I  don't 
get  angry  that  way,  I  was  just  very,  very  depressed  that 
something  like  that  would  happen.   It  was  sort  of  like  being  in 
the  presence  of  evil,  you  know.   [laughter]   I  don't  like  to 
think  evil  exists,  and  when  I  rub  shoulders  with  it,  it  always 
depresses  me  because  I'm  a  fairly  happy  person  and  an  optimistic 
one.   That  stayed  with  me  for  a  long  time. 


Lage:     Did  it  feel  like  a  threat  as  much  as  a  bribe? 
you. " 


Like,  "We  can  ruin 


Pesonen:  Well,  it  felt  like  both.   It  felt  like  both.  And  I  was  worried. 
I  thought,  "What  am  I  going  to  do  with  my  life?"   I  didn't  have  a 
career  that  was  saleable,  I  was  a  forester  and  I  wasn't  working 
in  forestry,  I  had  taken  on  a  huge  corporation  which  had  enormous 
influence.   There  were  moments  when  I  got  worried.   I  would  talk 
to  Karl  Kortum  and  say,  "You  know,  maybe  I'd  better  get  out  of 
this.   What's  going  to  happen  to  me?"   I  didn't  have  any  support 
system.   I  didn't  have  any  money.   But  I  didn't  quit,  anyway.   I 
put  that  out  of  my  mind  after  a  while. 


Role  of  Udall's  Department  of  Interior 


Pesonen:   By  this  time  Udall  was  involved,  the  USGS  was  starting  to  issue 
preliminary  reports  of  one  kind  or  another.   I'm  fuzzy  on  the 
sequence,  the  details  of  those.   They  seemed  to  be  very  well  laid 
out  in  this  Pacific  Historical  Review  article  by  J.  Samuel 
Walker.   There's  a  lot  in  that  article  that  I  had  forgotten  or 
didn't  have  in  a  linear  way  in  my  own  mind. 

Lage:     Well,  it's  been  a  while  since  it  happened,  after  all. 


66 


Pesonen:   Well,  I  wasn't  privy  to  all  of  what  happened  there.   I  wasn't 
supposed  to  talk  to  [Julius]  Schlocker  and  [Manuel  G.]  Bonilla 
who  were  the  two  geologists  from  Menlo  Park  with  the  USGS.   I 
felt  it  was  not  ethical  for  me  to  discuss  with  them  what  they 
were  finding  because  I  didn't  want  to  appear  to  be  influencing 
their  assessment  of  the  site. 

By  this  time,  PG&E  had  started  construction.   Preliminary 
construction  could  be  commenced  without  a  construction  license 
and  without  any  environmental  review;  there  was  no  requirement  of 
environmental  review  then.   What  I  learned  from  Walker's  article 
is  that  there  were  informal  efforts  between  the  AEC  and  the 
Department  of  the  Interior  to  do  what  the  National  Environmental 
Policy  Act  now  requires  them  to  do. 

Lage:     I  thought  that  was  a  very  key  thing  when  I  read  that-- 
Pesonen:   That  was  very  interesting. 
Lage:     --that  Udall-- 

Pesonen:   Yes.   They  proposed  a  joint  memorandum  for  evaluation  of  nuclear 
power  plants  generally. 

Lage:     Right.   To  be  sure  they  would  comply  with  conservation  efforts  of 
the  Department  of  the  Interior. 

Pesonen:   And  the  AEC  said  they  didn't  have  jurisdiction  to  look  at 
environmental  consequences  of  what  they  did  there.   It's  a 
mandate  now,  under  federal  law.   The  Calvert  Cliffs  decision  by 
the  District  of  Columbia  circuit  made  that  very  clear.   It  was 
one  of  the  early,  fine  decisions  under  NEPA.   But  at  that  time, 
NEPA  didn't  exist  and  so  Udall  was  approaching  this,  and  using 
Bodega  as  a  case  history,  as  a  centerpiece,  to  do  what  Congress 
finally  mandated  all  federal  agencies  do.   He  was  ahead  of  his 
time,  and  Bodega  was  the  precipitator  of  it.   I  don't  think 
there's  any  question  about  that. 


Keeping  Bodega  in  the  News;  Memorial  Day  Concert  and  Balloons 


Pesonen:   Well,  we  had  to  keep  cranking  the  publicity  up,  so  that's  what 
gave  rise  to  the  Memorial  Day  '63  balloon  episode. 

Lage:     Tell  me  about  that. 


67 


Pesonen:   That  was--.   Whose  idea  was  that?  That  was  not  my  idea, 
was  Pat  Watters--that  was  Lu  Watters's  wife's  idea. 


That 


Lage:     I  haven't  heard  her  name  mentioned  in  all  these  things, 
about  Lu  Watters,  but  I  don't  hear  about  his  wife. 


You  hear 


Pesonen:   Well,  Lu's  dead  now,  too,  and  they  divorced  a  few  years  later, 
but  they  were  living  in  Cotati,  and  they  were  very  involved. 
Somebody  had  talked  Lu  into  trying  to  play  his  horn  again  and--. 
Karl  Kortum  really  thought  this  one  up,  Karl  and  Pat,  and  they 
put  it  all  together.   I  just  went  and  gave  a  speech.  Karl  had 
been  a  college  student  when  Lu  was  at  the  height  of  his  powers 
with  the  Down  Club  in  Annie  Place  in  San  Francisco.   Lu  was  the 
father  of  the  revival  of  Dixieland  jazz  in  San  Francisco  in  the 
early  forties,  then  after  the  war.   So  there  were  tens  of 
thousands  of  people  who  knew  who  Lu  Watters  was  and  who  didn't 
know  anything  about  nuclear  power  or  Bodega,  or  cared  very  much. 

So  we  put  that  whole  thing  together,  and  it  was  a  wonderful 
day.   It  turned  out  to  be  a  beautiful  windy  day- -the  wind  was 
blowing  exactly  the  right  direction.   [laughter] 

Lage:     For  what  purpose? 

Pesonen:   To  blow  the  balloons  into  places  where  people  would  pick  up  the 
cards  and  call  the  local  newspapers.   I  was  told,  and  it  may  be 
apocryphal,  one  of  the  balloons  flew  right  into  a  hotel  room  in 
San  Francisco,  one  of  the  balloons  landed  in  the  fountain  at  the 
Civic  Center  in  Marin  County—they  came  down  all  over  the  place. 


Lage:     Now,  that  wasn't  your  idea  either,  or  was  it? 
balloon  release? 


Whose  idea  was  the 


Pesonen:   No.   I  thought  it  was  a  wonderful  idea,  but  I  didn't  come  up  with 
the  idea.   Pat  Watters  came  up  with  the  idea  of  the  balloons,  I 
think. 


Lage:     Because  that  was  used  a  lot  later. 

Pesonen:   It's  been  used  a  lot  by  people  since  then.   So  we  brought  Turk 
Murphy's  band  out  there.   Lu  talked  Turk  Murphy  into  coming  out 
with  his  band,  Bob  Helm,  Wally  what  was  his  name—most  of  those 
guys  are  dead  now.   By  this  time  Don  Sherwood  had  picked  the 
thing  up  and  was  talking  about  it  on  his  morning  talk  show  [on 
KSFO] . 

Lage:     Now,  he  was  quite  influential  on  public  opinion. 


68 


Pesonen:   He  was  very  influential.   He  was  funny,  and  he  was  irreverent. 
There  was  another  group  called  the  Goodtime  Washboard  Three  out 
here  in  Berkeley  that  put  out  a  record  called  "Don't  Blame  PG&E, 
Pal,  It  Must  Be  San  Andreas 's  Fault."   [laughter] 

Lage:     That's  a  good  one.  And  we  didn't  mention,  I  don't  think,  that  Lu 
Watters  recorded  "Blues  Over  Bodega,"  or  was  that  later? 

Pesonen:   That  was  later.   Lu  hadn't  recorded  anything  by  this  time.   So 
there  was  a  lot  of  attention.   Sherwood  was  talking  about  it  on 
his  morning  talk  show,  and  then  we  had  this  big  Memorial  Day 
thing.   Lots  and  lots  of  people  came.   We  all  drove  out  on  the 
head,  and  PG&E  had  a  public  relations  guy  in  a  trailer  out  there 
and  he  just  fled.  We  got  all  the  balloons  out,  the  band  got 
their  instruments  out,  and  they  started  to  play  good  old 
Dixieland,  and  we  started  letting  these  balloons  go.   They  just 
soared  off  into  the  beautiful  blue  sky,  sailed  out  over  Sonoma 
and  Marin  counties  and  disappeared  from  sight.   Each  one  with  a 
card  tied  to  it  saying,  "This  balloon  represents  a  radioactive 
molecule  of  Strontium  90  or  Iodine  131"--molecule  is  technically 
incorrect,  but  it  didn't  matter--"If  you  find  this  balloon,  call 
your  local  newspaper.   It  was  released  on  Bodega  Bay  on  Memorial 
Day,  1963."  And  they  did  come  down  in  all  different  places. 

The  thing  just  caught  people's  imagination,  and  they  had  a 
point  to  make,  which  was  that  they  were  going  to  build  a  nuclear 
power  plant  on  an  earthquake  fault,  or  next  to  one- -certainly  in 
a  seismically  dangerous  place- -upwind  from  where  millions  of 
people  lived.   That  was  our  strategy—that  really  epitomized  our 
strategy.  We  knew  we  couldn't  win  if  the  people  in  Sonoma  County 
were  the  only  ones  who  got  concerned.  We  had  to  get  the 
metropolitan  San  Francisco  area  up  in  arms.   People  had  to  feel 
personally  threatened  here. 

Lage:     And,  up  until  then,  had  they  not  been? 

Pesonen:   Up  until  then  it  was  some  remote  controversy  way  off  up  the  coast 
someplace,  it  didn't  affect  them.   This  helped  to  bring  it  home. 

Lage:     Did  that  event  get  a  lot  of  coverage? 

Pesonen:   It  got  a  lot  of  coverage,  and  colorful  coverage,  and  attention- 
gathering  coverage. 

II 

Pesonen:   So,  our  political  theory  was  to  make  the  Bay  Area  feel  that  this 
was  part  of  the  Bay  Area's  concern.   By  this  time,  Save  San 
Francisco  Bay  Association  had  been  started,  so  there  was  a 


69 


reviving  environmental  consciousness  in  San  Francisco.   We  wanted 
to  play  into  that.   We  found  an  atmospheric  physicist  at  the 
University  of  Arizona,  James  McDonald,  who  was  very  well 
respected  in  his  field.   He  came  out  and  we  got  all  of  the 
meteorological  reports  and  we  dug  out  historic  weather  records 
and  all  kinds  of  stuff,  and  he  put  together  a  report. 

The  idea  really  was  triggered  by  Karl  Kortum,  who  remembered 
a  forest  fire  up  there  back  in  the  early  fifties  or  late  forties 
in  which  the  smoke  had  gone  down  the  coast  and  come  in  the  Golden 
Gate.   So  we  had  a  theory  that,  if  there  were  a  major  accident 
and  a  release  of  radioactivity,  it  would  come  into  San  Francisco 
Bay,  the  prevailing  winds  being  from  the  northwest.   This 
atmospheric  physicist  was  able  to  establish  a  high  likelihood  of 
that  based  on  his  analysis  of  all  the  weather  records. 

Lage:     It  would  come  down  the  coast  instead  of  more  inland? 

Pesonen:   Right.   It  was  going  to  come  down  along  the  face  of  the  coast  and 
then  blow  in  the  Gate.   It  certainly  would  come  into  the  San 
Francisco  Bay  Area.   He  had  wonderful  diagrams  with  maps  and  all 
kinds  of  stuff,  and  we  put  out  a  nice,  impressive-looking  report. 
We  released  that,  and  that  got  people's  attention. 

Lage:     Now,  was  he  someone  you  had  to  hire? 

Pesonen:   No.   I  think  we  paid  his  expenses,  but  he  read  A  Visit  to  the 

Atomic  Park,  and  we  talked,  and  he  felt  the  way  we  did:  that  this 
was  wrong.   There  is  no  such  thing,  in  my  opinion,  as  a  totally 
disinterested  expert.   That  is  a  fiction. 

Lage:     On  either  side? 

Pesonen:   On  any  side,  that  is  a  fiction.   There  are  certain  professional 
standards,  and  an  expert  will  only  go  so  far,  but  they  will  make 
as  favorable  a  report  as  they  can  within  professional  standards, 
most  of  them,  on  behalf  of  who  paid  them  or  what  they  believe  in. 

McDonald  wrote  his  report  because  he  believed  we  were 
correct,  and  I  think  that  it's  not  a  dishonest  report.   But  there 
are  a  lot  of  uncertainties  too.   It  depends  on  what  time  of  day, 
what  direction  the  wind  is  blowing.   He  just  said  it's  possible, 
and  it's  not  a  low  probability. 


70 


Growing  Doubts  about  Site  Safety  and  PG&E  Pullout,  October  1964 


Pesonen:   So  we  had  this  compilation  of  pretty  good  stuff.   I  think  by  this 
time  we  had  Saint-Amand's  report--!  don't  remember  exactly  when 
we  got  that- -but  we  had  McDonald's  report,  we  had  Saint-Amand's 
report,  we  had  several  reports  that  even  PG&E's  people,  some  of 
them,  were  uneasy  about.  Don  Tocher,  I  think,  was  very  uneasy 
about  the  project. 

Lage:     Was  he  with  PG&E? 

Pesonen:   He  was  one  of  their  consultants.   There  were  a  lot  of  people 

involved  at  this  point  that  I  wasn't  personally  acquainted  with. 

So  it  was  building.   You  could  tell  PG&E  was  nervous.   They 
did  something  that  they  had  never  done  before,  that  I  know  of; 
they  attacked  us  in  the  press.  When  they  first  did  that,  they 
put  out  a  fact  sheet:  "Statements  by  the  Northern  California 
Association  to  Preserve  Bodega  Head  and  Harbor:  The  Truth."  It 
had  a  question  and  answer  format  like  that:  falsity,  truth; 
falsity,  truth.   Some  of  our  supporters  called;  I  know  the 
Ruebels  called,  and  they  were  very  worried,  "PG&E's  come  out  and 
they've  attacked  us  now.  We're  in  real  trouble,"  and  I  said, 
"It's  the  best  thing  that  ever  happened  to  us.   I  hope  they  do  it 
more."  Because  all  it  did  was  give  credibility  to  us.  A  little 
disorganized  band  of  citizens,  and  the  largest  utility  in  the 
world  is  putting  out  lengthy  statements  refuting  what  they  say. 
There's  enough  smoke  there;  there  must  be  some  fire  in  what  we're 
talking  about. 


Lage: 


Was  PG&E  taking  out  ads,  or  putting  out  press  releases? 


Pesonen:   Press  releases.   I  don't  recall  any  ads.  You  know,  newspaper 

reporters  are  pretty  cynical,  and  I  think  it  changed  the  way  the 
press  perceived  us.   If  we  were  worthy  enough  to  get  an  attack 
from  PG&E,  then  we  were  worthy  enough  for  them  to  listen  to  us. 
When  they  got  a  press  release  from  us,  they  paid  attention  to  it; 
it  wasn't  just  somebody  blowing  their  horn  out  there.   So  we  were 
able  to  get  a  lot  of  press,  and  we  had  a  high  level  of 
credibility  because  PG&E  attacked  us.  All  of  these  things  fed  on 
each  other.   Everything  is  connected  to  everything  else  in 
something  like  this. 


Lage: 


I  get  a  little  fuzzy  on  how  things  unfolded  then.   It  seems 
like  the  fall  of  '63  was  pretty  quiet. 

The  report  from  Saint-Amand  was  the  end  of  August  '63. 


71 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Was  it?  Okay,  yes.  That  sounds  about  right.   I  remember  when  we 
got  the  report,  I  went  to  see  the  president  of  PG&E  and  I  said, 
"We've  got  this  report,  you  are  in  an  embarrassing  situation,  you 
are  going  to  lose  this  fight  eventually.   We'll  be  glad  not  to 


release  the  report  if  you'll  just  pull  out." 
believe  how  naive  I  was. 


[laughter]   I  can't 


How  did  you  relate  with  him?  Had  you  ever  met  him? 

I'd  never  met  him  before.   I  didn't  have  any  trouble  getting  an 
appointment  with  him. 

Was  this  Sutherland  still? 

I  think  it  was  Sutherland.   He  had  a  staff  surrounding  him,  and 


they  all  sat  there  and  listened  solemnly, 
believe  I  did  that!   Anyway,  I  did. 

How  did  he  react? 


[laughter]   I  can't 


"Thank  you  very  much,  but  we  believe  we  are  on  the  right  track." 
Something  like  that.   I  didn't  keep  a  diary  then,  and  I  wish  I 
had,  but  it's  funny  when  I  look  back  on  it.   I  didn't  believe 
then,  really,  that  they  would  pull  out,  but  it  would  have  been  in 
their  self-interest,  but  people  don't  act  in  their  self-interest 
in  big  institutions. 

But  I  seem  to  recall  that  things  were  pretty  quiet  then. 
Julie  and  I  got  married  in  August  of  '63,  and  so  I  think  we  were 
setting  up  a  household,  and  she  was  working,  and  I  was  probably 
starting  to  think  about  writing  a  book  on  this.   I  was  getting 
worried  because  we'd  kind  of  run  out  of  things  to  keep  this  story 
alive  in  the  newspapers,  and  there  were  no  AEC  hearings 
scheduled. 

You  weren't  spending  every  minute  on  this,  it  sounds  like. 

Pretty  much.   I  don't  think  I  had  a  job.   I  wasn't  employed.   But 
we  just  exhausted  our--.   By  this  time  we  had  what  we  called  an 
organization.   We  were  raising  some  money,  and  I  had  a  newsletter 
I  was  putting  out  and  issuing  press  releases  now  and  then.   But 
it  seemed  quiet,  and  1  was  a  little  worried  about  that.  And 
then,  along  came  the  Good  Friday  earthquake  [in  southern  Alaska] 
in  1964. 

Well,  the  USGS  people  were  out  at  Bodega  schlocking  around, 
following  the  construction,  and  there  would  be  a  little  story 
here  and  a  little  story  there. 


72 


Lage:     On  September  25,  '63,  the  USGS  preliminary  report  came  out  that 
was  strongly  negative  toward  PG&E. 

Pesonen:   Preliminary  report,  but  you  get  one  day's  press  on  that,  and  then 
what  are  you  going  to  say? 

Well,  I  think  I  was  busy  keeping  track  of  all  of  these 
various  reports  and  studies  that  were  going  on  and  putting  out  a 
newsletter  to  our  members,  and  raising  money  from  them,  all  of 
which  we  did  by  hand,  you  know. 

Lage:     Most  of  the  money  you  raised  was  from  small  donors? 

Pesonen:  We  had  a  few  large  donors.   It  wasn't  a  lot.   I  don't  think  we 
spent  more  than  $20,000  on  the  whole  campaign. 

Lage:     Were  your  donors  Sonoma  locals? 

Pesonen:   One  was  George  Wheelwright  who  lived  in  Mar in  County,  on  the 
ranch  that  is  now  the  Zen  Center,  the  Wheelwright  Ranch. 
Wheelwright  was  very  interested  in  what  we  were  doing.   He  was  a 
friend  of  Peter  Behr's  [Marin  County  supervisor  and  later  state 
senator] . 

We  had  some  public  hearings.   We  had  a  public  hearing  before 
the  Marin  County  Board  of  Supervisors,  which  Peter  Behr  chaired. 
We  put  together  a  meeting  before  a  committee  on  the  San  Francisco 
Board  of  Supervisors,  chaired  by  Leo  McCarthy  at  that  time. 

Lage:     Did  you  get  them  to  pass  resolutions? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  or  recommend  resolutions,  but  mainly  we  used  them  as  forums 
for  more  public  attention,  and  they  worked  pretty  well  for  that. 
They  were  just  ways  of  keeping  the  thing  alive  until--.   We  fully 
expected  we  would  be  going  to  an  AEC  hearing. 

Lage:     Was  there  a  lawsuit  somewhere  along  the  way? 

Pesonen:   There  were  a  couple:  against  the  Board  of  Supervisors  for  the  way 
they  had  granted  the  local  permits,  but  those  were  dumped. 
Barney  Dreyfus  brought  those  and  did  a  nice  job  on  them,  but  he 
knew  that  they  were  what  the  courts  would  have  called  frivolous, 
I  think,  today.   They  sanction  lawyers  for  frivolous  lawsuits 
today;  they  didn't  then. 


Lage: 


There  probably  weren't  so  many  of  them  then. 


73 


Pesonen:   There  weren't  so  many  of  them  then.   There  wasn't  a  need  to 
sanction  lawyers  for  them.   And,  in  the  larger  sense,  they 
weren't  frivolous. 

I  don't  recall  what  happened  with  any  great  detail,  month- 
by-month  until  the  Good  Friday  earthquake. 

Lage:     That  was  March  27,  1964. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  that  is  right.   That  is  when  it  was.   And  that  was  a  big 

deal,  because  it  was  a  horrendous  earthquake.   Life  magazine  had 
a  cover  showing  whole  hillsides  of  houses  sliding  into  the  ocean 
in  Anchorage,  and  there  was  a  tsunami  created  by  that  earthquake 
which  hit  Crescent  City.   It  came  into  San  Francisco  Bay,  too, 
and  damaged  some  boats,  and  the  wave  killed  some  people  in 
Crescent  City.   Here  was  an  earthquake  3,000  miles  away  that 
killed  people  in  California.   It  gave  credence  to  what  we  were 
talking  about:  the  power  of  these  big  seismic  events. 

Lage:     Did  that  get  immediately  connected  to  Bodega? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  made  the  connection.   We  issued  a  press  release,  "This 

demonstrates  what  we've  been  talking  about."   People  were  scared. 
People  forget,  but  they  were  scared  for  a  while. 

I  was  getting  worried  and  optimistic  at  the  same  time.   Our 
membership  was  losing  interest.   Nothing  was  happening.   All  we 
were  hearing  was  press  releases  and  press  coverage.   By  this 
time,  of  course,  Udall  was  involved,  the  USGS  was  involved,  so 
this  was  big  time!   It  wasn't  just  a  little  band  of  dissidents 
out  here. 

Lage:     When  you  say  your  membership,  who  are  you — 

Pesonen:   Oh,  the  people  who  got  this  newsletter.   They  didn't  send  money 
in  as  much,  and  I  could  just  feel  that  our  support  was  dwindling 
just  out  of  boredom  by  the  length  of  this  campaign.   It  had  gone 
on  for  two  years,  by  this  time,  unresolved.   But  I  was  encouraged 
by  what  the  USGS  was  doing  and  what  Udall  was  doing  and  the 
uneasiness  we  detected  among  PG&E's  experts.   They  didn't  sound 
real  confident.  They'd  come  out  and  say  that  it  was  okay,  but 
they  didn't  ring  with  confidence.   Finally  the  AEC  said  they  were 
going  to  have  preliminary  reports  from  their  regulatory  staff  and 
from  the  Advisory  Committee  on  Reactor  Safeguards,  and  we 
anticipated  those.   When  those  came  down,  that  was  all  she  wrote. 
They  came  down  in  October  [1964].   I  think  by  this  time  I  was 
getting  ready  to  go  to  law  school. 


Lage: 


So  you  were  making  plans  for  your  future  by  this  time? 


Pesonen:   I  was  making  plans  for  my  future. 

What  happened  is  pretty  much  what  Walker  says  happened:  the 
Advisory  Committee  on  Reactor  Safeguards  concluded  that  the  site 
was  adequate,  with  sufficient  engineering  safeguards,  and  the  AEC 
staff  went  through  a  philosophical  analysis  of  what  "unacceptable 
risk"  means  and  said  that  they  didn't  exactly  know  what  it  meant, 
but  they  knew  that  this  one  was  over  the  line.   That  gave  PG&E 
the  out  that  they  needed  to  say  that,  "We've  always  maintained  it 
would  be  safe,  and  this  distinguished  panel  of  experts,  the 
Advisory  Committee  on  Reactor  Safety  agrees  with  us,  but  the 
staff  has  some  questions,  and  we've  always  maintained  if  there 
was  the  slightest  doubt  about  public  safety  we  wouldn't  go  ahead 
with  the  facility."  That  was  the  gist  of  their  statement  and  it 
didn't  fool  many  people,  but  it  made  them  feel  better, 
[laughter] 

Lage:     It  made  them  feel  that  they  had  gotten  out  graciously.   Do  you 
think  that  all  of  the  public  attention  was  the  key  thing  in 
raising  the  AEC  staff-- 

Pesonen:   Oh,  absolutely.   You  wouldn't  have  gotten  Udall  interested;  we 
had  the  Lieutenant  Governor  Glenn  Anderson  writing  letters. 


Stance  of  Governor  Pat  Brown  and  Democratic  Party  Officials 


Lage:     Now,  how  did  you  get  the  state  people  involved? 

Pesonen:   Well,  when  there  is  enough  public  attention  on  this  thing,  you 
know,  politicians  come  to  you  because  they  want  to  ride  on  your 
coattails,  and  we  want  to  ride  on  theirs.   It's  a  symbiotic 
relationship.  We  need  the  emphasis  that  they  give,  the 
credibility  and  prestige  they  bring  to  our  campaign,  and  they 
want  to  be  identified  as  something  they  see  as  politically  useful 
to  them. 

Lage:     What  about  Pat  Brown  with  all  of  his  enthusiasm  for  nuclear 
power?  At  some  point  he  comes  out  saying,  according  to  the 
Walker  article,  "I  don't  like  to  see  Bodega  Head  with  a  steam 
plant  located  out  there  in  that  beautiful  place." 

Pesonen:   But  that  is  not  all  of  what  Pat  Brown  said.   If  I  recall 

correctly--!  don't  want  to  dispute  this  writing  without  looking 
up  the  original  document,  but  my  recollection  is  that  he 
regretted  that  beautiful  site  was  being  used  for  nuclear  power; 
he  was  sorry  about  it,  but  nuclear  power  was  important  and  the 


75 


plant  should  go  ahead.   I  don't  recall  that  Brown  ever  came  out 
against  the  plant. 

Lage:     It  was  after  the  AEC  had  issued  its  report  in  October,  I  see, 
that  he  held  a  press  conference  saying  nuclear  danger  is  too 
great  to  take  a  chance. 

Pesonen:   That  was  PG&E's  position. 

Lage:     Right.   It  was  just  before  PG&E  withdrew. 

Pesonen:   They  probably  put  him  up  to  it  [laughter].   It  paved  the  way  for 
their  statement.   I  wouldn't  be  a  bit  surprised  at  that. 

Lage:     Did  the  issue  get  involved  in  Democratic  Party  politics?   Somehow 
Jean  Kortum  is  mentioned  with  the  CDC  [California  Democratic 
Council]  and-- 

Pesonen:   Well,  one  of  the  first  talks  I  gave  to  get  support  was  to  the 

Democratic  Central  Committee.   Roger  Kent  was  chair  at  that  time, 
and  they  had  a  meeting  in  Rohnert  Park.   I  don't  remember  when 
that  was.   I  think  it  was  late  '62  or  early  '63.   I  carefully 
wrote  what  I  think  was  a  very  good  speech  about  what  was 
happening,  and  they  allowed  me  to  get  on  the  program.   I  used  it 
as  a  forum.   I  gave  a  lot  of  speeches,  most  of  which  I  don't 
remember  where  they  were,  but  I  talked  to  a  lot  of  groups.   I 
talked  to  the  Garden  Club  in  Mill  Valley,  the  Rotary  Club  in 
Sonoma.   I  was  all  over  the  place. 

Lage:     Just  like  PG&E. 

Pesonen:   Just  like  PG&E.   [laughter] 

Lage:     Did  you  get  a  good  reception? 

Pesonen:   I  almost  got  lynched  by  the  Rotary  Club  in  Sonoma.   They  all  got 
drunk. 

Lage:     This  was  a  lunch  meeting. 

Pesonen:   No,  it  was  a  dinner  meeting.   It  was  the  Kiwanis  or  the  Rotary, 
and  a  local  banker  was  the  moderator,  and  I  think  they  had  a 
debate.   It  might  have  been  Strube  and  me.   These  guys  had  too 
much  to  drink,  and  they  really  started  coming  after  me. 

Lage:     Verbally? 

Pesonen:   A  couple  of  them  got  up  and  wanted  to  take  their  jackets  off. 


76 


Lage:     Had  you  made  statements  that  would  provoke  people? 

Pesonen:   No.   I  just  told  my  story,  but  they  believed  in  PG&E,  the  nice 
guys  from  PG&E  were  part  of  the  Kiwanis  or  the  Rotaries. 

Lage:     That's  right,  they  were  their  fellow- - 

Pesonen:   They  were  their  fellow  people,  and  I  was  attacking  their 

integrity,  I  guess.   And  it  meant  tax  revenue  for  a  depressed 
agricultural  economy.   Lots  of  tax  revenue.  So  I  was  a  threat  to 
their  bourgeois  values.   This  banker  stepped  in  and  calmed  things 
down.   He  said,  "Look,  we  invited  this  young  man  to  come  and  talk 
to  us.   He  is  our  guest.   We  have  an  obligation  as  gentlemen  to," 
there  are  no  women  in  Kiwanis,  so  he  could  say,  "we  have  an 
obligation  as  gentlemen  to  treat  him  with  courtesy."   That 
chained  them,  and  they  all  settled  down  and  went  home. 

Lage:     Now  how  was  your  reception  at  the  Democratic  Central  Committee? 

Pesonen:   Very  good.   Roger  Kent  was  very  helpful.   He  was  helpful 

throughout  the  matter,  behind  the  scenes.   He  may  have  had 
something  to  do  with  Udall  being  involved,  too.   Roger  was  a 
wonderful  man. 

Lage:     Do  you  remember  other  things  that  he  might  have  done? 

Pesonen:   I  think  he  opened  doors  for  me.   He  was  a  person  who  peddled 

influence.   He  had  a  lot  of  influence;  he  was  widely  respected, 
and  he  had  been  active  in  Democratic  politics  for  a  long  time, 
and  he  was  from  a  prominent  Marin  County  family  that  was  very 
wealthy.   I  think  he  even  gave  me  a  little  money.   It  was  more 
Roger  than  the  central  committee.   I  don't  remember  who  else  was 
on  the  central  committee. 

Lage:     And  did  Jean  Kortum  work  in  political  circles? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  Jean  was  very  active  in  San  Francisco  politics  and 

Democratic  politics.   I  don't  recall  if  she  was  ever  on  the 
central  committee.   She  was  very  close  to  Jack  Morrison,  who  was 
mayor  [of  San  Francisco]  or  became  mayor  right  around  that  time. 
She  worked  on  Morrison's  campaign.   She  was  part  of  what  would 
now  be  called  the  old-line  San  Francisco  liberal  establishment. 
Jean's  very  smart.   Jean  did  a  lot  of  the  hard  work  on  this.   She 
set  up  an  appointment  for  us  to  go  and  talk  to  Jerry  [Jerome] 
Waldie  who  was  speaker  of  the  assembly  at  that  time,  out  in 
Antioch.   She  had  a  lot  of  contacts  and  was  creative  and  worked 
hard  and  she  had  good  public  relations  sense.   She's  the  one  who 
put  together  that  collection  of  clippings  that  we  distributed  to 


77 


show  how  much  attention  was  given  to  this,  which  was  a  political 
device. 

Lage:  To  interest  the  people  in  politics? 

Pesonen:  For  people  in  politics. 

That's  the  story. 

Lage:  What  have  we  not  covered?  We've  gotten  PG&E  out. 

Pesonen:  There  are  hundreds,  thousands  of  anecdotes. 

Lage:  I'd  like  some  of  the  anecdotes. 

Pesonen:  Well,  you  know,  I  don't  remember  any. 

Lage:  If  you  remember  them. 

Pesonen:   It's  hard  for  me  to  dredge  them  up  on  my  own.   They  have  to  be 

precipitated  by  a  bottle  of  wine  and  story  telling  and  then  they 
come.   I  think  that  I  am  the  kind  of  person  who--.   One  of  my 
strengths  is  to  see  the  big  picture,  but  I  lose  the  details. 

Lage:     Well,  it  has  been  thirty  years. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  and  I  remember  this  one  better  than  a  lot  of  things  I've 
been  involved  in,  because  it  was  a  big  part  of  my  life.   It 
really  shaped  my  life  in  a  lot  of  ways. 

Lage:     Well,  if  they  come  back  to  you  at  some  point,  throw  them  in. 
The  Technical  and  Human  Problems  with  Nuclear  Power 


Lage:     One  thing  you  didn't  tell  here,  which  you  told  me  the  first  time 
we  met,  was  how  you  delved  into  some  of  the  technical  matters  and 
what  your  background  for  that  was. 

Pesonen:   Yes.   I  felt  it  necessary,  when  I  said  something  about  nuclear 

power,  that  I  knew  what  I  was  talking  about.   So  I  spent  a  lot  of 
time  reading  a  lot  of  technical  material.   I  had  had  the  brief 
hope  to  be  a  nuclear  engineer  when  I  first  got  out  of  high 
school.   I  was  kind  of  dazzled  by  nuclear  power,  too,  but  it 
became  clear  to  me  that  I  did  not  have  the  mathematical 
proficiency.   I  wasn't  going  to  be  a  brilliant  nuclear  physicist, 


78 


but  I  found  the  subject  fascinating  and  I  had  read  about  it  long 
before  Bodega. 

How  did  it  work?  I've  always  been  interested  in  how  things 
work.  When  I  was  a  little  boy,  I  used  to  take  clocks  apart  and 
try  to  put  them  back  together,  and  I  always  fixed  my  own  fishing 
reels,  and  I  was  always  taking  things  apart  and  putting  them  back 
together.   I've  just  always  been  interested  in  how  things  work. 
I  was  very  interested  in  how  nuclear  power  worked.   It  was  a 
fascinating  topic  and  very  interesting  physics.   It  was  the  big 
breakthrough  in  science. 

Lage:  So  you  were  part  of  the  same  group  that  was  affected  by  this 
feeling  that  atomic  power  might  be  the  saving  grace? 

Pesonen:   Yes.  At  first  I  did  believe  that.   I  wasn't  against  it.   So  I 
got  interested  in  how  a  nuclear  power  plant  works  and  how  you 
keep  it  safe  and  what  does  it  do? 

Lage:     Did  you  get  a  more  jaded  view  of  nuclear  power  aside  from  the 
site  at  Bodega,  with  the  faults  and  all  that? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  didn't  get  a  jaded  view  about  nuclear  power.   I  never 
thought  it  wouldn't  work.   I  thought  there  were  some  real 
problems.   The  waste  disposal  problem  was  very  serious,  and 
whatever  was  necessary  to  protect  against  a  major  meltdown  and  a 
release  of  this  intensely  radioactive  material—fission 
products—into  the  environment.   I  became  convinced  that  it 
wasn't  safe,  not  because  of  the  physics  of  it,  but  because  of  the 
kind  of  people  I  ran  into  who  were  in  charge  of  it.   [laughter] 
The  same  kind  of  people  who  ran  the  plant  at  Chernobyl,  you  know? 
They  believed  so  strongly  in  what  they  were  doing  that  they  would 
cut  corners. 

Lage:     Now,  where  did  you  see  that  happening? 
Pesonen:   Well,  Bodega  was  the  best  example. 
Lage:     The  way  they  handled  the  reports? 

Pesonen:  They  would  sort  of  deny  what  was  plain  on  its  face  to  me.  I 
didn't  trust  them.  It  wasn't  any  emotional  antipathy  toward 
nuclear  power  as  a  physical  means  of  making  energy. 

Lage:     There's  a  lot  of,  and  I  suppose  it's  in  the  Wellock  article  but 
other  places  too,  talk  about  the  anti-technology  theme  as  if 
there  was  just  sort  of  a  dislike  of  technology. 


79 


Pesonen:   Well,  I  didn't  share  that.   I'm  sure  a  lot  of  people  who 

supported  what  we  were  doing  were  part  of  that  anti-technology-- 
the  Luddites  of  the  world.  And  I'm  not  a  Luddite. 

Lage:     Later,  did  you  come  to  oppose  nuclear  power  in  a  broader  sense? 

Pesonen:   Mainly  because  of  the  waste  disposal  problem.   I  don't  know  the 
answer  to  that.   I  don't  know  that  anybody  does.  And  also 
because  I  think  the  design  of  the  generation  of  plants  that  we 
are  involved  with  is  inherently  unsafe.   I  gave  a  speech,  in 
fact,  in  1974  to  the  American  Nuclear  Society  where  I  said  that. 
I  said,  "You  could  make  a  safe  nuclear  power  plant,  but  you're  in 
too  big  a  hurry  to  make  a  profit  from  a  design  which  was  invented 
by  Alvin  Weinberg  to  run  submarines  with  about  five  megawatts  of 
power,  and  that's  pretty  safe  because  it's  small.   There's  not 
enough  heat  there  to  melt  the  whole  works  down.   But  you  move  up 
to  2,000  megawatts,  and  you've  got  too  much  residual  heat  there 
and  you  can't  get  rid  of  it  if  something  goes  wrong." 

But  there  are  entirely  different  designs  —  some  that  use 
thorium,  some  that  use  graphite  for  a  moderator.   The  Canadians 
have  a  reactor  that's  almost  impossible  to  melt  down.   They're 
called  CANDU  reactors.   But  there  are  other  designs  that  have 
inherent  feedback  safety  mechanisms:  as  they  start  to  run  away, 
they  shut  themselves  down. 

** 

Pesonen:   I  still  feel,  on  one  level,  that  nuclear  power  could  be  made 

safe.   It  may  have  to  be  at  some  point.   I'd  like  to  see  it  made 
safe,  but  the  industry  used  the  1954  Atomic  Energy  Act  as  a  way 
of  appropriating  a  technology  which  had  been  developed  for  a 
different  purpose—scaling  it  up,  but  without  changing  its 
fundamental  design:  a  water-moderated,  enriched  uranium  reactor 
that  is  controlled  by  boron  rods  that  are  mechanically  operated 
is  inherently  unsafe.   So  you  have  to  have  emergency  core  cooling 
systems  and  huge  containment  structures  and  all  kinds  of  other 
safety  devices  that  are  extraneous  to  the  operation  of  the 
reactor;  which  are  only  designed  for  safety,  to  work  in 
emergencies  and  not  to  work  at  all  until  there  is  an  emergency. 
And,  like  the  fire  extinguishers  in  most  houses,  they  don't  work 
anymore- -or  the  smoke  detectors- -and  even  when  they  are  needed, 
they  don't  work  very  well.   It's  not  a  particularly  good  analogy, 
but  it  will  do  for  the  moment.   I  know  enough  about  reactors  from 
what  I  read  back  then  that  I  am  sure  there  are  inherently  safe 
designs.   But  the  industry  was  in  too  big  a  hurry  to  get  out 
front,  competitively.   The  profit  motive  drove  them,  not  so  much 
to  cut  corners,  but  to  avoid  the  heavy  capital  investment  and  the 
research  and  development  investment  into  safer  design  theories. 


80 


Lage:     It  seems  very  much  kind  of  the  engineering,  seat-of-the-pants 
approach.   They  found  a  system  at  fault,  so  they  devised  a-- 

Pesonen:   Yes,  there  was  some  of  that  at  Bodega,  but  we're  talking  about 
nuclear  power,  generally.  And  I've  always  felt  that.   On  some 
other  level,  I  think  that  there  is  a  societal  problem  that  we  are 
going  to  run  out  of  resources  sooner  or  later—not  just  energy, 
we  are  going  to  run  out  of  a  lot  of  things,  and  a  substitute 
source  of  energy  for  fossil  fuels  will  just  delay  the  day  when  we 
are  going  to  have  to  reckon  with  the  size  of  our  population  and 
demand  on  the  planet.   But  that's  a  different  issue. 

Lage:     You  probably  hadn't  worked  all  of  that  out  at  Bodega. 

Pesonen:   But  that's  not  a  technical  question.   In  a  nutshell,  that's  how  I 
feel  about  it,  and  always  have. 

Lage:     You  haven't  changed  over  time? 

Pesonen:   No.   I  haven't  changed  over  time  about  that. 

Lage:     Did  you  have  any  feed- in  to  the  Sierra  Club  as  they  were  working 
out  their  position  on  nuclear  power  after  Bodega? 

Pesonen:   Some,  but  not  too  directly.   That  really  happened  around  the 

Diablo  Canyon  fight,  and  I  was  in  law  school  when  a  lot  of  that 
happened  and  I  didn't  have  time  to  get  involved  in  it. 

Lage:     And  it  happened  later,  too. 
Pesonen:   It  happened  later. 

Lage:     Did  you  know  Fred  Eissler,  who  seemed  to  sort  of  carry  the  flag 
in  Diablo? 

Pesonen:   Yes.  Well,  Fred  was  involved  with  Bodega,  too. 
Lage:     Oh,  he  was?  How  was  he  involved  in  that? 

Pesonen:   To  some  extent.   He  was  one  the  board--!  think  he  was  one  of  the 
dissidents  on  the  board  who  wanted  the  club  to  support  us,  and  he 
was  in  a  minority.   He  was  down  in  Santa  Barbara.   He  wasn't 
close  enough--. 

I  was  not  that  involved  with  the  Sierra  Club.  You  know  I 
worked,  for  a  short  time,  for  Ed  Wayburn  [Sierra  Club  president 
during  the  1960s. ] 


81 


Lage:     Now  when  did  you  do  that?   I  saw  a  notice  in  the  minutes  that 
they  had  gotten  some  money  to  hire  you  as  an  assistant  to-- 

Pesonen:  Assistant  to  Wayburn,  who  was  president  then. 

Lage:  And  that  was  in  '63. 

Pesonen:  That  was  in  '63. 

Lage:  Did  you  go  back  and  work  for  them  then? 

Pesonen:   I  did  for  a  while.  Not  for  very  long,  because  I  was  still 
working  on  Bodega  then. 

Lage:     I  was  kind  of  surprised,  given  the  split  about  Bodega,  that  they 
would  hire  you  right  at  that  time. 

Pesonen:   Well,  they  thought  I  was  pretty  effective,  I  guess.   I  did  a  lot 
of  other  things  for  the  club,  besides  nuclear  power,  and  I  could 
write,  and  I  could  speak  well,  and  Wayburn  needed  help.   He  was  a 
physician;  he  had  a  practice.   But  it  became  very  clear  that  it 
was  an  embarrassment  to  him  for  me  to  be  his  executive  assistant 
and  do  what  he  needed  and  comply  with  club  policy  on  nuclear 
power  and  then  put  on  my  other  hat  and  go  speak  out  on  Bodega. 
It  just  got  too  confusing,  and  it  just  wouldn't  work.   He  didn't 
have  that  much  for  me  to  do.   [laughter]   I  suppose  you  could 
spin  out  a  conspiracy  theory  that  this  was  a  way  to  try  to  keep 
me  quiet.   If  somebody  had  that  notion,  it  didn't  work, 
[laughter]   I  don't  think  Ed  was  party  to  any  such  idea.   And  I'm 
not  suggesting  that  was  a  fact. 

Lage:     From  the  minutes  I  read  [looks  at  notes]  it  sounds  like  they  had 
gotten  a  specific  donation.   Maybe  just  to  hire  somebody  for  Ed, 
but  I  wondered  if  they  had  gotten  a  specific  donation  to  hire 
you?   [Sierra  Club  Board  of  Directors  Executive  Committee 
minutes,  October  5,  1963.) 

Pesonen:   I  would  be  interested  to  know  where  the  donation  came  from. 
Lage:     I  would  too.   That's  not  in  the  minutes. 
Pesonen:   I  don't  remember  that. 

Lage:     There  are  still  some  ends  I  think  we  need  to  tie  up,  or  some 
reflections,  but  we  can  begin  with  that  next  time. 


The  Hole  in  the  Head,  nuclear  reactor  under 
construction  at  Campbell  Cove,  Bodega  Bay. 


Photo  by  Karl  Kortum 


Harold  Gilliam  and  David  Pesonen  at  Sierra  Club  Offices,  1962. 


photo  by  Karl  Kortum 


Karl  Kortum,  Joe  Neilands,  and  David,  after  the  PUC  hearings,  March  1962. 

Kortum  photo 


^P*feMpf     jJfe 


Bob  Helm,  clarinet;  Bob  Neighbor  and  Lu  Watters,  trumpets;  Turk  Murphy, 
trombone- -Memorial  Day  1963  concert  and  balloon  release  at  Bodega. 

Photos  by  Karl  Kortum 


David  Pesonen,  Joel  Hedgpeth,  Lu  Watters,  at  a  Bodega  event. 
"Regarding  Dave  Pesonen,  it  was  a  disastrous  break  for  PG&E 
when  this  talented  and  determined  Finn  appeared  on  the 
Bodega  scene  blessed  with  the  energy  of  a  dozen  pack  mules!" 
(Lu  Watters,  1964). 

photo  by  Karl  Kortum 


Finding  the  Fault- -USGS  team  in  the  reactor  hole. 


Photo  by  Karl  Kortum 


David  Pesonen  with  Rose  Gaffney,  a  rancher  on  Bodega  Head  whose  land  was  condemned 

by  PG&E.   "Before  the  man  even  sat  down  in  my  house,  he  told  me  that  PG&E's  powers 

of  condemnation  were  greater  than  those  of  the  State  of  California"  (Rose  Gaffney, 
ca.  1964). 

photo  by  Karl  Kortum 


Jean  Kortum  and  David  on  a  lobbying  trip  to 
Sacramento. 


Photo  by  Julie  Shearer 


Protestor  at  a 
demonstration  at 
PG&E's  San  Francisco 
headquarters,  1963. 


Joe  Beeman, 
Willie  Brown, 
John  Burton  with 
protest  placards,  1963 

Photos  by  Karl  Kortum 


"Saved:  Bodega  Head" 

Hazel  Bonneke  [Mitchell]  and  David  after  the 

victory. 

Photo  by  Julie  Shearer 


82 


IV   MORE  REFLECTIONS  ON  THE  BODEGA  CAMPAIGN  AND  ITS  AFTERMATH 
[Interview  3:   February  12,  1992]  ii 

Pioneers  of  Sixties-Style  Activism  or  Pragmatic  Campaigners? 


Pesonen:   I  am  probably  finding  out  more  about  the  Bodega  campaign  from 
this  interview  than  you  are,  because  these  articles  are  coming 
out  now  that  have  done  a  lot  of  research  that  I  never  did, 
uncovering  things  I  didn't  know  about.   I  didn't  know  there  was 
an  FBI  investigation  or  a  J.  Edgar  Hoover  dossier  on  us  until  I 
read  the  Wellock  piece. 

Lage:     Oh  really? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  had  no  idea  about  that.   There  were  people  who  suspected 
that  there  was  some  kind  of  FBI  investigation  of  the 
"subversives"  running  this  thing,  and  I  just  brushed  it  off.   It 
wasn't  worth  the  psychic  energy  to  go  play  with  that  idea  when  I 
had  other  things  to  do;  it  was  just  not  my  temperament.   But  it 
is  an  interesting  fact.   It  was  all  speculative  until  I  saw  the 
authority  in  that  paper  form.  There  are  lots  of  little  odds  and 
ends  and  tidbits  from  the  two  articles:  the  one  in  the  Pacific 
Historical  Review1  and  the  Wellock  piece2.   They  both  did  a 
pretty  fair  job. 


1  J.  Samuel  Walker,  "Reactor  at  the  Fault:  The  Bodega  Bay  Nuclear 
Plant  Controversy,  1958-1964--A  Case  Study  in  the  Politics  of  Technology," 
Pacific  Historical  Review,  1990,  pp.  323-348. 

2Thomas  Wellock,  "The  Battle  for  Bodega  Bay:  The  Sierra  Club  and 
Nuclear  Power,  1958-1964,"  later  published  in  California  History,  Vol. 
LXXI,  No.  2,  Summer  1992,  pp.  192-211. 


83 


And  I  got  confirmation  of  some  things  in  the  Sierra  Club 
that  I  suspected  but  didn't  know  about.  I  didn't  realize  how 
vehement  Dick  Leonard  was . 

Lage:     You  didn't  get  that  impression  from  him? 
Pesonen:   I  didn't  get  it  personally. 

Lage:  I  think  maybe  Phil  Berry  did.  He  might  have  been  present  at  the 
meetings;  maybe  you  weren't  even  present. 

Pesonen:   Well,  yes,  he  was  much  more  active  in  the  club  than  I  was.   I  was 
never  very  active  in  the  club;  I  am  not  much  of  a  joiner, 
actually.   I'll  talk  to  Phil  about  that. 

Lage:     Today  we  are  going  to  go  over  what  we  missed  about  Bodega  and 
wind  that  topic  up.   Did  you  have  a  chance  to  look  through  the 
scrapbooks  that  Julie  mentioned? 

Pesonen:  I'm  not  sure  what  Julie  means  by  the  scrapbooks.  I've  got  about 
eight  volumes  of  newspaper  clippings. 

Lage:  Maybe  that  is  what  she  was  talking  about.  That  would  take  you  a 
while  to  review. 

Pesonen:   That  is  a  huge  undertaking. 

Lage:     I  thought  maybe  we  had  one  scrapbook  of  pictures. 

Pesonen:  No.  There  is  a  little  book  of  commemorative  parties  we  had  when 
PG&E  pulled  out,  but  that  was  a  gift  to  me  at  that  party.  It  is 
not  historical  in  that  sense. 

Lage:     Are  the  eight  volumes  going  to  go  to  the  Bancroft  sometime? 

Pesonen:   They  could.   They  are  all  bound  up  in  binders  with  all  of  the 
newspaper  clippings  for  years . 

Lage:     Think  of  what  a  source  it  would  be  for  somebody.   Joel  Hedgpeth's 
Bodega  papers  are  there. 

Pesonen:  Well,  Hedgpeth  is  a  real  pack  rat.   In  fact,  I  got  that  out  of 
the  Wellock  article,  that  there  was  correspondence  between 
Hedgpeth  and  me  that  I  had  forgotten  all  about,  that  Wellock  very 
selectively  quotes  from  to  support  the  thesis  he  has  got  that  we 
were  precursors  of  a  technique  of  agitation  that  ripened  and  got 
mature  in  the  sixties,  and  we  were  the  pioneers  of  it.   I  don't 
share  that  thesis,  and  I  think  he  had  to  get  a  little  selective 
in  his  choice  of  materials  to  support  it,  but-- 


Lage:     Well,  you  wouldn't  necessarily  have  to  say  you  were  doing  this 
consciously,  but  do  you  think  that  you  did  bring  new  techniques 
that  were  precursors  or  were  elaborated  on  later?  Or  maybe  even 
served  as  a  model  for  later? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know.   It  certainly  was  no  conscious  plan  on  our  part.   I 
think  it  was  happening  all  across  the  country  and  it  was 
happening  in  various  ways  depending  on  what  the  issue  was.  Right 
here  in  the  Bay  Area  you  had  three  very  prominent  establishment 
women  spearheading  the  "Save  the  Bay"  campaign  simultaneously 
with  the  Bodega  campaign,  and  using  many  of  the  same  techniques. 
They  were  much  more  decorous  and  polite  about  it,  but  they  were 
appealing  to  the  same  instincts  in  the  public:  the  emergence  of 
an  environmental  consciousness.   I  thought  we  were  operating  on 
parallel  tracks. 

We  had  different  problems,  and  we  had  to  respond  to  those 
problems  in  different  ways.   We  had  a  huge  corporation  which  had 
a  great  deal  of  political  influence  and  was  conscious  about 
fostering  its  political  influence;  it  had  ties  to  the  University 
through  the  Sproul  family;  it  had  been  around  a  long  time;  it  was 
a  monopoly;  it  made  sure  that  it  gave  charitable  contributions  to 
a  lot  of  people;  it  had  a  conscious  corporate  policy  of  having 
its  field  personnel  active  in  social  clubs  and  service  clubs  in 
the  rural  areas.   This  was  still  largely  a  rural  state.   This  was 
before  reapportionment,  when  each  county  had  a  state  senator. 

Lage:     The  Rotary  Club  in  Sonoma  County  had  some  political  impact? 

Pesonen:   The  Rotary  Club  in  Sonoma  County  could  swing  the  vote  of  one 
state  senator.   They  couldn't  now;  there  have  been  enormous 
political  changes  in  this  country.   But  we  had  to  respond  to  the 
environment  that  we  operated  in,  and  we  knew  that  we  would  never 
prevail  if  we  relied  on  rural  sentiments.  They  were  very 
conservative.   It  was  inherent  and  natural  to  accept  a  whole  set 
of  values  that  are  traditional  capitalist  values.   Small 
businessmen  admire  big  businessmen.   [laughter]   And  believe  them 
and  believe  they  do  right. 

Lage:     And  that  it  is  good? 
Pesonen:   And  that  it  is  good. 

Lage:     The  statements  of  Nin  Guidotti  [Sonoma  County  supervisor]  are 
just  classic. 

Pesonen:   Sure. 


85 


So  we  had  to  respond  to  that  environment  and  we  had  to  pull 
that  issue  into  the  urban  Bay  Area.  The  balloon  event  on 
Memorial  Day,  1963,  is  a  classic  because  it  visually  and 
dramatically  caught  the  attention  of  the  urban  community, 
reminding  it  that  its  destiny  was  tied  to  what  was  happening  way 
out  here,  fifty  miles  away  in  a  little  rural  county  up  north  on 
the  coast.   Until  that  kind  of  thing  took  place  in  the  mind  of 
the  urban  public,  or  at  least  some  opinion  leaders  in  the  urban 
public,  we  didn't  have  a  chance.   Whereas  the  Save  the  Bay 
Association  had  the  bay  right  here  in  the  middle  of  the  urban 
community,  and  they  could  use  different  techniques.   But  if  the 
situation  had  been  reversed,  I  think  they  would  have  used  the 
same  kind  of  techniques  we  did. 

So  we  didn't  see  ourselves  as  pioneers  of  any  technique.   We 
tailored  what  we  did  to  the  needs  of  that  campaign. 


Some  Key  Figures;  Doris  Sloan,  Joe  Neilands,  Charlie  Smith,  Sam 
Rogers 


Lage:     I  don't  think  we  talked  about  Doris  Sloan.   Did-- 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know  how  much  we  talked  about  Doris,  but  Doris  was  a  very 
important  factor  in  the  campaign.   Everybody  was  important;  it 
was  very  much  a  team  effort.   Maybe  that  was  just  a  reflection  of 
my  style  of  leadership. 

Doris  had  been  active  in  the  Sierra  Club  in  the  newly 
organized--!  don't  know  if  it  was  officially  organized,  but  it 
was  a  nascent- -Redwood  Chapter.   She  was  a  young,  active  woman 
with  a  lot  of  energy. 

Lage:     Did  she  live  in  Bodega? 

Pesonen:   She  lived  in  Sebastopol.   She  had  been  married;  I  think  she  had 
recently  been  divorced.   She  had  four  small  children.   I  don't 
know  how  she  got  the  energy  to  do  all  of  this  stuff.   She  was 
very  active  in  the  American  Friends  Service  Committee.   I  don't 
know  how  she  supported  herself. 

Lage:     She  is  a  scientist  now,  at  UC,  isn't  she? 

Pesonen:   After  Bodega,  she  went  to  the  University  and  got  a  master's 
degree  in  geology  and  she  is  now  an  instructor. 

Lage:     But  at  the  time  she  wasn't? 


86 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


At  the  time  she  didn't  have  the  scientific  background.   But  she 
was  very  bright  and  sensible  and  has  a  low  threshold  of  anger 
over  the  way  PG&E  was  steamrolling  through  the  county.   There  may 
have  been  some  other  connections  that  got  her  stirred  up.   I 
don't  remember  how  I  got  in  touch  with  her,  I  just  remember  that 
very  early  on,  Doris  was  involved  and  she  really  got  involved 
after  that  meeting  in  Santa  Rosa  in  November  of  1962  when 
Alexander  Grendon  stood  up  and  made  a  fool  of  himself. 

That  fired  her  imagination? 

It  fired  the  whole  audience  up,  as  I  described  in  our  last 
session.  After  that,  Doris  was  full  time.   She  wasn't  being 
paid,  but  we  gave  her  a  title:  Sonoma  County  coordinator.   She 
was  the  eyes  and  ears  of  what  was  going  on  in  Sonoma  County.   If 
we  had  to  appear  before  the  board  of  supervisors  or  the  planning 
commission,  Doris  would  make  the  appearance.   I  didn't  have  time 
to  go  do  all  of  that.  We  were  constantly  in  communication  about 
what  was  happening  and  strategies.   I  don't  recall  that  we  ever 
had  any  disagreements  about  what  to  do.   Somebody  would  have  an 
idea;  we  would  toss  it  around,  and  if  it  was  good,  we  would  go 
with  it. 


It  sounds  very  informal, 
council? 


Did  you  have  formal  meetings  of  the 


We  never  had  any  elections;  we  didn't  keep  any  minutes.   It  was 
very  informal.   It  was  a  network  more  than  an  organization. 

Were  there  certain  people  that  you  were  always  careful  to  check 
with  before  something  was  decided  on? 

Oh  sure.   Well,  there  were  lots  of  things  I  did  on  my  own. 
Pretty  soon  after  you  network  long  enough  with  people,  you  get  to 
know  what  their  reaction  is  going  to  be.   We  were  in  almost  daily 
contact,  so  people  shared  information,  and  we  had  enough  of  a  mix 
of  talents  that  without  there  being  any  real  discussion  about  it, 
things  would  just  fall  into  place,  depending  on  who  could  do 
what,  where  they  were,  when  they  had  the  time,  and  what  abilities 
they  had. 

Did  you  have  any  trouble  keeping  people  stirred  up?  The  people 
at  the  top,  shall  we  say? 

Not  the  inner  group,  no.   We  stayed  stirred  up.   We  didn't  work 
on  it  all  of  the  time.   It  is  not  a  nine-to-five  job.  We 
responded  to  needs. 


Lage: 


Now,  you  didn't  get  any  salary? 


87 


Pesonen:   No,  I  didn't  get  paid  at  all. 

Lage:     You  were  supporting  yourself  on  the  side? 

Pesonen:   I  was  supporting  myself  on  the  side.  After  the  first  year  of  the 
campaign  or  so,  Julie  and  I  were  married  and  Julie  was  working, 
so  Julie  gets  a  lot  of  credit  for  this.   She  carried  this 
worthless  husband  [laughter]  through  the  whole  thing.  We  lived 
off  of  her  salary. 

Lage:     Well,  she  was  pretty  committed  to  it  too,  it  seems. 

Pesonen:   She  was  very  supportive.   She  was  a  tireless  worker.   She  had  a 
lot  of  good  ideas,  too.   But  she  had  a  regular  job.   She  worked 
for  [UC  Agricultural]  Ag  Extension,  and  I  was  either  writing  or 
agitating  or  doing  whatever  I  was  doing.   Sometimes  I  would  pick 
up  a  little  money  on  the  side,  maybe  some  kind  of  little 
consulting  job  or  something,  but  it  was  mainly  a  gratuity. 
Somebody  was  trying  to  help  me  out  and  justify  it  to  themselves 
that  it  wasn't  a  gift.   I  don't  even  remember  what  that  was,  it 
was  so  little. 

Lage:     You  said  you  worked  for  Neilands.   Or  was  that  earlier? 

Pesonen:   That  was  earlier.   That  was  when  I  was  writing  A  Visit  to  the 
Atomic  Park. 

Lage:     Was  he  involved  in  the  inner  circle,  too? 
Pesonen:   Neilands  was  very  much  involved. 
Lage:     Tell  me  about  him. 

Pesonen:   Neilands  is  an  interesting  guy.   Neilands  was  more  ideological 

about  this.   He  was  very  much  a  public  power  advocate.   He  comes 
from  an  old  radical  background  and  we  sometimes  had  some 
disagreements  with  Neilands  about  what  direction  the  campaign 
should  take. 

Lage:     Did  he  want  to  take  it  in  a  more  ideological  way? 

Pesonen:   He  wanted  to  take  it  in  a  more  ideological  direction.   I  firmly 
eschewed  that.   I  thought  that  would  be  the  death  knell.  We  had 
to  keep  it  completely  unideological.  We  were  going  to  save 
Bodega  Head.   It  was  a  bad  project,  it  was  full  of  risks,  and 
that  was  it.  We  weren't  interested  in  taking  over  PG&E,  we 
weren't  interested  in  promoting  public  power.   There  was  a 
movement  then  for  Berkeley  to  buy  out  the  PG&E  distribution 
system. 


88 


Lage:     I  remember  that.   Was  that  at  the  same  time? 

Pesonen:   Neilands  was  very  active  in  that  campaign.   His  bugaboo  was  the 
Raker  Act.   The  Raker  Act  had  been  passed  as  a  compensation  for 
the  damming  of  Hetch  Hetchy  during  the  progressive  era,  and  the 
Raker  Act  required  that  San  Francisco  buy  out  the  PG&E 
distribution  system  and  become  a  public  power  city.  There  are 
seven  or  eight  cities  in  the  state  that  have  their  own  electric 
distribution  system:  Alameda,  Glendale,  Anaheim,  Sacramento  had 
bought  out  the  PG&E  system  in  the  late  forties  or  early 
fifties  —  Santa  Clara,  Ukiah.   There  are  little  communities  around 
that  as  a  holdover  from  the  progressive  era  had  developed  their 
own  electric  distribution  systems.   They  didn't  generate 
electricity;  they  wheel  power  across  PG&E  lines.   PG&E  was 
required  to  distribute  it,  and  they  bought  Bureau  of  Reclamation 
power.   Then  the  Reclamation  Act  gave  preference  for  the  sale  of 
federally  produced  electricity  from  federal  dams  to  municipal 
systems. 

Well,  Neilands  wanted  Berkeley  to  have  a  municipal  system. 
And  he  had  an  ally,  a  guy  named  Charlie  Smith.   Charlie  Smith  was 
a  great  advocate  for  public  power  and  Berkeley's  buying  the 
distribution  system.   They  wanted  to  bring  that  issue  in  and 
bring  enforcement  of  the  Raker  Act  to  compel  San  Francisco  to 
comply  with  that  federal  statute.   I  wasn't  opposed  to  the  idea; 
I  just  didn't  think  that  it  ought  to  be  mixed  up  with  the  Bodega 
campaign. 

Charlie  Smith  was  helpful  because  in  those  days  there  were 
no  fax  machines ;  there  were  no  xerox  machines ;  there  were  no 
computers.   So  our  printing  was  done  either  on  old  offsets  or 
mimeograph.   Charlie  fancied  himself  as  a  pamphleteer  in  the  Tom 
Paine  tradition.   He  had  a  mimeograph  machine  in  his  basement. 
It  was  like  stepping  back  into  the  revolutionary  times.   He  would 
wear  a  sandwich  board  [laughter]  and  print  up  these  pamphlets--he 
even  had  a  folding  machine,  I  remember,  that  would  fold  them 
three  ways—and  stand  out  on  the  corner  down  here  at  Shattuck  and 
University  and  hand  out  these  pamphlets  on  anything;  on  all  kinds 
of  things:  world  peace,  stopping  atmospheric  testing  of  weapons, 
buying  out  the  PG&E  system.  He  had  ten  or  fifteen  issues  that  he 
was  a  pamphleteer  on.  He  would  spend  his  Saturdays  and  Sundays 
pamphleting.   It  was  his  recreation. 

Lage:     What  kind  of  work  was  he  doing? 

Pesonen:   He  worked  for  the  Department  of  Highways;  he  was  an  engineer. 

The  Department  of  Transportation  now.   He  was  a  nice  guy,  and  he 
did  all  of  our  production  for  free,  which  was  a  big  saving.   We 
couldn't  afford  to  go  to  a  print  shop  and  mimeograph  all  of  those 


89 


newsletters  and  press  releases  and  stuff, 
fun. 


Charlie  was  a  lot  of 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


He  and  Neilands  were  the  champions  of  public  power. 
Neilands  gave  some  money.   He  was  a  full  professor  at  the 
University  and  was  very  kind  to  me  by  giving  me  that  job  in  his 
lab  at  night  while  I  wrote  that  pamphlet.   I  have  kind  of  lost 
touch  with  Neilands  over  the  years. 

He  is  interested  now  in  animal  rights. 

He  is  very  much  interested  in  animal  rights  now,  I  understand. 
That  is  just  from  what  I  get  in  the  paper.   I  haven't  talked  to 
him  about  it. 


Lage:     I  hear  Charlie  Smith's  name  periodically, 
what  connection. 


I  can't  remember  in 


Pesonen:   I  think  he  still  lives  in  Berkeley.   Once  Bodega  was  over,  there 
was  not  a  tight  bond  among  all  of  us.  A  tight  bond  and  a  close 
friendship  continued  with  Doris  Sloan  and  the  Kortums.   Sam 
Rogers,  if  he  hadn't  moved  away,  I  think  we  would  have  stayed 
good  friends,  but  he  is  teaching  up  in  Montana,  I  think,  and  we 
kind  of  lost  track  of  each  other  because  he  lives  so  far  away. 

Lage:     Who  was  Sam  Rogers? 

Pesonen:   Sam  Rogers  was  a  grad  student  who  worked  for  Neilands.   Rogers 
was  the  one  who  spent  the  time  and  dug  out  the  contradictions 
between  the  seismic  geologic  and  engineering  reports  submitted 
with  the  AEC  license  in  late  '62  with  those  same  kinds  of 
material  that  had  been  given  to  the  PUC.   And  he  found  just  major 
inconsistencies.   It  was  his  work  that  was  the  foundation  of  the 
petition  we  filed  in  early  '63- -I  don't  remember  when  we  filed 
exactly—with  the  PUC  to  reopen  the  whole  proceedings  that  led  to 
Bill  Bennett's  dissent  from  the  decision  of  the  PUC  to  deny  that 
application.   I  think  I  mentioned  that  last  time. 


Attorney  Barney  Dreyfus  and  the  Use  of  Lawsuits  at  Bodega 


Lage:     Then  there  was  a  lawsuit  you  mentioned  that  you  said  would  now  be 
considered  a  frivolous  lawsuit.  That  followed? 


Pesonen:   That  was  right  about  the  same  time.   I  think  it  was  in  the  spring 
of  '63. 


90 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Did  you  see  it  as  a  frivolous  lawsuit  at  the  time? 
delaying  action? 


A  sort  of 


I  wasn't  a  lawyer  then.   No,  I  didn't  think  it  was  frivolous.   I 
thought  what  the  county  did  was  a  major  violation  of  the  law.   It 
had  to  be  wrong  some  way  or  another  for  the  board  of  supervisors 
of  Sonoma  County,  without  a  public  hearing,  to  grant  a  permit  to 
build  this  massive  industrial  facility  on  a  beautiful  site. 

It  would  be  illegal  now,  wouldn't  it? 

Sure,  today  there  would  be  an  environmental  impact  report,  there 
would  be  ten  thousand  permits- 
Lots  of  public  hearings? 

Lots  of  public  hearings.  There  would  be  all  kinds  of  stuff.  But 
that  didn't  happen  in  those  days.  So  we  persuaded  Barney  Dreyfus 
to  file  that  suit.  And  it  wasn't  a  frivolous  suit  —  I  don't  think 
it  was  frivolous.  It  was  a  creative  piece  of  lawyering. 


That  is  a  good  way  of  putting  it. 
come  in  on  it? 


Now,  how  did  Barney  Dreyfus 


We  were  looking  for  a  lawyer  to  do  something.  We  knew  we  had  to 
file  some  lawsuits  that  were  vehicles  for  getting  some  attention, 
for  one. 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


In  a  way  that  was  new,  too. 
common  thing. 


The  environmental  lawsuit  was  not  a 


Not  yet.   It  was  not  a  common  thing  yet.   It  was  pretty  much  my 
idea  that  we  had  to  file  some  lawsuits  because  there  was 
something  that  was  wrong.   I  was  not  a  lawyer  and  I  didn't  know 
exactly  what  was  wrong,  but  it  just  felt  wrong. 

It  should  be  illegal. 

"Where  there  is  a  wrong,  there  is  a  remedy"  is  what  they  tell  you 
in  law  school.  That  is  not  always  the  case,  but  I  believed  it 
anyway  at  that  time.   We  were  looking  around  for  a  lawyer.   We 
knew  that  we  weren't  going  to  get  any  big  conservative  law  firm 
to  represent  us.   Barney's  firm  was  Garry,  Dreyfus  and  McTernan 
at  that  time.   They  were  probably  all  old  members  of  the 
Communist  party;  they  were  all  idealistic  radicals  from  the 
thirties.   Barney  was  a  very  elegant  lawyer. 


Lage: 


How  old  a  man? 


91 


Pesonen:   He  was  probably  in  his  fifties  then.   Charlie  Garry  had  not 

become  famous  through  the  Black  Panthers  yet.  He  was  a  criminal 
defense  lawyer.  And  McTernan  did  civil  law,  probate  and  other 
things.   Their  clientele  was  the  radical  community;  the  old  left 
community  in  the  Bay  Area.  They  had  all  been  very  active  in  the 
National  Lawyers'  Guild,  which  had  been  a  target  of  the  House  Un- 
American  Activities  Committee.   Barney  had  been  president,  and  I 
think  Frank  had  been  president,  and  I  think  Charlie  Garry  had 
been  president  at  one  time.  At  least  Garry  had  been  president  of 
the  Bay  Chapter  which  was  the  biggest  chapter  outside  New  York 
City  of  the  National  Lawyers'  Guild.   The  Lawyers'  Guild  was  a 
left-wing  bar  association;  I  don't  think  there  is  any  doubt  about 
that. 

They  were  the  people  who  were  used  to  taking  risks  and  used 
to  trying  to  be  creative.   You  had  to  be  creative  if  you  were 
going  to  protect  yourself.   Barney  had  been  called  before  the 
House  Un-American  Activities  Committee,  and  I  think  Frank  and 
Charlie  had  been  and  had  distinguished  themselves  very  well. 

Barney  was  very  reluctant  to  take  the  case. 
Lage:     Who  approached  him? 

Pesonen:   Doug  Hill- -Doug  and  Mary  Ann  Hill  were  very  helpful  in  the 
campaign.   I  don't  remember  how  I  met  them.   Doug  was  a  law 
student  and  they  came  to  a  meeting  one  time.   I  think  we  had  a 
meeting  in  Berkeley  and  word  got  out.   They  showed  up  and  Doug 
got  very  interested  in  the  campaign.   Doug  was  more  interested  in 
the  printing  and  the  communications  side  of  it.   He  and  I,  I 
remember,  spent  all  night  one  night  running  an  old  offset  machine 
he  bought  someplace  to  print  the  pamphlet  about  the  earthquake 
hazards  and  bind  it  ourselves.  We  did  everything  ourselves, 
typed  it  ourselves,  typed  the  plates;  we  did  it  all,  the  two  of 
us. 


Doug  was  active  in  the  Lawyers'  Guild,  and  he  somehow  found 
Barney.   I  didn't  know  anything  about  that  world.   I  was  not 
active  in  left-wing  causes,  and  I  didn't  know  what  the  Lawyers' 
Guild  was.   Barney  was  very  reluctant.   Francis  Heisler  was 
helping  us,  but  Heisler  was  not  really  a  lawyer. 

Lage:     He  didn't  practice? 

Pesonen:   Heisler  was  a  unique  character.   He  was  a  Jewish  refugee  from  the 
holocaust.   He  looked  like  Albert  Einstein.   He  had  white  hair 
down  to  his  collar,  a  very  kind,  elderly  face;  he  was  the 
spitting  image  of  Albert  Einstein,  every  classic  picture  of 
Einstein.   And  he  was  a  Talmudic  type.   He  lived  in  another 


92 

world,  and  he  would  file  lawsuits.   I  am  told  he  was  a  pretty 
good  lawyer  back  in  Chicago,  but  he  had  kind  of  semiretired  and 
was  living  in  Carmel.   He  would  write  letters  and  do  things  for 
us,  but  he  wasn't  in  a  position  to  file  any  lawsuits. 

So  we  called  a  meeting  down  at  a  hotel  near  the  San 
Francisco  airport.  Heisler  was  coming  through  San  Francisco  on 
his  way  to  Chicago,  and  he  agreed  to  meet  with  Barney  and  try  to 
talk  Barney  into  taking  the  case.   I  still  have  a  photograph 
someplace  of  Barney  sitting  back  on  a  couch  in  some  motel  down 
there  by  the  San  Francisco  airport  and  Heisler  with  the  light 
coming  in  the  window,  shining  off  the  top  of  his  head,  with  four 
or  five  other  people--!  think  Neilands  was  there,  I  was  there, 
Doug  Hill  was  there,  maybe  Doris  was  there,  Jim  Goodwin--!  can 
just  see  that  picture.   Heisler  very  eloquently  described  what 
this  case  and  the  whole  thing  was  about.   It  was  a  breakthrough, 
historically,  and  Barney  had  a  professional  obligation  to  take 
the  case  even  if  we  didn't  have  any  money.  To  Barney's  credit, 
he  finally,  after  a  long  time,  said  he  would  do  it.   My  heart  was 
thrilled. 

Nowadays,  you  go  out  and  get  the  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense 
Fund,  the  Environmental  Defense  Fund,  or  some  other  lawyer.   Even 
the  big  law  firms  have  pro  bono  operations  that  will  do  these 
things.   But  those  days  were  different.  You  couldn't  get  a 
lawyer.   I  told  Barney  we  would  try  to  raise  a  thousand  dollars, 
which  today  wouldn't  get  you  in  the  door  at  a  law  firm;  wouldn't 
get  you  a  cup  of  coffee.   And  he  put  on  it  a  young,  very  bright 
lawyer  in  the  office,  Don  Kerson.   Don  Kerson  really  handled  the 
legal  work;  drafted  the  complaint  and  went  with  Barney  to  make 
the  appearance.   Ultimately,  we  paid  Barney  the  thousand  dollars. 

I  got  kind  of  disenchanted  after  maybe  six  or  eight  months. 
It  didn't  seem  like  Barney  was  doing  enough.   I  made  a  terrible 
mistake,  which  didn't  have  any  permanent  consequences.   I  got  a 
call  one  day  from  Melvin  Belli,  and  Belli  said  he  wanted  to  work 
for  us.   We  were  getting  a  lot  of  publicity,  and  we  were  getting 
a  lot  of  ink  and  attention,  and  I  think  that  if  there  is  anything 
that  is  mother's  milk  to  Melvin  Belli,  it  is  the  press, 
[laughter]   So  he  invited  us  over  to  his  office  on  Montgomery 
Street. 

Lage:     That  wonderful  office  that  you  can  peer  into  from  the  street? 

Pesonen:   It  is  full  of  antiques,  and  he  sits  there  and  pontificates.   So 
we  had  a  big  meeting  over  in  his  office. 

n 


93 


Pesonen:   Belli  was  working  with  the  Anti-Digit  Dialing  League. 
Lage:     What  was  the  Anti-Digit  Dialing  League? 

Pesonen:   Well,  Pacific  Telephone  at  that  point  had  announced  that  it  was 

going  to  abandon  the  old  prefixes  for  phone  numbers,  Klondike  and 
Thornhill.  You  used  to  dial  the  first  two  letters  and  then  five 
numbers.   You  just  remembered  phone  numbers  by  the  word  prefix. 
I  have  forgotten  what  they  were  now.   But  people  were  very 
attached  to  them. 

Lage:     They  had  kind  of  neighborhood  ties. 

Pesonen:   They  were  very  sentimental.   There  was  also  the  campaign  to  save 
the  cable  cars  going  on  at  that  time,  so  the  city  was  full  of 
this  sort  of  nostalgic  turmoil.   And  Belli  was  one  of  the  leaders 
of  the  Anti-Digit  Dialing  League.   That  was  winding  down,  and  I 
think  he  wanted  another  utility  to  take  on  to  get  some  more  ink. 
We  had  a  long  meeting  with  him,  and  he  said  we  were  doing  a  great 
job  and  he  would  like  to  handle  it.   Apparently  he  called  Barney 
to  see  how  Barney  would  feel  about  it,  and  Barney  told  Charlie 
Garry,  and  Garry  was  furious.   He  just  exploded.   He  called  me 
in,  and  he  just  read  me  out  like  I  have  never  been  read  out  in  my 
life.   Here  they  had  put  their  firm  on  the  line;  they  had  done 
this  for  free;  they  had  taken  great  risks;  they  had  done  it  out 
of  eleemosynary  instincts  and  out  of  belief  in  the  cause;  and 
here  I  was  going  around  behind  their  backs  to  some  other  lawyer. 
Charlie  liked  ink  too,  you  see.   [laughter]   The  only  thing  we 
were  going  to  steal  from  Charlie  if  we  went  to  Belli  was  the 
opportunity  to  get  your  name  in  the  papers . 

Belli  never  followed  through  with  it.  He  is  a  flake.   That 
probably  shouldn't  be  on  the  tape. 

Lage:     That  he  is  a  flake?  Well,  you  can  take  it  out,  but  I  think 
people  know.   [laughter] 

Pesonen:   But  Barney  was  a  wonderful  man.   He  had  a  great  sense  of  dignity, 
he  was  very  bright,  and  he  never  lost  sight  of  the  objective  of 
what  he  wanted  to  accomplish.   He  never  exhibited  anger.   He  was 
always  kind.   He  was  widely  respected  throughout  the  bar,  even  by 
the  most  conservative  people  who  hated  his  politics;  they  adored 
him.   He  had  a  nice,  wry  sense  of  humor.   He  was  just  one  of 
these  people  you  adored. 

Lage:     Did  he  take  a  larger  role  in  the  campaign? 

Pesonen:   He  never  took  a  role  outside  the  lawyer's  role.   He'd  give  me 

advice  now  and  then  if  I  asked  for  it,  but  he  didn't  try  to  put 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


himself  out  in  front  and  make  strategy, 
what  our  roles  were. 

Did  he  get  committed  to  the  cause? 


He  was  very  clear  about 


Oh  sure,  he  thought  we  were  on  the  right  track,  and  he  was 
delighted  when  we  won.  He  was  one  of  the  first  people  that  I 
called  when  we  got  word  that  PG&E  was  pulling  out. 

But  the  lawsuit  itself,  did  that  have  much  of  an  effect? 

Oh,  that  was  a  flash  in  the  pan.   We  got  one  day's  press  out  of 
that  and  that  was  gone.   We  filed  two  or  three,  but  they  were 
little  procedural  kind  of  lawsuits.   Hold  a  hearing  instead  of 
going  ahead.   They  were  attempts  to  compel  some  process  to  take 
place.  We  never  filed  any  lawsuits  to  substantively  stop  the 
plant.   We  had  no  authority  for  that. 

That  is  one  little  byway  in  this  whole  story.   I  suppose 
Wellock  would  find  in  it  support  for  his  thesis  that  we  were 
precursors  of  a  radical  movement.  We  certainly  drew  on  people 
from  the  left  because  they  were  and  still  are  to  some  extent, 
although  times  have  changed  a  lot  in  the  last  thirty  years  in 
that  political  landscape,  the  people  who  had  seen  oppression. 
They  were  the  people  who  organized  the  freedom  rides  in  the  civil 
rights  movement;  they  were  people  who  wanted  social  change. 

And  they  weren't  afraid  of  PG&E,  I  would  think. 

They  weren't  afraid  of  PG&E.   They  weren't  afraid  of  anything. 
They  weren't  afraid  of  rednecks  in  the  South  who  gunned  them 
down. 

So  there  was  a  ferment  in  the  country  going  on,  and  I  guess 
it  was  just  natural  that  we  would  come  along  and  be  part  of  it. 


Rose  Gaffney;  A  Fearless  Volcano 


Lage:     I  don't  think  you  have  really  described  Rose  Gaffney  on  the  tape. 
I  think  you  told  me  about  her  when  we  had  our  first  meeting.   It 
might  be  nice  if  you  could  talk  about  Rose. 

Pesonen:   I  described  Rose  in  A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park,  if  I  recall 

correctly,  as  looking  like  Bodega  Head.   She  was  a  big,  huge, 
homely  woman  with  a  great  big  bulbous  nose  and  a  wrinkled  face. 
She  just  emanated  energy.   Her  life  story,  as  I  understand  it, 


95 


and  I  don't  remember  where  I  heard  it- -part  of  it  I  heard  from 
her,  but  she  was  kind  of  private  about  it--was  that  she  and  her 
family  were  immigrants  from  Poland  who  had  come  to  Canada  around 
the  time  of  the  First  World  War,  maybe  before.   She  must  have 
been  a  pretty  attractive  young  woman,  and  she  ended  up,  for  some 
reason,  as  a  housekeeper  for  a  family  in  the  Napa  Valley.   She 
got  pregnant  and  had  to  leave  there  to  have  the  baby- -I  never 
heard  what  happened  to  that  child- -and  went  to  work  as  a 
housekeeper  for  the  Gaffney  family  who  were  dairy  farmers  out  in 
the  Bodega  area.   She  married  one  of  the  Gaffney  boys  and 
survived  all  of  the  Gaffneys  and  inherited  the  ranch. 

Lage:     Which  was  on  Bodega  Head? 

Pesonen:   It  was  on  Bodega  Head.   It  occupied  most  of  the  headlands.   It 
wasn't  a  very  productive  ranch. 

Lage:     I  doesn't  look  like  very  rich  country. 

Pesonen:   It  isn't  very  rich.   It  is  sandy  and  windswept.   There  are  very 
few  nutrients  in  that  sand.   But  she  loved  that  landscape.   She 
would  just  prowl  it.   She  knew  every  little  rock  and  every  little 
spring.   She  found  lots  of  arrowheads;  she  had  an  arrowhead 
collection  which  she  said  should  go  to  the  University,  and  it  was 
collected  from  all  over.   People  would  bring  her  arrowheads  from 
the  Sierra  or  from  the  Sonora  Desert.   She'd  stick  them  all  in 
her  big  box  of  arrowheads  and  claim  they  were  all  from  Bodega 
Head.   [laughter] 

She  was  just  a  fiercely  independent  person  who  was  devoted 
to  that  land  in  an  emotional  way.   It  was  all  she  had.   She 
leased  it  out  to  people  that  ran  a  few  cows  on  it,  and  that  was 
her  source  of  income. 

Lage:     And  she  lived  out  there? 

Pesonen:   She  lived  in  a  little  house  right  by  Salmon  Creek.   There  is  a 
cluster  of  houses  down  there  by  the  creek,  and  I  guess  it  had 
been  the  old  farm  house.   She  lived  there  alone,  but  she  was  a 
mountainous  woman  and  absolutely  fearless.   She  wasn't  afraid  of 
anybody  or  anything.   She  was  smart  in  a  cunning  sort  of  peasant 
way.   She  figured  things  out  her  own  way,  but  she  was  always 
figuring  things  out;  she  never  stopped  thinking  about  things. 
She  got  it  in  her  head  that  the  original  land  grant  from  the 
Spanish  to  whoever  was  the  predecessor  in  title  of  the  Gaffney's 
had  some  restrictions  that  would  impose  a  public  trust  on  all  of 
that  land . 


Lage: 


Interesting  that  she  would  have  thought  of  that. 


96 


Pesonen:   She  had  a  probate  lawyer  here  in  the  Bay  Area  who  represented  her 
in  the  condemnation  action,  and  he  tried  to  develop  that  theory 
as  a  defense  in  the  condemnation  action,  but  it  didn't  work.   But 
she  collected  all  kinds  of  papers,  and  she  started  reading 
history  and  reading  Bancroft's  history  of  California.  Anything 
she  could  get  her  hands  on  that  would  buttress  this  theory  of 
hers.  That  is  all  she  would  talk  about  after  a  while.   In  some 
way  it  was  tied  to  her  sense  of  oneness  with  that  landscape.   She 
was  such  a  colorful  person.   She  was  absolutely  fearless.   She 
would  stand  up  in  the  middle  of  a  meeting  and  start  to  let  loose. 
She  had  a  big  booming  voice.   She  wasn't  unarticulate;  she  could 
be  very  articulate,  and  she  could  be  very  emotional  about  it  and 
it  would  come  across  some  way  that  there  was  this  powerful 
personality  boiling  inside  this  huge,  shapeless  woman- -she  wore 
these  old  cotton  dresses  that  had  no  shape  to  them  at  all  that 
just  sort  of  draped  down  to  the  floor  and  old  beat-up  shoes.   She 
smelled  terrible;  she  never  took  a  bath. 

Lage:     Did  she  have  much  money  to  defend  herself  from  the  condemnation? 

Pesonen:   No,  she  didn't  have  any  money.   No,  I  think  her  lawyer  was  going 
to  get  paid  out  of  the  sales  price  after  the  condemnation  went 
through.   That  is  usually  what  happens.   She  had  enough  to  live 
on,  and  she  had  an  old  car.   She  kept  her  house  in  pretty  good 
shape. 

My  recollection  of  her  is  odd.   It  is  not  like  a  lot  of 
people.   A  lot  of  people  you  remember  particular  things  they  did 
or  you  remember  their  character,  but  I  just  have  this  big  image 
of  a  kind  of  volcano  of  a  woman  that  just  seemed  to  be  present 
all  of  the  time.   (laughter] 


The  Role  of  the  University  of  California 


Lage:     Is  there  anyone  else  we  have  missed  that  we  should  talk  about? 
We  haven't  talked  about  the  University  very  much,  only  alluding 
to  the  University's  role,  which  seems  interesting. 

Pesonen:   What  I  knew  about  the  University,  I  got  second-hand  from 
Hedgpeth. 

Lage:     So  he  sort  of  researched  it? 

Pesonen:   Well,  he  knew  all  of  the  people.   He  was  a  marine  biologist 
himself.   I  knew  Starker  Leopold  [wildlife  biologist,  UC 
professor  and  administrator],  and  I  was  very  disappointed  in 


97 


Starker  when  he  testified  that  the  University  was  not  interested 
[in  opposing  the  power  plant  at  Bodega,  near  the  site  for  a 
proposed  UC  marine  station]  at  the  Public  Utilities  Commission. 

Lage:     He  had  such  a  reputation  for  integrity. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  and  his  father's  [Aldo  Leopold,  author  of  A  Sand  County 
Almanac]  reputation  permeated  the  environmental  movement.   In 
those  days,  the  Bible  of  the  emerging  environmental  movement  was 
A  Sand  County  Almanac.   Starker  basked  in  that  glow  of  his 
father's  wonderful  writing.   I  don't  know  why  Starker  did  what  he 
did. 

Lage:     You  had  known  him  when  you  were  a  student,  probably? 

Pesonen:   I  had  known  him  as  a  student.   He  had  been  one  of  my  professors. 
I  had  taken  wildlife  biology  from  him  or  wildlife  management.   I 
knew  him  from  the  wilderness  study,  the  ORCC  study,  and  some 
other  things.   I  don't  remember  how  I  got  to  know  him.   I  first 
met  him  when  I  was  a  student  of  his . 

Starker  just  terribly  disappointed  me.   I  expected  him  to 
come  over  and  stand  up  and  say  this  facility  is  going  to  dump  hot 
water  and  radioactivity  in  a  place  that  is  the  greatest  site  for 
a  marine  lab  on  the  Pacific  coast;  it  is  going  to  destroy  an 
irreplaceable  resource.   He  said  none  of  those  things.   He  hedged 
and  he  prevaricated,  I  think.   He  disappointed  a  lot  of  us. 
Hedgpeth  was  furious.   He  fulminated  all  over  the  place  about  it. 

So  there  was  a  lot  of  curiosity  over  why  this  had  happened. 
Why  would  a  man  of  such  integrity,  of  such  scientific  purity,  in 
a  way,  take  a  position  which  was  so  bureaucratic  and  so 
politically  influenced? 

Lage:     He  was  vice  chancellor  at  the  time? 

Pesonen:   I  think  he  was  a  vice  chancellor  by  then.  We  had  a  lot  of 

speculation,  but  I  didn't  have  any  inside  information.   It  was 
speculation  that  PG&E,  through  the  [family  of  former  UC  President 
Robert  Gordon]  Sproul  connection,  through  [former  chancellor  and 
then  chairman  of  the  AEC]  Glenn  Seaborg,  who  knows  through  what 
channels,  through  the  Hearst  family,  maybe,  who  knows,  had 
persuaded  the  University  to  pull  out. 

We  got  our  hands  on  that  report  by  the  committee  headed  by 
Emerson. 

Lage:     The  faculty  committee? 


98 


Pesonen:   The  faculty  committee.   Ralph  Emerson  was  a  marine  biologist  on 
the  faculty  and  the  committee  had  been  asked  to  go  and  find  an 
alternate  site.   They  had  surveyed  the  coast  and  came  back  with  a 
report  that  contained  a  sentence  that  frankly  stated,  this  is  not 
an  exact  quote,  but  it  is  pretty  close,  "A  unique  and 
irreplaceable  site  for  study  of  marine  biology  is  being 
sacrificed  for  power  production."  That  is  pretty  strong  words 
for  an  academic  report.   We  got  our  hands  on  that  report,  and 
after  it  was  all  over,  I  went  and  interviewed  Emerson  and  I  made 
a  chapter  in  a  book  that  I  wrote  but  never  published  that 
contains  what  I  found  about  it. 

Emerson  was  very  reticent  to  talk  about  pressures  having 
been  put  on  him,  but  he  pretty  much  conceded  that  pressure  from 
the  administration  had  been  put  on  the  faculty  to  mute  his 
criticism  and  not  participate  in  the  Public  Utilities  Commission 
hearings  or  anything  else,  that  would  jeopardize  the  plans.   I 
don't  think  there  is  any  real  doubt  about  that  now. 

Lage:     Did  you  ever  have  any  conversations  with  Seaborg? 

Pesonen:   [laughter] 

Lage:     It  must  be  a  good  question! 

Pesonen:   Oh,  Seaborg  despises  me.   Seaborg  still  despises  me  to  this  day. 
When  I  was  appointed  general  manager  of  the  East  Bay  Regional 
Park  District,  he  wrote  a  bitter  letter  to  the  board  of  directors 
castigating  them  for  appointing  me.  That  was  only  1985. 

I  only  recall  seeing  Seaborg  once,  and  that  was  in  about 
1965,  after  Bodega  was  over--maybe  it  was  December  of  '64.   PG&E 
had  pulled  out  in  October,  the  American  Nuclear  Society  and 
Atomic  Industrial  Forum  had  their  annual  convention  in  San 
Francisco  in  December  of  that  year  at  the  St.  Francis  Hotel.   I 
went  over  there  to  watch  and  listen  and  have  fun.   And  I  got  into 
the  elevator  with  Seaborg.  You  know,  he  is  about  six  feet,  six 
inches  tall,  a  great  big  man.   I  stood  next  to  him  in  this 
crowded  elevator  and  I  said,  "Good  afternoon,  Dr.  Seaborg.   My 
name  is  David  Pesonen.   I  don't  know  whether  you  know  me."  He 
looked  down  at  me  and  he  said,  "I  know  who  you  are."  The 
elevator  doors  opened  and  he  stepped  out  on  the  mezzanine  and  I 
was  going  someplace  else,  and  I  never  saw  him  again.   And  that  is 
the  only  exchange  of  words  I  have  ever  had  with  Glenn  Seaborg. 

Lage:     Were  his  feelings  about  you  based  on  what  you  had  written? 


99 


Pesonen:   It  was  probably  from  what  I  had  written  and  the  fact  that  I  am 

sure  Bodega  was  what  he  thought  was  the  crown  jewel  of  his  career 
as  chairman  of  the  AEC.   It  was  going  to  be  the  first  plant  that 
was  going  to  break  the  economic  barrier.   Here  I  came  along  and 
in  his  eyes  sabotaged  it.   Sabotaged  it  for  extraneous  reasons  as 
far  as  he  was  concerned,  out  of  probably  what  he  perceived  as 
ulterior  motives.   I  don't  know  what  went  through  his  mind.   I  do 
know  that  he  took  it  very  personally,  and  he  has  demonstrated,  to 
me,  that  he  has  taken  it  very  personally.   I  have  no  animosity 
toward  him.   He  was  doing  his  job  as  he  saw  it,  and  he  is  a 
prominent  and  properly  distinguished  man,  but  I  didn't  care.   I 
don't  care.   It  is  too  bad.   I  think  it  is  his  loss.  We  could 
probably  have  some  nice  visits. 

Lage:     It  is  too  bad  he  carried  those  feelings  for  so  long.   It 

surprises  me.   I  guess  I  have  heard  very  positive  things  about 
him  in  other  settings. 

Pesonen:   I'm  sure  he  is  a  fine  person.   But  anyway,  that  has  been  my  only 
contact  with  Seaborg.   I  have  written  about  Seaborg  in  A  Visit  to 
the  Atomic  Park  and  other  pamphlets  and  things.   It  is  too  ripe  a 
fact  that  he  left  the  University  at  the  time  this  controversy  was 
just  getting  started  and  went  to  be  chairman  of  the  Atomic  Energy 
Commission,  which  had  the  promotional  role  for  nuclear  power,  not 
to  think  there  is  a  connection.   In  fact,  the  article  in  Pacific 
Historical  Review  makes  that  connection,  and  that  is  written  by 
the  historian  for  the  Nuclear  Regulatory  Commission,  not  me. 

Seaborg  resented  the  Department  of  the  Interior  intrusion 
into  this  process.  He  apparently  demonstrated  his  resentment. 
That  was  all  history;  I  didn't  know  about  it.  That  went  on  in 
Washington  and  I  wasn't  part  of  that. 


Speculations  on  Conspiracies  and  Phone  Taps 


Lage:     I  mentioned  Dave  Brower's  feeling  that  the  reason  PG&E  was 

supportive  of  Point  Reyes  National  Seashore  back  in  '62  when  it 
was  authorized  was  that  they  wanted  this  open  space  downwind  from 
Bodega.   Would  you  agree  with  that? 

Pesonen:   I  never  saw  any  evidence  of  it.   It  is  a  plausible  theory. 
Lage:     You  did  not  originate  that  idea?  That  is  Dave's  idea? 

Pesonen:   No,  that  idea  didn't  come  from  me.   It  kind  of  makes  sense.   But 
I  think  it  takes  too  much  away  from  PG&E.   They  are  not  incapable 


100 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


of  some  public  spirit,  even  back  then.   Now,  they  are  quite  a 
different  company;  they  are  much  more  enlightened  now.   But  they 
weren't  completely  unenlightened  then. 

I  think  that  one  of  their  land  agents  was  active  in  that  campaign 
for  Point  Reyes,  but  he  also  had  a  life  in  his  own  community  and 
was  interested  in  the  environment  of  Marin,  so  just  as  a  private 
individual  he  could  have  been-- 

Sure.   That  makes  perfect  sense.   I  don't  know  if  it  was  a 
corporate  strategy  connected  with  Bodega  or  not.   I  simply  have 
no  information  about  that.   If  Brower  wants  to  speculate  about 
that  and  has  some  information  about  it,  I'd  be  interested  to 
know,  but  I-- 

People  I  have  asked  who  have  been  involved  in  the  Point  Reyes 
campaign  just  can't  imagine  it.   It  just  boggles  their  mind  that 
anybody  could  come  up  with  that  idea. 


It  doesn't  boggle  ray  mind, 
not . 


I  don't  know  whether  to  believe  it  or 


Lage:     It  is  an  interesting  thought.   Now,  what  about  the  ideas  of  phone 
tapping  or  things  like  that  going  on? 

Pesonen:   Well,  until  I  read,  last  night,  Wellock's  piece  where  he  has  a 
footnote  that  cites  a  J.  Edgar  Hoover  file  on  us,  I  never 
attached  much  significance  to  those  speculations.   I  am  not  a 
paranoid  person.   Maybe  I  am  still  too  innocent. 

My  reaction  to  those  kinds  of  things  is  twofold.   One  is 
that  it  may  be  true,  but  it  doesn't  make  any  difference.   If  you 
spend  your  energy  brooding  about  it,  it  is  energy  you  don't  have 
to  pursue  what  is  important. 

Lage:     It  also  deflects  public  interest? 

Pesonen:   It  changes  the  issue.   I  am  very  goal  oriented  in  these  things, 
and  I  am  pretty  good  at  keeping  my  eye  on  what  is  going  to  work 
and  chasing  wire  taps  does  not  work.   It  is  very  hard  to  prove, 
and  if  you  do  prove  it,  once  it  is  over  it  is  over.   I  suppose 
Watergate  was  an  exception  to  that,  but  I  didn't  have  the 
resources  to  chase  that  one  down. 

Lage:     It  wasn't  something  that  you  felt  at  the  time,  it  sounds  like. 
You  didn't  suspect  it? 


101 


Pesonen:  We  were  careful  on  the  phone.  We  thought  it  was  possible  and  so 
you  just  didn't  say  a  lot.   Sensitive  things  you  just  did  not  say 
over  the  phone. 

Lage:     So  you  did  think  of  it  at  the  time.   One  other  little  thing:  in 
A  Visit  to  the  Atomic  Park  on  the  frontispiece  it  is  a  dollar 
"Contribution  toward  a  People's  Park  at  Bodega  Head."  That 
struck  me.   Was  that  a  common  term  at  the  time- -People ' s  Park? 

Pesonen:   I  just  made  that  up.  We  were  the  first  ones  to  use  that  term. 
Lage:     It  got  such  prominence  later. 

Pesonen:   In  Berkeley,  yes.  Much  later.   I  don't  think  there  is  any 
connection. 


Looking  Back;  The  Disembodied  Evil  of  Industrial  Civilizat ion 


Lage:     What  ever  happened  to  this  book  on  Bodega?  It  sounds  like 

everything  we  are  talking  about  is  probably  written  down  in  the 
book. 

Pesonen:   Some  of  it  is.   I  started  to  write  the  book  as  soon  as  this 

campaign  was  over  in  ' 64 .   I  had  applied  to  law  school  and  been 
admitted  and  then  went  to  Preble  Stolz  who  was  the  admissions 
dean  at  that  time. 

I  had  met  Preble  in  the  Bodega  campaign.   He  was  a  friend  of 
the  Goodwins,  whom  I  had  met  also  through  the  campaign,  and  they 
are  now  the  godparents  of  Julie's  and  my  kids.   Preble  was  a 
friend  of  theirs.   I  went  to  Preble  and  I  said,  "Look,  I  want  to 
write  this  book  and  I  can't  do  that  and  go  to  law  school.   Can  I 
put  this  off  for  a  year?"  So  he  agreed  to  put  my  admission  off 
for  a  year  without  my  having  to  take  the  LSAT  and  do  everything 
over  again,  and  I  just  started  to  write. 

Well,  I  also  went  fishing,  and  I  wrote  most  of  it.   I  made  a 
mistake  in  writing  it.   I  wrote  it  as  though  I  were  a  third  party 
observer.   I  tried  to  keep  my  own  role  out  of  it  pretty  much. 
And  that  is  not  possible;  it  doesn't  work,  because  I  was  too  much 
a  part  of  it.   I  was  too  central  a  figure.   So  I  wasn't  satisfied 
with  it.   It  didn't  strike  me  as  having  artistic  integrity.   It 
was  not  a  true  story.   So  I  didn't  publish  it.   I  had  an  advance 
to  publish  it,  an  advance  from-- 

Lage:     You  couldn't  revamp  it  and  make  it  an  "I"  book? 


102 


Pesonen:   I  thought  about  revamping  it,  but  now  my  ideas  are  different  and 
it  would  be  a  different  book.   So  the  manuscript  is  around.   In 
fact,  I  pulled  it  out  the  other  night  and  tried  to  read  it  again. 

Lage:     Now,  when  you  say  your  ideas  are  different  and  it  would  be  a 

different  book,  is  that  something  worth  commenting  on?  I  think 
it  is  interesting  how  your  view  of  things  changed  with  the 
passage  of  time  or  maturity  or  whatever. 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  is  multi-leveled.   I  tie  my  perception  of  it  now,  and  I 
would  use  this  as  a  centerpiece  of  an  introduction  to  the  new 
book  if  I  wrote  it :  I  was  driving  out  there  one  night  in  my  old 
Ford,  and  it  was  turning  evening--!  can  remember  this  so 
intensely—and  I  couldn't  figure  out  why  PG&E  was  continuing  to 
insist  on  building  this  plant.   The  was  probably  in  spring  of 
'64.   By  this  time  we  had  Saint-Amand' s  study,  we  had  all  kinds 
of  information  that  this  was  a  terrible  decision.   It  was  a 
terrible  decision  technically,  it  was  just  bad.   It  was  so 
stupid.   Here  was  this  great,  well-run  corporation  pursuing  this 
idiocy  and  getting  beat  up  in  the  newspapers  every  day.   Their 
dogged  determination  to  go  ahead;  it  didn't  make  any  sense  to  me 
and  I  was  constantly  trying  to  figure  that  out. 

I  had  almost  like  a  mystical  insight—in  my  mind  it  is  all 
connected  with  that  glowing  evening  landscape  with  the  eucalyptus 
trees  on  the  hillsides— that  I  was  up  against  some  kind  of  evil. 
Not  evil  people  —  a  disembodied  evil  of  some  type  that  was  out  in 
the  world.   And  it  was  scary.   I  wasn't  angry;  I  was  overwhelmed 
by  this  sadness  that  there  could  be  such  evil  in  the  world  that 
was  immune  to  reason,  immune  to  sound  argument.   We  weren't 
agitating;  when  we  put  something  out,  we  studied  what  we  were 
talking  about.   We  had  a  respect  for  facts. 

Well,  that  idea  has  stayed  with  me.  It  is  almost  a  mystical 
feeling.  What  I  would  like  to  do  is  convert  that  to  an  argument. 
If  it  is  possible  — 

II 

Pesonen:   It  wouldn't  be  an  original  thought  with  me  in  some  ways;  Dave 

Brower  has  talked  about  it  and  a  lot  of  people  have  written  about 
this  sort  of  moment  in  history  of  the  planet  that  is  industrial 
civilization.   I  suppose  Henry  Adams  felt  the  same  things  when  he 
wrote  The  Education  of  Henry  Adams.   There  is  an  aspect  of  that 
that  is  going  on  in  my  mind.   That  industrial  civilization  is 
very  dehumanizing  and  destructive,  ultimately,  and  has  no  sense 
of  history  and  no  sense  of  the  future.   This  nuclear  power 
development  is  a  centerpiece  of  that.   The  reason  so  many  people 
in  the  Sierra  Club  and  elsewhere  and  most  of  the  public  was 


103 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 


supportive  of  nuclear  power  was  that  at  some  visceral  level  we 
knew  we  were  using  up  the  resources  of  the  world  to  support  our 
comfortable  way  of  living,  and  we  had  to  buy  some  insurance 
against  when  they  ran  out. 

We  are  totally  dependent  on  petroleum.   We  farm  with  it,  we 
heat  with  it,  we  get  around  with  it,  we  couldn't  live  without  it 
in  our  current  way.   And  nuclear  power  looked  like  the  salvation 
of  civilization  when  it  runs  out  of  oil.   And  I'm  sure  it  is 
still  seen  that  way  by  a  lot  of  people.   In  fact,  there  is  a 
resurgence  of  interest  in  that.  And  I  want  to  say  something 
about  that.   What  I  want  to  say,  I  have  to  sit  down  and  write 
before  I  know  exactly.   Right  now,  it  is  a  holistic  image  in  my 
head  that  is  related  in  some  way  to  that  experience  I  had  that 
one  evening  driving  out  to  Bodega.   I  am  not  very  articulate 
about  it  right  now  because  there  are  too  many  pieces  to  it  all  at 
once. 

It  is  a  hard  thing  to  express  and  then  relate  to  the— 

I  can  do  it.   I  know  it  can  be  converted  to  an  elegant  argument, 
but  I  keep  putting  it  off  for  some  reason. 

It  might  not  be  the  time. 


Influences  of  the  Bodega  Experience  on  PG&E 


Lage:     My  next  question  has  to  do  with  the  influences  of  the  Bodega 

campaign.   Do  you  think  Bodega  made  a  change  in  PG&E,  or  did  they 
have  to  be  hit  two  or  three  more  times? 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  certainly  started  the  process  of  change.   I  think  Diablo 
Canyon  finished  it.   They  just  paid  too  high  a  price  for  their 
old  way  of  doing  things.   There  was  a  change  of  personalities; 
some  old  dinosaurs  left  and  new  blood  came  in.   They  faced  a 
different  Public  Utilities  Commission  under  Jerry  Brown.   There 
was  the  influence  of  the  Environmental  Defense  Fund—Tom  Graff 
and  Zach  Willy- -on  their  attitude  towards  energy  conservation. 

Lage:     On  PG&E  directly? 

Pesonen:   On  PG&E  directly.   They  were  able  to  persuade  them—it  took  quite 
a  while—that  they  could  make  money  with  energy  conservation. 

Lage:     So  that  was  a  new  tack? 


104 


Pesonen:   That  was  a  new  tack  and  it  was  very  creative  on  the  part  of  Graff 
and  Willy.   The  whole  society  changed.   They  couldn't  stay  the 
way  they  were,  it  would  have  been  fatal  to  them.   Their  survival 
depended  on  their  becoming  more  enlightened  because  they  were 
dealing  with  a  more  enlightened,  more  active  public,  a  much  more 
active  regulatory  climate,  much  more  regulatory  and 
environmentally  funded  legislation.  They  live  in  a  different 
world  now.   They  could  either  go  down  with  their  old  ideology  or 
adapt.   They  were  smart  enough  to  adapt.   But  Bodega  certainly 
gave  arguments  to  people  within  the  company  who  were  pushing  for 
change . 

No  organization  is  monolithic.   There  will  be  disputes 
within  about  what  direction  they  should  take  and  they  take  time 
to  get  resolved.   I  am  sure  that  there  were  people  who  were  more 
enlightened  than  some  of  the  old  guard.   I  don't  know  a  lot  of 
these  people—but  I  know  enough  about  institutions  to  know  that 
this  had  to  have  happened—that  argued  for  swifter  change,  and 
they  could  argue  from  events  like  Bodega  that  it  is  in  the 
company's  self-interest  to  change.  Whereas  if  they  had  won  at 
Bodega,  the  power  of  the  old  guard  would  have  been  reinforced. 
They  would  have  said,  "Look,  we  can  beat  these  people  back." 

Lage:     I  was  surprised  that  one  of  these  articles,  I  think  the  Wellock, 
shows  that  they  made  the  approach  to  the  Sierra  Club  over  at 
Nipomo  Dunes  and  Diablo  right  during  this  Bodega  campaign  and 
that  was  Ed  Wayburn  and  — 

Pesonen:   Yes,  they  learned  that  they  had  to  do  their  political  homework  in 
a  different  way.   They  couldn't  go  just  to  the  Rotary  Club  and 
the  Chamber  of  Commerce,  they  had  to  go  to  these  organizations 
like  the  Sierra  Club  which  could  cause  them  trouble.   That  is  why 
they  have  got  Diablo  now:  they  did  it  right.  They  did  a  terrible 
job  of  engineering,  but  they  did  a  pretty  good  job  of 
politicking. 


Personal  Impacts  of  the  Bodega  Campaign 


Lage:     You  had  said  last  time  that  this  campaign  shaped  your  life  in  a 
number  of  ways. 

Pesonen:   It  made  a  public  figure  out  of  me,  and  I've  been  a  public  figure 
in  some  sense  ever  since.   I  am  not  really  a  public  figure  type 
of  person.   I  am  a  pretty  private  person,  but  it  thrust  me  into 
the  public  eye,  and  it  was  a  bigger  event  than  I  thought  it  was 


105 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


to  a  lot  of  people.   It  had  a  lot  of  significance  to  a  great 
number  of  people  and  for  a  lot  of  different  reasons. 

For  the  people  involved  in  the  association? 

No,  the  public  generally.   Newspaper  reporters  knew  who  I  was.   I 
still  run  into  people  on  the  street  who  say,  "How  are  you  doing, 
Mr.  Pesonen?"  and  I  have  no  idea  who  they  are.   I  run  into  people 
now  who  remember  Bodega- -people  introduce  me  at  cocktail  parties 
and  stuff  because  of  Bodega.   That  is  the  identification.   They 
don't  remember  Point  Arena,  which  I  think  was  a  swifter,  more 
elegant  victory  in  a  lot  of  ways,  against  a  much  bigger  plant, 
with  a  tougher  geologic  question.   But  we  had  honed  our  skills  by 
then.   PG&E  had  also  wised  up  to  what  they  were  in  for  if  they 
didn't  pull  out  early.   But  that  was  a  very  elegant  little 
victory. 


Shall  we  talk  about  that  before  we  talk  about  law  school? 
you  are  feeding  right  into  it? 


Since 


Pesonen:   It  came  after  law  school. 

So  I  just  became  a  public  figure  in  many  people's  eyes.   I 
continued  to  live  in  the  Bay  Area;  I  continued  to  be  active  in 
one  way  or  another  in  environmental  matters.   I  became  a  lawyer 
who  was  pretty  successful  —  successful  in  my  lawsuits,  not 
successful  financially,  but  I  was  a  good  lawyer.   I  got  cases 
that  tended  to  get  public  attention,  and  I  knew  how  to  use  the 
press  if  it  furthered  the  objective  that  I  was  working  on.   I 
understood  how  the  press  worked,  and  I  learned  it  in  Bodega.   I 
learned  a  lot  of  lessons  in  it;  I  learned  a  lot  about  politics,  I 
learned  a  lot  about  public  relations,  and  I  learned  a  lot  about 
dealing  with  the  press.   If  I  needed  to  use  those  lessons  to 
accomplish  something  I  was  working  on,  I  did.   I  think  people 
respect  the  way  I  think  and  act,  and  I  think  I  have  a  lot  of 
integrity.   People  recognize  that  and  I  trade  on  it.   I  don't 
know  exactly  what  happened.   I  saw  the  world  differently  after  it 
was  over,  and  I  continued  to  see  the  world  differently. 

Lage:     Did  it  affect  your  decision  to  go  to  law  school,  or  did  it  have  a 
part  in  the  decision? 

Pesonen:   It  had  a  big  part  in  the  decision.  And  I'm  glad  I  did. 
Lage:     What  was  it  that  made  you  decide  to  go  to  law  school? 

Pesonen:   Power.   [laughter]  We  felt  very  powerless  at  Bodega.   That  whole 
story  about  rounding  up  Barney  Dreyfus --lawyers  are  a  source  of 


106 


power,  and  if  I  was  going  to  do  any  good  in  the  world,  I  needed 
more  power. 

Lage:     You  couldn't  imagine  an  environmental  campaign  now  that  didn't 
have  a  lawyer  signed  on. 

Pesonen:   That  didn't  have  lawyers  involved,  absolutely!   And  I  didn't  know 
what  else  I  wanted  to  do.   Law  sounded  like  a  way  to  get  power 
that  could  be  used  in  a  lot  of  different  ways  and  used  for  good. 

Lage:     Had  you  considered  law  before? 

Pesonen:   I  had  thought  about  it,  and  I  remember  thinking  it  was  awfully 
stuffy  and  I  wasn't  sure  that  I  wanted  to  be  involved  in 
something  that  was  so  stuffy.   But  that  changed  over  time, 
particularly  in  Bodega,  when  I  realized  that  it  didn't  have  to  be 
stuffy. 


Law  School;  UC's  Boalt  Hall,  1965-1968 


Lage:     How  did  you  find  the  law  school  experience?  Was  it  stuffy? 

Pesonen:   It  was  hard  for  me.   I  am  a  slow  reader;  I  am  not  a  quick 

thinker,  and  law  school  was  hard.   I  worked  hard  in  law  school. 
And  Julie  put  me  through  law  school. 

Lage:     Wives  are  very  handy. 

Pesonen:   Julie  was  a  good  one.   I  didn't  work  much  in  law  school.   I 

worked  in  the  summer,  but  during  school  I  didn't  work  much;  I 
studied  hard.   1  liked  it,  but  I  wanted  to  get  out. 

Lage:     Were  there  any  particular  professors  who  helped  shape  your 
thinking? 

Pesonen:   No,  not  particularly. 

Lage:     Did  you  find  them  interested  in  public  issues? 

Pesonen:   No.   They  were  a  little  suspicious  of  public  issues.   Law  schools 
tend  to  be  pretty  conservative.   I  liked  Jesse  Choper,  who  was 
the  professor  I  took  constitutional  law  and  contracts  law  from. 
He  was  a  very  good  teacher,  and  he  later  became  dean.   He  was  a 
fine  man,  and  he  was  a  wonderful  teacher.   But  he  wasn't  a 
political  activist.   None  of  them  were.   I  set  up  the  Lawyers' 
Guild  chapter  and  became  president  of  it,  and  I  was  class 


107 


valedictorian,  not  because  of  academic  achievement  but  because  my 
classmates  elected  me. 

Lage:     It  is  not  from  being  first  in  the  class? 

Pesonen:   No,  not  at  all.   It  has  nothing  to  do  with  academic  achievement. 
I  suppose  if  I  had  been  flunking  completely  I  would  not  have  been 
selected,  but  it  was  an  elective  process  and  I  was  recruited  to 
it  by  my  classmates. 

Lage:     That  is  quite  an  honor. 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  was  older  and  I  was  irreverent.   [laughter]   That  was 
during  the  Vietnam  War,  and  there  was  lots  of  agitation  on 
campus.   I  guess  it  was  just  my  temperament  and  my  irreverence. 
I  was  not  awed  by  law  school.   I  didn't  think  this  was  the 
Talmudic  truth  being  handed  down  to  us.   I  questioned  it  and  I 
was  a  little  bit  sassy  with  teachers  sometimes  in  class.   I  was 
never  disrespectful,  but  I  kept  my  sense  of  humor  about  it. 

Lage:     Did  you  get  involved  in  any  of  the  political  happenings  on  campus 
during  those  years? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  a  little  bit.   Not  much.   On  the  lower  campus  I  didn't  get 
involved  in  those  things.   But  we  had  a  couple  of  events  that 
sprung  out  of  the  law  school  itself.   The  law  school  always  saw 
itself  as  detached  from  the  rest  of  the  University.   It  calls 
itself  Boalt  Hall;  it  doesn't  call  itself  the  school  of  law  at 
the  University  of  California.   There  is  a  psychology  of  lofty 
detachment  in  the  law  school  that  is  very  elitist.   So  what  went 
on  in  the  lower  campus,  that  was  undergraduates. 

Lage:     I  have  never  even  heard  that  term:  the  lower  campus. 

Pesonen:   That  was  undergraduate  high  jinks  that  we  weren't  too  involved 

in.   Some  of  the  students  were,  but  I  was  just  as  elitist  as  the 
rest  of  them,  I  guess. 

When  the  Oakland  police  shot  up  the  house  that  Bobby  Button 
and  Eldridge  Cleaver  were  hiding  in  and  Bobby  Button  was  killed, 
on  April  6,  1967,  I  think,  there  was  a  big  protest  about  that  and 
I  spoke  at  that. 

Lage:     What  drew  your  attention  to  that? 

Pesonen:   The  National  Lawyers'  Guild  and  the  fact  that  I  had  been  with 

them.   I  worked  the  summer  the  second  year  I  was  in  law  school,  I 
think,  as  a  law  clerk  in  the  Dreyfus  office,  and  I  ultimately 


108 

went  to  work  there  as  his  partner.   And  [Charles]  Garry  was 
involved  in-- 

Lage:  Garry  was  defending  the  Black  Panthers. 

Pesonen:  So  there  were  these  other  connections. 

Lage:  The  times  were  just  so  different. 

Pesonen:  Those  were  lively  times.   They  had  to  happen,  I  think. 

Defending  People's  Park  Activist  Dan  Siegel 


Lage:     Julie  said  that  one  of  your  first  cases  out  of  law  school  was 
defending  Dan  Siegel  on  People's  Park? 

Pesonen:   Siegel  was  a  year  behind  me  at  law  school.   He  had  been  active  in 
the  Guild,  but  for  some  reason  he  sort  of  adopted  me  as  his 
mentor.   He  was  out  here  from  New  York  and  he  didn't  know  a  lot 
of  people,  and  he  was  a  very  idealistic  young  law  student.   He 
had  written  a  philosophical  paper  of  some  kind--I  don't  even 
remember  what  it  was --but  he  was  very  interested  in  my  comments 
on  it.   He  wanted  me  to  read  it  and  we  talked  about  it.  As  soon 
as  I  was  out  of  law  school  and  got  admitted  to  the  bar  in  January 
of  '69,  I  went  immediately  to  work  in  the  Garry  office. 

I  think  the  People's  Park  event  happened  in  spring  of  '69, 
and  Dan  was  charged  with  inciting  to  riot  for  his  speech  on  the 
Sproul  Hall  steps  that  ended  with  the  words  "Take  the  park." 
That  led  to  several  days  of  violence  in  town  and  a  couple  of 
people  were  killed,  I  think,  and  one  guy  was  blinded. 

Lage:     One  person  was  killed,  as  I  recall. 

Pesonen:   It  was  national  news,  [Governor  Ronald]  Reagan  called  in  the 

National  Guard.   [Alameda  County  District  Attorney]  Ed  [Edwin] 
Meese  came  over  and  arrested  hundreds  of  people.   It  was  a  huge, 
violent  couple  of  days  in  Berkeley.   And  they  needed  a  scapegoat. 

So  Dan  asked  me  to  defend  him,  and  I  was  delighted  to  do  it, 
but  I  was  also  very  scared  because  I  hadn't  tried  a  case;  I  had 
no  trial  experience .   I  knew  better  than  to  think  that  I  could  do 
that  by  myself,  so  I  asked  Mai  [Malcolm]  Bernstein  to  come  in  and 
join  me. 

Lage:     He  is  older? 


109 


Pesonen:   He  was  older;  he  was  a  partner  in  Bob  Truehaft's  firm.   Doris 

Walker,  Bob  Truehaft--Truehaft,  Walker  and  Bernstein  in  Oakland. 
That  was  another  old  radical  firm,  in  the  East  Bay.  Mai  was  the 
youngest  partner  in  that  firm,  and  he  was  a  Harvard  or  Yale  law 
school  graduate.  A  very  smart  guy.   He  had  some  trial 
experience,  and  he  also  had  the  first  amendment  seasoning  that  I 
didn't  have.   I  had  the  abstract  learnings  from  law  school,  but 
he  was  a  street  fighter.   He  knew  how  to  do  it  if  he  had  to.   I 
had  enough  modesty  to  know  that  it  would  be  a  big  mistake  for  me 
to  try  this  case  by  myself. 

Lage:     And  there  was  a  lot  of  attention  on  the  case,  I  remember. 

Pesonen:   So  I  asked  Mai  to  help,  and  Mai  was  delighted  and  the  two  of  us 

did  it  together.  Mai  really  took  the  lead,  I  think.   I  get  a  lot 
of  credit  for  it,  but  I  have  to  give  Mai  the  main  credit  for  that 
victory.   It  was  a  great  learning  experience.   We  tried  it  in  a 
municipal  court  in  Berkeley.   It  was  not  a  felony;  it  was 
misdemeanor  inciting  to  riot.   The  jury  was  a  lot  of  the  Berkeley 
blue  rinse  set. 

Lage:     Older  Berkeley  women  who  must  have  been  horrified  at  what  was 
happening  in  their  community. 

Pesonen:  Not  at  all! 

Lage:  They  weren't? 

Pesonen:  No.   It  was  not  a  radical  jury  at  all. 

Lage:  That  is  what  I  mean.   It  must  have  been  very  disturbing  to  them. 

Pesonen:   No,  they  were--.   Berkeley  is  a  unique  town.   The  blue  rinse  set 
can  be  pretty  radical  in  this  town.   I  don't  remember- -that  is 
not  the  whole  jury,  but  there  were  some  older,  distinguished 
looking  women  on  the  jury,  and  I  think  it  was  about  a  week- long 
trial. 

Mario  Barsotti  was  the  judge.   He  was  a  Reagan  appointee  to 
the  court.  He  was  a  very  nice  judge.   I  don't  think  he  was  a 
terribly  bright  Judge,  but  he  was  a  decent  judge.   There  aren't 
very  many  bright  judges.   If  they  are  bright,  they  don't  become 
judges. 

Lage:     We'll  have  to  get  more  elaboration  of  that  when  we  get  to  the 
later  points  in  your  career. 

Pesonen:   They  go  out  and  make  a  lot  of  money  doing  something  else.   I  was 
being  a  little  bit  facetious.   But  he  was  a  decent  judge  and 


110 


followed  the  law  the  best  he  could.   The  prosecutor,  whose  name 
escapes  me  at  the  moment,  was  a  very  uptight  guy.   He  is  now  a 
Superior  Court  judge  in  Alameda  County.   But  he  was  a  young 
deputy  district  attorney  at  that  time,  and  he  so  much  wanted  a 
conviction  he  could  taste  it.  This  was  going  to  make  his  career. 
Of  course,  the  press  was  there  all  of  the  time.   I  remember  after 
we  argued  the  case--.   I  put  on  a  couple  of  witnesses;  our  theory 
was  that  this  statement,  "Take  the  park,"  was  a  metaphorical 
statement  by  Dan  that  we  should,  through  political  means, 
accomplish  our  ends,  not  physically  go  down  and  seize  the 
property. 

Lage:     And  Dan  testified  to  that? 

Pesonen:   He  testified  to  that,  and  we  brought  in  people  who  had  been  in 
the  audience  on  Sproul  Plaza  who  understood  it  that  way  and  who 
testified  that  they  understood  it  that  way.  Well,  the  jury  came 
back  after  deliberating  half  a  day  or  a  day  with  a  note.   The 
judge  took  us  into  the  chambers,  and  he  handed  us  this  note  from 
the  foreman,  and  the  note  said,  "Can  we  find  him  sort  of  guilty?" 
[laughter] 

Mai  said,  "That  sounds  like  reasonable  doubt  to  me."  The 
judge  said,  "Sounds  like  that  to  me,  too."  The  prosecutor  was 
furious,  and  he  said,  "No,  it  just  means  they  haven't  deliberated 
long  enough."  We  said,  "No,  judge,  you  should  go  out  and  read 
them  the  instructions  on  reasonable  doubt  again."  The  judge 
agreed.   We  went  out,  and  the  judge  read  them  the  instructions. 
He  said,  "I  have  this  note  and  I  can't  respond  to  it  directly, 
but  I  can  give  you  some  of  the  instructions  you  have  had."  He 
read  the  reasonable  doubt  instruction  again,  which  is  very  clear 
that  if  there  is  a  reasonable  doubt—unless  they  feel  he  is 
guilty  to  a  moral  certainty,  they  must  acquit.   It  was  not  very 
long  after  that  that  they  came  in  with  a  "not  guilty' . 

There  was  a  party  after  that,  but  I  kind  of  felt  that  there 
was  some  culpability  on  Dan's  part;  he  knew  what  he  was  doing. 

Lage:     He  knew  that  the  crowd  was  at  that  point? 

Pesonen:   He  knew  that  it  was  very  likely  that  this  would  ignite  that 

crowd.  And  I  wasn't  happy.  We  have  remained  friends,  in  a  way, 
but  it  is  not  a  cordial  relationship  any  more.  And  I  think  that 
it  is  because  he  sensed  that  I  disapproved  of  what  he  had  done. 

Lage:     Interesting  that  in  your  first  case  you  had  that  dilemma,  then. 

Pesonen:   I  was  ambivalent  about  it.   I  wasn't  ambivalent  about--!  was 
delighted  to  win.   That  is  the  lawyer  in  me;  that  is  the 


Ill 

gladiator.   But  there  was  another  part  of  me  that  was  not 
disappointed  in  the  result,  sort  of  disappointed  in  the  person. 

Lage:     Is  this  the  same  Dan  Siegel  who  is  now  a  lawyer  for  the  Oakland 
School  District? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  he  matured  too.  He  is  a  very  good  lawyer  on  civil  rights 
and  employment  matters.   He  was  with  the  city  attorney's  office 
in  San  Francisco  for  a  while.   He  was  in  private  practice  for  a 
long  time.   In  fact,  he  appeared  before  me  once  when  I  was  a 
judge  out  in  Contra  Costa  County  in  a  settlement  conference. 
Then  he  left  private  practice  and  went  in  to  the  city  attorney's 
office  on  civil  rights  matters  and  then  became  the  general 
counsel  for  the  Oakland  School  District  about  two  years  ago. 
Same  guy.   His  brother  is  associated  with  my  firm  now. 


112 


V   ATTORNEY  IN  THE  FIRM  OF  GARRY,  DREYFUS,  McTERNAN,  AND  BROTSKY 
[Interview  A:   February  27,  19921  II 

The  Partners  and  Clients  in  a  Radical  Old-Left  Firm 


Lage:     We  are  going  to  talk  today  about  your  work  with  Garry,  Dreyfus, 
etc. 

Pesonen:   Well,  after  they  represented  us  on  the  Bodega  nuclear  plant 
controversy  and  two  or  three  small  actions  which  had  more 
political  purpose  than  legal  purpose,  we  impressed  each  other,  I 
guess,  and  so  I  clerked  for  them  when  I  was  a  second-year  law 
student,  for  the  summer  in  1967.   I  went  to  a  trial  with  Charlie 
Garry  of  some  young  black  woman  from  Richmond  who  had  been 
rousted  by  San  Francisco  police  and  then  accused  of  some 
misdemeanor  crimes  of  some  kind  to  cover  up  what  had  happened.   I 
sat  through  and  helped  Charlie  do  the  trial.   I  was  just 
fascinated  with  him  as  a  trial  attorney,  and  I  asked  him  if  I 
could  go  to  work  for  them  once  I  got  out  of  law  school. 

It  may  or  may  not  have  been  a  career  mistake;  I  don't  know. 
But  I  was  full  of  excitement  about  these  radical  lawyers .   I  went 
to  law  school  to  try  to  do  good  things  and  have  some  impact  on 
social  change,  and  they  were  committed  to  that.   At  least  they 
came  across  as  committed  to  that.   They  were  still  a  business  and 
had  to  make  a  living.   Barney  Dreyfus  had  some  independent 
wealth,  I  think,  so  he  was  able  to  spend  more  time  on  important 
political  cases,  although  Charlie  was  temperamentally  committed 
that  way,  and  so  was  Frank  McTernan.   They  were  the  three 
partners,  along  with  Alan  Brotsky  who  had  joined  the  firm  a  year 
or  two  before  I  went  to  work  there  and  who  had  a  successful  labor 
practice  of  his  own  before  that.   So  it  was  Garry,  Dreyfus, 
McTernan,  and  Brotsky  when  I  joined  the  firm. 


113 


At  the  time  I  joined  the  firm,  the  first  Huey  Newton  [Black 
Panther  leader]  trial  had  just  been  completed,  and  Fay  Stender 
was  in  that  office. 


Lage:     In  the  office  of  Garry,  etc.? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  she  was  one  of  the  associates  in  the  firm,  and  she  was 

writing  the  appeal  brief  that,  in  fact,  resulted  in  the  reversal 
of  the  first  conviction.   We  were  at  345  Market  Street.   It  was 
an  old  building--it  is  gone  now.   Owned  then  by  Bechtel  who,  I 
think,  had  long  term  plans  to  build  what  currently  is  one  of 
their  main  structures  in  downtown  San  Francisco.   It  was  a 
raggedy,  old  building  and  Fay  and  I  shared  a  little  cubicle 
space.   She  was  hammering  away  on  her  typewriter  writing  this 
brief,  and  I  just  handled  all  kinds  of  cases.   Little  probate 
matters,  little  divorce  matters. 

Lage:     How  did  you  get  assigned  to  cases? 

Pesonen:   The  partners  would  get  some  old  client  who  would  come  in  who  had 
some  minor  matter  that  had  no  political  or  other  significance  and 
they  could  make  a  little  money  on  it--fender  bender  and  small 
personal  injury  cases.   I  didn't  get  much  supervision.   They 
would  just  turn  them  over  to  me,  and  if  I  thought  I  needed  help, 
I  would  wander  in  on  them.   There  was  no  training  plan. 

Lage:     Is  that  unusual? 

Pesonen:  Well,  it  is  not  unusual  in  small  firms.   In  large  firms  there  is 
a  very  coherent  plan  for  training  young  associates  under  the 
tutelage  of  a  partner.   But  that  is  not  the  way  that  firm 
operated.   It  was  a  sink  or  swim  situation;  I  either  succeeded  or 
I  didn't.   I  was  pretty  much  on  my  own.   And  I  liked  that.   I 
liked  the  freedom  and  independence  of  that,  but  I  also  had  a  lot 
more  freedom  to  take  in  cases  that  an  associate  in  a  large  firm 
wouldn't  have.   You  would  have  to  go  through  a  clearing 
committee,  and  there  would  be  a  lot  of  analysis.   I  could  just 
sort  of  take  them  on  a  seat-of-the-pants  feeling  about  them.   On 
the  other  hand,  they  were  not  big,  complicated  cases,  either.   I 
went  to  court,  and  I  tried  cases,  and  it  was  about  that  time  that 
Dan  Siegel  called  me  up  on  the  People's  Park  case  we  talked  about 
last  time. 

They  were  an  interesting,  wonderful  mix  of  people.   Barney 
Dreyfus  was  a  man  of  just  total  class.   He  was  a  patrician;  he 
was  a  gentleman.   He  was  a  wonderful  writer,  and  he  had  a  fine, 
dry  sense  of  humor  and  very  good  judgement  about  people.   He  was 
the  center  of  that  firm.   He  was  the  emotional  and  stabilizing 


114 


center.   Charlie  Garry  was  very  volatile  and  impetuous  in  some 
ways. 

Lage:     What  was  Garry's  social  background? 

Pesonen:   Garry  had  grown  up  in  the  Central  Valley.   His  name  was  actually 
Garabedian. 

Lage:     Armenian? 

Pesonen:   He  was  Armenian,  and  Armenians  were  discriminated  against.   He 

became  a  tailor  in  San  Francisco  and  active  in  one  of  the  unions 
--I  don't  know  what  union  it  was  —  and  decided  on  night  law  school 
at  Golden  Gate  or  one  of  those.   He  started  out  in  labor  law,  but 
it  was  more  agitating  and  labor  activism  than  it  was  law.   How  he 
and  Barney  got  together,  I  never  really  heard  that  story.   They 
were  entirely  different  kinds  of  people.   Charlie  was  profane  and 
loud  and  impetuous  and  he  couldn't  write,  could  never  speak  a 
sentence  in  the  English  language.   And  Barney  was  just  the 
opposite.   Barney  lived  in  a  big  house  in  Mill  Valley  and  had 
four  kids,  I  think,  and  his  wife  was  quite  an  elegant  woman.   She 
is  still  alive,  and  she  is  a  fine  person.   But  they  lived  on  a 
different  social  level.   He  and  Charlie  just  had  a  bond  of  some 
kind  that  was  unbreakable.   Barney  was  a  levelling  influence  on 
Charlie .   He  was  the  only  one  I  ever  saw  who  could  back  him  down 
from  one  of  his  more  unusual  and  dangerous  positions. 

Frank  McTernan  was  another  stabilizing  influence,  although 
he  was  much  less  prone  to  intervene  in  disputes  of  one  kind  or 
another.   His  practice  was  different;  he  handled  a  lot  of  probate 
and  estate  matters.  He  was  very  good  at  it. 

Lage:     Now  how  did  he  get  tied  in  with  this  more  political--? 

Pesonen:   Well,  they  all  came  from  an  old  radical  background.   They  were 
part  of  the  Communist  Party  in  the  forties  and  the  thirties  and 
the  early  fifties.   They  had  all  been  subpoenaed  at  one  point  or 
another  to  testify  before  the  House  Un-American  Activities 
Committee. 

Each  community  in  the  Bay  Area  had  an  old  left-wing  law 
firm.   It  was  Newman,  Marsh  and  Furtado  down  in  the  Fremont/ 
Hayward  area;  it  was  Garry,  Dreyfus,  McTernan  and  Brotsky  in  San 
Francisco;  it  was  Truehaft,  Walker  and  Bernstein  in  Oakland. 
They  all  knew  each  other  and  they  networked  and  they  were  social 
friends.   And  their  clientele  were  in  the  old  radical  left 
community. 

Lage:     Until  the  sixties  when  we  saw  new  action? 


115 


Pesonen:   Yes,  and  then  they  were  kind  of  passed-by  by  the  times.   But  they 
were  successful.   They  had  a  steady  business.   A  lot  of  their 
clients  were  business  people  who  had  small  businesses  of  one  kind 
or  another  and  some  of  them  were  quite  successful.   They  tend  to 
be  an  educated  group  of  people,  and  that  was  their  market. 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


You  said  Garry  was  not  very  articulate, 
famous  for  his  court  presence? 


I  thought  he  was  kind  of 


Lage: 


I  didn't  say  he  wasn't  articulate,  I  said  he  couldn't  complete  a 
sentence  in  the  English  language.   Before  a  jury  or  when  he 
wanted  to  be  persuasive,  he  was  a  powerful  speaker  with  a  lot  of 
emotional  content,  and  that  was  his  strength.   There  was  enormous 
emotional  content;  he  just  believed  in  what  he  did  and  it  just 
emanated--it  came  across.   That  was  his  gift  with  juries.   I  am 
not  saying  he  wasn't  a  good  lawyer,  that  he  was  stupid;  he 
wasn't.   He  was  a  great  man,  but  he  just  didn't--.   Formal 
language  was  not  his  gift;  emotional  content  and  power  were  his 
gifts. 

He  also  knew  his  limitations.   He  knew  when  he  needed  to  get 
assistance  on  more  technical  matters.   That  was  just  boredom.   He 
was  bored  with  the  technical  side  of  the  law.   But  he  loved  it. 
He  had  a  great  memory  for  principles  that  had  been  announced  in 
cases.   He  couldn't  remember  the  case  names.   He  would  say,  "Go 
find  that  case  that  was  cited  in  1948  that  had  to  do  with  such 
and  such,"  and  you  would  look  around,  and  you'd  find  it,  and  he 
was  usually  right. 

There  was  another  lawyer  in  the  firm,  Don  Kerson,  who  was  a 
young  lawyer  who  had  worked  on  the  Bodega  stuff.   He  was  a  very 
bright,  quiet,  somewhat  troubled  person.   That  was  about  it.   I 
think  there  was  six  or  seven  of  us  in  the  firm,  and  then  there 
were  a  few  people  who  came  and  stayed  a  little  while  and  left: 
Bill  Schuler,  Bob  Meyer.   Bill  Schuler  isn't  practicing  any 
longer,  and  Bob  Meyer  is  a  solo  practitioner  down  on  the 
Peninsula  now.   He  had  come  out  of  the  U.S.  Attorney's  Office. 
Bill  Schuler  had  come  out  of  one  of  the  big  personal  injury 
firms. 

We  had  a  nice  time.   We  got  along  well.   I  never  made  any 
money.   I  was  on  a  salary.   I  started  out  at  $750  a  month,  which 
was—you  pay  a  housekeeper  that  now.   But  I  didn't  really  care. 
I  wasn't  thinking  about  money.   By  two  or  three  years,  I  was  a 
partner. 

Does  that  mean  a  share  in  the  profits  of  the  firm,  such  as  they 
are? 


116 


Pesonen:   In  the  losses,  too.   [laughter]   There  were  some  months  when  we 

went  without  any  partners'  draw  and  paid  the  staff.   But  it  was  a 
very  tight-knit  group.   They  had  known  each  other  a  long  time, 
and  they  were  very  close.  The  firm  ultimately  broke  up  after 
Barney  died. 

Lage:     Which  was  when? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  remember  the  year  that  Barney  died. 

Lage:     But  was  it  while  you  were  still  with  them? 

Pesonen:   No,  no.   It  was  after  I  had  left.   It  was  probably  1982.   I  think 
he  died  in  1982.   He  was  very  prone  to  skin  cancer;  he  had  very 
light  skin.   He  always  wore  a  hat  and  he  would  get  little  cancers 
on  his--.   He  was  very  fair.   And  I  think  he  died  of  melanoma. 


Peripheral  Role  in  Black  Panther  Defense 


Lage:     The  thing  I've  heard  most  about  Garry  is  the  defense  of  the  Black 
Panthers. 

Pesonen:   The  Black  Panther  matter—matter  is  too  mild  a  word  for  it—was 

all  going  on--.   The  big  invasion  of  the  legislature  with  guns  by 
Huey  Newton  and  his  crowd  had  come  before  I  joined  the  firm.   But 
that  had  put  them  on  the  front  page  of  the  papers  and  vaulted 
them  and  Charlie  into  prominence.  That  was  a  concerted  effort-- 

Lage:     Was  Charlie  their  lawyer  from  the  beginning? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  from  his  having  defended  Huey  Newton.   And  he  got  very 

involved  in  advising  the  Panthers.   Well,  there  was  a  concerted 
effort  by  law  enforcement  to  infiltrate  the  Panthers,  and  by  the 
Nixon  administration,  to  do  them  in.   I  haven't  read  all  of  the 
books  on  it,  but  I  have  read  about  it. 

I  was  not  that  enamored  of  the  Panthers .   I  thought  they 
were  a  useful  social  force  to  wake  people  up,  but  I  was  a  little 
troubled  by  all  of  the  weapons.   More  than  a  little  troubled  by 
all  of  that. 

Lage:     And  was  Garry  not  troubled  by  all  of  the  weapons? 
Pesonen:   I  don't  know  whether  Garry  was  troubled  by  it  or  not. 


117 


Lage:     Did  they  take  him  as  an  advisor  well? 
advice? 


Did  they  listen  to  his 


Pesonen:   Well,  you  could  tell  that  it  was  a  volatile,  fragile 

organization.   I  never  liked  Huey  Newton.   1  thought  he  was 
arrogant  and  manipulative.   But  I  didn't  think  he  ought  to  go  to 
prison,  either.  Kathleen  Cleaver  I  really  liked.   She  was  a 
great  woman.   Eldridge  Cleaver  I  always  felt  was  a  nut. 

Lage:     How  involved  were  you? 

Pesonen:   They  were  in  and  around  the  office,  and  they  knew  who  I  was.   But 
I  didn't  work  on  Panther  cases  very  much.   I  didn't  have  occasion 
to.   The  only  Panther  cases  I  worked  on  involved  the  federal 
grand  jury—there  was  a  special  grand  jury  set  up  to  investigate 
organized  crime,  and  its  real  focus  was  the  Panthers.   There  was 
a  strike  team  from  the  Justice  Department  in  Washington  that 
would  come  out  periodically  and  conduct  a  grand  jury  proceeding 
to  see  if  they  could  come  up  with  an  indictment  against  some  of 
them.   They  called  a  lot  of  witnesses  and  gave  them  immunity  when 
they  refused  to  testify. 

My  role  with  the  Panthers  mainly  was  representing  witnesses 
who  had  been  called  before  this  grand  jury.   Particularly  two 
young  women—Shelly  Bursey  was  one  of  them,  and  I  don't  remember 
the  name  of  the  other,  who  were  Panthers,  but  they  ran  the 
newspaper,  or  at  least  the  production  end  of  it.   They  were 
called,  and  they  testified  week  after  week.   The  grand  jury 
convened  each  week  the  morning  after  the  paper  had  to  get  out,  so 
these  young  women— they  were  only  in  their  early  twenties  or 
their  late  teens- -were  exhausted  from  putting  the  paper  out  all 
night.   They  never  followed  advice.   I'd  say,  "Don't  answer  any 
question  in  there  if  you  have  any  doubt  about  it;  come  out."   I 
wasn't  allowed  in  the  grand  jury  room,  I  had  to  sit  outside  in 
the  hall. 


Lage:     So  you  advised  them  to  come  outside  and  confer? 

Pesonen:   They  had  a  right  to  ask  to  come  out  and  talk  to  their  lawyer  if 
they  were  uneasy  about  a  question,  but  they  always  forgot. 

Lage:     They  didn't  have  the  legal  mind? 

Pesonen:   Sometimes  they  just  didn't  know  how  to — .   They  weren't  very 

bright,  and  they  sometimes  talked  and  sometimes  said,  "I  take  the 
Fifth  Amendment."  There  was  no  pattern  to  it.   So  they  were 
finally  held  in  contempt  by  a  judge  who  is  on  senior  status  now. 
A  fine  judge,  but  he  really  didn't  have  any  choice  under  the  law, 
and  they  were  sentenced  to  jail  until  they  talked.   He  said  they 


118 


had  the  key  to  the  jailhouse  in  their  mouths.   One  of  them  was 
quite  pregnant  by  that  time,  by  David  Billiard.   In  fact,  I  think 
she  is  now  married  to  Billiard.   Ber  daughter  graduated  with  Kyle 
[Pesonen's  son]  from  Berkeley  Bigh. 

Lage:     This  daughter  she  was  pregnant  with? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   So  there  was  a  big  demonstration—a  lot  of  women  and 
Panther  supporters—outside  the  courtroom  when  they  were 
sentenced;  we  knew  it  was  coming.   They  were  hauled  off  to  the 
top  floor  of  the  Federal  Building  in  San  Francisco.   There  are  a 
couple  of  holding  cells  up  there.   The  marshals  were  not  used  to 
this,  and  they  were  afraid.  They  thought  this  crowd,  which  had 
all  come  up  in  the  elevators  and  were  banging  on  the  doors ,  was 
going  to  do  something— 

Lage:     Where  were  you  when  all  of  this  was  going  on? 

Pesonen:   I  went  in  with  my  clients  to  see  that  they  were  comfortable  in 
their  cells  and  to  try  to  keep  things  calm.   So  I  went  out  and 
talked  to  the  crowd  and  said  that  I  would  ride  on  the  bus  with 
Shelly—they  were  particularly  worried  about  Shelly  because  she 
was  pregnant--!  would  go  with  her  to  county  jail  and  I  would 
watch  what  they  did  all  of  the  time  and  go  out  and  visit  her  when 
they  transferred  her  to  Santa  Rita.   That  satisfied  the  crowd 
that  somebody  was  looking  after  them.   I  talked  them  out  of  any 
further  violence,  and  the  crowd  finally  dispersed.   The  Justice 
Department  lawyers  were  very  impressed.   [laughter] 

Lage:     That  you  had  this  kind  of  power? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know  whether  I  had  much  power  or  not,  but  they--.   My 
style  has  not  been  ever  very  confrontational.   On  a  personal 
level  I  got  along  pretty  well  with  these  two  clowns  who  would 
come  out  from  Washington  every  week  to  harass  these  two  women. 
They  joked  about  it  and  said  they  didn't  know  I  was  a  bra  burner, 
and  I  said,  "I'm  not."   [laughter] 

Then  it  just  kind  of  fizzled  after  a  while.  Christmas  time 
came,  and  Shelly  was  still  in  jail.  This  must  have  been  1971  or 
so. 


It  was  Judge  Zirpoli,  Alfonso  Zirpoli.   I  went  back  to  Judge 
Zirpoli,  and  I  made  a  motion  to  release  them  since  they  weren't 
going  to  talk,  and  they  weren't  going  to  stay  in  jail  forever, 
and  it  was  not  right.   And  he  turned  them  loose. 

I  am  sure  there  have  been  investigative  reports  of  this 
Justice  Department  strike  force.   The  Pratt  case  is  one.   I've 


119 


forgotten  Pratt's  first  name  [Geronimo] .   He  is  still  in  jail, 
and  the  allegations  have  some  merit  that  he  was  set  up  and 
framed.   I  don't  know  anything  about  that,  I  never  got  to  that 
level  of  involvement  with  the  Panthers .   What  I  handled  were  sort 
of  peripheral  things  that  didn't  require  a  good  trial  lawyer, 
didn't  get  involved  in  policy. 

Then  I  got  further  and  further  away  from  any  of  the  criminal 
work  and  finally  just  wouldn't  do  it. 

Lage:     You  didn't  do  it  by  choice? 

Pesonen:   It  was  pretty  much  by  choice.   I  didn't  like  the  criminal  work;  I 
didn't  like  the  atmosphere  at  the  Hall  of  Justice  in  San 
Francisco,  and  I  didn't  feel  comfortable  with  it.   And  I  didn't 
feel  like  I  was  lawyer ing,  you  know?   I  mean  we  would  handle  an 
occasional  small  criminal  matter  of  one  type  or  another.   Some 
little  Chinese  gambling  ring  busted  down  in  Chinatown  for  playing 
Pai  Gow  or  whatever  they  did.  We  had  a  few  like  that,  but  I 
didn't  consider  it  my  career  direction. 


Defending  Point  Arena  from  a  PG&E  Nuclear  Power  Plant,  1972-1973 


Lage:     Let's  talk  about  some  of  the  cases  that  you  did  take  on. 

Pesonen:   I  was  looking  for  big  things  to  do.   There  was  always  a  tension 
between  me  and  the  rest  of  the  firm  over  the  environmental  issue. 
I  wanted  to  do  environmental  law,  and  they  thought  that  was  kind 
of  a  white  middle  class  perspective  on  the  world  and  didn't 
really  have  to  do  with  justice. 

Lage:     Did  all  of  them  feel  that  way? 

Pesonen:   No,  Barney  was  much  more  sympathetic  than  Charlie  was.   They 

weren't  hostile  or  antagonistic,  but  they  didn't  give  me  a  whole 
lot  of  support  either. 

The  first  big  opportunity  was  the  Sierra  Club  hiring  me  to 
handle  the  Point  Arena  nuclear  power  plant.   I  think  I  have 
talked  about  that. 


Lage:     We  really  haven't  talked  about  it.  We  referred  to  it,  but  not  in 
any-- 

Pesonen:   I  consider  that  a  more  elegant  victory  than  the  Bodega  victory, 
but  nobody  remembers  it.   Because  of  my  role  in  Bodega,  people 


120 


came  to  me  all  of  the  time  whenever  a  nuclear  power  plant  was 
proposed  in  California  for  advice.   There  was  the  Davenport 
plant;  PG&E  still  had  on  its  drawing  boards  a  lot  of  nuclear 
plants  down  the  coast. 

Lage:     Where  was  the  Davenport  plant? 
Pesonen:   Just  off  of  Santa  Cruz. 
Lage:     And  that  was  defeated? 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  never  got  off  the  drawing  boards,  really,  because  there 
was  local  protest  and  there  were  pretty  obvious  seismic  hazards. 


The  Svengali  of  the  Antinuclear  Power  Movement? 


Lage:     You  had  also  mentioned  off  the  tape  that  PG&E  had  come  to  you 
when  you  were  in  law  school  about  Rancho  Seco? 

Pesonen:   No,  not  PG&E.   The  general  manager  of  SMUD  [Sacramento  Municipal 
Utilities  District) . 

Lage:     What  was  that? 

Pesonen:   The  general  manager  and  the  assistant  general  manager  of  SMUD  had 
called  me  up  and  come  all  the  way  down  from  Sacramento  to  take  me 
to  lunch.   We  went  to  lunch  at  Larry  Blake's,  and  I  was  all  very 
flattered  about  this.  I  think  I  was  in  my  first  or  second  year  of 
law  school.   Their  agenda,  it  became  very  clear,  was  whether  I 
was  going  to  move  in  to  Sacramento  and  help  organize  a  campaign 
against  their  nuclear  power  plant.   I  had  never  even  thought  of 
doing  that. 

Lage:     So  they  really  had  a  vision  of  you  as  a  kind  of  the  overall 
leader  of  the--? 

Pesonen:   Svengali.   Stop  any  nuclear  power  plant.   Well,  that  wasn't  my 
perspective;  I  wanted  to  finish  law  school.   And  I  didn't  think 
the  Rancho  Seco  plant  was  such  a  bad  idea.   It  was  way  south  of 
town,  there  was  no  significant  population  around  it,  and  downwind 
was  toward  the  Sierra;  there  were  no  communities  down  there.   It 
was  just  flat  alkali  hardpan  ground  with  scattered  Digger  pine 
trees.   It  wasn't  a  very  attractive  site.   It  wasn't  scenically 
useful  at  all.   And  it  wouldn't  use  ocean  water,  it  would  get  its 
water  from  the  Folsom  South  Canal.   It  wouldn't  use  very  much 
water,  it  would  use  cooling  towers.   So,  given  my  view  of  nuclear 


Lage: 


121 


power  at  that  point,  it  seemed  like  a  pretty  good  way  to  go.   In 
any  event,  I  didn't  have  time,  and  I  didn't  know  anybody.   I 
didn't  have  an  organization;  it  just  wasn't  my  agenda.  And  I 
told  them  that  and  they  went  away  happy.   They  paid  for  the 
lunch.   [chuckles]   I  never  heard  from  them  again,  but  I  never 
got  involved  in  that  dispute. 

After  Bodega,  PG&E  had  focused  its  energies  on  the  north 
coast  for  nuclear  power  at  Point  Arena,  at  a  site  just  north  of 
the  town  of  Point  Arena.   Very  close  to  a  Coast  Guard  station;  a 
Coast  Guard  Loran  station—a  navigational  outpost.   By 
coincidence,  my  cousin,  Dan  Pesonen,  who  was  in  the  Coast  Guard 
at  that  time,  got  assigned  to  this  Loran  station. 

Is  that  the  name  of  the  station,  Loran? 


Pesonen:   L-0-R-A-N.   I  think  that  is  what  it  was.   It  is  a  navigational 
technique.1 

He  was  an  electrical  technician,  and  he  worked  at  this 
plant.   So  he  became  my  eyes  and  ears  as  to  what  was  going  on. 
It  was  right  next  to  the  PG&E  property.   The  first  thing  we  did 
was  start  to  organize  in  the  town  of  Mendocino  and  the  town  of 
Point  Arena. 

Lage:     Now,  was  this  after  the  Sierra  Club  took  you  on,  or  had  you 
gotten  involved--? 

Pesonen:   This  was  when  the  Sierra  Club  took  me  on.   I  had  watched  this 
through  law  school.   I  had  seen  it  developing,  and  I  read  the 
press  accounts.   It  was  clear  the  PG&E  had  done  a  very  thorough 
job  of  saturating  the  community  with  pronuclear  material:  comic 
books  in  the  schools,  and  speakers  at  all  of  the  social  clubs.   I 
followed  it,  but  I  just  didn't  do  anything  about  it—couldn't 
afford  to. 

So  I  went  to  the  Sierra  Club--the  Sierra  Club,  by  this  time, 
was  opposed  to  it,  but  they  didn't  have  any  organization  or 
organizational  approach- -and  I  proposed  that  they  retain  me, 
through  the  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund,  which  had  just  been 
set  up  a  year  or  two  earlier.   John  Hoffman  was  the  executive 
director  or  whatever  his  title  was--it  was  Jim  Moorman  at  first, 
and  then  it  was  John  Hoffman--!  think  I  started  working  on  it 
when  Jim  Moorman  was  still  heading  the  organization.   I  knew  it 


'Loran  (derived  from  long  range  navigation)  measures  the  time-of- 
arrival  difference  between  two  signals  transmitted  from  two  geographically 
separated  ground  stations. 


122 


would  be  a  big  commitment  of  time,  and  so  I  went  to  Barney  and 
said,  "This  is  what  I  would  like  to  do,"  and  he  said,  "Sure,  as 
long  as  you  get  paid  for  it." 

Lage:     So  you  were  hired  as  a  member  of  the  law  firm? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   But  they  hired  me.   The  firm  infrastructure  backed  me  up--I 
didn't  use  any  of  the  people  in  the  law  firm.  Then  I  had  a  long 
talk  with  Julie  because  I  knew  what  kind  of  a  commitment  of  time 
this  would  be  and  I  wanted  to  get  her  approval.   So  we  went  for  a 
long  walk  up  in  Redwood  Park  and  I  told  her  that  this  was  what  I 
really  wanted  to  do.   She  gave  it  her  blessing,  so  then  I  was  on 
my  way. 

The  first  thing  I  did  was  some  community  organizing.   There 
were  already  people  who  had  protested,  and  I  helped  them  pull 
together  an  organization,  but  I  had  no  official  position  in  the 
organization.   I  brought  [Pierre]  Saint-Amand  back  to  take  a  look 
at  it,  and  he  flew  up  in  his  own  plane  and  took  a  look  at  it  and 
said  sure  it  was  a  lousy  site,  and  he  was  going  to  work  on  it. 

Let's  see,  how  did  that  develop?   That  was  1973,  I  think. 
Lage:     I  have  the  dates  '72- '73. 
Pesonen:   I  may  have  started  on  it  in  '72. 


A  Seismically  Interesting  Problem 


Pesonen:   That  was  seismically  a  very  interesting  problem.   The  site  was 
picked  because  it  was  on  a  high  marine  terrace  which  supposedly 
had  been  stable  for  a  very  long  time  and  had  no  evidence  of  any 
fracturing  through  it.   Quite  apart  from  Bodega.   It  was  in  a 
Franciscan  formation,  not  the  Bodega  granodiorite  formation  which 
also  forms  Point  Reyes.  The  San  Andreas  fault  doesn't  run  too 
far  from  that  site.   It  runs  inland.   The  Gualala  and  Garcia 
rivers  run  in  the  fault  zone;  that  is  why  those  two  rivers  run 
north  south,  right  parallel  to  the  coastline,  and  then  just  as 
they  get  near  their  mouth  within  a  mile  or  two  of  the  ocean,  they 
cut  off  and  discharge  into  the  ocean.   So  if  you  look  at  a  map, 
these  two  rivers  are  lined  up  like  two  match  sticks  in  a  line  and 
that  is  the  trace  of  the  San  Andreas  fault.   Then  it  runs  north, 
and  there  is  an  extension,  and  then  it  goes  out  to  sea.   It  goes 
out  to  sea  north  of  this  site  that  PG&E  had  selected. 


123 


I  got  to  looking  at  the  maps  and  driving  around  the  country 
and  looking  at  the  geology,  and  at  some  point  I  was  given  notice 
that  the  Atomic  Energy  Commission  siting  regulations  on  seismic 
hazards  were  being  amended.   They  didn't  hold  public  hearings  on 
these  things;  they  were  technical  meetings.   The  US  Geological 
Survey  was  brought  in  very  early  to  advise  the  AEC  on  its  new 
regulations.  And  so  I  was  invited  to  attend  some  of  those 
meetings  down  in  Menlo  Park — 

if 

Pesonen:   --which  I  did.  At  one  of  the  meetings,  one  of  the  USGS 

geologists  took  me  aside  as  we  were  walking  back  from  lunch  and 
told  me  that  they  had  found  some  evidence  that  the  site  had  been 
tilted  in  recent  geologic  times.   He  had  done  his  graduate  thesis 
on  that  area,  and  he  had  used  the  technique  of  using  aerial 
photos,  mainly,  to  measure  the  elevation  of  marine  terraces.   And 
he  had  found  through  some  technique  that  he  used  that  the  marine 
terraces  weren't  level  there. 

Well,  the  ocean  is  always  level.   So  if  the  ocean  was  level, 
and  the  marine  terraces  that  were  cut  by  the  ocean  in  recent 
geologic  times  were  not  level,  that  meant  that  the  ground  tipped, 
not  the  ocean,  which  was  an  enormously  interesting  fact  for  that 
site,  because  it  said  that  the  site  was  not  free  of  major  seismic 
disturbance.  And  it  had  been  touted  by  PG&E  as  a  place  that  was 
free  of  any  major  seismic  disturbances.   If  there  were  any 
disturbances,  they  would  be  on  the  fault  line  which  was  about  two 
miles  away.   The  plant  could  be  built  to  withstand  shaking,  but 
it  couldn't  be  built  to  withstand  tilting. 


Unfavorable  Publicity  and  PG&E's  Swift  Abandonment  of  Point 
Arena 


Pesonen:   I  took  this  information  to  a  reporter  on  the  San  Francisco 

Chronicle  whom  I  had  gotten  to  know  pretty  well,  and  it  took  him 
a  long  time  to  understand  it. 

Lage:     Who  was  this? 

Pesonen:   His  name  was  Dale  Champion,  and  I  think  he  is  retired  now.   I 
worked  with  Dale  to  educate  him  on  what  this  meant  for  this 
plant.   It  would  be  the  Achilles  heel  of  it;  this  would  kill  it. 
There  still  wasn't  much  publicity  on  the  plant,  it  was  very  early 
in  the  process.   PG&E  had  done  some  trenching  up  there  to  check 
for  fault  displacement  at  the  site.  Champion  finally  figured  it 


124 


out  and  finally  understood  what  I  was  talking  about  and  did  a 
very  good  job.  He  wrote  a  long  article  and  had  maps  prepared  and 
it  hit  the  front  pages  of  the  Chronicle,  I  think  it  was  December 
28th  or  29th  of  1973.   It  might  have  been  '74--I  would  have  to  go 
back  and  look  at  the  clippings. 

It  was  right  in  the  Christmas  holiday  season,  and  it  was  a 
good  story.   It  really  laid  out  in  good  laymen's  language  what 
had  been  discovered  by  this  USGS  seismologist  whom  I  had  met  in 
these  rule-making  meetings.   When  that  hit  the  papers,  I  heard 
through  some  grapevine,  I  don't  remember  where  it  was,  that  the 
president  of  PG&E  had  been  called  to  Washington  by  the  AEC  and 
that  there  was  a  high  level  meeting.  A  few  weeks  later,  they 
announced  that  they  were  dropping  plans  for  that  plant. 

Lage:     It  is  such  a  contrast  with  Bodega. 

Pesonen:  Well,  they  knew  I  was  involved,  and  there  was  this  mystique  about 
some  power  I  could  wield.   [laughter]   They  knew  that  the  facts 
were  there.   I  would  love  the  internal  memoranda  of  the  USGS  or 
the  Department  of  the  Interior  and  the  Atomic  Energy  Commission, 
but  I  haven't  seen  them.   We  have  that  article  from  the  Pacific 
Historical  Review  on  Bodega.   I  would  love  to  have  him  write  the 
same  kind  of  piece  on  what  happened  at  Point  Arena  because  I 
don't  really  know  what  happened. 

Lage:     Behind  the  scenes? 

Pesonen:   I  saw  it  from  the  outside.   But  I  know  what  the  result  was.   The 
result  was  a  very  swift  abandonment.   So  soon  that  it  never  had  a 
chance  to  build  up  to  being  a  public  issue.   I  take  credit  for 
that  because  I  was  the  one  who  got  in  early  and  because  of  my  . 
historic  role  at  Bodega  I  was  in  a  position  to  find  out  this 
information.   I  was  approached  by  the  geologist  because  he 
figured  I  could  do  something  about  it.   He  wasn't  going  to  go  to 
the  newspapers.   He  couldn't  do  that  in  his  position,  but  he  knew 
I  could.   He  was  very  professional  about  it.   He  never  was  an 
advocate.   He  just  said,  "Here  are  some  facts  that  you  may  find 
interesting."   I  knew  enough  to  know  that  when  somebody  in  that 
kind  of  position  told  me  that,  that  it  was  my  responsibility  to 
do  more  than  just  find  some  interest  in  it. 

So  that  was  the  first  real  environmental  action  that  I  took 
after  I  went  with  the  Garry  firm.   It  was  successful,  and  I  got  a 
lot  of  praise  for  it,  and  I  got  a  lot  of  satisfaction  out  of  it. 

Lage:     The  role  of  the  local  organizers  and  the  public  doesn't  seem  to 
be  great. 


125 


Pesonen:   Those  things  all  fit  together.   If  the  proposer  of  a  facility 

like  that  doesn't  feel  that  there  is  a  strong  local  opposition, 
if  they  figure  they  can  roll  over  it--.   Opposition  worries  them 
and  creates  a  lot  of  uncertainty  and  a  lot  of  opportunity  for 
delay  and  expense. 

Lage:     What  first  interested  you  in  the  Point  Arena? 
Pesonen:   Well,  it  was  the  "son  of  Bodega,"  in  a  way. 
Lage:     It  was  where  PG&E  moved  after  Bodega? 

Pesonen:   It  was  where  they  moved  after  Bodega.   It  was  going  to  be  a  lot 
bigger  plant.   It  was  a  two  thousand  megawatt  facility. 

Lage:     You  said  you  weren't  objecting  wholeheartedly  to  nuclear  power. 

Pesonen:   I  was  real  skeptical  of  nuclear  power,  particularly  in  the 
seismic  coast. 

Lage:     Were  you  getting  more  skeptical  as  time  went  on? 

Pesonen:   Yes. 

Lage:     You  said  with  Rancho  Seco  you  thought  it  was  okay. 

Pesonen:   There  were  just  a  lot  of  practical  reasons  I  couldn't  get 

involved  in  Rancho  Seco.   I  suppose--.   I  think  probably  because 
it  was  a  public  power  facility,  I  was  less  inclined.   It  was  not 
a  scenic  site,  it  didn't  use  ocean  water,  it  wasn't  in  a  seismic 
zone,  and  it  was  a  public  power  agency.  All  of  those  things 
together  made  me  less  enthusiastic  about  taking  that  one  on,  plus 
my  personal  circumstances,  which  was  the  overriding  factor.   Now, 
here  was  an  opportunity  to  make  a  little  living,  bring  some 
little  revenue  into  the  firm.   It  wasn't  very  much;  I  think  it 
was  twenty  five  dollars  an  hour  for  all  of  this  work,  and  I 
didn't  charge  for  a  lot  of  it--all  of  the  trips  up  there,  I 
didn't  charge  for  all  of  that  time. 

Lage:     Because  the  work  you  were  doing  wasn't  really  as  a  lawyer  so 
much.   Did  you  have  some  lawyering,  also? 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  did  do  some  lawyering  in  that  case.   Dow  Chemical  was  an 
intervener  in  the  AEC  license  proceedings  to  oppose  the  plant 
nominally.   Their  real  agenda  was  to  coerce--to  get  some  leverage 
on  PG&E  to  require  them  to  wheel  power  that  was  generated  by  Dow 
Chemical  plants  over  PG&E  lines  so  they  could  sell  cogeneration 
power.   I  brought  a  petition  on  behalf  of  Dow  Chemical  that  I 
filed  with  the--I  think  it  was  still  the  AEC  then—in  that 


126 


licensing  proceeding,  and  it  was  a  petition  for  Dow  Chemical  to 
be  allowed  to  intervene.   It  was  a  nice,  elegant  piece  of  legal 
work  in  antitrust  law,  and  the  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund  was 
very  impressed  with  it.   But  most  of  it  was  not  lawyering. 


The  Sierra  Club,  Ike  Livermore,  and  Nuclear  Power 


Pesonen:   There  was  another  element  to  that  case  that  did  involve  the 

Sierra  Club.   As  part  of  its  political  ground  laying,  PG&E  had 
approached  the  Resources  Agency  under  the  Reagan  administration, 
and  the  secretary  for  resources  then  was  Norman  "Ike"  Livermore, 
who  was  a  good  environmentalist,  a  liberal  Republican,  old 
California  family.   His  brother,  Putnam  Livermore,  was  very 
prominent  in  Republican  fund-raising  circles.   Ike  was  a  close 
friend  of  Ray  Sherwin,  who  was  then  the  president  of  the  Sierra 
Club.  Now,  Ray  Sherwin  was  a  superior  court  judge  in  Solano 
County,  and  I  worked  with  Ray--there  was  a  lot  of  work  with  the 
club  to  get  them  to  let  me  take  the  case,  a  lot  of  meetings. 

Lage:     To  get  them  committed  to  opposing  the  Point  Arena  plant? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  and  to  get  some  guidelines  on  what  my  responsibilities  were 
because  they  weren't  just  hiring  a  lawyer,  they  were  hiring  a 
lawyer  and  an  organizer.   I  wrote  a  pamphlet  which  was  used  as  an 
organizing  tool,  which  I  have  sent  you,  Power  at  Point  Arena 
[July  1972,  available  in  The  Bancroft  Library],  I  think  is  the 
name  of  it . 

The  Department  of  Fish  and  Game  had  agreed  not  to  oppose  the 
plant  before  the  PUC  or  the  Atomic  Energy  Commission  in  exchange 
for  PG&E  paying  for  a  lot  of  studies  of  the  effect  of  the  plant 
on  the  marine  environment.   It  was  a  mitigation.  And  the  quid 
pro  quo  for  their  mitigation  was  Fish  and  Game  silence.   Well,  I 
thought  that  was  illegal,  and  I  brought  suit  in  San  Francisco 
superior  court  against  PG&E  and  the  Department  of  Fish  and  Game 
to  invalidate  this  agreement  because  I  knew  there  were  staff 
people  in  the  Department  of  Fish  and  Game  whom  I  had  talked  to 
who  were  very  skeptical  of  this  plant  but  were  under  a  gag  order. 

Lage:     This  agreement  was  up  front?  Acknowledged? 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  hadn't  been  publicized  and  it  hadn't  been  published 

anyplace,  but  I  found  out  about  it  and  got  my  hands  on  a  copy  and 
brought  this  action  in  the  superior  court.   We  were  on  our  way 
into  the  courthouse  to  have  a  hearing  on  this  petition  when  PG&E 
decided  they  would  abandon  the  agreement  with  Fish  and  Game. 


127 


While  that  was  pending,  Ray  Sherwin  had  lunch  with  Ike 
Livermore  and  had  just  agreed  without  talking  to  me  that  we 
wouldn't  try  to  invalidate  this  agreement,  we  would  get  some 
other  benefit  out  of  them.   I  was  furious.   I  felt  they  just 
yanked  the  rug  out  from  under  me  on  an  approach  that  had 
political  and  legal  significance.   So  I  told  Ray,  "If  you  are 
going  to  do  this,  I  can't  represent  the  club.   I've  got  to  do 
something  else  because  I  can't  have  my  clients  going  off  and 
making  cozy  little  side  deals  that  undercut  my  lawsuits."  And  he 
apologized  and  agreed  that  it  was  wrong  and  called  Ike  and  said 
he  couldn't  keep  his  word  on  that  one.  And  it  was  all  fine.  We 
had  lunch  down  here  at  what  is  now  Skates,  but  it  used  to  be 
another  restaurant  down  there  on  the  Berkeley  waterfront.   Ray 
drove  all  the  way  down  from  court  in  Fairfield.   So  that  problem 
got  taken  care  of. 

There  were  little  anecdotes  like  that  that  sprinkled  through 
this  Point  Arena  case. 

Lage:     Now,  Ike  Livermore  tells  in  his  oral  history  a  little  anecdote, 
quite  fondly,  actually,  recalling  that  he  picked  up  the  papers 
one  day,  and  David  Pesonen  had  said,  "Ike  Livermore  ought  to  be 
sent  to  jail!"   [laughter]   Do  you  remember  this? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  don't  remember  it. 

Lage:     He  seemed  to  think  it  was  amusing. 

Pesonen:   You  know,  we  are  pretty  good  friends,  we've  been  on  some  pack 
trips  in  the  high  Sierra  together. 

Lage:     He  indicated  that,  but-- 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  might  have  said  something  like  that-- 

Lage:     It  had  to  do  with  the  site  selection  committee--the  way  that  the 
state  worked  with  PG&E  to  select  sites.   And  he  even  agreed  that 
probably  that  was  outdated,  outmoded.   But  he  had  participated  in 
it,  and  I  guess  a  site  was  selected;  the  state  signed  on  to  the 
Point  Arena  site. 


Pesonen:   I  think  it  did,  yes. 
Game. 


That  is  why  the  deal  was  done  with  Fish  and 


Well,  I  don't  remember  saying  that,  but  I  could  have.   A 
little  hyperbole  never  hurts,  if  you  want  ink.   I  certainly 
wanted  ink  on  that  case.   You  need  it.   Probably  other  things 
will  occur  to  me  about  Point  Arena,  but  I  don't  remember  what 
they  are  now. 


128 


Lage:     Did  you  work  very  much  with  other  Sierra  Club  entities  on  this? 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  worked  with  the  club's  publications  people  putting  that 
pamphlet  together. 

Lage:     Any  local  environmentalists  or  anything  like  that?  The  pamphlet 
acknowledges  "the  assistance  of  volunteer  members  of  the  energy 
subcommittee,  Northern  California  Regional  Conservation 
Committee. " 

Pesonen:   Yes.   That  was  a  volunteer  group.   There  was  a  young  woman  who 

headed  it  up  named  Joanne--!  don't  remember  her  last  name  now,  I 
haven't  seen  her  for  years.   They  were  kind  of  an  advisory  group. 
But  I  pretty  much  ran  it. 

Lage:     You  ran  the  show;  they  didn't  direct  it? 

Pesonen:   They  didn't  direct  it,  I  directed  it.   You  can't  have  committees 
run  these  things,  you  have  got  to  have  a  leader,  and  a  leader  who 
has  some  confidence  about  his  judgment.   I  knew  I  had  this 
mystique  about  me  from  Bodega,  and  I  knew  that  I  had  a  certain 
amount  of  clarity  of  what  the  strategy  should  be,  and  I  would 
call  on  them  for  help  in  implementing  the  strategy  and  for 
advice,  and  we  would  brainstorm  together,  but  once  decisions  were 
made,  I  put  the-- 

Lage:     Did  you  notice  during  the  Point  Arena  campaign  changes  in 
attitudes  toward  nuclear  power  in  general,  since  Bodega? 

Pesonen:   Well,  by  this  time  there  was  a  lot  of  skepticism  about  nuclear 
power.   It  had  really  changed  dramatically. 

Lage:     And  the  club  itself  had  changed.   It  hadn't  been  too  many  years 
before  when  they  had  the  big  fight  over  Diablo. 

Pesonen:   Well,  the  big  fight  over  Diablo  started  before  that,  in  the  club, 
that's  true.   The  big  public  fight  over  Diablo  started  later. 
The  internal  club  dispute  over  the  deal  that  was  struck  (that's 
maybe  too  harsh  a  term),  over  the  agreement  [in  1966]  that  the 
club  would  not  oppose  Diablo  in  exchange  for  PG&E  moving  from  the 
Nipomo  Dunes,  had  occurred  within  the  club  and  caused  the  rift 
which  led  to  David  Brewer's  departure  [1969).   But  I  was  not  very 
much  involved  in  that.  First  of  all,  I  didn't  want  to  get 
involved  in  an  internal  club  dispute;  I  didn't  see  any  point  in 
that.   There  was  nothing  that  I  could  add  to  that  that  would  be 
constructive,  so  I  stayed  out  of  that  controversy  pretty  much.   I 
watched  it  with  a  lot  of  interest,  but  I  had  no  role  to  play. 


Lage: 


It  was  complicated  enough. 


129 


Pesonen:   It  was  complicated,  and  it  was  full  of  politics  that  I  wasn't 

part  of.   I  have  never  been  much  of  a  joiner.   I  had  never  been 
an  officer  in  the  Sierra  Club;  I  wasn't  anything  but  a  member, 
paying  dues,  pretty  much.   But  as  a  public  controversy,  Diablo 
construction  hadn't  even  started  yet.  All  of  those  problems  with 
the  switched  plans  and  the  Hosgri  fault  discovery;  that  all  came 
later. 

Lage:     Did  you  get  involved  in  that  later  battle  at  Diablo  at  all? 

Pesonen:   Not  very  much.   I  went  down  and  talked  to  a  group  down  there  once 
during  the  Prop.  15  campaign,  and  I  had  a  very  interesting  time 
when  I  was  director  of  forestry  with  Diablo.   It  is  a  wonderful 
story. 

But  anyway,  that  is  Point  Arena  in  a  nutshell. 


Defending  Public  Access  to  Beaches 


Lage:     Well,  it  seems  like  a  story  you  could  tell  in  a  nutshell—it  is 
cleaner. 


Pesonen:   Yes,  it  was  clean  and  I  picked  all  of  the  meat  out  of  it. 

The  next  case  I  handled,  right  about  the  same  time,  for  the 
Legal  Defense  Fund,  involved  public  access  to  some  beaches  in 
Humboldt  county,  north  of  Petrolia.   There  was  a  retired 
gentleman  up  there,  who  heated  his  house  with  driftwood  that  he 
collected  off  the  beaches  in  his  old  jeep,  and  there  was  a 
rancher  up  there  named  Zanoni,  who  owned  a  beautiful  piece  of 
land  north  of  Petrolia  where  the  little  coastal  road  runs  right 
along  the  beach  for  ten  or  fifteen  miles. 

He  one  day  closed  the  fence  off  after  this  fellow  had  driven 
through,  and  then  threatened  him  with  a  shotgun  and  said  he 
couldn't  go  to  the  beach.   Well,  by  this  time  Gion-Dietz  had  been 
decided  and  the  Gion-Dietz  doctrine  had  been  established  in 
California  that  the  public  had  an  absolute  right  to  the  public 
trust  lands  to  mean  high  tide. 

Lage:     Now,  when  was  that  decided? 

Pesonen:   That  was  decided  in  the  sixties  sometime,  late  sixties  or  early 
seventies.   The  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund  came  to  me  and 
asked  me  if  I  would  like  to  handle  this  case,  and  I  did.   And 
again  it  was  another  one  of  these  things  at  twenty- five  dollars 


130 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


an  hour,  but  it  did  bring  in  a  little  money;  I  could  justify  it 
to  the  firm. 

That  was  a  very  interesting  case.   I  filed  suit  against  this 
rancher  that  he  was  illegally  barring  the  public  from  crossing 
his  land  to  get  to  the  public  land  on  the  beach.   He  hired  an 
old,  very  well-known  lawyer  in  Eureka  who  went  by  the  nickname 
"Moose".   He  still  has  an  office  right  across  the  street  from 
that  big  old  wonderful  Victorian  building,  the  Ingomar  Club. 
This  case  sort  of  kicked  around  in  the  Humboldt  County  Superior 
Court  for  a  while,  and  we  couldn't  seem  to  get  it  off  the  ground; 
we  took  some  depositions.   I  didn't  have  a  lot  of  time  to  spend 
on  it,  but  finally  I  got  to  the  point  where  I  proposed  that  we 
settle  it  with  some  easements  —  recorded  easements  across  this 
land—but  we  didn't  know  who  to  grant  the  easements  to.   We 
couldn't  grant  them  to  the  Sierra  Club,  so  I  brought  the  state 
attorney  general's  office  in,  persuaded  them  to  come  into  the 
case  and  be  the  recipient  on  behalf  of  the  people  of  the  state  of 
the  grant  of  the  easements.   So  we  laid  out  five  easements  and 
got  them  surveyed  and  Zanoni  signed  the  deeds,  we  dismissed  the 
case  and  we  all  went  away  happy. 

I  was  up  there  a  couple  of  weeks  ago,  and  I  presume  the 
easements  are  still  there,  but  there  are  no  signs;  there  is 
nothing  to  tell  the  public  that  they  can  get  out  of  their  car  and 
walk  across  these  little  strips  of  land  to  the  beach. 


That's  too  bad. 
of  all  of  that. 


I  thought  the  coastal  commission  had  taken  care 


Well,  nobody  did  anything  about  it,  I  guess.   I  probably  ought  to 
write  to  them  and  suggest  they  let  the  public  know  they  own  a 
little  piece  of  that  land  up  there.   That  was  fun. 


The  Widener  Case;  Another  Encounter  with  PG&E 


Pesonen:   Then,  because  of  all  of  my  notoriety,  one  day  this  guy  walks  into 
the  office  named  Don  Widener.   Widener  laid  out  a  story  that  just 
lit  my  eyes  up.   His  case  had  languished.   He  had  been  a 
television  producer  for  KNBC,  the  flagship  station  for  NBC 
[National  Broadcasting  Corporation]  in  Los  Angeles.   He  had 
started  out  as  a  little  publicity  writer.   He  had  a  brash, 
aggressive  personality  and  fine  eyes  for  muckraking,  and  was  not 
shy  about  going  out  and  trying  to  do  things.   He  had  talked  his 
boss  into  letting  him  take  a  crew  and  do  a  little  documentary  on 
pollution  in  Tijuana.   Tijuana  Brass  was  the  name  of  the  film;  it 


131 

was  just  a  short.  And  it  got  an  Emmy,  or  it  got  a  big  award,  so 
he  was  given  some  more  resources,  and  he  preempted  a  role  for 
himself  in  NBC  as  a  documentary  producer.   He  had  no  training  or 
background,  but  he  could  do  it.   He  befriended  movie  stars  to 
narrate  these  things  and  brought  in  a  lot  of  audience  for  that 
station.   Ed  Asner  narrated  one  of  his  films.  And  then  he  hooked 
up  with  Jack  Lemmon,  who  was  a  superstar. 

Jack  Lemmon  and  he  did  a  film  on  ocean  pollution  that  got  a 
bunch  of  awards ,  and  then  he  and  Lemmon  put  together  the  film 
called  Powers  That  Be,  which  was  about  nuclear  power.   It  was  the 
first  feature-length  documentary,  that  I  know  of,  done  by  a  major 
media  source  on  the  nuclear  power  controversy  as  it  was  bubbling 
across  the  country. 

Lage:     When  would  this  have  been? 

Pesonen:   The  film  was  produced  in  '72,  I  think.   In  the  film,  Widener  had 
read  in  a  Look  magazine  article  that  there  were  problems  with  the 
Humboldt  nuclear  plant:  that  it  was  leaking  radio- iodine,  that 
the  fuel  elements  were  cracking.   The  material  that  they  had 
originally  used  was  either  stainless  steel  or  a  zirconium  alloy, 
and  it  would  become  embrittled  in  the  high  intensity  neutron 
environment  in  the  core.   Radio-iodine  is  one  of  the  by-products 
of  fission,  and  there  were  rumors  and  reports  of  airborne 
contamination  of  radio-iodine.  Widener  called  the  company  and 
made  arrangements  to  interview  a  spokesperson  at  the  plant.   They 
were  right  in  the  control  room,  kept  all  the  atmosphere.   And  he 
interviewed  the  engineer  who  had  had  a  management  responsibility 
before  that  plant,  his  name  was  James  Carroll.   In  preparing  for 
the  interview,  they  talked  a  while  outside,  and  then  they  went 
into  this  control  room  and  Widener  hit  with  the  question  and 
said,  "Mr.  Carroll,  there  have  been  reports  of  problems  with  the 
fuel  elements  in  this  plant.   Can  you  comment  on  that?"   Carroll 
looked  right  into  the  camera  and  said,  "That  is  too  long  of  a 
question.   I  don't  think  we  can  answer  it." 

Widener  took  that  little  snippet  of  film  and  used  it  to 
introduce  his  whole  documentary.   After  this  shot  of  Carroll 
saying,  "Too  long  a  question,  I  don't  think  we  can  answer  it," 
the  film  cuts  to  Jack  Lemmon  who  raises  one  eyebrow  and  says, 
"Long  questions,  short  answers.   The  main  questions  about  nuclear 
power  are  accidents,  waste,  radioactivity."   It  was  clearly  a 
commentary  intended  to  show  Carroll,  and  PG&E  by  implication,  as 
being  evasive. 

Carroll  heard  about  it  at  a  conference  in  Chicago  from 
somebody  who  had  seen  the  finished  film  broadcast  at  prime  time 
in  Los  Angeles  and  told  him  he  looked  very  bad  and  looked 


132 

evasive.   Carroll—this  is  my  theory,  anyway--at  that  point  in 
his  career  saw  that  he  was  rising  into  the  executive  levels  of 
the  company  and  had  volunteered  to  be  the  spokesperson  for  the 
company  in  this  interview.   He  was  very  upset  and  elected  to 
write  a  letter  of  complaint  to  NBC  which  turned  out  to  be  a  far 
bigger  mistake  than  anything  ever  said  on  the  film.  He  accused 
Widener  of  having  secretly  taped,  off  camera,  a  conversation  in 
which  Carroll  had  said  these  words,  and  then  having  dubbed  the 
sound  track  into  Carroll's  visual,  camera  appearance.   Carroll 
denied  having  said  those  words  on  camera. 

Lage:     He  accused  him  of  not  having  had  that  on  camera? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   That  would  have  been  a  very  unethical  thing  to  do.   My 
theory  was,  and  I've  never  had  it  destroyed- -never  had  it 
questioned,  really—that  Carroll  submitted  a  draft  of  this  letter 
to  the  public  relations  department  of  NBC,  and  they  were  worried 
about  the  Widener  film.   They  still  had  plans  to  build  a  lot  of 
nuclear  power  plants,  and  the  prospect  of  a  major  network  program 
with  Jack  Lemmon  as  the  narrator  getting  national  attention  just 
when  the  nuclear  industry  was  taking  off  was  something  of  grave 
concern  to  the  public  relations  department.   So  they  approved 
this  letter  and  helped  him  edit  it.   It  went  through  four  or  five 
iterations. 

Widener  said  it  was  not  true,  it  couldn't  have  happened,  it 
has  just  destroyed  my  career- -he  never  got  any  more  work  with  NBC 
after  that.   He  was  broke,  living  out  of  a  suitcase.   He  was 
libeled;  he  was  defamed  by  that,  because  the  letter  was  sent  to 
everybody  who  could  in  any  way  bring  pressure  on  NBC.   It  was 
sent  to  the  congressional  committee  that  was  overseeing 
journalistic  ethics  at  that  time  because  there  were  complaints 
about  journalistic  coverage  of  the  Vietnam  war.   Spiro  Agnew  was 
vice  president  then;  you  remember  he  was  taking  after  CBS 
[Columbia  Broadcasting  System] .   The  president  of  CBS  had  been 
subpoenaed  before  Congress  about  the  way  its  reporters  were 
reporting.  They  supposedly  had  dubbed  some  words  of  General 
Westmoreland  when  he  was  in  Vietnam.   On  and  on  and  on.   The 
media  were  very  worried  that--.   I  mean,  I  can  remember  all  of 
that  controversy  going  on  back,  twenty  years  ago.   The  Nixon 
administration  had  a  concerted  strategy  to  suppress  full  coverage 
of  what  was  happening  in  Vietnam. 

The  Carroll  letter  came  along  right  in  the  midst  of  this 
sensitivity  and  worry  and  concern  on  the  part  of  the  major  media. 
And  they  are  not  courageous.   These  big  networks  are  not 
courageous;  they  are  a  business.   The  days  of  Edward  R.  Murrow 
are  gone.   That  kind  of  investigative  reporting  is  seldom  done. 
60  Minutes  is  more  of  a  People  magazine  tabloid  than  it  is 


133 


investigative  reporting  anymore, 
my  opinion,  now. 


** 


with  some  exceptions.   That  is 


Pesonen:   Copies  of  the  letter  were  sent  to  the  manager  of  the  NBC  station 
for  whom  Widener  had  worked.   They  were  sent  to  one  of  the  big 
brokers  of  advertising  accounts  in  New  York.   It  was  clearly  a 
concerted  campaign.   Copies  were  sent  to  the  Washington  lobbyists 
for  PG&E. 

Well,  I  didn't  know  all  of  that  when  Widener  first  walked 
in.   I  saw  the  letter,  and  I  saw  how  damaging  it  was  to  Widener 's 
career.   Widener  had  hired  a  lawyer  in  Los  Angeles  who  became  a 
judge  and  had  to  abandon  working  on  the  case,  and  the  case  was 
about  to  be  dismissed  for  lack  of  prosecution,  and  he  was 
worried.   He  knew  it  was  about  to  be  dismissed.   PG&E  had  had  it 
transferred  to  San  Francisco  on  a  change  of  venue  motion  of  some 
kind  that  they  had  won.   So  it  was  just  languishing  over  in  the 
superior  court  in  San  Francisco.   Widener  had  gone  to  four  or 
five  lawyers  and  they  had  said,  "Well,  you  have  got  an 
interesting  case,"  but  they  didn't  want  to  take  it. 

Lage:     He  probably  couldn't  even  offer  the  twenty- five  dollars  an  hour. 

Pesonen:   He  couldn't  offer  any  money.   He  was  looking  for  a  lawyer  who 

would  take  it  on  a  straight  contingency,  and  nobody  was  willing 
to  do  it.  But  I  saw  more  than  just  the  lawsuit  in  this.  I  saw 
this  as  a  vehicle  for  a  lot  of  things  that  I  cared  about.  So  I 
said  I  would  take  the  case,  but  it  was  subject  to  approval  from 
the  partners  of  the  firm. 


A  Libel  Case  in  the  Interests  of  Free  Speech 


Pesonen:   I  went  to  Barney  and  Charlie  and  Frank,  and  they  were  skeptical 
of  it.   I  had  a  copy  of  the  film  and  I  showed  them  the  film. 

Lage:     Now,  why  were  they  skeptical? 

Pesonen:  Well,  libel  is  not  a  favored  area  of  the  law,  because  it  is 

intended  to  suppress  speech.   I  saw  a  great  irony  in  this.   Here 
was  a  libel  case,  which  has  usually  been  seen  as  a  way  of 
shutting  people  up,  sanctioning  them  for  speaking  too  freely  and 
too  vividly  and  untruthfully  sometimes  —  sometimes  you  skirt  the 
truth  when  you  get  excited.  As  the  Supreme  Court  said  in  the  New 
York  Times  case,  speech  should  be  robust  and  wide  open.   So  they 


134 


were--.   And  libel  suits  historically  had  often  been  a  tool  of 
repression.   So  they  were  philosophically  uneasy  with  a  libel 
suit.   I  said  here  was  a  great  irony:  here  was  a  libel  used  to 
suppress  speech.   I  knew  of  no  case,  historically,  where  it  had 
been  used  for  the  opposite  effect,  where  a  libel  suit  had  been 
used  to  promote  free  speech.   So  I  was  very  intrigued  with  it 
just  as  a  philosophical  matter,  as  a  legal  matter,  and  as  a 
political  matter. 

They  finally  agreed  that  I  could  take  the  case  if  I  could 
raise  twenty- five  thousand  dollars  as  a  fund  for  costs.   Widener 
didn't  have  that,  so  we  went  to  the  antinuclear  community, 
nationwide.   Barney  had  some  connections,  the  publisher  of 
Scientific  American,  and  I  went  to  some  other  people  who  may  not 
want  their  names  used,  but  I  suppose  it  doesn't  make  any 
difference.   Henry  Kendall,  who  had  been  one  of  the  founders  of 
the  Union  of  Concerned  Scientists  in  Massachusetts,  who  was  an 
MIT  professor  of  physics,  and  who  recently  won  the  Nobel  Prize, 
was  a  friend  of  mine  and  he  put  up  some  money- -he  also  had  a  lot 
of  independent  family  wealth. 

Lage:     Was  he  a  friend  through  your  inquiries  into  nuclear  power? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   By  that  time  we  already  had  the  first  meeting  at  his  house 
that  led  to  Proposition  15.   So  he  was  a  good  ally  and  colleague 
in  the  antinuclear-power  movement.   He  put  up  some  money,  and  we 
got  money  from  three  or  four  other  sources,  mostly  through 
Barney's  efforts,  and  when  the  twenty- five  thousand  was  in  the 
bank,  I  told  Widener,  "Okay,  we'll  go  with  it." 

The  first  thing  I  did  was  move  to  get  it  back  on  the  trial 
scheduling  calendar  and  get  some  more  time  on  it  and  defeat  the 
pending  motion  from  PG&E  to  dismiss  it  for  lack  of  prosecution. 
So  I  got  it  back  on  track,  procedurally,  in  the  court.   Then  I 
noticed  Carroll's  deposition,  and  I  took  Carroll's  deposition  in 
my  office,  and  I  requested  that  he  bring  all  papers  that  he  had. 
That  company  is  so  arrogant,  or  was  at  that  time,  that  they 
didn't  look  at  Carroll's  file. 

Lage:     They  just  sent  it  along? 

Pesonen:   He  just  walked  in  with  it;  he  walked  in  carrying  this  little 

manila  folder.   And  we  sat  down  at  a  table  and  started.   There 
were  two  lawyers  representing  him,  one  for  PG&E  and  one  for  him 
personally.   I  said,  "Did  you  bring  some  papers  with  you?"  and  he 
said,  "Yes,"  and  hands  over  this  little  file.   I  started  going 
through  it  and  here  were  all  kinds  of  smoking  guns.   Here  were 
the  notes  from  the  Washington  lobbyist  for  PG&E  saying  that  he 
had  talked  with  the  staff  of  the  house  committee  which  was 


135 


involved  in  media  ethics  at  that  point — I  don't  remember  the  name 
of  the  committee--and  said,  "He  tells  us  we  are  all  wet--they 
investigated  this—but  the  fact  that  NBC  is  scared  is  just  what 
we  wanted."  All  kinds  of  stuff  like  that. 

Lage:     It  is  kind  of  amazing  that  they-- 

Pesonen:  And  all  of  the  iterations  of  this  letter,  from  the  first  draft 
that  Carroll  had  drafted  on  his  kitchen  table,  to  the  final 
version  that  went  out  to  all  of  these  high  mucky-mucks.   The  file 
was  full  of  revelations.   And  the  two  lawyers  for  PG&E  and 
Carroll  began  to  figure  out  that  they  made  a  terrible  mistake.   I 
just  walked  out  of  the  room  with  the  folder  and  went  down  the 
hall  and  copied  it  all  and  then  gave  it  back  to  him.   Any  good 
corporate  lawyer  would  have  sanitized  that  file. 

Lage:     And  then  could  you  have  subpoenaed  for  more? 

Pesonen:   It  might  not  have  been  an  ethical  thing  to  do,  but  I  never  would 
have  found  out  about  it,  and  I  never  would  have  done  anything 
about  it.   Sure,  I  could  have  subpoenaed  that  record,  but  by  the 
time  I  had  done  it,  it  would  have  disappeared.   So  that  was  a 
very  expensive  mistake.   And  very  bad  lawyering  on  their  part. 

Well,  I  had  what  I  needed.   I  pretty  much  had  the  proof  by 
that  point  that  there  was  a  malicious  intent,  there  was  knowledge 
of  falsity,  and  there  was  falsity, and  there  was  some  sense  that 
Widener  had  been  damaged.  Whether  Widener  really  was  damaged  was 
the  weak  point  in  the  case  which  the  PG&E  lawyer  and  Carroll's 
lawyer  never  figured  out. 

Lage:     They  never  attacked  that? 

Pesonen:   No.   Because  I  think  Widener  was  such  a  brash,  impossible  person 
who  always  went  over  budget,  that  NBC  wouldn't  have  hired  him 
again  anyway.   I  don't  know  that  for  a  fact. 

Lage:     But  they  hired  him  for  so  many  before  that. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  but  this  was  the  third  of  a  contract — of  three  that  he  was 
contracted  to  do.   I  have  no  evidence  that  they  would  have  gone 
into  a  new  contract  with  him.   I  suspect  that  they  wouldn't  have. 
He  was  a  thorn  in  their  side.   He  was  an  agitator.   A  very  good 
agitator,  but  he  didn't  fit  with  the  corporate  system.   His 
expense  accounts  never  added  up.   When  he  got  his  eye  on  a  film, 
he  just  spent  money,  to  hire  airplanes,  fly  crews  all  over  the 
world,  and  do  whatever  needed  to  be  done  to  make  it  a  good  film. 
That  just  didn't  sit  well  with  corporate  management.   I  think 
they  were  going  to  let  that  contract  run  out  and  not  use  him 


136 


again.   Although  they  might  not  have  fired  him,  they  might  have 
given  him  a  lower  level  job  in  the  operation.   But  PG&E  never 
figured  out  that  they  could  weaken  this  case  by  showing  that 
Widener  wasn't  really  damaged  even  though  it  was  a  libel. 


A  Corrupt  Judge,  a  Sympathetic  Jury,  a  Final  Settlement 


Pesonen:   So  we  took  it  to  trial  finally,  in  superior  court,  and  it  was 

about  a  six-week  jury  trial.   Unfortunately,  it  was  heard  before 
a  judge  who  had  come  back  from  semiretirement,  Byron  Arnold,  a 
corrupt,  old,  former  member  of  the  board  of  supervisors,  old-line 
San  Francisco--a  lot  of  business  connections.   And  Arnold  was 
hostile  from  day  one.   I  should  have  challenged  him  and  not  had 
it  go  to  him,  but  I  was  too  naive  and  young,  and  I  thought  he 
would  at  least  follow  the  law.   It  became  clear  to  him  as  the 
trial  progressed  that  I  was  going  to  win,  and  I  was  going  to  win 
big.   He  tried  to  dismiss  the  case  before  it  got  to  the  jury,  and 
I  brought  in  an  expert  on  libel  law  from  Hastings,  an  old  guy  who 
had  just  written  a  book  on  it,  Laurence  H.  Eldredge,  who  was 
about  Arnold's  age,  and  he  looked  a  lot  like  Byron  Arnold.   He 
had  just  published  a  textbook,  The  Law  of  Defamation.   He  came 
and  argued  it  with  me,  and  Arnold  decided  to  let  the  case  get  to 
the  jury. 

The  jury  came  back  after  deliberating  about  a  day  with  a 
unanimous  verdict  of  $750,000  compensatory  damages  for  Widener 
and  $7  million  in  punitive  damages.   It  was  the  biggest  verdict 
ever  for  an  individual  plaintiff  in  the  history  of  the  common 
law,  up  to  that  time. 

Lage:     What  did  you  ask  for? 

Pesonen:   I  asked  for  about  that.   I  said  a  million  in  compensation  for 
harm  to  Widener 's  professional  reputation  and  $7  million  in 
punitive  damages.   They  didn't  give  me  quite  the  million.   I 
hadn't  put  in  much  evidence  on  damages.   I  had  Jack  Lemmon 
testifying  that  Widener  was  one  of  the  finest  documentary 
producers  he  had  ever  seen  and  had  a  high  reputation  in  the  film 
community,  all  of  which  was  pretty  shaky.  And  I  think  the  jury 
saw  that  Widener--.   But  they  liked  Widener,  and  they  liked  his 
wife,  who  sat  in  the  courtroom  throughout  the  proceedings  and 
testified  a  little  bit. 


There  was  just  a  flurry  of  dismay  in  the  room  at  the 
verdict.   Arnold  got  up  off  the  bench  and  walked  out  of  the 
courtroom  without  saying  a  word  to  anybody  after  that  verdict. 


137 


don't  think  he  even  said,  "Thank  you"  to  the  jury.   He  was 
plainly  emotionally  upset.   And  of  course  PG&E  immediately 
brought  a  motion  for  a  new  trial  and  to  overturn  the  verdict,  and 
Arnold  granted  them  all.   He  granted  judgment  for  PG&E  against 
Widener--they  had  a  cross-complaint  that  he  had  maliciously 
prosecuted  this  case  against  Carroll  and  that  he  had  libeled 
Carroll.   It  was  a  frivolous  strategy.   But  PG&E  went  out  of 
there  after  Arnold  got  through  with  it  with  a  clean  sweep.   I 
took  it  up  to  the  court  of  appeal  and-- 

Lage:     So  you  ended  up  having  to  appeal  it  when  you  had  won? 

Pesonen:   I  had  to  appeal.   I  had  to  appeal  to  get  the  right  to  try  it 
again. 

Lage:     I  don't  understand  how  the  jury  can  make  a  decision  and  then  the 
judge  can  overturn  it. 

Pesonen:   Under  rare  circumstances,  if  the  judge  thinks  that  jury  has  just 
run  away  and  ignored  the  law,  he  can  overturn  their  verdict.   It 
is  supposed  to  be  a  very  narrow  standard  set  up  for  the  rare  case 
when  something  goes  awry,  but  it  is  very  hard  to  control  that  if 
you've  got  a  corrupt  judge.  And  he  hadn't  followed  the  right 
standards,  so  when  he  granted  judgment  for  PG&E,  that  was 
reversed,  but  the  standard  on  a  new  trial  is  a  broader  standard; 
more  flexible.  And  the  court  affirmed  the  new  trial  order  so  it 
was  sent  back  for  a  new  trial. 

By  this  time,  PG&E  had  wised  up,  and  they  hired  a  very  good 
lawyer,  Ed  [Edwin]  Heafey,  Jr.,  who  had  written  the  book  on  trial 
practices  for  CEB  [Continuing  Education  of  the  Bar] .   We  spent  a 
lot  of  time  trying  to  get  that  case  to  trial  again.   He  took 
depositions  all  over  Hollywood  and  all  over  Los  Angeles,  from 
anybody  in  the  film  community  about  Widener's  reputation.   He 
spotted  the  weakness  in  the  case,  which  was  Widener's  damages. 
We  finally  got  sent  back  to  trial  before  Judge  Eugene  Lynch,  who 
is  now  on  the  federal  court,  and  Lynch  said  that  we  ought  to  try 
to  settle  this  case.   We  spent  about  a  week  on  various  motions 
and  settlement  discussions  and  finally  settled  it  for  $500,000, 
which  was  still  a  lot  of  money. 

Lage:     Yes.   Not  seven  million,  but-- 

Pesonen:   But  it  is  not  seven  million.   But  if  I  had  tried  that  case  before 
a  different  judge  at  that  time,  I  would  be  a  wealthy  man  today, 
because  I  had  it  on  a  40  percent  contingency. 


Lage: 


Was  the  $500,000  punitive  damages? 


138 


Pesonen:   No,  we  didn't  characterize  it  one  way  or  another.   It  was 

supposed  to  be  confidential,  more  or  less.   Fifteen  years  ago,  I 
don't  think  anybody  cares  now.   So  that  is  the  end  of  the  Widener 
saga.  Well,  not  quite  the  end. 

Lage:     This  must  have  endeared  you  even  more  to  PG&E. 

Pesonen:   Yes.  Well,  Widener  immediately  went  out  and  bought  a  new  Lincoln 
Continental  [laughter],  and  then  he  bought  a  big  house  up  in  Lake 
Arrowhead,  and  then  he  lost  it  all.   I've  lost  touch  with  him; 
I've  tried  to  track  him  down.   I  am  told  he  is  sort  of  living 
hand-to-mouth  from  one  motel  room  to  another,  but  he  was  always 
in  Jack  Lemmon's  office  all  of  the  time.   Jack  Lemmon's  secretary 
and  I  got  to  know  each  other,  and  she's  lost  track  of  him;  she 
doesn't  know  where  he  is  now. 

Lage:     He  never  got  back  into  the  documentary  film  business? 

Pesonen:  No.  I  don't  know  what  he  did  after  that.  He  didn't  do  much.  I 
had  dinner  with  him  once  at  Lake  Arrowhead  about  1980  or  so,  but 
I  understand  he  has  lost  all  of  that. 

He  did  do  me  one  favor.   In  1983--I  think  it  was  the  fall  of 
1983--when  I  was  gearing  up  to  run  for  reelection  as  a  judge, 
Senator  [John  A.]  Nejedly  threw  a  big  party  for  me  at  his  hilltop 
place  out  in  Walnut  Creek,  and  Don  Widener  got  Jack  Lemmon  to  fly 
up  and  speak  at  it.   That  was  pretty  nice.   I  think  I  am  not 
remembered  for  any  judicial  act  I  did  in  Contra  Costa  County  in 
the  two  years  that  I  was  a  judge  out  there  as  much  as  I  am 
remembered  as  the  guy  that  got  Jack  Lemmon  to  come  to  Contra 
Costa.   [laughter] 


Defense  of  Mount  Sutro  and  the  City  of  Davis 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Any  other  cases  we  should  talk  about  before  we  get  into  the 
nuclear  safeguards  initiative?  We  have  the  Mount  Sutro  Defense 
Committee  v.  Regents  of  the  University  of  California. 


Yes,  that  was  a  good  case, 
pretty  good  case. 


and  the  City  of  Davis  case  was  a 


The  Mount  Sutro  Defense  Committee  case  came  along  right 
about  the  same  time  as  the  Widener  case,  and  it  involved  the 
plans  of  the  University's  medical  center  to  expand  enormously  in 
San  Francisco:  to  add  a  whole  new  wing  to  the  Moffitt  Hospital, 
to  build  a  whole  new  dental  school.   It  is  in  a  very  compacted 


139 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


area,  near  Golden  Gate  Park  in  the  Haight-Ashbury  part  of  San 
Francisco,  and  the  community  was  up  in  arms  about  the  impact  of 
congestion. 

I  filed  an  action  under  the  California  Environmental  Quality 
Act  to  enjoin  the  whole  project  because  it  was  not  consistent 
with  the  long  range  development  plan  of  the  University  or  CEQA. 
I  tried  that  before  Ira  Brown.   The  University  was  represented  by 
the  general  counsel  for  the  regents  and  the  firm  of,  it  was  then 
Howard,  Prim,  Rice  &  Nemerovski.   Stewart  Pollock  handled  the 
case;  he  is  now  a  superior  court  judge  in  San  Francisco.   I  tried 
it  on  a  novel  theory  that  I  don't  think  Stewart  figured  out  until 
we  were  near  the  end  of  trial.   Lo  and  behold,  a  week  after  the 
Widener  verdict,  Judge  Brown  issues  his  decision  granting  the 
injunction  and  stopping  the  whole  construction  plan  out  there  at 
the  University.   So  within  a  week  I  had  these  two  front-page 
stories  of  legal  triumphs. 

Well,  the  University  appealed  immediately  and  brought  a 
special  kind  of  petition,  a  petition  of  a  writ  of  certiorari,  I 
think,  which  is  very  odd,  or  a  writ  of  quorum  nobis.   I  don't 
remember  what  the  writ  was.   It  was  an  unusual  writ,  and  they 
finally  prevailed  in  the  court  of  appeal,  and  by  this  time  the 
University  had  modified  its  design  plans  and  modified  the  design 
of  the  dental  school  so  that  it  sloped  into  the  hill  and  did  some 
visual  cosmetics  on  this  thing.   But  I  met  a  lot  of  people  in 
that  case,  and  I  represented  a  lot  of  community  organizations  and 
had  quite  a  following  in  San  Francisco.   That  is  why  I  was  going 
to  be  a  superior  court  judge  in  San  Francisco,  because  I  had 
political  support. 


Instead  of  Contra  Costa? 

That  is  a  whole  other  story, 
County. 


how  I  ended  up  in  Contra  Costa 


In  a  nutshell,  that  is  what  that  case  was  about. 

But  there  is  something  to  the  unusual  approach  you  used?   You 
said  you  had  used  a  certain  theory  that  the  other  lawyer  didn't 
catch  onto. 


Pesonen:   Yes,  it  was  the  theory  that  they  had  to  do  their  environmental 
impact  statement  before  they  went  to  the  legislature  for  their 
budget  appropriation,  and  I  persuaded  Judge  Brown  that  I  was 
right.   If  I  was  right,  it  would  have  brought  this  state  to  a 
halt.   [laughter] 


Lage: 


I  love  your  comments  after  the  fact. 


140 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Knowing  a  little  more  about  how  government  works  now,  it  just 
would  have  been  unworkable.  The  legislature  would  have  amended 
the  statute  if  the  courts  had  interpreted  it  the  way  I  thought  it 
should  be  interpreted.   But  the  language  supported  my 
interpretation,  and  the  evidence,  as  it  went  in,  was  consistent 
with  it. 

The  City  of  Davis  case  involved  an  overpass  called  the 
Kidwell  Road  overpass  which  was  to  connect  two  tomato  fields  on 
both  sides  of  Interstate  80,  when  Interstate  80  was  being 
completed  from  the  Dixon  Road  turnoff  into  the  city  of  Davis, 
where  Highway  113  takes  off  and  goes  north,  the  major 
reconstruction  of  that  highway.   The  Solano  County  development 
department  had  proposed  to  Caltrans  that  they  build  this 
overpass,  and  they  had  promoted  it  as  an  industrial  site;  that 
people  could  work  at  this  industrial  site  and  live  in  Davis, 
which  had  good  schools,  good  libraries,  and  a  fine  ambiance.   But 
all  of  the  taxes  would  go  to  Solano  County,  and  all  of  the  burden 
would  fall  on  the  City  of  Davis  and  Yolo  County.   There  is  a 
county  line  running  right  down  Putah  Creek,  just  a  couple  of 
hundred  yards  beyond  this  overpass. 

The  Federal  Highway  Administration  came  in  and  opposed  me, 
and  Caltrans  opposed  me,  and  the  contractor  hired  a  big  lawyer  to 
oppose  me,  and  I  brought  a  suit  in  the  federal  court  in 
Sacramento  in  front  of  Judge  Wilkins.   I  tried  it  by  myself  and, 
to  my  surprise,  Judge  Wilkins  issued  an  injunction,  a  temporary 
injunction.   Construction  was  underway;  they  had  piled  the  dirt 
up,  and  pile  drivers  were  out  there  for  the  center  piers.   When 
the  court  issued  that  decision,  I  remember  stopping  by  and 
talking  with  the  project  manager  and  I  said,  "Sorry,  the  court 
just  told  you  you  have  got  to  quit."  He  wasn't  too  happy  about 
it. 

After  six  or  eight  months,  they  issued  a  revised 
environmental  statement,  and  the  judge  dissolved  the  injunction, 
and  so  I  brought  a  petition  in  the  Ninth  Circuit  Court  of  Appeals 
to  reinstate  the  injunction  and  immediately  they  did  so.   They 
issued  an  injunction,  reinstated  the  order  until  further 
proceedings.   Well,  there  were  no  further  proceedings  until  a 
full  environmental  impact  had  been  done.   Well,  they  never  did 
one. 


Was  that  the  grounds  that  you  had? 
had  not  been--? 


That  the  environmental  impact 


There  had  to  be  a  full  environmental  impact  statement.   I  showed 
that  their  intention  was  to  build  this  industrial  facility  and 
that  has  a  major  environmental  impact,  and  they  had  ignored  it  in 


141 


their  environmental  statements.   It  was  part  of  a  scheme  by  the 
adjoining  county  to  rip  off  the  other  county.   That  was  why  the 
City  of  Davis  was  my  client.   They  saw  what  was  happening:  they 
were  going  to  get  a  bigger  demand  on  their  public  services  and  no 
way  to  pay  for  it . 

I  charged  $5,000  for  that  case;  that  is  all  I  ever  got.   I 
think  all  I  ever  got  was  $2,000  for  the  Mount  Sutro  case.   I  was 
a  lousy  businessman.   [laughter] 

Lage:     So  you  charged  just  a  flat  fee  on  those? 

Pesonen:   I  charged  a  flat  fee. 

Lage:     How  did  the  City  of  Davis  happen  to  come  to  you? 

Pesonen:   A  city  councilman  was  somebody  I  had  met  through  the  antinuclear 
movement,  Bob  Black,  who  later  went  on  to  the  board  of 
supervisors  in  Yolo  County.   I  guess  I  told  him  I  could  do  a  good 
job,  and  I  did.   But  I  didn't  make  any  money  on  that  case.   I 
didn't  make  any  money  on  any  of  these  cases,  just  a  little  bit  on 
the  Widener  case. 

Only  recently,  only  within  the  last  couple  of  months,  has 
something  happened.   I  am  not  involved  in  it  any  more,  but  they 
have  apparently  satisfied  the  City  of  Davis  or  somebody  that 
their  environmental  documents  are  okay,  so  after  seventeen  years, 
they  are  finally  building  the  Kidwell  Road  interchange,  which 
doesn't  go  to  anyplace. 

Lage:     There  will  probably  be  a  new  factory  outlet  center  or  something. 
Pesonen:   There  will  probably  be  a  new  factory  outlet  there,  sure. 
Lage:     What  was  "in  the  matter  of  PG&E"  at  Humboldt? 

Pesonen:   Well,  starting  in  about  1975  or  '76,  there  was  a  Forest  Service 

geologist  up  in  Eureka  who  discovered  that  there  was  some  serious 
faulting  in  the  vicinity  of  the  Humboldt  Bay  nuclear  power  plant, 
which  had  always  been  erratic  in  its  operation  anyway. 

Lage:     And  it  was  an  early  one? 

Pesonen:   It  was  the  first  real  commercial  sized  plant  —  sixty  megawatts,  I 
think.   It  was  not  a  very  big  plant,  but  it  was  an  operating 
nuclear  power  plant,  and  it  was  very  valuable  public  relations, 
and  it  did  produce  electricity.   They  probably  never  made  any 
money  on  it.   It  was  an  old  General  Electric  pressure-suppression 
safety  device,  a  very  primitive  design  from  a  safety  point  of 


142 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


view.   On  the  other  hand,  it  wasn't  very  big,  so  it  would  be  less 
likely  to  melt  down.   But  it  was  a  hazard,  so  we  brought  a 
petition  before  the  Nuclear  Regulatory  Commission--!  think  that 
is  what  it  was  called  then.   That  agency  has  gone  through  a 
couple  of  modifications;  the  AEC  was  abolished  in  "74- '75  and  its 
regulatory  role  was  split  off  from  its  promotional  role,  and  then 
there  was  another  change  and  I  have  sort  of  lost  track  of  what 
they  all  were,  but  we  brought  the  petition  before  whoever  had  the 
licensing  authority  over  the  operation--to  shut  it  down,  because 
of  this  newly  discovered  evidence  of  seismic  hazards.   That 
kicked  around  for  quite  a  while  and  finally  they  shut  them  down 
in  1979. 


So  this  wasn't  a  law  case? 
administrative? 


I  mean,  in  legal  court.   It  was  an 


It  was  an  administrative  petition.   I  didn't  see  that  quite  to 
the  end  because  I  got  appointed  director  of  forestry  before  it 
was  over.   It  was  over  in  late  "79,  and  I  got  appointed  in  April 
of  '79  to  the  Department  of  Forestry. 


The  Disturbing  Saga  of  Charles  Garry  and  the  People's  Temple 


Lage:     Before  we  go  on  to  the  Department  of  Forestry  and  the  Board  of 
Forestry,  let's  talk  a  little  more  about  the  Garry  firm  and  the 
People's  Temple  connection. 

Pesonen:   Well,  as  the  years  went  by,  Charlie  Garry—from  his  celebrity 
around  his  involvement  with  the  Panthers  and  his  successful 
defense  of  Huey  Newton  on  the  retrial  after  the  court  of  appeals 
reversed  the  first  conviction—became,  I  thought,  pretty  much 
enamored  of  his  public  image.   Hungry  for  publicity,  his  judgment 
began  to  deteriorate,  in  my  opinion. 

Lage:     How  old  was  he  by  this  time? 

Pesonen:   Oh,  he  was  in  his  sixties.   He  wasn't  bringing  in  much  business. 
I  was  trying  to  bring  in  some  business  and  pay  my  way  and  help 
pay  the  overhead;  I  was  never  a  big  rainmaker  with  big  money- 
making  cases.   Al  Brotsky  was  the  real  businessman  in  the  office, 
and  Barney,  because  of  his  reputation,  brought  in  a  lot  of 
business,  and  Frank  McTernan  had  a  steady  clientele,  but  Charlie 
began  to  be  kind  of  a  drag.   He  would  get  some  criminal  case  from 
a  drug  dealer,  who  would  give  him  five  thousand  in  cash  and  he'd 
come  down  to  us  and  say,  "Here,  I  got  this  money."  You  could 


143 


tell  he  was  feeling  a  little  defensive  about  it  himself.   He'd 
have  rolls  of  bills  stashed  in  the  light  fixtures. 

I  began  to  get  pretty  troubled  about  it.   But  I  didn't  do 
anything  about  it.   I  had  been  with  the  firm  eight  or  nine  years, 
and  it  wasn't  that  bad. 

Lage:     Are  you  pretty  independent  in  a  situation  like  that? 

Pesonen:  Yes,  we  all  had  kind  of  our  own  individual  practices.  It  was  not 
a  cohesive  business.  We  managed  all  our  business  together,  but 
we  didn't  make  decisions  collectively  very  much;  we  had  our  own 
sets  of  clients  and  our  own  kinds  of  cases  that  we  handled,  and 
we  would  refer  cases  back  and  forth  among  ourselves  in  the  firm 
depending  on  the  expertise  of  the  various  lawyers. 

It  began  to  really  trouble  me  when  Charlie  represented  some 
guy  who  was  involved  in  drugs  and  couldn't  pay  his  fees,  so  he 
gave  Charlie  his  Jaguar  as  the  fee.   Charlie  just  took  the 
Jaguar.   It  was  an  asset  that  he  just  took  for  himself;  we  didn't 
collectively  get  the  benefit  of  it.   And  he  started  to  do  things 
like  that.   It's  not  good  business  and  not  fair  to  the  rest  of 
us,  we  felt--I  felt  that  probably  more  strongly  than  anybody  else 
because  I  could  see  that  I  was  never  going  to  make  very  much 
money  in  that  firm,  and  I  was  getting  old  enough  that  I  was 
beginning  to  worry  that  I  had  kids  now  who  might  one  day  go  to 
college-- 


Pesonen:   I  was  not  making  a  lot  of  money,  and  I  never  expected  to  make  a 
lot  of  money  when  I  started  there,  but  you  change  as  you  get 
older  and  you  get  responsibilities.   So  I  just  didn't  see  that 
there  was  any  future  for  me  there,  but  I  didn't  know  what  else  to 
do.   So  the  thought  kind  of  nagged  at  me,  and  I  put  it  out  of  my 
mind. 


First  Suspicion  of  Evil  in  the  Temple 


Pesonen:   I  knew  Charlie  was  involved  with  the  People's  Temple.   The 

People's  Temple  was  politically  very  celebrated  in  the  city. 
This  guy  Jim  Jones  could  turn  out  precinct  workers  by  the 
hundreds  for  any  local  candidate  for  the  board  of  supervisors, 

Lage:     He  was  really  relied  on  by  a  lot  of  the  establishment. 


144 


Pesonen:   He  was  relied  on  by  the  liberal  establishment.   He  had  a  lot  of 
charisma,  and  he  had  a  loyal  following,  and  it  seemed  as  though 
he  was  doing  good  things.   He  was  a  minister  who  talked  the  right 
line.  And,  of  course,  Charlie  got  involved  with  him  immediately, 
because  Jim  Jones  was  always  in  the  newspapers,  and  Charlie 
wanted  to  be  in  the  newspapers.  But  I  really  didn't  have  much  to 
do  with  it. 


Lage: 


So  one  day  Charlie  came  to  me  and  said  that  he  would  like  me 
to  handle  some  libel  cases  involving  the  People's  Temple  because 
I  was  the  libel  expert,  from  the  Widener  case.   They  were  cases 
involving  the  parents  of  children  who  were—by  this  time  the 
temple  had  moved  to  Guyana.   Jim  Jones  had  gone  to  Guyana,  and 
there  had  been  some  articles  appearing  that  things  were  not  what 
they  appeared  with  Jim  Jones,  that  he  coerced  and  sexually  abused 
his  followers.   But  it  was  all  kind  of  hazy  and  full  of 
unsubstantiated  charges.   It  didn't  look  good,  but  there  wasn't 
any  proof.   I  discounted  a  lot  of  that;  I  figured  it  was  just 
reactionary  press  going  after  somebody  that  was  a  progressive. 
But  there  was  this  sort  of  nagging  question  unresolved. 

When  Charlie  brought  these  four  or  five  libel  suits  for  me 
to  handle,  to  defend  the  temple-- 

They  charged  the  parents  with  being--? 


Pesonen:   The  parents  had  accused  Jones  of  abusing  their  children  and 

holding  their  children  against  their  will.   These  were  parents 
who  had  joined  the  temple  when  it  was  here,  and  when  the  temple 
picked  up  over  night  and  moved  everything  to  Guyana,  some  of 
these  kids--some  of  them  were  little,  they  were  ten,  seven  years 
old,  little  kids.   The  parents,  by  this  time,  had  become 
disenchanted  with  the  temple  and  had  not  gone,  and  they  as  much 
as  accused  Jones  of  kidnaping  their  children.   Or  they  were 
people  who  had  gone  down  to  Guyana,  to  the  encampment  there,  and 
then  become  disenchanted  and  left  and  were  not  sure,  or  came  back 
for  personal  reasons  and  left  their  children  there  because  they 
still  believed  in  it.   There  were  a  lot  of  different  reasons  why 
the  parents  were  separated  from  the  children,  and  the  parents 
were  implicated  in  those  decisions.   It  wasn't  as  though  the  kids 
were  kidnaped  and  spirited  away  in  the  middle  of  the  night. 

But  the  disenchantment  had  grown,  and  the  parents  had  then 
accused  Jones  of  holding  the  children  against  their  will  and 
against  the  parents'  will  and  cutting  them  off  from  access;  they 
couldn't  get  into  this  remote  encampment  back  in  the  jungle.   You 
needed  a  little  airstrip  to  get  there  and  then  you  had  to  ride 
through  the  jungle  in  one  of  the  temple's  vehicles.   If  you 
didn't  have  those  arrangements,  you  just  couldn't  get  in;  you  had 


145 

to  have  permission.   Jones  would  get  on  his  shortwave  radio  and 
accuse  the  parents  of  having  molested  the  children  and  that  was 
why  the  children  wanted  to  stay.   They  didn't  want  to  go  back  to 
these  abusive  parents.   It  was  a  real  mess. 

So  the  parents  had  brought  libel  suits  against  Jones  for 
accusing  them  of  this  horrendous  behavior  toward  their  children 
by  shortwave  radio,  and  Jones,  in  turn,  cross-complained  (or 
Charlie  wanted  us  to  cross-complain)  against  the  parents.   One  of 
these  cases  was  filed  in  Los  Angeles,  and  I  went  down  to  defend 
some  motion  on  it.   I  took  all  of  these  papers  and  read  all  of 
these  complaints  and  many  of  them  were  done  in  propria  persona -- 
the  parents  didn't  have  lawyers—and  so  they  weren't  very 
artfully  drawn.   Good  pleading  pleads  what  are  called  ultimate 
facts.   Sloppy  pleading  pleads  a  lot  of  facts  which  are  not 
necessary  in  the  pleading.   They  may  be  necessary  in  the  evidence 
at  trial,  but  not  in  the  pleadings.  And  there  were  affidavits 
attached  to  the  complaints.  They  were  very  factual  and  very 
troubling.   I  didn't  know  where  the  truth  was.   People  always 
exaggerate  in  pleadings  to  some  extent.   Until  they  are  tested  by 
a  trial,  you  don't  know  what  the  truth  is. 

I  came  back  and  I  went  in  to  see  Charlie,  and  I  said, 
"Charlie,  there  is  an  awful  lot  of  stuff  in  here  that  really 
troubles  me,  and  it  can't  all  be  fabricated,  and  I  don't  want  to 
work  on  these  cases;  I  don't  think  we  ought  to  be  involved  in 
them.   There  is  too  much  smoke  here;  there  is  something  very  evil 
going  on  down  there.   I  feel  it  is  very  possible  that  there  is 
something  very  evil  about  this  place.  No  matter  what  the 
ideology,  I  don't  think  we  should  have  anything  to  do  with  it." 
Charlie  just  exploded  at  me.   He  said,  "It's  paradise,  I  tell 
you.   It's  paradise.   I've  been  down  there.   They  sing  and  they 
dance  and  they  have  gardens.   It  is  a  pure  socialist  world.   It 
is  the  dream  we've  all  had.   Everybody  shares.   They  all  live  in 
barracks.   They  love  each  other;  they  sing  and  dance  a  lot." 

Lage:     He  was  really  taken  in  by  it? 

Pesonen:   He  was  completely  taken  in.   I  said,  "Well,  Charlie,  I  don't 

know.   I  have  not  been  there,  but  I  have  read  all  of  this  stuff, 
and  I  do  not  want  to  work  on  it.   Get  somebody  else."   So  that 
was  the  beginning  of  the  real  falling  out  between  Charlie  and  me. 
He  felt  that  I  was  turning  conservative;  he  began  to  get  kind  of 
paranoid  about  me.   The  tension  wasn't  always  there;  we  continued 
to  work  together  and  talk  and  have  regular  office  meetings  and 
things,  but  this  was  in  the  background.   I  wasn't  completely  to 
be  trusted,  and  I  didn't  trust  his  judgment. 


146 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Did  Mark  Lane  get  in  on  some  of  this? 
connection  with  this. 


I  saw  his  name  in 


Charlie  was  worried  about  Mark  Lane.   Mark  Lane  was  a  lot  like 
Charlie.   He  was  crazy  too,  in  my  opinion.   Here  was  a  great 
left-wing  cause  for  him  to  identify  with,  and  Charlie  was  afraid 
that  Mark  Lane  was  trying  to  steal  the  client  away  from  him.   A 
client  that  never  paid  any  money.   Their  rewards  were  psychic, 
they  were  not  financial. 

They  didn't  get  paid? 

I  don't  think  they  got  paid  anything. 


Garry's  Trip  to  Guyana,  November  1978 


Pesonen:   So  Congressman  Ryan  finally—you  know,  there  were  congressional 
investigations  talked  about—and  Congressman  Ryan  finally  said 
that  he  was  going  to  go  down  there  and  see  for  himself  with  his 
aide  Jackie  Speier,  who  is  now  a  member  of  the  assembly.   Mark 
Lane  was  going  to  go  down  with  them,  and  Charlie  said  he  had  to 
go,  too.   And  there  were  a  couple  of  reporters  from  the  Examiner 
--one  of  them  was  killed.   It  was  in  November  of  1978. 

Lage:     And  Garry  went  on  that  trip  also? 

Pesonen:   Garry  went  on  that  trip,  too.   About  a  year  before  that, 

Charlie's  girlfriend  who  worked  in  the  office,  Pat  Richards, 
called  me  in  desperation  and  said  Charlie  was  in  Chicago,  and  she 
couldn't  find  him.   She  had  gotten  a  message  by  shortwave  from 
Guyana  that  they  were  all  going  to  kill  themselves,  and  could  I 
do  anything? 

Lage:     A  year  before? 

Pesonen:   I  said,  "Aw  come  on,  they  are  not  going  to  do  that.   Wait  until 

Charlie  gets  back,  he'll  handle  it."   I  had  forgotten  about  that. 

So  Julie  and  I  and  some  friends  were  at  a  little  resort  up 
on  the  Klamath  River  on  a  fishing  trip.   It  was  right  before 
Thanksgiving,  I  think,  the  weekend  before  Thanksgiving,  and  we 
were  listening  to  the  news  at  night  on  a  little  radio  that  didn't 
work  very  well,  and  these  reports  started  coming  in  of  some  great 
massacre  in  Guyana.   The  radio  would  fade  out  and  then  come  back. 
Three  people  killed,  fifteen,  the  numbers  kept  growing.   I  didn't 
know  what  had  happened  to  Charlie  or  anybody.   Then  the  report 


147 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 
Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


came  through  that  Congressman  Ryan  had  been  killed,  and  the 
reporter  for  the  Examiner  had  been  killed,  and  Jackie  Speier  had 
been  badly  wounded. 

So  I  got  back  to  the  office,  and  we  still  didn't  know  where 
Charlie  was.   Nobody  had  heard  from  within.   Then,  about  a  day  or 
two  later,  we  heard  that  he  had  escaped,  and  he  was  coming  home. 
He  arranged,  somehow,  for  a  press  conference  the  minute  he  got 
into  town.   He  set  it  up  over  at  what  was  then  the  Franciscan 
Hotel  at  8th  and  Market,  which  was  across  the  street  from  our 
office.   He  got  off  the  plane,  got  a  cab,  and  came  straight  to 
the  office.   He  was  a  ruined  man.   He  had  been  through  something 
so  horrible,  you  could  tell  it.   His  face  was  changed,  he  looked 
ten  years  older.   He  was  a  mess,  physically. 

And  he  told  us  what  had  happened.   They  had  gotten  there 
with  Ryan,  and  everything  was  nice  for  a  while,  and  then  it 
turned  sinister.   Some  member  of  the  group  had  pulled  a  knife  on 
Ryan,  and  Charlie  and  Lane  had  disarmed  this  person.   There  was  a 
lot  of  tension.   They  had  agreed  to  stay  as  kind  of  hostages  if 
Ryan  could  be  allowed  to  leave.   So  that  was  the  deal  that  was 
struck,  and  Ryan  and  Speier  and  the  reporters  and  the  rest  of 
their  entourage  headed  for  the  airport.   Unknown  to  Charlie--! 'm 
sure  it  was  not  known  to  Charlie;  I'm  sure  he  had  nothing  to  do 
with  it,  or  Mark  Lane--there  was  this  other  plan  to  assassinate 
Ryan  when  he  got  to  the  airstrip.   So  they  put  Charlie  and  Mark 
Lane  under  guard  in  a  couple  of  little  cabins  off  to  the  edge  of 
the  compound,  and  then  the  killing  started.   And  it  wasn't  very 
far  away,  and  they  could  hear  it. 

Where  was  Jim  Jones  during  all  of  this? 
He  was  overseeing  this  mass  suicide. 
Did  he  talk  to  Garry? 

I  don't  recall  what  Charlie  said  about  that.   It  was  as  though 
Jones  had  completely  gone  crazy,  and  there  was  no  real 
communication  there. 

So  Garry  could  hear? 

He  could  hear  mothers  giving  cyanide  to  their  kids,  and  Jones 
exhorting  them  over  the  loudspeaker. 

Well,  they  figured  out  what  was  happening.   You  didn't  need 
to  be  a  rocket  scientist  to  do  that.   And  the  guard  knew  what  was 
happening.   They  had  a  young  man  with  a  gun  who  was  watching  over 
them.   And  Lane,  according  to  Charlie,  persuaded  this  young  guard 


148 

that  this  was  a  great  historic  event  and  that  somebody  should  be 
allowed  to  go  back  to  the  outside  world  and  tell  them  what  a 
great  historic  event  it  was,  and  that  Charlie  and  Lane  should  be 
picked  as  these  emissaries.   So  the  guard  pointed  them  out  to  a 
hole  in  the  fence,  and  they  escaped  into  the  jungle  and  went  as 
far  as  they  could  go.   It  was  apparently  a  pretty  dense  tropical 
jungle.   Then  it  started  to  rain  and  got  dark.   They  spent  the 
night  huddled  under  a  tree. 

It  had  some  amusing  moments.   It  is  hard  to  think  that  it 
could,  but  Lane  offered  to  carry  one  of  Charlie's  bags,  which  had 
nothing  in  it  but  a  hair  dryer,  and  Charlie  doesn't  even  have  any 
hair.   [laughter]   He  had  a  toupee.   But  he  carried  a  hair  dryer 
for  his  toupee .  And  Mark  Lane  sat  in  the  rain  all  night  in  the 
rain  being  eaten  alive  by  insects,  chiggers  that  dug  into  the 
skin,  guarding  this  useless  hair  dryer. 

Well,  when  it  got  light,  they  found  their  way  to  a  road,  and 
by  this  time  the  authorities  were  coming  in  and  picked  them  up 
and  took  them  to  the  airstrip,  and  they  finally  got  out  of  there. 
When  Charlie  got  to  the  office,  I  remember,  he  pulled  his  shirt 
up  and  he  was  just  covered  with  big  red  welts  all  over  his  body. 
His  stomach  was  just  full  of  these  things.   The  biting  insects 
had  just  eaten  them  alive  that  night,  and  he  still  had  the  welts 
all  over  him.   And  then  he  went  across  the  street  to  this  press 
conference. 

Well,  everybody  in  the  world  was  there.   I  had  never  seen 
such  a  big  press  conference.   There  must  have  been  a  pincushion 
of  a  hundred  microphones  on  the  podium.   I  was  so  dazed  by  this 
whole  event,  the  magnitude,  the  enormity,  the  awfulness  of  it  was 
so  profound,  I  don't  remember  a  word  Charlie  said  at  that  press" 
conference. 

Lage:     It  is  interesting  that  he  had  that  need,  immediately. 


A  Difficult  Decision  to  Leave  the  Garry  Firm 


Pesonen:   I  went  over  and  just  watched  in  amazement  that  he  would  hold  a 
press  conference.   I  had  tried  to  advise  against  it  when  we  had 
this  little  office  meeting.   I  said,  "Charlie,  this  is  not  the 
sort  of  thing  you  want  any  publicity  on.  You  don't  want  to 
increase  the  public  identification  of  you  with  this  horrible 
thing  that  has  happened." 


149 


Well,  he  had  to  do  it,  and  he  wouldn't  listen  to  anything 
like  that.  A  couple  of  days  later,  he  and  I  had  a  talk,  and  I 
said,  "Charlie,  you  need  to--."  I  mean,  my  economic  destiny  was 
still  tied  to  this  firm,  and  I  saw  it  just  destroyed  there.   That 
was  when  I  decided  that  I  was  going  to  get  out.   I  was  going  to 
find  a  way  to  get  out  without  embarrassing  him  or  making  a  public 
rift  out  of  it  or  anything  else.   I  was  just  going  to  distance 
myself  from  this  hopeless  situation. 

I  said,  "Charlie,  you  need  a  public  relations  man.   You  need 
someone  to  advise  you  on  when  to  say  something  and  when  not  to 
say  something.   Sometimes  the  best  thing  to  do  is  to  not  say 
anything."   To  my  surprise,  he  agreed  that  he  wouldn't  say 
anything  unless  I  cleared  it  first. 

Lage:     I  bet  that  didn't  last  long. 

Pesonen:   That  didn't  last  very  long.   He  and  Mark  Lane  began  accusing  each 
other. 

Lage:     After  what  they  had  been  through  together? 

Pesonen:  After  what  they  had  been  through  together.   Each  was  blaming  the 
other  for  not  having  seen  it  coming.   I  said,  "Charlie,  don't 
even  get  in  a  pissing  match  with  a  skunk." 

So  a  couple  of  weeks  later,  here  he  is  back  in  the  papers, 
and  he  has  been  over  to  City  Hall,  and  he  hasn't  talked  with 
reporters  for  a  couple  of  weeks,  and  Connie  Chang,  who  was  the 
Examiner  stringer  at  City  Hall,  caught  him  in  the  hall  and  wanted 
to  get  a  quote  from  him  about  Mark  Lane's  latest  charge.   He 
says,  "I  can't  talk  to  you,  Connie.  My  partner  tells  me  don't 
ever  get  in  a  pissing  match  with  Mark  Lane!"   [laughter]   He 
always  got  it  wrong. 

Lage:     Was  he  very  shaken  by  this  experience? 
Pesonen:   He  was  very  shaken. 

Lage:     I  would  think,  psychologically,  the  faith  he  had  put  in  this 
group,  and  then  to  go  through  that  experience-- 

Pesonen:   He  had  put  his  whole—he  was  a  true-believer  personality.   That 
is  his  personality  profile.  When  he  got  into  something,  he  was 
into  it  with  his  whole  being.   And  he  was  a  true  believer  in  this 
dream  he  had  of  Guyana  being  the  perfect  socialist  experiment. 
So  he  felt  just  mortally  betrayed  and  humiliated.   And  Charlie 
didn't  take  humiliation  very  well.   He  had  enough  of  it  as  a  kid 
when  he  was  an  Armenian  child,  badly  treated  so  I'm  told,  enough 


150 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


so  that  he  changed  his  name  even.   He  was  very  complicated.   He 
had  a  complex  psychology,  but  I'm  no  psychologist.   He  had  great 
moments  of  generosity  and  great  moments  of  wisdom  and  insight, 
but  when  he  got  involved  in  things  like  this,  the  Panthers  or  Jim 
Jones  and  the  Temple,  he  lost  all  that,  and  he  knew  it.  He  knew 
it,  and  he  was  humiliated,  and  he  wouldn't  admit  it.  He  couldn't 
acknowledge  his  humiliation.   I  don't  know  whether  that  was  a 
defense  mechanism  that  went  back  to  his  childhood  or  not. 

So  I  began  to  look  around  for  office  space,  talk  to  people 
about  who  I  might  form  a  new  firm  with,  and  one  day  Huey  Johnson 
called  up  and  said,  "How  would  you  like  to  be  director  of  the 
Department  of  Forestry?"   It  was  the  perfect  way  out.   It  didn't 
imply  that--.   I  had  been  recruited  and  invited  to  take  this 
responsible  position  in  the  government  of  a  progressive  governor, 
who  was  of  interest  to  everybody.   We  were  all  fascinated  with 
Jerry  Brown.   And  it  didn't  imply  any  rejection  or  disapproval  of 
Charlie  or  Barney  or  Frank  or  anybody  else.   I  had  approached  Al 
Brotsky  to  see  if  he  wouldn't  work  with  me  to  reign  Charlie  in 
some  way,  and  he  agreed  with  me  that  it  was  an  unviable 
situation,  but  the  bonds  among  those  men  went  a  long  ways  back, 
and  I  was  still  an  upstart,  in  a  way.   I  was  the  youngest  partner 
and  not  part  of  that  old  left  world. 

A  different  generation? 

A  different  generation.   Al  was  a  much  smarter  businessman  than 
the  rest  of  them.   Frank  McTernan  wouldn't  hear  of  it.   He  was 
very  offended  that  I  would  even  suggest  some  disloyalty  to 
Charlie.   I  saw  that  was  hopeless,  hopeless  to  work  something  out 
within  the  firm.   It  was  only  after  I  had  tried  to  work  something 
out  within  the  firm,  to  get  some  limit,  some  reins  on  Charlie 
that  I  elected  to  leave. 

You  showed  a  lot  of  loyalty  yourself,  it  seems  to  me. 

Well,  I  had  learned  a  lot  from  him,  and  he  had  been  good  to  me. 
And  he  was  a  decent  man.   His  bad  judgment  didn't  mean  he  was 
evil,  even  though  he  got  swept  up  in  that  terribly  evil  thing 
that  happened  down  there.   I  wasn't  judgmental  about  him  that 
way.   Life  isn't  black  and  white  like  that.   And  he  was  a  good 
person,  and  he  had  tried  to  do  a  lot  of  good  things,  and  his 
heart  was  in  the  right  place,  but  his  judgment  was  tragic.   It 
was  just  a  tragic  fatal  flaw  he  had. 

Although  he  probably,  I  would  guess,  didn't  have  anything  to  do 
with  the  course  of  events  down  there. 


151 


Pesonen:   No,  I  don't  think  he  had  anything  to  do  with  the  course  of  events 
down  there,  except  maybe  that  his  prominent  support  for  the 
temple  had  allowed  Jones  to  accumulate  enough  power  and  hold  on 
to  enough  people  that  he  could  inflict  such  a  disaster  on  so  many 
people.   I  suppose  if  Charlie  had  questioned  them  sooner,  his 
paranoia  might  have  exploded  sooner.   Who  knows?   I  don't  know 
what  history  would  have  done  some  other  way.   But  Charlie  was  a 
person  I  worked  with  for  ten  years.   I  saw  no  point  in  increasing 
his  anguish  or  humiliation.   If  I  had  said  anything  publicly,  it 
might  have  been  a  one -day  story,  and  it  would  have  gone  away,  and 
then  the  people  who  knew  me  and  knew  him  would  remember  an  act  of 
disloyalty,  and  an  unnecessary  one. 


152 


VI    INITIATIVE  CAMPAIGN  FOR  THE  NUCLEAR  SAFEGUARDS  ACT,  1973- 
1976 

[Interview  5:   March  12,  1992]  ft 


Presumed  Dead 


Pesonen:   I  went  to  Washington,  D.C.,  on  the  fifth  of  March,  1992,  for  a 
meeting  on  a  topic  completely  unrelated  to  anything  we  are 
talking  about,  and  beforehand  I  called  J.  Samuel  Walker,  who  is 
not  only  the  historian  of  the  Nuclear  Regulatory  Commission,  he 
is  a  teacher  at  Georgetown  University  of  diplomatic  history.  He 
is  an  historian.   I  think  I  recall  he  is  from  Harvard 
[University] .   That  is  where  he  got  his  education.   He  is  a  very 
nice  guy,  and  he  was  delighted  to  hear  from  me  because  he  had 
sent  some  of  his  graduate  students  out  to  do  some  of  the  research 
for  that  article  that  he  wrote,  and  the  report  came  back  that  I 
was  dead.   [Laughter] 

Lage:     Somebody  didn't  want  to  get  in  touch  with  you,  it  sounds  like. 

Pesonen:   I  said,  "Well,  maybe  that  is  somebody  full  of  wishful  thinking  at 
PG&E  [Pacific  Gas  and  Electric  Company]."   It  might  have  been 
that  they  made  those  inquiries  while  I  was  really  sick  in  1984  or 
1983.   It  was  December  of  '83  when  I  got  really  sick.   The 
reports  were  that  I  might  not  live,  and  maybe  somebody  figured 
that  they  didn't  hear  anymore  so  I  didn't  make  it.   [Laughter] 

So  we  had  a  nice  visit.  That  article  is  part  of  a  book 
which  is  coming  out.  UC  [University  of  California]  Press  is 
publishing  it  and  it  will  be  out  this  summer.  He  was  not  really 
aware  of  the  Point  Arena  struggle  for  some  reason,  so  I  gave  him 
a  copy  of-- 

Lage:     That's  interesting—that  he  wouldn't  have  followed  through  to  the 
Point  Arena-- 


153 


Pesonen:   Well,  he  had  other  things  to  do,  I  guess.   Anyway,  I  gave  him  a 
copy  of  the  pamphlet  that  I  wrote  for  the  Sierra  Club  on  the 
Point  Arena  nuclear  plant,  and  he  is  going  to  look  into  possibly 
following  up  and  doing  something  more  on  that  history. 

Lage:     It  makes  a  nice  comparison. 

Pesonen:  Well,  it  makes  a  nice  comparison,  but  it  also  is  part  of  the 
historic  curve. 


Genesis  of  the  Idea  for  Initiative  Effort  in  California 


A  National  Antinuclear-Power  Network 


Lage:     We  are  going  to  talk  about  the  Nuclear  Safeguards  Initiative 
today. 

Pesonen:   That's  a  good  story.   That's  a  good  long  story. 
Lage:     When  did  you  get  involved  with  it? 

Pesonen:   I  think  I  was  in  on  the  beginnings  of  it.   The  notion  started 
kicking  around  among  the  people  who  were  in  the  network  of  the 
antinuclear  movement. 

Lage:     Now  tell  me  about  the  network  a  little  bit.   You  haven't  really 

talked  about  your  relationship  with  other  aspects  of  the  movement 
in  other  parts  of  the  country. 

Pesonen:   Well,  the  network  just  grew  informally.   The  Bodega  Bay  campaign 
was  the  beginning  of  it,  but  the  nuclear  industry  was  really 
starting  to  take  off.   Orders  were  coming  in;  it  was  very 
fashionable  for  utilities  across  the  country  to  propose  nuclear 
power  plants.   Bodega  had  kind  of  opened  people's  eyes--it  had 
gotten  a  lot  of  national  publicity—to  the  fact  that  there  were 
problems,  some  kind  of  a  problem.   So  I  got  lots  of  inquiries 
from  little  citizen  groups  around  the  country:  in  New  Jersey  on 
the  Oyster  Point  plant,  I  think  it  was  called;  plants  in 
Michigan;  and  of  course  there  were  a  couple  of  other  plants 
proposed  in  California.  There  began  to  be  a  little  body  of 
literature  in  popular  media.   I  just  had  a  little  address  book 
with  names  and  phone  numbers  of  people  who  had  called  me. 

The  first  coalescing,  I  guess,  of  any  kind  of  organization 
was  the  Union  of  Concerned  Scientists,  which  was  formed  by  Henry 


154 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Kendall  at  MIT  [Massachusetts  Institute  of  Technology]  and  a 
fellow  named  Dan  Ford  and  probably  some  other  people  that  I 
didn't  know.   They  began  to  issue  papers  on  various  issues  and 
testify  in  congressional  hearings  and  in  licensing  hearings  or 
public  meetings  of  various  kinds.   It  wasn't  so  much  an 
antinuclear  movement  as  it  was  very  concerned  about  the  safety  of 
large  nuclear  power  plants  that  were  water-moderated,  based  on 
that  Weinberg  early  design:  pressurized  or  boiling  water 
reactors,  which  were  the  two  basic  types  of  light  water-moderated 
reactors.   When  they  got  big,  up  around  a  thousand,  two  thousand 
megawatts,  there  were  serious  untested  safety  measures  that 
couldn't  be  tested.  They  were  just  too  massive  and  too 
problematic. 

So  the  idea  got  developed,  and  I  don't  remember  who 
originated  it,  for  a  meeting  at  Henry  Kendall's  house  that  would 
plan  the  future  strategy  of  the  antinuclear  movement.   I  think 
that  meeting  took  place  in  1972  or  '73.   I  didn't  start  my  diary 
until  after  that,  so  I  can't  remember  exactly  when  that  was.   But 
it  was  in  the  early  seventies,  and  I  went  and  Richard  Spohn  went. 
Richard  Spohn  was  with  CalPIRG,  the  California  Public  Interest 
Research  Group,  now  called  California  Citizens  Action,  I  think. 

CalPIRG  was  in  existence  already? 


I  think  it  was. 
organization. 


No,  Spohn  was  with  the  [Ralph]  Nader 


Oh,  the  Nader  organization.   It  probably  grew  into  CalPIRG. 

He  was  a  southern  California  stringer  for  the  Nader  organization. 
Joan  Mclntyre  and  maybe  Dorothy  Green  were  there.   There  were 
probably  ten  or  twelve,  maybe  fifteen  people  there.   It  was  a 
two-day  meeting  at  Henry's  house  in  Boston.  What  emerged  from 
that  was  a  plan  to  use  California  as  the  first  place  for  a  really 
well-organized  campaign  that  was  generic  and  not  specific  to 
individual  plants. 

Using  the  initiative  process? 

Well,  that  was  the  backup.  We  thought  the  first  thing  we  would 
do  was  try  to  see  if  we  could  get  legislation.   The  initiative 
process  is  very  risky,  very  expensive. 

It  wasn't  as  frequently  used  then. 

It  wasn't  as  frequently  used  then,  that's  true.   We  knew  about 
it,  and  it  had  been  used  before. 


155 

Lage:     The  Coastal  Zone  Conservation  Act  was  November  1972. ' 
Pesonen:  And  that  was  an  initiative. 

Lage:     Right.   And  then  Proposition  9  was  in  June  1972.   It  was 
defeated.   The  Clean  Environment  Act.   It  was  very  broad. 

Pesonen:   That  was  the  [Edward]  Koupal  measure.   It  had  some  antinuclear 
components  to  it,  but  it  also  attempted  to  ban  all  compounds 
containing  DDT,  chlorofluorocarbons;  it  was  very  foresighted  in 
that  respect.   But  it  was  a  catchall.   That  was  put  together  by 
Ed  Koupal. 


Ed  Koupal  and  the  Art  of  Signature-Gathering 


Lage:     Was  Koupal  at  this  meeting  at  Kendall's  house? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  think  Koupal  was  there,  but  somebody  from  Koupal 's 

organization  was  there.   Koupal  was  a  very  interesting  fellow. 
He  had  been  a  car  salesman  up  in  Roseville,  and  he  somehow  got 
sore  at  Governor  [Ronald]  Reagan  and  decided  to  try  to  recall 
him.   He  launched  the  first  recall  campaign  against  Reagan  as 
governor,  and  it  failed.   But  he  developed  techniques  for  getting 
signatures  for  initiatives,  referendums,  recalls.   You  have  to 
get  a  lot  of  signatures,  and  he  was  organized  about  it. 

His  theory,  as  I  heard  him  say  it  many  times,  was  based  on 
how  he  sold  cars.   Two  yeses  and  you  get  a  sale.   So  he  developed 
a  very  simple  technique  of  setting  up  a  table  at  a  place  of  high 
pedestrian  traffic  and  having  one  person  behind  the  table,  have 
the  petition  pasted  down  on  the  table  facing  toward  the  traffic, 
and  have  a  shill  or  a  barker  out  standing  on  the  sidewalk  and 
asking  passersby  two  simple  questions:  one,  do  you  want  nuclear 
power  to  be  safe?   (This  is  by  example.)   He  would  say,  "Do  you 
want  good  government"--something  you  couldn't  say  "no"  to--and 
"Are  you  a  registered  voter?"  You've  got  these  two  yeses,  and  by 
that  time  you  are  leading  the  person  over  to  the  table  and 
handing  them  a  pen.   It  worked  very  well. 

So  Koupal  was  clearly  the  master  of  how  to  get  a  lot  of 
signatures,  and  I  think  somebody  from  Koupal 's  organization  was 
there.   Koupal  had  decided  that  the  next  issue  he  was  going  to 
take  on  was  nuclear  power.   It  had  a  certain  sex  appeal  to  a  lot 


1  Proposition  20  (November  1972) 


156 


of  people.   Politicians  and  people  in  public  office  were  uneasy 
about  it,  but  they  saw  something  growing.   They  felt  that  there 
was  something  happening  here  that  they  had  better  know  something 
about.   Some  of  the  more  courageous  ones,  or  foolish  ones, 
depending  on  your  point  of  view,  took  positions  against  nuclear 
power. 


Assemblyman  Charles  Warren's  Encouragement 


Pesonen:   Anyway,  this  meeting  ended  up  with  a  plan  that  Richard  Spohn  and 
I,  I  think,  would  go  and  see  [Assemblyman  Charles]  Charlie 
Warren.   We  went  to  see  Charlie  and  we  spent  a  couple  of  hours 
with  him.   That  must  have  been  in  early  '73,  and  Charlie  said, 
"There  is  just  no  way  I'm  going  to  get  any  kind  of  legislation 
through  this  legislature  in  this  current  climate."  The  labor 
unions  were  very  much  pronuclear,  led  by  the  construction  unions. 
There  just  wasn't  enough  of  a  political  base  to  make  anybody  in 
Sacramento  courageous  enough  to  take  that  on.   Charlie  would  have 
done  it  if  it  had  a  chance,  but  he  thought  it  was  hopeless. 

Lage:     Had  he  made  up  his  mind  about  nuclear  power  at  that  point? 

Pesonen:   Oh  yes.   Charlie,  by  that  time,  was  pretty  clear  that  nuclear 

power  was  too  big  a  problem.   He  had  been  involved  in  some  of  the 
early  protests  on  San  Onofre,  and  he  had  read  up  about  it.   He 
was  foresighted  enough  to  see  that  there  was  something  happening 
here  and  that  there  were  a  lot  of  problems  with  nuclear  power. 
But  he  was  a  member  of  the  assembly;  he  was  elected  out  of  a 
district  somewhere  down  in  Los  Angeles,  and  he  didn't  have  a 
groundswell  in  his  district  either.   But  he  was  an 
environmentalist,  and  he  was  in  touch  with  the  environmental 
community.   Dorothy  Green,  active  in  both  the  women's  and  the 
environmental  movement  in  Los  Angeles,  was  very  active  I  know, 
and  I  think  she  had  his  ear. 

He  said,  "I  won't  be  able  to  get  anything  through  this 
legislature  until  you  bring  an  initiative."  We  had  already 
thought  that  maybe  an  initiative  was  the  fall-back  position,  so 
we  went  back  and  we  started  talking  about  how  to  put  together  an 
initiative  campaign.   I  had  never  done  one,  Roupal  had.   And 
Alvin  Duskin,  who  was  an  acquaintance  of  Kendall's — I  think 
Duskin  was  at  that  meeting,  too--Duskin  and  Koupal  teamed  up  to 
put  the  initiative  together. 


157 


Early  Efforts  by  Koupal,  Duskin,  and  the  People's  Lobby 


Lage:     And  Duskin  was  the  clothing  manufacturer  in  San  Francisco? 

Pesonen:   He  was  the  clothing  manufacturer,  but  he  had  run  an  initiative  in 
San  Francisco  against  high-rise  buildings  in  the  early  seventies. 
It  failed,  but  he  became  quite  well  known  as  an  activist  on 
environmental  causes . 

So  I  kind  of  was  left  out  of  this  process.   I  would  talk  to 
Duskin  now  and  then,  he  would  call  me  for  my  advice  on  something, 
but  for  some  reason  he  didn't  want  me  involved.   I  felt  I  was 
being  excluded  from  the  process,  partly  because  I  didn't  have  the 
kind  of  time  he  did  and  Koupal  did,  but  also  they  got  some  money. 
I  think  they  got  some  money  from  Kendall.   I  think  they  might 
have  gotten  twenty-five  thousand  dollars  to  get  it  started,  which 
was  a  lot  of  money  in  those  days.   They  put  the  campaign  together 
and  they  got  a  crew  of  volunteers,  and  I  kind  of  watched  it  from 
the  sidelines.   That  had  to  have  been  before  '73  because  I  was 
still  in  my  office  at  345  Market  Street. 

Lage:     So  this  was  early  on? 
Pesonen:   This  was  very  early  on. 

I  kind  of  resented  this.   I  thought,  you  know,  I  am  the 
father  of  this  thing  and  I  ought  to  have  more  involvement,  and  as 
I  watched  it,  I  thought  they  were  making  some  mistakes.   I  had 
some  part  in  the  drafting;  I  saw  it  as  a  draft.   Duskin  would 
send  me  drafts  of  the  measure,  and  then  it  would  go  through  three 
or  four  iterations,  and  I  would  see  another  draft,  and  I  wouldn't 
know  what  had  gone  on. 


Lage: 


Who  was  drafting  it?  Did  they  have  legal  input? 


Pesonen:   Duskin  and  Koupal  and  some  other  people  that  they  were  involved 
with,  whom  I  don't  remember. 

Anyway,  they  started  their  signature  gathering,  and  I  think 
in  those  days  you  had  to  get  something  around  300,000  statewide 
to  qualify  the  measure.  And  there  is  a  time  line;  there  is  a 
statutory  period  within  which  you  can  get  those  signatures  after 
the  secretary  of  state  gives  title  and  summary  and  you  get  them 
printed  up  in  the  proper  form.   Occasionally,  I  would  get  reports 
on  how  the  numbers  were  going,  and  they  were  disappointing.   So 
at  some  point--. 


158 


In  the  interval,  we  moved  our  office  up  to  1256  Market,  and 
I  distinctly  remember  getting  a  call  from  the  local  signature- 
gathering  group  in  San  Francisco.   It  was  run  by  a  woman  whose 
name  I  don't  remember,  but  she  had  been  kind  of  delegated  the  San 
Francisco  area  or  the  Bay  Area.  A  group  of  maybe  eight  or  nine 
of  the  people  who  had  been  involved  in  the  signature  gathering 
came  to  my  office  and  said  that  they  were  convinced  that  they 
were  not  going  to  make  the  deadline;  the  campaign  was  not  well 
organized,  the  morale  was  low.   Something  had  to  be  done,  and 
would  I  step  in  and  fix  it  and  help  them  decide  what  to  do? 

I  saw  immediately  this  was  a  prescription  for  friction 
between  me  and  Duskin  and  Koupal.   [Laughter]   So  I  called  Duskin 
and — Koupal  was  a  very  difficult  person  to  deal  with.   He  had  a 
huge  ego  and  was  very  manipulative.   He  and  his  wife,  Joyce,  they 
were  a  team.   They  were  street  fighters. 

Lage:     And  their  group  was  People's  Lobby? 

Pesonen:   It  was  People's  Lobby.   They  had  then  started  forming  an 

organization  called  People  for  Proof,  which  would  be  the  spinoff 
organization  to  handle  the  nuclear  initiative.   They  said,  "Oh, 
it's  fine.   We're  going  to  make  it.   We'll  get  another  infusion 
of  money."  And  I  didn't  believe  them,  nor  did  their  troops,  who 
had  come  to  me.   I  had  not  gone  out  and  rounded  this  up,  I  just 
was  watching  at  this  point,  but  I  was  invited  to  come  in  by  this 
dissident  group  of  signature  gatherers.  A  lot  of  street  people 
and  counter-culture  types:  long  hair  and  beads  and  bangles  and 
marijuana  smoke  in  the  air. 

Lage:     These  were  the  ones  who  were  gathering  the  signatures? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   [Laughter]   So  we  had  a  series  of  meetings  around  town.   I 
remember  one  was  in  North  Beach  at  some  restaurant  in  the  back 
room,  and  all  of  the  people  who  had  been  involved  in  this  effort 
would  come  to  these  meetings  and  the  idea  was  to  get  some 
grassroots  sense  of  how  the  campaign  should  be  organized,  and 
make  the  decision,  which  was  a  very  critical  strategic  decision, 
whether  to  go  all  the  way  and  not  get  enough  signatures  and  start 
over,  or  whether  to  gracefully  announce  that  we  were  suspending 
the  campaign  to  take  another  look  at  it  and  start  over.   That  was 
the  strategy  I  wanted  to  follow. 

I  said,  "If  you  go  right  up  to  the  statutory  deadline  and 
the  secretary  of  state  announces  that  you  failed  to  get  enough 
signatures,  your  credibility  is  in  bad  shape.   It  would  be  very 
hard  to  qualify  another  one  because  you  go  in  as  a  failure. 
Whereas  if  you  announce  early  on  that  you  have  taken  another  look 
at  your  effort,  and  you  want  to  do  some  fine  tuning  on  it  and 


159 


start  over,  and  it  has  been  a  good  training  to  get  started  on 
this  one,  you  sound  like  you  are  in  charge  of  what  you  are 
doing."   [Laughter]   So  my  view  prevailed  finally.   There  was  a 
lot  of  debate  about  it. 


Pesonen's  Emergence  as  Leader  of  a  New  Campaign,  1975 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Now,  were  you  talking  with  Koupal  and  Duskin  also? 
signature  gatherers? 


Or  with  your 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


I  guess  I  was  talking  to  them  occasionally,  but  I  had  started  to 
emerge  as  the  new  leader,  and  this  dissident  group  grew  to 
involve  most  of  the  people  who  had  been  working  on  the  campaign. 

Well,  I  didn't  know  where  it  was  headed  and  I  wasn't  getting 
paid  for  all  of  this,  but  it  was  important  to  me.   So  we  finally 
made  that  decision.   We  issued  a  press  release  and  held  a  press 
conference  and  said,  "This  has  been  a  very  instructive  effort  and 
we  are  going  to  make  some  changes  in  the  measure  and  start  over." 
So  that's  what  we  did.   The  drafting  was  done  very  collectively 
in  these  meetings. 

The  drafting  of  the  initiative? 

The  drafting  of  the  new  initiative.   But  the  basic  form  was  the 
original.   I  can't  take  credit  for  completely  rewriting  it.   But 
we  cleaned  it  up  some.   The  basic  themes  remained  the  same:  the 
safe  disposal  of  the  spent  fuel,  the  emergency  cooling  systems, 
and  the  Price-Anderson  Act'  insurance  umbrella.   Those  all  had  to 
be  changed,  and  those  were  the  three  main  themes  of  the  first 
measure,  too. 

So  we  redrafted  it,  we  submitted  it  to  the  secretary  of 
state,  we  got  a  new  petition,  and  I  thought  we  would  start  with 
the  same  old  group  of  people,  but  better  organized.  We  got  a  new 
budget;  Henry  Kendall  sent  me  five  thousand  dollars,  and  I  set  it 
up  virtually  on  a  card  table  in  the  basement  of  my  law  office.  I 
hired  a  young  man,  Dwight  Cocke,  to  kind  of  keep  track  of  it  and 
organize  it.   He  worked  down  in  the  basement  of  the  law  office; 
that  was  our  first  official  space.   Dwight  had  been  involved  in 
the  first  effort,  and  he  was  a  level-headed  young  man  and 
understood  Koupal 's  technique. 


'Atomic  Energy  Damages  Act  of  1954,  71  Stat.  576  (1954)  is  popularly 
called  the  Price-Anderson  Act. 


160 


Lage:     What  role  did  Koupal  take  in  this  second  effort? 

Pesonen:   There  was  a  big  struggle  at  that  point,  a  big  power  struggle  over 
who  was  going  to  take  charge  of  this  new  campaign.   [State  Board 
of  Equalization  Member  William]  Bill  Bennett,  I  believe,  saw  it 
as  a  chance  to  resurrect  his  own  political  fortunes  by  being 
chairman  with  Roupal  really  running  the  show.  Koupal  and  a  woman 
named  [Susan]  Sue  Steigerwalt  and  Richard  Spohn  were  the  people 
on  the  other  side. 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


I  have  started  reading  my  diary  on  it,  which  is  very 
piecemeal,  but  I  do  remember  that  there  was  a  tremendous  amount 
of  intrigue  and  Machiavellian  stuff  going  on,  all  of  which 
frustrated  me.   But  I  knew  that  I  did  not  want  Koupal  in  charge 
of  this  campaign  and  that  Koupal  didn't  want  me  in  charge  of  this 
campaign.   [Laughter]   It  seems  too  silly  in  retrospect  because 
there  was  absolutely  no  money  in  it,  and  I  wasn't  doing  it  for 
any  glory.   I  was  doing  it  purely  out  of  belief  in  what  it  stood 
for,  but  I  suspected  Koupal 's  motives,  and  I  suspected  Bennett's 
motives,  and  I  wasn't  too  sure  about  Spohn "s  motives. 

Now,  what  did  you  suspect  their  motives  might  be? 

Well,  it  was  just  aggrandizement  for  Koupal.   For  Bennett,  I 
believed  he  had  been  looking  since  the  Bodega  days  for  some 
striking  environmental  issue  on  which  he  could  ride  to  the 
governor's  office.   It  was  a  quixotic  view  of  the  world.   I  think 
Bennett's  always  had  a  somewhat  quixotic  view  of  the  political 
world.   You  know,  he  is  still  on  the  State  Board  of  Equalization, 
and  he  was  on  the  PUC  [Public  Utilities  Commission]  at  the  time 
of  the  second  part  of  Bodega.   And  he  was  a  very  fine  lawyer, 
too.   He  won  a  great  case  when  he  was  at  the  PUC.   He  actually 
was  on  the  commission  and  a  lawyer  for  the  commission,  I  think, 
before  the  U.S.  Supreme  Court  on  allocation  of  natural  gas.   It 
was  a  great  consumer  victory.  He  was  a  fine  lawyer,  but  he  is  a 
big,  volatile,  energetic  Irishman  with  a  huge  ego,  and  his 
judgment  isn't  always  the  best. 

Koupal1 s  judgment --Koupal  didn't  believe  in  anything  except 
he  loved  the  business  of  collecting  signatures. 


That's  interesting, 
issue? 


So  it  wasn't  so  much  the  nuclear  power 


No,  I  don't  think  it  was  that.   He  just  loved  to  kick  ass  and 
cause  trouble,  and  he  knew  how  to  do  it. 


Lage: 


A  lot  more  fun  than  selling  cars. 


161 


Pesonen:   Yes,  a  lot  more  fun  than  selling  cars.   And  also,  he  always 

picked  issues  that  were  in  the  public  interest.   I'm  sure  his 
heart  was  in  the  right  place,  in  some  way.   But  his  judgment 
about  the  long-term  solid  nailing  down  of  sound  policy  I  didn't 
have  much  respect  for. 

So  this  struggle  went  on  for  five  or  six  months,  and  1  was 
very  clear  on  what  I  wanted,  and  I  finally  prevailed.   I 
prevailed  at  a  big  meeting.   I  think  it  was  in  early  '75  held  at 
the  Sierra  Club  office,  I  think.   I  just  wore  them  down. 

Lage:     Was  this  over  the  question  of  leadership? 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  question  of  leadership,  and  it  came  to  a  vote  as  to 

whether  Bennett  would  be  the  chairman  or  I  would  be  the  chairman. 

Lage:     I  see. 

Pesonen:   And  I  won  that  vote.   Bennett  was  the  only  one  who  voted  against 
me.   [Laughter]   Koupal  was  not  present.   I  had  engineered  the 
agenda  for  the  meeting  and  the  constituency  who  was  there.   It 
was  not  democratic. 

Lage:     So  you  had  gotten  your  people  there? 

Pesonen:   I  had  gotten  my  people  there.   Part  of  the  problem  grew  out  of  a 
split  between  the  north  and  the  south.   The  real  organizing 
strength  was  in  the  Bay  Area,  mostly  in  San  Francisco.   There  was 
a  lot  of  trouble  getting  some  coherent  organization  going  in 
southern  California.   Koupal  was,  by  this  time,  living  in 
southern  California,  and  nobody  could  seem  to  pull  anything 
together  down  there,  but  they  had  an  organization,  with  a  name 
and  getting  press  attention,  called  People  for  Proof.   That's 
what  we  had  called  ourselves,  too—People  for  Proof.  We  couldn't 
have  two  Peoples  for  Proofs.   It  wasn't  a  very  good  name  anyway, 
but  the  confusion  of  two  of  them  without  a  single  voice  speaking 
was  a  prescription  for  disaster.   So  I  became  the  chair  of  People 
for  Proof,  and  then  we  decided  to  change  the  name  to  Calif ornians 
for  Nuclear  Safeguards,  and  then  there  was  no  more  People  for 
Proof.   We  sort  of  gobbled  up  the  southern  California  People  for 
Proof  and  then  put  the  name  on  ice. 

Well,  once  that  decision  had  been  made,  that  I  was  clearly 
the  chosen  leader,  then  we  could  start  putting  our  energies  into 
a  strategy,  budget,  fund  raising,  organizing,  getting  the  people. 


162 


The  Role  of  Creative  Initiative  in  Qualifying  the  Ballot  Measure 


Pesonen:   It  was  about  this  time  that  we  heard  about  Project  Survival,  or 
it  was  called  then—what  was  it  called? 

Lage:     Was  that  Creative  Initiative? 

Pesonen:   Creative  Initiative.  Dwight  Cocke  was  contacted  by  them,  I  think 
in  December  of  '74.   They  were  interested  in  the  nuclear 
initiative  question,  and  they  wanted  me  to  come  and  speak  to 
them.   I  knew  nothing  about  them.   I  just  knew  there  was  this  big 
organization  down  the  Peninsula  [south  of  San  Francisco]  that 
seemed  mysterious  and  powerful.   I  didn't  understand  it. 


First  Meeting  with  an  Extraordinary  Organization:  Funds  and 
Personal  Resources 


Pesonen:   So  we  made  arrangements  for  me  to  go  and  speak  to  Creative 
Initiative  in  January  of  '75,  I  think.   It  was  at  Gunn  High 
School  in  Palo  Alto  at  the  auditorium.   I  went  down  there  by 
myself.   I  met  Dwight  and  his  wife  or  girlfriend  there,  Lori--I 
don't  remember  her  last  name—there  were  five  or  six  of  us  from 
the  organization  Calif ornians  for  Nuclear  Safeguards.   Dwight  was 
kind  of  in  charge  of  the  signature-gathering  organization.   I've 
forgotten  who  was  in  charge  of  raising  money.   I  walked  into  this 
place,  and  here  were  probably  five  hundred  people,  all  sitting 
quietly  in  their  seats.  All  couples,  all  middle  class  or  better, 
all  professionals,  well  dressed,  coats  and  ties,  and  I  just 
didn't  know  what  I  was  getting  into. 

Lage:     You  weren't  used  to  this?   [Laughter] 
II 

Pesonen:   Most  of  our  volunteers  were,  you  know,  refugees  from  the  Haight- 
Ashbury  of  the  sixties,  all  kinds  of  counter-culture  people, 
mostly.   And  this  was  something  entirely  different. 

Lage:     Had  you  gone  down  in  suit  and  tie? 
Pesonen:   Yes,  I  was  dressed  up. 

Well,  I  didn't  know  quite  what  I  was  going  to  say.   I  didn't 
have  a  prepared  address.   It  was  very  clear  that  they  had  strong 
leadership.   There  was  a  fellow  named  [James]  Jim  Burch  who  was 


163 


very  much  in  charge  and  Amelia  Rathbun,  a  big,  powerful-voiced, 
red-haired  woman. 

Lage:      Rathbun? 

Pesonen:   Her  husband  [Harry  J.]  was  a  law  professor  at  Stanford 

[University]  and  had  written  the  book  on  Creative  Initiative. 
[Creative  Initiative:   Guide  to  Fulfillment,  Palo  Alto,  CA: 
Creative  Initiative  Foundation,  1976]. 

But  I  really  knew  nothing  about  the  organization  except 
little  snippets  and  bits  and  pieces  of  things  which  didn't  make 
any  sense  to  me.   So  I  just  started  to  tell  them  kind  of  my  life 
story  of  my  involvement  with  the  nuclear  power  movement,  starting 
with  Bodega  and  then  I  opened  it  up  to  questions.   And  somebody 
asked  me  the  question,  somebody  from  the  audience—maybe  it  was 
Amelia  herself  who  asked  the  question- -"What  kept  you  going  in 
light  of  all  of  these  obstacles  and  setbacks?"  I  said,  "Because 
I  knew  I  was  right,"  and  the  audience  burst  into  applause. 

Lage:     You  gave  the  right  answer! 

Pesonen:   I  gave  the  right  answer.   So  they  took  a  break  for  lunch- -this 

whole  process  took  all  morning- -and  Jim  Burch  got  up  and  laid  out 
the  agenda.   He  said,  "Now  we  are  all  going  to  go  outside  and 
have  lunch."  It  was  a  January  day,  but  it  was  one  of  these 
wonderful  January  days  we  get  occasionally,  when  it  turns  lovely 
and  warm,  and  the  trees  start  to  show  they  are  going  to  turn  to 
blossoms,  and  you  can  sit  out  on  the  lawn  and  take  your  jacket 
off.   It  was  just  an  absolutely  beautiful  January  day,  maybe 
seventy-five  degrees,  eighty  degrees.   It  was  just  beautiful. 

The  leadership  of  the  group  grabbed  onto  me,  and  we  went 
with  our  bag  lunches  out  onto  the  lawn.   Here  were  all  of  the 
rest  of  these  people  scattered  all  over  the  place.   Burch 
announced,  he  said,  "You  have  heard  David  speak  and  you  know  that 
he  needs  help,  and  so  now  is  the  time  to  choose."  And  I  could 
hear  these  code  words,  you  know,  these  code  phrases  or  code--. 
There  was  a  common  understanding  about  the  meaning  of  these 
things  he  was  saying. 

Lage:     Like  "time  to  choose?" 

Pesonen:   Like  "time  to  choose."  As  though  they  had  prepared  themselves 

for  this.  He  said,  "And  those  of  you  who  have  chosen,  come  back 
after  lunch  into  this  room,"  which  was  the  main  auditorium,  "and 
those  of  you  who  are  unsure  go  into  the  other  room,"  which  was  a 
little  tiny  room,  a  little  side  auditorium.  [Laughter] 


164 

So  I  started  questioning  them  at  lunch.   I  said,  "Well,  you 
know,  what  are  the  origins  of  this  group?  Who  are  you?"  They 
were  very  forthcoming,  it  seemed  like,  but  I  still  didn't 
understand  it.  This  was  a  sociological  phenomenon  of  some  kind 
that  had  coalesced,  and  I  was  trying  to  figure  it  out.  What  they 
told  me  was,  in  essence,  that  these  were  people  who  were 
dissatisfied  with  the  direction  of  the  world  and  felt  that  their 
lives  were  not  being  fulfilled  by  their  work  alone,  and  that  they 
had  an  obligation  to  use  their  enormous  energy  and  education. 
They  were  all  engineers,  lawyers,  doctors,  professional  people  of 
all  kinds,  people  who  owned  their  own  successful  businesses, 
pretty  much  centered  in  the  Peninsula  and  pretty  much  very  upper 
middle  class,  and  people  who  had  come  from  educated  families. 

And  they  or  many  of  them  had  found  problems  in  their 
marriages.   This  was  very  strongly  oriented  towards  married 
couples,  and  they  had  very  clear  ideas  about  the  proper  role  of 
women  and  the  proper  role  of  men.  They  had  this  book  that 
Rathbun  had  written  that  there  were  innate  qualities  that  were 
male  qualities  and  innate  qualities  that  were  female  qualities, 
and  that  both  sexes  possessed  both  qualities  but  in  different 
proportions  and  that  they  could  be  most  effective  in  the  world  if 
they  understood  their  proper  distribution  of  these  male /female 
qualities.   It  was  very  much  oriented  towards  their  spirituality 
around  their  sexuality.   Not  sexuality,  but  their  gender. 

Bits  and  pieces  of  that  started  to  come  out,  but  the  gist  of 
it  was  that  as  they  grew,  and  they  grew  by  word  of  mouth  and 
meetings  in  people's  living  rooms  and  so  on,  that  when  they  got 
to  a  thousand  couples,  they  would  reach  their  critical  mass  and 
it  was  time  "to  go  out,"  as  they  said—this  was  their  term—and 
choose  an  issue  in  the  outside  world  and  concentrate  all  of  this 
organized  energy  they  had  been  able  to  figure  out  and  put 
together  by  sorting  out  their  various  positions  in  the  world,  and 
direct  all  of  that  energy  towards  changing  the  world.   They  had 
watched  a  number  of  different  issues  develop,  and  they  had  chosen 
the  Nuclear  Safeguards  Initiative  as  the  issue  that  they  would 
use  to  turn  out  and  come  out  of  their  living  rooms  and  go  public. 

Lage:     All  of  this  unbeknownst  to  the  people  with  the  Nuclear  Safeguards 
Initiative? 

Pesonen:   Absolutely  unbeknownst  to  me.   They  had  made  this  decision  on 

their  own  without  talking  to  us.   But  they  weren't  sure  about  it 
until  they  talked  to  the  leader  of  what  they  perceived  as  the 
antinuclear  or  nuclear  safety  measure.   When  I  had  said,  "Because 
I  knew  I  was  right,"  that  somehow  carried  the  message  to  them 
that  I  was  the  right  person  they  were  willing  to  work  with.   I 
had  the  integrity  they  were  looking  for.   They  were  very 


165 


suspicious  of  politics.   They  were  very  suspicious  of  the 
political  process  generally.   They  thought  it  was  corrupt  and 
full  of  compromise,  and  here  was  somebody  they  perceived  as  not 
like  that. 

So  we  went  back  into  this  auditorium,  and  I  sat  down  in  the 
front  row  with  Jim  Burch.   The  program  then  was  for  our  crew, 
Dwight  Cocke  and  the  other  people  who  were  with  him,  to 
demonstrate  how  you  get  signatures.   They  put  on  kind  of  a  mock 
street  scene  on  the  stage.   Somebody  would  walk  by  and  we  showed 
them  Koupal's  technique  for  getting  signatures.   And  virtually 
everybody  came  back  into  the  main  auditorium.   Only  a  few  people 
didn't.   But  before  this  demonstration  began,  Burch  got  up  and 
said,  "Now,  you  heard  David  say  they  needed  some  money."  And 
from  nowhere  it  seemed,  these  attractive  women,  beautifully 
dressed,  carrying  big  boxes,  emerged  from  the  back  of  the 
auditorium,  came  down  the  aisles  passing  these  —  it  was  like 
church- -pas sing  these  boxes  up  and  down  the  aisles.   Money  was 
pouring  into  them.   Checks  and  cash  and-- 

Lage:     You  must  have  been  in  seventh  heaven! 

Pesonen:   I  couldn't  believe  it.  We  were  broke.   Calif ornians  for  Nuclear 
Safeguards  was  broke.   I  figured  this  campaign  has  failed  also, 
like  the  previous  Duskin/Koupal  campaign.  We  were  out  of  money. 
We  needed  money  to  pay  the  expenses  of  the  people  who  were  out 
gathering  the  signatures.   We  were  running  it  on  a  shoestring, 
but  it  still  costs  money  to  run  a  campaign  like  that  and  we  just 
didn't  have  it.   It  pretty  well  had  dried  up.  And  I'm  no 
fundraiser.   I  don't  like  fundraising;  I  don't  know  how  to  do  it. 
I'm  sort  of  the  big  idea,  strategy,  leader-type  person,  but  I 
don't  know  how  to  do  a  lot  of  these  things,  and  I  couldn't  find 
anybody  who  did,  either,  or  could  do  it  well  enough  for  us  to 
pull  through. 

So  Creative  Initiative  came  along  at  just  the  most  critical 
moment.   I'm  convinced  that  that  campaign  never  would  have  made 
it  without  Creative  Initiative.   They  energized  that  campaign. 

Lage:     So  they  gave  you  money. 

Pesonen:   Well,  so  the  boxes  were  then  taken  off  into  some  remote  place,  I 
don't  know,  to  count  all  of  the  money,  and  we  started  this 
demonstration  on  the  stage  on  how  to  gather  signatures,  and  maybe 
an  hour  went  by.   Suddenly  somebody  came  over  and  whispered  in 
Jim  Burch 's  ear,  and  he  walked  up  to  the  stage  and  took  the 
microphone.   He  interrupted  the  show  that  was  going  on,  that  we 
were  putting  on.   He  asked  me  to  come  up  on  the  stage.   There  was 
a  long  silence,  everybody  had  shut  up;  they  knew  exactly  what  he 


166 

was  going  to  say.   He  said,  "Twenty  thousand  dollars."   [pause] 
That's  all  he  said.   I  mean,  he  didn't  say,  "We've  counted  the 
money  and--"  he  just  uttered  the  words,  "Twenty  thousand 
dollars,"  and  the  whole  audience  burst  into  applause. 

Well,  I  was  overwhelmed.   I  was  bowled  over.  A  thousand 
dollars  was  a  big  chunk  of  cash  for  us.   So  we  walked  down  off 
the  stage,  and  he  just  handed  this  money  to  me. 

Lage:     This  cash? 

Pesonen:   Most  of  it  was  checks.   He  just  handed  me  a  big  fistful  of 
checks.   He  said  the  cash  was  maybe  three  or  four  thousand 
dollars,  and  they  were  going  to  keep  that  to  pay  for  this 
organization  and  to  pay  for  their  own  organizing  effort,  and  they 
were  going  to  give  all  of  the  checks  to  me.   I  could  have  just 
walked  out  with  all  of  that  money.   The  checks  were  all  made  out 
to  Calif ornians  for  Nuclear  Safeguards. 

Lage :     I  wonder  how  much  background  they  had  on  you? 
Pesonen:   They  had  done  some  background  on  me. 
Lage:     They  must  have. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  they  had  done  quite  a  bit  of  background,  but  I  don't  know 
how  efficient  they  were  about  it.   And  I  really  don't  know  what 
they  ever  found  out.   I  guess  what  they  found  out  was  that 
everything  I  told  them  in  my  speech  was  true.   I  suspect  that's 
as  far  as  it  went. 

Well,  I  said,  "Jim,  we  can't  do  this."   I  said,  "First  of" 
all,  we've  got  to  comply  with  the  California  Fair  Political 
Practices  Act.1  We  have  to  know  the  employers  of  all  these 
people;  we  have  to  report  all  of  this  money."  This  was  '74.   We 
were  the  first  statewide  initiative  to  have  to  comply  with  the 
Fair  Political  Practices  Act. 

Of  course,  they  didn't  have  all  of  their  rules  or 
regulations  in  order;  they  didn't  have  their  forms  completely 
settled.   The  FPPC  [Fair  Political  Practices  Commission]  didn't 
quite  know  what  it  was  doing  either,  but  we  knew  that  we  were  a 
controversial  campaign,  that  we  would  be  under  a  microscope,  that 
any  mistake  we  made  could  be  very  damaging  to  the  campaign.   So 
we  had  to  be  like  Caesar's  wife  as  the  first  measure  to  go 


'Political  Reform  Act  of  1974  came  into  being  in  Proposition  9  (June 
1974). 


167 


through  under  this  complex  set  of  regulations.   So  we  had  some 
people  helping  us  on  this,  but  I  didn't  really  know  what  we  had 
to  do,  and  I  didn't  want  to  screw  up. 

So  I  said,  "We  have  got  to  be  very  careful  how  we  handle 
this  money."  I  could  have  run  off  and  gone  to  Mexico  with  it, 
you  know.   I  said,  "Furthermore,  all  of  the  names  are  going  to  be 
a  public  record,  and  I  know  you've  got  people  here  who  work  for 
GE  [General  Electric]  or  Westinghouse  or  are  in  some  other  way 
involved  in  the  nuclear  industry,  and  they  may  get  retaliation 
from  their  employers."  Well,  they  hadn't  thought  of  any  of  this. 
They  were  really  innocent  in  a  lot  of  ways . 

So  Burch  went  back  and  announced  that  we  would  have  to 
publicly  report  any  donation;  that  it  could  come  to  the  attention 
of  the  employer,  and  if  anybody  wanted  to  reconsider  their 
contribution,  we  would  understand.   He  said,  "Write  a  note  and 
send  us  up  your  name."   So  they  collected  maybe  ten  or  fifteen 
names,  and  Jim  and  I  sat  out  in  the  sun  on  a  garden  railing  and 
went  through  every  check  and  found  these  fifteen  names  and  pulled 
those  checks  out.   They  took  those  back.   Then,  a  couple  of  days 
later,  I  gave  the  checks  to  the  volunteer  outfit  that  was 
handling  our  accounting. 

When  our  demonstration  was  over,  Jim  said,  "Okay,  now  we  are 
going  to  organize  our  resources."  You  know,  we  didn't  have  a 
lawyer;  we  didn't  have  a  professional  public  relations  person. 
There  were  lots  of  resources  that  a  big  campaign  would  have  at 
its  fingertips  today,  and  we  were  doing  it  ourselves,  a  lot  of 
that.   I  was  doing  some  of  the  lawyering. 

We  were  unhappy  with  the  secretary  of  state's  title  and 
summary  and  the  estimate  of  the  impact  on  tax  revenues.   We 
thought  it  was  a  biased  summary  of  the  measure.   That  had  to  be 
printed  in  bold  type  at  the  top  of  the  petition,  and  it  would  be 
printed  in  bold  type  in  the  voter  pamphlet.   So  I  brought  a  suit 
in  the  Sacramento  Superior  Court  to  reform  the  measure.   I  sued 
the  secretary  of  state,  the  attorney  general's  office,  and  I 
think  it  was  the  legislative  counsel. 


Lage:     Was  that  unusual? 

Pesonen:   That  was  very  unusual.   It's  almost  never  done, 
trial  in  Sacramento.   I  tried  the  case. 


And  we  had  a 


Lage:     And  what  was  the  outcome? 

Pesonen:   We  lost  it.   [Laughter]   We  got  some  publicity  out  of  it.   The 

state  hired  an  outside  lawyer,  who  is  now  on  the  federal  court  of 


168 

appeals,  on  the  Ninth  Circuit  Court  of  Appeals,  who  was  very 
good,  and  he  was  a  good  liberal.   A  well-known  lawyer  in  southern 
California,  Stephen  Reinhardt.   He's  a  very  good  lawyer.   But  it 
is  a  very  uphill  battle.  Here  you  are  trying  to  ask  a  judge  to 
rewrite  a  summary  of  a  confusing  statute—the  initiative  measure 
— with  no  standards  and  up  against  three  arms  of  government  who 
are  in  business  to  write  this  kind  of  stuff.  We  took  a  petition 
to  the  California  Supreme  Court  right  after  that,  and  that  didn't 
work  either,  but  it  was  worth  doing. 

Well,  so  anyway  that  is  a  demonstration:  I  was  managing  the 
campaign  and  I  was  doing  the  lawyer ing  for  it,  and  we  didn't  have 
any  money.   So  Burch  gets  up  and  he  says,  "All  right.   In 
classroom  3B  all  the  lawyers  go,  and  in  classroom  x  all  of  the 
people  who  are  in  the  business  of  public  relations,  and  the 
people  who  are  accountants  go  in  this  room."   But  that  was  all  of 
the  men.   The  women  were  to  go  into  another  auditorium  and  learn 
more  about  signature  gathering  and  organize  their  signature 
gathering. 

Lage:     The  women  had  an  innate  ability  in  that  direction? 

Pesonen:   Women  supposedly  have  this  innate  ability,  and  the  men  were  the 
professional  doers,  in  their  view. 

So  we  broke  up  and  we  spread  out  into  these  various  centers 
to  get  better  organized,  and  I  went  into  the  room  with  the 
lawyers.   There  were  thirty  lawyers  in  there.   All  with  private 
practices,  some  with  government.   Paul  Valentine,  who  has  a  firm 
in  Palo  Alto,  a  very  nice  man,  took  the  lead.  Valentine  said, 
"All  right,  the  first  thing  we  are  all  going  to  do  is  hold 
hands,"  and  all  thirty  lawyers  held  hands  in  a  circle. 
[Laughter]   He  said,  "And  now  we  are  going  to  tell  why  we  are 
here,  why  we  have  chosen."  Every  person  in  the  room  gave  a 
testimonial  to  this  great  moment  in  his  life  when  he  had  decided 
that  he  was  not  going  to  be  selfish  anymore;  he  wasn't  going  to 
be  turned  inward  just  to  making  money;  he  was  going  to  give 
himself  up  to  this  movement. 

Well,  I  was  just  completely  bowled  over.   I  was  swept  away 
by  this  power  that  was  at  my  disposal  all  of  a  sudden.   It  was 
such  an  overwhelming  change  from  this  shoestring  operation  that 
we  had.   Thirty  lawyers  from  none.  And  I  knew  that  going  on  in 
these  other  rooms  were  all  of  these  accountants  and  public 
relations  people,  and  we  had  some  of  our  staff  in  those  rooms. 
And  then  a  room  with  two  hundred  women  ready  to  hit  the  streets, 
dressed  in  their  Saks  Fifth  Avenue  finest.   Well  coif fed  and  well 
made-up.   And  they  all  were  very  pretty;  they  all  were  in  their 
thirties  and  early  forties;  they  were  professional  women;  they 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


169 


all  had  college  degrees;  they  were  married  to  professional 
people.   They  just  wanted  to  hit  the  streets.   I  couldn't  believe 
it. 

It  must  have  been  like  a  dream! 

It  was  like  a  dream.   I  couldn't  get  it.   I  went  home  and  told 
Julie  about  it;  I  couldn't  absorb  it  all.   I  had  a  stack  of 
checks  on  the  seat  in  the  car  when  I  drove  home  by  myself.   It 
was  six  inches  high  with  just  a  big  rubber  band  around  it. 

That's  a  great  picture. 

Well,  I  was  so  overwhelmed  by  this  and  inspired.   I  was  inspired 
that  we  had  what  I  thought  we  needed  now  to  get  the  campaign 
qualified—get  the  measure  qualified.   All  of  my  depression  and 
fear  that  we  were  failing  just  was  gone.   This  was  a  huge  engine 
at  our  disposal.   I  thought  it  was  naive;  I  thought  it  was  likely 
to  be  disappointed  in  the  long  run,  but  I  didn't  care.   I  was 
going  to  use  that  resource. 


After  the  lawyers  gave  their  testimonials,  then  what? 
you  do  with  thirty  lawyers? 


What  do 


Pesonen:   That's  right.   We  had  an  abundance  of  riches  and  resources  we 

didn't  really  need  for  lawyer ing.   But  we  knew  that  there  would 
be  legal  issues  come  up.   Maybe  on  the  campaign  reform  act, 
compliance  with  that.  We  just  brainstormed  for  a  little  while, 
and  then  I  left.   I  left  early.   I  said,  "You  guys  run  it;  we'll 
be  in  touch." 


A  Sense  of  Uneasiness 


Pesonen:  There  was  a  part  of  me  that  was  uneasy  with  this. 

Lage:  You  kind  of  took  on  a  responsibility  to  them,  in  a  sense? 

Pesonen:  Yes. 

Lage:  To  provide  a  vehicle. 

Pesonen:   That  was  part  of  it;  it  was  just  suddenly  a  huge  responsibility 

on  me.   I  couldn't  duck  out  of  this  quietly  anymore  if  I  got  worn 
out  or  was  broke—you  know,  I  wasn't  in  a  lucrative  law  firm.   I 
still  had  to  make  a  living.   And  I  was  stealing  a  lot  of  time 


170 


from  the  office  for  this,  and  they  all  knew  it,  and  they 
supported  me,  but  I  was  not  earning  my  keep. 

But  there  was  something  else  that  I  was  uneasy  about.   I'm 
uneasy  about  any  mass  movement.   There  is  a  submergence  of  the 
individual  in  those  things,  and  they  can  be  very  dangerous. 
There  was  a  little  tickle  of  uneasiness  about  that.  Not  very 
much,  but  I  had  some  distance  on  it. 

Well,  then  the  question  was  how  do  we  really  turn  this 
resource  to  use.   I  didn't  get  involved  in  the  day-to-day 
business  of  that,  I  delegated  that  to  Dwight  and  to  a  guy  named 
Richard  Grossman,  who  did  a  lot  of  writing  for  us.   There  were 
some  other  people.   It  is  all  a  big  blur  as  I  look  back  on  it, 
and  I  can't  remember  who  they  all  were.   I'm  sure  if  I  met  them 
now  and  they  reminded  me  it  would  all  come  back,  but--. 


Organizing  in  Southern  California 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


What  did  you  do  for  southern  California? 
didn't  have  people  down  there,  did  they? 


Creative  Initiative 


Creative  Initiative  didn't  have  many  people  in  southern 
California.   It  had  some,  and  I'm  glad  you  reminded  me.   That  was 
one  of  the  tasks  we  gave  to  them,  to  help  build  a  southern 
California  organization.   Just  go  down  there  and  do  it.   Some  of 
them  were  in  television  advertising,  so  they  had  ins.   They  knew 
how  to  open  doors,  and  they  set  up  a  southern  California 
organization. 

So  you  could  turn  things  over  to  them? 


Pesonen:   I  could  turn  a  lot  over  to  them,  and  I  could  trust  them  to  do  it. 
They  had  some  screwy  ideas .   They  had  kind  of  a  pyramid  scheme 
notion  about  how  the  world  would  work:  if  you  got  ten  people  to 
sign  up,  and  they  got  ten  people  to  sign  up,  you  know,  you  would 
multiply  this  so  fast  pretty  soon  you  had  signed  up  the  whole 
state.   I  can  remember  going  to  one  meeting  with  them  where  they 
firmly  believed  that  we  would  have,  within  three  weeks,  all  of 
the  signatures  we  needed  because  of  this  multiplying  effect.   I 
knew  that  was  going  to  run  into  a  rocky  future  pretty  quick,  and 
it  did.   The  first  group  of  ten  they  contacted,  of  course,  were 
people  like  themselves.   Those  people  then  began  to  contact 
people  who  weren't  like  themselves  and  so  on. 


171 


But  we  got  the  signatures,  and  we  got  them  fast.   They  set 
up  tables  everywhere.   They  were  in  every  mall,  they  were  on 
every  major  street  corner,  they  were  in  southern  California.   And 
these  were  people  who  had  personal  money.   These  were  people  who 
made  salaries  of  seventy-five,  one  hundred,  one  hundred  fifty, 
two  hundred  thousand  dollars  a  year.   They  were  doctors- - 

Lage:     But  also  must  have  had  a  lot  of  commitments  at  home,  to  jobs, 
family? 

Pesonen:   They  had  made  personal  decisions  that  for  the  next  year 

every  thing- -many  of  them  quit  their  business—we  had  four  or  five 
doctors  who  simply  suspended  their  medical  practices  for  a  year, 
lawyers  who  suspended  their  law  practices  for  a  year.   They  just 
put  everything  they  had  into  this.   And  they  paid  their  own  way; 
we  didn't  have  to  reimburse  them.   So  they'd  fly  back  and  forth 
to  southern  California  all  of  the  time.   I  kept  seeing  them  on 
planes  when  1  went  down  there  to  appear  on  television  programs. 
There  was  never  an  expense  voucher  from  them  for  this .   Maybe  we 
should  have  reported  it  to  the  FPPC  [Fair  Political  Practices 
Commission],  you  know,  as  a  contribution,  but  I  don't  think  we 
did.   I  don't  really  remember  what  happened  on  that. 


The  "Defection"  of  Three  General  Electric  Nuclear  Engineers 


Pesonen:   It  scared  the  hell  out  of  the  nuclear  industry.   The  word  got  out 
pretty  fast.   There  were  three  nuclear  engineers  who  worked  for 
GE,  who  were  involved  with  Creative  Initiative.   The  three 
engineers,  Dick  Hubbard,  Dale  Minor  and  Bridenbaugh,  I  think  his 
name  was--MHB.   They  were  nuclear  engineers  building  nuclear 
power  plants . 

Lage:     Had  they  been  the  ones  that  interested  the  group  in  this  issue, 
do  you  think? 

Pesonen:   No,  no.   They  were  drawn  into  it  later.   But  they  were  troubled 
by  what  they  were  doing.   They  were  all  engineers  with  General 
Electric.   General  Electric  in  San  Jose  had  its  nuclear 
engineering  center.   In  fact,  that's  the  place  where  Governor 
[Edmund  G.]  Pat  Brown  [Sr.]  had  announced  in  1958  that  the  state 
would  become  a  center  of  nuclear  development,  and  where  he  had 
promised  to  appoint  [Retired  Colonel]  Alexander  Grendon  to  this 


172 

new  position  in  his  administration.1  The  reason  he  made  that 
announcement  in  San  Jose  was  that  that  was  the  center  of  nuclear 
engineering  for  General  Electric. 

These  young  men  worked  for  GE.   They  had  been  educated  as 
nuclear  engineers  or  chemical  engineers.  They  all  had  a  nuclear 
engineering  background,  and  they  had  worked  at  the  Hanford  works. 
I  remember  I  think  it  was  Dale  Hubbard's  wife  telling  me  about 
when  they  were  a  young  couple,  and  this  was  his  first  job  out  of 
college,  working  for  the  AEC  [Atomic  Energy  Commission]  at  the 
Hanford  nuclear  works.  The  first  morning  they  saw  what  looked 
like  a  milk  truck  pull  up.  They  thought,  "Well,  how  nice  of  the 
government  to  deliver  milk."  They  had  a  baby.   But  what  they 
delivered  was  empty  bottles,  because  everybody  in  the  town  had  to 
give  a  urine  sample,  which  was  picked  up  every  day.   The  truck 
would  come  back  at  night  to  pick  up  the  bottles  to  test  for 
plutonium,  cesium,  strontium-90. 

Lage:     They  were  guinea  pigs? 

Pesonen:   They  were  guinea  pigs.   That  had  planted  some  seeds  of  worry 

early  on.   So  they  went  public.  We  had  a  long  agonizing  meeting. 
I  remember  we  spent  one  whole  day  and  an  evening  in  a  kind  of  a 
counseling  session  with  them  about  what  this  would  mean  if  they 
went  public  and  they  held  a  press  conference  about  their 
opposition  to  nuclear  power  and  their  support  for  the  nuclear 
initiative,  given  their  background. 

Well,  it  was  an  explosive  press  conference.   It  just  shook 
the  whole  industry.   This  was  another  public  relations  coup  that 
Pesonen  had  pulled  off;  I'm  sure  that's  how  they  saw  it.   But  it 
was  written  up  all  over  the  place:  "Nuclear  Engineers  Defect  in 
Favor  of  the  Nuclear  Initiative."   It  went  into  the  highest 
boardrooms,  I'm  sure.   Westinghouse,  Babcock-Wilcox,  GE,  PG&E, 
Southern  California  Edison,  and  all  of  the  other  peripheral 
industries  that  were  connected  with  the  nuclear  industry.   This 
really  made  an  impact;  it  was  a  Time  magazine  story,  all  kinds  of 
stuff. 


'The  position  was  coordinator  of  Atomic  Energy  Development  and 
Radiation  Protection. 


173 


Leadership  and  Nature  of  Creative  Initiative 


Pesonen:   That  was  an  outgrowth  of  this  Project  Survival.   They  spun  off 

this  separate  legal  entity,  Project  Survival,  but  it  was  all  made 
up  of  the  Creative  Initiative  people. 

Lage:     The  Creative  Initiative  continued  as  a  name  and  a  group,  and  this 
was  their  nuclear  fighting  arm? 

Pesonen:   Yes. 
II 

Pesonen:   It  was  very  well  organized.   I  mean,  you  would  go  to  a  meeting 

with  them,  and  there  would  be  thirty  people  in  the  room.   If  you 
go  to  a  usual  meeting  that  is  called  together  by  some 
neighborhood  organization,  the  subject  just  sort  of  flows  all 
over  the  place,  and  it  never  gets  focused,  and  there  are  egos 
going  on  and  all  kinds  of  static.   There  was  none  of  that, 
absolutely  none  of  that  when  you  went  to  one  of  their  meetings. 
Everybody  who  said  something  said  something  on  the  point,  they 
didn't  say  anything  superfluous.   You  couldn't  hear  their  ego 
echoing  in  it,  you  couldn't  hear  any  other  distractions  going  on. 
Their  minds  were  clear  and  they  were  goal  oriented. 

Lage:     Was  this  the  type  of  people  that  they  drew,  or  do  you  think  it 
was  the  training? 

Pesonen:   I  think  it  was  the  training.   They  were  probably  that  kind  of 
people  anyway,  but  they  had  that  training.  And  they  were  all 
nice  people;  I  liked  them,  but  I  never  felt  completely 
comfortable,  and  I  don't  know  whether  they  sensed  that  or  not.   I 
never  joined.   They  tried  to  recruit  Julie  and  me  as  members  of 
Creative  Initiative. 

The  central  leadership  was  a  group  of  people  who  lived 
quasi- communally  in  Portola  Valley  in  a  place  called  the  Hub. 
Jim  Burch  was  quite  well-off  for  example.   He  had  been  a  very 
successful  advertising  executive  for  Batten,  Barton,  Durstine,  & 
Osborn,  I  think,  BBDO;  he  had  the  Standard  Oil  account,  and  he 
had  made  a  lot  of  money  somehow.   He  was  a  very  fine  person;  I 
liked  all  of  the  people. 

But  this  dinner--!  kept  getting  insights  into  them.  Nobody 
ever  sat  down  and  told  me  the  real  story,  I  would  just  pick  up 
clues.   But  they  invited  Julie  and  me  to  dinner  at  the  Hub,  the 
Rathbuns'  house,  maybe  a  month  or  two  after  the  speech  at  Gunn 
High  School.   Their  living  arrangement  was  individual  houses-- 


174 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


beautiful,  big  houses--in  a  circle  at  the  end  of  a  street  with 
open  space  behind  them  and  a  communal  building  in  the  center  for 
meetings,  laundry  facilities,  a  big  cooking  area  if  they  wanted 
to  get  together  and  eat  together.   But  they  all  had  their 
separate  dwellings,  so  they  kind  of  never  quite  made  up  their 
minds  whether  they  were  going  to  be  communal  or  individual. 
[Laughter]   But  the  architecture  and  the  whole  design  of  this 
development  was  a  reflection  of  their  philosophy,  and  it  had  been 
built  for  the  leadership  of  this  organization  to  live  there:  the 
Rathbuns  lived  there,  the  Burches  lived  there,  the  Valentines 
lived  there,  Walt  Hayes  and  his  wife  lived  there—Walt  was  a 
lawyer  from  San  Jose.   There  were  six  or  seven  families,  but 
those  are  the  ones  I  remember  most  vividly  right  now. 

Did  you  pick  up  a  religious  component  of  this  group? 

Yes.   In  fact  they  were  explicit  about  that.   They  were  eclectic. 
They  picked  a  little  bit  from  Buddhism,  a  little  bit  from 
Catholicism;  from  Christian  religions,  Moslem  religions,  Eastern 
religions,  they  picked  little  bits  and  pieces  and  fitted  it  all 
together.   I  think  that's  what  Rathbun's  book  is  about.   I  never 
could  get  through  it.  You  know,  the  Rainbow  women  were  part  of 
that,  remember? 

Not  [Reverend]  Jesse  Jackson? 

Not  Jesse  Jackson.   It  was  before  Jesse  Jackson.   They  sang 
rainbow  songs,  and  they  went  to  Sacramento,  and  the  women  all 
wore  colorful  garb  and  marched  around  the  capitol  on  the  nuclear 
issue,  by  the  hundreds.   And  they  were  all  there  on  time.   It  was 
too  disciplined  for  my  taste.   But  I  had  to  admire  the  way  they 
mustered  their  energy  and  their  focus,  and  when  they  said  they'd 
do  something,  they  did  it,  and  they  did  it  right,  and  they  were 
professional. 

So  I  was  telling  the  story  about  this  dinner.   Julie  and  I 
went  to  dinner  down  there,  and  we  all  sat  in  a  circle  with  TV 
trays.   It  was  buffet  style,  and  then  we  all  sat  down.   Amelia, 
who  was  a  very  strong  personality,  said,  "Now,  tell  us  about 
yourselves."  Now,  this  is  supposed  to  be  a  dinner  party.   I 
thought  we  would  get  to  know  each  other  a  little  better  and  have 
some  chit-chat  and  tell  some  stories  and  see  if  people  like  to  go 
fishing  or  what  they  like  to  do.   No,  they  were  going  to  get 
right  to  the  point:  how  is  your  marriage?   [Laughter]   What  is 
your  theory  about  raising  your  children?  How  do  you  resolve 
conflict  in  your  marriage? 

I  felt  like  a  bug  on  the  end  of  a  pin.   So  did  Julie.   Julie 
was  very  uncomfortable;  she  didn't  like  it  at  all.   She  liked  it 


175 


even  less  than  I  did.  And  it  wasn't  impolite;  it  was  as  though 
by  being  invited  into  this  very  sanctified  circle  of  the  top 
leadership  of  this  organization,  they  assumed  that  we  would  want 
to  just  succumb  and  be  part  of  the  world  they  lived  in- -their 
mental  and  spiritual  world- -and  that  we  could  all  be  quite  frank 
with  each  other.   I  think  I  shot  back  with  some  kind  of  a 
question  about  them.   I  didn't  really  answer  their  questions.   I 
think  Julie  and  I  were  having  a  little  problem  with  our  marriage 
already  by  then,  unacknowledged  but  enough  so  that  we  didn't  want 
to  talk  about  it. 

Lage:     You  feel  pretty  threatened  when-- 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  didn't  feel  threatened.   I  think  Julie  felt  threatened. 
I  just  was  surprised  and  a  little  shocked  at  the  directness  of 
it.   And  then  I  wasn't  shocked.   This  was  the  way  they  are;  this 
was  how  they  had  trained  themselves  to  deal  with  the  world,  and 
it  has  given  them  this  power  to  be  direct  and  uncluttered  in 
their  approach  to  things  and  in  the  way  they  thought,  and  it  was 
the  power  that  was  helping  us  get  our  initiative  qualified. 
[Laughter]   It  was  a  big,  beautiful  contrast  to  the  intrigue  and 
small-mindedness  of  the  Koupals,  of  the  world  that  I  had  been 
dealing  with.   And  with  most  people  you  deal  with,  you  run  into  a 
lot  of  static. 

So  I  admired  that  quality  of  theirs,  I  just  didn't 
understand  its  origins,  and  I  was  skeptical  of  its  origins.   But 
I've  stayed  intrigued  by  them.   I've  kind  of  lost  touch  with  some 
of  them  although  I  still  run  into  people  twenty  years  later,  on 
the  street,  in  meetings.   It  must  happen  once  a  month,  I'll  run 
into  somebody  who  was  in  Gunn  High  School  on  that  day,  and  I 
won't  remember  who  they  were,  and  they  will  introduce  themselves. 
I've  had  people  come  up  in  restaurants  and  introduce  themselves 
and  say,  "I  was  there  on  that  day  in  Gunn  High  School." 

Lage:     So  that  was  a  big  moment  for  them? 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  big  moment  for  me,  too. 

Lage:     And  they  went  on  to  do  Beyond  War,  I  remember. 

Pesonen:   They  went  on  to  do  Beyond  War.   I  sensed,  and  I  think  some  of 

them  kind  of  conceded  later,  that  they  were  very  naive  about  the 
political  process,  and  they  were  somewhat  disappointed  about  the 
kinds  of  compromises  we  had  to  make  in  the  campaign.  There  was  a 
period  when  we  believed  we  could  pass  the  initiative,  which  was 
naive  and  unrealistic.   I  never  really  thought  we  would  pass  that 
measure,  but  after  this  Creative  Initiative  group  came  along,  I 


176 


thought,  "Well,  maybe  we  have  a  possibility."  We  knew  it  was  a 
very  long  shot  and  we — 

Lage:     Did  you  get  it  qualified  right  away  after  they--? 

Pesonen:   Oh,  we  got  it  qualified,  yes.   I  think  within  a  month  after  that. 

[tape  interruption] 
Pesonen:   Well,  I  don't  know  that  my  theories  are-- 

Lage:     Well,  put  it  on  tape,  and  we  can  take  it  out  if,  when  you  read 
it,  you  think  it  isn't  valid. 

Pesonen:   Well,  they  struck  me  as  people  who  had  bought  completely  into  the 
American  Dream  early.   They  went  to  college;  they  got  married  out 
of  college;  they  got  a  suburban  home,  and  they  were  happy  larks. 
They  had  a  couple  of  kids;  they  had  a  station  wagon  in  the 
driveway,  and  the  wife  was  busy  running  kids  back  and  forth  to 
Little  League  and  school,  and  shopping,  and  her  coffee  klatches 
and  her  minor  community  activity,  and  PTA  [Parent  Teacher 
Association).   But  something  was  missing;  they  felt  something  was 
missing.  This  wasn't  what  they  thought  life  was  going  to  be  like 
after  they  got  their  career  started.   And  they  began  to  search 
for  some  answers.   Out  of  that  process,  somewhere  the  germ  was 
planted,  and  this  organization  started.  There  have  been  other 
movements  responding  to  the  same  uneasiness  and  dissatisfaction. 
It  is  very  idealistic;  somehow  their  idealism  was  out  of  phase 
with  the  reality  they  faced. 

Lage:     It  also  was  a  time  in  the  seventies  of  encounter  groups  and 

counter-culture  things,  and  this  is  kind  of  a  respectable  middle- 
class  group  that  couldn't  quite  fit  in  to  that  counter-culture. 

Pesonen:   I  think  that's  true  also. 

Lage:     But  they  took  on  some  of  its  attributes. 

Pesonen:   I  think  a  lot  of  people  felt  they  were  better  off  from  it  even 
when  they  left  it.   They  got  some  clarity  about  who  they  were. 

The  world  really  is  a  messy  place,  and  it  is  always  going  to 
be  a  messy  place.   [laughter]   You  are  always  going  to  be 
disappointed  if  you've  got  very  high  ideals  about  it.   I  think  a 
lot  of  them  got  wiser,  came  out  of  it  wiser  and  better  able  to 
deal  with  it. 


177 


An  Intense  Political  Campaign  to  Pass  Proposition  15' 


Lage:     So  you  got  the  initiative  qualified. 

Pesonen:   We  got  it  qualified.   Then  we  had  to  launch  a  political  campaign. 
That  was  a  whole  different  kettle  of  fish,  and  that's  where,  I 
think,  the  disenchantment  started  to  set  in  with  Creative 
Initiative,  because  the  political  campaign  was  a  very  intense 
political  campaign.   The  industry  put  more  money  into  opposing 
that  measure  than  had  been  put  into  any  measure  in  the  history  of 
the  initiative  process  in  California.   I  think  the  realistic 
figure — the  reported  figure  was  something  like  five  million 
dollars  and  I  believe  it  was  really  around  seven.   I  don't 
remember  how  I  came  up  with  that  number,  but  I  was  pretty 
confident  of  it  at  the  time. 

Lage:     They  spent  more  than  they  reported? 

Pesonen:   We  all  probably  spent  more  than  we  reported.   That  was  the  first 
campaign  under  the  new  measure  [the  fair  campaign  practices 
measure].   But  it  was  a  lot  of  money.  And  it  was  a  media 
saturation  campaign,  and  we  tried  to  counter  that.  We  ran  a  real 
campaign. 

Lage:     Did  you  hire  a  media  firm? 

Pesonen:   One  of  the  Creative  Initiative  group  gave  us  a  lot  of  help  on 

that.   I  kept  quite  a  bit  of  control  over  that,  but  we  had  lots 
of  television.   We  always  searched  for  the  free  publicity:  the 
press  conference  with  some  new  announcement,  or  a  talk  show,  or  a 
debate  on  public  television.   I  was  in  I  don't  know  how  many  of 
those  things.   It  seemed  like  every  week  I  was  going  off  to  L.A. 
[Los  Angeles]  to  tape  some  television  program  or  some  television 
debate  or  give  a  speech  someplace  or  speak  to  a  medical  group.   I 
was  always  giving  speeches.   And  other  people  were,  too.   A  lot 
of  these  Creative  Initiative  people  were. 

Lage:     So  you  felt  comfortable  turning  them  loose  in  that--? 

Pesonen:   Oh  yes.   The  doctors  would  talk  to  doctors'  groups,  the  lawyers 
would  talk  to  lawyers '  groups ,  the  engineers  would  talk  to 
engineers'  groups.   Everybody  talked. 

Lage:     That's  very  effective. 


'Proposition  15  (June  1976). 


178 


Pesonen:   Yes.   But  the  campaign  lasted  about  eight  months,  I  guess,  and  it 
got  very  intense  in  the  last  four  or  five  months  before  the 
election  in  June  of  '76.   It  got  very  intense  at  that  stage.  And 
money  started  to  come  in.   We  started  really  raising  money. 

Lage:     From  small  donors? 

Pesonen:   From  small  donors,  yes,  big  donors.   Mostly  small  donors.   Lots 
and  lots.  We  had  a  whole  direct  mail  campaign  going,  and  it  was 
working.   We  were  solvent. 


Safe  Nuclear  Power  or  No  Nuclear  Power? 


Lage:     You  said  you  even  began  to  believe  that  you  might  win. 

Pesonen:   We  began  to  believe  that  we  might  win.   There  were  always 

problems  that  arise.   I  know  that  [environmentalist  David]  Dave 
Brower,  who  had  founded  the  Friends  of  the  Earth  by  then,  was 
unhappy  that  we  weren't--. 

We  had  compromised  our  position.   The  industry  took  the 
strategy  to  force  us  to  say  we  were  against  nuclear  power  in  any 
form.   They  knew  that  the  public  still  pretty  much  supported 
nuclear  power.   I  think  the  polls  showed  that  about  60  to  65 
percent  of  the  people  thought  that  nuclear  power  was  a  very 
important  source  of  energy  and  useful  and  valuable.   If  they 
could  force  us  to  the  position  of  saying  that  this  really  was  an 
antinuclear  movement,  that  we  would  be  on  the  defensive.  We 
sensed  that,  too,  so  we  took  the  position  that  all  we  really 
wanted  was  to  make  it  safe. 

Lage:     That's  the  way  it  was  written,  after  all. 

Pesonen:   That's  the  way  it  was  written.   Well,  you  know  that's  really 
duplicitous.   In  fact,  I  told  an  L.A.  Times  reporter--! 've 
forgotten  his  name  now,  but  he  was  a  good  reporter  who  covered 
the  campaign  very  well.  We  had  a  kind  of  a  post  mortem  after  it 
was  over,  and  I  said,  "Yes,  it  really  was  kind  of  duplicitous." 
And  that  may  have  been  our  problem.   People  sensed  that  we  were 
really  against  nuclear  power,  or  most  of  the  movement  was.  Most 
of  the  people  involved  were  fervently  against  nuclear  power. 
They  were  people  who  liked  clear-cut  positions,  and  they  believed 
it. 

Lage:     And  did  Dave  Brower  not  want--? 


179 


Pesonen:   Dave  Brower  did  not  want  us  to  just  say  we  were  for  safe  nuclear 
power;  he  wanted  us  to  say  that  we  were  for  no  nuclear  power. 
And  so  we  had  to  sort  that  out  with  him. 

Lage:     Did  you  work  closely  with  the  Sierra  Club  at  all? 

Pesonen:   The  Sierra  Club  was  very  much  involved,  yes.   Sierra  Club 

chapters  helped  circulate  petitions  and  pass  resolutions.   A  lot 
of  organizations-- 

Lage:     Did  you  have  a  steering  committee? 

Pesonen:   We  had  a  steering  committee  that  was  very  informally  set  up.   I 
headed  it.   I  think  Jim  Burch  from  Project  Survival  was  on  it, 
Walt  Hayes  from  Project  Survival.   By  this  time  we  had  been 
joined  by  a  very  effective  person,  John  Geeseman,  who  is  now  a 
lawyer  practicing  in  San  Francisco  and  was  active  in  the 
[Governor  Edmund  G.]  Jerry  Brown  [Jr.]  campaign  later.   We  sort 
of  picked  people  based  on  their  ability;  I  picked  people  very 
much  based  on  their  ability. 

Lage:     But  you  didn't  have  a  representative  from  the  Sierra  Club,  a 
representative  from  Friends  of  the  Earth,  that  kind  of  thing? 

Pesonen:   Off  and  on.   The  steering  committee  was  not  ever  formally 
designated,  I  think. 

Lage:     What  happened  to  the  Nader  group? 

Pesonen:   Well,  the  Nader  group  was  led  by  Richard  Spohn,  and  Spohn  had 
wanted  to  be  head  of  the  organization,  and  I  had  told  him  he 
couldn't.   [Laughter]   I  didn't  trust  his  judgment.   He  had  done 
some  really  dumb  things  early  on.   But  he  did  come  around.   He 
aligned  himself  with  Koupal  in  that  first  struggle  and  then  later 
we  straightened  that  out.   He  just  lives  around  the  corner  here, 
and  we  are  good  acquaintances  now,  but  it  was  a  little  tense 
there  twenty  years  ago. 

You  know,  I  wish  I  had  a  better  memory  for  this  kind  of 
detail.   I  just  don't.   I  see  the  big,  sweeping  panorama  of  these 
events. 


Effect  of  the  Warren  Legislation  on  the  Campaign 


Pesonen:   In  any  event,  in  the  latter  days  of  the  campaign,  the  last  two  or 
three  months,  this  notion  that  the  measure  was  too  radical 


180 


started  to  emerge,  and  Charlie  Warren  and  Jerry  Brown  raised  the 
idea  of  some  more  responsible  legislation.   The  idea  of  a 
statutory  response  by  the  legislature  didn't  emerge  until  a  few 
months  before  the  election. 

Lage:     Warren  was  having  these  extensive  hearings,  though? 

Pesonen:  That's  right.  I  forgot  about  those  hearings.  Warren  had  these 
big  hearings,  which  were  a  valuable  platform.  I  don't  remember 
when  he  had  those  hearings. 

Lage:  I  can  check  the  dates  but  I  think  they  went  on  in  1975. 

Pesonen:  Well,  that  fits  now  that  I  think  back  on  it. 

Lage:  Did  they  communicate  with  you? 

Pesonen:  Oh  yes. 

Lage:  Was  there  coordination  there? 

Pesonen:  We  were  in  contact  with  Charlie,  and  he  and  I  would  talk  on  the 
phone  all  of  the  time.   We  presented  testimony  at  the  hearings, 
and  I  followed  those  pretty  closely.   I  had  forgotten  about  that. 
I  don't  know  how  I  would  forget  about  that. 

That  wasn't  the  central  focus  of  my  energy,  but  they  were  an 
important  aspect  of  the  whole  collection  of  things  that  were 
going  on.   And  they  were  very  valuable  hearings.   He  had  a  staff 
person,  [Emilio  E.,  Ill]  Gene  Varanini,  who  later  went  on  to  be 
on  the  energy  commission  [Energy  Resources  Conservation  and 
Development  Commission],  I  think,  who  wrote  the  report,  wrote  a 
very  good  report.1  And  there  were  reports  coming  out.   Some 
group  down  at  Stanford  put  out  a  report  analyzing  the  measure  and 
its  economic  effect,  and  we  had  to  respond  to  these.   There  was 
just  a  lot  of  activity.  That  happens  in  any  initiative;  academic 
groups  put  out  reports  that  purport  to  say  what  the  real  meaning 
of  the  measure  is  in  terms  of  its  impact  on  the  economy  or  the 
resource  or  anything  else. 

So  then  the  debate  emerged  in  our  informal  steering 
committee  of  how  we  should  respond  to  the  statutes.   There  were 
three  bills  that  came  out  of  the  Warren  committee  hearings.   I 
think  that  was  the  Assembly  Natural  Resources  Committee 


'Reassessment  of  Nuclear  Energy  in  California:   A  Policy  Analysis  of 
Proposition  15  and  Its  Alternatives.   California  State  Assembly,  Committee 
on  Resources,  Land  Use,  and  Energy,  1976. 


181 


[Committee  on  Resources,  Land  Use,  and  Energy].   Should  we 
support  them,  or  should  we  oppose  them?  They  were  pretty  good 
bills,  and  they  were  patterned  after  many  of  the  issues  that  we 
had  raised  in  the  nuclear  initiative:  no  new  plants  until  there 
was  a  certified  solution  to  the  spent  fuel  disposal  problem,  and 
it  did  address  the  insurance  issue  a  little  differently--!  don't 
remember  exactly  how.   They  addressed  most  of  the  issues. 

Lage:     I  think  one  of  the  differences  was  they  didn't  deal  with  existing 
plants . 

Pesonen:   Right,  they  just  dealt  with  future  plants. 

Lage:     Whereas  yours  was  going  to  cut  back  existing  plants. 

Pesonen:   No,  ours  was  prospective  only,  too,  I  think. 

Lage:     No,  I  think  if  it  wasn't  certified  safe,  then  the  level  of 
production  of  existing  plants  was  to  be  cut  back. 

Pesonen:   Oh,  that's  right.   They  had  to  phase  back  their  power  levels. 

Lage:     Yes. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  that's  right.   The  legislation  didn't  touch  existing  plants. 

Lage:     No.   And  I  think  they  didn't  deal  with  the  Price-Anderson  Act 
quite  so  directly  because  they  felt  the  state  couldn't-- 

Pesonen:   It  would  probably  be  preempted.   But  they  did  address  a  lot  of 
the  issues  we  had  raised  and  that  were  at  the  center  of  the 
debate  over  the  nuclear  safeguards  measure.   So  we  had  to  decide 
what's  our  strategy  when  it  comes  to  the  bills?  Do  we  support 
them?  Do  we  support  their  being  introduced?  If  they  are 
introduced  what  is  our  position  on  them? 

I  took  the  position  that  they  were  a  big  step  forward,  that 
there  was  a  great  risk  we  weren't  going  to  pass  the  initiative 
and  that  we  should  support  them,  and  that  in  any  event  it  was  a 
political  matter.   We  had  to  support  them  because  we  had  already 
elected  our  strategy:  that  we  were  going  to  be  for  safe  nuclear 
power.   If  we  had  elected  a  strategy  up  front  to  be  against  any 
nuclear  power,  we  could  have  taken  the  position  with  integrity 
that  the  bills  were  weak  compromises  and  didn't  go  far  enough  and 
were  misleading.   But  we  couldn't  take  that  position  because  of 
the  strategy  we  had  elected  for  our  own  measure,  which  was  the 
same  strategy,  watered  down  in  the  legislation.   It  was  just  a 
difference  in  details. 


182 


So  we  did  announce  that  we  would  support  the  legislation, 
and  they  passed  very  quickly.1 

Lage:     Do  you  think  the  legislation  passed  because  of  the  fear  of  the 
initiative? 

Pesonen:   I  am  convinced  that  they  wouldn't  even  have  been  introduced  but 
for  the  initiative,  and  that's  what  Charlie  told  us  three  years 
earlier  when  we  had  gone  to  see  him  and  asked  him  if  he  would 
introduce  legislation.  He  had  said,  "I  can't  do  anything  without 
the  initiative."  Well,  with  the  initiative  bubbling  as  the 
central  environmental  question  in  the  state  at  that  time,  he 
could  hold  hearings,  and  they  would  draw  a  lot  of  attention,  and 
they  would  catch  the  attention  of  his  fellow  members  of  the 
legislature,  and  it  would  create  the  momentum  for  their  passage. 

Jerry  Brown  was  scared  to  death  of  the  initiative.   I  think 
he  was  sympathetic  to  it,  and  he  followed  it  all  the  time.   He 
called  me  once  a  week,  "How  are  you  doing?   What  do  your  polls 
tell  you?"   He  was  very  interested  in  it.   But  he  saw  a  safe  way 
out  by  this  more  responsible  response,  so  he  pushed  it  also.   He 
and  Warren,  together,  so  you  had  the  executive  branch  and  the 
leadership  of  the  key  committee  in  the  legislature,  and  all  over 
the  front  pages  of  the  newspapers  every  day  was  something  going 
on  about  nuclear  power  and  an  agitated  public  and  constituency  in 
all  of  these  legislators'  districts.   So  it  was  easy  to  get  the 
three  bills  through  as  the  responsible  alternative.   Then 
immediately  the  governor  took  the  position  that  it  was  not 
necessary  to  pass  the  initiative  because  the  legislature  had 
finally  done  the  responsible  thing. 

Lage:     And  what  did  that  do  to  your  campaign? 

Pesonen:   1  don't  think  it  made  any  difference  in  the  campaign.   The  people 
in  the  campaign  felt  that  it  undercut  our  support.   I  doubt  it. 
I  think  most  of  the  people  who  voted  for  it,  for  Proposition  15 
or  against  it,  were  unaware  of  those  bills.   I  don't  think  they 
made  up  their  minds  based  on  that  kind  of  analysis,  not  a 
significant  number  of  voters  did.  We  would  have  lost  anyway;  I 
am  convinced  of  that.   There  is  no  question.   What  did  we  get,  40 
percent  of  the  vote? 


'A.B.  2820,  1975-1976  Reg.  Sess.,  Cal.  Stat.,  ch.  194  (1976) 
A.B.  2821,  1975-1976  Reg.  Sess.,  Cal.  Stat.,  ch.  195  (1976) 
A.B.  2822,  1975-1976  Reg.  Sess.,  Cal.  Stat.,  ch.  196  (1976). 


183 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


I  think  it  was  about  that.   [The  vote  was  32.5  percent  in  favor 
of  Proposition  15.]   Were  people  disillusioned,  your  Project 
Survival  people? 

They  were  disillusioned. 

Because  of  the  failure  of  the  initiative? 


Yes.   I  think  they  believed  it  could  win. 
were  ever  realistic  about  it. 


But  I  don't  think  they 


They  didn't  take  satisfaction  in  seeing  that  the  pressure 
probably  led  to  some  fairly  decent  legislation? 

I  think  some  of  the  more  wise  ones  did.   But  a  lot  of  people  just 
saw  life  in  "you  win  or  you  lose"  terms.   I  didn't.   I  was 
exhausted.   I  was  glad  it  was  over.   [laughter]   But  I  don't 
think  there  is  any  question  that  the  bills  did  not  affect  the 
outcome  of  the  measure,  but  that  the  bills  wouldn't  have  existed 
but  for  the  measure.   So,  when  you  go  back  and  look  back  at  the 
strategy  we  devised  in  Henry  Kendall's  living  room  four  years 
before,  it  worked.  And  it  worked  just  fine.   I  mean,  our  plan  to 
a  tee.   It  was  just  a  very  wasteful  way  to  do  it,  but  there  was 
no  other  way  to  do  it.  At  least,  I  didn't  know  of  any  other  way 
to  do  it.  We  got  what  we  wanted,  or  we  got  a  lot  of  what  we 
wanted.   And  it  did  stop  any  further  nuclear  development  in 
California.   There  hasn't  been  any  since. 


Inspiring  and  Assisting  Efforts  in  Other  States 


Pesonen:   Now,  in  the  meantime,  this  Proposition  15  had  inspired  other 

measures,  similar  measures  in  other  states.   In  Oregon,  Montana. 
Missouri;  there  were  five  or  six  states  that  had  measures.  We 
were  on  in  June,  and  they  were  on  in  November. 

Lage:     Did  you  get  a  lot  of  calls  from  those  states? 

Pesonen:  We  got  a  lot  of  calls.  More  than  that,  we  got  requests  for  money 
because  a  very  interesting  thing  happened:  the  curve  of 
contributions  to  the  Proposition  15  campaign  just  kept  on  rising 
as  people  began  to  hear  and  understand  the  issue  and  get  our 
message.   So  the  biggest  day  of  funds  we  received,  the  most 
amount  of  money  per  day,  came  in  the  day  of  the  election, 
[laughter]  We  ended  up  with  a  surplus  of  about  one  hundred 
thousand  dollars. 


184 


Lage:     That's  really  unheard  of. 

Pesonen:   We  paid  all  of  our  bills,  and  then  we  had  all  of  this  money. 

There  weren't  any  restrictions,  except  that  we  couldn't  use  it 
for  personal  gain  or  anything  like  that;  we  had  to  use  it  in  ways 
that  were  consistent  with  what  it  had  been  raised  for.   You 
couldn't  give  it  back,  you  didn't  know  where  all  of  the  people 
were,  and  the  money  all  got  commingled.   So  we  decided  to  give  it 
to  these  other  measures,  and  we  had  this  continued  steering 
committee.   It  was  Calif ornians  for  Nuclear  Safeguards. 

By  this  time  it  had  taken  on  a  more  formal  structure.   It 
had  a  representative  from  CalPIRG,  from  the  Nader  organization, 
from  the  Sierra  Club,  from  the  Friends  of  the  Earth,  from  ten  or 
fifteen  organizations,  and  some  of  the  people  who  had  been  active 
in  the  Proposition  15  campaign:  Roy  Alper  from  CalPIRG,  Dwight 
Cocke  was  there.   And  we  would  have  meetings  pretty  frequently 
right  after  the  election  to  decide  how  to  spend  this  money.   I 
think  we  funded  a  little  research  job.   And  of  course  once  the 
word  got  out  that  we  had  some  money,  everybody  came  around 
looking  for  a  piece  of  it,  so  we  got  rid  of  it  pretty  quick, 
[laughter]   I  didn't  want  to  be  in  charge  of  piecing  money  out  to 
too  many  worthy  causes.   We  gave  almost  all  of  it  to  Oregon, 
Montana  and  Missouri. 


Jerry  Brown  and  a  Debate  on  Nuclear  Power  in  San  Francisco.  1976 
ti 


Lage:     Julie  told  me  about  a  debate  that  you  had  at  the  Zen  Center  [in 
San  Francisco]  to  inform  Jerry  Brown  about  nuclear  power. 

Pesonen:   Well,  that  was  before  the  measure. 
Lage:     Oh,  before  the  measure  even  came? 

Pesonen:   That  was--or  very  early  on  in  the  measure.   I  know  it  was  before 
"75.   I'm  almost  positive  it  was  before  "75.   I  may  have  to  go 
back  and  look  at  that  diary,  which  started  in  '75. 

Anyway,  I  got  the  word  that  the  governor- -let's  see.   When 
was  he  elected?  He  was  elected  in  '74,  wasn't  he? 

Lage:     Right.   At  the  same  time  that  the  Fair  Political  Practices  Act 
was  passed. 

Pesonen:   Well,  Jerry  wanted  to  know  more  about  the  nuclear  power  issue. 

We  got  the  word  that  the  governor  wanted  a  real  presentation.   It 


185 


wasn't  at  the  Zen  Center,  it  was  held  over  at  the  UC  [University 
of  California,  Berkeley]  Extension  on  Laguna  Street  in  San 
Francisco.   He  contacted  the  organization  which  was  very  active 
in  opposing  the  measure—it  must  have  been  after  the  measure  was 
qualified—called,  what  was  it  called? 

Lage:     Calif ornians  for  Economic  Balance? 

Pesonen:   [Calif ornians  for]  Environmental  and  Economic  Balance.   Yes.   And 
there  was  a  fellow  who  was  very  active  in  that,  Michael  Peevey. 
Anyway,  he  told  them  he  wanted  them  to  bring  some  people  who  were 
pronuclear  who  were  good  spokespeople,  and  he  told  me  to  round  up 
two  or  three  very  knowledgeable  people  on  the  antinuclear  side. 
So  I  got  Henry  Kendall- -Henry  agreed  to  come—who  else  did  we 
have?   Henry  Kendall  was  our  principle  spokesperson,  and  on  the 
other  side  was  a  fellow  named  Bob  Budnitz,  who  was  a  nuclear 
engineer  who  works  out  at  the  Lawrence  Livermore  Laboratory. 

It  went  on  pretty  much  all  day.   It  was  set  up  in  this  room 
with  a  long  table.   The  governor  was  there  with  his  entourage: 
[Special  Assistant  to  the  Governor]  Jacques  Barzaghi  and  I  think 
even  [Chief  of  Staff]  Gray  Davis  was  there. 

Lage:     Had  you  met  the  governor  before? 

Pesonen:   I  think  I  had.   I  hadn't  really  spent  any  time  with  him.   I  know 
how  I  heard  about  it.   He  contacted  me  through  Richard  Baker,  who 
was  the  roshi  of  the  Zen  Center.   Richard  was  a  personal 
acquaintance,  not  from  Zen  particularly,  but  his  wife  and  Julie 
had  gone  to  high  school  together  in  Minneapolis,  and  he  had  come 
to  see  me  about  the  Bodega  campaign  when  he  was  working  for  UC 
Extension  before  he  even  went  into  Zen.   He  was  very  interested 
in  the  counter-culture  movements,  and  he  had  contacted  me  in  the 
early  sixties,  and  we  had  remained  acquaintances  because  he  was 
married  to  this  friend  of  Julie's.   He  is  a  very  interesting 
person,  very  charismatic  kind  of  personality. 

The  governor  had  gravitated  to  him,  and  he  was  at  that  time 
very  close  to  the  governor,  supposedly.   The  governor  had  this 
entourage  of  people  like  [informal  advisor  to  Governor  Brown] 
Stewart  Brand,  Dick  Baker;  far  out  thinkers  of  one  kind  or 
another.   I  never  was  part  of  that  world.   I  like  to  go  fishing, 
and  I'm  too  much  of  a  country  boy,  I  guess.   I  don't  know.   I 
never  thought  that  way,  and  I  don't  think  it  has  to  do  with  self- 
image;  I  just  don't  think  that  way.   [laughter] 


186 


So  at  the  end  of  this  meeting,  Henry  Kendall  gave  the  most-- 
I  wish  I  had  a  tape  of  it--the  most  eloquent  summing  up,  a 
powerfully  persuasive  statement.  He  is  a  very  fine  speaker,  and 
he  is  a  man  of  great  integrity,  and  he  looks  like  a  New  England 
physicist.   He  has  this  craggy  New  England  face;  he  is  very 
handsome,  very  well  spoken,  and  he  is  very  knowledgeable. 
Knowledgeable  enough  that  he  got  the  Nobel  Prize  last  year  with 
two  other  people  for  some  obscure  corner  of  physics.  At  the  end, 
Baker  sidled  up  to  me  and  said,  "The  governor  would  like  you  and 
Henry  to  join  us  for  dinner  over  at  my  house,"  and  that  was  just 
right  across  the  street  I  think.   He  lived  in  a  spacious  flat 
over  the  Zen  Center. 

So  there  were  maybe  eight  or  ten  people  there,  sitting 
around  on  the  floor.   The  governor,  Henry  Kendall,  me,  the 
Bakers,  Julie  was  with  us  —  I  think  Julie  came  over  by  then—and 
three  or  four  other  people.   And  we  just  sat  and  talked  into  the 
evening.   The  governor  didn't  say  very  much.   Kendall  did  a  lot 
of  talking.   The  governor  was  just  curious. 

Lage:     This  was  after  the  debate? 

Pesonen:   This  was  after  the  debate  had  gone  on.   I  knew  we  won  the  debate. 

Lage:     The  other  side  didn't  look  too  good? 

Pesonen:  No,  they  were  agitated,  they  weren't  very  organized,  I  didn't 
find  them  persuasive—of  course,  I  wouldn't  necessarily.  But 
they  weren't  invited  to  dinner.  [laughter]  And  we  were. 

Lage:     So  the  talk  went  on  about  nuclear  power? 

Pesonen:  The  talk  went  on  about  a  lot  of  other  things,  too.  It  became 
more  of  a  social  evening. 

Lage:     Did  anyone  ask  about  your  marriage?   [laughter] 

Pesonen:   No,  it  was  just  the  opposite  of  Creative  Initiative.   That's,  I 
think,  the  beginning  of  my  relationship  with  the  governor. 

Lage:     But  he  didn't  talk  much? 

Pesonen:   He  didn't  talk  very  much,  no.   He  asked  a  few  questions.   He 

mostly  listened.   There  was  a  lot  of  wine,  everybody  got  happy, 
and  it  was  a  party.   A  party  of  people  who  were  on  an  emotional 
high  from  this  day.   It  had  been  a  very  significant  day.   I  mean, 
you  don't  get  your  hands  on  a  governor  all  day  very  often, 
particularly  one  who's  kind  of  interesting  like  Jerry,  and  win 
him  over  to  your  position.   So  this  was  a  victory  that  was 


187 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 
Lage: 
Pesonen: 
Lage: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 


pregnant  with  future  possibility.  And  I  didn't  miss  that  part. 
I  was  not  just  in  a  state  of  elation  over  the  success  of  that 
day;  I  saw  this  as  an  investment  in  access  to  power  we  needed  for 
what  we  wanted  to  do  in  the  future.   I  never  thought  it  would 
lead  to  [the  Department  of]  Forestry,  but  I'm  sure  that  it  did. 
But  he  liked  me.   I  think  he  respected  the  way  that  I  thought  and 
talked.   He  never  says  those  things  to  people,  you  know.   You 
have  to  draw  your  inferences,  and  I  may  be  flattering  myself,  but 
I  apparently  made  a  significant  enough  impression  on  him  that 
day,  partly  because  of  the  people  I  was  associated  with,  that  it 
led  to  other  things  in  his  administration  later  on. 

But  I  gather  from  what  you  said  that  he  didn't  make  a  commitment 
to  sign  on  to  Proposition  15,  or  an  antinuclear  stance. 

He  didn't  expressly,  but  his  conduct  constituted  a  commitment. 
But  there  was  no  policy  discussion  or--? 
No,  no.   He  didn't  have  to. 

That's  interesting.   It's  true  you  don't  often  get  a  day  with  the 
governor  to  talk  about  a  broad  issue  like  that. 


Pesonen:   He  was  having  fun,  too.   You  could  tell  he  was  enjoying  himself. 
He  had  this  strange  entourage,  you  know.   That's  when  I  first  met 


Barzaghi,  this  Svengali  that  still  hangs  around  with  him. 
What's  he  like? 

Very  cynical.   I  don't  really  know  Barzaghi.   He's  mysterious. 
He's  got  this  sexy  French  accent,  this  very  lean,  wolf like 
quality  about  him.   He  appears  to  be  a  deep  thinker,  and  every 
motion,  gesture,  touch,  turn  of  his  clothes  looks  as  though  it  is 
constructed  to  project  the  image  of  a  deep  thinker.   He  utters--! 
can't  think  of  the  words  I  want.   His  utterances  all  have  a  sense 
of  mystery  about  them.  They  are  ambiguous.   It  is  not  clear  what 
the  profundity  is. 

The  implied  profundity. 

Yes.   I'll  think  of  the  word  after  you  leave,  I'm  sure.   Cryptic 
is  close.   He  will  come  up  later,  I'm  sure. 

I  think  we  have  pretty  well  covered  the  Proposition  15  campaign. 
I  think  so. 


We'll  go  to  forestry  next  time? 


188 


VII   MANAGING  CALIFORNIA'S  FORESTS  IN  THE  JERRY  BROWN 
ADMINISTRATION 

[Interview  6:   April  2,  1992]  ti 


Serving  on  the  State  Board  of  Forestry.  1977-1979 


Lage:     We  want  to  get  into  your  career  in  forestry,  the  California  State 
Board  of  Forestry  and  the  Department  of  Forestry.  Let's  start 
with  the  state  board.  No,  let's  start  before  the  state  board. 
Had  you  been  involved  in  any  forestry  issues  before  you  were 
appointed  to  the  board? 

Pesonen:   Not  very  much.   I  was  involved  with  the  state  Board  of  Forestry 
back  in  the  early  sixties  when  I  worked  for  [Executive  Director 
David  R.]  Dave  Brower  at  the  Sierra  Club.   That  was  part  of  my 
unshaped  responsibility  that  he  gave  me.   My  title  was 
conservation  editor,  but  I  did  all  kinds  of  things,  and  one  part 
of  the  job  was  to  represent  the  club  before  the  state  Board  of 
Forestry  in  the  very  early  years  —  in  my  early  years,  anyway.   And 
then  after  I  went  into  law  practice  in  1969  I  kind  of  kept  an  eye 
on  it.   I  was  asked  by  Henry  Vaux  to  serve  on  a  study  committee 
of  the  American  Association  for  the  Advancement  of  Science  [AAAS] 
on  forest  practices.   That  was  probably  around  1975  and  we  did  a 
little  report  for  AAAS.   I  had  kept  in  touch  with  [Chairman  of 
Board  of  Forestry  Henry]  Vaux,  Hank  Vaux,1  and  [Dean  of  School  of 
Forestry]  John  Zivnuska  over  the  years,  but  I  wouldn't  appear  or 
sue  the  board  or  have  any  litigation  involving  the  board. 


'See  Henry  J.  Vaux,  "Forestry  in  the  Public  Interest:   Education, 
Economics,  State  Policy,  1933-1983,"  an  oral  history  conducted  in  1986  by 
Ann  Lage,  Regional  Oral  History  Office,  The  Bancroft  Library,  University  of 
California,  Berkeley,  1987. 


189 


Lage:     You  didn't  have  anything  to  do  with  the  new  legislation  on  forest 
practices  in  the  seventies—the  Z'Berg-Nejedly  Act  [California 
Forest  Practice  Act  of  1973] ?' 

Pesonen:   No.   I  might  have  been  consulted  on  the  phone  about  something, 
but  I  wasn't  an  active  participant. 

Lage:     How  did  the  appointment  come  about  to  the  state  board? 

Pesonen:   Well,  Hank  Vaux  was  chairman  by  then,  and  I  guess  he  consulted 
with  [Secretary  for  Resources]  Huey  [Johnson].   There  was  an 
opening  for  a  public  member  who  would  be  acceptable  to  the 
environmental  community.   They  knew  who  I  was  and—whether  Vaux 
planted  the  idea  with  Huey  or  whether  Huey  came  up  with  it 
himself  I  don't  know. 

Lage:     Did  you  know  Huey? 

Pesonen:   I  knew  Huey  from  his  Trust  for  Public  Land  days.   I  just  got 
offered  the  position.   It  was  part  time,  and  it  sounded  like 
something  interesting.   There  were  a  lot  of  forestry  issues 
involving  the  Redwood  National  Park  that  were  in  the  press  a  lot. 
So  I  thought  it  would  be  kind  of  fun  and  a  change  of  pace. 

Lage:     Is  that  a  paid  appointment? 

Pesonen:   I  think  you  get  $50  a  day  for  attending  one  of  those  all-day 
meetings. 

Lage:     You  must  have  had  additional  work  aside  from  your  all-day 
meetings. 

Pesonen:   There  was  a  per-diem  kind  of  thing.   It  didn't  amount  to  a  hill 
of  beans.   It  was  not  a  perquisite.   I  didn't  take  it  for  the 
perks.   I  lost  money  on  the  whole  time  away  from  my  practice  to 
come  to  these  meetings.   So  I  don't  think  there  was  any 
significant  amount  of  money  involved. 

Lage:     I  just  wondered  what  kind  of  monetary  arrangement  they  made. 


'A.B.  227,  1973-1974  Reg.  Sess.,  Cal.  Stat.,  ch.  880  (1973). 


190 


The  Redwood  Park  Issue 


Lage:     Well,  when  you  came  on  the  board,  your  first  meeting  was  highly 
focused  on  the  redwood  park  issue  [May  1977].   Do  you  remember 
much  about  that? 

Pesonen:   I  remember  that  meeting,  but  I  don't  remember  in  particular  that 
it  was  the  first  meeting.   It  was  close  to  the  first  meeting.   It 
was  very  early  on,  but  I  think  I  had  been  to  one  or  two  meetings 
before  that. 

Well,  the  redwood  park  was  the  forestry  environmental  issue 
at  that  time.   Congress  had  passed  the  Redwood  [National]  Park 
bill  in  1968  but  it  was  not  an  adequate  park.   The  park  covered 
Redwood  Creek,  but  it  only  covered  the  narrow  strip  up  the  creek 
called  the  worm.  On  a  map  it  just  looked  like  a  worm  meandering 
up  the  creek.  The  surrounding  watershed  was  vulnerable  to 
continued  logging.   It  was  just  plain  that  that  park  wouldn't 
amount  to  anything  if  the  entire  watershed  didn't  have  some 
protection,  whether  incorporation  in  the  park  or  limitations  on 
logging  different  from  the  regular  forest  practice  rules,  which 
was  under  consideration  by  the  Board  of  Forestry  when  I  first  got 
there.   And  there  was  a  bill  in  Congress  to  extend  the  park 
substantially.   [Senator  Alan]  Al  Cranston--!  think  it  was 
Cranston--and  [Representative  Phillip]  Phil  Burton  were  carrying 
that  bill.   There  was  a  lot  of  interest  in  it,  but  it  hadn't 
passed  yet. 

In  the  meantime,  Louisiana  Pacific  and  Simpson  [lumber 
companies]--!  think  those  were  the  two  principal  companies,  maybe 
Georgia  Pacific,  too--had  filed  with  the  department  very  large 
timber  harvest  plans  to  log  in  that  watershed.   It  was  very  clear 
that  their  strategy  was  to  get  as  much  timber  out  of  there  as 
they  could  before  we  got  it  condemned  by  the  federal  government 
for  addition  to  the  park.   So  the  problem  was  to  figure  out  a 
legally  sound  theory  for  holding  up  those  timber  harvest  plans 
until  Congress  could  act  on  the  expansion  of  the  park  and  fund 
it.   It  wasn't  very  clear  in  the  law  how  we  could  do  that. 

Lage:     You  had  to  go  by  the  prescribed  forest  practice  law? 
[tape  interruption] 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  wasn't  very  clear  how  the  board  had  authority  to  deny  a 
plan.   I  think  the  director  [of  the  Department  of  Forestry]  had 
denied  the  plans,  the  companies  had  appealed  to  the  board-- 


191 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 


Because  you  only  considered  these  issues  on  appeals  from  the 
decisions  of  the  director,  as  I  understand  it? 

Yes.   The  question  was  whether  we  could  deny  the  companies' 
timber  harvest  plans.   I  think  [Board  of  Forestry  member  Phillip 
S.]  Phil  Berry  and  I  spun  out  a  theory  that  was  not  complete 
hokum  to  deny  the  plans  for  some  interim  period  because  there  had 
been  actual  action  by  Congress.   The  bill  had  passed  one  house; 
it  just  hadn't  passed  the  other  house,  and  that  was  enough,  we 
thought,  to  fit  into  certain  language  in  the  rules  that  gave  the 
board  authority. 

That  was  a  big  hearing;  there  were  a  lot  of  people  there.   I 
thought  it  was  a  lot  of  fun.   It  gave  me  an  opportunity  to 
explain  what  we  were  doing,  explain  the  limitations  on  what  our 
power  was.   And  I  took  that  seriously.   It  wasn't  just  fun.   But 
it  was  very  clear  that  the  administration  and  a  majority  of  the 
board  wanted  to  protect  that  watershed  because  we  were  quite  sure 
that  Congress  was  going  to  pass  the  measure  pretty  quickly  and 
fund  it.   You  know,  you  got  the  usual  arguments  from  the  industry 
that  tens  of  thousands  of  jobs  would  be  lost  forever.   You  hear 
that  all  of  the  time  from  the  industry. 

You  are  still  hearing  it. 

You  still  hear  it  in  the  ancient  forests  controversy.   I  think 
their  economics  is  shaky,  but  even  if  they  are  not  shaky,  the 
jobs  are  temporary  and  the  park  is  permanent.   I  was  an 
acknowledged  environmentalist,  and  I  was  put  on  the  board  with 
that  in  mind.   I  was  a  public  member;  I  wouldn't  say  I  had  a 
constituency,  but  I  certainly  had  a  sympathy  for  what  the  Sierra 
Club  and  Save  the  Redwoods  League  and  other  people  wanted  to  do. 
So  if,  legally,  we  could  do  what  we  wanted  to  do,  we  would.   If 
we  couldn't  do  it  legally,  we  wouldn't. 


You  said  there  were  a  lot  of  people  at  the  hearing, 
both  sides? 


Were  they  on 


Both  sides.   It  was  a  big  hearing. 

Was  it  pretty  intense? 

It  was  lively.   It  wasn't  angry. 

Somehow  I  would  envision  a  lot  of  anger  at  that  point. 

I  don't  remember  it  as  being  an  angry  meeting. 


192 


Chairman  Henry  Vaux  and  Board  Members 


Lage:     How  about  on  other  issues  among  the  board  members?  Was  the 

cooperation  among  the  board  members  good?   It  seems  like  there 
was  a  balance  of  people. 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  was,  by  the  time  I  got  on  the  board,  dominated  by  Jerry 
Brown  appointees,  and  I  think  the  cooperation  on  the  board  was 
very  good.   I  attribute  that  to  Hank  Vaux's  style.  Hank  Vaux  was 
a  wonderful  chairman,  and  he  had  a  great  skill  at  finding 
consensus  among  board  members.   He  had  a  good,  crafty  sense  of 
pace  of  how  things  were  to  be  done,  and  of  process.  And  he  is  a 
wise,  thoughtful  person  and  a  very  good  leader.   He  was  hard 
working,  and  I  respected  his  abilities.   I  didn't  always  agree 
with  him,  but  I  never  felt  that  he  was  unfair. 

Lage:     He  devoted  a  great  deal  of  time  to  that,  it  seems. 

Pesonen:   Oh,  he  devoted  an  enormous  amount  of  time  to  it.   It  was  almost  a 
full-time  job  for  him. 

Lage:     I  interviewed  him  on  the  Board  of  Forestry  so  we  talked  about  it 
quite  a  bit.   He  seemed  very  process-oriented,  to  be  sure  that 
process  was  just  correct  so  it  wouldn't  be  challenged  later  in 
courts  and--was  that  something  you  discussed  with  him? 

Pesonen:   That's  the  way  a  lawyer  thinks,  too.   But  it's  also  the  way  a 
very  skilled  administrator  thinks,  and  Hank  was  a  skilled 
administrator.   It's  also  the  fairest  way  to  do  things.   Process 
is  an  established  set  of  agreements  among  people  about  how  things 
ought  to  be  done  to  assure  that  when  the  result  is  reached,  that 
everybody  who  has  participated  in  it  feels  that  the  result  was 
fairly  reached  even  if  they  don't  agree  with  the  result.  That's 
one  of  the  problems  we  are  seeing  now  in  the  resource  agencies 
under  [Governor  George]  Deukmejian  on  a  state  level  and  under 
[President  Ronald]  Reagan  and  [President  George]  Bush  on  the 
federal  level.   To  the  extent  that  they  can  get  away  with  it, 
they  have  very  little  respect  for  process.   That's  why  you  find 
in  the  [United  States]  Forest  Service  now,  for  example,  rebellion 
among  resource  staff  people  because  they  think  the  process  is 
being  distorted. 

Lage:     So  was  Vaux  able  to  bring  along  those  members  of  the  board  who 
were  industry  representatives? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   It  was  a  very  fine  board.   The  leading  industry 

representative  was  [Henry]  Hank  Trobitz  who,  for  a  long  time,  had 
been  a  principal  of  the  Simpson  Timber  Company  in  Eureka. 


193 


Trobitz  was  just  a  gentleman  of  the  old-school.   He  didn't  like  a 
lot  of  things  that  were  happening,  but  he  didn't  personalize 
things.   He  knew  he  was  in  the  minority.   [laughter] 

Lage:     That's  right.   That  would  give  you  a  certain  position. 

Pesonen:   He  knew  he  was  in  a  minority  so  he  made  his  points  and  he  made 
them  well,  and  sometimes  he  prevailed  if  it  wasn't  a  matter  of 
fundamental  policy.   He  was  a  decent  guy.   I  liked  him.   I  had  a 
lot  of  respect  for  him. 

Lage:     Any  other  on  the  board  that  were-- 

Pesonen:   Well,  there  was  Virginia  Harwood,  who  was  a  Democrat.   She  and 
her  husband.   She  was  married  to  Bud  Harwood  of  the  Harwood 
Lumber  Company  up  in  Branscomb.   Virginia  was  a  smart  lady,  and 
she  was  put  on  there  because  she  was  one  of  the  few  Democrats,  I 
think,  in  the  redwood  region. 

Lage:     And  she  was  a  Brown  appointee? 

Pesonen:   She  was  a  Brown  appointee.   She  ended  up  with  Trobitz  more  often 
than  not,  but  she  also  was  a  nice  person  and  didn't  personalize 
her  political  disagreements  and  her  policy  disagreements  with  the 
other  members  of  the  board.   And  the  other  members  of  the  board 
were  pretty  congenial.   There  was  Phil  Berry;  there  was  myself; 
there  was  [University  of  California  professor  of  Geology]  Clyde 
Wahrhaftig,  who's  just  a  sweet  old  man  and  a  wonderful  guy.   And 
he's  a  very  sound  scientist  and  teacher.   Then  there  was  a  woman 
who  was  active  in  the  Sierra  Club  from  southern  California, 
Cecile  Rosenthal.   Let's  see,  who  else  was  on  there?   Richard 
Wilson,  who  is  now  the  director  of  the  department. 

Lage:     Was  he  a  Brown  appointee?   He  was  a  Republican. 

Pesonen:   He. was  a  Republican,  but  he  was  a  Brown  appointee,  I  think. 

Lage:     What  did  you  think  of  him? 

Pesonen:   I  liked  him.   He's  very  independent  minded.   He  didn't  fit  as 
well  into  any  of  the  two  camps,  if  you  can  say  there  were  two 
camps  on  that  board  although  that's  an  exaggeration.   I  don't 
think  he  spent  a  lot  of  time  on  the  board.   He  had  things  going 
on  in  his  personal  life.   He  had  his  ranch  up  there  in  Covelo, 
and  there  were  certain  issues  where  he  cared  a  lot  and  certain 
issues  where  he  just  didn't  care  at  all. 


Lage: 


What  is  his  position  now? 


194 


He 


Pesonen:   He  is  director  of  the  department. 
Lage:     Of  forestry? 

Pesonen:  Yes.  It's  now  called  [the  Department  of]  Forestry  and  Fire, 
was  just  appointed  a  couple  of  months  ago  by  [Governor  Pete] 
Wilson. 

Lage:     So  I  hope  he's  interested  in  forestry  now. 

Pesonen:   Well,  he  is.   Very  much.   He  got  appointed  during  a  turbulent 
time  when  the  Grand  Accord  [legislation  governing  timber 
practices  on  old-growth  forests  on  private  lands]  had  been 
through  the  legislature  and  then  was  vetoed  by  the  governor.   It 
caused  a  great  turmoil  and  in  the  wake  of  Proposition  130  and  138 
[both  bond  acts  dealing  with  forest  protection  and  forest 
harvesting]  in  1990,'  there  was  another  initiative  being 
circulated,  that  legislation  is  still  held  up  in  the  legislature 
right  now  by  [Speaker  of  the  Assembly]  Willie  Brown,  probably  for 
reasons  completely  extraneous  to  the  merits  of  the  legislation. 
And  it's  divided  the  environmental  community  because  of  the  way 
it  was  put  together.   It's  a  mess.   And  poor  Richard  Wilson  is 
right  in  the  middle  of  it.  He  walked  into  a  hurricane. 

Lage:     It's  a  wonderful  title,  Grand  Accord,  but  it  doesn't  seem  quite 
appropriate  right  now. 

Pesonen:   Well,  it's  a  grand  mess  right  now.   I  don't  remember  who  else  was 
on  the  board,  but  they  were  a  congenial  board.   Clearly  it  was 
the  length  and  shadow  of  Hank  Vaux's  style. 


Regulating  Non-Point  Sources  of  Pollution 


Lage:     Now,  you  worked  on  the  best  management  practices  for  the  non- 
point  sources  of  pollution?  What  was  that? 

Pesonen:  Well,  shortly  after  I  got  on  the  board,  Hank  asked  me  if  I  would 
handle  a  subcommittee,  a  citizens  advisory  committee  under 
Section  208  of  the  Federal  Water  Pollution  Control  Act.2 


'Propositions  130  and  138  (November  1990) 
290  Stat.  377  (1976). 


195 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


The  Federal  Water  Pollution  Control  Act  addresses 
essentially  two  kinds  of  pollution:  point  sources  and  non-point 
sources.   Point  sources  are  pipes  that  dump  things  into  streams 
and  water  courses.   Non-point  sources  are  more  diffuse:  runoff 
from  streets  in  cities,  runoff  from  wildlands  irrigation  and 
other  things.   Under  the  act  the  development  of  rules  for  control 
of  non-point  sources  to  meet  the  goals  of  the  act  was  delegated 
to  the  states  in  the  first  place.   And  in  California,  that  would 
be  the  Water  Resources  Control  Board.   The  Water  Resources 
Control  Board  broke  that  subject  up  based  on  the  source  of  the 
non-point  pollution.   Timber  harvesting  was  one  major  source  that 
they  identified  and  then  they  delegated  to  the  Board  of  Forestry, 
or  they  contracted  with  the  Board  of  Forestry,  the  job  of 
developing  those  rules  which  ultimately  would  have  to  be  approved 
by  the  Water  Resources  Control  Board,  but  they  didn't  have  the 
staff  or  expertise,  so  they  thought,  to  do  the  work.   That  was 
delegated  to  the  Board  of  Forestry  and  I  was  appointed  to  be  in 
charge  of  that  process. 

We  set  up  a  committee  called  the  BMPSAC--Best  Management 
Practices  Advisory  Committee- -and  it  had  all  kinds  of  people  on 
it,  people  who  came  from  the  timber  industry,  came  from 
professional  licensed  foresters,  the  environmental  community, 
people  with  interests  from  the  North  Coast  Regional  Water  Quality 
Control  Board.   It  was  a  committee  of  fifteen  or  twenty  people, 
and  we  started  developing  the  rules. 


Now,  how  did  this  relate  to  the  subcommittee? 
advisory  committee  and  then  also  the-- 


You  had  a  citizens 


Well,  the  citizen's  advisory  committee  was  advisory  to  this 
subcommittee  of  the  board.   Of  course,  the  idea  was  to  get  as 
much  buy-in  on  whatever  rules  we  come  up  with  ultimately,  so  that 
they  could  then  be  adopted  by  the  Board  of  Forestry  and 
transmitted  with  their  recommendation  to  the  Water  Resources 
Control  Board  for  adoption  in  compliance  with  the  act. 

Am  I  right  in  remembering  that  you  were  making  the  forest 
practice  rules  sort  of  take  in  this-- 

Yes.   The  notion  was  that  once  best  management  practices  were 
adopted  to  comply  with  section  208,  they  would  be  folded  in,  by 
amendment,  to  the  forest  practice  rules  so  that  the  forest 
practice  rules  would  incorporate  these  best  management  practices. 


Lage:     So  you'd  just  have  one  set  of  rules? 
Pesonen:   You  would  have  one  set  of  rules. 


196 


Well,  that  never  got  completed  while  I  was  on  the  board.   It 
was  a  much  more  lengthy  and  controversial  topic  than  we  thought. 
And  it  is.   It's  a  very  difficult  subject  to  get  your  hands  on, 
at  least  under  the  Z'berg-Nejedly  Act  as  it  then  existed  and  the 
forest  practice  rules  as  they  then  were  in  place.   And,  of 
course,  I  sensed  that  there  was  a  lot  of  obstructionism  on  the 
part  of  the  industry.   Industry  representatives  didn't  want  any 
changes . 

Lage:     Was  that  evident  on  your  advisory  committee? 

Pesonen:   On  the  advisory  committee.  Any  change  in  those  rules  would  be 

more  restrictive.   There  was  just  no  way  out  of  it,  and  they  knew 
that. 

Lage:     And  yet  you  were  under  federal  mandate? 

Pesonen:   Well,  yes,  but  there  wasn't  much  of  a  timetable  on  it.   And  I 

didn't  understand  the  process  well  enough  at  the  beginning,  and  I 
had  an  educational  learning  curve  to  go  through  myself.   I  had 
two  learning  curves.   One  was  managing  an  administrative 
committee  like  that,  which  I  had  never  had  much  experience  with, 
and  the  other  was  understanding  the  rules  in  that  level  of  detail 
and  being  able  to  justify  that  whatever  amendments  we  were  to 
propose  had  some  sound  analytical  basis.   That  was  just  a  lot  of 
work.   There  were  staff  of  the  department  who  were  stretched  thin 
doing  other  things,  so  there  wasn't  a  lot  of  urgency  about  it,  or 
at  least  it  didn't  seem  to  move  in  much  more  than  a  glacial  pace, 
and  that  may  have  been  my  fault.   I  was  busy  running  a  law 
practice  and  trying  to  do  this-- 

Lage:     My  immediate  reaction  is  that  it's  a  tremendous  thing  to 
undertake  as  a  private  citizen-- 

Pesonen:   It  was. 

Lage:     --more  or  less  volunteering,  doing  your  civic  duties. 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  lot  more  than  I  thought  it  would  be  when  I  accepted  Hank 
Vaux's  flattering  offer.   [laughter] 

Lage:     Were  the  other  portions  of  this  section  208  examination  also  done 
by  citizen  committees,  do  you  think? 

Pesonen:   I  think  it  depended  on  the  nature  of  the  source  that  was  being 
addressed.   I  don't  know  who  was  responsible  for  developing  the 
rules  for  agriculture,  for  example,  if  anybody.   I  doubt  it  would 
be  the  Department  of  Agriculture.   It  might  have  been  the 
Department  of  Water  Resources. 


197 


Lage:     Did  running  that  advisory  committee  help  prepare  you  for  your 
work  in  the  department? 

Pesonen:   Oh  yes.   All  of  that.   Everything  you  do- -everything  I  do--it 
seems  to  me,  feeds  into  the  next  step.   I  never  stop  learning. 
I've  learned  from  mistakes  more  often  than  anything  else.  And 
I've  made  some  big  ones.   Sure  it  was  a  learning  experience.   It 
was  an  exposure  to  so-called  participatory  democracy,  a 
formalized  form  of  participatory  democracy,  and  it's  a  process 
that's  used  all  of  the  time  in  government. 

Lage:     More  recently.   More  in  the  last  twenty  years. 

Pesonen:   I  think  that's  probably  true.   I'm  not  a  student  of  that  history, 
of  that  process,  but  it  can  be  used  as  a  way  of  seeing  that 
nothing  gets  done  as  much  as  it  can  be  a  device  to  see  that 
things  get  done  that  will  get  institutionalized  and  stay. 

Lage:     That  people  will  buy  into  it? 

Pesonen:   People  will  buy  into  it.  And  it's  just  as  effective  for  one  as 

for  the  other  depending  on  what  the  committee  really  wants  to  do. 
What  I  wanted  was  for  our  rules  to  be  adopted,  but  I  didn't  have 
enough  time  to  complete  the  process. 

Anything  else  we  should  mention  on  this?  Who  took  it  over  after 
you  left? 

I  don't  know. 

It  did  get  done? 

Yes,  I  guess  it  did  get  done. 

At  some  point. 

At  some  point  it  got  done.   I  think  it's  still  kicking  around.   I 
think  there  are  still  problems  getting  it  incorporated  into  the 
forest  practice  bills.   But  I  didn't  pay  a  lot  of  attention  to  it 
after  I  became  director  of  the  department. 

Lage:     So  it  was  more  a  responsibility  of  the  board,  rather  than  the 
department? 

Pesonen:   Well,  the  department  had  some  staff  support  for  the  BMPSAC  and  to 
the  board,  but  I  just  had  so  many  other  things  to  do.   I  figured 
it  was  in  good  hands,  and  there  was  nothing  to  be  added  by  my 
sticking  my  finger  into  it.   I  had  bigger  fish  to  fry. 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 


198 


Lage:     Is  that  relationship  between  the  board  and  the  department  an  easy 
one?  I  mean,  here  you  have  seen  both  sides  of  it. 

Pesonen:   It  depends  on  who  the  director  is  and  who  the  members  of  the 
board  are. 

Lage:     Was  [Lewis]  Moran  the  director  when  you  were  on  the  board? 

Pesonen:   I  replaced  Moran.   He  retired.   I  think  his  relations  with  the 
board  were--I  wouldn't  say  strained  because  he  was--he  was  an 
old-time  bureaucrat.   I  mean,  he  was  a  survivor.   He  was  like 
[Charles]  Charlie  Fullerton  at  [the  Department  of]  Fish  and  Game. 
They  were  real  survivors.  They  didn't  want  to  see  too  much 
change.   They  were  too  much  a  part  of  the  organization;  they  had 
come  up  from  the  ranks.   They  were  susceptible  to  what  happens  to 
anybody  who  is  around  too  long  in  any  organization:  they  had  too 
many  connections,  too  many  friends,  too  many  debts,  too  many 
skeletons  in  their  closets,  I  suspect.   And  they  get  tired. 
Pretty  soon  they'd  get  their  eyes  set  on  retirement,  and  they 
just  want  to  get  there.   As  little  trouble  as  possible  is  the 
best  way  to  get  there.   So  Moran  didn't  do  very  much.   I  think 
that  that  is  what  I  was  told,  and  that's  what  it  appeared  to  me 
when  I  got  there.   On  the  other  hand,  he  didn't  actively  obstruct 
what  the  administration  wanted  to  do  and  the  board  wanted  to  do. 
He  did  his  job,  but  he  didn't  have  any  great  agenda  for  change. 

Lage:     Before  we  get  into  the  department,  do  you  have  any  other--!  think 
we  have  covered  most  of  the  thoughts  I  had  on  the  board,  but  is 
there  anything  that  you  want  to  add  or  particular  meetings  that 
you  remember  or  issues  that--I  mean,  we  haven't,  by  any  means, 
addressed  the  full  range  of  issues  that  you  were  involved  with. 

Pesonen:   Oh,  no.   There  were  lots  of  other  issues,  but  the  Redwood 

National  Park  thing  was  certainly  the  highlight,  and  that  came 
right  at  the  beginning,  and  then  there  was  the  208  committee. 
There  were  lots  of  things  going  on  all  the  time,  but-- 

Lage:     Well,  the  complete  review  of  the  forest  practice  rules  sounded 
like  that  was  a  major  undertaking,  from  my  interview  with  Henry 
Vaux. 

Pesonen:   We  had  a  few  appeals  that  were  controversial.   The  rules  were 

under  review  in  a  number  of  respects.   There  was  a  major  set  of 
amendments  to  the  rules  for  the  Coastal  Protection  Act.1   I  have 
forgotten  the  exact  title  of  those  rules,  but  they  were 


'S.B.  1277,  California  Coastal  Act  of  1976,  1975-1976  Reg.  Sess., 
Stat.,  ch.  1330  (1976). 


Cal. 


199 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


amendments,  major  amendments,  to  the  rules  within  the  coastal 
zone  and  that  happened  while  I  was  on  the  board  and  that  took  a 
lot  of  time  and  study. 

But  I  have  to  say  that  I  probably  wasn't  as  conscientious  a 
board  member,  except  on  the  208  issue,  as  I  might  have  been,  as 
some  other  board  members  were.   It  really  was  an  intrusion  on  my 
law  practice.   The  kind  of  law  practice  I  had  was  not  one  where  I 
was  a  major  partner  in  a  good  firm  and  had  lots  of  time  to  be  a 
figurehead.   I  had  to  work.   I  had  to  try  cases.   And  I  felt  the 
board  was  an  intrusion  on  that,  and  I  continued  to  do  it  out  of  a 
sense  of  public  responsibility.   But  I  wouldn't  look  back  on  it 
and  say  that  I  was  as  conscientious  a  board  member  as  some  others 
might  be.   I  mean,  I  picked  up  the  agenda  on  the  bus  riding  up 
there  and  I  read  it  on  the  ride.   I  didn't  spend  much  time  in 
between  times  except  on  the  208  stuff. 

I'll  bet  any  number  of  board  members  had  to  do  that  unless  they 
were  in  a  senior  position,  or  retired. 

I  think  that's  true  of  a  lot  of  citizen  boards.   I  have  certainly 
found  it  to  be  true  when  I  was  manager  of  the  East  Bay  Regional 
Parks  District.   The  board  members  didn't  pay  much  attention 
until  they  got  to  a  board  meeting  unless  they  had  a  particular 
issue  that  they  had  been  stirred  up  about  by  some  constituents. 

So  you  had  Henry  Vaux,  who  put  a  tremendous  amount  of  time  into 
it,  and  he  was  able  to  get  staff  for  the  Board  of  Forestry  for 
the  first  time. 


Pesonen:   Yes,  and  I  trusted  Vaux  to  keep  things  going  on  the  right  track. 
I  had  a  lot  of  confidence  in  him. 


Appointment  as  Director  of  the  Department  of  Forestry.  1979 


Lage:     Let's  leave  the  board  and  go  to  the  department.   Now  how  did  that 
appointment  come  about?  Are  you  aware  of  how  your  name  came  up? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know  how  that  came  about.   I  know  that  I  had  been  thought 
of  as  director  sometime  earlier  when  Claire  Dedrick  was  secretary 
for  resources  before  Huey.   Moran  was  thinking  of  retiring,  or 
maybe  Dedrick  was  thinking  of  replacing  Moran.   This  was  probably 
two  years  earlier.   I  think  it  was  right  about  the  time  I  got  on 
the  board.   It  might  even  have  been  before  I  got  on  the  board. 

Lage:     Were  you  aware  of  it  at  the  time,  that  you  were  being  considered? 


200 


Pesonen:   Well,  she  called  me  up  one  day.   I  knew  her.   She  had  been  with 

the  Sierra  Club  Loma  Prieta  Chapter,  and  I  had  known  her  from  the 
antinuclear  days. 

Lage:     Had  she  been  involved  in  that  antinuclear  movement? 
Pesonen:   Somewhat.   She  and  her  husband. 

II 

Pesonen:   Let's  see.   When  did  Jerry  Brown  come  into  office? 
Lage:     January  of  '75. 
Pesonen:   Well,  this  was  about-- 

Lage:     And  Claire  Dedrick  was  hung  in  effigy  by  the  lumber  people  soon 
after  she  came  in. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  but  she  was  his  first  secretary  for  resources.   Initially,  I 
think  she  wanted  a  younger,  more  active  person  as  forestry 
department  director.   Moran  was  playing  out  his  last  days  with 
the  department  before  retirement.   He  knew  that.   So  I  spent  an 
afternoon,  and  then  we  went  to  dinner  with  her,  and  then  I  didn't 
hear  anything  more  from  her.   I  guess  she  decided  she  would  stick 
with  Moran. 

Lage:     As  she  stuck  with  Charlie  Fullerton? 

Pesonen:  As  she  stuck  with  Charlie  Fullerton.  And  I  didn't  pursue  it. 
[tape  interruption] 

Pesonen:   Well,  how  did  it  happen?  Huey  called  me  in,  I  guess  it  was  March 
of  1979,  and  just  flat  out — you  know,  he  doesn't  mince  any  words 
--just  wanted  to  know  if  I'd  like  to  be  director  of  the 
department,  and  could  I  come  right  away?  And  it  might  have  even 
been  February  when  he  called.   I  said,  "Well,  I  have  some  things 
to  wind  down  in  my  law  practice."  He  wasn't  happy  about  that.   I 
didn't  hesitate. 

Lage:     You  immediately—well,  you  said  earlier  you  were  kind  of  ready  to 
get  out. 

Pesonen:   I  was  looking  for  a  big  change,  for  a  lot  of  reasons  I  have 

already  discussed.   So  I  told  my  partners  about  it,  and  they  were 
not  happy  about  it.   I  said  I  would  have  to  wind  down  what  I  had. 
Huey  was  unhappy  about  that,  but  he  was  willing  to  wait.   I  am 
sure  he  had  talked  to  the  governor  about  it.   He  wouldn't  have 


201 


done  such  a  thing  without  talking  to  the  governor,  and  it  might 
even  have  been  partly  the  governor's  idea  for  all  I  know. 

Lage:     Because  you'd  had  that  meeting  with  the  governor  on  the  nuclear 
issue  earlier? 

Pesonen:   I  knew  the  governor  from  that,  and  the  governor  had  stayed  in 
touch  with  me.   There  had  been  a  campaign  against  some  nuclear 
power  plants  in  Kern  County,  the  Wasco  plant  which  was  a  huge, 
absolutely  huge,  nuclear  facility  proposed  by  the  Los  Angeles 
Department  of  Water  and  Power  [LADWP] ,  to  be  built  near  the  town 
of  Wasco  outside  Bakersfield.   There  was  a  citizen's  initiative 
to  stop  it,  cut  off  its  water  supply.   Without  water  it  couldn't 
have  any  cooling  towers,  and  it  wouldn't  be  possible.   They  were 
afraid  the  water  would  be  diverted  from  agriculture. 

Larry  Levine  was  managing  the  campaign  against  that  plant. 
I  forgot  to  mention  Larry  in  our  last  session  about  the  nuclear 
initiative,  and  I  should  have  because  he  was  the  hired 
strategist,  the  hired  campaign  manager,  he  and  a  guy  named 
[Robert]  Bob  Jeans.   Larry  was  the  press  manager.   And  he  is  a 
campaign  consultant  in  southern  California.   He  handles  school 
board  candidates  and  local  congressional  and  supervisor 
candidates.   He  makes  his  living  doing  that.  And  he's  a 
wonderful  guy.  We  just  really  got  to  know  each  other  and  liked 
each  other  a  lot  in  the  Proposition  15  [Nuclear  Safeguards  Act, 
June  1976]  campaign.   And  he  was  managing  the  campaign  for  the 
farmers  in  Kern  County,  and  he  was  keeping  me  posted  every  day 
about  how  things  were  going. 

Lage:     Interesting  that  you  had  the  farmers  organized  against  nuclear 
power . 

Pesonen:   Well,  the  farmers  whose  water  would  be  lost.   And  Larry  could 

tell  that  story  better  than  I  could.   It  was  a  very  interesting 
campaign.   The  governor  watched  it  very  closely,  almost  daily. 
He  was  calling  me  every  other  day,  I  think,  to  see  how  the  vote 
was  going  to  go  because  he  had  already  positioned  himself  as  an 
antinuclear  candidate,  and  it  was  very  important  to  him  that  that 
initiative  succeed  in  Kern  County.   It  would  buttress  his 
position.   It  would  justify  it.   I  can't  think  of  quite  the  right 
word  I  want,  but  if  it  lost,  he  would  see  it  as  a  blow  to  his  own 
position.   And  it  won. 

So  I  had  been  in  touch  with  the  governor  as  sort  of  an 
information  source  about  the  Wasco  plant  campaign  through  '75,  I 
think,  or  through  '76  or  '77.   So  we  knew  each  other.   It  was  a 
first-name  basis,  and  I  knew  Huey.   And  it  just  happened.   I 
mean,  I  didn't  go  through  a  long  interview  process,  I  didn't  file 


202 


an  application,  I  didn't  send  in  a  resume,  I  didn't  do  anything, 
it  was  just  my  reputation. 

Lage:     Did  you  have  a  meeting  with  the  governor  and  Huey  to  talk  about — 

Pesonen:   It  was  just  a  done  deal.   When  I  said  "yes"  on  the  phone,  it  was 
a  done  deal. 

Lage:     But  before  you  got  into  the  job,  was  there  any  discussion  of 
where  the  department  should  go  or-- 

Pesonen:   No.   I  don't  recall  meeting  with  the  governor  before  that  at  all. 
Lage:     So  it  was  just  up  to  you? 


Secretary  for  Resources  Huey  Johnson 


Pesonen:   It  was  just  up  to  me.  Well,  no.  Where  the  department  was  going 
to  go  was  a  matter  of  great  interest  to  Huey,  but  I  never 
discussed  it  with  the  governor  before  my  appointment. 

That  was  April  1979,  so  it  was  just  thirteen  years  ago. 
Well,  anybody  who  goes  into  a  position  like  that  has  to  sort  of 
get  the  lay  of  the  land,  you  know?  Who  your  staff  is,  what  the 
history  of  things  is,  what  are  the  underlying  issues,  how  is  the 
place  organized,  what's  its  real  mission  and  what  does  it 
perceive  its  mission  to  be?   I  set  out  to  just  kind  of  keep  my 
ear  to  the  ground  and  go  around  and  talk  to  a  lot  of  people.   I 
called  a  staff  meeting  right  away,  and  I  recall  that  staff 
meeting. 

The  top  level  of  staff  was  called  the  executive  advisory 
group  or  something,  EAC.   In  other  words,  anybody  who  was  a 
ranger  IV  and  above,  a  regional  chief  and  above.   And  I  held  up  a 
blank  piece  of  paper  and  I  said,  "This  is  my  agenda  right  now.   I 
want  to  find  out  from  you  what  this  department  does,  how  it  does 
it." 

Huey  left  me  alone  at  the  beginning.   He  didn't  come  right 
in  and  say,  "Here's  what  I  want  you  to  do  with  the  department." 
He  had  his  weekly  staff  meetings,  and  they  were  very  episodic. 
It  was  very  hard  to  figure  out  what  Huey's  plan  was. 

Lage:     Did  you  know  that  he  had  a  plan? 


203 


Pesonen:   I  wasn't  sure  he  had  one.   [laughter]   The  staff  meetings  were 
amusing. 

Lage:     This  was  with  all  of  the  departments  within  the  Resources  Agency? 

Pesonen:   This  was  all  of  the  Resources  Agency  heads:  conservation,  fish 
and  game,  water  resources -- 

Lage :     Parks  ? 

Pesonen:   --parks,  State  Lands  Commission,  Water  Resources  Control  Board, 
and  then  there  were  a  couple  of  little  bodies  of  one  kind  or 
another,  but  they  were  all  part  of  the  Resources  Agency.   And 
there  were  maybe  twelve  to  fifteen  people  in  Huey's  Monday 
morning  staff  meetings.   There  was  never  a  written  agenda.   There 
was  usually  some  issue  in  the  legislature,  something  the  governor 
had  said.   It  was  political,  it  was  policies.   Sometimes  it  was 
just  Huey  holding  forth  about  the  world  in  his  swinging  chair, 
and  the  rest  of  us  sitting  in  these  creaky  chairs  that  he  brought 
up  from  Mexico. 

Lage:     Was  this  his  chair  that  hangs  from  the  ceiling? 

Pesonen:   He  had  two  swinging  basket  chairs  from  the  ceiling,  and  if  you 
met  with  him  one-on-one,  you  each  sat  in  the  swinging  chairs 
swinging  back  and  forth.   [Chuckles]   Huey  loved  those  chairs. 
But  during  the  staff  meetings,  he'd  take  one  of  them  down,  or 
sometimes  he'd  leave  it  up,  and  nobody  wanted  to  sit  in  it,  but 
if  there  weren't  any  other  chairs,  if  you  were  late,  you  ended  up 
in  the  other  swinging  chair. 

And  he  had  these  other  chairs  which  were  real  handmade 
creaky  things  from  Mexico  that  were  leather  and  strips  of 
mesquite,  I  think.   And  they  had  worms  in  them.   They  were  very 
uncomfortable,  and  they  would  creak  and  they'd  squeak. 

Lage:     So  if  people  were  restless-- 

Pesonen:   If  people  were  restless,  there  would  be  squeaking  going  on  among 
all  of  these  chairs  all  over  the  place  and  when  you'd  come  in  on 
Monday  morning,  there  would  be  these  little  tiny  heaps  of  sawdust 
around  these  chairs  where  these  worms  had  eaten  at  them  over  the 
weekend.   [Laughter]   Every  once  in  a  while,  one  would  collapse. 

You  just  never  knew  what  Huey's  agenda  was  going  to  be.   He 
was  kept  on  an  even  keel  more  or  less  by  [Harold]  Hal  Warass,  who 
was  one  of  his  deputies  and  who  had  been  a  deputy  for  resource 
secretaries  for  a  long  time  for  administration  personnel  dealing 
with  the  Department  of  Finance.   And  Hal  Warass  was  a  consummate 


204 


bureaucrat.   He  was  a  wonderful  guy.   I  mean,  bureaucrat  is  not  a 
pejorative  term  in  my  lexicon.   There  are  people  who  have  to  make 
government  work  and  understand  how  to  do  it  and  are  very 
successful  at  it.   Hal  Warass  is  one  of  those  people.   He  stayed 
on  with  the  agency  after  Huey  left;  he'd  been  with  Claire  before 
Huey;  I  think  he  had  been  with  whoever  was  resources  secretary 
before  her. 

Lage:     I  haven't  heard  anybody  mention  his  name.   I've  interviewed 

[former  Secretary  of  Resources  Norman  B.]  Livermore  [Jr.]  and 
Dedrick  and-- 

Pesonen:   Well,  he  was  a  Svengali  of  the  Resources  Agency.   He  was  very 

careful  not  to  take  a  policy  position.  He  made  the  engine  run. 

Lage:     So  did  he  keep  Huey  on  track? 

Pesonen:   He  tried.   I  had  a  lot  of  respect  for  Hal  in  the  challenge  he 
faced. 

Anyway,  so  you  try  to  glean  what  Huey  wanted  from  these 
staff  meetings.   Sometimes  he'd  give  you  a  direct  order,  but  not 
very  often.   You  were  supposed  to  pick  up  the  vibrations  of  what 
he  wanted. 

Lage:     Or  maybe  he  just  wanted  you  to  go  your  own  way? 

Pesonen:   No,  he  didn't  want  you  to  go  your  own  way.   I  think  he  was  trying 
to  figure  out  what  he  wanted  to  do  for  a  while  that  I  was  there. 
He  finally  came  up  with  a  plan,  and  then  we  had  to  buy  into  that 
plan,  and  it  was  a  good  plan.   It  was  the  idea  behind  his 
Renewable  Resources  Institute  [where  Johnson  is  now  director] , • 
which  focussed  on  Huey's  central  theme,  which  is  still  his 
central  theme,  and  I  think  it  always  has  been  since  he  left  Trust 
for  Public  Lands--maybe  it  was  even  before  that—that  a  society 
that  is  dependent  on  nonrenewable  resources  is  doomed  and  that 
now,  while  we've  still  got  time  and  nonrenewable  resources  to 
use,  we  should  build  a  system  that  depends  on  renewable 
resources:  wood,  water,  sunlight,  wind.   And  certainly  wood  was  a 
large  part  of  that,  for  energy  and  building  materials.   So 
forestry  was  very  important  to  him  as  part  of  this  renewable 
resource  notion;  a  society  that  recycled  things,  used  things  that 
grew  again,  planted  for  the  future.   Wood  energy  was  a  big  deal 
with  him. 

Part  of  that  program  was  the  chaparral  management  program 
which  the  Department  of  Forestry  presented  to  him  as  a  renewable 
resource  program  that  we  could  manage  for  millions  of  acres  of 
brushland  in  California,  increasing  water  yield,  wildlife  yield. 


205 


Lage:     But  not  increasing  wood  supply,  am  I  right? 

Pesonen:   We  wanted  to  try  to  make  wood  energy  out  of  it:  chopping  it  up 

and  bundling  it  up.   There  was  a  little  pilot  program  down  in  San 
Diego  County  to  try  that.   It  just  wasn't  economical.   But  using 
logging  slash  and  other  more  concentrated  forms  of  wood  did  have 
some  possibilities,  or  appeared  to.   And  I  put  that  whole  program 
in  charge  of  a  deputy  for  resource  programs,  Loyd  Forrest. 

Lage:     Forrest? 
Pesonen:   F-0-R-R-E-S-T. 

[tape  interruption] 


Restructuring  the  Department's  Staff  and  Management  Systems 


Pesonen:   Where  was  I?  Trying  to  figure  out  what  Huey  wanted. 

1  had  one  agenda  for  myself,  and  then  I,  of  course,  was 
going  to  carry  out  whatever  program  Huey  had.   First  I  had  to  put 
together  my  staff.   And  it  took  me  a  while  to  find  out  what  kind 
of  people  I  had  inherited  as  deputies. 

Lage:     Are  the  deputies  ones  that  you  can  appoint  on  your  own? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  they  are  called  CEA  positions,  career  executive 

appointments.   They  don't  have  any  civil  service  security  in  a 
particular  position.   They  have  some  civil  service  rights  to 
return  to  a  civil  service  position  of  some  kind,  but  they  are 
very  high  level.   And  they  get  paid  well.   I  had  three  CEA 
deputies.   I  have  forgotten  exactly  how  Moran  had  that  organized, 
but  it  didn't  make  any  sense  to  me,  anyway.   He  had  one  very 
close  deputy.   In  fact,  he  had  the  office  rebuilt  so  that  you 
could  close  the  doors  of  his  office  and  this  other  deputy's 
office,  and  there  was  a  door  between  the  two  of  them.   I'm  told 
there  was  a  very  secretive  little  world  in  there. 

He  had  a  secretary  whose  name  was  Josephine  Guillino  who  had 
been  there  a  long  time,  and  I  immediately  developed  a  respect  for 
her.   She  was  a  very  tough,  strong  woman,  knew  where  all  kinds  of 
skeletons  were  buried.   She  was  very  loyal,  and  she  started 
helping  me  out.   She  liked  me.   She  figured  I  was  honest,  and  she 
said  once  she  thought  that  was  refreshing.   [Laughter]   I  didn't 
have  any  hidden  personal  agendas;  I  just  wanted  to  do  a  good  job. 


206 


So  I  ultimately  restructured  the  top  management,  and  that 
always  sends  reverberations  of  anxiety  throughout  an 
organization.   And  1  let  some  of  those  people  go.   I  brought  in 
Loyd  Forrest,  1  brought  in  [Robert]  Bob  Connelly  as  the  chief 
deputy  director. 

Lage:     Where  did  you  get  these  people? 

Pesonen:   Bob  Connelly  had  been  in  the  legislature,  working  in  the 

legislature  a  long  time.   He'd  been  at  the  legislative  analyst's 
office,  and  he  had  worked  on  the  staff  of  most  of  the  important 
people  in  the  legislature,  Senator  [Alfred  E.]  Alquist.   Let's 
see,  who  else  did  he  work  for?  He  was  an  insider  in  the 
legislature.   He  also  was  a  very  close  personal  friend.   He  and  I 
had  gone  to  high  school  together,  and  he  was  probably  my  closest 
personal  friend  as  well.   He  still  is.   And  he's  very  bright  and 
he's  very  knowledgeable.   He's  got  good  political  sense.   And  he 
was  sort  of  bored  with  what  he  was  doing  over  in  the  legislature, 
so  he  came  in  as  chief  deputy.   Then  there  was  Loyd  Forrest  on 
resource  programs,  [Robert]  Bob  Paulus  who  initially  impressed 
me,  in  charge  of  fire  programs,  and  then  there  was  an 
administrative  person. 

Lage:     But  this  was  a  reorganization? 

Pesonen:   This  was  a  reorganization. 

Lage:     Moran  hadn't  divided  it  into  fire  and  resources? 

Pesonen:   It  wasn't  quite  that  clear  a  division.   Some  of  the  fire 
responsibilities  were  under  the  resource  person. 

And  that  caused  a  bit  of  a  stir,  that  reorganization.   But  I 
felt  that  it  had  to  be  done,  and  Hal  Warass  helped  me  carry  out 
so  it  went  smoothly:  got  it  through  the  Department  of  Finance  and 
got  the  positions  authorized  by  the  State  Personnel  Board. 
There's  a  lot  you  have  to  do  with  what  are  called  control 
agencies  in  state  government  before  you  can  do  anything.   It  took 
me  a  while  to  get  over  my  impatience  with  that  process.   Once  I 
realized  its  purpose,  then  I  figured  out  how  to  use  it,  and  I 
didn't  resent  it  anymore. 


Women  and  Minorities  in  the  Department 


Pesonen:   There  was  another  problem:  the  department  was  under  some 

sanctions  or  impending  sanctions  order  from  the  personnel  board 


207 


for  failure  to  appoint  minorities  and  women  in  the  fire  side  of 
the  organization—well,  in  the  whole  organization,  but  the  fire 
side  was  80  percent  of  it  and  that's  where  most  of  the  problems 
were.   Coming  out  of  a  civil  rights  liberal  law  firm,  there  was  a 
lot  of  anxiety  that  I  was  going  to  start  changing  that,  and  we 
were  under  pressure  from  the  personnel  board.   They  were  going  to 
sanction  the  department  and  take  over. 

Lage:     Didn't  they  eventually  do  that? 

Pesonen:   I  think  maybe  they  did,  but  I  don't  think  they  sanctioned  them 

while  I  was  there.   I  kept  fending  off  the  sanctions  because  what 
the  sanction  would  mean  was  that  they  would  take  over  personnel 
administration  for  the  department.   Then  you  lose  your  freedom 
and  your  flexibility  in  appointing  people  you  think  ought  to  be 
in  certain  positions,  and  I  wanted  that  authority.   I  didn't  want 
to  lose  it  to  the  personnel  board.   So  I  had  to  promise  to  try  to 
get  serious  about  it  and  put  a  lot  of  pressure  on  the  department 
about  it.   Well,  I  got  a  lot  of  heat  for  that. 

The  first  big  executive  meeting  I  had  was  at  Lake  Arrowhead 
and  that  was  all  the  rangers,  all  the  regional  chiefs,  all  the 
top  staff  in  Sacramento.   There  were  thirty-five  or  forty  people. 
I  have  a  photograph  of  it,  a  big  picture  taken,  and  everyone's  a 
white  male  and  they  are  all  in  uniform.   It  looks  like  the 
military  from  the  First  World  War  or  something.   Here  we  all  are 
with  our  stars  on  our  collars  and  khaki  uniforms  and  they  are  all 
pressed  and  shiny  shoes,  and  there  isn't  a  black  face  or  a  woman 
or  a  Hispanic  there.  And  that  had  to  change.   It  had  to  change 
all  the  way  down  the  line. 

Lage:     Was  that  addressed  at  the  meeting? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   And  you  got  the  usual  rationalizations,  "They  aren't 

interested;  they  don't  want  the  jobs;  we've  tried;  we  can't  find 
them;  we've  done  everything  we  can;  it's  hopeless."  And  I  didn't 
accept  that,  and  I  think  they  knew  I  didn't  accept  that. 

For  example,  I  went  down  the  hall  to  the  supply  room  in 
headquarters.   There  was  a  supply  room  on  that  floor—we  were,  I 
think,  on  the  ninth  floor  of  the  resources  building- -and  it  was  a 
big  room  where  everybody  in  the  office  had  to  go  to  get  all  kinds 
of  supplies,  and  it  was  run  by  two  or  three  guys  who  didn't  have 
a  lot  to  do.   It  was  full  of  pinups  and  naked  girls  and  the  kind 
of  calendars  you'd  see  in  a  little  auto  repair  shop.   And  I  said, 
"Take  that  stuff  down."  And  there  was  an  uproar. 

Lage:     So  it  was  really  entrenched? 


208 


Pesonen:   I  said,  "Every  woman  in  this  office  has  to  come  in  here  and  pick 
up  materials  for  their  department,  and  they've  got  to  be  exposed 
to  that  stuff.   I  didn't  think  of  the  term  "sexual  harassment," 
but  now  people  would  call  it  sexual  harassment.   It  was  just 
inappropriate.   And  they  didn't  like  that  at  all.   There  was 
grumbling  and  growling  all  around  the  building:  "Can't  have  any 
fun  any  more  around  here."   [laughter] 

Lage:     What  about  hiring?  Were  you  able  to  turn  that  around? 

Pesonen:   It  was  hard.   It  was  hard  because  we  met  resistance  all  the  way 

down  the  line.   And  the  director  doesn't  do  the  hiring;  you  don't 
interview  everybody  for  every  fire  fighter  job.   And  you  can't 
set  quotas.   Legally  you  can't  set  quotas.   You  just  have  to  put 
the  pressure  on.   There  were  systems  for  giving  credit  for 
minority  or  woman  status  on  exam  results.   You  could  add  a 
certain  number  of  points,  but  the  interview  was,  of  course,  a 
large  part  of  each  one  of  these  assignments,  and  that's  where  the 
existing  institutional  mindset  exerted  its  influence. 

Lage:     But  could  you  give  points  to  your  supervisors  for  having  success 
at  hiring  minorities? 

Pesonen:   I  think  now,  today,  knowing  what  I  know  now,  having  worked  in  a 
civil  rights  law  firm,  I  would  have  done  things  somewhat 
differently;  I  would  have  hired  some  more  help.   I  didn't  get  as 
much  help  from  the  personnel  board  on  how  to  do  this  as  I  thought 
I  would.   The  personnel  board  sort  of  told  you  what  to  do,  but 
they  didn't  tell  you  how  very  well.  That's  my  recollection, 
anyway.   I  don't  want  to  be  unfair  to  them,  but  that's  the  way  it 
seemed  to  me.   It  seemed  that  I  was  kind  of  on  my  own.   Now,  I 
know  that  there  are  people  who  are  really  skilled  in  how  to  carry 
out  affirmative  action  programs  and  who  have  developed  a  lot  of 
techniques  for  making  it  work,  including  techniques  for  rewarding 
and  evaluating  and  appointing  authorities  down  the  line.   And  I 
just  didn't  understand  that  well  enough  and  I  didn't  get  much 
help  on  it,  as  I  recall. 

There's  been  a  lot  of  improvement  since  then.   I  don't  think 
that  the  department's  under  a  sanctions  order  any  longer,  but 
that's  been  thirteen  years.   I  know  my  son,  for  the  last  three 
years,  has  been  a  summer  fire  fighter,  a  seasonal  fire  fighter, 
and  there  are  women  in  every  station  now,  and  Afro-Americans.   So 
it  is  highly  integrated  now,  at  the  lowest  levels.   It  is  still 
not  higher  up.   And  the  budget  crises  over  the  last  number  of 
years  have  pretty  much  cut  off  much  promotional  opportunity,  so  I 
think  it's  probably  at  the  upper  level  still  pretty  much  the  kind 
of  organization  that  I  saw. 


209 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


I  did  create  one  high  level  position  to  which  I  appointed  a 
woman,  Suzie  Lange,  who  now  works  for  the  Department  of 
Education. 

What  was  that? 

That  was  press,  publicity,  special  programs  [assistant  to  the 
director,  policy  analysis,  information,  and  legislation];  kind  of 
a  collection  of  things.   But  she  was  part  of  the  executive  level 
group.   Otherwise,  I  didn't  do  very  well. 


But  you  kept  the  personnel  board  off  your  back? 
something  about  a  1980  sanction. 


I  thought  I  read 


Well,  there  was  a  sanction  proceeding,  but  I  think  they  softened 
it  to  give  me  a  chance.   I  mean,  I  was  new,  and  they  knew  I  was 
new,  and  they  were  going  to  give  me  a  honeymoon  period  on  this. 
And  we  were  successful  in  getting  that. 


Management  by  Objectives 


Lage:     You  mention  the  bureaucracy,  or  the  term  "bureaucrat."  Did  you 

get  a  sense  of  what  the  civil  service  appointees  were  like  in  the 
department?   Did  you  come  to  respect  them  or  did  you  find  them-- 

Pesonen:   I  respected  a  lot  of  them.   I  mean,  it's  a  good  department.   It 
has  a  very  clear  mission.   I  didn't  think  it  was  very  well 
managed  in  the  sense  that  it  was  difficult  in  the  budget  section 
to  really  get  a  handle  on  how  many  positions  and  how  much 
equipment  we  needed.   It  was  all  very  subjective.   That  I  found 
really  frustrating. 

Lage:     Is  this  mainly  fire  we  are  talking  about? 

Pesonen:  Mainly  fire.   In  terms  of  organization  reform,  the  fire  side  of 
the  organization  was  so  big,  such  a  huge  consumer  of  its  budget, 
that's  where  I  spent  a  lot  of  my  time.  And  I  started  looking 
around  for  systems ,  management  systems ,  that  could  be  implemented 
where  I  could  get  a  handle  on  what  the  department  did  down  to  the 
lowest  level,  where  at  every  level  they  would  have  a  plan  for 
what  they  did,  where  they  would  have  a  way  of  justifying  their 
budget.   And  I  read  a  book  called  Management  by  Objectives  and 


210 


Results  in  the  Public  Sector.1  I  was  intrigued  by  that  book  and 
I  went  over  and  talked  to  the  commissioner  of  the  [California] 
Highway  Patrol,  who  had  implemented  such  a  system  in  the  Highway 
Patrol.   I  then  brought  in  some  consultants  and  had  all  the  top 
staff  come,  and  we  spent  a  couple  of  days  going  through  a 
training  session  on  this  management-by-objectives.  Well,  it 
takes  a  long  time  to  implement  such  a  system,  and  it  wasn't 
completely  implemented  by  the  time  I  left.   In  fact,  I'm  told 
that  it  was  abandoned  as  soon  as  I  left.   [laughter] 

Lage:     Was  it  resisted  by  the  people  in  charge? 

Pesonen:  Yes,  they  didn't  like  it  because  it  took  away  their--look  at  it 
from  two  sides:  from  my  point  of  view,  they  could  never  tell  me 
why  they  needed  a  certain  lookout,  or  why  they  needed  a  certain 
number  of  engines,  or  why  they  needed  a  certain  station,  or  why 
they  needed  fifteen  bulldozer  operators  in  this  ranger  unit  and 
two  bulldozer  operators  in  that.  There  was  just  no  way  I  could 
get  a  handle  on  justifying  the  budget. 

Lage:     They  just  felt  they  needed  it. 

Pesonen:   They  felt  they  needed  it,  and  of  course  they  think  in  terms  of 
their  worst-case  catastrophes  and  very  large  fires.  And  that's 
understandable  because  they  are  on  the  line.   But  I  had  to 
respond  to  the  legislature  and  the  Department  of  Finance  and  the 
Governor's  Office  and  justify  what  I  was  asking  for.   We  had  to 
make  cuts,  the  cuts  had  to  be  where  they  would  do  the  least 
damage  to  the  department's  ability  to  do  its  mission.   There  was 
just  no  objective  way  to  classify  need  to  do  that. 


Pesonen:   So  I  started  to  concentrate  on  implementing  this  management-by- 
objectives  system.   I  was  able  to  get  authority  to  hire  some 
people:  a  guy  named  Bill  who  was  skilled  in  computerizing  this 
kind  of  information.   Suzie  Lange  [assistant  to  the  director, 
policy  analysis,  information,  and  legislation]  was  in  charge  of 
the  whole  planning  process.   And  it  was  glacial.   I  mean,  I'd 
push  it,  and  I'd  push  it,  and  we  would  develop  these  plans  at 
descending  levels  in  the  organization  and  massage  them  and  roll 
up  into  the  department  plans .   It  was  never  sufficiently 
finished,  but  it  could  be  used  for  the  budget  process. 


'George  L.  Morrisey  (Reading,  Massachusetts:  Addison-Wesley 
Publications  Company,  1976). 


211 


Lage:     In  a  nutshell,  could  you  describe  what  management  by  objectives 
is? 

Pesonen:   Well,  it's  a  way  of—it's  an  intellectual  process  of  setting 

out--at  increasing  levels  of  detail  and  descending  levels  in  a 
line  and  staff  organization—of  articulating  what  your  job  is  and 
articulating  it  in  terms  of  measurable  units.  At  the  top  level, 
you  define  a  mission  for  the  whole  organization  and  that's  a 
narrative  statement:  what  are  you  about,  why  do  you  exist,  why 
are  you  necessary?  And  then  at  the  next  level  you  break  that 
down  into  sub-missions  and  finally  you  get  down  to  what  are 
called  tasks  or  activities  which  can  be  very  specific.   You  are 
going  to  inspect  150  houses  in  the  first  three  months  of  the  year 
for  fire  hazards  in  wildland  areas.   That's  the  lowest  kind  of 
definition.   And  if  you  don't  inspect  150  houses,  you  explain 
why;  why  you  only  did  140  or  maybe  you  would  do  200,  and  you 
would  revise  it  each  year. 

At  the  top  level  you  say  the  mission  of  the  department  is  to 
efficiently,  economically,  and  swiftly  reduce  to  the  feasible 
minimum  the  number  of  acres  burned  each  year.   The  level  of 
detail  and  the  level  of  precision  in  measurement  increases  as  you 
go  further  down  in  the  organization.   And  you  can  structure  all 
of  this  and  lay  it  out  graphically  and  revise  it.   If  it  is  in 
place  and  it's  used  and  people  buy  into  it  and  understand  it,  I'm 
told  it  works  in  some  organizations.   It  has  its  faults. 

Lage:     Did  it  work  in  the  Highway  Patrol? 

Pesonen:   The  Highway  Patrol  seemed  pleased  with  it.   That  has  a  reputation 
as  a  very  well-run  organization.   There  are  surely  other  reasons 
for  it  being  a  well-run  organization  than  simply  the  use  of  this 
management  system. 


Renewable  Resource  Programs 


Pesonen:   So  a  lot  of  my  attention  went  into  that.   But  then  Huey  came 
along  with,  of  course,  his  program.   Huey  didn't  care  what 
management  system  I  used.  Huey  had  his  own  theories  about 
management,  which  were  very  one-on-one,  and  he  didn't  have  the 
patience  to  even  listen  to  it.  As  long  as  it  was  my  idea  and  he 
had  confidence  in  me,  I  had  his  support. 

There  were  a  couple  of  things  that  Huey  got  us  involved  in. 
One  was  the  wild  and  scenic  rivers  designation  for  quite  a  number 


212 


of  rivers  in  California,  which  was  a  federal  program.  He  wanted 
everybody  in  his  department  to  throw  their  resources  into  that. 

Lage:     Into  designating  the  rivers  as  wild  and  scenic? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Designating  the  Smith  River,  the  Klamath,  the  American, 

parts  of  the  Eel  I  think--!  don't  remember  what  all  of  the  rivers 
were—parts  of  the  Stanislaus,  the  Kern,  parts  of  the  Feather. 
But  there  were  still  administration  regulations  in  the  Department 
of  the  Interior  to  designate  these  rivers,  and  that  was  a  very 
important  program  for  him.   Regardless  of  what  department  you 
were  in,  you  were  expected  to  help  the  state  lobby  for  that 
legislation. 

Then  there  was --in  each  department  you  were  to  come  up  with 
a  number  of  programs  which  would  further  this  renewable  resource 
idea.   My  department  came  up  with--I  don't  remember  them  all—but 
chaparral  management  was  one,  wood  energy  was  one;  those  were 
sort  of  the  high  visibility  ones. 

Another  major  program  that  was  under  way  and  was  a  product 
of  legislation  that  had  been  passed  before  I  got  there,  which  was 
really  Vaux's  baby,  was  the  FRAP  program,  Forest  Resources 
Assessment  Program,  and  the  first  report  of  that.   That  was  all 
done  by  the  staff  of  the  department.  That  was  also  under  Loyd 
Forrest's  responsibility. 

Lage:     Now  what  did  that  involve? 

Pesonen:   That  involved  a  very  comprehensive  assessment  of  all  of  the 
resources  in  the  state.   All  of  the  wildland  resources. 

Lage:     That  must  have  been  a  major  undertaking. 

Pesonen:   That  was  a  major  project,  and  it  was  very  well  done,  too.   We  had 
some  really  good  people  on  that. 

Lage:     Did  this  include  private  lands  as  well  as  public? 

Pesonen:   Everything.   It  was  a  whole  economic  analysis  of  timber, 

brushland,  water,  wildlife  resources,  timberland,  private  and 
public,  large  and  small,  and  how  it  would  meet  the  needs  of  the 
future.   The  first  report  came  out  while  I  was  director,  and  the 
second  report  just  came  out  two  years  ago.   It's  a  very  valuable 
document.  Nobody  really  knew  what  the  forest  resources  were  in 
California  so  you  didn't  know  how  much  you  could  cut.   You  didn't 
know  if  you  were  overcutting  or  undercutting.   You  didn't  know  if 
you  were  growing  enough  to  replace  what  you  were  cutting;  you 


213 


didn't  know  anything,  including  policies  to  increase  sound 
management  such  as  tax  and  regulatory  policies. 

Lage:     So  you  completed  an  evaluation  of  the  entire  thing? 

Pesonen:   The  first  evaluation.   I  didn't  do  it;  the  staff  did  it.   There 

was  a  very  professional  staff,  but  it  was  done  while  I  was  there. 

Lage:     Did  it  get  reflected  in  policy? 

Pesonen:   Well,  not  a  whole  lot  at  that  point.   I  think  people  were  sort  of 
getting  used  to  using  it  and  understanding  it.   The  second  one 
was  prominently  relied  upon  in  the  debates  over  the  Grand  Accord 
last  year  and  two  propositions  which  were  on  the  ballot  in  1990. 
Yes,  it  was  the  centerpiece  of  the  debate  in  those  campaigns.   It 
came  up  with  some  very  startling  results. 

But  that  process  was  underway.  It  was  long  term.  It  needed 
to  be  nurtured  and  supported;  when  there  were  budget  tradeoffs,  I 
wanted  to  protect  that  program. 

Lage:     Where  did  Loyd  Forrest  come  from? 

Pesonen:   Loyd  had  been  in  the  department,  and  he'd  also  been  in  the 

Department  of  Finance.   He  was  a  career  government  employee.   He 
had  a  forestry  degree  from  [California  State  University  at] 
Humboldt.   He  also  was  a  very  good  administrator,  a  very  well- 
organized  administrator,  and  I  had  a  lot  of  respect  for  him. 
Most  of  Huey's  programs  ended  up  under  Loyd's  portion  of  my  top 
staff.   And  Loyd  was  a  little  secretive  about  it.   I'd  get 
reports  from  him  about  how  they  were  doing  by  and  large,  but  I 
didn't  look  over  his  shoulder  a  whole  lot  unless  Huey  wanted  me 
to. 

Lage:     And  that  worked? 

Pesonen:   I  told  Loyd  what  needed  to  be  done,  and  he  just  got  busy  and  did 
it.   And  if  he  needed  resources  or  help- -he  was  somewhat  resented 
in  the  organization,  I  think.   He  didn't  come  out  of  the  fire 
organization  although  he  had  some  experience  in  it.   But  he  was  a 
calculating,  hard-driving  manager. 


The  Fire  Fighting  Organization;   Acquiring  Air  Force  Helicopters 


Lage:     Did  most  people  in  the  top  levels  come  out  of  the  fire 
organization? 


214 


Pesonen:   Yes. 

Lage:     Was  there  tension  between  the  two  parts? 

Pesonen:   There  was  some  distance  there,  which  was  another  thing  I  had  to 
deal  with. 

Our  biggest  coup  was  to  get  all  of  these  helicopters  from 
the  air  force.   It  was  one  that  Huey  bought  into  reluctantly,  and 
Bob  Connelly  was  the  one  who  pulled  that  off.   As  a  state  agency, 
the  department  was  entitled  to  receive  surplus  military  equipment 
for  nothing.   We  learned  that  the  U.S.  Air  Force  had  twelve  huge 
"Huey"  helicopters.  They  are  the  kind  that  can  carry  twelve 
people.   It's  the  air  force  version  of  the  main  troop  carrying 
helicopter  that  was  used  in  Vietnam:  a  very  fast,  very 
maneuverable,  large,  reliable  helicopter.   We  wanted  to  use  it 
for  the  Chaparral  Management  Program  with  what's  called  a 
helitorch,  where  you  dribble  jellied  gasoline  around  a  big  patch 
of  brush  and  burn  it  off  from  the  helicopter  instead  of  having  to 
build  roads  and  manage  the  fire  by  hand.   The  idea  was  that  you 
take  a  huge  piece  of  territory  that  had  a  lot  of  brush  on  it  and 
you  would  burn  a  mosaic  in  it  each  year  on  a  plan  so  that 
ultimately,  over  a  ten-year  period  it  will  all  be  burned. 

Lage:     To  keep  down  the  fire  hazard? 

Pesonen:   To  keep  down  the  fire  hazard,  increase  the  water  yield,  increase 
wildlife  habitat. 

Lage:     Was  this  all  scientifically  accepted? 

Pesonen:   Pretty  much,  yes.   There  was  a  professor  at  Berkeley,  Harold 

Heady,  who  had  been  promoting  it  for  decades.   It  was  hard  to  do 
because  there  were  occasions  when  fires  got  away  from  you,  you 
know,  if  the  wind  conditions  and  fuel  moisture  were  not  right. 
So  you  had  to  have  a  lot  of  study  to  pick  exactly  the  right 
conditions  and  a  lot  of  training  of  the  field  people  who 
supervised  it. 

But  you  needed  the  helicopters,  and  we  didn't  have  any 
helicopters.  We  had  some  helicopters  that  were  on  contract  only 
during  the  fire  season  for  dropping  water,  but  we  wanted  our  own 
helicopters,  so  Bob  went  to  Washington  a  couple  of  times  and 
pulled  off  this  deal  where  the  air  force  just  gave  us  twelve  of 
these  big  helicopters,  which  are  enormously  expensive  machines. 

Anyway,  of  course,  I  had  to  budget  for  maintenance.   We  put, 
I  think,  six  of  them  into  operation  the  first  year. 


215 


Lage:     And  pilots.   Did  you  have  pilots? 

Pesonen:   We  had  to  get  pilots  for  them.   They  were  not  free,  really. 

Lage:     Why  did  Huey  have  to  be  persuaded? 

Pesonen:   Because  Huey  didn't  think  much  of  helicopters.   He  didn't  have 

any  interest  in  the  fire  side  of  the  organization.   That  was  just 
a  bunch  of  paramilitary /military  types.   It  didn't  interest  him. 
It  had  no  resource  magic  about  it.   It  was  just  a  job  the 
department  did.   He  wasn't  unsupportive;  he  was  just  bored  with 
it. 

I  was  kind  of  intrigued  with  it,  actually.   I  kind  of 
enjoyed  getting  out  in  the  field,  and  I  loved  the  idea  of  having 
all  these  helicopters.   [laughter]   But,  of  course,  our  hidden 
agenda  was  to  also  use  them  for  fire  fighting  because  they  could 
carry  crews  quickly,  and  they  could  carry  a  much  larger  bucket 
for  a  water  drop.   You  know,  they  can  fly  over  a  lake  and  pick  up 
the  water  and  go  drop  it  on  a  fire  right  away.   How  effective 
they  are,  I  really  don't  know;  nobody  knows,  I  think.   It's  just 
too  hard  to  measure  that,  but  there  was  a  firm  belief  that  they 
were. 

[tape  interruption] 

Pesonen:   So  we  got  the  helicopters.   We  were  afraid  somebody  would  find 
out  that  we  got  these  twelve  helicopters  before  we  got  them  and 
stop  it.   I  thought  Huey  might  try  to  stop  it.   I  sort  of  kept 
him  informed,  but  I  didn't  go  out  of  my  way  to  demonstrate  my 
enthusiasm  for  them.  And  of  course  the  air  program  staff  was 
delighted  because  this  increased  their  domain  enormously.   They 
got  all  these  toys  to  play  with.   So  we  had  to  work  out  a  plan 
for  these  big  flatbed  trucks  to  go  down  to  Davis-Monthan  Air 
Force  Base  in  Arizona  and  pick  them  up,  and  instead  of  having  a 
caravan  of  twelve  helicopters  coming  up  the  highway,  some  of  them 
came  up  Highway  99,  some  of  them  came  up  Highway  1,  some  of  them 
came  up  Highway  5-- 

Lage:     This  was  to  keep  it  a  little-- 

Pesonen:   --keep  them  all  spread  out  so  nobody  noticed.   [laughter] 

Lage:     Someone  would  think  there  is  this  attack  on  Sacramento. 

Pesonen:   We  put  them  in  a  hangar  down  in  Hayward  until  we  could  get  them 
assembled  and  checked  out  and  a  couple  of  them  in  the  air.   That 
was  a  lot  of  fun,  pulling  that  one  off. 


216 


I  probably,  if  I  look  back  on  it,  was  not  as  dedicated  a 
soldier  in  Huey's  army  of  the  future  as  he  wanted. 

Lage:     Was  this  partly  because  the  nature  of  your  department  was  so 
heavily  related  to  fire  fighting? 

Pesonen:   It  was  partly  that,  and  it  was  partly  that  Huey  just  troubled  me. 
I  never  really  quite  knew  what  he  wanted.   And  I'm  not  sure  he 
was  quite  clear.  He  may  have  had  a  big  bubble  of  an  idea  in  his 
head,  but  he  was  not  very  good  at  articulating  it.   And  some  of 
it  was  just  impractical. 

Lage:     Any  examples? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  don't  want  to  do  that.   I  liked  him,  and  he  amused  me,  but 
sometimes  I  just  thought  he  was  frustrating  and  silly  and 
unrealistic. 


Lage:     Could  you  tell  him? 

Pesonen:   No.   Sometimes  you'd  give  him  gentle  advice,  and  sometimes  he'd 
listen.   Sometimes  he'd  get  mad. 

Lage:     Maybe  I've  misunderstood  what  you've  said,  but  I  have  the  idea 
that  he  wasn't  a  good  manager,  but  he  seemed  to  feel  his 
authority. 

Pesonen:   He  had  authority  and  ideas.   He  was  not  much  of  a  manager.   Huey 
was  impatient  with  institutions,  and  my  sense  of  it  was  that  if 
any  program  was  going  to  stick  and  stay  after  we  left—because  we 
were  political  appointees  and  I  knew  our  tenure  was  limited—that 
anything  we  were  going  to  do  that  was  going  to  last  had  to  be 
institutionalized.   You  had  to  get  the  people  in  the  organization 
to  buy  into  it.   It  had  to  be  lawful;  it  had  to  make  sense;  it 
had  to  have  some  payoff  for  the  organization,  and  public  support. 
You  couldn't  just  take  a  bright  idea  and  throw  it  down  and  say, 
"This  is  the  way  things  are  going  to  be,"  because  it  would 
evaporate  as  soon  as  you  weren't  there  to  continue  the  pressure. 

Lage:     And  you  really  didn't  have  a  lot  of  time.   I  mean,  you  knew  you 
were  going  to  be  out  by  '82  and  you  went  in  in  '79.   So  that's 
just  three  years. 

Pesonen:   Closer  to  four  years.   But  the  first  year  is  start-up  and 

figuring  out  where  you  are  and  getting  the  lay  of  the  land  in  a 
big  organization,  and  that  was  a  big  organization.   It  was  the 
biggest  organization  within  the  Resources  Agency  by  far.   And  it 
was  very  spread  out.   It  had  500  separate  field  facilities.   I 
never  did  get  to  see  it  all,  I  never  got  to  see  10  percent  of  it. 


217 


Lage:     The  number  of  personnel  must  have  fluctuated  a  great  deal  in  the 
summer,  in  the  fire  season? 

Pesonen:   Well,  you  had  seasonal  fire  fighters  and  certain  seasonal 

positions,  but  the  base  staff  didn't  fluctuate  very  much.   It 
started  to  get  cut  back  because  Governor  Jerry  Brown  was  very 
penurious  about  our  department.   That  was  one  of  the  principal 
topics  of  Huey's  Monday  morning  staff  meetings:  fighting  with  the 
Department  of  Finance  for  money  for  his  resource  renewal 
programs. 

Lage:     He  preferred  those,  so  was  he  less  generous  with  funding  the  fire 
protection? 

Pesonen:   He  wouldn't  go  out  of  his  way  to  support  that  side  of  the 
program. 


Dismantling  the  State  Fire  Fighting  Program  in  Orange  County 


Pesonen:   And  then  along  came  the  Orange  County  struggle,  which  was  in  the 
wind  when  I  got  there.   It  was  very  clear  that  Jerry  Brown  wanted 
to  go  out  of  office  saying  that  he  had  limited  the  growth  of 
state  government.   He  was  going  to  be  a  no-growth  governor.   This 
was  his  post-Proposition  131  public  position,  that  he  was  going 
to  cut  the  size  of  government.   Orange  County  was  by  far  the 
largest  ranger  unit  in  the  department. 

When  the  department  was  set  up,  Orange  County  was  a  rural 
county,  and  as  it  exploded  in  growth—there  was  a  program  called 
the  "Schedule  A"  program.   It  was  authorized  by  statute,  and  it 
permitted  the  department  to  contract  with  local  governments  to  be 
the  local  government  fire  service,  and  it  would  be  reimbursed  by 
the  local  government.   There  were  parts  of  it  that  I  think 
probably  never  really  were  reimbursed  at  the  administrative 
level,  but  it  was  close  to  a  bargain  for  a  long  time. 

Lage:     For  the  county? 

Pesonen:   For  the  county.   The  accounting  was  very  complicated,  but,  on 
balance,  it  was  a  good  deal  for  a  lot  of  counties  for  parts  of 
their  fire  service  needs  for  small  communities  here  and  there. 
It  wouldn't  cover  a  whole  county  in  most  cases;  it  would  cover  a 
fire  district  or  some  small  town  or-- 


'Proposition  13  (June  1978). 


David  Pesonen,  director,  accepting  the  Smoky  Bear  Award  for  the  California 
Department  of  Forestry  from  Max  Peterson,  chief,  United  States  Forest 
Service. 


218 


Lage:     In  the  wildland  setting? 

Pesonen:   In  counties  which  had  a  large  wildland  area.   So  it  was  very  much 
used  down  the  coast,  in  Monterey,  in  San  Bernardino,  in  San  Luis 
Obispo,  and  along  the  foothills,  and  in  southern  California. 

Well,  there  had  been  a  ranger  down  there  who  had  been  the 
ranger  in  charge  in  Orange  County  throughout  the  entire  period 
that  Orange  County  was  going  through  its  explosive  growth, 
starting  in  the  fifties  and  on  up  into  the  seventies.   When  it 
was  no  longer  a  bunch  of  orange  groves,  the  Irvine  Company  had 
come  in,  and  there  was  Newport  Beach  and  there  was  a  lot  of 
things.   It's  a  big  population  center.   It  swings  elections  in 
the  state  now. 

This  ranger,  his  name  was  Carl  (I  can't  remember  his  last 
name  now,  sorry)  was  politically  very  astute  and  cultivated  the 
board  of  supervisors  and  was  very  effective  in  building  this  fire 
organization  until  it  had  500  employees.   It  was  a  big  fire 
department .   You  would  fly  into  the  John  Wayne  Airport  down  there 
(or  you  did  when  I  was  director),  and  it's  a  major  airport.   The 
fire  department  for  the  airport  was  the  Department  of  Forestry. 
All  of  these  big  trucks  that  run  out  and  put  foam  on  the  runway 
when  an  airplane  is  in  trouble  and  are  trained  in  crash  rescue 
and  aircraft  disasters,  those  were  all  Department  of  Forestry. 

Lage:     And  was  that  true  of  all  of  the  fire  fighting  within  the  county? 

Pesonen:   Except  some  cities  had  their  own  fire  departments.   But 

throughout  most  of  the  county,  which  was  largely  unincorporated 
and  there  were  a  lot  of  little  communities  which  had  just  bought 
into  this  Schedule  A  system;  it  was  just  huge.   There  were  a  lot 
of  employees,  and  if  you  could  turn  those  over  to  the  county  so 
they  were  no  longer  on  a  state  payroll,  it  would  look  like  you 
had  cut  the  state  payroll  by  500  positions.   The  public  payroll 
wouldn't  be  cut  at  all  if  you  counted  the  counties  because  the 
county  would  have  to  take  those  people  on. 

Well,  the  Department  of  Forestry  employees  were  unionized  by 
this  time,  and  there  was  a  lot  of  opposition.   There  was  a  fear 
that  Orange  County  was  just  the  beginning  of  dismantling  the 
Schedule  A  program  which  probably  accounted  for  half  the  Jobs  in 
the  department,  or  at  least  a  third  of  the  jobs.   It  was  a  big 
part  of  the  organization.   If  you  cut  out  all  of  the  Schedule  A 
contracts,  the  opportunity  for  promotion  within  the  department 
would  be  much  less  for  most  people.   So  Orange  County  was  a  way 
station  for  rising  in  the  organization;  there  were  a  lot  of  jobs 
there.   But  it  was  very  clear  that  Jerry  Brown  wanted  that 
contract  cut  loose. 


219 


Lage:     Wasn't  there  some  pressure  from  the  local  fire  fighting  union? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  well  there  was  a  dispute.   That  complicated  it.   That  was 
one  of  the  reasons  for  Jerry  Brown's  position.   The  Federated 
Fire  Fighters  wanted  to  unionize  as  many  people  as  possible,  like 
all  unions,  and  they  couldn't  get  their  hands  on  Orange  County. 
Here  was  a  big  plum.   If  there  was  a  county  fire  department,  it 
could  be  unionized  by  Federated  Fire  Fighters  and  taken  out  of 
local  CDFEA,  California  Department  of  Forestry  Employees 
Association,  which  was  the  union  I  had  to  deal  with.   It  was  a 
union  of  state  employees  like  CSEA  [California  State  Education 
Association] . 

There  was  a  lot  of  heat  about  this.   There  was  a  lot  of 
antagonism  between  the  two  union  organizations.  It  was  really  a 
reflection  of  turf  battles  between  the  leadership.   To  the  rank- 
and-file,  I  don't  think  it  made  a  lot  of  difference,  but  union 
bosses  had  been  there  forever,  and  this  was  how  they  got  paid: 
with  the  dues  from  these  people.   I  was  pretty  cynical  about 
that.   But  it  was  very  clear  that  because  of  union  pressures  from 
the  Federated  Fire  Fighters  and  because  of  this  agenda  to  cut  the 
state  service,  Orange  County  was  going  to  go. 

And  there  was  a  widespread  belief  in  the  department  that  the 
reason  I  was  appointed  as  the  director  was  to  carry  out  this 
anti-CDFEA,  anti-state  employee  agenda.   Well,  I  didn't  even  know 
about  the  issue  when  I  got  appointed.   People  started  talking 
about  Orange  County,  and  I  didn't  really  understand  what  was 
going  on.   So  I  finally  decided  I  had  better  figure  it  out  in  a 
hurry.   If  there  is  that  much  talk  about  it,  I'd  better 
understand  it. 

Lage:     Did  you  get  it  from  Huey? 

Pesonen:   I  got  it  from  within  the  department,  and  I  got  it  from  the  union 
representative  for  the  Federated  Fire  Fighters  who  came  to  see 
me,  possibly  at  the  governor's  suggestion.   It  became  very  clear 
that  I  had  to  see  that  it  happened.  And  I  had  to  see  to  it  that 
it  happened  pretty  soon. 

Lage:     Did  you  get  direction  from  above?  Do  you  remember? 

Pesonen:   [Pause]   Yes.   But  it  was  as  though  they  expected  me  to 

understand  that  Orange  County  was  going  to  be  turned  over  to 
Orange  County  and  taken  out  of  the  department.   I  don't  remember 
ever  receiving  a  memo  that  so  much  as  said  so,  but  it  was  not 
necessary.   I  was  visited  by  a  lot  of  people,  some  that  opposed 
it  and  some  who  favored  it,  but  it  was  very  clear  that  this  was 
going  to  happen.   Some  things  had  gone  on  about  it  before  I  got 


220 


appointed  director.   Maybe  the  governor  had  made  some  public 
pronouncements.   There  just  wasn't  any  question  it  was  going  to 
happen. 

Well,  it  wasn't  as  simple  as  just  saying,  "OK,  the  contract 
is  over."  There  was  all  of  this  equipment,  hundreds  of  pieces  of 
equipment  in  fire  stations  where  nobody  had  paid  any  attention  to 
the  title,  or  half  the  building  would  be  owned  by  the  state  and 
half  would  be  owned  by  the  county,  or  the  county  would  own  the 
grounds  and  the  state  would  own  the  building,  or  the  county  had 
bought  the  fire  engine  and  then  it  had  partly  depreciated  but  it 
wasn't  totally  depreciated.   There  were  benefits  that  many  of  the 
employees  had  accumulated  over  the  years,  vacation,  sick  leave, 
retirement,  and  those  all  had  to  be  transferred  without  their 
losing  anything. 

So  it  took  three  or  four  pieces  of  legislation  to  amend  the 
Public  Employees  Retirement  Act  —  there  were  four  or  five  bills, 
three  or  four  bills  anyway,  that  had  to  be  shepherded  through  the 
legislature,  and  every  time  there  was  a  hearing  on  them,  the 
Department  of  Forestry  employees  would  show  up  en  masse  and 
oppose  them.   [Laughter]  And  here  was  their  director  taking  one 
position  and  the  rank-and-file  taking  another,  and  I  didn't  have 
any  choice;  I  had  my  marching  orders. 

Lage:     But  you  were  the  one  who  had  to-- 

Pesonen:   I  was  the  one  that  had  to  take  the  heat  from  within  the 

department,  so  it  caused  a  lot  of  moral  problems  and  a  lot  of 
tension  between  me  and  the  field  organization.   They  thought  I 
was  the  governor's  cat's  paw,  and  I  was.   I  had  to  be.   I  was 
carrying  out  the  governor's  dirty  work  as  far  as  they  were 
concerned.   I  just  didn't  have  any  choice.  And  it  made  sense  to 
me,  too.   I  saw  the  department  as  a  wildlands  fire  department, 
and  in  Orange  County  it  clearly  was  no  longer  a  wildlands  fire 
department;  they  had  high-rise  ladders,  they  protected  the 
airport.   They  were  a  municipal  fire  department. 

Lage:     It  does  make  sense,  looking  back  on  it. 

Pesonen:   Looking  back  on  it,  but  from  the  point  of  view  of  these  employees 
who  were  looking  for  job  security,  it  was  not  good. 

So  eventually  it  happened,  and  after  it  happened,  there  was 
a  vote  of  no-confidence  by  the  employees  against  me  as  the 
director.   And  I  attributed  a  lot  of  it  to  the  Orange  County 
situation.   And  probably  a  lot  of  it  to  the  fact  that  they 
realized  that  deep  in  my  heart  I  was  not  a  fireman.   I  was 


221 


interested  in  the  resource  side  of  the  organization.   I  didn't 
come  across  as  a  good  old  fireman.   Never  will. 

Lage:     Even  though  you  got  them  the  helicopters? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  but  that  was  just  for  part  of  the  staff.   The  ground  forces 
never  cared  that  much  about  the  helicopters  anyway.   In  fact, 
there  was  tension  between  the  air  and  ground  forces.   This  goes 
on  in  any  emergency  response  organization. 

Lage:     Now,  Vaux  mentioned,  in  talking  about  that  Orange  County 

situation,  that  some  people  were  worried  about  diminishing  the 
fire  response  abilities  because  you  had  these  500  people  that 
could  be  transferred,  when  needed,  throughout  the  state. 

Pesonen:   That  was  one  of  the  arguments  that  was  made  within  the 

organization:  that  since  the  Orange  County  organization,  even 
though  it  was  paid  for  by  the  county,  the  contract  provided  that 
it  remained  under  the  Department  of  Forestry's  command  structure, 
and  all  of  those  resources  were  available  to  be  called  on  without 
going  through  an  intermediate  command  structure,  a  separate 
command  structure,  to  be  called  in  and  managed  on  large 
catastrophes. 

There  may  have  been  some  diminishment  of  that,  but  there  are 
mutual  aid  agreements  all  of  the  time  among  the  various  fire 
departments.   If  it  doesn't  work,  you  have  things  like  what 
happened  with  this  Oakland  Hills  fire,  where  the  Berkeley  fire 
station  right  behind  my  house  here  didn't  know  for  two  hours  that 
it  was  supposed  to  go  to  the  fire  which  you  could  see  out  the 
window  here.   There  was  a  bad  command  structure:  bad  mutual  aid 
and  bad  joint  response  system. 

** 

Pesonen:   But  the  department  had  developed  a  very  fine  integrated  command 
structure  called  Instant  Command  System,  which  is  in  place  now 
and  was  in  place  pretty  much  then.   So  I  don't  think  there  has 
been  very  much  diminishment,  at  least  nobody  says  anything  more 
about  it.  The  transition  went  smoothly,  and  the  employees  that 
ended  up  in  Orange  County  get  paid  more  than  they  were  paid  by 
the  department  and  were  unionized  immediately  by  the  Federated 
Fire  Fighters.  And  then  the  Department  of  Forestry  employees 
ultimately  joined  the  Federated  Fire  Fighters  after  I  left,  so 
there  is  no  tension  between  the  two  unions  anymore  because  they 
are  all  one  union. 


222 


Sources  of  Tension  Between  the  Director  and  Department  Employees 


Lage:     Well,  what  did  this  vote  of  no  confidence  mean  to  you  or  mean  to 
the  department? 

Pesonen:  Well,  I  wasn't  happy  about  it. 

Lage:  Was  that  voted  by  the  union  organization? 

Pesonen:  It  was  by  the  union  organization,  pretty  much. 

Lage:  Were  there  other  labor  negotiations  problems? 

Pesonen:   No.  Well,  we  fought  them  on  the  budget  every  year,  Bob  Connelly 
and  I,  but  that's  management's  responsibility.   You  are  not  going 
to  give  away  the  store.  We  had  a  budget  constraint.  The  more 
money  they  got  for  salaries,  the  less  we  had  for  all  of  the  other 
things  we  had  to  do.  We  were  just  in  a  management  frame  of  mind; 
that  was  my  job. 

I  think  part  of  it  was  the  Orange  County  thing;  part  of  it 
was  their  sense  that  I  was  what  they  perceived  as  a  bit  of  an 
elitist.   I  was  the  first  director  who  hadn't  come  up  through  the 
ranks .   Moran  had  come  up  through  the  ranks ;  everybody  who  had 
ever  been  director  had  come  up  through  the  organization,  and  I 
was  this  outsider  thrust  upon  them,  and  I  brought  in  a  chief 
deputy  who  was  an  outsider.   It's  a  very  insular  organization. 
And  I  wouldn't  be  surprised  if  my  touch  was  not  gentle  all  of  the 
time  either. 

Lage:     Do  you  think  the  affirmative  action  measures  were  a  source  of 
tension? 

Pesonen:   Affirmative  action  had  something  to  do  with  it.   There  were  a  lot 
of  changes  that  were  under  way  that  were-- 

Lage:     The  management-by-objectives? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know  how  much  that  had  to  do  with  it  because  I  don't 

think  that  ever  got  down  to  the  rank- and- file.   It  was  a  bit  more 
in  terms  of  talk.  The  system  never  got  developed  enough  to  get 
down  to  the  station  level. 

Lage:     What  about  fire  prevention  programs?  Was  that  a  concern? 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  concern,  but  I  don't  think  it  was  a  big  policy  issue. 
It  was  just  something  we  did. 


223 


Lage:     I  suppose  the  chaparral  management  must  have  been-- 

Pesonen:   The  chaparral  management  was  justified  partly  in  terms  of  not  so 
much  fire  prevention  as  fuel  reduction. 


Relations  with  Timber  Companies  and  the  Legislature 


Lage:     How  about  approving  timber  harvest  plans?  Was  that 
controversial? 

Pesonen:   That  was  an  ongoing  issue. 
Lage:     Were  most  of  them  just  routine? 

Pesonen:   Most  of  them  were  pretty  routine.   Occasionally  some  would  come 
along  where  they  were  very  controversial,  mostly  where  they  were 
close  to  communities  and  affected  water  supplies.   The  degree  to 
which  timber  harvest  plans  are  controversial  is  a  reflection  of 
the  local  population.   When  I  was  director,  the  north  coast  was 
just  beginning  to  be  invaded—that '  s  the  wrong  word,  but  some 
people  would  use  it—by  counter-culture  people  and  retirees  and 
other  people  who  had  come  from  urban  areas  looking  for  solace  in 
the  wilderness,  or  what  they  think  of  as  a  wilderness  in 
Mendocino  and  Humboldt  counties,  southern  Humboldt,  anyway,  who 
weren't  tied  at  all  to  the  timber  industry  and  who  weren't  afraid 
of  being  political  activists.   So  more  and  more  there  was 
opposition  to  timber  harvest  plans  around  the  coast,  in  southern 
Humboldt  and  certainly  in  Mendocino. 

Lage:     Now,  were  those  plans  that  were  developed  by  the  companies  and 
then  approved  by  the  department  or  denied? 

Pesonen:   The  timber  harvest  plans  are  always  developed  by  the  company 
forester  who  certifies  that  it  meets  the  rules.   Then  it  is 
inspected,  submitted  to  the  department  and  the  department  has  a 
very  short  period  of  time  to  evaluate  it,  get  comments  from  [the 
Department  of]  Fish  and  Game  or  the  Regional  Water  Quality 
Control  Board  if  necessary.   And  some  of  them  were  controversial. 
And  I  sometimes  denied  them,  and  the  companies  would  appeal  them 
to  the  board. 

One  of  the  ones  that  stands  out  was  in  Mendocino  County.   It 
was  in  the  headwaters  of  the  water  supply  for  a  little  community 
on  the  coast,  and  I  think  I  turned  that  one  down  and  it  got 
appealed.   I  don't  know  what  happened  to  it. 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


224 


There  was  one  that  I  found  a  press  release  for  having  to  do  with 
the  bald  eagle  near  Round  Valley.  You  denied  the  timber  harvest 
plan. 


Yes,  but  I  think  that  kind  of  got  worked  out  on  that  one. 
revised  and  then  finally  got  approved. 

OK. 


It  got 


You  know,  it  is  funny  that  even  though  that  was  my  main  interest, 
there  isn't  anything  there  much  that  stands  out  in  my  memory  from 
my  term  as  director  around  timber  harvest  plans  as  much  as  around 
the  fire  organization. 

Because  that  side  of  the  organization  dominated? 
Yes. 

That's  too  bad  that  that  was  your  interest  but  you  weren't  able 
to  pursue  it  that  much. 

Well,  I  always  harbored  the  hopes  that  I  would  get  it  under 
control  and  then  I  could  go  really  pay  more  attention  to  the 
resource  section.   It  never  happened. 

Did  you  get  an  impression  of  the  private  companies  and  how 
responsible  they  were  and-- 

Well,  yes.   Every  company  has  a  personality,  you  know?   Some  are 
easier  to  get  along  with  than  others.   Some  have  a  very 
antagonistic  view  toward  any  regulations.   There  were  some 
changes  that  went  on  while  I  was  there.   Hank  Trobitz  retired  • 
from  Simpson  [Lumber  Company] ,  and  they  brought  in  a  new  manager 
who  was  very  much  a  supply-side  economist  and  very  much  a 
believer  in  no  regulations  and  he  fought  us  hard. 


I  did  a  lot  of  just  sort  of  learning,  too. 
lot  of  tours  and  inspection  tours. 


I  went  out  on  a 


Earlier  there  had  been--I  can't  quite  remember  the  details  of  it 
--but  there  had  been  the  controversy  about  making  the  timber 
harvest  plans  substitute  for  the  CEQA  [California  Environmental 
Quality  Act]1  requirements? 


Pesonen:   That  was  pretty  well  resolved  before  I  got  there. 


'A.B.  2045,  California  Environmental  Quality  Act  of  1970,  1970  Reg. 
Sess.,  Cal.  Stat.,  ch.  1433  (1970). 


225 


Lage:     Was  that  taken  care  of? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  it  had  been  determined,  legislatively,  by  the  time  I  was 
appointed  that  timber  harvest  plans  were  the  functional 
equivalents  of  CEQA's  environmental  impact  statements. 

Lage:     Did  you  work  closely  at  all  with  different  legislators? 

Pesonen:  Well,  I  worked  with  those  whose  committees  affected  my  budget  and 
had  jurisdiction  over  my  budget  or  over  policy  legislation 
affecting  the  department. 

Lage:     Did  you  have  to  go  to  testify  frequently? 

Pesonen:   I  testified,  and  I  would  testify  on  the  budget  all  of  the  time 
with  staff  assistance. 

Lage:     Any  legislators  that  were  particularly  helpful  or  understanding? 

Pesonen:   Well,  Senator  [Alfred]  Alquist  was  helpful,  and  a  lot  of  that  was 
because  of  Bob  Connelly's  skill  and  familiarity  with  him. 
[Assemblyman  Meldon  E.]  Mel  Levine,  who  is  now  a  congressman 
running  for  U.S.  Senate  now,  was  helpful.   [Assemblyman]  Byron 
Sher  was  very  helpful.   He  took  a  great  interest  in  forestry 
matters.   [Assemblyman  Thomas  M.]  Tom  Hannigan  from  Sonoma 
County.   [Assemblyman  Douglas  H.]  Doug  Bosco,  who  then  went  on  to 
Congress  and  then  got  defeated.   I  noticed  he  was  one  of  those 
who  bounced  a  lot  of  checks  [in  the  current  scandal  involving  the 
House  of  Representatives  bank] .   [Senator]  Barry  Keene  in  the 
senate  and  Alquist  in  the  senate.   Certainly  Senator  Robert 
Presley  from  Riverside  County  was  very  helpful. 

Lage:     In  what  respect? 

Pesonen:   Well,  if  there  was  bad  legislation,  he  [Presley]  was  a  good 

person  to  talk  to  to  stop  it.   He  was  very  well  respected  in  the 
senate.   He  was  a  real  statesman. 

I'm  sorry,  Ann.   You  know,  I  just  don't  have  a  distinct 
recollection  of  any  large  pieces  of  legislation  that  came  out. 
There  was  always  something  happening. 

Lage:     I  can  imagine. 

Pesonen:   I  mean,  I  was  over  in  the  legislature  once  a  week  it  seemed  like. 
It  was  very  frustrating  because  I-- 


Lage: 


Was  it  putting  out  fires? 


226 


Pesonen:   Putting  out  fires.   Just  responding  to  inquiries  or  attending 
interim  hearings  or—there's  an  awful  lot  that  goes  on  that 
doesn't  have  any  product  anticipated  at  the  end  of  it.   It  is 
just  somebody  wants  to  do  something,  or  they  want  to  know 
something,  or  they  want  to  talk  with  somebody. 

Lage:     And  you  were  the  one?  You  couldn't  send  Bob  Connelly? 

Pesonen:   Sometimes  they  wanted  the  director.   If  they  were  on  your  budget 
committee  or  your  policy  committee,  the  director  had  better 
respond. 

Lage:     But  some  of  that,  you  felt,  wasn't  that  useful? 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  wasn't  whether  it  was  useful  or  not,  that's  politics. 

Politics  is  people  rubbing  up  against  issues  and  each  other.   It 
was  exploratory,  or  it  was  an  excuse  for  them  to  get  their  per 
diem  by  holding  a  hearing. 

Lage:     Did  you  really  feel  that  frequently? 
Pesonen:   Yes,  sometimes. 

Lage:     That's  kind  of  discouraging  if  you  feel  you  have  a  job  to  do 
and-- 

Pesonen:   Well,  yes.   I  mean,  the  budget  is  not  something  that  just  happens 
when  you  go  to  a  hearing.   There  is  a  lot  of  internal  work 
developing  it,  and  there  was  a  lot  of  time  spent  on  that  process, 
internally. 

Lage:     Especially  with  the  size  of  your  department. 

Pesonen:   With  the  size  of  the  department,  there  was  just  a  lot  of  time 
spent  on  that.   You  are  in  the  budget  process  year  round.   You 
get  one  budget  passed,  and  you  are  already  building  the  budget 
for  the  next  round.   The  budget  passes  in  the  summer;  the 
Department  of  Finance  wants  your  budget  by  the  end  of  November 
for  the  next  year  so  it  can  be  submitted  to  the  legislature  in 
January  so  they  can  flyspeck  it  before  they  put  it  in  the  final 
budget,  which  the  legislative  analyst  is  constantly  critiquing. 

Money  is  the  mother's  milk  of  a  lot  of  things,  but  it 
certainly  is  what  runs  government  and  you  spend,  as  a  top 
administrator,  an  enormous  amount  of  your  time  on  it.   At  least  I 
did.   Maybe  I  shouldn't  have  spent  so  much  time  on  it.   Maybe  I 
should  have  left  a  lot  of  that  to  staff  people.   But  I  took  an 
interest  in  it. 


227 


Lage:     Did  this  type  of  job  fit  your--did  you  find  that  you  liked  it? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  I  liked  it.   I  like  winning  things.   I  liked  making  things 
happen.   I  found  parts  of  it  frustrating.   It  was  very  slow  to 
make  things  happen  and  to  institutionalize  them.  And  I  had  a 
learning  curve  of  how  to  administer  a  big  organization. 

Lage:     It  was  quite  different  from  what  you  had  done. 

Pesonen:   Big  difference.   You  know,  you  have  to  develop  a  style  you  are 
comfortable  with  that  works.   It  was  not  an  organization  of  the 
kind  of  people  that  I  find  myself  congenial  with.   It  was  not  an 
intellectual  organization;  it  is  a  get-out-and-do,  good-old-boy 
network,  kind  of  organization.   And  there  was  a  side  of  me  that 
liked  that. 

Lage:     You  like  to  go  fishing. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  but  that's  a  solitary  pursuit. 

It  intrigued  and  interested  me.   But  I  always  felt  the 
outsider.   I  never  felt  I  was  folded  into  the  organization  at 
some  emotional  level  that  some  people  reached.  And  I  never 
particularly  pursued  that. 

Lage:     You  probably  didn't  work  there  long  enough  for  that  to  happen. 
Pesonen:   I  don't  think  it  ever  would  have  happened. 

Lage:     If  you  had  the  eight  years  of  the  Brown  administration  to  be  in 
charge,  do  you  think- - 

Pesonen:   I  might  have  gotten  more  comfortable,  but  I  was  never  one  of  the 

boys,  and  I  never  really  tried  to  be  one  of  the  boys.   I  may  have 

worn  a  uniform  and  some  of  the  other  trappings,  but  down  deep 
that  wasn't  the  kind  of  person  I  was. 

Lage:     The  director  wore  a  uniform  also? 

Pesonen:   Oh  yes.   Not  every  day,  but  when  I  went  to  some  of  our  functions 
and  ceremonial  things,  I  had  a  uniform.   I  had  a  uniform 
allowance . 

Lage:     You  mentioned- -maybe  it  was  in  your  resume- -that  one  of  the 

things  you  did  was  getting  industry  acceptance  of  the  Z'Berg- 
Nejedly  Act. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  I  worked  hard  to--I  should  have  said  that  earlier.   One  of 

my  agendas  was  to  reduce  the  level  of  adversarial  feeling  towards 


228 


the  Z'Berg-Nejedly  Act,  and  I  think  I  had  some  success  at  that. 
It  was  never  complete. 

Lage:     Where  did  the  adversarial  relationships  come  in? 

Pesonen:   If  a  timber  harvest  plan  which  had  some  opposition  to  it  still 

met  the  law,  I  approved  it.   I  was  very  careful  to  know  that  the 
industry  knew  that  I  was  going  to  follow  the  law  and  I  didn't 
have  an  environmentalist  agenda.   I  was  happy  to  see  the  law 
changed,  and  I  would  work  to  change  the  law,  but  if  I  couldn't 
change  it,  I  was  going  to  follow  it.   I  also  spent  a  lot  of  time, 
like  anybody  would,  like  a  lobbyist,  in  effect.   There  was  an 
open-door  policy.   The  timber  industry  representatives  could  go 
in  and  make  their  pitch  anytime  they  wanted,  and  I  didn't  treat 
them  like  enemies. 

Lage:  Was  that  a  difficult  transition  for  you?  I  mean  you  kind  of  came 
from  being  seen  as  an  activist,  whether  you  saw  yourself  that  way 
or  not,  to  becoming  an  administrator. 

Pesonen:   That  was  not  hard  for  me  at  all.   I  think  that  is  the  kind  of 

person  I  am.   I  mean,  there  were  times  in  my  career  in  the  past 
when  there  was  no  choice  but  to  be  a  hard-charging  activist  to 
get  the  job  done.   But  that  was  to  get  the  job  done,  that's  not 
because  I'm  inherently  one  who  likes  to  fight. 

Lage:     Well,  Claire  Dedrick,  coming  out  of  the  environmentalist 

community  had  a  really  hard  time,  partly  because  she  was  so 
criticized  by  environmentalists  when  she  tried  to— 

Pesonen:   She  was  very  insecure,  I  think.   And  she  had  a  hard  time.   She 

really  had  a  hard  time.   She  was  a  woman—the  first  woman  to  head 
a  resource  agency  which  was  a  very  white-male-dominated  set  of 
institutions.   Fish  and  Game  is  terrible  that  way;  Forestry  is 
terrible  that  way.   Jan  Denton  tells  stories  of  when  she  went  in 
as  director  of  conservation  over  at  the  Division  of  Mines  and 
Geology  and  a  couple  of  other  divisions  there  that  were  mostly 
institutionalized  male  organizations.   They  were  having  a 
terrible  time.   [Secretary  of  Agriculture  and  Services  Agency] 
Rose  Bird  had  a  terrible  time  at—where  was  it—Agriculture.   I 
didn't  have  that  problem. 

Lage:  You  didn't  feel  that  you  were  expected  to  behave  in  a  certain  way 
by  the  environmental  community? 

Pesonen:   Well,  my  reputation  was  pretty  solid,  number  one.   Number  two,  in 
those  days  the  Department  of  Forestry  was  not  the  focus  of  a  lot 
of  the  environmental  controversies. 


229 


The  Z'Berg-Nejedly  Act  wasn't  very  old.   We  were  still 
maturing.  And  I  was  determined  to  see  that  that  process 
continued.  Where  there  was  going  to  be  some  serious  resource 
damage  and  the  timber  harvest  plan  had  a  flaw  in  it,  I'd  turn  it 
down. 

Lage:     Did  you  feel  like  you  made  progress  getting  the  timber  industries 
to  buy  into  it  a  little  more? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know.   I  really  don't  know.   [Laughter]   I  know  they'd 
rather  not  have  the  Z'Berg-Nejedly  Forest  Practices  Act,  and 
that's  never  going  to  change.   They  are  in  it  for  business,  and 
it  constrains  their  business.   They  are  never  going  to  get  used 
to  that. 


Inspecting  Fire  Services  at  Diablo  Canyon  Nuclear  Power  Plant 


Lage:     One  thing  to  mention—this  is  skipping  around  a  little  bit—but  I 
think  you  said  earlier,  "Bring  up  Diablo  Canyon  when  we  talk 
about  the  Department  of  Forestry." 

Pesonen:   That  is  a  wonderful  story.   The  Diablo  Canyon  plant,  which  was 
the  most  controversial  nuclear  power  plant  in  the  country  by 
then—there  had  been  terrible  mistakes  by  PG&E  [Pacific  Gas  and 
Electric  Company]:  they  had  reversed  plans;  there  was  the 
suggestion  that  they  had  known  of  the  Hosgre  fault  and  covered  it 
up;  and  there  were  demonstrations  going  on  all  of  the  time. 
Mothers  for  Peace  down  there  had  organized  that  community. 

Jerry  Brown,  consistent  with  his  early  position  on  nuclear 
power,  had  his  administration,  through  counsel  hired  in 
Washington,  D.C.,  intervene  in  the  licensing  proceedings.   Now, 
at  that  stage,  the  issue  in  the  licensing  proceedings  was  the 
adequacy  of  the  emergency  response  plans .   Part  of  an  emergency 
response  plan,  of  course,  is  a  fire  plan. 

I  was  not  involved  in  that  process  at  all.   It  wasn't  part 
of  my  job  and  I  just  didn't  get  involved  in  it,  but  one  day  I  got 
a  call  from  the  governor's  office.   They  were  furious  because 
PG&E  had  filed  a  pleading  in  the  proceedings  in  Washington  to 
show  that  their  emergency  response  plan  was  adequate  and  part  of 
their  emergency  response  plan  was  the  Department  of  Forestry  as 
the  fire  department.   I  knew  absolutely  nothing.   I  had  not  known 
anything  about  this . 


230 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


So  I  started  calling.   I  called  first--!  went  through  the 
chain  of  conmand--and  I  called  John  Hastings,  who  was  the 
regional  chief  in  Monterey,  and  he  didn't  know  anything  about  it. 
The  ranger  in  charge  of  San  Luis  Obispo  County  was  a  guy  named 
Tom  Wadell,  and  I  had  never  liked  Wadell.   He  was  a  very 
reactionary,  right-wing  type,  and  he  was  always  kind  of  sour  in 
our  meetings.   I  don't  think  he  was  very  well  liked  in  the 
organization  at  all.  And  he  was  very  friendly  with  the  manager 
of  the  PG&E  plant  —  of  the  project  manager  for  the  Diablo  Canyon 
plant—and  he  had  entered  into  an  agreement  with  them  that  the 
Department  of  Forestry  would  respond  to  fire  emergencies  in 
Diablo.   It  was  just  a  letter  agreement. 

Without  clearing  it? 

He  never  cleared  it.   He  never  went  up  through  the  chain  of 
command.   He  figured  San  Luis  Obispo  County  was  his  bailiwick;  he 
was  the  ranger  in  charge  there,  and  he  could  do  this  if  he  felt 
like  it.   And  a  lot  of  those  agreements  were  made  with  local 
communities  or  little  institutions  or  hospitals  or  things  like 
that.   He  just  saw  this  as  another  one  of  these  little  side 
deals.   There  was  no  budget  for  it;  there  was  no  money  involved. 

You'd  expect  maybe  even  a  little  special  training  on  how  to  deal 
with  a  fire  at  a  nuclear  power  plant. 


Pesonen:   One  would  expect  so. 

So  I  said,  "Well,  we  are  going  to  go  down  there  and  do  an 
inspection."  So  I  put  my  uniform  on,  and  I  made  arrangements  to 
pick  up  John  Hastings  at  the  Monterey  airport,  and  one  or  two 
other  staff  people  on  the  fire  side  of  the  organization.   We  flew 
down  to  San  Luis  Obispo  in  the  department's  twin-engine 
Beechcraft  Baron  and  we  all  landed  at  the  San  Luis  Obispo 
airport,  and  there  was  Wadell  and  his  entourage  to  take  the 
director  and  the  regional  chief  around.   I  insisted  that  I  wanted 
to  go  inside  the  plant  and  meet  the  plant  manager  and  discuss 
this  contract  and  discuss  what  the  emergency  response  plans  were. 

Well,  the  word  was  out,  and  I  had  heard  back  already.   This 
was  my  antinuclear  agenda.   Well,  it  had  nothing  to  do  with  my 
antinuclear  agenda.   It  had  to  do  with  the  fact  that  the  governor 
was  on  my  back  for  having  had  my  department  undercut  his  lawsuit 
in  Washington. 

So  the  first  place  we  went  was  the  little  fire  station  at 
the  airport.   The  Department  of  Forestry  had  a  contract  to 
protect  the  airport,  and  only  one  fire  captain  was  there.   We 
went  in  the  kitchen  and  had  a  cup  of  coffee  and  ate  some  cookies, 


231 


and  I  asked  him  if  he  knew  about  this.   Well,  he  had  heard 
something  about  it,  but  he  didn't  know  what  he  was  supposed  to 
do.   I  said,  "What  happens  if  you  get  a  call  that  there's  a  fire 
in  the  nuclear  power  plant  over  there?  What  are  you  going  to 
do?"   He  said,  "Well,  I  don't  know.   I  guess  I'll  go  over  there." 

Lage:     And  see  what's  happening? 

Pesonen:   See  what's  happening.   A  large  part  of  the  fire  response 
organization  in  San  Luis  Obispo  County  was  a  volunteer 
organization:  a  local  druggist,  a  gas  station  operator.   You  blow 
a  whistle,  and  everybody  would  throw  on  their  turn-out  gear  and 
jump  on  the  truck,  or  they  would  go  to  the  site  in  their  personal 
car. 

So  we  went  to  one  or  two  other  stations,  and  there  was 
clearly  a  lot  of  just  bewilderment  at  the  field  staff  level. 
They  had  had  no  training.   They  had  been  in  the  plant  once  or 
twice,  or  they  had  been  around  the  grounds,  but  no  significant 
training,  no  implementation  of  this  agreement. 

Then  we  went  out  to  the  plant,  and  you  had  to  go  through  a 
very  elaborate  security  system  to  get  into  that  plant.   You  had 
to  park  a  couple  of  miles  away  and  go  through  a  metal  detector. 
I  had  five  silver  stars  on  each  collar  of  my  uniform  that  sent 
the  metal  detectors  crazy.   Then  we  got  into  vans  and  drove  out 
to  the  coast,  and  that  is  one  awesome  facility.   When  you  come 
around  a  corner  and  see  it,  you  get  the  same  feeling  you  got  when 
you  first  saw  2001:  A  Space  Odyssey  twenty-five  years  ago.   You 
expect  Strauss 's  Thus  Spake  Zarathustra  to  come  blasting  out  of 
the  heavens.   It  was  the  mind-boggling,  awesome,  inhuman  size  of 
the  facility.   Then  we  had  to  go  through  another  security  system 
to  get  inside  the  plant  grounds,  and  everybody  was  very  nervous. 
The  plant  manager,  it  turned  out,  had  been  a  witness  for  PG&E  in 
the  Widener  case,  and  I  had  cross-examined  him  when  I  was  a 
private  lawyer. 

Lage:     Did  you  remember  him? 

Pesonen:   Oh  yes,  and  he  remembered  me,  too.   So  here  we  were  in  entirely 
different  roles. 

The  plant  had  been  tremendously  controversial.   The  company 
was  under  a  lot  of  bad  press  for  it.   Everybody  was  paranoid  as 
hell  about  anybody  looking  over  their  shoulder.   And  they  had 
made  some  terrible  mistakes  which  had  been  very  embarrassing. 
But  they  had  to  go  through  with  this,  and  I  was  now  in  this 
official  position. 


232 

So  we  went  through  the  plant,  and  they"  had  an  emergency  plan 
for  the  plant.   I  had  been  given  a  copy  of  it  before,  which  I  had 
read  before  I  went  down  there  and  had  along  with  me.  The  first 
thing  I  remember  is  going  inside  that  place  and  thinking,  "How  is 
anybody  ever  going  to  find  their  way  around  in  here?"  There  were 
pipes  and  huge  five- foot-thick  steel  doors  that  would  slam  shut 
in  emergencies,  and  the  place  was  as  big  as  several  football 
fields,  it  seemed  like,  inside.   I  wanted  to  go  up  to  the  control 
room,  which  I  had  seen  lots  of  pictures  of--I  had  seen  lots  of 
pictures  of  nuclear  power  plant  control  rooms  with  these  acres  of 
dials  and  buttons  and  switches  and  people  sitting  around  at 
counters  and  command  centers  and  lights  and  buzzers  and — 


Lage:     Another  movie  scene. 


Pesonen:   Another  movie  set,  and  I  wanted  to  go  up  there.   Well,  we  got  in 
the  elevator,  and  the  elevator  had  about  six  buttons  on  it,  and 
each  one  had  an  odd  number.   It  was  like  twenty- five,  forty- six, 
one  hundred  and  thirty-three,  two  hundred  and  ten,  and  I  said, 
"What  are  those  numbers  that  are  on  those  buttons?"  He  said, 
"That's  the  elevation  above  sea  level  of  the  place  where  the 
elevator  stops."  I  said,  "Well,  how  is  any  fireman  going  to  know 
that?  It  doesn't  say  "control  room',  it  doesn't  say  anything. 
Even  if  you  are  going  to  use  the  elevator.   Say  you  have  an 
emergency  at  213,  how  is  he  going  to  know  what  that  is?"   "Well, 
I  don't  know."  Nobody  had  a  very  good  answer  for  that. 

So  there  were  lots  and  lots  of  things  that  a  person  who  was 
responding  to  a  fire  there  would  have  to  know,  would  have  to  be 
trained  in,  for  which  there  had  been  no  training  at  all  and  no 
thought  put  into.   And  I  kept  asking  these  questions  as  we  went 
around,  and  the  plant  manager  was  getting  more  and  more 
embarrassed,  it  was  very  clear. 

So  we  spent  a  couple  of  hours  in  there,  and  I  was 
fascinated.   I  had  never  been  in  a  nuclear  power  plant,  and  while 
I  was  there  I  wanted  to  see  as  much  as  I  could,  just  out  of  long- 
suppressed  curiosity.   I  said,  "Well,  let's  assemble  in  this 
little  conference  room,"  which  was  out  by  the  gate,  as  we  were 
leaving,  and  I  started  peppering  this  plant  manager  and  his  staff 
with  questions.   I  remember  I  said—they  didn't  even  know  it  was 
a  volunteer  fire  department--!  said,  "I  noticed  the  security  we 
went  through  to  get  here.  You  had  to  know  the  license  number  of 
every  vehicle  that  is  going  to  arrive,  you  had  to  put  us  through 
an  elaborate  check  process,  we  had  to  get  badges,  you  had  a 
character  with  an  automatic  weapon  watching  us  while  we  went 
through  the  gate." 

Lage:     This  is  all  worrying  about  terrorism,  do  you  think? 


233 


Pesonen:   Oh,  yes,  they  were  very  worried  about  terrorism  or  sabotage. 
That  was  the  purpose  of  it,  and  it  was  heightened  by  the 
demonstrations  and  people  who  climbed  the  fence  and  sneaked  into 
the  grounds. 

Lage:     I  see.   So  they  were  worried  about  the  antinuclear  activists 
rather  than-- 

Pesonen:   Yes,  but  the  purpose  of  all  of  this  security  was  to  protect 

against  sabotage,  but  their  sensitivity  to  it  was  heightened  by 
these  assaults  from  these  demonstrators  who  were  climbing  the 
fences  all  of  the  time. 


Pesonen:  "Let's  say  you  have  a  fire  here,  and  your  own  in-house  brigade 
can't  handle  it,  and  you  call  on  the  Department  of  Forestry  to 
respond  and  assist  you.  What  do  you  think  is  going  to  happen?" 

He  said,  "Your  fire  engines  with  their  crews  will  show  up." 
I  said,  "No,  that's  not  what's  going  to  happen.   What's  going  to 
happen  is  four  or  five  pickup  trucks  and  small  cars  with  little 
"volunteer  fire  department'  stickers  on  the  bumpers  are  going  to 
show  up,  and  these  guys  are  going  to  be  in  street  clothes,  and 
they  are  going  to  jump  out  and  open  the  trunk  of  their  car  and 
start  putting  on  their  gear.  And  you're  not  going  to  know  who 
they  are.   In  the  meantime  your  emergency  is  growing  inside  the 
plant.   And  what  are  your  security  people  going  to  do?  Are  they 
going  to  let  all  of  these  people  through  without  knowing  who  they 
are  or  where  they  come  from?   They  are  going  to  come  out  of  the 
local  gas  station  and  the  local  drugstore  and  a  shoe  store.  Who 
knows  where  they  are  going  to  come  from.   And  there  may  be  a 
terrorist  among  them.  Are  you  going  to  let  them  all  in  here  and 
open  all  of  the  doors?" 

Well,  they  hadn't  thought  about  that.   They  didn't  know  it 
was  a  volunteer  fire  department.   They  didn't  know  that  the  CDF 
[California  Department  of  Forestry]  professional  staff,  like  the 
captain  I  had  met  at  the  station  by  the  airport,  had  no  training 
and  no  plans.   They  just  didn't  have  a  plan. 

Lage:     Was  that  usual,  to  use  these  volunteer- - 

Pesonen:  Oh,  that  was  very  common.  We  had  a  lot  of  volunteer ism  and  they 
are  integrated  into  the  command  and  communications  system  of  the 
department . 

Well,  it  was  very  clear  that  that  plan  was  dead  at  the  end 
of  that  meeting.   So  I  went  back  to  Sacramento,  and  I  just  wrote 


234 


Wadell  and  I  said,  "Cancel  that  letter."  He  immediately  went  to 
the  press,  the  San  Luis  Obispo  newspaper,  saying  that  this  was 
Jerry  Brown  illegitimately  using  his  administration  to  undercut 
PG&E's  position  in  the  NRC  [Nuclear  Regulatory  Commission] 
proceedings,  that  it  was  a  left-wing  plot.  There  were  headlines 
and  editorials-- 

Lage:  He  didn't  follow  the  chain  of  command  too  well. 

Pesonen:  He  never  had. 

Lage:  But  PG&E  seem  to  have  seen  the  wisdom  of  your  view. 

Pesonen:  He  was  the  only  person  I  fired. 

Lage:  Oh,  you  did? 

Pesonen:  I  fired  him  for  incompetence.   Of  course,  he  grieved  it. 

Lage:  Now,  when  did  you  fire  him  in  relation  to  this  incident? 

Pesonen:   Fairly  near  the  end  of  my  term.   It  was  about  six  or  eight  months 
after  that.   I  brought  a  disciplinary  proceeding  against  him,  and 
we  settled  it  by  his  agreeing  to  retire.   Although  Wadell  was 
part  of  management,  he  hired  a  lawyer  who  represented  the  union, 
[Ronald]  Ron  Yank,  who  is  a  labor  lawyer  in  San  Francisco. 

Lage:     He  lives  right  near  here,  doesn't  he? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  he  lives  right  in  my  neighborhood,  and  he's  a  friend  of 
mine. 

Lage:     Was  there  another  incident  that  caused  you  to  institute 
disciplinary  proceedings? 

Pesonen:   I  told  him  to  implement  another  plan,  to  put  a  real  plan  into 

action.   I  said,  "I  don't  mind  the  department  being  in  support  of 
PG&E  if  they  have  an  emergency  out  there,  but  you've  got  to  have 
a  plan  that  will  work,"  and  he  dragged  his  heels  on  that,  and  he 
was  insubordinate.   So  I  decided  to — that  was  the  only  head  that 
rolled  in  my  whole  time  I  was  there.   I'm  sure  he  believes  to 
this  day  that  I  was  carrying  out  my  antinuclear  agenda,  which 
simply  wasn't  the  case. 

Lage:     It  sounds  as  if  PG&E  could  realize  that  it  wouldn't  work,  that 
the  plan  was-- 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  think  without  the  lawyers  in  Washington  when  they  filed 
this  plan,  they  never  would  have  known  about  it.   I  never  would 


235 

have  known  about  it  if  it  hadn't  shown  up  in  legal  circles  in 
Washington. 

Lage:     That's  a  good  story.   Was  there  any  other  fallout  on  that? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  think  so.   I  don't  remember  any  fallout.   I  think  that 
was  very  close  to  the  time  1  wasn't  there  any  longer. 

Lage:     OK.   Any  other  thoughts  about  that  time,  or  do  you  want  to  mull 
it  over  before  our  next  interview? 

Pesonen:   Well,  let  me  mull  it  over.   Julie  suggested  we  talk  about  it 

because  she  remembers  some  of  those  things  better  than  I  do.   We 
just  haven't  had  a  chance  to  do  that. 

Lage:     OK,  we'll  do  that,  and  if  you  come  up  with  some  other  incidents 
or-- 

Pesonen:   But  that's  the  grand  sweep  of  it,  anyway. 

Lage:     Yes,  I  think  we've  covered  the  overall  general  topics  unless 

something  else  comes  up  like  that  Diablo  that  you  can  remember. 


236 


VIII   SUPERIOR  COURT  JUDGE,  CONTRA  COSTA  COUNTY,  1983-1984 
[Interview  7:   May  U,  1992]  it 

Midnight  Appointment  by  Jerry  Brown,  to  the  Wrong  Court 


Lage:     Here  we  are,  May  14,  1992,  continuing  our  interview  with  David 
Pesonen.   We  decided  that  we  had  pretty  well  completed  our 
discussion  of  the  Department  of  Forestry,  and  we  want  to  go  on  to 
the  next  stage,  which  was  your  midnight  appointment  to  the  court. 
All  of  those  judicial  appointments  that  Jerry  Brown  made  at  the 
very  last  minute  got  a  lot  of  play  in  the  newspapers.   How  did 
that  come  about  for  you? 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  made  application  to  be  a  judge.   There  is  a  process,  and 
it's  a  lengthy  one.   It  hadn't  occurred  to  me  to  seek  judicial 
appointment,  but  I  was  having  lunch  with  Coleman  Blease  one  day, 
who  was  on  the  State  Court  of  Appeal  in  Sacramento  and  an  old 
friend.   And  I  had  met  Cole  in  the  Bodega  campaign.   He  was  with 
the  American  Civil  Liberties  Union  at  that  time—he  was  the 
lobbyist  for  the  American  Civil  Liberties  Union  at  one  point- -and 
he  had  been  appointed  to  the  court  of  appeal  by  Jerry  Brown  early 
in  Jerry's  term.   He  was  a  very  fine  lawyer.   He  had  a  practice— 
a  private  practice— in  Sacramento.   His  other  partner  is  a 
federal  district  judge  in  Sacramento. 

In  fact,  during  the  Prop.  15  campaign  I  think  I  described 
earlier  in  this  interview  that  we  brought  a  petition  against  the 
secretary  of  state  and  the  Attorney  General's  Office  and  the 
legislative  counsel  to  reform  the  ballot  summary  statement  of 
Proposition  15  as  it  would  appear  on  the  ballot  and  the  petition. 
I  used  Coleman' s  office  as  a  base  when  we  tried  that  case  in 
Sacramento.   So  we  went  way  back. 

So  he  had  suggested  it,  and  the  idea  kind  of  cooked  for  a 
while,  and  then  I  decided  I  would  apply.   I  applied  for  the  court 


237 


of  appeal  and  was  approved  by  the  Commission  on  Judicial  Nominees 
Evaluation,  I  think  it's  called,  and  that's  a  commission  that 
investigates  all  applications  for  judicial  appointments.   And  I 
received  a  high  rating  from  them;  they  do  a  background  check. 
But  then  it  sat.   That  was  in  the  late  summer /early  fall  of  1982. 

The  problem  with  that  appointment  was  that  it  was  to  have 
been  a  newly-created  position  on  the  court  of  appeal;  there  was 
legislation  newly  through  the  legislature  to  authorize  more 
positions  because  the  case  load  had  increased  and  so  forth.   And 
it  became  very  partisan  over  whether  those  positions  would  be 
approved  or  not-- 

Lage:     Before  the  change  in  governorship? 

Pesonen:   --before  the  change  in  governorship.   And  I  don't  remember  all  of 
the  details  of  that  because  it  got  very  intricate  and  there  were 
some  trade-offs.   I  think  Republicans  wanted  some  of  the 
appointments  in  exchange  for  their  votes,  and  I  wasn't  privy  to 
those  negotiations.   Then,  once  the  legislation  was  approved, 
there  was  a  lawsuit  brought  by  a  prominent  Republican  attorney  in 
San  Francisco,  alleging  that  the  legislation  had  been  improperly 
adopted,  and  the  strategy  was  simply  to  hold  it  up  until  Jerry 
Brown  went  out  of  office  and  had  no  power  to  fill  the  positions. 
So  in  exchange  for  some  tradeoffs  that  I  don't  know  the 
background  on,  Jerry  made  a  couple  of  appointments  to  the  court 
of  appeal  to  the  positions  that  I  might  have  gotten  appointed  to. 

It  was  very  hectic  then. 
Lage:     He  made  appointments  that  were  agreeable  to  others,  you  mean? 

Pesonen:   They  were  agreeable  to  others,  or  they  were  politically  more 
palatable  to  Jerry  for  some  reason. 

Lage:     Did  you  discuss  this  with  Brown  or  others? 

Pesonen:   He  was  not  very  accessible  on  this  issue.  His  appointments 

secretary,  Byron  Georgiou  [legal  affairs  secretary],  was  the  one 
I  talked  to  mostly.  And  then  there  was  a  kind  of  a  rumor  mill 
about  it  around  the  capitol.   Tony  Kline  was  one  of  the  people  I 
talked  to,  J.  Anthony  Kline,  and  he's  on  the  court  of  appeal  now. 
And  [William  A.]  Bill  Newsom  [Jr.],  who  was  close  to  the  governor 
and  is  also  a  court  of  appeal  justice. 

Lage:     Were  they  all  appointed  then? 

Pesonen:   They  were  all  appointed  by  Jerry  earlier,  but  they  were  in  touch 
with  the  process  and  they  were  acquaintances  of  mine. 


238 


Well,  it  became  clear  that  the  court  of  appeal  was  not  a 
possibility,  and  I  think  Byron  Georgiou  suggested—or  maybe 
Coleman  Blease  suggested—that  I  resubmit  the  application  for  the 
superior  court  in  San  Francisco  because  one  of  the  appointments 
to  the  court  of  appeal,  one  or  two,  would  have  been  from  the  San 
Francisco  superior  court,  so  there  would  be  openings  behind  those 
positions. 

One  of  those  appointments  that  was  made  before  the  midnight 
appointments  was  [Donald]  Don  Ring,  whom  I  also  knew,  having 
tried  a  case  before  him  when  I  was  in  practice,  and  we'd  known 
each  other  by  reputation  and  a  little  bit  socially.   I  got  a  call 
one  day,  probably  in  November  of  "82  from  Don  King  who  said  that 
he  understood  I  was  going  to  be  appointed  to  the  superior  court 
in  San  Francisco--it  might  have  been  early  December,  but  it  was 
near  the  end  of  Jerry's  term—and  that  I  was  going  to  be 
appointed  to  Don  King's  position  and  that  he  would  like  me  to 
come  down  to  San  Francisco  and  meet  his  court  reporter  and  his 
clerk  because  those  are  positions  that  are  at  the  discretion  of 
the  judge,  and  he  wanted  to  take  care  of  his  staff  and  see  that 
they  had  jobs  after  he  went  to  the  court  of  appeal.   For  some 
civil  service  reason,  they  couldn't  go  to  the  court  of  appeal 
with  him.   Also,  appellate  court  justices  don't  have  court  clerks 
to  keep  their  minutes  and  manage  the  courtroom. 

So  I  went  down  and  I  had  a  very  nice  visit  with  them,  and  I 
thought  they  looked  like  competent  people,  and  I  would  get  along 
fine.   I  gave  them  as  much  assurance  as  I  could  that  if  I  got  the 
appointment  they  would  be  my  staff.   I  also  visited  the  presiding 
judge,  who  was  Ira  Brown  at  that  time—he's  now  retired—and  whom 
I  knew  very  well  from  having  tried  a  couple  of  cases  before  him 
and  a  lot  of  motion  work  when  he  was  the  law  and  motion  judge  for 
many  years.   He  was  a  very  fine  judge. 

The  word  was  out  around  city  hall  that  I  was  to  be  appointed 
to  Don  King's  seat.   I  walked  in  on  Brown  in  his  chambers,  and  he 
said,  "Welcome  to  our  court."  He  knew  about  it  already.   It  Just 
looked  like  a  done  deal.   And  then  Jerry  didn't  make  the 
appointment.   He  didn't  make  any  of  these  appointments.   And  he 
procrastinated  or  vacillated  or  had  some  intriguing  schemes  to 
balance  all  of  these  appointments  off,  which  of  course  are 
political  plums. 

The  days  went  by  and  there  was  no  word.   And  there  were  a 
lot  of  people  waiting.   And  the  days  continued  to  go  by  and  there 
was  no  word.   So  finally,  I  thought  it  just  wasn't  going  to 
happen.   And  at  that  time,  Julie  and  I  had  a  practice  of  every 
year,  between  Christmas  and  New  Year's  going  up  to  Sea  Ranch  with 
the  children,  and  we  were  going  to  do  that  that  year.   Instead  of 


239 


waiting  around  for  this  appointment,  I  decided  we  were  going  to 
go  to  Sea  Ranch  anyway,  and  I  left  word  at  the  governor's  office 
where  I  could  be  reached. 

There's  a  Department  of  Forestry  fire  station  at  Sea  Ranch, 
one  of  these  Schedule  A  stations,  under  contract,  and  I  would 
leave  word  at  the  fire  station  where  I  could  be  found  if  we  were 
out  fishing  or  something,  and  they  could  get  in  touch  with  them. 
In  fact,  I  think  I  had  a  little  two-way  radio.   I  really  was  very 
anxious  about  this  because  I  didn't  have  a  job,  and  I  didn't  know 
what  I  was  going  to  do  after  Brown's  term  ended. 

I  think  it  was  about  3:00  A.M.,  it  was  a  Thursday  night. 
His  term  went  to  the  third  or  fourth  of  January  because  of  the 
way  the  clock  runs  in  the  constitution.   It's  the  first  Monday 
after  the  first  Sunday  or  something  like  that.   And  so  he  had  a 
few  more  days  into  the  year  of  1983  to  make  appointments  than 
would  ordinarily  be  the  case.   His  term  just  didn't  end  at 
midnight,  December  thirty-first.   I  think  it  was  January  first  or 
second  at  about  3:00  A.M.  the  phone  rang,  and  Julie  and  I  were 
asleep,  and  it  was  the  governor  on  the  phone. 

It  was  him  personally,  and  he  said,  "I've  been  thinking 
about  the  San  Francisco  appointment,"  and  he  said,  "I'm  getting 
jammed  in  San  Francisco."   Those  were  his  words,  and  he  didn't 
explain  what  they  meant.   He  said,  "I've  got  a  new  appointment  in 
Contra  Costa  County.   You'd  love  it  out  there,  the  schools  are 
great,  housing's  nice,  the  weather's  wonderful.   How  would  you 
like  to  be  appointed  in  Contra  Costa  County?" 

I  said,  "I  don't  know  anything  about  Contra  Costa  County.   I 
don't  have  any  political  base  out  there;  I  don't  know  any  of  the 
people."  The  only  person  I  really  knew  was  one  of  the  judges, 
[Richard  L.]  Dick  Patsey,  who  was  an  old  acquaintance  and  a  good 
friend.   I  said,  "When  would  I  have  to  stand  for  election?" 

He  said,  "You  have  to  stand  within  two  years,  because  in  a 
new  seat  you  have  to  stand  for  the  first  general  election  that 
comes  along,  and  that  would  be  June  of  "84." 

So  I  would  be  in  office  and  running  for  office  immediately, 
which  was  not  to  my  liking  particularly.   And  in  a  politically 
unknown  landscape  for  me.   So  I  called  Dick  Patsey  and  rolled  him 
out  of  bed  around  three-thirty,  and  I  told  the  governor  I  was 
calling  him.   I  said,  "I  don't  know  whether  I'd  like  that  idea, 
but  I'll  call  up  my  friend  Dick  Patsey  and  see  what  he  says." 

Dick  said,  "Call  him  back  right  now."  He  said,  "You  are  not 
going  to  get  reelected  out  here.   It  is  a  very  reactionary 


240 


county;  you'll  be  perceived  as  a  carpetbagger.   The  local 
newspaper  is  run  by  a  flaming  reactionary  who  will  dredge  up  all 
your  background  with  the  Garry  [Charles  Garry,  of  Garry,  Dreyfus, 
McTernan,  and  Brotsky]  firm,  and  you're  going  to  be  in  real 
trouble." 

So  I  called—and  the  governor  had  said  call  him  right  back. 
He  gave  me  a  direct  number,  and  I  called,  and  he  picked  up  the 
phone  himself.   You  could  hear  murmuring  sleepy  voices  in  the 
background.   [Laughter] 

Lage:     Was  his  a  murmuring  sleepy  voice? 

Pesonen:   No,  he  loves  this.   You  could  tell.   The  governor  loves  this 
high-adrenaline,  emergency  way  of  doing  things. 

Lage:     Maybe  that's  why  he  put  off  the  appointments? 

Pesonen:   It  could  be;  maybe  he  gets  a  high  out  of  it.   [Laughter] 

So  I  said,  "It's  not  going  to  work,  Jerry.   I'm  not  going  to 
get  reelected,  according  to  Dick  Patsey,  and  I'm  concerned  about 
that." 

He  said,  "Well,  I've  already  signed  the  commission  so  there 
isn't  anything  to  be  done  but  make  the  best  of  it." 


Swearing-in  Ceremonies,  Sacramento  and  Martinez 


Pesonen:   We  cut  short  our  trip  at  Sea  Ranch  and  fled  back  to  Berkeley 
and-- 

Lage:     Started  your  election  campaign. 

Pesonen:   Well,  no.   I  had  to  get  sworn  in  before  the  deadline.   So  he  made 
a  lot--I  don't  know  how  many,  but  lots  and  lots—of  these  last- 
minute  appointments  all  about  the  same  time,  and  so  we  were  being 
sworn  in  en  masse  in  Sacramento.   Cruz  Reynoso,  who  was  on  the 
state  supreme  court  at  that  time  and  who  later  lost  reelection 
himself,  with  [Chief  Justice  of  the  State  Supreme  Court]  Rose 
Bird,  and  who  was  also  an  acquaintance  of  mine,  was  swearing  in 
all  of  the  new  judges.  We  didn't  even  have  an  extra  car  at  that 
point,  so  I  took  the  Greyhound  bus  to  Sacramento.   It  was  cold 
and  rainy  and  dismal,  and  I  walked  over  to  the  capitol.   I 
figured  that  there  were  so  many  judges  getting  appointed  there 


241 

was  going  to  be  a  couple  from  San  Francisco,  and  I'll  find  a  ride 
home  with  someone. 

We  were  scheduled  in  fifteen-minute  intervals,  like  getting 
your  physical  when  you're  drafted.   Reynoso  would  administer  the 
oath,  and  then  he'd  say,  "Would  you  like  to  say  a  few  words?"  and 
there  would  be  a  small  gathering  of  the  bedraggled  family  and 
friends  in  the  antechamber  of  the  governor's  office.   I  think 
there's  a  big  conference  room  right  after  you  go  into  the 
governor's  suite.   I  said  something  milquetoasty  about  how 
pleased  I  was  with  the  honor  and  so  forth.   Then  I  went  and 
waited  and  watched  who  was  being  sworn  in  and  from  where,  to  go 
and  nab  somebody  for  a  ride  home.   [laughter] 

The  next  batch  included  a  municipal  court  judge  in  San 
Francisco.   His  name  was  [Joseph]  Joe  Desmond.   Desmond  took  the 
oath  and  then  was  asked  whether  he  wanted  to  say  a  few  remarks, 
and  he  got  up  and  said,  "Yes,  I'm  just  goddamned  glad  Jerry  got 
around  to  it!"   [laughter]   I  said,  "That's  my  man,"  and  I  went 
up  and  told  him  who  I  was  and  told  him  my  circumstances  and  he 
said,  "Sure,  come  on.   We'll  go  home." 

Well,  his  wife  waited  in  the  car,  outside-- 
Lage:     While  he  ran  in  and-- 

Pesonen:   --while  he  ran  in.   He  was  a  sole  practitioner  who  had  been 

around  the  criminal  courts  for  a  long  time  and  was  part  of  that 
old  Irish  mafia  in  San  Francisco.   The  car  was  beat  up,  the 
windshield  wipers  didn't  work,  and  the  upholstery  was  coming  out 
of  it,  and  the  windows  were  all  foggy,  and  we  headed  out  toward 
the  [San  Francisco]  Bay  Area  on  Interstate  80.   I  was  sitting  in 
the  back,  and  he  threw  me  an  old,  dirty  towel  and  asked  me  to 
wipe  the  fog  off  the  rear  window.   His  wife  had  a  big,  grand, 
bouffant  hairdo,  and  he  had  cigarette  ashes  all  down  his  tie. 
They  were  something  else,  and  he  was  a  funny  guy. 

We  got  about  as  far  as  Davis,  and  he  turned  around  and  he 
said,  "What  did  you  say  your  name  was  again?"  and  I  told  him.   He 
said,  "I  heard  of  you.   You're  that  anti-nuke  guy."   He  said,  "I 
was  just  talking  to,"  and  he  mentioned  the  governor's  brother-in- 
law  who's  married  to  Kathleen  Brown  and  they'd  had  dinner--! 
can't  remember  his  first  name,  Kelly  is  his  last  name,  I  think-- 
and  he  was  an  attorney  for  PG&E.   He  said,  "I  was  talking  to  him 
the  other  day  and  he  said,  "Hell,  Jerry's  got  to  appoint  Pesonen 
to  keep  him  out  of  our  fucking  hair!'"   [Laughter] 

Lage:     That's  a  good  story. 


242 


Pesonen:   Well,  we  had  a  nice,  visit  in  the  car,  and  he  dropped  me  off  in 

Berkeley.   Then  I  made  arrangements  for  the  following  work  day  to 
go  out  and  meet  the  presiding  judge  in  Martinez,  where  the  court 
is.   I  called  Dick  Patsey  and  got  directions.   I  think  I  had  been 
to  that  court  once,  years  before,  on  some  little  divorce  case 
that  I  did  when  I  was  in  the  Garry  offices,  but  I  couldn't 
remember  how  to  get  there. 

Of  course,  it  was  all  over  the  papers.   It  was  in  sort  of  a 
mass  of  Jerry  Brown's  last-minute  appointments,  packing  the 
courts  with  his  liberal  cronies.   That  was  the  tone  of  it. 

Lage:     Even  though,  as  you  tell  it,  it  was  more  a  question  of  delay 
rather  than  getting  things  together  at  the  last  minute. 

Pesonen:   Right.   But  that's  the  way  the  story  played,  as  I  recall  it,  in 
the  Contra  Costa  press  and  in  the  rest  of  the  Bay  Area  press. 

Well,  the  presiding  judge  was  William  Channell,  who  was  a 
very  nice  man  and  a  real  gentleman.   He  welcomed  me  to  the  court, 
and  he  was  cordial  and  helpful  and  gave  me  a  lot  of  tips  on  how 
to  get  started.   He  seemed  to  have  all  of  the  time  in  the  world 
to  spend  with  me,  not  the  reception  I  feared  at  all.   I'm  not 
sure  I  was  as  cordially  received  by  some  of  the  other  judges  as  I 
was  by  Channell,  but  nobody  was  hostile. 

There  was  another  appointment  out  there  at  the  same  time. 
There  were  two  of  us  appointed  at  the  same  time,  [Theodore]  Ted 
Merrill.   He  had  been  a  criminal  defense  lawyer  out  there  at--I 
think  the  firm  was  Thiessen,  Gagen,  McCoy  and  Merrill  in 
Danville.   We  were  sworn  in  at  the  same  time  in  a  big  ceremony  in 
the  supervisor's  chambers,  and  I  asked  [Senator]  John  Nejedly  to 
speak  for  me  and  Jesse  Choper,  who  was  then  the  dean  of  the  Boalt 
Hall  School  of  Law.   And  Rose  Bird  called  up  and  wanted  to  come 
because  I  knew  Rose,  too. 

Lage:     Was  this  sort  of  routine,  that  you  have  people  there  to-- 

Pesonen:   You  have  people  there  to  say  a  few  remarks.   It's  a  ceremony  more 
than  anything  else.  A  lot  of  people  show  up. 

Well,  the  first  crisis  was  whether  Rose  Bird  should  show  up, 
because  she  was  not  popular  in  Contra  Costa  County.   I  asked  Dick 
Patsey  and  he  said,  "If  you  can  keep  Rose  from  coming,  you  ought 
to  do  it."   I  said,  "Well,  I  can't  do  that.   She  wants  to  come 
and  she  is  paying  her  respects  to  me--" 


Lage: 


She  wasn't  sensitive  to  the  political  implications? 


243 


Pesonen:   I  don't  think  she  cared.   So  I  declined  to  suggest  that  Rose  not, 
and  she  did  show  up  and  it  caused  a  bit  of  a  stir  in  the 
audience.  Rose  Bird  was  there,  and  it  wasn't  missed  by  anybody 
either. 

Lage:     Was  it  commented  on  in  the  papers? 
Pesonen:   I  don't  remember  whether  it  was  or  not. 


Preparing  for  the  Bench,  Hearing  Cases 


Pesonen:   The  ceremony  went  fine,  and  we  took  pictures  and,  you  know,  what 
they  do  in  those  things.   Then  I  decided  I  was  going  to  go  to 
work-- 

Lage:     And  be  a  judge-- 

Pesonen:   --and  be  a  judge. 

Lage:     --which  you  hadn't  been  before. 

Pesonen:   Which  I  hadn't  been  before.   There  is  a  school  for  judges,  run  by 
the  state.   But  you  don't  go  to  it  for  like  six  months.   I  don't 
think  I  attended  it  until  summer. 

Lage:     Is  that  routine,  to  attend  it? 

Pesonen:   It's  mandatory.   But  you  get  a  lot  of  experience  before  you  go  to 
the  school.   I  hadn't  practiced  law  for  four  years,  I  hadn't  read 
the  evidence  code  for  four  years.   I  just  took  Jefferson's 
Evidence  bench  book,  which  was  two  big  volumes  of  examples  of 
evidence  problems.   The  things  that  judges  have  to  know  most  are 
the  rules  of  order  and  the  rules  of  procedure.   They  don't  have 
to  know  the  substantive  law  too  much.   It  helps  if  they  do,  but 
the  lawyer's  responsibility  is  to  bring  the  substantive  law  to 
the  judge's  attention.   In  trials,  the  judge  has  to  be  able  to 
rule  correctly  on  admission  of  evidence  and  process  on  the  spot. 
So  I  just  every  night  stayed  up  until  two  or  three  in  the 
morning,  reading  Jefferson's  Evidence  bench  book,  and  it  was  a 
wonderful  experience.   I  mean,  I  learned  a  lot  of  law  that  I  had 
never  known  before.   I  learned  to  figure  out  the  hearsay  rule, 
which  had  always  confused  me  a  little  bit. 

I  picked  as  my  mentor—it's  a  custom  that  a  new  judge  can 
select  an  older  judge  to  be  an  advisor  on  the  spot.   In  the 
middle  of  the  trial,  if  some  difficult  question  comes  up, 


244 


including  a  question  about  your  political  career,  how  things  are 
going  to  look  or  what's  ethical  or  what's  the  appropriate 
procedure  for  a  judge,  you  can  recess,  call  your  mentor  and  he'll 
drop  what  he's  doing,  even  if  he's  in  the  middle  of  a  jury  trial, 
and  help  you  out. 

Lage:     So  that's  an  official  kind  of  mentorship? 

Pesonen:   It's  a  custom  in  the  court.   I  don't  know  whether  all  courts  do 
it,  but  the  Contra  Costa  court  does  it  and  I  think  it's  a--it's 
not  mandated  by  law,  legislated,  it's  an  outgrowth  of  history  and 
experience. 

I  had--I  picked  as  my  mentor  Coleman  Fannin,  who  had  been  on 
that  court  a  long  time  and  was  a  quite  colorful  character.   He 
came  from  west  county  and  supposedly  had  good  political  sense. 
He  had  been  a  Reagan  appointee  to  the  court.   He  was  a  very  close 
friend  of  Dick  Patsey's,  and  Patsey  recommended  him,  and  I  liked 
him.   He  was  very  helpful  to  me.   He's  a  wonderful  man. 

Lage:     How  large  a  court  is  it?  How  many  judges? 

Pesonen:   There  were  fifteen.   I  was  the  fifteenth  judge.   It  was  a  new 

seat  created.   Up  until  that  time,  there  were  fourteen.   I  think 
it's  up  to  eighteen  now. 

I  began  to  recognize  that  there  were  cliques  within  the 
court  as  there  are  with  any  institutions.   There  were  people  with 
lesser  or  greater  competence,  some  people  didn't  like  each  other. 
There  were  cliques  and  alliances,  probably  not  unique  to  that 
court  and  I'm  sure  at  every  other  court. 

Lage:     I  had  the  impression  that  you  were  working  sort  of  as  an 
individual. 


Pesonen:   Well,  yes,  but  there's  a  lot  of  business  of  the  court  that's  done 
by  the  judges  as  a  committee.  The  presiding  judge  presides  over 
those  meetings,  too.   We  had  regular  meetings.   Channell  presided 
over  the  assignment  of  cases,  assignment  of  staff,  the  budget- 
there  was  a  courthouse  budget,  and  we  had  to  get  it  through  both 
the  Board  of  Supervisors—part  of  it  through  the  Board  of 
Supervisors.  You  know,  your  space  allocations,  what  courtrooms 
you  have.  There  is  a  lot  of  just  housekeeping  that  affects  the 
quality  of  life  of  the  judges. 

Then  the  courts  had  local  rules  governing  filing  dates, 
assignment  of  cases  for  law  and  motion  work,  allocation  of 
criminal  cases,  who  gets  what  kind  of  jury  cases;  all  kinds  of 


245 


things.   I  attended  those  meetings,  and  I  was  bewildered  at  how 
much  business  there  is  that  is  behind  those  closed  doors. 

I  began  to  feel  that  while  our  people  were  superficially 
friendly,  there  was  always  some  trouble  out  there. 

Lage:     Even  among  all  of  the  judges? 

Pesonen:   No.   They  didn't  go  out  of  their  way  to  cause  me  any  trouble,  but 
they  also  didn't  go  out  of  their  way  to  help  me,  because  within 
weeks  of  my  appointment,  a  colorful  lawyer  out  there,  who  was 
well  known,  had  filed  a  lawsuit  to  throw  me  out  of  office  on  the 
grounds  that  I  had  not  been  a  resident  of  the  county  and  that  the 
constitution  required  that  I  be  a  resident  of  the  county  at  the 
time  of  the  appointment,  and  it  was  an  illegal  appointment.   That 
got  a  lot  of  publicity. 

Lage:     Now,  did  you  move  out  there? 

Pesonen:   I  moved  immediately.   Julie  and  I  separated  right  at  that  time, 
and  I  moved  to  Point  Richmond,  which  was  in  the  county. 

So  I  had  this;  my  marriage  torn  apart,  and  I  had  the  kids  on 
weekends,  and  I  was  trying  to  be  a  new  judge,  and  I  got  sued.  It 
was  called  a  quo  warranto  action,  I  think,  a  Latin  term  for  suing 
on  behalf  of  the  public. 

Lage:     And  you,  yourself,  were  sued? 

Pesonen:   I  was  named  and  the  governor  was  named,  but  I  was  the  object  of 
it,  obviously.   Maurice  Moyal  was  that  lawyer's  name,  M-0-Y-A-L. 
Maurice  had  a  thick  French  accent;  he  had  come  from  Nigeria  or 
someplace.   He  had  a  divorce  practice,  mainly,  and  he  was  a 
flamboyant,  colorful  character.   Not  a  very  good  lawyer  in  my 
opinion.   I  think  he  was  outraged  that  Governor  Brown  had 
appointed  somebody  from  outside  the  county.   He  didn't  really 
care  that  it  was  Brown  and  my  liberal  background,  it  was  just  he 
wanted  it  kept  in  the  community,  in  the  neighborhood. 

So  I  didn't  know  what  to  do. 
Lage:     Did  you  think  the  suit  had  grounds? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  didn't  think  so,  but  1  had  to  have  a  lawyer.   I  met  a 

wonderful  man,  named  David  Levy,  who  had  been  in  the  county  a 
long  time  and  was  respected  by  everybody  as  a  thorough-going, 
gentle,  intelligent  kind  of  a  person,  and  also  a  very  good 
lawyer.   He  represented  a  lot  of  cities.   That  was  one  of  his 
specialties.   He  was  also  a  survivor  of  the  Bataan  Death  March. 


246 


He  had  a  wonderful  sense  of  humor.  He  was  just  the  ideal  picture 
of  a  patrician,  gentle  lawyer  in  the  last  century;  an  Abe  Lincoln 
type.  He  volunteered  to  represent  me  for  nothing. 

Lage:     That  was  a  show  of  support. 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  strong  show  of  support.   There  was  another  judge  who  was 
sued  at  the  same  time.  He  was  a  municipal  court  judge  in 
Danville,  who  also  had- -he  lived  in  the  county,  but  not  in  the 
municipal  court's  district.  That  was  an  even  weaker  case.   So  he 
sued  us  both  and  it  was  all  over  the  Lesher  papers. 

Lage:     Now  the  Lesher  papers  are  what? 

Pesonen:   The  Contra  Costa  Times. 

Lage:     And  Dean  Lesher  is  the  publisher?   [Lesher  died  in  spring  1993.] 

Pesonen:   Dean  Lesher  is  the  publisher  and  the  ruling  patriarch.   He  owns 
the  whole  thing,  and  it  reflects  his  views.  He's  a  very 
aggressive  businessman,  and  it's  been  a  very  successful 
newspaper.   But  he's  also  an  enormous  reactionary.   [Pause] 

So  Levy  and  I  decided  that  we  would  talk  to  Moyal  first . 
And  Moyal  really  just  needed  somebody  to  pay  attention  to  him. 
Levy  and  I  took  him  to  lunch  one  day  in  an  attorney's  restaurant 
there  in  Martinez.   He  talked  about  his  kids,  and  he'd  had  a  lot 
of  trouble  with  his  kids;  they  had  gotten  in  a  lot  of  trouble 
with  the  law.  We  showed  a  lot  of  sympathy  to  him,  and  he  dropped 
the  suit.   [laughter] 

Lage:     As  simple  as  that? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   It  was  about  as  simple  as  that. 

Lage:     He  decided  you  were  an  OK  guy. 

Pesonen:   He  decided  I  was  OK,  and  he  dropped  it.   He  didn't  drop  it 

against  the  other  judge,  because  he  didn't  like  him,  but  he  liked 
Levy,  and  he  turned  out  liking  me.   So  we  squirreled  it  away. 
The  case  went  away,  but  the  melody  lingered  on. 

Lage:     It  remained  in  the  paper? 

Pesonen:   That's  right.   So  here  I  had  come  into  office  with  a  lot  of 

adverse  publicity,  and  Moyal 's  lawsuit  kept,  it  alive.   So  I  was 
wearing  this  cloak  of  this  controversial  post  from  the  day  I  went 
to  the  court. 


247 


Well,  I  started  being  a  judge.   I  started  hearing  cases. 
Civil  cases  and  a  lot  of  criminal  cases.   My  sense  is  that  the 
word  started  getting  around  that  I  was  a  pretty  good  judge  and 
that  I  was  fair.   I  wasn't  a  liberal  wild-eyed  crazy  out  there. 
I  began  to  feel  a  lot  of  support  coming  from  the  bar.   I  was  a 
judge  they  could  count  on  to  give  them  a  fair  shake. 


Two  Politically  Crucial  Sentencing  Decisions 


Lage:     You  were  seeing  a  lot  of  criminal  cases? 

Pesonen:   None  of  them  were  real  high-profile  murder  cases  or  anything,  but 
some  armed  robberies  and  drug  cases. 

Lage:     Now,  you  said  that's  not  often  done  with  a  new  judge? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know  whether  it's  done  in  other  courts  or  not.   If  the 
establishment  of  the  court  wants  to  protect  the  new  judge,  they 
will  keep  him  away  from  criminal  cases  because  those  are  the  ones 
that  can  blow  up  in  your  face,  politically.   You  can  make  a 
mistake  in  sentencing,  and  the  person  goes  out  and  commits 
another  crime,  and  it's  all  over  the  papers  that  this  judge 
turned  this  criminal  loose  on  the  community.   They  are 
politically  risky.   But  that's  what  I  got.   I  didn't  get  big, 
high-visibility,  politically  risky  cases,  but  all  criminal  cases, 
to  some  extent,  for  a  judge  in  these  times  when  people  are  much 
less  reticent  about  running  against  incumbent  judges,  are  risky. 

I  didn't  feel  that  I  wanted  to  be  a  law  and  order  judge  just 
to  protect  my  job.   I  was  going  to  continue  to  call  them  as  I  saw 
them.   I  called  two  cases  against  the  advice  of  Richard  Arnason, 
who  was  the  dean  of  the  criminal  court  out  there.   He  felt  very 
possessive  about  the  criminal  cases,  and  I  would  sometimes  ask 
him  for  advice.   The  sentencing  law  is  very  complicated.   The 
legislature  had  passed  the  determinate  sentencing  act1  maybe 
seven  or  eight  years  earlier.   It  was  a  very  complicated  program 
and  most  of  the  judges  didn't  really  understand  it.  Arnason 
understood  it. 


Lage: 


It  restricted  your  ability  to-- 


'Uniform  Determinate  Sentencing  Act,  S.B.  42,  1975-1976  Reg.  Sess. 
Cal.  Stat.,  ch.  1139  (1976). 


248 


Pesonen:   It  restricted  your  discretion  in  sentencing  severely,  but  it  also 
imposed  mandatory  obligations  in  sentencing  with  formulas  for 
calculating  the  amount  of  time  in  prison  based  on  prior  offenses 
and  the  nature  of  the  offense,  whether  a  weapon  was  involved  or  a 
police  officer  was  involved.   There  were  a  lot  of  factors,  and 
they  all  worked  different  ways,  and  you  had  to  study  big  manuals 
to  figure  out  how  to  properly  and  legally  impose  a  sentence.   You 
had  some  discretion  but  not  a  whole  lot.   It  was  just 
complicated.   And  it  was  just  another  big  area  of  the  law  to 
learn,  and  there  weren't  any  computer  programs.   Now  they  have 
computer  programs;  you  plug  in  all  the  records,  and  they  tell  you 
what  the  sentence  is  supposed  to  be.   [laughter]   They  didn't 
have  that  then. 

Lage:     You  had  a  clerk.   Was  he  helpful? 

Pesonen:   The  clerk  didn't  know. 

Lage:     The  clerk  didn't  do  things  like  that? 

Pesonen:   The  clerk  didn't  know  those  things.  A  clerk  wouldn't  be  expected 
to. 

Lage:     But  to  research  it? 

Pesonen:   I  had  to  research  it. 

Lage:     You  had  to  do  this  yourself? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   But  sometimes  I  really  didn't  know  the  answer,  and  I  had  to 
go  to  Arnason.   Some  were  simple. 

As  I  look  back  on  it,  I  made  two  sentencing  decisions  which 
were  terrible  mistakes.   I  probably  would  have  done  them  the  same 
way  over  again,  but  they  did  turn  out  to  be  political  handicaps. 
One  involved  an  elderly  Hispanic  man  who  shot  up  a  Mexican 
artifact  store  and  all  of  the  pottery  because  he  got  into  a 
struggle  with  the  shop  owner  with  whom  he  had  a  dispute,  because 
the  shop  owner's  son  was  harassing  the  assailant's  daughter.   It 
wasn't  a  robbery,  and  no  one  was  hurt,  fortunately.  The  whole 
community  turned  out  for  this  old  man  to  keep  him  out  of  state 
prison,  including  the  bishop  of  the  church.   I  got  letters  from 
all  over  the  place  about  that  he  was  a  sweet,  simple  man  who  had 
never  been  in  trouble.   Thirty  years  before  he  had  had  a  hand  in 
a  burglary  or  something,  but  it  was  when  he  was  a  young  man  and 
he  now  had  his  own  children.   This  was  one  of  these  emotional, 
interfamily  disputes,  and  nobody  got  hurt,  fortunately;  some 
merchandise  got  busted  up.   So  I  didn't  send  him  to  prison;  I  put 
him  on  probation. 


249 


Lage:     Now,  was  that  within  your  determinate  sentencing  options? 
Pesonen:   I  sentenced  him  to  community  service,  lots  of  community  service. 

Well,  that  hit  the  papers:  "Gunman  Sent  for  Community 
Service"  was  the  way  the  story  went.   In  fact,  later  on,  when  I 
was  still  a  judge,  I  was  assigned  to  the  Richmond  court  which 
handled  non-jury  cases,  and  there  were  a  lot  of  domestic  disputes 
out  there.   He  showed  up  in  my  court  representing  one  of  these 
disputants  and  helping  them  mediate  a  domestic  dispute,  and  he 
was  really  very  good  as  a  mediator.   So  in  substance  that  was  a 
success;  politically  it  was  a  mistake.   And  I  would  do  that  again 
the  same  way. 

There  was  another  one  where  there  was  a  fellow  who  was 
involved  with  drugs,  selling  amphetamines,  who  had  a  record  as  a 
juvenile  and  now  he  was  close  to  thirty  years  old  and  appeared  to 
be  finally  getting  his  life  in  order.   He  had  been  back  to  school 
and  straightened  himself  out.   I  gave  him  the  benefit  of  the 
doubt,  and  he  was  back  in  jail  within  a  few  months  on  another 
drug  charge. 

Well,  here  I  had  turned  a  chronic  drug  manufacturer  loose  on 
the  community  again,  and  I  obviously  didn't  know  what  I  was  doing 
because  he  didn't  make  it. 

Those  two  cases  were  very  frequently  in  the  paper  as 
examples  of  the  kind  of  crazy,  criminal-oriented  judge  that  Jerry 
had  appointed  out  there.   So  from  the  day  I  started,  I  knew  I  was 
running  a  political  campaign,  and  I  started  putting  one  together. 

Lage:     Two  years  in  advance? 

Pesonen:   Two  years--a  year  and  a  half  in  advance.   I  was  going  to  every 
[Contra  Costa  County]  bar  gathering,  every  political  gathering, 
and  of  course  my  base  would  be  in  the  Democratic  party.   So  I  was 
cultivating  everybody.   [laughter] 

Lage:     You  must  have  been  pretty  busy  with  all  of  this. 
Pesonen:   I  was  pretty  busy. 

Lage:     You  must  have  been  pretty  busy  trying  to  learn  to  be  a  judge  and 
run  your  campaign  at  the  same  time. 

Pesonen:   I  was  pretty  busy.   I  didn't  have  a  very  satisfactory  living 

arrangement.   I  was  trying  to  find  a  decent  apartment  in  Point 
Richmond,  and  that  was  hard.   I  didn't  have  much  money--!  didn't 
have  any  money--a  beat-up  old  car,  a  Peugeot  diesel  that  rattled 


250 


in  the  parking  lot  and  made  a  lot  of  smoke.   That  was  a  strange 
time.   And  I  had  to  be  there  on  time;  I  had  jury  cases  every  day. 
I  had  a  wonderful  staff  whom  I  still  get  together  with  every 
year.   I  really  liked  that  staff,  and  they  were  very  helpful  to 

me . 

I  was  put  into  an  old  courtroom.   It  wasn't  really  a 
courtroom;  it  was  the  basement  of  a  veterans  hall,  and  it  was 
just  an  auditorium,  where  the  veterans  group  would  come  and  have 
card  games  on  Monday  night,  so  Tuesday  morning  we  would  come  in 
and  the  place  would  be  full  of  stale  cigar  smoke  and  beer, 
[laughter]   It  had  bare  wooden  floors,  and  people  would  come  down 
the  stairs,  and  the  place  would  rattle  and  echo.   It  had  no  air 
conditioning,  and  it  was  hot  out  there  so  we'd  throw  the  windows 
open.   The  jury  sat  in  hard-backed  chairs-- 

Lage:     This  was  your  courtroom? 
Pesonen:   This  was  my  courtroom. 
Lage:     You  didn't  get  moved  around? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  was  in  that  courtroom  as  long  as  I  was  in  Martinez.   Unless 
some  other  judge  went  on  vacation,  and  I  got  to  go  use  a  decent 
courtroom.   But  the  basement  of  the  veteran's  building  was  my 
courtroom,  Department  15. 

So  it  wasn't  limousine  treatment  exactly. 
Lage:     Did  you  like  the  work?   Being  a  judge? 

Pesonen:   I  loved  juries.   I  found  it  interesting,  and  it  was  challenging. 
It  was  not  a  simple  job.   It  is  confining.   Your  time  is  not  your 
own.   People  think  judges  goof  off  a  lot;  judges  work  very  hard, 
and  to  keep  up  with  the  case  load  you  are  spending  a  lot  of  time 
in  the  evening. 


Putting  Together  a  Political  Campaign 


Pesonen:   And  then  I  had  the  political  campaign  to  put  together  on  top  of 
that.   I  got  a  lot  of  help  from  people.   [William]  Bill  Gagen, 
who  was  a  well-known  lawyer  out  there,  offered  to  help  on  my 
campaign. 

I  think  I  made  one  very  serious  political  mistake,  and  I 
might  still  be  a  judge  if  I  hadn't  done  that.   Contra  Costa 


251 

County  had  gone  through,  since  the  Second  World  War,  enormous 
changes.   It  used  to  be  the  rust  belt  —  the  industrial  belt—of 
the  Bay  Area.  The  whole  shoreline  from  the  Chevron  refinery  in 
Richmond  all  the  way  around  to  Antioch  were  steel  mills  and  pulp 
mills,  and  there  was  a  strong  union  base,  strong  Democratic  base. 
But  over  the  years,  of  course,  those  demographics  had  declined 
and  the  so-called  Lamorinda  area- -Lafayette,  Moraga,  Orinda-- 
Walnut  Creek,  Concord,  and  even  starting  out  into  the  Delta  and 
down  the  San  Ramon  Valley- -had  developed  and  that  was  where  the 
population  shift  had  come,  and  it  was  much  more  conservative. 

So  I  picked  Bert  Coffey  as  my  campaign  manager.   Coffey  was 
an  old-line  Democrat.   He  was  really  out  of  touch  with  the  rest 
of  the  county.   His  power—he  was  kind  of  a  legendary  figure  in 
running  campaigns  in  west  county,  which  was  not  where  the 
population  base  was  anymore. 

Lage:     And  you  were  running  countywide? 

Pesonen:   I  had  to  run  countywide.   My  finance  chairman  was  a  Republican 
lawyer  in  Richmond  who  represented  the  Mechanics  Bank,  Fran 
Watson.   His  firm  had  been  the  prominent  firm  in  the  west  county 
for  a  long  time,  but  it  was  in  something  of  a  decline.  Watson 
didn't  want  to  do  it,  I  think.   I  think  he  did  it  mainly  on 
Coleman  Fannin's  urging.   So  I  focussed  my  campaign  on  people  in 
west  county,  when  the  votes  were  not  all  in  west  county.   But  I 
didn't  know  enough  about  Contra  Costa  Counly  to  know  that  that 
was  a  mistake  until  I  look  back  on  it  now.   I  think  if  I  hadn't 
been  something  of  a  person  who  they  wanted  to  keep  a  little 
distance  from  out  there--. 

And  I  think  the  other  judges  felt  I  was  vulnerable  and 
didn't  want  to  get  too  close.   Judges  like  to  keep  their  jobs. 
But  politically  I  stood  for  a  new,  foreign  substance  thrust  into 
their  presence.   It  hadn't  happened  before  like  that.  And  being 
vulnerable,  it  just  made  them  uncomfortable  and  in  a  way  that  I'm 
not  sure  they  were  even  alert  to.   They  didn't  know  why  they  were 
uncomfortable,  or  if  they  did  they  didn't  articulate  it  to  me, 
anyway . 

But  I  certainly  sensed  it,  and  I  knew  the  reasons  for  it  and 
I  appreciated  what  the  reasons  were.   I  didn't  resent  them.   I 
suppose  if  I  had  been  a  long-time  judge  who  wanted  to  keep  my  Job 
long  enough  to  retire,  I'd  be  a  little  uneasy,  too,  about  this 
youngster  carrying  all  of  this  baggage. 

[Senator  John]  Nejedly  was  a  strong  source  of  support.   I 
had  known  him  in  the  legislature,  and  he  knew  of  my  forestry 
background,  and  we  just  liked  each  other.   So  a  campaign 


252 


committee  started  coming  together.  The  rumor  was  that  somebody 
out  of  the  district  attorney's  office  was  being  groomed  to  run 
against  me  and  that  he  would  have  a  lot  of  support  from  the 
right-wing  money  in  this  state.   H.  L.  Richardson  had  left  the 
senate  by  that  time  and  I  think  he  was  running  an  organization  in 
southern  California  whose  job  was  to  get  rid  of  liberal  judges 
and  give  their  opponents  money. 

Well,  I  was  successful  enough  with  this  big  party  at 
Nejedly's-- 

Lage:     Is  that  the  one  that  Jack  Lemmon  came  to? 

Pesonen:   No,  Jack  Lemmon  came  to  the  second  one.   The  first  one  was  in  the 
summer  of  '83,  and  it  was  a  big  party  with  lots  of  people.   It 
was  cheap  to  get  in.   The  point  was  to  get  a  lot  of  people  there. 
Everybody  likes  to  be  at  Nejedly's  place;  it  sits  on  the  top  of  a 
hill  overlooking  the  whole  Walnut  Creek/ San  Ramon  Valley;  it  has 
a  big  swimming  pool. 

It  was  a  nice  party.   Quite  a  few  people  showed  up,  and  it 
was  well  catered,  and  I  made  a  good  appearance.   Julie  came,  the 
kids  came,  and  so  I  didn't  look  like  such  a  crazy.   I  began  to 
look  successful.   I  mean,  I  had  money.   I  had  put  money  in  the 
bank  for  this  campaign. 

Lage:     Money  that  you  raised? 

Pesonen:  Raised  through  some  direct-mail,  some  one-on-one  solicitations, 
which  is  always  delicate  for  a  judge,  because  most  of  the  money 
comes  from  lawyers. 

Lage:     That  would  be  delicate. 

Pesonen:   It's  always  a  problem. 

Lage:     Lawyers  who  are  going  to  appear  in  front  of  you? 

Pesonen:   That's  right.   That's  always  a  problem  for  judges,  but  I  didn't 
see  any  alternative,  and  I  figured  that  I  could  take  money  from 
somebody  and  still  rule  against  them.  Like  [Speaker  of  the 
Assembly]  Jesse  Unruh  said,  "You  drink  their  whiskey,  take  their 
money,  screw  their  women,  and  vote  against  them."   [Laughter]   So 
I  didn't  feel  compromised,  but  that's  me.   Maybe  I  was 
compromised.   Certainly  the  appearance  is  always  there. 

Lage:     But  you  are  not  the  only  one  who  does  it,  are  you? 
Pesonen:   No. 


253 


Lage:     It's  a  standard  procedure? 

Pesonen:  Sure.  [Superior  Court  Judge  Demetrios  P.]  Agretelis  is  running 
for  reelection  in  Alameda  County  right  now  and  all  of  his  money 
comes  from  lawyers. 

Lage:  And  then  do  lawyers  feel  that  if  they  ask  they  pretty  well  have 
to-- 

Pesonen:   There  is  some  of  that  pressure,  yes.   I'm  sure  there  is.   I  feel 
it  now,  now  that  I  am  on  the  other  side.   But  it's  a  fact  of  life 
that  I  didn't  know  any  alternative  to.   I  certainly  had  no 
personal  money  of  my  own. 

The  word  began  to  get  out  that  I  had  put  together  a 
successful  enough  list  of  endorsements  and  that  my  reputation  at 
the  bar  was  good,  that  I  was  a  good  judge,  that  they  decided  not 
--this  person  was  not  going  to  run  against  me.   By  December,  that 
was  the  way  it  looked:  that  I  was  going  to  have  an  uncontested 
election  in  June  of  '84. 


Serious  Illness,  Poor  Press,  Election  Loss 


Pesonen:   Then  I  got  sick,  and  I  ended  up  in  the  hospital  for  several 

months,  and  it  looked  like  I  was  going  to  die.  I  was  unable  to 
function.  I  couldn't  walk.  That  revived  interest  that  maybe  I 
was  vulnerable  after  all.  [laughs] 

Lage:     The  vultures  started  to  circle. 

Pesonen:   The  vultures  started  to  circle.   So  I  lay  in  the  hospital  bed  and 
read  the  papers,  and  there  wasn't  anything  I  could  do  about  it. 
The  filing  date  came  and  I  had  an  opponent,  [Richard]  Rick  Flier, 
who  was  a  young  attorney  in  the  district  attorney's  office. 

Lage:     Not  the  same  one  who  had  been  going  to  run? 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  wasn't  sure  who  was  going  to  run.  His  name  had  been 
rumored  as  one  of  the  possibilities. 

There  wasn't  anything  I  could  do.   I  couldn't  get  out  of 
bed.  My  foot  was  in  terrible  shape  and-- 

Lage:     This  was  an  infection? 


254 


Pesonen:   I  had  an  infection  that  I  let  go  too  long.   I  was  trying  a  very 
difficult  case  out  in  Richmond,  and  I  wanted  it  over  with,  and  I 
felt  just  terrible.   I  didn't  go  to  the  doctor;  I  would  just 
collapse  after  a  day  in  court  and  then  go  back  the  next  day  and 
feel  pretty  good  in  the  morning  and  then  collapse  at  the  end  of 
the  day.   By  that  weekend,  at  the  end  of  that  week,  I  woke  up 
with  excruciating  pain  in  this  foot.   I  was  living  alone  in  a 
little  shack  out  there  in  Point  Richmond  that  I  had  rented 
temporarily,  didn't  have  a  phone--the  phone  hadn't  been  installed 
yet--and  it  was  out  in  the  park,  there  were  no  people  around,  so 
there  wasn't  any  way  to  get  help.   It  was  so  painful,  I  couldn't 
walk.   I  had  to  crawl  to  the  car  and  work  the  clutch  with  a  broom 
handle . 

I  stopped  at  one  of  these  roadside  phones  and  called  Julie 
and  told  her  what  was  going  on  and  said  I  wanted  some  crutches  so 
I  could  get  to  the  hospital.   She  took  me  down  to  Kaiser,  and 
they  looked  me  over  and  decided  it  was  gout.   I  was  totally 
incapacitated  by  the  pain,  so  I  went  back  and  stayed  at  Julie's 
house,  and  I  kept  going  back  each  day  and  it  got  worse.   They 
said,  "Well,  we'll  give  you  another  gout  medicine,  and  then  it'll 
work."  The  fourth  day—the  fourth  or  fifth  day--I  woke  up  and  I 
had  big  red  streaks  up  my  leg  and  down  my  arms  and  I  had  a  raging 
blood  poisoning  that  had  metastasized  into  my  heart,  and  I  just 
went  into  a  coma. 

I  was  out  for  I  don't  know  how  long,  and  once  I  was  an 
emergency  case  for  Kaiser,  they  took  very  good  care  of  me. 

Lage:     But  they  weren't  too  swift  on  the  original  diagnosis. 

Pesonen:   They  weren't  too  swift  on  the  original  diagnosis.   So  I  had  to - 
have  a  lot  of  blood  transfusions  and  major  surgery  on  this  foot 
to  cut  this  infection  out  and  then  a  lot  of  skin  grafting.   I  had 
to  grow  my  foot  back.   They  were  about  to  amputate  it;  they  were 
real  close  to  amputating  it,  and  I  said  I  didn't  want  to  lose 
that  foot.   I  couldn't  go  fishing  anymore  if  I  lost  my  foot. 

So  they  held  on  to  it,  and  I  finally  got  well.   But  I  was 
campaigning  in  a  wheelchair  for  a  couple  of  weeks  and  rolling  up 
and  down  the  streets  of  Martinez  in  a  wheelchair.   It  was  just 
awful  with  an  election  impending. 

I  raised  a  lot  of  money  by  just  calling  people  and  writing 
personal  notes  from  my  hospital  bed.   I  think  the  sympathy  factor 
must  have  helped.   And  from  people  you  wouldn't  expect. 
[Charles]  Charlie  Kennedy,  who  is  a  famous  lawyer,  well-known 
lawyer  in  San  Francisco,  for  example,  who  had  represented  Carroll 
in  the  PG&E/Widener  case,  the  second  time  around,  sent  me  five 


255 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 


hundred  bucks  and  wrote  me  a  note.   There  were  a  lot  of  people 
that  had  been  opponents  in  my  prior  cases.   And  a  lot  of  people 
in  the  bar.   I  wasn't  getting  rich  by  any  means,  but  I  was  making 
some  money.   Then  we  had  the  Jack  Lemmon  party.   But  by  then  it 
was  too  late. 

Somebody  told  me,  I  don't  remember  who,  that  Richard  Arnason 
had  something  to  do  with  it.   In  any  event,  Bill  Gagen  took  me  to 
see  Dean  Lesher  to  see  if  I  could,  if  not  get  the  Contra  Costa 
Times'  endorsement,  at  least  neutralize  it.   Lesher  ushered  us 
into  his  office,  which  is  surrounded  with  art  of  old  West, 
bucking  broncos  and  buffaloes;  it  looked  like  Ross  Perot's 
office,  Remington  paintings  and- -he's  a  very  wealthy  man,  and  he 
buys  all  of  this  junk.   We  finally  were  ushered  into  his  office 
and  he's  a  huge,  obese  man.   He's  not  in  very  good  health,  I 
think,  and  he's  sitting  behind  a  huge  desk. 

Gagen  had  been  his  lawyer  in  a  dispute  over  some  properties, 
and  Gagen 's  a  very  engaging,  very  bright  lawyer;  he's  a  very  fine 
lawyer.   He's  also  a  very  engaging,  likeable  person.   He's  the  MC 
[master  of  ceremonies]  at  most  of  these  dinners,  and  he's  sought 
after  for  that  kind  of  thing.   He's  funny,  and  he  knows 
everybody.   He  knows  what's  going  on,  and  he's  widely  respected 
in  the  county  and  deservedly  so. 

So  he  was  my  entree  to  Lesher.   I  just  sat  down,  and  Lesher 
looked  at  me  for  a  minute,  and  he  said,  "I  understand  you're  a 
carpetbagger."   The  first  words  out  of  his  mouth. 

This  was  after  your  illness  or  during  it? 

No,  this  was  after  the  illness.   It  might  have  been  before. 
Things  blur  a  little  bit  when  you  go  through  something  like  that. 
I  remember  I  was  in  good  health  when  I  went  in  there,  so  it  must 
have  been  shortly  before.   It  was  early  work.   It  had  to  be 
before. 

Well,  the  conversation  kind  of  went  downhill  from  there. 
Lesher  didn't  let  on  what  he  was  going  to  do. 

Did  you  come  right  out  and  ask  him  to  be  neutral  or  was  this 
just-- 


Pesonen:   No.   Gagen  made  his  speech,  and  he  said,  "You  know  why  we're 

here.   Dave's  going  to  have,  probably,  opposition  next  year,  and 
we'd  like  you  to  know  him  so  that  if  you  feel  inclined  to  do  some 
editorial  work  on  this  you'll  know  what  you're  talking  about.   I 
think  you'll  find  he's  a  good  judge." 


256 


Lage: 


Well,  Lesher  was  totally  noncommittal.  He  wasn't  openly 
hostile.   I  mean,  he  laughed  when  he  said  this  carpetbagger 
remark.   So  the  election  was  Tuesday,  I  think  it  was  June  7,  of 
"84,  and  on  Sunday  preceding  the  election  there  was  this  huge 
editorial  in  Lesher "s  paper  about  the  two  cases  where  I'd  made 
what  he  characterized  as  mistakes  in  sentencing,  turned  criminals 
loose  on  the  community,  that  I  had  represented  the  Black  Panthers 
who  were  advocates  of  violence  and  overthrow  of  our  government 
and  our  way  of  life.   It  was  a  real  hit  piece.   I  thought,  "I'm 
going  to  be  real  lucky  if  I  get  through  this  election." 

And  I  didn't.   It  was  close,  but  it  wasn't  close  enough.   I 
think  I  got  49  percent.   No  cigar.   Flier  got  51  percent.   So 
then  I  had  to  figure  out  what  I  was  going  to  do. 

We  keep  referring  to  this  Jack  Lemmon  thing  but  we  haven't  really 
said  what  it  is. 


Pesonen:   Well,  we  threw  another  party  at  Nejedly's  house. 
Lage:     Later  on? 

Pesonen:   Later  on.   For  big  money.   I  think  it  was  $250  or  something  to 
get  in  and  in  those  days  that  was  big  money.   I  contacted  Don 
Widener,  who  was  still  in  touch  with  Jack  Lemmon,  and  he  asked 
Jack  if  Jack  would  fly  up  there  and  appear  at  this  gathering  at 
Nejedly's,  and  Jack  said  sure,  he'd  be  happy  to.  And  he  did.   He 
made  a  wonderful  little  speech  about  the  Widener  case  and  what  a 
great  lawyer  I  was.   He  remembered  I'd  go  to  trial  against  this 
battery  of  lawyers  from  big  corporations  with  my  little  paper  bag 
lunch  on  the  table.   [laughter] 

It  was  very  complimentary.   Everybody  wanted  to  go  to  that. 
It  was  the  first  time  anybody  in  an  election  campaign  in  Contra 
Costa  County  had  a  celebrity  like  Jack  Lemmon  appear  for  him.   It 
was  very  well  attended.   It  paid  for  all  of  the  literature  and 
the  advertising  and  the  signs  and  all  of  the  things  you  do  in  a 
campaign  like  that. 

But  I  was  not  optimistic.   It  was  a  high;  it  was  a  wonderful 
day,  a  beautiful,  sunny,  afternoon  and  Jack  was  in  great  form. 
Julie  picked  him  up  at  the  airport,  and  Widener  and  his  wife  came 
and  that  was  it. 

Lage:     Did  you  make  enough  so  that  you  didn't  end  up  with  a  debt? 

Pesonen:   I  didn't  end  up  with  a  debt.   I  wasn't  going  to  go  in  debt, 

either.   I  figured  there  was  a  good  chance  I  was  going  to  lose 
and  I  didn't  have  much  money,  but  I  was  going  to  spend  it  all  on 


257 


the  campaign  and  nothing  more  than  that . 
through  a  decent  campaign. 


I  had  enough  to  get 


Of  course,  we  had  to  file  reports  with  the  Fair  Political 
Practices  Commission;  there  was  a  lot  of  administration  of  the 
campaign.  Watson's  office  was  very  helpful  on  that.   He  had  a 
staff  person  who  was  just  marvelous.   She  kept  charge  of  all  of 
the  money  and  all  of  the  reports  and  I  never  had  any  problems 
with  that. 

Lage:  That's  good,  because  that  can  be  a  bother. 

Pesonen:  That  was  a  volunteer  effort.   [Pause] 

Lage:  So  there  you  are,  out  of  a  job.   How  much  time  left? 

Pesonen:  You  have  a  lot  of  time. 

Lage:  Six  months? 

Pesonen:   Six  months.   You  have  until  the  end  of  the  year.   So  I  had  June 

until  the  first  part  of  January  to  figure  out  what  I  was  going  to 
do. 

Well,  the  first  thing  I  decided  to  do  was  take  some  time 
off.   I  was  just  very  stressed  out  from  all  of  this  and  depressed 
at  the  results.   I  didn't  know  what  the  future  held.   I  got  into 
a  quarrel  with  the  presiding  judge  at  that  point.   He  said  I  had 
to  stay  on  and  work  just  like  nothing  had  happened  and  I  told  him 
I  wasn't  going  to  do  it  and  there  wasn't  anything  he  could  do 
about  it.   [laughter] 

So  I  patched  that  up,  and  I  took  some  time  off,  and  I  took 
the  kids  and  went  on  a  pack  trip  in  the  mountains  with  Gagen  and 
some  other  friends  for  a  week. 

Lage:     So  you  recovered  pretty  well  from  your  leg. 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  horseback  trip.   I  could  walk  around.   I  could  hike.   It 
still  hurt;  I  was  not  fully  recovered.   It's  still  recovering. 
Seven  years  later,  it's  still  getting  better. 

So  I  started  sending  resumes  out  just  like  any  other  job 
hunter,  without  much  success  because  just  about  everybody  thinks 
that  a  judge  wants  too  much  money  because  you're  coming  in 
laterally  at  a  partnership  level  or  something,  and  most  firms 
cultivate  their  youngsters  or  young  associates  for  their 
partnership  positions.   It's  very  rare--it  happens  now  and  then-- 
but  it  was  almost  unheard  of  at  that  time  that  somebody  would 


258 


come  in  at  a  partnership  level.   So  I  didn't  get  too  many 
favorable  responses.   I  had  a  few  interviews.   In  the  meantime,  I 
kept  on  kicking  around  and  running  my  court. 


Pesonen:   I  finally  got  a  favorable  response  from  two  firms,  one  in  Contra 
Costa  County  from  people  who  wanted  to  bring  me  in  as  a  partner 
and  it  was  a  good  firm.   It  was  in  Concord  and  it  was  a  growing 
firm  and  it  would  have  been  a  nice,  stable  position. 

The  other  was  from  Jerry  Sterns  in  San  Francisco.   Sterns 
wanted  to  bring  me  in  as  managing  attorney—a  managing  partner-- 
because  his  office  wasn't  very  well  managed,  he  felt,  and  he 
wanted  somebody  to  get  it  organized.   It  was  a  firm  that  had 
grown  very  fast;  handled  a  lot  of  mass  cases,  a  lot  of  asbestos 
work.   The  firm's  specialty  was  aircraft  litigation—aircraft 
crash  litigation  on  the  plaintiff's  side  —  and  he  was  very  well 
known  for  that.   He  was  a  splendid  lawyer. 

So  I  started  there  in  January.   Bought  a  house  in  Berkeley 
and  got  my  life  back  in  order. 


259 


IX   EAST  BAY  REGIONAL  PARKS  DISTRICT  GENERAL  MANAGER,  1985-1988: 
THE  ORGANIZATION  AND  ITS  POLITICS 


An  Interim  Position  in  Sterns  Law  Firm 


Lage:     So  we  have  you  back  in  private  life  and  working  at  Sterns,  Smith, 
Walker,  Pesonen,  and  Grell  in  1985. 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Stern's  office  was  not  well  managed.   It  needed  a  lot  of 
work. 

Lage:     Now,  where  was  the  office? 

Pesonen:   In  San  Francisco.   It  was  not  easy  to  figure  out  where  all  of  the 
money  was.   It  was  a  little  frustrating,  but  I  took  hold  and 
started  getting  it  organized  and  getting  some  systems  in  place. 

Lage:     Did  this  make  relationships  difficult? 

Pesonen:   No. 

Lage:     You  didn't  have  to  stir  things  up? 

Pesonen:   I  wasn't  there  to  stir  things  up.   I  was  there  to--.   Sterns 
wasn't  around  much.   There  wasn't  anybody  in  place  to  give 
guidance  to  running  the  firm.   He  was  out  trying  cases  off  in 
London  and  around  the  world.   He  had  an  office  in  Hawaii;  he 
liked  it  over  there  so  he  was  not  very  accessible  sometimes,  and 
people  felt  a  bit  adrift. 

It  had  possibilities.   He  had  one  mass  case  which  had 
languished.   It  hadn't  really  had  the  attention  it  deserved.   It 
involved  over  a  hundred  families  down  in  San  Mateo  County  whose 
property  values  had  been  badly  eroded  from  huge  landslides  in 
those  '81  and  '82  floods.   Some  people  had  been  killed,  hills  had 
come  down  and  wiped  their  houses  out.   He  had  gone  down  and 


260 


rounded  up  a  lot  of  clients  down  there,  and  the  case  just  wasn't 
going  anywhere.   It  was  against  everybody  in  the  world.   It  was 
against  the  developer,  the  geologist,  even  the  Archdiocese  of  San 
Francisco  which  owned  part  of  one  of  the  hills.   They  were 
claiming  this  was  an  act  of  God.   [laughter] 

There  were  about  fifteen  defendants  who  had  been  involved  in 
one  way  or  another  in  the  development  of  this  housing  tract.   It 
was  a  very  interesting  case.   It  was  interesting  geology  and 
hydrology.   But  mainly  what  it  needed  was  getting  it  all  together 
and  moving  it.   So  I  got  appointed  lead  counsel  for  the 
plaintiffs  by  the  superior  court  in  San  Mateo  County,  and  I 
pulled  it  together  and  got  it  ready  to  be  settled.   It  settled 
right  about  the  time  I  left,  it  turned  out,  in  the  summer  of  '85. 


Hired  by  the  Park  District;  Reorganizing  the  Staff 


Pesonen:   I  hadn't  been  there  very  long  before  Harlan  Kessel  of  the  board 

of  the  [East  Bay  Regional]  Park  District  called  me  up  one  day  and 
said  that  the  general  manager,  [Richard  C.]  Dick  Trudeau  was 
retiring,  and  would  I  be  interested  in  applying  for  the  position 
of  general  manager  of  the  park  district.   That  was  just 
wonderful.   So  I  did  fill  in  an  application,  and  I  rounded  up 
some  letters  of  recommendation  and  I  had  some  credentials  that 
looked  pretty  good  in  comparison  to  some  of  the  other  candidates, 
I  guess. 

Lage:     Was  this  a  nationwide  search? 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  nationwide  search.   They  had  a  search  firm,  one  of  these 
outfits  that  does  executive  searches.   I  went  through  a  number  of 
interviews.   It  was  a  partly  political  appointment,  too.   The 
board  is  all  elected. 

Finally,  I  got  appointed.   The  appointment  was  announced  in 
July,  and  it  took  me  some  time  to  wind  down  what  I  was  handling 
at  Sterns'  office,  including  the  mass  landslide  case  down  in  San 
Mateo  County.   So  I  don't  think  I  started  at  the  park  district 
until  the  end  of  August. 

Lage:     Now,  in  the  course  of  all  of  this  interviewing,  what  was  your 
sense  of  what  they  were  looking  for  and--? 

Pesonen:  They  were  looking  for  somebody  who  could  completely  reform  the 
organization.  Trudeau  had  quite  a  different  management  style, 
from  what  I  understand.  Trudeau  was  at  odds  with  the  board.  I 


261 


think  he  was  not  happy  about  his  retirement;  it  wasn't  entirely 
voluntary. 

Lage:     He'd  been  there  a  while. 

Pesonen:   He'd  been  there  about  twenty  years.   Seventeen  years. 

Lage:     And  then,  before  that,  he  was  assistant  for  public  relations 
under  [William  Penn]  Mott. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  he  had  headed  public  relations  under  Mott.   But  he  was  not  a 
Mott.   In  fact,  I  spoke  at  the  Rotary  Club  in  Richmond  one  time 
while  I  was  general  manager,  and  they  still  thought  that  Mott  had 
preceded  me.   For  seventeen  years  they  didn't  know  who  Dick 
Trudeau  was . 

Lage:     Even  though  his  background  was  in  public  relations? 
Pesonen:   Yes,  but  his  style  was  entirely  different. 
Lage:     Different  from  Mott's  or  different  from  yours? 

Pesonen:   Different  from  both.   [laughter]   He  liked  to  work  behind  the 

scenes,  and  the  board  and  he  were  not  comfortable  with  each  other 
anymore.   Trudeau  was  no  help  to  me.   He  didn't  want  me  to  be 
appointed;  he  had  his  own  candidate.   I  had  some  reason  to 
believe  and  some  evidence  that  he  tried  to  stop  it.   But  he  was 
not  successful  in  that.   His  influence  with  the  board  was  pretty 
eroded  by  then. 

Lage:     Was  the  board  clear  in  what  it  wanted  from  you? 

Pesonen:   No,  it  wasn't  clear  what  it  wanted.   There  was  no  job 

description,  they  didn't  offer  me  a  contract.   It  was  just  sort 
of  serve  at  their  pleasure  and  fix  the  place.   Fix  it. 

Lage:     Just  very  vague. 
Pesonen:   Yes. 

So  it  was  a  wide-open  charter  that  I  was  handed.   I  didn't 
realize--.  When  I  look  back  over  my  life,  whatever  mistakes  I've 
made  have  usually  been  out  of  ignorance  or  naivete,  more  naivete 
than  ignorance,  but  both,  and  I  was  not  aware  of  how  deep  the 
divisions  were  in  that  board. 

The  first  thing  I  was  expected  to  do  was  a  major 
reorganization,  which  I  undertook.   I  reoriented  the  lines  of 
authority  with  a  strong  emphasis  on  natural  resource  protection 


262 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 
Lage: 
Pesonen: 


and  created  a  new  section  called  land  stewardship,  which  pulled 
together  scattered  functions  that  were  at  all  different  levels: 
some  with  the  union,  some  in  management,  some  out  in  the  field, 
some  in  the  office  —  all  having  to  do  with  geology,  hydrology, 
fisheries,  water  quality,  forestry.   I  put  them  all  under  one 
head  and  called  it  land  stewardship.   I  brought  in  a  new  person, 
Kevin  Shea,  who  had  a  natural  resource  background  and  a  writing 
background  and  some  administrative  ability  to  head  that  up.   He 
headed  it  up  until  he  retired  just  last  year. 

Did  you  get  a  sense  that  things  were  in  sort  of  disarray? 

Oh  yes.   The  organizational  structure  didn't  make  any  sense.   It 
looked  like  a  history  of  patchwork  cronyism.   There  were  some 
people  who  were  not  very  competent,  who  were  just  not  doing 
anything.   The  head  of  public  relations,  as  far  as  I  could  tell, 
hadn't  done  anything  for  years. 

My  approach  was  to  interview  everybody  and  have  a  long 
interview,  and  the  question  was,  "What  do  you  do,  how  have  you 
done  it,  and  what  have  you  done  that  is  lasting?"  I  got  good 
answers  from  some  people  and  not  from  others. 

Whenever  you  move  into  a  position  like  that,  you  seek  out 
people  you  can  trust,  whose  judgment  you  can  trust,  who  have  an 
institutional  history.   You  get  your  education  that  way. 


He  was  forthcoming  if 


Who  did  you  find? 

Jerry  Kent,  who  had  been  there  forever, 
you  knew  what  to  ask  him. 

He  was  assistant  manager  under  Trudeau-- 

Under  Trudeau. 

--under  you,  and  is  still  assistant  manager? 

Still  assistant  general  manager.   He  handles  all  of  the  field 
operations.   He  has  an  immensely  detailed  memory  of  everything 
that's  ever  happened  since  Mott's  day. 

Bob  Owen  was  another  person.   And  I  brought  in  Bob  Connelly, 
briefly--!  created  a  position  for  him  as  a  chief  deputy  general 
manager. 


Lage: 


Now,  he  had  been  a  deputy  in-- 


263 


Pesonen:   He  had  been  chief  deputy  director  in  the  Department  of  Forestry. 
The  district's  relations  with  Sacramento  were  not  very  good.   The 
district  gets  a  lot  of  its  money  from  grants  and  so  on,  and 
there's  always  legislation  that  affects  the  district.   I  thought 
Bob  could  handle  that.   Bob  also  had  a  lot  of  administrative 
skills,  and  the  police  department  of  the  parks  district  was  in 
disarray.   It  was  just  out  of  control.  The  chief  was  not  doing 
anything.   Overtime  was  enormous.   It  seemed  to  be  erratic; 
whenever  an  officer  needed  to  make  a  boat  payment  he'd  run  up 
some  overtime.   Its  budget  was  out  of  control. 

Lage:     But  you  could  see  these  problems  rather  quickly. 

Pesonen:   Yes.   It  took  me  five  or  six  months  to  get  some  priorities  on 
them.   But  I  wasn't  watching  my  backside  with  the  board. 


Political  Controversies  and  the  Politics  on  the  EBRPD  Board 


Pesonen:   There  were  some  political  controversies  going  on,  the  Berkeley 
Shakespeare  Festival,  for  example,  which  wanted  to  move  into 
Tilden  Park.   Mary  Jefferds,  who  was  on  the  board,  would  never 
make  it  clear  whether  she  wanted  the  Shakespeare  Festival  there 
or  not.   She  wanted  to  play  both  sides,  and  I  made  the  mistake  of 
talking  to  one  of  the  participants  against  her  directions  not  to 
talk  to  one  of  the  people  who  was  an  activist  in  that  campaign. 
She  found  out  about  it,  and  that  was  enough  for  her. 

Something  came  up  where  they  decided  that  they  wanted  to 
have  a  vote  of  confidence.   This  was  after  I  had  been  there  about 
a  year,  and  I  didn't  anticipate  much  problem,  and  to  my 
astonishment,  Mary  Jefferds  voted  to  get  rid  of  me.   By  this 
time,  I  had  offended  Harlan  Kessel  enormously,  which  ain't  hard 
to  do. 


Lage:     What-- 

Pesonen:  Well,  Harlan  had  an  agenda.  Much  of  this  is  such  recent  history 
I  am  a  little  uneasy  talking  about  it,  but-- 

Lage:     Well,  if  they  are  things  that  are  important  that  you  don't  want 
made  public  at  this  time,  we  can  seal  a  portion. 

Pesonen:   Well,  there  was  an  employee  who  was  a  black  man,  an  elderly  black 
man,  who  absolutely  did  nothing  and  was  protected  by  Harlan  and 
had  been  for  many  years.   He  was  an  embarrassment  within  the 


264 


organization.   You  would  give  him  a  task,  and  he'd  disappear  for 
days. 

Lage:     He  was  in  the  office,  not  out  in  the  field? 
Pesonen:  Well,  it  was  sort  of  vague  where  his  office  was. 

And  he  wanted  more  money.   He  was  also  the  chairman  of  the 
Hayward  NAACP,  and  every  year  that  Harlan  came  up  for  election- - 
every  time  Harlan  came  up  for  election—he 'd  get  the  endorsement 
of  the  Hayward  NAACP,  which  consists  of  about  six  people,  I 
think.   Harlan  began  to  put  a  lot  of  pressure  on  me  to  see  that 
person  was  elevated  to  a  much  higher  position  in  management.   I 
kept  resisting  and  delaying  and  stalling  and  finding  ways  not  to 
do  it.   I  knew  that  it  would  just  infuriate  the  rest  of  the  staff 
because  they  knew  he  didn't  do  anything,  and  he  couldn't  do 
anything.   But  Harlan  kept  saying  how  competent  and  wonderful  he 
was  and  what  a  great  job  he  did.   He  never  did  anything. 

Lage:     Did  you  confront  Harlan  directly  on  this? 

Pesonen:   Obliquely,  I  would.   I  wanted  to  hold  on  to  Harlan 's  support. 
But  Harlan  began  to  see  that  I  was  never  going  to  do  what  he 
wanted  me  to  do  for  this  person.   He  wanted  the  guy  to  get  a 
salary  close  to  the  general  manager's  salary.   It  was  ridiculous. 

I  think  there  were  some  other  problems.   I  got  crosswise 
with  a  woman  who  was  very  active  in  the  park  advisory  committee. 
Afton  Crooks  her  name  was.   She  was  with  the  University. 

Lage:     Now,  what  was  the  park  advisory  committee? 

Pesonen:   The  park  advisory  committee  is  the  group  that--.   It's  really  a 
device  that  the  park  board  members  have  of  putting  people  in  a 
place  where  they  feel  they  have  some  influence  over  the  park 
district.   The  park  advisory  committee  looks  at  the  general 
plans;  they  hold  meetings  once  a  month  in  which  they  discuss 
various  issues  in  the  park  and  pass  resolutions.   Sometimes  the 
board  pays  attention  to  them,  sometimes  it  doesn't. 

But  Afton  was  chair  of  the  park  advisory  committee,  and  an 
issue  at  that  time  was  the  issue  of  mitigation  in  development 
projects.   Apparently  Trudeau  had  offended  the  park  district,  or 
offended  its  political  constituency,  the  activist  constituency, 
the  Afton  Crooks  of  the  world.   There  was  a  small  group  of  people 
who  watched  that  park  district  like  a  hawk.   Trudeau  had  made 
deals  with  developers  down  in  the  expanding  south  Alameda  County 
area  around  Pleasanton,  in  which  the  park  district  would 
politically  support,  or  not  oppose,  various  kinds  of  developments 


265 


in  exchange  for  mitigation  given  to  the  park  district:  land, 
money,  other  kinds  of  things  that  were  useful. 

Lage:     Is  some  of  this  around  the  Sunol  Regional  Park? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  the  Sunol  park  area  is  part  of  it.   Trudeau,  over  the  years, 
had  cultivated  and  become  quite  close  to  some  very  prominent, 
wealthy  developer  people,  or  bankers  or  lawyers  down  in  southern 
Alameda  County.   Some  of  these  had  backfired.   The  project  was  so 
offensive  to  the  environmental  constituency  that  watched  the  park 
district  that  there  was  no  mitigation  that  was  acceptable  to 
them,  so  they  saw  this  as  a  sellout  by  the  management  of  the  park 
district. 

One  involved  a  huge  gravel  mining  pit  that  still  hasn't  been 
started,  in  which  the  developer,  De  Silva,  agreed  to  transplant 
tule  elk  in  Sunol  and  give  royalties  off  of  his  gravel  to  the 
park  district  for  many  years.   That  was  a  very  controversial 
project. 

Lage:     Were  you  put  in  the  middle  of  these  decisions,  or  were  they  done 
deals? 


Pesonen:   They  were  done  deals,  but  the  park  advisory  committee  had 

proposed  a  resolution,  a  board  resolution  which  would  govern  the 
conduct  of  the  administration  of  the  park  district,  that  no  more 
mitigation  could  happen  unless  it  went  through  an  elaborate 
process,  which  was  so  elaborate  you  never  could  get  it  through. 

Well,  I  didn't  know  enough  about  it  to  know  whether  this  was 
a  good  policy  or  not,  so  I  suggested  it  be  put  off  for  a  year. 
And  a  lot  of  mitigation  made  sense.   There  were  a  lot  of  projects 
which  the  park  district  couldn't  influence  —  its  political 
influence  would  be  insignificant- -where  the  park  district  could 
get  something  from  mitigation. 

So  I  didn't  think  that  the  suggested  process  was  very 
helpful.   In  fact,  the  Ferry  Point  acquisition  was,  in  effect, 
mitigation.   Nobody's  ever  called  it  that.   Everybody  liked  the 
project  so  much  they  didn't  realize  it  was  mitigation  so  the 
procedure  was  never  applied  to  it. 

Lage:     Yes,  a  blanket  prohibition  of  mitigation  seems  a  little — 

Pesonen:   It  didn't  go  that  far,  but  it  made  it  almost  impossible  to 
approve  a  mitigation. 

Well,  I  got  crosswise  with  Afton  when  I  opposed  early 
adoption  of  that  policy  because  Afton  was  the  real  author  and 


266 


proponent,  and  she  was  very  aggressive  about  it. 
like  what  I  did  on  that. 


She  just  didn't 


There  were  a  number  of  other  things.   Part  of  it  was  my 
style,  too.   I  was  not  suited  for  that  position.   Mott  had  been 
able  to  get  away  with  running  the  district  when  the  board  was 
window-dressing,  but  those  times--. 

Lage:     Was  that  the  times,  or  was  that  Mott? 

Pesonen:   I  think  it  was  both.   I  think  part  of  it  was  Mott's  style.  Mott 
had  political  ability,  sensitivity  about  dealing  with  elected 
boards,  which  I  didn't  have.   You  know,  I  thought  I  had  been 
given  a  job  to  run  the  place.   I  didn't  realize  how  much  intrigue 
there  was  politically  on  the  board. 

Lage:     It  sounds  as  if  the  board  was  closely  involved  with  matters  large 
and  small. 


Pesonen:   It  was  matters  large  and  small,  but  I  was  not  good  at  cultivating 
the  board.   I  didn't  spend  a  lot  of  time  holding  their  hand, 
calling  them  up  and  schmoozing  them;  I  was  busy  running  the 
district.   I  spent  a  lot  of  time  out  in  the  field,  I  paid  a  lot 
of  attention  to  field  morale  and  what  was  going  on  in  the  field 
and-- . 

Lage:     But  the  changes  you  were  making  in  the  organization  must  have  had 
quite  an  effect  on  morale,  I  would  think. 

Pesonen:   Well,  most  of  it  was  positive  after  it  was  over.   There  were  some 
people  at  the  top  who  shouldn't  have  been  there  any  more,  who 
left,  but  in  the  field,  I  strengthened  the  field  organization, 
and  lines  of  authority  in  headquarters  were  much  clearer.   I  was 
accessible  in  a  way  that  Trudeau  had  never  been,  and  I  treated 
people  nicely. 

Lage:     So  often,  when  you  do  a  reorganization  like  this,  people  are  so 
insecure  about  their  jobs  or-- 

Pesonen:  Well,  there  is  always  a  period  of  insecurity  until  it  settles 

down.   It  settled  down,  I  think,  fairly  well.   Other  people  may 
have  a  different  perspective  on  that,  but  I  firmly  believe  that. 

And  there  were  some  people  who  got  hurt  in  it  and  never 
forgot  it. 

Lage:     Who  stayed  with  the  district? 

Pesonen:   Some  who  stayed  with  the  district  and  some  who  didn't. 


267 


Well,  but  I  didn't  cultivate  the  board  in  the  way  that  I 
should  have  if  job  security  was  foremost  in  my  mind.   While  job 
security  was  certainly  important  to  me,  doing  a  good  job  was  just 
as  important,  as  I  saw  it,  and  maybe  doing  a  good  job  involves 
schmoozing  the  board  more  than  I  did.   I  probably  wasn't 
temperamentally,  at  that  time,  anyway,  the  right  person. 

And  then  I  made  a  terrible  mistake  which  was  what  they  were 
looking  for.   I  had  some  enemies  on  the  board  after  this 
beginning,  but  I  still  had  four  or  five  votes. 


Elected  Board  Members ;  Intrigue  and  Interference 


Lage:  How  many  people  on  the  board? 

Pesonen:  Seven. 

Lage:  Seven.   And  Harlan  Kessel,  who  had  been  a  supporter — 

Pesonen:  --became  an  enemy. 

Lage:  And  then  Mary  Jefferds? 

Pesonen:  Then  Mary  Jefferds. 

Lage:  Was  she  really  lost  just  over  that  issue  of  talking  to--? 

Pesonen:   She  never  said.   That's  my  speculation.   Mary  was  very  difficult 
to  read. 

Lage:     Had  you  known  her  before? 

Pesonen:   I  had  known  her  before. 

Lage:     She  has  a  reputation  for  being  a  good  environmentalist. 

Pesonen:   She  had  good  environmentalist  credentials,  but  by  that  time  she 
had  been  on  the  board  for  fifteen  or  twenty  years,  a  long  time, 
and  she  was  tired  and  sick,  and  she  was  mean-spirited.   She  and 
Harlan  were  just  cruel  to  the  staff.  Every  board  meeting  was  an 
ordeal. 

Lage:     You  mean,  not  just  you,  but  they  would  attack  lower  staff 
members? 


268 


Pesonen:   Yes,  they  would  attack  anybody.  Anybody  who  ever  stood  up  before 
them  and  said  something  they  didn't  like,  they  would  accuse  them 
of  being  incompetent,  of  cheating,  of  lying.   Every  board  meeting 
was  a  horrible  ordeal  of  pointlessness  and  unpleasantness.   They 
were  a  very  unpleasant  bunch  of  people. 

Not  all  of  them.   Ted  Radke,  who  was  president  during  part 
of  the  time  I  was  there,  was  not  that  way,  but  he  wasn't  a  very 
strong  personality,  and  he  couldn't  control  them.   Jim  Duncan, 
who  was  from  Alameda,  was  a  decent  man.   He  was  new  to  the  board. 
In  fact,  I  think  he  was  elected  about  the  time  I  came  in,  and  he 
didn't  have  the  political  base  to  control  them. 

Then  they  had  another  crazy,  Lynn  Bowers,  who  was  really  a 
nut,  from  Pleasanton. 

Lage:     A  man  or  a  woman? 

Pesonen:   A  man.   He's  from  Sunol,  actually.   Bowers  was  a  developer,  but 
his  baby  was  Pleasanton  Ridge,  which  had  been  messed-up 
politically,  and  I  wanted  to  get  that  back  on  the  right  track. 

Lage:     Was  this  Apperson  Ridge,  or  are  they  two  different  places? 

Pesonen:   Pleasanton.   No,  Apperson  Ridge  was  the  gravel  quarry. 

Pleasanton  Ridge  is  the  big  ridge  that  runs  from  Hayward  down  to 
Pleasanton.   A  beautiful  area.   Big.   There  was  a  lot  of 
controversy  because  the  ranchers  up  there  wanted  to  develop  it. 

Lage:     And  was  Bowers  on  the  side  of  developing  it,  or--? 

Pesonen:   No,  Bowers  was  on  the  side  of  making  it  a  park,  but  he  was 

developing  around  the  edges  of  it.   His  scheme,  I  think,  was  it 
would  make  his  other  developments  more  attractive  if  he  had  a  big 
park  right  next  to  them. 

Lage:     But  he  seemed  personally  interested? 

Pesonen:   I  thought  he  was  personally  interested.   He  was  a  very  strange 
guy,  and  he  insisted  on  meeting  with  me  once  a  week  down  in 
Pleasanton.  We  would  go  out  and  have  breakfast  and  he'd  have  an 
agenda  of  things  to  talk  about,  some  of  them  very  detailed 
internal  administration.   I  didn't  trust  Bowers,  but  Bowers  and 
Kessel  hated  each  other;  so  as  long  as  Kessel  wanted  to  vote 
against  me,  Bowers  was  going  to  vote  for  me. 

Lage:     Tremendous  intrigue! 
Pesonen:   Yes. 


269 


Lage :     It  doesn't  seem  like  the  way  these  elected  boards  should  work. 

Pesonen:   There  is  enormous  intrigue  in  those  things.  The  trading  off  of 
small  ego  strokes. 

Lage:     I  keep  interrupting  you. 
Pesonen:   Oh,  that's  fine. 

It  was  very  dif ficult--it  became  a  very  difficult  job.   And 
I  began  to  feel  insecure  that  I  didn't  have  a  unanimous  board, 
and  I  couldn't  figure  out  how  to  satisfy  them.   They  just  seemed 
to  want  to  be  unhappy.   They're  still  unhappy.   I'm  told  that 
poor  Pat  0' Brian  who  came  after  me  is  in  the  same  situation, 
except  he  was  able,  in  the  wake  of  my  resignation,  to  negotiate  a 
contract  which  costs  them  an  arm  and  a  leg  if  they  fire  him.   It 
would  cost  them  a  lot  of  money  to  fire  him,  and  that's  a 
deterrent.   I  didn't  have  a  contract.   They  had  said,  "Oh,  you 
don't  need  a  contract."   I'll  know  better  next  time. 

So  there  was  this  problem  with  Karen  Frick.   We  needed  a 
staff  person  who  could--Bob  Connelly  left.   Bob  Connelly  saw, 
sooner  than  I  did,  that  this  was  a  hopeless  situation.   He  went 
right  back  to  the  legislature.   His  words  were,  "It's  a  lot 
easier  to  work  with  eighty  crazies  than  seven." 

Lage:     So  he  saw  what  you  were  up  against? 

Pesonen:   He  saw  what  I  was  up  against,  and  he  saw  no  future  for  himself 
there.   He  got  offered  a  very  good  position  by  Willie  Brown,  as 
staff  to  the  Assembly  Rules  Committee;  it  was  a  very  good 
position  and  he  was  very  good  at  it.   And  still  he's  essentially 
running  the  Rules  Committee  for  the  assembly,  trying  to  keep 
Willie  Brown  out  of  trouble.   Willie's  a  challenge,  too. 
[laughter] 

But  Bob  saw  that  there  wasn't  any  way  he  could  keep  me  out 
of  trouble.   Knowing  me  as  well  as  he  does,  I  think,  he  realized 
that  I  was  doomed,  and  he  would  go  down  with  me.   I  think  he  made 
a  smart  choice,  a  wise  decision. 


A  Fatal  Mistake  and  More  Intrigue 


Pesonen:   Anyway,  in  the  wake  of  Bob's  not  being  there,  we  needed  somebody 
to  handle  this  legislative  program  in  Sacramento.   Janet  Cobb, 
whom  I  had  hired  to  run  public  relations  and  who's  still  there 


270 

and  who  is  just  a  dynamite  woman,  had  a  friend  whom  she  had 
worked  with  before,  Karen  Frick,  who  had  been  on  the  staff  at 
Senator  Montoya's  office  and  had  done  some  political  consulting 
around  the  Bay  Area.   She  seemed  to  have  the  right  credentials. 
We  interviewed  three  or  four  people,  but  we  hired  her.   Her 
office  was  right  next  to  mine  in  this  little  executive  suite  up 
on  the  hill. 

Well,  that  was  in  the  fall  of  '85,  I  guess,  around  December. 
I  started  taking  Karen  to  some  of  these  gatherings  that  I  go  to, 
the  Association  of  Bay  Area  Governments,  and  other  things,  to 
introduce  her  to  people.   One  night  we  were  at  a  Christmas  party, 
it  got  a  little  romantic.   I  thought  she  was  interested,  and  I 
was  interested,  and  we  dated  for  a  while.   The  dating  didn't  go 
very  far. 

That  was  a  fatal  mistake,  to  even  get  involved  at  all, 
because  it  turned  out  that  Karen  was  also  dating  Lynn  Bowers.   I 
began  to  hear  rumors  of  that,  and  I  thought,  "This  was  a  very 
stupid  thing  to  do."   So  I  broke  it  off,  probably  in  January. 
There  was  never  any  sex  in  it.   I  told  my  friend  Paul  Halvonik 
about  it  one  time,  and  he  said,  "You  went  through  all  this 
trouble  and  you  never  got  laid?"   [laughter]   We  may  cut  that  one 
out  of  the  transcript.   It  just  didn't  go  very  far,  but  it  was 
public.   We  showed  up  with  each  other  at  these  gatherings. 

Lage:     Was  the  Lynn  Bowers  thing  public,  too? 

Pesonen:   That  became  public,  shortly  afterwards.   Bowers  was  married,  and 
he  was  showing  up  at  social  gatherings  with  Karen  Frick  on  his 
arm. 

Well,  what  happened  then  was  the  staff,  who  feared  Bowers- 
Bowers  was  one  of  the  most  brutal  to  staff  of  anybody  on  that 
board,  and  he  could  be  really  vicious,  and  he  could  also  be 
devious  in  trying  to  get  what  he  wanted  through  manipulation  of 
staff.   Nobody  trusted  Bowers.   Here  was  my  right-hand  staff 
person  showing  up  at  closed  staff  meetings  where  we  talked  about 
how  we  were  going  to  present  something  to  the  board,  and  suddenly 
nobody  would  talk  because  they  began  to  feel  that  it  was  getting 
back  to  Bowers  through  pillow  talk  through  Karen.   It  became  an 
almost  impossible  situation.   It  was  very  hard  to  function  around 
there  when  you  had  what  everybody  perceived  as  a  spy  right  in  the 
general  manager's  office;  a  spy  to  the  most  hated  and  despised 
and  feared  member  of  the  board. 

II 

Lage:     That  would  seem  to  be  a  conflict  of  interest  on  her  part. 


271 


Pesonen:   Well,  it's  not  a  legal  conflict  of  interest.   You  know, 

government  can't  say  what  people's  personal  lives  are  supposed  to 

be  like,  as  long  as  they  are  not  in  violation  of  some  law,  and 

there  was  no  law  that  governed  this. 

And  Karen  started  to  kind  of  flout  her  connection  with 
Bowers.   I  just  didn't  know  what  to  do.   I  mean,  there  wasn't 
anything  I  could  do.   I  was  unable  to  do  my  job;  it  was  eroding 
my  fragile  support  on  the  board  already.   Finally,  Janet  and  I 
talked  about  it.   Janet  was  very  close  to  Karen.   Janet  thought 
it  was  a  crazy  situation  and  impossible  and  we  had  to  find  some 
way  out  of  it.   Janet  took  Karen  aside  —  this  was  four  or  five 
months  after  we  had  been  dating—and  persuaded  her  that  it  wasn't 
in  her  interests  to  stay  on  in  this  circumstance  and  that  she 
should  resign.   She  agreed.   Janet  called  me  full  of  exuberance 
and  excitation  at  home  that  night,  "Karen  has  agreed  to  leave." 

Well,  I  felt  this  huge  load  off  my  shoulders.  At  5:30  the 
next  morning,  I  get  a  call  from  Lynn  Bowers.   He  said,  "I  want  to 
see  you  this  morning,  right  now,"  and  he  named  a  place  down  in 
Hayward,  some  little  restaurant.   I  showed  up  there  and  Bowers 
walked  in.   He  walked  over  and  sat  down  at  the  table  and  he  said, 
"I'm  going  to  get  you."  He  said,  "Karen  can't  leave."  He 
confirmed  that  he  needed  Karen  to  stay  in  that  position  of 
information-- 

Lage:     Oh,  I  see.   He  confirmed  that  he  saw  her  as  a  source  of 
information. 


Pesonen:   Oh,  absolutely.   And  he  was  furious  that  Janet,  working  on  my 

behalf,  had  persuaded  Karen  to  resign.   And  so  she  had  reversed 
her  position.   He  told  me,  "She's  not  going  to  resign."  Well,, 
she  hadn't  told  us  that,  but  she  must  have  told  him  that  that 
night.   He  said,  "You've  just  lost  your  fourth  vote."   He  was 
going  to  join  with  Kessel  and  Kay  Peterson  and  Mary  Jefferds. 

I  said,  "Let's  go  for  a  walk."  We  went  over  to  Lake  Chabot 
Park  and  walked  around.   It  was  a  beautiful  sunny  morning,  and 
people  were  out  fishing  and  riding  their  bikes  and  I  said,  "This 
is  what  I'm  here  for.   I  don't  know  what  you're  here  for,  but  it 
appears  that  you've  got  some  other  interests,  and  I'll  fight  you. 
I  may  lose  it,  but  I'm  not  going  to  go  back  and  embrace  Karen  as 
part  of  the  staff.   It  would  be  impossible  to  do  the  job." 

So  I  went  back  to  the  office,  and  there  was  no  Karen  Frick 
around.   Of  course,  I  told  Janet  and  a  couple  of  other  confidants 
what  had  happened  and  Karen  showed  up  about  one  o'clock  in  the 
afternoon,  drunk.   Not  drunk,  but  she  had  been  drinking,  I  could 
tell;  you  could  smell  it.   And  distraught.   So  I  called  her  in 


272 


the  office,  and  I  said,  "This  is  totally  untenable.   It's  not 
going  to  work.   You're  fired."  This  was  against  the  advice  of 
Ellen  Maldonado,  who  was  our  legal  staff,  and  I  should  have 
listened  to  her,  but  I  was  so  upset  at  what  Bowers  had  said  that 
morning.   He  had  sort  of  thrown  this  gauntlet  down,  and  my 
reaction  was  not  thought  out. 

Lage:     Now,  why  was  it  against  the  advice  of  your  legal--? 

Pesonen:  Well,  she  said,  "You've  got  a  basis  to  fire  her,  but  you've  got 
to  make  a  record."  I  hadn't  made  a  record  that  would  stand  up. 
This  had  all  been  talk  and  the  grist  of  water  cooler  breaks.  I 
hadn't  sat  down  and  formally,  the  way  you  have  to  do,  and-- 

Lage:     Provide  warnings? 

Pesonen:   Provide  warnings,  opportunities  for  correction.   Nothing  that  I 
had  told  her  either  had  to  do  with  her  performance.   Her 
performance  was  falling  off,  and  it  could  have  been  documented, 
but  it  wasn't  documented.   So--.   Well,  the  reason  I  fired  her 
was  that  I  knew  she  wasn't  doing  her  job;  she  was  an 
embarrassment  to  me  and  my  emotional  reaction  was:  Bowers  can't 
do  this  to  me. 

About  a  month  or  two  later,  Ellen  Maldonado  walked  into  my 
office  with  bad  news.   Karen  had  gotten  a  lawyer,  a  very  good 
lawyer  in  San  Francisco,  who  had  written  a  letter,  a  confidential 
letter,  threatening  to  bring  charges  before  the  State  Fair 
Employment  Practices  Commission  alleging  that  she  had  been 
wrongfully  fired  in  retaliation  for  spurning  my  sexual  advances 
and  that  he  would  keep  it  confidential  and  he  wouldn't  file  suit 
if  we  reached  a  quick  settlement. 

Lage:     Sounds  suspiciously  like  blackmail. 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Well,  but  it's  legal.   So  I  immediately  called  the  board, 

or  notified  the  board,  anyway,  and  got  a  lawyer  for  the  board.   I 
went  and  told  the  lawyer  the  whole  story  with  Ellen  along. 

Lage:     What  a  difficult  situation,  with  a  board  member  involved. 

Pesonen:   Bowers  was  still  sleeping  with  Karen.   Everybody  knew  it  by  this 
time.   He  practically  admitted  it.   I  think  he  was  about  ready  to 
say  he  was  going  to  move  out  of  his  house  and  leave  his  wife 
behind  and  go  someplace  with  Karen.   Or  maybe  by  this  time  they 
had  gotten  an  apartment.   I  don't  remember.   It  was  notorious, 
anyway . 


273 


I  told  the  whole  story  to  this  lawyer,  who  was  a  very  good 
lawyer  who  Guy  Saperstein  referred  me  to.   And  he  said,  "What  a 
mess."   [laughter]   "What  a  mess."  And  it  certainly  was.   I 
can't  claim  that  I'm  not  responsible  for  it  having  been  such  a 
mess. 

Well,  the  matter  dragged  out  and  the  negotiations  dragged 
out  on  the  settlement,  and  at  first  this  guy  demanded  half  a 
million  dollars  to  keep  her  mouth  shut  and  go  away.   She  wasn't 
interested  in  reinstatement.   She  just  wanted  money.   They 
finally  settled,  I  think,  for  a  very  nominal  sum—thirty  thousand 
dollars,  I  think,  which  is  nothing  in  these  days- -but  the 
political  ramifications  were  enormous.   The  board  was  very 
uneasy,  very  nervous,  as  this  story  emerged. 

Well,  somebody  tipped  off  a  reporter  on  the  Tribune  and  on 
the  Hayward  Daily  Review  and  they  started  calling  and  saying 
"What's  going  on?"   "Well,  it's  all  confidential,"  we'd  say. 
Well,  nothing  hooks  the  appetite  of  a  reporter  more  than  to  say 
that  there's  a  scandal  brewing  someplace  and  it's  confidential. 
So  this  reporter,  Julie — I've  forgotten  her  last  name  now--on  the 
Hayward  Daily  Review,  she  was  a  good  investigative  reporter.   She 
began  to  sniff  out  bits  and  pieces  here  and  there,  and  the  story 
began  to  leak,  as  it  inevitably  would. 

I  remember  one  meeting  before  the  board  when  the  board  was 
to  approve  the  settlement,  and  it  was  a  closed  session,  and 
Bowers  was  there.   The  lawyer  we'd  hired  from  Crosby,  Heafey, 
Roach,  and  May  was  also  there,  and  Bowers  stood  up  and  said,  "I 
object  to  this  meeting  proceeding  while  we  have  this  sex  maniac 
present."   I  said,  "Well,  he's  my  lawyer,  too,  but  I'll  tell  you 
what.   If  it  makes  your  job  easier,  I'll  go  out  and  walk  around 
the  block  while  you  discuss  your  options  with  our  lawyer,  and 
I'll  come  back." 

I  did,  and  Bowers  by  that  time,  was  quiet,  and  the  board 
accepted  the  proposal  that  had  been  negotiated  by  our  lawyer 
which  was  forty  thousand  dollars  and  total  confidentiality  and  a 
provision  that  we  would  not  say  anything  derogatory  about  Karen 
if  we  got  a  call  from  a  future  employer  reference. 

That  was  satisfactory,  but  they  didn't  stay  quiet  and  more 
and  more  inquiries  came  along.   Finally,  the  Hayward  Daily  Review 
sued  or  threatened  to  sue,  to  open  up  the  file.   Ellen  thought 
they  might  very  well  win  because  the  park  district  was  a  public 
agency,  so  we  decided  to  just  open  up  the  whole  file.   We  did  so 
at  an  open  board  meeting,  and  I  made  a  little  speech  about  how 
it's  all  behind  us,  and  I  made  some  mistakes,  but  let's  get  on 


274 


with  running  the  park  district,  and  Bowers  resigned.   Bowers 
resigned  right  after  that  meeting,  I  think. 

Lage:     Did  that  come  out  in  the  Hayward  Daily  Review! 

Pesonen:   The  newspapers  had  hinted  at  the  relationship  between  Karen  Frick 
and  Lynn  Bowers.   I  don't  think  they  ever  came  out  completely  and 
said  it.   But  they  hinted  that  they  were  close  acquaintances,  it 
was--what  is  the  word  I'm  thinking  of,  "close  friends." 

Lage:     Discreet  language? 

Pesonen:   Euphemism.   These  were  some  standard  euphemisms  for 

relationships,  it  seems.   They're  married  now,  Bowers  and  Karen 
Frick.   So  I  am  told,  anyway.   I  don't  have  a  lot  to  do  with 
them. 

Lage:     So  he  resigned? 

Pesonen:   He  resigned.   He  said  he'd  accomplished  everything  he  wanted  to 

accomplish.   There  was  no  reason  for  him  to  stay  on  the  board  any 
longer.  Which  nobody  believed;  at  least  I  didn't  believe  it.   So 
it  was  a  very  unpleasant  time,  but  I  thought,  "Well,  now  we've 
got  it  behind  us,  we've  sort  of  cleared  the  air.   Let's  get  on 
with  it." 


Leaving  the  Park  District  Position 


Pesonen:   Right  at  that  time,  Guy  Saperstein  called  up  and  said,  "I've  got 
this  big  sex-discrimination  lawsuit  that  I  need  somebody  to 
manage;  would  you  be  interested?"   [laughter]   It  turned  out  to 
be  the  biggest  sex-discrimination  case  in  the  history  of  the 
Civil  Rights  Act.   I  thought,  "My  reputation  is  really  in 
trouble,  and  it's  in  trouble  partly  from  my  own  doing.   I'm  not 
free  of  responsibility  for  that.   I  think  I  got  trapped  by  some 
other  people,  but  I  walked  into  the  trap.   This  is  a  great 
opportunity;  it's  a  lot  more  money,  it's  an  opportunity  to--at 
least  superf icially--redress  the  sense  that  I'm  kind  of  a  sex 
ogre,  and  I'm  free  of  this  board." 

Lage:     Do  you  think  they  would  have  put  it  behind  them  if  you  hadn't 
left  at  that  time? 

Pesonen:   I  don't  know  if  they  would  have  or  not.   There  was  talk  that 

maybe  I  should  resign.   It  hadn't  come  to  anything,  but  it  was — 


275 


Lage:     Now  there  were  only  six  members  on  the  board. 

Pesonen:   But  there  was  an  appointment  made  by  the  board  to  fill  Bowers' 
seat.   That  was  Joycelyn  Combs  from  Pleasanton.   I  talked  to 
Joycelyn,  and  she  knew  what  had  happened,  and  she  knew  about  the 
Bowers /Frick  thing.   She  would  have  been  a  support  vote.   But  the 
taint  was  there,  and  the  echo  was  there;  the  history  was  there. 

Lage:     And  you  had  the  other  problems  that  preceded  it. 

Pesonen:   And  I  had  the  other  problems.   I  wasn't  happy  at  the  park 

district.   I  had  never  been  happy  after  about  the  first  year.   1 
always  felt  that  I  was  being  dangled  a  little  bit  by  that  board 
and  being  deliberately  kept  insecure  so  that  I  would  respond  to 
their  personal  needs.  They  all  had  little  political  agendas, 
where  they  wanted  the  staff  to  do  something  special  for  a 
constituent  that  would  take  away  from  some  other  program.   I  was 
trying  to  balance  these  needs  among  these  board  members. 

Lage:     So  it  wasn't  the  setup  that  an  outsider  might  envision,  where  the 
board  sets  policy  and  oversees  the  general  manager,  who  then  has 
control  over  the  organization. 

Pesonen:   It  is  nothing  like  that.   It  still  isn't  like  that. 

Lage:     So  each  one  has  their  own  little  agenda  and  interferes  at  various 
levels? 


Pesonen:   Have  you  ever  been  to  one  of  those  board  meetings? 
Lage:     No. 

Pesonen:   Go  to  one  of  the  board  meetings  sometime.   It  is  an 

embarrassment.   It  is  an  embarrassment  the  way  they  talk  to  each 
other;  it  is  an  embarrassment  the  way  they  insult  each  other,  the 
way  they  insult  their  staff-- 

•Lage:     Did  that  include  you,  the  insulting? 

Pesonen:   It  included  everybody.   Jerry  Kent  was  the  only  one  who  had  a  way 
somehow  of  smoothing  things  over. 

Lage:     Did  he  make  special  approaches  to  the  board? 

Pesonen:   Oh  yes.  He  is  capable  of  doing  that,  but  he  does  it  without 

leaving  too  many  fingerprints.   He's  very  skilled  at  that.   He 
should  be  the  general  manager. 


Lage: 


Why  has  he  not  been  general  manager? 


276 


Pesonen:   He  didn't  want  it.   He  was  invited  to  apply  when  I  got  appointed. 
He  knew  what  it  was  like.   He  knows  he's  insulated  in  the 
assistant  general  manager  position  from  absorbing  all  of  the 
abuse.   He's  cushioned  from  it.   A  smart  decision  on  his  part. 
Not  a  high  visibility  position,  he's  not  the  point  person  on  whom 
the  board  focuses  their  dismay. 

So  I  started  negotiating  an  agreement  with  Guy  to  come  over 
to  his  firm  and  manage  the  Kraszewski  v.  State  Farm  case,  which 
was  only  a  gleam  in  everybody's  eye  at  that  time.   It  was  a  big 
consent  decree  approved  by  the  district  court.   It  didn't  even 
have  an  office,  it  didn't  have  a  staff,  it  didn't  have  a  budget, 
it  didn't  have  anything.   And  we  were  going  after  a  couple  of 
hundred  million  dollars  from  State  Farm. 

Lage:     Before  we  get  into  that,  it  seems  to  me  there's  more  on  the  East 
Bay  parks  besides  your  relationship  with  the  board.   I  mean,  some 
of  the  things  that  happened  in  the  parks. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  well,  there  were  some  good  things  that  happened. 
Lage:     Can  we  go  a  little  bit  more  into  that? 

Pesonen:   Substantively?   Yes.   I  think  the  district  got  much  more 

professional  in  the  way  it  managed  its  land  and  dealt  with  the 
grazing  issue,  with  the  water  quality  issue,  with--.   And  the 
district  continued  to  be  aggressive  with  land  acquisition,  and  it 
made,  I  think,  by  and  large,  wise  choices. 


Conflicting  Views  of  the  District's  Mission 


Lage:     Was  there  a  tension  between  whether  to  spend  the  money  on 
acquisition  or  on  management? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  very  much  so. 

Lage:     Was  that  something  the  board  was  divided  on? 

Pesonen:   That  was  one  of  the  big  fights  on  the  board  all  of  the  time.   My 
overall  slant,  in  thirty  words  or  less,  is  that  that  board  is  not 
subject  to  very  much  public  attention.   It  holds  its  meetings  at 
remote  locations  in  the  middle  of  the  day,  so  the  only  people  who 
really  see  what  goes  on  in  those  board  meetings  —  and  even  the 
press  doesn't  show  up  most  of  the  time- -is  a  very  small  clique  of 
extreme  open  space  environmentalists.   Afton  Crooks  is  one  of 
those,  and  there  are  a  number  of  other  people,  and  they  all  know 


277 


Lage: 


each  other.   They  don't  want  any  money  spent  on  anything  but  land 
acquisition. 

There  are  parks  which  get  a  lot  of  public  use.   Tilden  is  an 
exception  to  the  park  district.   Tilden  is  what  a  lot  of  Berkeley 
people  think  of  as  the  East  Bay  Regional  Park  District,  but  it's 
an  aberration. 

In  the  amount  of  use  it  gets  and  the  amount  of  development  it 
has? 


Pesonen:   It  was  Mott's  idea,  and  it's  very  highly  developed.   From  the 

beginning,  even  before  Mott,  with  a  golf  course  and  a  merry-go- 
round  and  the  swimming  lakes  and--.   Tilden  is  where  all  of  the 
high-visibility  activity,  where  you  take  children  and  families  go 
to  picnic,  is  focused.   Most  of  the  park  district  is  open  space. 
Developers  are  buying  up  open  space  and  building  houses,  and  it's 
a  race  between  the  park  district  and  the  developers  for  the  park 
district  to  get  out  in  front  and  buy  it  while  it's  cheap. 

Hulet  Hornbeck,  who  ran  the  land  department  for  years  and 
years  under  Trudeau,  was  the  architect  of  a  lot  of  that 
acquisition. 

Lage:     And  that  was  the  thrust  —  acquisition? 

Pesonen:   He  left  at  the  same  time  Trudeau  did;  he  retired.   He  was 

replaced  by  his  young  assistant,  Bob  Doyle,  who  attempted  to 
carry  on  Hulet ' s  approach.   Doyle  was  very  popular  with  the 
board;  his  land  acquisition  was  popular.   But,  you  know,  you  had 
playgrounds  falling  apart  and  trails  to  build.   So  I  was  looking 
for  a  different  balance,  with  some  development  in  parks. 

There  were  a  couple  of  board  members,  Kay  Peterson  having 
been  probably  the  most  vocal,  against  any  tot  lots,  for  example, 
a  place  where  mothers  could  go  and  sit  and  read  and  knit,  or 
fathers,  for  that  matter,  and  have  their  kids  play  on  a  little 
play  structure.   They  hated  little  play  structures.   They  didn't 
want  them  any  place.   So  if  we  put  them  in  the  budget,  they'd 
take  them  out  or  there  was  a  move  to  take  them  out. 

Lage:     So  they  would  review  a  plan  that  you  might  have  for  an  individual 
park  and  object  to  certain-- 

Pesonen:   They  would  object  to  those  kinds  of  things;  they'd  object  to--. 

Each  budget  cycle  we'd  go  through  this.   I  just  didn't  think  that 
was  a  good  balance.   We  had  a  lot  of  people  coming  to  parks  with 
no  place  go:  there  were  no  picnic  tables. 


278 

I  think  there  was  a  certain  amount  of  racism  in  it,  too,  or 
cultural  bias,  anyway.   Because,  you  go  to  parks  like  Garin 
[Regional]  Park  down  near  Hayward  on  a  sunny  Sunday  afternoon, 
and  the  place  would  be  jammed  with  low- income  people,  a  lot  of 
Hispanics,  a  lot  of  black  people,  and  no  place  to  have  a  picnic. 
You  knew  these  people  lived  in  daily  living  circumstances  which 
probably  weren't  very  comfortable—little  apartments  with  no  open 
space,  nothing  outdoors  except  a  concrete  ramp  where  you  park  the 
cars  and  the  kids  play  stick  ball. 

My  philosophy  was  that  the  more  you  could  get  people  into 
parks --whether  it's  true  or  not  there's  no  way  to  prove  it  —  the 
more  you  could  get  people  released  to  get  out  into  open  space, 
into  parks,  and  have  enough  room,  they'd  be  better  citizens. 
That's  an  old  notion  in  the  United  States.   It  goes  back  to 
Jefferson.   Nobody  knows  whether  it's  true  or  not,  but  I  believed 
it  anyway. 

So  I  wanted  facilities.   These  were  not  people  who  put  on  an 
Audubon  Society  backpack  and  went  off  into  the  remote  parts  of 
the  park;  it  just  wasn't  their  lifestyle.   It  would  be  nice  if 
they  did,  but  they  weren't  going  to  do  it.   They  were  tied  down 
with  industrial,  blue-collar  jobs  all  week  and  three  or  four  kids 
running  around,  and  they  just  wanted  to  get  out  and  away  and  play 
their  radios  and  drink  some  beer  and  cook  some  hot  dogs  and  ribs 
or— 

Lage:     And  have  their  tot  structures? 

Pesonen:   --and  have  their  tot  structure  and  just  get  some  release.   The 

board  was  very  much  opposed  to  that.   So  I  thought  it  was  a  kind 
of  elitist  position  on  the  part  of  the  board  members. 

On  the  other  hand,  you  did  need  to  buy  land  while  it  was 
cheap,  so  I  wasn't  opposed  to  land  acquisition,  I  was  all  for  it, 
focused  on  various  parks.   But  what  often  happened  is  that 
somebody  who  was  close  to  one  of  the  board  members,  who  already 
lived  in  a  nice  place  on  the  edge  of  a  piece  of  open  space,  found 
out  that  they  were  going  to  lose  their  free  open  space  and  would 
put  pressure  on  the  board  to  buy  that  land  when  it  wasn't  part  of 
any  plan  for  development  of  the  park.   In  effect,  they  were 
protecting  some  already  privileged  person  or  group  of  people. 

Those  things  would  come  along,  and  you  never  knew  when  one 
of  those  requests  would  walk  in  the  door  and  be  turned  into  a 
political  push  by  the  board,  with  accusations  that  we  were  trying 
to  sell  out  to  the  developers  by  not  buying  it  immediately.   They 
were  always  accusing  the  staff  of  bad  faith.   It  was  just  a 
constant  problem. 


279 


Harlan  was  one  of  the  worst.   He  had  some  friends  up  in  the 
hills  who  wanted  the  horse  ranch  up  there  near  the  entrance  where 
you  go  over  the  hill  on  Redwood  Road,  a  very  expensive  piece  of 
property.   It  didn't  really  fit  in  the  park  at  all.  Harlan  would 
come  up  with  these  notions  that  this  was  the  gateway  to  the  park 
lands,  and  we  should  buy  it.  He  had  a  friend  who  had  a  building 
up  there;  he  wanted  the  park  district  to  buy  the  building  and 
find  some  use  for  it. 

Lage:     And  these  didn't  fit  logically  geographically  with  the  park? 

Pesonen:   Many  of  them  were  isolated  from  the  park.   But  they  were  doing  a 
favor  for  somebody.  They  were  very  expensive.   So  some  of  the 
land  acquisition  was  not  wise.   Some  of  it  was  good,  very  sound. 
And  land  is  expensive,  and  I  was  all  for  acquiring  as  much  land 
as  possible  in  Pleasanton  Ridge,  for  example,  or  along  the 
shoreline,  or  wetlands. 

The  park  district  had  a  general  plan  for  that,  a  master 
plan.   Many  of  these  acquisitions  were  outside  the  master  plan. 
The  board  would  go  through  elaborate  public  hearings,  adopt  a 
master  plan,  and  then  just  completely  ignore  it. 

Lage:     Completely  ignore  it  and  pick  up  little  pieces  of  property? 
Pesonen:   Pick  up  little  bits  and  pieces  here  and  there. 

Lage:     You  would  almost  have  to  go  out  and  develop  your  own 
constituency,  it  seems,  to  challenge  them. 

Pesonen:   Well,  that  was  the  problem.   It  was  a  very  elitist,  small 

constituency  that  was,  in  effect,  running  the  political  agenda, 
for  the  board.   It  offended  me;  it  offended  my  sense  of  what  the 
park  district  was  all  about.   You  can't  have  a  general  manager 
who  is  offended  by  the  policies  of  his  board.   I  suppose  I  could 
have  gone  out  and  tried,  sub  rosa  to  generate  some  constituency, 
and  that's  what  Mott  was  good  at. 

Lage:     I  can't  imagine  his  putting  up  with  that  from  his  board  too  well. 
But  maybe  it  didn't  happen  when-- 

Pesonen:   No.   But  times  were  different,  too.   You  know,  Mott's  board  were 
businessmen  who--.   You  know,  like  [Paul]  Harberts,  who  ran  the 
sporting  goods  store  in  Berkeley  and  people  like  that  that  come 
to  a  board  meeting,  and  they  nod  their  heads.   Like  corporate 
boards.   Corporate  boards  don't  tell  management  what  to  do;  they 
collect  their  stipend,  and  they  go  back  and  run  their  own 
businesses . 


280 


But  Harlan  didn't  have  a  job;  Mary  Jefferds  didn't  have  a 
job;  Kay  Peterson  didn't  have  a  job;  Lynn  Bowers  didn't  have  a 
job  that  anybody  could  figure  out--he  had  some  kind  of  a 
business.   So  you  had  four  board  members  who  essentially  spent 
full  time  messing  around  with  the  district.   The  more  tractable 
members  of  the  board,  like  Jim  Duncan  and  Ted  Radke,  did  have 
full-time  jobs,  and  they  couldn't  spend  the  time  that  Harlan  and 
Mary  and  Kay  Peterson,  for  example,  could  do. 

Those  people  were  in  that  building  all  of  the  time,  sneaking 
up  and  down  the  hall,  visiting  with  some  top  staff  person, 
shutting  the  door,  telling  them  what  to  do.   Then  the  staff  would 
come  back  and  report  to  me  and  say,  "What  do  I  do?   I've  got 
directions  from  you  to  do  one  thing,  and  now  they  are  telling  me 
that  I  should  do  something  else."   It  would  be  one  board  member, 
one  out  of  seven,  but  it  would  be  a  board  member  who  could  maybe 
swing  a  couple  more  votes  at  the  next  board  meeting. 


Lage:     Very  untenable. 


Negotiating  the  Acquisition  of  Ferry  Point  in  Martinez 


Lage:     What  about  the  Ferry  Point  acquisition?  That's  mentioned  as  one 
of  your  accomplishments. 

Pesonen:   Well,  Ferry  Point  I  look  upon  as  one  of  my  triumphs.   The  park 
district  and  the  city  of  Martinez  jointly  operate  a  park  in 
Martinez,  which  is  on  the  other  side  of  the  Southern  Pacific 
Railroad  tracks  from  the  main  town.   It's  a  very  nice  park  with  a 
marina  and  lots  of  open  space,  and  it's  very  popular. 

But  the  Southern  Pacific  trains  stop  right  at  the  Martinez 
station,  and  they  block  the  street  that  gets  to  the  park. 
There ' s  a  switching  yard  down  the  line  a  little  ways  towards 
Crockett,  and  a  lot  of  switching  goes  back  and  forth  with  cars 
that  are  serving  those  refineries  around  the  bay.   So  it  has  been 
a  constant  irritant  to  Martinez  that  the  railroad  was  cutting  it 
off  from  its  waterfront. 

In  1983  or  '84,  the  two  railroads,  Southern  Pacific  and 
Santa  Fe  Railway  were  purchased  by  one  company.   It  became  the 
Santa  Fe  Pacific  Railway.   The  plan  in  that  merger  was  that  the 
two  railroads  would  merge  their  operations.   Well,  both  lines  run 
through  Martinez:  the  Santa  Fe  line  inland  along  Highway  4,  the 
Southern  Pacific  lines  historically  right  along  the  bay.   The 
plan  further  called  for  consolidating  all  rail  traffic  on  the 


281 

Southern  Pacific  line  and  abandoning  the  Santa  Fe  line.   The 
inference  which  you  expect  from  that  is  there  would  be  a  lot  more 
traffic  along  the  bay—rail  traffic—less  access  to  the  bay,  and 
more  interference  with  Martinez's  use  of  the  park. 

So  the  park  district  joined  with  Martinez  in  intervening  in 
the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission  proceedings  which  were 
required  to  approve  the  merger,  and  that  kind  of  languished.  We 
got  a  lawyer  in  Washington  who  didn't  do  much.   So  I  started 
looking  at  this  case  —  something  about  it  came  across  my  desk— and 
I  thought,  "You  know,  there's  some  leverage  here  to  get  something 
out  of  these  railways."   So  I  got  the  park  district  and  Martinez 
to  join  together  and  hire  a  firm  in  San  Francisco  to  file  a 
petition  with  the  ICC  asserting  that  the  environmental  review  of 
this  merger  was  inadequate  under  federal  law. 

That  started  to  work,  started  to  get  their  attention.   And  I 
pushed  that,  I  got  personally  involved  in  that  to  some  extent.   I 
realized  that  it  had  to  be,  to  some  extent,  a  political  campaign. 
I  organized  all  of  the  mayors  of  the  cities  along  the  bay  from 
Richmond  all  the  way  around  to  Martinez--!  didn't  have  to  work  on 
Martinez  because  their  city  manager  was  with  us,  a  very  effective 
city  manager,  Jack  Garner.   We  started  getting  some  press 
attention,  that  there  was  going  to  be  a  Berlin  Wall  of  freight 
cars  cutting  people  off  from  the  bay  and  slogans  like  that,  and 
getting  lots  of  coverage  and  then  collecting  the  clippings  and 
sending  them  off  to  the  ICC.   And  getting  the  budget  to  pay  these 
lawyers  to  file  a  very  serious  petition  that  the  environmental 
review  was  inadequate. 

I  went  back  to  Washington  and  met  with  the  environmental 
staff  for  the  ICC.   They  were  very  helpful  to  us  because,  under 
the  Reagan  administration,  their  budget  had  been  cut  and  they 
felt  cast  adrift  and  abandoned  and  unlistened-to  by  the 
commission  itself.   So  they  were  happy  to  help  us  because  it 
enhanced  their  own  role  within  the  agency.   We  had  a  very  fine 
lobbyist  in  Washington  named  Dave  Wyman  who  helped  me  with  this. 

I  think  I  made  at  least  two  trips  to  Washington,  one  with 
Peter  Langley— he' s  running  for  mayor  of  Martinez  now— he  and  I 
went  together. 

I* 

Pesonen:  I  took  a  personal  interest  in  this  because  I  saw  that  there  was  a 
chance  to  get,  in  effect,  mitigation— an  enormous  mitigation— for 
access  to  the  bay. 


282 


We  finally  put  together  meetings  with  the  top  management  of 
Santa  Fe  and  Southern  Pacific,  and  we  made  an  agreement  that  in 
exchange  for  the  park  district  withdrawing  its  opposition  in  the 
ICC,  the  railroad  would  grant  seven  easements  for  pedestrian 
bridges  across  the  rail  line  to  the  bay,  would  sell  Ferry  Point 
to  the  park  district  at  fair  market  value  and  would  give  it  an 
option,  and  would  make  concessions  in  their  operations  in 
Martinez  that  were  very  favorable  to  the  city,  including 
transferring  some  property  to  the  city.   It  was  a  good  deal. 

Lage:     You  didn't  get  them  to  move  into  the  inland  tracks? 

Pesonen:   Practically,  that  didn't  make  sense.   There  was  a  tunnel  on  that 
that  wouldn't  accommodate  the  double-decker  container  trains  that 
they  planned  to  use  the  line  for.   There  were  some  practical 
reasons  why  the  inland  track  was  the  one  that  should  be 
abandoned.   We  didn't  have  the  leverage  to  force  that  anyway;  we 
couldn't  have  persuaded  the  commission  to  compel  that. 

But  we  could,  possibly,  persuade  the  commission  to  give  us 
some  environmental  mitigation,  and  we  always  had  the  threat  of 
going  to  federal  court  and  holding  the  whole  thing  up,  which  was 
our  real  leverage  because  this  was  a  junk-bond-financed 
transaction  where  there  were  enormous  interest,  carrying  charges, 
going  on  all  the  time,  and  if  we  hold  the  thing  up  for  a  month  it 
costs  them  fifty  million  bucks  in  interest.   They  were  willing  to 
buy  you  off  early  for  a  lot.   It  was  a  very  useful  device.   It 
can  be  used  for  bad  purposes,  and  it  can  be  used  for  good  ones. 
We  happened  to  be  using  it  for  good  ones,  in  my  opinion. 

That  deal  was  conditioned  on  the  ICC  approving  the  merger, 
and  to  everybody's  shock  and  astonishment,  the  commission  turned 
down  the  petition  to  merge,  and  so  we  were  back  to  square  one. 
The  commission  further  ordered  Santa  Fe  Pacific  to  sell  one  of 
the  railroads  to  somebody  else.   That  went  on  for  about  a  year 
and  Santa  Fe  finally  decided  to  sell  the  Southern  Pacific  Railway 
to  Denver  and  Rio  Grande,  which  is  about  one-tenth  the  size,  and 
SP  is  now  owned  by  multi-billionaire  Phillip  Anschults  in  Denver, 
who  owned  the  Denver  and  Rio  Grande. 

So  we  went  to  Anschults  and  went  back  to  Washington  and 
talked  to  his  lawyer  and  talked  with  the  Santa  Fe  Pacific  people 
in  Chicago,  and  we  put  together  another  deal. 

Lage:     But  you  didn't  have  the  leverage  of  holding — ? 

Pesonen:   We  had  the  same  leverage  because  the  purchasing  railroad  was 

outside  the  company  we  had  been  dealing  with,  but  Santa  Fe  still 
needed  ICC  approval  for  this  sale.   So  we  resurrected  our  threat, 


283 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 


and  this  time  the  connection  was  a  little  more  remote.   Denver 
and  Rio  Grande  and  Southern  Pacific  had  to  persuade  Atchison, 
Topeka,  and  Santa  Fe  Railway  to  sell  us  Ferry  Point  because  that 
was  owned  by  the  Santa  Fe  Railway.  And  Santa  Fe  wasn't  being 
sold,  and  it  wasn't  merging,  but  it  was  part  of  the  larger 
company  that  had  a  financial  interest  in  getting  rid  of  Southern 
Pacific. 

So,  in  the  interest  of  furthering  their  need  to  divest 
Southern  Pacific  at  a  favorable  price,  we  were  able  to  put 
pressure  on  Santa  Fe  to  give  us  a  good  deal  on  Ferry  Point. 

When  I  left  the  park  district,  I  had  a  fairly  sizeable 
severance  package,  and  one  of  the  things  I  insisted  on  was  that  I 
stay  on  as  a  consultant  to  the  park  district  and  get  paid  for  it, 
to  complete  the  deal  at  Ferry  Point.   I  worked  on  that  for  the 
last  four  years. 

Oh,  it's  still  ongoing? 

We  closed  the  deal  in  December  of  1991.   The  park  district  now 
owns  that  Ferry  Point  land. 

And  did  you  get  the  other  mitigations,  the  access? 

We  got  the  other  mitigations,  too,  including  in  the  city  of 
Martinez  and  the  railroad  crossings.  They  didn't  build  the 
bridges,  but  we  have  the  easements. 

So  the  park  district  has  to  build  the  bridges. 

The  park  district  has  to  build  the  bridges  if  they  ever  want  it. 
So  far  the  economy  has  been  so  bad  there  hasn't  been  any  increase 
in  rail  traffic  on  that  line. 


But  that's  a  good  story, 
accepted? 


Now,  was  that  one  that  was  universally 


Lage: 


That  was  universally  accepted.   I  went  up  to  the  park  district 
back  in  December  when  the  board  approved  the  purchase,  and 
everybody  was  laudatory.   I  was  asked  to  give  a  little  talk  to 
the  board;  we  all  went  out  and  had  our  picture  taken  together. 
Mary  Jefferds  is  gone  by  now,  Kay  Peterson  is  gone,  Lynn  Bowers 
is  gone,  but  Harlan  was  still  there.  Harlan  and  I  were  in  the 
same  photograph  that  was  published  in  the  Log,  the  park  district 
monthly  newsletter.   Harlan  was  very  complimentary. 

Well,  that's  nice,  to  have  some  good  feeling  after  a  few  years. 
Let's  stop  here. 


284 


X   LAND  ACQUISITION  AND  PARK  PLANNING  AND  MANAGEMENT  AT  EBRPD 
[Interview  8:  May  28,  1992]  II 

Financing  Acquisitions  with  State  Grants  and  Revenue  Bonds 


Lage: 


We  had  a  few  more  topics  to  cover  on  the  East  Bay  Regional  Parks. 


Pesonen:   Yes,  there  were  a  number  of  issues  we  didn't  talk  about  last 
time. 

The  issue  of  budget  and  finance  that  comes  with  all  public 
agencies  is  always  foremost.   I  mean,  when  I  was  at  the 
Department  of  Forestry,  we  were  in  the  budget  cycle  year-round. 
To  some  extent,  the  East  Bay  Regional  Parks  District  was  the  same 
way.   The  park  district  had  an  annual  budget  approved  each 
December  for  the  next  fiscal  year  (which  was  the  calendar  year) . 
The  district  was  fairly  well  endowed  and  it  had--it  was  a 
beneficiary  of  some  property  tax  legislation  that  had  been  passed 
right  after  Prop.  13,  and  I  confess  I  don't  remember  the  details 
of  it,  but  I  remember  that  the  district  was  fairly  well-off 
financially. 

Lage:     After  Prop.  13  they  made  some  kind  of  corrective  legislation  that 
allowed  them  to  tax--? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   But  given  the  appetite  of  the  board  for  land  acquisition 
and  the  pressures  on  land  in  the  East  Bay,  that  wasn't  enough. 
The  district  was  very  successful  at  acquiring  land  with  grants 
from  the  Department  of  Parks  and  Recreation  out  of  state  park 
bond  money.  Most  of  the  state  park  bond  issues  which  had  passed 
in  prior  years  authorized  a  portion  of  those  bond  proceeds  —  in 
fact  mandated  that  a  portion  of  those  bond  proceeds—be  used  for 
regional  and  local  parks.   So  they  were  earmarked  for  that. 

Lage:     Was  there  a  lot  of  competition,  then,  for  that  money? 


285 


Pesonen:   There  was  some  competition,  but  the  East  Bay  Regional  Parks 

District  was  the  most  aggressive,  the  most  well  organized,  the 
most  politically-connected  in  Sacramento,  and  it  got  the  lion's 
share  of  those  monies.   Probably  its  biggest  competitor  was  the 
Santa  Monica  Mountains  Trust,  because  the  people  who  ran  that 
organization  also  had  a  lot  of  political  influence.   It  was  not  a 
regional  park  district,  but  it  was  an  open  space  organization. 

Lage:     Was  this  related  at  all  to  Republican/Democrat  party  politics  and 
influence? 

Pesonen:   No,  it  was  regional.   It  crossed  party  lines,  pretty  much.   Even 
a  very,  very  dyed-in-the-wool  reactionary  conservative  like  Bill 
Baker  from  Danville,  who  was  far  to  the  right  on  every  issue,  was 
helpful  to  the  park  district.  And  then  the  park  district  had  in 
its  area  a  lot  of  people  who  had  been  in  the  legislature.   There 
was  [Assemblyman  John]  Jack  Knox,  who  had  been  speaker  at  one 
point,  lived  in  Point  Richmond,  very  helpful  to  the  park  district 
even  after  he  left  the  legislature.   Senator  Nejedly,  John 
Nejedly,  was  always  willing  to  help.   The  district  had  a 
lobbyist. 

Lage:     Was  this  done  through  the  legislature  or  through  the  parks 
department? 

Pesonen:   Sometimes  it  took  legislation  to  get  some  of  this  bond  money 

transferred  over  to  the  park  district,  sometimes  it  was  earmarked 
from  the  terms  of  the  state  park  bond  measures.   There  were 
various  ways  to  do  it,  and  there  was  a  long  history  of  experience 
with  that.   The  district  had  a  full-time  development  officer 
whose  job,  in  part,  was  keeping  track  of  all  of  those  bond 
monies. 


Well,  it  still  wasn't  enough.   So  the  result  was  that  much 
of  the  tension  on  the  board  that  I  confronted  was  what  you'd 
expect  in  any  public  agency  where  the  elected  officials  have  to 
fight  over  a  dwindling  pie  with  increasing  demands.   They  were 
constantly  jockeying  back  and  forth.   It  was  very  hard  to  plan 
acquisitions  in  an  orderly  way.   Even  though  the  district  was 
well  endowed,  was  well-off  financially  compared  to  other  park 
agencies,  it  wasn't  well-off  compared  to  its  own  appetite,  the 
appetite  of  its  own  board. 

Lynn  Bowers,  who  was  probably  the  most  vocal  voice  on  the 
board  for  the  Pleasanton  Ridge  acquisition,  which  would  be  very 
expensive,  kept  talking  about  a  districtwide  bond  issue.   I  was 
skeptical  that  we  could  get  the  two-thirds  vote  in  Contra  Costa 
County.   It  had  to  be  across  the  board  in  both  counties,  and  you 
needed  66  2/3  percent,  and  that  was  very  hard  to  get. 


286 


Lage:     Did  you  need  that  in  each  county  or — ? 

Pesonen:   No,  in  the  district—within  the  district — which  encompassed 

virtually  all  of  both  counties  except  a  couple  of  eastern  parts 
of  Contra  Costa  and  one  school  district  out  there  and  a  school 
district  in  southeastern  Alameda  County,  none  of  which  were 
heavily  populated.   So  basically  the  whole  population  of  both 
counties  was  in  the  district. 

So  I  called  a  big  meeting,  I  think  it  was  in  the  spring  of 
1987,  and  brought  in  some  experts:  a  lawyer,  Steve  Meyer,  from 
the  firm  Howard,  Rice,  Nemerovski,  Canady,  Robertson,  and  Falk  in 
San  Francisco,  who  was  an  expert  on  local  government  financing. 
It  was  an  all-day  session  with  the  board.   We  made  presentations 
on  ways  in  which  the  district  could  raise  more  money. 

The  district  had  never,  to  my  knowledge,  since  its  founding 
in  1936,  I  think,  issued  any  revenue  bonds.   There  was  discussion 
of  use  of  these  various  devices  that  local  governments  frequently 
use:  Mello-Roos  bonds;  certificates  of  participation,  which  is  a 
way  of  selling  buildings  and  leasing  them  back-- 

Lage:     Like  Oakland  has  done  with  the  Oakland  Museum? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  Oakland  has  done  a  lot  of  that.   It  didn't  work  very  well  in 
Oakland's  case.   [laughter]   You  have  to  have  a  revenue-producing 
structure  to  make  it  work,  and  a  public  building  like  a  city  hall 
is  a  revenue-producing  structure  in  a  way,  in  that  the  city  pays 
its  rent. 

I  began  to  favor  revenue  bonds,  and  we  put  together  a  bond 
issue  which,  I  think,  was  $16  million,  which  was  a  lot  of  money. 
I  mean,  you  could  buy  quite  a  bit  of  land.   And  it  made  up  the 
deficit  between  the  appetite  of  the  board  for  immediate 
acquisition  and  what  was  available,  at  least  in  the  short  run. 

Lage:     Now,  can  this  be  done  without  an  election,  these  revenue  bonds? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   Revenue  bonds  can  be  issued  without  an  election.  That's 
why  we  went  that  route. 

Lage:     Now,  the  revenue  bond,  then,  is  paid  off  on  what  basis? 

Pesonen:   It's  paid  off  from  the  district's  regular  tax  revenue,  but  it 
doesn't  increase  the  tax  base  of  the  taxpayers. 


Lage: 


But  doesn't  it  obligate  the  taxpayers  down  the  line? 


287 


Pesonen:   Yes,  it  obligates  them  down  the  line,  but  it  doesn't  increase 
their  taxes.   The  district  had  a  sufficient  cash  flow  and  a 
sufficiently  sound  tax  base  that  the  underwriters  and  the  bond 
rating  companies  gave  it  a  really  high  rating. 

The  idea  was  to  buy  the  land  early,  when  the  price  was  still 
lower,  and  save  the  district  money  in  the  long  run  by  not  having 
to  buy  more  expensive  land  when  development  pressures  would  push 
the  price  up.   It  seemed  like  a  modest  amount.   It  was  still  an 
enormous  struggle  to  get  it  through  the  board.   There  was  a  lot 
of  history  in  the  district  of  not  going  into  debt  for  land 
acquisition;  a  pay-as-you-go  history. 

Dick  Trudeau  had  very  much  favored  the  pay-as-you-go  history 
and  he  had  successfully  squirrelled  away,  I  suppose,  a  reserve 
fund,  a  very  large  reserve  fund.   The  district  was  totally 
solvent. 

Lage:     So  you  had  a  good  financial  basis. 

Pesonen:   But  that  fund  was  being  depleted  pretty  fast  by  the  land 
acquisition  needs  that  the  board  saw. 

Lage:  Did  Trudeau  keep  a  ceiling  on  those  land  acquisition  needs?  Was 
he  able  to  keep  the  board  in  hand  better?  Keep  their  desires  in 
leash? 


Pesonen:   I  wasn't  there  then.   I'm  not  a  firsthand  observer  of  that.   I 

heard  later  that  part  of  the  reason  he  left  (I'm  told  it  was  not 
entirely  voluntarily  although  he  was  retirement  age)  was  that  he 
wasn't  aggressive  enough  about  land  acquisition.   But  he  left  the 
district,  when  I  took  over,  in  very  sound  financial  condition 
with  a  substantial  reserve.   What  Trudeau  had  seen  happen  and  was 
in  fact  what  was  happening  while  I  was  there  was  that  reserve,  if 
we  responded  to  the  board's  demands,  wasn't  going  to  last  very 
long. 

The  board  was  getting  divided  by  its  geographic  ambitions. 
Harlan  Kessel  would  say,  "We've  got  to  spend  more  money  in  my 
ward,"  and  Ted  Radke  would  say,  "Well,  we  spent  enough  in  your 
ward.   We  ought  to  spend  some  in  mine,"  and  that  sort  of  thing 
was  going  on.   There  wasn't  enough  to  spend,  enough  to  satisfy 
them  in  both  their  wards- -or  in  all  seven  wards  that  made  up  the 
board. 

So  we  did  get  the  bonds  issued,  and  that  was  a  breather;  it 
was  only  a  breather. 

Lage:     And  what  was  purchased  with  those? 


288 


Pesonen:   Well,  you  know  I  don't  remember  specifically,  but  that  went  into 
a  fund  and  then  each  year  the  board  would  have  a  land  session  in 
which  there  was  this  huge  laundry  list  of  potential  purchases, 
and  the  board  would  set  priorities  with  some  criteria.   The  staff 
would  make  recommendations  and  by  and  large  the  board  went  along 
with  them  because  it  was  our  job  to  know  roughly  where  the  board 
would  end  up.   They  tinkered  with  it—with  the  priorities--to 
some  extent,  but  by  and  large  it  came  out  the  way  the  staff 
recommended  it. 


It  was  a  big  event  each  year,  the  land  session.   Since  it 
was  concerned  with  purchasing  property,  under  the  Brown  Act  it 
could  be  a  closed  session,  so  the  public  was  not  invited  to 
those;  they  were  not  permitted  into  those  meetings. 

Lage:     So  the  public  didn't  know  the  priorities? 

Pesonen:   Yes.   And  there  were  some  good  reasons  for  it.   If  a  developer 
out  there  knew  that  the  board  had  put  a  very  high  priority  on 
purchasing  his  property,  it  would  give  him  leverage  in 
negotiations  over  the  price. 

That  land  session  was  one  of  the  big  events  with  the  board 
each  year,  and  the  board  came  to  it  like  jackals  coming  to  the 
kill.   This  was  what  they  really  loved,  was  buying  land,  and  they 
loved  that  session.   It  was  a  real  high  for  them.   It  gave 
reality  to  these  acquisitions. 

Lage:     Since  it  was  a  closed  session,  it  sounds  as  if  the  public 

pressure  aspect  is  removed  a  bit.  Or  did  that  come  in  in  some 
other  way? 

Pesonen:   Public  pressure  on  that  board  never  depended  on  attendance  at 

these  board  meetings.   That  was  outside  the  formal  proceedings  in 
which  business  was  conducted.   So  those  board  members  came  into 
those  land  sessions  knowing  what  their  constituents  wanted,  and 
what  they  wanted,  and  what  they  wanted  to  be  able  to  tell  their 
constituents  they'd  gotten.   It  didn't  matter  whether  it  was  a 
closed  session  or  not,  the  pressures  were  still  there. 

That  was  the  first  major  bond  issuance  by  the  district  since 
it  had  been  founded,  and  it  was  a  lot  of  work  getting  it 
approved;  getting  the  board  persuaded  to  do  it  and  then 
developing  the  kind  of  information  that  the  bond  rating  agencies 
wanted. 


289 


The  Regional  Park  District  and  the  Oakland  Zoo 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Part  of  the  pressure  that  was  on  the  district  was  from  the 
Oakland  Zoo.   The  Oakland  Zoo  had  fallen  into  poor  condition.   In 
fact,  it  had  been  decertified--!  don't  know  the  exact 
terminology,  but  the  American  Zoological  Society  or  whatever 
organization  it  is  that  reviews  zoos  and  certifies  them  as  good 
or  bad,  had  threatened  to  remove  the  approval  of  the  Oakland  Zoo 
because  the  cages  or  the  animal  compounds  were  in  poor  condition, 
they  were  old-fashioned,  they  were  unhealthy.   The  zoo  society 
had  hired  Joel  Parrott  when  the  former  chief  director  had 
retired.   Parrott  had  been  the  veterinarian  there.   He  was  a  very 
dynamic  person.   He  loved  the  animals,  and  he  was  very  aggressive 
about  going  out  and  raising  money  for  the  zoo,  to  rebuild  it. 
He's  come  a  long  way.   He's  done  a  fine  job  with  that  zoo. 

Well,  Kathy  Neal,  who  was  Elihu  Harris's  wife,  was  on  the 
Oakland  Zoo  board.  I'm  not  sure  that's  the  exact  title  of  the 
organization,  but  it's  a  quasi-public  body. 


Now,  Mott  was  connected  with  that,  too,  wasn't  he? 
resigned  by  this  time? 


Or  had  he 


He  had  resigned  by  this  time.   The  zoo  had  fallen  into  poor  shape 
under  Mott's  tenure,  but  I  don't  know  what  the  reasons  were.   He 
may  not  have  had  much  choice  given  the  finances  that  he  faced. 

So  [Assemblyman,  now  Oakland  Mayor]  Elihu  Harris  began  to 
look  at  the  bounty  enjoyed  by  the  park  district  as  a  place  to 
subsidize  the  zoo.   That  caused  consternation  on  the  board. 

Was  all  of  the  board  opposed  to  that? 

Pretty  much.   Mary  Jefferds  was  probably  the  most  strongly 
opposed  to  it.   Harlan  Kessel  had  problems  with  it  because  it  was 
Oakland,  and  that's  in  his  ward.   He  counted  on  Elihu  Harris  for 
support,  and  so  he  was  ambivalent.   He  was  looking  for  some  way 
out,  to  compromise  his  way  out  of  that. 

That  threat  was  renewed  each  year.   Finally,  I  don't 
remember  all  of  the  details,  but  we  peeled  some  money  off --not  a 
whole  lot--for  the  zoo  one  year,  I  think  in  '86.   But  the  problem 
didn't  go  away.   It  was  going  to  come  back  the  next  budget  year 
and  the  next  budget  year.   So  that  was  a  constant  bur  under  my 
saddle;  it  was  an  irritant.   I  wasn't  particularly  sympathetic  to 
the  zoo,  either.   I  didn't  think  that  it  was  appropriate  for  the 
park  district  money  to  go  to  that  when  the  demands  for  open  space 
were  so  great.   But  I  could  have  been  wrong. 


290 


Lage:     Was  that  something  you  had  to  take  an  active  role  in,  working 
with--? 

Pesonen:   I  had  to  mediate  between  the  board.   I  had  to  find  some 

politically  acceptable  way  to  solve  that  problem  that  the  board 
would  accept.   That  was  always  my  goal  in  that  area.   1  didn't 
see  my  goal  as  helping  the  zoo  out  any  more  than  necessary. 
While  I  had  great  admiration  for  Joel  Parrott  and  what  he  was 
doing,  my  perception  of  what  parks  were  about  didn't  include  the 
zoo.   But  my  value  judgments  were  not  that  important.   It  was  the 
politics  that  were  more  important,  and  maybe  my  value  judgments 
weren't  thought  through  very  well. 

1  believed  in  open  space.   I  wanted  to  get  people  into  open 
space,  not  into  zoos;  not  to  see  caged  animals  in  an  artificial 
environment.   There  is  certainly  a  value  to  that,  but  it  just 
wasn't  what  I  thought  parks  were  about.   I'm  sure  there  are  many 
views  on  that  that  can  be  well  supported  by  good  arguments,  but 
that  was  my  bias,  anyway. 


Ardenwood  Regional  Park 


Lage:     What  was  your  involvement  with  Ardenwood  Park  in  Fremont? 

Pesonen:   The  Ardenwood  acquisition  and  development  had  happened  before  I 
came  to  the  park  district,  and  there  was  an  Ardenwood  advisory 
committee  set  up,  I  think  as  part  of  a  compromise  out  of  some 
controversy  growing  out  of  the  establishment  of  Ardenwood 
[encompassing  an  historic  house  and  small  working  historic 
farm].1 

Lage:     Is  that  unusual,  for  the  particular  park  to  have  an  advisory 
committee? 

Pesonen:   That  was  unusual.   I  think  Ardenwood  was  the  only  one  that  did. 
Ardenwood  was  resented,  to  some  extent,  because  it  was  very 
expensive.   It  was  expensive  to  operate.   It  was  an  attempt  to 
recreate  an  old  farm.   You  needed  all  of  the  machinery,  and  you 
had  aesthetics  to  maintain;  there  were  problems  with  the 
eucalyptus  trees  getting  too  old  and  the  deer  population  over- 


'For  further  information  on  the  history  of  Ardenwood  Regional  Park, 
see  Patterson  Family  and  Ranch:  Southern  Alameda  County  In  Transition,  an 
oral  history  project  of  the  Regional  Oral  History  Office,  1988. 


291 


populating.   It  didn't  grow  vegetables  very  well;  the  water  was 
contaminated. 

It  was  a  lovely  place,  but-- 
Lage:     And  it's  expensive  to  maintain  those  old  houses. 

Pesonen:  And  it  took  a  lot  of  staff,  and  that  was  expensive.  So  there  was 
some  resentment  of  Ardenwood  because  it  was  sucking  more  than  its 
share  of  district  funds. 

Lage:     Was  this  resentment  from  the  board  or  the  staff? 

Pesonen:   On  the  board.   Harlan  didn't  particularly  like  Ardenwood,  but  he 
didn't  dare  say  so.  And  I  don't  think  Mary  Jefferds  liked 
Ardenwood  very  well  either. 

Lage:     Well,  it  wasn't  an  open  space  kind  of  thing  either. 

Pesonen:   No,  it  wasn't.   And  that  was  the  other  reason  they  didn't 

particularly  like  it.  But  the  political  pressure,  apparently, 
had  been  very  great.  There  had  been  a  threat  from  the  Fremont 
area  to  pull  out  of  the  park  district  altogether. 

Lage:     They  have  Coyote  Hills,  near  Ardenwood. 

Pesonen:   They  have  Coyote  Hills.   Coyote  Hills  is  a  very  interesting  place 
for  wildlife  and  for  the  study  of  wildlife  and  wetlands,  but  it 
doesn't  get  a  lot  of  use.   It  doesn't  have  the  political  support 
that  an  Ardenwood  does.   Ardenwoods  are  like  the  T.V.  world. 
It's  a  fantastical  Victorian  house.   People  hold  weddings  there. 
It's  got  a  lot  of  middle  class  appeal,  and  it  was  about  to  be 
turned  into  a  housing  development  if  the  park  district  didn't  buy 
it.   So  I  understand,  at  any  rate.   That  was  before  I  had  gotten 
there,  and  I  hadn't  known  much  about  Ardenwood  before  I  became 
general  manager.   I  sure  had  to  learn  about  it  when  I  was. 

So  Ardenwood  was  not  liked  by  some  of  the  board  members,  but 
there  wasn't  anything  they  could  do  about  it.   The  circumstances 
of  its  origin  and  creation  were  too  scary  to  try  to  take  on 
Ardenwood.   Every  once  in  a  while,  Harlan  would  say  something 
about,  "We  ought  to  get  rid  of  Ardenwood,"  and  then  he'd  back  off 
from  it. 

We  had  a  lot  of  these  little  brush  fires  going  all  of  the 
time  that  never  went  away. 

Lage:     Were  you  asked  to  keep  the  budget  down  on  Ardenwood? 


292 


Pesonen:  No.  The  budget  on  Ardenwood  was  set;  it's  fixed.  I  mean,  it  has 
a  little  annual  increase,  but  it  was  already  expensive  when  I  got 
there.  It  was  an  operating  budget. 

Lage:     I  did  an  oral  history  project  on  Ardenwood.  Not  just  on 

Ardenwood,  but  the  whole  development  down  there- -the  Patterson 
properties.   I  have  a  recollection  of  something  about  the  manager 
of  Ardenwood;  some  controversy  of  his  being  transferred. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  it  was  Dave  Luten.   He  has  since  had  a  very  serious  accident 
and  sustained  some  brain  damage.   He  lived  up  on  Mission  Peak;  he 
had  a  house  up  on  Mission  Peak.   His  wife  and  he  had  two  kids. 
He  didn't  come  out  of  a  traditional  park  background.  He  was  a 
high-energy  organizer  and  a  fixer-upper,  and  he  was  a  person  who 
didn't  have  a  lot  of  patience  with  going  through  the  normal 
procedures.   He  would  barter  with  somebody  for  fenceposts  or  feed 
for  the  animals,  completely  outside  the  budget;  completely 
outside  normal  procedures. 

Lage:     Sounds  kind  of  refreshing. 

Pesonen:   It  was  kind  of  refreshing.   But  every  once  in  a  while  he  went  a 
little  far.   He  also  had  the  skill  of  maintaining  his  political 
connections.   He  had  his  own  political  base,  and  people  liked  him 
and  they  liked  his  iconoclastic  freshness  and  his  can-do  way  of 
operating  the  park. 

He  thought  there  was  a  scandal  involving  the  park  down 
there.   He  became  convinced  that  there  was  some  illegality  going 
on.   I  should  remember,  but  I  remember  the  chronic  struggle  with 
him  over  that  issue  because  I  couldn't  find  any  evidence  of  what 
he  was  talking  about .   He  thought  that  Lynn  Bowers  was  on  the  • 
take  from  some  developer  down  there,  and  he  was  calling  the 
newspapers  about  it.   The  evidence  didn't  seem  to  materialize. 
The  accusations  got  out  there,  but  then  the  evidence  didn't  seem 
to  materialize. 

I  wouldn't  put  it  past  Bowers.   I  didn't  have  a  lot  of 
respect  for  Bowers'  integrity,  but  I  didn't  see  any  evidence  that 
Luten  had  anything  but  plain  old  suspicions  about  it.   He  later 
was  transferred  to  another  job  in  the  park  district,  finally 
and-- 

Lage:     Was  he  transferred  as  a  result  of  this? 

Pesonen:   It  was  an  outgrowth  of  a  number  of  things.   He  offended  some 

people  over  time,  and  he  had  some  staff  problems.   I'm  sorry,  I 
just  don't  remember  the  details. 


293 


Then,  sometime  after  that,  he  was  in  a  very  serious  bicycle 
accident.   He  was  hit  on  his  bicycle  riding  down  the  hill  from 
Mission  Peak  by  a  passing  car.   I  don't  know  what's  happened  to 
him  since.   He's  still  alive,  but  I  think  he's  just  permanently 
very  seriously  disabled. 


Relations  with  Park  Field  Staff  and  Unions 


Lage:     Now,  would  you  get  out  to  the  parks  on  a  regular  basis? 

Pesonen:   I  tried  to  go  out  to  the  parks  a  lot.   I  made  a  special  point  of 
going  to  field  staff  meetings.   They  had  a  regular  meeting  once  a 
month  or  once  every  two  months,  and  I  would  always  go.   Trudeau 
had  never  gone  to  those  meetings,  and  many  of  the  park  district 
staff  said  they  had  never  met  Trudeau;  they'd  never  seen  him  in 
the  park. 

Lage:     Field  staff  meetings  were  all  in  the  parks? 

Pesonen:   In  all  of  the  parks.   He  did  not  go  out  into  the  parks.   I  loved 
to  go  out  into  the  parks;   I  got  out  as  much  as  I  could.   There 
were  meetings  in  the  park,  field  staff  gatherings  of  one  kind  or 
another. 

Lage:     Did  that  make  a  difference,  do  you  think? 

Pesonen:   I  think  it  made  a  difference  in  field  staff  morale.  There's 
always  a  dichotomy  between  the  field  staff  and  headquarters 
staff.   Headquarters  is  management.   I  mean,  it's  never  going  to 
go  away.   No  matter  how  much  time  you  spend  in  the  parks,  how 
much  time  management  goes  out  with  a  hands-on  approach,  that 
dichotomy  is  never  going  to  go  away. 

And  then  the  field  staff  were  unionized  and  their  contract 
came  up  every  year  or  two  years,  and  we  always  had  a  struggle, 
and  they  always  had  a  demonstration  outside  the  board  meeting 
when  they  didn't  think  they  got  a  good  enough  offer  from 
management . 

There  had  been  a  strike  under  Trudeau 's  tenure,  a  very 
bitter  strike,  and  there  were  still  little  echoes  of  that  when  I 
got  there. 

Lage:     Did  you  have  to  negotiate  that  personally,  or  did  you  have--? 


294 


Pesonen:   Bob  Owen  did  most  of  the  negotiating.   We'd  lay  out  what  our 

position  was  going  to  be,  and  he  did  the  hands-on  negotiation, 
along  with  our  attorney  whose  name  was  Joe  Wiley.   Wiley  had  a 
firm  down  in  Emeryville,  a  big  management-oriented  employment  law 
firm. 

Wiley  was  good,  and  Owen  was  good. 
Lage:     Did  the  board  get  involved  in  that  heavily? 

Pesonen:   The  board  would  only  get  involved  at  the  end  when  it  came  time 
for  ratification  of  the  contract  and  the  union  was  holding  out 
for  more.   There  would  be  a  big  meeting,  a  board  meeting,  and  the 
union  would  pack  the  board  meeting.   The  board  would  throw  them  a 
carrot  of  some  kind,  and  we  would  get  a  contract  and  get  on  with 
business.   There  were  no  strikes  while  I  was  there.   But  that 
pattern  repeated  itself,  and  everybody  knew  the  dance, 
[laughter] 

Lage :     The  union  and  you? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  the  union  song  was  the  same  pretty  much.   It  was  a  regular 
ritual. 

There  were  two  unions.   There  was  the  union  of  the  police 
officers  and  the  union  of  the  rest  of  the  field  staff.   Their 
contracts  came  up  at  different  times,  and  they  tended  to  play  one 
off  against  the  other  sometimes,  on  various  kinds  of  benefits. 

Lage:     You  mean  they  didn't  work  together? 

Pesonen:   No,  they  didn't  openly  work  together.   Each  would  leverage  its- 
position  off  what  the  other  had  obtained  the  year  before.   1 
think  they  came  up  in  alternate  years.  And  the  length  of  the 
contract  was  sometimes  an  issue.   There  was  an  effort  by  the 
board,  I  think,  to  have  the  contract  talks  renew  at  the  same 
time.   The  unions  didn't  like  that.   I  think  they  saw  it  as 
diminishing  their  bargaining  leverage. 


Quiet  Victories  in  Chabot  and  Sunol  Parks 


Pesonen:   There  were  a  couple  of  things  that  I  did  which  were  not  initiated 
by  the  board  but  which  were  supported  by  the  board,  that  I  take 
as  my  quiet  little  victories.   One  was  getting  the  motorcycles 
out  of  Chabot  park.   For  years  and  years  I  had  seen  those  off- 
road  motorcycles  just  tearing  that  hillside  up,  and  I  was  told 


295 


that  it  was  impossible  to  stop  that;  that  the  motorcycle  lobby 
would  pack  the  board  room  and  cause  a  lot  of  trouble  and  the 
board  would  back  down.   Apparently  that  had  happened  in  the  past. 

So  I  set  out  on  a  strategy  to  get  the  motorcycles  out  of 
there,  and  it  took  about  a  year  and  a  half. 

t* 

Pesonen:   The  motorcycling  site  was  along  Redwood  Road  in  Chabot  Park, 

overlooking  Upper  San  Leandro  Reservoir.   The  riding  had  started 
spontaneously  twenty-five  or  thirty  years  ago,  and  by  the  time  I 
got  in  as  general  manager,  there  was  a  lot  of  activity.   Every 
weekend  there  would  be  motorcycles  all  over  there. 

Lage:     That  must  have  been  deafening. 

Pesonen:   The  roar  and  buzz  and  whine  of  those  things-- 

Lage :     The  neighbors  must  have  objected. 

Pesonen:   Well,  there  weren't  any  neighbors.   It's  out  in  the  middle  of  the 
park,  and  it's  on  the  top  of  the  ridge  looking  down  over  the 
reservoir.   So  I  involved  Jerry  Gilbert,  who  was  the  general 
manager  of  the  East  Bay  Municipal  Utilities  District.   In  fact,  I 
drafted  the  letter  which  he  then  sent  to  me  formally  telling  me 
that  we  ought  to  get  the  motorcycles  out  of  there  because  it  was 
causing  erosion  which  was  polluting  the  water  supply. 

Lage:     Had  he  noticed  that  before  you  drafted-- 

Pesonen:   He  noticed,  but  he  hadn't  really  done  anything  about  it.   But  he 
was  perfectly  happy  to  help  me.   He  didn't  like  the  motorcycles 
up  there  either.   So  I  drafted  this  very  strong  letter  from  the 
water  district  to  the  park  district  saying,  "Get  the  motorcycles 
out  of  your  park  because  it's  hurting  our  water  system,"  and  he 
was  glad  to  put  it  on  his  letterhead  and  send  it  to  me.   Then  I 
could  wave  it  around  at  the  board  and  wave  it  at  the  motorcycle 
people. 

And  I  did  some  other  things.   We  got  some  vague  promises 
that  there  was  an  alternative  site  that  had  already  been  chewed 
up  by  quarrying  out  in  eastern  Contra  Costa  County,  that  might  be 
suitable  and  the  park  district  would--.   We  had  a  grant—we  had 
some  money  from  some  kind  of  a  grant  out  of  one  of  these  park 
bond  measures  —  to  develop  an  alternative  site.   We  never  did  find 
an  alternative  site.   I  don't  think  the  money  ever  got  spent, 
actually. 


296 


Lage:     How  did  you  control  the  motorcyclists? 

Pesonen:   Well,  we  used-- 

Lage:     You  almost  have  to  get  their  agreement. 

Pesonen:   Well,  there  is  a  motorcycle  park  way  out  there  someplace,  but 

this  was  close  in.   It  was  just  around  the  corner  from  Oakland, 
and  it  was  a  lovely  site,  and  it  was  scenic. 

So  we  finally  got  them  out  of  there.   Then  there  was  a  major 
rehabilitation  effort:  hydroseeding,  laying  mesh  over  the 
hillside,  which  was  terribly  scarred  and  still  looks  scarred  if 
you  go  up  there.   As  a  matter  of  fact  I  was  up  there  last 
weekend.   It  looks  a  lot  better  than  it  did  five  or  six  years 
ago,  and  it's  coming  back  slowly. 

Lage:     Did  you  have  to  fence  it  or  did  you  get  the  motorcyclists  to 
agree  to  this? 

Pesonen:  No,  it  had  to  be  fenced.  We  got  some  money  from  that  source  of 
funds.  I  just  don't  remember  the  details  of  that.  I  never  was 
very  good  at  figuring  out  those  things.  I  left  that  up  to  Owen 
and  other  people. 

Lage:     You  mean  the  grant  money? 

Pesonen:   The  grant  money  that  was  spent  on  that  project  and  which  financed 
some  of  the  rehabilitation.   It's  a  good  job.   It's  coming  back, 
and  it's  quiet  up  there.   It's  like  a  park  now.   And  it's  not 
silting  up  the  reservoir,  which  is  still  not  open  to  the  public. 

Lage:     That's  one  of  the  few  that's  not  open  to  the  public? 

Pesonen:  That's  one  of  the  few.  Boy,  I'd  love  to  get  into  that,  because 
that's  got  big  rainbow  trout  in  it. 

The  other  little  triumph  was  the  opening  up  of  Sunol  Park. 
Lage:     That  had  not  been  opened  up? 

Pesonen:   It  had  been  opened  once  some  time  ago,  and  then  the  San  Francisco 
Water  Department  hated  the  idea  of  the  public  running  around  on 
its  land,  and  the  park  district  and  the  San  Francisco  Water 
Department  land  intermingled  out  there.   The  main  road  that  goes 
up  Alameda  Creek  and  goes  way  back  to  Ohlone  wilderness,  cuts 
across  San  Francisco  Water  Department  land,  then  into  park 
district  land,  then  into  water  department  land,  then  into  private 


297 

ranch,  then  back  into  park  district  land.   There  is  the  Grimmer 
ranch  back  there. 

For  many  years,  since  the  Hetch  Hetchy  system  was  built,  San 
Francisco  had  kept  the  public  out  of  that  land.   The  only  people 
that  were  let  in  were  the  people  that  had  in-holding  ranches  back 
there  who  used  that  road.   If  you  go  back  there  now,  there  are 
seven  or  eight  locks  on  the  gate.   So  if  you  went  about  a  quarter 
of  a  mile  from  the  bridge  out  of  Sunol  Park,  you  came  up  against 
a  big  fence  which  said  "San  Francisco  Water  Department—Keep 
Out."   It  was  horrible.   Here  you  were  in  a  big  meadow  with  a 
creek  running  right  down  alongside  of  you  and  this  huge  cyclone 
fence  telling  the  public  to  stay  out  of  what  looked  like  complete 
wilderness,  looked  like  an  extension  of  the  park.   In  order  to 
get  into  that  country,  you  had  to  veer  way  up  the  hillside. 

Lage:     And  you  had  to  know  that  there  was  a  way  around? 

Pesonen:   You  had  to  know  that  there  was  a  way  around,  and  it  essentially 
kept  families,  children,  and  a  lot  of  people  out  of  a  very 
beautiful  part  of  the  country.   There  is  a  little  place  up  there 
called  "Little  Yosemite,"  which  has  huge  boulders  and  rocks 
strewn  down  into  the  creek  bed. 

But  the  San  Francisco  Water  Department  was  adamant  that  if 
you  let  any  people  in  there,  they  would  go  up  the  little  road 
that  went  to  the  southwest  up  out  of  the  Alameda  Creek  Canyon  to 
Calaveras  Reservoir,  which  is  a  major  part  of  the  San  Francisco 
Hetch  Hetchy  distribution  system.   It's  been  a  kind  of  a  private 
little  jewel  for  staff  and  guests  of  the  San  Francisco  Water 
Department  for  a  long  time.   I've  heard  rumors  of  huge  rainbow 
trout  in  that  lake,  and  nobody  goes  in  there  without  permission. 
It's  heavily  patrolled. 

So  there  was  a  fear  on  the  part  of  the  San  Francisco  Water 
Department  old-time  staff  that  somebody  would  come  up  and  damage 
or  sabotage  their  filtration  system—they  had  a  chlorine 
treatment  plant  up  there- -that  they  would  blow  up  the  chlorine 
treatment  plant  and  a  cloud  of  green  gas  would  come  down  the 
hillside  and  kill  all  of  the  people  in  the  park.   They  had  all 
kinds  of  horror  stories  that  would  happen  if  we  let  anybody  in 
there. 

Well,  Rudy  Nothenberg,  who  was  the  financial  officer  for  the 
mayor,  or  for  the  city,  had  been  a  good  friend  of  Bob  Connelly's 
in  Sacramento  when  they  both  worked  in  the  legislature.   So  Bob 
and  I  put  it  together.  We  brought  Rudy  and  some  of  the  water 
department  staff  out  there  in  the  park  district  helicopter  and 
put  on  a  nice  little  picnic  thing  with  lunch  out  at  Ohlone  Park 


298 


and  showed  them  this  excrescence  of  a  fence  on  our  landscape  and 
got  a  promise  that  they  really  would  use  their  influence  to  try 
to  get  it  solved. 

Lage:     Which  city  was  Rudy  with? 

Pesonen:   San  Francisco.   You  know,  out  in  Sunol  there's  the  water  temple, 
and  that  whole  area  is-- 

Lage:     Yes,  it's  incongruous  when  you  see  all  that  San  Francisco  stuff 
out  there. 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  was  where  they  brought  water  down  from  Hetch  Hetchy  and 
then  shipped  it  under  the  bay  over  to  Crystal  Springs  and  that 
reservoir  system  into  the  city. 

Lage:     And  they  keep  Crystal  Springs  pretty  well  sealed  off,  too. 
Pesonen:   Yes.   There's  a  lot  of  pressure  to  open  that  up,  too. 

So  we  promised  that  we  would  undertake  the  expense  of  a  new 
fencing  system  to  discourage  people  from  going  up  to  Calaveras 
Reservoir  if  we  could  open  this  property  up.   It  wasn't  until 
late  1987,  I  think,  that  we  did  finally  get  this.   It  took  two 
years  of  steady  effort,  but  the  fence  is  down  now  and  you  can 
walk  all  the  way  back  into  Sunol  and  Ohlone  Parks . 

Lage:     I  think  Sunol  is  a  great  park. 

Pesonen:   Oh,  it's  a  wonderful  park.   You  still  can't  drive  back  there, 

which  is  appropriate,  but  now  you  can  go  back  there  on  weekends 
and  there's  people  pushing  strollers  and  bicycles  and  there's  all 
kinds  of  people  back  there.   That  was--.   Lynn  Bowers,  of  course, 
took  credit  for  that.   We  had  a  celebration  out  there,  and  Lynn 
gave  a  speech.   That  was  fine,  but  I  did  that.   I  was  real  clear 
that  I  was  going  to  open  that  up. 

What  it  did  was  to  make  an  enormous  amount  of  open  space 
available  to  people  without  any  more  significant  expenditure 
except  the  cost  of  this  expensive  fencing.   It  was  a  pretty 
elaborate  fence:  it  had  to  go  up  the  hillside  and  over  the  rocks 
and  all.   The  city  threw  up  every  roadblock.   They  didn't  like 
the  fence;  complained  it  wasn't  secure  enough.   By  the  city  I 
mean  the  real  old  guard  in  the  city's  Public  Utilities  Commission 
and  the  water  department. 

Lage:     When  East  Bay  MUD  has  opened  up  so  many  of  their  reservoirs,  how 
does  San  Francisco  continue  these  arguments? 


299 


Pesonen:  Well,  it  embarrasses  San  Francisco. 

Lage:     Right  across  the  bay  they  have  Lafayette  Reservoir  and  San  Pablo 
Reservoir  open. 

Pesonen:   Exactly.    It's  a  different  political  world.   East  Bay  MUD  has  an 
elected  board;  San  Francisco  Water  Department  has  an  appointed 
Public  Utilities  Commission,  appointed  by  the  mayor.   It's 
insulated.   And  the  Public  Utilities  Commission  has  the  MUNI,  has 
the  water  system,  two  or  three  other  activities.   The  water 
department  was  a  closed  little  world,  and  they  were  very  skilled 
at  coming  up  with  all  kinds  of  arguments  for  why  nothing  should 
change . 

Lage:  Well,  that  was  a  good  accomplishment.  Can  you  tell  me  anything 
about  Soraerville,  the  old  coal  mining  area  that  was  part  of  one 
of  the  parks? 

Pesonen:   That's  in  Black  Diamond  Mines  Regional  Park. 

Lage:     Yes,  Black  Diamond.   Didn't  the  park  have  some  connection  with 
Somerville? 


Pesonen:   Yes,  there  was  an  abandoned  Welsh  mining  town  out  there  called 

Somerville  right  in  the  park.   I  didn't  have  too  much  to  do  with 
that.   It  seemed  to  be  run  well,  and  it  had  a  manager  of  the  mine 
part  who  was  very  effective  at  getting  money,  and  he  was  very 
skilled  at  mine  history  and  mine  design;  he  understood  all  of 
that,  mine  safety.   That  part  ran  itself  well. 

For  the  money,  the  attempt  to  reconstruct  a  little  makeshift 
replica  of  a  village  there  at  the  park  entrance  never  really  got 
very  far  as  long  as  I  was  general  manager,  but  that  was  because 
of  money.   It  was  a  catch-as-catch-can  project,  collecting  old 
buildings  out  of  Antioch  and  Pittsburg  that  had  been  historic 
buildings  that  were  going  to  be  torn  down  and  get  them  moved  up 
there.   It  wasn't  very  well  planned  but  that's  just  because  it 
was  the  nature  of  the  resources  that  were  available. 

I  don't  remember  any  particular  issues  about  Black  Diamond 
Mines . 

Lage:     Did  these  parks  have  any  separate  financial  help  from  local 
citizens? 

Pesonen:   Some  of  them  did.   Black  Diamond  Mines  had  some  local  support. 
It  was  a  historic  mine,  so  you  could  get  money  from  the  federal 
government  for  historic  projects  that  you  couldn't  get  for  other 
things.   Sometimes  you  need  a  little  citizens'  advisory  committee 


300 


to  kind  of  oversee  that  or  meet  some  qualification  in  the  federal 
application  process. 


Reorganizing  the  Interpretive  Program 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


I  had  a  note  here  to  ask  you  about  interpretive  programs, 
that  an  area  where  you  made  any  changes? 


Was 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 
Pesonen: 

Lage: 


In  the  reorganization,  the  interpretive  programs  were  brought 
under  the  management  of  the  interpretive  parks.   I  think  I 
mentioned  this  in  our  last  interview—the  major  part  of  the 
reorganization  that  I  undertook  was  to  change  the  reporting 
structure  for  all  of  the  field  parks.   Before  that  it  had  been  on 
a  geographic  basis.   You  had  southern  Alameda;  you  had  Contra 
Costa,   shoreline  and  inland  Contra  Costa;  it  was  broken  up 
geographically . 

I  thought  it  made  more  sense  and  would  be  more  efficient  and 
lead  to  better  interpretive  programs  if  the  parks  were  classified 
by  the  nature  of  the  park.   Shorelines  and  lakes,  which  had  water 
issues  and  water  contact  questions,  fishing,  used  different  kinds 
of  equipment  and  called  for  different  expertise  on  the  part  of 
the  staff.  The  open  space  parks,  which  had  in  common  grazing 
issues,  for  example,  management  of  their  grazing  program.   And 
the  interpretive  parks.   I  reorganized  the  system  along  those 
lines.   One  of  the  purposes  was  to  increase  the  emphasis  on 
professionalism  in  the  interpretive  programs,  which  were  kind  of 
scattered  and  unconnected.   The  interpretive  staff  talked  to  each 
other  and  had  a  manager,  but  they  also  had  another  manager,  who 
was  their  geographic  manager.   So  I  tried  to  consolidate  that, 
giving  more  coherence  to  their  direction  and  planning.   To  some 
extent  that  happened.   It  didn't  happen  overnight. 

Were  you  happy  with  the  interpretive  efforts? 

Well,  some  of  it  is  personal.   I  thought  the  interpretive  efforts 
were  not  very  aggressively  promoted.  They  tended  to  involve  the 
same  people  over  and  over  again. 

You  mean  the  same  clientele? 

Yes.   The  same  clientele  was  part  of  it,  and  part  of  it  was--I 
can't  think  of  the  word  I  want  to  say  is  keetchy.   [laughter) 

How  do  you  spell  that? 


301 


Pesonen:   I  don't  know  how  to  spell  it. 
cute. 


It  was  just  a  little  bit  too 


Lage:     Puppet  shows? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  that  kind  of  thing.   I  didn't  sense  a  lot  of  depth  in  the 
interpretive  program.   That  may  be  unfair.   I  don't  want  to  be 
unfair  to  that  staff.   Certainly  Ron  Russo,  who  took  over  in 
charge  of  the  interpretive  program,  was  very  knowledgeable  about 
interpretive  programs  generally,  and  he  had  some  staff  who  were. 

Lage:     Was  he  somebody  you  got  from  outside? 

Pesonen:   No,  he  was  there  already,  and  he  had  been  high  up  in  the 

interpretive  program.   He  just  took  on  a  different  title  in  the 
reorganization,  somewhat  more  administrative  responsibility.   I 
thought  the  interpretive  program  was  central  to  what  the  parks 
were  about.   It  never  seemed  to  get  anywhere.   I  think  part  of 
that  was  the  nature  of  those  parks.   It's  amazing  how  few  people 
in  the  East  Bay  still  really  understand  that  park  system.   It's 
not  aggressively  promoted  in  the  way  the  one  around  Minneapolis 
is.   It's  out  back  there  some  place.   There's  Tilden  Park  for 
people  who  live  in  Berkeley,  which  is  a  unique  park  all  to 
itself. 

Lage:     It  has  everything. 

Pesonen:   Yes,  it  has  everything.   That  was  the  original  park. 

That  park  system  is  a  huge  patchwork  of  wonderful  stuff  and 
if  there  is  a  coherent  idea  about  it,  I  never  figured  out  what  it 
was.   It's  a  lot  of  things  to  a  lot  of  different  people.   It's  a 
place  for  picnics  on  weekends  for  a  lot  of  people  in  southern 
Alameda.   Gar in  Park  is  like  that,  although  there  is  a  lot  more 
of  Garin  Park  that  I  think  people  don't  know  about. 

Lage:     Is  there  a  historical  element  there  in  Garin  Park? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  there's  an  old  ranch.   Garin' s  interpretive  claim  to  fame  is 
its  apple  orchard.   There  are  a  lot  of  different  varieties  of 
apples  that  were  planted  historically,  some  of  them  by  the 
original  homesteader  out  there. 

I'm  puzzled  about  that  park  district.   I  never  got  a 
coherent  idea  of  what  it  was  about.   It  was  heavily  used  parks  in 
some  places;  it  was  an  attempt  to  fend  off  development  of 
wetlands  in  other  places;  it  was  a  trail  system  in  other  places; 
it  was  an  open  space  wilderness  system  in  other  places;  it  was 
historic  museums  in  other  ways.   It  was  a  lot  of  different 


302 


things,  and  getting  a  coherent  definition  of  it  in  my  own  mind 
never  worked.   I  don't  know.   Maybe  it's  not  possible.   Maybe 
it's  just  the  nature  of  the  beast. 


Lack  of  Support  from  the  Board  for  Promoting  the  Parks 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 
Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Did  the  parks  newsletter  start  under  your  tenure? 
The  Log? 
The  Log. 

Well,  the  Log  was  a  colorless  little  publication,  and  all  of  the 
brochures  for  all  of  the  parks  were  out  of  date  or  smudgy  little 
xerox  foldover  things.  There  was  abysmal  promotion  of  the  park 
district.   I  concluded  that  that's  the  way  a  lot  of  the  board 
members  wanted  it .   I  thought  there  was  a  certain  amount  of 
elitism  there.   They  didn't  want  a  lot  of  people  in  the  park. 

Did  you  conclude  that  by  things  that  they  said? 

I  concluded  it  by  the  policies  they  favored.   They  didn't  want 
money  spent  on  promotion.   I  had  to  fight  for  the  money  to 
promote  the  parks.   I  hired  Janet  Cobb  as  the  assistant  general 
manager  for  development  and  public  relations,  and  she  was 
dynamite.   She  came  with  a  graphics  design  background,  and  she 
agreed  with  me  that  the  promotional  materials  for  the  park 
district  were  abysmal. 

They  were  years  behind  the  times. 

Yes,  so  she  set  out  to  change  that.   And  the  board  fought  the 
budget  for  that  and  complained  bitterly  about  it.   They  never 
said  anything  nice  about  it,  never  complemented  her  staff  on 
their  wonderful  job  of  completely  changing  the  publications 
program  of  the  parks.   They  were  much  more  useful  to  people.   She 
started  bringing  in  groups  of  disabled  children  for  fishing 
derbies  at  Temescal;  all  kinds  of  things  she  started  to  do  to  get 
people  into  the  parks .   Every  one  of  them  was  met  with  a  sour 
response  by  the  board.   I  thought  there  was  a  certain  amount  of 
misanthropism  on  the  part  of  that  board.   They  wanted  open  space 


Lage: 


for  themselves  and  their  friends,  to  say  it  most  bluntly, 
the  way  I  often  felt  that  board  used  the  parks. 

So  they  weren't  keen  on  the  interpretive  programs  and  the 
promotional  efforts? 


That ' s 


303 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


No.   They  couldn't  come  out  and  be  against  them;  they  are  too 
much  a  part  of  what  parks  are  supposed  to  be  about.   It  was  just 
easier  not  to  give  them  any  help. 

But  also  your  political  support  depends,  in  part,  on  people 
knowing  about  the  parks  and  your  effort  to  pass  a  bond  issue  and 
all  of  that. 

I  don't  think  that  park  district  really  is  very  politically 
visible.   There's  almost  never  been  a  contested  election  for 
board  seats.   That's  starting  to  happen  now.   Kay  Peterson  was 
defeated  three  years  ago  or  four  years  ago,  maybe.   Maybe  it  was 

That  was  the  first  time  a  sitting  board 
has  been  defeated,  I  think,  in  living 


just  two  years  ago. 
member,  an  incumbent 
memory . 


Was  there  some  issue  there? 

Well,  that  was  after  I  left  as  general  manager.   I'm  not  sure 
what  the  issue  was.   I  know  the  union  supported  her  opponent. 
The  union  hated  her.   She  was  a  stupid  little--.   She  epitomized 
what  I  didn't  like  most  about  a  lot  of  the  supporters  of  the 
board  members.   The  board  members  had  a  very  small  constituency 
that  they  listened  to. 

Where  was  she  from? 
She  was  from  Lafayette. 

They  listened  to  a  handful  of  people  who  were  white,  middle 
class  hikers,  Sierra  Club  types  who  had  no  other  social 
conscience  as  far  as  I  could  tell,  who  I  thought  had  a  good  deal. 
They  had,  in  effect,  a  huge  backyard  to  play  in  and  didn't  want 
any  other  people  playing  in  it.   I  saw  parks  as  a  social  device 
for  taking  some  of  the  tensions  out  of  poor  people's  lives  and 
out  of  urban  stresses.   I  didn't  get  the  feeling  that  the  board 
had  any  sympathy  for  that  by-and-large,  or  any  sympathy  for  that 
idea  at  all. 

Yours  seems  to  be  more  in  line  with  Mott's  ideas  about  parks. 

Yes,  and  that's  why  Tilden  is  what  it  is.   You  could  never  build 
a  Tilden  Park  within  the  East  Bay  Regional  Parks  District  now. 
The  merry-go-round  would  have  been  opposed;  the  pony  rides  would 
have  been  opposed;  the  swimming  at  Lake  Anza  would  have  been 
opposed;  the  golf  course,  of  course,  would  have  been  anathema. 
Maybe  it  is  anathema,  but  nevertheless  a  lot  of  people  use  the 
golf  course.   It  gets  a  lot  of  use,  and  that's  what  parks  should 
get. 


304 


Lage:     And  who's  to  make  judgments  on  other  people's  pleasures? 

Pesonen:   I'm  not  sure  I  want  the  rest  of  the  park  district  to  be  like 

Tilden,  but  I  think  the  park  district  can  use  a  park  like  Tilden 
and  maybe  an  Ardenwood  too,  for  that  matter.   But  the  dominant 
theme  on  that  board  was,  in  my  view,  to  buy  as  much  land  for  a 
kind  of  private  open  space  and  promote  it  as  little  as  possible 
and  not  encourage  public  use,  or  if  you  are  going  to  have  any 
public  use,  concentrate  it  in  a  few  little  places. 

Lage:     Did  they  talk  in  terms  of  a  "land  bank"  idea  for  the  future? 

Pesonen:   No,  every  park  had  to  be  open,  had  to  be  accessible.   The  board 
certainly  didn't  oppose  that,  but  they  weren't  in  favor  of  going 
out  and  bringing  people  into  the  parks  and  promoting  their  use. 

That  was  certainly  true  of  the  promotions,  and  Janet  Cobb 
and  I  had  a  constant  uphill  fight.   Mary  Jefferds  would  try  to 
take  money  out  of  Janet's  budget;  she  didn't  want  any  money  for 
publications.   She  would  never  explain  it  as  I'm  speculating  what 
her  motives  were,  nor  did  Harlan  explain  it  as  I  am  speculating, 
but  I  drew  the  conclusions. 

Lage:     Then  how  did  they  explain  it? 

Pesonen:   Well,  you'd  have  a  budget  hearing,  and  they'd  chop  the  budget. 

Lage:     Without  too  much  explanation  of  it? 

Pesonen:   Without  much  explanation,  and  then  we'd  have  to  fight  for  it.   Or 
they'd  find  some  excuse  that  the  money  was  being  misused  or 
something  which  had  no  evidence  to  support  it.   Harlan  didn't  . 
like  Janet,  and  Janet  was  a  dynamite  woman.   She  has  gone  out  and 
built  her  own  political  constituency.  They  can't  get  rid  of  her. 

Lage:     She's  still  there? 

Pesonen:   She's  still  there.   [laughs] 

Lage:     Now  what  local  constituency  would  she  draw  on?   How  do  you  build 
one  as  a  member  of  a  staff  like  that? 

Pesonen:   She  has  taken  the  leadership  in  other  organizations  which  have  an 
interest  in  the  park  district  like  the  California  Oaks 
Foundation.   She's  on  the  board  of  the  Planning  and  Conservation 
League.   She  has  really  taken  off,  and  she  just  has  a  wide  circle 
of  friends  and  maintains  a  wide  circle  of  acquaintances.   She's 
on  the  board  of  what  used  to  be  called  Amendment  27,  which  was  a 
proposal  for  a  federal  constitutional  amendment  to  protect  the 


Lage: 


305 


environment- -it's  going  to  have  to  change  its  number  now  because 
of  the  one  the  Congress  just  certified,  the  one  about  pay  raises, 
which  we  didn't  even  know  about  when  we  started  the  environmental 
one. 

Is  that  the  environmental  bill  of  rights? 


Pesonen:   I  think  that's  it.  We  were  calling  it  Amendment  27. 

Anyway,  she's  very  effective  and  very  well  respected  and 
she's  the  one  who  got  Proposition  AA  put  together.   She  put  that 
together  almost  single-handedly.   That  was  a  $125  million  bond 
issue  for  the  park  district.   It  was  after  I  left.   I  was  opposed 
to  it  when  I  was  general  manager.   She  kept  saying,  "Let's  go  for 
some  real  big  money  on  a  general  obligation  bond  issue  and  get  a 
a  two-thirds  vote."   I  said,  "You'll  never  do  it,"  and  she  proved 
me  wrong.   In  fact,  I  resisted  it  when  I  was  general  manager. 

Once  I  was  gone,  the  main  barrier  as  far  as  Janet  was 
concerned  was  out  of  the  way,  and  she  put  it  together.   She 
rounded  up  the  support.   She  was  opposed  by  Harlan  all  the  way. 
She  set  up  the  citizen's  advisory  committee  to  get  it  done,  and 
it  went.   It  got  68  percent  of  the  vote,  I  think.   The  park 
district's  rich  now.   It's  got  a  lot  of  money.   It's  still 
issuing  these  bonds  under  that  authorization.   It  was  a  complete 
triumph  for  Janet  Cobb,  and  nobody  else  can  take  anywhere  near 
the  credit  that  she  did.   She  organized  it.   She's  just  an 
enormous  high-energy,  well-organized  person.   She  has  very  good 
political  sense  and  absolute  stubborn  determination,  and  when 
she's  going  to  do  something,  she's  going  to  find  a  way  to  make  it 
happen.   She  certainly  proved  me  wrong  on  a  big  general 
obligation  bond  election.   I  have  great  admiration  for  her. 

Lage:     She  should  go  to  work  for  the  school  districts.   [laughs] 
Pesonen:   Well,  she  may  take  that  on  next. 


Working  with  City  Officials  and  Environmental  Organizations 


Lage:     Is  there  something  else  we  should  talk  about  here?   We've  talked 
a  little  bit  about  East  Bay  MUD,  state  grants,  which  speaks  to 
the  topic  of  relationships  with  other  public  agencies.   What 
about  relationships  with  cities  in  the  park  district  and  with 
organizations  such  as  the  Sierra  Club? 


306 


Pesonen:  Well,  there  was  a  certain  tension  between  the  park  district  and 
some  of  the  communities.   A  part  of  it  just  reflected  Trudeau's 
style,  and  part  of  it  reflected  some  history,  historic 
developments  where  there  had  been  some  disagreements  over  policy. 
The  city  of  Richmond  and  the  park  district  were  not  on  good  terms 
when  I  got  there.   I  set  about  to  try  and  mend  that  because  I  had 
lived  in  Richmond  and  been  a  judge  out  in  that  county,  and  I  knew 
a  lot  of  the  local  public  officials.   I  made  an  effort  to  try  to 
respond  to  Richmond's  concerns. 

Lage:     Did  they  feel  neglected  in  Richmond? 

Pesonen:   They  felt  neglected. 

Lage:     There  was  Point  Pinole.   Is  that  in  Richmond? 

Pesonen:   That's  in  Richmond,  but  the  difficulties  had  to  do  with  Alvarado 
Park,  which  is  up  there  towards  the  north  end  of  Wildcat  Canyon 
Regional  Park.   I  don't  remember  what  it  was  that  had  set  off  the 
tensions  there.  Also  the  trail  along  the  bay  conflicted  with 
some  of  Richmond's  shoreline  development  plans. 


Pesonen:   I  set  up  a  committee  involving  the  city  managers  of  Fremont, 

Newark,  and  Union  City  and  the  Southern  Alameda  Water  District, 
which  was  involved  with  Alameda  Creek.  Alameda  Creek  was  used  to 
recharge  the  ground  water  system  down  there,  which  affects 
Ardenwood.  Also  we  had  a  plan  for  the  development  of  a  wonderful 
park  in  the  quarries  there  in  Fremont,  [which  are  part  of  the 
Alameda  Water  District],  and  that  was  slow-going.   I  think  it's 
finally  getting  off  the  ground.   There  was  just  a  need  for  a  lot 
of  coordination  there,  and  I  spearheaded  that.   That  mended  a  lot 
of  relations. 

Things  were  somewhat  distant  between  the  city  of  Fremont  and 
the  park  district.   A  lot  of  that  I  just  noticed  after  I  got 
there,  that  people  seemed  a  little  chilly  when  I'd  meet  them  at 
social  gatherings  and  things.   I  figured  there  was  something  that 
happened  while  Trudeau  was  there  that  offended  somebody,  and  I 
was  a  new  face,  and  I  was  going  to  go  out  and  start  over.   I  did 
a  lot  of  that.   The  park  district  rubs  up  against  a  lot  of 
different  public  agencies.   I  think  I  counted  them  once,  sixty- 
seven  or  seventy  different  public  agencies:  fire  districts,  water 
districts,  cities,  counties,  transportation  systems,  all  of  the 
different  governments. 


Lage: 


Is  that  an  argument  for  regional  government? 


307 


Pesonen:   I  think  it  could  be  an  argument  for  regional  government,  yes.   I 
think  it  is  an  argument  for  regional  government.   There's  a  lot 
of  overlapping  and  lack  of  coordination. 

My  relations  with  the  Sierra  Club  were  pretty  good.   There 
were  some  club  members  who  were  active  in  local  environmental 
matters  that  I  got  crosswise  with.   One  was  Alan  La  Pointe  over 
in  Richmond. 

Lage:     Over  what  kind  of  issue? 

Pesonen:   It  was  over  the  development  of  the  cleanup  and  fixing  of  Alvarado 
Park  and  Wildcat  Creek.   There  was  a  little  bridge  that  was  going 
to  be  widened  by  the  city  right  there  near  Alvarado  Park  to 
improve  local  traffic  conditions.   La  Pointe  was  leading  a  group 
that  was  opposed  to  it;  they  wanted  to  keep  it  kind  of  rustic  and 
small.   I  didn't  think  it  made  that  much  difference.   I  said 
something  once  that  La  Pointe  took  as  suggesting  that  his  only 
reason  was  that  he  wanted  to  protect  his  own  little  property 
values  up  in  the  canyon  there. 

Lage:     He  lived  up  there? 
Pesonen:   He  lived  up  there. 

So  he  was  a  bitter  enemy  ever  after  that  and  I  happen  to 
think  that  I  was—what  he  concluded,  I  thought,  he  concluded 
correctly.   [laughter] 

Lage:     So  you  did  think  that  he  was  concerned  with  protecting  his 
property  values? 

Pesonen:   Yes. 

Lage:     He  may  not  have  misinterpreted  your  remark? 

Pesonen:   He  didn't  misinterpret  it. 


Parks  for  the  People  or  "Nimby"  Preserves 


Lage:     When  you  referred  to  Sierra  Club  "types"  earlier  as  being  some  of 
the  ones  that  wanted  to  try  to  preserve- - 

Pesonen:   I  want  to  correct  that.   There  is  no  such  thing  as  a  Sierra  Club 
"type"  but  there  is  a  suburban  middle  class  nimby,  and  I  met  some 
who  were  probably  some  of  the  most  active  constituents  of  the 


308 


board  members  of  the  park  district.   It's  a  very  small  group  of 
people.   They  do  reflect  the  values  of  a  lot  of  people,  and  the 
park  district  is  very  popular  in  the  East  Bay  or  it  wouldn't  have 
passed  Measure  AA  with  a  more  than  two-thirds  vote.   The  parks 
are  a  symbol  of  serenity  and  grace,  and  they  are  fairly  well 
managed.   When  people  do  come  in  contact  with  the  parks,  the 
staff  is  friendly  and  helpful. 

At  bottom,  my  concern  and  frustration  was  that  I  wanted  more 
people  to  get  into  the  parks  and  I  didn't--.   I  was  the  wrong 
person  for  that  job  because  the  people  who  seemed  to  have  the 
most  influence  with  the  board  members  were  people  who  in  my 
estimation  didn't  want  people  in  the  parks. 

Lage :     So  that  would  be  a  kind  of  a  mission  which  should  be  stated  by 
the  board  in  some  way? 

Pesonen:   Right.   Well,  the  board  had  a  master  plan—adopted  their  new 
master  plan  while  I  was  there—but  the  master  plan  was  really 
nothing  but  a  set  of  maps  about  acquisitions.   They  had  some 
policies,  but  nobody  paid  any  attention  to  the  policies  and 
guidelines.   They  would  look  at  the  maps  and  the  acquisition 
plan.   That's  what  it  was  really  about. 

Lage:     Anything  else  you  want  to  comment  on  before  we  leave  the  subject 
of  the  East  Bay  Regional  Park  District? 

[tape  interruption] 

Pesonen:   I'll  sum  up  my  view  of  the  park  district  and  why  I  probably  was 
always  out  of  phase  with  the  board—not  always,  but  enough  so 
that  I  didn't  enjoy  it  there  and  I  think  we  parted  company 
knowing  that  I  wasn't  the  right  person  for  a  long-term  cordial 
relationship  with  the  board.   I  had  the  strong  feeling  after  I 
had  been  there  a  while  that  the  most  vocal  voices  on  the  board 
were  influenced  by  a  small  group  of  essentially  misanthropic 
people.   They  were  perfectly  entitled  to  be  misanthropic,  but  I 
thought  that  this  was  a  public  agency,  that  everybody  in  the  East 
Bay  paid  for  those  parks,  and  everybody  in  the  East  Bay  ought  to 
be  able  to  use  them.   So  it  was  a  good-government  view  on  my 
part,  as  well  as  a  philosophy  about  parks  which  was  out  of  phase, 
I  felt,  with  what  the  emphasis  that  the  dominant  board  members 
had,  and  that  tension  never  went  away. 

Lage:     Some  of  those  board  members  had  been  your  original  supporters 
when  you  took  the  job? 

Pesonen:   Correct,  because  they  didn't,  I  think,  understand  how  strongly  I 
felt  about  that. 


309 


Lage:     It  sounds  like  they  wanted  a  little  wilderness  system  on  park 

1  QTM^  O 


lands. 
Pesonen:   Very  much  so 


310 


XI    RECENT  WORK  AS  A  PRIVATE  ATTORNEY 


Mediating  the  Dispute  between  the  Sierra  Club  and  the  Sierra  Club 
Legal  Defense  Fund 


Lage:     Shall  we  go  on  to  the  work  you  did  to  mediate  the  dispute  between 
the  Sierra  Club  and  the  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund? 

Pesonen:   That's  been  fairly  recent. 

Lage:     I  know.   Is  it  too  recent  to  talk  about? 

Pesonen:   I  think  we  can  talk  about  it. 

Starting  in  1989,  I  think,  a  crisis  point  was  reached  in 
which  the  Sierra  Club  and  the  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund 
found  themselves  on  opposite  sides  of  a  political  issue.   It  grew 
out  of  litigation  launched  by  the  legal  defense  fund  to  stop 
forest  management  plans  in  the  Northwest  which  threatened  the 
habitat  of  the  native  spotted  owl.   That  was  a  hot  controversy, 
as  it  still  is,  and  one  of  the  legal  defense  fund's  staff  lawyers 
had  openly  criticized  the  club  while  the  club  was  one  of  its 
clients. 

Lage:     Was  the  club  a  client  on  this  litigation? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  but  the  club--so  I  understand--didn' t  want  to  be  quite  as 
aggressive  as  some  of  the  other  clients,  the  Oregon  Audubon 
Society  and  some  of  the  others  in  the  Northwest.   The  real 
purpose  of  that  litigation  was  to  prevent  logging  of  the  last  of 
the  old-growth  forests  in  the  Cascades.   I  think  it  was  Senator 
[Robert]  Packwood  who  got  a  rider  on  the  appropriations  bill  that 
took  jurisdiction  away  from  the  federal  courts  to  hear  such 
suits,  temporarily  at  least.   The  club  lobbyist  in  Washington  had 
supported  that  amendment  in  exchange  for  a  vote  on  something  that 
the  club  thought  was  more  important  to  them  in  Alaska.   The  legal 


311 


Lage: 


Pesonen: 


defense  fund's  lobbyist  took  the  opposite  position  on  the 
amendment  and  claimed  betrayal  by  the  club. 

A  falling  out  had  developed,  and  the  club's  board  threatened 
to  revoke  what  they  maintained  was  the  license  to  the  Sierra  Club 
Legal  Defense  Fund  to  use  the  name  Sierra  Club.   Over  the  years, 
the  name  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund  had  acquired  its  own 
value  in  fundraising  and  identity  with  the  courts  and  the  public; 
it's  like  a  trademark.   That  threat  to  revoke  the  Sierra  Club 
name  really  threatened  the  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund. 

Was  it  something  the  club  could  do? 

Well,  it's  not  clear.   It  wasn't  clear  to  me.   It  wasn't  clear  to 
the  club;  it  probably  wasn't  clear  to  the  legal  defense  fund. 
But  they  were  on  the  threshold  of  going  to  court,  and  I  thought 
that  would  be  an  enormous  disaster  for  both  organizations.   It 
would  deprive  them  both  of  a  very  high  level  of  public  confidence 
that  they  had  enjoyed  for  a  long  time.   It  would  be  an  unseemly 
struggle,  it  would  certainly  be  public,  and  it  would,  I  think, 
permanently  damage  both  organizations.   But  it  seemed  intractable 
for  a  while. 


The  president  of  the  legal  defense  fund,  Rick  Sutherland, 
was  a  very  strong-willed  person.   The  legal  defense  fund  over  the 
years  had  grown  into  a  substantial  organization  in  its  own  right 
with  its  own  board. 

Lage:     It  was,  essentially,  a  separate  organization? 

Pesonen:   It  was  a  separate  organization,  but  its  origins  were  very 

innocent  and  very  casual.   It  was  1971  when  the  legal  defense 
fund  was  set  up.   I  read  all  of  the  original  papers,  and  there 
was  no  written  license.   There  was  a  proposal  from  Larry  Moss,  a 
former  board  member,  that  there  should  be  a  written  license,  but 
it  just  never  seemed  to  happen,  or  if  it  did  happen  then  it  has 
gotten  lost. 

Lage:     I  just  recently  interviewed  Larry  Moss.   He  was  on  the  Sierra 
Club  board  in  the  seventies  and  president  for  a  year.   He 
recalled  that  when  the  defense  fund  was  founded,  he  had  insisted 
that  the  Sierra  Club  retain  the  right  to  revoke  the  use  of  its 
name.   He  says  there  was  a  resolution  passed  that  the  club  could 
revoke  the  name.  Was  there  a  board  resolution? 

Pesonen:   There's  a  reference  in  the  minutes  to  the  need  for  a  written 

license,  but  there's  no  record  of  its  ever  having  been  executed. 
The  club  president  at  the  time  I  started  looking  into  the  problem 
was  Sue  Merrow  from  Connecticut. 


312 


Lage:     How  did  you  get  called  to  look  into  it? 

Pesonen:   Well,  I  kind  of  made  it  known  that  I  would  like  to  work  on 

resolving  that  dispute.   I  made  it  known  to  the  principals.   I 
went  around  and  talked  to  some  people  who  were  involved  and  got  a 
pretty  good  idea  of  what  it  was  about  and  very  much  wanted  to 
help  resolve  it.   I  knew  they  were  at  each  other's  throats.   It 
was  just  very  bitter.   The  correspondence  back  and  forth  was  most 
unpleasant,  and  it  had  gotten  somewhat  personal,  and  the  Sierra 
Club  board  had  its  back  up.   They  felt  that  their  hundred-year 
ownership  of  the  name  was  challenged.   They  were  the  preeminent 
environmental  organization  in  the  country,  and  they  perceived 
there  was  confusion  developing  because  the  Sierra  Club  and  the 
Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund  would  take  different  positions  in 
professional  lobbying,  such  as  the  example  on  the  appropriations 
rider  affecting  the  court's  jurisdiction. 

But  there  were  deeper  institutional  reasons  I  began  to 
understand.   The  legal  defense  fund  depended  on  the  club  for  part 
of  its  fundraising.   The  club  was  also  its  principal  client.   At 
the  staff  level  things  ran  quite  well,  but  at  the  top  policy- 
making  level,  there  was  a  sense—as  I  characterized  it  anyway--on 
the  legal  defense  fund's  part  that  they  were  not  being  treated 
with  the  dignity  that  they  deserved.   They  had  seven  or  eight 
regional  offices  around  the  country,  and  Rick  Sutherland  had 
built  it  up  into  a  huge  and  very  successful  environmental 
litigation  organization,  but  they  were  still  a  kind  of  a  little 
brother  to  the  club. 

So  I  set  about  to  see  if  1  could  mediate  that  controversy, 
and  I  got  myself  appointed  by  both  of  them,  accepted  by  both  as 
the  mediator.   They  both  had  counsel,  and  counsel  were  hedging 
their  bets,  getting  ready  to  end  up  in  court  over  trademark  and 
trade  name  interests.   So  at  the  beginning  it  was--.   I  was 
working  with  both  of  the  lawyers  and  representatives  appointed  by 
each  organization's  board  to  negotiate—Rick  Sutherland 
principally  on  the  legal  defense  fund's  side,  and  Phil  Berry  and 
Sue  Merrow  on  the  club  side.   Phil  had  been  on  the  Sierra  Club 
board  when  the  legal  defense  fund  was  first  set  up. 

Lage:     And  he  had  been  instrumental  in  establishing  it,  as  I  remember. 

Pesonen:   He  had  been  instrumental.   And  on  the  other  side  there  was  Fred 
Fisher  who  was  with  the  Lillick  law  office  in  San  Francisco, 
which  for  many  years  had  been  on  a  small  retainer  to  handle  the 
club's  litigation.   Fred  Fisher  and  Don  Harris,  who  had  also  been 
with  the  Lillick  firm,  put  together  the  papers  to  create  the 
legal  defense  fund  as  a  501(c)(3)  organization,  and  it  was  all 
very  congenial  and  cordial  and  casual  when  it  first  happened.   It 


313 


was  a  small  operation  with  one  staff  person  who  transferred  over 
from  the  club  staff  to  the  legal  defense  fund  staff.   Through  the 
three  executive  director/presidents  and  particularly  through  Rick 
Sutherland,  the  legal  defense  fund  grew  into  a  completely 
separate  entity. 

Lage:     It  had  other  clients  and--? 

Pesonen:   It  had  other  clients  and  had  plans  to  go  international,  and  the 
club  felt  a  little  threatened  by  some  of  that.   They  didn't  know 
where  it  was  headed.   The  Sierra  Club  name  would  then  appear  in 
France  and  Canada  and  Brazil  without  the  club  having  anything  to 
do  with  it.   The  club  had  its  own  long-range  ambitions  for  more 
international  activity. 

I  started  meeting  with  both  sides,  and  it  took  a  long  time 
for  a  level  of  trust  to  develop  so  that  we  could  start  to  make 
some  progress.   I  really  got  involved  in  it  in  early  1991  and 
worked  on  it  all  through  the  year  1991.   In  the  spring  of  1991 
we  had  a  meeting  in  which  it  became  clear  to  me  that  it  was  going 
to  be  very  difficult  to  come  to  a  workable  agreement  that  covered 
all  aspects  of  their  relationship.   I  suggested  that  the  legal 
defense  fund  may  wish  to  consider  changing  its  name  so  that  it 
wouldn't  be  beholden  to  the  Sierra  Club  anymore.   That  got  some 
initial  favorable  response.   I  went  and  spoke  to  the  Sierra  Club 
board  at  a  retreat  they  had  out  at  Audubon  Canyon  Ranch  and  said 
that  this  looked  like  the  way  this  mediation  was  going  to  go.   I 
suggested  that  they  get  Walter  Landor  and  Associates  who  were 
very  good  at  name  changes.   They  had  changed  the  name  of  Datsun 
to  Nissan  successfully. 

Lage:     You  mean  in  terms  of  public  relations? 

Pesonen:   In  terms  of  public  relations,  everything  that  goes  with  corporate 
or  institutional  identity  in  the  public.   They  have  a  fine 
reputation,  they  are  very  successful,  and  I  had  worked  with  them 
on  some  other  things.   But  they  also  had  represented  the  club,  so 
the  legal  defense  fund  was  suspicious  of  that  and  wouldn't  use 
Landor. 


Lage:     Was  this  retreat  a  defense  fund  retreat? 

Pesonen:   No,  it  was  the  Sierra  Club  board.   The  reaction  of  the  Sierra 
Club  board  was  rather  lukewarm.   There  was  an  ambivalence. 

Lage:     They  like  having  the  connection? 

Pesonen:   They  liked  having  the  captive  law  firm.   That  sounds  too  cynical. 
There  was  a  symbiotic  relationship  there.   They  had  a  long 


Lage: 


314 


history,  and  it  had  worked  very  well.   The  idea  of  severing  it, 
even  an  amicable  severance,  was  an  uneasy  notion  for  a  lot  of 
people.   But  the  club  recognized  what  had  happened  over  the 
intervening  twenty  years,  and  I  got  a  letter  from  Sue  Merrow 
saying,  "We  are  not  particularly  enthusiastic  about  it,  but  if 
that's  the  direction  the  legal  defense  fund  wants  to  go,  why  we 
will,  of  course,  give  them  our  blessing." 

Then  the  legal  defense  fund  took  a  look  at  the  problem  and 
at  that  issue,  and  they  were  uneasy  about  it,  too.   Then  we  got 
back  into  trying  to  negotiate  an  agreement  to  cover  all  of  the 
relationships.   The  more  we  dug  into  it,  the  more  issues  came  up 
that  had  to  be  dealt  with  in  any  final  contract  or  charter. 
There  was  no  written  agreement  ever  between  those  two 
organizations.   There  was  a  series  of-- 

If  there  had  been,  it  probably  would  not  have  been  complicated 
enough  to  handle  everything. 


Pesonen:   Well,  if  there  had  been,  maybe  this  controversy  never  would  have 
arisen.   But  there  were  lots  of  misunderstandings.   There  had 
been  changes  of  staff  on  both  sides,  and  much  of  the  history  was 
a  kind  of  a  common  law  of  handshakes  and  agreements  between  the 
executive  director  of  the  club  and  the  executive  director/ 
president  of  the  legal  defense  fund.   And  just  working  habits.   A 
lot  of  it  had  to  do  with  money;  how  the  club  raised  money  for  the 
legal  defense  fund,  how  the  legal  defense  fund  raised  money  from 
many  of  the  same  sources  as  the  club  raised  money  from.  Money 
had  a  lot  to  do  with  it. 


Lage:     The  club's  development  office  also  raises  money  for  the  legal 
defense  fund? 

Pesonen:   It's  called  a  check-off.   When  you  get  your  Sierra  Club  dues 

notice,  there  is  a  place  to  check  off  and  add  some  money  for  the 
legal  defense  fund  which  cements  in  the  donor's  mind  the 
cohesiveness  and  connection  of  the  activity  of  the  two 
organizations.   There  had  been  some  experimentation  with  dropping 
the  check-off,  but  the  check-off  was  a  substantial  source  of 
funds  for  the  legal  defense  fund. 

So  there  were  all  kinds  of  things.   Limitations  on  lobbying, 
what  they  could  say-- 

Lage:     The  legal  defense  fund  lobbies  also? 

Pesonen:   The  legal  defense  fund  lobbies  also,  yes.   They  both  have 
lobbies,  and  they  both  have  regional  spokespeople. 


315 


Lage:     And  legal  defense  fund  actions  affect  proposed  congressional 
legislation. 

Pesonen:   Exactly.   So  the  effort  to  work  this  out  ended  up  in  something 
like  a  twenty- five  or  thirty-page  agreement  which  covered 
fundraising;  it  covered  lobbying  and  public  statements;  it 
covered  public  relations  generally;  it  covered  use  of 
publications;  it  covered  the  timing  of  fund  appeals.   I've 
forgotten  all  of  the  topics  —  I'd  have  to  dig  the  documents  out-- 
but  it  was  very  elaborate. 

Late  last  year  or  early  this  year--I  guess  it  was  early  this 
year  [1992]--!  again  appeared  before  both  boards  within  several 
weeks  to  present  this  agreement  which  had  been  hammered  out  over 
many  sessions,  where  we'd  get  one  step  forward,  two  steps  back, 
two  steps  forward,  one  step  back.   We'd  get  where  it  would  look 
like  an  agreement,  and  then  they'd  go  back  and  think  about  it, 
and  they  didn't  like  it.   I  finally  presented  this  agreement  to 
the  legal  defense  fund  board  and  argued  that  it  should  be 
adopted,  that  it  was  pretty  much  at  the  end  of  the  line.   There 
wasn't  much  else  that  we  could  do,  and  the  club  had  set  a 
deadline  of  the  end  of  February  this  year  for  an  agreement  or 
they'd  go  to  court.   The  antagonism  hadn't  completely 
disappeared. 

Now,  some  of  the  delay  and  some  of  the  difficulty  in  getting 
agreement  was  because  of  some  terrible  things  that  happened 
during  the  process.   Rick  Sutherland  was  killed  last  July,  I 
think,  on  the  Sunday  after  I  had  met  with  him  on  Friday  and 
gotten  his  agreement  to  virtually  everything  that  was  left  at 
loose  ends.   I  had  persuaded  him  that  in  the  long-range  interest 
of  the  legal  defense  fund  he  should  be  a  little  more  flexible  in 
some  areas. 

One  of  the  reasons  I  was  chosen  was  that  I  knew  all  of  those 
people,  and  they  all  trusted  me,  and  they  trusted  me  not  to  take 
sides.   They  knew  that  my  main  concern  was  to  keep  them  both  from 
going  to  court  and  doing  great  damage  to  what  they  stood  for.   I 
am  a  very  good  friend  of  Phil  Berry,  and  I  was  a  very  good  friend 
of  Rick  Sutherland,  and  they  were  on  opposite  sides  of  this. 
Mike  Traynor,  who  succeeded  Rick  Sutherland,  was  a  good  friend 
going  way  back  to  Bodega  days.   So  I  was  personally  acquainted 
and,  I  think,  respected  by  all  of  them. 

Lage:     Did  Mike  Traynor  come  out  of  the  legal  defense  fund  organization? 

Pesonen:   No,  he  was  a  private  lawyer,  but  he  was  the  president  of  the 
board  or  had  been  for  a  long  time.   When  they  had  to  pick  a 
successor  for  Rick,  he  had  reached  a  point  in  his  career  where  he 


316 


wanted  to  do  something  different  and  they  selected  him  as  the 
president  and  he  left  his  law  firm.   He  is  still  of  counsel, 
Cooley,  Godward,  Castro,  Huddleson,  and  Tatum,  I  think  was  the 
name  of  the  firm,  a  very  big,  well-established,  San  Francisco  law 
firm. 

Then,  of  course,  Phil  Berry  had  his  terrible  accident  when 
he  was  badly  burned,  and  I  was  practically  on  scene  for  that. 
Mary  Jane  and  I  had  been  camping  with  him  that  weekend,  and  he 
was  behind  us  on  the  road,  and  we  lost  sight  of  him,  and  then  his 
truck  caught  fire.   He  was  very  badly  burned  and  in  the  hospital 
for  a  long  time.   That  came  during  all  of  this  process,  so  that 
held  things  up  until  he  got  healed.   After  he  got  healed  then 
Rick  got  killed.   Each  time  one  of  these  things  happened,  we  were 
close,  I  thought,  to  an  agreement.   Then  the  person  who  had  to 
make  the  agreement,  that  was  in  charge,  was  gone. 

Lage:     Were  Fred  Fisher  and  Don  Harris  involved? 

Pesonen:   No.   They  stayed  out  of  it.   They  were  on  the  board  of  the  legal 
defense  fund,  but  they  had  stayed  out  of  these  negotiations. 

Well,  to  my  great  surprise,  after  I  met  with  the  legal 
defense  fund  board  in  early  February  or  late  January  of  this 
year,  I  left  the  meeting  feeling  that  they  would  swallow  their 
pride  a  little  bit  and  sign  this  agreement  which  we  had  hammered 
out  over  the  previous  year.   To  my  astonishment,  I  learned  a  few 
days  later  that  they  had  voted  to  change  their  name.   [laughs] 

Lage:     And  is  that  the  way  it  ended? 
Pesonen:   That's  the  way  it  is  right  now. 

Lage:     Oh  goodness.   Last  time  I  talked  to  you  it  was  probably  before 

you  learned  that  because  last  time  we  discussed  this  you  said  it 
was  just  on  the  verge  of  being  signed. 

Pesonen:  Well,  it  was.   Then  they  decided  that  the  constraints- - 
Lage:     What  kind  of  constraints? 

Pesonen:   Oh,  there  were  lots  of  limitations  on  what  they  could  say 

publicly,  and  the  club  had  to  be  their  primary  client,  had  first 
choice  of  being  their  client.   It  was  an  entanglement,  a  lot  of 
entanglement.   I  began  to  understand  that  they  felt  like  Gulliver 
tied  down  by  a  bunch  of  Lilliputians  in  this  agreement,  and  that 
it  was  time  to  recognize  history  and  go  their  own  way,  and  do  it 
in  an  orderly,  planned  way.   They  have  hired  a  consultant--! 
don't  know  his  identity;  it  may  be  confidential  still- -who  has 


317 

laid  out  plans  for  them  for  some  years  to  make  a  gradual  change. 
I  am  informed  informally  that  there  is  an  interim  very  modest 
agreement  for  a  working  arrangement  during  this  transition. 

But  once  they  made  that  decision,  they  also  decided  they 
really  didn't  need  a  mediator  any  longer.   But  they  are  not  going 
to  court,  which  is  what  I  wanted  to  have  happen,  and  they  are 
working  together  as  the  legal  defense  fund  goes  its  merry  way  to 
become  a  different  organization- -the  same  organization  with  a 
different  name.   Maybe  the  John  Muir  Legal  Defense  Fund  or 
something  else.   Maybe  they  don't  know  what  they  are  going  to 
call  themselves  ultimately,  but  it  worked.  And  I  charged  them 
for  it;  I  got  paid  for  it.   I  charged  them  $250  an  hour  and  told 
them,  "I'm  not  going  to  do  this  for  free  because  then  you  won't 
take  it  seriously."   They  split  it  between  the  two  organizations. 

I  think  both  organizations  are  going  through  terrible  budget 
problems  because  of  the  recession.   Eleemosynary  giving  has 
fallen  off  very  sharply,  and  the  idea  of  no  longer  paying 
somebody  to  do  something  that  they  now  are  in  a  position  to  do 
themselves  makes  sense. 

So  I  think  it  was  successful.   The  resolution  was  different 
from  what  I  thought  would  happen,  but  I  had  intuitively  seen  that 
this  was  the  way  they  were  going  to  go  a  year  ago  and  proposed 
the  name  change.   They  weren't  ready  at  that  time.   But  as  the 
reality  of  thirty-five  pages  of  entangling  limitations  on  their 
freedom  began  to  sink  in,  they  went  along  with  what  my  intuition 
had  been  a  year  before. 

Lage:     Did  you  sense  that  this  was  a  philosophical  difference,  the 
defense  fund  maybe  being  more  bold  than  the  club? 

Pesonen:   Well,  sure  they  have  different  missions,  and  there  have  been 

different  ways  of  operating.   The  legal  defense  fund  is  a  staff - 
driven  organization  with  a  professional  staff,  mainly  lawyers. 
The  Sierra  Club  is  a  much  more  political  organization  with  an 
elected  board  from  across  the  country.   They  are  contested 
elections;  they  have  a  far  wider  agenda;  and  like  any 
organization  of  600,000  members  with  as  big  an  agenda  as  the 
environment,  is  more  cautious  and  less  focused  in  its  operations. 

a 

Lage:     I  know  that  the  spotted  owl-ancient  forests  issue  has  created  a 
certain  controversy  within  the  club  also.   I  haven't  gotten  the 
full  story  on  that  one.   [See  oral  history  interviews  with  Sierra 
Club  leaders  Phillip  S.  Berry,  Michael  L.  Fischer,  and  Edgar 


318 


Wayburn,  in  process,  for  more  information  on  the  ancient  forests 
issue  and  the  conflict  with  the  Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund.] 

Pesonen:   I  don't  have  a  full  story  on  how  much  that's  a  controversy  within 
the  club  either.   But  each  institution  has  its  own  identity, 
which  is  an  outgrowth  of  its  history  and  accidents  of  who  was 
there  to  shape  it.   Emerson  said,  I  think,  "An  institution  is  the 
lengthened  shadow  of  one  man."  He  said  it  before  modern  times 
when  women  led  organizations  as  well.   There  is  some  truth  to 
that.   The  legal  defense  fund  was  the  lengthened  shadow  of  Rick 
Sutherland,  who  had  a  particular  world  view. 

Lage:     How  would  you  characterize  his  world  view?  Was  it  distinctive? 

Pesonen:   Irreverent  towards  big  business  and  government,  gutsy,  courageous 
and  shrewd,  not  very  compromising,  not  willing  to  compromise 
unless  he  didn't  have  much  choice-- 

Lage:     That  probably  wouldn't  work  well  within  the  Sierra  Club 
organization  itself. 

Pesonen:   No,  they  both  have  their  strengths.   I  think  the  club  wouldn't  be 
as  strong  and  effective  an  organization  if  it  were  an  Earth 
First!  militant,  no-compromise--.   As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  would 
lose  a  lot  of  its  members  and  a  lot  of  its  support  and  a  lot  of 
its  power.   There's  nothing  invidious  in  that  comparison.   They 
were  just  different  kinds  of  institutions,  and  once  the  legal 
defense  fund  was  large  enough  to  have  a  sense  of  its  own  self  and 
its  destiny  and  institutional  integrity,  it  was  inevitable  that 
there  would  be  some  discordance.   I  think  some  of  it  might  have 
had  to  do  with  personalities.   Rick  could  be  abrasive. 

Lage:     Was  Rick  also  a  friend  of  Phil  Berry? 

Pesonen:   Oh  yes.   Old  friend.   Although  there  were  strains  developed  out 

of  this.   And  Mike  Fischer,  who  was  the  executive  director  of  the 
club,  he  and  Rick  didn't  get  along  together  at  all,  so  that  may 
have  exacerbated  it.   But  it  probably  would  have  happened  anyway. 
It  just  made  my  job  a  little  harder. 

Lage:     Was  Mike  Fischer  involved  in  these  negotiations? 
Pesonen:   Very  much  so. 

Lage:     How  did  you  feel  he  worked?  Did  you  have  a  chance  to  evaluate 
him  as  a--? 

Pesonen:   I  think  he's  an  effective  administrator.   That's  a  very  difficult 
job.   I  think  working  for  the  park  district  board  was  a  piece  of 


319 


cake  probably  compared  to  working  for  the  Sierra  Club  board, 
[laughs]   There's  nothing  like  working  for  volunteers  because 
volunteers'  only  reward  is  their  psychic  reward,  their  ego 
reward.  That's  sometimes  a  lot  harder  to  satisfy  than  a  good 


straightforward  financial  reward, 
difficult  to  read. 


They  are  also  more  erratic  and 


Lage:     What  was  Sue  Merrow's  role?  I'm  going  to  be  interviewing  her  for 
the  Sierra  Club  series.1 

Pesonen:   She's  now  the  mayor,  or  first  selectwoman  of  a  little  town  in 
Connecticut. 

She  very  much  wanted  the  dispute  to  be  resolved,  and  she 
worked  very  hard  to  see  that  that  happened.   She  had  hoped  it 
would  happen  while  she  was  president.   Phil  had  hoped  it  would 
happen  while  he  was  president,  the  following  year.   It's  a 
measure  of  how  intractable  the  problem  was  that  it  didn't  happen 
during  either  of  their  presidencies,  although  neither  did  they 
end  up  in  court  suing  each  other  during  either  of  their 
presidencies.   And  I  don't  think  they  are  going  to  end  up  in 
court  now. 


The  State  Farm  Sex-Discrimination-in-Hiring  Case;  Managing  the 
Remedy  Phase 


Lage:     Let's  turn  to  your  role  in  the  State  Farm  case  now,  if  we  haven't 
carried  on  too  long  for  your  attention  and  patience? 

[tape  interruption] 

Pesonen:   I  think  as  I  mentioned  at  the  last  interview,  in  the  fall  of  1987 
I  was  pretty  sure  that  I  didn't  want  to  stay  at  the  park 
district,  and  I  got  a  call  from  Guy  Saperstein--his  firm  then  was 
named  Farnsworth,  Saperstein,  and  Seligman- -asking  me  if  I  would 
be  interested  in  leaving  the  park  district  to  manage  the 
Kraszewsk±  v.  State  Farm  case,  about  which  I  knew  very  little.   I 
read  a  little  bit  in  the  papers  over  the  years,  and  I  was 
acquainted  with  Guy  Saperstein  and  had  followed  his  career.   He 
suggested  some  things  I  could  go  and  read  to  find  out  more  about 
it,  including  the  decision  in  1985  by  District  Judge  Thelton 
Henderson  finding  State  Farm  liable  for  sex  discrimination  in 


'Susan  D.  Merrow,  "Sierra  Club  President  and  Council  Chair: 
Volunteer  Leadership,  1980s- 1990s, "  1994. 


Effective 


320 


recruitment  and  hiring  of  its  sales  force.   It's  a  very  long 
decision,  and  I  read  the  decision,  and  it  was  fascinating.   It 
was  a  very  thoroughly  tried  case  and  a  very  thoroughly  decided 
case. 

So  I  told  Guy  I  would  be  interested. 
Lage:     The  decision  was  made  and  you  were  going  to  manage--? 

Pesonen:   The  remedy  phase.   In  the  fall  of  1987,  Guy  was  quite  sure  that 
by  early  1988  the  court  would  approve  a  consent  decree  defining 
the  system  and  the  procedures  and  the  standards  for  selecting 
class  members  who  would  be  compensated.   The  original  trial  had 
been  brought  by  only  three  women,  but  on  behalf  of  thousands  who 
had  suffered  discrimination  in  seeking  the  State  Farm  agent 
positions  with  the  company.   So  I  told  him  I  would  be  interested. 
I  didn't  tell  the  park  district  board  that.   I  did  tell  Jim 
Duncan,  who  was  president  of  the  board,  that  I  was  looking  into 
this  possibility,  but  that  I  didn't  know  if  anything  would  come 
of  it. 

So  over  several  months  Guy  and  I  started  negotiating  an 
employment  agreement  for  me  to  be  managing  attorney  of  the  claims 
procedure.   Then  at  one  point  when  I  was  fairly  confident  that 
Guy  and  I  would  be  able  to  work  something  out--and  the  prospect 
looked  fascinating;  it  was  a  fascinating  management  problem--! 
told  the  board  that  I  was  considering  leaving,  and  I  wanted  to 
negotiate  a  severance  package.   I  negotiated  both  agreements 
simultaneously  with  a  target  date  of  March  15  [1988]  to  leave  the 
park  district,  which  was  the  day  that  Judge  Henderson  approved 
the  consent  decree.   That  slipped  a  little  bit,  and  I  think  it 
was  April  1  when  I  left  the  park  district  and  I  started  with  Guy. 

When  I  started,  we  were  at  505  14th  Street,  and  I  didn't 
even  have  an  office.   The  firm  had  leased  a  floor  in  the 
building,  or  most  of  the  floor  in  the  building,  which  hadn't  been 
built  out.   So  it  was  being  built  out  when  I  got  there.   My 
office  was  a  table  in  the  library  on  the  eleventh  floor,  and  the 
whole  Kraszewski  case  was  going  to  be  managed  on  the  eighth 
floor.   The  computers  all  had  to  be  hooked  up,  and  the  phones, 
and  the  staff  had  to  be  hired.   The  first  thing  to  do  was  to  go 
out  and  hire  a  bunch  of  people,  paralegals  and  lawyers. 

Lage:     Did  this  make  the  firm  a  lot  bigger? 

Pesonen:   It  immediately  doubled  the  size  of  the  firm.   It  ultimately 

tripled  and  quadrupled  the  size  of  the  firm.  Ultimately,  there 
were  at  least  thirty  lawyers  working  on  this  project  alone,  and 
then,  of  course,  there  was  a  lot  more  support  staff  and  a  lot 


321 


more  paralegals.   But  when  I  started  out  I  had  the  consent 
decree,  I  had  space  that  was  being  filled  up,  103  bankers'  boxes 
of  documents  pertaining  to  male  State  Farm  agents,  not  organized 
or  anything,  and  the  prospect  that  a  year  and  a  half  or  two  years 
later  we  would  start  litigated  hearings  for  each  one  of  the 
approximately  1,000  women  that  we  selected  as  final  claimants  and 
clients. 

The  whole  thing  was  laid  out  in  the  consent  decree,  and  it 
wouldn't  be  fruitful  for  me  to  simply  describe  each  detail.   But 
it  was  a  very  comprehensive  private  legal  system—the  judges  were 
called  special  masters  appointed  by  name.   The  elements  of  proof 
that  each  woman  had  to  establish  for  her  entitlement,  the  formula 
for  what  damages  she  would  recover  in  back  pay  and  front  pay-- 

Lage:     That  was  all  set  out? 

Pesonen:   It  was  all  set  out.   The  first  thing  that  happened  was  that 
notices  were  sent  out  to  70,000  women  that  they  had  an 
opportunity  to  be  considered  in  this  process.   Out  of  that,  about 
6,500  responded  in  a  timely  way  and  filed  a  little  form. 

Lage:     Who  were  the  70,000  women? 

Pesonen:   They  were  all  women  who  had  any  kind  of  employment  contact  with 
State  Farm  since  1974. 

Lage:     You  got  records  of  people  who  had  come  in  for  interviews? 
Pesonen:   Yes,  State  Farm  had  to  mail  this  notice  out. 

Then,  out  of  that  6,500  we  would  select  up  to  1,193,  I 
think,  which  was  the  number  of  male  agents  appointed  during  the 
period  covered  by  this  case  going  back  to  1974.   The  theory  of 
the  consent  decree  was  that  we  would  challenge  each  male 
appointed  with  a  woman,  on  the  theory  that  a  woman  should  have 
been  appointed.  We  knew  that  we  wouldn't  prevail  on  all  of 
those,  but  that  was  the  maximum  number,  because  the  pleading,  the 
document  which  finally  established  the  final  claimants'  right  to 
go  to  a  hearing,  was  a  claim  form  which  named  a  male  agent,  the 
date  of  his  appointment,  who  he  was.   We  had  his  file,  and  we 
would  then  go  to  a  hearing  and  establish  that  the  woman  was 
qualified  and  would  have  been  appointed  in  the  absence  of  State 
Farm's  discriminatory  policies. 

Lage:     Did  you  have  to  pick  a  woman  who  applied  about  that  time? 

Pesonen:   Yes,  it  had  to  be  a  woman  who  applied  within  that  time  period  or 
had  been  deterred  from  applying  in  that  general  time  period. 


322 


That  time  period  was  very  specifically  laid  out  in  the  consent 
decree  also. 

Well,  I  developed  a  plan,  hired  the  staff,  did  the  training, 
set  up  some  systems  for  numerically  ranking  the  strengths  of  each 
one  of  these  people.   There  were  some  tests  that  they  had  to 
take.   We  had  to  organize  all  of  that  all  over  the  country. 

Lage:     You  ran  a  kind  of  an  employment  bureau. 

Pesonen:   It  had  some  qualities  of  that.   These  tests  were  given  in  high 
school  auditoriums  so  we  could  monitor  them.   State  Farm 
administered  the  tests  and  the  state  Department  of  Insurance 
administered  some  of  them,  and  we  would  be  there  to  answer 
questions  from  the  women  and  had  the  staff  all  over  the  country 
going  to  these  meetings.   There  would  be  a  whole  auditorium  full 
of  100  to  200  women  taking  this  exam  to  get  into  this  process. 

We  boiled  that  down  to  about  1,400  from  the  6,500  who  had 
responded  to  the  mailing.   Then  we  interviewed  every  one  of  them 
in  a  lengthy,  structured  interview,  made  a  report,  developed  a 
numerical  ranking  system,  established  their  time  periods,  then 
filed  final  claims  for  them  and  started  into  the  trial  process. 

Lage:     Now,  was  there  a  precedent  for  this  way  of  handling  a  case? 

Pesonen:   Not  on  this  scale.   It  had  never  been  done  before,  and  I  suspect 
it  will  never  be  done  again.   [laughter]   Because  it  got  very 
expensive,  and  it  was  very  stressful.   It  was  just  as  stressful 
for  State  Farm  as  it  was  for  us;  maybe  more.   It  was  certainly 
more  expensive  for  them.   We  had  heard  that  it  was  costing  them 
about  $30  million  a  year  just  to  defend  against  what  we  had  set 
up. 

Lage:     They  already  lost  on  the  consent  decree? 

Pesonen:   They  had  lost  on  liability;  it  was  established  that  they  had 
discriminated  against  women  as  a  matter  of  law. 

Lage:     But  then  they  were  fighting  the  amounts? 

Pesonen:   We  had  to  find  out  which  women.   Each  one  of  these  women  who  went 
to  hearing  to  prove  the  specific  elements  had  to  show  that  she 
was  an  actual  victim  of  the  discrimination,  not  just  somebody  who 
walked  in  off  the  street  and  filed  a  piece  of  paper.   Those  were 
very  intensely  litigated  hearings.   State  Farm's  attorneys, 
Morrison  &  Foerster  in  San  Francisco,  threw  everything  at  it.   It 
was  a  scorched  earth  defense  as  Guy  Saperstein  describes  it. 


323 


Lage:     Did  you  argue  those  cases  or  did  you  manage  everybody  else? 

Pesonen:   I  argued  some.   They  were  tried,  we  called  witnesses,  had 

depositions,  put  in  exhibits,  wrote  briefs  and  got  decisions.   1 
ended  up  trying  nine  out  of  about  seventy  that  went  to  hearing. 
I  won  five,  I  lost  two,  and  two  are  still  awaiting  decision;  I 
don't  know  how  they  are  going  to  come  out. 

Lage:     And  how  about  the  other  sixty-one? 

Pesonen:   We  were  winning  about  45  percent  of  those  that  were  tried;  they 

were  settling  half,  and  of  the  half  that  went  to  hearing,  we  were 
winning  about  a  little  less  than  half  of  those.   If  we  won  at 
each  one,  it  was  roughly  $700,000  to  the  claimant  and  another 
couple  of  hundred  thousand  dollars  of  attorney's  fees  on  top  of 
that  for  all  of  the  work  we  put  in.   Over  time,  it  became 
apparent  to  State  Farm  that  this  process  would  go  on  until  maybe 
1998  and  the  value  of  each  claim  was  increasing  with  time  because 
of  an  accumulated  back-pay  formula  with  interest  so  that  the 
claims  that  would  go  to  hearing  in  the  late  1990s  would  be  worth 
over  a  million  dollars  a  piece,  and  we  had  800  of  those  left, 
roughly.   So  an  overture  to  try  to  settle  all  of  this  was  made 
last  fall. 

Lage:     By  State  Farm? 

Pesonen:   By  State  Farm.  And  in  about  September  of  '91  through  January  of 
this  year  [1992]  we  negotiated  a  very  comprehensive  settlement 
program  which  gave  each  woman  less  than  she  would  get  if  we  went 
to  trial  and  won,  but  with  the  certainty  that  she'd  get  it.   The 
condition  was  that  87.5  percent  of  about  821  cases  remaining  had 
to  accept  it  or  it  was  voidable.   It  ended  up  that  89  percent 
accepted  the  offer. 

Lage:     So  they  preferred  the  certainty? 

Pesonen:   Well,  it  was  a  healthy  chunk  of  cash.   No  woman  got  less  than 
$135,000,  and  most  of  them  got  up  in  the  range  of  between 
$150,000  and  $200,000.   Some  over  $200,000,  depending  on  the  year 
of  the  challenged  appointment.   So  the  total  was  $157  million  and 
814  out  of  821  accepted  that.  The  other  seven  felt  that  they  had 
such  good  cases  they  would  go  for  the  full  value,  and  State  Farm 
immediately  settled  two  of  those  for  full  value,  which  was  a  lot 
of  money.   The  others  are  settled,  all  but  one,  which  is  going  to 
go  to  trial  in  July  of  this  year.   Then  there  are  ten  or  twelve 
that  were  tried  before  the  settlement  that  are  awaiting  decision 
from  the  special  masters.   So  it  is  just  about  wrapped  up.   It 
will  be  wrapped  up  by  this  fall.   Now  the  total  amount  recovered 
for  the  women  is  going  to  be  over  $200  million. 


324 


Lage:     How  about  the  total  amount  recovered  for  the  law  firm? 
Pesonen:   Well,  that  I'm  not  at  liberty  to  say,  but  it's  a  lot. 

Lage:     There  is  always  the  popular  perception  that  the  lawyers  are  the 
ones  who  win  in  these  cases.  Do  you  think  that's  justified? 

Pesonen:   The  lawyers  did  very  well.   The  lawyers  are  not  complaining.   But 
when  you  consider  that  Guy  Saperstein  started  this  case  sixteen 
years  ago  and  had  to  take  the  risk  of  all  of  the  overhead,  hiring 
all  of  the  people  and  building  a  new  office,  taking  on  the 
enormous  liability  of  possible  malpractice  if  anything  were 
mishandled  in  this  claim  procedure,  he's  not  been  overcompensated 


in  my  opinion, 
be. 


He's  a  wealthy  man  after  this  case,  and  he  should 


Lage:     Does  he  have  to  adjudicate  his  own  compensation? 

Pesonen:   No,  that's  part  of  the  deal.   But  I  don't  know  any  lawyer  who 

would  take  that  kind  of  risk  for  that  long.   There  were  periods 
when  he  had  three  mortgages  on  his  house  to  finance  this  case,  to 
keep  it  going,  and  long  periods  of  time  when  he  was  deeply  in 
debt  and  didn't  get  paid  at  all.   And  I'm  sure  he  went  through  a 
lot.   It's  the  American  way.   I  mean,  it's  a  gamble. 

Lage:     Was  the  law  firm  always  in  the  field  of  sex  discrimination? 

Pesonen:   Civil  rights,  which  includes  sex  discrimination;  it  includes  race 
discrimination,  and  the  firm  now  does  nothing  but  a  lot  of  class 
actions  against  large  employers.   Several  cases  going  against 
large  grocery  chains  for  sex  discrimination  in  the  promotion  and 
hire  of  their  clerical  or  management  staff.   We  have  one  huge 
case  going  in  the  South  against  a  restaurant  chain  for  race 
discrimination.   We  are  starting  to  move  more—we  are  hoping  at 
least- -to  move  into  large  environmental  cases. 

Lage:     And  these  will  also  be  large  class  actions? 

Pesonen:   Well,  not  necessarily  class  actions,  but  large  cases  involving 
lots  of  money  and  lots  of--.   Well,  they  won't  be  just  your 
little  not-in-my-back-yard  garbage  dump  cases.  We  don't  know 
exactly  what  they  are  going  to  be  yet,  but  they  could  be  large 
toxics  cases,  toxic  contamination,  air  pollution,  water 
pollution. 

Lage:     Is  that  what  you  are  going  to  go  into? 

Pesonen:   That's  what  I'm  supposed  to  go  into.   I'm  just  starting  to  work 
on  it . 


325 


Lage: 
Pesonen: 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 

Pesonen: 


Lage: 

Pesonen: 

Lage: 


What  will  that  involve? 

Well,  it's  never  been  done  before  on  this  scale 
large  class  actions  settle  with  a  formula.  The 
a  chunk  of  cash,  which  could  be  a  lot  of  money, 
in  and  file  a  form  and  get  a  little  piece  of  it 
get  ten  cents  on  the  dollar.  In  the  State  Farm 
were  close  to  being  fully  compensated,  but  they 
this  ordeal  to  reach  that  level  of  compensation 
the  largest  amount  of  money  ever  recovered. 


Most  of  these 
defendant  puts  up 
Then  people  come 

They  usually 
case  these  women 
had  to  go  through 

It  is  certainly 


Was  this  Guy  Saperstein's  idea  that  it  would  be  done  on  such  an 
individual  basis? 

Yes.   Well- 
He  put  it  across  to  the  judge? 

There's  a  U.S.  Supreme  Court  precedent.   The  case  involved  a 
teacher's  union  versus  the  United  States  in  1977,  I  think,  which 
reasoned  that  when  the  injury  is  as  personal  as  sex 
discrimination  and  as  individual  to  the  victim,  that  an 
individually  tailored  remedy  for  each  member  of  the  class  was 
preferred  to  a  formula  distribution.   A  formula  distribution  is 
favored  in  cases  where  the  amount  of  recovery  is  small  and  the 
injury  is  fairly  economic,  such  as  antitrust  violations,  for 
example,  where  you  are  overcharged  $1.50  for  a  pair  of  Levi's  or 
your  bank  overcharges  you  $1.50  for  each  bounced  check,  that  sort 
of  thing. 

It  doesn't  make  sense  to  go  through  this  kind  of  process  for 
that  kind  of  case,  but  where  you  are  deprived  of  a  career  path 
that  could  be  very  lucrative—you  know  these  State  Farm  agents 
make  a  lot  of  money—and  shunted  off  into  a  clerical  position  or 
some  other  career  path,  it  is  really  a  distortion  of  what  your 
life  would  be  but  for  this  illegal  conduct.   We  are  talking  about 
something  a  lot  more  personal  and  a  lot  more  freighted  with 


emotional  and  identity  issues,  and  a  lot  of  money, 
only  place  you  make  your  money,  is  your  work. 


That's  the 


And,  on  the  other  hand,  each  woman  had  to  show  that  she  was  a 
potential  hiree? 

That's  right,  and  that  she  had  the  qualifications  and  the 
interest. 


It  sounds  very  interesting.   Did  you  enjoy  working  on  it? 
must  have  been  a  great  management  problem. 


It 


326 


or 


Pesonen:   It  was,  but  I  loved  it.   I  love  big  management  problems.   I  love 
new  challenges.   This  was  an  unprecedented  challenge. 

Lage:     How  did  it  compare  with  managing  the  Department  of  Forestry 
the  regional  parks  in  terms  of  just  the  management? 

Pesonen:   Well,  those  were  public  agencies.   They  are  subject  to  a  lot  of 
rules  and  constraints.   The  Department  of  Forestry,  managing  it 
is  80  percent  people  and  motivating,  training,  selecting,  and 
guiding.   The  rest  of  it  is  inspiration  and  leadership.   The 
mission  here  was  very  clear,  simple,  and  straightforward.   The 
mission  of  a  public  agency  often  is  very  diffuse.   They  have  many 
missions-- 

Lage:     And  many  more  complications? 

Pesonen:   --and  many  more  complications,  but  in  the  personnel  area  there 
are  many  more  constraints,  too.   You  can't  just  go  out  and  hire 
people  who  you  think  would  do  a  good  job,  you  have  to  go  through 
the  civil  service  system,  deal  with  unions;  in  the  state  you  are 
completely  stuck  with  the  civil  service  system  except  in  very 
rare  instances.   Here  we  could  just  put  ads  in  the  legal 
newspapers  that  said  we  want  lawyers  with  certain  minimum 
qualifications,  and  then  we  interviewed  hundreds  to  select  the 
correct  staff.   So  at  least  the  recruitment  and  hire  part  is  far 
different  from  public  agencies.   The  personnel  management,  a  lot 
of  it  is  the  same.   It  is  just  common  sense.  You  treat  people 
fairly,  compensate  them  fairly,  give  them  some  sense  of  self- 
worth  about  what  they  are  doing,  some  clarity  about  what  is 
expected  of  them,  and  they  do  a  good  job.   They  really  did  a  good 
job  on  this  case. 

Lage:     That's  a  good  place  to  end.   Shall  we  cut  off  now  or  do  you  have 
anything  else  you  want  to  say? 

Pesonen:   No,  I  don't  think  so.   I'll  probably  think  of  something  when  I 
look  at  the  transcript. 

Lage:     You  can  add  it  then. 


Transcriber:   Kian  Sandjideh 
Final  Typist:   Shannon  Page 


327 


TAPE  GUIDE- -David  E.  Pesonen 


Interview  1:  December  17, 

Tape  1,  Side  A 

Tape  1,  Side  B 

Tape  2,  Side  A 

Tape  2,  Side  B 


1991 


Interview  2: 
Tape  3, 
Tape  3, 
Tape  4, 
Tape  4, 
Tape  5, 
Tape  5,  Side  B  not  recorded 


January  23,  1992 

Side  A 

Side  B 

Side  A 

Side  B 

Side  A 


Interview  3: 
Tape  6, 
Tape  6, 
Tape  7, 


February  12,  1992 
Side  A 
Side  B 
Side  A 


Tape  7,  Side  B  not  recorded 

Interview  4:  February  27,  1992 

Tape  8,  Side  A 

Tape  8,  Side  B 

Tape  9,  Side  A 

Tape  9,  Side  B 

Interview  5:   March  12,  1992 
Tape  10,  Side  A 
Tape  10,  Side  B 
Tape  11,  Side  A 
Tape  11,  Side  B 

Interview  6:   April  2,  1992 

Tape  12,  Side  A 

Tape  12,  Side  B 

Tape  13,  Side  A 

Tape  13,  Side  B 

Tape  14,  Side  A 

Tape  14,  Side  B  not  recorded 


1 

12 
21 
33 


38 
48 
59 
68 
79 


82 
92 

102 


112 
123 
133 
143 


152 
162 
173 
184 


188 
200 
210 
221 
233 


328 

Interview  7:   May  14,  1992 

Tape  15,  Side  A  236 

Tape  15,  Side  B  247 

Tape  16,  Side  A  258 

Tape  16,  Side  B  270 

Tape  17,  Side  A  281 
Tape  17,  Side  B  not  recorded 

Interview  8:  May  28,  1992 

Tape  18,  Side  A  284 

Tape  18,  Side  B  295 

Tape  19,  Side  A  306 

Tape  19,  Side  B  317 


329 


APPENDICES--David  E.  Pesonen 


A.  Karl  Kortum  letter  on  Bodega,  San  Francisco  Chronicle, 

3/14/62  330 

B.  "The  Battle  of  Bodega  Bay,"  by  David  Pesonen,  Sierra  Club 

Bulletin.  June  1962.  331 


330 


Appendix  A.     Karl  Kortum  letter  on 
Bodega,   San  Francisco  Chronicle.    3/14/62 


LETTERS   TO   THE    EDITOR 


Atom  vs.  Nature  at  Bodega 


Editor  —  Harold  Gilliam's  article 
"Atom  vs.  Nature  at  Bodega"  (This 
World,  February  1 1),  described 
how  one  of  the  few  harbors  on  our 
almost  harborless  Northern  Cali 
fornia  coast  is  going  to  be  hacked 
and  filled  and  finally  disfigured  by 
an  atomic  power  plant.  How  a 
great,  brooding  California  head 
land,  sea-girt  and  of  ancient  gran 
ite,  will  be  given  a  profile  like 
neighbor  Richmond  and  its  gas 
tank  How  a  large  State  park  at 
Bodega  has  been  killed,  and  a 
county  park  will  be  made  to  en 
gorge  steel  towers  and  the  familiar 
droop  of  transmission  wires. 

Nearly  a  quarter  century  ago,  I 
fished  for  some  days  running  out 
side  the  Tomales  Bay  bar.  Bodega 
Head  lay  to  the  north,  enveloped  in 
moods  and  mists  like  a  cape  thrust 
into  the  Irish  Sea.  I  never  closed 
with  this  headland  and  indeed  re 
moteness  seems  much  of  its  char 
acter.  Even  today  no  highway  has 
ever  been  scratched  in  angular  sur 
vey  down  its  soft  contour.  And  a 
bay  filled  with  fishing  boats  inter 
venes  between  it  and  the  nearest 
gathering  point  of  the  automobile. 

Conservationists  from  the  State 
Park  Commission  and  the  National 
Park  Service  came  in  the  last  dec 
ade  to  walk  among  the  lupine  and 
decide  that  this  should  be  a  public 
preserve. 

But  about  the  same  time  came 
men  of  a  different  type.  They  too 
walked  out  on  the  point  and  gave 
it  the  triumphant  glance  of  dem 
igods. 

I  am  reconstructing.  These  men 
are  engineers  from  a  public  utility, 
and  as  a  member  of  the  public  it  is 
my  privilege  and  duty  to  speculate. 
The  scene  shifts  to  the  home 
office: 

"Our  engineering  boys  think  we 
ought  to  grab  Bodega  Head  ." 

"They  do'  (low  whistle)  That 
might  be  a  little  rough." 

"Why?  Why  more  than  Moss 
Landing  or  Humboldt  Bay?" 

"Well,  it's  more  scenic.  There 
will  be  more  protest.  The  State 
park  people  and  the  national  park 
people  are  already  on  record  for 
public  acquisition." 

"Our  engineers  sav  we  need  it. 


We'll  just  buy,  fast.   Get  in  ahead 
of  them.   It's  legal." 

"Well  .  .  ." 

"What  we  can't  buy  we'll  con 
demn." 

"What  about  public  protest.  This 
one  could  ge^  a  little  noisy." 

"Keep  it  at  the  county  level.  Or 
try  to  Every  service  club  in  every 
town  has  got  our  people  in  it  rub 
bing  shoulders  In  the  country, 
opinion  is  made  at  the  weekly 
luncheon  .  .  ." 

"How  about   the  newspapers'" 

"It's  the  local  businessmen  who 
buy  the  space.  Oh,  I  don't  say  we 
haven't  got  some  work  to  do.  But 
these  guys  have  got  other  things  on 
their  minds  —  they're  scratching 
out  a  living." 

"Have  you  got  an  angle?  I  mean 
apart  from  the<  fact  that  we  want 
it." 

"Oh,  sure  We'll  get  out  some 
releases  and  speeches  on  how  the 
county  tax  base  will  be  improved. 
We  might  even  try  calling  it  a 
tourist  attraction ." 

"And  the  county  officials'" 

"They're  o.k.  We'll  set  the  tone 
up  there  and  they'll  respond  to 
it  Just  as  elected  representatives 
should  Oh,  you  might  get  some 
idealist  .  .  ." 

What  is  the  matter'  Why  do 
these  things  come  to  pass' 

The  answer  is  simple  Our  engi 
neer  demigods  are  obsolete. 

The  idea  of  shaking  their  ped 
estals  to  see  if  they  will  topple  over 
has  only  lately  come  upon  us.  (A 
covey  bit  the  dust  lately  when 
the  Tiburr  n  Bridge 'was  canceled  > 

The  engineers  of  this  public  util 
ity  may  find  that  their  callousness 
has  crested  at  Bodega  Head.  Just  as 
the  Toll  Bridge  Authority  engineers 
crested  with  the  bridge  that  sags 
frugally  from  Richmond  to  San 
Rafael  Or  the  highway  engineers 
with  the  two-deck  freeway  that 
spoils  the  Embarcadero. 

An  atomic  plant  doesn't  have  to 
be  built  at  Bodega  Head.  Without 
any  expertise  whatsoever,  I  can 
make  that  statement  categorically. 
It  is  just  a  matter  of  whose  engi 
neers  you  listen  to. 

Engineers  have  amazlne  re 


sources.  They  have  been  able  to 
prove  that  it  is  mechanically  impos 
sible  for  a  bee  to  fly  ... 

"You  can't  lick  the  biggest  'city 
hall'  of  them  all  .  .  ."  wrote  Ed 
Mannion  in  his  column  in  the  Peta- 
luma  Argus  -  Courier  on  February 
17,  pointing  out  that  two  friends, 
one  a  member  of  the  county  grand 
jury  and  the  other  a  prominent 
newspaper  reporter,  had  urged  him 
to  give  up  the  fight. 

Well,  Ed,  you  can  lick  them  If 
everyone  reading  this  would  take 
five  minutes  to  write  a  letter  they 
would  be  licked.  But  a  licking  is  not 
what  to  ask  for;  regulation  is  suf 
ficient  —  regulation  in  the  full 
Breadth  of  U*  pijWk.  »*eiesi.  We 
have  a  Public  Utilities  Commission 
charged  with  doing  just  that. 

KARL  KORTUM. 

San  Francisco. 

FEPC  Progress 

Editor — To  correct  the  impres 
sion  readers  may  get  from  your 
report  of  results  obtained  by  the 
California  Fair  Employment  Prac 
tice  Commission  ("Progress  Re 
port  by  State  FEPC",  March  8) 
may  I  explain  that  the  agency  has 
reached  a  determination  in  more 
than  1000  cases  as  to  whether  the 
evidence  indicates  discrimination 
m  employment  on  account  of  race, 
religious  creed  or  ancestry 

In  36.6  per  cent  of  those  cases 
such  evidence  was  established 
and  corrective  action  taken.  In  the 
remaining  cases,  there  was  insuf 
ficient  or  no  evidence  and  the 
cases  were  dismissed 

FREDCUNSKY. 
Information  Officer,  FEPC. 
San  Francisco. 

'Living  Future' 

Editor  —  The  resumption  of  ot- 
mospheric  tests  is  merely  a  symp 
tom  of  our  failure  to  reduce  world 
tensions.  It  is  unrealistic  to  blome 
eoch  new  step  in  the  orms  race  on 
the  malevolence  of  the  Russian 
leaders  .  .  . 

Negotioting  means  give  and 
take,  ond  this  process  might  force 
us  to  give  on  some  positions,  but 
the  result  could  be  o  better  world 
because  we  could  reasonably  ex 
pect  o  living  future. 

MIRIAM  M.    HAWLEY. 

Berkelev 


331 


The  Battle  of  Bodega  Bay 


Appendix  B.   from 

Sierra  Club  Bulletin.  June,  1962. 

By  David  E.  Pesonen 


BODEGA'S  headland  is  a  bold  arm  of  gran 
ite  curving  into  the  Pacific  Ocean  about 
fifty  miles  north  of  San  Francisco.  It  curls 
nround  Bodega  Harbor  and  protects  the 
fishing  village  of  Bodega  Bay  and  the  Meet 
in  the  harbor  from  the  heavy  wind  and  surf 
that  beat  against  California's  northern  coast. 
Since  the  main  north-south  highways  run  far 
inland  at  this  point,  the  Bodega  area  was, 
until  recently,  relatively  little  known  among 
scenic  attractions  of  the  Pacific  shoreline. 
But  never  again  will  it  be  a  sleepy,  remote, 
wildly  beautiful  place  off  in  a  far  corner. 

On  March  7,  the  state  Public  Utilities 
Commission  opened  hearings  on  an  applica 
tion  by  the  Pacific  Gas  and  Electric  Com 
pany  for  a  "certificate  of  public  convenience 
and  necessity"  to  construct  a  $64  million 
nuclear  fueled  electric  generator  at  Bodega 
Head. 

The  hearings  took  eight  days,  spread  over 
a  four-month  period,  during  which  the  util 
ity  argued  that  Bodega  Head  is  an  attractive 
site  for  a  nuclear  reactor  for  a  number  of 
reasons — some  ostensibly  technical,  but  at 
the  root  mostly  economic.  The  headland's 
close  proximity  to  the  growing  San  Fran 
cisco  Bay  Area  would  assure  low  power 
transmission  costs.  Harbor  facilities  for 
transporting  fission  products  are  ideal.  And 
since  present  reactors  gulp  great  volumes  of 
cooling  water,  Bodega  Head,  the  Company 
asserted,  is  about  the  only  site  in  the  region 
where  cheap  intake  and  outlet  structures  are 
feasible.  If  built,  the  Bodega  Bay  plant 
would  be  a  "breakthrough"  for  private  cap 
ital.  It  would,  according  to  Mr.  N.  R.  Suth 
erland,  the  Company's  president,  "produce 
electricity  ...  as  economically  and  as  reli 
ably  as  available  conventional  fuels." 

Opposition  to  the  plant  was  vigorous, 
widespread,  and  at  times  acrimonious.  Bo 
dega  Head  is  a  seismic  stepchild  of  the  San 
Andreas  Fault.  It  is  a  block  of  granite  sep 
arated  from  the  mainland  by  this  greatest  of 
the  Earth's  rifts,  and  it  appears  to  have  ar 
rived  where  it  is  through  movement  along 
this  fault.  Understandably,  residents  of  the 
town  of  Bodega  Bay  are  uncomfortable  at 
the  thought  of  a  nuclear  reactor  virtually  in 
their  front  yard,  on  the  skirts  of  the  same 
fault  which  heaved  in  the  1906  San  Fran 
cisco  earthquake.  Further,  the  excavated 
granite  would  be  used  as  fill  for  a  heavy 
duty  road  to  the  plant  along  the  Harbor's 
tideland,  obliterating  the  rich  clamming- 
grounds  and  endangering  the  fishing  fleet 
during  heavy  weather.  Powerlines  from  the 
plant  are  mapped  to  stream  across  the  har 
bor  mouth,  down  the  length  of  the  county's 
Doran  Park,  a  sandspit  which  defines  the 
southern  border  of  the  harbor. 

The   University   of   California,   which   is 

SIERRA   CLUB    BULLETIN,  JUNE.    1962 


now  in  litigation  to  condemn  a  strip  of 
property  next  to  the  P.G.&E.  holdings  for  a 
marine  research  station,  took  a  neutral  stand 
at  the  hearings.  Despite  a  parade  of  marine 
biologists  who  testified  that  the  temperature 
and  radiological  effects  of  the  plant  would 
certainly  affect  local  marine  life  (to  an  un 
known  degree),  the  Chancellor's  representa 
tive  at  the  hearings  told  the  Commission 
that  the  University  "neither  supports  nor  op 
poses"  the  power  installation.  He  added  that 
the  plant  would  not  "render  the  [marine] 
site  unusable."  But  he  declined  to  state 
whether  the  marine  station  would  be  a  bet 
ter  research  facility  without  the  reactor  next 
door. 

Although  the  State  Division  of  Beaches 
and  Parks  had  plannned  in  1955  to  acquire 
all  of  Bodega  Head  for  addition  to  the  state 
park  system,  all  interest  was  withdrawn  in 
1958  for  lack  of  county  enthusiasm  and  be 
cause  the  area  had  been  "spoken  for."  The 
Division's  representative  at  the  P.U.C.  hear 
ings  took  a  position  similar  to  the  Univer 
sity's.  Although  he  testified  that  the  State's 
interest  was  lukewarm  because  enough  of 
the  Bodega-type  shoreline  was  already  in 
state  ownership,  under  cross-examination  he 
could  cite  no  comparable  area. 

The  Sierra  Club's  opposition  to  the  plant 
was  based  on  two  principles:  (1)  The  alter 
native  uses  of  Bodega  Head  are  of  higher 
value  than  the  proposed  plant  and  would  by 
their  nature  preclude  its  construction,  and 
(2)  The  cost  of  power  is  an  inadequate  meas 
ure  for  determining  "public  convenience 
and  necessity"  at  Bodega  Head.  The  Com 
pany  already  runs  three  plants  along  the 
coast;  the  Bodega  plant  would  be  the  fourth. 
"The  future  demands  for  energy-  are  going 
to  be  too  great  for  the  public  to  wish  a  series 
of  precedents  that  would  result  in  the  sys 
tematic  picking  off  of  irreplaceable  scenic 
and  recreational  sites  for  power  genera 


tion,"  the  club's  statement  said.  "One  kilo 
watt  hour  looks  just  like  every  other  kilo 
watt  hour,  and  this  energy  should  come  from 
the  transformation  of  common  resources,  not 
from  the  transformation  of  unique  sites." 

The  statement  of  the  Sierra  Club  argued 
that  "it  is  not  really  a  'breakthrough'  at  Bo 
dega  Head  if  no  other  site  is  competitive. 
This  would  merely  demonstrate  the  penin 
sula's  uniqueness.  It  is  of  questionable  eco 
nomic  value,  in  the  advancing  technology  of 
nuclear  electric  generation,  to  demonstrate 
that  only  with  the  most  fortuitous  proximity 
of  bay,  ocean,  and  peninsula  can  the  nuclear 
process  be  competitive.  A  comparable  situa 
tion  would  be  to  have  the  utility  allege  that 
only  by  using  Yosemite  Falls  could  it  build 
a  competitive  hydroelectric  plant,  and  then 
claim  a  'breakthrough'  by  building  a  plant 
that  would  require  using  up  this  unique  re 
source.  Engineers  can  surely  do  better  than 
this.  They  must." 

Unless  startling  new  evidence  is  uncov 
ered,  no  further  hearings  will  be  held  by  the 
Public  Utilities  Commission.  The  final  de 
cision  is  not  expected  until  late  in  the  sum 
mer,  after  the  Company  provides  some  addi 
tional  seismic  data  requested  by  the  Com 
mission's  staff,  and  after  the  Commission 
members  convene  formally  to  assess  the 
eight-volume  record  of  testimony  at  the 
hearings.  A  great  many  complex  technical 
questions  remain  to  be  answered  before  a 
final  decision  is  rendered. 

The  club's  statement  concluded:  "The 
public  is  entitled  to  know  how  much  more 
an  individual's  monthly  electric  bill  will  be 
increased — or  decreased — by  using  alterna 
tives.  ...  If  there  were  [no  alternatives], 
the  public  might  very  well  be  willing  to  buy 
a  little  less  electricity  each  month  in  prefer 
ence  to  destroying  a  scenic  resource  that  is 
the  last  of  its  kind  on  a  coast  that  belongs 
to  the  world." 


Bodega  Bay 
looking  north. 
John  Lf  Baron 

photograph 


INDEX--David  Pesonen 


332 


A  Visit  to  Atomic  Park.  37,  38, 

49-53,  55-56,  59,  69,  87,  99, 

101 
affirmative  action,  206-209,  222, 

228 

Agretelis,  Demetrios,  253 
Alper,  Roy,  184 
Alquist,  Alfred,  206,  225 
Alvarado  Park,  Richmond, 

California,  306-307 
American  Civil  Liberties  Union 

(ACLU),  57,  236 
American  Friends  Service 

Committee,  57,  85 
Anderson,  Glenn,  74 
Anschults,  Phillip,  282 
Ardenwood  Regional  Park,  290-293, 

304,  306 

Arnason,  Richard,  247-248,  255 
Arnold,  Byron,  136-137 
Association  of  Bay  Area 

Governments  (ABAC),  270 
Atchison,  Topeka  and  Santa  Fe 
Railway,  283.   See  also  Santa 
Fe  Pacific  Railway 
Atomic  Energy  Act  of  1954,  79 
Atomic  Energy  Commission  (AEC) , 

47-48,  50,  54,  56,  58,  60-61, 

66,  71-75,  89,  97-99,  123-126, 

142,  172 
atomic  power.   See  nuclear  power. 

Baker,  Richard,  185-186 

Baker,  William,  285 

Barsotti,  Mario,  109-110 

Barzaghi,  Jacques,  185,  187 

Behr,  Peter,  72 

Belli,  Melvin,  92-93 

Bennett,  William,  61-62,  89,  160- 

161 

Berkeley  Shakespeare  Festival,  263 
Bernstein,  Malcolm,  108-110 
Berry,  Phillip,  44,  54,  83,  191, 

193,  312,  315-316,  317-318,  319 
Bird,  Rose,  228,  240,  242-243 


Black  Diamond  Mines  Regional  Park, 

299-300 
Black  Panthers,  91,  108,  112,  116- 

119,  142,  150,  256 
Blease,  Coleman,  236,  238 
Bodega  Bay,  Ca. :   proposed  power 

plant,  34-35,  37-105,  112,  115, 

119,  122,  124,  125,  128,  153, 

160,  163,  185,  236 
Bonneke,  Hazel,  [now  Mitchell]  50 
Bosco,  Douglas,  225 
Bowers,  Lynn,  268,  270-274,  275, 

289,  283,  285,  292,  298 
Brand,  Stewart,  185 
Bridenbaugh  [nuclear  engineer], 

171 

Brotsky,  Alan,  112,  142,  150 
Brower,  David,  28-29,  31-33,  42, 

44,  46-48,  52-53,  99-100,  102, 

128,  178-179,  188 
Brown  Act,  288 
Brown,  Ira,  139-140,  238 
Brown,  Jerry,  [Edmund  G.,  Jr.], 

32,  103,  150,  179,  180,  182, 

185-242,  244,  249 
Brown,  Pat  [Edmund  G. ,  Sr.],  53, 

55,  56,  74-75,  171-172 
Brown,  Willie,  194,  269 
Budnitz,  Bob,  185 
Bunnelle,  Hasse,  33 
Burch,  James,  162-163,  165-168, 

173-175,  179 
Burton,  Phillip,  190 
Bush,  George,  192 

California  Coastal  Act  of  1976, 

198-199 
California  Energy  Resources 

Conservation  &  Development 

Commission,  180 
California  Environmental  Quality 

Act  (CEQA),  139,  224-225 
California  State  Board  of 

Forestry,  32,  42,  188-199 


333 


California  State  Department  of 

Agriculture,  196 
California  State  Department  of 

Finance,  203,  206,  210,  213, 

217,  226 
California  State  Department  of 

Fish  and  Game,  30-31,  126-127, 

198,  223,  228 
California  State  Department  of 

Forestry,  190-191,  194,  198-236, 

239,  263,  284,  326;  director  of, 

129,  142,  150,  187,  198-235. 

See  also  fire  fighting. 
California  State  Department  of 

Highways,  57 
California  State  Department  of 

Insurance,  322 
California  State  Department  of 

Parks  and  Recreation,  50,  284 
California  State  Department  of 

Transportation  (Caltrans),  140- 

141 
California  State  Department  of 

Water  Resources,  196 
California  State  Division  of  Mines 

and  Geology,  228 
California  State  Highway  Patrol, 

210-211 
California  State  Legislature,  139- 

140,  179-183,  194,  206,  223-226, 

228,  269-270,  285;  Assembly 

Committee  on  Resources,  Land 

Use,  and  Energy,  180-181; 

Assembly  Fish  and  Game 

Committee,  29-31;  Assembly  Rules 

Committee,  14-15,  269 
California  State  Personnel  Board, 

206-207,  208 
California  State  Public  Utilities 

Commission  (PUC),  42-45,  46-48, 

50,  53,  58,  60-61,  89,  97-98, 

103,  126,  160 
California  State  Resources  Agency, 

199-200,  202-205,  211-217 
Californians  for  Environmental  and 

Economic  Balance,  185 
Californians  for  Nuclear 

Safeguards,  161,  162,  165-166, 

184 


CalPIRG  (California  Public 

Interest  Research  Group),  154, 

184 

Calvert  Cliffs.   66 
Carroll,  James,  131-137,  254 
CBS  (Columbia  Broadcasting 

System) ,  132 
Central  Valley  Project,  10-12,  40- 

41 

Champion,  Dale,  123-124 
Channell,  William,  242,  244 
Choper,  Jesse,  106,  242 
civil  rights,  38-39,  111,  274, 

276,  319-326 
Civilian  Conservation  Corps,  3-4, 

7 

Clark,  Lewis,  47 
Cleaver,  Eldridge,  107,  117 
Cleaver,  Kathleen,  117 
Cobb,  Janet,  269-270,  271,  302, 

304-305 
Cocke,  Dwight,  159-160,  162,  165, 

170,  184 

Coffey,  Bert,  251 
cold  war,  35-37,  41 
Combs,  Joycelyn,  275 
communism,  35-36,  41 
Communist  party,  35-38,  41,  114 
Connelly,  Robert,  14-15,  19,  31, 

206,  214,  222,  225,  226,  262- 

263,  269,  297 
conservation.   See  environmental 

protection. 
Contra  Costa  County  Superior 

Court,  31,  111,  138,  139,  236- 

259 
Contra  Costa  Times.  242-243,  246, 

249,  255-256 
Coyote  Hills,  291 
Cranston,  Alan,  190 
Creative  Initiative,  162-178,  186 
criminal  law,  116-119,  247-249, 

256 

Crooks,  Afton,  264-266,  276-277 
Crosby,  Heafey,  Roach,  and  May, 

273-274 

Davis,  city  of,  140-141 
Davis,  Gray,  185 
Davis,  Pauline,  29-31 


334 


Dedrick,  Claire,  199-200,  204,  228 
Democratic  party,  38,  74-77,  249, 

251 

Denton,  Jan,  228 
Desmond,  Joseph,  241-242 
Deukmejian,  George,  192 
Diablo  Canyon  power  plant,  63,  80, 

103-104,  128-129,  229-235 
Dow  Chemical,  125 
Doyle,  Bob,  277 
Dreyfus,  Barney,  64,  72,  89-94, 

105-106,  112-114,  116,  119,  121- 

122,  133-134,  142,  150 
Duncan,  Jim,  268,  280,  320 
Duskin,  Alvin,  156-159,  165 

earthquake,  Good  Friday  1964 

(Crescent  City,  CA) ,  71,  73 
East  Bay  Municipal  Utility 

District,  295,  298-299,  305 
East  Bay  Regional  Park  District, 
98,  199,  259-310,  318-319,  320, 
326;  Advisory  Committee,  264- 
266;  budget  and  finance,  284- 
287;  Board,  260-261,  263-280, 
283,  285,  287-289,  291,  302-305, 
308,  318-319,  320;  Measure  AA, 
305,  308.   See  also  individual 
parks. 

Eisenhower,  Dwight  D.,  35 
Eissler,  Fred,  80 
Eldredge,  Laurence  E.,  136 
elections,  initiative  process  in 
California:   Proposition  9 
(1972),  Clean  Environment  Act, 
155;  Proposition  9  (1974), 
Political  Reform  Act  of  1974, 
166-167,  168,  177,  184; 
Proposition  13  (1978),  217, 
284;  Proposition  15  (1976), 
See  Nuclear  Safeguards  Act; 
Proposition  20  (1972),  Coastal 
Zone  Conservation  Act,  155; 
Proposition  130  (1990),  194; 
Proposition  138  (1990),  194. 
Emerson,  Ralph,  97-98 
employment  practices, 

discrimination  in,  319-326 
Environmental  Defense  Fund,  92, 
103-104 


environmental  law,  28-29,  54,  66, 
104,  119-126,  139-142,  304-305 

environmental  protection,  156-157, 
224,  228-229,  261-262,  264-265, 
276;  legal  actions,  89-94,126- 
129,  138-142;  personal 
motivations  for,  30,  164,  168; 
philosophy  of,  11-13,  84-85, 
101-103,  204-205.   See  also 
Bodega  Bay. 

evidence,  rules  of,  243-244 

Fair  Employment  Practices 

Commission,  272 
Fair  Political  Practices  Act 

(1974).   See  Proposition  9 

(1974). 
Fair  Political  Practices 

Commission,  166-167,  171,  257 
Fannin,  Coleman,  244,  251 
FBI,  82,  99-101 
Federal  Water  Pollution  Control 

Act  (1976),  194-199 
Ferry  Point,  265,  280-283 
fire  fighting,  15-17,  18-19,  206- 

208,  209-211,  213-224,  229-235 
Fischer,  Michael,  317-319 
Fisher,  Fred,  312,  316 
Flier,  Richard,  253,  256 
Flint,  Phil,  50 
Ford,  Dan,  154 
forest  policy  issues,  188-213, 

310,  317-318 
forest  practice  rules,  42,  190, 

195-199 
Forest  Practices  Act,  32,  189, 

196,  227-229 

Forrest,  Loyd,  205,  206,  212-213 
Free  Speech  Movement,  38-39 
Freedom  of  Information  Act,  61 
freedom  of  speech,  133-136 
Frick,  Karen,  269,  270-274,  275 
Friends  of  the  Earth,  178-179,  184 
Fullerton,  Charles,  198,  200 

Gaffney,  Rose,  43,  94-96 
Gagen,  William,  250,  255,  257 
Garin  Regional  Park,  278,  301 
Garner,  Jack,  281 


335 


Garry,  Charles,  91,  93,  108,  112- 

117,  133,  142-151 
Garry,  Dreyfus,  McTernan  and 

Brotsky,  90-91,  107-108,  112- 

152,  169-170,  200-201,  207-208, 

240,  242 

Geeseman,  John,  179 
General  Electric,  55,  90,  167, 

171-172 

Georgiou,  Byron,  237,  238 
Gilbert,  Jerry,  295 
Gilliam,  Harold,  50,  59-60 
Gilligan,  James,  27-28 
Gion-Dietz  doctrine,  129-130 
Golden,  Robert,  33 
Goodwin,  Jim,  92,  101 
Graff,  Tom,  103-104 
Grand  Accord,  194,  213 
Green,  Dorothy,  154,  156 
Grendon,  Alexander,  55-56,  86, 

171-172 

Grossman,  Richard,  170 
Guidotti,  Win,  49,  84 
Guillino,  Josephine,  205-206 

Hannigan,  Thomas,  225 

Harberts,  Paul,  279 

Harris,  Don,  312,  316 

Harris,  Elihu,  289 

Harwood,  Bud  and  Virginia,  193 

Hastings,  John,  230-233 

Hawaii,  childhood  in,  3-9 

Hayes,  Walt,  174,  179 

Hayward  Daily  Review.  273-274 

Heady,  Harold,  214 

Heafey,  Edwin,  Jr.,  137 

Hearst  family,  97 

Hedgpeth,  Joel,  44,  49-51,  83,  96- 

97 

Heisler,  Francis,  91-92 
Henderson,  Thelton,  319-320 
Herring,  Frances,  64 
Hetch  Hetchy  reservoir,  88,  297 
Hill,  Doug  and  Mary  Ann,  91-92 
Billiard,  David,  118-119 
Billiard,  Shelly  Bursey,  118-119 
Hoffman,  John,  121 
Hoover,  J.  Edgar,  82,  100 
Hornbeck,  Hulet,  277 


House  Unamerican  Activities 

Committee,  91,  114 
Hubbard,  Dick,  171-172 
Humboldt  Bay  power  plant,  63,  130- 

133,  141-142 
Button,  Bobby,  107 

Interstate  Commerce  Commission, 
281-283 

Jeans,  Robert,  201 

Jefferds,  Mary,  263,  267,  271, 

280,  283,  289,  291,  304 
Johnson,  Buey,  150,  189,  199-205, 

211-217,  219 
Jones,  Jim,  143-151 
Joyner,  Ernie,  52-53 

Kaiser  Hospital,  254 

Keene,  Barry,  225 

Kendall,  Henry,  134,  153-156,  183, 

185-186 

Kennedy,  Charles,  254-255 
Kent,  Jerry,  262,  275-276 
Kent,  Roger,  75-76 
Kerson,  Don,  92,  115 
Kessel,  Harlan,  260,  263-264,  267, 

268,  271,  279-280,  283,  287, 

289,  291,  304-305 
King,  Don,  238 
Kline,  J.  Anthony,  237 
Knecht,  William,  45 
Knox,  John  (Jack),  285 
Koenig  (geologist),  46 
Kortum,  Jean,  55,  59,  75-77,  89 
Kortum,  Karl,  42,  44,  45,  50-52, 

57,  59,  65,  69 
Kortum,  Lucy,  51-52 
Kortum,  William,  51-52,  54,  89 
Koupal,  Edward,  155-161,  165,  175, 

179 
Kraszewski  v.  State  Farm.  274, 

276,  319-326 

LaBelle,  Mary  Jane,  316 

La  Pointe,  Alan,  307 

labor  law,  112,  114 

labor  unions,  218-223,  251,  293- 

294,  303 
Lafayette  Reservoir,  299 


336 


Lake  Chabot  Park,  271,  294-296 

land  acquisition,  276-310 

Landor,  Walter,  313 

Lane,  Mark,  146-149 

Lange,  Suzie,  209,  210 

Langley,  Peter,  281 

Lemmon,  Jack,  131-132,  136,  138, 

252,  255,  256 

Leonard,  Richard,  47-48,  83 
Leopold,  Aldo,  27,  97 
Leopold,  Starker,  22,  31,  96-97 
Lesher,  Dean,  246,  255-256 
Levine,  Larry,  201 
Levine,  Meldon,  225 
Levy,  David,  244-245 
libel  law,  133-136,  144-145 
Livermore,  Norman  "Ike",  126-127, 

204 

Livermore,  Putnam,  126 
lumber  industry,  190,  192-196, 

223-224,  228-229 
Luten,  Dave,  292-293 
Lynch,  Eugene,  137 

Maldonado,  Ellen,  272-274 
Martinez,  city  of,  280-283 
McCarthy,  Leo,  72 
McDonald,  James,  69,  70 
Mclntyre,  Joan,  55,  58,  154 
McTernan,  Frank,  91,  112,  114, 

133,  142,  150 
Meese,  Edwin,  108 
Merrill,  Theodore,  242 
Merrow,  Sue,  311,  312,  319 
Meyer,  Bob,  115 
Meyer,  Steve,  286 
Michigan,  childhood  and  background 

in,  1-2 

Miller,  Clem,  49 
Minor,  Dale,  171 
Mitchell,  Hazel.   See  Bonneke. 
mitigation,  264-266,  281-283 
Moorman,  Jim,  121 
Moran,  Lewis,  198,  199-200,  205, 

222 

Morrison  &  Foerster,  322 
Morrison,  Jack,  76 
Morrissey,   John  C.,  45 
Moss,  Larry,  311 


Mott,  William  Penn,  2,  261,  262, 

266,  277,  279,  289,  303 
Moyal,  Maurice,  244-245 
Muldoon,  James  B.,  51 
Murphy,  Turk,  67 

NAACP,  Hayward,  California,  264 

Nader,  Ralph,  154,  179,  184 

National  Environmental  Policy  Act, 
66 

National  Lawyers'  Guild,  91,  106- 
108 

National  Park  Service,  2-4 

NBC  (National  Broadcasting 
Corporation),  130-137 

Neal,  Kathy,  289 

Neilands,  John  B.  (Joe),  3,  50, 
60-61,  87-89,  92 

Nejedly,  John,  138,  242,  251-252, 
256,  285 

New  Deal,  2-3,  10 

Newhall,  Scott,  57 

Newman,  Marsh  and  Furtado,  114 

Newsom,  William  A. ,  237 

Newton,  Huey,  112,  116-117,  142 

Nixon  administration,  132 

North  Coast  Regional  Water  Quality 
Control  Board,  195,  223 

Nothenberg,  Rudy,  297-298 

nuclear  engineering,  52,  171-172 

nuclear  power,  attitudes  toward, 
47-48,  74-80,  101-103,  163-165, 
171-172,  178-179,  184-188,  201- 
202,  229;  movement  against,  12, 
42-82,  119-129,  131-136,  141, 
153-156,  163-168,  171-172,  178- 
188,  201-202,  230-233;  safety 
of,  47-48,  51,  54-55,  74-75, 
78-80,  97-98,  131-133,  164-165, 
178-188;  waste  management,  78- 
79,  181.   See  also  Bodega  Bay 
and  Nuclear  Safeguards  Act. 

nuclear  power  plants,  66,  78-79, 
119-120,  153-154.   See  also 
specific  power  plants. 

Nuclear  Regulatory  Commission, 
142,  152,  234 

Nuclear  Safeguards  Act,  1976,  129, 
134,  152-188,  201,  236. 

nuclear  weapons,  55 


337 


O'Brian,  Pat,  269 
Oakland  Museum,  286 
Oakland  Tribune.  273 
Oakland  Zoo,  289-290 
Ohlone  Park,  297-298 
Owen,  Bob,  294,  296 

Pacific  Gas  &  Electric  Company, 

37,  38,  41-45,  46-48,  50,  58, 

60-61,  62-66,  68,  70-77,  83-84, 

86-89,  97-98,  99-100,  102-104, 

105,  119-129,  130-138,  141-142, 

229-235,  241,  254-255 
Packwood,  Robert,  310 
Parkinson,  Thomas,  22 
Parrott,  Joel,  289-290 
Patsey,  Richard,  31,  239-240,  242, 

244 

Paulus,  Robert,  206 
Pearl  Harbor,  1941,  4-6,  11 
Peavey,  Michael,  185 
People's  Lobby,  157-159 
People's  Park,  108-111,  113 
People's  Temple,  142-149,  151 
Pesonen,  Bart  (brother),  4-9,  11, 

13,  26 

Pesonen,  Dan  (cousin),  121 
Pesonen,  Eleanor  Barton  (mother), 

1,  3-11,  13,  25-26,  38 
Pesonen,  Everett  (father),  1-13, 

14-15,  25-26,  36-37,  38,  40 
Pesonen,  Kyle  (son),  118 
Peterson,  Kay,  271,  277,  280,  283, 

303 

Pleasanton  Ridge,  268,  279,  285 
Point  Arena  nuclear  power  plant, 

105,  119-129,  152-153 
Point  Reyes  National  Seashore,  59, 

99-101 
political  philosophy,  new  left, 

38-40 
political  philosophy,  old  left, 

91-94,  109,  112-116,  146,  150 
Pollack,  Stewart,  139 
Presley,  Robert,  225 
Price-Anderson  Act,  159,  181 
Project  Survival,  173,  179,  183 
Public  Employees  Retirement  Act, 

220 

Radke,  Ted,  268,  280,  287 
Raker  Act,  88 


Rancho  Seco  power  plant,  120-121, 

125-126 
Rathbun,  Amelia  and  Harry,  163, 

164,  173-175 
Reagan,  Ronald,  108-109,  155,  192, 

244,  281 

Reclamation  Act,  88 
Redwood  National  Park,  189-192, 

198 

Reinhardt,  Stephen,  167-168 
renewable  resources,  204,  211-213, 

217 

revenue  bonds,  284,  286-287 
Reynoso,  Cruz,  240-241 
Richardson,  H.L.,  252 
Richmond,  California,   city  of, 

306-307 

Rogers,  Sam,  60-61,  89 
Rosenthal,  Cecile,  193 
Rudden,  Cliff,  33 
Ruebel,  Marion  and  Ray,  43,  50, 

70 

Russo,  Ron,  300 
Ryan,  Leo,  146-147 

Sacramento  Junior  College,  14,  18 
Sacramento  Municipal  Utility 

District,  120-121 
Saint -Amand,  Pierre,  58-59,  70-71, 

102,  122 

San  Andreas  Fault,  59,  61,  68,  122 
San  Francisco  Water  Department, 

296-299 

San  Pablo  Reservoir,  299 
San  Onofre  power  plant,  156 
Santa  Fe,  New  Mexico,  childhood 

in,  2-4 

Santa  Fe  Pacific  Railway,  280-283 
Saperstein,  Guy,  273,  274,  276, 

319-320,  322,  324-325 
Sargent,  Tony,  45,  50 
Save  San  Francisco  Bay 

Association,  68,  84-85 
Save  the  Redwoods  League,  191 
Schuler,  Bill,  115 
Seaborg,  Glenn  T. ,  38,  97-99 
seismic  safety,  46-48,  58-62,  68- 

69,  73-74,  122-126,  142,  229 
Shea,  Kevin,  262 
Shearer,  Julie,  58,  60-61,  63,  71, 

83,  87,  101,  106,  122,  146,  169, 


338 


173-175,  185-186,  235,  238-239, 

254,  256 

Sher,  Byron,  225 
Sherwin,  Ray,  126-127 
Sherwood,  Don,  67-68 
Siegel,  Dan,  108-111,  113 
Sierra  Club,  28-29,  31-33,  34-35, 

42-48,  52,  63,  80-81,  83,  85, 

102-104,  119,  121-122,  126-129, 

179,  184,  188,  191,  193,  310-319 
Sierra  Club  Legal  Defense  Fund, 

92,  121-126,  129-130,  310-319 
Silva,  Julio,  15-17 
Sloan,  Doris,  50,  57,  85-86,  89, 

92 

Smith,  Charlie,  88-89 
Southern  Pacific  Railroad,  280-283 
Speier,  Jacqueline,  146-147 
Spohn,  Richard,  154,  156,  160,  179 
State  Farm  Insurance  Company,  319- 

326 

Stegner,  Wallace,  27-29 
Stender,  Fay,  112-113 
Sterns,  Jerry,  258-260 
Stolz,  Preble,  101 
Stone,  Edward  C.,  22 
Strube,  Hal,  63-65,  75 
Sunol  Regional  Park,  265,  296-298 
Sutherland,  Rick,  311-313,  315- 

316,  318 

Tilden  Park,  263,  277,  301,  303- 

304 

Tocher,  Don,  70 
Traynor,  Mike,  315-316 
Trobitz,  Henry,  192-193,  224 
Trudeau,  Richard  C.,  260-262,  264- 

266,  277,  287,  293,  306 
Truehaft,  Bob,  109,  114 
Truehaft,  Walker  and  Bernstein, 

114 

Udall,  Stewart,  29,  59-60,  65-66, 

73-74,  76 
Uniform  Determinate  Sentencing 

Act,  247-248 
Union  of  Concerned  Scientists, 

134,  153-154 


United  Nations,  Food  and 

Agriculture  Organization,  34-37, 

46,  48,  49 
United  States  Army,  15,  22-23,  35- 

36 
United  States  Bureau  of 

Reclamation,  9-12,  40-41 
United  States  Congress.   See  House 

UnAmerican  Activities  Committee. 
United  States  Department  of 

Interior,  59-60,  65-66,  99,  124, 

212 
United  States  Department  of 

Justice,  117-119 
United  States  Forest  Service,  15- 

17,  25,  192;  regulations,  29 
United  States  Geological  Survey, 

59,  65-66,  71-73,  123-124 
University  of  California, 

Berkeley,  38-39,  50,  84;  Boalt 

Hall,  101,  105-108;  School  of 

Forestry,  14,  19-26,  34,  60,  97 
University  of  California,  Lawrence 

Livermore  Laboratory,  38,  45 
University  of  California,  proposed 

marine  biology  station  at 

Bodega  Bay,  96-99 
University  of  California, 

Radiation  Laboratory,  38 
University  of  California,  San 

Francisco,  expansion  of,  138-139 
University  of  California, 

Wildlands  Research  Center,  25-29 
Unruh,  Jesse,  252 

Valentine,  Paul,  168,  174 
Varanini,  Emilio  E.,  Ill,  180 
Vaux,  Henry,  20-22,  29,  31,  34, 

39,  60,  188-189,  192-194,  196, 

198-199,  212,  221 
Vietnam  conflict,  107,  132 

Wadell,  Tom,  230,  233-234 
Waegell  family,  15,  35-36 
Wahrhaftig,  Clyde,  193 
Waldie,  Jerome,  76 
Walker,  J.  Samuel,  58-59,  65-66, 

74,  82,  99,  152-153 
Wallace,  Henry,  38 
Warass,  Harold,  203-204,  206 


339 


Warren,  Charles,  156,  179-183 
Wasco  power  plant,  201-202 
water  issues,  11-13,  40-41,  194- 

199,  223,  296-299,  306 
Water  Resources  Control  Board,  195 
Watson,  Fran,  251,  257 
Watters,  Lu,  67-68 
Watters,  Pat,  67 
Wayburn,  Edgar,  47,  80-81,  104, 

317-318 
Wellock,  Thomas,  38,  52,  78-79, 

82,  83,  94,  100 
Wheelwright,  George,  72 
Widener,  Don,  130-138,  139,  144, 

231,  254-255,  256 
Wildcat  Canyon  Regional  Park,  306- 

307 

wilderness,  27-29,  223 
Wilderness  Act,  28-29 
"Wilderness  Letter,"  (Wallace 

Stegner),  28-29,  32 
Wiley,  Joe,  294 
Willy,  Zach,  103-104 
Wilson,  Pete,  194 
Wilson,  Richard,  193-194 
World  War  II,  childhood 

experiences  of,  4-9,  11 
Wyman,  Dave,  281 

Yank,  Ronald,  234 

Z'berg-Nejedly  Act.   See  Forest 

Practices  Act. 
Zen  Center,  184-187 
Zinoni,  129-130 
Zirpoli,  Alfonso,  118-119 
Zivnuska,  John,  21-22,  34,  60,  188 


ANN  LAGE 


B.A.,  and  M.A. ,  in  History,  University  of 
California,  Berkeley. 

Postgraduate  studies,  University  of 
California,  Berkeley,  American  history  and 
education. 

Chairman,  Sierra  Club  History  Committee,  1978-1986; 
oral  history  coordinator,  1974-present;  Chairman, 
Sierra  Club  Library  Committee,  1993-present. 

Interviewer/Editor,  Regional  Oral  History 
Office,  in  the  fields  of  natural  resources 
and  the  environment,  university  history, 
California  political  history,  1976-present. 

Principal  Editor,  assistant  office  head,  Regional 
Oral  History  Office,  1994-present. 


Af5S 


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