Lou Hexter
Lou Hexter was born on March 2, 1960, at Baylor Hospital in Dallas and grew up in Highland Park, the second of three children between his older sister Holly and younger sister Victoria. His parents, Victor Hexter and Emily Lefkowitz Hexter, built an architecturally significant home in Highland Park in 1963. He was deeply aware of his family history: his great-grandfather Rabbi David Lefkowitz served at Temple Emanu-El for decades, his family was connected to banker Fred Florence and Helen Lefkowitz Florence, and his great-grandfather Victor H. Hexter was a Dallas city councilman honored with an elementary school named for him. Lou credited close sibling bonds, extended family, and multi-generational connections with his grandparents as a defining gift of his childhood.
As one of only a handful of Jewish families in Highland Park, Lou often felt like an outsider both at his elementary school and at religious school, where he did not know the other children. Still, he embraced Sunday school at Temple Emanu-El, was confirmed at the end of tenth grade, and served as student council president his senior year, an achievement that led Rabbi Klein to give the baccalaureate service. His family celebrated Passover and the High Holy Days while also keeping a Christmas tree, reflecting life in a largely Christian community. He described his Jewish identity as an enduring heritage he still claims even while no longer belonging to a temple.
In 1978 Lou left for Stanford University, where he designed his own major in urban studies and architecture. After a year abroad in Italy helped him understand his identity, he came out as gay during his senior year. He settled in the Bay Area, working for a planning and design consulting firm for roughly thirty years as a facilitator of community and stakeholder meetings, with time spent doing HIV/AIDS prevention work in San Francisco and the East Bay. He met his husband in 1990, and the couple, married in 2008, adopted two sons through foster care. Now retired and living in Mill Valley, Lou values family, heritage, the outdoors, and civic engagement above all.
Full Transcript
so my name is alexander today is july 13th i'm so sorry one more time okay okay all right so my name is alexa hola today is july 13 2022 and i'm interviewing louis hexter uh go ahead and introduce yourself even though i actually didn't sure uh i'm i'm i go by lou but my full name is lewis lewis hexter uh technically um my grandfather for whom i'm named uh pronounced it louis uh heckster and so um i kind of never really took that on i just always was called lewis growing up and then several years ago somebody started shortening it to lou and i kind
of liked it so i i've been going by lou for a while and i don't know what else you want to know i i live in mill valley california which is a suburb of san francisco and i've lived here for about 30 years and left dallas to go to college and in 1978 from highland park high school in dallas and came out here to go to stanford came here for four was there for four years and never and decided when i graduated not to come back to texas but to stay in the bay area so and i've been here ever since then we're having our
40th college reunion this fall and i'm involved in that so 40 years i've been in the bay area that's great so i guess i'll ask so you were born in dallas i was born in dallas and baylor hospital yeah okay so i asked when were you for march 2nd 1960 that's texas independence day in case you were wondering which means that on my 16th birthday i couldn't get my driver's license because the dmv was closed that's why that date is important march 2nd 1916. um i guess we'll move on to about your childhood uh what was your family like or how were they active in the community uh did you attend any religious services religious school great yeah um yeah we uh my parents built a home in highland park in 1963 when i was three years old which later became an architecturally significant home was recognized as an architecturally significant home i'll come back to that a little bit because it's a really important part of my childhood to be honest um but i'm the second of three kids um i have an older sister holly and a younger sister victoria they
both still go by the their last name of hexter even though they're both well holly is not married at the moment but anyway they have their same last name we did go i did go to religious school we belong to temple emanuel on hillcrest and northwest highway i grew up in helen park there weren't a whole lot of jewish families in highland park at that time i don't know if they're there now but um so when i went to religious school at temple um i found myself among people that i didn't go to regular school with elementary school or grammar school with and so i
was kind of an outsider at elementary school being jewish not being christian um you know it wasn't a big deal but i you know just there was that difference and then when i went to religious school i didn't recognize any of the folk the kids really so it was a little bit of a being an outsider in both places but um i think because i didn't have a big social experience in religious school to me it made me pay more attention to the actual religious school and i think the teachers at religious school were used to kids just being kind of not paying attention so
i got a lot of attention because i was paying attention and um i liked it i liked going to religious school um i guess i should also mention that um on my mother's side of the family my great-grandfather was a rabbi at temple emanuel for a number of years i think from the 20s to the 50s and uh rabbi david lefkowitz so that that gave our family some standing at the temple we were kind of a recognizable family there i did get confirmed at the temple emanuel in the end of 10th grade that was a really interesting and um happy time i was glad that
i had stuck it out through through all those years and got a chance to have confirmation i was not bar mitzvahed so my temple life was really restricted to just sunday school and holidays going going to services on the high holy days and things like that so not super observant um anyway that's my that's that experience um but i did not have a bar mitzvah um but i was happy that i made it through uh you know sunday school to through 10th grade and and i really um i've had a positive experience with religious school i would say that's good yeah uh so uh what
about your family with the jewish community what was it like yeah um as i said you know growing up in highland park there weren't a lot of jewish families my cousins the florences who were also important at temple emanuel um descended from fred florence who is the banker um in the early 1900s uh he was fred florence was married to my uh is it my aunt my great aunt helen helen lefkowitz and um so helen and fred donated money for the temple um and fred was was really you know an important businessman in the city um so so that was and as i said my
great-grandfather on my mother's side was david lefkowitz the rabbi so we had you know some standing in in the temple community for sure my cousins the florences grew up in highland park with us so they were another jewish family and i'm trying to think the hatchbergs um were in they didn't go to temple emanuel but they were they lived in highland park so just a few handful of families um you know i that i grew up with and then as i mentioned i only went to temple for service mostly for high holy day services and and um in religious schools so our family wasn't really
tied in a lot we didn't go regularly weekly to you know shabbat services or anything at the temple and so i would you know i would say that um my jewish identity was really tied to just the fact that i you know we belong to the temple but mostly because my my mother's family was uh related to the rabbi and um so yeah and growing up in highland park you know it was it's a very was a very um christian oriented place there were at school um there was a lot of socializing around you know christian groups and things like that so i felt a
little bit as i said before a little bit outside for that those that reason but um i managed to to you know figure out a way i you know to to be in uh involved and by high school i had figured it out to the extent that i got to be student council president my senior year of high school and uh i think in deference to the fact that i had become a leader in the class the administration at the high school decided to have rabbi klein from temple emanuel give the baccalaureate service at the end of of high school senior year and i think
that was as i said kind of a a def a nod to an appreciation for the fact that they had a jewish kid being a student council president which i think might have been the first time that happened so that was my jewish identity pretty much growing up um i think um trying to think if there was anything else significant i mean we we definitely celebrated passovers at home that was a big thing with extended family grandmothers grandparents and cousins and things so i think that was pretty much my my jewish life were on the high holy days and the holidays things like that uh
so were there any like maybe special traditions or things that only maybe your family would do hmm let's see um well i guess i i did find it a little odd um that we also had a christmas tree every every december so we had a menorah and a christmas tree in our house and i'm not exactly sure why that was the case but um you know it was fine we kind of really maybe it was the fact that we lived in in this christian community that we felt like you know we wanted to be part of that celebration so but anyway so um yeah we
had christmas tree we had we celebrated christmas i have i grew up really loving christmas carols the songs i liked all of the christmas parties that were held so lots of that festive season was part of our traditions for sure so i don't know if that's that's a little bit uh not surprising given given the fact that we grew up in in that community um and i guess a funny story about just sort of that holding holding christian traditions as well as jewish i think it was my junior year of high school i ended up singing a solo in the messiah which my parents thought
was really funny my grandmother thought was very funny too that i you know this jewish boy was standing up in a church singing the pretty funny tell us about your family um siblings yeah like your siblings your parents just everyone in general i guess sure well um well my dad was victor hexter and he uh was the son of louis hexter uh he was in real estate he was in real estate development he also worked for the title company that my grandfather louis had started and so they they were business and business together until that didn't really work out and my dad went into independent
you know real estate investing and development so and dad was you know he wasn't um particularly observant as as a jewish member of of temple he didn't hold any kind of leadership positions there but uh yeah he was a um a great a great dad in in many respects he had met my mother gosh i think our their families went back quite a ways and they they got engaged when my mother was only about 20 or 21 i think 20 even and um they got married in the summer of 55 1955 when she was only 21 and um he was 28 so you know in
retrospect they got married fairly fairly early in their lives my mother was emily lefkowitz hexter and she she was the son of an attorney louis lefkowitz and um and blanche mittenthal lefkowitz and there's a whole lot of interesting stories about the mitten paul family they go back a ways in dallas and my grandfather lewis was the son of the rabbi and the brother of helen uh left winston florence whom i mentioned earlier so um yeah i grew up with a real sense of history of both on both sides of the family the hexters and the lefkowitz's victor hexter the first my dad's grandfather my great-grandfather
was a dallas city councilman and and also uh maybe superintendent of the schools in dallas um in the early 1900s and there's a elementary school named for him victor h hexter elementary that exists to this day so um as i said i i grew up feeling like i was connected to two very important families in dallas and it's uh kind of ironic that given that sense of history and tradition and vote on both sides that my sisters and i both are all all of us decided that we did not want to settle in dallas after after college so the three of us none of us
came back to dallas to you know live or set up families or anything like that so that's something that i i think about from time to time what would it have been like for me to um you know grow uh as an adult be part of the dallas community whether that would be in highland park or part of the jewish community or both somehow i think it would be um would have been interesting to carry on the family name in dallas so um but that was not the choice that any of us made and so as a result uh you know there won't be there
aren't hexters currently in dallas so so that's that's sort of a reality um i told you a little bit about my dad and his kind of background um and my mom and you know she was the granddaughter of the rabbi she went to goucher college in maryland and got married right after she graduated at 21 and had my sister right and you know nine months later my sister was a honeymoon baby so um so holly you'll i think you'll be speaking with her she um she's four years older than i am and then uh two years after i came along uh victoria came i don't
know if you're going to be speaking with her so and i i guess i've come to appreciate that our the three of us um the way we connected and got along and you know uh created this sense of family um has persisted to this to this day which is um the youngest of us just celebrated her 60th birthday and we were all together we started this tradition of sharing decade birthdays and traveling to exotic places or not so exotic places but at least to share the share the joy of decade birthdays and that's been going on for a number of years now so um but
what i was saying about that was it i don't think it's every sibling group that that maintains that level of closeness and um you know true affection and devotion that we that we share and i guess i would i give my older sister holly a lot of credit for that she was the leader of the pack and she always had um some project for the three of us to do uh together um we started a family magazine called the family gas i still have copies of it you know 55 years later um we did productions little productions this is what we did before you know
there were a lot of tv channels there was no internet so we had to make our own entertainment and fun and so you know i could talk about that for a long time but i think that what i've come to appreciate is just that that that closeness um that affection that appreciation for each other has persisted over all these years and i i don't know a lot of i don't talk to a lot of people who have that level of connection and closeness with their siblings and and extended family so i feel very fortunate so whatever our parents did to to support that um i
appreciate and um it definitely is something that i try to pass on to my kids um that importance of family and yeah that we're there there for each other so see i think that's a little bit about my childhood i had great opportunities um got to escape dallas during the summers and i went to camp in maine every you know for several summers and it was seven and a half eight weeks of continuous camp which um i felt really privileged to do and that's again i guess i just have this history of being really committed to things but um i am still in touch with
my summer camp i'm part of that community i donate money to them and i believe they were an important part of my character development growing up and uh yeah they yeah so that was a significant part of my my childhood and i guess i'll just wrap up by saying that um there were three really influential four four really influential people in my life outside of my family that um because yeah i could count a couple of of relatives but uh one was my piano teacher i started piano lessons at five and took until i was 14 and my piano teacher was really um helped give
me a sense of that i had some talent and that i could you know that i could work on that i could i could have an identity that related to piano and music and appreciate that and so she was one of the most influential people the second was my english teacher mrs barrett who um i got to have for two years because she she moved with us from junior year to senior year um advanced placement english and she was she was a terrific english teacher um and she opened my eyes to a lot of things about literature and the relationship of literature to life and
anyway it was i i really appreciated her the third person was the choir director at highland park hi don wah and um he taught me he was the one that gave me the role of the messiah and it was sort of a good example of how he would just push me into doing things that i might not have signed on for myself but um because he believed that i could do it and he he just he he just had a way of um challenging not just me but you know all of his students to believe in themselves and you know and push and strive and
he i really uh owe a lot to his confidence and his um enthusiasm and then the fourth person was the director of the camp that summer camp that i just mentioned um i won't talk much about that but it's those those summers at uh summer camp where you had like seven weeks to like just live with yourself be with yourself as a kid and learn learn how to do some things um one of the principles of the camp was character development so each week you were given a character goal to work on on yourself and um at the end of the week you were given
a candle at the council fire if you if you achieved your goal or at least showed effort and that's just an example of how character development was a really important principle at the the camp and the director was you know was the person that started that and impor you know kind of lived by it and set great examples so those four people i feel um i should mention as part of my childhood because aside from my parents and grandparents they they were the most influential i guess that's what i want to say about that part of my life that was really great um so uh
do you still have like any connections to dallas other than your name maybe uh the last um relative like blood relative of ours that lived in dallas pat mittenthal passed away in um march of 2020 um or was it 2021 i'm not not sure now i think it was 2020. and um so i don't have any living relatives in dallas right now that i that i know of oh helen florence take that back helen florence one of the florence children lives there but um i do keep up with high school friends and i was on the phone with one of them this morning so talk to him regularly through facebook i i you know stay in touch with a lot of folks that i grew up with in dallas i'm also um as i mentioned working on the reunion for um for stanford the college that i went to out here and and there are a few
dallas sites from from my class that that i'm in touch with because you know we came from that place and came to the same place and so there's we have that connection but um uh and my high school friends are interested to know when i'm coming back to to visit i i was at the last high school reunion in 2018 and had a great time um i you know those the people that i grew up with you know know me in a way that a lot of folks i went to college with and then subsequently you know don't really know me um so i i
think a lot of people have that feeling like the kids that you grew up with um you know you'll always have some kind of connection with and i feel that way about the people in dallas the other thing i would say that might be a little bit unusual maybe not is just that our parents you know had a pretty good social life and they they hosted a lot of social activities and as a result we kids got introduced to a lot of their their generation friends of their generation and my grandparents generation so so leaving dallas wasn't just leaving behind um people of my generation
but also you know family friends and um there too because you know my parents we kept i've kept up with my parents friends i guess is what i want to say and i think that's um that's a way of staying connected with dallas and the pollock family in particular who else um that one stands out for some reason um eisenberg's hawkstems um so these are these are families that i remember i i'm not in as much in touch with those folks the pollocks for sure but um yeah so i think that we enjoyed um sort of multi-generational connections and um yeah that's i think that's
not something that every every person carries with them perhaps into especially if if you move away i guess that's the other thing is you know having moved away there are still those connections with dallas in terms of family friends what about your grandparents what what do you know about them yeah on my dad's side again louie hexter he passed away in 1977. um i i think as a result of getting having gotten in touch with you all for this um i was directed to an interview that he had done for i think the historical society and so i got a chance to listen to his interview um a little while ago and got to hear his voice again and it reminded me of uh he's he he struck me growing up as a very eccentric person yeah you can there's a whole history on him i'm sure that you all have eccentric in the sense that he was just a real you know iconoclast uh he he liked being different
he liked challenging the status quo he was to me a super intellectual um you know and just somebody to he wasn't like uh warm and fuzzy per se but he sort of when we went to visit him he was sort of held court and had things to say that you know you wanted to listen um and he had divorced a long time before my grandmother my grandmother ruth can again you all have a good dossier on on ruth so she was living independently when when i was growing up so she had divorced louie and she had uh lost her second husband lawrence can years before
years before i was born so i always knew her as a single single person and she was a character great great memories of her she took me to theater and to symphony and to opera she really gave me the kind of the arts education those interests um you know gilbert and sullivan theater three those those things those uh i can still remember deflater mouse you know performances that i attended with her and um so yeah she was a big influence on my life for sure and i know she both she and my grandfather drove my mom crazy uh being you know her in-laws there was
a lot there was a lot of uh tension at times between our family and and those those characters because they were both characters they were not shrinking violets either of them and they had an outside outsized influence on our family life at times i remember a little of them getting under the skin of my mom from time to time on the other side my mom's side uh my grandfather on that side died when i was six so i didn't really get to know him well i do have some memories of him you know the house that we went to visit him in and and how
he smelled in particular he liked beach nut chewing gum and he smoked a pipe so he always smelled like pipe tobacco and peach nut chewing gum and um hair tonic so um and then my grandmother his wife blanche she was also a bit of a force she um once he once he passed away you know she was not a shrinking violet either she found purpose in her life she became director of the dallas taping for the blind and so she at 60 whatever um she started a new career and that was um that was really uh impressive to me that you know my grandmother was
actually working you know went to work every day um that was that was something um i felt again looking back on on my life that at certain things that i've i feel were special um i feel fortunate that both sets of grandparents lived in dallas and that we had opportunities for extended family events and traditions and occasions and as i said i learned i learned something from all of my grandparents that i think if i if they hadn't lived in the same community i wouldn't have had that opportunity so um and i'm keenly aware of that because raising my kids they don't have any of
their grandparents around and um they didn't get that opportunity to have multi-generational experience and so i really appreciate um even though as i said the grandparents drove my mom and probably my dad crazy at times because they were so close and they would drop by unannounced and just impose themselves into our family life you know i feel that was really fortunate for us kids one of the one of the decisions one of the factors in deciding not to come back to dallas after stanford was my mom saying you know you know don't come back don't come back here um you know make your make your
own way you know um i think she was responding in that way because she felt that um my dad had lived under the scrutiny and you know and fishbowl of having his parents you know coming living in dallas with his parents and she didn't want me to be feel constrained by by that even though she would have loved to have had me come home and be and grow up uh or live there she her advice was you know stay in california you know figure figure your life out and i appreciate i appreciate that advice i really i really do so that's one way that um
i feel like i got to live a life that i got to choose rather than come back to dallas and try to conform to whatever expectations either my family or the community had for me and i you know so that's a definite inflection point in my life for sure so what about your your marriage who did you marry or what was it like great so um i don't know if this exists anywhere in my family tree um but as a senior in college i uh came out uh figured out that i i was gay and i um yeah i entered into a relationship fairly quickly
after college and lived a suburban suburban life um that was a difficult it wasn't difficult transition or or like information for my mom to to take in or my sisters but my father had a bit of a difficulty with that and we had um we had some difficulty for a couple years around what he perceived was my lifestyle choice uh i remember saying that you know i didn't know a whole lot about about my identity but i didn't feel like it was a choice so i i think that's an important part of my story is that coming out process um this was early 80s 1980s
so it wasn't the dark ages for gay liberation but it wasn't you know super super widely known um it also was the beginning of the hiv aids crisis so it was a bit of a scary time i'm sure for my parents to realize that they had a gay son i kind of feel like sequestering myself into a suburban relationship kind of may have protected me from the aids epidemic a bit so um and then about in the mid 80s i began to be curious about i was in san francisco and i began to be curious about the san francisco community and was approached there to
see if i was interested in joining a conversation around hiv aids and and the gay community and i said yes i'd be interested in doing that they were doing this um program around trying to promote safer safer sex and things to to prevent aids and so anyway the reason i'm telling that story is because i that that gave me an opportunity to work um i i enjoyed that uh interaction i enjoyed meeting other people from the community and um so that kind of launched me into working in hiv aids in the late 80s i met i ended that that relationship that i was in and
about three weeks later i met the person that became my actual husband so that was in 1990 and uh we met and began dating and then 92 we decided to move in together into this house in mill valley which is where i live now so 30 years later i'm with the same person we had we've had several commitment ceremonies culminating in an actual you know wedding or marriage um in 2008 so um but always on the same day of day of the year october 7th and so that's our anniversary date and about uh 15 years into our relationship we were we made the decision to
do a foster adopt i feel extremely extremely grateful that we've had that opportunity i um i don't think when i came out in the mid in the early 80s that it was even a possibility in my mind that i might be able to have a family and as you've heard you know growing up in in a very close family family is very important so i think i just had assumed that i would hopefully find a partner and that would be it but in 2005 we were we began to uh look for opportunity to to take in a foster foster child that we were presented with
the opportunity to take in two at the same time who were half brothers and we did that um i'm skipping over some of the some of the pieces but um they became our sons and uh when you when you do foster foster to adopt and the idea is that your intention is to eventually adopt and the kids that are that are um matched up with you are kids that are they call low risk meaning it's there's a low risk that they will be reunited with their birth families and so there's a high high probability that you will be able to take them from foster kids
to adoptive kids and so that's what we were trying to do and um there were there were a few little hiccups with our younger son about his birth family but eventually both of them were um available for adoption and we adopted them both at different times but they are both our sons and um that was 17 years ago um our older son was two and a half and our younger son was four months so we've had them since they were very very small i really can't even say um much other than um it's pretty much what you would expect a family you know we we
don't look like every family it's all guys here and there are times when i wish there were some female energy in the room a lot of times thanks to my mom i feel like i i get to provide that a lot of times i channel channel her um they're mixed race so they don't look like they don't look like us um that's challenging for them and uh so we we other than those things i mean i think we have a lot of the same you know issues and challenges and joys that any family has so that's been a huge a huge part of my adult
life was getting into a solid relationship with a person you know working on that because they're relationships are hard um but i feel good that we've we made it to a point where we felt like we could um create a home for for foster kids and adoptive kids and so here we are our younger son is going to be a senior in high school and hopefully graduate in a year and so then we will be empty nesters so i mean that's that's the way it goes yeah so what was it like um being queer during that time what was it well it was exciting and
i think it was exciting for me because i i felt finally like i was um not living a double life because growing up in dallas i definitely felt i i definitely felt like i had to hide that part of me and i wasn't really even that aware of that part of me um i was just i felt really repressed i felt like you know as i was an art arty person you know i had a lot of creativity i was in music i was in theater then i went to stanford california you would think you know leaving texas i always think leaving texas behind i
would have felt really free to to be me free to be me as they say but um it took literally leaving the country i went away for uh supreme court of junior year from stanford and went to italy and um it was only then that i felt like i could express who i who i was and so i came back for senior year at college and and that felt i still felt like i couldn't be fully out at college and so my classmates at college didn't know me as a gay man i was closeted even for senior year and so um anyway i think that's
just kind of emblematic of i i believe that's part of honestly you know growing up in dallas in texas at that time just wasn't really cool and there weren't you know it wasn't celebrated you know you're and so i um and growing up at that time of being feeling really repressed i think has been difficult for me all the way up through you know through now i just sort of have residual trauma around um being told that i was less than or not as good as um or something wrong with me so um but you asked what was it like to grow up then i
it was it was very freeing aside from the aids epidemic which was no joke and very sad and difficult and again was kind of a damper on being sexually expressive right so yeah that was that was difficult but other than that other than that you know i i really enjoyed feeling a little bit more free a little bit more aligned with you know who i was got to figure out you know where does my sexuality fit into my overall identity yeah i like to think that i'm as a mature person i've figured that out by now like being gay is part of who i am
it's not everything being jewish is definitely you know i hold on to my jewishness in the sense that um it's an it's a it's a heritage that i have you know i feel connected to that heritage in deep ways and i don't you know i don't belong to a temple now i don't go to high holy day services there's no not really many ways that i express my jewishness other than to claim my my siblings and my relatives as you know as as all of that and if but you know it's the traditions that i that i grew up in and i still and then
i feel formulated who i am and so i i do claim if somebody asks you know what what's your religious affiliation i'll say jewish and it's sort of a you know an ethnic affiliation or an ethnic kind of uh part of my identity so i don't know if i've veered off your question but it was it what was it like to grow up um at that time you know kind of liberating for me and you know we had fights we had fights to fight the government wasn't paying attention to uh to hiv aids and there was an opportunity to be active as a as a
gay person so that's what i did and i did that that encounter in san francisco around safe safe sex i brought that model to the to the east bay um and i started that i started doing those um community meetings around safer sex um in the east bay and um that was really meaningful work really really meaningful work and a way for me to participate in the gay community that was i felt was positive uh so what kind of work did you do like now and then sure that's easy also because um i grew up thinking i'm interested in a whole bunch of things i'll
probably have a bunch of different careers and a lot of different jobs but as it turned out um at stanford i i originally thought i wanted to be an architect and they had they'd stopped doing architecture at stanford when i when i started there and i i knew that so i just ended up taking as much related architecture as i could with the idea that i might still be able to to be an architect and um ended up i ended up in um not liking all the huge civil civil engineering classes that i was forced to takes or thought i needed to take so i
i found this little program called the program on urban studies which is a multi-disciplinary course of studies anthropology sociology civil engineering uh you know environmental studies um so it was very multi-disciplinary and then there was also some history of architecture and some one i think one design studio and i created my own major that was the thing to do back then you could you could design your own major and so i called it urban studies and architecture senior year i met three instructors there that were starting their own consulting firm and i after i graduated i just knocked on their door and said hey remember
me from from the class could you use some help at your consulting firm and they said yeah we could as a matter of fact so i started out part-time with them and after about six months their consulting business was growing so i just you know i got to be full-time and so that was a consulting in urban planning landscape architecture so planning a design basically and that was i just really enjoyed it i stayed there for about five and a half years and then i actually got a job in hiv aids i had done that volunteer work and i thought this is really cool i
want to do this professionally so i left urban planning and went to hiv aids for a few years and then got really burnt out on doing that and ended up coming back to the planning firm so i just retired in january of this year while semi retired because i'm still on call with them but so from 90 1992 to basically 2022 about 30 years i worked for the same planning planning firm so my dream of working a bunch of different jobs in a different bunch of different places did not end up happening i'm just a really boring like one one job person one spouse person
you know same house for you know however many almost 30 years in the same house so so the job was urban planning policy planning and this kind of the core competency that i developed over the years was as a facilitator a facilitator of community meetings stakeholder meetings to inform public policy around transportation um new development things like that natural resources so i've worked in a lot of different content areas but always with being asked to basically facilitate conversations among people who are trying to make decisions around policy yeah that's it's been really an interesting career i would say what is something you want people to
remember about you that's a great question i've been thinking about that a bit um attending some memorial services recently reaching that 60 milestone like what's what's the legacy i i you said one thing i think family has kind of been essential that i really value family and i value the give and take connection to tradition the connection you know uh heritage and i'm not just saying that because of who i'm speaking to but um the historical society but i um yeah i think that's something that i will be remembered as somebody who cares a lot about you know keeping family um as a as an
important value in our lives um if i could have a second one go ahead to be remembered by i had i have this feeling that i'm gonna be remembered for um being an outdoors person because in the later part of my 50s and through my 60s so far i've become known as a hiker uh an enjoyer of the hills and hills and valleys and and coastal areas around the bay area i you know have a lot of photographs of hikes that i take and i think that's going to be something that my kids are going to remember me for because i'm always out on trails
and always sending sending photographs of places that i've been um yeah so i think those are those are things that i will be remembered for all right just one last question so would you like to leave any advice for the next generation man i i'm giving advice all the time are you kidding one piece of advice for the next generation well um i'm keenly uh aware and concerned right now this is you know so this is going to be a time capsule of sorts that in this moment we're um in my view in a really perilous place in our democracy so i and this is
part of my family heritage of being uh you know politically politically active um or very at least very opinionated so i think that my advice is um you know stay engaged don't be complacent yeah i and and believe believe in yourself i you know our kids as i mentioned are mixed race and i know that we spent a lot of time in raising them trying to get them to understand uh the racism in our in our culture in our society and how um you know to look out for it to be aware that it's there even though you know and just understand the history of
civil rights um at the same time i started to worry that we were emphasizing a lot about the negative and um so another piece of advice i would say is just believe in yourself and the value that you bring that um don't let anybody tell you that you're less than or you know that you have every opportunity i mean yes some people have a harder time with opportunity be just based on what they look like and and everything but um but believe in yourself is pretty much my my mantra and if you believe in yourself you know pretty pretty soon others are gonna see that
and and not be able to disrespect you for that so i don't know if that makes any sense but that's sort of where i am right now well that's all i had for you it was really great speaking to you thank you so much thanks for the opportunity to do this