When the new campus for Lowell High School was about to open in the Fall of 1963, the San Francisco School Board voted to end the century-long history of Lowell as an academically select college prep school that fed graduating students into U.C. Berkeley and Stanford.

That set in motion a 25-year sequence that included me.

The current School Board has voted to do the same thing again. Will it have similar repercussions?

Nearly sixty years, ago, Ruth Kadish organized the alumni of Lowell to stop the downgrading of the school to ordinary status.  She succeeded with the help of many illustrious alumni including the Governor of California, Pat Brown, (who was in the Lowell class of 1923 with my father,) along with Walter Haas, Cyril Magnin, Alexander Calder, William Hewlett, Art Hoppe, Dian Fossey, Warren Hellman and many other prominent and well-off alums.

At the same time Ruth created SCOPE, (the blue ribbon Service Committee on Public Education) to lobby the S.F. School Board to improve the entire S.F. public school system.  

SCOPE was influential in significantly improving the schools for the next decade until Mayor Joe Alioto, in a pique of racist anger at the court-ordered school integration, made the school board elective.

My three children went to Lowell. My son left to go to an early charter school called The Urban Pioneers where he was usually outdoors and comfortable as a hyperactive young man.

Ruth made me the second president of SCOPE in 1964-65.  I was president of the Young Republicans and a banker. Very respectable.

With little to do, as Ruth ran the political side of the organization, I decided to create an Education Fair to show teachers the latest teaching tools available on the market.  The Fair was held on a weekend on the campus of San Francisco State College.  Teachers at Lowell each had a budget of $200 and the Fair was very successful.

One of the attendees was Stewart Brand. Stewart was so impressed with the educational tools he saw at the Fair, that he spent the next year trying to raise foundation funds to take the Fair national.  He used Dick Raymond’s non-profit, Portola Institute, across the street from the Menlo Park train station, as the potential funding recipient. 

He gave up on getting grants and took his 1963 Dodge truck, with the resources he found at the Fair and much more on a trip around the U.S. to the many hippie communes springing up in 1965-67.  Based on the needs he saw on his travels he decided to return to the Portola Institute and publish a magazine with the relevant information and tools. He opened a store, warehouse and publishing venture next door to Portola called the Whole Earth Truck Store. 

The newsprint magazine became the renowned Whole Earth Catalog. When Stewart closed the Truck Store and published The Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1972, he took the money to create the Point Foundation which funded hundreds of projects in the hippie world, the environmental movement and the socially -responsible-investment movement.  

I was on the Board of Portola and conceived of Point as a non-profit alumni association of Portola. Stewart put me on the Point Board and made me President two years later.

The rest is history.  That was a seminal point in American history. Very little of that history is covered in Wikipedia but will be the subject of many books over the coming half-century.