Ringside
I spent Fourth of July at Dolores Park watching San Francisco Mime Troupe’s excellent production of Treasure Island, a musical about San Francisco land owner greed with an insightful focus on the city’s own toxic Treasure Island. Beginning with the salvaging and scrubbing of radioactive ships destroyed by atomic testing at Bikini Atoll (testing began in 1946) the Navy polluted the San Francisco Bay Area with impunity. A naval base on the island conducted a training center for radiological decontamination and dumped radioactive material and other contaminants in large rubbish pits. The base closed in 1997. The Navy was required to clean up the polluted site in order to transfer ownership back to the City and County of San Francisco. But the clean up process cannot be trusted; for further information, consult Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice at www.greenaction.org. The island is phasing into high income housing and hostelry, pushing out low income residents who have lived on the island for many years.
San Francisco Mime Troupe is celebrating sixty years with a benefit concert on October 7th. For their summer schedule, consult: http://www.sfmt.org/schedule/index.php
LaborFest is offering its 26th annual program of events about labor and culture. Events are held throughout the San Francisco Bay Area during the month of July. I will be conducting a walking tour with brother Gifford Hartman on Saturday, July 21st, at 10:00 a.m. This free tour’s focus is on labor activist Tom Mooney and the Preparedness Day Bombing of 1916. For more information on this year’s schedule of events, visit: https://laborfest.net/
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