Over in the canyon, just up the street from the bookshop, the Gum Tree Girls Festival is slated for 10am to 3:30pm on Sunday the 10th, with live music, stirring oratory, informative history, food, drink, games and community camaraderie! You don’t want to miss it! With the Festival coming up in just a few days, they need volunteeers to help out! See the link at right!

(Sunday, too, be sure to drop by Bird & Beckett after the Fest at 5pm for The Seducers, America’s favorite honky tonk band, live in the bookshop!)

The Gum Tree Girls, you ask?

In the mid-1960s, the Gum Tree Girls — Geri Arkush, Zoanne Theriault Nordstrom and Joan Seiwald, pictured here — and prior to that, in 1958, Minnie Straub Baxter, stood up and saved Glen Canyon from sporting a double deck, elevated “viaduct” expressway to the other side of Twin Peaks! Right over 2nd base and the Rec Center! Can you imagine??

Now, the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project is Celebrating Moxie! by throwing the Glen Park Gum Tree Girls Festival, the first annual all-day picnic and celebration in Glen Canyon Park with live bands, food, children’s art and family games, plus screening of the Gum Tree Girls’ oral history on video and much community camaraderie — all to celebrate the Gum Tree Girls’ feat of great common sense and fierce resistance to the outrageous nonsense that was to be called the “Circumferential Freeway.” In a Glen Park Women’s Hall of Fame, other significant Glen Park women in the 20^th century who strove to make a difference will also be recognized, and there will be a solemn, sound healing remembrance of those we’ve lost to COVID.

 

Come out this Sunday, July 10th, 10:30am to 3:30pm for the Festival in Glen Canyon Park! Enjoy the day or contribute in a bigger way – volunteers are needed!
https://www.glenparkassociation.org/volunteers-needed-for-gum-tree-girls-festival/

Some additional background and details on the festival schedule can be found at this link.

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You’re up in the playground behind the shopping center in Diamond Heights, with a Safeway and a Wallgreens and a post office and mailing business at your back…along with a few other human-scale businesses, thankfully…looking out over Glen Canyon. Here’s a photo. Picture the houses of Miraloma Park above the chert alongside Bosworth across the way, about where that tree line is. So be it. Now picture an elevated double-decker freeway springing out of the baseball diamond and rec center way down to the left swooping right up to the top of the canyon and down the other side to and through the park and beyond, carrying thousands of cars both directions, scurrying like so many ants through San Francisco and over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Nah, wipe it out of your vision. It’s not there.

That took moxie!

Gum Tree Girl moxie!

Don’t cotton to what’s going on in Trump’s America today?

Get your back up!

Learn from history! Get some Moxie!

Join forces with your neighbors and push back!