Mary Brown and Laura Lent

00:04 I am Mary Brown. I'm 46 years old. It is June 11th, 2015 and we are recording in the story book.

00:15 Now storybooth for storycorps booth in the public library and I am here with Laura lent to the very close friend and collaborator.

00:27 And I am that Laura lent and I am 60 years old and Mary and I are friends but you will notice that sometimes we're on a last name basis cuz I like to call her Mary Brown and she likes to call me Laura lent but this doesn't mean that we haven't known each other and been good friends for quite a while.

00:50 How do you spell Mary I thought I'd start with a little background about you to provide some context for our conversation. So you may think of this is a very brief dossier on your life while you certainly spent time outside the state you're in your life and your career and at your work as an activist in architectural historian have focused on California and our streets landscape architecture Wilderness geography and and history of the state.

01:31 Your email even address even starts with the geography of Mary Brown. So, you know, you are a geographer you've lived both in the way southern part of the state growing up in Mission Beach in San Diego and also way far up north where you studied photography as a college student up at Humboldt State, but you spent the largest part of your adult life in San Francisco living in the mission neighborhood.

02:02 A major component of our friendship of about twenty years has been exploring California together through bike touring backpacking hiking camping Urban Walk a number of which you've LED off and on your birthday and Architectural Explorations. So I was wondering to get started off today. I was wondering if you could share a few of your very favorite places in California and also some of the people who've influenced you in your work submit marries an inveterate reader and often has this huge stacks of books at home that she gets through this expedited interlibrary loan system called blank plus I love

02:49 So about favorite places. Definitely my favorite favorite place of all is San Francisco and I'm I'm deeply in love with him Francisco. I was learning more about the city and I say what I like to do is the concept this idea of reading the landscape of looking at buildings and streetscapes and try and understand why they look the way they do what factors impacted them just in terms of material design or step back sew in

03:23 In the course of many many walks around the city. I feel that I have a deep understanding of why the city looks like it does. I wish I didn't have when I first moved here when I first moved here, I was all beautiful and Victoria Marisol and jumbled and I couldn't tell anything apart and just learning more about buildings and styles and

03:44 History, I was able to pick it apart and understand understand what I was looking at that is super fun for me and it still is incredibly fun for me. And if so many different buyers to look at for houses or store friends or churches or commercial buildings. So that's my favorite place. Definitely San Francisco, but I also other spots are you semity the seven in the backcountry ridiculously pretty and there's so much to see back there and we've got on some really beautiful backpacking trips out there and looking down at the

04:25 The canyon in the cords, and it's ridiculously pretty.

04:30 So I love you. So many and I went there a year ago on a backpacking travel solo backpacking trip my first one for 8 days and Yosemite and I climbed Half Dome and it was a dream. Actually do it. I've always seen half down and actually climb up it.

04:50 Fantastic, I loved hearing your stories about those backpacking trips. And your loss the long Solo solo on you did at Yosemite and another one you do with friends last year. And when you were talking earlier about your love of San Francisco and the landscape only recently threw a walking tour that you led in my own neighborhood the sunset did even though I live there for 17 years after I went on this walking tour of the sunset with you that you were doing as a project through your work at the planning department. All of a sudden the sunset is it looks like you know, Malvina Reynolds little boxes of ticky tacky or something is is it at first look everything looks the same and after that walking tour with you. I was like no business Builder did

05:50 This over here and this was the house where they that was used as the sales hat of the sales location for other houses the sales office and now I walk to my own neighborhood with completely different eyes. Thank you. Thanks to that tour. I was really fun. And I had when I started that project for work, I thought this is going to be no big deal really quickly. The sunset is so boring easy the same kind of house and it turned out to be so much more and I love the sense that now and then I was able to leave these walking tours for work and get paid for it furthered my dreams out there. It was very fun.

06:35 So how about are there some people who influenced you most I I know you know, you're you're really into photography and you know a lot about it too. Well, I work for a photo historian when I was in college up in Humboldt called his name is Peter pump West and he focused on the west and he was he didn't have degrees in photography used very interested in it. And he had these huge collections amazing collection of photographs of early women photographers Pioneer photographers glass play Carleton Watkins, and he would convert on his on his compound in. I've been humbled that chicken house. We converted into an archive for women all these different of the houses he would build and so he had this massive collection and he's some random guy up there and he was

07:28 Great, and I met him by getting a job typing for him early on and then this when I was 19, I became like one of their extra daughters and part of the family and I'm still very close with his partner Pam and this is 30 almost 30 years later. So she was a big influence and so I worked a lot in the archives and I was rude love historic photographs and looking at photographs and getting clues. And so he was definitely a big impact on my life, especially in the history Department.

08:06 And then in San Francisco right when I moved her I met Chris Carlson who was in the bike seeing and he also I was starting the shaping San Francisco community history project. And so I wrote about I women photographers in San Francisco for that forsaken SF.

08:27 So he left he was one of the first people I met when I moved to the city and it turned to be very fruitful and long friendship.

08:36 So I love that the that the chicken house was an art the chicken coop was an archive for women. Actually we were before and after you feel today and then I was there and he just took all the chickens and butchered that might have been converted it into it was needed for a p pump goes with killed over in Emeryville about 10 more than 10 years ago by hit-and-run driver and which is a huge huge loss in his archives were sold to the beineke. Yeah, they're transferred over and I have the files on me.

09:33 Kelly Paper files and there's also my photo files are in like an archived box at yeah. I did not know that he made a book about women photographers that I'm part of the photo.

09:50 Mary on a on a serious note here, but you had your first bout with cancer when you were 25, which was before I had met you and I didn't really get to know you until you were about 30 and now you're 46. Is that correcting Saturday mornings? I wake up and I really can't really remember my you've always let a very full and adventurous life. I'm at least, you know, maybe since you got out of Catholic School

10:36 And so and you've just always, you know continued in that vein. And one thing I'm curious about as I was thinking about this interview is to know if you think that you would have led your life any differently sort of both on the inside and on the outside and what you did if you hadn't had a first Reckoning with cancer when you were so young. Yeah, definitely totally totally and I'm definitely not one of those people who ever say cancer is like the best thing that ever happened to me because it's always been the worst thing. So I moved to San Francisco just for a few months and only because my brother left here.

11:30 Because I have been robbed in in Nicaragua and I lost everything and so I've been traveling in Central America. Was that the kidnapping? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah so that we just funny cuz I was a really big deal of the time and now I just started my side but so I came here. I had no money at all and my brother left here which is why I came here and I just wanted to get a job and make some money and keep just save some money so I can keep going travelling cuz I was on my way to go through the Darien Gap and down to Columbia and South America and I was very intense on that but then I got diagnosed with cancer has to like as soon as I moved here after a couple months. I got a job with health insurance and I went to the doctor.

12:15 So and I remember even telling the doctor cuz he's talking about chemotherapy and I was like, no you don't understand. I am going traveling.

12:25 And he was like no you don't understand so that ended up I was here and then by the time I got well, I had a boyfriend I'd friends I lived in a coop. My brother is still here and I just felt routed to San Francisco still thinking I would leave not in awhile. But I mean I was 21 years ago now so that played a bigger role than I realized in kind of anchoring you to one place and then throughout throughout my life is limited because of the fear of recurrence, which has been a very valid fear because it's required three times of having someone to take care of me and being scared of being in a new place.

13:13 And not having a community there. So I've had these ideas for a long time to move to Detroit or Pittsburgh and really start over and kind of feeling done with San Francisco for a while just because of the somebody changes and so different but I was never it was too much. It was too big of a decision for me to make and now I'm glad I didn't go lucky for me and your devoted friends lucky for me to

13:43 After you recovered from the cancer treatment when you were 25, you rode your bike across the country solo raising awareness of cancer, and we've talked about it some but what was it like to do that solo ride and I've seen some great clippings about your trip to and what kind of fears did you have to overcome to be able to do that by yourself?

14:20 Well, that was a great trip. And I was what I loved about it. If I'd been sick the chemo and radiation and people to take care of me a lot and I have our time of that and is boring. I was home all the time. So riding cross-country.

14:40 And having to be completely independent having to solve every problem myself and fear exactly where I was going. I felt incredibly exciting and sometimes it was really hard. Sometimes I would I would just like to stop by the side of the road. I have a flat tire or something would go wrong. I didn't know I was good and I'll just sit and cry and then but then ultimately I realize like okay, I still have to figure it out. And so I would get a fix my buy a car trying to figure out what I was going to do, but I love that feeling of being responsible for myself and figuring things out seeing new things new places meeting a bunch of new people at the big part of it really was

15:22 Not knowing what was going to happen every single day and this is before the internet or maybe there was an app. I had never seen it before always in biliary had asked him have maps at Woodlake Crossing to a new state and get a nap at a gas station. So I never really knew where I was going and just kind of generally or I'd have different landmarks. I wanted to go to like

15:46 Bryce Canyon or an abandoned places that mostly every day was New and every night like figuring out where to sleep.

15:54 Was ne'er so and then I realize I was afraid of high school kids and so camping somewhere with not going to encounter high school kids are drunks with key.

16:06 And yeah, there's a big thing to be afraid it. Legitimate just goes straight to the Sheriff's office or they the cop shop somewhere and say I'm right in cross-country. Where is a safe space for me to camp and no one ever shot me down ever and they were generally play me to the fairgrounds or a park and I would often like send the cop car around so it felt very safe ride a few weird encounters that are scary, but ultimately everything.

16:49 That was ever injured or did you ever hide? I did High.

16:58 Where there's a so there was a crazy guy in the campground and he was mentally ill and he was very I even the Hiker Biker with me as well. He was a young college student but I realized something is definitely wrong with them. So in the middle of the night, I kind of just edged my way out.

17:18 No one else in the Camp Randall. This is really far away Illinois or Kentucky or somewhere around there and ended up just without my flashlight without anything. I just walked out watch all the campgrounds completely pitch black car comes down the road and flagged down and it says a woman is in the car was relieved and I explain what's happening to turning in the campground and she said

17:42 Okay. Yes, I will help you. But you should know that my husband just murdered my divorce lawyer. I'm on the run with my kids and my and my father in the trailer this Campground and the sheriff knows and he comes around and I'd read about it in the paper as well as some guy just Gone Bananas and she's like, he's a good Christian man. I just lost it and I was so I

18:11 The best offer and she was genuine and she was like so happy to help me actually, so she drove me to the the RV there in and her kids are there and everyone's like shocked and so weird things women coming in the night and I slept there really freaked out and then in the morning she drove me to back to my camp with all my stuff in it is quickly like put everything together.

18:39 Yeah, so that was a very scary we are time but intends to instead of beautiful that we both had this fear of men and we were going to On the Run by the wow. I've always found you to be, you know, just incredibly, you know courageous and and you know an assertive person, but I do know that speaking of fears that you did there was something with bears and could you describe a certain recent breakthrough that you had, you know?

19:32 Lord I went backpacking at the last Coast which was really one of the most beautiful places I've ever come back to a key but they were bears and they would leave Footprints a lot of walking on the beach and we could tell the Bears are really recently walking there because of his hide the Lord I would be walking on the beach with a verra Footprints in front of us. Just hoping when we turn around the cliff anyway, so we had clearly I have a lot of Barenziah t i was have but when I was backpacking out in the Sierra last summer, I there's Bears out there and it's pretty high up in the middle of nowhere on a lake and I was with my friend Paul and he knew I was going to let him do not like he called across the lake said merry there's a bear to your left and I just got up and started like running in the other direction.

20:25 And then I stopped and realized that I wanted to see a bear in the wild and so I went back and I like crap back on the edges like until I could see the bear and then I saw the bear in the various. So beautiful in a meadow being a bear on a really big I got on his haunches like an actor like a bear actor commercial bear food. Yeah. It was huge. It was a huge breakthrough. Yeah. I'm still afraid of a wild pig. Maybe someday. I'll have a breakthrough. But ever since I saw that scene in The Thorn Birds with the wild pig attacks the guy on the horse. I am terrified of those. I don't want you to lose that fear.

21:16 After after coming back from your cross-country bicycle trip, you became a key early days activists for the San Francisco bike Coalition and you are a leader and very successful efforts to create bike Lanes on the busy streets in San Francisco like Balenciaga that are big Crosstown quarters. What made you decide to do that? And what did you learn from that experience?

21:49 Well, I the bike scene in the nineties was booming with critical mass. It was really improve my social life at that time and I live right off of valentia Street and it didn't used to have that bike Lanes is really scary to buy gone and it just seems I didn't really know what I was getting into. I had no idea about organizing or any of those kind of activism work, but I I want to buy clay and so I put up some it's so cute. Now that I think about it now, we have the internet and people have certain ways to do tonight, but I wrote a hand with these fires and posted them in the neighborhood and then yeah then put them on and it worked though. There was a small very small group of us and we would meet in the living room of the coop. I lived in this 10% co-op in the mission.

22:47 And took a long time and we none of us know what we're doing, but we ended up canvassing the neighborhood and the merchants and getting support for it.

22:59 It's all very shocked. I wrote it. I vote for the new Mission News at that time. So I was able to write a bunch of very positive articles with bike Lanes on Valencia Street.

23:10 So and I worked out and that was beautiful ultimately they were proved and there was a huge success obviously and it felt very exciting and empowering to not know what you're doing and have to be able to make a physical change on the street that impacted people's life. So you're one of the reasons that the streets are just lousy with bicycles down more likely to run into another when I'm riding my bike out more likely to ride it to another bicyclist. I hardly ever ride car because there's so many and they're so I'm definitely the slowest person on the on the bike ride. So you went back to school in the early two-thousands to pursue a geography degree and then you developed a specialty working for the planning City and County of San Francisco planning department is an architectural historian.

24:06 Can you talk about what you consider your most important work and what it means to you?

24:14 I think I'm going back to grad school with a big deal for me and partially is after the bone marrow transplant. I had it in my second round of chemo and if it does impact your brain and I felt less sharp felis funny just generally more dull and I was worried about if I would be able to cut it in grad school or hang with it. It was a big bad even studying for the GRE was really intense. Just wondering like how much brain power I really had. So going to grad school geography with a big deal.

24:54 Such a smart move really fun. I love the professors there had a great cohort and I did Super well and I got a big Fellowship too. So I was able to not work for a couple years while I was there.

25:08 And and then immediately after getting my Master's Degree. I got a job at the planet of a dream job in The Binding of our van and I was the light was right when the recession hit and run 2008 and I was literally the last planet planner hired at The Point apartment for years and most Junior planner, but it was to write about history of San Francisco and to do historical at resource surveys for the look at buildings and right of individual buildings and then just to write about the history of neighborhoods and it's ridiculous. I still can't believe that people get paid money to do this. Well, you know, you got paid money, but they got their money's worth that because you won awards for some of your surveys and that you wanted to say toward and we know left are leaving a fantastic body of work in that area is true. I have to say that

26:08 What I'm most proud of is I wrote a big report about 300 pages about modern architecture and landscape design in San Francisco. And I didn't know anything about this going into head. So and I was also kind of worried like I don't know nothing about that. So I worked a lot and I walked all over the city to just to get a better understanding of what these buildings looks like and where they were or where they're clustered what design elements for in common and I was able to break it I think deep down I'm a library and I'll of classifying and I was thought I would go back to get library to create and I'm to be an archivist but I feel like I could do it with buildings and Landscapes. So I did a really it's a really good report and there isn't one in there is no other than that, there's no basic like here is what

27:00 Modern design is in San Francisco report people on the project in the next couple months is a stripping it of boring things and then making it more for myself and then I can find up copies for friends to have very exciting and you know, we'll put We'll add it to the library collect. I have that power. Yeah. Yeah, that was fun either learned about the city or particular architectural details that you're really surprised by or John to really love art deco architecture and I love storefront architecture in San Francisco does still have quite a few intact historic storefronts and

28:00 That was part of the jumble for me before but a storefront was and now I can look at a storefront and see what the materials were see how they related to different government programs of modernization different loan programs to modernize your friends. So for me where I'm most excited right now, and they're incredible.

28:27 Cuz I'm Mary you've been continuing to mix it up with new things even as as you're dealing with your you know, fourth round of cancer and facing your own mortality and some of the things I know you've done recently and some of them I got to do with you were going mushrooming seeing an octopus in a tide pool. I'm still thinking about that. You acquired a scooter and a rescue cat named drift and the two of us have been going to services at different churches in San Francisco together to see the varieties of architecture and just fill out these different Church communities and you you started this this thing we go to the coffee hour after we go to the service and Mary started you started asking people like how they came to that church and that question has elicited.

29:27 Did so many interesting stories from the from the the folks we've met. But anyway, I was just wondering you know, how you what are your thoughts right now about what things are the most important to you or the least important and what you want to do.

29:51 Well, it's hard to say changes all the time. But the church project that we're doing is Super Glide a good. Yeah, that is really fun. And then I made it specially I'm an atheist. I'm not there for the god part of it, but I also haven't been to any churches and insert 25 years maybe and so seeing that I mean to send that flip the gimmicks that the churches use, but how effective they are and how they're so different from anything. I went to Growing Up Catholic high in San Diego.

30:29 Though, I love it. I love the building's I love how.

30:33 Learning about the congregations. I think it's an incredibly fantastic but in terms of a person being like what am I doing right now? Do ya what how do you want to spend your time? And what's important to you or even not important to you?

30:56 Yeah.

31:00 Because my family is more important than it's ever been. I was just in San Diego and then I'm getting a lot of pleasure from hanging out with them. My brother such as my older brother Jim.

31:12 And strangely enough. I'm obsessed with my cat and I had to put it out there. I'm not a cat person, but apparently I am and I obsess about him and I see him so he has been a huge comfort.

31:27 In all of this money doesn't matter at all work. I haven't told them yet, but I'm and if I retired from work,

31:36 And

31:39 I'm finding that I really love going and seeing beautiful thing is so go to the beach has been important looking at sunsets going on short walks.

31:50 What did you tell me you did with your cat you held him up to the ceiling and it was very co-dependent on the ceiling and he would really wanted it and you couldn't get it. And so I was holding him up to the ceiling at so he would be closer to get them off.

32:10 Which event made me think about having a Baby Bjorn type Contraption for a cat so I can walk around with a cab. It's weird. I left it though. I love him. I feel like I'm just need love in my life.

32:26 Well, you know, I have a lot of love for you in my life Mary Brown and have for a long time and one of the things I I wanted to mention is.

32:37 Just that this isn't that question. It's really just something I wanted to say is that

32:43 You've taught your teaching me so much about how to live in the really modeling living in the present. I am I'm a person who tends to sort of you. No worry about my to do list too much and not eating disorder be able to stop and enjoy myself and the time that we spend together whether it's you know, walking or camping or going places or just just hang out and laughing, you know, it's really helped anchor me to the present and and it's it's been a gift to see how much you're doing that, you know, even while facing these really

33:28 But this really serious.

33:32 Issues in your own life that mean I really couldn't be more serious than they are.

33:39 But now I have a question until recently you were you were in a very long-term relationship and you're still close to your partner's son that you helped to raise and as mentioned before you have very large and overlapping Circles of of extremely devoted friends and we're all trying to face the unimaginable, you know future as as bravely as you're facing your mortality. Do you have any advice for a device for everybody at this point Bring It On of Clairvoyance where I am going to look back at my life and I think Dad should I wasted so much time the years I shouldn't have done that. I should have ended this relationship with a really beautiful and wonderful man that I love but that should have ended for both of us a long time ago.

34:38 So I think we're friends. I just look at all my friends now and I just feel like I have to stop working and I or they should work where they really want to work or they should I feel like shaking a lot of my friends to get out of their butts that are people are young and they're beautiful and there's these minor little rats that don't even matter or things that don't matter that our friends find upsetting and I just feel like shaking them and say living and I want friends too. So I have to do all this like will and planning and it's super tedious and not fun and I want and if it was like, oh you had to do it to do it. I want all my friends have to do that to a child if I have to do what I want to do it, but people do die randomly and

35:36 I've had cancer for 21 years and so many people have a die before me. I probably have not done all the planning that I've done. So I have the Practical thing. I want people to deal with unpleasant us. And then I also I feel okay.

36:02 I feel like I have enough friends.

36:05 That I'm not really alone.

36:08 I second that yet because I I know them in one thing I want to do is try to become closer to some of your friends that you know, what I don't know is swell like Kim prisons and because together she will be able to share stories about your life that only one of us may know. So that's my plan Mary Brown. I like that. I like she's taken to it having the memory of me out there as long as they can before even though I don't have a partner now, which is not an ideal. I wished I did but I do have I do super close friends so I don't feel alone.

36:53 And I love knowing that that your parents are going to have drift your cat and how much comfort they're going to get from having really in there right now. I'm kind of worried. Yeah.

37:20 Thank you, Mary Brown. Thank you Laura then.