3

The Yell Leader

In high school, Pat Brown said, only half-­jokingly, he ran for president
of every club even if he was not a member.
Because the Browns lived two blocks away, Pat attended Lowell, one
of the oldest public high schools west of the Mississippi and one of the
most prestigious. The school’s opening in 1856 augured the state’s extraor-
dinary commitment to accessible higher education and was celebrated
as a milestone in the quest to build a democracy around an educated
populace. “The citizens of San Francisco have, with their accustomed
liberality, cheerfully devoted their means and influence in planting
upon these Pacific shores the seeds of virtue and knowledge, which, if
properly nourished and guarded, will soon ripen into a rich harvest of
intelligent citizens,” the city school superintendent said at the opening
celebration. Sixty years later, the interest in higher education had
spawned multiple high schools in San Francisco, but Lowell remained
the most renowned. Its focus on college preparation attracted high-­
achieving students from wealthy families around the city.
Pat was a member of the debating society, the rowing team, and the
camera club, and at various times president of all three. He was the
shortest boy at Mrs. Chase’s dance school, but his stature did not deter
him from joining as many sports teams as possible. He competed in broad
jump for the track team and played on the basketball team for those
weighing less than a hundred pounds—­until he skipped practice to be
in the soccer team picture and the basketball coach threw him off.
As a junior, Pat ran for yell leader, defeated the incumbent, and
took to the field decked out in white flannel trousers and a red jersey

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 t h e y ell le ader  29

emblazoned with white megaphones. The next year he was elected class
secretary after shying away from the office he really wanted, student
body president, to avoid competing with the captain of the football
team. He never enjoyed being secretary and later said he took from the
experience a determination not to avoid a campaign solely for fear of
losing.
Pat was both popular and an outsider. The wealthier boys hung out
at the Bonbonniere candy store across the street; Pat went home for
lunch fixed by his mother. He was invited to join a fraternity but spurned
the offer when they wouldn’t accept his good friend Arnold Schiller
because he was Jewish. Outraged, Pat started an ecumenical frater-
nity, the Nocturnes, later renamed Sigma Delta Kappa. His popularity
confounded the better-­dressed students from upper-­class families who
looked down on the short kid in corduroys. But Pat’s decency, drive, and
moral convictions won him lifelong friends. His exuberance compen-
sated for any lack of polish.
In history class his junior year, the yell leader launched another deter-
mined quest. Pat began to court Bernice Layne, the precocious daughter
of a police captain. He walked her home sometimes, almost two miles to
the house at the corner of Seventeenth and Shrader. When Pat asked her
out on a date, Bernice accepted, then backed out at the last minute without
explanation. She was embarrassed to tell him her mother wouldn’t allow
her to date. She was only thirteen.
Bernice’s mother had seen that her daughter was bored as soon as she
entered grammar school and enrolled her in a small experimental school
for training teachers. Students progressed at their own pace. Bernice
completed eight grades in three and a half years. Math was her favorite
subject. Accumulating points for every book read, she plowed through
Horatio Alger, the Rover Boys, and Little Women. After school, she
learned to sew, making dresses for Belgian babies in a program set up by
the Red Cross to help with the war effort. She was still ten when she
finished all the coursework necessary to enter high school, so she spent
six months working in the school library and the cooking classroom. She
turned eleven and entered Lowell High School at the start of 1920.
Like Pat, she was the child of a mixed marriage. Arthur Layne, a well-­
known police captain in the toughest precinct in the city, traced his
Protestant roots back several generations in Texas and the South, where
his ancestors had been strong supporters of the Confederacy. Captain

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Layne’s reputation for honesty in a department known for corruption was

bolstered during a year-­long graft investigation. His testimony helped get
five of nine captains fired.
On her mother’s side, Bernice was a mix of French, Italian, and Irish
Catholic, harking back to the polyglot community formed around the
California gold mines. Bernice’s great-­grandmother Zelia Rouhaud had
emigrated from France in 1854 to keep house for her brother, a French
diplomat. The French played a big role in the early mining days, but their
dominance faded because, unlike Spain, France did not allow dual citi-
zenship and the United States did not allow noncitizens to acquire prop-
erty. While taking care of her brother, Zelia met and married an Italian
merchant, Giovanni Baptiste Cuneo. Their first child, named Hippolyte
after her brother, grew up to be an ironworker and labor activist in San
Francisco, serving as secretary of the Iron Moulders’ Union. Hippolyte
married Julia Roche, a Californian of Irish descent. Their oldest daughter
was Alice Cuneo. She married Arthur Layne in 1904.
Bernice was born to the couple four years later. She and her four siblings
were raised as Episcopalians. When she was thirteen, Bernice was allowed
to attend Friday night dances that her mother helped organize at All
Saints Episcopal Church. Pat began to show up at the dances.
Although he was not religious, Ed Brown wanted his children raised
Catholic. Ida acquiesced and sent the boys off to church on Sundays.
When he was twelve, Pat skipped his own confirmation and stopped
attending services. His mother, initially indifferent, grew increasingly
skeptical of the Catholic Church and then openly hostile. Several things
sparked Ida’s strong and vocal rejection of the Church. She bristled at
derogatory remarks that Ed’s sisters made about Ida’s insistence on
sending her children to public school. Her reading caused her to ques-
tion some Catholic dogma. And a priest tried to harangue her into conver-
sion, warning that her children were bastards until she was married in
the Church. For the strong-­willed Ida, such admonishments backfired.
Ida’s antipathy to the Catholic Church did not stem from lack of faith
or spirituality, which were integral to her character. She studied the Bible
and read Bible stories to her children before bed. So Ida set out, in her
methodical fashion, to find a satisfactory place to worship. She auditioned
religious leaders in visits to church services around the city. In the end,
she chose the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco, an institution with
a reputation for social justice and a storied past.

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The First Unitarian Church had risen to prominence during the Civil
War under the leadership of Thomas Starr King, who came west with
some reluctance in 1860 and died four years later as a state hero. The story
of the young minister who rose from relative poverty based solely on his
talent became an important brick in the California legend. King embraced
his adopted state and wrote extensively about its natural beauty, partic-
ularly the Yosemite Valley. His writings, published in the East, were cred-
ited with helping naturalist John Muir in his crusade to establish
Yosemite as the first national park. During the Civil War, King delivered
so many passionate speeches around the state urging support for Lincoln
that he became known as “the man who kept California in the Union.”
King was thirty-­nine years old when he died from pneumonia and diph-
theria; twenty thousand people lined his funeral route.
When Ida joined the Unitarian Church, Dr. Caleb S. S. Dutton, known
as Sam, was preaching inspired sermons in the lilting accent of his native
Britain. Dutton had come to San Francisco from Brooklyn, where he
helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People. In his first sermon in San Francisco in 1913, he laid out his vision
for the congregation: “To identify ourselves with social causes wherever
apparent and bring them to their full, complete fruition in all just expres-
sion, to stand for that complete democracy which is the demand of
idealism, to fight as champions of the God of Righteousness every form
of oppression—­economic, social or political—­and consecrate ourselves
to that form of spiritual religion.”
This was a vision Ida could embrace. The Unitarians’ Channing Auxil-
iary, a pioneering women’s group, offered a range of literary and cultural
programs. The church had a relationship with Temple Emanu-­El that
dated back to Thomas Starr King and included a joint Thanksgiving
service. Ida brought her children to debates between reform and orthodox
Jews. She enrolled in a course about the Old Testament and took Pat to a
synagogue. One of her favorite quotes, recited often to her family, was
from the Book of Micah: “What doth the Lord require of thee but to do
justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?” If people
lived like that, Ida told her offspring, there wouldn’t need to be any laws.
Through church and civic activities, Ida immersed herself in a circle
of educated and intellectually engaged friends. Dutton held Thursday
evening book club discussions. Once or twice a week Ida attended lectures,
the principal form of intellectual entertainment in the era before radio

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became popular. She took Pat to hear politicians like Hiram Johnson, the
Progressive ex-­governor who was running for Senate. Lectures sent her
back to the library in search of books to decipher or deepen her knowl-
edge of what she had heard. A reference to something she did not
understand—­“Trojan horse,” for example—­became an excuse to further
her self-­education. She read voraciously and eclectically; Jack London and
Robert Louis Stevenson were favorites, as were Mark Twain and Robert
Ingersoll. She read Hubert Howe Bancroft on California history and
William James on religion and psychology. For several years, she taught
Sunday school at the Unitarian church.
She passed along to her children the value of learning and also her
condemnation of bigotry. She believed fervently in civil rights, religious
tolerance, and the need to crusade for equal rights for blacks. By nature
and by nurture, her children grew up with the moral certainty that preju-
dice was wrong and must be fought. She conveyed her spirit of indepen-
dence through actions as well as words. “To thine own self be true,” she
would often cite.
Increasingly, that advice took her further away from Ed. They pursued
parallel lives and had less and less to do with each other. At home, the
tension increased. Frank, the youngest child, would sit at breakfast hoping
that his father would find the two-­minute soft-­boiled eggs satisfactory; if
not, Ed threw them out the window. Ed slept in the front bedroom, Ida
slept in the back, Pat and Harold shared the third bedroom, and Connie
and Frank slept in the dining room. Eventually, Ed moved into an apart-
ment downtown. Though they had little use for each other, neither parent
denigrated the other to their children, rather praising each other for
working hard to provide and care for the family.
After the end of World War I, business slowed down at the photo
studios. Ed hired a barker in top hat and cane who stood in front and
tried to drum up business. Then he fired two employees and replaced
them with Pat and Harold. Both boys found additional work at the city’s
four competing newspapers. Harold put together inserts for the Sunday
edition of the Examiner, earning fifty cents an hour for twelve-­hour shifts
that started Friday afternoon. Pat had a newspaper route for the Call-­
Bulletin and then the Chronicle.
On weekends, Pat took the ferry across the bay with friends to attend
home games of the Golden Bears, the football “Wonder Team” at the
University of California that was in the midst of a fifty-­game unbeaten

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 t h e y ell le ader  33

streak. The university charged no tuition and only a token student fee,
and most of Pat’s high school classmates expected to end up on the
Berkeley campus, known as Cal. Some preferred rival Stanford, which
also charged minimal tuition and fashioned itself as an entry point for
working-­class Californians. “In no other state is the path from the farm-
house to the college so well trodden as here,” boasted Stanford’s first pres-
ident, David Starr Jordan (who had taken Starr as his middle name in
honor of the Unitarian tradition of public service and the man who “saved
California for the Union,” Thomas Starr King). Ida later traced her love
of literature to a talk that Jordan had delivered at the Unitarian church.
Pat seemed likely to head to Cal, closest to home. But as high school
graduation approached, the eighteen-­year-­old made a major decision: He
scrapped plans for college. His friend Arnold Schiller’s brother had gone
directly from high school to night law school, and Pat saw that path as
both financially and politically expedient. College was not automatic for
many people, and attending Cal would have required a lengthy commute
to Berkeley—­streetcar to ferry to another streetcar on the other side, about
a three-­hour round trip. By attending night law school, Pat could earn
money during the day and also fast-­track his career. He was always in a
hurry to get where he was going; he had no use for men who smoked
pipes, because he felt it slowed them down.
Pat entered San Francisco Law School in 1923. Adjusting to the work
meant average grades the first few semesters. By the third year, he hit his
stride, and by the fourth and final year he was first in his class. Just as at
Lowell, Pat also excelled at extracurricular activities. He started a student
organization, a law journal, and an affiliate for a legal fraternity—­a nd
headed all three.
The part-­time class schedule—­three to four nights a week and summer
courses—­gave Pat plenty of time to work. For the first two years he worked
for his father, who ran a quasilegal poker club. Poker was legal only if
played at a private club. Pat’s job was to guard the door to give the opera-
tion a veneer of exclusivity, though in reality anyone could play. He earned
$150 a month sitting outside the Railroad Men’s Social Club, then made
another $150 to $200 running his own dice game. He often ended up
giving much of that to his father, who was perennially broke.
In his third year, Pat accepted a job with a well-­k nown lawyer, Milton
Schmitt, who had lost his sight and needed an assistant. The switch meant
a pay cut, but it netted Pat experience in a law office and in the courts.

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During his two-­year apprenticeship, he made connections and became

familiar with the milieu.
Schmitt was a conservative Republican who had served four terms in
the state Assembly, and he discouraged Pat when he talked about running
for office. But the twenty-­three-­year-­old was in a hurry. One year out of
law school, Pat challenged an incumbent assemblyman in a Republican
primary, campaigning with the indisputable slogan “23  years in the
district.” Some of his fraternity brothers helped, and Bernice rang door-
bells on one side of the street while Pat went down the other, up and down
hills on Castro Street. She told people she was his sister. He spent about
$500 and fell far short, winning only about five hundred votes.
Each summer, Pat took two weeks off and went with his brother Harold
and three friends on a pilgrimage to Yosemite, a place both familiar and
wild, a touchstone of the outdoor world he loved. They hiked during the
day and danced at night. Pat and Harold scaled summits and posed for
photos on high ledges. Pat was thin, 140 pounds on his five-­foot-­ten-­inch
frame, and he smoked. On one trip, Pat met Tom Lynch, who would
become one of his closest, lifelong friends. Lynch was also San Francisco
Irish. Orphaned at a young age, he attended Jesuit schools until he had
to drop out and work, then enrolled in night law school. Lynch and Pat
bonded over a shared fondness for the Red Nichols and His Five Pennies
jazz band and the American Mercury, a review founded by H. L. Mencken.
Pat introduced Lynch to his future wife, a sorority girl from Cal who had
registered at the Yosemite hotel under an assumed name she took from
an old Jeanette MacDonald movie.
Hiking, camping, and outdoor excursions were essential parts of the
California lifestyle from the state’s earliest days. All over the vast state,
mountains and valleys were covered with trails, and tens of thousands
took advantage of the mild weather to hike during much of the year. In
addition to visiting Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada range, the Browns
made short jaunts to the nearby Russian River, where groups had gone
for vacation and summer encampments since the 1860s, a tradition called
the paseár.
The stunning beauty of Yosemite drew Pat back year after year. From
1864, when President Lincoln made Yosemite the first nationally protected
wilderness area, the valley attracted thousands of tourists by train, stage-
coach, and horseback. Yosemite was painted, photographed, and written
about so much that it became a symbol of California to the rest of the

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In 1926, twenty-­one-­year-­old Pat Brown (seated in front) and his brother Harold
(squatting) climbed Half Dome with three friends on their annual summer
vacation in Yosemite. (Courtesy of Karin Surber)

world and a symbol of their identity to Californians—­a scene of immense

natural beauty, an outdoor playground, and an environmental battle-
field. The fights over the destruction and degradation of the pristine
wilderness led John Muir to found the Sierra Club in San Francisco in
1892. Charter members included academics and outdoor enthusiasts
who became the vanguard of the conservation movement.
During the school year, Pat used his free time to court Bernice, who
was a student at Cal. On Saturdays, his only day off, Pat dressed in his
best suit and told the family he had to see a client. They all knew he was
going to see Bern. During the week, Pat collected nickels and called her
from the pay phone in the Palace Hotel near the law school. He wrote
her letters on any paper handy—­a pad swiped from the Hotel Whitcomb
or stationery from Yosemite’s Camp Curry cabins.
Always a strong student, Bernice enjoyed college, particularly language
classes. She studied Spanish and French and joined the French club. Her

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 36 t h e b row n s of california

only poor grade was an E in archery. Students were required to go outside

to the field when it rained and be marked present, even though class was
canceled. She viewed this as a waste of time and refused. Bernice
commuted from home to school her first three years and then shared an
apartment with a friend who worked part time as a secretary for Senator
Hiram Johnson. She finished the necessary credits to graduate in
December 1927; just as in grammar school, she was told to stay for another
six months because she was only nineteen.
Bernice’s options after college were limited to the traditional paths for
women—­teaching, secretarial work, or marriage. She pursued a teaching
credential, worked as a substitute teacher during the day, and taught natu-
ralization classes at night. By 1930 she had become a probationary
teacher. One of the conditions of her job was that she remain unmarried.
On the evening of October 30, 1930, a telegram arrived from Reno,
Nevada, at the Browns’ house at 1572 Grove Street: “Married this morning at
Trinity Cathedral. Now staying at Riverside Hotel.” Pat’s fourteen-­year-­old
brother Frank was awakened by the news, and shrugged. The timing may
have been a surprise, but the outcome had long been expected. The elope-
ment was typical of Pat. Like the decision to skip college, eloping was
efficient and financially expedient. As it was, Bernice had to buy her own
wedding ring. (It would be six years before Pat’s finances allowed him to
buy her an engagement ring.) Bernice would later regret the timing of their
wedding, because October 30 always fell the week before Election Day.
Bernice had hoped the marriage would stay secret, but she was
front page news in the Examiner and the Chronicle: police captain’s

A precocious student, Bernice Layne was only fifteen when she entered the
University of California. She graduated in 1928.

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 t h e y ell le ader  37

daughter elopes with attorney. She lost her job. At first the newly-
weds lived in the basement of the Gaylord Hotel; the $45-­a-­month rent
was all they could afford. Bernice was not enamored of the window-
less apartment, although the twelve-­story Spanish Colonial Revival
building, open only two years, was in an up-­and-­coming neighborhood.
The Gaylord had been built at the end of a housing boom on the south
slope of Nob Hill, an area leveled by the 1906 earthquake. More than three
hundred multistory residential buildings were erected in a three-­by-­five-­
block area adjacent to the Tenderloin, stucco-­and-­brick structures with
cornices and bay windows, attractive for their design and proximity to
the business districts.
San Francisco had been known since the Gold Rush as a town of hotel
dwellers, with accommodations that spanned bare-­bones to luxury.
Transients needed cheap lodging, while many who could afford fancier
homes preferred the convenience of full-­service accommodations. The
1929 Blue Book, the social register, listed permanent residents for half the
rooms at the elegant Fairmont Hotel. Apartment hotels like the Gaylord
were a transitional hybrid during a period when apartment buildings
started to edge out residential hotels as multifamily housing.
On the second Saturday in January 1931, Pat sat on their new sofa in
the basement apartment late at night. The radio played music. He had
given up trying to read his book, Mixed Marriages. Several drinks of
moonshine emboldened Pat to write down his thoughts. He wanted to
preserve the moment. He was feeling overwhelmed. He had been married
for just two and a half months, and he had learned he was going to be a
father.

I have a peculiar, lackadaisical somewhat remote feeling. Diffi-

cult to understand, more difficult to write. I just feel the urge to
jot it down . . . ​I feel that genius lurks somewhere in my system.
I am not thinking. I am writing just as the thought enters my
head. The liquor (if it can be dignified by calling it liquor) has
permeated my system until my surroundings seem strange,
unreal and not true.
I meditate. I am a young lawyer, recently married. I doubt my
own ability but will to push it forward with bromides I read.
It is an interesting evening—­a Saturday night which used to
be depressing unless I did something. Now I am married. In a

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 38 t h e b row n s of california

short three months I am faced with the knowledge that I have

obeyed the dictates of the mother church not by choice but
by ignorance and will soon have a child. Life—­how peculiar.
Here it is continuing—­soon—­very soon I will pass on—­t hen
this unborn child will pass on.
The law—­how hard to eke out an existence. My pals—­my
classmates—­what are they doing—­night law school. Will I
lack the knowledge that follows a college education. Ignorant
parents—­unable to give us the luxuries . . . ​Terrific ambition . . . ​
opportunities that seem to fall or rise. Where will I be 25 years
from now? What difference does it make? Questions—­questions.
They seem to have no answer but let’s hope to hell and give all
that has been given to us.
What does it matter but it does—­life is short—­live with your
power—­you soon will die and any plaudits that might follow you
will know little about.
Edmund Gerald Brown. Nearly 26—­Jan. 10, 1931

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