BY STAS MARGARONIS
Caryl Mezey would likely have been elected a San Francisco Supervisor had the City not recently changed over to a district election system when Caryl ran in 1977.
Caryl was a coalition builder who could be as comfortable talking to the President of a Longshore local as she could to the President of the PTA.
Her experiences in the fight to desegregate San Francisco schools, her work as a parent of children attending San Francisco schools and her work with the PTA gave her a considerable background. This was enhanced when she became Human Rights Commissioner where she had to rule on claims of discrimination in company practices impacting the City of San Francisco filed by women, minorities and gay people.
Her experiences were further broadened by working for George Moscone for Mayor in 1975, whose administration created a period of reform in San Francisco politics.
Then in 1977, Caryl also took a leading role defeating the Recall of Mayor Moscone, District Attorney Freitas and the Sheriff Hongisto. This placed her in the middle of a city-wide struggle between a new, tolerant and diverse San Francisco fighting a less diverse, anti-spending, anti-union coalition that failed in San Francisco.
Unfortunately, this coalition represented a new wave that in California won passage of the anti-government spending initiative Proposition 13 in 1978 and help elect Ronald Reagan for President in 1980, which began the dismantling of Roosevelt New Deal reforms.
Caryl Mezey emerged from these conflicts squarely on the side of a new San Francisco that was pro-environment, pro-women, pro-labor and pro-diversity.
It is a struggle that has yet to be resolved in the rest of the United States in 2018.
Caryl built a city-wide network. This came from working on issues and with people that included downtown business leaders including those at U.S. Leasing, where husband Peter worked. This network included people she came into contact with from Western Addition, Hunter’s Point and the Mission where issues of discrimination were coming to the attention of the Human Rights Commission. Caryl and Peter also had close ties to organized labor in San Francisco thanks to their relationship with longshore leaders such as Jimmy Herman and Dave Jenkins.
People who met Caryl during the campaign for Supervisor found her to be direct, knowledgeable, sympathetic and sincere-not necessarily the qualifications of a politician, but not a detraction either.
During her campaign for Supervisor in 1977, she walked precincts, raised money, gave many speeches per day, and continued to forge links with people in disparate parts of San Francisco.
She also found time to cook dinner for her campaign staff before she went out to neighborhood meetings on almost every evening. We were sometimes joined at dinner by Caryl’s son Philip and daughters Alison and Jennifer who helped the campaign. The campaign staff for Caryl Mezey for Supervisor had to have been the best fed campaign in San Francisco: an attribute certainly in keeping with the City’s culinary tradition
The problem was that Caryl was running for Supervisor in a Pacific Heights/Marina district where she was perceived as being too liberal and where she was running against the formidable future Mayor and future U.S. Senator: Dianne Feinstein.
Caryl worked with a new generation of women who had come of age during the 1950s and 1960s and who were making the transition to the politics of the late 1970s that would soon be challenged by the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.
This would catapult Dianne Feinstein into the Mayor’s office after she defeated Caryl and was elected President of the Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Feinstein was next in line to be Mayor after Mayor Moscone’s death and was the first woman Mayor of San Francisco.
Three women who supported Caryl during her run for Supervisor were: Stephanie Alioto Wilhelm, San Francisco restauranteur student of French poetry and the sister of the late Mayor Joseph Alioto, Libby Denebeim, a Board of Education member who sat on almost as many non-profit boards as existed in San Francisco and Pat Jackson, a hard-charging Service Employee International Union leader and community activist. Only Stephanie Wilhelm lived in Caryl’s district. These women emerged from the shadows of the 1950s and set a new political standard of female activism in San Francisco in the 1970s and onwards.
It is an activism most prominently represented by Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi.
In baseball terms, I think that you could say that Caryl Mezey came out of a terrific farm system of talented San Francisco women leaders and that set the standard for today’s San Francisco women leaders. Women that include Caryl’s daughters: Jennifer, Alison and Lauren.