Stewart Brand, Stewart Brand 10/09/1973 – by Peter Breinig/San Francisco Chronicle

I had them conflated in my dream — Coleman White’s signature on a notecard and memories of a young Stewart Brand as I knew him in the 1960s.  I woke up confused, asking Nyel where our copies of the Whole Earth Catalog are.  “Over there on the shelf,” he said.  Funny how you cease to see what is in front of you all the time.

Back in the early 60s, some years before he got the idea for The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart was part of a photography seminar that met at our house in Castro Valley.  The seminars were connected with a long-distance learning class by Rochester Institute’s Minor White at California School for the Arts in San Francisco.  My husband, Bill LaRue, Minor’s summertime assistant, was the West Coast facilitator for that class.  The group met once or twice a month in the evenings in our living room.  I was “the little woman” who kept them in coffee and cookies and secluded from interruptions.  Somehow I became friends with only two of the group — Helen Nestor of Berkeley and Stewart of San Francisco.  I remember both of them as being kind and inclusive, even though I tried to be invisible (as instructed).

The last time I saw Stewart  was on a trip to the Bay Area about the time that Ossie and his sons-in-law, the Mack Brothers, began building my house on the bay.  Stewart and I met at a coffee shop in Sausalito near his houseboat.  We talked about living gently on the land and I remember telling him that I had considered solar and wind power — even purchased a wind turbine — but felt it would be too difficult for me to manage as a single woman.  Surprisingly, he agreed with me, and made me feel better about staying on the grid.  Bless him.

Coleman White (1944-2019)

Coleman and Sally White moved to the Peninsula in the mid-80s — Coleman having left his bright-lights-of-Broadway career at the perfect time to become Director of the Peninsula Players.  Lawrence Lessard had just moved to Hawaii and the Players were in need.  I can’t remember how many shows Coleman directed — only that both Nyel and I were in several of them and found him to be kind and insightful.  They weren’t here long — opened their B&B, the Boreas Inn, enrolled their young son Caton at Ocean Park’s multi-grade school, and then moved to Port Townsend all in the blink of an eye.  Or so those eight years seem in retrospect.

I don’t know why I confused those two men in my dream.  They were both tall and slim, both imaginative and thoughtful, both good listeners.   Come to think of it… a lot like Nyel.  Go figure.