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On Monday, the Redwood City Council voted 5-2 in favor of approving Jay Paul’s Harbor View proposal. The mixed-use campus will replace the defunct Malibu Grand Prix amusement park. The vote closes a nine-year approval process for a project that has undergone multiple iterations.

Council members considered five recommendations from city staff, all of which resulted in a 5-2 vote with Vice Mayor Diana Reddy and Councilmember Diane Howard dissenting. Supporters of the project argued that the project’s $65M community benefit package outweighed the potential impacts. The dissenting councilmembers cited concerns about traffic and potential strains on the city’s jobs-to-housing ratio.

Sister Christina Heltsley, executive director of the St. Francis Center called the project “awesome” and “historic” during public comment, stating that “this is the time to process with our heads and finally hear the cry of the economically poor.”

Staff argued if another project were to meet city zoning, it would likely carry the same impacts as Harbor View without the addition of added community benefits, many of which the city is in critical need of.

“We still have a lot of community benefits in this package so I’m thinking it’s something worth voting for because otherwise we’d have something with much less community benefits potentially,” Councilmember Lissette Espinoza-Garnica said. “Any other project would be probably just as impactful, if not just a little less, so that’s why I think it’s good enough for Redwood City.”

Several attendees and councilmembers echoed her sentiment.

The total Community Benefits package amounts to over $65.6 million in addition to $20 million in required city fees, making it the largest in Redwood City history. These funds will go towards various community projects, including construction of 64 units of extremely low income housing in partnership with the St. Francis Center, maintaining and improving parks and fields, and investing in transportation infrastructure.

“We’ve finally gotten to a place where we can move forward,” Councilmember Jeff Gee said during Monday’s City Council meeting. “Redwood City has earned the right to ask for community benefits in exchange for development and that’s what is before us tonight, a pretty damn good robust set of community benefits that we can look at that will help many parts of our Redwood City community.”

Plans for Harbor View have gone through various iterations since its initial submittal in 2011. The most recent proposal made extensive revisions based off feedback from previous meetings, resulting in reduction of project size by a third and expanding open space. Since the previous July study session, Jay Paul added an additional $9M in community benefits, including an additional $2.5M to the City’s affordable housing fund, and $6.2M for the construction of the Blomquist Bridge.

The tech office campus in its current rendition encompasses 765,150 square feet of commercial office, 35,000 square feet of amenities, and 2,591 private parking spaces. The campus will include four 7-story office buildings, one 4-story and one 6-story parking structure, and a two-story employee amenities building.

Disclaimer: Adam Alberti, the publisher of Climate Magazine, is Managing Director at Singer Associates, Inc. Jay Paul is represented by Singer Associates. 

By Aimee Lewis Strain

Swing open the glass doors at 1682 El Camino Real in San Carlos, and an aromatic blend of fresh roses, lilacs and peonies seems to overwhelm the senses. The steady, tranquil sound of dripping water from a fountain complements the abstract art that adorns every wall.

The peaceful spot has been home to Granara’s Flowers since 1946. For the past 44 years, it has been owned and operated by the Maffei family of San Carlos—from 1978 to 1994 by patriarch Primo “ Jim” Maffei and then by his daughter and son, Robin and Tim. By mid-January, the younger Maffeis plan to lock the doors for the last time as they convert to an entirely online presence for customers.

We used to have a line out the door on holidays, but people don’t walk into flower shops anymore. They order things online and have it delivered.

“We have seen a huge shift in the way people shop for flowers,” Tim says. “We used to have a line out the door on holidays, but people don’t walk into flower shops anymore. They order things online and have it delivered. We can provide our clients with the same services we always have with our comprehensive website. For the last few years, we have seen a huge rise in this area and we are able to service multiple orders at once all across the country.”

For the Maffei family, flowers have long been a passion. As a young boy, Jim worked for Sheridan and Bell, a florist in San Francisco, and later for Ah Sam Floral Co. in San Mateo before starting at Granara’s in 1950. On New Year’s Eve of 1978, he purchased the business for $100,000 from his former boss, Romeo Granara.

“My dad had this incredible gift—a vision of beauty and could turn anything into a masterpiece,” Tim says.

That talent extended to Robin and Tim, who grew up in San Carlos and began working as kids at the flower shop, creating corsages, managing the counter and making deliveries.

Small-town San Carlos worked well for the Maffeis. Jim’s wife, Rosie, raised eight children, who remain close today. Robin says the family was a large supporter of the San Carlos Chamber of Commerce, St. Charles School, the San Carlos Rotary Club and the charities of St. Vincent de Paul, among other local organizations.

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This story first appeared in the October edition of Climate Magazine

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Jim and Rosie lived to 90 and 88, respectively. Jim died in 2018, and Rosie followed him nine months later. That started family discussions over what to do with the business. As with many older establishments on the Peninsula, the store’s real-estate value had risen significantly over the decades.

“After Dad passed, we had to make a decision about selling the building,” Robin says. “Our siblings were happy to give us five extra years here, but we were presented with an offer to sell the building and could not pass it up.”

No doubt, saying goodbye to the flower shop that Tim and Robin have called their second home will be their most emotional arrangement yet. But continuing to expand the business through the Internet should bring a rewarding challenge. And customers who call or use Granara’s website (granarasflowers.com) can pick up flowers at the as-yet unpublicized location of the store’s workshop.

“We already work with our clients with web and phone communication and deliveries,” Robin says. “So it won’t be a big change for us.”

Like much of the California shoreline, the San Mateo County seaboard was a natural for smugglers. The Coast Guard had difficulty enforcing the National Prohibition Act, which lasted from 1920 to 1933. One steamer, the Ardenza, brought in 25,000 cases of Scotch in 1924 on a voyage that extended from Scotland through the Panama Canal. Most ocean-borne booze, however, came from Canada. Half Moon Bay offered an excellent entry point because of the area’s many landing sites, nearby roads and sparsely populated settlements.

Violent encounters between bootleggers and the authorities were frequent. Author June Morrall recalls one such fight on her website, “Half Moon Bay Memories.”  The Coast Guard boarded a smuggler’s boat near Moss Beach, took the vessel in tow, and left only one sailor to supervise the seized ship. The crooks overpowered him, cut the towline and sped away. The crew on the Coast Guard cutter let go with rifles, machine guns and a deck gun, but the lawbreakers managed to outdistance their pursuers in the dark. The next morning, hatches and wreckage floated ashore, proof that the gunfire had, at the least, hit the fleeing boat.

One of the more interesting coastal remnants of the nation’s dry spell sits near Shelter Cove in Pacifica. There, government agents blasted shut an abandoned railroad tunnel that bootleggers used for a warehouse. Author Barbara VanderWerf recounted the saga of the tunnel in her book, “Montara Mountain.”

At night, rumrunners took over the cove, known then as Smuggler’s Cove, to off-load thousands of bottles of illegal whiskey from Canadian ships. The next day, the whiskey was for sale in San Francisco speakeasies.

“At night, rumrunners took over the cove, known then as Smuggler’s Cove, to off-load thousands of bottles of illegal whiskey from Canadian ships,” she wrote. “The next day, the whiskey was for sale in San Francisco speakeasies.”

The 354-foot-long tunnel was built by the Ocean Shore Railroad, an ill-fated venture designed to link San Francisco with Santa Cruz. The railroad, whose slogan was “Reaches the Beaches,” lasted from 1907 to 1920, when autos increasingly lured away passengers. Faced with continuing mudslides, the company never completed its 75-mile route down the coast.

Speakeasies Were Everywhere

In addition to the railroad tunnel, other reminders remain from the Gatsby age. Mitch Postel, president of the San Mateo County Historical Association, says visitors shouldn’t be surprised.

“On the coastside, at various times, nearly every prominent building served as a speakeasy — even (Pacifica’s) historic Sanchez Adobe,” he says.

Among the most popular haunts today is the lively Moss Beach Distillery, which overlooks the ocean from a cliff that once shielded smugglers. The restaurant boasts a fabled flapper ghost known as “The Blue Lady,” who, some say, wanders the beach in search of her lover. Built in 1927 by Frank Torres, whom Morrall describes as a “Peruvian world traveler,” the establishment was originally dubbed “Frank’s Place.” According to legend, the clientele, said to include mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, was so influential that the place was never raided.

Other spots known for their shady past include the Miramar Beach Restaurant, called the Miramar Hotel during Prohibition. It was designed specifically as a speakeasy, complete with revolving cabinets and other secret compartments for booze. An imposing private residence in Pacifica known today as “Sam’s Castle” was called “Chateau LaFayette,” popular not only for its alcohol but also its restaurant and dance floor. The operators were rumored to be so confident of avoiding arrest that they signaled boats when to bring their illegal cargo ashore.

Hoarders Were the First Targets

Before bootlegging, the era’s main source of liquor was not “rotgut,” but, rather, good stuff stashed by rich people who had planned for Prohibition. Shortly after booze was outlawed, newspapers carried numerous stories about private stocks stolen from homes.

In a research paper in 1978, Eileen Wieland, a student at the College of San Mateo, reported that such thefts occurred almost daily in the early years of Prohibition.  Fame provided no safety shield. Wieland wrote that the San Mateo home of Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini was hit in January 1920 by brazen but disappointed bandits who found only wine. They left a note reading, “We’re looking for booze. We don’t like your vino.”

Still, it was the contraband artists and their customers who stole headlines with colorful tales that were sure to bait news reporters. Take the case, no pun intended, of Jack Mori, who hired an armada of small boats to haul liquor to a dock at what is now Pacifica. In 1921, police confiscated $50,000 worth of alcohol, including 1,000 cases of whiskey, at Mori’s roadhouse.  It constituted one of Prohibition’s richest seizures in the county.

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This story first appeared in the September edition of Climate Magazine

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Lighthouse keepers had a bird’s-eye panorama of many operations. Jessie Mygrants Davis, daughter of Pigeon Point’s assistant keeper, called the smugglers “quite ruthless men.”

Davis is quoted in “Shipwrecks, Scalawags, and Scavengers: The Storied Waters of Pigeon Point,” by JoAnn Semones of Half Moon Bay. The chronicles include the story of the night Davis’s father, Jesse Mygrants, was forced at gunpoint to drive a band of rumrunners eight miles down the coast.

“They were audacious enough to use the lighthouse derrick to unload their ships,” Davis recalled. “They always came on moonlight nights, so we could see them clearly.”

How Did Prohibition Happen?

Accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1928, Herbert Hoover said of Prohibition, “Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” If that was true, then San Mateo County could have been considered a laboratory. It had all the ingredients — hijackings, stills, gunfights and speakeasies. In that sense, it reflected much of the nation.

Experiments are supposed to produce answers. To many members of the generations that followed Prohibition, the biggest question was this: How did the United States get to the point that alcohol was outlawed?

The temperance movement stretched back to the early 1800s. But historian Daniel Okrent, author of “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,” believes its ultimate genius was Wayne Wheeler, an attorney and leader of the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio. Okrent says Wheeler was able to bring together groups that on the surface seemed directly opposed to one another.

Wheeler’s devotion to the dream of a dry America accommodated any number of unlikely allies. These groups included the Ku Klux Klan.

Writing in Smithsonian Magazine in 2010, Okrent observed, “Wheeler’s devotion to the dream of a dry America accommodated any number of unlikely allies. These groups included the Ku Klux Klan, which joined the radical Industrial Workers of the World in the drive against liquor. The Klan’s anti-liquor sentiment was rooted in its hatred of the immigrant masses in liquor-soaked cities; the IWW believed liquor was a capitalist weapon used to keep the working classes in a stupor. Anti-German hostility in World War I also played a part. A dry Wisconsin politician named John Strange said the ‘worst of all our German enemies … are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller.’”

Okrent wrote further that Wheeler’s organization made common cause with social reformers who wanted to wrest political control of cities from forces they thought purchased the immigrant vote through saloons. Suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought not only for a woman’s right to vote, but also, through the temperance movement, sought to prevent the wages of working wives (money that legally belonged to their husbands) from filling the cash registers of corner bars. Prohibitionists also joined racists whose greatest fear, Okrent said, was a black man “with a bottle in one hand and a ballot in the other.”

Who Really Supported Prohibition?

California’s legislature ratified the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, joining counterparts in every other state except Rhode Island. But popular support may have remained tepid. Gary Kamiya, author of “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2018 that the City trailed only New York in its wide-open acceptance of unlawful boozing. Kamiya wrote that the Anti-Saloon League “argued falsely” that Californians beyond the San Francisco-centered “whiskey strip” backed Prohibition.

As the Peninsula grew to become a San Francisco suburb during the first two decades of the 1900s, residents may have objected more to drinking establishments than to drinking per se. In 2007, the Redwood City Public Library Archives Committee published “Redwood City: A Hometown History.” In a chapter titled “Saloons, Breweries and Bordellos,” now-retired Redwood City librarian Mary K. Spore-Alhadef explored the county’s quest for respectability.

After the 1906 earthquake, Spore-Alhadef wrote, families began moving south from San Francisco. Many who left behind the City’s highly visible vices brought with them an early version of what later became known as “family values.” As their number grew, Spore-Alhadef said, sentiment “began to turn against the saloon.” Even so, increasingly popular fraternal organizations began to supplant taverns as places where self-described “family men” could indulge in alcohol-fueled conviviality.

It all came crashing down — officially, at least — on January 17, 1920, when Prohibition took effect. The “noble experiment” lasted nearly 14 years until its repeal at 5:32 p.m. on December 5, 1933. At that moment, ready to lift a glass but also weighted by the Great Depression and the nascent threat of Nazism, President Franklin D. Roosevelt summed up the national mood.

“What America needs now,” he said, “is a drink.”

By Kimberly Carlisle

The 90,185 spectators at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena were about to lose their hearing. Minutes before, Briana Scurry, the goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s World Cup soccer team, had blocked an attempt by China’s Liu Ying in the post-overtime shootout that would decide the championship game on July 10, 1999. Now, with the penalty kicks knotted at four apiece, 31-year-old Brandi Chastain of the U.S. had a shot at history.

Slowly, meticulously, she settled the ball onto the small, white square 12 yards from the goal. She turned, walked back six steps, turned again, paused, and scrunched her forehead. Then she started forward, drew back her left foot and drove the ball toward the upper right corner of the net.

The entire sporting world knows what happened next. Chastain’s winning kick matched Bobby Thomson’s “Shot heard ’round the world” for the 1951 New York Giants and “The Catch” by Dwight Clark that sent the San Francisco 49ers to their first Super Bowl in 1981. Chastain spun around, raised her head, pumped her fists and yanked off her jersey. Clad in just her soccer shorts and sports bra, she joined her teammates in a celebration that etched a defining image in the continuing progress of women’s athletics.

Like virtually every U.S. female athlete over the last 50 years, Chastain got her biggest break when Congress passed the legislation known as the Education Amendments of 1972. Among them was an update to the Great Society-era Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Title IX in the 1972 law banned sex discrimination in “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

What a difference those few words would make.

Dreams of a Southern Girl

In 1972, I was 11 years old and a budding swimmer in the Southeast. It was an Olympic year, and my family was living in Knoxville. My father, a career swimming coach, was studying for his master’s degree and assisting the men’s swim team at the University of Tennessee.

That summer, the women’s U.S. Olympic swimming team chose the Tennessee facility for its training camp. Like a little girl peering over the candy counter, I watched practices and collected autographs. Many of my swimming idols to this day populated that team.

None went to college on an athletic scholarship. But that was about to change.

Just seven years later, in 1979, I was one of the nation’s top college swimming recruits. Full rides promised a university education pretty much anywhere. I chose Stanford, and the course of my life — along with my small-town, southern view of the world — blew wide-open. I went from being a smart, athletic girl who was ostracized to a smart, athletic woman who was celebrated.

Other than the right to vote, Title IX is the single-most important piece of legislation ever passed for women.

“Other than the right to vote, Title IX is the single-most important piece of legislation ever passed for women,” says Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an attorney, activist, author and expert on access and equality in athletics. “In the United States,” Hogshead-Makar continues, “education is the ticket to ride. It allows us to transcend social and economic classes, and can change how one fundamentally sees herself and how she understands the world.”

Hogshead-Makar was a world-class swimmer, a gold medalist at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics who had accepted an athletic scholarship to Duke four years earlier. “My life was profoundly changed,” she says, “not just from sports, but by the opportunity for me just to go to college.”

Opening Doors at Last

Title IX’s most immediate and visible application was to high-school and college athletics, where opportunities for girls and women began steadily increasing in the latter 1970s. A study completed in 2006 documented a nine-fold increase in the number of girls in high-school sports, and more than a 450-percent expansion in college athletics. A 2008 assessment of U.S. intercollegiate sports showed women competing on more than 9,000 teams — approximately nine per school.

And the new opportunities extended beyond campus. “Title IX was the most ridiculous blessing I have ever received, then and now,” says Kim Oden, a 1986 Stanford graduate who became a two-time Olympian and member of the U.S. bronze-medal indoor volleyball team at Barcelona in 1992. “Our sport was growing exponentially at the club level and in visibility nationwide,” Oden says. “All of a sudden, women’s sports became serious.”

In the summers between her Stanford years, Oden represented the U.S. in national and international tournaments. Beyond competing in the Olympics, she played the professional circuits in Italy, China, Brazil and Turkey in both indoor and four-person beach volleyball.

“I was able to play volleyball and earn a good living until I was 34,” Oden says. “It was a mindset change.”

As a swimmer in an earlier era, Anne Warner Cribbs experienced far different circumstances. Growing up in Menlo Park, she won gold at age 14 at the Pan-American Games in Chicago in 1959. The next year, she swam in a preliminary round for the victorious U.S. 400-meter medley relay team at the Rome Olympics. But after, like other young women of her time, she returned to hometown salutes and little more.

She left the pool and later attended Stanford, graduating in 1979. Nearly two decades later, she co-founded the American Basketball League. It was a professional women’s organization that operated for two-plus seasons from 1996 to 1998 before folding in part because of competition from the newly formed Women’s National Basketball Association, created and backed financially by the NBA.

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This story first appeared in the September edition of Climate Magazine

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“After years of seeing women’s college basketball seniors get roses on their home court and then disappear overseas to play professionally, we decided to do something about it,” recalls Cribbs, now 77. “We started the ABL so little girls can see themselves as professional basketball players right here at home, and for all the women my age who played three-bounce basketball because in my day it wasn’t believed women could run the full length of a basketball court.”

More than Athletics

As much as it benefited female athletes, Title IX addressed all aspects of education. As Cribbs says, “It’s not just about sports opportunities. It’s about finance, medicine, law. The parity Title IX seeks to effect brings women into college in general, and then into the workforce, who wouldn’t otherwise have been.”

One of those academic and professional fields was music. When Stanford upset Ohio State and Michigan in the 1971 and 1972 Rose Bowls, none of the schools’ bands included women. At the time, it appeared the norm; a 2014 article in the Columbus Dispatch reported that before Title IX, “college marching bands typically were reserved for men.”

Not that the Stanford band hadn’t tried — at least, well, once. Stanford was founded as a coed institution, and a 1947 article in the Stanford Daily invited female musicians to join their male counterparts. It’s not clear that any did; until the 1960s, the band was a traditional, fraternal, military-style marching unit. The sixties’ dismantling of cultural norms gave rise to the band’s irreverent halftime themes and wild scramble formations that many Stanford fans still cherish. Nontheless, women remained absent. Until Title IX.

“By the early 1970s, we were deep in protest of the Vietnam war, and the mindset was anti-establishment,” remembers Greg Hall, a retired Southern California banker who played clarinet in Stanford’s band from 1971 to 1975. This time, though, it was that very establishment — notably Republican President Richard Nixon, who signed Title IX — that in 1972 was compelling bands and other collegiate organizations to admit women. “Eventually,” Hall says, “we fell in line.”

In that fall of 1972, freshman Jacki Williams-Jones, another clarinetist, became one of only six Stanford women who took the field with an instrument. A year later, she was the first band member to join Stanford’s athletic dance troupe, the Dollies. She says she might not have attempted the latter but for the encouragement of her male bandmates.

“Those guys my freshman year not only spoiled me; they gave me the courage to try different things,” says Williams-Jones, who earned a master’s degree in education and spent a three-decade career teaching high-school French. “They continue to this day to be there for me in the best and the worst of times.”

The director who oversaw the transition was Dr. Arthur P. Barnes, whose rock-and-roll arrangements turned marching-band music upside down during the 1960s and 1970s. Today, Russ Gavin is the Dr. Arthur P. Barnes Director of Bands at Stanford. For him, having women in the band is a no-brainer.

“Bands are great environments for coeducation,” he says. “In their best iterations, they cross the gender spectrum of working together. Music has been historically sexist, and the gendered nature of music is a long-carried burden. I’m thankful for Title IX entering the university landscape. The absence of female voices in an ensemble would be a significant void.”

Gavin’s assessment of music’s historical sexism is well-founded. Although major groups such as the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra hired women starting in the 1920s, the London Symphony and the Vienna Philharmonic appointed their first female members in 1975 and 2003, respectively. Until perhaps the last 30 years, the jazz world also frequently shunned women other than singers and piano players. It may not be coincidental that current stars such as violinist Regina Carter, clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen and trombonist Natalie Cressman emerged from college music programs post-Title IX.

Splitting the Pie

Whether for music, history or physics, all educational institutions must answer to accountants. The most obvious and difficult challenge for high-school and college athletic departments is allocating funds for women while still supporting men, especially at schools that field expensive football programs. Stanford, an early adopter of Title IX, incorporated women’s sports into its previous athletic administration and immediately enlisted the savvy and devotion of its alumni to raise money for scholarships.

Today, the university takes pride in its robust offerings for both women and men. Even so, coaching legend Tara VanDerveer believes the school needs to do more.

“Stanford is still working hard to have gender equity,” says VanDerveer, the Setsuko Ishiyama Director of Women’s Basketball. “The challenge for Stanford and basically all universities and high schools is built-in bias and the financial challenge.

“Yes, there has been progress,” VanDerveer continues. “But we are 50 years into this legislation, and you would be hard-pressed to find any major program in compliance.”

An oft-cited criticism of Title IX has been that male athletes in sports beyond football and basketball have paid the price when their programs have been cut to free up money for women’s teams.

Hogshead-Makar doesn’t buy it. “I had a son first,” she says, “and then his twin sisters were born. My son didn’t lose anything, but he did have to learn how to share resources. It’s part of being a good citizen.”

VanDerveer says an ironic result of the rise of women’s collegiate athletics has come in the coaching ranks. “One of the unintended consequences of Title IX has been that because coaching women has become lucrative, men have taken a large majority of the jobs,” she says. “This is very unfortunate for both the female coaches and the young girls who don’t benefit from female role models.”

The growing number of men in women’s sports has coincided with increased reports of sexual harassment, abuse and assault. Recent cases have involved highly publicized scandals within USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University and San Jose State.

The first legal action that tied harassment to discrimination went to trial in 1980. A group of five Yale students employed Title IX’s protections to sue the university over alleged improprieties by a flute instructor, an English professor and a hockey coach. The women lost the case but won their objectives; Yale established a grievance system and the courts agreed that sexual harassment equaled illegal sexual discrimination.

Losing Momentum?

Today, Stanford and many other institutions devote considerable means to sensitivity training as well as investigating complaints and supporting victims. The nationwide initiatives are so sweeping that the term “Title IX” may now stand more for safeguards than opportunities.

That bothers Hogshead-Makar, whose advocacy now includes cases of sexual abuse and assault. She alleges the shift has allowed many institutions to reduce or abandon their efforts toward athletic equality.

Across the United States, 200,000 women are still being denied college opportunities that rightfully belong to them.

“Right now,” she says, “across the United States, 200,000 women are still being denied college opportunities that rightfully belong to them.”

High schools also appear to be struggling with Title IX. “Despite its 50-year history designed to address inequalities, and despite a massive amount of progress,” says Sean Priest, principal of Sequoia High School in Redwood City, “we have not achieved equity.”

Nonetheless, he adds, “Title IX has been a valuable compass in guiding us through the challenges — number of teams, facility space, availability of coaches — in offering the valuable and formative experience of sports to more who wish to participate, and in helping us to change outmoded perceptions of what women and men do best.”

Title IX’s reach has been extensive, but still applies only to educational endeavors that receive federal funds. Other institutions, such as the Olympics, lie beyond its authority.

Hogshead-Makar recently joined a United States Olympic Committee-sponsored commission to address potential abuse of its female athletes. Currently, she and her organization, Champion Women, are also studying Title IX’s implications for transgender athletes in women’s sports.

“Title IX set clear direction regarding sex, where sex and gender identity are the same,” she says. “But now, with fluid gender identity, we have sex and biology — specifically the unfair competitive advantage of testosterone — coming into question.”

Produced by both sexes but in far greater volume by men, testosterone affects growth, among other bodily functions. Testosterone-suppression drugs greatly reduce strength, lean body mass and muscle area in transgender women. Earlier this year, however, the International Olympic Committee reversed its previous policy that required at least a year of testosterone suppression for transgender female athletes, and punted the issue to the governing bodies of individual sports.

Reflections of an Athletic Woman

Among Title IX’s many successes, it has changed how women view themselves and their accomplishments. Cribbs recalls a telling moment from 1995, when Stanford awarded 2,200 “Block S” varsity letters to women who had competed before Title IX. The university invited three athletes from different eras to speak: Cribbs, the Olympian, who didn’t swim for Stanford but graduated in 1979; me, an alumna from 1983; and Anne Wicks, a volleyball player at the time.

“I spoke about having no vision of women athletes attending college,” Cribbs says. “You spoke about wondering if you deserved the scholarship you were given and doing everything you could to be worthy of it. Anne Wicks essentially said, ‘I earned this, and I deserve it.’”

Title IX’s greatest legacy may be twofold. First, it illuminated vast and continuing inequities. That was vital, because before we can create change, we must see the need. Second, and even more powerful, it reinforced and extended our society’s fundamental belief in equality: Our belief that as women — for ourselves, our daughters and sons, their fathers and each other — we have and deserve the right to equal play and equal pay. Our belief that that principle extends to everything from playing soccer to playing the trombone, from studying, writing and speaking to coaching and teaching. And perhaps most of all, our belief that we have an inalienable right to receive equal access to education in all its forms, free of harassment and stereotypes.

We’ll still working on it. But here’s more evidence of progress. To celebrate Title IX’s fiftieth anniversary, Stanford this fall will induct Tara VanDerveer and eight other women into the first all-female class in the university’s athletic hall of fame.

The City Council of Redwood City will appoint an eligible resident to complete the remainder of District 4 Councilmember Michael Smith’s term, which runs through December 2024. Smith announced his resignation last week as he is moving closer to his family in the Northeast.

City staff recommended the appointment process over the alternative route of holding a special election, which would need to be held after January 2023, leaving the District 4 council seat vacant for at least eight months. A special election would also cost the city an estimated $104,000-$124,800, staff said.

As part of the appointment process, the city will advertise the opening and accept applications from eligible community members through Aug. 16. Eligible residents must live within the boundaries of District 4 that coincide with the map approved by City Council in 2019. The latest map, adjusted to reflect 2020 Census data, has different boundaries for District 4. City staff will launch a website and other outreach providing the 2019 map for residents interested in applying to succeed Smith.

Following recruitment, staff will confirm eligibility of applicants. City Council members will then conduct interviews with eligible applicants and make an appointment at their meeting Aug. 22.

In his last meeting on City Council, Smith was lauded for his service to the community, which “extends far beyond this dais,” said Mayor Giselle Hale.

City Manager Melissa Stevenson Diaz expressed gratitude for working with Smith in his roles on the Palm Park Neighborhood Association, then Planning Commission and then on City Council following his election in November 2020. Diaz says she appreciated Smith’s “thoughtfulness and perspectives.”

“You have helped in many ways us in improving our service to the community,” Diaz said, adding he will having a “lasting impact in ensuring that our analysis and the impact of the work we do has significant rigor.”