By Nicole Meldahl

In last month’s column, I wrote about the power of people in the history and preservation of the Richmond’s beloved eyesore, the Alexandria Theatre. Several of you referenced the piece while either initiating or renewing your memberships with Western Neighborhoods Project (WNP). As it turns out, the power of our local independent press is also very real. I’m not sure how to find the right words to describe how I felt after reading the brief notes you attached to these memberships, but this gets close: It made my heart full.

Thank you, history friends. My heart was most certainly in need of that last month because WNP is starting 2024 recovering from a profound loss. On Dec. 1, 2023, we lost a critical member of the WNP family with the unexpected passing of community historian Arnold Marcus Woods. He was a Richmond District resident since 1996 and a founding member of our Board of Directors when this little-nonprofit-that-could began in 1999.

But you probably know Arnold best as my kindly co-host on the “Outside Lands San Francisco” podcast and as the friendly face that welcomed you to WNP events. Or, you might remember Arnold as the kind man who shared Cliff House and Sutro Baths history with you at The Museum at The Cliff, our temporary pop-up in the former restaurant and gift shop from 2021-2022.

Arnold’s background as a lawyer made him an incredible, detail-oriented researcher and his temperament made him a wonderful, irreplaceable colleague. After his passing, WNP went into mourning. The podcast went quiet, the office went dark. Even as I write this, it doesn’t feel real that he’s not here to celebrate our 25th anniversary this year. Above all else, Arnold was our friend. That’s the thing about being the west side’s friendly neighborhood history group: The friendship is integral to the history. WNP will simply never be the same without him.

We, as historians, will also not be the same without him. Sometimes history can be overly academic and removed from daily life, written by solitary people pursuing their own objectives. But that’s not how we do it. At the WNP Clubhouse, history is a team sport, and every player brings their unique talents into play. Arnold, as a history maker, brought who he was to the stories he told, and he amplified the histories that spoke to him. That’s the thing about public history. There are typically two voices audible in every story – the person who has lived it and the person who is telling it.

He and I both found our voices as historians writing for WNP. We both shared a love of photography and his explorations of our archive reflect a subjectively diverse curiosity, with articles that studiously shared his love of music (“The SNACK at Kezar”), his devotion to the entire Cliff House Collection experience (“The Largest Gift Shop in the World”) and showcased his meticulous analysis of how San Francisco came to look like San Francisco (“The Esplanade”: Phase I and Phase 2). In this medium, this soft-spoken man has spoken volumes.

In this medium, I’ve also tried to share history that resonates with me. Our series, “The San Franciscans,” daylights the extraordinary lives of ordinary people we find in the OpenSFHistory archive. At its best, I think this fosters a deeper connection to people of the past who really aren’t so different from us even though they can feel stiff and remote in black-and-white photographs. Ultimately, I just need to know more about certain people who are staring back at me from beyond the grave – people with whom I feel some sort of metaphysical connection.

It’s an impulse Arnold felt too, and he contributed to the series by writing about people who resonated with him. Like Cecil F. Poole, the country’s first African American U.S. attorney. I’m drawn to overlooked women like Norma Ball Norwood, whose vibrance radiates off the pages of her photograph album and who, to this day, has the fiercest obituary I’ve ever read (and I read a lot of obituaries in my line of work). Sometimes I wonder if these women find me, though, as a kindred spirit across time.

Take, for example, the way in which I met Irene Canby LeRoy – the daughter of a U.S. Army paymaster at the Presidio of San Francisco, and the wife of a French importer/exporter who inherited a large portion of a defaulted Mexican land grant. Irene outlived her entire family, and her estate was scattered after her death (my worst nightmare!), including an incredible photo archive. One part of that archive was purchased by the anonymous private collector who seeded our OpenSFHistory program. Another ended up at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area’s Park Archives and Records Center where I worked for many years.

Coincidentally, I was cataloging her photographs in two separate archives at the same time, and I recognized her Jack Russell terrier in both collections. The story I was able to piece together from clues found in both collections and publish on the OpenSFHistory blog was found by Bertrand Pellegrin, who likely purchased Irene’s passport from the same antique store that our private collector visited. Bertrand had always wondered what had happened to Irene and hoped to return the passport to a surviving relative. Not every history has a happy ending, but at least he found her final resting place, so to speak.

Stories like this give our work as community historians purpose and meaning. As do stories like those shared by Ann Morales after reading last week’s column. Ann worked as a candy girl at “The Alex,” as she called the Alexandria Theatre, and her memories are soon to be added to the WNP website. Personal histories are so precious to me and I’m very grateful to provide a safe place for them to live in discoverable perpetuity at WNP.

But, more than anything, I’m grateful for the camaraderie of working with like-hearted souls like Arnold, who will forever be the first gentleman of WNP. And now, as the historian has become part of the past, we’ll do our best to remember him as the extraordinary San Franciscan that he was and carry on the work to which he was so devoted.

Nicole Meldahl is the executive director of the Western Neighborhoods Project. Learn more at outsidelands.org. You can find more of Meldahl’s writings on her blog (nostosalgos.org) or her Instagram (@nostosnic).