What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [127]
With chain record stores opening in the area, Betty soon realized that Reid’s Records would never do the kind of business it once did. But she saw an opportunity to use the store as a social platform that might be able to save Sacramento Street. She conceived of a strategy by which she would be “pretty little Dr. Soskin’s wife when that was convenient” to make some political inroads, and “slip into being my angry black merchant from Sacramento Street when I needed” to make others. To improve her political position, Betty got herself hired as an aide to a Berkeley council member, Don Jelinek. He had been her lawyer when she divorced Mel. Before moving to Berkeley, the native New Yorker had served as a civil rights lawyer for Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi. Betty began attending city council meetings and preparing information packets for Jelinek, and soon became City Hall savvy. It was not long before Mayor Newport appointed her to serve on a committee to select sites for low-income housing in the city. She soon had an arsenal of information with which to create the Sacramento Street Housing Development Corporation and push for the redevelopment of the blighted street. “I learned to set myself short-term, achievable goals, and to be satisfied with the fulfillment of them,” she said.
For seven years, Betty worked behind the scenes, convincing city officials that the shooting galleries, houses of prostitution, and other derelict buildings were a cancer in the South Berkeley community and had to be removed. She came up against those in government who believed in a kind of appeasement policy, allowing the illicit activity to continue on Sacramento Street to keep it from arising elsewhere. On the street, there were many who distrusted Betty’s motives, fearing her efforts to clean up the block were a self-motivated ploy for gentrification.
Finally, one day in 1985, she was working in the record store when she heard the sound of large construction trucks on the move. “We rushed to the front of the store to stare out the windows at the sight of that humongous claw machine chewing its way through that infamous house across the street,” she said. As a crowd gathered, Betty thought about all the people who had told her she would never succeed and of all the time she’d been plodding along, identifying steps, making moves, and drawing others along, despite their protests.” “And here it was, happening before our eyes,” she said. The following week, the street rejoiced, a band played in the newly cleared lot, and children flew kites over Sacramento Street. “It was like an exorcism.”
Not long after, the then-sixty-five-year-old Betty held a ceremonial shovel, along with Mayor Lonnie Hancock, and broke ground for the $8.5 million construction of forty-one units of affordable housing that would resuscitate the neighborhood.
Surely Betty deserved some respite, a time to savor her success. But for the next decade, her life was consumed with painful personal upheaval. Her marriage to Soskin ended in as Berkeley-like a way as it began: he left for India to become a lama. “When Bill went off, I still loved him very much. Mel was my best friend, but Bill was my great adventure, my great love.” Then, within a two-year span, the three most significant men in Betty’s life died: Mel, at seventy, after a decade of decline; her father, Dorson Louis Charbonnet, at ninety-five; and Bill Soskin, in 1988, of cancer. They were followed by her son, Rick, who died an alcoholic, at age fifty, in 1991. Four years later, Betty’s mother died, at 101.
In addition to those emotional trials, in her seventies, Betty had to devote considerable time and energy to settling her now middle-aged daughter, Dorian, into an independent life in her own apartment in the community, monitoring it and occasionally, for Dorian’s safety and welfare, bringing her home to live with her. “Since she has little awareness of what the risks are, she does better than I do,” said