William Russell-Shapiro – 50th Reunion Essay

William Russell-Shapiro

San Francisco, CA

brs@absinthe.com

415-430-6508

Spouse(s): Alice Russell-Shapiro (1973)

Child(ren): Madeleine Nina Russell-Shapiro (1977); William Haas Russell-Shapiro (1979)

Education: BA Yale, 1969; Master of City Planning, MIT, 1975

Career: Urban Planner, 1975–1982; restaurateur 1982–present

Avocations: family, reading, occasional travel to old cities, architecture, politics.

College: Pierson

I’m the grandson of four immigrants whose parents were peasants, some of them persecuted. My parents rode educational opportunity to eventual, not immediate, successful suburban comfort, to my sister’s and my advantage.

I was happy and successful in high school, happy and a bit scattered at Yale. I learned a great deal in many of my classes, loved art history, French literature, political economics, and shooting pool. I was very influenced by a city-planning class TA. He encouraged me to think about addressing urban problems beyond the big-brother role I’d taken on through Dwight Hall with a group of street boys in New Haven. I survived the required science distributional because the department chair took pity on me in return for my promise never to take another science course. I learned more from my roommates and friends, and from the atmosphere at Yale, which for me was generally one of mutual respect, housed in cloaks of sardonic humor. The Vietnam War changed all our views on virtually everything. I got a job offer for after college from Saul Alinsky, a legendary community organizer in Chicago, but my draft board said nothing doing.

After Yale I was a public affairs fellow at San Francisco’s Coro Foundation, moving to California where I knew not one person. I met my future wife on our first day in the program. Then I diverted from the path to law school and went to MIT for a graduate degree in urban planning. That took extra years, as I also had to work in a community health project to fulfill my obligations as a conscientious objector.

After managing an unsuccessful Congressional campaign in New Hampshire, I returned to California and community planning and organizing. My goals were to help make a better world for everyone—and in the process to become important and famous.

On my 35th birthday, while co-chairing the California Democratic party state convention, I was pressed by my wife to think about why we’d had children. The next morning, at the apogee of my political activism and what seemed to be the beginnings of political success, I told my lawyer I needed a new line of work. He introduced me to San Francisco’s second black firefighter, who owned a BBQ restaurant and needed a partner. I thus changed my life and career overnight, and I remain in the food and wine business today.

The firm I own and manage has four restaurants, a 110-year-old saloon, a wine store, and 350 employees who count on each other and me to keep things going. We face the dilemma of an intense industry that can’t pay people what they deserve and need to earn to live in the new and exploding San Francisco. I relish the challenge, but it’s occurred to me that I might want still more time for family, and for reading, exercise, travel, and just plain peace—and that I might not live forever. I’m trying to reconcile all that.