Several years after her husband’s death, Annette Dobbs was preparing to discard more than 700 condolence letters she’d received from friends and admirers of former S.F. supervisor, Harold Dobbs.
Her son, Stephen, asked to take a look at them.
That look initially consumed an entire weekend — and eventually 2-1/2 years as the younger Dobbs embarked on an effort to document the life of his father, a San Francisco lawyer, politician and civic leader.
The resulting product is a self-published book called “Ambition & Achievement: The Life of Harold Stanley Dobbs, 1918-1994.”
For Dobbs, former president and CEO of the Marin Community Foundation, the writing project was a labor of love and tribute as well as a way to pass his father’s legacy on to future generations.
“His generation may have been the first of middle-class Jews in this country to begin what I call a march to affluence and social standing,” said Dobbs, a San Rafael resident, of his father.
Harold Dobbs, who died of leukemia in 1994 at the age of 75, was a three-term San Francisco supervisor, three-time candidate for mayor, co-founder of Mel’s Drive-In restaurants and head of numerous civic and Jewish organizations.
Reading the letters collected by his mother, a former president of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, “galvanized” Dobbs to begin researching and documenting his father’s life, said the 59-year-old writer who reviews books for the Jewish Bulletin.
“I was astonished to realize the range of my father’s contacts,” Dobbs said. The letters also gave him a window into events in his father’s life that he’d never before known.
Dobbs recommends the process to others wanting to preserve the story of a loved relative, irrespective of their stature or celebrity in the wider community. “People should not hesitate to do a family history because no one in the family is famous,” said Dobbs.
He concedes, however, that the effort “is a big job” — and his most difficult assignment in 40 years of writing.
After reading the notes his mother had collected, Dobbs wrote letters of inquiry to more than 100 friends and acquaintances of his father. Written on what would have been his father’s 81st birthday, the notes asked each person to share a memory about Harold Dobbs.
“I heard back from almost everybody,” Dobbs said. “People are quoted throughout the book.”
He also pored over newspaper clippings and other mementos collected by his mother in 18 family scrapbooks. “In our case, we had abundant material,” he said.
Sometimes, Dobbs received several different accounts of the same incident. A favorite concerns the accidental discovery by the elder Dobbs’ law partners of his ownership in the drive-in, which opened in 1947.
Fearing their reaction, “he did not tell the partners right away that he was involved in this new enterprise,” said Dobbs, whose father would stop by the diner daily during lunchtime to help out.
One day, Dobbs recounts in the book, his father was helping to direct cars in the parking lot when a partner drove up for lunch. The elder Dobbs was convinced that he’d lose his job, but instead “the partners were impressed with Harold’s capitalist initiative.”
The book recounts Dobbs’ political career, starting in 1951 with his election to the Board of Supervisors and ending in 1971, when he lost his third bid for mayor. A mentor of George Christopher, Dobbs had “a natural calling to serve,” said his son.
Also mentioned in the book is what Dobbs describes as “The Willie Mays Controversy,” in which some members of the Concordia-Argonaut, a Jewish men’s club, objected in 1966 to admitting the baseball star as its first non-white member. Dobbs, then the president, had encouraged Mays to join and succeeded in getting him admitted. He later stepped down as president and “resigned in disgust” from the board, the younger Dobbs reports.
Dobbs also served during his lifetime as president of the Jewish Home for the Aged, Sinai Memorial Chapel, the YMCA and Junior Chamber of Commerce among other organizations.
He had an “agreeable but firm way of silencing people who went on at encyclopedic length,” said Dobbs, noting that his father believed that most meetings should last no more than an hour to 90 minutes.
Given that Dobbs was often private about his inner emotions, his son was asked to speculate about what his father’s reaction would have been to the book.
“I think he would have ambivalent feelings,” his son said. On the one hand, the elder Dobbs would probably be touched by the tribute and the love behind it. “On the down side, he’d say, ‘You wrote about what?'”