As Pelosi Prepares to Retire, an Amazing but True Tale from the Before Times of Driving with Ms. Nancy
Long before she made history, the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House paid her dues in the retail, street politics of San Francisco, and had to put up with pesky and annoying local reporters.
In 1987, I covered Nancy Pelosi’s first campaign for Congress for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Pelosi announced last week that she will step down at the end of her current term, nearly 40 years after S.F. voters first selected her to represent them in Washington after a special election. Her pronouncement brought back a flood of memories about that first race, when I was still the new guy on the political beat. Here’s one.
Wrong way on Brotherhood Way. A few days after Pelosi’s June 2, 1987 victory, I asked to hang out with her for an afternoon to talk and gather color for my Saturday column. She readily agreed and offered to pick me up at the paper downtown on her way to speak at a luncheon meeting of the Irish-Israeli-Italian Society.
Nancy was talking rapidly and intensely as we headed to a restaurant near Ocean Beach and, somehow, she ended up driving the wrong way on a one-way side of Brotherhood Way, a busy crosstown avenue.
I pointed this out to her as I dove for the floor, and she resourcefully managed to maneuver back on the right side of the road, barely pausing for breath in her running commentary, as we both cheated death.
When I got back to the office, I wrote up a column focusing on her lunch speech, adding a P.S. note as a kicker that briefly recounted our traffic misadventure and said, “Now that’s she’s been elected, the first thing Nancy Pelosi should do is hire a driver.”
Well.
She called me Saturday morning, a few hours after the column appeared, and angrily chewed me out, saying I’d made it sound like she didn’t know her way around her own district. I mumbled something about the item having the benefit of, um, being true.
And there the matter rested, as we engaged professionally and civilly on multiple issues after she’d left for Washington and kept winning re-election every two years.
The rest of the story. When I left the Chron in 2002, Pelosi was nice enough to enter some kind words about me into the Congressional Record, but I didn’t see her again until the summer of 2007, six months after she was elected Speaker and five years after I’d moved to Santa Barbara.
When she came to town for a fundraiser that July, I showed up.
The moment she saw me, for the first time in five years -- and 20 years after my three paragraph item about her driving -- she put her hands on my shoulders and said, with a smile and perfect comic timing, “Jerry -- I have a driver now.”
Her superstar pol’s delivery, and her astonishing and instant recall of that long-ago event cracked me up, a moment captured by my friend and then-Montecito Journal columnist J’Amy Brown.
A passenger to history. Pelosi is a true political giant, and getting to cover the start of her career is one of those treasured experiences, privileges and pleasures of being a journalist that I appreciate more as the years pass. As I used to say, “I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this.”
Godspeed Nancy.
Photos by J’Amy Brown.