Moments in life that determine its path

Among the honorees at San Francisco Suicide Prevention’s Heroes of Nonprofit Luncheon on Feb. 9, was Eve Meyer, who is retiring after 30 years as executive director of the group. Meyer’s family story has to have had an impact on her professional story.

Meyer’s father was a pediatrician, head of the public health department in Berlin. Meyer hadn’t been born when, persecuted as Jews in Germany, her grandmother, father, mother, sister and brother fled to Belgium. Her sister died there; Meyer doesn’t know quite how.

Rounded up in Belgium, the family was taken to a concentration camp in Southern France. After several months there, they managed to escape and set out for the Spanish border.

When they arrived, a border guard asked for papers and, having determined that theirs were not in order, said they would have to return to France. Mother, father and grandmother “agreed to walk into the sea,” Meyer said, “took my brother’s hand and started walking. The guard was so moved by that, mostly by my brother’s screaming, that he came up to them, said the papers were fine” and allowed them to enter Spain.

They left Spain for the United States on the last boat out of Cadiz.

Meyer’s father found work here as clinical director in a series of state-run residential facilities for mental patients. He was one in a corps of immigrants hired by state officials who thought any doctor with a German accent would know something about psychiatry.

“They’d deliberately hire such people,” said Meyer, because they had fled to the United States with no possessions, “and if they provided them with apartments, furniture, sheets ... they would accept low salaries.” The doctors often moved from institution to institution, “when local political candidates, in the age of McCarthyism, ran on platforms of getting rid of the ‘Communists that are in the hospitals.’ ”

Meyer was born in 1942, a year after her parents arrived. Her brother became a psychiatrist and taught at the University of Chicago. She became a health administrator and social worker, devoting 30 years to rescuing people contemplating suicide.

Suicide Prevention’s annual fundraising comedy night, “Laughs for Life,” is scheduled for May 3 at the Julia Morgan Ballroom.

Student producers at Cal Performances decided that this year’s March 21 Front Row event — for which a committee of 11 student curators chooses the performers and subject — will be Front Row with Margaret Cho and Friends, in a program dealing with “issues of race, identity and power.”

A release about this said that Cho has identified herself as the “patron saint of outsiders.” “I’d love to create an event,” she said, “where we talk all about race in entertainment.” Her guests will be comedian/writer/performer Aparna Nancherla and political comic Hari Kondabolu.

This is the third Front Row event; the first was hosted by Lars Ulrich of Metallica, the second by Daniel Handler. Tickets are only $5, but the event is for UC Berkeley students only. Lurching into the future: A Piedmont Nextdoor giveaway spotted by A.M. offered “Filofax diary/ calendar pages for free (A5 size) — for leadites only!” I’m wondering if a leadite is someone who wields a pencil, or perhaps a leadité, like a crudité, is the pencil itself.

Amanda Jackson, 10, was at a coffeehouse in Park City, Utah, when she heard the mother of a teenager implore the girl: “Honey, will you please look up?” “Why do I have to look up?” answered the girl. “Why can’t you just FaceTime me?”

At the Montgomery Street BART stop, reports Karyn Logsdon, the sign that informs people that the escalator is out of service has been amended by a freelance fortune-teller. Under the preprinted section that says, “This unit will be out of service until,” someone has written, with marker, “12th of never.”

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I’m not so aggressive on the downhill anymore, since my middle school son is faster than me.” Woman cyclist to woman cyclist, overheard on Grizzly Peak Boulevard in Oakland by Steven Jenner

As to the most complicated intersection in San Francisco, James Wittenbrook says it’s not South Van Ness/Mission/ Otis/12th Street. He nominates Sloat/Portola/West Portal/Junipero Serra, which, in addition to what Wittenbrook calls “the spiderweb of intersecting streets ... features left turn signals and 2 Metro lines.”

Completely nonpartisan sticker on car with Washington state plates, spotted by Anne Gomes in Oakland: “Ignorance is patriotic, truth is treason.”