Forth and back, all aboard BART

As his BART train zoomed westward from the East Bay one late night, “we sped through the bay,” writes Tony Press, “then stopped at Embarcadero.” All was normal.

“Then we zipped through Montgomery, coming to a stop at Powell.” There, the doors opened and closed, says Press, and the operator announced, “somewhat apologetically,” that the train would return to Montgomery Street, “because we had ‘missed it.’ ”

After a few minutes, “we did go back (felt like we were going in reverse).” At Montgomery, people got on, and perhaps some got off, says Press, and then the journey continued.

Praised are the careful newspaper readers, Tamar Resnick among them. Reading the Sunday, July 8, Chronicle, she learned that Tartine bakery is opening a place on Ninth Avenue in the Inner Sunset. The building, said the story, used to be the headquarters for Standard Roofing Co.

In the same paper, Resnick read of the death June 23 of Herman “Menne”

Shine, 95. Born in Berlin, Shine was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1939. There, said a death notice placed by his family, he claimed to be a roofer “in order to make it more difficult for the guards to beat him.” Presumably, he thought if he worked above ground level, he wouldn’t be noticed. Assigned to roofing duty, he actually learned to do the work, which he continued when he was taken to Auschwitz in 1942.

To pass the time while working on a roof there, Shine was in the habit of singing. A female prisoner who heard him became his friend, then his girlfriend, later his wife. When Shine and a friend escaped the camp, members of his wife’s family helped them hide.

After the war, the Shines came to San Francisco, where, in 1956, he founded the Standard Roofing Co. They were married for 74 years; he retired in 1979. “He enjoyed his family and his friends,” said the notice placed in The Chronicle by his family, “and a good game of bridge right to the end.” Last week’s reports that the Art Institute of California is closing created some public relations aggravation for the San Francisco Art Institute, which was pictured erroneously in at least one TV report of the closing. There was enough confusion that SFAI issued a press release saying it is “still here and open. ... While SFAI may share a similar name to The Art Institute of California, SFAI is a very different art school. .... SFAI isn’t going anywhere!”

After working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for 38 years, exhibitions design manager Kent Roberts has retired. At a gathering last week in the SFMOMA Third Street lobby, a crowd of fellow SFMOMA workers, art lovers and museum supporters honored the contributions of a staffer who over the years had installed a thousand exhibitions and forged a multitude of friendships.

Museum director Neal Benezra said it was impossible to overestimate “the importance of the experience that artists have in this place.” Over the years, it was Roberts who had the closest contacts with those artists. Showing the art in its best form was goal No. 1, of course, but Roberts also took on responsibility for “the care and treatment of these artists in our behalf,” said Benezra, specifically mentioning Richard Serra and Olafur Eliasson. “You are the one who worked hand in hand with these artists when they came here.” Painting and sculpture curator Janet Bishop looked out over the crowd of staffers and guests, museum insiders wearing interesting clothes and distinctive eyewear. “All of you were probably, or close to it, the coolest person at your high school,” she said. “But I can assure you that Kent is cooler.”

Roberts “pulls allnighters with Richard Serra,” she said. “He bartends for Tom Marioni. He cat-sits for Whitney Chadwick and Bob Bechtel. He was once in love with Joan Brown.” As a working artist as well as a member of the local art family, he has “a profound understanding of what it means to be an artist,” she said.

Roberts’ retirement from a demanding job will allow him to focus on his own art. His 25-foot-long stainless steel sculpture, “Passage,” was installed at the Moscone Recreation Center in 2010.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I cannot buy a pint, because I treat it like a single.” Woman emerging from Noble Folk Ice Cream in Healdsburg, overheard by Pat Sides