The city family suffers a huge loss
The wound of Sydney Goldstein’s sudden death is first and most deeply suffered, of course, by her family. But the circle of mourners is wide, including not only the civic leaders with whom she worked to build City Arts & Lectures and the authors to whom she provided a platform, but also the vast community of people who attended events she produced, listened to radio broadcasts, shared her passion for words written and spoken.
Sam Whiting’s obituary for her quoted Dave Eggers, a member of the board of City Arts & Lectures. She’d devoted a yearly “On Arts” series to raising money for a scholarship program for 826 Valencia, which he’d founded. “I feel like I lost an aunt,” said Eggers, in an additional remembrance he forwarded to The Chronicle. “She was a mentor to me, and treated me — and all of her board — like family. The City Arts & Lectures board meetings were always one hour, no longer, and even then there was filler. She did not really need much help with anything. She reported the successes of the year, she showed us the budget (always tidy and never in the red), and then we ate bagels and lox. It was nononsense, but it was fun, too.
“Sydney was like the student who brings home the report card with all A’s and doesn’t need or want much praise. She matter-of-factly got monumental things done, and then just moved on to the next monumental thing.”
Pat Holt is former book editor of The Chronicle. But before that, she was at Publishers Weekly, where in the mid-1970s, she wrote about Goldstein’s new lecture series at the College of Marin. “Even then,” Holt emailed, “she had featured so many authors that I had space to mention only those with names beginning with A and B.
“At the time, few believed anything like City Arts & Lectures could be self-sustaining. But due to Sydney’s ingenuity and the backing of San Francisco philanthropists (as well as writers from New York like Susan Sontag), CA&L remained as healthy as it was unique in the country.”
Holt’s column, “a rather small story in a trade magazine,” resulted in Goldstein being “inundated by mail from all over the country” from authors, literary agents, publishers, publicity people.” There was so much of it that “even after months had passed, she would dump yet another stack on my front door (we lived a few blocks apart) ... and on top of it, some furiously scrawled note from Sydney . ... The angrier she got the funnier.”
Years later, “they “joked that maybe it was time for another PW column, this time featuring authors beginning with names from C to D.”
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Goldstein created a cultural hub that was known around the country, but she was also Sydney, a friend: generous, hospitable, critical of her own endeavors but encouraging to everyone else’s.
“She was candid, punctual, no-nonsense, and yet extremely warm and familial,” wrote Eggers. “When you hadn’t seen her in a few weeks or months, she would look up at you, tilt her head and scan your face, as if reading you for defects in your text. ‘How
are you?’ she would ask in that patrician voice of hers. Then she’d name your kids and ask about them, too. Nothing and no one escaped her discerning eye.”
She often celebrated the “sisters” whose work in the arts had brought them shoulder to shoulder with her. In her office on Sutter Street, and then on the darkened stage of the Nourse Auditorium as that space was readied for reopening, she hosted dinners for the group she called Old Growth Redwoods. Her guests were women who’d spent their careers as part of the San Francisco cultural panorama.
For one such event, she’d had someone make tiny paintings of redwood trees, each with the name of the guest painted on, that served as place cards. I’m sure every guest saved hers. Years later, when I’d brought mine with me to another dinner, she expressed surprise that I still had it.
The souvenir will be with me forever, but none of us who shared in her friendship, drank her Scotch, sat at her table, shared an ice cream sundae or laughed at her complaints about one program or another, will ever need a tangible reminder.