San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Quest for birth parents sparked zeal for government openness
When Laurie Jones Neighbors learned she was adopted, she decided to find her birth parents, which took 40 years of determination and sleuthing.
She was born in a Texas home for unwed mothers and was stonewalled in every attempt to learn the identity of her mom. This instilled in her a distrust of institutional secrecy, a trait that made her an optimal fit for the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, a San Francisco agency whose purpose is to protect the public’s access to the inner workings of city government.
If a citizen filed a complaint, Neighbors and her cohorts on the volunteer task force would take action to get information released if it was improperly obscured from public view.
There are 11 seats on the task force, each appointed by the Board of Supervisors. It is a dry job that Neighbors gave color to, cheerfully reading documents and attending meetings that could run deep into the night while also working full time as a consultant with her own firm, Cities and People Advisers, which seeks to place members of underserved communities onto civic committees and boards.
Neighbors was just starting a typical 50- or 60-hour workweek when she suffered a fatal cardiac event at her home in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood on Nov. 1. She was 56.
“She always had a soft spot
for transparent government and how to ensure it,” said her husband, Gordon Edgar.
“She was someone who was not afraid to speak her mind and push to do the right ethical thing, which is what I admired most about her,” said Matthew Yankee, chair of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. “She would not give in to the politics or emotions of an issue but focus on what was correct under the law. I am going to miss her terribly.”
In recognition, the board will adjourn its Tuesday meeting in Neighbors’ honor at the request of Supervisor Dean Preston.
“Laurie was an incredible person and her passing is a heartbreaking loss for our city and for everyone who knew and loved her,” Preston said in a statement.
“Her wisdom, kindness, and unwavering advocacy for transparency and social justice had a major impact and inspired so many of us to turn words to action, challenge injustice, and build a better world,” he said.
Neighbors was open about everything, from meetings to her bisexuality. Her professional life was dedicated to opening government, which she first pursued while working at Urban Habitat, an Oakland social justice nonprofit. She put her stamp on the organization by implementing a Board and Commissions Leadership Institute.
“As a white woman, she was able to understand her privilege and listen and learn from a Black woman like me,” said Sheryl Lane, who went through the institute and was appointed to the planning commission in the city of Richmond. With mentoring from Neighbors, she is now executive director of Building Blocks for Kids, a Richmond nonprofit.
“Laurie was funny and very snarky and direct,” Lane said. “With her I could laugh, I could cry.”
Laurie Lynn Jones was born April 8, 1966, at a foster home in Fort Worth, Texas. Immediately given up for adoption, she was raised by Marvin and Jimmie Jones in Lubbock. Her dad was in engineer at an agricultural manufacturer. Her mother ran a boutique, where Laurie worked as an after-school bookkeeper as a teenager. That is also when she started becoming aware that she was adopted. Neighbors started inquiring about her lineage at a young age — and got nowhere.
“There was so much secrecy around it that she hit brick walls,” Edgar said. “There was no way to get information at that time.”
After graduating from Monterey High School in Lubbock in 1985, she attended Texas Tech there, paying her way through school while delivering pizzas and working at the campus bars frequented by fraternity members.
“The kind of bars where people order a six-pack of beer in a bucket of ice, she liked to say,” Edgar said. After graduating with a double major in English and history, she went directly to graduate school at Texas Tech to study rhetoric in the English department.
There she met Lincoln Neighbors, a fellow English grad student. They were married in 1989 and moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains after she received her master of arts in 1990. She found work teaching English at Monterey Peninsula College and later at Cal State University Monterey Bay.
They settled in a house that had been red-tagged in the Loma Prieta earthquake. The house was never retrofitted, which helped keep the rent low. They adopted two boys, Tim and Theo Neighbors, who were half brothers.
Neighbors became more open about her bisexuality after leaving Lubbock. In Santa Cruz, she formed a relationship with Jean Kerr and was soon divorced from her husband.
Neighbors and Kerr moved to Eugene, Ore., in 2002 with the two sons, and Neighbors taught at the University of Oregon, though she was never on the full-time faculty. When Neighbors decided to pursue a second master’s degree at UC Irvine, she and Kerr parted ways.
After receiving a master’s degree in sociology, Neighbors moved to Oakland to work for Urban Habitat. She met Edgar online in 2004, but it took four years for an internet relationship to evolve into an in-person one. She moved into his apartment in Duboce Triangle, near his job as the cheesemonger at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. They were married at San Francisco City Hall in 2014.
That was also the year of the last World Series Championship for the San Francisco Giants. Neighbors and Edgar had full season tickets, 81 home games.
“She liked to be known as the mayor of Section 150, in the arcade just outside the right field foul pole,” Edgar said. “Buster Posey’s final home run (in 2021) went right over our heads.”
For Neighbors, 2014 held one more fateful moment: It was the year she submitted her DNA to Ancestry, the genealogy tracking company.
Turns out, she was descended on her father’s side from a revered Shawnee warrior named Chief Blue Jacket, who died in 1810. She also worked the internet to learn her mother’s identity and friended her on Facebook. Neighbors’ mother shut down her request to take the relationship further, Edgar said.
That was the end of her 40year search, but not the end of her empathy for the adopted. When walking her schnauzer in Duboce Park, she’d meet owners of rescue dogs. This would compel her to get down on her haunches, make eye contact with the dog and say, “I feel you, little pup. I’m adopted, too.”
Survivors include her husband, Gordon Edgar of San Francisco; sons, Tim Neighbors of Eugene and Theo Neighbors, residence unknown; and adopted brother, Mike Jones of Tacoma, Wash.