Oct 8, 2024
Aaron Peskin is incredibly easy to talk with. And his life story is one you have to hear to believe.
In this podcast, Episode 1 of Season 7 of Storied: San Francisco, the multi-term D3 supervisor-slash-president of the Board of Supervisors-slash-current candidate for mayor of San Francisco shares his story, beginning with the tales of his parents and their families' migration to the United States.
On Aaron's mom's side, the story
goes back to Russia. His maternal grandfather was one of five boys
born to a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg. Two of the boys stayed
in Russia, one came to San Francisco, and the other two migrated
across Russia amid revolutionary upheaval there to the
Mediterranean and later, to Haifa in Palestine.
Aaron's grandfather ended up in Tel
Aviv. His mom was born there in 1940, when it was still Palestine.
She migrated to the US in 1963 to visit her sister, who taught at a
temple in Oakland. Aaron's mom ended up meeting his dad on that
fateful trip, and the two were married five weeks later.
On his dad's side, his grandparents
came to the US from Poland before the Nazi invasion in 1939,
arriving in New York City where they ran a candy store. Aaron's dad
went to City College of New York, where he graduated and got into
UC Berkeley grad school for psychology. On his bus ride west,
though, the elder Peskin got drafted to serve the US Army in its
war in Korea. After service, he finished his doctorate at Berkeley
and got a job teaching at SF State, where he stayed for 40 years
until he retired.
Aaron goes on a sidebar about
running into many of his dad's students from over the years,
something that happens to him up to this day.
His parents settled in Berkeley
shortly after they got married, in 1963. They had Aaron in 1964. As
a kid, in the 1970s, he remembers some of the goings on at SF
State, when student-led protests and sit-ins were happening and the
Ethnic Studies was founded.
Back in the East Bay, Aaron attended
the first fully integrated public school class in Berkeley. One of
his classmates, from kindergarten through third, was none other
than Kamala Harris. (See photos in the episode post on our
website!)
Aaron's younger brother is a
professor at Arizona State University. Both his parents ended up in
higher education. He calls himself the "black sheep" of his family
in this regard, as he "only" ended up with a bachelor's degree.
Both parents were also therapists, something they carried on amid
their academic careers.
Growing up in the 1970s, the family
spent significant time in The City, coming over as often as
possible from their home in Berkeley. Aaron rattles off a litany of
activities his parents engaged him and his brother in when they
were young.
He says that his time in high school
in the East Bay was idyllic. He went to Berkeley High, still the
only high school in that city. He fell in with a group of four
other boys who took weekend hiking and backpacking trips as much as
possible.
Also around this time, in his later
teen/high school years, Aaron popped over to San Francisco to do
things like see kung-fu movies in Chinatown or go to The Keystone
to see The Cure and punk bands. He saw The Greg Kihn Band, Talking
Heads, and other legendary groups at places like the Greek Theater
and Mabuhay Gardens.
He graduated Berkeley High in 1982,
though he and a handful of friends got out a semester earlier than
everyone else. They packed up a van, the five of them, and drove
around the Western United States and Canada for 100 days. They
ended their trip spending the night in the van in the Berkeley High
parking lot.
The friend group then scattered,
predictably, with Aaron and a couple others heading down to UC
Santa Cruz. In his freshman year, he and a friend took the spring
semester off and rode their bikes from California to North Carolina
and up to Washington, DC, as you do.
Santa Cruz was different enough from
home, but not too far away. The school provided a challenging
academic environment for him, also. He ended up studying animal
behavior, specifically the northern elephant seal. Through that
program, he lived with a team in experimental housing on Año Nuevo
Island off the San Mateo coast doing research. But physical
chemistry precluded Aaron from going for a marine biology degree.
He instead got into a liberal arts program called "Modern Society
and Social Thought."
While he was going to school in
Santa Cruz, he experienced his first political awakening. Aaron was
involved in the effort to make the banana slug become the school's
official mascot. The student government wanted the slug, but the
chancellor wanted the elephant seal. Aaron had the idea of putting
the decision to a vote of the student body. They put ballot boxes
all over campus, and the slug won overwhelmingly. But the
chancellor rejected the results. News articles helped the students'
cause, and they won in the end.
During his college years, he
travelled to Asia on money he'd saved from a job at a photo store.
Neighbors in Berkeley had climbed the Himalayas several times, and
it had an effect on Aaron. He and some friends went and travelled
over parts of South Asia to do some climbing themselves. He was
gone for a year and four months.
Upon his return to the US, still
working toward getting his bachelor's, Aaron ran into trouble
getting student housing. And so he set up a tent in the woods above
campus, slept there, went to class during the day, and then did it
all again the next day.
Check back next week for Part 2 and
Aaron's life after college.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
We recorded this podcast at Aaron Peskin for Mayor HQ on Market Street in July 2024.