Like many San Franciscans, Miss Jo isn’t from the City by the Bay, although she got to know it long ago from her mom, June’s, stories about living here as a Pan American stewardess in the mid-to-late 1940s.
June and her fellow flight attendants had a Nob Hill one-bedroom flat where they alighted after long trips across the Pacific to Japan, China, India and points in between. To young Miss Jo in 1970s Texas, San Francisco spelled excitement, beauty and possibility.
In 2005, a half lifetime later and well into her career as a Washington, D.C. journalist, Miss Jo and her husband, Jeff, then a public defender, moved to SF.
The City had romanced them during getaways from grim post-9/11 Washington. Each trip left them convinced that San Francisco would be their next home.
That was it: they would start anew in the City by the Bay, but not by themselves–- Miss Jo’s mom, at 85 , would come too.
Miss Jo’s San Francisco is about what’s happened since on their northern California adventure— an evolving tale of the City, which like any San Francisco telling, has a lot to do with neighborhoods undiscovered by visitors, diverse cultures, regionally grown food, indie businesses of all kinds, big city problems, an eclectic art and music scene, hight cost of living, earthquakes, hills, being green, hidden views, fog—- and possibility.
PHOTO: Golden Gate Bridge snapped by Miss Jo from the Presidio; Ready for transcontinental flight, Miss Jo’s mom, November 1948, San Francisco Municipal Airport (now SFO).