I am interested in biographical information about Adrian J. Falk, a public transportation official in San Francisco before the creation of BART. Any assistance would be appreciated.

-- william j. smart (wjsmart@fresno.k12.ca.us), March 18, 1999

Answers

We knew his maid in the 1960's. She was an old Austrian woman named Teresa Kern. She loved animals and used to come to our cottage on Russian Hill and feed our dog treats. It was her only pleasure in life as she worked for Adrian Falk, and judging by the ongoing stories, he was a bastard! This is all hearsay that I am repeating:

A.F. lived at 1000 Green Street,(fact), an apartment building from the '40's. He was a petty mean man who had bladder control problems and cheated his maid out of pay.

His wife was the worst. She would, when confronted with anything threatening, shout "I know Lurie!" (SF financier of the period).

I saw a picture of Falk at the contols of a BART car when I was just a little kid in the 60's. I still remember thinking:"No wonder BART has so many problems, look whose running it...".

Wish I could offer you more information.

-- chris verdant (verdant@hooked.net), December 22, 1999.

Well, William, Mr. Verdant sounds like a really nice person -- not at all a mean, petty little bastard who mocks the health problems of the infinitely more accomplished. And, incidentally, I believe Mr. and Mrs. Hitler (senior)-- not to mention little Adolf -- worked as servants, and loved animals, too.

I don't know all that much about my late Great Uncle (by marriage), except that he seemed a damned nice guy, and was self-educated and eminently successful, with one hell of a lot of friends. He didn't grow up in a "cottage" , like the aforementioned, underprivileged (and, no doubt, rugged) correspondent, who seems to have a chip on his shoulder as big as the hill on which he spent his luxuriating boyhood.

I do know that my aunt, whom Mr. Verdant (rather fitting name, don't you think?) cavalierly desparages as "the worst", once helped out a former servant,who had a medical emergency, to the tune of about twenty thousand dollars -- about a hundred thousand, or more, in today's terms.

If you'd like to know what little I *do* know about Adrien Falk, please e-mail me at the address, above.

David Stein Toronto

-- David Stein (dstein97@yahoo.ca), January 15, 2001.