By Carolyn Anspacher, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 August 1973
Click Beatrice McCall Whitnah for the photo that appeared with this article.
On Sunday afternoon at 3 0'clock there will be a gathering at 2719 Webster street in Berkeley.
Only God knows how many people will file into the house because a public call has been issued of all the friends of Beatrice Whitnah to assemble in her memory.
Mrs. Whitnah died last Sunday after a brief illness. She was 92 years old, a flame until the end of her life.
Little and round, with hair that wisped and eyes that flashed, Mrs. Whitnah was a benign and religious radical.
She battled for social justice in a day when refined ladies swooned if anyone suggested they might be women.
She waged a one-woman peace campaign until less than two years ago, tottering around on crutches and ripping down fallout shelter signs all over the East Bay and San Francisco.
Her purpose was to demonstrate in the only way she knew how the supreme folly of greed-spawned wars.
Mrs. Whitnah was never sure what made her a crusader.
She was born in Elko county, Nev., in 1881, the daughter of Patrick McCall, a prosperous cattle rancher who moved his family to the Bay Area in 1886 and finally settled in Napa.
One of her early and lasting memories was watching in horror as a gang of hoodlums murdered a Chinese on the streets of Oakland.
In 1900 Mrs. Whitnah moved to Berkeley.
After her graduation from the University of California, she went to work for the Catholic Women's Aid Society.
Later she was appointed the first probation officer for women in Alameda county.
She created such a ruckus in what was then called the Women's Protective Bureau that when she finally departed, the office was closed, and never reopened.
She said not long ago that she must have been a little "unusual," and acknowledged she kicked up a succession of storms.
Whenever she found what had ruined a woman on probation, she went after the thing or person that had proved ruinous.
She ripped down the curtains that covered the doors and windows of restaurants, for instance, and fought like a steer to protect the confidential records of her clients.
She was 36 when she married a San Francisco newspaperman, Joseph C. Whitnah, who, in later years, became public relations officer for the East Bay Municipal Utility District and the Richmond Chamber of Commerce.
Mrs. Whitnah and her husband were prime movers in the successful campaign to establish the Regional Park System and were also active in promoting social reforms at both the local and state levels.
The Whitnahs had three sons: Joseph Jr., Kerwin and Lionel.
Joseph, the oldest son, was shot during a World War II bombing raid over Germany.
Word of his death came to the parents at the moment 22 - year - old Kerwin, a conscientious objector, was sentenced to federal prison as a draft evader.
There were a few years after her husband's death in 1962 when Mrs. Whitnah remained out of the limelight.
But she was back in full stride late in the 1960s, subsidizing (at $5 a crack) anyone who would join her crusade to remove fallout shelter signs.
She planted half-a-dozen such signs and a forest of peace placards in her front garden and stored 56 more inside her house--always in the hope police would stop by and arrest her.
But to her dismay, the officers always smiled slightly, averted their eyes and carefully crossed the street, even when she ripped a shlter sign from the face of Oakland's Hall of Justice and presented it triumphantly to the presiding judge.
"I am horrified to realize that unless the peoples of the world organize to stop their government's preparations for the massive slaughter of a nuclear war, the life expectancy of my three grandchildren is little different from my own," the 87-year-old Gold Star mother said at the time.
She was in her 90th year when she applied for a license to beg on the streets of Berkeley to help defray the legal expenses of Ruchell Magee. As far as is known, her petition was ignored.
Mrs. Whitnah is survived by her two sons and by the three grandchildren for whose future she feared...
And of course, by all the friends, the hundreds of fond and devoted friends who will remember her as a flame.
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