Bea Whitnah, a round, sparkling woman of ninety lives with her son, Lionel, and several students in a large, dusky old house in Berkeley where she gardens, reads avidly and masterminds her various schemes for emphasizing to the public what she considers the disastrous paths they are pusuing to eventual destruction.

Among those schemes has been a campaign to take down Civil Defense Shelter signs--"to call attention to the awful thing that's happening to us"--for which she paid people three dollars a sign. She helped someone take down the signs this past summer. She says, "I held the ladder ... I had to punch a policeman out of the way, but we got every one of the signs down in Berkeley, though they just put them all back..."

They also arrested Mrs. Whitnah's associate. His trial for malicious mischief was scheduled for November.

Mrs. Whitnah, who claims to have set off a number of Civil Defense sirens, has been on crutches since being run over by a car in 1916, an accident her husband, Joe, used to say could only happen to her-- "who else could find a car to hit her in 1916."

One of the first women probation officers in California, Mrs. Whitnah also has fought for jail reforms and women's rights.

"I don't think one gets wiser as one grows older. I think the answer lies in the young people. I love them. I garden outside frequently, and I see hippies come along the street all the time with lots of hair, whiskers galore, not too clean, and if I have a rose I will give them one; they dearly love it.

"I like to encourage the young people to do what they think is right. I was never encouraged by my family. My sisters were not involved in social reform like I was. They were Phi Beta Kappas and taught school. They were noble, moral and did a tremendous amount of good. They thought I was irrational. My mother loved me so much that I couldn't do any wrong in her eyes; and my father was dead when I went into social work at the age of twenty five as a probation officer.

"The Chief Probation Officer was a pacifist, a marvelous man, Christopher Ruess. I worked for him for five years as the first woman probation officer in Alameda County, in 1908. I was paid one of the biggest salaries at that time: $175 a month, paid in gold.

"I was a little unusual, looking back on it. They were so glad to get rid of me that they never opened up my office again. I made too much trouble. Whenever I found what had ruined a probationer, I went after the thing that ruined them, no holds barred. It was more Ruess' idea than mine. Looking back I don't think I had many original ideas. But I was effective. For instance, at that time, curtains were over all the doors to the restaurants. A young girl was beaten and raped behind one of the doors. She died in my arms at the county hospital. So I said: 'Down come the curtains,' which turned every restaurant man in Oakland and San Francisco against me. I became a notorious character, you see. But I thought I had to do it, and Ruess was behind me. I went before the city council, and got the curtains down in all of the restaurants.

"I made enemies every time I turned around. The other young officers deplored my doings because they said it would give us a bad name. But I never stopped. I lost some friends but I gained new ones too, mostly young people. I've always been a very gregarious person. I was rather pretty, a bit too plump but pleasing. But the newspapers would take pictures of me that made me look awful, so I would dodge publicity whenever I could. I was downhearted a lot of the time, because I didn't want people to dislike me.

"I got married at thirty-six and it all came to a halt. Joe wouldn't let me out of the front door. He was a poet and a prominent newspaperman who was very sensitive, and I loved him dearly. When we were married I was so glad to get away from the general public and stay home that no one saw anything of me. But when my youngest son, Lionel, was nine, a woman who had started the State Free Employment Bureau asked me to take her job because she was getting married. I ran to meet my husband that afternoon and told him that I'd be going down to the office with him in the morning. The next morning I got up and squeezed five glasses of orange juice, made breakfast, and put on the best things I had. I rushed out after my husband who said: 'Where are you going?' I said that I was going about the job, and he said: 'All right, get in the car, but on the way back I'm going to file for divorce.' He was five feet eight, slight, and angry. He said: 'I can support this family, and I intend to!'"

Joe Whitnah was a reporter when Bea met him in 1914. He worked for the Examiner, the Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, and later became city editor of the old San Francisco Bulletin. He contributed poetry to the New York Times and turned to a career in public relations which prospered.

"And support us? Good heavens! He built us a mansion in Berkeley Hills, a beautiful place. But anyway, I ran into the house and cried and cried and decided to get a divorce. At lunch time he called and said: 'You're not mad at me and you know it.' I said, 'No, but I still think it was a mistake for me not to take that job.' I never went into any regular employment after that.

"None of my household responsibilities were very difficult for me because I never took them seriously enough for them to be. I was a bad housekeeper, but a good cook. I had lots of flowers around, and a big fireplace down by the creek where we entertained and had dinner several times a week. I liked a lovely house and I like to keep it that way, but I didn't always succeed. A good housekeeper keeps her house that way all the time. My house would shine for a couple of days and then it would be a mess again for awhile.

"I had forty-three years with my husband, but I don't think that our marriage was a very happy one for him. He fill in love with me because I made everyone feel at home. My husband was a shy man, and I made him feel so thoroughly at home, but that wasn't too good, for him. I used to fill the house with every Tome, Dick, and Harry; it never mattered to me who it was. This enormous, gregarious Irish hospitality was hard for him to bear. He was a lonely man.

"I fixed up his bedroom just marvelously. It was no the second story and did not have a fireplace. I went over to Sloan's and got the finest easy chair I could get. I know my face lit up so when he brought the chair downstairs in front of the fireplace where everyone else was. When he took up weaving later, after he retired, he put his loom right in the middle of the dining room!

"I built him an office right off the kitchen because by then I knew him well enough to know he would want to be down where the children, dogs and everybody else was. Then he built a darkroom and I scolded about that for fifteen years, because it would have made another nice sized bedroom. But, instead, the whole family became photographers. While everyone else was taking pictures, I took cello lessons from the man who had been the cellist at the Czar's palace in Russia. Every free minute I had I went to the cello.

"The most difficult period of my life was when Mr. Whitnah died, but it wasn't because I was so dependent upon him. I was never very dependent upon him, poor man. I think I gave him a hard time. Once I told a friend that Joe wouldn't let me have any company after nine o'clock, and she asked me what I did then. I said: 'Oh I go on the streets!' Joe didn't want to go out at night, and I was perfectly willing for him not to, I didn't demand it. But I did get up my own gang! We had a marvelous time. I'd cook up a big dinner and we'd to to the theater, and then go down to my son Lionel's house. We went to everything at the University (Berkeley), and it was delightful. We'd leave Lionel's house about 12 or 1:00, and I'd sneak in the house.

"That was quite a happy period of my life, though there was one episode that I was involved in that made Joe very unhappy. He had loaned some money to a man who ran a throwaway weekly (Joe called it a 'gutter weakly'), and thia man poid Joe back by giving him the paper. I was wild to run it, and I did for a year, and had the time of my life.

"I didn't have a car so I couldn't get around to sell ads, but I could write in it anything I pleased. I wasn't particularly influential because it only got around to the dullest of middle class Americans. But one night Mr. Whitnah was at the Bohemian Club, and everyone confronted him with this editorial I had written on the English.

"Poor Joe would get all of the fallout from my aritcles. Sometimes he couldn't help being amused, but he didn't like his wife doing it. Of course, I apologized profusely, and the next time the opportunity came along I did it again.

"At one time I was a devout Catholic, but while working as a probation officer, I went to a hanging at San Quentin. Afterward, I approached all the priests in the East Bay and San Francisco with a petition against capital punishment. They said they could not sign it, so I left the Church.

"But I'm still a believer in the Word of Jesus, which is what motivates me in my stand against harming people. Any people.

"I raised my sons on the Sermon on the Mount. One of them spent thirteen months in prison for being a conscientous objector. He was no doubt influenced by the wounded soldiers we used to take in after Pearl Harbor.

"I think that marriage should be absolute equality between a man and a woman. That comes naturally in a good marriage. My husband would consult me about every investment he made. I'd protest sometimes but he'd go right ahead and do it anyway. The important thing was that he had consulted me, you see. He wouldn't let me do the kind of investing that I wanted to do. I would be a very right woman today if he had. I had a great yen for buying up property. I think I'm a dominant woman, but I did what Joe wanted me to do.

"I don't like women's liberation, and I don't think women have done anything for themselves by choosing lofty careers. The job takes them completely. I like men but if a disagreement comes up between a man and a woman, I'll always take the woman's side. I was trained for that.

"The most important thing in a woman's life is not a career but her children. She is responsible for them. The father should be, but he's not raised to be. Joe was a tender and beautiful father. I remember him putting Lionel, who was awfully lippy and cute, to bed one night, and I overheard him say: 'Good night, honey, thank God you'll still be little in the morning.'

"The children are the mother's responsibility, but it's very important for her to look up to her husband, not worship him, but make him the manager of the house. Then everyone else looks up to him, and if he's a decent man, it's all right.

"I have been discriminated against because I was a woman. I remember once asking for a raise because one of my male co-workers had gotten one, and being turned down because the man would get married and raise a family. I put on my hat and went down to Judge Wells, and said: 'Judge Wells, Mr. Ruess says Tyson gets a raise because he has a family. I have a mother that I'm supporting, and a sister whom I'm putting through college.' He got me that raise.

"I don't think I intentionally kept myself from getting into an antagonistic attitude toward men. But you see, men have always been so good to me.

"For instance, after Joe died I went down to the Catholic Workers House and gathered up six drunks to take care of. The manager of a business in the area, who didn't know me at all, came in one day and told me he was going to put $100 in my bank account to help me out. I paid it back but had a hard time doing it. But you see, men have been doing things like that for me all my life, so I can't hate them. They accept my weaknesses and I have some. My greatest personal weakness is dehumanizing other people. Everybody is human regardless of what evil they may have done.

"That's why I intend to continue taking down the signs, and to set off more sirens to call attention to the evil we are doing. The last time I set off a siren, I wrote a full confession to Mayor Alioto, the Chief of Police, and the Fire Chief. They refused to put me in jail, although I would like to be jailed for my beliefs."

See also:

• 'Fiend' and Sign-Stealer, by Larry D. Hatfield (story about Beatrice Whitnah)
• A Bay Radical is Dead at 92, by Carolyn Anspacher (Beatrice Whitnah obituary)