Tom Butt

I’m President of the East Brother Light Station Inc., a nonprofit corporation that operates the historic lighthouse island under license from the US Coast Guard, an architect and owner of Interactive Resources, an architecture and engineering firm in Richmond and I also serve as a member of the City Council in Richmond

I’ve lived in Richmond for 28 years. Richmond is a city with tremendous potential. It has thirty-two miles of shoreline, which is more than any other city on San Francisco Bay. The city has a history that is highly interesting but it’s also a history that has not seen Richmond really take advantage of the resources and assets that are represented by its shoreline. That’s one of the things that brought me to Richmond. It’s been one of the things that I’ve concentrated on while on the City Council, getting the city to pursue a program that realizes the full potential of its shoreline.

One important project that we’re working on is to complete the Bay Trail through Richmond. It’ll run through some very interesting places– for example, Point Molate, historically know as Winehaven.

In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, the California Wine Industry was pretty much controlled by a single cooperative called the California Wine Growers Association. The focus of their operation was in San Francisco, on the waterfront. They had all their warehouses and so forth there. That’s where they shipped wine to around the world. That entire infrastructure went down in the 1906 earthquake. They needed a place to revive the industry — and quickly — so they bought the Point Molate property in Richmond, because it had deep water ship access, and they built this complex called Winehaven. It was a self-contained company town. It had its own housing, it’s own power plant, and it’s own railroad. There was nothing here before that. Richmond didn’t even exist (it wasn’t incorporated until 1905). This winery was built and at the time, depending on what source you read, it was either the largest in the United States or the largest in the world.

So it thrived until Prohibition, which shut it down, of course. In the late 30’s the Navy bought it and used it as a fuel depot. All of the buildings are still intact and they are now part of a historic district. The fuel depot is closed and the property is in the process of being turned over to the City of Richmond. One of the things we’re looking at it using the housing area up there as housing for a conference center, something like Asilomar. It can be thought of as kind of a little Presidio.

There are also some 3,000 acres of regional parks along the Richmond shoreline. Some of those have historic sites in them like the Park Pinole Regional Park, which is the site of a dynamite industry that was built during the Civil War. The Miller Knox Regional Park has the old ferry terminal that was the original terminus of the transcontinental Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. The whole village of Point Richmond is a national historic district. Marina Bay area is now a national park, the Rosie The Riveter World War II Homefront National Historical Park. The point is that all these attractions tied together with the Bay Trail and properly publicized will make the Richmond waterfront a major Bay Area draw.

Ferry service can play a critical role in these plans, and it’s one of the things I’ve worked hardest to do. It was a severe disappointment for others and me on the City Council when the experiment by the Red & White Fleet didn’t pay off. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. Some of them are just fate and others have to do with bad planning and bad marketing. We all feel like we’ll get our ferry back, and part of being able to get it back is to realize some of the projects that are going on now to give that area enough critical mass of people and jobs and demand to justify ferry service. The Marina Bay area continues to grow and it’ll all play a role in getting ferry service back here.

The East Brother Lighthouse is my long-time volunteer commitment. Lighthouses all across the country began to be automated back in the 1960’s for budgetary reasons. The Coast Guard budget couldn’t afford to maintain people taking care of them.

So the Coast Guard automated the lighthouses and shut East Brother down, not the light and the foghorn, but the buildings, sometime in 1969. There was a group in Point Richmond who called themselves Contra Costa Shoreline Parks Committee. They heard about what was happening out here, that the Coast Guard had plans to actually raze these buildings, so they got East Brother successfully nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. That meant that the Coast Guard was then obligated to maintain the buildings. They didn’t have to fix them up but they couldn’t tear them down.

The Coast Guard then started trying to interest some other government agency in taking East Brother over. They talked to a lot of them – City of Richmond, East Bay Regional Park District, National Park Service, on and on – and nobody wanted to deal with it. They figured it was too much of a hassle. That’s when Proposition 13 was passed and all the agencies at that time didn’t have time for anything that wasn’t just basic government. I came out here in 1977 or 1978, and that’s when I started working with the group, and it’s when we had the idea of starting a non-profit. The Coast Guard went along with it; we got some grants, attracted hundreds of volunteers, and, starting in 1978, spent about a year totally rehabilitating the place.

We had a guy who owned a lumber company in El Cerrito who donated all the redwood. We had unions that came in and did all the plastering work. We had a concrete finishing class that worked with the California Conservation Corps to pour all the concrete. I ran the whole thing for a year as a volunteer. I didn’t quit my job as an architect, but I spent every weekend out here for a year. Finally, we were ready for occupancy and opened as a bed and breakfast inn. We hired a couple as keepers and we’ve been doing it ever since. We have a board of directors and volunteers. I’m the President of the organization, and I deal with finding keepers and dealing with government agencies and licenses and permits, and I deal with anything that’s got to do with architectural stuff. My wife, Shirley, for the last ten years, has kept the books for the organization, which is a big job. Other people on the board do different things. Some come out here physically and work on projects and that kind of thing. That’s what keeps it together.

Well, one of the nicest things about this project is that people just want to do it. They get out here and want to get into it. It’s such a fascinating, beautiful, unique place. You don’t have to beg and cajole people. They just want to be involved. It made it a lot easier to find volunteers. So here we are today.

Fleet Keeper

Regina Roberts

The Fleet Keeper is a marine restoration company. My main focus is restoring bright work, redoing all the varnish work. That’s my main specialty. I also do painting. I specialize in being able brush on linear polyurethane paints. There aren’t many people around who can do that.

Bright work is a general term, which is actually the wrong term but it’s what’s been adopted over the years to all the teak work on a boat. A customer will call me up and tell me they need all the bright work done. So we’ll come in with heat guns, strip all the existing varnish off, sand it down, use some teak cleaner products on it, sand it down more and then taping it and building new varnish back up again. What you’re striving for is you want it to look like there’s glass over the wood. The whole process for a forty to fifty foot boat takes about three weeks. Once we’ve done that, the customer generally wants us to maintain it.

The majority of my customer base are generally people who live in the Silicon Valley so coming up here is like having a Tahoe vacation house. The last thing they want to do on their twenty four hours off, is have to spend all their time working on the varnish work. Plus they don’t do it all the time like me so I can obviously do a better job. So I will keep it up for them and put them on a maintenance schedule where I come back every three months and put another coat of varnish on for them. They’ll usually ask me to also put them on a washing schedule so we’ll come around twice a month and wash the boat.

I’ve had the business for eleven years. I first started working on boats in Hawaii back in 1982. I’d gone to college for three years studying Wildlife Management and after three years, decided that I wanted to travel for a little while. I went down to Mexico, was camping down in Baja, and ended up making friends with some people who were traveling on their boats. I asked them how they could afford to do this, just travel around on their boats. There just happened to be one guy who was Bob Green, a captain for Greenpeace. He told me I should go to Greece and that I could easily get work as crew on somebody’s boat. I was 21 and thought that sounded good so I left the next day. Two days later I was in a subway station in London and I felt someone grab my daypack. I turned around and there was Bob Green. He just happened to be traveling around there.

I got 86’d out of Europe after a standoff with the immigration at Dover. I returned to San Francisco and looked up Bob Green. They had a guy who would fix up boats that had been donated to Greenpeace and he got me a job with him. But that all fell apart because Greenpeace isn’t as organized as they might seem. I got a job in Arcata as a carpenter’s apprentice but the whole time knew I wanted to work on boats so I bought a plane ticket and went to Hawaii, where I got a job with a couple of shipwrights.

I stayed there about a year and a half and then went to Alaska. Just wanted to. I just basically had a goal that I wanted to travel around the world as much as I could and that was one of the places I wanted to go. I started doing carpentry work. I fell off a roof and hurt my back so I started going to a chiropractor. I became really intrigued with chiropractic and ended up working for a chiropractor for three years. He ended up training me as his assistant. Eventually, I left Anchorage to move back to the Bay Area to go to chiropractic school in San Lorenzo. I came down here and started doing some of the prerequisite courses but got back into the boats again. I went to school for massage and had a massage business for a while. I even did a little balancing act – doing massage more in the winter and doing the boats in the spring and summer when massage business goes downhill. But the boats eventually became a more solid reliable business endeavor. As much as I like doing massage, it can be very off and on. I started taking some business courses at Piedmont Adult School and it just became more obvious on a business level, that I should stay focused on the boats because it was a much more consistent and regular business.

I pretty much stay in Alameda now. I used to go all over the Bay Area but because of the traffic, it’s just not worth traveling around. My center is Grand Marina here. It was not my intention to be a boat cleaning business but customers kept asking me to do it. I started out doing it with a bucket and brush and dragging that around but after a while I was doing so many boats and it was taking up so much time, that I thought there had to be a power tool that would make it easier. So I bought a pressure washer. That was faster but it was still exhausting dragging the pressure washer all over the place. Just a few years ago, I bought the ten and a half foot inflatable and put the pressure washer on the inflatable. Twice a month, we motor around between Marina Village and Grand Marina and wash all the boats on the same day. We usually have anywhere from 12 to 25 boats that we wash in a day. It’s just much more efficient to do it from the boat with the pressure washer. It’s fun too. At this time, I have one full time assistant.