01-05-2025
- General
- San Francisco Chronicle
Glady Thacher, philanthropist who launched nonprofits from her S.F. living room, dies at 95
Like many of the big houses in San Francisco's Presidio Heights, Glady Thacher's home had a formal living room that nobody ever sat in during the day. One morning she came downstairs, saw all that wasted space and turned it into Enterprise for High School Students, a nonprofit Thacher dreamed up in 1969 to help city kids get summer and after school jobs.
With a copy machine on the piano, a Rolodex on the coffee table and a second telephone dragged in from the kitchen, Thacher recruited eight or nine neighborhood women who would sit on the floor going through binders of jobs and contacts. The nonprofit service was immediately in demand, with kids from all over the city ringing the doorbell for an interview that would result in a paying job.
Launched before internships became prevalent, Enterprise was the first big idea with legs that walked out of the Thacher living room on Washington Street, two doors from the home of the great 49ers receiver Gene Washington.
Her second big idea was the San Francisco Education Fund, which supplied financial assistance to public schools after California's Proposition 13 property tax measure started impacting their budgets. Her third act was to co-found San Francisco Village to help older residents address issues of aging and housing.
Thacher, who wrote an editorial for the Chronicle in 1994 titled 'The Life that Begins at 50,' led by example. So did her husband, James Thacher, a Montgomery Street attorney who walked 3.6 miles to work and 3.6 miles back in wingtips and wool suits until he suffered a fatal stroke at 83. Glady (a shortening of Gladys), as she was always known, started the San Francisco Education Fund when she was 50. She launched another nonprofit, the LifePlan Center, when she was 65 and continued working in philanthropy deep into her 90s, while also writing poetry.
After she was widowed, she became romantically involved with indefatigable Chronicle science editor David Perlman, and they became a couple until Perlman's death in 2021 at age 101.
Badly injured in an auto accident while driving on Lake Street from her house to Perlman's at age 89, Thacher required two surgeries, but recovered and became involved with another boyfriend when she was in her 90s. She lived in the house with the useful living room until her dying day, April 3. She was 95 and died peacefully in her sleep.
'She would get an idea and she would pursue it to the end,' said her daughter Hally Thacher, a painter and sculptor in New York City. 'She loved getting people together, having a cause and going for it. And she did it in a very understated way.'
Gladys Pomeroy Stevens was born July 11, 1929, in New York City. She grew up in Old Chatham, in upstate New York. In elementary school, she went to boarding school at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pa. She was introduced to New York society at the debutante ball in 1947.
While still in high school, she came west for the first time to visit a friend in Lake Tahoe, where she met James Thacher, a Yalie whose family founded the Thacher School in Ojai. She was 17 and he was 22, having had his undergraduate experience interrupted by service in the Army during World War II, which included combat action as a radio operator in a communications platoon of the First Army.
After that summer in Tahoe, the romance continued east as Stevens completed her undergraduate degree at Smith, graduating in 1950. The couple got married soon after, following an engagement that merited an announcement in the New York Times social pages. Thacher continued at Yale through law school.
In the mid-1950s they moved to San Francisco, where Thacher joined his father's law firm, Thacher, Casey & Ball. Glady Thacher studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts, later renamed the San Francisco Arts Institute.
In 1955, they settled in Presidio Heights to raise four children and became involved in the political swirl of Democratic Party. They hosted a party for Adlai Stevenson when he was Democratic nominee for president in 1956. They switched to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and Jim Thacher was named Northern California campaign treasurer. As a reward, he was appointed to the commission to determine the future of Alcatraz when the federal prison was closed in 1963. All of these issues were debated among a constant flow of people in their home — as many as 110 for a birthday party.
'That living room is famous, it was used kind of like a stage,' said Hally Thacher, eldest of the children. 'My parents had big ideas and were involved in the community. They just really wanted to make a difference.'
The biggest idea was Enterprise. When it was launched in 1969, Thacher had just finished her master's degree in educational counseling at San Francisco State University and was eager to put it to use.
'She was a very curious woman who listened and asked 'why not' more than she asked 'why,' ' said her son Will. 'She was a fundraising machine, which is how you create any nonprofit. She was not afraid to walk into the president of Wells Fargo's office and ask for money. She saw the goal and she figured out the way to get there. She was just very determined.'
For an article in the Chronicle in 1974, reporter Ruthe Stein visited the Thacher living room with a staff photographer who captured nine women at work in one frame. The article was headlined 'The Youngest Job Service,' and Thacher was assigned the title 'mother of invention' in a photo caption.
While Stein was there, high school kids came to the door and were invited to join the fray while going through an 'opportunity book' of summer jobs that the volunteers had compiled from San Francisco employers. That was the essence of Enterprise; they took no commissions or other pay. They survived on a budget of $30,000 from foundation grants.
'We started Enterprise out of necessity,' Thacher explained to Stein. 'There were so few jobs for high school students and their parents were anxious about what they would do. There was no central place to find out what was available.'
That central place became the Thacher living room, which was a high school jobs clearinghouse in the truest sense. 'We were so embarrassed that all of this office equipment had invaded our living room. It looked like a call center,' said Hally, who was a teenager at the time. 'My father would come home and there would be all these people in the living room and he had to sneak upstairs. There were strangers in the house and it was odd. We'd be upstairs waiting for dinner.'
It went on like this for five years before Enterprise relocated to an office downtown and hired its first paid staff member. At that time, Thacher gave up her position as president, though Enterprise kept growing without her, with more than 30,000 youths served to date. In 2024, Enterprise for Youth, as it is now called, connected young people to 502 internships and created $750,000 in wages.
'Gladys's genius was in listening to young people, seeing their dignity, and establishing an organization to help them learn how to work and make meaningful contributions,' said Ninive Calegari, who recently retired as CEO of Enterprise. 'She always said to adults, 'Just listen.'
Thacher's follow-up, the San Francisco Education Fund, came to her when she was riding a Muni bus, according to a story in the Chronicle.
'When I was hanging on the strap of that bus with all the steamy windows, I was thinking that all these people probably don't have their kids in public schools. . . . Who cared about public schools?' she told reporter Torri Minton, referring to the drain on school funding from local property tax dollars brought about by state voters' approval of Proposition 13 in 1978.
Apparently more people cared than she anticipated, because the San Francisco Education Fund also lives on.
'The woman had her finger on the pulse of what was happening with students and their parents,' said Ann Levy Walden, CEO of the Education Fund. 'Her intuition, clear-eyed vision and deep love for this city led her to create the San Francisco Education Fund as a way for the community to step up when our schools needed it most.'
Ultimately Thacher turned her attention to helping people her own age. She founded Alumnae Resources, to help women transition from volunteer work to professional positions, as well as LifeSpan Center, a place to realize creative change and renewal for people over 50.
'She always worked from the inside out as opposed to from the outside in,' said Hally Thacher. 'She had her own reasons for what was driving her, and she very rarely revealed it.'
When Glady Thacher was 60 and really getting going, she told Chronicle, 'The things that come out of my mouth are like a seamless web. It comes from my bones outward, from my feet up.'
