Woody LaBounty, Part 1 (S7E11)
Storied: San Francisco
On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850. In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of . But he’s so, so much more than that. He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco. On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His...
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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, Part 2 (S7E10)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we start off talking about the significance of opening a Latinx-owned bookstore in the heart of the Mission, on 24th Street. The folks who run Medicine for Nightmares call the entire space at 3036 24th Street—the bookstore in front and gallery in back—"The Portal." Josiah talks about the intention to utilize that gallery space to highlight art and artists in the Mission. The gallery is also often home to community group meetings, further solidifying its importance. That's my kind of mixed-use. In the three years that MfN has been open, they've hosted more than 800 events...
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Josiah Luis Alderete/Medicine for Nightmares, Part 1 (S7E10)
Storied: San Francisco
This episode is a sequel podcast nearly five years in the making. We last talked with poet back in 2020, over Zoom, in the early COVID days. In this podcast, we pick up, more or less, with where we left off that summer. Back in those days, Josiah Luis still worked at in North Beach. He walks us through that store’s process of rearranging around social-distancing protocols that were new at the time. He says that the early days of the pandemic meant hunkering down at home and reading-reading-reading. But once it was deemed safe to reopen City Lights, Josiah was really happy to be back. One...
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Ask Me SF's Ellen Lo, Part 2 (S7E9)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up with Ellen's life after she graduated from Washington University. Next up was a move to New York City. In the Big City, she consulted for a financial services company. It was 2007, just before the financial crisis of those years. She found the job market tight, so she got a job in Washington, DC, where she lived for four years. Ellen says that during her time in the nation's capital, she behaved like a New York snob, never really giving DC a chance. She'd go back to NYC just about every weekend. Some of her New York friends didn't realize that she'd moved, in fact....
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Ask Me SF’s Ellen Lo, Part 1 (S7E9)
Storied: San Francisco
One of Ellen Lo’s main motivations is to beautify the spaces she’s in. In this podcast, we meet and get to know Ellen. Today, she runs , a site and handle she populates with reviews of spots around The City she wants to share with the world. Sounds familiar, but we’ll get to that later in the episode. We start with Ellen’s childhood, which began in small-town North Carolina. It was a town so small, in fact, that the few times she’s gone back to visit, it hasn’t changed. Ellen’s time in North Carolina wasn’t easy. Hers was the only Asian-American family in her school and town,...
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Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 2 (S7E8)
Storied: San Francisco
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Nato details the three times he's left his hometown of San Francisco. The first was when he went to college, which was at Reed in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-Nineties. To get us there, Nato rattles off all of the ways that he was a "comedy head" before that was even a thing. At Reed, he met a guy who's dad was the manager of the Comedy Underground in Seattle. Nato's first time doing stand-up on stage was at the Comedy Underground, in fact. As he describes it, to say that he bombed that first time would be an...
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Comedian/Union Organizer Nato Green, Part 1 (S7E8)
Storied: San Francisco
Nato Green started hanging out at San Francisco comedy clubs when he was in eighth grade. Nato’s parents met when they both still lived in the suburbs of Chicago. They got married in 1968 and moved to San Francisco soon after that. Nato says that they “were in the counter-culture, but bad at it.” What he means by that is they didn’t take their subversive lifestyles all the way like many of their peers did. But they were definitely left-leaning folks. They settled in Noe Valley, which was quite a different neighborhood back then. It was much more working-class than it is today. Think:...
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Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 2 (S7E7)
Storied: San Francisco
Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Barbara had just really become settled in San Francisco and was in what would become a decades-long process of learning the place (I can totally relate, btw). She hung out in the Castro more than the Mission, which in those days was a lesbian mecca. Café Flore (nowadays known as ) was a favorite. Eventually, though, Barbara moved to the Mission. The company she had been contracting with hired her and that provided the security she needed. She called an apartment at 19th Street and Dolores, across from Dolores Park, home. She's quick to point...
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Barbara Gratta/Gratta Wines, Part 1 (S7E7)
Storied: San Francisco
One set of Barbara Gratta's grandparents came to the US from Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy. The other grandparents came from across the Italian peninsula—Bari. In this episode, meet Barbara. Today, she owns, operates, and makes wine at in the Bayview. But her journey began in White Plains, NY. All four grandparents came to Brooklyn in the 1920s. They all eventually moved north to raise families away from the bustle of New York City. Barbara's grandparents were a big part of her early life, the extended families getting together often for "big Italian Sunday dinners"...
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Whack Donuts' First Anniversary (S7 bonus)
Storied: San Francisco
It's been a damn year, y'all. In this bonus episode, we catch up with friend of the show , owner and creator of . His brick-and-mortar shop in EMB 4 just marked its one-year anniversary (and last year was a Leap Year!), and I dropped by to chat with Vandor about the time since he opened, where things stand now, and the road ahead. This Saturday, to celebrate Whack Donuts' birthday, Vandor is hosting a breakdancing jam event: 5x5 crew breaking battle $1,000 donuts line dancing free giveaways Follow for more info. And if you're able to, please to help offset some...
info_outlineOne set of Barbara Gratta's grandparents came to the US from Calabria, the toe of the boot of Italy. The other grandparents came from across the Italian peninsula—Bari.
In this episode, meet Barbara. Today, she owns, operates, and makes wine at Gratta Wines in the Bayview. But her journey began in White Plains, NY. All four grandparents came to Brooklyn in the 1920s. They all eventually moved north to raise families away from the bustle of New York City. Barbara's grandparents were a big part of her early life, the extended families getting together often for "big Italian Sunday dinners" (yum!). These involved aunts, uncles, and cousins as well as the older generation.
Barbara and her immediate family lived upstairs from her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Because of this set-up, she says it was more like one big family. And every week culminated on Sundays, with as many as 30 people coming in and out of these get-togethers. The sauce was on the stove starting early in the morning. And if more people came, it simply meant more pasta. If, like me, you're thinking of the "Fishes" episode of The Bear, you're not far off.
Saturdays were spent going "up the street," which meant shopping at places like Sears or Macy's. Maybe they'd stop at White Plains Diner for lunch. But they always ended up back at her grandmother's house for cake and coffee.
Her mom's youngest brother went to school with Barbara's dad's youngest sister. They came from different towns, but all ran in the same circles. And thanks to this, as well as a tight-knit Italian-American community in the area, her parents met. They got married in 1958 and had their first kid, a son, in 1959. Then Barbara was born in 1960.
The family is Catholic, but that manifested more in traditions than any religious sense. They went to church on big holidays, and Barbara shares a story about her grandmother giving her money for the Easter Sunday collection. But she and her cousins pocketed the money and spent the service on the church roof. After she was confirmed, around eighth grade, her parents gave her the choice whether to keep going or not. Barbara chose to hang up her career with Catholicism at that point.
By the time Barbara was in high school, her immediate family moved to Florida, in the Sarasota area. She says it was a hard time for her, being torn from all the people and places she knew. There wasn't a lot of Italian culture in her new home. Her mom searched for ingredients to make the food she was accustomed to. She spotted a sausage truck one day and followed it. Only through this was she able to maintain some semblance of her cultural past.
Barbara stuck around after high school down in Florida. She got a degree in physical therapy and worked for about 10 years on the west coast of the state. Still, neither she nor her two brothers (one older, one younger) loved it there. Barbara left Florida around 1989 or 1990 for California.
Her first visit, before she moved to San Francisco, was a vacation with a coworker in the mid-Eighties. They stayed in a hotel on Van Ness near The Bay. They did what tourists do—Fisherman's Wharf, drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, that sort of thing—and didn't travel to any SF neighborhoods. The visit involved a quick drive down to Monterey to see a former coworker of theirs. The entire trip left her wanting to visit again someday.
When the time came to move here, her job set her up with a place to live for a few months. Barbara kept renewing these contracts every three months. She started in the southwest corner of The City, within walking distance of Joe's of Westlake in Daly City.
We end Part 1 with stories of Barbara's early friends in SF showing her around The City.
Check back next week for Part 2 and the conclusion of my episode with Barbara Gratta.
We recorded this podcast at Gratta Wines in the Bayview in December 2024.
Photography by Dan Hernandez