The St. Francis Yacht Club has recently been in the local news because of a book that describes how Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) tried to get the club to sponsor his Americas Cup boat and to bring the America's Cup race to San Francisco.
Ellison failed in that effort and moved his efforts 100 yards to the Golden Gate Yacht club, a dinky ramshackle blue-collar drinking club. There he succeeded. The Golden Gate Yacht club, in return for some building upgrading, sponsors Ellison's yacht and the America's Cup race this summer in San Francisco.
Ellison (a Jew) would not have been a member of the St. Francis yacht club, in the first place, if it had not been for my efforts in the 1970s.
The St. Francis is on public property with a long-term lease supervised by the Park and Recreation Department.
The St. Francis was one of the very last vestiges of the hereditary upper class. It was frequently listed in the San Francisco Blue Book.
The laws had changed by the 1970s and clubs with more than 200 members could not legally discriminate.
When the St. Francis lease was due to come up, I mounted a campaign to make their lease renewal conditional on affirmative action in membership. Their employees were already 90% minority.
It took only a few phone calls and I had the necessary political backing.
By the time of the lease renewal hearing before the Park and Recreation Commission, the St. Francis Club had capitulated and put a nondiscriminatory clause in their charter and invited a few prominent blacks to join the club.
The club remains a stuffy old farts hangout but they legally had to let Ellison become a member.