Volunteer of the month Marge Macris
They wouldn't let her write the news, so she makes it instead
Marge Macris might have made a very good reporter. But Chicago newspapers in the '50s didn't hire female reporters, and so she went into planning instead - and ended up being a key activist for responsible land use in the Bay Area and especially in Marin County.
Marge serves as chair of Community Marin - a consortium of environmental organizations that in 2007 convinced the Marin County Supervisors to adopt a Countywide Plan with strong environmental protections. Community Marin is now focused on preserving and strengthening the West Marin Local Coastal Plan. Marge is also co-chair of the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative and last fall chaired the campaign for Proposition Q, a ballot measure to fund the Marin-Sonoma SMART rail line, which passed after two previous failed attempts. She has served as chair of the Sierra Club's Marin Group, and of the full Bay Chapter.
Her professional planning skills have surely been one of the keys to Marge's success as a volunteer. "Marge has an extensive knowledge of planning, housing, and environmental issues, and the accompanying years of experience to make her an extremely effective advocate," says Elena Belsky, current Marin Group chair. Former Marin Group chair Gordon Bennett adds, "Marge is a consummate professional who has worked for the environment and for environmental justice through thick and thin while always maintaining an even temper and good spirits."
Marge was born in Chicago and raised in its western suburbs. As editor of her high-school paper, she foresaw a career in journalism, and she went on to earn a journalism degree at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Upon graduation in the late 1950s, however, she discovered that the degree and competence didn't matter to the newspapers. Their personnel officers said, "We aren't hiring girls to be reporters." Advertising was open to women, but that didn't appeal to Marge, and so she returned to the University of Illinois, this time to do graduate work in a relatively new field, city planning. City planners, she was told, were in such demand that even women could find jobs.
Marge worked a decade for Chicago as a city planner, a somewhat frustrating position since the only criterion for success was the approval of Mayor Richard Daley (father of the current Chicago mayor). The trick was to get his political cronies to champion one's cause. Fortunately, the city's beachfront parks on Lake Michigan were positive examples of city planning enjoyed by the city's residents. Marge recalls a Memorial Day when her children were two and four. She had agreed to take them to the beach, but the thermometer read 40. "You promised!" the children whined, and so she packed them into a double stroller, and off they went in the blustery weather. Near the snack stand, she spied the only two other people on the beach. The next day's Chicago Sun Times featured a picture of Marge and her windblown children. The other two beachgoers had been a newspaper photographer and reporter.
In 1968, when her then-husband, also a city planner, was offered a job doing city planning for San Francisco, the Macris family moved to the Bay Area. In 1970 Marge started working for the Marin County Planning Department, where she became planning director 1978 to 1984.
This was a vastly different experience from Mayor Daley's monocratic Chicago - here citizens wanted to be involved in the decision-making process, and Marge led a department at the forefront of socially responsible planning.
From 1984 until 1989 Marge was planning director for Berkeley - a job that took citizen involvement to an almost anarchic extreme. It seemed that everyone wanted a voice in planning decisions, and a planning decision had to be passed through several layers of bureaucracy before reaching the City Council. The support systems didn't work efficiently. Unions wouldn't recognize that some incompetent people needed to be fired. Activists were suspicious of paid staff.
Marge's first big Berkeley project might have scared away less spunky souls. It was preparing a plan for the waterfront. The owner of key waterfront property, the Santa Fe Railroad, had proposed "ghastly office buildings", which were predictably unpopular with the majority of residents. Seven different commissions were involved in developing the plan. Marge had to report to each one. When a plan was finally adopted, and voters passed a ballot version, Santa Fe sued. The case went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, which denied Santa Fe's claim. That land now, of course, is no longer privately owned - it is part of the East Bay Shoreline Park.
In 1989 Marge discovered her perfect job - interim planning director. She could rescue a community from its predicament, but didn't have to stay long-term. She served in this capacity for the cities of Emeryville, San Anselmo, Alameda, El Cerrito, Belmont, and Half Moon Bay.
In the midst of all her city work, Marge takes time to enjoy the outdoors. Although she was raised in the urban Midwest, her family joined the Chicago Mountaineering Club. Since Chicago has no mountains, her parents took her and her brother Roger camping and hiking in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. She and Roger still hike those Rockies together. Ordinarily she's not a group hiker, but she has participated in a couple of Sierra Club outings - one, in 1982, to the base camp of Mount Everest, and another more recently, to Death Valley's Telescope Peak, where she could see both the highest and the lowest points of the lower 48. Her second husband, now deceased, worked for Mountain Travel, and the two of them went on many trips, some of which he led. She has been to Tibet three times, to Annapurna, and to the Baltoro Glacier in Pakistan. She has ridden a camel in Algeria.
But a city planner seeks pleasure and adventures in cities. Family is important: Marge's daughter also is a planner, with her own business in San Francisco. Her son, the only defector from the family line of work, is starting a company. He and his family, including Marge's granddaughter, live in Hoboken, but he commutes regularly to the West Coast.
Exercise is also a part of Marge's life. She has jogged many of the sidewalks and roads of the Bay Area. If that seems a little tame, she has run the Boston Marathon three times.
But unlike most retirees Marge still spends many hours doing what she did during her professional years - only for free. As Elena Belsky says, "Marge is an incredible asset to the environmental community; the Sierra Club is very fortunate, indeed, to have had her as a leader for so many years!"
The Sierra Club - and the whole Bay Area environment - are very lucky that Marge became a planner.