Jerry Mander, San Francisco’s radical adman, dies at 86

Sam Whiting

April 27, 2023 Updated: April 28, 2023 9:38 p.m. (SFChronicle.com)

Jerry Mander on the Big Island of Hawaii in 2022.
Jerry Mander on the Big Island of Hawaii in 2022.Provided by Kai Mander
Jerry Mander wrote eight nonfiction books, most notably “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.”

Even the Trips Festival — the three-night be-in at Longshoremen’s Hall credited with launching the San Francisco underground of the 1960s — needed above-ground publicity, and that was the job of Jerry Mander, the radical adman of North Beach. 

Operating out of a flat above City Lights Books, Mander cooked up the slogan “An LSD experience without the LSD.” That wasn’t exactly truth in advertising, but it appealed to the masses. 

A hustler named Bill Graham was assigned to pass out handbills, and the event staged in January 1966 was a success, clearing $12,500. Police did not bust it before 2 a.m. on any of the nights. Afterward Graham asked Mander to partner up with him to lease the Fillmore Auditorium and promote trips-like concerts.

Mander declined that opportunity to become part of that history, but he went on to create some of his own.

He co-founded Public Interest Communications, said to be the country’s first public interest nonprofit advertising agency, and later joined the Public Media Center, which serviced the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood and a variety of causes that were were pro-choice, pro-dolphin, pro-whale, pro-old-growth redwood, pro-Indigenous rights and pro-Earth in general. 

Mander’s work formed the core of an autobiography called “70 Ads to Save the World,” which was released by City Lights in 2022. 

A longtime resident of Bolinas who kept an office in the Presidio of San Francisco, Mander attended the online launch party for his book from the Big Island of Hawaii, where he had been living in the family home of his wife, Koohan Paik-Mander. He died April 11 at home in Kukuihaele overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Mander had been suffering for years from prostate cancer, said his son, Kai Mander. He was 86.

Mander left behind a legacy as a visionary who foresaw the problems globalism would create and rallied against them by founding an anti-NAFTA think tank called the International Forum on Globalization. 

He wrote eight nonfiction books on an IBM Selectric Typewriter, which he usually fired up at 2 a.m. to start his workday. When he was on vacation, he would have a typewriter delivered to his room.  

His general outlook on technological progress was evident in the title of his second book, “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” published in 1978. 

“Jerry left his mark in a whole lot of ways,’’ said Carl Pope, former director of the Sierra Club. “He was challenging the Washington consensus long before anybody else, and history has proved him correct.”

As referenced in a tribute posted on the Synergetic Press website, one of Mander’s favorite campaigns was helping the Sierra Club stop federal plans to build dams within the walls of the Grand Canyon. 

Federal officials thought the dam would raise the Colorado River and make the canyon more accessible to boaters. His favored medium was the full-page newspaper ad, and he wrote a zinger of a headline to address the plan by the Bureau of Reclamation: 

“Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?” 

“Jerry could take all of this information and boil it down to headlines,” said Elizabeth Garsonnin, who worked with Mander at the Public Media Center and became his second wife. “That’s why he was such a good adman.” 

Jerold Irwin Mander was born May 1, 1936, in the Bronx to Jewish parents who fled persecution and came through Ellis Island. His father came from Poland and his mother from Romania. His father, Harry Mander, worked in the garment district, and his mother, Eve, stayed home to raise her two children, Jerry and Anita, in Yonkers. While he was growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, Mander ran through a neighboring forest and splashed in streams.

But slowly, he saw the country become a suburb, a theme he revisited later in life.

“He didn’t like the profit motive and the impact on the environment and Indigenous peoples,” Kai said. Mander took the long way to get to that revelation.  

After graduating from Lincoln High School in Yonkers in 1953, Mander earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 1957. He advanced to a graduate program in international economics at Columbia University, earning his master’s degree in 1959.

His father wanted him to join the family business in the garment district, making linings and waistbands for men’s suits, but Mander was too restless for that. 

He moved to San Francisco in 1960 and joined an agency that became Freeman, Mander & Gossage, operating out of a converted firehouse on the waterfront. Mander handled the publicity for a European tour by modern dancer Anna Halprin and the San Francisco International Film Festival. A mainstay client was the Committee, the ribald troupe that came out of the Second City in Chicago, in the early ’60s. He also did publicity for Firesign Theatre.

Freeman, Mander & Gossage dissolved in 1969, with the death of his mentor and partner Howard Gossage. Mander continued on his own before joining the Public Media Center, which had been launched in 1974 by Herb Chao Gunther. It operated out of an office above the Old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach and had a global clientele.

Mander stayed busy there for 20 years.

Katie Kleinsasser joined the firm in 1985. She worked with Mander on his last major campaign there, the Turning Point Project, 25 full-page ads that ran weekly in the New York Times, sponsored by the Foundation for Deep Ecology. The ads took on the extinction crisis, Big Tech, genetic engineering, industrial agriculture and economic globalization.

“Jerry was remarkably thoughtful and prescient about the crises we now face as a planet,” said Kleinsasser, who went on to co-found her own strategic communications firm. In 1963, Mander met feminist author Anica Vesel at Nepenthe, the Big Sur restaurant, and they wed in 1965. A Yugoslavian immigrant who became a professor of languages at San Francisco State, she lost her job in the student strikes. She then founded the women’s studies department at the New College of San Francisco, becoming a noted feminist author.   

They lived along the Hyde Street cable car line on Russian Hill, where they raised two sons, Kai and Yari. In 1977, they separated en route to divorce. “They got along better as divorcees than when they were married,” Kai said, “so it worked out fairly well.” 

Anica Vesel Mander died in 2002 at age 67. 

In 1982, Mander was working on a book titled “In the Absence of the Sacred,” about Indigenous people in the face of pressure to adopt Anglo ways. At a Berkeley gathering of local tribes he met Elizabeth Garsonnin, a Canadian documentary filmmaker who attended the event with a guy she was dating. That night marked the end of one relationship and the start of another. She and Mander married in 1987. They later divorced but remained close friends. 

One constant in Mander’s career as an adman and activist was Doug Tompkins, the Esprit co-founder who turned his fortune toward environmental protection in Chile and Argentina through the Foundation for Deep Ecology.

Mander worked with Tompkins and later spun the Foundation for Deep Ecology into his own think tank called International Forum on Globalization. It started as a counterpoint to the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had been pushed through by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The IFG took off, and before long it represented more than 60 nongovernmental organizations in 25 countries, working against economic globalization.

“Jerry was the thought leader and mastermind behind the IFG,” said Debbie Barker, who became co-director with Mander. “With his background as an adman he could drill down a complex issue into something that people could relate to.”

The primary tool was the two-day teach-in, held in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. They all sold out, culminating in a public teach-in during the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999.

Held at a symphony hall, it sold out, thousands of tickets and involved speakers from all over. “It was like a rock concert,” Barker said. “People were standing in lines around the block hoping that when someone left they would hand over their ticket.”

The teach-in precipitated protests in the street that led to “the shutdown of the WTO talks,” Barker said. “IFG created an unprecedented global movement, and Jerry’s vision was instrumental in creating that.”

In 2009, Mander married Koohan Paik, a filmmaker who had been connected to him by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. They commuted between her home in Hawaii and his rustic home in Bolinas.

He conceded to carrying a flip phone but never a smartphone. The small television he had was sparingly used, mostly for San Francisco Giants games. 

With his trademark shock of hair that stuck out in all directions and had turned white, he was recognizable walking the cliffs above Agate Beach and through town. People would stop him to discuss issues, which he always obliged. The shorebirds wanted his attention, too.

“Birds used to try to nest in that hair,” his son said. “I saw it happen.”   

Reach Sam Whiting: swhiting@sfchronicle.com

Written By Sam Whiting

Sam Whiting has been a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle since 1988. He started as a feature writer in the People section, which was anchored by Herb Caen’s column, and has written about people ever since. He is a general assignment reporter with a focus on writing feature-length obituaries. He lives in San Francisco and walks three miles a day on the steep city streets.

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