James Heig

James Lee Heig

Jan. 31, 1931 -Nov. 8, 2013

Jim Heig wasn't born in San Francisco, but he got here as soon as he could.

The youngest of eight children born to a Norwegian mother and a Swedish father, he grew up on a farm without electricity or running water in Clark, South Dakota during the Depression. He rode a horse to a one-room schoolhouse.

He came to this bright city in 1952, when he was 21. He got a Masters at UC Berkeley and became an English teacher at College of Marin, where he introduced students to Jane Austen and poetry and took them to plays at ACT in San Francisco. When he was 31, he taught for a year in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship, and from then on his house was filled with the visiting Germans he'd formed close friendships with.

After class he'd rush back to the city in his convertible VW bug to restore the four-story, 1892 Queen Anne Victorian he'd bought in the Lower Haight in 1971, when decaying Victorians were a dime a dozen, and the neighborhood was full of screaming junkies and wailing sirens. Now every time you walk outside there's someone taking a picture of it, on their way to or from brunch.

It's a big yellow house on Scott and Waller. Come see it sometime. He'd want you to.

Because he was gay, he did not expect to marry or have children, but to his surprise found that he had prepared the house for a family. He fell in love with one of his English students, Adair Lara. "Have you noticed that the restaurant at the Savoy-Tivoli is straight and the bar is gay?" he told her one night. "Well, I'm more like the bar than the restaurant." She didn't care. They were married in 1976 and had two children: Morgan born in 1978 and Patrick in 1980.

After the children were born, he quit teaching and started a one-man printing press called Scottwall Associates, publishing California and San Francisco histories. He knew everything about this city. If you told him where you lived, he'd tell you what your house used to be, that a creek used to run through it or that he had a chance to buy it for the price of a used car in 1968.

He and Adair parted ways, but they were still family and she and her new husband Bill LeBlond bought the flat below from Jim and the kids ran up and down the back stairs. When Bill sent Patrick upstairs to ask Jim for a turkey baster, Jim sent a message back saying that if Bill was making turkey, he had some peppers and fresh green beans to go with it. When the kids' report cards arrived, they thumped in through adjoining mail slots. Two years ago Adair and Bill rented out their own flat and moved upstairs to live with Jim.

He remained deeply Midwestern - polite, unfailingly dependable and stoic. In the middle of the day or the dead of the night he was the person you called when you needed someone. He always did more than his share. Adair gave him two Himalayan kittens she didn't want, and though they were awful cats, and even he didn't like them, he kept them until they died of old age. When he broke his leg, he was discovered in his Volvo, trying to work the clutch with his cast so he could drive Morgan to school. "I think I can drive all right," he said, and it took three people to put him back in the house.

His defining characteristic was his passion for life - for Victorian architecture, for music, for the writings of Flannery O'Connor, for his uncountable nieces and nephews, and, most of all, for his children. Once he gave his heart away, it was for good. Though the divorce had happened decades before, he never took off his wedding ring. He kept every friend he'd ever had, every letter he was ever sent. Just as he looked at tired carpeting and still saw the gleaming expanse of wool he had installed when Nixon was president, so when he looked at you, he saw what he loved about you.

In 1994 Jim discovered he had Parkinson's. He still went to the gym every day, to Berkeley Rep and the San Francisco Opera and the farmer's markets he loved long before everybody else did. He went to a friend's piano recital on the first of November, and still had the music in his ears, and was surrounded by friends when a bite of hors d'oeuvres blocked his airway. He died a week later, on November 8.

He is survived by his son Patrick Heij (he reverted to the original Swedish spelling of his name), by his daughter Morgan Daly and her husband Eric Ingerson, and by Morgan's children, Ryan Adair Anderson, 10, and Margaret James Anderson, 8.

There will be a memorial at the house this Saturday at three for friends and family. For those who would like to see Jim and say goodbye, Morgan and Patrick have arranged viewings Friday and Saturday at Sullivan's funeral parlor at 2254 Market. They will host the first one Friday night 5-8 pm, and the second one, unhosted, is Saturday 9 am-3 pm. Jim has asked to be buried in Clark, South Dakota.

In lieu of flowers, donations to the Victorian Alliance would be gratefully appreciated.

Those wishing to reach the family can email adair.lara@gmail.com. The address is 95 Scott Street, San Francisco, 94117.