February 21, 2025 The celebration was well attended! We’ll have another at a different location soon. Special guests included Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, Melanie Mathewson, Legislative Aide, and Josh Schectel of Xeric-Oasis. Josh designed the garden at Merritt/Danvers Park.
Survey Results
Fifty residents responded to the survey. The top issues that residents think CHN should focus on:
Safety and Crime
Prevention
28
(55%)
Preservation of Open Space
24
(47%)
Beautification (e.g., landscaping, clean-ups, public art)
23
(45%)
Traffic Calming and Pedestrian Safety
20
(39%)
Historic
Preservation and Neighborhood Character
17
(33%)
Street and Sidewalk Maintenance
16
(31%)
Advocacy for Responsible Development and Zoning
14
(27%)
Community Events and Social Gatherings
7
(14%)
CHN has already contacted SFMTA to address the numerous concerns regarding Traffic Calming and Pedestrian Safety. CHN plans to invite speakers to our upcoming General Membership meeting on April 28 to address Safety and Crime Prevention. Watch for announcements regarding beautification projects, including public art.
The winner of the draw for a
Cliff’s $50 gift card is Katherine Z. of Ord Street.
Speed Safety Cameras
Starting in March the speed safety camera, one of 33 in the city, will be operating on the 3000 block of Market Street. This block of Market Street is the narrowest portion of Market Street, created in the 1920s with the opening of the upper Market Street (and elimination of Merritt Street).
The cameras have been placed on streets
where speeding vehicles are a known issue. CHN and EVNA requested the camera for this block and Supervisor Mandelman was able to see that it was provided.
The speed safety camera will photograph the rear license plate of vehicles traveling 11 MPH or more over the posted speed limit (30 MPH). Warning notices will be issued for the first 60 days, followed by citations on or about May 1, 2025. The fines are $50 for driving 11 to 15 miles per hour over
the speed limit, $100 for 16 to 25 miles over, $200 for 26 to 99 miles over and $500 fine for drivers going over 100 miles per hour over the posted limit (reduced fees will be offered to anyone who qualifies for a low-income discount).
Spotted in the
Neighborhood
Red-tailed Hawk and a Hummingbird Nest/Egg
Credit: Hetty Tulloss
February 2, 2025 Credit: John KoelschFebruary 3, 2025 Credit: John KoelschFebruary 23, 2025 Credit: John KoelschFebruary 26, 2025 Credit: John Koelsch
Richie’s March Pick
Richie Partington has recently moved to Corbett Avenue. He taught children’s
library services classes in the San Jose State MLIS program. Richie has served on numerous American Library Association award and selection committees, including the Caldecott Medal committee. Richie generously and willingly agreed to let us print this latest review.
Richie’s Picks: THE ENIGMA GIRLS: HOW TEN TEENAGERS BROKE CIPHERS, KEPT SECRETS, AND HELPED WIN WORLD WAR II by Candace Fleming, Scholastic Focus, March 2024, 384p., ISBN:
978-1-338-74957-1
“Listen
Do you want to know a secret?
Do you promise not to tell?”
– Lennon/McCartney (1962)
“A MYSTERIOUS SUMMONS
The letter arrived in an ordinary brown envelope. It did not have a return address. And inside there was just a single piece of paper that read:
You are to report to Station X at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire in four days’ time…That is all you need to
know.
Signed
Commander Travis”
This morning I shared an enciphered message with author Candace Fleming:
THE ENIGMA GIRLS, which recently received a Sibert Honor from the American Library Association as one of the most distinguished informational books for children published in 2024, is a jaw-dropping true story detailing how British
girls with smarts and trustworthiness secretly worked for the government, as part of a vital war operation–intercepting and deciphering enemy messages during WWII. By the end of the book’s first section (1940), you should have a good shot at deciphering my message to the author in a reasonable amount of time. By that point in the book, you may well be glued to your seat the way I was.
“Let’s start with the basics. There are two kinds of secret writing: codes and
ciphers. A code is a form of writing in which each individual word is written as a secret code word, code number, or code symbol…A cipher is a system of secret writing in which every letter, instead of every word, has its own secret symbol.”
In order to decipher an enciphered message, one needs to first have or determine the key to the cipher. What is the relationship between the letters in an enciphered message being transmitted, and the letters making up the real
message. In order to prevent the enemy from understanding any of the stream of Morse code messages being sent out, Hitler’s military people were creating new keys for enciphering messages on a daily basis.
This led to England enlisting a group of British brainiacs, including Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science. They were ensconced at Bletchley Park, an estate in Buckinghamshire near the east coast of Britain. Radio operators at Britain’s various secret
listening bases (Y stations) would scan the radio frequencies around the clock in order to intercept messages being sent by the Germans and their allies. They would forward these intercepted, enciphered messages to Bletchley Park. There, the brainiacs feverishly worked to determine the key to that day’s enciphered Morse code messages.
Then, “Enigma girls” took over, utilizing that day’s cracked cipher key to decipher all incoming messages as quickly as humanly possible.
The tasks those young women worked so hard to complete could and did save countless lives. Arguably, they were key to the war being won.
The next day, the Germans would begin using a new key for enciphering messages, and the work at Bletchley Park would start all over again.
We learn about a number of mechanical proto-computing machines being employed at Bletchley Park that radically sped up the processes. Thus, the title of the book.
A
wonderfully useful chapter in the middle of the book summarizes the steps involved in the process as German messages are transmitted, intercepted, deciphered, translated into English, and sent forward to the military brass and government leaders.
As we learn, many of the young women engaged in this work were daughters of the crème de la crème of British society. It makes sense, since these were young women who were often well educated, frequently spoke multiple languages, and
who thoroughly understood the need for secrecy. They were also the sort of women who–once word got out about Bletchley Park, many decades later–would write memoirs that would provide rich primary source material for this book. It’s amusing to read about their receiving notes to report to Station X, not having the faintest idea what they were actually going, or what they would actually be doing to help the war effort. We see them struggling, in the little time they had, to somehow choose what to
pack themselves for an extended period of time…somewhere.
Above all, this is a female empowerment tale of the first order. Despite the fact that the soldiers with guns and grenades and fighter planes were all men, and despite the limitations otherwise put on British women, who’d only gotten the right to vote a decade earlier, THE ENIGMA GIRLS vividly depicts how intelligent, patriotic, young British women worked right alongside the men, playing essential roles in winning WWII.
They were not sitting around eating bonbons, keeping the home fires burning, and nursing babies.
The part of the book that choked me up the most was near the end where the jubilation I felt as a reader, resulting from the successes of D-Day, was severely tempered by the author’s recounting the unimaginable statistics of American and Allied lives lost and shattered in the process.
It’s for that reason that I most strongly recommend that this book
be paired with the author’s THE RISE AND FALL OF CHARLES LINDBERGH. Winner of the 2021 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction award. Ms. Fleming’s bio of Lindbergh details how Lucky Lindy sucked up to Hitler and preached American isolationism. There is no doubt that Lindberg’s advocacy emboldened Hitler and contributed to millions of lives lost when, instead, the civilized world should have shut down Hitler before he got going.
