Alvin Duskin (1931 – July 25, 2021)[1] was a San Francisco Bay Area educator, entrepreneur, and activist known for leading a series of campaigns in the 1970s.
By 1958, Duskin realized there were no job opportunities for philosophy teachers at four-year colleges and universities, so he decided to earn a teaching credential as a graduate student at San Francisco State.
He called the founder, Mark Goldes; met with him; and, at 29 years of age, accepted a position as Dean of Emerson College and philosophy teacher.
[citation needed] Among the campaigns he led were the stopping the sale of Alcatraz Island to a Texas oilman, blocking the construction of the Peripheral Canal to take Northern California water and deliver it to Southern California, supporting GI coffee houses, and organizing anti-war rallies in Golden Gate Park and the Marin County Civic Center.
He also was involved in delaying the construction of the Yerba Buena Center—until housing was provided for displaced residents of the South-of-Market neighborhood—and organizing the anti high-rise campaigns in San Francisco, to maintain the livability of the city.
He also bought a weekend house in the Carmel Highlands where, by a critical coincidence, his next-door neighbor was the legendary political organizer, Saul Alinsky.
He also joined Public Interest Communication, a non-profit advertising agency with clients like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace and became its managing director.
The initiative failed at the polls, but Duskin included its key provisions in the Nuclear Safeguards Act, which the California legislature passed.
At the end of the 1960s, Texas billionaire Lamar Hunt presented a proposal, to the Surplus Property Commission, to completely redevelop Alcatraz and install a monument to the Apollo missions and a Victorian theme park.
[6][7] Hearing about the idea, Duskin took out full-page ads in local newspapers, starting a campaign that proclaimed the deal "As Big a Steal as Manhattan Island".
In May 1971, the General Services Administration announced that it planned to transfer Alcatraz to the Department of the Interior; and, in 1972, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area was created.
In 1970, Duskin married Sara Urquhart, a Scottish woman who had worked with him as the head of the design department at the dress company, after several years managing the chain of high-fashion stores, Paraphernalia.
In 1971, Duskin started a ballot measure called Proposition T, which would have limited the height of buildings in San Francisco to 72 feet.
In 1973, the San Francisco board of supervisors voted to limit building heights in the residential neighborhoods, permitting skyscrapers only in the downtown financial districts.
In 1986, he decided to leave the wind business and work on the lessening of Cold War tensions by developing joint ventures with industrial firms in the Soviet Union.
To maintain a presence in Eastern Europe, Alvin formed the Copernican Group and raised funds to buy PPZ—a cereals-and-potato processing company located in Toruń, Poland—from the Polish federal government in Warsaw.
He stopped his monthly commutes to Europe and spent the next years full-time with his wife Sara and their children in San Francisco.
He organized a cooperative research-and-development agreement to develop flywheel energy technology with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and, when that was not successful, a joint-development project with the combustion-engineering department at Stanford University.