Woody LaBounty
On his mom’s side, Woody LaBounty’s San Francisco roots go back to 1850.
In Part 1, get to know Woody, who, today, is the president and CEO of SF Heritage. But he’s so, so much more than that.
He begins by tracing his lineage back to the early days of the Gold Rush. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather arrived here mid-Nineteenth Century. Woody even knows what ship he was on and the exact day that it arrived in the recently christened city of San Francisco.
On Woody’s dad’s side, the roots are about 100 years younger than that. His father grew up in Fort Worth, Texas (like I did). His dad’s mom was single and fell on hard times in Texas. She came to San Francisco, where she had a step-brother.
Woody’s parents met at the Donut Bowl at 10th Avenue and Geary Boulevard (where Boudin Bakery is today). Donut Bowl was a combination donut shop/hot dog joint. At the time the two met, his dad worked as a cook there and his mom was in high school. His mom and her friends went to nearby Washington High and would hang out at the donut shop after school. The next year or so, his parents had their first kid—Woody.
They came from different sides of the track, as it were. Woody’s mom’s family wasn’t crazy about her dating his working-class dad, who didn’t finish high school. But once his mom became pregnant with Woody, everything changed.
The couple had two more sons after Woody. One of his brothers played for the 49ers in the Nineties and lives in Oregon today. His other brother works with underserved high school kids in New Jersey, helping them get into college.
Woody shares some impressions of his first 10 years or so of life by describing The City in the mid-Seventies. Yes, kids played in the streets and rode Muni to Candlestick Park and The Tenderloin to go bowling. It was also the era of Patty Hearst and the SLA, Jonestown, and the Moscone/Milk murders. But for 10-year-old Woody, it was home. It felt safe, like a village.
Because I’m a dork, I ask Woody to share his memories of when Star Wars came out. Obliging me, he goes on a sidebar about how the cinematic phenomenon came into his world in San Francisco. He did, in fact, see Star Wars in its first run at the Coronet.
He attended Sacred Heart on Cathedral Hill when it was an all-boys high school. He grew up Catholic, although you didn’t have to be to go to one of SF’s three Catholic boys’ high schools. Woody describes, in broad terms, the types of families that sent their boys to the three schools. Sacred Heart was generally for kids of working-class folks.
After school, if they didn’t take Muni back home to the Richmond District, Woody and his friends might head over to Fisherman’s Wharf to play early era video games. Or, most likely, they’d head over to any number of high schools to talk to girls.
Because parental supervision was lacking, let’s say, Woody and his buddies also frequently went to several 18+ and 21+ spots. The I-Beam in the Haight, The Triangle in the Marina, The Pierce Street Annex, Enrico’s in North Beach, Mabuhay Gardens. There, he saw bands like The Tubes and The Dead Kennedy’s, although punk wasn’t really his thing. Woody was more into jazz, RnB, and late-disco.
We chat a little about café culture in San Francisco, something that didn’t really exist until the Eighties. To this day, Woody still spends his Friday mornings at Simple Pleasures Cafe.
And we end Part 1 with Woody’s brief time at UC Berkeley (one year) and the real reason he even bothered to try college.
In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Woody's brief time at UC Berkeley across The Bay. During that one year of college, he lived at his grandmother's house in the Outer Richmond. His parents had recently split up, and both his parents moved, separately, to Marin.
In fact, Woody says, his parents' moves north forced him to think about and start to consider that San Francisco was and would perhaps always be his home. Time has proven that to be true, of course. But to his young-adult mind, it just felt right for that moment. He'd spent a little time in Marin, and it wasn't a fit for young Woody.
A decade or so later, now married and with a kid, Woody and his wife moved to Durham, North Carolina, for nine months. It was yet another not-San Francisco town that provided a contrast with his hometown and reminded him how much he wanted to be here.
After that brief stint in college, Woody decided he wanted to entertain, and so he enrolled in a clown school run by Ringling Brothers in Florida. He got work with the PIckle Family Circus back in The City. He did a lot of vaudeville with them and even went to Japan and on other tours.
It was during his time in the circus that Woody met his wife. Nancy had a boyfriend at the time and was headed to Spain to teach English. Two years later, she returned to The Bay and Woody was single. Their first date was at Rock and Bowl, the spot on Haight Street where Amoeba is today. They walked down Haight after that to Mad Dog in the Fog. When they left Mad Dog, Woody knew it was love when Nancy asked him, "Where can we go play video games?"
In 1997, they had a baby, their daughter Miranda. That effectively ended the Performer chapter of Woody's life. Nancy is a midwife, and he needed to be flexible enough that he could watch his daughter while his wife was working.
After that stint in North Carolina, Woody came back with a renewed purpose—he decided to devote his life to letting people know how great San Francisco is. It would start with The City's past, and how that history informs the present and helps chart a path to our future. This led to the establishment of the Western Neighborhoods Project.
David Gallagher was married to a woman who Woody had performed with. David and Woody formed a board with a couple friends also interested in SF history. They settled on being a nonprofit and built a website, something that was pretty novel at the time. They interviewed folks and shared stories of the west side of town. They also had (and still have) a podcast.
Woody was with WNP for 20 years, until just recently. He talks about how the main objective of WNP was to gather as much forgotten history of the west side of San Francisco as possible, and then to make that available to as many folks as possible so that they might understand what came before and what could be possible in the here and now.
We take a sidebar to talk about the so-called Doom Loop, especially as it relates to hearing from friends and family who aren't in San Francisco, but will ask us things like, "What the hell is going on out there?" Not to diminish the real problems facing our and other cities, bu that media trope is tired and was always nonsense.
We talk briefly about the Outsidelands Podcast, which started way back in early 2013. Woody is no longer directly involved, but it's in good hands with WNP Executive Director Nicole Meldahl. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.
From WNP, Woody joined SF Heritage, where he works today. SF Heritage's mission is "to preserve and enhance San Francisco’s unique architectural and cultural identity." Nowadays, Woody is the CEO and president of the nonprofit, and he says that in that role, he "doesn't get to do a lot of the fun stuff," being more on the business side as he is. Still, he of course believes wholeheartedly in the organization's mission—it was what drew him to SF Heritage, in fact.
We end the podcast with Woody's take on our theme this season—Keep It Local.
We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025.
Photography by Jeff Hunt
