Black History Lost and Found: Dorothy Jaymes and Accessible Transit

Black History Lost and Found: Dorothy Jaymes and Accessible Transit
By Jeremy Menzies

We continue to celebrate Black History Month by sharing the stories of SFMTA staff whose revolutionary work helped pave the way for future generations of Muni riders. Today, we look at the incredible contributions of Dorothy Jaymes, who played a critical role in helping advance accessibility on transit in San Francisco at a time when little was being done.

Employees standing in between shelving holding various items such as a umbrella, tennis racket and bicycles. The shelving is filled with additional various items.

Jaymes (left, holding tennis racket) with her assistant, Linda Westry in the Muni Lost & Found Department in 1977.

Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Jaymes started her career in Muni’s Lost & Found Department in the 1970s. According to a 1977 article in the department newsletter, Trolley Topics, she took her job seriously, accounting for every lost item no matter how small or large.

Around the same time, protests by local disability rights advocates exposed the issues of poor access to public transit to local officials. The city responded in part by seeking contracts for new buses with passenger lifts in 1978 and by establishing the Elderly & Handicapped Program, to which Jaymes was a foundational contributor.

Group photo of employees. The back row of three staff is standing. The front row of three staff is seated. One emplyee is wearing a Muni work vest.

Members of Muni Elderly & Handicapped Office staff in 1985, with Jaymes at center.

By October 1979, Jaymes headed up the E&H Office and was responsible for processing applications for discounted transit fare cards. An early version of the Free Muni for People with Disabilities Program, this program lowered the cost of transit for people who needed it most.

Jaymes’ role in the office played a critical part in improving access to transit for all San Franciscans.

Employee smiling and holding a vintage card camera

Working out of a room in the Muni Photo Department, Jaymes wields an ID card camera in this 1979 photo.

She left Muni in 1990 and finished out her career with the City of San Francisco at the Planning Department, before retiring in the early 2000s. Jaymes returned to Louisiana in retirement and passed away in 2015 at age 89. One of her former San Francisco co-workers remembered her as “a wonderful woman who was strong and always stood up for the workers.”

So often, we only hear the stories of major figures and their brave breakthroughs in history. Capturing the full story begins with also celebrating and recognizing the contributions of our “unsung heroes,” whose daily work is still helping Muni riders today.

Published February 28, 2023 at 11:01PM
https://ift.tt/CEeZw87

Comments

New top story from Time: All 53 People Aboard Indonesia Submarine Declared Dead After Vessel’s Wreckage Found

https://ift.tt/3ezrzg5 ANYUWANGI, Indonesia — Indonesia’s military on Sunday officially said all 53 crew members from a submarine that sank and broke apart last week are dead, and that search teams had located the vessel’s wreckage on the ocean floor. The grim announcement comes a day after Indonesia said the submarine was considered sunk, not merely missing , but did not explicitly say whether the crew was dead. Officials had also said the KRI Nanggala 402’s oxygen supply would have run out early Saturday, three days after vessel went missing off the resort island of Bali. “We received underwater pictures that are confirmed as the parts of the submarine, including its rear vertical rudder, anchors, outer pressure body, embossed dive rudder and other ship parts,” military chief Hadi Tjahjanto told reporters in Bali on Sunday. “With this authentic evidence, we can declare that KRI Nanggala 402 has sunk and all the crew members are dead,” Tjahjanto said. An underwater ro...

CBSE very likely to announce Class 10, Class 12 exam schedule tomorrow https://ift.tt/34zqEYO

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is very likely to announce the board exam schedule for Class 10 and Class 12 on Tuesday, official sources have said. The CBSE Class 10 and 12 exams are scheduled to be conducted next year through the paper-pen mode and an announcement regarding the examination dates is expected by Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, who will interact with teachers across the country tomorrow.

New top story from Time: An Innovative Washington Law Aims to Get Foreign-Trained Doctors Back in Hospitals

https://ift.tt/3v0a9kk Growing up in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu, where people sometimes die of preventable or treatable illnesses like diarrhea, typhoid and malaria, taught Abdifitah Mohamed a painful lesson: adequate health care is indispensable. In 1996, Mohamed’s mother died of septicemia after spending nine months hospitalized for a gunshot wound. Her death, Mohamed says, inspired him to go to medical school, and for about four years he worked to treat the sick and injured in Somalia, Sudan and Kenya. But Mohamed hasn’t been able to work as a doctor since 2015, when he left for the United States, where his wife emigrated in 2007. Before moving, Mohamed believed that being allowed to practice in the U.S. was a simple matter of passing the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE)—a three-step exam for receiving a U.S. medical license that tests medical knowledge, principles and skills—and then completing a medical residency. However, he didn’t expect that af...

New top story from Time: Over 550,000 U.S. Borrowers Could Be Newly Eligible for Student Debt Relief

https://ift.tt/3lf52cK The Biden administration is temporarily relaxing the rules for a student loan forgiveness program that has been criticized for its notoriously complex requirements—a change that could offer debt relief to thousands of teachers, social workers, military members and other public servants. The Education Department said Wednesday it will drop some of the toughest requirements around Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a program that was launched in 2007 to steer more college graduates into public service but, since then, has helped just 5,500 borrowers get their loans erased. Congress created the program as a reward for college students who go into public service. As long as they made 10 years of payments on their federal student loans, the program promised to erase the remainder. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But more than 90% of applicants have been rejected. After making a decade of payments, many borrowers have found that they have the wrong type of...

New top story from Time: 11 Moments From Asian American History That You Should Know

https://ift.tt/330kaRq More than 30 years after President George H.W. Bush signed a law that designated May 1990 as the first Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month , much of Asian American history remains unknown to many Americans—including many Asian Americans themselves. Often the Asian-American history taught in classrooms is limited to a few milestones like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the incarceration of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and that abridged version rarely includes the nearly 50 other ethnic groups that make up the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S. in the first two decades of the 21st century . To many, the resulting lack of awareness was highlighted after the March 16 Atlanta spa shootings that left six women of Asian descent dead. The killings fit into a larger trend of violence against Asians failing to be seen or charged as a hate crime , even as leaders lamented that “racist attacks [are]… no...

New top story from Time: 6 Russian Military Officers Charged in Vast Hacking Campaign

https://ift.tt/35hiCmD (WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department announced charges Monday against Russian intelligence officers in a string of global cyberattacks that targeted a French presidential election, the Winter Olympics in South Korea and American businesses. The case implicates the same Kremlin unit that interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections, but is not related to the November vote. The indictment accuses the six defendants, all said to be current and former officers in the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU, of hacks that prosecutors say were aimed at furthering the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests and in destabilizing or punishing perceived enemies. All told, the attacks caused billions of dollars in losses and disrupted a broad cross-section of life, including health care in Pennsylvania, a power grid serving hundreds of thousands of customers in Ukraine and a French election that saw the late-stage disclosure of hacked emails. The seven-count ...

New top story from Time: Nirvana Is Being Sued by the Man Who Was the Nude Baby on the Nevermind Album Cover

https://ift.tt/3gAIAZ3 LOS ANGELES — A 30-year-old man who appeared nude at 4 months old in 1991 on the cover of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album is suing the band and others, alleging the image is child pornography they have profited from. The lawsuit, filed by Spencer Elden on Tuesday in federal court in California, alleges that Nirvana and the record labels behind “Nevermind” “intentionally commercially marketed Spencer’s child pornography and leveraged the shocking nature of his image to promote themselves and their music at his expense.” The lawsuit says Elden has suffered “lifelong damages” from the ubiquitous image of him naked underwater appearing to swim after a dollar bill on a fish hook. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] It seeks at least $150,000 from each of more than a dozen defendants, including the Kurt Cobain estate, surviving Nirvana members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl and Geffen Records. Emails seeking comment from representatives for the defendants were n...

New top story from Time: Trump Campaign Website Briefly Defaced With Cryptocurrency Scam

https://ift.tt/3oxeEze One of Donald Trump’s campaign websites, donaldjtrump.com , was briefly made to look like it had been seized by law enforcement Tuesday, an effort that appeared to be part of a cryptocurrency scam. The takeover, termed a defacement by cybersecurity experts, lasted for less than an hour. During that time, the web page was made to look like it had been take over by the government and included images of Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department seals. It also included a message urging people to send digital currency to an account, a technique used by criminals. Trump's campaign website hacked by cryptocurrency scammers https://t.co/wIqNATXtEU | by Devin Coldewey — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) October 27, 2020 It is unknown who caused the defacement, or if the Trump website was hacked. A website defacement doesn’t necessarily mean information from the site was taken. TechCrunch previously reported the incident. A Trump campaign spokesman...

New top story from Time: U.S. Officials Link Iran to Emails Meant to Intimidate Voters Into Supporting Trump

https://ift.tt/3m9aDyR (WASHINGTON) — U.S. officials accused Iran on Wednesday of being behind a flurry of emails sent to Democratic voters in multiple battleground states that appeared to be aimed at intimidating them into voting for President Donald Trump. The announcement at a rare, hastily called news conference just two weeks before the election underscored the concern within the U.S. government about efforts by foreign countries to spread false information meant to suppress voter turnout and undermine American confidence in the vote. The activities attributed to Iran would mark a significant escalation for a nation that some cybersecurity experts regard as a second-rate player in online espionage, with the announcement coming as most public discussion surrounding election interference has centered on Russia, which hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 election, and China, a Trump administration adversary. “These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adver...

New top story from Time: White House Chief of Staff Reportedly Hosted Large Wedding for Daughter That Violated Georgia COVID-19 Restrictions

https://ift.tt/2GKXbSy (MARIETTA, Ga.) — White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows hosted a large wedding for his daughter that appeared to violate a Georgia order and city of Atlanta guidelines to stop the spread of COVID-19, a newspaper reported Thursday. Photos of the event show many of the guests crowding together, dancing and hugging during the May 31 nuptials at the Biltmore Ballrooms Atlanta, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. About 70 guests, including U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, wore tuxedos and ball gowns but no masks at the indoor wedding, and photographs show groups of people clustered closely together in the same room throughout the evening, the newspaper said. Gov. Brian Kemp’s orders at the time banned gatherings of more than 10 people. The governor later loosened some coronavirus restrictions. Novare Events, which plans events at the Biltmore Ballrooms, verified ahead of time that it would be acting within the law and in compliance with details...

My precise view

Search This Blog