East Bay Yesterday podcaster shares the region’s most fascinating histories

Did you know that Bruce Lee taught ballroom dancing in Oakland? Or that the walnut groves that once covered Walnut Creek dated back millennia?

Liam O’Donoghue does. The Oakland-based creator of the independently-produced East Bay Yesterday podcast, which is available via Apple, Spotify and other platforms, is an expert in all the cultural, political and fascinating stories that have come to shape Oakland, Berkeley and other cities in Contra Costa and Alameda counties.

A former journalist, O’Donoghue started the podcast in 2016 “to feel more connected” to his hometown and deliver the type of fleshed-out back stories and real-life voices you won’t find on Atlas Obscura.

O’Donoghue has produced 83 episodes to date on everything from the East Bay’s earliest baseball teams to the creation of the country’s first Black union. O’Donoghue’s popular boat and walking tours are coming back this spring.

Q: How do you see the history of the East Bay overall? 

A: When we look around and see how fast things are changing, especially in the past 20 years with the tech boom, property development and the price of real estate, we have to remember that when we look back on the last 150 years of California history, things have always been changing fast. You can pick almost any decade to prove it. The exciting thing about this is that we can look back at these crossroads and have this critical view. My hope is that we can look at issues like development and say, “Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to plow through thriving neighborhoods.”

Q: You devote an episode to Martinez’s John Muir. Any little-known facts or stories?

A: Not everyone knows that the reason John Muir ended up moving to Martinez in the late 1800s was because he met and married Louisa Strentzel and went into business with her father managing the orchards on his farm. People would see him come into the bank with dollar bills stuffed into pillowcases. I think his burial site is a really overlooked East Bay destination.

Q: We all know the Transcontinental Railroad was a game changer. But, where did it stop? And how did goods and people get the rest of the way?

A: It really changed everything. Oakland was a small town before the railroad got there. Tons of industry developed around the terminal. There was a stop in downtown Oakland and then it basically went all the way to the Bay Bridge — at the Oakland Long Wharf, people would get off and take a ferry into San Francisco. Another terminus was at Point Richmond, where people would take a ferry to San Rafael. At one point, the Bay Area was the most passengered ferry system in the world. History goes in cycles. Those ferries went out of business in favor of the trains, but now there is so much traffic that they’re trying to bring the ferries back again.

Q: Who was C.L. Dellums and how did he help create the country’s first Black union?

A: One of the defining struggles in the years before the 1960s marches for racial equality was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In the early 20th century, the Pullman Car Company was the biggest employer of Black men in the country. The company hired them to keep their trains clean and serve White passengers. But by the 1920s, the workers were fed up with the low pay and abusive conditions. Oakland activist C.L. Dellums helped them organize and that was a training ground for future struggles, including the 1940s struggle to desegregate the U.S. military. People like Thurgood Marshall would come to Oakland and meet with Dellums at his house.

Q: Any little-known East Bay pop culture factoids?

A: The Matrix reboot is coming out in a month and there’s a famous car chase scene that was filmed in the Posey Tube between Oakland and Alameda.

Bruce Lee spent some years in Oakland. Before he was a kung fu master, one of his side hustles was as a ballroom dancer and instructor. He would hang out at various hotels, like The Leamington, and charge couples $1 for a dance lesson.

And on one of my Oakland walking tours, a 96-year-old man said that when he was a kid, he would go down to the airport and watch Amelia Earhart fly her plane. She had an office in Oakland when she was fundraising for her flight.

Q: Any curious Contra Costa County morsels you can share?

A: There’s an abandoned hotel in Byron, the Byron Hot Springs Hotel, that is falling apart and closed to the public. But in the 1920s, it was a resort to Hollywood’s elite. I was going cherry picking in Brentwood with my wife and some friends and decided to check it out, but we got chased away by a security guard who was driving around the area. What is fascinating about the site is that the government took it over in 1941 as an interrogation place for prisoners of war during World War II.

Liam O’Donogue’s five favorite East Bay historical sites:

Redwood Regional Park: “The county line that divides Alameda and Contra Costa was placed there because the old groves were one of the most valuable resources for several lumber mills operating in the area. The counties split it down the middle.”

Lake Merritt: “I just love walking around the lake. There are so many pieces of Oakland history, like the Camron-Stanford House and the Grand Lake Theatre.”