Who's Bette Higgins?

If you're gonna talk about who first got it started, Bette Higgins was the one who first got it started. Because she put a sign on her lawn "Save Our Mountain." And then, just out of curiosity I asked, "What do you mean?—Save Our Mountain" and she was out in front of her house and she said, "Well, haven't you heard? and I said "Well, no." She said "We oughta have a meeting." And I met David at the meeting.

Bette and David were both diamonds in the rough that had different talents. Bette had this facility for getting in close to the politicians and the people on the other side. She was very good at the public meetings and Daly City used to have a lot of those public meetings. Bette could get in there on a one-to-one basis with any of the politicians or Visitacion Associates people and she was on a first name basis. David was good at writing.

Bette would have been great as an elected official. But people like that don't get elected. Nobody recognizes their talent—that's the problem. They listened to her but you've only got a small minority who even know who Bette Higgins is. And unless youpon the inside of this movement and see how she operates and the talent she has...you know you can't advertise talents like that. People run for office and they put out brochures and they have people write endorsements and people send "Dear Friend" cards and all that. All you have to do is look around and see the type of people who get elected to office. They don't get elected because they're gonna do a good job.

And Bette would have been great as a front person for any kind of business. She had that facility for ingratiating herself with these people, meeting the developers and getting accepted by them. And all at the same time she was trying to cut their legs off. She was their adversary and she was advocating a different position. But she always had the respect of these people. They called us all kind of names. But she was a real diplomat. You could have sent her to talk to Sadam Hussein or anybody.

- Jim Keegan, South San Francisco Citizens for our Mountain

Bette Higgins lived on the other side of the mountain across the street from Paradise Valley. She started a group over there, which eventually became the Committee To Save San Bruno Mountain. And so they joined hands with us, with David and Luman and all of us who were interested in this. So we joined forces and we began to agitate. Not only did we hold meetings and have goats there at the rallys, but we did a lot of work behind the scenes. Bette did a lot of work. She got in with some of the county supervisors, with Jean Fassler and began to work with the supervisors that you could talk to. So there was a lot of work going on there. She would be going in to have personal meetings with the supervisors. And Bette had a natural knack for that. She was really good at it. David was kinda left out of politics. David operated on his own vision and I think they figured that they didn't want to disturb him from doing what he was doing by getting him mixed up with politics. You can't have everybody doing politics, you got to have people in all areas.

- Paul Goerke, Brisbane Citizens for Civic Progress