NATIONAL AIDS MEMORIAL GROVE

Ben Small: 1922 - 2002

The Grove Was Ben's Spiritual Home

I never had a religion. The Grove was my religion, really. And all those wonderful people," Ben said softly, reaching for a tissue on the table next to his hospital bed. He gently removes his glasses and wipes his eyes.

"Uh-oh. It's crying time again."

Ben Small found a home at the National AIDS Memorial Grove in the early '90s, making himself useful in the sweet way he knew best. He baked treats for all the participants at the monthly volunteer Workdays. Month after month, year after year, he offered something a little different each time, some new twist on an old recipe for cookies or brownies.

Always self-effacing, in a number of ways Ben Small was, nevertheless, very large indeed. Born in Glendale, California, in 1922, he grew tall and lanky and eventually became a walking piece of history. Ben's story has appeared in a number of books about gay life in the 1940s, and especially about being gay in the military. Alan Berube, author of Coming Out Under Fire, interviewed Ben about witnessing from just twenty feet away the death of his army buddy and boyfriend, Jim. Forty people were killed that day during a surprise-bombing raid in the South Pacific in World War II.

"I went into a three-day period of hysterics," Ben is quoted in Charles Kaiser's history, The Gay Metropolis. I was treated with such kindness by the guys I served with, who were totally aware of why I had gone hysterical...There was a sort of compassion then."

His war career thankfully ended, Ben flew back to the mainland from the Philippines. After landing at Hamilton Field in Marin County, he obtained a three-day pass.

"We headed right for the gay bars in San Francisco, places like Gordon's and the Paper Doll in North Beach. A couple of bars in town had grand staircases you could descend to make an entrance. We had such fun in those days! After that, there was no going back to Glendale."

After the war years, Ben acted and directed in community theater, both in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and at the Monterey Wharf Theater. He became quite an accomplished chef, too, prepping in the kitchen at Scott's Seafood Restaurant when it opened in the Embarcadero Center. Ben loved the art of Georgia O'Keefe, saying that he finds real peace and comfort in her florals. He celebrated his own artistic nature in photography, a lifelong hobby. He also sculpted lovely masks, and late in life took a mixed-media (collage) class.

For 22 years Ben faithfully attended the concerts of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. Ben never missed a show until he fell ill with cancer in the fall of 2001. Even in March 2002, as he approached the culmination of his life in Coming Home Hospice, Ben fantasized about "making a getaway" and catching a Chorus concert with special guest-star Carol Channing.

Then there was his kitty, Bijou, the light of his life. "Bijou — that means little jewel," he would say, producing a photo like a proud grandpa. In a snapshot that Ben took, Baby Bijou's blue eyes peek out of a blue-and-white Ming flower pot.

In 1989, Ben lost his lover of many years to AIDS. He was at a loss to explain why his life was spared during the AIDS epidemic, just as he puzzles over being a survivor of the war years more than two generations earlier.

At a garden show at Fort Mason in the early 1990s, he met Todd Cole, a Grove board member at the time. Todd was standing at "a tacky card table," promoting an idea about a section of Golden Gate Park that would be set aside to commemorate all lives touched by AIDS.

"Count me in," Ben said. He popped up at an early Grove Volunteer Workday bearing three dozen cookies that he had baked.

"It might have been the first volunteer Workday. I don't remember now. I do remember how nice Alice Russell-Shapiro [Grove co-founder and board member] was to make a fuss over my cookies," he says. After that, Ben never came to another Workday without something sweet. It became his proud tradition, a service he continued long after he gave up pulling weeds.

"I figure I baked ten thousand cookies for the Grove over ten years. That's ten thousand cookies, give or take a few," he offered with a twinkle.

In his last months, Ben accepted his certain fate with what can only be described as cheerfulness. "I saw a lot of boys die over there at Ward 5-A [San Francisco General Hospital's HIV ward] in the 1980s. A few of them knew how to do it in style, with a little class. I learned to watch them."

On March 16, 2002, a bright Japanese maple was placed in the Grove that he loved so much—planted to honor a sweet, colorful jewel of a man.

— Paul D. Hufstedler, Grove volunteer

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