Hi everyone,

As part of a blog series, there will be a few board members who will introduce themselves to our members.  I thought I would start off with the first one.

I am Kevin Kaatz, the President of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.  I was the President in 2024-2025 and just elected again at the Annual Meeting in May.  I joined BAHA as a volunteer in 2021 and got on the Board in 2023.  I totally believe in the mission of BAHA:  “to promote, through education, an understanding and appreciation for Berkeley’s history, and to encourage the preservation of its historic buildings.”  While we are currently having issues with “the preservation of its historic buildings” we will not stop the encouragement of saving our architectural history!

A little about myself:  I am currently the Director of General Education at California State University, East Bay Campus (Hayward) and am a Professor of History in the Department of History and Global Cultures.  I earned my M.A. at the Graduate Theological Union here in Berkeley and went on to do my Ph.D. in Ancient History at Macquarie University, Sydney Australia.  After that we moved back to San Francisco and then to Redwood City.  There I was a board member of the Local History Room and was elected to the Historic Resource Advisory Committee for Redwood City where we looked over landmark and Mills Act proposals and reported to the Planning Commission.  Much of what I publish is on the ancient world but while working as a board member in Redwood City, I was introduced to an archive of amazing letters from Japanese Americans to their banker, during WWII, when all of them were being kept at Topaz, Utah.  A friend and I published Citizen Internees:  A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Internment Camps in 2017 and its companion volume, Documents of Japanese American Internment:  Eyewitness to History, in 2020.  This led to another article on Japanese-Canadian internees.  While I love Roman history, local history is pretty fascinating too.

Much of my work at BAHA, especially last year, was working in the archives.  A big project that was recently completed was to organize, catalog, and properly store over 100 architectural plans that BAHA had collected over the years.  I am also part of a small team that has been steadily scanning our Donogh Files (going on for over 20 years).  These are index cards put together by Donogh, a Berkeley real estate agent.  He worked on this project in the 1930’s through the 1970s.  These are very delicate and priceless as they cover almost every house in Berkeley (see photo of my house from this collection).  We are hoping that the scanning is completed in the next few years.  We also have over 7,000 slides that are slowly being digitized and catalogued.

Thanks so much for being BAHA members and your support really helps us to achieve our mission.  If you are not a member, please think about joining!  You can do so here.