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Grace Perego in Six Scenes
Meet SF’s First-Wave Feminist Housing Mogul
One.
Helen Grace Greenwood Yager stands up, cradling her three-month-old son Jackson. She’s 28, her patrician features brushed with the haze of new parenthood. She raises her right hand and swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her god. It’s 1913.
The whole mess comes spilling out, splashing into the Chronicle the next day.¹ She was 17 when she married William in their home state of Kansas, and they traveled west in the dawn of the new century. William ran a construction firm, while Helen Grace helped with building sales. It was modest, but successful.
Eventually, William started taking work trips up and down the coast: Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles. And on these trips, he was — apparently — in the habit of traveling with another woman, whom he introduced as his wife. Right around the time Jackson was born, the other woman finally spurned his advances, and William confessed everything.
The gavel comes down, and Helen Grace walks out of the courtroom with Jackson and an alimony. It’s enough to cover rent and then some. She drops the “Helen,” and some time over the next year or two, she returns to the real estate business.
Two.
The iconic plunging strings which open Renée Geyer’s cover of “It’s a Man’s World” vibrate anachronistically overhead, as Grace Perego emerges — backlit, in slow motion — from billowing clouds of steam off a locomotive. Lace brocade and ostrich feathers. Tonight, she’s closing the sale on an under-construction apartment building on Clay and Polk. Three stories of scaffolding and iron girders glimmer in the streetlights. It’s 1922.
After the divorce, she started out catch-as-catch-can: brokering small flats and flipping farmland in Santa Rosa. During her short-lived second marriage to Capt. Fordyce L. Perego,² they pooled their funds so she could swing larger properties. In the Chronicle, these sales are credited to “F.L. Perego and wf” — but we all know what’s up.³ Fordyce ships off to Manilla.⁴
She finally got her name on the door with a partnership: Kincanon & Perego. She handles sales, prolific builder John Kincanon handles the…
