NoNo

Remembering Elenora Smith Clark

September 7, 1937-April 1, 2026

When I think of Elenora, I picture her enjoying a martini—Grey Goose with extra olives, in an ice-cold glass. 

Thinking about Elenora also reminds me of her love for San Francisco.

I didn’t meet Elenora until she was already 65, but over the more than twenty years that I came to know her, mostly during East Coast visits and West Coast family gatherings in Vallejo, I listened to her tell many tales about her early childhood in Louisiana and the American South and the teen and adult life she led in California.

Elenora's life was reflected in the food she would feed family members during the holidays and for birthdays and other celebrations. Red beans and rice, gumbo, potato salad, meat pies, and other Louisiana specialties were staples. Elenora was sure to have fresh California Dungeness crab in her gumbo, which was always made carefully with a chocolate brown roux and the Cajun-Creole holy trinity of onions, bell peppers, and celery. 

Around the holidays, sweet treats from the 1960 Better Homes and Gardens Dessert Cookbook would usually start to appear. Sometimes, if we didn’t make it to California for the holidays, and if we were lucky, pralines, toffee, peanut brittle, bourbon balls, and fruit cake would make their way to us in Maryland, carefully packaged in festive holiday tins. Other San Francisco Bay Area foods could often be found on Elenora’s table, such as Boudin bread or Red Hawk Cheese from Cowgirl Creamery.

Born in the Jim Crow South, Elenora, who was also known to say that the truth should never stand in the way of a good story, told colorful tales around the dinner table. She shared stories about segregated movie theaters and having to switch to the "colored" train car when traveling as train passenger headed south of Chicago. Her accounts were usually delivered with a funny anecdote and a lot of laughter, however, sometimes, the conversation turned to even more personal, sometimes uncomfortable, reflections on secrets she had heard, events she witnessed, and unexpected turns of events. It was not unusual for an evening to end with melancholy—and an empty martini glass.

But at the start of any event, Elenora was always one to try to fuel the festivities with good food, invitations to a seat at the table, and whimsy to meet the occasion, such as superhero and other themed decorations, or even costumes for the kids. For every holiday, seasonal decorations could be found all around the house, including in the washroom.

There were also well-intentioned efforts that sometimes went comically sideways, my favorite being her excitement over a whole porchetta that she had ordered from a popular restaurant in San Francisco’s Ferry Building. We hauled that 15-pound hunk of pork back to her kitchen and realized that we had a piece of meat that could easily feed thirty people, many more than she had planned to feed that day. While Elenora had loved to get a porchetta sandwich from Roli Roti, I am not sure if she ever ate another one ever again.

The house would frequently fill up with family, usually eating and often watching the latest San Franciso Giants, 49ers, or Golden State Warriors game. She would never hesitate to remind the crowd that she has just never understood sports and what people get so excited about. (i.e., Why aren’t you paying more attention to the food, the cook, and her stories?) So, boy, did she surprise us when we got her in the pool during one East Coast visit and she started shooting some hoops. Baller! Seriously, Grandma NoNo had some skills.

For me, it is easy to distill Elenora’s story into that of the American experience. I connect her to the charm and poverty of Louisiana, the Great Migration, the challenges and opportunities for Black people in the twentieth century West, the vibrancy of California food and culture, the special beauty of the Bay Area, the uncommon culture of San Francisco. She lived through it all as an African American, Virgo, woman, daughter, sister, friend, wife, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. There are other labels that she wore, also with interesting stories and through lines: IBM pensioner (Elenora worked decades for IBM during its “Big Blue” heyday) and Charmette (her San Francisco Washington High School girl “squad”) are just two.

Elenora possessed stories and experienced personal events connected to each of the labels above, particularly those of woman, daughter, wife, mother, grandmother. I am certain I do not know even half of them. Those lived experiences led Elenora to be the source of whimsy in certain moments and to possess an aura of sadness or frustration in others. Sometimes she could leave you feeling like she was annoyed, offended, or inconvenienced, but you weren’t quite sure why and usually you wondered if she had created those circumstances herself.

Elenora, you were loved and dear to many. Spoken aloud or simply in my mind, you will be in my thoughts during holiday meals as I hear you saying, "Good food, good meat, good Lord, let's eat."