Bidding goodbye to Barbara Bundschu

Friends, family and admirers will bid goodbye this week to one of California’s great ladies. Barbara Bundschu, great-granddaughter of Jacob Gundlach, founder of California’s oldest family-owned winery, Gundlach-Bundschu, of Sonoma, and granddaughter of Thomas Geary, a congressman from Santa Rosa from 1890-1895, was an independent woman before the Women’s Movement even had a name. She was brought up to be a lady, as can be seen in a news item in the Oakland Tribune in 1926, which reported “Little Miss Barbara Bundschu” handing out calling cards at front doors, inviting guests to tea.
But adventure called, and after graduating from Mills College in 1938, she became a reporter in the glamorous mode of the forties and fifties, writing about crime and espionage and politics—after a coy few years writing about ladies’ fashions and weighty matters such as questions of cleavage, solutions to painful earrings, and advice to young girls about handling boys just home from the war. She had a zappy style: “Hollywood may bare its breast for fashion if it wants to, but most New York dressmakers aren’t having any, thank you.” (That, from a story in the Waukesha Daily Freeman in 1946.)
As she matured as a reporter, working for United Press International, she covered the trial of Judith Coplon, the Department of Justice security analyst convicted in 1950 of spying for the Soviets, and Estes Kefauver’s U.S. Senate investigation into organized crime. She wrote on John F. Kennedy when he came into the White House, and in 1961, she wrote a seven-part investigative series on the then little-known John Birch Society.
In 1962, she retired from the newspapers, but she did not retire from journalism. She returned to Mills College to work as assistant to the president and director of publications, a job she held until 1978.
After that, she turned to gardening, volunteering as a docent for the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society at Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park. There, she headed up the department that propagated trees, and became an expert in magnolias. She served in that capacity for over twenty years.
The memorial service for Barbara Bundschu will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday, in the main lounge at the San Francisco Towers, 1661 Pine Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street in San Francisco. Gifts for student scholarships may be made to Mills College in memory of “Barbara Bundschu ’38.” Send them to Mills College, Office of Institutional Advancement, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, Calif. 94613.