Friends Remember Joe Kukura, SFist Editor and Singular Soul

Joe Kukura, associate editor of SFist and a writer whose byline stretched across San Francisco media for years, died last week. He was remembered this week through a gathering of memories from friends spanning four decades, from the suburbs of Ohio to the streets of the Mission District, all of them pointing to the same essential person.

A celebration of life is being planned in the Mission District in the coming weeks. Details on the date, time, and location will be posted at sfist.com as they are confirmed.

The remembrances SFist collected paint a portrait that reaches back to junior high school in Chesterland, Ohio. Todd Golling knew Kukura in seventh grade, remembered the Hawaiian shirts and the Weird Al Yankovic phase, the accordion, and a band the two of them started together called Dead Petting Zoo Animals. By high school, Kukura had moved on to tuba in the marching band. When he broke a weld on the instrument after practice, Golling’s father took it home and soldered it back together. Kukura never let that go.

Golling reached out to Kukura last September after his father, now in hospice, asked about his old friend. The two had not spoken in nearly thirty years. What Golling did not know at the time was that Kukura was privately fighting cancer. It did not stop him. He called Golling’s father multiple times, spending 45 minutes on each call, speaking slowly and patiently with a man managing hearing loss and dementia. He had no obligation to make those calls. He made them anyway.

Brian Grinnell, a classmate from West Geauga High School, Class of 1989, wrote that reading the remembrances on SFist made clear something he had suspected: Kukura had not changed. The qualities Grinnell valued in that friendship nearly forty years ago, the warmth, the humor, the creative energy, the reliability, showed up intact in the memories of people who knew him in San Francisco decades later.

Grinnell credited Kukura with shaping significant portions of his cultural life. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Catch-22. They Might Be Giants and Camper Van Beethoven. Buckaroo Banzai and Midnight Run. The two of them sat through a 24-hour sci-fi marathon at Case Western together, heckling the pacing of 2001: A Space Odyssey somewhere deep into the early morning hours.

Those details matter because they capture something specific about the way Kukura moved through the world. He was not someone who kept enthusiasm at arm’s length. He committed to things, to bands and books and friends and phone calls. He treated pop culture with the same seriousness he brought to people he cared about, and he made others feel that their tastes and their time and their fathers in hospice were worth his full attention.

For San Francisco readers, Kukura was a presence at SFist for years, covering the city with the kind of knowing, often irreverent energy the site was built around. But the tributes pouring in this week make clear that the professional record is only part of what he left behind. The other part lives in the people who still remember what record he put on, what book he handed them, and what he said when they finally picked up the phone after thirty years.

SFist is collecting additional memories from anyone who knew Kukura and wants to contribute. Submissions can be sent to tips@sfist.com with the subject line “Joe Kukura Memories.”