Helen Souranoff (Class of 1984)
Longtime CSM Media Services Manager and Theatre Events Manager
Jazz on the Hill Technical Director
Preserver of College History
One of CSM’s First Out LGBTQ+Employees
“What are you doing Saturday? Meet me on the soccer field.”
– Claire Mack to Media Services Manager Helen Souranoff the day before the first Jazz
on the Hill
Not only did Helen Souranoff attend College of San Mateo, but she was hired by the College while still a student in 1981 and never worked anyplace else until her retirement in 2016.
As might be expected from someone with a lifetime of CSM service, Souranoff helped shape many stories and throughlines of College history. A graduate in theater arts, Souranoff made her mark putting on community events for the campus.
As a staffer in CSM’s pre-Internet Media Center, Souranoff mastered the time-critical task of delivering the projectors and other AV equipment that faculty required to give their lectures—a logistical challenge when funding cuts meant there weren’t enough projectors to go around.
As manager of CSM’s Theatre—a one-woman show, again because of funding constraints—she maintained the venue for College and community events, the latter providing CSM a welcome source of revenue.
As Media Center manager, Souranoff became the founding technical director for Jazz on the Hill, the concert festival celebrating KCSM-FM, one of the few public jazz stations in America.
She remembers it all started when Jazz on the Hill founder Claire Mack came up to her one Friday afternoon and asked, “’What are you doing on Saturday? Meet me on the soccer field.’ So, I went out and met her; I brought one power cord, and we had one short stage, and a dusty soccer field. That’s how Jazz on the Hill started.”
Over the years, Souranoff and Mack grew Jazz on The Hill into a complex, multi-stage event. Mack, as community affairs manager of KCSM, booked the acts and handled talent, contracts and publicity. Souranoff handled the technical side, from designing dual-act stages to wrangling drum sets.
When CSM went out into the community, for example at the San Mateo County Fair, Souranoff repped the College as its Bulldog mascot. She sang in the Bulldawgs, the College’s faculty/staff band, with Sam Haun, Chris Phillips, Alicia Clancy and Chris Cortez from KCSM; ethnic studies instructor Rudy Ramirez; John Avakian and band founder Virgil Stanford from campus administration; and, on drums and then keyboards, former CSM President Mike Claire.
“We actually thought about naming the band ‘All the President’s Men,’” Souranoff said.
She also became visible in a more historic way around 1997, as one of the first CSM employees to come out on campus as LGBT. This happened, Souranoff remembered, at a diversity training on campus.
In the 1990s, even in liberal California, gay men and lesbians had few legal rights and no marriage, workplace or hate-crimes protections. Souranoff had left home after high school in 1980 partly so she could live an open life. At CSM, from early on, she worked with emerging LGBT groups like the Gay Student Union, letting them use the Theatre shop to make posters that she witnessed being promptly pulled down by anti-gay students and, in one case, a member of the faculty.
“Dr. Lillian Roybal Rose [the trainer] homed in on how we perceive things. I walked up to her and I flat-out told her that I was gay. I said, ‘I do see animosity on campus, and could you please address that?’ She said, ‘You’ll have your chance.’ We’re all standing around in this big circle. She breaks people into white and nonwhite, male and female, etc. Then she came to the subject I was mostly dreading, but also looking forward to. ... Well, my moment came and I knew I would not be able to live with myself properly if I didn’t do the right thing.”
“I was the only one on the other side of the room. And then she told people what it was like to be me. And I remember standing there and seeing people cry. I knew there were people who should have been standing with me and couldn’t.”
“And that’s how I came out to the College. I’ve been told I was the first. I don’t know if that’s true; there may have been others that served openly, but none that had come out in such a big way to the campus.”
When CSM’s Media Center was emptied during a 1990s library renovation, Souranoff salvaged the photo files of longtime colleague Isago Isao Tanaka, a well-known figure in the Japanese-American community. She delivered the files to Bill Rundberg and Gus Petropolous, two staffers with an interest in preserving CSM history. They found money to archive and digitize Tanaka’s images, which help underpin CSM’s centennial celebrations and which reside in the library once again as part of the CSM Historical Photograph Collection.
Of all her work at CSM, Souranoff most treasures her efforts to make the College known in the community.
“Jazz on the Hill was just a great thing. It was such a great way to bring people up to the College. Just like the Theatre was. The College is made to serve the community. If the community doesn’t want to come up, how can we serve you? How do we know what you want and need?”
“People think academics are the only thing that can do it. Community events can do it too.”
