EL CERRITO — Chris Treadway, a longtime champion of East Bay news and history, died Nov. 11 of pancreatic cancer. He was 66.
In a 35-year journalism career that began in 1986, Treadway started out as a reporter, columnist and editor for the Berkeley Voice, El Cerrito Journal and Montclarion community newspapers, then owned by Hills Newspapers. He continued in those roles after the Hills papers were acquired by Contra Costa Newspapers in 1998, adding overlapping duties over the years as a reporter and editor for the West County Times and later the East Bay Times.
He wrote the West County Times’ “Our Neighbors” column from 2005 to 2016. For almost two decades, Treadway was a mentor and a kind but demanding taskmaster to this former Times, Journal and Voice reporter who can attribute much of his best work to Treadway’s guidance and tutelage.
An El Cerrito resident since 1985, Treadway was also a member, and most recently vice president, of El Cerrito Historical Society and a frequent contributor to its publications, Sparks and The Forge. He was known for his scholarly rigor with a flair for the quirky and an antenna for intriguing details that could appear mundane to the less inquisitive.
“A lot of people think that local history can be dry, boring,” said Dave Weinstein, president of El Cerrito Historical Society, addressing El Cerrito’s City Council during their public comment period Nov. 2. “Over the years, he’s helped me out so much … finding weird information about ostrich races at the old dog track; matchbook covers; any kind of oddball things. He’s really brought just a tremendous amount of fun to what he was doing while at the same time being really serious about it.” The council that same day issued its proclamation “Recognizing Chris Treadway for His Decades of Journalism and Memorializing the City of El Cerrito.”
Craig Lazzeretti, a former East Bay Times metro editor who worked closely with Treadway for more than a decade and became his close friend, remembers Treadway’s “voracious appetite for digging through the archives of local papers and finding journalistic gems or quirky tidbits that gave people a window into different eras of the past.”
“One thing that he stumbled across in the last few months were ads during the Great Depression about do-it-yourself work-at-home schemes that became popular when people of the time were trying to make ends meet,” Lazzeretti recalled. “One in particular that caught my attention was an opportunity for people to make their own lamps using real squirrels. I can’t count how many times I broke into laughter coming across one of his historical gems on social media.”
Treadway was a birdwatcher and walker and loved music, but he also devoted much of his downtime to studying history, as evidenced by the orderly proliferation of old magazines, newspapers, books and other historical artifacts in his El Cerrito home.
“Whenever he sat down, a pile of newspapers built up around him,” said his wife of 36 years, Diana Treadway. She showed a recent photo of her husband seated at a desk in front of a computer, surrounded by a Life magazine from 1963 and other memorabilia, and said, “That was my Chris.”
At the time of his death, Treadway was working on a book about local gambling dens and nightclubs from the 1910s to the 1950s. Diana Treadway and Weinstein said they are determined to see the book published.
“This is Chris’s legacy,” Diana Treadway said.
While the focus of his journalism and historical study was mostly local, many of Treadway’s stories had a national angle. He reported extensively about Betty Reid Soskin, today the oldest active U.S. National Park Service ranger at age 100, based at Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond. Soskin, who worked as a file clerk in a segregated Boilermakers Union hall in World War II, introduced then-President Barack Obama in 2015 at the national Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Washington, D.C., and was a Black History Month Unsung Hero honoree in 2016.
During research on local centenarians, Treadway came upon George Johnson, a World War I veteran who said he was the grandson of a former slave and Reconstruction Era President Andrew Johnson. George Johnson was the oldest resident of California when he died in 2006 at age 112.
Treadway identified many of the artifacts among a trove of documents found in Johnson’s Richmond house shortly after Johnson died, among them the 1942-43 California Negro Directory that listed the state’s Black population and businesses. Treadway donated Johnson’s archives to the Richmond Museum of History and Culture, as noted in the city’s Nov. 2 proclamation honoring him.
Treadway was quite the expert when it came to computers and social media; in the newsroom, as this reporter witnessed, Treadway was the go-to person for computer glitches and other tech problems that baffled less savvy colleagues. The council proclamation notes that he co-edited El Cerrito Historical Society’s Facebook page and increased its social media presence; he also created a Facebook page, “Lost Mastheads,” focused on East Bay history.
Treadway was born in Berkeley and grew up in Oakland’s Montclair district. His journalism career started early — in fourth grade, when he published a newspaper that he sold door-to-door to neighbors for 5 cents, his wife said.
“He assigned a story to his younger sister to write about Abraham Lincoln, and she said he expected it to be completed by a certain time,” Diana Treadway said.
After he graduated from Skyline High School in 1973, Treadway was a reporter and editor for the Merritt College student newspaper, and later the The Laney (College) Tower. He earned a journalism degree in 1989 from San Francisco State University.
Treadway’s career with the East Bay Times ended in 2018. He then worked for Oakland’s Bay City News wire service and the online publication Piedmont Exedra and regularly submitted freelance articles until his health forced him into retirement this past June. A week after he retired, he went back to work on what would be his last news story, about Sean Bennett, an El Cerrito resident who competed in this year’s Tour de France bicycle race, published June 29.
Treadway and his wife met in July 1977 when he, then a student and a delivery driver for Leo’s Drugs, a four-store chain, ran into Diana, who was interning at Leo’s Summit Pharmacy in Oakland on her way to becoming a licensed pharmacist. They married in August 1985 and settled in Diana’s childhood home in El Cerrito.
Chris and Diana’s lives were devastated by the tragic death in May 2012 of their son and only child, Henry, a sophomore at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. A bench was erected in Henry’s memory at Cerrito Vista Park in El Cerrito.
Chris Treadway’s survivors include his wife; father-in-law, Robert Dapiran, of Vallejo; sister, Susanna Baker, of Garland, Texas; brother, Patrick Treadway, of Spokane, Washington; three nieces; two grand-nephews; an aunt; and numerous cousins.
Treadway’s remains were cremated Nov. 19 at Sunset View Cemetery in El Cerrito, with Father Michael Pham of St. Jerome Catholic Church presiding. A memorial service is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Dec. 12 at Rohan Hall in the St. Jerome church, 308 Carmel Ave. in El Cerrito.
“Chris’s ashes will be buried alongside Henry’s in the urn garden (at Sunset View Cemetery),” Diana Treadway said. “He will be next to Henry, with the entire Bay Area at their feet.”