Dorothea Walker; S.F. Writer, Arbiter of Taste

Dorothea Walker, 93, San Francisco taste maven who was a longtime contributing editor for Vogue and House & Garden magazines. Walker was a third-generation Californian whose grandfather, Stephen Uren, emigrated from Cornwall, England, for the Gold Rush and made a fortune from his inventions and patents of machinery for the railroads. She was born in San Francisco in 1906. As a Navy wife in Honolulu in the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, she stumbled into her first career when she discovered how little her fellow Navy wives knew about what went on at the huge naval base. She talked the base commander into letting her host a weekly radio program on base life. After she was evacuated to San Francisco, she reported on the aftermath of the Japanese invasion on national radio, which led to a radio show. Her chance meeting with Vogue editor Jessica Daves in the late 1940s led to an assignment for a story about Bay Area movers and shakers. The piece was so direct--she compared a prominent literary critic to a sick mouse and a composer to a baked potato--that she “almost had to leave town.” But the magazine loved it. For the next five decades Walker wrote features on fashion and living as the West Coast editor of Conde Nast, which publishes Vogue and House & Garden. She was credited with introducing the casual, airy “California look,” exemplified by designer Michael Taylor, to a national audience. On Tuesday at St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco.