Margaret Grade, a California neuropsychologist who made a sharp career change by opening a cozy, eclectic inn near the Point Reyes National Seashore, which was known for catering to farmers and fishermen with the same attention it gave to the movie stars and writers who lived there sought refuge, died February 28 in San Francisco. She was 72.

Ms. Grade was injured in a car accident in Marin County on January 11. She spent several weeks in a hospital before dying there from complications related to her injuries, said her brother Matthew Grade, a doctor.

The introverted Mrs. Grade recognized that she was a most unlikely innkeeper.

“If they put me up front, it would be bad for business,” she said in a 2003 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. She also admitted that when she opened her inn, Manka’s Inverness Lodge, she didn’t have the first idea about running an establishment. “I didn’t know the term ‘working capital,’ and as a result, I didn’t have any,” she said.

Yet Manka’s, a century-old former hunting lodge hidden in the woods two hours northwest of San Francisco in Inverness, California, was a trailblazer in hyper-local dining, a haven for chefs and celebrities, and a darling of the national media.

Mrs. Grade (pronounced GRAH-dee) was more than an innkeeper. She had a preternatural ability to anticipate guests’ wishes and sometimes had unusual ways of fulfilling them.

“She’s not someone I would call warm, but you always felt the touch of her hand in every room,” actor Frances McDormand, who spent holidays there with her family for years, says by phone. “She had an old-fashioned understanding of what true luxury is. Part of her real gift was creating a fantasy that you had just fallen into. It was witchcraft.”

Margaret Major Grade, the fourth of eleven children, was born on December 9, 1951 in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. Her mother, Shirley Agnes (Bothwick) Grade, worked for a while as a journalist and became famous in international knitting circles. Her father, John Oscar Grade, was a popular general practitioner who hunted, fished and planted wonderful gardens.

Mrs. Grade, called Peg by her family, inherited his love of fast cars and food.

“He taught me by example that eating well, and the prelude to it, is part of life lived to the full,” she said in 2003.

Like many of her siblings, Ms. Grade chose to study medicine, first attending nursing school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then attending the California School of Professional Psychology at Berkeley (now part of Alliant International University), where she graduated with a doctorate in psychology. Her dissertation, published in 1984, was about boredom.

She built a practice with lupus patients and conducted clinical brain research at the University of California, San Francisco. In the mid-1980s, she joined the San Francisco AIDS Advisory Board and began conducting global AIDS-related research.

Mrs. Grade was looking for a second home in 1989 when she discovered the inn, which was named after its longtime owner, Manka Prokupek. She teamed up with her brother Thomas to buy it, and their younger brother Benjamin, a chef, took over the kitchen.

Mrs. Grade’s sister Johanna Perkins helped her transform the inn’s four rooms and ground-floor restaurant into a quirky arts and crafts gem with an aesthetic that favored enormous floral arrangements, frayed tree branches and a cheerful use of taxidermy: deer hooves serving as clothes hooks, a squirrel that greeted guests at the reception hangs a framed tarantula in a bathroom.

After her brother Ben returned to the Midwest in 1996, Ms. Grade visited cookbook author Marion Cunningham, who served for years as consigliere to a generation of Northern California chefs and food writers to ask whether she should dedicate her life to cooking. Ms Cunningham said she had to read the work of food writers Richard Olney, Jane Grigson and MFK Fisher before making her decision.

Mrs. Grade never looked back, but running both the kitchen and the inn was a huge challenge. In 1998, she hired Northern Californian chef Daniel DeLong. Together they raised the kitchen, and they soon became romantically involved. The two never married, but became parents of twins in 2008.

With only food that Mrs. Grade described as “within reach,” the couple built dishes from chanterelles that local children gathered in the forest, seafood from the surrounding waters hours before it was served, and notable local produce such as bread from the star baker. Chad Robertson and cheese from Cowgirl Creamery.

Descriptions on her daily menus were poetic. “Local king salmon on a throne of Bolinas beans, defended by a close cousin,” said one. “Another sole rescued from the surrounding seas,” said another.

Mrs. McDormand recalled a dish called something like “a little raft of local sea urchin floating in a bay with creamy corn chowder,” which her son devoured when he was ten, endearing him to the infamously prickly Mrs. Grade.

Ms. Grade spoke in a voice that seemed only slightly louder than a whisper, and she talked privately about her personal life, which appealed to celebrities; they knew she would respect their privacy as well. Robert Redford shared the dining room with a local child who was celebrating a birthday. Sean Penn made chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. The chef Thomas Keller came for his birthday dinner.

But the real stars were the people who brought the raw produce to the back door.

“If a duck farmer showed up and sold us sausage, it was like having King Charles in our establishment,” Luc Kamerlandwho cooked at Manka for seven years, told the newspaper The Point Reyes Light.

Mrs. Grade did indeed have Charles in her establishment. In 2005, while still a prince, he and his wife Camilla traveled to the United States in part to fuel his interest in organic farming. He visited restaurateur Alice Waters at her Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley and then went to Manka’s.

“She made the most beautiful lunch in his honor,” Ms. Waters, who attended the meal and whose Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, was a model for Ms. Grade, said in an interview. “When I looked at the menu I thought, ‘Oh my God, is he going to like this?'”

He did, including a dish that Mrs. Grade called “duck fit for a prince.”

In addition to her brother Matthew, Mrs. Grade is survived by her children, Coco and Django Grade-DeLong, and six other siblings, Johanna Perkins, Mary Katherine Grade Reynolds and Benjamin, Andrew, Charles and Jean Therese Grade. She lived in Inverness.

Early on December 27, 2006, the inn, made of redwood, burned down after an oak tree fell and severed a propane line during a storm. Chef Elizabeth Falkner and actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal were sleeping upstairs. Mr Gyllenhaal joined the rush to save what he could from the burning building.

Zoning laws kept Mrs. Grade from rebuilding. She and Mr. DeLong continued to operate cabins in the area and purchased other properties, including Olema, a historic inn with a restaurant they called Sir and Star, which opened for great reviews in 2013. But the couple never recaptured Manka’s magic, and Olema has since closed.

“Her basic modus operandi was to be willing to let laws and rigid structures disappear,” said her brother Matthew.

That was reflected once when Mrs. Grade tried to add high ceilings to a room she was remodeling. The county zoning administrator insisted they could only be 8 feet tall, Jim Emmott, who worked on her construction projects, told The Light. She pushed back.

“I don’t know if you realize it, but I’m in the fantasy world,” he remembered her telling the manager. “I wonder how you would plan for me to fit a fantasy under an eight-foot ceiling. Does Disney World have an 8-foot ceiling?”

Despite the clear human and environmental toll of global warming, countries are taking only “baby steps” to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, a senior United Nations official said, summarizing a new UN report on the pledges that governments have done so far.

The UN findings, published Tuesday, are the latest in a number of assessments that paint a bleak picture of countries not doing nearly enough to keep global warming within relatively safe levels. “Today’s report shows that governments are taking baby steps together to avert the climate crisis,” said Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN Climate Change Agency. “And it shows why governments must take bold steps forward.”

Notably, a separate study from Saudi Arabia found that the country could face an “existential crisis” – threatening food and water supplies, along with the health of religious pilgrims during the Hajj – if global average temperatures increasing by 3 degrees Celsius, or 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to pre-industrial times. That’s roughly the level of warming expected if every country meets its climate goals.

Saudi Arabia is, of course, one of the largest oil producers in the world, and it is the burning of oil and other fossil fuels that is warming the planet by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“At this critical juncture,” the October report said, “Saudi Arabia faces a momentous choice: adapt and innovate in the face of climate adversity, or suffer the dire and potentially irrevocable consequences of inaction.” The A 133-page study was written by researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center.

These kinds of findings are likely to be at the center of the debate later this month when tens of thousands of people, including world leaders, gather in Dubai for the UN’s annual global climate negotiations. The future of fossil fuels is the main focal point of these talks, especially since the negotiations are taking place in the oil-rich Middle East.

The talks will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates, an oil state. For the first time, an oil industry executive will chair the UN climate negotiations.

According to the United Nations report released Tuesday, global emissions would increase by 9 percent between now and 2030, compared to 2010 levels, if every country does what it has promised to curb global warming , and that’s a big if.

That’s slightly better than where things were last year.

But the scientific consensus says it’s the opposite of what should happen. Global greenhouse gas emissions would need to fall by almost half from 2010 levels by 2030 if the world is to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2011, compared to the start of the industrial age – an ambitious threshold that seems increasingly unreachable.

“The world is failing to get a handle on the climate crisis,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday. The UN report, which focuses on diplomacy, does not indicate which countries are doing what, nor does it point the finger at laggards or obstructionists.

Currently, the average temperature on Earth is about 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than it was 150 years ago, before the Industrial Revolution. If countries meet their current climate pledges, the average global temperature is expected to rise by up to 2.8 degrees.

By one metric, the world is on track to meet its short-term emissions reduction target, and that’s sales of electric passenger cars. This is according to another report, jointly published by several independent research groups.

That report also evaluated 41 other indicators, including moving away from fossil fuels in the electricity sector and making buildings more energy efficient. None of the others were on track to meet the target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. For example, the share of wind and solar energy for electricity production is growing, but not fast enough.

And some indicators are moving in completely the wrong direction, the report warned. For example, government subsidies for fossil fuels grew last year, driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the skyrocketing costs of oil and gas.

Among the winners of that price increase were the world’s oil giants, including American oil giants and Middle Eastern petrostates such as Saudi Arabia.

Good morning. It’s Monday. Today two education-related topics. We meet an up-and-coming high school student whose focus is on saving for college. And we’ll look at what the affirmative action decision could mean for students who don’t attend schools with race-conscious admissions policies.

The question for Caileigh Boyce was: how much is in your savings account?

“Something like, $5,000,” said Caileigh, who just graduated fifth grade at Public School 112Q in Long Island City, Queens, and will be entering high school in the fall.

“I wish,” said her mother, Celeste Lawton, standing behind her and rolling her eyes. “Six hundred and fifty-two dollars.”

Is that enough to pay for college? “Maybe not, like already,” Caileigh told me last week, before raising another $118, for a total of $770. “But it’s a start.”

And that’s the point.

Caileigh is one of nearly 3,300 rising sixth graders who got their own savings account for the 2017-2018 academic year, when Caileigh started preschool. Collectively, they have since invested $1.26 million for college in NYC Scholarship Accounts.

That works out to just under $400 per child on average, though one child in the program put down $1,747 — still maybe not enough to pay for tuition, but there’s time. The non-profit organization that administers the program NYC Kids RISEprojects that the average preschooler’s bill could easily be worth $3,000 by the time he or she graduates from high school.

Lawton didn’t know about the program until a teacher at the school told her and her daughter about it, Lawton told me last week. “I did my own research and found out that you don’t really have to do anything,” Lawton said. “The community organizations — nonprofits — give the money to the kids and it goes straight into their accounts.”

NYC Kids RISE, which runs the Save for College program in partnership with the Department of Education, says research points to other benefits. Even a small college bill seems to increase a student’s chances of getting an education after high school. One study concluded that a low- and middle-income child with less than $500 in a college savings account is more than three times more likely to enroll in university and four times more likely to graduate than a child without an account.

Fifth graders’ accounts were automatically opened with $100 from the Gray Foundation, founded by Jon Gray, the president and chief operating officer of the private equity giant Blackstone, and his wife, Mindy Gray. Lawton was surprised by how easy the process was. “First name, last name,” she said. “It grows as she grows.”

The program expanded to nearly every preschooler in a public school in the city, including charter schools, in the 2021-2022 school year — more than 75,000 children in total. (The money in their accounts came from the city, $100 for each preschooler; NYC Kids RISE put it into each child’s account. The money is invested in the New York 529 Direct Plan, named for the section of the Internal Revenue Code that describes the tax benefits of college savings accounts.)

As Caileigh learned, account setup paves the way for community groups and businesses to funnel money to students. This means that “the message of expectation, the message of what is possible, is reinforced from several directions,” says Debra-Ellen Glickstein, executive director of NYC Kids RISE.

Some 19 “community grants” have been paid into children’s accounts by businesses in Queens, as well as religious organizations and community groups. Caileigh received seven, including $126.26 from one and $48.89 from the other.

And, like every child in the program in her school district, she received $18.86 from the 2019 Concert for College, a standing room-only gospel performance during Black History Month that sent the money from an auditorium of $20 per seat to the school bill. of the children.

“There was a lot of work to get to that amount,” Caileigh said, and Lawton said she had encouraged friends to send graduation gifts to Caileigh’s account. “Everyone wants to give money,” Lawton said, “but I’m giving money to the college bill because college is going to be expensive.”

Lawton said the bill amounted to “a promise for the future”.

“It gives me peace,” she says. “The community says we want you to go to school. It’s money that you can use for college or for vocational school or nursing school.

Weather

Expect showers and thunderstorms from the afternoon through the evening, with a maximum of nearly 90 during the day.

ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING

Effective today. Suspended tomorrow (Independence Day).

As it turns out, race-conscious admissions helped only a fraction of black and Hispanic college students. Fewer than 200 universities are believed to have affirmative action admissions policies and to award no more than 15,000 degrees per year to students who would not have enrolled without affirmative action — 2 percent of all black, Hispanic, and Native American students in four-year colleges. according to a rough estimate by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University.

That leaves much more for whom those schools are not an option academically or financially – students who encounter hurdles in paying for or completing college.

As my colleagues Sarah Mervosh and Troy Closson have explained, many of those students go straight to work after high school or go to less selective universities that don’t consider race and ethnicity for admission. At least a third of all undergraduate students — including half of Hispanic students — attend community colleges, which typically allow open enrollment. Some drop out and put their education on hold to continue working, sometimes for more than a semester or academic year.

“Somewhere it went from ‘I want to go to school’ to ‘I just want to survive,'” says Dolly Ramos, who recently completed her nursing degree. To get there, she accumulated college credits from several colleges in upstate New York. Sometimes she lived in a youth shelter and slept on the floor of a professor’s room.

METROPOLITAN Diary

Lonely performance

Dear Diary:

It was late one night in the seventies. I was taking the PATH train home to Hoboken from Christopher Street after a rehearsal when I noticed a series of cameras pointed at the turnstiles.

What a boring job it must be to stare at them all night, I thought.

There was no one else waiting on the platform, so I decided on a whim to do a silly, Shirley Temple-esque tap dance to amuse whoever was watching the cameras. I faked up and down the stairs a few times and ended up with a big finish. Ta-da!

As I bowed, I was startled to hear a series of slow claps somewhere in the dark. Looking around, I saw that a young man had stepped out from behind one of the columns at the far end of the platform and was applauding.

I was embarrassed, but smiled playfully.

“Thanks,” I yelled.

Some time after that, one night I was standing in a long line outside an Upper East Side movie theater with some friends when a man behind me tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned around.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but did you do a tap dance at the Christopher Street PATH station a few years ago?”

I was absolutely stunned.

“Oh no,” I said. “Did you watch the monitors that night?”

“No,” he said. “I was the man at the end of the platform. I clapped for you.’

— Francesca Rizzo

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.

I’m taking the rest of the week off, and a few days next week as well. Until then, I read New York Today, as do you, as several of my Metro colleagues keep us posted. — JB

PS Here’s today’s Mini crossword And Game match. You can find all our puzzles here.

Ashley Shannon Wu and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

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