‘Honey, you got one of me’

RUTH DEWSON, the longtime proprietor of Mrs. Dewson’s Hats and the self-proclaimed Mayor of Fillmore Street, helped start the Fillmore Jazz Festival in 1984.

She recalls approaching promoter Terry Pimsleur, who had started the Union Street Festival, about creating a similar street fair on upper Fillmore, where new businesses were opening and trying to improve the struggling commercial strip. But she was rebuffed, told there weren’t enough people or merchants on Fillmore to make a street fair successful.

“I told her, ‘Honey, you got one of me, that’s enough,” Dewson recalls. “I like to tackle things that people say we can’t do.”

So “Jazz and All that Art on Fillmore” was launched on the Fourth of July weekend in 1984 and has grown through the years in scale and ambition, eventually being renamed the Fillmore Jazz Festival. 

“Right from the beginning it was a success,” Dewson says. 

She has been battling health problems and now lives in an assisted living facility, but she’s planning to be back in her store at 2050 Fillmore Street for this year’s festival.

“I’m gonna have a chair outside on the street,” she says. “And all the people that like me and love me and want to see me, I’m gonna be sitting outside.”