The evening will include refreshments, dancing, door prizes, a raffle and the chance to bid on Silent Auction items, including firehouse meals, cooked and served by Oakland firefighters, and a luxury box at an Oakland A's game. The raffle drawing grand prize is a one-week getaway for two at Pueblo Bonito in Cabo San Lucas Mexico (including airfare).

All proceeds go to Random Acts -- now in its fourth year -- founded by a group Oakland firefighters who believed they could make a positive difference in ways beyond their job-related emergency response work.

The organization's board is made up of department members of various ranks, all serving on a volunteer basis. Their mission statement is to "create a positive difference in the lives of individuals through random acts of kindness."

The Community Center where the gala will take place is a multipurpose building (completed in 1978), and part of a 61/2-acre complex on Lincoln Avenue, dedicated to the Greek Orthodox Church Cathedral of the Ascension. Both the cathedral and its immediate neighbor further up the street -- the Church of Latter-day Saints -- were erected in the early 1960s. As a result of these ambitious construction projects, prominently visible from around the Bay Area, the site has earned the nickname "Temple Hill."

According to Oakland Library History Room files, the Mormons were the first to acquire acreage in the hills where Lincoln Avenue (originally a pioneer-era wagon road) meets the Warren Freeway (Highway 13). This happened shortly after the end of World War II. Mormons were among the earliest settlers in Alameda County, files say, staking claims near present-day Fremont, and pursuing logging in the redwood groves in the East Bay hills. Church member Thomas Eager is recorded as establishing a sawmill in Redwood Canyon in 1854, becoming a leading supplier of the lumber that built Oakland and San Francisco.

History author Beth Bagwell recounts how churches affiliated with immigrant arrivals were active as social and cultural centers from Oakland's earliest period. When the Gold Rush days were long past, the churches continued to nurture the needs of the community, especially immigrant groups such as Italians, Portuguese, Germans, Mexicans and Greeks, says Bagwell. The first Greek Orthodox Church in Oakland opened for worship in 1920 on Brush near 10th Street. It served its continually growing congregation into the mid-1950s.

In 1958, after mounting a fund-raising campaign, members of the Greek church acquired the hillside property adjacent to where the Latter-day Saints were building their complex. Also under construction nearby during this time, say the files, was another religious affiliated complex, the new campus of the College of Holy Names (formerly located since the 1860s next to Lake Merritt).

The new million-dollar Greek Orthodox church, in the so-called Modern Byzantine style with its 65-foot-tall ribbed copper dome and cruciform plan (designed by San Francisco architect Robert Olwell), received raves and accolades throughout the world when it opened in December 1960. It was patterned, Cultural Heritage Survey files say, after Haghia Sophia in Istanbul. Another notable feature of the structure is the gold anodized aluminum sheathing of the dome's interior ceiling and the striking portraits of Christ and the Apostles, glimmering overhead.

For more information on the Firefighters' Ball, call (510) 465-8422 or log on to www.ofrandomacts.org. Tickets are $75 per person.

For information on the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension, call 531-3400, or visit on the Web www.ascensioncathedral.org.

The Oakland Tribune: Cityside
Leanne McLaughlin, Managing Editor
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(510) 208-6477 Fax##
lmclaughlin@angnewspapers.com Email

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