The Fearless Force

As those who knew Patty Berg best take time to reflect on her life and legacy in the wake of her Nov. 19 death at the age of 82, they call her many things.

The term “trailblazer” comes up repeatedly, as they note Berg’s role as Humboldt County’s first sex-ed instructor, the founding executive director of the Area 1 Agency on Aging, her repeatedly introducing and championing California’s first assisted suicide bill and her co-founding the Redwood Coast Jazz Festival.

Connie Stewart, who served as Berg’s local field rep when she represented the North Coast in the California state Assembly, recalls that a local paper dubbed her the “energizer bunny” for her seemingly tireless work ethic and long hours, noting that when they worked together, she’d often get calls at 6 a.m. “just to check in.” But Stewart said she preferred the nickname “honey badger,” because Berg was “fearless.”

They call her a “feminist,” noting her work supporting Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in its infancy, helping launch a local chapter of the National Organization of Women, championing women’s issues in the Legislature, lifting up fellow female lawmakers, hosting a monthly “girls night” for all members of the Legislature’s women’s caucus she chaired — Republicans and Democrats alike — and her creating a training and mentorship program for new female legislators.

They call her a “force,” marveling at how someone so small in stature and unflinchingly kind could be so driven and effective, seemingly at whatever she set her mind to, which was almost always helping those she could.

But almost universally, those who spent enough time with her — whether because their paths crossed socially, they were on the same side of a community effort or they worked together — say Patty Berg was a true friend.

“She became part of my family,” says Liz Murguia, who met Berg after she moved to Eureka to run then Assemblymember Barry Keene’s office, while Berg was working at the county public health department. “She was here to help plan weddings and memorial services.”

Murguia, one of Berg’s best friends, chuckles at the memory of Berg helping plan her daughter’s wedding at the family home, including a sit-down dinner for 250 people.

“No stone was left unturned,” Murguia says. “There must have been 15 pages of planning notes with day-by-day checklists. She always called me Lizzy, and the wedding day schedule said, ‘At 2:01, Lizzy shall enter the church. The doors will be closed.'”

Murguia laughs, noting Berg attended the ceremony, clipboard in hand.

Asked where Berg’s drive and attention to detail came from, Murguia says it seems she always had them.

“Let’s just say she was given a lot of responsibility at a very young age to help raise her brother and sister,” she says. “She had the innate tools to do it, but she had to step up, and she did. And I think she just brought that with her. She worked and put her way through college. Everything she earned, she earned on her own.”

Born and raised in Seattle, Berg moved to Southern California in 1962 to attend California State University at Los Angeles, where she graduated with degrees in sociology and social work, before moving to New York City. There, in 1970, she met the man who would become the love of her life, Patrick Murphy. After what her obituary describes as a “whirlwind four-day romance,” Berg moved back to California, where Murphy was a practicing physician. It was Murphy’s work as a psychiatrist that brought them to Humboldt County in 1974 after his residency at Napa State Hospital.

Berg wasted little time making her presence felt in what would become her lifelong home. In 1975, she helped start the Humboldt Senior Resource Center before working with the Humboldt County Public Health Department to develop California’s first comprehensive K-12 family life and sex education curriculum for public schools. She also became the first person to teach sex education in the county at South Fork High School.

In 1980, Berg became the founding executive director of the Area 1 Agency on Aging, a Eureka-based nonprofit formed to bolster senior services on the North Coast, from nutrition programs to supporting families and caregivers to lobbying for changes in state and federal law. Over her tenure, the organization would grow from a staff of four to more than two dozen employees, offering dozens of services to seniors in Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

Murphy died in 1987, but Berg’s drive to do more for more people continued unabated.

When senior programs faced budget cuts in the late 1980s, Berg sought out a solution and worked with Bonnie Neely — then a newly elected Humboldt County supervisor, beginning what would become a 24-year run in office — to start what would become the Redwood Coast Music Festival to raise money for senior services.

“We co-chaired that event for the first 17 years and it’s still happening,” Neely says. “She was a remarkable person and best friend. Her efforts always made our community better.”

When Berg decided to retire from the Area 1 Agency on Aging in 1999, Murguia says Berg’s close friends were relieved.

“We all thought she always worked too hard,” Murguia says, noting that Berg had also — as expected — planned and saved meticulously for retirement, and seemed genuinely ready to pursue a new chapter of her life focused on her garden and less demanding obligations. “She thought that was what she wanted to do. And it wasn’t, of course.”

Within months, Berg had taken on a leadership role in an effort to combat an initiative that would have rezoned a section of the Eureka waterfront to allow construction of a large Wal-Mart store. She didn’t look back, then setting her sights on the state Assembly, taking office in 2002.

One of the first things Berg did was hire Stewart, Arcata’s former mayor who’d worked with the Northcoast Environmental Center, to be her Humboldt County field representative. Stewart notes that she didn’t have her driver’s license before accepting the job, rode the bus to work on her first day, underwent a driving crash course organized in part by Berg and got her license five days later. She was soon putting 20,000 miles a year on her car, many of them spent toting Berg around what was then the sprawling Second Assembly District, which stretched from the Oregon border into Sonoma County.

Stewart says Berg believed strongly in focusing on constituent services work and organized her staff accordingly, putting more feet on the ground from her payroll in her districts than in Sacramento. Laughing into the phone, Stewart recalls how she’d drive to pick up Berg in Ukiah or Laytonville — Berg having left a legislative session in Sacramento to meet with district staff there — and drive her back to Eureka.

“All the way back, it would be, ‘What constituents services have you done? Who have you talked to? What problems have you helped with?’ It would be three hours of nonstop talk about what was happening in the district.”

Working for Berg was demanding, Stewart says, but never demeaning.

You might get calls before the sun came up but “you were never going to get yelled at,” she says. “If there was a problem, it was, ‘Let’s help brainstorm. How can I help?'”

Berg served through a tumultuous period in the Legislature that saw a budget crisis and massive cuts, a recall election and action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger take over the governorship, but through it all Stewart says Berg always stayed focused on her district. She helped save Trinity Hospital in Weaverville, working with residents to create a hospital district to take ownership from the county and rallying support for a tax measure that Stewart says was one of the first times citizens of Trinity County voted to tax themselves. She also met relentlessly with constituents, taking out ads in the Trinity Journal to announce she’d be setting up shop at a coffee shop for five or six hours if anyone wanted to stop by and bend her ear. She’d testify before a county board of supervisors and close by telling the audience where she’d be afterward if anyone had an issue they wanted to discuss.

In Sacramento, meanwhile, Berg was taking on big issues, many with a sharp focus on aging.

Will Shuck was working as a bureau chief at the Stockton Record when he first met Berg at a job interview. He says he was mulling a career change and Berg had decided she needed a press secretary, having decided to introduce California’s first assisted suicide bill modeled after one in Oregon and knowing full well the controversy it would cause.

Shuck recalls sitting with Berg, noting that she chaired the Assembly Committee on Aging and Long-term Care and that she was now proposing death with dignity legislation, saying there seemed to be a conflict there. He says he told Berg that she had a messaging problem.

“She just said, ‘Well, that would be your problem, honey,'” Shuck says, laughing. “I kind of knew at that moment, this is someone I could work for.”

Shuck took the job and a short time later was promoted to Berg’s chief of staff, a position for which he says he was largely unqualified. “She turned me into a chief of staff because she thought she could,” he says.

In the ensuing years, Shuck says he was repeatedly awed by Berg — how she prepared, how hard she worked, how much she cared seemingly about everything, including her staff.

“She cared about the whole person, not just the employee,” Shuck says. “She was a very demanding, driven, goal-oriented, organized boss who always wanted to achieve more goals, to be more organized and more efficient. She expected a lot because she wanted to do a lot, but she also cared about you as a person and the other things in your life that weren’t just her, that weren’t just her objectives. I think she really saw people and thought, ‘I can probably offer something to benefit your life.’ And she would try.”

Susan Block worked as Berg’s scheduler in Sacramento and recalls talking to her after the state Supreme Court had struck down a law outlawing same-sex marriage in California. Block says she told Berg her brother was looking to marry his boyfriend of 20 years but hadn’t been able to find an officiant to put on the ceremony, having been turned away several times.

“She said, ‘I’m going to do it,'” Block recalls. “Then, she made all the arrangements. It was done on the balcony off the Assembly floor.”

William Nilva, 57, and Richard Saxton, 53, would soon become the first same-sex couple married in the state Capitol on June 17, 2008, a Tuesday, as Block recalls.

“She was everything,” Block says of Berg, talking about how she carried big legislation, paid attention to all the details, was always kind and impeccably dressed and instructed her to only schedule meetings in 15-minute blocks, saying, “If they can’t get to the point in 15 minutes, I’m not going to spend 30 or 45 waiting for them to find it.”

Shuck says he also came to marvel at Berg’s impact on other lawmakers, awed by how this woman representing a rural district and pushing legislation that was often politically unpopular, at least in some corners, held sway.

“It was the way other members reacted to her,” he says. “Her causes weren’t always the priorities for the caucuses, and they weren’t necessarily easy for Republicans, but she had earned absolute trust. You don’t see that much anymore.”

Former Humboldt County Health Officer Ann Lindsay came to know Berg during her time in the Assembly, as she’d regularly fly to Sacramento to testify before the Legislature and the two would often find themselves at the airport together waiting — sometimes for hours — to fly back to Humboldt after a Thursday hearing. Berg was a supportive legislator, Lindsay says, working on politically unpopular public health issues like needle exchange and elder care, but it wasn’t just that. It was the little things, like the way she’d send a hand-written thank you note every time Lindsay appeared to testify before one of her committees. Over the years, Lindsay says they became dear friends.

“Her intellect and her energy stand out, but she was just a good friend,” Lindsay says. “She really would do whatever you needed, really had a lot of empathy. That was it. And it was just fun to be with her. She liked to have fun.”

That’s something that’s hard to see from the outside, friends say, as Berg cared so deeply about and worked so hard for so many causes. But she also threw a great party, played a mean game of cards and genuinely enjoyed life.

Berg’s last years were difficult, as she suffered a series of strokes and struggled to stay in her home, which was laid out with her bedroom upstairs and steps throughout.

“She wanted to live at home and wanted to live alone and didn’t want caregivers there all the time,” Murguia says. “And mostly she was able, just through grit, I think, to do that.”

But about eight months before her death, Berg’s health took a sharp turn and she went into hospice, relying on an organization whose board she’d served on after her retirement from the Legislature in 2008. She received wonderful care, Murguia says, and “graduated” to living in Timber Ridge for a while, and then Frye’s Care Home. She had a steady stream of visitors — many from her “girlfriends group” of about a dozen accomplished women who’d come together as professionals over the age of 60 and maintained friendships for decades — and stayed invested in her causes, most notably Life Plan Humboldt, an effort spearheaded by Lindsay to build a new resident-led independent living community for elders in Humboldt County. (After joining the board in 2020, Lindsay says Berg was a fundraising force for the organization while also pushing it to include affordable housing in its plans, saying, “Access was always one of her issues.”)

Murguia says Berg’s health seemed to be improving and she was making plans to return home, saying she had her house cleaner over to Frye’s, giving them instructions and a to-do list. Then, her health took a sharp turn, and she was gone.

Talking to the Journal, Murguia — like almost everyone interviewed for this story — then draws the contrast between Berg’s small physical stature and her outsized spirit and impact.

“She was such a tiny little force,” she says. “But boy was she determined.”

Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal’s news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 321, or thad@northcoastjournal.com.

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