Source of this article - Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2008.
By Elaine Woo 'AN AMAZING KNOWLEDGE OF THE ENVIRONMENT': Jill Swift was a prime force behind creation of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, the world's largest urban national park. She built awareness through hikes that brought people into the mountains. |
Jill Swift, a former teacher and hiking enthusiast whose love of
the outdoors led her to play a central role in the creation of a national park
in the Santa Monica Mountains, died Monday at her home in Tarzana. She was
79.
The cause was multiple myeloma, which she battled for 12 years, said
her sister, Wendy Averill of Los Angeles.
Swift was one of a trio of
women who were widely acknowledged as the prime force behind the Santa Monica
Mountains National Recreation Area. Along with Westside activists Sue Nelson and
Margot Feuer, Swift helped lead the effort that won federal approval in 1978 of
what is now the world's largest urban national park.
Though Nelson and
Feuer focused more on lobbying public officials, Swift devoted herself to
building grass-roots awareness. She did it one step at a time, literally, by
organizing hikes that brought people in direct contact with the area's beaches,
trails, flora and fauna. She led thousands of people into the mountains, most
dramatically in 1971 with a march on Mulholland Drive that attracted 5,000
participants.
"Jill was absolutely crucial in getting the public informed
that there was something worth saving in the Santa Monica Mountains. I would say
she was the key person," said Cecile Rosenthal, former conservation chair for
the Los Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club. "Her focus was to get people out to
see what was in the mountains and get them interested in it. She was very
effective in that."
Born in Oak Park, Ill., in 1928, Swift moved to
Altadena in 1946. In 1952 she graduated from Stanford University and became a
teacher in Montebello.
A petite woman with vibrant red hair and blue
eyes, Swift began hiking with her children in the late 1960s. Although she lived
in the Tarzana hills, she did most of her hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains
because there was "practically no public land in the Santa Monica Mountains,"
said Ron Webster, a Sierra Club trail builder who met Swift more than 30 years
ago. "In our backyard was this beautiful coastal range, but no one ever went
there. She felt that was a resource that really needed protecting and should be
brought into public ownership."
She began by offering one hike a month,
but they became so popular -- drawing 50 to 100 or more participants each time
-- that she began to give them weekly. "We said we'll lead 10,000 people into
the mountains and maybe 1,000 will work to preserve them," recalled Webster, who
helped lead the hikes.
Swift proved to be an innate naturalist who could
identify all the wildflowers and native plants, from nicotiana and purple
filaree to sticky monkey flower and deadly nightshade.
"She had an
amazing knowledge of the environment, down to the smallest details," said Woody
Smeck, superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area,
who went on later hikes with Swift. "You couldn't help but be hooked in and feel
the same passion she did."
When the city of Los Angeles proposed widening
Mulholland from a scenic two-lane road to a four-lane thoroughfare through the
mountains, she knew it would open the way for massive development. The
self-described housewife and Girl Scout troop mother mounted the Mulholland
march "when my kids dared me to stop complaining about the paving of Mulholland
Drive and do something about it," she recalled in a 1997 interview with the
Daily News.
Some Sierra Club members did not think the club should
discourage development and opposed the march, but it turned out to be a
staggering success.
"I don't think the Sierra Club had engaged in
anything that looked like a public demonstration until that campaign," said Judy
Anderson, a former chairman of the Los Angeles chapter. "People in the club were
impressed with the numbers of the general public who showed up."
Swift's
hikes and the Mulholland march "pulled in people who had only previously hiked
and turned them into leaders of hikes involved in saving the Santa Monicas,"
Anderson added.
After the march, Swift's committee became an official
Sierra Club task force, which she co-chaired with Feuer, a Malibu resident who
later became a member of the California Coastal Commission.
Along with
Nelson, who was a leader of Friends of the Santa Monica Mountains, they pushed
federal officials to grant Los Angeles a national park. The authorizing
legislation was signed by President Carter on Nov. 10, 1978.
Swift
remained a vigorous advocate for the Santa Monica Mountains over the decades.
She led the charge against a plan to extend Reseda Boulevard from the San
Fernando Valley to the coast. She also became a champion of Tarzana's Caballero
Canyon and, with her late husband, Mel, formed a nonprofit group to promote and
defend it.
She hiked all over the world, including Tibet. She also
continued to lead hikes through her beloved Santa Monicas. One of the most
popular was the Valley-to-the-Sea hike, a trek of 10 to 15 miles that began at
the end of Reseda Boulevard and ended at Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific
Palisades. To make it even more of an adventure, she encouraged participants to
use public transit to go home after the hike. Most of the hikers did.
She
entertained them with stories about the trails, including one particularly
rugged footpath chiseled out of a steep slope by two men as therapy when their
marriages were breaking up. She pointed out the sycamores, sage and vistas that
made urban life seem so far away.
Sometimes she slipped in a serious
note, such as on one Valley-to-the-Sea hike in 1989, when she pointed to a ridge
that was to be leveled for a housing development.
"I want you to look at
that ridge," she said, "and remember. When the bulldozers come, please don't
call me and say, 'Why didn't you do something?' "
Swift is survived by
three daughters, two grandchildren, a brother and three sisters. A memorial walk
will be held at 2 p.m. June 22, beginning at the trail head to Caballero Canyon,
on Reseda Boulevard across from Braemar Country Club in Tarzana.