After suffering from the effects of congestive heart failure for several months, longtime progressive and environmental activist Jean Newman “Jeanie” Bernstein died at her Laguna Beach home surrounded by her children and caregiver Angie on Oct. 22.
She was 88.
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According to a memorial page
posted by her children, Newman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and moved
as a young girl with her family to Capitola, where her world view was
shaped by the extreme poverty of her schoolmates and
their families in the rural community of the Great
Depression.
She again moved with her family in 1939 to Los Angeles. She graduated from
Beverly Hills High, served as editor of the campus newspaper at UCLA and
met her future husband, Sanford (Sandy) Bernstein. They married in a
small ceremony in the UCLA chapel, “boycotted by her parents because of
their disapproval of her choice of an impoverished radical as a husband,” according to the memorial page.
Jean dropped out of UCLA to work at Lockheed during WWII. She and her
husband were active in liberal causes as they raised a family.
She worked for the Hollywood Press Times, and in public relations for
Cedars Sinai Hospital. She later divorced, moved to Laguna Beach and raised her children there alone and later with partner Peter Carr.
Over her lifetime, she protested against the Vietnam War, nuclear
weapons and the nuclear power generating station at San Onofre, among
many progressive causes. She was a founding member of the Alliance for
Survival, and she famously chained herself to a bulldozer preparing to carve a
toll road through Laguna Canyon.
Newman is survived by her son Marc, daughters Jolie, Leyna and Shari
and four grandchildren, one of whom said of her, “She's just crazy about
peace.”
Her
family says her ashes will be scattered in the ocean, the high Sierras and the desert
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