If Camille Gavin’s life story were a stage production, it would start with a happy childhood clouded by tragedy, build to a feel-good twist of reinvention before intermission and climax with a third act of triumph that would bring the audience to its feet.
When the longtime Californian columnist, prolific author of several books of local history — and my mentor — died Oct. 12, she had long ago become a beloved champion for theater, visual art, music and books in a region that has not been effusive in its support for the arts. But Camille always showed up, at the play, the museum opening, the lecture — sometimes all by herself — using her column to gently nudge the rest of us to open our minds and souls to the culture all around us.
And when her health began to decline, decades of opening nights were not lost on Camille. She knew she wanted her own story to finish big.
“It was her goal to live to 90,” said Christy Gavin, Camille’s daughter. “We had a birthday party for her in July. I asked her if there was anything here on earth that was holding her here, and she said no. She told me more than once that she lived a very good life.”
Camille Lois Beaty Gavin was born on July 16, 1932, in Bakersfield and died in the same city 90 years later. The life she led — or more precisely, the lives she led — were marked by so many new beginnings and second acts that it is hard to keep track.
“I’ve had a very convoluted life,” she said in 2011. “You’re really taking on a lot when you ask me to give my bio.”
Born at 2615 Eye St., she and her family moved to the historic Oleander neighborhood when she was a child, and she attended Franklin and William Penn elementary schools, Emerson Junior High and Bakersfield High School.
In 1944, at age 12, her idyllic childhood ended with the sudden death of her father, Pete, on his 44th birthday. Her mother, also named Camille, did the best she could to raise her Camille and her older sister, Suzanne, alone, but it would be just a few short years before her baby would leave at age 18 to marry Timothy Gavin, on the day the Korean War started, perhaps an omen for the couple’s troubled marriage.
“I left the day after Christmas in 1974 with my typewriter and my hair dryer,” Camille told me in 2011 for a profile of her that I wrote in The Californian.
The courageous decision as a mother of three to start over with nothing was practically unheard of at the time, her daughter said.
“Every time she reinvented herself, she took risks, and I really admire that.”
Camille earned her bachelor’s degree in social science at age 36 and eventually completed her master’s degree in education at Cal State Bakersfield.
After working as a librarian for five years, Camille began her long association with The Californian, when she was hired in 1975 as a features writer for what was then called the Scene section, a forerunner of today’s Eye Street.
Of the 30 to 35 employees who made up the news staff back then, only five, including Camille, were women. There wasn’t even a women’s bathroom on the third floor, where the newsroom was located, so Camille started a petition that all the men signed, resulting in equal access — at least in matters of plumbing.
“It really wasn’t quite as bad as that,” Camille said in 2011. “But the assistant city editor was aghast because I asked him for a pass key because I was covering the symphony. He said, ‘You can’t stay out that late.’ He didn’t say it was because you’re a woman, but that’s what it was.”
In 1976, she and several newspaper colleagues founded the Arts Council of Kern, an advocacy and education group that still operates today.
She left The Californian in 1988 to become director of public affairs at KGET-TV and moved to San Diego the following year to be near her grandchildren. She returned to Bakersfield in 2001 and resumed her weekly arts column at The Californian, where she kept her finger on the city’s sometimes faint cultural pulse.
“I realized, at least to me, The Californian needed someone to talk about the arts,” she said in 2011. “I really felt the arts were being neglected.”
When I assumed the role of Eye Street editor in 2005, the theater community immediately let me have it for — in the view of some — not assigning enough coverage of local stages. I asked Camille what she thought:
“Oh, Jennifer, you’ll never make theater people happy.”
Maybe not, but Camille understood something essential about the role of the media in covering the arts in a city our size.
“Her ego wasn’t involved, No. 1, and she didn’t approach local theater like it was Broadway theater,” Christy Gavin said. “She was gentle in her reviews, but she pointed out things she thought would be helpful in terms of improvement. It was never about her.”
For the last 15 years of her life, Camille was active at Rosewood Senior Living, serving on the Resident Council, and she never stopped writing. Vignettes from her childhood were a favorite topic of the published author, whose books include “Kern’s Movers & Shakers,” “How Roadrunner Got His Red Spots and Other Yokuts Myths,” “Biddy Mason: A Place of Her Own” and “Dear Cora : A Personal History of Early Bakersfield.”
In her last column for The Californian, dated Dec. 3, 2014, Camille modestly made her final goodbye the last of three items, below a preview of “Winter Wonderettes” at Stars Theater Restaurant and a preview of a wildlife photography exhibit.
“One of my greatest rewards is seeing how interest in the arts has grown in Bakersfield, partly because the audience has become more sophisticated,” she wrote. “Especially in music and theater, and to some extent in visual art, the offerings have become more innovative and the talent more professional.”
And for that, Camille Gavin could have taken a bow, if her ego had permitted it (but it didn’t). In honor of her wishes, there will be no funeral services.
Camille is survived by her children, Christy, Jeanine, Daniel (Cindi), several grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Christy Gavin, who retired from CSUB after a 40-year career as a librarian, said that in lieu of flowers, her mother would have wanted friends to send gifts to the university’s Walter W. Stiern Library, which Camille supported for years.
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