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Advocate For Low-Income Housing Projects

Gail-Marie Shearer ’47

March 6, 2024, in Berkeley, California.

A daughter of the Great Depression who became an advocate for low-income housing projects, Gail was raised in Hawley, Minnesota. Her mother, Mildred Bergheim, was a schoolteacher before she had children, and her father, Martin Bergheim, was a country doctor who died when Gail was 12.

Gail and her younger sister Jeanne-Marie lived with their grandparents while their mother trained as a nurse in Minneapolis. These upheavals happened during the Depression, which had a profound effect on Gail. Her parents lost most of their savings when the Bank of Hawley failed, and later in life, Gail described Franklin Roosevelt as her hero for making sure that her bank accounts were FDIC–insured.

Gail’s mother eventually found work in Portland, Oregon, and Gail earned her bachelor of arts in sociology at Reed. She subsequently earned a master of sciences in social work from Bryn Mawr College and married James Welles Shearer, with whom she had two sons, James and Peter.

In 1957, the family moved to Livermore, California, where James worked as a physicist at what is now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Gail and James ultimately settled on a former chicken ranch in South Livermore, where Gail helped to design an addition to the small farmhouse on the property. While Gail assumed a traditional homemaker role during the 1960s, she found time to volunteer as a social worker, with particular interest in low-income housing projects like the Leahy Square project.

After James was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1983, Gail helped care for him until his death in 1984. The next year, she started renting rooms in her house to LLNL visitors, running a small bed-and-breakfast business for 10 years. In 1987, she married another physicist, John Fletcher, who worked at LLNL until his retirement.

Gail had a small vineyard of Syrah grapes installed on her rural property in the southern Livermore “wine country” in 2000. She named it Tazetta Vineyard, after the flowers she enjoyed planting around the yard, and was active in the local grape-growers’ association and the Spinning Wheel Antique Club.

Among other progressive charitable causes, Gail supported the performing arts, donating to the Livermore Valley Opera and Livermore-Amador Symphony, a community orchestra her first husband helped form. And in 2004, she and John also successfully advocated for correcting the mistakes on a mosaic in front of the Livermore Public Library, which was rife with misspellings such as “Eistein,” “Shakespere,” and “Van Gough.”

Gail died at age 98 at the Silverado Memory Care Home. She was predeceased by her second husband, John Fletcher, and is survived by her sons, James Bergheim Shearer and Peter Marston Shearer.

Appeared in Reed magazine: Winter 2024

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