JENNIFER SELF: The Curtain Falls for Art | Entertainment

Camille didn’t lose decades of opening night when her health began to decline. She knew she wanted her story to end.

“Her goal is to live to be 90,” said Camille’s daughter, Christy Gavin. “We threw her a birthday party in July. I asked her if there was something in the world trapping her here and she said no. She told me more than once that she had a very good life.”

Camille Lois Beaty Gavin was born in Bakersfield on July 16, 1932, and died in the same city 90 years later. The life she lived—or, more precisely, the life she lived—was marked by so many new beginnings and second actions that it was difficult to trace.

“My life has been very tortuous,” she said in 2011. “You really took on a lot when you asked me for my resume.”

Born at 2615 Eye St. and moved to the historic Oleander community with her family as a child, she attended Franklin and William Penn Elementary School, Emerson Middle School and Bakersfield High School.

In 1944, when she was 12 years old, her idyllic childhood ended with the sudden death of her father, Pete, on his 44th birthday. Her mother, also named Camille, did her best to raise Camille and sister Suzanne on her own, but it was only a few short years before her child left at 18 and married Timothy Gavin. The outbreak of the Korean War may herald the couple’s troubled marriage.

“I left with my typewriter and hairdryer the day after Christmas 1974,” Camille told me in 2011, as I wrote her profile on The Californian.

As a mother of three, it was almost unheard of at the time to bravely decide to start from scratch, her daughter said.

“Every time she reinvents herself, she takes a risk, and I really admire that.”

Camille earned a bachelor’s degree in social sciences at age 36 and eventually completed a master’s degree in education at California State University Bakersfield.

After five years as a librarian, Camille began her longtime collaboration with the Californian when she was hired in 1975 as a feature writer for what was then called The Scenes Section, the precursor to today’s Eye Street.

Of the 30 to 35 employees who made up the news crew at the time, only five, including Camille, were women. There wasn’t even a women’s restroom on the third floor, where the newsroom was located, so Camille started a petition signed by all men to achieve equal access — at least when it comes to plumbing.

“It wasn’t really that bad,” Camille said in 2011, “but the assistant city editor freaked out because I asked him for the code while covering the symphony. He said, ‘You can’t stay so late. Didn’t say it was because you were a woman, but it was what it was.”

In 1976, she and several newspaper colleagues founded the Kern Arts Council, an advocacy and education group that still operates today.

She left The Californian in 1988 to become KGET-TV’s director of public affairs, and moved to San Diego the following year to be close to her grandchildren. She returned to Bakersfield in 2001 and resumed her weekly art column for The Californian, where she kept her eye on the city’s sometimes-tight cultural pulse.

“I realized that, at least for me, ‘California’ needed someone to talk about art,” she said in 2011. “I really felt like art was being ignored.”

When I took on the role of Eye Street editor in 2005, the theater community immediately let me have it—in some people’s eyes—not allocating enough local stage coverage. I asked Camille what she thought:

“Oh, Jennifer, you’ll never make the theater people happy.”

Maybe not, but Camille understands the important role the media plays in reporting art in a city of our size.

“Her ego wasn’t involved, and number one, she wasn’t as close to a local theater as a Broadway theater,” Christie Gavin said. “Her comments were mild, but she pointed out things she thought would help improve. It’s not about her.”

For the last 15 years of her life, Camille has been active in Rosewood Senior Living, serving on the Residents Council, and she has never stopped writing. Her childhood vignettes are a favorite topic for the published author, whose books include “Kern’s Movers and Shakers,” “How a Road Runner Got His Red Dot and Other Yocut Myths,” “Beddie Mason” : Her Own Place” and “Dear Cora”: A Personal History of Early Bakersfield. “

In her final column for The Californian, written on December 3, 2014, Camille humbly bid farewell to the last of three pieces, the following is a preview of “Winter Wonderettes” at the Stars Theatre restaurant and a wild A preview of the animal photography exhibition.

“One of my biggest takeaways has been seeing how Bakersfield’s interest in art has grown, in part because audiences have become more mature,” she wrote. “Especially in music and theatre, and to a certain extent in the visual arts, the product has become more innovative and the talent more professional.”

To that end, Camille Gavin could bow if her ego would allow it (but it didn’t). To respect her wishes, there will be no funeral.

Camille is survived by her children Christy, Jeanine, Daniel (Cindi), several grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Christy Gavin, who retired from CSUB after 40 years as a librarian, said her mother would want friends to pay tribute to the university’s Walter W. Steen Library, which Camille has supported for years. W. Stiern Library) sent gifts in lieu of flowers.