Volunteer of the month

Liz Stern - a social non-climber, who leads while wandering on her own

A child who lost her native language, an enthusiast for a sport she never pursued, leader of a Sierra Club activity section that doesn't actually do any activity - Liz Stern has been an anomaly all her life, but she has managed to utilize her singularity in service.

From the Austrian Alps to the crags of Berkeley

Born in Vienna, four-year-old Liz fled with her Jewish mother to England in May of 1939, four months before the start of the war. Like many English children whose families wanted to protect them from the bombing of major cities, she was sent to a Catholic orphanage outside of London. The separation from her mother was the more traumatic because Liz knew no English. The next two years she calls "a nightmare".

When Liz was six, with assistance from the English Quakers, her mother got permission for the two of them to settle in Newbury, a small market town in Berkshire. By now Liz could speak English, but she couldn't remember German, so that she and her mother communicated with great difficulty. They lived in a rented room among people suspicious of foreigners. In time, though, Liz came to feel like a regular English schoolgirl.

After the war she returned to Vienna for long visits with her father and other non-Jewish relatives, and relearned her mother tongue. She spent the last part of her adolescence in London, a city she came to adore.

When she was 18, Liz and her mother, who by now had learned English, moved to New York City, which Liz found hostile and cold. She had to start life all over again, make new friends, find a way out of poverty. She went to work in the admissions office at Columbia University. There she met a young graduate student, whom she married. Their daughter Eve was born in 1955.

In 1956 the little family moved to Berkeley, a town Liz's husband had learned to love during his earlier student days. Again Liz had to start her life over. Her second day in Berkeley, someone on Shattuck Avenue told her, "Welcome to Berkeley. You must join the Coop, Kaiser, and the Sierra Club. She did all three, but not until Eve started nursery school and Liz met other young mothers, did some of her loneliness dissipate.

Her marriage ended, and Liz needed to earn a living. She took a one-year program to become a vocational nurse. She worked at Kaiser for some years, and then took a job as a nurse in a doctor's office.

Bay City College, then a small college in downtown Oakland, hired her to train medical assistants, so that she happily taught in the mornings, in the afternoons assisting at the doctor's office. Her last official full-time job was at the Orientation Center for the Blind in Albany, where she worked as both a counselor and a nurse until almost eight years ago.

She never fully retired. She is still the weekend and back-up nurse at the Orientation Center. And she reports regularly to do volunteer work at the Bay Chapter Office. For close to seven years, she has spent her Wednesdays doing whatever paperwork needs to be done - filing, writing thank-you notes, and dealing with Yodelers returned by the Post Office from members who haven't sent their address changes to the Sierra Club.

Chapter administrative assistant Joanne Drabek reports: "She does whatever needs to be done, and is so pleasant to have around." She enlivens the office conversation with stories about her beloved dog. "And she is so modest!" Joanne says. Her idea of a great photograph of herself is one in which she is barely visible behind Hannah, a 120-pound black Newfoundland.

Reaching new heights without climbing

A hiker most of her life, and long a Sierra Club member, she usually hit the trails alone. Her second husband, though, Daniel Zimmerlin, has been an enthusiastic rock climber for decades, and Liz began accompanying the Bay Chapter Rock Climbing Section on its weekend outings. While the others scrambled up the faces of mountains, she would set out on her own treks, meeting back with the group for dinner. "When you're a rock climber," she explains, "you're stuck in one place all day. I'd walk for miles - see different people, flowers, scenery, have different experiences."

Despite her own less-vertical preferences, Liz's loyalty to the climbers has been unwavering. Long-time section member Wes Wagnon, who has known Liz and Dan since the early 1980s, says it was Liz who would arrange camping sites - a particularly laborious task when the group went to Yosemite. It was Liz who handled the section's correspondence. It was Liz who planned the business and social meetings. Wes says Liz knows the lingo as well those who actually scale the rocks. She can tell you the difficulty ratings of most technical routes. She knows local rock-climbing history.

In 1988, because of insurance problems, the Sierra Club had to discontinue sponsoring rock climbing. The climbers rebaptized themselves for climbing purposes as the Cragmont Climbing Club (the group's original name before it became part of the Sierra Club in the 1930s). The Chapter's Rock Climbing Section, however, continued on as a social section, and chair of the section is non-climber Liz Stern. She inherited the position from her husband Daniel, who directed the RCS for half a dozen difficult years.

Liz credits Daniel with saving the section when it was foundering. At one point there were only nine members. Dan and Liz called an emergency meeting, notifying everyone they thought might be remotely interested. They offered classes in rock climbing, and tried to get new people involved. Under their watchful eyes, the section revived. Now about 30 members attend meetings - men and women, young and old, of all ranges of climbing experience.

Today Liz is the section's detail-organizer and the regular hostess of its business and social meetings. Renowned for dinners at her home, she is known as "the Duchess of the Cragmont Climbing Club". Wagnon, recently chair of the CCC, describes her as a cook par excellence, her mouth-watering dishes often having a European flare.

Because of problems with her feet, Liz has had to relinquish her long hikes and cross-country skiing, but she still camps with the climbers and "hangs out" with a book while they hang from belays. Liz provides comfort, Wagnon notes, for panicked significant others when rock climbers fail to return to camp on schedule. Liz has agonized over such tardiness herself, and knows how to calm worried souls.

Liz has replaced mountain trails with the pools at the YMCA, where she does laps four times a week (not Wednesday, remember - Wednesday she is returning those misguided Yodelers). She also enjoys the company of daughter Eve, now a Stanford biology graduate who works at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Albany and lives with her husband in Berkeley.

Liz and Dan love to travel, especially to Great Britain and Austria, where this last year she delighted in meeting a first cousin for the first time. Her German, she has been told, is terrible grammatically, but her accent is almost perfect. It seems fitting that she takes pleasure in returning to the lost land of her birth, thinking perhaps of all the mountains, figurative and real, she has climbed on the long trip out and back.

Karen Rosenbaum

 

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© 2006 San Francisco Sierra Club Yodeler