Elizabeth Walker, 1963-2003

Elizabeth Walker, a longtime member of the Bay Guardian extended family who had more friends than she could count and was always the life of the party, died at sunrise March 25 after a battle with cancer. She was 39.

Elizabeth started working at the Bay Guardian in 1991 as assistant to the publisher before moving into the new position of promotions director. "Elizabeth had a great Irish spirit that shone through everything she did and carried through to the end," Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann said. "She became our first promotions director, and her endless energy and enthusiasm produced all kinds of Bay Guardian special events with her unique bubbly imprimatur."

She later worked for several entertainment and dot-com companies, including Nick at Night and Ask Jeeves in New York, before landing a job in promotions and marketing at Amnesty International. "That's where she really found her niche, what she wanted to do," her father, Thomas Walker, told us.

Elizabeth was born in Madison, Wis., in 1963. Her father was an Air Force pilot, and the family moved around a lot: She lived at various times in New York, Florida, Connecticut, and Hawaii before settling in Berkeley, where she attended De Anza College and San Francisco State University.

Everyone who knew her was struck by her vibrant personality and love of life. "I always knew she lived on a different plane than most humans," her father said.

At a celebration of her life, held in Berkeley March 26, more than a dozen people who spoke identified themselves as "Elizabeth's best friend." As her sister, Susan Walker, put it, "She saw the best in everyone, even if they didn't see it in themselves."

An old friend named Steve circulated a flyer at the memorial that described "one late fall evening in San Francisco going out to dinner with Elizabeth and a group of friends. After the meal, everyone drifts back home, but Elizabeth can't let the night go. 'Come on, it's barely two, where are we going, dancing?' Elizabeth insists that we put the top down on the car, so we can see the stars. People will think we're crazy, it's freezing. 'Don't let the player haters get you down, baby,' Elizabeth says and bursts out with her low, throaty chuckle."

Elizabeth loved animals and was known to harangue fur-wearers on the streets. She seemed, in Steve's words, "to understand her right to enjoy the world around her, which sprung out of her deep sense of responsibility to that world."

In her last moments, she told her mother, Peggy Reskin, a story about a safari she'd taken to Africa a few years ago, to see "her animals." She'd gone with a few others in an open jeep to see a group of lions in Zambia. When the lions became aware of the human presence, they slowly got up and walked into the tall grass, their natural camouflage causing them to virtually disappear.

"In her final days, she was heading out in that tall grass, an area where she'd never been before," Reskin said. "She went through it with grace and courage."

In fact, Reskin noted, even in the advanced stages of ovarian cancer, Elizabeth still managed to make friends so quickly that all of her doctors came to see her during her last week, and the emergency room doctor who had treated her for pain knitted her a cap.

The final morning of her life, her father recalled, Elizabeth "told me she wanted us to promise to love the world and treat it as well as she did. She had no regrets – she'd had a wonderful life."

Well after the celebration ended, Bay Guardian sales and development manager Warren Spicer recalls, several of the paper's employees and alums who had worked with her found themselves standing around the room drinking beer and talking. "And we realized that's exactly what Elizabeth would have wanted us to be doing. And we knew she'd be asking, 'Where's the after party?' " (Tim Redmond)