Olive Graham Hendricks was born on November 7, 1918 and died peacefully on March 20, 2013. She grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey and Great Neck, Long Island, with her younger sister Jan and her older stepbrother Alan, who suffered from life-long debilitating mental retardation. Ollie was very close to her father, and often recounted the story of how he gave up his compensation as owner of a manufacturing facility so he could continue to employ his workers during the depths of the Great Depression.
At age 16, Ollie entered Swarthmore College. She majored in engineering and became the second woman to graduate with an engineering degree from Swarthmore and the only woman engineer in her class. While at Swarthmore, she discovered her love of the outdoors. She was a member of the Outing Club and enjoyed hiking, sailing, skiing and camping. Upon graduation in 1939, she went to the University of Michigan where she obtained a master’s degree in engineering. Her first job was as an engineer at Sperry Gyroscope.
Ever adventurous, Ollie went on a solo exploration of the Rocky Mountains in 1941. It was on that trip that she met a young doctor from New York City when she strolled into a lodge on a rainy day in Estes Park, Colorado. They went on hikes together, and within three months Henry Mayer proposed marriage. Ollie turned him down because she wanted to remain independent, but then came Pearl Harbor and when Hank joined the Navy, Ollie proposed to him, and they got married three weeks later on December 31, 1941. Family legend has it that Ollie initially said no because she wanted to travel and did not want to cook a man’s dinner, wash his clothes, or keep his house. But when Hank made clear his feelings that “I want a pal, not a maid”, she reconsidered.
Hank finished his medical residency and moved west to join the Navy in Seattle. Hank and Ollie stopped in Wyoming to climb the Grand Tetons, becoming among the first to reach the summit of the highest peak. During the war, Ollie lived in Los Angeles while Hank was in San Diego serving on a mine sweeper. When Hank was transferred to Treasure Island, Ollie moved north to be with him, and they both fell in love with Northern California and decided to make their home there.
After the war, Hank did another residency in San Francisco while Ollie lived in Burlingame, and then they moved to their home in Woodside and Hank started his private medical practice in Redwood City. Ollie was unable to obtain a job as an engineer, in part because she was a woman and in part because of the large number of GI’s returning after the war, so she established her own machine shop in San Carlos.
In the early 1950’s Ollie sold her machine shop and started SEPCO, a company that manufactured science education products for middle and high schools. Ollie built this business to the point where it could be sold to a large publishing company in 1962 for enough to fund her retirement. She remained on as a consultant for five years, finally completing her work in the for-profit sector in 1967.
Hank and Ollie started their family in 1948 with the birth of their son Bob. Their daughter Judy was born in 1950. Their house had a television set that Ollie had “broken”, and as a consequence all four Mayers enjoyed an idyllic family life in their little house at the top of the hill.
In the 50’s , Ollie began the idealistic activism for which she is best known. During the McCarthy period, Ollie and Hank provided support to friends who were blacklisted, and participated in political activism resisting the assault on civil liberties. Ollie endured hostility, criticism, and government harassment, but it only strengthened her resolve to stand up for her friends and her political beliefs. She supported Hank’s efforts in desegregating public accommodations in Redwood City. She became an advocate for peace and international understanding. At the height of the Cold War, she formed the Committee for International Friendly Visits, sponsoring cultural exchanges of American and Soviet women. In the 60’s Ollie became an early and vocal critic of the war in Vietnam. Her understanding of the horrors of war, in part informed by her experiences with injured soldiers returning from WW II and the Korean War, moved her to join the Palo Alto Friends Meeting on September 23, 1966.
Following the sale of her business, Ollie decided to devote herself to environmental conservation. She formed hiking groups and joined the Sierra Club, ultimately becoming president of the Loma Prieta Chapter. She organized summer hikes for school children, and spent years monitoring and opposing illegal logging activities in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Ollie served a term as a member of the city council of the Town of Woodside, seeking to preserve its rural and diverse character. Though often in the minority, she always but firmly pressed her progressive ideas about proper land use planning. Most notably, Ollie was at the forefront of a forty-year struggle to prevent Caltrans from building a highway through Montara Mountain that would have opened the San Mateo County coast to intense urban development. Her work culminated in the opening in 2013 of the Tom Lantos Tunnel and the conversion of Devil’s Slide into a coastside hiking trail. For her decades-long leadership in the environmental conservation movement, Ollie received much recognition, including being one of the first women chosen for the San Mateo County Hall of Fame, receiving the Duveneck Award from the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club, and receiving a special Achievement Award from the National Sierra Club.
In 1968, Ollie and Hank took a sabbatical and traveled around the world for a year. Hank developed material for movies on the effects of population growth, and Ollie studied city planning. One outcome of this trip was Ollie’s desire to build a series of hikers’ huts in the Santa Cruz Mountains, each a day’s hike apart, as she had seen in Europe. She succeeded (with her son Bob) in importing from Denmark a prefabricated structure that became the Ollie Mayer Hikers’ Hut in Sam McDonald Park, which has been enjoyed by thousands of hikers over thirty-five years.
Ollie loved to travel. Throughout their marriage of sixty-eight years, Ollie and Hank traveled all over the world, visiting many countries on all continents, visiting friends abroad, usually finding a way to include a hike and some intellectual pursuit, with Ollie putting up with Hank’s extremely frugal approach to touring. Judy and Bob went on many of those trips as children, and the entire extended family joined in later years. Ollie was a voracious reader, notorious for reading late into the night. Though not known for her culinary or homemaking skills, she always found a way to make a happy home for her family, a refuge for friends needing a helping hand, a beautiful place for many meetings, celebrations, and family dinners and Sunday brunches outside in the sunshine.
Even though Ollie had seen plenty of the dark side of humanity, her optimism, good cheer, and faith in the inherent goodness in all people was undiminished and truly inspiring. There was always hope for a better future, a belief that people could unite and make their lives better, protect the beautiful places in the world, find peace and stop suffering. She personified the famous saying attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Ollie was a force of nature, determined, blessed with great intellect, principled, and fearless. She was mentor to many who have become leaders in the conservation movement. She is predeceased by her husband Henry Mayer, and is survived by her sister Jan Clucas, her children Bob Mayer (Lisa) and Judy O’Brien (Brad), and her grandchildren, Reid Mayer, Drew Mayer, Connor O’Brien (Shannon) and Lauren O’Brien.