After Losing Her Alphabet Streets Home, 94-Year-Old Patty Ryan Bearer Burns Finds Strength in Family and Memories

By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor

Perhaps no one has experienced a richer, more fulfilling life in Pacific Palisades than Patty Ryan Bearer Burns. For 65 years she lived on McKendree Avenue in the Alphabet Streets, but in a matter of minutes seven months ago, almost everything she owned was lost forever.

Since her house burned in the Palisades fire, Patty is coping with the tragedy thanks to the love and support of her children. They have rallied around their legendary mom, who, for decades, has been an active member of the community near and dear to her heart.

“We have some history in this town,” said her youngest son, Tim Bearer, who joined Patty at the Santa Monica 4th of July Parade along with Conrad Solum (a Palisadian since 1965), Conrad’s daughter, Lori, and her fiancé, Larry Van Lint.

Solum was attending an Optimist Club meeting the morning of the blaze on January 7. The 90-year-old, affectionately known as “Bobo,” escaped with only the clothes on his back. He, too, is faced with the daunting task of starting over.

“I spent my first 18 years growing up in the Palisades,” said Tim, who resides in Calabasas. “Along with those of my mother and my sister, Suzy, many of my close friends’ homes went up in flames. Their loss has changed my life, and I’m working with a builder to help restore my hometown. Mom’s house—the one I grew up in—won’t be rebuilt, but my sister’s will.”

Patty, who turned 94 on May 12, is displaced and coping as best she can at Brookdale Ocean House, an assisted living facility in Santa Monica. The fire destroyed her home, but could not erase a lifetime’s worth of cherished memories.

“The backyard was 20 yards by 10 yards, and we named it ‘Bearer Stadium,’” Tim recalled. “We had a volleyball net and lights were put in when I was 10 or so. By our baseball rules, it was an automatic three outs if you hit the ball into a neighbor’s yard. That’s how I learned to be a line drive hitter.”

Patty was born in Chicago but grew up in Santa Monica and graduated from Santa Monica High in 1949. She and her husband, Daniel Bearer II, met playing volleyball at Incline Beach in the late ’40s, just south of the Jonathan Club.

Daniel was also a golfer and became club champion at The Riviera Country Club. Patty and her volleyball friends from local beaches drove cross country to the National Indoors four years in a row in the early ’50s, traveling to Nashville, Oklahoma City, Memphis and Houston.

She was selected to the U.S. National team and represented our country in the Pan American Games in Mexico City in 1955. The red-white-and-blue sweats from that competition, emblazoned with USA across the front, were among the prized possessions that did not survive the fire.

Tim recounted what happened that fateful day: “I remember my Watch Duty app pinging me around 10 a.m. that a fire had erupted in the Highlands. Suzy wasted little time getting Mom out and clear of danger. She drove to her mother-in-law’s home in Bel Air, but there was no time to save things. Just a couple bags of clothes and sundries. On the morning of the 8th we were all pretty numb and Mom was in tears.”

Patty taught PE and coached the girls’ Catholic Youth Organization sports teams at Corpus Christi School from the early ’60s to 1970, then taught tennis at courts in and around the Palisades well into the ’80s.

She had a second stint as PE coach for 20 more years at Corpus and became a parishioner upon moving from Mar Vista to the Palisades in 1959. She raised four children—Danny, Wendy, Tim and Suzy—each attending Corpus Christi, Paul Revere Charter Middle and Palisades Charter High schools and inheriting her athletic genes.

Danny (Class of ’68) played tennis for two years and made it to the City Rec and Parks 12-year-old championship match while Wendy (Class of ’69) was the Most Valuable Player of her eighth-grade class at Corpus and has taken up skydiving as a hobby. They were original members of the Hobie Surf and Skate team that won the inaugural International Skateboard Championships (broadcast by ABC’s Wide World of Sports) at Anaheim’s La Palma Stadium in 1965. Afterward, Danny and Wendy were both interviewed.

“I would’ve been the youngest competitor at age 7, but was too shy to participate,” Tim said.

Danny, who died of heart failure in his Santa Monica apartment in 2009 at the age of 59, was posthumously inducted into the Skateboard Hall of Fame (located in Simi Valley) in 2012. Wendy was inducted the next year, and Patty wrote an article that August for the Palisadian-Post titled “Bearers: Skateboarding Pioneers of the Palisades” about the sport’s genesis.

“A lot of us had nailed our old rollerskates to the bottom of a 2×4 and skated on sidewalks, but the new wave was conceived by surfers when the surf was small, as a way to exercise on land and have fun doing it,” Patty wrote. “In 1963, Larry Stevenson formed a team called Makaha to compete in the new evolving sport. The wheels were such that sidewalk surfers could do more tricks than ever and gain more comfort and speed. The first members of this team were Danny and Wendy Bearer, John Freis, George Trafton, Torger Johnson, Dave and Steve Hilton, and Greg Carroll.

“Soon, contests were held all over California and other teams formed. Don Burgess and son Don Mike made up a competitive team with Peter Berg, Barry Blenkhorn, the Keller brothers, and Chris and Steve Piccilo—all Pacific Palisades kids—called the Palisades Skate Team. Hobie Alter picked up on the new sport and the Makaha team all joined Hobie Super Surfer, adding Colleen Boyd, Suzie Rowland and Woody Woodward.”

The next year, a tournament took place at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Wendy was the first competitor to receive three “10s” in a contest. Her outstanding trick was to jump from her moving board over a three-foot-high jump and land back on her board.

“As skating so closely resembled surfing, in addition to Kick Turns, 360s, 180s and wheelies (now called manuals), they did a lot of ‘walking’ moves to get to the nose of the board and did a nose wheelie (hanging 10 on a surf board),” Patty wrote. “So all you young skaters: Know there is a lot of history about your passion, but please be respectful of your sport and of all of the people and places that you affect around town.”

“We invented moves as we went along,” Wendy said. “We were pioneers and had only each other to learn from.”

The siblings were both avid surfers and members of the Malibu Surf Association. Danny was ranked 17th in the country as a 17-year-old and Wendy was one of but a few female surfers. Both won the inaugural LA City Championships at Sunset Beach in 1968.

Tim, a 1976 Pali High alum, is an athlete himself. He was MVP of his Pop Warner football team, played in the PPBA World Series three times, is in the UC Santa Barbara Intramural Department Hall of Fame (after having spent 20 years playing an alumni six-man flag football tournament) and graduated from USC. For many years he pitched for the alumni team in Pali High’s annual alumni baseball game, finally retiring in 2006 at age 48.

Suzy, whose married name is Pion, was the City Section Player of the Year in 1980 and was the setter on Pali High’s state championship volleyball squad in 1979 coached by Gayle Van Meter (still the school’s only state title). She went on to play one year at UCLA and has won many paddle tennis championships at Bel-Air Bay Club (she has been a member since the late ’70s) with her mom, her husband, Jeff, and her oldest son, Chase.

The Pions moved from Kenter Canyon in Brentwood to the Alphabet Streets in 2000. Two of their three boys—Drew and Chase—starred in soccer and volleyball at Windward School.

“Our family’s full of super athletes,” Tim said. “We learned it all from my mom.”

Tim’s youngest stepbrother, Marty, was best friends with Steve Kerr (a five-time NBA champion as a player and currently the head coach of the Golden State Warriors), who briefly lived with Patty and George Burns (the kids’ stepdad from 1973 until he died 10 years ago) while Kerr’s parents, Malcolm and Ann, were diplomats in Lebanon in the early ’80s.

“Marty and Steve were one year apart at Pali High and they had all the sports covered,” Tim reminisced. “Marty was the quarterback on the football team and the setter on the volleyball team, while Steve was a pitcher and shortstop on the baseball team and the point guard on the basketball team. George was like Steve’s second dad. He joked that he taught Steve to shoot at the YMCA when he was 7 or 8. Steve always gave him credit for that.”

One of Patty’s proudest moments occurred at the Santa Monica Pier in the summer of 2018 when she was inducted into the Santa Monica Beach Volleyball Hall of Fame in a ceremony emceed by lifelong Palisadian Sam Laganà.

Patty was 87 at the time and sharing that honor with her were Wendy, Tim, Suzy and Marty. She was inducted along with fellow Samohi alum Michael O’Hara, who captained the first U.S. Olympic team in 1964 and won 21 beach titles.

“Patty was my mom’s pick to be my first tennis coach,” Laganà said at the ceremony. “And Mr. Burns was our Santa Claus.”

Tim has vowed to give back to his community and called an old client from his ad sales days, Williams Homes (a family-run new home builder in Santa Clarita for 30 years) for advice about rebuilding Patty’s home (which she and her first husband had purchased for a mere $30,000). Since then, he has become the rebuild ambassador for Williams Rebuild in the Palisades area.

“My mission is to help families restore what they’ve lost with care, expertise and a clear path forward,” he said. “I work directly with homeowners, whether they already have architectural plans or need help starting from scratch. With economy of scales pricing, my role is to clarify the process, simplify decisions and guide every step from permits to move-in.”

Friends of the Palisades Library sponsored two nature writing workshops for Westside children and teenagers at the Palms-Rancho Park Branch Library, which were attended by approximately 45 participants: a Children’s Nature Writing Workshop and Teen Nature Writing Workshop.

“We collaborated with the librarians at Palms-Rancho, including Young Adult Librarian Kim Androlowicz, who is actually the YA Librarian assigned to the Palisades but is temporarily working at the Palms-Rancho branch,” Kathy Slattery explained. “James Corman, an incoming 11th-grader, conducted both workshops. He was the first-place winner last year in the summer creative writing contest in the high school category. After the fire, we decided to offer these nature writing workshops instead of the contest.”

Corman prepared slides that described what nature writing could encompass. He also read examples of poems and flash fiction to the participants.

Attendees then composed their own pieces, with some sharing in front of the group. Corman used “ambient nature sounds and nature objects and pictures” to help inspire the writers. Each attendee received a packet of native plant seeds from Theodore Payne Foundation, a trowel and writing notebook.

“Both events were a great way to keep young people engaged in creative writing,” Slattery said.

After graduating from Palisades Charter High School with the Class of 2025, Casey Scaduto traveled to Latvia to participate in the U.S. Department of State  – Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affair’s National Security Language Initiative for Youth program this summer where she studied Russian. Scaduto was one of 440 students selected from thousands of high school applicants to receive a scholarship.

While in Latvia, she lived with a host family, immersing in the local culture and host community, while engaging with peers to “enhance language learning and represent American culture as a citizen ambassador.”

“Launched in 2006 as part of a multi-agency U.S. Government initiative, NSLI-Y increases the number of young Americans with the critical language skills necessary to contribute to U.S. national security and economic competitiveness,” according to a statement. “Many NSLI-Y alumni go on to pursue education and careers vital to U.S. national security and credit the program experience with helping them improve their cross-cultural communication and leadership skills.”

Scaduto, also a graduate of Paul Revere Charter Middle and Marquez Charter Elementary schools, will attend University of California, Berkeley, beginning in August.

Local author and filmmaker Cali Gilbert and her father, Joe Gilbert, hosted a book signing and fundraiser at Mystic Journey Bookstore in Santa Monica, with 10% of proceeds going toward their Pacific Palisades Rebuilding Fund. The fund was created by Cali through her nonprofit, Tower 15 Productions, to “support female entrepreneurs who lost homes and businesses in the devastating January fires.”

“It was a wonderful afternoon,” Cali said of the event.

Las Madrinas—the “oldest affiliate group of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles”—announced the 19 families and their daughters who will be honored for their community service at the 2025 Las Madrinas Ball in December, including Palisadians.

“This year marks the 92nd year of Las Madrinas’ support for CHLA, with current funding directed toward a $5 million pledge to the Las Madrinas Endowment and Chair in Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics,” read a statement.

Those who will be presented at Las Madrinas Ball include: Ava Mae Bakhshandehpour, Victoria Lee Bessant, Katherine Nicole Boskovich, Scout Montez Bucher, Capri Cristina Chaves, Tate Garvan Cobb, Reed Marian Dietrick, Kaleigh Cynthia Elizabeth Eichler, Elizabeth Lee Esbenshade, Caroline Jane Holdsworth, Reese Eden Jameson, Isabella Diane Lanstra, Ashley Elizabeth Lemons, Francesca Elizabeth Lesinski, Tatum Elisabeth Wallis Lowe, Mary Kathleen McCoy, Sophie Noelle Min, Isabel Marie Norton and Catherine Alexandra Sabbag.

By MISHA PAZ KEYVANFAR | Junior Reporter | Pali High Senior

It’s a strange thing to find yourself going to high school in an abandoned Sears building that once sold washing machines and shoes.

I would not have known the connection between Sears, segregation and social activism had it not been for Palisades Charter High School relocating to the Santa Monica Sears building after the Palisades fire. The history is awe inspiring.

I had seen the Sears building many times before. We had often gone there to get Covid tested during Covid days. My parents say they got our vacuum cleaner there. My mom’s coworker told us that some “Brady Bunch” episodes were filmed at the Santa Monica Sears Building.

Most importantly, my sister told me that she saw an amazing documentary about a very inspiring man who built the Sears company and thousands of schools in the South. I was intrigued and decided to investigate this “inspiring man.” And indeed, I think my life changed when I learned about Julius Rosenwald.

Julius Rosenwald was the American born child of Jewish immigrants from Europe who had fled discrimination and antisemitism. In the 1800s, Jewish families in Europe were barred from universities, land ownership, restricted to certain jobs and forced to pay special taxes, and forced to live in ghettos.

Julius was born during the American Civil War and grew up in a modest, hard working immigrant family, strongly shaped by the concept of giving back and “Tikun Olam”—healing the world. Without a college degree, based on apprenticeships and excelling at his first jobs, Julius Rosenwald’s work ethic eventually led him to become the head of Sears Roebuck & Co. in 1908.

He transformed the company into an empire, and Sears became one of the most successful companies in America in the early 20th century. It was the Amazon of their time.

He was full of ideas that he put into action. For example, he revolutionized the Sears mail-order catalog and helped bring affordable goods to millions of rural Americans.

His warehouses were filled with innovation, such as having the workers wear roller skates so that they could fill orders faster. His business genius soon made him a millionaire.

I was inspired to learn that despite his wealth, Rosenwald was very humble and divided his earnings into thirds: 1/3 to spend, 1/3 for savings and 1/3 for charity. This sets the background for when the story rises from being a rags to riches story to a story that inspires and changes lives.

Around 1911, Booker T. Washington, the prominent African American educator, author and leader, approached Rosenwald. He told him that the government had failed to provide proper schools for Black children in the South. At this time, the law of the land was based on the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), where the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” laws, allowing segregation as long as the separate facilities were equal. They were not equal, Booker T. Washington assured Rosenwald. He took Rosenwald to visit the Black communities in the South to see this for himself.

Booker T. Washington showed him that while on paper his community was given the right to education, in reality, they were denied this right. The children didn’t have teachers, school buildings or school materials. They did not have blackboards, paper or pens.

Rosenwald was moved into action: He partnered with Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute to launch an innovative program. They developed the matching grant model, which required shared investment from several sources. Rosenwald would fund approximately 1/3 of the cost of a school. However, the funds would only be released only when the other partners also contributed. The most vital was the community contribution, whereby local African American families raised money, donated, and provided labor and materials to contribute in building their own school. Lastly, the local white public school boards were required to provide some part of the funding. This model encouraged cooperation and empowered communities to lead their own progress.

Between 1912 and 1937, Rosenwald funds contributed to the building of over 5,000 schools and teacher homes in 15 Southern states. As a result, over hundreds of thousands of Black children were educated.

Rosenwald Schools helped launch the education of future civil rights leaders, teachers, writers, artists and other professionals, including poet Maya Angelou, U.S. Congressman John Lewis and opera singer Leontyne Price. Many people who rose to prominence in the civil rights movement, literature, music and politics either attended Rosenwald Schools, or were part of families and communities deeply influenced by them. The schools didn’t just educate, they empowered generations. In fact, Rosenwald Schools are considered one of the most important grassroots education movements in U.S. history.

I was very moved to learn this powerful story behind Sears. I am forever changed from learning about Julius Rosenwald, and how a modest, hardworking immigrant with strong values rooted in faith, education and community service was able to collaborate with another marginalized community.

When I’m sitting in that echoey classroom, with shower curtains as doors in the Sears building, I remember that having a place to learn, even one that used to sell washing machines, is a privilege. We Pali students are thankful to our administrators, faculty, community and Pali students who infused this abandoned building with life and learning. We get to learn.

We are showing up to learn, and who knows which one of our Pali peers will be the next Julius Rosenwald.