Champion of the have-nots, Lucy Forest dies at age 94

Lucy Forest was a compact woman with a tiny apartment and a great, steely determination to do whatever she could to resolve or prevent injustice, war and other distortions of humanity.

A revered elder among Sonoma County’s left-of-center activists, Forest wielded her intellect and collaborative skills to build consensus to act against homelessness, neglect of the elderly, abuse of workers, discrimination and militarism. She co-founded the county’s Peace and Justice Center and also Santa Rosa Creek Commons, a housing cooperative in Santa Rosa.

She told of feeling fortunate to be alive and present for the celebration of her life that friends and family put on at the Commons last May. Some of the people closest to her also were with her when she died Friday at the age of 94.

Son John Cushing of Carpinteria said his mother’s life was so full and accomplished that it is hard for him to wrap his arms around all that she had done. But he said why she did most of it is simple:

“She cared about people.”

Forest’s stepdaughter, Tamara Kushner of Solana Beach, said there was no lightning-bolt moment that transformed her into a fighter for social justice.

“It was that, early on, she saw the difference between the haves and the have-nots, and she decided to improve the conditions of the have-nots.”

In 1999, then-Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, doubly honored Forest by presenting peacemaker awards to both her and internationally renowned anti-nuclear advocate Helen Caldicott of Australia.

In the latter part of her life, Forest remained focused on national and global issues while digging deeply into concerns of the elderly. As a leader of the former Gray Panthers and author of the former “On the Plus Side” column in The Press Democrat, she informed and advocated for seniors in areas such as housing, health care and continuing education.

Her rich, long life encompassed a startling diversity of work - the nearly lifelong peace activist was involved for a time in a secret rocket project at Caltech - international travel and three marriages.

She felt she at last got marriage right when she and longtime family friend and fellow widower and activist Jim Forest tied the knot in 1969. They made a dynamic duo, certainly in the area of affordable housing advocacy, until he died in 1990.

Four years later, Lucy Forest was present when the Burbank Housing Development Corp. dubbed a 48-unit low-income apartment complex in Windsor “Forest Winds.”

“He’d be absolutely ecstatic,” his widow said at the time. “It represents everything he believed in and worked for.”

The former Lucy Benner was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1920. She wrote in a series of recollections of her life that her family lived in a house so big “my mother even had a room for her canaries.”

But the house had to be sold after her father, Fernando Benner, died when she was 8 years old. “It changed everything,” she wrote.

She was sent to a convent, then moved on to a Catholic high school. She enrolled at New York University, but, she wrote, “I was just overwhelmed by the size and the crowds. I had never seen anything like it. So I decided to go to secretarial school to have a skill.”

In 1939, “on a dare,” the nearly 19-year-old Lucy Benner applied for work at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. She wrote that she was hired and assigned to the Beech-Nut gum and baby food booth.

“When the fair started, we were the first place they organized, and we had to join the union. The start of a long history of working to support workers’ rights.”

From that first job, she went on to work for a New York magazine, What’s New, and a short time later moved cross-country to Los Angeles for a job with a commercial film production.

There she met a Caltech biologist, John Cushing. They married in 1942, not long after the U.S. entered World War II. The couple started a family and moved to Baltimore, then to Santa Barbara.

The future Lucy Forest discovered the Experiment in International Living, and she volunteered to place American students with families abroad. She wrote in the review of her life, “This was the start of what I’ve been doing ever since - working for peace and justice.”

After she divorced from John Cushing in 1963, she left Southern California for San Francisco, working first for Planned Parenthood and then the San Francisco Council for Civic Unity. Subsequently, she did campaign work for the late State Sen. Nick Petris and the Upward Bound program at UC San Francisco.

She and Jim Forest married in 1969. Eight years later, they left San Francisco for Santa Rosa upon hearing that some people there were keen to create a co-op housing project. They spent years helping to plan, obtain approval for and build Santa Rosa Creek Commons, and in 1982 they moved into one of the new units.

After the death of Jim Forest nearly 25 years ago, his widow relocated into a smaller space at the Commons. Longtime friend Andrea Learned said, “Remarkably, she lived in the fewest square feet of anyone I know.

“While Lucy didn’t take up a lot of square footage,” Learned added, “She was a force to be reckoned with.”

Preceded in death by a daughter, stepdaughter and stepson, Forest is survived by her son in Carpinteria, her stepdaughter in Solana Beach, stepson Jim Forest Jr. of Holland, 16 grandchildren and step-grandchildren, and 21 great-grandchildren and step-great-grandchildren.

Plans are underway for a celebration of her life.