Group Effort ’90 to Pay Tribute to Couple
Garbo, Soda and Sam--a basset, a bulldog and a Labrador--frolic on a beautiful flagstone terrace. Enormous sycamores tower everywhere against a grassy backdrop ascending into the affluent hills of Bel-Air. The dogs are all over Judy and John Bedrosian.
If happy pets reflect happy owners, then the Bedrosians are most happy. They’re also generous givers and generous volunteers, on the corporate and personal levels.
Saturday evening at the Beverly Hilton, Group Effort ’90 will recognize them. Almost 700 are expected to gather for an auction of mammoth proportions. Benefiting will be the Arthritis Foundation, Diabetes Unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles Children’s Museum and Loyola Marymount University. In the last 10 years, Group Effort has raised more than $4 million. Cruises to Panama and the Greek Islands, trips to the Orient, Kona and the famous Tikchik Narrows Lodge in Alaska (the lodge stay was donated by the Bedrosians) will be auctioned, along with 18-carat objects.
Bedrosian is co-founder and senior executive vice president of National Medical Enterprises Inc., a health-services company. He has served as co-chairman of the health-care industries division on the cabinet of the Music Center Unified Fund and spearheaded the Very Special Arts Festival in May for the disabled. He’s had a lifelong interest in underprivileged youth, and has served as a national trustee of Boys Club of America. As a resident of the San Fernando Valley from 1960 to 1987, he was active in Granada Hills Kiwanis Club youth and senior charitable projects. As an elder of the Bel-Air Presbyterian Church, he is among those overseeing the building of a $13-million sanctuary.
Judy Bedrosian--they’ll be married 30 years Sept. 5--prefers hands-on volunteering. She’s worked with infants in the pediatrics Pavilion at Los Angeles County/USC General hospital, supports the League for Children and the Crippled Children’s Society, was at the Music Center last week as a member of the Blue Ribbon Committee, helping to guide thousands of fifth-graders into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for their first glimpse of opera. She will be vice president of the prestigious Club 100 at the Music Center next year and is outgoing vice president of the French Foundation for Alzheimer’s.
“I love my home. I love cooking in the kitchen--I just love being in my house,” she said. He golfs, also has a trainer who comes to their house for private workouts three times a week. Both play Mendelssohn on a grand piano in a living room suffused with elegance. He plays hymns at Christmas. They ski at their home in Snowmass with their three children, who she refers to, with motherly modesty, as “bright and pretty nice people.” A good life.
Looking around, he says, “My grandfather came from Turkey (the Bedrosians are Armenian). He slipped away at night, and made it to France, then Troy, N. Y. My grandfather was in the shoe business. In Troy, he became a butcher. My father was a butcher. My grandfather had no education, and my father went to the seventh grade. It was the Depression, and he couldn’t finish high school. He had to work to help support the family. My mother left Turkey by way of Egypt. They had to live in tents for two years.
“I am not living in this house because I am great. I am here because I had a grandfather and father who worked like hell to provide--as did so many people in those days. And I don’t ever want to forget where I came from.” Then he quotes the Bible, Luke: “To whom much is given, much shall be required.”’
