Van Camp Trust Gives $4 Million : Bequest: Gifts divided between Long Beach and San Pedro hospitals, the YMCA and Boys and Girls Club.

To those who knew her, Mary Van Camp of San Pedro was an unassuming friend who rose above the tragedies in her life. She also will be remembered as a woman of extraordinary generosity.

Mrs. Van Camp, who died recently at 84, established a $4-million charitable trust, leaving the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center Foundation nearly $2.4 million, the San Pedro Peninsula Hospital about $1.2 million, and the San Pedro and Peninsula YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club of San Pedro $400,000 each.

“If there was a need for something, and she thought it was worthwhile, she would open her heart to it,” said Angie Papadakis, a San Pedro woman who first befriended Mrs. Van Camp about 25 years ago.

Mrs. Van Camp and her husband, Gilbert Van Camp Sr., who died in 1978, became interested in Long Beach Memorial when Gilbert was a patient there. The couple, who owned the Van Camp Tuna Cannery on Terminal Island, had already donated about $1 million to the hospital over the years.

Donna Reckseen, the foundation’s president and a personal friend, recalls that Mrs. Van Camp attended Christmas productions of Handel’s “Messiah” with sick children at the hospital.

“After one of her visits, she just sat in my office and wrote out a $25,000 check for the children,” Reckseen said. The money went to a children’s resources facility, unofficially referred to as the Mary Van Camp Library.

Mrs. Van Camp was plagued by illness, particularly in the last year of her life. But she didn’t like to “bother” her doctor, even when she was hurting, Papadakis said.

Born Mary Malinowski, she was one of 12 siblings who were raised in Detroit.

Much of her early life was beset by tragedy. Her father died when she was about 10.

She and her first husband, William Peter Leider, had one son, Warren William. After the family moved to California, Warren was accidentally killed at age 15 by a friend during a hunting expedition.

“Her husband committed suicide one year later,” recalled her niece, Laguna Beach resident Jeri Kissler-Painter. “She never said that, just that he died unexpectedly. But he couldn’t handle Warren’s death. She fell apart and came and lived with us.”

Mrs. Van Camp’s second marriage, in 1956, to a Congregational Church minister, the Rev. Ray Anger, also ended suddenly when Anger was struck and killed by a train three years later.

In 1962, she married Gilbert Van Camp. By all accounts, the couple led a quiet life in their modest San Pedro home at Dodson Avenue and West 10th Street.

They supported a host of local causes in the 16 years before Gilbert Van Camp died of a heart attack. Mrs. Van Camp then continued their philanthropic activities.

She gave $8,000 a year to the Boys and Girls Club, which is on property that Van Camp purchased in 1941 and held in trust.

Friends and family say Mrs. Van Camp never got over the death of her son, Warren. Near the end of her life, she had a photograph of him in her kitchen that she went to every day. Even after her eyesight deteriorated, she would hold the picture close and squint to focus on his face. Every time, his memory would make her cry, said her caretaker, Carmelita Trujillo.

In the same room, she would practice another daily ritual.

Trujillo said she would watch Mrs. Van Camp “float away” to the sounds of her records on an old Magnavox player. Waltzes and a recording of “Fiddler on the Roof” were favorites. But it was the dramatic horns and strings of the Polish national anthem that would stir Mrs. Van Camp the most.

“She loved to hear that music because she said she could see her mom dancing,” Trujillo said.

Mrs. Van Camp’s pride and joy was her garden, with its manicured lawns, rose gardens and exotic fruit trees. Guests left laden with roses or fresh apricots, figs, mangoes, guavas and persimmons.

Papadakis walked in the garden with her often in the final years. “She bound me to her by saying, ‘Don’t you forget me.’ Even now, my car still automatically turns up Dodson when I go out,” Papadakis said. “She bore her life with such dignity. I learned so much from her.”