Family Pays Tribute to Bard as Mother and Humanitarian

It was not until his wife’s death, Archie Bard confessed to 400 mourners Thursday, that he fully appreciated his wife’s life.

All the cards, letters, phone calls and newspaper articles, he said, narrated the public side of Carla Bard better than he ever could.

“I have a new respect for Carla--the deepness, the richness of her life,” Bard told those gathered at Ojai Valley Community Church. “It’s sort of been a fascinating experience for me, to really get this deep, vivid picture of her.”

Carla Bard died in a car accident Saturday as she drove to yet another meeting on yet another issue that mattered.

For Bard, nearly five decades of social and environmental activism had ended. But, even at age 69, her commitment to nature, both human and otherwise, never wavered.

The hourlong service memorializing her life Thursday was as uplifting as it was sad, with tears tempered by laughter. Family, friends and colleagues told of how honored they were to know her and how sad they are to lose her.

“Mom,” Thomas Bard repeated several times during his sometimes tearful, sometimes laughter-inducing speech, “you are my hero.”

Her dedication to environmental and social pursuits often meant that Carla Bard was not there when her four children, Thomas, Gregory, Jennifer and Victoria, came home from school.

Instead, Thomas Bard joked, they would settle for the voice of their myna bird, Hector.

But his mother, he said, was always there when her children needed her most. She approached them with the same fervor and dedication she gave to her public pursuits, Thomas Bard said, offering her children the same gentle nudges and encouragement to take risks that she gave her allies.

And if mom wasn’t home after school, Thomas said, he and his siblings understood why.

“We always knew she was doing something important,” he said. “We were and are so very proud of what she accomplished in her life, and we were so very fortunate to have such a loving individual for a mother.”

God, he joked later, better be keeping a clean house.

“If not,” he said, “I know someone who will be in your face.”

Carla Bard’s ability to get in someone’s face and still gain their respect was honed over 49 years of activism that began after she and Archie, the grandson of Ventura County farming pioneer and U.S. senator Thomas Bard, moved to Somis in 1950.

Over the next five decades, she would devote her energy to orphaned children and to the poor of Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood, to preserving the county’s farmland and improving its criminal justice system and hospitals, and to protecting what is perhaps the state’s most precious natural resource--water--and the ecological jewels of Ventura County.

Tapped by County Supervisor John K. Flynn in 1973 as the first woman to sit on the county’s Planning Commission and by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1979 to head the State Water Resources Control Board, Bard built a legacy as one of the state’s most effective environmental activists largely by virtue of her unique style of friendly aggressiveness.

“This valley, this county, this state will not be the same place without Carla,” Ojai City Councilwoman Nina Shelley told mourners on Thursday. “Some things might slide.”

Speakers agreed that whatever the project, whatever the issue, Bard always knew what her goal was. And it always centered on improving the lives of others.

“Here was this amazing person who lived in our midst,” said Lloyd Fellows, a longtime friend of the Bards and a minister of the United Church of Christ. “She is worthy of being an inspiration to us and worthy of us seeking to be more like her.”

The Environmental Defense Center of Ventura County, where Bard worked as an analyst for the past year, will hold a special tribute at 1 p.m. Dec. 7 at the Harbortown resort in Ventura.