BONNY DOON, Calif. — Lee Calvert’s new bedroom glowed with the dappled sunlight of a late-spring afternoon. Just outside her window, she could see hot-pink rhododendron flowers and the stately redwoods of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Despite the beauty, it was a view — and a life — she was still adjusting to.
Calvert is 100 years old. She’d spent the last six decades in a little house in Pacific Palisades with an ocean view.
She lived alone in Tahitian Terrace, a hillside mobile home park where, until January, she had occupied the same rented plot on Samoa Way since around 1967. And she kept busy — practicing table tennis in the park’s poolside clubhouse, hosting meals on her patio overlooking Will Rogers State Beach, giving speeches about physical fitness at the Pacific Palisades Woman’s and Optimist clubs.
“I loved everything about the Palisades,” Calvert said. Despite her family’s gentle pleas to join them here in Santa Cruz County as she got older, she would say: “I’m not leaving paradise.”
“Of course,” she said, “my intention was to stay there until I’m gone.”
But the universe had other plans. Five months after her 100th birthday, the Palisades fire tore through Tahitian Terrace, destroying her double-wide trailer and 156 other homes in the park.
Now, Calvert is working to rebuild the full, active life she led before the fire — age be damned.
She goes swing dancing on the Santa Cruz Wharf. She takes vigorous hikes in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. She is learning pottery. And she plays pingpong at the senior center a few times a week.
“I don’t want to feel sorry for myself,” Calvert said.
Calvert stands about 5 foot 1, has smile lines around her big blue eyes and keeps her strawberry-blond bob neatly curled. The winner of senior badminton and table tennis competitions around the world, she is, at her core, an athlete — competitive, confident and, perhaps, a bit headstrong.
On a warm, late May afternoon, she showed off the upstairs apartment her daughter and son-in-law fixed up for her on their wooded property in rural Bonny Doon: The fuzzy white mat where she does 15 push-ups every day. The makeup-strewn vanity table where, she said, “I make myself gorgeous.”
“It’s quite a change for me, going from an ocean view to the redwoods,” she said. “But I’m making the adjustment. Which proves to me that you can be 100 years old and change if you have to.”
Change came on Jan. 7.
That morning, Calvert was at home with her part-time caregiver, who helped her around the house during the day. Just after 10:30 a.m. came a call from her stepdaughter, Cheryl Calvert.
Cheryl — who is married to the son of Lee’s late second husband — has lived in Malibu for some 40 years. She knew high winds were in the forecast, which meant possible power shutoffs and fire. She was driving to pick up extra dog food and was near Pepperdine University when, to the east, she spotted “the tiniest, tiniest piece of smoke.”
She dialed Calvert, who answered with a chipper: “Oh, hi, honey! Are you coming for lunch?”
Cheryl did not mention the smoke. Or the newly reported fire popping up on her FireWatch app. She asked Calvert to gather a few things — a jacket, some jeans, her cellphone — but the centenarian kept chatting cheerfully.
Cheryl, 68, knew that if she tried to get Calvert herself, she might hit road closures and gridlock and not make it in time. And she figured that if she told Calvert there was a fire, she might panic — and not want to quickly leave her beloved Tahitian Terrace, where there is only one steep, narrow road out.
So, Cheryl fibbed. She said she would meet Calvert in Santa Monica for lunch — even though she was headed back to her own home, which she worried might burn.
Grab your things, she pleaded, and have your caregiver drive you. Calvert was in no hurry.
Cheryl said she started yelling: “Lee, you are leaving! Get out now!”
“I thought, ‘This is a crazy request. But Cheryl is such a good friend,’” Calvert said. “I said, ‘But! But! But!’ And she said: ‘Do it, Lee.’ She had a firmness in her voice. I said, ‘OK.’”
Calvert moved to Tahitian Terrace around 1967. She was in her early 40s and newly divorced.
She and her ex-husband had lived in a three-bedroom house on Erskine Drive with their son and daughter, who had attended the then-newly built Palisades High School.
But after the divorce, money got tight. She rented out the house and paid $5,000 for what would become her new home — a “darling little mobile home,” sold by a family friend in nearby Tahitian Terrace.
Carved into the hillside above Pacific Coast Highway, Tahitian Terrace had opened in 1962 amid a post-World War II boom in mobile home parks. Residents owned their houses and rented tiny, ocean-view plots for as little as $200 a month — a jaw-dropping bargain, even then.
The park’s founder, Robert E. Westenhaver, scoffed at the phrase “trailer park” and “had high ideals” about the importance of community, Calvert said.
“He’d say, ‘There’s nothing mobile about it. These are homes,’ ” she said. “I liked that.”
Tahitian Terrace had Hawaiian dance lessons and art classes. Residents would give presentations about their work or hobbies. And there was a community room with free coffee — good coffee, Calvert specified — and a sense of camaraderie.
It was as good a landing spot as any for a woman who had spent her whole life hustling.
Her family had been plunged into poverty after the 1929 stock market crash. She was 5 years old at the time. They lived in the Mission District in San Francisco, and her father lost his job hand-painting the striping on Cadillac cars. The family moved to Los Angeles, hoping he could find work.
Unable to afford rent during the Great Depression, they bounced from home to home.
During a stint in Studio City, “Mother had some rabbits she would kill for our suppers and cook over an open fire [and] she had my brother go behind the local market and try to rescue some vegetables that were thrown out at the end of the day,” Calvert wrote in a six-page autobiography. “I knew we were in trouble and always hungry. I got sick — no sanitation.”
She and her younger sister attended free acting and dance classes taught by out-of-work artists through the federal Works Progress Administration. As a teenager, she landed theater acting gigs, making $60 a week — more than her father.
And after the U.S. entered World War II, she volunteered as a USO girl, dancing with young soldiers on the Santa Monica Pier, she said, “before they went overseas to God knows what.”
“When I was young,” she said, “ I was not exactly ugly.”
Between shows and dances, she wrote letters to her older brother, Gene M. Hirsch, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces who had always looked out for her and kept her laughing during their difficult upbringing.
On Sept. 11, 1942, Hirsch, age 24, and nine other soldiers stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tuscon were in a B-24 Liberator on the return leg of a training flight to Nebraska. Amid bad weather, their plane crashed into a mountain in eastern Arizona. All of them died.
Calvert kept the letters from her brother — which she still pulled out to read, just to feel close to him — in a lockbox in her closet.
Just after Calvert moved to Tahitian Terrace, the park’s owner asked most of the residents to temporarily move their trailers during the construction of the adjacent Temescal Canyon Road.
The Times reported in 1968 that Palisades residents regarded Temescal as “an escape route which will allow them to get into the community if landslides block the coast highway.”
Calvert — who would become Tahitian Terrace’s longest-term resident — pleaded for special permission to stay, despite the near-constant construction noise.
She worked from home and had her own business, creating TV and movie continuity scripts, which meticulously detail dialogue, sound effects, music and scene descriptions in the order they appear on screen.
The work required silence and concentration. So she flipped her schedule.
“I slept during the day, when I could,” Calvert said. “It was a lot of noise and scraping machinery. So I worked at night. I had to rescue the business, because otherwise I wasn’t going to make it.”
Calvert did make it, though, and kept working until she was 88. Among the shows for which she did continuity scripts: “The Lucy Show,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “Cheers,” “Star Trek,” “The Good Wife” and “NCIS.”
In 1968, she married again, this time to Larry Calvert — a World War II veteran and aeronautical engineer. He was a fellow badminton player who encouraged her to travel the world competing in the sport, for which she earned more than 200 medals and induction into the USA Badminton Hall of Fame.
They built a happy life together at Tahitian Terrace for 31 years. Larry died in 1999.
In August 2024, Calvert turned 100. Neighbors and her family threw two big parties at Tahitian Terrace, where the clubhouse was decorated in her favorite color, royal blue.
She wore figure-flattering dresses that showed off her toned legs. She danced the tango with her son-in-law, John Lingemann, who joked that she was “a hundred-year-old hottie.” And she did 15 push-ups while her friends and neighbors cheered.
On Jan. 7, Lee and her caregiver calmly drove out of Tahitian Terrace just before 11 a.m., headed to lunch in Santa Monica. Pacific Coast Highway had yet to become gridlocked with people fleeing the fast-moving flames.
Cheryl knew she wasn’t going to join them. She feared her own home in Malibu was in danger. So she asked a friend from Van Nuys to meet the women at the now-closed Earth, Wind and Flour Italian restaurant.
“Just have lunch,” Cheryl asked her friend. “Talk about nothing. Just be — happy.”
The women had a pleasant meal, chatting about Calvert’s badminton days. Calvert’s daughter, Nancy Lingemann, booked her a hotel by the ocean in Santa Monica.
“Getting her out of the Palisades — that was the greatest triumph of my life,” Cheryl said.
Flames entered Tahitian Terrace by 4:30 p.m. Within two hours, the complex was gone.
Three weeks after the fire, Cheryl pleaded with a National Guard soldier to let her past the barricades into Pacific Palisades. She parked at an empty Vons off Sunset Boulevard, walked a mile and a half along the closed Pacific Coast Highway — past military trucks and police cars — and up the hill to Tahitian Terrace.
She found Calvert’s lockbox. Everything in it — including letters from her brother and husband — had burned.
“I told her, ‘They’re in your memory. You’ll never forget,’” Cheryl said, her voice cracking.
Cheryl told her: “Lee, you’re an optimist. And optimists always look ahead.”
Calvert has not been back to Tahitian Terrace. She doesn’t know when, or if, she will ever be ready.
It is unclear if the mobile home park will be rebuilt. It has long been owned by a small, family-run company that makes little profit off its rent-controlled plots. In a March letter to residents, the park’s owners wrote that if Tahitian Terrace is rebuilt, the process “could take many years.”
Soon after the fire, Calvert moved in with her daughter, Nancy, 78, and son-in-law, John, 81.
They live so deep in the redwood forest that, for years, they have hung paper plates with hand-drawn arrows to fence posts to assure guests they’re still on the right path.
Theirs is a hilly 29-acre property, filled with vegetable gardens, citrus and avocado trees and the flowers Nancy grows for her business making wedding floral arrangements.
Calvert, who had a few falls in recent years, climbs the hills in orthopedic tennis shoes. She uses a cane at her daughter’s urging. And sometimes leaves it behind on purpose.
“I’m more careful now,” Calvert said, grinning. “I’ve never known anything about being careful. But I have learned.”
For Mother’s Day, Nancy surprised her with a large framed portrait of her brother, Gene, in his military uniform. Calvert thought all her photos had burned — but Nancy had made digital copies before the 100th birthday party.
It sits on the vanity table in her new apartment next to Nancy and John’s house. Across the room hang several medals. The Huntsman World Senior Games — upon learning many of her badminton and table tennis medals burned — sent several replacements.
“I could be devastated, losing so much,” Calvert said on a recent afternoon. “I mean, I lost treasures that I wanted to give to my great-grandchildren. I wanted to give them little things I had that I thought were important.”
Nancy gently interjected, putting her arm around her: “But you know, Mom, those things are not that important. They love you for who you are.”
“Well, they’ll just have to do that, won’t they?” she said, laughing. “I don’t have a choice anymore.”
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Calvert posted up at a pingpong table at the London Nelson Community Center in downtown Santa Cruz for a game of senior doubles.
“I don’t want you to take it easy,” she told Perry Brown, her competitor across the table. “I can only keep up my game if I push myself.”
Calvert, a lefty, had a steely-eyed game face, grinning only when she scored a point or stopped an opponent’s serve.
Afterward, Brown, a 62-year-old retired contractor with muscled arms and a tank top, told her she played well and that he had been surprised to learn her age.
Calvert jokingly flirted.
“I could take him home, but they won’t let me,” she deadpanned. “People would talk.”
Calvert was rushing with Nancy to a great-granddaughter’s elementary school graduation. But she promised she would be back for more pingpong. Improving her game — and keeping busy — is giving her reasons to look ahead in this life after the fire.
“I think that’s a secret to a good life: You have to adapt to whatever happens,” she said. “Doesn’t mean you’re always going to like it. But you can try to like it. You get through those things — and you look for the next good thing.”
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