A truly wonderful person who did so much for the Parkway and deserves all of the honor directed to her.
When I was president of the American River Natural History Association (ARNHA), her home at Palm and Panama came up for sale and it was pretty much as she had left it; as the ARNHA board members who went there with me to look at it and had known Effie well, verified.
I tried to get the board to approve buying it (we had the funds) to ensure it would be preserved as part of the tradition she had begun. I had suggested ARNHA use it as an office; but the board didn’t agree and a great opportunity to continue her memory was lost.
An excerpt.
A new page for Effie Yeaw
Booklet on nature center namesake is re-released.
By Bill Lindelof -- Bee Staff Writer Published 12:01 am PDT Thursday, August 24, 2006
Effie Yeaw, a bespectacled lover of nature, died decades ago. So it's not surprising that people ask who she is when they visit the Effie Yeaw Nature Center in Ancil Hoffman Park.
That's one reason "Effie Yeaw, A Sketch of Her Life," originally written 15 years ago, has been re-released in a new edition.
This time it has more pictures illustrating her life and a homespun children's story by the late kindergarten teacher and naturalist.
The biographical booklet ($4.95 at the nature center) fills people in about a woman who accomplished much in her life before dying of cancer on Jan. 3, 1970, at age 69.
As her biographer, Frederic R. Gunsky writes, Yeaw has been called the leading spirit to protect and understand Sacramento's environment.
"She did a lot to make the parkway possible," Gunsky said this week. "She is a hero of the environmental movement."
Yeaw was a charter member of the Save the American River Association, formed to push local, state and federal government to create what is now the American River Parkway.
She was a guiding force behind persuading county supervisors to write a tree ordinance, mainly to save heritage oaks from development.
In slacks and shirt, she led thousands of schoolchildren on nature walks in the woods along the American River where the nature center now stands.
And she was a one-woman animal rescue team. When a reporter visited her home in 1963, she was tending to a crow named Carlyle, mockingbirds, a jay, a skunk and a blackbird who bathed in the sink.
Outside her garage were 100 oak seedlings in gallon cans, available to anyone who wanted one. At one time, she ran a nature center in Carmichael Park that was filled with rescued animals.
She was born Effie Mae Cummings in Chico; both her parents were teachers. After her father contracted tuberculosis, the family moved to the ocean in Sonoma County and then the desert in Barstow.
After her father died, she and her mother moved to Lincoln, and then Sacramento. She attended Sacramento High School, eventually going on to University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in social studies. She taught in Oakland, what was then called Sutter Junior High School in Sacramento and in Hawaii. She received a master's degree in social studies while in the islands.
William H. Yeaw, a railroad accountant who had met her in Sacramento, traveled to Hawaii and asked her to return to the mainland. Yeaw, which rhymes with saw, is of Scottish origin.
The pair were married at the Pioneer Congregational Church in Sacramento in 1933. They had three children.
Bill Yeaw, 36, and Effie Yeaw, 33, first took up residence in a former chicken house on 5 acres in Carmichael, Gunsky writes.
In 1941, they moved into a house at Palm and Panama avenues. She taught in what is now the San Juan Unified School District before retiring in 1962.
