Get Toni Gaylord, Gerry MacCartee and Nancy Cobb together in the same room and the air literally crackles with their energy, with each woman talking over the other, remembering this or that event they made happen, the pitfalls, the pratfalls, the giant successes. There are howls of laughter at inside stories about Coronado characters (living and dead) – names we recognize, people who worked with them, advised them, helped and/or hindered them along the way.

One would be hard pressed to put a monetary value on the combined service they have given to this community or their uncanny understanding of what makes Coronado unique and “worth fighting for.” With them you experience to your bones the value of real teamwork, the almost palpable friendship they share, the respect they have for one another. After all, they’ve been collaborating on this stuff for a long, long time.

Each year, Soroptimist International Coronado hosts one major fundraising event, “The Legends Luncheon,” set this year for Saturday, May 16 at The Coronado Marriott Resort. As always, the club will honor three local “Legends”— women of great passion, excellence, energy, and achievement. This single event raises enough capital to fund all the projects the club has planned for the year; see accompanying story on page 25.

This year’s Legends, Toni Gaylord, Gerry MacCartee and Nancy Cobb, have much in common: they’ve worked shoulder to shoulder for nearly four decades toward one common goal: to preserve and protect Coronado’s history.

Gerry and Nancy met in the 1970s through their husbands, who had served together in the Navy, immediately becoming fast friends. Because they had each purchased historic Coronado houses, they attended a slide show on early Coronado given by Bunny McKenzie, founder, with Katherine Carlin, of the Coronado Historical Association. They were hooked.

“Kat” Carlin knew a good thing when she saw it, immediately taking the young women under her wing, grooming them as her “successors.” Sharing a babysitter for their four small boys, they spent hours every week in Kat’s living room, poring over her boxes of old photos and clippings, cataloguing, learning firsthand the history of Coronado buildings and the colorful people who made those buildings come alive. Kat’s extensive collection of notes and photos would later be published posthumously as “Coronado, The Enchanted Island,” with Nancy and Gerry acting as consultants to author/ historian Dr. Ray Brandeis. It is available today at the Coronado Historic Association’s Museum gift shop.

When Toni Gaylord hit town with husband Fritz and family in 1978, she fell in love with Coronado and jumped right in as a Coronado Historical Association volunteer. Although Fritz was still an active duty naval officer at the time, they knew that Coronado would be home for good one day. “It was my town and it was important to help where I could,” Toni said.

The years that followed were busy ones, always, it seemed, with one or more of these three women in the thick of it. To raise community awareness, they gave talks and slide shows about Coronado “to any group who would listen,” there were tours of historic Coronado houses decked out for Christmas by well known local designers, architects, and people like Bob Creel of Ye Olde Flower Shoppe and Maryly Benzian of Baby Bloomers, all “for love,” of course. With the help of attorney Sharon Sherman, the historical association became a non-profit 501 (c) 3 corporation, enabling them to begin fundraising in earnest for a proper museum. The association’s offices at the time were located in the Babcock Court cottages, which were doomed for demolition to make way for the new police station. At the time, Gerry was the historic association president, Nancy was treasurer and Toni was on the board (“If you could call what we were an actual ‘board’ — we were not very organized,” remembers Toni. They made Fourth of July floats, planned events, marched in parades, and pleaded before city council to save historic houses from demolition. They solicited community input to formulate the Downtown Design Guidelines (precursor to today’s Orange Avenue Specific Plan). They helped draft the Coronado Historic Ordinance and encouraged the city council to form the Historic Resource Commission. About that time, Fritz Gaylord got orders to Washington DC for three years. Gerry and Nancy started Coronado Touring, conducting historic walking tours for a whopping $2.50 a ticket. Nancy continues these today, still a bargain at $12. Toni, back in town once again, became involved with Coronado MainStreet.

Things were happening fast; the historical association now had money in the bank and was desperate for a new location. Realtor Craig Clark says he was walking down Loma Avenue one day, saw a “For Sale” sign in front of a charming Victorian house at 1126 Loma Avenue, and knew it would make a perfect museum. Everyone agreed. He recalls that the asking price was around $160,000, more than the association had in the coffers. He immediately decided to forego his real estate commission. He also approached Home Savings and Loan (where Washington Mutual stands today), who agreed to give the association a nointerest loan. Other “angels” appeared: the city of Coronado donated $10,000 to the cause, the late Chris Mortensen, the developer who brought the “Baby Del” Victorian across the bay on a barge, gave a generous donation (there was a room in the museum named in his honor), and one anonymous final donation to put it over the top. When the museum, freshly painted and refurbished entirely by volunteer work parties, opened in 1993, the building was debt free. Gerry and Nancy resigned their board positions to devote full energy to the museum and Toni took over as president. All three still to this day regret the decision (not theirs) to sell the building before moving the museum to its present location at 1100 Orange Ave. “We had a paid-for building,” says Gerry, “paid for by the citizens of Coronado. We raised that money, every cent of it. Boy, it was hard to see it go; we had poured our souls into it.”

The Loma Avenue building is now owned by Lamb’s Players Theatre and houses its corporate offices.

Toni Gaylord
Toni Fahy Gaylord, Admiral’s daughter and Captain’s wife, has never shied away from new places, things or people. After graduation from the Dominican School in San Rafael (where she was recently honored as a “Distinguished Alumna”), and then from Rosemont College in Pennsylvania, she landed her first job as a switchboard operator (the Lily Tomlin one-ringy-dingy kind) for the Vallejo Times Herald, where she “kept hanging up on people.” When husband Fritz got orders to Yokusaka, Japan, Toni earned $180 a week there, running her son’s nursery school. In Washington she worked on Capitol Hill, both in the House and Senate, and later in association management positions for former Nixon Press Secretary Ron Zeigler, “pretty exciting jobs,” she recalls.

She worked for a time for the Coronado Visitor Bureau, where, among many achievements, she organized a spirited home-town delegation for the 1992 America’s Cup.

But what really lights up Toni’s eyes is her fifteen-year love affair with Coronado MainStreet, Ltd., serving as its Executive Director. MainStreet, part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, was founded to revitalize the shop-worn main streets of small towns everywhere, sad victims of the suburban shopping mall. With Toni at the helm, Coronado bloomed (literally), winning prestigious national awards for the Orange Avenue median gardens and revitalized downtown. Outdoor sidewalk dining flourished; ugly, too-large signs began to disappear, and formula-fast-food restaurants were strictly curtailed. Soon she was traveling to other cities, helping them develop their own MainStreet programs.

Retired now from that, she has been a Coronado Planning Commissioner for five years. She was seriously considering a run for City Council until unexpected health issues changed her plans.

Nancy Cobb
Nancy Pugh was an adolescent in the mid-1950s when her naval aviator father took command of Carrier Air Group 21 at NAS Moffett Field. Serving under him was a young Navy pilot named Jim Stockdale. Who knew that a generation later Nancy would be reviewing photographs of the Stockdale family and their historic A Avenue bungalow, deciding which to include in the Enchanted Island book? Her business degree from the University of Maryland came in handy in her various endeavors with Gerry, who was “always the creative one,” she insists. Now divorced from architect Bay Cobb, Nancy has two grown sons who live in San Diego.

Nancy has assisted many homeowners with the daunting research required to have their homes historically designated. As Gerry says, “She really knows this stuff.” She was a founder of the Cottage Conservancy, a grass-roots effort to raise awareness of the many small cottages that were being demolished at an alarming rate. She says her main goal has always been to raise awareness of the value of historic neighborhoods. “When one or two homes are gone, a neighborhood is forever changed,” Nancy laments. “That’s why we always concentrated our home tours in one small area, so people could experience firsthand how each house, although often able to stand alone in importance, was in fact part of a whole, a community of neighbors. It’s the way the houses relate to each other and to the street. Historic neighborhoods become so much more meaningful once you’ve physically walked from one house to another; it’s a feeling.” She believes Coronado has several potential “Historic Districts” and that if people really understand how that kind of preservation actually increases property values, they would explore the possibility of designation.

For ten years, Nancy and Gerry owned and operated “Reruns,” a very fun secondhand shop for kids located in the Crown Shops on C Avenue. “The time came, you know, when we really had to earn a little money,” Nancy deadpanned. Working today with Destination Events, a management company that often incorporates her walking tours in their packages, Nancy is busier than ever.

Gerry MacCartee
After graduation from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, Gerry Emerson headed for New York, landing a job at Mademoiselle Magazine and then at Glamour, where she became Assistant Beauty Editor. Free-spirited Gerry then “threw all that away to travel and bum around,” ending up in Coronado, where she met her future husband Rob MacCartee, “and that was that!”

Rob, an attorney and former UDT officer (the Navy’s elite Underwater Demolition Team, esteemed ancestor of the current Navy SEALS), died tragically in 1978 at the age of 34 while on a fishing trip with friends. Rob and Gerry’s two sons, now grown and living nearby, were just eighteen months and two years old at the time. Gerry has not re-married, but will say if you ask, “I have a wonderful man in my life.”

Among her countless contributions to the city of Coronado are the six recent years she served as a Historic Resource Commissioner. On her final day on the Commission she was presented a framed proclamation that read, “Gerry has voluntarily expended her time and efforts with distinction and commitment to the highest levels of civic practice. As Chair of HRC…, Gerry has consistently and thoughtfully weighed the goals of the historic preservation program with the rights of individual property owners. She has carefully striven for compromise and equitable solutions to challenging situations, which ultimately were proven acceptable to all parties. Her tacit and spoken skills have served our city and its people in the highest traditions of public service.”

Gerry is volunteering once again for her beloved Coronado Historical Association and is busy writing a book, “The House on D Avenue,” about her vine-covered cottage behind the Vons parking lot. It’s about how a house and a family over time become one. Like Gerry and Coronado.

Tickets to the Legends luncheon are $65 and can be ordered by calling Pat Boer at (619) 435-4201.