by Whitney Merrill

Cynthia Ramseyer and her Coastside elephants. Photos: Whitney Merrill.

November 2010 — I join Cynthia Ramseyer on a sunny late afternoon on her deck overlooking Pillar Point Harbor in the hills of El Granada. She is enjoying what she refers to as her “sunset ceremony” and offers me a glass of wine as I take in the view. We can see the Half Moon Bay Yacht Club far below where both Ramseyer and her husband have been Club Commodores. “It’s like being president,” she says, and adds, “I get on boats when other people are in charge and then I do what I’m told.” As you will see from a brief look into Ramseyer’s life, this is a common theme with her: getting “on board” when others are in charge, and truly enjoying the ride.

As a child, Ramseyer lived in South Africa and Holland, and then later in a suburb of Chicago. She attended college in Minnesota in the late ’60s, saying of that time period, “There was a sea change in people’s perceptions and expectations — a consciousness-raising.” After a few particularly extreme winters in the Midwest, she hitched a ride with a friend of hers who was heading west and finally felt like a round peg in a round hole when she reached the Bay Area.

Arriving in El Granada in 1975, she answered an ad in the paper for a live-in nanny only to be told that the position was filled. In her bold style, Ramseyer responded, “What do you mean you’ve hired someone already? You haven’t interviewed me yet.” The single father of two girls, ages 2 and 5 at the time, was obviously taken with her because he hired her — and then six years later proposed to her on Mother’s Day. Ramseyer recalls, “My best friend from college asked ‘Why would you say no?’ — so I said yes!” She and her husband went on their honeymoon first, then were married. “We always did everything backwards,” she says. Commenting on that period of her life, Ramseyer says, “You could hear one door closing and another one opening.” She and her husband are celebrating their 30th anniversary next year.

After the girls were a little older, Ramseyer took some part-time jobs in town, including working as a short-order chef at the English Tea Room in El Granada — where Family Ink Graphic Design is now — and serving as the secretary at the local Lutheran church. She then took a full-time position as a secretary for the Earthquake teams at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park where she worked for 23 years, including during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. “A neighbor helped me navigate the federal employment system. I had some wonderful bosses and they were interesting people to work with,” she says.

Ramseyer then went to work as Secretary to Scott Hubbard — named the Mars Czar for his work leading the Mars lander project for NASA — at the NASA Ames Research Center. When I ask her what it was like to work with him she says, “Just wonderful. I told him you’re my last boss, my last move.” When Hubbard eventually left NASA and went to work at the SETI Institute, Ramseyer followed him and she still works at SETI today. “I like scientists … they are always poking into interesting stuff, finding something new,” she says. However, she thinks the chance of SETI actually finding extra-terrestrial intelligence is “very, very slim.”

Ramseyer shows me her extensive collection of carved elephants in her home and shares a story of the Coastside that surprises me. The circus used to come to the Coastside and set up in the open lots that now house Safeway and the Oceano Hotel. She says, “We would take the girls and watch the elephants put up and take down the circus tents in a couple of hours.” As I call up the magical image of elephants in the fog on the coast, she says, “I love the Coastside. I love the fact that we have live theater and not a movie theater.” Ramseyer worked with the This Side of the Hill Players — now the Coastal Repertory Theatre — when it was a traveling road show at Farrallone School and the sets had to be stored each night in a rental truck.

As we wind down our conversation, workmen come through the house for the installation of a new pantry sink. Ramseyer tells me that the house has been completely remodeled; she and her husband even put in an elevator as part of their plans for the future. “We made a fundamental decision … we’re not retiring anywhere else but here.” She notes that there are some sacrifices that she has had to make living on the Coastside, such as including commuting over the hill to work in Mountain View each day, but that it is all about your perspective. She sums up with one last comment about herself: “I have one foot barely anchored in the present and the rest of me flung into the future.”