Meri Anne Beck-Woods

Meri Anne (Phillips) Beck-Woods, 79, of Playa del Rey, California, passed away on February 14, 2026.

She preferred, when she could, to make four right turns rather than a single left, a small expression of a life lived on her own terms.

She was born on June 25, 1946, in Inglewood, California, to Kathleen Marie Schaffer and Henry John Phillips of Revere, Massachusetts. Her mother was a descendant of the Schwab family, German Catholic settlers of Mount Angel, Oregon, who helped establish Mount Angel Abbey in the late 1800s.

Her childhood was unsettled, both financially and emotionally. At fourteen, she made a decision that would shape her life: asking to live with a school friend, Lorraine Whittler, and Lorraine’s family, Charlotte and Rene Delofree. They became, in all the ways that mattered, her chosen family. From their home on Belden Drive, the daily walk to and from school included climbing the Hollywoodland stairs, 148 granite steps each way. A 1963 graduate of Hollywood High School, she began her career as a bookkeeper at Frederick’s of Hollywood, starting a lifelong path in finance.

On January 27, 1968, she married Donald Joseph Beck in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. They were married for 20 years and had one child, a daughter.

While working full time, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Redlands and later an MBA in Finance from Pepperdine University. In the years that followed, she built a distinguished career in finance and investment management during an era when a woman in such a role was not simply rare but often unwelcome.

She came of age professionally during a period of extraordinary market change, as the industry moved from handwritten ledgers and floor trading into the modern world of computerized and global markets.

At Loomis, Sayles & Co., she became a Senior Portfolio Manager during the golden age of active management. She managed major institutional portfolios, including the Federal Service Fund and the Boy Scouts of America Fund, each exceeding one billion dollars. Often the only woman in the room, she succeeded in an industry that offered few opportunities and helped open it for those who would come after, reshaping expectations in her own steady way.

In 1990, she married Paul Allen Woods Jr. In 2000, they founded Odyssey Advisors LLC, where she served as Chairman and Chief Operating Officer until the firm was sold. Together, they built a life in Playa del Rey and traveled extensively in search of new experiences.

At home, a voracious reader with a fondness for handmade quilts, she collected cookbooks with a kind of optimism that exceeded her interest in cooking. Her cooking was uneven, with one consistent exception: crepes, made on holidays and special occasions.

Her life included profound challenges, which she faced with resilience and candor. Diagnosed in her forties with severe depression and paranoid schizophrenia, she lived with these conditions for the rest of her life and continued to engage the world with intellectual curiosity and humor. When asked if she heard voices, she would sometimes say, “Not today.”

Later, through DNA testing, she learned that Henry John Phillips was not her biological father, deepening her understanding of her family history and her relationship with him.

Her husband, Paul Allen Woods Jr., died in 2013. They had been together for 24 years.

In later years, she volunteered with various nonprofits and remained active to the end, trading stocks and publishing word search books. She followed current events closely and spoke often, in her own way, about the importance of accountability in public life.

She is survived by her daughter, Erika Kirsten Beck; her grandson, Ryder Beck Pyeatt; and her half-sisters, Michelle Anne Rao and Lisa Anne Morton. She was preceded in death by her mother and her half-siblings, Cheryl Anne Holliman and John Henry Phillips.

She will be remembered in ways both large and small, many of them known only to those who knew her. She had asked to be remembered, not memorialized.