Phyllis Levin Wasserstrom

Phyllis Levin Wasserstrom passed away peacefully at home surrounded by family on September 14. She was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. She grew up in the Boston suburbs until she went to Mount Holyoke College and then to the University of Michigan, from which she graduated in 1958. She met her future husband Richard (Dick) while he was a student at Amherst College. They married in 1957, had four children (one daughter followed by three sons), and celebrated 66 wedding anniversaries. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, they lived in Palo Alto and then spent a brief time in Washington, D.C., where Dick spent a time in government before resuming his academic career. They then moved to Tuskegee, Alabama—a brave venture into a different setting where Phyllis for the first but not last time found meaningful ways to benefit a local community. While Dick worked at Tuskegee Institute, Phyllis ran an interracial pre-school program, and she also did field work for Tuskegee's School of Agriculture.When a UCLA job for Dick took them back west, the family settled in Santa Monica. They lived there until 1979, aside from the year the family spent in Oxford, England. While in Santa Monica, Phyllis earned a M.A. in psychology from Azusa Pacific College. She also worked both as a trainer for Vista, which was a domestic counterpart of the Peace Corps and as a participant in an interracial school project in the San Fernando Valley.The family moved to Santa Cruz in 1979. While Dick worked at UCSC, Phyllis got a job at Youth Services as a crisis counselor. Her responsibilities increased until she became the head of Youth Services in the mid 1980s. After she and Dick retired in 1994, her desire to support others extended to supervising grief counselors at Hospice and volunteering at other agencies. All of this was a core part of her personal as well as professional life, as the wide circle of devoted friends of different ages she leaves behind testifies.Phyllis loved chocolate—especially good chocolate (though she often said that in her view there was really no such things as bad chocolate). Her favorite meal was crab. She liked word games such as Scrabble, playing duplicate bridge (where she became a Life Master), and doing jigsaw puzzles—and she was one of the many who did more of those after the start of COVID than she had in the preceding decades.Phyllis loved learning about new types of therapy and being involved in groups. She organized and led everything from consciousness raising groups for women to encounter groups for couples. This went along with her great capacity for friendship. She made new and lasting friends in Santa Cruz, and many of them rallied to help her when her health began to decline rapidly a few months ago. She also maintained ties with friends in Southern California and even kept in touch with one of her classmates from third grade, talking to her on the phone daily until just a few weeks before her death. Phyllis is survived by her husband, four children, five grandchildren and a great grandchild. The family requests that in lieu of flowers donations be made to Doctors Without Borders or a charity of choice.