Rhea Alpert Friend

1928 - 2025

Rhea Alpert Friend
11/02/1928 - 02/21/2025
Rhea Alpert Friend died peacefully at The Vi at Palo Alto on February 21, 2025. She was 96.
Rhea was an excellent student and graduated at the top of her class in High School. Because of her academic success and ambition, she was accepted to Northwestern University, where she was a member of the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority and majored in speech correction and audiology. At Northwestern, Rhea met Hugo M. "Skip" Friend, Jr., who was studying law at Northwestern, at a sorority party. Skip, like many of his generation, was returning from a four-year tour in the Army Air Forces in London after WWII.
Rhea and Skip were married in 1951, while Rhea was a senior at Northwestern. They had two sons, James Hugo Friend and Peter Andrew Friend.
The Friend family soon moved to the Bay Area in 1960, where Skip launched a career at Hyatt Corporation, from which he retired as president in 1978. Rhea was instrumental in supporting that career as Hyatt grew rapidly. The family lived in the Bay Area for more than 60 years, mostly in Woodside, CA.
Rhea was an active board member and volunteer in many Bay Area charitable organizations including Peninsula Volunteers, the San Francisco Art Institute, ARCS Foundation and the San Francisco Opera Guild, where she chaired four opera balls celebrating the opening of the opera season. Rhea had many lifelong friends in San Francisco and on the Peninsula. She loved tennis, theater, movies, and travel. She was an excellent bridge player and played at The Vi regularly until a few weeks before her passing.
Rhea and Skip had a wonderful and loving marriage for 69 years, until Skip's death, at the age of 95, in 2020. The family celebrated many happy memories together over the years. Rhea and Skip were blessed with two wonderful grandsons, Max and Matthew, the sons of Peter Friend, and they shared a mutually loving relationship.
Rhea Friend is survived by her sons, Jim Friend of New York and Peter Friend of San Francisco; and her grandsons Max Friend and Matthew Friend.
The family asks that donations in Rhea's memory be made to Peninsula Volunteers, https://1pvi.org, or the San Francisco Opera Guild, https://www.sfopera.com/opera-guild/.