Newsmakers 2025: Those we lost

This midwinter season, Lookout Santa Cruz is checking in with some of the people and topics we’ve covered over the past year.

In 2025, Santa Cruz County lost a number of influential figures, from former mayors to tireless reporters. Here’s a partial list of those in the community whose example deserves our remembrance:

For decades, the moving memoir “Farewell to Manzanar,” which drew attention to the American military’s internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, was a curriculum staple in California’s public schools. The book documented the early life of Santa Cruz’s Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who co-authored the book with her husband, novelist James D. Houston. The success of “Manzanar” made her famous — she’s the only Santa Cruzan in the California Hall of Fame. But locally, Jeanne Houston is mostly remembered for her generosity and her regal presence at the center of Santa Cruz’s rich literary community, as a writer, editor, mentor and social connector. She died Dec. 21, 2024, at the age of 90. 

Already a veteran reporter when she joined the staff of the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 2014, Jessica York brought a level of humanity to her journalism, covering the often difficult beats of homelessness, crime and the courts. A native New Englander, she was, said many who worked with her, versatile. She also covered everything from city politics to natural disasters and was particularly devoted to maintaining the balance of compassion, accuracy and timelessness that were the hallmarks of her profession. She died Jan. 11 of cancer at 43.

Celia Scott’s career as an environmental activist spanned five decades and brought her to prominence in Santa Cruz city government. She was first elected to the Santa Cruz City Council in 1994, and served as mayor in 1997. But her environmental advocacy began much earlier, as an activist for preservation of open space in the early 1970s and a lobbyist for the Sierra Club. Trained as an attorney, she used her legal skills to fight for a number of ecological issues and — alongside her husband, former UCSC physics professor Peter Scott, who died in 2024 — she nurtured a deep love for Santa Cruz’s natural environment. She died Jan. 17 at the age of 89. 

Gifted jazz and gospel vocalist Tammi Brown was a central figure in Santa Cruz’s music scene for more than 20 years. Reared in the Bay Area and steeped in the influence of the Black church, she built a music career that led to collaborations with such giants as Stanley Jordan and Bobby McFerrin. In Santa Cruz, she performed regularly as a solo act and as a backup singer to countless other musician friends. She also consistently offered her talents to benefit concerts, earning her recognition as Santa Cruz Artist of the Year. She died April 5 of ovarian cancer.

For decades, Barry Swenson’s name has been a part of the urban landscape throughout Santa Cruz County. He was a third-generation leader of Swenson Builders, the San Jose-based construction company that constructed many of Santa Cruz’s most prominent buildings and homes. Locally, Swenson’s legacy is deeply entwined in the county’s yearslong recovery from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and in the ongoing transformation of the city landscape to meet the demand for housing. He died April 19 at the age of 85.

In the downtown community of regulars at the Blue Lagoon and fans of punk rock in Santa Cruz County, Felix Lozano was larger than life. He was both one of the most familiar faces behind the bar at the Blue Lagoon, and a founding member of the seminal Mexican American punk band Los Dryheavers. He was also instrumental in making life better for local people with developmental disabilities through his work at Hope Services, cultivating relationships with young people across the county. He died of a heart attack on April 19 at the age of 51. 

Decades before the term “AI” became part of common usage, David Cope was doing something audacious: creating “new” musical works in the style of famous composers using computer technology. A longtime professor of music at UC Santa Cruz, Cope established his “Experiments in Musical Intelligence” program in 1981 to generate music using the compositions of Mozart, Bach and others as models, sparking excitement from technologists and outrage from traditional musicians. He died May 4 of heart failure at the age of 83.

Perhaps the least meaningful part of Mike Rotkin’s role in public life was his record five terms as mayor of Santa Cruz. Before, during and after those years as mayor, Rotkin embodied cool-headed, effective, humane progressive activism. He first emerged 50 years ago as a self-described Marxist/socialist out of the UCSC Community Studies department. Most recently, he took on a role as a level-headed voice of centrism on the Regional Transportation Commission. In between, Rotkin was in constant motion as an activist in LGBTQ rights, health care, the environment, housing, water, libraries and neighborhood organizing. He died at the age of 79 on June 18. 

He was both a doctor and a health care executive, but Larry deGhetaldi’s lasting legacy in California was in his essential work to reform Medicare payments to chronically underpaid doctors in rural and small-town areas. His efforts as the CEO and president of the Santa Cruz division of Sutter Health helped pass federal legislation that allowed many doctors to continue to treat Medicare patients when they couldn’t afford to do so otherwise. He died Aug. 10 from brain cancer at the age of 69. 

For more than 25 years, Jondi Gumz was a pillar of the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s staff of reporters, covering a wide range of beats across the county. She was, however, most well-known for her meticulous and tenacious reporting on local education and business, which earned her both local and national recognition. After leaving the Sentinel in 2019, she continued to pursue her passion for newspaper journalism as an editor with the Times Publishing Group, covering Aptos, Scotts Valley and Capitola. She died at the age of 72 on Sept. 11.

Most of Rose Filicetti’s essential work on behalf of the community in Santa Cruz County took place after she retired. The longtime activist with local nonprofits first moved to the area from Silicon Valley, supposedly to retire. But from that point forward, she joined the board of the educational organization Digital NEST and established her own nonprofit to streamline services for people in need. Through it all, she served as a mentor and a connector, especially for women. She died at 73 on Nov. 10.

UC Santa Cruz physics professor Joel Primack was used to thinking big. It was, after all, part of the job description of being a cosmologist. For almost 50 years, he worked in the rarified field of particle astrophysics, and was a pioneering theorist in the field of dark matter and the birth of the universe. Yet Primack was also grounded in more terrestrial matters, helping to found the Union of Concerned Scientists and working to bring science to the field of government policy. He and his wife, Nancy Abrams, wrote two books together and co-taught a popular class at UCSC titled “Cosmology and Culture.” He died Nov. 13 at the age of 80. 

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