Gambling – especially on horses – traveling and being with friends were among retired schoolteacher and administrator Maruta Gardner’s favorite things, friends and family noted during a celebration of Gardner’s life in the park near the Mission Beach jetty on March 4.
Gardner’s passion, however, was community service, which anyone who’d seen her painting out graffiti along the boardwalk and elsewhere in Mission Beach, can attest to. That, in fact, was how Gardner was tragically killed, while painting out graffiti in the 600 block of San Diego Place during a road rage incident Feb. 12 just days before her 69th birthday,
“Maruta loved champagne, chocolate, her corvette and her red cowboy boots,” said a tearful Nancie Geller of Mission Beach Women’s Club, who noted the club was “forever changed” once Gardner joined in 2003.
“Maruta was extraordinary in every sense of the word,” said Geller. “She was talented, determined and had a magical way of making you believe you could do anything.”
Gardner said there was an expression about Gardner’s pervasive impact on people. It was called being “Marutaized.”
“You found yourself chairing an event, or taking on a project you never believed you could do,” Geller said, adding, “Maruta made a profound difference in our beach community.”
Geller noted Gardner spearheaded funding projects “year after year,” everything from raising money to purchase police dogs, to renovating Firehouse 21 and paying for lighting and security cameras as well as medical equipment for the Beach Area Family Health Center.
“She took pride in the beautification of our beach, and faithfully chaired all the beach cleanups and was our graffiti remover extraordinaire,” Geller said.
San Diego Police chief Shelley Zimmerman recalled how Maruta’s anti-graffiti relationship with the city of San Diego got started.
Zimmerman noted she’d gotten calls from the mayor and others in the city to go down and check out the graffiti on Mission Beach’s boardwalk.
“I’d go down to the end of the boardwalk and I’d look and I’d say, ‘I don’t see any graffiti. I see fresh paint,'” Zimmerman said.
After about a half dozen more times of that, Zimmerman said she finally encountered Gardner and her husband, Willie, walking on the boardwalk.
Zimmerman asked her, “Are you the one that keeps painting out all the graffiti? And she said, ‘yes.'”
Zimmerman replied, “How about you take pictures of the graffiti, and we’ll have you work with the gang unit, and maybe we’ll be able to catch the ones who are doing the graffiti? We’ll work together.”
After Gardner agreed, Zimmerman said she “deputized her and the whole bit,” then gave her an honorary badge.
“She asked for a gun,” the police chief quipped. “I didn’t give her one, but it was the beginning of a partnership.”
Noting public safety is a “shared responsibility,” Zimmerman said if you looked that term up in the dictionary “you’d see Maruta’s picture right there, because she was the perfect person that exemplified that.”
Speaking of Gardner’s legacy, Zimmerman said, “Her memory will always live on because she touched all of our lives in such a positive way.”
Another of Gardner’s longstanding friends, who was a member of her regular poker “club” and attended her annual opening-day outings at the Del Mar Racetrack, said Gardner realized two of her dreams – going to the Kentucky Derby and seeing a Triple Crown winner – the last year of her life. Other friends and family members read specially prepared poems that captured the spirit – and humor – of Gardner’s life at her March 4 memorial.
“Maruta was larger than life,” concluded Geller, “No one will ever fill her red cowboy boots. We will miss her dearly, that small laughter and her favorite saying, ‘Oh my, how nice.’ Rest in peace. You left this world a better place.”