News & Impact

The Beverly Shirlee Zimmerman Bock Fund for Girls and Women at Risk, established by Robert Dishman Bock in memory and celebration of his beloved wife, will provide services—including emergency housing and living expenses, college tuition, psychological counseling, and drug rehabilitation—to adolescent girls and women at risk of abuse or addiction, thereby ensuring their safety, care, and return to a healthy life.

Beverly Shirlee Zimmerman was born in San Francisco on October 17, 1950. Her mother, Shirlee Graubart Zimmerman, died after giving birth from a complication routinely treated today. This tragedy affected Beverly all of her life. She grew up with Shirlee’s beauty and wonderful smile and the charm and graciousness of her father, Arthur Zimmerman. A smart, athletic, and musical child, Beverly danced in the San Francisco Ballet’s annual production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker.

There was no Title IX legislation encouraging girls and young women to participate in sports when Beverly went to high school and college, and certainly there were no activities that compared with the allure of the drug culture emerging in San Francisco in 1963, when Beverly was 13 and got high for the first time. She graduated from high school in Marin, went to college in Los Angeles, dropped out, married, traveled for a year in South America and Mexico, divorced, and drifted far from her family.

Beverly baked bread for a North Bay commune and rode with well-known Bay Area motorcycle clubs. At less than 100 pounds she was too small to pilot the mandatory (and for her behemoth) Harley Davidsons, so she chose to ride her own Triumph Tiger rather than be a “chick on the back.” She once rode through the gates of San Quentin Prison as part of a biker-prisoner visit. She roller-skated joyfully through Peninsula city streets for hours and became a “gym rat.” She was in the audience of many legendary rock shows. She also got introduced to DOS 1.0, bought a Mac, and began a romance with computers and graphic design.

Beverly’s husband Robert doesn’t know when or how she came to her first decision to escape addiction. But she reached out to her parents, her brother and sister, her aunts, uncles, and cousins, who returned her love and trust and supported her through her recovery. Beverly experienced the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake while in a dental chair at the top of a San Francisco high rise having the dental effects of methamphetamine use reversed. She went through drug recovery programs. She completed college at the University of San Francisco and the coursework for her master’s degree at Dominican College. At the gym, she dazzled onlookers when pirouetting on a full-speed Stairmaster while listening to Stevie Nicks on her Walkman. Beverly also became a spiritual sister to singer Tina Turner, who had rebounded from the abuse that had defined her own youth.

Her family stayed supportive as Beverly went through cycles of successes and relapses. None was more loyal than Rocky, her Tibetan terrier, whom she cherished as the child she always wished for. She loved her nieces and nephews, taking pride in them as though they were her own, and her aunts as if they were her mother (and they sometimes were), but Rocky owned her heart.

If you were to spend what would have been a perfect week for Beverly, you would sunbathe on the beach at Kapalua, Maui, or nude in your backyard; go to dinner at Max’s Opera Cafe or Toscana’s before attending a performance of the San Francisco Ballet or Marin Symphony with her dad and his friends; have your nails done early Saturday morning (but not too early), and then watch Lidia’s Italian Kitchen on PBS (even though you, yourself, don’t cook); reread a letter from your nephew at summer camp, phone an aunt or your sister and talk for an hour, then walk with Rocky during a spectacular sunset; and spend Sunday seeing a new Sean Connery movie with a large box of popcorn—buttered or not, depending on how the jeans fit when Beverly was getting dressed that morning.

Beverly, a beautiful, intelligent, and loving woman, died in July 2006 in San Rafael, California, and is buried there. Although the loss is great, both for those who loved her and for those who will never meet her, the Beverly Shirlee Zimmerman Bock Fund for Girls and Women at Risk, dedicated to the struggles and needs that Beverly had at various times in her life, serves as a lasting memorial to her life and keeps her lovingly in Robert’s and others’ hearts and prayers.

Shared from the Heart
Other organizations important to Beverly were Sunny Hills Services and Alcoholics Anonymous.

If you would like to start a Named Endowment Fund at JFCS, please contact [email protected] or 415-449-3858.