Biographical Profile |
Stephanie Gardner Trimble is the elder daughter of John and Aida Gardner. A “PhD baby” born in Berkeley in 1938, Stephanie moved to Connecticut with her parents when her father got his first post-doctoral job, at Connecticut College. Two years later, her sister, Francesca “Checka” Gardner was born, while John Gardner was teaching at Mount Holyoke College. After Pearl Harbor, her father enlisted in the Marines, and the family moved to the Washington, DC area. There he underwent various kinds of training and in June of 1942 joined the newly-organized Office of Strategic Services (OSS). When he was sent to Europe with the OSS--first to Italy, then to Austria--Stephanie and the family moved back to Palo Alto, where John and Aida, as newlyweds, had lived during John’s senior year at Stanford (1934-1935). After Captain John Gardner’s discharge from the Marines in 1946, the family moved to New York City, when he joined the Carnegie Corporation. The Gardners soon bought a house in Scarsdale, New York, where Stephanie and Checka spent most of their growing up years. Graduating from Scarsdale High School in 1956, Stephanie went on to Radcliffe College, earning her AB in 1960. While working as Secretary to Erwin Griswold, Dean of Harvard Law School, Stephanie met her future husband, Phillip R. Trimble. They married in 1963 after he graduated and passed the New York Bar, but moved first to Berkeley for a year before Phillip joined the firm of Cravath, Swain and Moore in New York. Stephanie’s two sons, J. “Gardner” Trimble and William “Billy” Trimble were born in New York in 1968 and 1970, respectively. In this period, Stephanie worked at Time magazine as a researcher-reporter, covering stories in law, medicine, science, press, and religion. After her separation from Phillip in the early 1970s, Stephanie and her sons moved to Washington, where they joined the household of John and Aida Gardner in Chevy Chase, Maryland. For many years, Stephanie worked as a technical information specialist in the Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, while Gardner and Billy attended private schools in the area through high school. In 1986, Gardner went to California to attend UC Santa Cruz, and three years later, the entire family moved back to California--Billy to attend Pomona College, John Gardner to take up the newly-endowed Haas Professorship in Public Service at Stanford, and Stephanie to attend law school at the University of San Francisco. Stephanie went on to utilize her training as an estate attorney in both private practice and at California Advocates for Nursing Homes (CANHR) in the 1990s. She also volunteered for custody and support cases at the SF Bar Association and to draw up wills and trusts for AIDS patients through the AIDS Legal Referral Panel. Stephanie has been an enthusiastic supporter of the John W. Gardner Legacy Oral History Project since its inception.
|