Today's the longest day of the year and the first day of summer. All I know is that it's still light when I slip under the covers at 8 each night with a smile on my face. A far cry from 70 years ago when I HAD to go to bed at 7 and I was upset that I could hear the other kids still in the street playing Three Flies Up.
Marcia Solomon LeVitt ’64 passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in Sacramento, California. Marcia was born and raised in San Diego, California where she lived a care-free life, much to the chagrin of her parents Samuel and Hope Solomon. Besides the tamer tennis and swimming, she often rode the bus by herself to the beach eight miles from her home. She was also known to sneak out of worship services to meet up with her friends doing the same at a local soda shop. She and childhood and lifelong friend Donna even hitchhiked to Mazatlán when Marcia was just nineteen. Marcia, known by some classmates as “Mushie”, graduated in 1964 after skipping a grade a few years earlier. She went on to nursing school in Los Angeles at 17, but some of the realities of the profession led her to pursue a teaching career. She attended Long Beach State and graduated from Chico State in 1972. Marcia taught briefly at schools in inner-city Los Angeles and later in Foresthill, California. She switched gears again, however, and worked for the Nevada County and Placer County Human Assistance Departments. She later transferred to the Sacramento HA Department where she worked for 26 years in the Welfare Fraud unit, making additional friends for life. She retired in 2004. A hippie at heart, Marcia met Ed Zajac during communal living in an old Victorian house in Long Beach. They shared a decade of travel and college-hopping before parting ways. After moving to Sacramento, her next door neighbor introduced her to yet another set of friends for life, whose passion was exploring old mines and ghost towns in Nevada. She became a staunch believer in “life begins at 40” when she met and married Raymond LeVitt. Marcia and Ray soon began volunteering and gathering more friends for life at several of the monthly community breakfasts on the Divide. Marcia also volunteered her talents at the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historical Park in Coloma. She especially loved teaching gold-panning to visiting fourth graders and other tourists. She even won a second place in the California State Gold Panning Championships! Marcia is survived by, among others, her heartbroken husband Ray, sister Lynne Solomon Ballman and forever friend Donna Glazier.
