Sylvia McLaughlin sat in the study of her Berkeley hills home - books, maps and documents scattered, as always, on her desk - and gestured out of a large corner window toward the gleaming blue San Francisco Bay.

"It's beautiful," she said, admiring the sailboats, the brilliant sun shining on the water and the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. "We should save these beautiful places."

The 94-year-old co-founder of the nonprofit group Save the Bay knows a little something about the subject. She has spent a half century fighting to save the bay from the ravages of development, garbage dumping, toxic pollution, sewage and environmental degradation.

Her accomplishments are now on display outside her study window, where people can jog, gaze at birds or exercise their dogs along a giant estuary that was once in danger of becoming a filthy channel amid industrial sites and tract home developments.

McLaughlin will be honored Thursday on the 50th anniversary of the day she and two other East Bay women founded Save the Bay under the then-crazy notion that they might be able to protect San Francisco Bay. McLaughlin will be given a lifetime achievement award and accept the honor on behalf of her now-deceased cohorts, Catherine "Kay" Kerr and Esther Gulick.

"The only reason they did succeed was because they didn't realize that they couldn't be successful," said David Lewis, the executive director of Save the Bay. Lewis was born in 1961, the year McLaughlin, Kerr and Gulick founded the organization. "These women were forces of nature. They just couldn't be denied, and they built a movement involving tens of thousands of people."

McLaughlin grew up in Denver, where she developed a passion for wild landscapes and the outdoors. She eventually made her way to the East Coast, where she received a bachelor's degree in French from Vassar College in 1939.

She married Donald McLaughlin in 1948, and the couple settled in Berkeley. They had two children.

Ugly sights, smells

McLaughlin, who moved into her hillside home in 1955, did not like the view out of the window back then. She saw garbage being dumped on the shoreline, marshlands being filled and raw sewage being piped into the bay. By 1961, a third of the bay had already been filled or diked off, and only 10 percent of the original wetlands remained.

"Cities had their dumps along the shoreline, and you could see dump trucks going down there continuously," McLaughlin said. "I remember seeing garbage burning out there. And people who lived here then remember the smell of sewage. It was not very nice."

At that time, less than 6 miles of shoreline was accessible to the public, and developers were planning to fill in 60 percent of what remained of the bay, including much of the Berkeley shore. The Army Corps of Engineers said the bay would be nothing more than a shipping canal by 2020 if development continued at the same rate.

McLaughlin, Kerr and Gulick, whose husbands were all UC Berkeley administrators or faculty, decided something had to be done. They gathered representatives of every environmental organization they knew about and presented them with the problem. The group concluded that a new organization should be formed to deal with the problem and, with that, McLaughlin said, "they all filed out and wished us luck."

With no one else to carry the banner, the three women formed Save San Francisco Bay Association while sitting around their kitchen tables munching almond cookies and sipping tea. It was the first organization devoted exclusively to protecting San Francisco Bay and one of the first modern grassroots environmental movements in the country.

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