Beatrice Challiss Laws

Beatrice Challiss Laws died on March 10, 2020, at home with her sons James Challiss Laws and John Muir Laws. Beatsie was a loving wife, mother, and grandmother who gave to her family and community with passion, patience, wisdom, and strength. She was born on August 2, 1927, in Los Angeles California, the daughter of John Van Hoesen Challiss and Beatrice Ward Challiss. Growing up with her sister Catharine, she attended Los Angeles High School, spending her summers as a camp counselor. She developed a love of the outdoors: flyfishing, horseback riding, backpacking, and studying botany and astronomy.

She attended the University of California at Berkeley and subsequently Stanford Law School, and in 1952 was one of the first female graduates. In 1953, she was admitted to the California Bar and clerked for Chief Justice Phil Gibson of the California Supreme Court. It was there that she met Robert Henry Laws Jr. They fell in love on a camping trip in the Sierra Nevada, and were married in 1962 and settled permanently in San Francisco. They supported each other steadfastly through both hard and happy times, raising two sons and spending many summers exploring the Sierra.

Beatrice lived a life of service. Following her work at the California Supreme Court, she was a deputy city attorney in San Francisco. She later worked as an attorney at the Sierra Club, protecting wildlands throughout the United States. Locally, in San Francisco, she was instrumental in the effort to save Tank Hill, now a protected natural area. Similarly, she helped defeat speculative development near Mount Sutro. In the 1980’s she served the City of San Francisco the work he did foretold what’s happening on the internet and social media right now.”

Orchestrating all this revolutionary activity was Alice Lowe. As she explained in her own matter of fact words: “My role was that of the modern day CEO - which means in charge of everything: parties, running business, finance, hiring, firing, hitting deadlines, media buying, everything you can think of … except for art direction and copy.” She was also the adman’s confidante. Gossage was brilliant, but he was difficult. Prone to depression, he would stay away from work for days on end. The only person who could coax him back to his desk was Alice Lowe. She understood the pressures he was under and how the artistic temperament responds to those pressures. But it was tough love that she dispensed. Especially when it came to judging his work. “Tell it like it is, Big Al” he’d say, and Alice would oblige, warts and all.

When Gossage was on form, he’d throw the best parties in San Francisco with such guests as the film director John Huston, Nobel Prize winning novelist John Steinbeck, Buckminster Fuller, a young Tom Wolfe, Herb Caen, David Brower, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Marshall McLuhan - whose media career was launched by Gossage in 1966.

Much to Alice’s consternation, Gossage often gave her only a few hours’ notice. Under such pressures she invented “The Instant Party Plan” which enabled her to transform a working office into a bar, buffet, restaurant and dance floor within 15 minutes.

She was the driving force behind the agency. Jerry Mander, who joined as a Partner in the early 1960s says she was “a remarkable up-beat energetic brilliant person ... she played a great part in my life----in the agency days---a true brilliant as a commissioner for the Juvenile Court.

Toward the end of her life, she faced multiple medical challenges with cheerfulness, courage, and grace. Known and respected in the neighborhood and community, her home became a hub where people came to share in her friendship kindness and wisdom. wonder of efficiency, collaborativeness, competence, creativity, cheerfulness, and kindness.”

All this was duly acknowledged when Alice was made President of the business. At a time when adland was a male preserve, having a female running the show was highly unusual. The fact that this woman was of an Asian ethnic background made Alice’s achievement even more remarkable. Somehow, while running Howard Gossage and his agency, Alice found time for an extracurricular activity which was to become the focal point of her life after she left advertising when Gossage died in 1969. Alice had always been fascinated by her Chinese heritage, and when she saw an advertisement recruiting Docents for San Francisco’s Brundage Collection of Asian art she asked Gossage if she could have time out each week to study.

As she explained, “Howard let me do what I wanted, and said ‘you shall be my contribution to culture’.”

With that, in 1966, Alice became one of the first Docents at what was to be the Asian Art Museum. Thereafter she also used her professional experience to transform the collection’s PR and fundraising.

One of her key initiatives was to use the museum as the venue for the fund raising events upon which the institution survived. This met with much resistance, but Alice got her way. She then transformed these events by organizing the spectacular “Marco Polo Ball.” As she explained: “We had a select group of [influential] candidates that we chose, and they were to sell raffle tickets. The one who sold the most raffle tickets would get to be Marco Polo” - and be the focal point of an extravaganza which ultimately brought in $100,000. As Alice said, “a lot of money in those days”.

After that, the Museum became synonymous with sensational balls, galas and other creative commercial events..

She brought the same maverick approach to raising the Museum’s public profile. With Alice in charge of PR, close working relations were established with the San Francisco Chronicle and other mainstream media outlets.

As Chair of the Committee on Communities, Alice also worked hard to involve the Bay Area’s Asian and other communities who had, up until then, felt ignored by the Museum’s leaders. As she said, “I feel blessed, in a way … they told me how they really felt, so that I could do something about it.”

“Doing something about it” was Alice’s forte. And this urge to change and make things better led to her being appointed by then Mayor Dianne Feinstein to serve as a Commissioner on the San Francisco Asian Art Commission from 1985 to 1999. Alice later served as the first Asian American Chair of the Commission from 1989 to 1993.

Alice was also President of the Society for Asian Art from 1986 to 1988. It was during her tenure that the city of San Francisco offered the downtown library to the Museum with the provision that a bond measure be successfully passed to renovate and upgrade the facility suitable for the collection.

Alice made sure that this provision was met, and the Museum moved to its new home in 2003

Despite the prestige and pressures that came with these positions, Alice continued to work every week as an Asian Art Museum Docent.

In fact she did so for more than 50 years. Even as her health was failing, she would study the background of new exhibits so that she could maintain the high standards which she had set as one of the first Docents, a half century earlier.

Alice still visited the Museum after moving out of her home in San Francisco’s Sunset district into the Peninsula Del Rey Retirement Community in Daly City. Her rooms there were decorated with replicas of some of her favorite pieces from the Museum, and with paintings by her late husband, the artist Lewis Lowe.

She died on Monday, 2nd March having fought illness with great dignity and tenacity for several years. Alice Lowe: Born November 4, 1922, Died March 2, 2020. She was predeceased by her husband Lewis Lowe. They had no children. Donations in Alice’s memory may be made to the Asian Art Museum.