Lyn Chervil

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Lyn Chevil
Lyn Chevil

With a conservative East Coast upbringing, Lyn Chevli was born as Marilyn Keith in New Haven, Conn. Growing up in Milford, she enjoyed boating in a small rowboat her father, Arthur Reginald Keith had built and christened The ARK, for his initials. She lived with her father, mother Betty, and brother Al Keith.

A 1954 graduate of Skidmore College, she embarked on a European tour, hitchhiking through Europe with a girlfriend, unheard of at the time.

Upon her return, she married, but was ill-suited to life as a housewife so she and her mother left the East Coast for a cross-country trek with her two daughters, Neela and Shanta. Her mother had vacationed in Laguna Beach so they headed there in 1961. Lyn Chevli embraced Laguna Beach as her town and never looked back. She was proud to be a long-time resident of Laguna and died peacefully on Oct. 8. She would have been 85 on Christmas Eve.

Chevli was the original owner of Fahrenheit 451 and a silver jewelry exhibitor at the Festival of Arts and Sawdust Festival. She was a sculptor, welding on the balcony of her Park Ave apartment in a bikini; a community activist; underground cartoonist; and single parent. She was always doing something interesting. At the time of her death, she had finished two memoirs about her underground comics experience and her time living in India.

In the 1970s, she entertained foreign writers and others in the arts at the request of the U.S. State Department. She mingled and worked with members of the gay community, demonstrated for peace on Main Beach and created the birth control and problem pregnancy wing at the Laguna Beach Free Clinic, where she was also a counselor for many years. In her early 70s, she picketed with Albertson’s employees when they were locked out.

She romped in the surf with feminist Kate Millet, entertained cartoonist Sergio Aragones, partied with underground cartoonists Gilbert Shelton, R. Crumb, S. Cay Wilson, and Harvey Kurtzman among others. She was a good friend to Ronnie Gilbert of The Weavers and let a piece of her sculpture, “The Jabberwocky,” go on tour with the writer Arch Obler. It had its own seat on the airplane.

She and Joyce Farmer partnered to write and publish the first feminist underground comics, another first which would secure her as a feminist icon.

She lived most of her last years at Aliso Viejo, across from the Montage in South Laguna. There she set up a giant workbench and a bookcase that was made by local artist Andy Wing. She made intricate sculptures using mixed media, mostly bones, of different species of animals.

As a long-time secular feminist, realist, humanist, she wanted no funeral service. As a passionate recycler, she donated her body to UCI Medical School. As a determined feminist, she wishes the men of the world more humility. Those wishing to honor her memory are requested to commit an act of kindness or creativity and live lightly on the planet.

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