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Tyrone Pike says the best way to honor his wife Bettina Pike, who died on Sept. 5 at the age of 52, is for those who knew and loved her to “pay it forward” by trying to “be more like Bettina” in their lives.
Bettina Pike, who served on the Woodside Elementary School District’s governing board for 12 years, six of them as its president, “was really good at kind of pulling people together and helping people work through difficult issues,” Tyrone Pike says. She excelled, he says, at “the art of listening to people, the art of defining and driving to compromise,” and he hopes others can work to emulate those skills as a way of honoring her life.
Former school board colleague Lori Livingston agrees. “In her work on the board and in the rest of her life, Bettina had a passion for building bridges between people to create solutions,” Livingston says.
An example of that skill comes from three school bond measures that Pike worked on. The first measure, in 1998, gained only 53 percent of the vote — far shy of the 66 percent needed at that time. But Pike talked to school neighbors and others who had opposed the measure and helped craft a compromise bond measure, which passed the next year with nearly 74 percent of the vote.
In 2005, another bond measure she worked on received more than 68 percent of the votes.
Friend Mary Pinkus, who collaborated with Pike when the two were presidents of the Woodside School Foundation and school board, respectively, says Pike “was refreshing to work with because she was such a straight shooter.”
“She touched so many lives,” Pinkus says. “She put so much time and energy into the school. I think she’d do anything for her children and obviously for all our children.”
After Pike’s children left Woodside Elementary, Pike was very active at Menlo School. She was also involved in the Young Men’s Service League and spent years working with the Episcopal diocese of San Francisco to try to start an Episcopal school in Foster City, an endeavor that ultimately failed, Tyrone Pike says, because not enough money could be raised.
Sheree Shoch, who became friends with Pike when they had children in the same grade at Woodside Elementary, says Bettina Pike was also “an incredibly talented public speaker and was always willing to speak.”
“I think she enjoyed public speaking because she enjoyed feeling like she was making a difference,” Shoch says.
Pike was also “the kind of friend you could call in the middle of the night and you knew she wouldn’t be annoyed,” Shoch says. She was honest with those around her, and “wouldn’t say things just because she knew you wanted to hear it,” Shoch says.
Pike, who lived with breast cancer for more than 10 years, also “thought it was important to laugh even when things were tough,” Shoch says.
Tyrone Pike says he was smitten with Bettina when he saw her in the check-in line on a flight from the East Coast to the Bay Area in 1997. When some seats opened up because of a 2.5-hour delay to repair mechanical problems, he saw his chance to sit with her. He asked her to dinner one night during her business trip and then asked her to extend her stay through the weekend. “She went off and talked to all her girlfriends and family about whether she should do that,” he says. “She decided to stay, and the rest is history.”
They married in 1998. Tyrone Pike had two children from an earlier marriage, Logan and Lili, and the two had two more children, George and Lucy. “Bettina was an amazing mother and stepmother to those kids,” he says.
Bettina was born in 1966 in Wareham, Massachusetts to George L. and Dagmar (Scheve) Unhoch. She graduated from Friends Academy in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and Yale University, where she studied economics.
She was raised in Marion, Massachusetts, a place she returned to throughout her life. “She really took in my two older children and exposed them in a really complete way to the great things she had back in life in Marion,” Tyrone Pike says, including sailing, golf and tennis.
Athletics were always part of Bettina Pike’s life. As a sailor, she was one of the few women to compete in the Beverly Yacht Club’s Marion to Bermuda race. She played varsity women’s squash and rowed varsity women’s crew at Yale.
She also loved the outdoors, and up until she went into hospice care three weeks before her death, she put in two or three miles a day walking with her husband, friends and beloved Labrador retrievers. “In the last year she probably put a million miles on her shoes,” says friend Mary Pinkus.
Pike worked on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch, in Paris for Brown Brothers Harriman and Co. — where she used her fluent German serving clients throughout Germany — and returned to New York to work for Hambrecht & Quist and Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
She is survived by parents George and Dagmar Unhoch of Marion; husband Tyrone F. Pike and children George and Lucy of Woodside; stepchildren Logan of San Francisco and Lili of Beijing, China; and sister Christina Unhoch Mason of New York City.
Private memorial services will be held in California and Massachusetts.
Contributions can be made to the Bettina Unhoch Pike Memorial Cancer Fund at the UCSF Foundation, PO Box 45339, San Francisco, CA 94145, or online at https://giving.ucsf.edu/honor-memorial.
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Bettina Pike with her son George and Labradors Alta and Tug in their Woodside backyard in 2015.(Photo by Barbara Wood/The Almanac) -
Bettina Pike as grand marshal of the Woodside May Day Parade in 2009. (Photo by Carol Hamilton) -
Bettina Pike representing the Woodside School Board in the May Day Parade 2008. She served 12 years on the school board, six of them as president. (Photo by Carol Hamilton) -
Bettina Pike and her son George in 2015. (Photo by Barbara Wood/The Almanac)
