Carole Adele Farley passed away on July 2, 2024 at her home in Bodega Bay, CA. She is survived by 4 children and 5 grandchildren. Carole was born in St. Petersburg, FL and grew up in San Francisco, CA. Her son, Kevin, shared these words of his mother:

"My first memory of my mother was her yelling at a Forty Niner game on television. A passionate sports fan, she agonized over every Niner game, rooted tirelessly for the Warriors, and although she let herself be dragged to some A’s games, she was a Giants fan to the core. But more than anything, she loved Tennis; playing most of her life, always watching otherwise.

A voracious reader, I remember her sitting me on her lap and reading the classics to me; I can still remember the voice for Phineas Fogg in “Around the World in 80 Days”. (A man I think she admired because he had all sort of adventures without seeming to get dirty or sleep on the ground.) She loved the outdoors, but she had one word for camping, and that was “Ahwahnee”.

She met my father in high school, but her second love affair was the sea. Born in the South on the Gulf and could swim as early as she could walk, she loved the water. Growing up in California, one of her favorite things was to accompany her father on his trips up and down the coast. He was tasked with inspecting the lighthouses along the Pacific coast, and she never tired of the Pacific.

My mother was tenacious; a trait she passed on to us kids. Once she took my Grandmother in her little ’72 Toyota to pick us up from a Backpacking trip. In the days before Google Maps, she followed a road that ostensibly took her to the trailhead. It started as a two lane blacktop, then one lane, then gravel, a dirt road, then eventually a one foot wide hiking trail through the Sierras. An hour later a Boy Scout troop on a rugged mountain hike was startled to encounter two women in a compact car bouncing along over rocks in the opposite direction. “Just taking my mom for a Sunday drive!”

Not surprisingly, she got where she was going.

A sharp wit, she didn’t suffer fools gladly, and I noticed that her friends were all cut from the same cloth; intelligent, a good if slightly warped sense of humor, and unafraid to stick up for what they believed. A quiet person in a noisy clan, she always seemed to have the memorable comment at the end of the evening. She raised us to stick up for ourselves, to try new things, to be responsible and polite, and generally succeeded on the first three points at least.

Over the past few years after my father passed away, she commented frequently on how fortunate she felt to be able to read a book with the Tennis Channel on, and the view of waves breaking over the reef offshore. I think if you threw in a plate of Negri’s spaghetti, she’d call that heaven.

She has been such a huge part of my life that she is with me every moment, and it’s impossible to imagine that she won’t be there to greet me."

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