Alice Baker, Flagler Beach’s former mayor, two-time interim manager and peripatetic city worker whose warmth and kindliness hid the temperament of a dogged fighter, died on July 15 in her hometown of Clarkesville, Ga., where she had returned in 2016. She was 95.
Baker worked in the city administration for 17 years, starting as a cashier in 1979 and making her way through most city departments, especially in the clerk’s office. She retired in 1996 then served as interim manager a couple of times and on five advisory boards before her appointment as mayor in 2006, when she was 75.
Ed Kuhnlein had been elected mayor over JoAnne Ricardi in 2005. A year later he announced he would resign to care for his wife. There was fierce debate–as there often was back then on a commission that, unlike its current, model version, was often a spectacle–over holding a special election. Kuhnlein vetoed two commission attempts to set one. Baker was eventually appointed as other applicants withdrew, and seated at the end of April 2006.
Three years later Baker defeated Jamal Nejame with 60 percent of the vote. Baker stopped attending meetings in late 2011, after tripping on a car-stopper at Target and injuring herself. She was 80. She announced that she would not return or run again, and Linda Provencher was elected in early 2012.
“She was a great representative of the city. I served with her when I was a commissioner, and only ran for Mayor when she decided not to run again,” Provencher said. “We stayed in touch when she moved to Georgia. She would call me and give me her opinion on issues. It was important to her to listen to the residents.”
Baker was strongly against food trucks but just as strongly in favor of allowing dogs in outdoor seating at local restaurants. She was against hot dog stands (“I think when she stepped down Joy gave her a small toy hotdogs stand,” Provencher recalled) but all for TNR, trap, neuter and return programs. She was always battling to preserve Flagler Beach’s old-time charm, as if she wanted to preserve the continuity of her own small-town childhood.
“She was a very strong-willed person, but had a compassionate side as well,” Provencher said. And she loved cats.
That was always the story: kind, yes, but.
“She was a very kind person, but she was very strong,” said Jane Mealy, the former long-time city commissioner who served six years with Baker, not always on the same side of issues. “She had beliefs about what Flagler Beach should look like, how it should be run, and she wouldn’t give in easily to people that disagreed with her. In her day-to-day, go-out-for-lunch kind of thing, she was very kind. And if you had personal problems, she would care about you. But she was very strong-willed when it came to things about the city.”
Baker left Flagler Beach to care for her ailing husband back in her native environment. Her husband died a year later. “I’ve been thinking that it’s probably good that she never came back after she moved to Georgia, because I don’t think she would like the hotel or the building just north of it,” Mealy said, referring to the imposing Compass Hotel that rose next to Veterans Park, or the multi-use, multistory building rising on North 2nd Street, though Baker was old enough to have known the previous hotel that stood where the Compass does now. Mealy surmises that Baker would have opposed the recent annexation of Veranda Bay and Summertown, the subdivisions across the bridge, because she did not want toe mainland to have more power than the island.
Flagler Beach government announced her death on the city’s website last Friday.
In late February 2016, the City Commission bid her farewell as she had decided to move back to Clarkesville, where she was born and raised. “Anytime I couldn’t make a decision, needed a little bit of help as to how to balance something out as to what was to the greater good, I could always count on Alice,” then-City Commissioner Joy McGrew said during the meeting.
It was really her second farewell. The commission had celebrated her in February 2012, recognizing her long service to the city, when then-Commissioner Barbara Revels, a resident of Flagler Beach and a business owner there, was among those in attendance.
“Alice was a dedicated, Flagler Beach public servant,” Revels said on Monday. “She always had a smile and would listen and be fair, but you wouldn’t want to mistake her sweetness for lack of resolve. She stood her ground when necessary. She was a good spokesperson for our tiny city.”
The commission eventually ceded the floor to a poem by Stan Drescher, the city’s poet laureate, called “The Gal Who Did It All.” The 33 stanzas–most of Drescher’s poems were epics–were read by Commissioner Kim Carney, and included the following lines:
Alice Baker to us all
Was an institution
And it will be tough to find
A good substitution
It’s very hard to step down
Alice is no quitter
And ‘tho she is a legend
It’s sweet but not bitter
So let us picture Alice
As her parade goes on
She’s still in front as always
But now waves a baton
You’ve given much to all of us
It’s so hard thanking you
But since that’s impossible
We’ll wave and bid adieu.
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