Barbara Lee Simard

Barbara Lee (Dennen) Simard (1949–2025)

Barbara Lee Simard’s heart slowed to a peaceful stop on June 3, 2025, closing the final chapter of a life marked by grit, grace, and unshakable independence.

Born in Logan, Utah, on April 2, 1949, Barbara was the second of six children. The family relocated to the Bay Area shortly after her birth. When she graduated from Hayward High School in 1967, she headed straight to San Francisco, drawn by the counterculture movement that was reshaping the world. She strung beads to make her rent and soaked in the energy of a generation in revolt that would help shape her free-spirited personality.

But Barbara also had a great mind that she put to good use. She eventually decided it was time for a steady income and at age 19 nailed her first and only job interview at Bank of America in San Francisco—hired to stuff envelopes—and didn’t stop advancing until she became a top executive with the bank. So indispensable was she that the bank created an entirely new leadership position, Vice President for Technology, to accommodate her, despite her lack of a college education. 

She married Francis Xavier Dennen in 1980. Barbara and Frank were confirmed city dwellers, yet their great joy was camping together in the mountains. Despite a rocky relationship, she was by his side when he passed in 2023.

Her career came screeching to a halt in 1995 when she suffered a massive brain aneurysm, leaving her with partial paralysis on her right side. Most people would have taken that as a cue to slow down. Instead, after a heroic struggle to regain her speech, her ability to walk, and to navigate in the world, Barbara followed her long-time dream and bought a bed and breakfast in Ashland, Oregon, the home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  For nearly a decade, she provided gracious accommodations for her theatre-loving guests, never attending the performances herself.  She was content to sit with her visitors and enjoy their accounts. 

When she sold the B&B, she and Frank bought a lovely house on a lake in San Luis Obispo, which is the place she said she will always consider home. In her final years, Barbara lived in assisted living in Folsom, California, where she remained as she always had been: lovely, kind, and tough as nails, with a smile that lit up any room she entered.

She was among the first patients in the U.S. to receive platinum coils after her aneurysm—a treatment still experimental at the time. She outlived every other participant in the neurological trial by more than twenty years, a fact that would surprise no one who knew her.

She is preceded in death by her parents, Marjorie Lee (McCowin) and Victor Louis Simard II, and her husband, Frank; and survived by her five siblings: Victor Simard III, James Simard, Diane Warren, Carolyn Chezik, and Suzanne Reese, as well as many treasured nieces and nephews. Her family remembers her as the force she was—a woman who lived on her own terms and made the life she wanted.

The family will gather in Santa Maria, California, on July 12 at 2:00 to commend her ashes to the Pacific Ocean and celebrate her life’s journey; a second small gathering will be held at the Logan Cemetery in Logan, Utah, on August 23rd. Friends and family who would like to join either gathering are warmly invited to attend (text (650) 265-1193 to receive details‬). In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the American Stroke Foundation (stroke.org).