Janice Anderson-Gram

On November 21, 2023, longtime Tiburon resident Janice Anderson-Gram died peacefully at home surrounded by family after a year-long battle with brain cancer.

Janice was born in Pasadena in 1945 and raised in Palo Alto, graduating from Cubberley High School in1963. In 1967, she earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from UC Berkeley where she was a member of the Tri-Delt sorority.

After college, Janice moved to San Francisco to begin her professional career and obtained her securities license before joining a small investment firm for several years.

In 1969, Janice met her future husband, Tom Gram, shortly after Tom moved to San Francisco to begin his law practice. Tom claims he had two phone numbers — the first one was busy and he married the second.

In 1971, Janice joined IBM in one of several sales and management roles she held at the firm during her tenure. Janice excelled at IBM and was their top-grossing salesperson in the country for two years in the mid-size computer division. Subsequently, Janice joined IBM’s management team and oversaw major IBM antitrust cases in coordination with the company’s legal teams.

In 1978, Janice left IBM to join Coopers & Lybrand, then a top-five national and international accounting firm and predecessor to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where she worked in the litigation consulting department and managed high profile litigation matters. When Janice was promoted to partner, she was one of only three female partners at Coopers & Lybrand out of over two thousand partners nationally. Janice remained at Coopers & Lybrand until 1987.

In her personal life, Janice was a film lover and connoisseur, and attended the Telluride, Sundance and other film festivals for over a decade. Janice and her film buddies watched 4-5 films a day, while husband Tom played golf. After each festival, Janice wrote her “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” reviews of every movie and shared this with several hundred friends and family. Over the years, we heard from many readers that they looked forward to receiving Janice’s reviews before choosing which movies to attend themselves. In addition to film, Janice felt a deep responsibility and commitment to give back to the communities in which she lived, and she volunteered for many Tiburon, Marin and San Francisco nonprofits. To name a few:

Janice founded the “Films at the Library” series in Tiburon, where she screened movies and then brought in the film’s director and/or actors for post-movie interviews.

An avid gardener and lifelong student of landscaping, Janice was one of the founding members of the Tiburon GreenTeam. Janice was a volunteer at the Godmothers of St. Vincent School for Boys, a Marin nonprofit whose mission is to “provide a safe, nurturing environment where [students] can build self-esteem, improve social skills, and renew trust.”

.Janice served on the Tiburon Marketing and Communications Task Force, which developed a branding and marketing program for downtown Tiburon and surrounds.

Janice was the longest serving panelist on the San Francisco Fee Arbitration panel for the San Francisco Bar Association, which arbitrated attorneys’ fee disputes.

In 1996, building on her love of gardening, Janice decided to write a book on a gardening topic. After extensive research, she found that there was no definitive book published on the poinsettia flowering plant. So, in 1998, she co-authored and published a book titled “Poinsettias, Myth and Legend: History and Botanical Fact” about the holiday flower, which received the Benjamin Franklin Award by the Independent Book Publishers Association as a finalist in the “Best New Voice” category. Janice also wrote and distributed a teachers’ guide to teaching about the Christmas flower.

Janice loved to cook (a magician in the kitchen!) and entertain family and friends, both in Tiburon and in Truckee, where Janice and Tom spent their summers in recent years.

Since Janice’s passing, our family has been heartened and humbled by the wonderful outpouring of support, condolences, and reminisces from those who knew her. The Janice we knew was kind, thoughtful, graceful, infinitely curious, loved to laugh, and an incredible wife and mother. Her spirit will live on in our memories and in our hearts.

Janice and Tom have lived in Tiburon for all of the 52 years they were married. Janice is survived by her husband, two sons and one grandson.

A Celebration of Life gathering announcement will be forthcoming soon.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that you make a memorial gift in Janice’s name to the Glioblastoma Foundation at glioblastomafoundation.org.