John Charles Bedford
John Charles Bedford was born in Patterson, NJ on April 17, 1942 to Catharine Walker Bedford and Fred Leslie Bedford. He was the second child, little brother to Alice Bedford.
John’s family moved to Arizona from NJ when John was five due to his sister’s allergies. This was a time when Phoenix was smaller than Santa Barbara is now. His father was a Quaker from farmland in Forksville, PA, and his mother who was raised on an apple farm in Springdale, AR, met at Columbia University and married in NY. Given his family’s history, John learned early on from his mother to cook a delicious apple pie. He also inherited his parents’ love of math, and used it as a foundation to master computers and music. He learned piano early on and played the clarinet on into college, in the University of Colorado band. John was also a natural athlete – an avid skier with Nastar medals – and at 6’4” with a broad wingspan, a competitor on the tennis courts.
John graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1964 with a Bachelor’s in Physics and a Master’s in Business. After a fondly remembered first job in Geneva, Switzerland for Texas Instruments, he returned to the US and dabbled in small computer development companies, landing in Chicago in the 1970s.
John married Nan A. Necas, a Chicago native, on July 4th, 1981, and began a devoted, loving marriage of 44 years with champagne and hero sandwiches watching Chicago’s fireworks. They were blessed with two lovely girl children and John devoted himself to coaching his daughters’ soccer teams. Soccer, a sport that was just being launched in the ’90s for girls as a team sport, was the focus of John’s 10+ year AYSO coaching career where he took Chicago teams to multiple regional playoffs in California, Texas, Maryland and Florida.
John was also involved early in Democratic Chicago politics that culminated in working Indiana for Barak Obama in 2012. He worked both in Chicago and Santa Barbara with English as a Second Language programs and in retirement was on the board of the Riveria Association and contributed to international as well as local scholarship efforts.
By 1989 John applied his computer skills to Nan’s nascent new product consulting business and turned it into a competitive database product that provided clients with digitized, translated and searchable TV advertising from 30 countries that could be loaded on client systems and distributed to their companies worldwide. Their first client was J&J and over the next 10 years MAI provided competitive advertising databases to such clients as PepsiCo, Phillips, Unilever, Exxon, Clorox, Verizon, ING Bank, and P&G. Nan & John became a team that admired each other’s strengths and built a business that was the love of their lives. Another blessing was that the business provides them with the opportunity to travel extensively overseas and to retire to Santa Barbara in 2009, eventually moving to Casa Dorinda in 2022 with many good friends.
John lived true to his liberal values and love of family — a kind, caring and gracious man. He was a true partner with Nan, and a wonderful father, grandfather and friend. His dry wit and genial nature will be missed by so many. John and Nan together fought John’s cancer courageously with the exceptional care of Cedars-Sinai’s oncology team and John died peacefully, surrounded by family.
John Bedford is survived by his wife, Nan, two daughters Amy and Sara, their respective partners Anja Dieke Bedford and Maggie Whitehead, grandchildren Ruth Bedford, Henrik Bedford, and Charles Bedford, and his sister Alice Cox.
A celebration of life will be held in the fall of 2025 in Santa Barbara. Please consider a donation for the Cedars-Sinai Arsen Osipov Pancreatic Research Fund, attn: Laura Asok, 6500 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1600, Los Angeles, CA 90048 or contribute at https://www.cedars-sinai.org/giving.html Please note in the memo field “in memory of John Bedford” as John will live on through every patient they treat and every advancement they make.
