Sharon A. Bolton has been named partner...

Sharon A. Bolton has been named partner and vice president of Dartmouth Development Co., a newly formed real estate development firm in Del Mar. She will be responsible for marketing and sales.

Before joining Dartmouth two months ago, Bolton was a vice president at Bedford Properties, developer of the master-planned community of Rancho California. In that position, she was responsible for managing the sales of more than 16,000 acres, including the Oakridge Ranches project in Rancho California.

Bolton, 45, also spent several years as an outside real estate saleswoman and has owned her own Orange County advertising agency with clients including Knott’s Berry Farm and Lion Country Safari. Her marketing and sales career began in the late 1960s.

“Basically, my background is more one of experience than of a fancy educational dossier,” she said. “Experience-wise, I started working in 1967, doing marketing and planning for Mission Viejo Co., which was just a baby then.”

Bolton then went to work at the Irvine Co. as assistant manager of the firm’s Fashion Island project in Newport Beach before starting her own ad agency.

Always an active community volunteer, Bolton founded PHASE in 1974. She developed the nonprofit group, which grew to 2,200 members, to serve the needs and utilize the skills of newly divorced and widowed women who had never worked outside the home before.

“PHASE’s primary purpose was to help women get employment,” Bolton said. “I was married 12 years before I got divorced, but there were women out there who had been married 30 and 40 years who had never done anything besides take care of the house and family.”

Bolton said that what started as a way for women to market their organizational skills rapidly became a major support network that drew national attention.

“We published a magazine and sold memberships to women, and advertised to people who found these women were a very specialized market,” she said. “It took off like wildfire then. I went on television, was in front-page articles, and all of a sudden I was a celebrity.”

Bolton moved to Rancho California nine years ago with her second husband, Robert, and their three children. They raise thoroughbred horses on their 50-acre ranch.