In Loving Memory of Ilona Jo Katz from Santa Monica College

Ilona Jo Katz: April 29, 1933 -- April 26, 2000

April 26, 2000, mid-afternoon. Herb Katz, Ilona's husband of forty-two years, sits in his kitchen while Dana Katz Wood, Herb and Ilona's daughter, and a nurse attend to Ilona in a nearby bedroom.

"The nurse doesn't understand it," he says, "how can Ilona's heart be so strong? But I understand it -- Ilona never knew anything but fighting. They'd get her on the mat and she'd just get up again, ready for the next battle."

He gestures to the bedroom. "Ilona's still fighting. She's in there fighting right now. The nurse doesn't understand but I do -- that's a woman with a heart that's just... incredible."

Dedication. Commitment. Passion. Intelligence.

Those are the words that come over and over again when people speak of Ilona Jo Katz.

"For over twenty-three years, Ilona served this College with absolute dedication and total commitment," says Dr. Piedad Robertson, President of Santa Monica College, "and she did it with great courage, with great vision, with strength, and also with a soft touch."

Former Santa Monica City Manager John Jalili puts it this way: "She was one of the most
dedicated people I ever met. She dedicated her whole life to this city, to this College, and to all the causes she worked for."

And Judy Neveau, Director of Community Relations for Santa Monica College, adds this: "Ilona gave her whole life to this College. And she did it with intelligence and passion. There's a huge difference between people who do things because they have passion and people who do things because they think they ought to.

"Ilona Katz did things because she had passion. I should also mention that Ilona wore very stylish hats and wore them with great elan."

Ilona Jo Katz was born on April 29, 1933. Her mother was self-taught and worked as a beautician; her father was a graduate of Stanford University and worked for Hughes Aircraft. Ilona was raised in Beverly Hills -- that's where she met her husband, when he was a senior and she was a sophomore at Beverly Hills High School.

"We dated, went steady," says Herb, "then we fought, broke up, got back together some ten years later, got married and we've been together ever since."

Ilona attended UCLA but dropped out to work as a telemarketer. She married Herb, an architect and Korean War veteran, in 1958.

"I don't know if you could ever call Ilona a `normal' housewife,"says Herb, grinning, "but I guess things were pretty normal around here until our boys came along."

Ilona and Herb had two boys -- Gregg and Glenn. Both boys were blind nearly from birth, suffering from retenoblastoma, cancer of the eye.

"If it wasn't for our boys, Ilona and I might have been two rather indifferent people," says Herb. "We saw their blindness not as handicap but as an opportunity. Ilona never believed in limits -- that word did not exist for either of us. And that's what we taught our sons -- they were totally self-sufficient, completely independent. Glenn even played in the marching band at UCLA."

It was advocacy for her two sons that led Ilona into her first forays into educational activism: she was a room mother for Gregg's class at Grant Elementary School, then President of the PTA at both Grant and Madison Schools.

"We had moved to Santa Monica because they were main-streaming disabled kids into regular classrooms," recalls Herb. "Soon after we got here, the Superintendent decided that all the disabled kids in the district should be put into one school, Madison. That really ticked Ilona off and that's when she decided to run for the school board."

It's almost ludicrous to even attempt to catalog Ilona Jo Katz's achievements as an activist in the educational field, but let's try: Ilona Jo Katz served on the Santa Monica College Board of Trustees for over 23 years -- she was the longest-serving member of the Board,
serving as Chair for three terms and Vice-Chair for two terms. Prior to serving on the College's Board of Trustees, Ilona was a board member and chair of the Santa Monica Unified School District. She served for 10 years on the Board of Directors of the California Community College Trustees, including one year as President and separate terms as both First and Second Vice-President.

While serving on that board, Ilona was chair of the Legislative Committee and a member of the Task Force for Accreditation Standards on Governance and Administration. She served for two years as Chair for the Committee on Credentials for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and she also served on the National School Board
Association's Task Force for the Handicapped. In addition, she worked with the State of California and co-authored the Master Plan to integrate disabled students into the classroom.

"She had an incredible belief that education offered people an opportunity to change their lives," says Dr. Robertson. "That's why she was so wonderful for this College. Because she believed that the community college was the place where the widest diversity of people were offered the greatest assortment of educational opportunities."

Ilona Jo Katz's activism didn't stop with the College and the school system: she served on a wide variety of commissions and boards, including the Charter Review Commission for the City of Santa Monica, the Board of Directors for the American Heart Association, the Santa Monica Heritage Square Museum Society, the Dinner Committee of the National Conference for Community and Justice, the Santa Monica Bay Area Girls Club, and the Santa Monica YWCA.

She has been honored by the California PTA, the Santa Monica Lions Club, the Santa Monica Mayor's Office, and both the YMCA and the YWCA -- in fact, the Katz's were named Family of the Year by the Santa Monica YMCA. "Her range of commitments was simply astonishing," says John Jalili.

And she did her jobs well: "She was a perfectionist," says Herb, himself no stranger to community activism, having served the City of Santa Monica as Councilman, Planning Commissioner and Mayor Pro Tem. ""When Ilona started something, she was going to finish it, by god, and it was going to be done right."

Herb and Ilona lost both their boys -- Gregg died of cancer in 1971 and Glenn died of the same disease in 1980. "When the first boy died, that was tough," says Herb, "very tough. But when the second boy died, that was just...unbelievably hard. But we've had Dana and she's just been extraordinary."

Ilona battled her own cancer for thirty years. Biopsies, tumors, surgeries, her elbow, her kidneys, her mouth, her liver, her lungs.

"She has showed us all this extraordinary courage," says Judy Neveau, "first with the death of her children and then with her own struggle. We all thought she would live forever, that's how strong she was. And she never whined, even when she really had things to honestly whine about, she never whined." Herb concurs: "If I show a tenth of the courage that she mustered when I face my own mortality, I'll be doing great."

Ilona Jo Katz is dead, that's true. But she lived and that's the more important fact.

She traveled -- to Africa, to China, to Europe many times, and all across Canada and the United States of America. "We had a trip to Bangkok planned for a couple of months and she was getting tired," says Herb. "I wasn't sure she should go. But we knew this as it. She said I want to go, I need to go, I have to go. So we went and she had the most magnificent time."

She had a family -- a husband, two sons, a daughter. "Things were never ordinary around here," says Herb. "We lived a very flexible life. We loved going to plays, movies, museums. We used to go camping -- Ilona was a much better fisherman than I ever was. And we had season tickets to UCLA basketball. Ilona would bring her knitting and crocheting to the games -- she was like Madame LaFarge, looking down at the action while she worked with her knitting needles."

She witnessed and was a participant in a great deal of historical change. The change in attitude about people with disabilities. The change in the role and importance of the community college.

She had friends. "I remember I think it was Ilona's fiftieth birthday," recalls Judy Neveau, "Herb took her in a long black limo to the original Tommy's. They pull up and here's a long table with a white tablecloth and all her friends are there. And then this marching band comes down the street -- in fact I believe it was SAMO High marching band -- and what are they playing? `The Old Gray Mare She Ain't What She Used To Be.' Then we went back to their house and there wasn't even room for all the people who showed up -- it was just overflowing."

And she had work.

What she gave to the College.

What she gave to Santa Monica, the Westside, Los Angeles, the State.

What she gave to the world.

She'll be remembered. As a great woman who had passion, intelligence, and a sense of dedication to use those gifts for causes to which she was fully committed.