Hometown Hero: Nancy Cattell

Nancy wanted to major in Political Science and International Relations. She asked her professor what she could do when she graduated. He said, “Be a good citizen.”

“He wouldn’t have said that to a man. It was a prejudiced world in those days,” remembers Nancy. The year was 1937. She was a freshman at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Born in 1921 into the Gossard family in Ohio. Her father, a banker, had a degree in agriculture. The mission of his bank was to loan money to farmers. Her mother was a housewife. “My father didn’t think I should work. He gave my brother summer jobs at the bank I wished he would have given me. But he believed in education for girls. The tradition of getting an education was in their family history.”

Nancy followed the family tradition and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1941 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and went into the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in 1942. Her first job was as a Company Commander for a 150 women unit. The women were drivers and mechanics and cooks and office workers.

When WWII ended in Europe Nancy was assigned to Germany.
“I played a significant role in running the country as Chief of Military Personnel for the U.S. Military Government in Germany. Our job was to restore Germany and make it function.”

“We should be taking lessons from our successes in Germany. We are taking the wrong approach in the Middle East. We need to focus on education; especially for women, and we need to make sure people have clean, running water and electricity, food, safety and health care. Look at the billions we spend on military campaigns and look what we could do if we spent billions doing a better job of giving people life’s necessities.”

Returning to the States after two years in Germany, she went to Columbia University on the GI Bill. At Columbia Nancy met David Cattell, the man who was to be her husband of 20 years and the father of her two children. When they both graduated from Columbia he got a position as a professor at Brown University. Nancy also wanted to teach, but wasn’t able to get an interview, much less a job. Her husband taught both at Brown and then, in 1952 he became a Political Science Professor at UCLA. The Department had 48 professors, all men. “After WWII there was a discernable improvement in opportunities for women – but only up to a point.”

“The most blatant discrimination for me was that UCLA Law School, in 1968, would not accept me. Fortunately, Loyola took me right away – those Jesuits were not as prejudiced as UCLA.” Now Nancy Cattell, Esq., is a graduate of Loyola Law School (1971) and practices law in Santa Monica.

Nancy’s love of education led her to Santa Monica College, where she taught Political Science for 31 years and was elected, twice, to be a Member of the Santa Monica College Board and is now a Member of the Santa Monica College Foundation Board. “In this country, when we supported education, we formed the Community Colleges and what do you know, we educated people, they got good jobs and they became good taxpayers.”

It was while Nancy was teaching at Santa Monica College that she resumed her pilot’s training, finally getting her license. She was thrilled to be flying at Santa Monica Airport (Clover Field), where Amelia Earhart, Nancy’s childhood hero, used to fly.

In 1998, now single, she re-met and married the man who had been her commanding officer in Berlin. To read about that story or the story of how she met her hero, Eleanor Roosevelt, and all the triumphs and difficulties of her life, you’ll have to wait for the autobiography she is writing to be published.

When Nancy was 4 and her brother 5, they took the train to visit their grandparents. She is still travelling. Mementos from her travels, photographs of her family, her law books and her library fill her living room to overflowing.

“My advice to women today is do whatever you want. Pay no attention, just do what you want.” If you look at her life, she took her own advice.

What Say You? Santa Monica 2025

Santa Monica 2025. The elegant and welcoming gardens and park in front of City Hall are very busy this summer Saturday in the year 2025. A jazz concert is the center of activity, with people sitting on blankets on the lawn and listening to the music. Nearby, children who live in the Civic Center Village are playing a game of tag between the trees. The day is warm and clear. There is a view all the way to the ocean and the horizon. It’s a postcard Santa Monica moment.

To get to the park, Santa Monicans walked on wide, tree lined sidewalks, rode their bikes or took local jitneys. Visitors from, really, everywhere, came by light rail; some to the park, some to the beach, some to shop at Bloomingdales or Nordstrom’s at Santa Monica Place or at the 3^rd Street Promenade, and some to eat in Santa Monica’s restaurants. Others came, along tree lined boulevards, by car and have parked their cars in a central location, planning to spend the day and to get around by walking, renting a bike, or by using the fun, local transportation.

Are you wondering if I’ve been reading too much Alice in Wonderland? In fact, I’ve been reading the Santa Monica Draft Land Use and Circulation Element, affectionately called ‘the LUCE.’ Produced by City Planning, the LUCE document was developed through a strong and deep process of public discussions and meetings with the community and with the full participation of all the City Boards and Commissions and the City Council.

As described in the LUCE, in 2025, our neighborhoods will look pretty much the same as they do today, each with its character and identity carefully protected. Our local shopping streets will have almost everything we need, making it easier to get our errands done without getting into our cars. Neighbors and friends meet at local cafes with outdoor seating. New neighborhoods have taken root at Bergamot Station and in the Creative Arts District. New development will be designed to protect existing neighborhoods and our historic buildings and places will be protected.

All neighborhoods, from Sunset Park and the Pico Neighborhood on the East to Ocean Park and North of Montana on the West, will be connected by ‘green streets’; with bike lanes, a substantial tree canopy, and wide and safe sidewalks.

Santa Monica has made the responsibility for environmental stewardship a core responsibility of the City and that is expressed throughout the LUCE. By 2025, through our stormwater infiltration designs, we protected the Santa Monica Bay and made it cleaner and safer for swimming and surfing. As a City, we developed systems for the use of recycled water for landscape and so our water conservation is very high. We changed the way people get to Santa Monica and we changed the way people get around the City and so have greatly reduced both traffic congestion and environmental pollutants.

This LUCE represents the dreams, hopes and aspirations of our City. Will those dreams translate to reality? Some parts of the plan are already in the works. Expo (light rail) is coming to 4^th and Colorado and is planned to be here by 2015. Planning for the Civic Center Park is underway. It is scheduled to open in 2014. The green design for Ocean Park Blvd from Lincoln Blvd to Neilson Way is in progress and construction is planned to begin in early 2011. Santa Monica Place will reopen, in August of this year, with Nordstrom’s and Bloomingdales as its anchor stores.

But the LUCE is really a vision statement. The reality will come from how well we, as a City, can implement the vision. That will take real work, over time. And it will take the continued actions of a concerned and caring community.

For now, please read, for yourself, the LUCE, available online at www.shapethefuture2025.net or in hard copy at all our City libraries. It’s a thick book. But it has a good, short, Executive Summary and is clearly divided into sections by issue and by area and so it’s pretty easy to fine the sections that interest you.

What Say You?