Vera Katz, Mayor Who Oversaw Portland's Flowering, Dies at 84
Vera Katz, a refugee from Nazi Germany and a former Brooklynite who became a feminist
force in Oregon and a three-term mayor of its largest city, Portland, as it grew from
an unremarkable port and timber town into a liberal bastion of visionary urban planning,
died on Monday at her home in Southwest Portland.
She was 84.
The cause was complications of kidney disease and leukemia, her son, Jesse, said.
She successfully underwent treatment years earlier for two other forms of cancer.
Inspired by Cesar Chavez, the migrant farmworkers' leader, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New
York, Ms. Katz was in her mid-30s when she embarked on a political career, graduating
from licking envelopes during Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign to become the first
woman elected speaker, or presiding officer, of Oregon's House of Representatives.
She served three terms as speaker, an Oregon record, from 1985 to 1990.
At the time, she was one of only two women in the country holding that post.
First elected to the State Legislature in 1972, Ms. Katz advocated gun control and rights
for women, gay people and migrant workers before those causes gained wider approval.
She also oversaw an overhaul of Oregon's school system.
As mayor from 1993 to 2005, she presided over Portland's metamorphosis into a pedestrian-friendly
city that embraced mass transit, environmentalism and other facets of progressive urban planning
and that was regularly ranked among the nation's most livable metropolitan areas.
Its official slogan, "The City That Works," was complemented by an equally popular one
that emerged as an informal mandate for what blossomed into Oregon's hipster haven: "Keep
Portland Weird."
(That sensibility was later embraced in the comedy sketch television series "Portlandia.")
Her family moved there in 1964, but Ms. Katz never outgrew her Brooklyn roots.
She missed egg creams and took a bus to work.
She didn't drive because she couldn't — she twice flunked driving tests, failing
to master the required maneuvering.
In his memoir "The Opposite Field" (2009), her son, Jesse, wrote: "On her final try,
the instructor admonished her, a line she delights in repeating: 'Missus Katz, you
don't exude confidence' — a judgment belied by the brassy reputation she developed
as a diminutive (five feet tall) but indomitable elected official.
"She had no hobbies," he continued, "no diversions or indulgences to dull her focus
or, it might be said, to soften her brio."
Ms. Katz practiced, largely successfully, what she described as "feminization of power"
— achieving her goals by consensus instead of confrontation.
She was born Vera Pistrak on Aug. 3, 1933, in Düsseldorf, Germany, to Jewish parents
who had been Mensheviks, socialists opposed to Bolshevism, and had fled Russia after the
revolution of 1917.
Her father, Lazar, was a political operative and writer who later worked for the United
States Information Agency; in 1960 he published a biography of Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet
leader.
Her mother, Raissa Goodman, supported the family at first by making handbags in sweatshops;
she became a translator for the Voice of America.
Two months after Vera was born, with Hitler already installed as Germany's chancellor,
she escaped to Paris with her parents and older sister.
When she was 7, after the Nazis invaded France, the family crossed the Pyrenees by foot into
Spain and boarded a Greek steamship for the United States.
There, when she was 12, her father would leave the family.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Vera attended Julia Richman High School on the Upper East Side
of Manhattan and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Brooklyn College in 1955.
She also studied dance under Martha Graham.
She married an artist, Mel Katz, and moved west with their son, settling in Portland
in 1964.
They divorced in 1985.
In addition to her son, a writer and editor, she is survived by a grandson.
In 1968, Jesse Katz recalled, "Mom was 34 with a sociology degree from Brooklyn College
that was going to waste and genes that were programmed, long ago and far away, for political
action."
Her first formal foray was the Kennedy campaign.
As Portland mayor, she helped revitalize the Pearl District and the South Waterfront neighborhood
and was instrumental in the construction of the Lan Su Chinese Garden and the Eastbank
Esplanade and in the establishment of the Portland streetcar system.
After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, she led a good-will delegation
of Portlanders to New York.
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