Remembering former Torrance mayor and community visionary Katy Geissert

Every rapidly growing, forward-thinking city could use a Katy Geissert.

Geissert was devoted to making Torrance a better place to live before, during and after her twenty years in city government.

The evidence is all around town. The main branch of the Torrance library is named for her. She played a major role in the establishment of the Madrona Marsh preserve and nature center and the Torrance Cultural Arts Center.

She also sparked the redevelopment of the Old Torrance downtown area, and was an impetus behind establishing the city’s farmer’s market, now a Wilson Park fixture, in 1985. 

She was born Cathryn Ann Owen in 1926 in the small logging town of Raymond in western Washington state. She attended Stanford, majoring in journalism and playing on the softball team.

While at Stanford, she met and married former infantry captain William Geissert in 1948. After William got a job with Union Oil, they moved first to San Pedro and then to Long Beach.

Then, in 1952, the couple bought a house for $15,000 in the still-developing Hollywood Riviera section of Torrance, where they would raise five children, three boys and two girls. They would live in that same house on Calle de Castellana for the next half a century or so.

Geissert’s keen interest in public affairs can be traced to the 1960s, when she became a charter board member of the Torrance League of Women Voters. The group formed in 1962, and she later served as its president. She and her fellow members became regular attendees at Torrance City Council meetings.

Geissert also became an active proponent of civic and cultural improvements. She worked on the movement to help create Columbia Park, which involved battling with the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

In 1967 she fought successfully for a $2.35 million bond issue that allowed for Torrance’s library system to become independent from the Los Angeles County system. The additional funds provided for the construction of a new main library building in the city’s civic center complex and the addition of the Southeast branch library in 1972.

To honor her library advocacy, the central Torrance Civic Center Library was renamed the Katy Geissert Civic Center Library in 1996.

During a 1968 City Council meeting, she had a run-in with then-Mayor Albert Isen that inspired her full-on move into city politics. Representing the League of Women Voters, Geissert was advocating that a proposed 550-unit housing complex near Madrona Ave. and Del Amo Blvd. in Torrance be rejected and the land, a former scrapyard, be turned into a public park instead.

During a heated debate, Isen told Geissert to “sit down and shut up.” Councilman Ken Miller responded, “Let her speak.” She did, and the land ultimately became Delthorne Park. Geissert ended up helming Miller’s successful campaign for mayor in 1970 against Isen.

Her effective activism brought increasing encouragement from friends and colleagues for her to run for public office herself. She decided to run for the Torrance City Council in 1974. She garnered 7,169 votes, second highest in the election, and became the first woman to win a council seat in the city’s history.

She served for three terms on the Council before running for and winning the mayor’s office in 1986. She ran unopposed to win a second term in 1990. Torrance mayors can only serve two terms, so she left city government and essentially retired from politics in 1994.

Her years on the council and as mayor were filled with challenges. In 1979, she helped broker the Madrona Marsh agreement that saved 43 acres of native wetland threatened by a massive new residential development. A year later, she helped convince Mobil Oil to stop using the toxic chemical hydrofluoric acid at its Torrance refinery.

In March 1991, the Council approved a $44 million renovation of the Old Torrance area that included residential elements as well as commercial improvements. That October, the city’s new Cultural Arts Center opened, including a theater, dance studio, meeting rooms and a Japanese garden.

The Arts Center was particularly meaningful to Geissert, a supporter of the arts dating back to her early days in the city. She founded the Torrance Cultural Arts Foundation group in conjunction with the Center’s creation.

Her ability to get such projects done had friends and colleagues anticipating that Geissert, a registered Republican, would continue her political career. But the headline on a March 13, 1994 Daily Breeze story published shortly after her retirement said it all: “Despite her popularity, she sought no higher office.”

Geissert told the Daily Breeze in 1994 that  two factors deterred her from further political climbing: her family and her healthy distaste for partisan politics. She pointed out that she originally had waited until her youngest child was in high school before seeking public office, and that she didn’t relish the thought of commuting to work in Sacramento or Washington, D.C.

In the late 1990s, Geissert began a long battle against lung cancer. On July 14, 2000, she made her final public appearance as the guest of honor at a banquet held by the Torrance Cultural Arts Foundation, the group she founded.

One week later, on July 21, 2000, she died at 73. Following her death, the Daily Breeze solicited remembrances and appreciations of the woman nicknamed “Mother Mayor,” and ended up running dozens of them in its memorial editions.

Note: Special thanks to Katy Geissert Civic Center Library reference librarian Mike George for his assistance.

Sources:

Daily Breeze archives.

Los Angeles Times archives.

“Mayor Geissert Interview,” by Molly M. Sipe, California Revealed website, May 13, 1987.

Palos Verdes Peninsula News archives.

Torrance Press Herald archives.