Roz Wyman, city’s youngest council member who helped bring Dodgers to L.A., dies at 92
Roz Wyman died last week in her home in Oxnard, Calif., of complications from lung cancer.
Born on Nov. 24, 1931, in Los Angeles, she was the city’s youngest council member at the time of her death. She was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1965 at age 26, succeeding fellow council member Jack O’Connell.
O’Connell, who had also worked on the staff of the city clerk’s office, died as the council member who headed the tax commission.
Her early life was eventful. Her father, a World War I veteran, returned home after the war to find his family in the midst of a financial crisis, he told the New York Times in 1990. The family had no money and no savings. They had to sell their clothes and shoes to get by.
“I felt there was something wrong and I realized I was from the wrong side of the tracks, from the wrong area,” Wyman would later tell the newspaper.
Wyman’s father was a World War I veteran and her mother, the daughter of a Polish immigrant, survived the L.A. riots of 1919 as they fled to Oakland with her two young daughters.
Her mother, a self-described anarchist, was known as the “lady with the red shoes” for her defiant acts, including running her home with a shotgun in 1921 after neighbors yelled at her for throwing food out of her bedroom window.
She died in 1932, a few months before her 18th birthday.
Wyman grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park where she attended Beverly Park High School, where she was the student government president at the time the school would become the Beverly Hills High School.
“When I was in high school, I was a good student. I was a good athlete and was a good student,” Wyman told the newspaper in 1996.
She studied political science at USC and attended Harvard University’s Advanced Management Program