Margot Feuer dies at 89

After Margot Feuer in 1965 moved to the hills of Malibu, she "launched a community action" by the threat of development in the surrounding Santa Monica Mountains.

The frightening suggestions include building a nuclear plant in a remote ravine and a highway through Malibu Canyon.

"I looked around I in the midst of was," she later said, "I thought, gosh, the idea of ​​a park is a wonderful idea."

Hundreds of her movement to a national park in Los Angeles would join to create, but Feuer and two other activists will be recognized as the "founding mothers" of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, in 1978 the federal approval.

Feuer, the last survivor of the trio of advocates, died June 16 of a stroke in her Los Angeles home overlooking Stone Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains, said her son, Mark. She was 89.

"We are indebted to Margot for her lifelong environmental activism and the role she played in the founding of the nation's largest urban national park," Lorenza Fong, acting superintendent of the recreation area, in a statement to The Times said.

Feuer's sister was in activism Jill Swift, that grassroots awareness building through increases in the Santa Monica Mountains to organize, and Susan Nelson, who works closely with then-Reps. Phillip Burton (D-San Francisco) and Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills).

When the Sierra Club Feuer talks on country meetings, she was asked to join Swift as co-chairman of the group's Santa Monica Mountains Task Force.

Feuer Sierra Club's chief lobbyist for the park and become repeat trips to Washington to testify before Congress, according to the 2006 edition of the "National Parks and the woman's voice: a history"

"A few people like Margot had happened. This is not something that an agency did," said David Brown, the conservation chair of the Santa Monica Mountains Task Force. "She insisted, she had connections that helped his mind."

On the West Side in 1978 a group of park supporters are nervously awaiting the results of a conference vote when a phone rang.

Feuer has to answer, and again to announce that legislation establishing the recreation area has passed. The park has since grown to more than 150,000 hectares to include.

Feuer sees the creation of the park as a great achievement - and a reaffirmation of the democratic process.

"The public is so often instructed not really in" action on a specific goal depends, she said to The Times in 1978. "It confirms the need for really depends. All the people who worked there - for the length of time - did it."

A portion of the quote on a plaque at the recreation area was recently opened visitor center at the historic King. Gillette Ranch, a piece of land in Calabasas that Feuer helped the rescue of the development.

Margot Elizabeth Kramer was born in 1922 and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, the youngest of two daughters, Eva and Morris Kramer, immigrants from Russia. Her father was farming in South Dakota to fur up.

Grew, she developed an appreciation for nature while walking the roads of Long Island, her son said.

At Wellesley College, she earned a BA degree in music in 1943 before moving to New York to try to make it in the theater.

In 1946, she moved to Los Angeles for her singing career to promote. She soon met and married Stanley Feuer, who was a mechanical engineer.

If a local environmental activist Margot Feuer started as a founder of Stamp Out Smog, by women who formed "self-described amateur in politics, but willing to learn," The Times reported in 1959.

Since the mid-1960s, she was involved with the provincial government on land use planning issues and has served on the South Coast Regional Commission of the California Coastal.

As a founder and leader of the Save Open Space Santa Monica Mountains, Feuer has an important role in helping the Ahmanson Ranch preserve on the eastern edge of Ventura County and neighboring Jordan Ranch, according to. Joanne Jackson, a longtime friend.

Feuer Besides her son, Mark of Boulder, Colo., is survived by two sons, Zachary Feuer of Los Angeles and Dr. Joshua Feuer Santa Barbara, and four grandchildren. Her husband died at 74 in 1989.