Margo Albert--a Memorial Service With Energy

“There is no graffiti on Margo Albert’s place.”

Rudy Salas gestured around him at the spotless walls of the Plaza de la Raza cultural center. Salas, a city employee who helps care for the Lincoln Park center, said he never asked the youths who scrawl graffiti in the area why they leave the center’s walls unmarred.

“I already know why,” he said. “It is respecto, complete respect. They know Margo built this place for all of us.”

On Sunday, Salas joined more than 300 friends, relatives and admirers of Mrs. Albert at an outdoor memorial service for the chairwoman of the board and driving force behind the creation of Plaza de la Raza, one of the largest Chicano educational and cultural centers in the nation.

Mrs. Albert, a well-known actress as a teen-ager who left stage and screen behind after marrying actor Eddie Albert, died Wednesday at her home in Pacific Palisades after an illness of several months. She was 68.

The range of her civic and cultural activities in later years was indicated by the organizations represented Sunday: the National Endowment for the Arts, the board of the Center Theatre Group of the Music Center, and Mayor Tom Bradley’s advisory Committee on Cultural Affairs.

Those who knew her best, however, said her proudest civic accomplishment was the Plaza de la Raza, where Mrs. Albert became affectionately known as Madrina, the godmother.

Instead of grieving for her, participants at the Plaza memorial service, which her daughter, Maria Carmen Zucht, helped organize, said they wanted the occasion to reflect the vitality of the woman they were honoring.

A strolling mariachi band played, and colorfully dressed children, students in one of the Plaza’s performing arts classes, danced for the audience between eulogies by corporate officers, chairmen of leading cultural groups, and politicians, including Bradley, who asked that the center’s name be changed to the Margo Albert Plaza de la Raza.

“Some knew her as a real bearcat,” Bradley said. “There was no way you could say no to that indomitable spirit of Margo Albert. Without her, this cultural center would not have happened and we would not be here.”

“Margo Albert is alive in each and every one of us and she is well and prospering and having a great goddamned time,” said Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Center Theatre Group, eliciting cheers from Eddie Albert and the Alberts’ son, Edward Albert, who greeted a standing ovation for his mother by calling out “Viva Margo!”

National Endowment of the Arts Chairman Frank Hodsoll called Mrs. Albert a “gadfly, chief optimist, and whirlwind advocate.”

“Challenged to a duel, I have no doubt that Margo would have chosen a telephone as her weapon,” Hodsoll said, eliciting knowing laughter from the audience.

After the service, her son said the festive spirit of the occasion was a perfect memorial for his mother.

“She would have said, ‘Let’s take all this energy and let’s put it into a new project,’ ” he said.

“And the next thing she would have said is, ‘Adelante! Let’s get on with it,”’ her husband added.