Georgiana Hardy; School Official for 20 Years

Georgiana Hardy, whose election to the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education in 1955 signaled the collapse of an archconservative majority and the beginning of a liberal era in local education, has died, it was learned Tuesday.

The woman who served 20 years on the board--believed longer than anyone else in the 134-year history of the school system--was 78 when she died of heart failure Monday at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.

Her daughter, Georgiana Rodiger, a clinical psychologist, said Mrs. Hardy had been in declining health for some time.

A lifelong liberal whose credentials included public service on the national level, Mrs. Hardy served on the school board from 1955 to 1975 and was school board president three times (1958-59; 1963-64 and 1967-68).

Her election came at a time when conservatives representative of the McCarthy era were directing the school board and when textbooks they deemed unpatriotic were being kept out of classrooms.

After her election Mrs. Hardy helped reshape and liberalize policies, among them one that had prevented the teaching of the aims and policies of the United Nations. Hers was an early voice for school integration because, as she told The Times in 1970: “It overcomes a lot of fears, and fear is the basis of prejudice.”

She spoke dozens of times as the board’s social conscience and once, when a school construction bond issue had been defeated, chastised parents in a suburban area: “You supported bond issues when (your area) was undergoing its greatest growth, but once you had it made, you didn’t give a damn what was happening in other parts of the city.”

Born Georgiana Sibley in Orange, N.J., she became involved in several national organizations, serving on the White House Committee on Youth from 1935 to 1939, as National Girl Scouts vice president from 1938 to 1942, as a member of the U.S. attorney general’s Conference on Juvenile Delinquency in 1948 and as chairman of the Los Angeles County Conference on Community Relations from 1953 to 1955.

Mrs. Hardy also was an early participant in civil rights demonstrations, picketing outside the National Theater in Washington to protest Marian Anderson’s being barred from singing there because she was black.

She attended the Eastman School of Music and Radcliffe College and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Judaism in 1968.

Her first marriage ended in divorce, her daughter said. She then married attorney Jack Hardy, who died in 1955.

In 1948, she moved to Los Angeles, where she became a book reviewer and panelist on the long-running educational TV program “Cavalcade of Books” on KNXT. The show won a George Foster Peabody Award in 1953 for best educational television show.

She is survived by her daughter, Dr. Rodiger, and a son, the Rev. Charles Glenn, both from her first marriage, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

A funeral service will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena.