Leona Bertha Blake; Restaurateur and Women’s Rights Advocate

Leona Bertha Blake, 76, a restaurateur and women’s rights advocate, who in 1943 won a landmark court battle against American Trust Co. over the right of women to buy homes in their own names. She owned and managed several restaurants, including Larry Blake’s, in Berkeley. Mrs. Blake and her husband, Larry, helped educate an uncounted number of students at UC Berkeley with an informal and largely unpublicized scholarship program that provided food, jobs, loans and grants to needy students. Like her mother, Bertha Cress, who marched with pioneer feminist Margaret Sanger, Mrs. Blake was a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood and women’s abortion rights, speaking publicly about her own abortion in 1937. At her home in Santa Cruz, on an unreported date, after a lengthy battle with cancer.