Hortense Tingstad; Social Worker

Hortense O. Tingstad, a career social welfare worker with California who spent her later years establishing support groups for those who, like herself, had to watch Alzheimer’s disease cripple and kill loved ones, has died.

The former board president of USC’s Andrus Gerontology Center was 81 when she died Wednesday in Los Angeles.

She had graduated from USC in 1931 with a degree in political science but the scarcity of work during the Depression forced her to accept a temporary position in public welfare with the state. That became a 33-year career.

In 1946 she married Edward Maurice Tingstad, whose Alzheimer’s was diagnosed in 1977. In an effort to help him, she returned to USC and the Andrus Center, where she founded a support group for the families of Alzheimer’s patients. In 1987, five years after her husband’s death, she established an endowment fund to provide financial assistance for Alzheimer’s patients and their families.

In 1990 she was honored with the USC Dean’s Medallion.