On the Front Lines of Cityhood

Finding Betty Hohwiesner’s home in Leisure World, the sprawling south Orange County retirement community where voters approved cityhood last week, is not easy. The first time Hohwiesner, the pro-incorporation group leader, tried negotiating the circuitous route to her co-op building on cul-de-sac 85 at night, she got lost.

But not to worry about getting through the front gate.

“They’ll let you in,” Hohwiesner said with a laugh the day after the election. “The media have been swarming all over the place. You’d think Leisure World was the only thing happening in this world.”

For the 18,000 residents of the 3.2-square-mile senior community next to Laguna Hills, it was. By a narrow 342-vote margin, residents voted to create Laguna Woods, the nation’s first gated city of seniors.

And none too soon for Hohwiesner, a 79-year-old grandmother whose idea of retirement was nothing like the way she spent the last year.

“We all worked liked dogs,” she said.

As the volunteer president of Leisure World Residents for Cityhood, she found her weeks were filled with campaign-planning sessions, resident informational meetings, and meetings with Local Agency Formation Commission representatives and outside advocates of cityhood.

Residents, spotting the “Cityhood Yes” button Hohwiesner wore religiously, approached her on street corners and at the supermarket to pump her with cityhood questions. At home, she had to field a constant barrage of phone calls, many of them from irate members of the anti-cityhood faction. (“The anti’s,” she calls them.)

The always-outspoken Hohwiesner, who has done more than her share of talking over the last year, accepted her volunteer post only six months after undergoing cancer surgery, in which half her tongue was removed.

“I had to learn how to talk again, which took some doing,” she said. “Now I just have the lisp, but I can talk.”

Husband of 56 Years Dies in Nursing Home

Only the week before she learned she had cancer, her husband of 56 years, a retired Pacific Northwest canning company CEO, died at 78 after spending two years in a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients.

Henry Hohwiesner had been involved in the failed 1989 proposal for incorporation of Laguna Hills, which became a city in 1991.

“I remember his coming home so many times having had doors slammed in his face,” she recalled. “When this came up and I was asked to be president of the group, I said, ‘Well, I’ll do it for my husband, in his memory.’ ”

She said her main reason for supporting cityhood was that “I felt we should have control over our destiny, our own tax money, and be accountable in the eyes of the government.”

That county supervisors “are using our tax money to help support” the planned conversion of nearby El Toro Marine Base into a commercial airport, with an arrival flight path over their heads, played a big factor in her pro-cityhood stance.

“That really bugged the hell out of me,” she said. “I saw no reason why they can use our money for things that [Leisure World residents] are so diametrically opposed to.”

During the heated campaign, Hohwiesner says her phone would start ringing at 7 in the morning and not stop until 9:30 at night. One day she came home and found 19 messages on her phone answering machine.

The last year’s labors are a far cry from Hohwiesner’s usual M.O.

When she and Henry moved into Leisure World from Walla Walla, Wash., in 1984, they couldn’t wait to get involved in the retirement community’s recreational and cultural activities.

They joined the saddle, tennis, dance and bridge clubs, the Theater Guild and the historical society.

Hohwiesner goes to art exhibits, takes art history classes and is a member of several committees.

“I’m a busy lady,” she said.

But never so much as during the last year as leader of Leisure World’s pro-incorporation group.

“It absolutely has taken over my life,” she said, seated in her elegant, Asian art- and knickknack-filled living room, a Chopin cassette playing in the background.

“I really worked harder on this campaign than I worked for money or anything in my life, but it was well worth it because we won,” she said.

After College, She Does Stint as a Model

In her younger years--after graduating from Scripps College in Claremont in 1941 with a degree in dramatic literature--the 5-foot-9 Los Angeles native had a brief stint as a model for the Eileen Ford Modeling Agency in New York, while her husband served in the Navy. (She appeared in Harper’s, Mademoiselle and Vogue, and twice graced the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal.) Later, after her son and daughter left for college in the ‘60s, she spent six years as a buyer of designer clothes for a Salem, Ore., department store.

But most of her life outside the home, she says, has been devoted to volunteer work.

Although she’s always had a “keen” interest in politics and is a member of the Leisure World Republican Club, the cityhood effort marked Hohwiesner’s first foray into local politics.

Members of the pro-cityhood group say they pressed her into service because of her leadership experience as a five-time president of the Leisure World Philharmonic Committee of the Orange County Philharmonic Society and four-time president of Opera 100.

She’s Recruited as

Leader by ‘Friend’

“How did I become president of this?” Hohwiesner said with a hearty laugh. “A friend--and I use the term loosely--talked me into it. I was told, ‘You won’t have to do anything; just be our leader.’ Well! I should have known better than that. Anyway, I did hold them together.”

Joan Nugent, 68, who served as the pro-cityhood group’s secretary, said of Hohwiesner: “She kept us moving ahead; she never skipped a beat.”

For Nugent, the cityhood campaign is just another example of a “Betty project,” as Nugent called Hohwiesner’s penchant for getting involved in Leisure World activities--like the time Hohwiesner spearheaded a campaign to raise money to repair the vintage 1926 Steinway grand piano in Clubhouse 3 a few years ago. (A fellow Leisure World resident stepped forward and donated the $26,000 in memory of his pianist wife.)

“She just really worked her fingers to the bone on this one,” said newly elected City Councilwoman Ann Snider, 73, who moved to Leisure World 10 years ago. “For someone who has not had any background in politics, I thought she did a marvelous job.”

Hohwiesner says she’s “elated” by the election outcome. Just don’t ask her to spearhead another local political campaign.

The cityhood effort, she said, “was really very nasty. That’s why [politics] is not for me. I don’t like that. I don’t like to be mad all the time, and I was mad all the time.”

Then she laughed: “I said last night, ‘Why don’t I go back to being my own darling, true self after I’ve been mad all year?’ ”

Some Say She’ll

Keep an Active Role

There are some, however, who say Hohwiesner can’t be ruled out of participating in the running of what ranks as both Orange County’s youngest--and oldest--city.

“Coming up here I think she’s going to be enticed to use all this knowledge she’s acquired and we’ll get her back in harness again,” Snider said. “She’s a very active person, and I have a feeling after about 30 days of rest, she’s going to be bored stiff until we start something else.”

Hohwiesner has no intention of being bored.

After a year of putting her life on hold, she has drawn up a travel itinerary: Virginia in May to see her granddaughter graduate from college, two weeks in Paris with a friend in September, two weeks in Maui with her brother in November and back to Virginia in December to spend Christmas with her son’s family.

Meanwhile, her phone is still ringing.

“But at least now I’m getting phone calls from people that I love and not these people that are telling me what a nut I am,” she said. “Today my friends are calling and saying, ‘You’re back! Can we now plan a bridge game or go to the movies or something?’ ”