Florence Clifton; Activist Got College Degree at 83

In her 50s, she slept on a grass mat on a concrete floor with no windows to keep out the mosquitoes.

In her 80s, she returned to UCLA to pick up the bachelor’s degree that the Depression had forced her to abandon six decades earlier.

Florence “Susie” McChesney Clifton, Democratic fund-raiser and campaign organizer, watchdog over women’s and children’s labor laws, Peace Corps veteran and belated college graduate, has died. She was 91.

Clifton died May 13 of complications from a stroke in Castro Valley, Calif., where she had moved after the death of her husband in 1999.

Born in Riverside, Florence McChesney dreamed of becoming a modern dancer, so she majored in physical education at UCLA. She was among 6,000 students who in 1929 moved the campus from Vermont Avenue to its new home in Westwood.

But in 1931, only four units short of graduation, she dropped out and got a 50-cents-an-hour job to help save her family home from foreclosure. Her parents lost the house anyway, but the dropout didn’t return to campus until she was 83.

She just never found the time.

In 1933, she married a young attorney, Robert Clifton, who would later serve 25 years on the Los Angeles Municipal and Superior courts. It was he who dubbed her “Susie.” Together they worked in progressive causes, starting with the unsuccessful 1934 gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair.

While rearing five children, working as a riveter at Lockheed during World War II and later in the insurance business, Clifton established herself as a power in California Democratic politics.

She helped elect Culbert Olson in 1938, the state’s first Democratic governor in 44 years, and worked for Helen Gahagan Douglas in Congress, Gov. Pat Brown and, nationally, for Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.

Clifton served on the state Democratic Central Committee for 18 years and was a delegate or alternate to five Democratic national presidential nominating conventions.

She served from 1953 to 1955 as a member and vice chairwoman of the Los Angeles Housing Commission.

Named chief of California’s Division of Industrial Welfare by Brown, she served from 1959 to 1967, dealing with labor laws for women and children and attending United Nations and White House Conferences on the Status of Women.

Present at a political gathering in 1960 when soon-to-be President John F. Kennedy announced his plans for the Peace Corps, Clifton was eager to sign up. But she had to wait until 1967, when her youngest child turned 18.

Soon afterward she and her husband were on a plane for Micronesia--two of only three of the 138 Peace Corps volunteers aboard who were older than 26.

In the islands, Susie Clifton drafted proposals for a Headstart program, adult education, a community action agency and Job Corps and neighborhood youth corps programs. She recruited and trained locals to run the projects and arranged for 50 young men to take Job Corps training in Hawaii.

She also chaired an educational study commission to work out policy changes in the islands’ education system and set up an employment service to hire local workers before importing foreign labor.

“It’s the most meaningful thing anyone could do,” she told The Times in 1972, urging other senior citizens to join the Peace Corps. “Gray hairs are an asset.”

After the two-year stint in Micronesia, 1967 to 1969, Clifton and her husband served another Peace Corps term in Liberia from 1976 to 1978.

Only in her 80s did Susie Clifton have time to remember that college degree she had always intended to get.

“When you get up in your 80s, you start looking back at what you’ve done--and what you wish you’d done,” she told The Times.

So she inquired about enrolling in necessary classes, eager to return to the modern campus. But UCLA officials discovered that extension courses she had taken in insurance in the 1950s more than qualified her for official graduation. If she wanted to study further, they said, she could always enroll in graduate school.

On June 20, 1993, the 83-year-old matriarch put on her cap and gown and received her diploma, 62 years late. She was alone among the 2,500 School of Social Sciences graduates receiving a bachelor’s degree in physical education--UCLA had dropped the major 20 years earlier.

Clifton is survived by two sons, Robert of Bellingham, Wash., and Thomas of Oakland, Calif; three daughters, Carol Cady of Laguna Hills, Susan Clifton of Thousand Oaks and Helen Clifton, of Richmond, Calif.; two sisters, Marian Ihrig and Elizabeth Sarka, both of Seal Beach; 16 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and one great-great-granddaughter.

Services will be private. The family has asked that any memorial contributions be sent to a charity of the donor’s choice.