Peter W. Dauterive, 83; Executive for S&L; Was on Board of L.A. Zoo

Peter W. Dauterive, a savings and loan executive and community leader who served on boards of such institutions as the Los Angeles Zoo and the California Science Museum, has died. He was 83.

Dauterive died Friday in Los Angeles of natural causes, according to his wife, Verna Dauterive, principal of Franklin Avenue Elementary School.

Dauterive was an executive with Broadway Federal Savings & Loan Assn. for 23 years, rising to executive vice president. He served the Crenshaw area throughout his career.

In 1972, Dauterive was the founding president and chief executive officer of Founders Savings & Loan Assn., which bought the Santa Barbara Avenue branch of Santa Barbara Savings. In starting the new company, he told The Times, he wanted to provide home loans for a community scarred by the 1965 Watts riots, which had made many financial institutions abandon the area.

“I look on this as an opportunity to provide this community with financial services it needed pretty badly,” he said in 1973.

After Dauterive stepped down in 1986, he formed the Peter W. Dauterive & Associates property management firm.

Active in the Republican Party, Dauterive served as a national convention delegate from 1976 through 1996 and served on the Republican National Committee, the California Golden Circle, the Ronald Reagan 10 Club and the President’s Committee of Citizens for the Republic. He was chairman of the Metropolitan Los Angeles Lincoln Club and finance vice chairman of the State Committee to Elect the President.

Dauterive served as a director of the California Savings and Loan League and director and president of the American Savings and Loan League. Reagan named him to the National Commission for Employment Policy, and he also served on several state commissions, including the California Economic Development Corp.

At the time of his death, Dauterive was a director of the California Science Center in Exposition Park, a trustee of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn. and a trustee of the Children’s Bureau Foundation of Southern California. He was also active in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission, the Los Angeles Figueroa Corridor and the Access to Loans for Learning Student Loan Corp. He was a director of the Los Angeles County Health Facilities Authority Commission.

Highly respected in the business community, he helped break racial barriers in many areas. In 1964, he became one of the first three blacks admitted to the previously all-white Western Avenue Golf Club after the late Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and colleagues ordered a halt to discrimination on county golf courses.

Born in New Orleans, Dauterive earned a bachelor’s degree from USC and a master’s in executive management at Indiana University. He was an Army veteran of World War II, earning the rank of staff sergeant.

Dauterive is survived by his wife, Verna.

Services are scheduled for 11 a.m. Friday at Holman United Methodist Church, 3320 W. Adams St., Los Angeles. The family has asked that donations be made to a charity of the donor’s choice.