Sandy Elster, 86; Retired Businessman Was Civic Activist

Sandy Elster, a retired executive and longtime activist whose efforts bolstered campaigns for such causes as clean air, campaign finance reform and human rights, died of pulmonary fibrosis Tuesday at his Venice home. He was 86.

Elster oversaw the development of his family-run hardware store in Los Angeles into a national food service equipment business that was sold to the Hyatt Hotel Corp. in 1968. He ran the company as a Hyatt senior vice president and board member for 11 years until retiring in 1979 to devote himself to civic activism.

His crusades ranged from his frontyard to the world, from preserving a nesting ground for the endangered California least tern on the beach in front of his home to pressing for federal ratification of a United Nations treaty outlawing genocide.

A native of Colchester, Conn., Elster was the son of Russian-Jewish parents who ran Elster’s Hardware Store in Boyle Heights for many years. His father died when he was 8, but Elster, his three siblings and their mother kept the business afloat during the Depression.

After serving in the Army in World War II, Elster returned to Los Angeles in 1946 and spent the next two decades expanding the family business until it became a national concern that provided food service equipment to hotels and restaurants across the country.

He became an avid environmentalist decades before it was fashionable, serving the first of three terms as president of the Clean Air Council in 1948. Working with the Southern California Federation of Scientists, the council later designed guidelines that influenced the adoption of air quality standards in California and other states.

In more recent years, Elster was a consultant to the Metropolitan Transit Authority to develop a nonpolluting, long-range mass transit system. He drove one of the first electric cars, the EV-1, made by General Motors, but later switched to the hybrid Toyota Prius and persuaded many of his friends to buy one too.

“He was a top salesman,” said Ted Williams, a friend for 30 years, who ordered one of the cars after Elster insisted on lending him his for a trial run.

In the 1950s, Elster joined a coalition of religious, labor and civic groups to press for U.S. ratification of the Genocide Convention, which had been approved by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 to establish genocide as a crime under international law. Fifty years after the law was drawn up in response to the Nazi extermination of more than 6 million Jews, Elster represented Amnesty International at a ceremony in Chicago where then-President Ronald Reagan signed the accord.

During the 1980s, Elster also was instrumental in the campaign that resulted in legislation to require California public schools to teach about genocide to students in seventh through 12th grades.

More recently, he immersed himself in campaign finance reform as a founder of California Clean Money, a nonprofit organization that supports the concept of publicly financed political campaigns.

His good turns extended to the California least tern, a small gray and white seabird that made endangered lists in 1970. A few years after moving to Venice in 1973, Elster helped tern-lovers cut through red tape to erect a sturdy fence around a plot of sand about half the size of a football field, directly across from his front window. The fence kept dogs, cats and other predators away from tern eggs and chicks that hatch there every spring.

The effort was so successful that the nesting ground now occupies an expanse of beach the size of two football fields, said Elster’s wife of 56 years, Ernestine. She noted that, despite his patronage, the mother terns “would dive bomb us because we were too close to the babies.”

Elster, who donated his body to medical research at UCLA, is also survived by three sons, Charlie, Don and Steven; and two grandchildren. The family requests that memorial donations be sent to the California Clean Money Campaign, 8800 Venice Blvd., Suite 321, Los Angeles, CA 90034.