OBITUARIES / PASSINGS / Madelyn Katz
Madelyn “Maddie” Katz, 73, a philanthropist who helped establish a UCLA Medical Center program to provide reconstructive plastic surgery to soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, died Sunday at her Los Angeles home after a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer, the center announced.
With her husband, inventor Ronald A. Katz, she set up the Katz Family Foundation in 2002. The foundation has given more than 30 major gifts to charity and often supported UCLA, which the couple attended.
Their $1 million gift helped set up Operation Mend, which tries to provide advanced treatment at UCLA for military personnel who have undergone surgery and rehabilitation in San Antonio at Brooke Army Medical Center, a leader in burn victim treatment.
As president of the UCLA Medical Center Auxiliary from 1996 to 1999, Katz noticed that families might benefit from a private room to wait for news about surgery. A donation from the Katz family led to such a surgical waiting room at the new Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Her husband of 52 years insisted that it be called “Maddie’s Room.”
She was born Madelyn Rae Guttelman on Dec. 2, 1935, in Sioux City, Iowa. Katz was close to graduating from UCLA when she had the first of her two sons.
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