Burbank historian Mary Jane Strickland dies at 90

Mary Jane Strickland, a lifelong Burbank resident and founder of the Burbank Historical Society, died Sept. 18 at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, about a month and a half after the death of her husband. She was 90.

Her daughter, Penny Rivera, said Strickland had broken a hip last Thanksgiving and had been in declining health, which took a dramatic turn after the death of her husband, Harry, in early August. She had been in and out of the hospital for “little things from age,” but her death was “not expected at all.”

“The moment my dad died, she just went straight down,” Rivera said. “I don’t know if she died of a broken heart.”

Mary Jane Strickland was born in November 1924 to George and Blanche Cole during a family trip to Texas. Her father had been the first Burbank Police Chief in the early 1920s and had battled bootleggers in the city during the Prohibition era. He was later appointed as a federal marshal.

She attended elementary, middle and high schools in Burbank. During World War II, she worked at the Lockheed Airplane Factory in Burbank, where many women, including Rosalie Kunert, the model for “Rosie the Riveter,” took up formerly male-dominated trades such as riveting the cockpit shells of airplane bombers.

Rivera, who was born in 1943, said she wasn’t sure what her mother did at the plant, but “they did joke and call her ‘Rosie the Riveter.’”

In 1956, Mary Jane Strickland went to work for the city, first as a librarian and later as public information officer, a job she held until she retired. At age 60, she ran for City Council in 1985 among a field of 18 candidates, but lost.

Her efforts to preserve the city’s history are what she is perhaps best known for, efforts that in 2002 earned her the Zonta Club of Burbank Area’s Woman of the Year.

The quest to find accurate information about her father’s years as police chief is what led her to organize a historical society in 1973, she told the Los Angeles Times in a 1990 article. After that, she said “I just started collecting things, putting things together and talking to people, and pretty soon I was a woman possessed.”

In the early 1980s, she and her husband spent two years restoring the 1887 Mentzer House, located in George Izay Park, which is now home to the society’s Gordon R. Howard Museum.

“She was the motivating force” behind the historical society and museum, Rivera said. “If my mother wanted something done, she got it done.”

She was a divorcee in 1951, when she married Harry Strickland, then a police officer with the city of Burbank who, like her father, also played a role in combating organized crime in Burbank.

“It’s hard to describe somebody who was so big in my life,” Mary Jane Strickland of her husband of 64 years after he died last month at the age of 100. She described him as “my silent man, my Gary Cooper.”

Aside from the couple’s efforts at the historical society, they spent time traveling in a motor home, Rivera said, and also enjoyed spending time with family. At one point, they purchased a second home in Mount Shasta to be close to their granddaughter and great-grandchildren.

Strickland is survived by her daughter, granddaughter Michelle Rey, and great-grandchildren Shaye Herriford, Robert Herriford and Jesse Rey-Gutierrez.

A memorial service will be at 11 a.m. next Saturday at the Gordon R. Howard Museum, 115 N. Lomita St. Parking will be available in the lot at 1100 W. Clark Ave. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Burbank Historical Society or a favorite charity.