Ida Porter: She’s Always Made Her Votes Count
Local Woman Has Spent Her Life in Service to Others
Palos Verdes Estates resident Ida Porter with her award from the Los Angeles City Fire Commission where she served as the first female member for a major city in the United States. Photo by Betty Lukas
For the past 15 years, Ida Porter has done her duty as a citizen.
During that time she’s been an election inspector at polling places throughout the Peninsula. And Tuesday, Nov. 2, is no exception. Like all other elections, it will be a very busy day.
She’ll haul all the election supplies she’s picked up two days before, and take them to this year’s precinct assignment at Malaga Cove Library by 6 a.m. to prepare for polls to open at 7 a.m. Aided by her team of clerks, they’ll set up individual voter booths, sift through supplies and assemble them in proper order on tables; check out the mechanical ballot box to make sure it works, post outdoor signs, raise the American Flag, and, finally, take the pledge of allegiance.
By this time, the line will have already formed.
So why has this 85-year-old woman been getting up at the crack of dawn and not leaving until 9:30 p.m. for all these years?
“Voting is what democracy is all about,” she explained during a recent interview at the spacious Montemalaga home she shares with her second husband of nine years.
“People have paid a high price for the right to vote,” she went on. “People give their lives for the right to vote. Those who don’t vote can’t complain if they don’t like what they get,” she added.
Throughout her multifaceted life and through her many opportunities to work in behalf of others, Porter has applied her father’s advice: “You have to reach others to help others if you’re going to be a Christian.” Her father was always involved in helping others, she said.
A native of Keithville, La.—near Shreveport—Porter was the ninth of 12 children, she said. Her father was a prosperous farmer, who also owned a gas station, general store and barber shop, where, she added, two of her brothers worked as barbers.
When she was two, however, her parents sent her to Houston to live with an aunt whose daughter had died. “But I always spent summers with my parents. My aunt would put me on the train to Shreveport, and my parents picked me up there. That’s why I was always connected with them,” she explained.
After finishing high school, she moved with her Houston family to Los Angeles. “My uncle got a job there,” she explained. And Porter went off to college. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the then California State College (now University) Los Angeles in 1960, and went on to earn a double master of science degree in counseling and guidance and rehabilitation counseling in 1962 from the same school.
With those degrees in hand, Porter found at job with the California State Department of Rehabilitation, where she remained for 29 years as a rehabilitation counselor and supervisor at several high schools.
The array of awards from other state agencies that line a long hallway in their home, attest to all the other accomplishments that filled those years.
As a member of the Los Angeles City Fire Commission from 1972-1974, she was the first female in a major American city to serve in that capacity. Also, during that period she was the second female and the first minority female candidate for the California State Senate, where she lost by a “small margin of votes.”
Gov. Ronald Reagan appointed her in 1974 to the Commission on the Status of Women where she served until 1979, and was instrumental in influencing the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in establishing the existing Los Angeles County Commission on the Status of Women.
In 1980, the mayor of Gardena appointed her to serve on the Gardena Inter Agency Task Force and Local Employment and Training Advisory Committee.
And all during that time she was married and a mother–and she did have a nanny.
According to Porter’s recollection, the marriage happened this way: It’s 1946, and 21-year-old Ida Porter took some family papers that needed signatures to a law office “I guess that was my first introduction to politics,” she smiled at the memory. “I saw this young attorney, and I said to myself, ‘He’s going to be my husband.’” As it turned out, that young attorney needed to bring the signed papers to Porter’s home, and after he arrived, “I offered him cake and coffee.”
Well, cake and coffee led to a picnic, which led to marriage in 1948, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1984. During those years, former attorney Everett M. Porter had been serving as judge in both the Municipal and Superior Courts of Los Angeles County.
Throughout their long marriage, the Porters had become the parents of two daughters, Tanya and Alean. Tanya died in 2009 of ovarian cancer, Porter said, but Tanya’s daughter, Kimberly, is a graduate of West Point, served active duty in Europe, and currently in the reserves, is working on the MBA at USC. Alean, now a widow, living in Los Angeles, is the mother of a son and daughter.
Porter’s past affiliations and leadership roles are numerous, but at present she confines herself to membership in Delta Sigma Theta, Rolling Hills/Palos Verdes Chapter, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Lennox Station, where she works as a volunteer—plus, of course, her job as polling inspector for the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters.
Although she reported that she won a prize for baking a lemon pie when she was five—honest!– her current cuisine consists of fewer pies and more fish, she said. “We have wild salmon about three times a week,” she noted.
And what is this woman of 85 who has only taken one doctor-prescribed pill a day for the past several years going to have for lunch?
“I think we’ll have fruit salad.”
See you at the polls on Nov. 2! Check in with Ida Porter at the Malaga Cove Library. PEN