Early Life
Vera Katz was born on August 3, 1933 as Vera Pistrak in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her parents had fled Moscow, Russia, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, settling in Germany. As Jewish Mensheviks, the family fled for France when Vera was 2 months old as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power. Once World War II began and Hitler invaded France, the family of four fled over the Pyrenees Mountains to Spain on foot. After a time the family was able to immigrate to the United States and settled in New York City. Vera's parents later divorced when she was 12 years old.
She received a Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College in 1955 and a Master of Arts in 1957. Vera would work as a camp counselor in upstate New York where she met her future husband, a waiter. They moved to Portland, Oregon in 1962 after selecting Portland from a list that included Seattle, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Vera and her husband Mel, an artist, had decided to leave New York, with Vera's image of longtime U.S. Senator Wayne Morse helping to decide the matter. She would give birth to a son after they moved, Jesse. Jesse went on to graduate from Lincoln High School in 1981 and became a journalist in Los Angeles; his memoir, The Opposite Field, was published in October 2009.
Katz became involved in politics in the late 1960s while working on the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy had antagonized many in Portland through his aggressive pursuit of local corruption as United States Attorney General. Katz moved on to support the nationwide grape boycott organized in the late 1960s by Cesar Chavez to support migrant agricultural workers. She then protested and picketed the City Club of Portland over their male only membership requirement in the early 1970s, leading to the end of the practice by the private club.
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