Kathleen Straus
prefers to work among
the people rather than
lord it over them
PEOPLE
SUSAN WELCH
Special Tb The Jewish News
I
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n her office at the Center for
Creative Studies in Detroit,
Acting President Kathleen
Strauss extends a friendly wel-
come. The setting seems ap-
propriate for a woman who had made
Detroit's concerns her own and whose
name, among her friends and col-
leagues, is a byword for approachabili-
ty and warmth.
She works not in the luxurious
penthouse of a suburban ivory tower,
but at the city's cultural heart, on the
accessible first floor of a beautiful old
apartment building, now a student
residence for the center. A few elder-
ly tenants from its former days still
live there, coexisting amicably with
the often unconventional art students.
Their friendly interaction obviously
pleases Straus — which is not surpris-
ing. She has spent a good deal of time
and energy, over the years, in forging
unlikely coalitions, in bringing
together apparently disparate groups
of people to foster mutual understan-
ding and respect.
Involvement with the public
welfare seems 'to come to Straus as
naturally as breathing — the unforc-
ed expression of the principles of her
Jewish heritage and traditions, and of
a real, unsentimental liking and con-
cern for people.
"She is bright, sensitive, skillful,
intelligent and friendly," says Detroit
City. Councilman Mel Ravitz. "She is
a friendly person, and genuinely so.
She likes people and they respond in
kind?'
"She has a wonderful way with
people," agrees State Sen. Jack Fax-
on, another friend and former col-
league. "She's a very sincere person,
who is always up front with you. She's
effective because she does what she
believes in and she does it very well?'
Doing what she believes in has led
to a career in state and civic govern-
ment, in jobs such as deputy director-
ship of the Detroit Model
Neighborhood Agency, divisional
directorship of the Southeast
Michigan Council of Governments
and lobbyist for the Michigan
Association of School Boards.
It has also led to her participation
in Jewish communal life. Since she
came to Detroit 35 years ago, Straus
has actively involved herself in many
of its Jewish organizations, including
Women's American ORT, the Na-
tional Council of Jewish Women and
the Jewish Community Council, on
whose human relations committee
she worked for many years.
For three years she served as
president of the Detroit Chapter of
the American Jewish Committee, the
first and only woman to hold that
position. This year she received
the AJCommittee's Award for
Kathleen Straus admires a sculpture at the Center for Creative Studies.
Glenn Triest
IVO
Distinguished Community Service, a
fitting tribute, says Mary Shapero,
chairman of the board of governors.
The award, Straus says, surprised
and rather overwhelmed her but,
characteristically, she "decided to en-
joy it:' Enjoyment of life, say her
friends, is a fundamental key to her
success.
"Burn-out," it would seem, is not
in her vocabulary. "It is not in her to
be jaded or cynical," Faxon says. "She
is an eternal optimist. And it is the
eternal optimists who get things
done.
"I hate to use the term 'old-
fashioned liberal; " he adds, "but it's
probably not an inaccurate way of
describing her. She believes that peo-
ple can always do things to improve
the quality of life. She believes that
people can make a difference?'
Before coming to Detroit, Straus
spent most of her life in her native
New York City. Growing up there, she
remembers, was great fun, despite a
lack of money to enjoy its amenities.
It was "very much like growing up in
a small town" she says. "All the peo-
ple in the neighborhood knew each
other?'
Though "born and bred" a
Democrat, she had no thought, in
those days, of a political career, but
became an economic analyst with the
U.S. Treasury, having majored in
economics at Hunter College in New
York.
In Detroit she quickly "started do-
ing things;' combining child rearing
with a host of volunteer activities
from P.T.A.s to citizens' action groups.
She enjoyed her increasingly active
role within the Jewish community
and deepened her political involve-
ment, largely through her activities
with the League of Women Voters, of
which she was president from
1961-1963. "Everything," she says,
"just mushroomed?'
In 1968, after almost 20 years of
happy marriage, her husband, Everet,
died suddenly of a heart attack.
Bolstered by the love of family and
friends, she turned her organizational
skills and political insights into a
new, full-time, professional career.
"One thing has sort of led to
another," Straus says. "When I work-
ed in Lansing, I knew people who
were very goal oriented. They knew
exactly what they wanted to do and
every move was calculated to advance
toward that goal . . . I never did that.
I had no plan. Things just happened.
Opportunities presented themselves
and so I tried different things:'
For a cause that she believes in,
however, she can be pleasantly but
ruthlessly tenacious. Persistence, says
Linda Bruin, legal counsel for the
Michigan Association of School
Boards, made Straus a particularly
powerful advocate.
"She would take an idea that had
merit and really spend the time and
effort to convince others that was the
direction they needed to be going. She
would work at all hours to track peo-
ple down or get a project done."
The power of education to improve
the quality of life and the necessity
of constant communication and
liaison have been the themes most
often sounded through all of Straus'
work, professional and volunteer.
As a member of the AJCommit-
tee's national executive comittee and
of the Detroit Chapter's advisory
board, she continues to urge Jewish
community leaders to reach out, as
they have done in the past, to bridge
the racial and economic gaps which
sometimes seem to have widened
rather than diminished.
In the perennial argument over
the appropriate areas of concern for
the Jewish community and its
organizations, "There were always
people who felt that we should only
be concerned with the Jewish com-
munity," says Straus. "There are
others of us who felt that the concern
of the entire community was the con-
cern of the Jewish community. If it is
not prosperous and healthy, we can-
not be prosperous and healthy. The
needs," she adds, "have not changed.
They've just become more exacer-
bated if anything?'
"One of the things that distresses
me the most;' she says, "is the
deterioration of much of Detroit and
the outward migration to the suburbs,
with the consequent diminishing of
people's feelings of responsibility for
Detroit. This has to be reversed?'
There has to be a greater effort,
she believes, particularly on the part
of community leadership, to tackle
the fear and hostility which separates
urban blacks and suburban whites,
more "getting people together and
talking, more broaching of subjects
that people are reluctant to talk
about," she says.
Reflecting on contributions Jews
have already made in every field of
community life and thinking, some-
times, how little progress has been
made in spite of their efforts, Straus
said she sometimes gets discouraged.
"But then;' she says, "I wonder what
things might have been like if we
hadn't done anything?'
The important thing, she thinks
is to persuade people not to withdraw
in discouragement, "so that we don't
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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