Lillian’s Story: Independent Palisadian Celebrates 99 Years

(Note: This story was originally published in 2014. Read the July 30, 2015 issue of the Palisadian-Post for a story about Lillian Weitzner’s 100th birthday party.)

Palisadian Lillian Weitzner has charted her own course since she was a girl growing up in a Hasidic family in Brooklyn, New York.  Like the storied artist, Beatrice Woods, who inspired the lead female character in the film, Titanic, Lillian traveled the road not taken, becoming a student of Martha Graham and Anna Freud.  Unlike Woods, Lillian is still a pin-up girl in a bathing suit as she enters her 100th year.

Dancer, hiker, swimmer, teacher, psycholanalyst, Lillian is one of the few women of her generation to realize her dreams, against all odds.  At 17, she sought out an experimental college at the University of Michigan, only to discover when she arrived that it was limited to male students.  After a year, she returned to New York and Hunter College at a time when women students were isolated on a campus with substandard teachers. She married early, left school, and took up creative dancing in Chicago, while her husband, Herbert Weitzner, attended medical school there. They moved back to New York, where Lillian continued dancing under the tutelage of Martha Graham, and Herbert practiced medicine.

In 1940 Janet was born and soon the U.S. was at war.  Chip was born in 1944 while his dad was serving in the South Pacific and was thought to be missing in action.  Lillian wanted to become a children’s play therapist, but there was no such program at Columbia University, and she settled for an degree in education.

Her husband returned to them in 1946, but according to Lillian, “he was never the same,” a victim of what we now call post traumatic stress syndrome. They were active in left-wing causes as the McCarthy era approached.  After a neighbor threatened to report them to the FBI in 1951, they left for Berkeley, California where Herbert started an innovative clinic at the “very liberal” Kaiser Hospital.

Lillian faced a series of setbacks and was unable to get a job teaching. Her Columbia credential was not respected, and she was afraid of signing the mandatory loyalty oath. Then her application for graduate school at UC was rejected because she wanted to study applied, not research, psychology.  One day, a neighbor with an autistic daughter suggested that she and Lillian start the first school for autistic children in the United States, as there were no public school programs that addressed their needs. The East Bay Activity Center started out in a burnt-out old building in a Berkeley park and is still serving children today under the auspices of the Oakland board of education.

After three years, Lillian decided to find out more than was currently known about mental disorders, such as autism, so she applied to and was accepted by the UC graduate school in social work, where many of the professors were psycholanalysts.  A year later, Herbert was found dead in their home, and she was again on her own with two children.  With her Berkeley M.A., she practiced clinical therapy, and was asked to give a lecture for a former professor.  In the audience that day was an “important person” who came up to Lillian afterwards and suggested she go to London to study psycholanalysis with Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna.

With Janet studying at the Sorbonne and Chip enrolled in a London high school, Lillian spent four years in London.  She found Anna Freud a stern teacher, but she relished the experiences, among which was a session with a writer who later won the Nobel Prize and who wanted Lillian to sit with her while she tried out LSD.  She set up a psychoanalytic practice in Berkeley and was asked to assist in a ground-breaking study at the Rice-Davies Child Study Center in Los Angeles.  After commuting weekly to LA for two years, Lillian  moved here in 1968.  Soon after, she began teaching and supervising students in child development at UCLA.

In 1975, Lillian married businessman Norman Liebman, whom she had known as a child in New York. They traveled extensively until Norman died in 1979. In 1980 she married Heinz Lowenstam, a Cal Tech professor, “among the 20th century’s most superb natural scientists,” who was also a refugee from Hitler’s Germany.  He was “drafted as the ‘atomic paleontologist’” for Harold Urey’s research group, but his innovative work in geochemistry took him to many countries during their marriage.  Wherever he went, Lillian also taught—in Jerusalem, Germany, Holland—and her eyes sparkle recalling their exciting years together.

They lived in Pasadena, but Lillian bought a house in Malibu, where they spent their weekends.

After Heinz’s death from lung cancer in 1992, Lillian moved to Malibu, where six months later her house burned down in the great fire.  She was able to purchase her current home in Pacific Palisades near the hiking trails she loved in the mountains.  Although her husbands all smoked, Lillian never did, and she continued her dancing exercises, along with hiking and swimming until recently.  My husband and I met Lillian around the Temescal Canyon swimming pool, where he received water therapy for paraplegia and she swam with a water exercise group.  After the pool was shut down, we continued our water therapy at Lillian’s condo pool and became fast friends.

Lillian listens better than anyone I have ever met, a knowing twinkle in her blue eyes. She loves nothing more than a party, a gathering of friends.  I catch her reading the New York Review of Books.  She no longer drives, but she attends the ballet and films, and frequents the Palisades Branch Library.  She lives on her own in a three-story condo with neighbors and friends frequently in attendance, all of whom celebrate this modest and independent woman as an uncommon inspiration.   When I remark on how, despite many rejections, she triumphed by persisting, she shrugs it all off with, “I just had to get away.”

The quotes about Prof. Heinz Lowenstam are taken from a biographical memoir  written by Joseph L. Kirschvink and published in 2003 by the National Academies Press, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.