Etta-Belle Kitchen: She Captains League of Women Voters

When Gloria Schmidt urged Etta-Belle Kitchen to accept nomination for the presidency of the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles, Kitchen fired back a staccato “No! No! No!”

That was typical Kitchen talk. She comes on hot and strong: a fireball. It takes a while to find the cooler, gentler side of this woman.

Schmidt, who last year chaired the league’s nominating committee, kept the pressure on.

As Kitchen tells the tale: “After Gloria called several times, I told her, ‘OK, I’ll do it if you become vice president.’ Gloria said, ‘I don’t have time,’ and I said, ‘Neither do I,’ and hung up.”

Two weeks later, Kitchen picked up the nominating committee report. “There I was,” she recalled, laughing, “down for president with Gloria as vice president.”

Kitchen is a natural for president of almost anything. Twist her arm and she admits to being “in my 70s,” but she looks 60 and thinks younger. She is a lawyer and a retired Navy commander who has managed everything from a direct-mail advertising company to the Navy’s Recruit Training Command for Women. She is former president of the Los Angeles Opera Guild, president of the cooperative where she lives, a workaholic, a bit of a flirt, a woman who says what’s on her mind and who deeply loves the League of Woman Voters because “it is democracy in action . . . and I am a patriot.”

She tends toward pithy self-evaluation: “My philosophy is, don’t tell me what’s wrong, tell me how to correct it.” “I have a need to be loved.” “I only look at now and the future. I never look back or regret.” “I love being appreciated.” “I speak out. I am forthright. I am probably capable.”

Schmidt, who works daily with Kitchen, observed that the League is Kitchen’s raison d’etre : “She looks forward to having a reason to face life every morning, and right now that reason is the League. She’s doing super.

“Etta-Belle is our leader,” Schmidt declared emphatically, “She brings strong administrative capabilities to us. She has a knowledge of the League.”

Perhaps nobody knows Kitchen’s leadership style better than her secretary, Nima Long.

League presidents serve for two years. Long has served as secretary for nearly two decades. She has seen so many presidents come and go, and has so much league information in her head, that she half-jokes, “I boss them, they don’t boss me.”

Long labels Kitchen “dynamite,” adding, “She knows how to talk to people, how to run meetings. She talks to people as League president, but more like a friend. She cares. She cares a lot.”

Thelma Hall, a retired secretary in Richland, Wash., and Kitchen’s sister, repeatedly emphasized respect and love for her sibling before describing her as, “On the one hand authoritative and demanding, on the other loving and caring. I think it is the result of her having been in authority. I’ve had to tell her more than once, ‘You’re not in the Navy now.”’

A Little Tougher

Comparing Kitchen with other league presidents she’s worked for, Long--who occasionally slips into understatement--observed that, “She might be a little tougher than some of the others.”

The secretary said when Kitchen gets angry “she hollers a little bit, raises her voice some and tries to be taller than what she is. She usually gets her point across. In the end she and the other person she got into it with are usually laughing and they’ve solved the problem. It can go either way; she doesn’t have to win them all.”

Kitchen knows she raises her voice, but she doesn’t like it. After shouting at someone she feels “ashamed and embarrassed. I stay awake at night and finally I call and apologize.”

Long’s passing reference to her boss trying to be “taller than what she is” gains meaning when you meet the League president, whose intense brown eyes meet yours head-on--if you’re 5 feet tall.

Kitchen jokes about her stature today, but as a child it troubled her. “I guess I wasn’t very popular when I was a kid,” she recalled. “I was too little. I was unhappy.”

Through high school in Le Grande, Ore., Kitchen’s parents “kept a tight rein on me . . . maybe I’ve always been the different one. I guess that’s true.”

But when she got to the University of Oregon in 1926, life changed. She joined the Alpha Chi Omega sorority and quickly became “very active.” She developed a “wide circle of new friends with varied interests.” And those restrictive parental reins were too short to reach her.

“I did drama, I studied, but mostly I played,” Kitchen said of her college years. “I was very popular in college. I was a very good dancer. I used to win dance contests. I never had any trouble getting dates on Saturday night. College was fun. I enjoyed every day of it.”

Bill Whitely, a college friend with whom Kitchen went dancing and “drank home-brew,” remembers the coed as “an independent little devil who didn’t let people push her around.”

“I had a lot of fun with her,” added the retired attorney from Newport Beach, who described his former fellow student as “a hell of an intelligent little gal.”

Went to Law School

“After college,” Kitchen said, “I had the choice of traveling or having an affair or going to law school. I took the dumb one.” She went to law school.

For the next five years, Kitchen worked days as a secretary. At night she attended Northwestern College of Law in Portland. She passed the bar in 1937.

After law school she married the head of the finance company where she had worked while studying law.

“I was fairly innocent and I didn’t know what marriage was going to be like,” Kitchen said. “I didn’t like it. I divorced him.” The union lasted 2 1/2 years. (Kitchen, who goes by her maiden name, was married once more, to a seminar facilitator for 1 1/2 years in the early ‘70s. Today, she recalls that relationship as “pleasant but not fulfilling.”)

Following her first marriage, she got a job as office manager of a Portland law firm.

In 1942 Kitchen read a Time magazine article about the need for women in the Navy. “I’m going to sea,” she told the partners of her law firm. They offered her a job as an attorney, but it was too late. In October of 1942, the U.S. Navy swore in Lt. (j.g.) Etta-Belle Kitchen.

But she never went to sea. “I joined the Navy to see the world. They sent me to Bremerton.”

For four years Kitchen served as assistant to the Navy’s industrial relations officer in Bremerton, Wash., designating civilians who had jobs vital to the Navy, and naming others who were eligible for the draft.

World War II ended in 1945, and by early the next year Lt. Cmdr. Kitchen was Miss Kitchen, living in San Francisco, hopping a cable car every morning in front of her one-bedroom apartment on California Street, and rumbling to the end of the line, across from the Veterans’ Administration office where she was “the No. 2 person in the personnel department.”

Kitchen missed the Navy and didn’t think much of the VA. On New Year’s Eve of 1947, less than two years after donning civvies, she accepted the Navy’s invitation to return to duty as a regular naval officer.

The duty lasted 14 years, and encompassed assignments in Washington, D.C., reviewing and evaluating laws related to military personnel, in San Diego assigning personnel in the 11th Navy District, and in Bainbridge, Md., commanding the Recruit Training Command for Women.

Other Jobs

In 1962, Cmdr. Kitchen retired from the Navy, moved to Los Angeles and worked at a series of volunteer and paid jobs: administering a Head Start program, managing a direct mail advertising company, and devoting thousands of hours to the Los Angeles Opera Guild and the League of Women Voters.

A passionate opera lover, Kitchen organized trips for the Opera Guild, and served as president of the group for three years ending in 1985. “It was full-time volunteer work,” she said.

Since leaving the military, Kitchen has more than made up for her failure to see the world by joining the Navy. Her itinerary reads like an atlas index: Alaska, Australia, Bali, Egypt, France, Germany, Hawaii, Israel, Italy, Japan, Macao, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, “all of South America,” Spain, Sumatra and Taiwan.

A dozen years ago, on a trip to Portugal, Kitchen met Westwood resident Anna Fischer, who invited her to a League meeting.

The meeting inspired Kitchen to join the League. She quickly became head of membership for the League’s Cheviot-Mar Vista unit, and then was elected the unit’s chairwoman. Next she took over as a League area director, overseeing seven units of from 12 to 30 members each on the Westside. That job put her on the board of directors, and led to her presidency of the Los Angeles League.

Kitchen describes the League as “completely dedicated to educating American citizens to be informed voters.”

Although the League never endorses candidates, it conducts extensive studies on issues, and then recommends how to vote on them.

With 1,100 members, the Los Angeles League stands as the nation’s largest. It participates in national, state, county and local studies, ranging from a nationwide investigation of basic human needs like rights to education and affordable shelter, to a recently completed study of child care in Los Angeles.

Kitchen extols the child-care study, and cites it as one of many the reasons she is willing to devote 50 or 60 hours a week to the League. It is, she says, a typical League effort, because everything the organization does is directed toward making the world a better place. If anything is more important to her, she can’t think of it.