Ramona Ripston

Named the Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California on September 1, 1972. Ms. Ripston, who had been in failing health for several months, died on Nov. 3 in Marina del Rey, said Hector Villagra, her successor as executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Southern California. She was 91. The daughter of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, Ms. Ripston was born and grew up in Queens, New York. She graduated with a political science degree from Hunter College, and has an honorary doctorate of law from West Los Angeles School of Law. Prior to taking over as executive director of the ACLU/SC, Ms. Ripston held various positions within the ACLU’s national office, and in its New York and New Jersey affiliates. She also worked for several years for the New York Urban Coalition as Director of Public Affairs. Ms. Ripston, a tall, thin former model with cascading blonde hair, cut a fashionable figure in the sometimes rumpled world of civil liberties litigation. Ramona Ann Ripston was born on Feb. 18, 1927, in Queens, N.Y. Her father, William Ripston, taught physics at Brooklyn College, and her mother, Elsie (Fleischman) Ripston, was a bookkeeper. She grew up in Queens and graduated in 1948 from Hunter College with a degree in political science. Ms. Ripston was married five times. Driven by feminist instinct, she kept her maiden name. But she often said that her decision was a stroke of luck, since she had no inkling she would marry so often. She is survived by two of her children, Laura Ripston and William Caplin, and three grandchildren; a second son, Mark Caplin, is dead. Her final marriage, in 1991, was to Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt, a liberal lion on the very liberal United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. He died in March 2018.