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Keck Foundation, the Los Angeles Opera and others.īesides her three grown children, she is survived by five grandchildren. She also served on the boards of the W.M. In 2007 she and Riordan legally separated.Īn avid collector of American and California Impressionist art and Rookwood pottery, Daly joined the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2002 and was elected board chair by fellow trustees in 2005. She was active in Democrat Hertzberg’s unsuccessful 2005 campaign for mayor. In 2003, she co-chaired, with former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, a committee to oversee the spending of tobacco tax funds to help provide preschool for all 4-year-olds in the county. He appointed her to a new city commission on children and families, and she took on another project as well - overseeing the privately funded restoration of Getty House, the timeworn Tudor city manse in Windsor Square.Īs the mayor’s wife, and well after he left office in 2001, Daly continued her enthusiastic participation in civic and cultural life. When Riordan was elected mayor in 1993, she was at his side for inauguration ceremonies. They soon became a couple but did not marry until 1998. She filed for divorce in November 1991, and Riordan, who was separated from his second wife, invited the children’s activist to a Christmas holiday party at Union Station.
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He gave $25,000 and rounded up more in donations from friends and business associates.
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She met Riordan, then a prominent Los Angeles lawyer, investment banker and philanthropist, around 1989, when she asked him to help pay for a computer reading lab for MacLaren.Ī couple of years later she called on Riordan again, this time to help bankroll an immunization program for children of low-income families. Her role as entertainment industry executive’s wife and her interest in the arts also brought her in contact with many of the city’s movers and shakers. Then came the family’s move to Los Angeles and Daly’s fateful visit to MacLaren and her increasing involvement with children’s issues. She quit work a couple of years later, and the Dalys started a family with the birth of daughter Linda in 1966 sons Bobby and Brian followed.ĭaly said she enjoyed being a stay-at-home mom, immersing herself and her children in play groups, soccer and Scouts. They married in 1961 - she was 20, he 24 - and settled into an apartment in Brooklyn. She met Bob Daly while she was a secretary at CBS, where he had started in the mail room. She grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., where her father was an accountant and her mother a homemaker. Nancy MacNeil was born June 11, 1941, into a middle-class family in Tenafly, N.J.
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“She brought this real personal engagement to thinking about these children because she didn’t relate to them in a professional capacity, but as a mentor and advocate and friend of children in foster care,” Cohen said. “She was the central, most important person on the commission for adolescence and foster care and the transition from foster care to adulthood,” a fellow commissioner, Donald Cohen of the Yale Child Studies Center, said of her in a 1994 interview. In 1989, she was appointed to the nonpartisan President’s Commission on Children, which recommended federal government policy reforms. She also helped found the Children’s Action Network, which sponsored briefings for the entertainment industry on children’s issues and racked up a long record of lobbying in Sacramento and Washington for legislation to improve the lot of foster youngsters. She also worked to establish the county’s Family Preservation Program and its committee. In 1984, she successfully lobbied for the creation of what is now the county Department of Children and Family Services and served on its advisory commission from the department’s founding until 1999. Her early work at MacLaren led to a much broader involvement in children’s issues. “We were one of the first studio executive families to do this,” she said in The Times interview. When Bob Daly became chief executive at Warner Bros., she got him to dispense with the customary practice of sending expensive gifts to industry notables at Christmastime and instead to make contributions to MacLaren on their behalf. “The kids looked sad, and I found it almost unbearable.”īut she went back, with actor Henry Winkler, and soon helped found United Friends of the Children to aid youngsters in foster care.
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