Blanche Corona; Organized Labor Campaigns

A memorial service is scheduled Sunday for Blanche Taff Corona, an organizer of labor and Latino campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, who died July 22. She was 75.

Mrs. Corona, who lived in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, died of lung cancer.

The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Mrs. Corona was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and moved to Los Angeles as a child, later attending Los Angeles High School and Los Angeles City College.

In her early 20s, she joined other college students in supporting a campaign by the Committee for Industrial Organization of the AFL and the Longshoremen’s union to organize North American Aviation Corp. During a rally in front of the North American plant, she met her future husband, labor and Latino activist Bert Corona, president of Local 26 of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.

As newlyweds they stood on a mass picket line broken up by the 6th Army, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent from Washington state, an event soon followed by North American signing a contract with the United Auto Workers.

From 1940 to 1942, Mrs. Corona helped form squads that went into scrap yards to organize the largely Mexican, Jewish and immigrant Russian workers of the used iron, bottle, rag and cloth industries.

During World War II, while her husband served in the Army, Mrs. Corona worked with the leaders of the National Congress of the Spanish Speaking People to build support for the war effort among the Spanish-speaking.

After the war, the Coronas moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they worked organizing chapters of the new Asociacion Nacional Mexico Americana. With Jimmy Delgadillo, Herman Gallegos and Cesar Chavez, they also helped form chapters of Saul Alinsky’s Community Service Organization.

After 1960, Mrs. Corona worked to support her three children while her husband devoted himself to organizing the Mexican American Political Assn. in California and other states.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by two sons, David of Cambria and Frank of Los Angeles; a daughter, Margo De Ley of Chicago, and a sister, Julie Goldhaber of Los Angeles.

The memorial on Sunday will be from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive.