Lenora Berson: 'She knew everybody' dies at 82

LENORA BERSON was a woman who just couldn't sit still.

When her son, Assistant District Attorney Peter Berson, was asked to recount his mother's activities through her long life, he started out with "billions" and wound up with "trillions."

Slight exaggerations, of course, but it demonstrates how busy this woman was over the more than eight decades of her life, and just how many of those activities helped shape the city's political, sociological, cultural and artistic communities.

After she died of renal failure Saturday, at the age of 84, her son started going through her Rolodex to see whom he should notify.

"My head is still spinning," he said. "She knew everybody. She was a great friend to so many people."

Lenora and her husband, former state Rep. Norman Berson, were the pillars of liberal thinking in Philadelphia from the '60s on.

In the '70s, she wrote a political column for the Daily News.

Lenora campaigned for a dizzying number of political candidates, from City Council to the state Legislature, and for a staggering number of judges.

She wasn't much of a doorbell ringer, but she was a supreme strategist, and passed her expertise on to the candidates she favored.

"My father was the politician," her son said. "Mom was the strategist."

Even on the national level, they campaigned for favored liberal candidates for Congress and the presidency.

They worked for Sen. George S. McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, a futile effort which, in he her son's view, was "like arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." But McGovern encompassed the liberal views of the Bersons, unlike the man who won, Richard M. Nixon.

Lenora was a supporter of W. Wilson Goode when he ran for mayor in 1983. After he became the city's first black mayor, he named her director of special events in the City Representative's Office.

In that role, Lenora started the popular "Book and the Cook" promotion, which brought prominent chefs together with food writers; and the "Philadelphia Dresses the World" project, in which local designers showed their fashions in runway shows.

Both events were aimed at calling attention to the city, which she saw as her job in the city administration.

Lenora lived in Center City most of her life. Her husband was Democratic leader of the 8th Ward there. He served in the state House from 1969 to 1982.

Lenora was a vocal foe of former Mayor Frank Rizzo, opposing his effort to change the City Home Rule Charter so that he could run for a third term in 1979, and, as head of Americans for Democratic Action, joined the effort in 1975 to recall him because he reneged on a promise not to raise taxes.

Running into Rizzo at a social gathering, she later told friends that she had a feeling he wanted to punch her out.

Lenora was also a leader of the Center City Residents Association, founded by her mother, Sadie Ersner.

The group was described by a writer in '08 as "a polite but pushy mob of Philadelphia watchdogs, gadflies and chlorophyll pushers."

Lenora was born in Philadelphia to Matthew and Sadie Ersner. Her father was a doctor. She graduated from Girls High School and later took degrees from the University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania.

She became a social worker in New York City, then took a job as a researcher for Time magazine.

Returning to Philadelphia, she and her husband were influenced by the reform movement engineered by Democrats Richardson Dilworth and Joseph S. Clark, which kicked out the long-entrenched Republican regime in the '50s.

One of her first causes was opposition to the controversial Crosstown Expressway, envisioned as the southern part of the "Center City loop," comprising the Schuylkill, Delaware and Vine Street expressways.

But its proposed route along South Street brought an eruption of civic opposition in the '50s, which led highway planners eventually to scrap the idea.

Lenora wrote a study of the 1964 gangland riots on Columbia Avenue, and authored the sociological study, "The Negroes and the Jews," pubished by Random House in 1971.

In her later years, she became interested in photography and took a course at the University of the Arts. Her photos, mainly of city scenes, were shown at a number of venues, including the Balch Institute, the University of Pennsylvania Faculty Club and the Central Branch of the Free Library.

In addition to the Daily News, Lenora wrote for Philadelphia Magazine and the New York Times Magazine.

"She was involved in everything," her son said. "You needed a schedule to keep her schedule."

"She wouldn't take any guff from anyone," said Mike Freeman, onetime Daily News assistant city editor now with Exelon Corp. who grew up with her son. "She was a tiny woman but she would get in your face. She never kow-towed to anyone."

Besides her son and husband, she is survived by a daughter, Erica Berson, and a grandson, Matthew.

Services: Memorial service 1 p.m. Feb. 21 at Trinity Memorial Church, 22nd and Spruce streets.