It is my sad and unfortunate duty to inform you that our fellow Altadenan, Judith Payson Wheeler died Dec. 20 at 4:20 a.m.

Judith was descended from a pair of early New England families, the Wheelers and the Paysons. Judith was a third generation Smith College graduate and a housemate of Gloria Steinem. Early in her working life Judith compiled the Fortune 500 and edited Alan Greenspan’s doctoral dissertation.

Judith lived the life of a modern liberated woman that others only wrote about. She refused marriage, unlike many of her contemporaries, to wealthy and powerful men, believing she could and should make her own way. Judith worked for the Rand Corporation becoming its first credited female analyst, and she gender integrated the executive lunch and board rooms at Lockheed.

Judith was active in the Smith College Alumni Association, the Pasadena Chapter of the League of Women Voters (in both cases she served as newsletter editor), in the committee overseeing the Altadena Community Center, the West Altadena Neighborhood Association and in the effort to revitalize the Lincoln Avenue Redevelopment into a thriving commercial district. For that effort, Judith a consummate researcher, relied on her business experience and crunched all of the numbers of the competing proposals and analyzed each of them, giving the public hard numbers to make factual comparisons.

Judith suffered a serious stroke in in 2006 and never fully recovered the use of her body, but her mind remained sharp and brilliant to the end.