Mercury News
December 30, 2005

Lois Crozier-Hogle, 92, protector of foothills

By Linda Goldston

Her focus was the environment and protecting the lush green foothills of the Peninsula.

But Lois Crozier-Hogle's life was about more than land and open space.

Along the way in her 92 years, the Los Altos Hills resident helped inspire hundreds to join her in the fight and brought a community closer.

“I named her the Peninsula's First Lady of the Environment,” said Mary Davey, a close friend and past president of the Committee for Green Foothills, which Ms. Crozier-Hogle co-founded in 1962.

“The legacy she left was a love of open space and the need for all of us to be stewards. You can't have a better legacy than that,” Davey said. “She was loved by multitudes of people.”

The environmental pioneer died of cancer at her home on Tuesday after receiving guests from around the country for two weeks prior. She was 92.

Ms. Crozier-Hogle remained strong until the very end, pressing her friends and family for news from her many causes.

“What impressed me so much is that it was never about her,” a friend, Nancy Couperus, said. “The first words out of her mouth were, ‘Tell me what's going on. What's happening with the open space committee?’ ”

Ms. Crozier-Hogle was born in Coalinga and developed an appreciation for nature and the environment at an early age — an appreciation her three children later developed.

“She influenced us like crazy,” her son, Stephen Hogle, said. “Nothing got wasted. That's just the way we lived. We took care of the environment, and all us have the same conviction.”

Ms. Crozier-Hogle is best known for co-founding the Committee for Green Foothills, an open-space advocacy group that has battled with Stanford University and others to try to halt development in the foothills. But she devoted her time to numerous environmental and social causes and was included in a book recently published by the Sierra Club called Legacy: Portraits of 50 Bay Area Environmentalists.

In a 2002 interview with the Mercury News, Ms. Crozier-Hogle said she was proud that the Peninsula environmental movement had “made people aware that the foothills can be saved, that open space can be saved — and it is being saved.”

Ms. Crozier-Hogle's interests included American Indians, whom she regarded as “perhaps the first ecologists — living lightly on the environment,” and she was co-author of Surviving in Two Worlds: Contemporary Native American Voices.

Earlier this year, she donated her 11-acre property in Los Altos Hills as a conservation easement, meaning the land can never be developed. It was where she lived for much of her adult life and where she wanted to spend her remaining days. Her former husband, George Hogle, lives in Woodside.

In addition to the environmental causes Ms. Crozier-Hogle contributed to so generously with time and money, perhaps her greatest gift was her ability to inspire others, her friends and family said.

“It seemed like all of the right people were drawn to her and they got good things done,” Stephen Hogle said. “She was a real sparkplug.”

Lois Crozier-Hogle

Born: Dec. 21, 1913, in Coalinga

Died: Dec. 27, 2005, in Los Altos Hills

Survived by: Sons, Allan Hogle of Sebastopol and Stephen Hogle of Healdsburg; daughter, Francie Kelley of Los Angeles.

Services: A memorial service will be held in late February.

Page last updated September 13, 2010.