Alice Wolf

Alice K. Wolf (December 24, 1933 – January 26, 2023) was an Austrian-born American politician who served as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1996 to 2013, representing the 25th Middlesex District.

Wolf was born to a Jewish family in 1933 in Vienna, Austria.

Her parents, Frederick (Fritz) and Renee Koerner, fled Nazi persecution in 1938, bringing the family to Brighton, Massachusetts.

Wolf attended the Baldwin Early Learning Center in Brighton, Massachusetts and high school at Boston Girls Latin School, which is now Boston Latin Academy in Boston.

She graduated from Simmons College in Boston, where she graduated in 1955 with a degree in Experimental Psychology.

The same year, she and her husband, Robert Wolf were married.

The Wolfs settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they reared children.

She later earned a master's degree in public administration at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University.

Wolf’s career started at the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she conducted perceptual research by programming the Memory Test Computer to display dot patterns to human subjects.

Later, she co-authored a paper "Baseball: An Automated Question Answerer" which described an early attempt at natural language database queries.

The paper was translated into Chinese and Russian.

After Lincoln Laboratory, Wolf worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman as well as Computer Corporation of America, which was later acquired by Rocket Software.

Wolf’s path to civic engagement and elective office began with participation in the Parent-Teacher Association of the Peabody School in Cambridge, where her sons were students.

Wolf began her long career in public service when she was elected on November 6, 1973, as a member of the Cambridge School Committee, where she served from January 1974 through January 1982.

While on the School Committee, she championed community involvement in decision-making (such as the hiring of school principals), was lauded for crafting the first plan for racial desegregation of the city’s schools, and provided leadership in the siting of the city’s high school, the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.

Deep involvement as a parent with school affairs ultimately led to her election in 1974 as a member of the Cambridge School Committee, where she served from January 1974 through January 1982.

In the 1980s, in conjunction with the Cambridge Peace Commission, she created a "peace curriculum," a program of peace education for the public schools, K-12, to assist teachers in assuring kids of all ages could develop a constructive approach to resolving differences and disputes.

Wolf led marches and did research to support "economic conversion," trying to convince local companies to convert military-focused enterprises into peace-oriented activities.

She developed Sister City relationships, a model for international cooperation at the grassroots level, with San José Las Flores, Chalatenango, El Salvador and Yerevan, Armenia.

In 1981, near the end of her fourth term on the School Committee, she felt that her efforts to bring about social equality would be better spent on the Cambridge City Council.

She ran for the Council in 1981, but narrowly missed a win in a crowded field of 25 candidates.

In 1983, she again ran for election to the Cambridge City Council and was successful.

She joined the Council in January 1984.

Wolf’s accomplishments on the Cambridge City Council included the establishment and passage of a number of key laws.

In 1984, she sponsored the Cambridge Human Rights Ordinance, that protects Cambridge residents from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, as well as other protected classes.

Wolf also led the city initiative to create a domestic partners ordinance, and establish the commission to enforce the ordinance.

She was elected five times to the Council, serving from 1984 through 1994.

Wolf was the sponsor of the first Mayor's Gay Pride Breakfast, which has become an annual Cambridge event.

At a subsequent Gay Pride Breakfast, she was named an "honorary lesbian."

During the era of rent control in Massachusetts, Cambridge prohibited any apartment from being vacant for more than 120 days.

Those who violated the law were subject to a $500 a day fine and jail time.

Because of the low rents owner John McAdams was receiving, he was unable to repair several of his apartments on Broadway to make them legally habitable.

Wolf led the effort to make Cambridge a Sanctuary City, where persecuted people fleeing tyranny and death in their countries of origin could come when they were not given political asylum in the U.S. Wolf worked with the Cambridge Peace Commission and others to hold a yearly Cambridge Holocaust Commemoration, support Armenia (through the Cambridge-Yerevan sister city relationship) after the 1988 earthquake, continue nurturing the connection with the residents of San Jose Las Flores, El Salvador, and to bring together Cambridge people of diverse backgrounds to support our Muslim neighbors after 9/11.

Wolf led in the creation of the Cambridge Kids Council, which is dedicated to developing policy recommendations and programs aimed at improving the quality of life for children, youth and families in Cambridge.

The Cambridge City Council is elected by Proportional Representation using the Single Transferable Vote system.

After inauguration, the Mayor is selected by the elected members of the city council.

She previously served on the Cambridge, Massachusetts School Committee and Cambridge City Council, and as Mayor of Cambridge for one year, from 1990 to 1991.

Wolf served as the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts from January 1990 to January 1992.

On March 22, 2012, Wolf announced that she would not seek re-election.

Her term ended in January 2013.