Roberta Butzbach, Elected Judge at 31, Dies at Age of 70

Roberta Butzbach, who was 31 when she was elected a justice of the peace in 1946, making her the youngest judge in California at the time, has died of cancer at the City of Hope.

Mrs. Butzbach was 70, and had retired as a Los Cerritos Municipal Court judge in Bellflower in 1976.

She was newly married when she moved to Southern California in 1943 to be closer to her husband’s parents after he was sent overseas during World War II. In 1946, the incumbent justice of the peace in Signal Hill decided not seek reelection and Mrs. Butzbach, a 1939 graduate of Boalt Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, was urged to seek his seat. She was elected with 70% of the vote.

In an interview after her retirement, she recalled that “I used to spray my hair gray to look older” when she went on the bench. Over the years she served in Los Angeles, Long Beach and in Riverside, where she filled in as a Superior Court judge for one year.

Mrs. Butzbach, who died July 25, was known as a strict interpreter of the law, but one who also could bend it to fit circumstances. She once ordered a teen-age boy to repaint the house of a teacher after the angry student had bombarded it with tomatoes.

Her survivors include a son, Paul, and a grandson.