September 14, 1929 – May 21, 2025

The service for William ‘Bill’ Stanley Lambert will be held on Tuesday, May 27, 3:00 PM at the Eden Memorial Park (1500 Sepulveda Blvd, Mission Hills, CA 91345). Cards can be sent to his family at 4905 Topeka Dr, Tarzana, CA 91346.

Bill was a proud alumnus of Fairfax High School. He began his career in 1955 as a teacher at Montague Elementary School, and later continued educating students at Canterbury Elementary School. Following his early experiences as a teacher, Bill continued his ongoing education advocacy (as chronicled in the obituary below by UTLA Past President John Perez).

Bill Lambert is survived by his wife Leonore (after 64 years of marriage), his children (one of whom is currently an LAUSD teacher), and many grandchildren.

On April 30, 2023, Los Angeles honored UTLA co-founder Bill Lambert for his life of education advocacy by renaming the street outside Portola Middle School to ‘Bill Lambert Way’. (A video of the renaming ceremony is below.)

Obituary by UTLA Past President, John Perez:

“With the passing of Bill Lambert, UTLA has lost one of its founding members and a giant of the California educator union movement.

Mr. Lambert started his career in the LAUSD as an elementary teacher and served as President of the ‘Elementary and Secondary Probationary Teachers Association’, one of many predecessor organizations that eventually led to UTLA. 

Lambert was active in a number of CTA affiliated groups in the LAUSD when he was a classroom teacher, and he eventually became a staff member for the Association of Classroom Teachers Los Angeles — the CTA affiliated union that joined with AFT Local 1021 to form UTLA on February 2, 1970.  Lambert immediately became a UTLA staff member.  In 1971, UTLA Executive Director Don Baer chose Lambert to serve as UTLA’s lobbyist in Sacramento.  When Bill retired in 2007, he was the longest-serving education lobbyist in California history. 

The most important state law that Bill helped get passed was the Rhodda Act.  After the first UTLA strike in 1970, which lasted 23 work days, the contract we won was ruled invalid because California had no collective bargaining law for educators at that time.  The Rhodda Act, signed by Governor Jerry Brown in 1975, granted California’s educators collective bargaining. Two of the most impactful education leaders who fought to get the Rhodda Act passed were Bill Lambert and the late CFT President Raoul Teilhet. 

In the early ’90s, retired educators in California and 12 other states who qualified for both a State Teachers Retirement System pension and a Social Security pension lost as much as 60% of their Social Security pension and 100% of their Social Security Survivors pension. Bill was one of the very first educators to fight the unfair Government Pension Offset (GPO) and the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) in the Social Security Act that had been signed into law by President Reagan in 1983.

Bill recruited Howard “Buck” McKeon and Howard Berman to be the first two members of the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce a repeal bill. 

Under Bill’s leadership, UTLA became the first local union to come out for the repeal of the WEP and the GPO, and thus began a 30-year fight that ended recently with President Biden eliminating both by signing the Social Security Fairness Act in January 2024, the law that eliminated the WEP and the GPO. Bill Lambert was recognized by the NEA with its Human and Civil Rights Award.  

From the first UTLA president, Bob Ransome, to the ninth president, James Duffy, Bill Lambert was one of our closest advisors. I know that during my term, I was constantly walking down the hall from my office to Bill’s so I could ask for his sage advice.

He will be sorely missed, but all of his legion of friends will remember with great fondness his long life of service to UTLA and all of California’s state educators.”

On April 30, 2023, Los Angeles honored UTLA co-founder Bill Lambert for his life of education advocacy by renaming the street outside Portola Middle School to ‘Bill Lambert Way’.