Louise Woerner Sellers
Neighbor Louise Woerner Sellers passed away last week, and her burial was yesterday.
We wrote about Sellers in 2012 when she turned 100 years old. At the time, we reported that Sellers graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1930. At the time of her death, she was the school’s oldest living Woodrow graduate.
She was an honor student at Woodrow and on the committee that designed the 1930 Class Ring. In 2013, Louise donated the funds needed to install the new flagpole that is located on the front lawn at Woodrow.
Sellers grew up in the Hollywood/Santa Monica neighborhood. She and her husband, J.D. Sellers, moved to Casa Linda in 1939.
In 1941, while Sellers was pregnant with her second child, Steve Sellers, her husband died of complications from ulcers.
Louise went to work as a secretary at O.M. Roberts Elementary four months after Steve was born, earning $1,785 a year. She also cut grass and took in sewing to keep her family, including daughter, Celia, in shoes. Then came a succession of progressively higher-paying secretary gigs: GMAC, U.S. Engineers, Burrus Feed Mills, Airmaid Hosiery Co. and finally, in 1950, for J. Hugh Campbell Co., more commonly known as The Flag Store.
Louise bought The Flag Store in 1960, and she designed a building for it on Haskell. The Sellers family owned The Flag Store until 2011, when Steve died.
When Louise was younger, she traveled to the British Isles, China, Japan, Australia, Alaska, Austria, Italy, Germany Russia, Denmark and Sweden.
“That’s what I wanted to do,” she told our reporters in 2012. “I wanted to see the world.”
