How on Earth did Stanley Benson Viltz ’64, MPA ’74, a longtime college administrator, get her first name?

It had to do with a 1942 movie, In This Our Life, starring Bette Davis. Davis played a girl named Stanley with a sister named Roy. Stanley Viltz’s mom liked the story. “I guess my mother was a closet feminist,” Viltz says.

Starting out with an unusual name wasn’t the only thing that set Viltz apart early.

As a three-and-a-half-year-old in daycare, Viltz used to ditch naptime and sneak into an adjoining first-grade classroom. By the time her teachers wised up to her whereabouts, Viltz had learned so much that they had no choice but to let her stay in the first grade.

When Viltz graduated from high school at age 15, she didn’t actually fill out a college application for USC, which was walking distance from her childhood home. “I chose Marquette, University of San Francisco, and Howard, all of which denied me, saying that I was too young, they were in big cities, and they didn’t want to be responsible for a person of my youth in that kind of environment,” says Viltz. “My mother grabbed me by the hand and said, ‘Come on, you’re going to somebody’s school.’ And we walked to USC, and we went to see the registrar.”

Even though Viltz had missed the application deadline by one day, USC permitted her to enroll in 12 units of evening classes and, based on her stellar academic performance, she was admitted to regular standing the following semester. She planned to become a juvenile court referee or a dentist, but was employed as a social worker after graduation.

After marrying fellow Trojan and professional football player Theo Viltz in 1966 and giving birth to the first of their two daughters, she returned to USC to work as an administrative assistant for School of Pharmacy professor Walter Wolf from 1969 to 1975, while earning her master’s in public administration.

Viltz went on to progressively more responsible positions at community colleges, then was district director for Congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald and served in many community leadership roles.

But her mission in life didn’t crystallize until two decades ago, when she became the co-founder of the Black Women’s Leadership Conference. Viltz and four other teachers and administrators from the California community college system met to discuss the glass ceiling. “We thought about it, and we decided that one of the things is that we didn’t have an old boys’ network, so let’s see if we could make a black girls’ network,” she says. “We thought we were inviting 36 women. The day the event occurred, 136 people showed up. And that’s when it hit me that I could be responsible for helping somebody else be successful.” In 1998, Viltz finished her dissertation on the pathways to the California community college presidency for African- American women and earned her Ed.D. from UCLA.

As of this past July, Viltz has once again demonstrated her commitment to helping others achieve success by delaying her own retirement to serve as associate provost for student affairs at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina, a historically black college. “People asked me, ‘Why are you leaving and going to Bennett College? I thought you were going to retire,’ ” she says. “Then it came out of my mouth: ‘I’ve been doing Black Women’s Leadership for 20 years, once a year. Now I can do it every day.’ ”

– Cristy Lytal