George Mitrovich, San Diego City Club President and long-time political activist, has died at 84.
Mitrovich considered himself a proud native son of the City of San Diego who constantly urged city leaders to do better.
“I have issues with San Diego but I love our town and I hope by the virtue of the things that I’ve done that I proved that,” Mitrovich once said.
Mitrovich was a press aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy in his presidential campaign of 1968 and served on the staffs of Sen. Charles Goodell (R-New York) and Sen. Harold Hughes (D-Iowa).
In 1975, he founded The City Club of San Diego as a non-partisan public forum. He wrote extensively for newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times and blogged for the Huffington Post.
He often contributed his analysis to San Diego politics, including on NBC 7 San Diego's "Politically Speaking" with Gene Cubbison.
The long-time NBC 7 reporter called Mitrovich's perspective on local politics and their effect on the larger political world "invaluable."
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“I find it hard to believe, or imagine, that there could be another George Mitrovich. He was very important to me." Cubbison said. "It’ll take so many hands to count on the number of times I thought, 'I need his perspective in this story.'"
Friends also described Mitrovich as an expert on a number of issues, including baseball. Mitrovich was a passionate player for the adult-league's Marston Mets, John Freeman writes of his friend.
Educated in San Diego area public schools, Mitrovich attended college at Pasadena (Nazarene) College and, briefly, the School of Theology, Claremont, California.
In May of 2007, Mitrovich was awarded a Doctor of Human Letters Degree by his alma mater, Point Loma Nazarene University.
Mitrovich married La Verle Ann Sutherland of Spokane, Washington and had three children: Carolyn, Mark and Tim. Carolyn has a son, Matthew James Mitrovich, a graduate of University of California Santa Barbara, while Tim and his wife, Lisa, have two daughters, Jessica and Juliette.
“We need to be doing good things and right things and we need to be our brother’s keeper,” Mitrovich said in a June 2015 appearance on NBC 7’s “Politically Speaking.”
