Joe CapozziA trailblazer, she was the first woman to be elected mayor of Boca Raton and later county clerk.
Long before she climbed Machu Picchu and paddled down the Amazon as an adventurous grandmother, Dorothy Wilken blazed a legacy-defining trail in Palm Beach County as a fearless political dynamo who shattered glass ceilings and fought for growth control.
Known for milestone achievements as the first woman mayor in Boca Raton (1976), the second woman elected to the Palm Beach County Commission (1982) and first female clerk of the courts (1992), she left an indelible mark as a leading — and often loud — advocate for smart urban planning at a time of rapid growth.
A civic giant who stood 5-foot-2 — “with a Beatles haircut and owlish eyes that can shine like high-beam headlights,” as the Palm Beach Post reporter Rob Hiaasen wrote in a 1988 profile — Wilken led an unrelenting and at times lonely crusade, often to her own political detriment, to rein in the northward march of development that had transformed Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
“Four-to-one Dorothy” she called herself, a nod to both her way with words and her place at the dais with colleagues who often voted 4-1 against her.
“She was a fierce fighter for the environment and for good public planning. She wasn’t afraid to take anybody on,” said former County Commissioner Karen Marcus.
For Wilken, a Republican who switched to Democrat in the late 1970s because she did not like the direction the GOP was going, public service was a calling.
“There is nothing extraordinary about us,” she said about county commissioners, “but we are asked to do extraordinary work.”
And she proved that dedication, vision and a willingness to challenge the status quo can transform a community for generations.
“I’m a builder at heart,” she told The Post in 1988. “I really like to see things built toward a healthier place to live.”
‘Public service was in her blood’
Wilken, who died June 22 after a brief hospitalization at 90, came from a family of public servants.
Her maternal grandfather, Aaron Shenk Kreider, was a Pennsylvania shoemaker who went on to serve as a Republican in the U.S. House from 1913 to 1923.
Her Welsh-born paternal grandfather, the noted Washington, D.C., municipal architect Albert Harris, drew up plans for, among other buildings, the Natural History Museum and the reptile house in the National Zoo.
Her father, William H. Harris, another accomplished architect, helped remodel the interior of the White House in the 1930s and designed Hunting Tower, a Potomac River high-rise for returning World War II veterans.
In 1987, at the height of her County Commission growth-management battles, Wilken noted how her father won an award for the Virginia high-rise. “And here I am trying to stop them,” she said.
“Public service was in her blood,” said Melany Jenkins, one of Wilken’s four daughters. “Their family was really about doing what was best to the community and watching out for the community.”
Born in Annville, Pa., in 1936, Wilken remembered “strong arguments at the dinner table” over politics, she told The Boca Raton News in 1974. Her father was a Democrat, her mother a Republican ”who thought no one should speak Roosevelt’s name in the house.”
Around 1943, the family bought a vacation home in Fort Lauderdale and started splitting time between there and the D.C. area. Wilken earned a bachelor’s degree in art from George Washington University.
Living with Arvida
She got married and moved to Fort Lauderdale, eventually settling in 1965 just outside Boca Raton at University Park, a company town north of Glades Road operated by former aluminum executive Arthur Vining Davis’ Arvida Corp.
She worked as a graphic artist at Florida Atlantic University, raised four daughters, earned a master’s in public administration at FAU and started immersing herself in civic issues.
Before long, she was inviting neighbors to her living room to discuss the proposed annexation of University Park, forming the nucleus of a group that would successfully push for annexation into Boca, approved in a 1971 referendum.
The group, Citizens for Reasonable Growth, would become a strong support base when Wilken waded into politics.
She was elected to the Boca Raton City Council in 1974 and became mayor two years later. Among her many initiatives: fighting for growth management, establishing park impact fees, buying South Inlet Beach and banning topless sunbathers.
‘The most stubborn, difficult, dogmatic anti-development person in the whole county’
After losing the next two city elections, she stayed active with environmental groups. In 1982, she ran for the County Commission District 4 seat and trounced her Republican opponent, Delray Beach City Commissioner Malcolm Bird, by 22 percentage points.
“He was the overwhelming favorite with a lot of money. Her campaign had very, very little and it was a countywide race. The issue was growth control and she blew it away,” recalled Andre Fladell, the longtime south county condo power broker.
“She then became the most stubborn, difficult, dogmatic anti-development person in the whole county,” Fladell said. “She would lose all the votes 4-1 but she wouldn’t bend. She wouldn’t compromise. She wanted to stop growth and she wanted Palm Beach County not to look like Broward. That was Dorothy in a nutshell.”
In 1983, she walked out of a County Commission meeting to block a vote to end a south county sewer moratorium. She once suggested that her differences with fellow commissioners may be more than philosophical.
“I’m Dorothy. I’m short and round and they’re not. I’m a brown-eyed person in a blue-eyed world,” she said in a 1987 Sun Sentinel story under the headline “Dorothy Wilken: Rebel with a cause.”
She was passed over three times by her colleagues for commission chairman, a ceremonial post bestowed on a rotating basis to every commissioner. The snubs brought her to tears, but she learned to get over it.
“When you’ve raised four children and have changed as many diapers as I have, you know that everything washes off in the end,” she told a reporter. “It may smell bad for a while but it washes off.”
An early opponent at the dais was Marcus, who wound up joining Wilken as a staunch growth management advocate.
“Her style of disagreement was certainly very passionate, and sometimes it didn’t always work, but you knew where she was coming from and at the end of the day she had the best interests of everybody at heart,” Marcus said.
Developers mounted campaign to block her
During the 1980s, county commissioners were elected countywide, giving enormous power to the so-called condo commandos who filled sprawling south county retirement communities and viewed Wilken as a leader.
Wilken, concerned about the county’s ability to build roads fast enough to keep up with booming growth and frustrated by condo residents’ complaints about traffic jams, became such a source of frustration for developers that they worked to change county government.
In 1988, a developer-backed campaign to expand the County Commission to seven members, each elected in a specific district, ended the control of the condo commandos.
“Her legacy is that she took the words ‘growth control’ and made them work,” then-state Rep. Carol Hanson, who died in 2017, said in 1988. “The little guy and the little girl out there love her.”
Wilken left the commission that year to run for Congress, losing in the Democratic primary to Harry Johnston. When she tried to return to the County Commission in 1990 under single-member district voting, she lost to Mary McCarty, who would serve for nearly 19 years.
“Dorothy was as honest a human being as you’d ever meet,” Fladell said, “and she was just dogmatic and not in any format compromising or bending. She couldn’t be pressured. There was no middle. There was no compromise. So she put herself on an island.”
In 1992, Wilken ran for a countywide post, making history again as the first woman elected as the Palm Beach County clerk of court. When she retired in 2004, she had brought the office into the digital era, earning the prestigious Governor’s Sterling Award for organizational excellence.
“Dorothy Wilken was a true force in Palm Beach County, setting a high standard for transparency and accountability in every office she held,” said Mike Caruso, a Republican who now serves as clerk.
Cookbooks for her daughters
Throughout her career, she made time for her daughters, who tagged along when Mom collected signatures or conducted government business.
“She was always ‘mom,’” said Lorilee Montenegro, Wilken’s youngest daughter. “I grew up going to City Council meetings with her, hanging out in her office during meetings, waiting for her to be finished so we could go home.”
And she loved to cook, especially on election night. “She’d cook until the results came in. That was how she relaxed, a stress relief,” said her daughter, Stephany.
Wilken made cookbooks for each daughter with popular family recipes, including her “Green Noodle Casserole” (a Christmas tradition) and her “Justifiably Famous Spaghetti Sauce.”
In retirement, Wilken combined her two passions: spending time with family and traveling. She took each grandchild on a trip, hoping to instill in them the love of travel and learning.
Aside from visiting South America, she walked the Great Wall of China, climbed Masada in Israel, cruised the Nile, visited the Colosseum, rode elephants in Thailand and zip-lined in Costa Rica.
In January, she celebrated her 90th birthday with a big party at home in Delray Beach with family and friends.
After she died, Wilken continued her public service. Her body was donated to science.
She is survived by her four daughters, Melany R. Jenkins (Michael), Stephany M. Wilken (Deb Epstein), Marjory F. Armstrong (Douglas) and Lorilee W. Montenegro (Robert); stepdaughter Nancy Hamill (Bill Immerman); stepson Paul Hamill; 13 grandchildren; and 19 great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband, Jim Hamill, and her sister, Molly H. Leban.
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations in Wilken’s name to two programs she championed — the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, and the Palm Beach County Chapter of the National Organization for Women’s Aid to Victims of Domestic Abuse, for which Wilken helped secure money to open a shelter for women and children in Delray Beach.
A celebration of life will be held at a later date.
“She paved and cleared the path for so many girls and women,” her daughter Melany said. “While it came at a cost that my sisters and I did not always understand, as we look back it is a sacrifice my sisters and I are grateful for, and we love her for it. She was amazing in so many ways.”
