Nate Holden

Nate Holden
Member of the California Senate from the 30th district
In office 1974–1978
Preceded by	Lawrence E. Walsh
Succeeded by	Diane Watson
Los Angeles City Council District 10
In office 1987–2002
Preceded by	David Cunningham
Succeeded by	Martin Ludlow
Personal details
Born	Nathaniel N. Holden Macon, Georgia, U.S.
Children	Chris Holden Reginald Holden

Nathaniel N. "Nate" Holden (born June 1929) is a Los Angeles County politician who served four years in the California State Senate and 16 years on the Los Angeles City Council.

Holden was born in Macon, Georgia, the son of a railroad brakeman in the Central of Georgia yards. He moved with his mother and brothers to a cold-water flat in Elizabeth, New Jersey, when he was 10; he quit high school at age 16, when, although he was under age, he enlisted in the Army, where he became a military policeman. Back home, he earned a high school diploma in night school and later studied design and engineering in the evenings at West Coast University. He worked for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, then moved to California in 1955 and worked as an aerospace engineer. He has two sons, Chris Holden, a California State Assemblymember, and Reginald Holden, a Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff.

Holden was an amateur boxer as a teenager, weighing only 167 pounds. At age 59, he was a "tall, gray-haired dignified-looking man in a nicely conservative suit." Holden completed the Los Angeles Marathon in 1990 and 1991, when he was in his sixties.

He had two sides to his personality, Los Angeles Times reporter Bill Boyarsky wrote in 1989 — "The Nice Nate" and "The Mean Nate." On one hand, Holden was "a gentle, considerate, compassionate person much of the time." On the other hand, Boyarsky wrote, Holden is marked by a "hostile toughness . . . when he discusses the way black leaders refused to back him in unsuccessful races and in his election to the council." Fellow councilman John Ferraro said of Holden, "He is gruff and he is rough, but he has a big heart."

In California, he became active in Democratic politics; he was a member of the "steering committee for the California Democratic Council's peace delegation" and an officer of the Alta Loma Democratic Club. Holden made his first run for public office in 1968, when he was an unsuccessful candidate in California's 26th congressional district, which at the time included Beverly Hills, part of Culver City, most of Venice and some of Santa Monica and West Los Angeles. He became president of the CDC in 1970 and that year made two more runs for Congress.

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