Certified public accountant and public official Kathryn Jean Niederhofer Whitmire (born 1946) was mayor of Houston, Texas and later taught at Harvard's School of Government.

First elected mayor of Houston, Texas, in 1981, Kathryn. J. Whitmire took office in January 1982 just as the Houston oil boom had crested and was beginning to decline. Mayor Whitmire proved a durable chief executive who rode out the oil recession and was elected to five consecutive two-year terms as mayor.

Kathryn Jean Niederhofer was born on August 15, 1946, to Karl Niederhofer, a Houston electrician, and his wife Ida. She was raised in a blue-collar, lower-middle-income neighborhood on the northeast side of the city. A hardworking and brilliant student, she graduated from the University of Houston with honors in business administration and two years later earned a master's degree in accounting and joined the firm of Coopers and Lybrand.

Fascinated by politics since her father's spare-time...