Political Challengers : Gadflies Carry the American Tradition of Dissent to City Halls

There comes a time, at nearly every Redondo Beach City Council meeting, when a hush falls over the dais.

Up to the podium strides an erect, white-haired figure who takes a deep breath, pauses for a moment, slams his fist down on the wood veneer and identifies himself in the clipped baritone of a Massachusetts transplant:

“T-a-h-h-m O’L-e-eary, Re-dahn-do Beach.”

And then, for as long as he can sustain his pitch, Tom O’Leary delivers his two-cents’worth on any subject from open government to the racket generated by the local electric plant.

In similar scenes in city halls across the South Bay, eagle-eyed activists carry on the tradition of independence celebrated on the Fourth of July. Vigilant citizens who challenge their government, they turn meetings that otherwise would be a quick succession of “ayes” and “nays” into lengthy, tumultuous affairs.

Be careful what you call them, for civic activists are by definition a critical lot.

Terry Coleman of Inglewood prefers “political activist” and hands out business cards identifying himself as such. Others favor “watchdog” or “critic” or “council watcher.”

The term “gadfly” offends O’Leary. He says it reminds him more of an insect than a well-researched citizen.

“I most emphatically consider the term ‘gadfly’ to be derogatory,” he said. “I consider it to be an insult. I don’t want to be included in any story that uses the word ‘gadfly.’ ”

Inglewood Mayor Edward Vincent is no fan of gadflies either, but it’s the concept--not the word--that rubs him the wrong way. “Grandstanding” and “negativism” are words he uses to describe those like Coleman--who lambaste City Hall.

Vincent is not the only elected official who sometimes looks upon these activists as members of the opposing team. Many city officials complain that cable television broadcasts of meetings have turned activists into actors. And verbosity has forced governmental bodies throughout the area to impose time limits on residents’ speech.

The Lawndale City Council not long ago voted to oust Herman Weinstein from a meeting for talking too much. Weinstein, in his trademark sarcastic style, asked at the next meeting for a plaque and a minute of silence to commemorate his achievement as the first Lawndale resident to be expelled by the council.

The council took no action on the plaque and Weinstein had to get his minute of silence from the time allotted to him to speak.

In Torrance, one gadfly--Joyce Olds--became so contentious this year that City Clerk John Bramhall obtained a court order to prevent her from approaching him. Olds, a neighbor of Bramhall, had been barraging officials both at council meetings and in telephone calls with criticisms of then-Police Chief Donald E. Nash.

Some South Bay cities lack gadflies who hector their local officials. But where they flourish, they come in varying breeds: candidates in disguise, outsiders who cherish their independence, a few who have sat on both sides of the City Council dais.

Roger Creighton, 53, a tall, rangy, Hermosa Beach native with long gray hair and a populist’s view of democracy, used to constantly scrutinize his city officials--questioning them, challenging them, even occasionally suing them. Three years ago, he became one of them.

“I gave a thorough review of the candidates running and recognized that the vastness of the void offered the perfect opportunity for mediocrity, such as myself, to rise to the top,” Creighton said.

He said his experience first as a council watcher, then as a council member confirmed his belief that neighborhood activists are essential to city government.

“The average person will sit at home, staring into the distance with the expression of a glazed doughnut while the government fritters their money away,” Creighton said. “I think (watchdogs) offer a breath of fresh air--even if some think it’s a rather stale breath.”

When the South Bay’s civic activists are not lobbying, expounding, critiquing or researching, they are working as schoolteachers and management analysts, lawyers and realtors. Some are retirees who devote themselves full-time to activism.

Challenging the status quo is time-consuming, frustrating and, only occasionally, rewarding. Just ask an activist.

In Wilmington, Bill and Gertrude Schwab (known by some as Mr. and Mrs. Wilmington) figure they attend community meetings or events at least five times a week and sometimes on Saturdays. Sundays are reserved for investigating.

“I go to so many meetings, I can’t even keep track of them,” said Bill Schwab, 66, a retired merchant mariner who has lived in Wilmington since he was a toddler.

“We’re not troublemakers. We’re just trying to show our concern for the community,” said Gertrude Schwab, 64, who has lived all her life in Wilmington, a community within the city of Los Angeles.

Over the years, the couple’s investigating and complaining has paid off. They’ve helped relocate a foul-smelling compost facility from the neighborhood and force trucks bound to and from the Port of Los Angeles from hauling cargo on several residential streets.

Other activists, too, have had successes. In Manhattan Beach, Roger Kohn sat down at his home computer and made changes to the city’s water bill that officials later adopted.

“We appreciated what he did and think a lot of him,” said City Manager Bill Smith. “A lot of people say, ‘Geez, here he comes again, a pain in the rear end,’ but that’s not the way all of us feel. He has provided a lot of input.”

Coleman, a 48-year-old former police officer and bachelor, said his activism in Inglewood has taken over his life.

“I spend too much time on issues,” he said. “That’s why I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m married to city issues. That’s my wife. I come home, and my answering machine is full of calls about politics.”

Joseph Arciuch, a retiree, used to be a hard-core activist in Torrance. But he has thrown in the towel.

After 16 years, he said that he became so thoroughly discouraged that he has avoided Torrance City Council meetings for the last six months.

“Lately, I got a feeling, a message, that I was not welcome,” he said. “ . . . I’m not sure if the City Council cares to have people coming over. It makes it more convenient if you have no opposition. But is it good for the community? You be the judge.”

Lifelong Hermosa Beach resident Parker Herriott, on the other hand, seems just as focused on his elusive goal--creating a beachfront park on the old Biltmore Hotel site--as the day he began nine years ago.

“It’s true, it takes up a good percentage of my time, but it’s invigorating,” Herriott said.

Hard-core activism often revolves around mounds of paperwork--old agendas, campaign finance reports, court documents and hand-written jottings--and many activists have a file, a box or even an entire room devoted to their causes. Many are as well-researched as the officials they are lobbying.

City council members take trips every year to mingle with colleagues at gatherings like the California League of Cities. Gadflies, considered by some to be lone troublemakers, are beginning to network too.

Sherry Passmore Curtis, founder of the 3-year-old Citizen Action Network, estimates that she has trained up to 100 fellow activists throughout the state.

“I think they are growing in numbers,” she said from her home base near Fresno. “They are starting to stand up . . . .

“It’s not like you wake up and say, ‘I’m going to be a citizen activist and go down to City Hall and see what I can do to bug you,’ ” Rather, people are drawn to the role when they feel they’re under direct attack by the city.

When colonists disguised as American Indians boarded British ships in 1773 and dumped tea into Boston harbor, they became a symbol for an American tradition of activism. Three years later, on this day 215 years ago, it was another group of citizens--the Second Continental Congress--that officially declared the 13 original colonies free of British rule.

Weinstein, a 69-year-old flight engineer and realtor, has not forgotten that history.

Whenever Lawndale officials discuss raising taxes or fees, he marches into council chambers with a battered Lipton tea box strung around his neck.

“It’s the Lawndale tea party,” he says.

Here are capsule looks at a few of the area’s activists:

High School Orator

“When I was in high school, I was the class orator, so I knew how to talk at an early age,” said Tom O’Leary, 76, a resident of Redondo Beach since 1962 and a civic activist for the past 15 years.

By the time the former Defense Department analyst had retired in the mid-1970s, he was well grounded in dealing with stubborn bureaucracies. So when he found himself annoyed by the steady noise and greasy soot from the nearby Southern California Edison plant, he didn’t think twice about going to City Council meetings to complain.

“I pointed out to (council members) that there was all this noise and soot, and what were they gonna do,” O’Leary recalled, “and I got the biggest bunch of double talk you ever heard in your life. They said they didn’t know who was responsible. So the next week I came back and asked them to find out who was. And the next week I went back, and they didn’t know yet. So I went back the week after that.

“Finally, after six weeks they said they had found out who was responsible. And so I asked them--I’ll never forget it--’Now that you know who’s responsible, what are you going to have those people do?’

“And there was dead silence. The City Council had done nothing about the problem at all.”

The response frosted O’Leary, and he soon made himself such a fixture at City Hall that he was asked by neighbors to run for office in 1977.

He lost by only a few dozen votes to a barber, Jim Eben. The last-minute mudslinging he encountered in the campaign so soured him that he dropped out of civic affairs for two years.

Today, however, O’Leary is back.

And last year, his crusade against the power plant began to pay off, as the city cracked down on Edison for violating the local noise ordinance. Still, O’Leary said, there is reason to remain involved.

“I think now that you can do just as much as a council member, if you exert more effort, work with greater persistence and do deeper research,” he said.

Battle for ‘Biltmore Park’

What to do with the site of the defunct Biltmore Hotel?

For 25 years now, this question has dogged Hermosa Beach, and for a decade of that time Parker Herriott has insisted he has the answer.

Herriott, a 52-year-old lifelong resident of the city, wants to turn the beachfront lot into a public park. But one City Council after another has fought him on the issue, arguing that the city could make more money--and buy even more parkland--by selling the Biltmore site at beachfront real estate prices.

“I’ve spent years on it,” acknowledged Herriott of his “Biltmore Park” quest, which dates to 1982. But his fascination with local democracy dates to the late 1970s.

Herriott had just gotten a master’s degree in theater arts and his main source of income was a four-unit apartment house just off the beach, which he had inherited from his parents.

He “was paying close to $3,000 a year in property taxes--which was a lot of money back then,” Herriott said. Outraged, he got involved in city politics, calling for drastic cuts in the cost of local government.

Finally, in 1978--the year that the tax-slashing Proposition 13 was voted in statewide--Herriott, its champion in Hermosa Beach, ran for City Council. He lost.

But he maintains his zest for local democracy, and no council meeting is complete without Herriott, with his spectacles and baggy pants, stepping to the microphone to accuse elected officials of chicanery.

Council members acknowledge his expertise and commitment on the Biltmore issue; he managed to get his park idea on the ballot for the last city election, and it will appear again in November.

“I care very much about what happens in Hermosa Beach, and especially about the Biltmore site--it’s almost like the Alamo to me,” he said.

Racial Incident Was the Spur

It was a police roust four decades ago that sparked Mildred McNair’s activism in Inglewood.

As an Arkansas teen-ager visiting Southern California in the early 1950s, McNair and a friend stopped their car in a parking lot in Inglewood to eat hamburgers and malts. Suddenly, she recalled, six police officers surrounded her father’s car, and an officer told her that blacks were not welcome in the city.

“I remembered that incident,” she said. “I said that if and when I came to Los Angeles, I would live in one of those apartments across the street from where I was parked. To this day, that is where I live. I select to live where I was told to leave.”

Civil rights remains one of McNair’s focuses, and she never forgets to remind her audiences that she once marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

McNair, 54, a bilingual teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, is best known for her vitriolic speeches at council and school board meetings and her frequent campaigns for public office.

She peers over half-glasses when she speaks at meetings, uses dramatic pauses for effect and continues to make her point when she takes her chair by calling out “I hear you!” from the audience.

“Mildred’s all right,” said William Jenkins, 67, another longtime activist. “We don’t have enough people who give a darn, who speak up for what’s right.”

McNair has run at least six unsuccessful campaigns for school board, city clerk and the El Camino College board of trustees during the past decade. She rarely spends money on her campaigns but is active in debates and forces otherwise-unopposed candidates to defend their records.

She is gearing up for another shot at the El Camino board in November, challenging longtime trustee Pat Scott.

“I’m going to be serious this time,” she vowed.

Activism Began Before Cityhood

A small, grizzled man often clad in mismatched stripes and plaids, Herman Weinstein is the activist emeritus of Lawndale’s gang of three--an ever-present group of gadflies that includes data analyst Nancy Marthens, 47, and retired machinist and carpet store owner Steve Mino, 63.

Weinstein’s civic involvement began with the city’s inception in 1959, when he circulated a petition for its incorporation. Since then, he has had something to say about everything from zoning issues to redevelopment to the spending of taxpayers’ money.

Over the years, he’s waged three unsuccessful bids for council, served on the city’s beautification committee and sat as a Lawndale School District trustee. Today, the Iowa native is so well-known in activist circles throughout the South Bay that he frequently receives calls from people in other cities asking for his advice or support.

Council members express frustration at the relentlessness of Weinstein and his fellow activists. “Whatever the council wants to do, they don’t want to do,” said Councilman William Johnson.

Weinstein considers the term “gadfly” a compliment.

“It means I’m having some kind of effect and that’s what I’m after,” Weinstein said. “If they completely ignored me, I’d probably dry up and blow away.”

It All Started When He Was Quoted

Back in 1983, physicist turned lawyer Roger Kohn attended his first Manhattan Beach City Council meeting, where he became riled about a proposed development near his house.

Two days later, a local newspaper quoted his comments, and an activist was born.

Since then, Kohn, 39, has had a hand in strengthening a beach loitering ordinance and successfully challenging businesses who reserved parking for customers at a downtown public lot.

When the city implemented water conservation earlier this year, Kohn said water bills didn’t provide customers with enough information to help them cut usage. He worked out a sample bill on his home computer.

Officials adopted many of his suggestions and dubbed him “Citizen Kohn” in City Hall.

Kohn, who practices law out of his home and maintains voluminous files on city issues, fills his presentations with well-researched detail.

Sometimes they’re too lengthy for some council members to hide their impatience, but Kohn says he’s getting better about that: “I’ve become less strident, less verbose. I used to go for half an hour, now I’m down to five or 10 minutes.”

Councilman Dan Stern said of Kohn and another activist, Jan Dennis, “They speak for a lot of people who would not otherwise take the time to make themselves heard.”

First He Saved Peacocks

Gar Goodson’s first stab at community activism was aimed at saving peacocks on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

In 1984, residents who hated the peacocks’ noisy, messy ways urged the city to remove them. Goodson, 62, a wildlife book author, joined Friends of the Peacocks and helped win an injunction that forbade the city from exiling more than 50 birds a year.

Having helped save the birds, Goodson is now taking on bulldozers.

As head of Save our Coastline 2000, he leads a fight to keep the peninsula’s bluffs free of large developments and open for the public’s enjoyment. He got involved in the cause four years ago when Marineland in Rancho Palos Verdes was closed and the site was purchased by a developer for a hotel and resort complex.

Goodson, who lives in Palos Verdes Estates, has taken to the podium at countless public meetings to espouse his view that Rancho Palos Verdes’ planning laws prohibit such a project.

He is also a prolific letter writer. So far, he figures he has written 30 or 40 letters scorching city officials for courting the development of a resort, and a good number of his writings have wound up in local newspapers.

City officials dispute Goodson’s interpretation of the planning laws. And some make no secret of their belief that Goodson should keep his nose out of Rancho Palos Verdes’s business.

Goodson shrugs off his critics.

“We are all affected if they build a 450-room hotel,” he said. “It is going to impact all our highways and infrastructure. They can’t say, ‘Stay out of our city, this is none of your business.’ ”

Despite their beef with Goodson, some officials appreciate his activism.

“I do respect Gar in that I think he is an intelligent guy,” said Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor Douglas Hinchliffe. “He certainly is an articulate guy. He writes good letters.”

Ever Ready With a Question

Go to any meeting in or about Wilmington and you are bound to see JoAnn Wysocki, her eyes darting about the room, her hands busy taking notes.

And if she is there, and there is an opportunity to talk, rest assured the 55-year-old community activist will be just as ready with a question as the most inquisitive of the third-grade students she teaches at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park.

“As an honest person, I wish to ask questions,” Wysocki said in a voice that always sounds impatient. “Because if someone doesn’t, I believe something bad will happen.”

Bad, she says, like another scrap yard moving to Wilmington. Bad, she says, like the Port of Los Angeles or Los Angeles City Hall consigning more big industry, with noise and air pollution, to her community.

Though determined to speak out on an array of issues, Wysocki says she never shoots from the hip. Instead, she pores over government reports, even giant environmental impact statements, to be sure she knows what she’s talking about.

And whether or not her argument proves persuasive, Wysocki insists on airing it. “I have come to the point where any criticism is like water off a duck to me,” she said. “I will not be silenced. I will speak and I will be heard.”

To do that doesn’t always mean just attending meetings. Indeed, between the hours she spends teaching and the time she spends at public hearings and the like, Wysocki also voices her opinions in letters to public officials, government agencies, local companies and newspapers.

“I do a lot of nagging,” she said.

Of course, as president of Wilmington Home Owners, secretary of the New Wilmington secession movement and a member or official of a dozen other organizations and committees, Wysocki doesn’t always have as much time as she would like to attend government meetings, especially when school is in session.

Ah, but then there are summer and winter vacations. “When school starts, I do as much as I can,” she said. “But when I’m off, I can take as much library time as I want for research.”

And for speaking out.