Engineer Battles for the Cross in Redlands’ Seal

A Scott Siegel tour of downtown Redlands is a game of what’s missing.

He whisks past stone-tiled City Hall in favor of a second-story window at the drab public-works building. “Look!” he says pointing to the window. There, like a coffee-cup ring on a table, is a faint gray circle.

He walks into the Fire Department. “Hey, can I see someone’s badge?” he asks. A firefighter shows where someone drilled a nail-sized hole into the badge.

What’s missing?

A cross.

In this former citrus town of 66,000 residents in San Bernardino County, Siegel is the cross guy, bound and determined to reaffix the Christian symbol on the lower-right quadrant of the city seal. The City Council removed it last year, after complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Siegel is the one council members confronted during meetings in an attempt to end what one member called “the saga.”

The computer network engineer spearheaded the collection of 5,983 signatures for a ballot initiative -- approved in March -- that will ask residents whether they want to return to the old city seal, with its “shining cross,” snow-tipped mountains, scales of justice, industrial buildings and an orange.

Friends say Siegel, 33, is a rabble-rouser. “The fire sign in him, the Leo in him, is his nature,” said David Kettering, an immigration lawyer in Redlands who has known Siegel since they were teens. “You mix that with smarts and gumption, and you have Scott, and sometimes that rubs people the wrong way.”

Reared in Kettering, Ohio, outside Dayton, Siegel is the oldest of three boys in a Seventh-day Adventist household that worshiped on Saturdays. At 12, after his parents divorced, he lived for a year with his parents’ friends who were missionaries in Santo Domingo, Ecuador. When they left Ecuador, Siegel stayed, paying for his room in a boys’ dormitory by wiring its electrical system.

He returned to the U.S. at 14, and moved with his mother to California. He dropped out of Redlands High School his junior year and worked at a computer store for about $4.50 an hour, and later began his own computer company, Cybertek.

“School was a complete waste of time for me. You’d do the homework and bring it back and discuss it. I didn’t accomplish anything, and I liked accomplishing things,” he said.

When it comes to politics, Siegel is not exactly a soapbox kind of guy. His activism includes speaking at a Public Utilities Commission hearing and gathering signatures to recall then-Gov. Gray Davis.

Clues to his principles pepper his modest home, which he shares with his wife, Helen, and 3-year-old son, Gareth. Prayer cards top the toilet tank, hand-held flags fill a carafe and a sheet-sized American flag rustles on a 25-foot pole.

A letter mailed last spring got Siegel agitated. The ACLU of Southern California told Redlands officials that two residents had complained that the four-decade-old seal was in violation of the 1st Amendment’s establishment of religion clause. The group asked the city to eliminate the seal’s cross or face a lawsuit, foreshadowing a similar debate over the Los Angeles County seal, from which the cross was removed last year.

Redlands officials concealed the crosses on city vehicles and business cards with blue tape or black marker. Siegel’s wife heard about the fracas at her nondenominational Bible study group and relayed it to her husband. Soon after, Scott Siegel teamed up with the group, Save Redlands’ Seal, whose members plotted a grass-roots counterattack -- including a website and T-shirts -- from the cramped desks of a Christian academy.

They thought that in a place nicknamed “City of Churches,” where some intersections feature a house of worship on each corner, it shouldn’t be hard to sway residents, Siegel said. Half of the city’s voters are registered Republicans, though on the plush suburban streets are a hodgepodge of synagogues, Baptist churches, a Mormon temple and the University of Redlands, a private liberal arts college.

“Be careful who you talk about, because they’re all related,” is how one speaker characterized the city at a recent council meeting.

Two months into its campaign, Save Redlands’ Seal ousted Siegel because of his “hard-line approach,” said Don Wallace, a pastor and group president. Members wanted to woo the City Council, but Siegel pushed for a ballot measure. Wallace compared the situation to a road trip where “everyone is grabbing for the steering wheel.”

Last July, Siegel’s friend Kettering helped draft the cross initiative, which kicked off a six-month campaign. Residents, including a couple in their 80s, knocked on Siegel’s door and offered to solicit signatures at grocery stores.

Eventually, Siegel shelled out half of the campaign’s nearly $10,000 cost, much of it for hiring professional signature-gatherers.

He devoted as many hours to the cause as some people do to part-time jobs. In his living room, manila folders bulged with newspaper clippings and Supreme Court cases. Helen Siegel unfurled a leftover banner and a folded T-shirt that read, “Don’t Toss the Cross.”

“We’re not even really big cross people,” Siegel said. But sometimes, he said, he wakes up thinking about the seal.

“It’s not so much an overzealous commitment to the cross, but he doesn’t want the ACLU to come in and force the town to do something,” Kettering said. “He thought it was immoral that a city that would otherwise keep the cross would have to take it down because of bully tactics. He’s said if the orange were taken off the seal, he’d be just as upset.”

Siegel’s quest has not received unanimous hallelujahs. Community leaders, including University of Redlands chaplain John Walsh, have supported the removing of the cross.

“I thought we settled [this debate] 200 years ago,” Walsh said.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

‘The cross guy’

Scott Siegel started working at 15, putting in part-time hours at such places as Wienerschnitzel, Del Taco and a movie theater in Colton. He wanted the theater job so badly that he showed up once a week until the owner caved in. It took five weeks.

* Siegel met his wife, Helen, in Ecuador, and they kept in touch for almost two decades before dating. “I always liked her; I just couldn’t get a handle on her,” he said. The couple married Aug. 12, 2001, and are expecting their second child in September.

* Siegel enjoys the occasional adrenaline fix. His ride in high school was a Kawasaki 550 motorcycle, and he has scuba-dived the Great Barrier Reef. But he had trouble getting a long-desired pilot’s license because small airplanes make him queasy. “I threw up all over the side of the airplane,” he said.

* Siegel launched his website, www.redlandsseal.org, to chronicle his city seal campaign. Reflecting his opinion of ACLU attorneys, it depicts a sour-faced, suited man clutching a hammer, about to pound out the cross in the old seal. Siegel’s next venture could be a showdown with Sacramento: He holds the rights to the site www.nomorebonds.org.

Los Angeles Times