Early Challenges, Different Paths, Same Goal

Jim Hahn doesn’t mention fun when he recounts his high school years. He was a sprinter on the track team, but never won a race. He ran for several student government offices, but lost every time. He never had a girlfriend, and can’t remember a lot of dates.

But his high school yearbook tells another story. Jim Hahn was voted best-looking and most spirited by the senior class of 1968. He was sports editor of the school newspaper, director of student activities for the senior class, an escort for the homecoming court and a member of the cheerleading squad.

As a “yell king,” he wore white pants and his letterman’s sweater and did stunts on the court at basketball games. His job was to pump up the crowd at Los Angeles Lutheran High School.

“The basketball coach wanted to increase attendance at the games,” recalled Hahn’s fellow yell king, J.C. Agajanian Jr. “So he figured out if he got certain personalities that were popular and well-liked and they were down there on the floor, the kids would think it was cool to go to games.”

The fringe benefit was the chance to cozy up to the cheerleaders. “All of a sudden, we were one of the in-crowd,” Agajanian said.

But being part of the in-crowd wasn’t easy for Jim. When he was picked as one of five escorts for the homecoming court, a yearbook photo recorded the result. His four comrades are shown squirming in their tuxes. The caption reflects their missing partner: “Jim Hahn was too nervous even to be photographed.”

That prim reserve, a throwback to his 1950s-style upbringing, is still a defining trait of James K. Hahn as he battles for his second term as mayor of Los Angeles. Even on the campaign trail, he projects the same sort of strait-laced earnestness that marked his formative years in South Los Angeles.

The area was swirling with social change: its neighborhoods shifting from white to black, young people challenging their elders’ power. Members of Jim Hahn’s family were central players. His father, Kenneth, was the county supervisor representing the area when it exploded in riots in 1965, the summer before Jim’s sophomore year in high school.

But though he was raised in South Los Angeles, Jim Hahn was not exactly a child of the ‘hood. As a kid, his best friends were not his black neighbors but the white kids in his church youth group and his cousins a few blocks away in then-predominantly white Inglewood.

Hahn’s elementary school was all white, and he left the local junior high for private school after being roughed up repeatedly by tough young blacks. His parents cemented his outsider status, insisting on a proper decorum in the rebellious 1960s.

In his youth are the seeds of Hahn’s adult success and his present political challenges. Self-effacing and likable as a child, conscientious and responsible in his teens, he was also innately unconnected to his home community. That detachment would come back to haunt him four decades later, when he lost the support of many black voters over what they considered his clumsy ouster of Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks.

It’s impossible to know how much of Hahn’s demeanor is innate and how much owes to the burden of straddling two worlds, trying to reconcile battling self-images.

In the public’s eye, he was groomed for greatness, ever on stage -- the photogenic, good-guy son of the legendary Kenny Hahn. But on his home turf, he was invisible, his role constricted by his shyness, his confidence neutralized by his status as one of the few white children in a neighborhood of blacks.

James Kenneth Hahn was born in 1950, when the Hahn family -- his father was then a city councilman -- lived near 89th and Figueroa streets, in a small home that Jim remembers primarily because it was four doors from Manchester Park, where he learned to swim and hung out with neighborhood children.

In 1959, the family -- Kenneth, by then a county supervisor; his wife, Ramona; 9-year-old Jim; and 7-year-old Janice -- moved to Morningside Park, into a three-bedroom Spanish-style corner bungalow that faced a Baptist church across the street. The neighborhood -- 78th Place and Crenshaw Boulevard, a few blocks east of Inglewood -- was solidly middle-class and virtually all white.

Before long, though, young black families began trickling in, moving up from the same sorts of inner-city neighborhoods that Hahn’s family had left behind. Kenny Hahn was a one-man welcoming committee, taking new black residents door to door, introducing them to their white neighbors.

But unscrupulous real estate agents were going door to door too, preying on white homeowners’ fears by warning them to sell quickly, before the influx of blacks made property values drop.

“We ended up being one of the few white families who stayed,” Hahn recalled. “That was too bad, because if they’d stayed they would have seen you couldn’t tell the difference between the black families and the white families. You drive down the street and everybody has the manicured lawns and the nice cars in the driveway.”

Jimmy’s carefully circumscribed life made him immune to the changing dynamics. He had no close friends among the neighbors who left or the newcomers who replaced them. His life revolved, as it always had, around church -- his family attended services three times a week, and he and Janice went to youth camp every summer -- and visits with his close-knit, extended family.

His grade school, Daniel Freeman Elementary, was across the city line in Inglewood. His parents got permission to send him there because it was closer than the neighborhood school. Locals remember it for another reason: Unlike the well-integrated neighborhood campus, it had only a few black students.

There, the supervisor’s son was a student leader. He played second trumpet in the Inglewood All-City Honor Band and organized a student drive that persuaded district officials to follow the lead of other schools and build a handball court on campus.

After elementary school, Hahn enrolled at his neighborhood junior high, Horace Mann, where whites were scarce and a slight, soft-spoken seventh-grader was an easy target. “I may be 6 feet 2 now, but I was real little” then, Hahn recalled. “There were some rough kids there, bullies who would beat you up for your lunch money.... That was kind of a drag.”

Most of the time he got along fine. He joined his classmates at noontime dances, where the Slausons and the Watts -- “social clubs” they called themselves, though Hahn recalls them as budding gangs -- would strut their stuff, “American Bandstand” style. Hahn made a game attempt to fit in, learning the steps to the Slauson shuffle, a line dance he still executes, though a bit awkwardly, when called on.

Tasting Racial Hostility

But he also tasted racial hostility. More than once, he said, he was attacked just for being white. “Surfer” was the hurled epithet. “It was never usually one on one.” Even up, he said, he could have held his own. “But four on one was kind of hard.”

He can joke about it now -- “Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet developed my own cadre of supporters” -- but back then the pain was intense and lasting. “It really hurts when somebody picks on you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

His parents advised him to complain to the principal, but young Hahn knew enough about playground dynamics to veto that idea. Instead, after one year, he left Horace Mann and spent eighth grade in a tiny private school that convened in a church nearby.

He began ninth grade at Los Angeles Lutheran High, a private school within walking distance of home. The campus drew students from Lutheran churches across the county and had become a haven for whites in the changing neighborhood. The biggest difference? “There wasn’t one fight the whole four years I was in high school. I’d never been at a school like that before.”

But if the campus was calm, the streets outside were anything but. During the summer after Hahn’s freshman year, South Los Angeles was the site of the nation’s worst urban unrest, the Watts riots. For six days and nights, angry black mobs burned businesses, looted stores and hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at passing cars. Thirty-four people died and more than 1,000 were injured.

Their rage was initially aimed at police, sparked by a ham-handed traffic stop. But it reflected decades of pent-up frustration over vanishing jobs, failing schools, perceived brutal treatment by police and neglect by city leaders.

Jim Hahn was the sentry who alerted his father. “I was up late watching the news -- George Putnam, I think -- when I saw the fires burning on TV.... My dad had already gone to bed, so I went in and woke him up.”

Kenny Hahn dressed quickly, summoned an aide and headed out. He would return home hours later, Hahn said, “shaking glass out of his suit,” with a gaping wound in his neck.

“A brick had been thrown through his car window and cut my dad from the bottom of his neck up to his ear,” Hahn said. After a visit to a hospital for stitches, he headed back onto the streets, this time with a sheriff’s deputy. It took another brick through the windshield -- knocking unconscious the deputy driving the car -- to persuade Supervisor Hahn to retreat.

At home, concerned black neighbors advised the Hahns to protect themselves by hanging something white from their front door, the signal that a black family lived there. Kenny Hahn refused. “My dad said this was our home and everybody knew who we were.”

Rioting never reached Morningside Park, but residents there had to endure smoke-filled days, obey evening curfews and navigate around roadblocks set up to contain the looting. At night, they could sit on their front porches and see flames glowing orange from nearby fires.

A Defining Symbol

Nationally, the riots became the era’s defining symbol of black rage and militancy. Locally, they created a gulf between black and white that lasted long after order was restored. For blacks, the uprising felt like a flexing of power; for whites, it seemed unfathomable and threatening.

“We all got along so well here; we just couldn’t understand what was going on. How could this happen?” recalled Mary Turner, whose family had been the first blacks on Hahn’s block in 1961. “Most of my [white] neighbors were confused; some of them were afraid to go out for a while.”

Not even Hahn’s father -- who had spent his life championing poor blacks -- could explain the anger that had pushed the community to erupt. “It shocked my dad that somebody would burn down his own neighborhood,” Hahn said.

When Jim, then 15, returned to school that fall, there was a new and noticeable unease between white students and the half-dozen black children in his class.

“For the African American students, they came back to school that next month with a new sense of boldness, assertiveness,” he said. “There was a new sort of energy imparted to them out of this. For the white kids, this was something new. We really didn’t understand what was going on, didn’t know what to make of them.”

That summer taught Hahn a valuable lesson: Skin color is its own sort of boundary, one that transcends geography. “There was no way I could ever know what it was like to be black. Even though we went to the same movie theaters, shopped at the same markets ... it was a different experience for me. Because I’m white.”

For all the turmoil in the streets, the Hahn family home remained a refuge. “We had the most normal life, or what I thought was normal,” recalled Janice Hahn, Jim’s younger sibling by 20 months. “My parents did not drink, did not smoke, hung around with the same set of friends they’d had since college. My dad was in bed by 9:30 or 10 every night. He’d put his pajamas on when he came home from work. I figured everybody lived this way.”

Their course was mapped out by their parents. “Some things were just foregone conclusions in our family,” Janice Hahn said. “ ‘You’ll be Democrats, you’ll go to Pepperdine.’ We weren’t allowed to object. I don’t think Jim or I would have thought about rebelling.”

In high school, Jim was “conscientious, serious and smart,” said his sister, who was two years behind him at Lutheran High. “He got the good report cards; the teachers loved him.... But I don’t know if he had as much fun as I had.”

He held down two jobs as a teenager: bagging groceries at Ralphs and flipping hamburgers at a fast-food joint. When he turned 16 and got his driver’s license, his parents lent him the family car to drive his sister’s cheerleading squad to far-flung games -- Perris, Fallbrook, Rim of the World, Solvang -- that Hahn, now the father of teenagers, would never allow his children to make. “The moms trusted me with their daughters,” he notes, his voice tinged with pride.

His high school record was squeaky clean. He belonged to the Key Club, National Honor Society and California Scholastic Federation. His favorite activity was hanging around a local print shop on Saturdays, waiting for the school paper to come off the presses.

He spent his free time building miniature cars, then launching them in races against cars built by his buddies, “watching them fly off the track and crash to pieces.”

His lone indiscretion was predictably bland: He was suspended from school for one day in the 12th grade for traveling with the track team to a cross-country meet without a signed permission slip.

But Hahn was no milquetoast, insists Agajanian, who was two years ahead of him in school but has known Hahn’s family all his life. His father, J.C. Agajanian Sr., the legendary motor car race promoter, was close friends with Kenny Hahn.

“Jim was ... the kind of guy who works hard and doesn’t call the limelight on himself,” said Agajanian, now a well-known racing promoter himself. “He was a quiet, good-looking, thin kid, and a lot of the girls liked him. And I don’t think he even knew.”

Indeed, even now, Hahn seems embarrassed by that suggestion. Told by a reporter that some of Janice’s teenage friends had crushes on her handsome older brother, he smiles and fidgets in his seat.

“I wish she would have let me know,” he says. “I had a pretty uneventful social life when I was in school.” He shrugs, by way of apology. “I was a late bloomer, I guess.”

In the 37 years since graduation, Hahn has lost touch with his school buddies. He doesn’t go to alumni functions and is barely mentioned in school newsletters. “Most of the people I was close to, I don’t have contact with anymore,” he says. “I don’t even know where most of them are.”

His high school, citing declining enrollment and “safety concerns,” shuttered its campus and moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1977.

Hahn lived at home with his parents while he attended Pepperdine University, where he earned a law degree in 1975. In 1986, he moved to San Pedro, into the childhood home of his second wife, Monica, from whom he is now separated. His mother, Ramona, stayed on in the family home -- new neighbors knew her only as “that nice old white lady” -- until four years ago, when she moved, at Jim’s behest, to a San Pedro condo. Morningside Park -- 95% white when the Hahns moved in -- had changed so much that there is now only one white student among the 1,600 pupils at Hahn’s old junior high, Horace Mann. Unlike her son, Ramona Hahn stays in touch with her former neighbors. “I’m envious of my mom and dad,” he says wistfully. “They had friends that last your whole life.”

Then, as now, Jim was never much of a socializer. “He was never what you’d call outgoing,” recalls Mary Turner, whose son, Vance, spent afternoons playing pingpong with Jim on the enclosed patio at the Hahns’ home.

“They’d play, but only when Vance went down and got him. He was a nice kid, but very quiet. That’s one reason people don’t get close to him.”

But she’s convinced that the neighborhood made a mark on him. Several years ago, before his first run for mayor, an alley behind their street was converted to a small neighborhood park. Jim Hahn came to the grand opening, she said. “And he remembered the area. And he knew everybody.”