His vision of Lakewood as a new kind of city created a model copied nationwide

In the annals of California municipal history, Lakewood of the early 1950s was David fighting the Goliath of Long Beach, a city intent on gobbling up its unincorporated neighbor parcel by parcel. The legal turf battles were exhausting Lakewood’s defenders, most of whom were transplants drawn to the promise of this sleepy village-turned-postwar boomtown

Then along came John Sanford Todd, a struggling attorney and proud Lakewood resident, who dreamed up a way to preserve his community’s independence without it going broke: It would become a new kind of city, one that contracted out for police protection, trash collection, firefighting -- just about every service a city provides.

That practice is commonplace today, but it was a revelation 54 years ago.

Todd’s vision, dubbed the Lakewood Plan, became a model of local government that lighted incorporation drives throughout Southern California and beyond. Suburbia took shape in a rash of “contract cities,” including Dairy Valley (now Cerritos), La Puente, Bellflower, Duarte, Irwindale, Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs, which sprang up in such rapid succession that some observers began proclaiming the end of big cities.

Todd was the architect of this transformation, “the first to say, ‘Let’s form a new city, but let’s not do it the old way,’ ” said Charlie Martin, the longtime city attorney of Temple City, which became a contract city in 1960. “A lot of people thought it wouldn’t succeed, but it did. He started a whole new trend.”

The so-called father of the Lakewood Plan, Todd died Saturday at Fountain Valley Regional Medical Center of complications from surgery following a fall, according to his son, Mike. He was 89 and retired only four years ago after 50 years as Lakewood’s city attorney.

His unusual legacy forms an important chapter in the history of the region, as creator of a form of city government that also was, perhaps unintentionally, a social experiment, a mechanism for reinforcing the social and cultural values that shaped community identity.

Lakewood in the late 1940s was largely a collection of bean fields and hog farms. But as servicemen returned home after World War II, it became a magnet for young families. In less than three years, Lakewood’s developers -- Mark Taper, Louis Boyer and Ben Weingart -- built 17,500 nearly identical houses, laid out in a uniform grid, with all streets meeting at right angles, each block containing exactly 46 houses, and each house planted on a 50-by-100-foot lot. It was the largest subdivision in the world, offering what cultural analyst and Lakewood historian D.J. Waldie called “a compass of possibilities.”

Within that grid was a community that was 95% white. Later generations of historians would take note of this homogeneity and read an exclusionary motive into the incorporation effort. “It was part and parcel of a larger rejection of big cities and urban life” and contributed to inner-city unrest in the 1960s, said UCLA professor Eric Avila, an expert on white flight who teaches urban planning, history and Chicano studies.

But Waldie, an assistant to the Lakewood city manager, says otherwise. Lakewood today is racially and ethnically diverse, with whites making up only about half of its 83,000 residents. Fifty years ago, the identity that the city’s fathers wanted to preserve was related more to age and class than racial identity, he said. Most of Lakewood’s residents were just starting out. When they looked at their big neighbor to the south they “saw an older city. . . . They didn’t see the mirror of themselves,” said Waldie, whose memoir of growing up in Lakewood, “Holy Land,” was published in 1996.

Of course, when they looked at Long Beach, they also saw a big-city bureaucracy that might regard Lakewood as “a sort of hinterland” and disregard the special needs of young families like Todd’s.

Born in Grand Forks, N.D., on July 27, 1919, Todd moved to Los Angeles as an infant when his father joined the psychology faculty at USC. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at USC, then served in World War II as an Army Air Forces munitions specialist in Alaska and Guam. He married in 1943, finished law school at USC and moved to Lakewood in 1949, and by 1955 had two sons with his wife, Frances.

There was one other lawyer in town but, as Todd once noted, “the legal business wasn’t exactly booming,” so he and Frances began to get involved in civic affairs.

Soon Todd found himself arguing to close down Lakewood’s hog farms on behalf of fellow residents, who regarded the farms as a smelly nuisance. In 1950 he was elected managing director of the Lakewood Taxpayers’ Assn., the main civic organization.

In mid-1951, the city of Long Beach released a detailed report on the feasibility of annexing all or part of Lakewood. Of particular interest were Lakewood’s country club and golf course. Todd became the legal advisor to a group of businessmen who wanted to devise a strategy to defeat Long Beach’s plan. Petitions were circulated, and irate Lakewood residents showed up en masse at annexation hearings, but it was a long, expensive, wearying process and annexation appeared inevitable.

When Long Beach dangled a carrot -- a $10-million proposal to develop parks that would enhance Lakewood -- a county official told Todd, “You can’t remain unincorporated, and Lakewood can’t afford to incorporate.”

That’s when Todd saw a way to avoid a new city’s costly capital outlays for municipal buildings and services.

Arguing for contracting with the county for essential services, he led a grass-roots incorporation drive that featured as its motto “Lakewood, Tomorrow’s City Today.”

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved the proposed incorporation Jan. 10, 1954, with one member declaring that one day Lakewood would be “showing us a thing or two about government.” On March 9, the people of Lakewood voted in favor of cityhood by a ratio of 3 to 2.

Lakewood became the first city in the county to incorporate since 1939.

It received national attention in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, even the Harvard Law Review. The incorporation movement Lakewood spawned was further bolstered by a legislative change in California that allowed cities to partake of sales taxes generated in their jurisdiction, which provided a revenue source.

Today more than a fourth of California cities -- about 130 -- are contract cities, including Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, San Clemente and Laguna Niguel in Orange County, as well as Elk Grove in Sacramento County, Camarillo in Ventura County and Solana Beach in San Diego County.

But “all cities now are contracting for something,” said Sam Olivito, executive director of the California Contract Cities Assn. “John Todd was a tireless individual who believed in what he was doing for the community. As a result, other cities have taken up that mantle” and are saving money by contracting out all kinds of services, including tree trimming, street light maintenance and road repairs, Olivito said. “He deserves a tremendous amount of gratitude.”

Described by colleagues as unassuming but intense when challenged, Todd survived a number of political storms, including a rocky period in the 1970s when some residents, including members of the City Council, perceived him as too powerful and tried to oust him.

“He demonstrated he was one of the smartest people in the room,” Waldie said. “He outlasted them all.”

Todd is survived by his sons John of Lafayette, Calif. and Mike of Eugene, Ore., and five grandchildren. His wife, Frances, died in 1988 and his second wife, Millie, died in 1997.

Services will be held at 11 a.m. Monday at the Centre at Sycamore Plaza, 5000 Clark Ave., Lakewood.

Donations in lieu of flowers may be sent to the American Diabetes Foundation.

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elaine.woo@latimes.com