Former Huntington Beach mayor has done it all

Former Huntington Beach mayor Ralph Bauer appears to have sipped from the Fountain of Youth.

The 87-year-old served on the City Council for 10 years and the boards of the Ocean View School District and Huntington Beach Union High School District for eight years each.

He’s made his mark in almost all corners of the city, including helping with the establishment of Central Park and the city Sports Complex, preservation of the Bolsa Chica wetlands and overseeing the design of the pier and Pier Plaza after much of it had been damaged by a storm. He’s even had a park named in his honor.

And he’s still working today.

Bauer is seen regularly during public comment periods at council meetings, urging the city to work on solving the homelessness spreading through the community. According to a study by the Huntington Beach Police Department early last year, more than 200 homeless people were living in the city, compared with about 130 in 2013.

Bauer said he’s been working with several organizations to try to solve the issue.

He was part of the Homeless Task Force initiated by the council in March 2015. About a year later, the group presented a list of recommendations for coordination of homeless assistance resources and law enforcement efforts.

“Every human being has value, and we ought to make sure that somehow we value that human being and help them,” Bauer said.

Shirley Dettloff, a former mayor and council member who served with Bauer, said she could always turn to him for an intelligent view on an issue.

“If there is a cause that needs addressing, Ralph is always the first to raise his hand,” she said.

Bauer’s drive is a reflection of his experiences in early adulthood.

He entered UCLA in 1948 and played basketball for John Wooden. The legendary coach was known not only for teaching basketball skills but also character attributes that helped his players become successful in the outside world.

“I always tell people that I got the Pyramid of Success at the age of 18,” Bauer said, referring to Wooden’s character-building diagram.

Bauer used those skills and picked up a few others when he entered the Navy in 1952. He served for about 15 months in the Korean War.

“I know both coasts of North Korea intimately,” Bauer said.

He learned how to lead men and deal with fear under difficult circumstances.

Part of what fuels Bauer’s long history of community service is his sentiment that he has to work for those who died during the war he was able to return home from.

“I have an obligation to those 37,000 to do in society what they cannot do,” Bauer said. “The war was a long time ago, but it marks you.”

When he returned from the war, he went back to UCLA, attaining a Ph.d. in chemistry. Along the way he authored a paper with his professor Donald Cram, which Cram later used to devise an idea that won him the 1987 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

While Bauer worked as a research chemist from the 1960s through the 1980s, he had a variety of roles in civic life, including serving on two Huntington Beach school boards at once.

He said one of his most memorable efforts is fighting alongside Amigos de Bolsa Chica to prevent development of the wetlands.

He served on the City Council from 1992 to 2002, aiding in a variety of projects, but he remains most proud of his work with Dettloff to create the Human Relations Task Force and the Declaration of Policy About Human Dignity.

Bauer said both were meant to set a tone for how people should treat one another in the wake of two crimes in the city, one in which a black man was killed and the other in which a Native American man was stabbed several times.

“Everyone should be treated with courtesy and respect, regardless of their racial background, their nation of origin, the religion they practice, their sexual orientation, gender or disability status,” the statement on human dignity reads. “It is the right of all citizens to pursue their daily lives with the knowledge that they will not be physically harmed or verbally abused.”

Bauer said the council has reaffirmed the statement since.

After his service on the council, Bauer took up a new challenge that took over a decade to reach fruition: establishing a new senior center.

As a member of the Huntington Beach Council on Aging, he worked with others to get the center built, but he said there was significant public opposition. The city was sued in 2008 by a residents group that argued the project’s environmental impact report was insufficient.

But the 38,000-square-foot senior center opened about a year ago in Central Park.

Bauer says the reward for all his endeavors is simple.

When he drives down Pacific Coast Highway and sees children learning about wildlife at the wetlands, watches senior citizens at the new center or takes a stroll around Central Park, he sees the enjoyment on people’s faces, and that makes it all worth it, he said.

But he isn’t about to sit still, because for Bauer, there’s more work to be done.

“Ralph’s done so much with his life, he should be content to just sit back on the beach,” Dettloff said. “But that’s not his personality.”

benjamin.brazil@latimes.com

Twitter:@benbrazilpilot