Voters in 38th Unfazed by Political Din : Dornan, Robinson Fight for County’s Key Congressional District

The 38th Congressional District, whose voters will choose Nov. 4 between Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and Assemblyman Richard Robinson (D-Garden Grove), is the urban core of Orange County.

Within its 90 square miles, stretching from Santa Ana to Cerritos, there are more than 18,300 businesses, three shopping malls and 12 Catholic parishes. More than 526,000 people live in its seven communities--all of Garden Grove and parts of Santa Ana, Stanton, Buena Park, Anaheim, Midway City, Westminster and Cerritos.

The district encompasses the heart of county government--the courts and the county administration building in Santa Ana--as well as Knott’s Berry Farm, Disneyland, Anaheim Stadium and the Movieland Wax Museum. Buena Clinton, a Garden Grove neighborhood that is the county’s worst slum, is in the 38th. So is Little Saigon, a community of 60,500 along Bolsa Avenue that has one of the largest concentrations of Southeast Asian immigrants in the nation.

With its bowling alleys, fast-food restaurants and modest stucco homes, the 38th is the site of one of the most expensive congressional races in the nation this year. So far, more than $1 million has been poured into the Dornan-Robinson race, and with just over a week to go before the election the spending frenzy appears to be far from over.

Democratic strategists speak confidently of the 38th as a Democratic district. The median income is $22,993 a year, and the population is 75.3% white, 27.6% Latino, 7% Asian and 2.5% black, according to 1980 Census figures supplied by Claremont College’s Rose Institute. Of the district’s 199,683 registered voters, 48.4% are Democrats and 41.8% are Republicans.

“If Orange County has a place you can vote for a Democrat, this is it,” said Michael Berman, a partner in the Democratic political consulting firm of Berman & D’Agostino Campaigns.

But these are conservative Democrats.

This is the same district that gave President Reagan 62.1% of its vote in 1980 and 69.4% in 1984. It is also the same district where, in 1984, the voters ousted a five-term Democratic congressman, Jerry Patterson, for Dornan, a conservative Republican, by a vote of 53% to 45%.

It is a district where the majority party, says Brian O’Leary Bennett, Dornan’s chief of staff, is made up of “the Democrats the national party left behind.”

Here are a few of the faces of the 38th.

The corner lot is called Statueland. It is an island of marble lions, Venus de Milos, dolphin heads and small nymphs bearing fish, nestled among the fast-food restaurants and used car lots of Harbor Boulevard.

“We do major fountains,” said owner Woody Butterfield, 67, a friendly bear of a man with white hair and a bushy gray mustache. Once a sculptor for MGM studios, Butterfield began this business 39 years ago when land in Garden Grove was selling for $2,000 an acre and across the way there was nothing but orange groves. As a suburb grew up around him, Butterfield stayed on, sculpting and casting forms from rubber molds to make the garden ornaments, fountains and balustrades that decorate homes all over Southern California.

Scuffing through the marble dust, Butterfield takes a visitor through a shop cluttered with statuary. Among the pieces is an oversized bronze bust of President Reagan. Butterfield made his first Reagan bust in 1982 on special order from John Gavin, who was then the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Since then he has been making copies for the Republican Central Committee.

Years ago, he turned out similar busts of President Kennedy for local Democratic clubs. Made of terrazzo--a mix of marble and Riverside white cement--they sold for $7.50 a head. “I sold 9,700 of them,” Butterfield remembers. “But after he died, I gave up doing them.”

There have been other changes since then. Butterfield says his once small business now grosses more than $1 million a year. And his politics are different. A lifelong Democrat who has worked in local campaigns--beginning with former Assemblyman Dick Hanna--he plans to vote for Robinson on Nov. 4.

But Butterfield said he won’t mind if Dornan is reelected. That’s ironic, he added, stopping a moment to savor the memory: “You know, I tried to put him in jail.”

During the 1984 campaign, Butterfield, then an active supporter of incumbent Rep. Patterson of Garden Grove, learned that Dornan had registered to vote using his campaign office as his address. He called the district attorney’s office. He also called the newspapers.

Public Apology

If Dornan’s office was being used as a residence, Dornan had violated zoning codes, Butterfield said. If it was empty “he had committed perjury.” Either way, “we did want some bad press for him.” Butterfield’s complaint led to a public apology by Dornan but no official charges.

After the controversy died down, Dornan visited Butterfield.

“I made him stand off 20 feet,” Butterfield recalled. “I made sure he wasn’t armed. But he just wanted to talk to me. He said ‘I may be your next congressman.’ ”

Butterfield says now that Dornan’s performance in Congress hasn’t been the disaster he had feared. When it comes to constituents’ problems, Dornan has worked for him, he said. The congressman recently helped Butterfield when he needed to know if an employee had to have a visa for a buying trip abroad.

And on the issues, Butterfield said, he usually agrees with Dornan. Take, for instance, Dornan’s support for the Nicaraguan contras, the rebels who are fighting the Sandinista government.

“As far as I’m concerned, Dornan was totally right on Nicaragua,” Butterfield said. “People say, ‘Do you want your son to go down there?’ I’d rather have him fight down there than up here.”

Today, politics is less of a passion for Butterfield than it once was. He wants to travel, to turn his business over to his sons and watch his grandchildren grow up in quiet Garden Grove. Life is good now.

“We’re comfortable as hell,” he said.

“Politicians are so vain.”

Those are the words of Rueben Martinez, and he is in a position to know.

Working in a small shop in Santa Ana, the 46-year-old hairdresser has been cutting politicians’ hair for 13 years. Robinson, Patterson and Santa Ana Mayor Dan Griset all know the touch of his scissors.

“I’ve done them all except (Santa Ana City Councilman John) Acosta. I don’t get credit for his flattop,” Martinez said.

Formerly of East Los Angeles, Martinez saw promise in Santa Ana, moving there from West Covina in 1973. When redevelopment came, Martinez applauded.

“The city was ready for change,” he said. “Now, downtown businessmen are very happy with their business, and it is a growing city. But now people don’t want it to grow as fast.”

Martinez is a member of the county Democratic Central Committee and the Latino Democratic Club.

“I happen to be a Democrat who will vote for a Democrat,” Martinez said.

So of course he will vote for Robinson, he said.

Sees Little Difference

But he sees little difference in temperament between Robinson and Dornan. Both are fighters, he said. “It will be the battle of the two bullheads out there.”

And yet, Martinez said, his clients have commented recently that the battle has taken a long time to get under way.

“There is an interest in the election, but nobody really knows what’s going to happen,” he said. “And Robinson hasn’t done much lately. I think he is going to run on his fantastic record--and his potholders.” (Robinson mailed potholders with his name on them to district residents earlier this month.)

Party differences aside, Martinez said, he would never vote for Dornan. He doesn’t like his style.

“I would like to be proud of my congressman,” Martinez said, “but no, I’m not proud of him at all.”

He recalled an incident last year when Dornan called Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.) a “draft-dodging wimp” and scuffled with Downey on the House floor.

“Pulling congressmen’s ties and calling him a wimp--he’s embarrassing to our county,” Martinez said of Dornan. “I would have to show him respect because he is a congressman. He is in a position that needs to be respected. But no, I don’t respect him--you understand?”

Danh Quach’s pharmacy in Westminster is the Vietnamese equivalent of a country store. Along with the cough syrup and codeine, Quach sells ginseng tea, bolts of cloth, Singer sewing machines and TV sets.

Quach calls it his “one-stop store.” It was one of the first Vietnamese businesses to open in the area along Bolsa Avenue known as Little Saigon.

Like many of Orange County’s Vietnamese merchants, Quach came here eight years ago by a circuitous route. Formerly a government pharmacist in charge of supplies for 16 hospitals in Vietnam, Quach left there in 1975 with his sister, wife and their two children.

In the space of three years, Quach and his family moved from an Arkansas refugee camp to a relative’s home in Connecticut and then to Nebraska, where he and his wife attended pharmacy school at the University of Nebraska before coming to Orange County.

Reasons for Move

“Because of the weather,” Quach said in explaining the move, and because he and his wife had visited Orange County on a vacation. “We see a lot of Vietnamese here.”

Quach is a member of several civic organizations: the Westminster Chamber of Commerce, the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and the Vietnamese-American Republican Club.

He is a registered Republican who thinks Dornan is doing a good job, and he has never even considered becoming a Democrat. Like many Vietnamese refugees, Quach has political convictions that are tied to the history of the war in his homeland.

“We do not want to say anything bad to the Democrats,” he said, “but we’ve had a bad experience. We feel the Republicans are strong against the Communists.”

Still, Quach noted that he has not seen Dornan lately. He did not know why.

“He has campaign. He should go visit the merchants on Bolsa Street,” Quach said.

But then, he added, “we have not heard anything from Richard Robinson” either.

Until last August, when a jet airliner and a small plane collided in the sky above his city, “most people didn’t know where Cerritos was,” Mayor Don Knabe said. And that was just fine with him.

When anyone asked, Knabe would explain that his city--sometimes called the Irvine of Los Angeles County--was a nice little suburban community with 25 parks, 56,000 residents and “total freeway access” that was “just 10 minutes from Knott’s Berry Farm.”

On Aug. 31, the collision of an Aeromexico jet and private plane put Cerritos on the map. The crash killed 82 people, 15 of them on the ground.

Scars from the tragedy remain. In the pleasant residential tract where the jet hit, barricades are still up to keep the gawkers out. But the twisted metal and rubble from homes that burned have been hauled away, and some homeowners at the crash site are rebuilding, Knabe said.

Incorporated in 1956 on farmland once known as Dairy Valley, Cerritos receives $11.9 million a year in sales-tax revenue from its shopping mall and an arch-windowed Auto Center. Its residents have the second highest median income in the nation, at $32,097 a year. And Cerritos boasts 25 parks, including a public swimming center that looks like a private spa.

Proud of Prosperity

Knabe, 43, is proud of his city’s prosperity.

“We don’t have a lot of problems,” he said, as he stretched beside a large oak desk in his office at the modern City Hall.

Because the city has few problems, its residents don’t seem to care much who their next congressman will be, Knabe said. As a Republican himself, however, he is actively supporting Dornan’s reelection.

Dornan has done a good job for the city, he said. After the Aeromexico crash, the congressman helped city officials get in touch with the proper federal agencies. When architectural plans for a new post office were stalled last year, Dornan cut through the red tape.

Not everyone in Cerritos appreciates Dornan’s temperament, Knabe said.

“He’s too flamboyant for some of the Democrats,” the mayor said. “He’s even too flamboyant for some of the Republicans.”

Still, he said, many residents have “a sense of comfortableness” with Dornan.

All in all, Knabe said, the congressional race has not caused much of a stir so far.

At least partly because of the Aeromexico tragedy, “this community is having a hard time getting excited about anything right now,” said Knabe, who lost a friend in the crash. “You think, ‘Gee whiz. There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ ”

From the outside, school Supt. Cynthia Grennan’s offices don’t look like much--a low cinder-block structure that used to be a Fedmart store.

But from this building on industrial land near the Santa Ana Freeway in Anaheim, Grennan runs the Anaheim Union High School District, which comprises 22,500 students, 2,000 employees and more than 20 schools.

A former English teacher and school psychologist, Grennan is in charge of the district’s budget, personnel and facilities. “I am an educator and a teacher and a student advocate,” she said. “I’m concerned about all children learning.”

Her district has undergone considerable change in recent years. In 1974, 11% of its students were members of minority groups; that figure is 37% today. Many of the district’s students don’t speak English. In 1978, the district counted 225 students speaking 12 other languages; by October, 1985, there were 3,000 non-English-speaking students speaking Russian, Hmong, Vietnamese, Korean, Iranian and 56 other languages.

Beginning in 1982, Grennan fought a three-year battle with the federal government over a $500,000 grant for teacher aides to work with non-English-speaking students. The government wanted to give the money only if the district hired new employees and let them go when the funds ran out. But Grennan wanted to train her own staff.

Didn’t Ask for Help

Eventually, she won--though not without several trips to Washington and “a serious raising of voices.” Throughout the fight, Grennan said, she never thought to ask for the help of either of the two congressmen who represent different parts of the school district.

But then, Grennan said, she doesn’t see a congressman very often. Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) has attended board meetings and held several forums for educators. Dornan has been to a school board meeting and “has been active in terms of the students,” she said, sending letters of congratulation when they won awards.

But Grennan would like to see more.

“I would like the congressman to be knowledgeable of school needs so he could provide for that. . . . I would want them to be supportive of education.”

In the 38th congressional campaign, Grennan has heard nothing about education. For that matter, she said, she has heard little or nothing about “the economy, defense, the quality of life.” What she has heard, she said, is “mudslinging.”

“It has become a media and newspaper and mail campaign,” she said, noting that she throws most of the campaign mail away. “I would prefer personal contact. Maybe this is old-fashioned and not reasonable, but I would like coffees and having the candidates just being available to the voters.”

Grennan, a registered independent, has not made up her mind whether to vote for either candidate. “I have been known to leave the space blank,” she said.

“It is better now, but it was bad two years ago,” Cristina Mungaray said. “There were the gangs, the drugs.”

Mungaray, 30, lives in Buena Clinton, a small Garden Grove neighborhood of rundown apartments that is the worst slum in the county.

She has lived there for the past 13 years, first in a one-bedroom apartment and now in an immaculate two-bedroom apartment on Keel Street with her husband and four children.

Although crime is not entirely gone from Buena Clinton, Mungaray said, it is not such a bad place to live.

“I have very, very good neighbors,” she said. They share baby-sitting duties, and when she isn’t working they share good times. Sometimes they pack a picnic and take the children to Irvine Regional Park in Orange to see “the horses and the water and the boats. It is a lot of fun for the kids.”

While Mungaray works nights as a maid at a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in Anaheim, her husband, a construction worker, takes care of their children. In the mornings, Mungaray does volunteer work at her sons’ elementary school.

She said all the work will soon be rewarded. “My husband and I are happy because we are buying a house in Corona. I think it’s more quiet. Not too many people. It is close to my husband’s work. And it’s a big house. I need a big house for my family.”

It is that house that occupies her mind now. Not politics. She has no interest in the election. She has no knowledge of Dornan or his pride in having secured a $2-million rehabilitation grant for Buena Clinton last year. “I don’t know about the election,” she said.