McClellan’s Vista Covers Blocs, Public : ‘Moral Conscience’ of City Denies She Follows Vogue Views

For Gloria McClellan, it was an emancipation of sorts.

The year was 1946 and McClellan was the archetypical young Marine wife, obediently following her husband’s orders on the home front, from what clothes to wear, to how her hair should be styled, to what food would sit on the dinner table each night.

But when her husband was shipped off to China, McClellan decided she had put up with enough. It was time for a change.

“I was 21 years old, but I looked dowdy, like an old lady,” McClellan recalls today. “When he was gone, I said, ‘This is it; he’s not going to do this ever again to me.’ I cut my hair, and I bought the clothes I wanted. I decided to become myself--and he liked it. I won my independence for sure.”

In the decades since, McClellan has moved to new challenges, reaching a pinnacle that seemed all but inconceivable during her days as a young housewife.

For the past 14 years, she has served on the Vista City Council, forging a record as perhaps the most potent force in the topsy-turvy political world of this inland community.

In November, McClellan ascended to the highest elected office in Vista, demonstrating her clout at the polls by besting two rivals in the race to become mayor.

With her platinum blonde, bouffant hairdo and Cheshire cat grin, McClellan has easily become one of the most familiar faces around town. Almost everyone knows her as Gloria.

Even the 61-year-old mayor’s fiercest foes admit to being charmed by her motherly and disarmingly friendly disposition.

McClellan’s years have been spiced by numerous battles, but she’s perhaps known best for her efforts to rid Vista of the seedy elements that she fears threaten the city’s moral fabric. By fighting a seemingly ceaseless campaign against adult bookstores, massage parlors, and even a bawdy cable television channel, McClellan has carved a reputation as Vista’s self-appointed moral conscience.

And apparently, residents have found her occasional crusades to their liking--or at least tolerable. Other local lawmakers have come and gone, but Gloria McClellan has persevered--indeed thrived--as a representative of this growing community of 47,000.

“She’s an excellent politician, I think the best politician Vista has ever known,” said Lloyd Tracy, a former councilman who served with McClellan. “She’s been in office longer than anyone else. She’s doing the job. She does her homework. She knows what the voters want.”

Though popular with most of the electorate, McClellan has attracted her share of critics, who complain that the newly seated mayor shifts far too easily with the political currents in her zeal to curry favor with potential blocs of voters.

“I don’t think she operates on principle, but on a desire to be reelected,” said Lloyd von Haden, a former council colleague and unsuccessful mayoral candidate last month. “When an issue arises, most of the time she tries to figure out which side will get her the most votes and then takes that side.”

As proof, Von Haden points to McClellan’s flip-flop on the question of establishing a redevelopment agency in Vista. In 1985, when the issue was placed on the agenda, McClellan declined to take a stand. A year later she supported redevelopment, but only when it became apparent that voters favored the urban renewal effort by a wide margin, Von Haden said.

Councilman Gene Asmus said, “Gloria’s been criticized as being too quick to lead the charge of some small group that wanted to go a certain direction. She has been criticized for doing things that sometimes are not in the best interests of the total community but build political support for her.”

McClellan concedes that she often heeds the wishes of her constituents. But she believes that’s a good thing. Listening and responding to the public is the very essence of the democratic process, she says.

“If there’s one thing over the years that I’ve learned, it’s that people are very smart,” McClellan said during a recent interview at her spacious Vista home. “They know what they want, and I listen. That’s the name of the game. If you’re sitting up there telling everybody what’s good for them, that makes ‘em mad to start with. Who wants that?”

To practice that political philosophy, McClellan relies on what are undoubtedly the best set of connections in the city. As both friends and foes tell it, McClellan seems to know just about everyone in Vista and is continually on the phone soliciting opinions or listening to complaints.

“Gloria dedicates all her waking time to this city,” said Marie Malone, a Vista resident who has worked with her on numerous issues. “I have found her to be very, very dedicated. She truly has tried to serve all of the community.”

During recesses at Vista’s often lengthy council meetings, McClellan must run a gauntlet of friends and admirers, eager to pump her hand or just share some news. Dressed typically in a red blazer, knee-length skirt and frilly, high-necked white blouse, the mayor is stopped so often by constituents that it sometimes becomes a challenge for her to reach the drinking fountain for a gulp of water.

It is her constituents--the public--that she holds above all else. McClellan may cross swords occasionally with a group of residents, but she always takes pains to later extend an olive branch.

“The issues come and go, but people are here forever,” she said. “They may be angry at me, but I always try to reach out to them.”

That sort of eternally optimistic attitude is something that’s always been a part of Gloria McClellan.

Born in 1925 in Rolapp, Utah, a tiny copper-mining town that is no longer on the map, she was the youngest of three children--and, she admits, the one who received the lion’s share of the attention.

The family’s life, though, was a tough one and only got harder as the Depression set in. Her father struggled through jobs, while her mother worked as a seamstress and raised the children as Mormons.

At an early age, McClellan’s family moved to Los Angeles. But when she was 13, her parents separated, and she moved to Salt Lake City with her mother. It was there she met Donald (Mac) McClellan.

They were married when she was 17, and Mac, who had joined the Marines, was transferred soon after to Camp Pendleton, bringing his new bride. Gloria McClellan got her first glimpse of Vista.

“I loved Vista from the day we got here,” she recalled. “There were little dirt roads. We’d buy fresh fruit. I fell in love with the community.”

The family, which was soon to include four children, lived on and off in Vista between stints at other bases until they bought a house in the community in 1957.

As the children grew, McClellan began doing more and more community work, first as a Sheriff’s Department matron, then as a board member for a local home for the mentally retarded. But she soon realized it wasn’t enough.

“I could see that if I really wanted to get things accomplished, I had to be on the legislative end,” McClellan said. “That was really where it was happening.”

In 1970, she decided to run for City Council. Councilman Asmus, who then was Vista’s city manager, recalled that McClellan was so raw that she didn’t know better than to ask him to run her campaign.

“That showed how much she knew about politics,” Asmus recalled with a chuckle. “She was a total political novice.”

Predictably, McClellan lost that first campaign. But she learned fast, attending every council meeting for the next two years and serving on the city’s Traffic Advisory Commission.

It was a different story in 1972. McClellan ran a smart campaign, stressing her desire to represent every single Vista resident. She earned a council seat, and she has never looked back.

From the start, the issue that has captured McClellan’s attention--and earned the most headlines--has been her ongoing crusade against all things she sees as immoral.

During her first year on the council, a local drive-in theater began showing racy movies.

“This is the first time in my life that I saw a 50-foot nudie on the screen,” she said. “It was right next to the hospital. The women’s clubs, the churches, the doctors, I’m the first one they called. They saw these 50-foot nudies and said we can’t have this.”

After several years of complaining, McClellan finally decided enough was enough. In 1975, she persuaded a local sheriff’s deputy to stuff his underage daughter in a car with several other youths, then have them go buy tickets to the films. When the deputy came before the City Council with his revelations, the resulting uproar made the theater owner end the films.

It didn’t stop there. McClellan’s next target was a massage parlor. She and the other council members finally shut it by requiring that all employees have 1,000 hours of specialized training.

Next, the councilwoman set her sights on an adult bookstore. She began picketing the business soon after it opened and was joined by local church groups. It went on every day for nine months. By 1978, the owner agreed to close.

Most recently, McClellan has vented her wrath on the Playboy Channel and its spicy, R-rated fare carried on cable television.

“We had kids skipping school, like 100 at a time, and holing up in some empty house to watch the Playboy Channel,” McClellan said. “You can’t expose your youth to that kind of thing and expect them to grow up normally.”

In 1984, McClellan helped push a ballot measure to outlaw the use of the city’s public right of way for transmission of such programming. The measure lost in a tight race in November of that year, but the cable company decided to stop offering the Playboy Channel just a few months later because of a lack of viewers.

Though many of McClellan’s supporters say the mayor went out on a limb to wage her moral fights, critics such as Von Haden maintain that she was simply doing it to please a segment of voters. Many opponents see nearly all of McClellan’s actions as political moves, efforts to maintain her power base and to remain in the limelight.

In particular, Von Haden complains that the mayor has walked a tightrope on the issue of development in Vista, talking like a slow-growther but voting another way. “She gives the impression that she’s concerned about rapid growth, but she votes for all the projects,” Von Haden said.

McClellan counters that she judges developments on their merits and has rejected a fair share of projects through the years. The mayor stresses that she has taken part in decisions that have helped ease growth in Vista, pointing to a move in the mid-1970s to change zoning in the city to allow an ultimate population of less than 100,000, instead of the 250,000 permitted at the time.

But foes have made life difficult on occasion. In 1984, then-Mayor Mike Flick and other opponents pushed to prohibit council members from serving more than two terms, a move that most City Hall insiders say was designed to get McClellan out of office. McClellan fought it in court, arguing that it was unconstitutional, and won.

McClellan admits to once toying with the idea of seeking higher office, but says she is content now to remain where she is.

“I’m just really happy right here,” McClellan said. “I like it right here in Vista.”