Former Associate Denies Croton Held Arts Post He Claimed on Resume

A former associate heatedly denied Thursday that Los Angeles city department head Fred Croton held the job that he said he did when both worked for an arts foundation in Sharon, Conn., several years ago.

The dispute over job experience is at the core of Mayor Tom Bradley’s move to oust Croton, general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department.

Humor columnist Robert Yoakum, one of the most damaging witnesses against Croton so far before a Civil Service hearing officer, testified for more than four hours that Croton was a minor player in the largely volunteer creative arts organization during the early 1970s. For a few months in 1973, Yoakum said, Croton held the position of vice president of the foundation’s board of trustees.

‘Full Responsibilities’

The 53-year-old Croton wrote on his Los Angeles job application that between March, 1973, and July, 1975, he was director in Sharon with “full responsibilities for administrative and artistic activities of a year-round performing art and visual arts center.”

Never did Croton hold the position of Sharon Creative Arts Foundation director, nor did he receive the $24,000 annual salary cited on his controversial job application to the City of Los Angeles in June, 1980, Yoakum said.

“We were always broke,” Yoakum said of the foundation, adding that there was so little money that any proposed expenditure over $200 had to be approved by the board of trustees.

Croton’s allegedly false claims of job experience are the main reason that Bradley has said he wants to fire him. The mayor said his decision followed an 18-month investigation into Croton’s work record. Bradley said that Croton is lying about his job history and that he actually worked only part-time in Sharon.

At the same time, Bradley said that Croton failed to tell city personnel he was working full-time for a party goods firm during the period when he said he was director of the foundation.

The Los Angeles City Council in the coming weeks will cast the deciding vote on whether Croton will retain his $58,756-a-year job. Until then, Croton remains on a paid leave of absence that began last month.

Yoakum, a member of the foundation’s board during that period and its president in 1976, said that he became angry when he learned recently of Croton’s claims. He explained that a longtime friend of his, Ann Hoskins, who has since died, held the post Croton says was his.

“Anyone who pretended to do that job that she was doing so well for so many years is despicable,” Yoakum said, glaring at Croton and his attorney, Richard Grey. “I can’t see it as anything but deliberate falsification.”

When Grey asked Yoakum if his main interest in testifying was to see that Croton was fired, Yoakum shot back, “My interest in Mr. Croton would have to be measured by an electron microscope.”

But Yoakum did acknowledge that after learning of Croton’s claims he spent several days poring over old newspaper clippings and talking to people to compile a history of the Sharon Creative Arts Foundation in the 1970s.

And he said he repeatedly urged Judson Philips, who Croton listed as his immediate supervisor during the period, to tell city investigators that Croton had misrepresented the facts. Philips, 86, is not likely to testify in the hearings because of failing health, officials have said.