‘Tell him you have no place to live and Mort cries.’ : Diamond in the Rough

Things were jumping at the Pizza Pub.

Music played, the Dodgers were winning on television, a mother threatened to beat her screaming baby into mush and the Mort Diamond Fund Raiser was calling for another round of pepperoni. It was a night brimming with warmth, God, hope and mozzarella cheese.

Then why, I hear you ask, was I there?

It’s this way. I was ambling around the Valley one day in a manner peculiar to suburban journalists when I saw a sign that said, “Mort Diamond for City Council.”

“That name,” I said to my wife, “rings a bell.” I often speak in cliches while off-duty.

“Probably someone you’ve ruined,” she said.

“No! I remember! He’s the hot dog vendor who’s fighting City Hall. The man’s got spunk!”

“You hate spunk.”

“Not in him. He’s a champion of the little people.”

“You’ve never been crazy about them either.”

Well, she’s partly right. I don’t encourage friendship with those who smell faintly of lube oil and cheeseburgers, but I am concerned with their welfare. And if anyone out there is capable of representing them at all, Mort’s the one.

I tracked him down the other night at the aforementioned fund-raiser in a Canoga Park pizza parlor just down the block from the Duke of Bourbon Liquors.

About 50 supporters, who had paid $10 a person for all the pizza they could eat, were gathered around wooden tables toasting Mort with tumblers of Budweiser and Diet Coke.

I abstained from eating simply because I am emotionally incapable of putting pizza in my mouth, but I did enjoy the . . . well . . . gritty nature of the evening.

Mort is running against Joy Picus, a quasi-feminist with limited perceptions, who counts among her supporters many of the big land developers in the Valley. She smiles for them and they, in turn, contribute handsomely to her campaigns.

In 1985, for instance, Picus spent $150,000 winning reelection. It was a sum that represented only half of her campaign chest but equaled the total amount five other candidates spent trying to defeat her.

Mort Diamond, on the other hand, has managed to gather only about $1,000, a good deal of it in nickels and dimes contributed by those who buy his hot dogs at the corner of Sherman Way and Owensmouth Avenue.

“Mort,” I said, “are you serious about all this?”

“I wouldn’t be in it if I wasn’t,” he said firmly.

“He’s a fighter,” his campaign manager added.

Her name is Merilyn Ulrich, with an “e.” She spelled the name carefully, watching that an “a” didn’t slip in.

Merilyn operates a bookstore on the corner where Mort sells hot dogs from a cart and was the one who suggested that he ought to run for City Council next year.

“Mort is truly a man of the people,” she said. “He’s out there with them every day at his hot dog cart often giving free food to the homeless, paying their bills and trying to get them off the street. Tell him you have no place to live and Mort cries.”

The candidate lowered his head in response. He reminded me of Bozo Miller, a tidy fat man I knew in Oakland who is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having eaten 27 chickens at one sitting. Mort had dropped 75 pounds off his still ample girth in the past few months and was looking sharp.

When I asked about his platform, he handed me a position paper produced by the Mort Diamond Committee that generally places him on the side of morality, little children, flowers, renters and old people.

“Mort is less interested in the national problem of toxic waste,” the tract says, “and more interested in whether you and your family can enter and leave your homes safely.”

It also mentioned the “self-agrondizement” of Joy Picus, though I feel certain the committee meant to say aggrandizement . No problem. “Self” was spelled absolutely right.

Picus, by the way, was not held in high esteem at the Pizza Pub.

“Look at a list of her contributors,” Mort said, holding it close to a flickering candle on the table so I could see. “Developer, developer, real estate, development company, developer, development company, developer, developer. . . .”

“He spends hours in the library studying city problems,” Merilyn said proudly. “People laughed when he first announced his candidacy. Now they call him ‘Councilman’ on the block.”

There is, I suppose, that tendency to scoff at a hot dog vendor who presumes upon small reputation to challenge political entrenchment. God knows there have been more articulate men at grander fund-raisers.

But there is something about Mort Diamond that earns respect, a willingness to attack the guarded walls of incumbency armed only with a notion of fair play that has nothing to do with either logic or any profound knowledge of precisely how to breach the walls.

I may not be big on spunk, pizza or little people, but I’ll hoist a dry martini in a decent restaurant to anyone who is willing to march off to war unarmed and underfunded while the rest of us only sit and wonder.