‘If you have been blessed with a...

‘If you have been blessed with a good memory, tenacity, concern and an anger at injustice, you have an obligation to use them.’

For someone who once saw herself as a loser, Arline Mathews has led a lot of successful crusades.

One of the first--and perhaps the best-known--was the meat boycott she launched with a friend in 1973 to protest rising prices at markets in her San Fernando Valley neighborhood. That earned Mathews some national attention and “proved that you could fight city hall,” she said the other day.

In 1975, the Chatsworth art gallery owner and mother of three got involved in the fight to eliminate government-authorized minimum price levels on dairy products, gathering 15,000 signatures on petitions to support legislation under debate in Sacramento. That eventually led to the elimination of minimum pricing, although laws still prohibit retailers from selling dairy products below cost.

In 1976, Mathews championed the cause of “Dirty Sally,” an 84-year-old Pentacostal minister named Hilary Moss. Moss had been made a ward of Ventura County and placed in a rest home, virtually incommunicado, after officials failed to persuade her to clean up the back yard of her home in Simi Valley.

“They shouldn’t have done that,” Mathews said last week. “She had a right to be an aged hippie, if that’s what she wanted.”

Although Mathews hadn’t planned it that way, she ended up being named the old woman’s conservator, and Moss was permitted to move back into her littered home.

“She was still a dirty slob,” Mathews said. “But she was a lot happier than when she was in a rest home.”

There were other causes for Mathews in those days, too, battles to improve conditions in state hospitals, to halt strip mining in the Los Padres National Forest and to improve the handling of victims in rape cases.

Along the way, she tried her hand at politics. That didn’t work out so well.

She won the Democratic nomination in what then was California’s 20th Congressional District in 1974, but lost the general election--by a decisive 3-2 margin--to the Republican incumbent, Barry Goldwater Jr.

Two years later, she won the Democratic nomination in the 37th Assembly District, again losing to her Republican opponent. In 1980, she tried the same thing, with the same results.

“We’d thought grass-roots support would do it,” Mathews said. “We found out that it takes money. . . .

“Another thing was that I always ran in conservative districts. . . . Not too smart.”

But these setbacks didn’t slow her down much.

In the years that followed, she backed the efforts of a Zionist organization to spread information about Israel, pressed for greater accountability by the Federal Reserve Board and bent the ear of the state attorney general about what she felt was unethical advertising.

At 61, she’s still at it, bugging the news media and public officials about whatever she feels is wrong, unfair or worth doing something about.

“I feel a duty,” she explained. “If you have been blessed with a good memory, tenacity, concern and an anger at injustice, you have an obligation to use them.”

Mathews said she was abused as a child--an upbringing that left her, as a young woman, with a sense of worthlessness.

“I felt I was a burden, just in the way,” she said. “I had a terrible feeling of inferiority.”

But a few years later, she said, while working at a modeling school in Denver, she found that she could help people. That led to her first successful cause--a traffic light for a busy intersection near a school.

She said the rest just seemed to follow, “and one day I said to God:

“ ‘Maybe you didn’t make a mistake by creating Arline, after all.’ ”