Gadfly,85,Earns Long Beach Council’s Respect If Not Its Action on Homeless Issue

When Henry Graber tucks the handle of his cane into his pocket and gazes over the podium at members of the Long Beach City Council, they know--just as surely as they know how many votes make a quorum--that they are going to get chewed out.

For Graber, an 85-year-old socialist, the revolution “don’t stop.” He preaches it with fervor, humor and a gravelly voice hoarsened by age, routinely chastising the council “for not doing anything for the people.”

A lifelong union activist and member of the Socialist Party, Graber seizes the cause of the people with the persistence of a dog gnawing a bone. His voice climbs and dips with emphasis when he lectures the council on one of his dearest subjects, the homeless.

“The hard-liners in Germany and Poland, Gorby and many more, are making concessions. Even South Africa is making concessions. But not the City Council,” he proclaimed sarcastically as he recently condemned the council’s stance on the homeless. “That is why I say a Labor Party is not only the solution for the poor and the homeless, but for all workers . . . .”

Ever the advocate for the formation of an American Labor Party, he informed the council last month that it was forcing a “yellow dog contract” on the police union when the council voted to declare an impasse in bargaining talks and adopt the city’s last contract offer.

He told the council that President Bush’s war on drugs “has several major purposes which all have little to do with suppressing the lucrative drug business. First of all, the war is designed to cover up the fact that the government has no workable plan to provide the jobs, housing, schools, hospitals and drug treatment clinics that the people in our inner cities desperately need . . . .”

In perhaps the ultimate statement on the city bureaucracy, Graber commented during a discussion of the city’s revised general plan, “On top of this, there is that.”

As for council members: “I can’t remember one thing that any of them did that amounted to anything,” Graber said in a recent interview. “Most of the members, I would say, are bought and paid for by the real estate developers.”

Yet although council members can barely contain their contempt for some of the gadflies who routinely take them to task, they have a soft spot for Graber. They generally ignore his advice, but they listen to him with a glimmer of a smile on their faces.

“What comes through,” said Vice Mayor Wallace Edgerton, “. . . is the genuineness of the man. He is obviously truly concerned, and there doesn’t seem to be any self-interest.”

“He’s not an angry young man. He’s an angry elderly man,” continued Edgerton, chuckling over the way Graber refers to “the lord,” only to later clarify that he means the landlord.

Graber has been crusading for social change for some 60 years. He is the son of a German coal miner, migrated to Chicago when he was 2, went to work at the age of 14 and helped bring the union above ground at International Harvester in Chicago, where he did sheet metal work for 30 years.

When he started at International Harvester in the 1930s, he earned 40 cents for each tractor fender he hammered into shape, a wage of less than $7 a day. Employees became eligible for one week of vacation after five years of work. He remembers the name of the Chicago police officer, Capt. Barnes, who had him arrested three times in one day for participating in picket lines. During the Depression, he and his buddies would watch out for evictions in their neighborhood. “When the sheriff would leave, we’d put the furniture back in the apartment. That used to be a riot.”

During a hunger march for more government benefits, Graber and his wife pushed their child “in a baby carriage 7 1/2 miles one way and 7 1/2 miles back home again.”

He retired in 1965, and in 1973 he and his wife moved to Long Beach, where he had often visited his sisters. He started attending council meetings after his wife died in 1984, just about the time the homeless population began to spill over the sidewalks.

“That’s what got me started, the homeless question and the City Council,” Graber recalled. “I think if they’d acted a little bit on the homeless question, I don’t think I would have bothered much with the City Council meetings after that.”