Measure N Seemed to Seek Out Fred Plumer

If you look closely at the sidewalk in front of Reuben’s restaurant across from the new airport terminal, you will see--faintly engraved in the concrete--”Fred, ’71.” The scratching was made in another life by a man very much in the public eye in the city of Irvine over the past year: Pastor Fred Plumer of Irvine’s United Church of Christ.

Inscribing his name in front of a favorite Newport Beach watering hole is history of which Fred Plumer is neither proud nor ashamed. He left his mark in many other places and ways--not always warmly recalled--in Orange County two decades ago, that might as well be two millenniums when weighed against the distance he has come since then. These are facts of his life, and he dealt with them matter of factly when we met for lunch at Reuben’s last week.

Although we had postulated identical positions during the recent bloodletting in Irvine over Measure N--which denies homosexuals the protection of Irvine’s Human Rights Ordinance--I had never met Plumer until the Sunday before our lunch when I visited his church to listen to a wonderfully rational talk by Prof. James Nelson of the United Theological Seminary of Minneapolis. Nelson--who has written several books on the subject and whose scholarship has been widely praised--spoke on Christian ethics and sexuality with warmth, lucidity and authority. He gave his lecture without a fee because word of the yeoman service of Fred Plumer and his congregation in the Measure N fight had filtered all the way back to Minnesota.

Some local citizens who knew Fred Plumer in his early Orange County years are probably still rubbing their eyes at his reincarnation. Until 10 years ago, very little of his history would have predicted such a turn.

As he told it to me over lunch, Plumer grew up in a middle-class family in West Covina and married his high school sweetheart while he was in college at UC Riverside. Since he had one child and another on the way when he graduated, he started a janitorial-service company in Newport Beach to produce enough money to support his family and to put him through graduate school in political science, which he wanted to teach at the college level.

Within two years, the janitorial company was prospering sufficiently for Plumer to apply to graduate school at UC Irvine--and he says the whole course of his life changed when he was turned down in spite of impressive credentials from UC Riverside. He went back to his company, built it up to 250 employees, and became a man about town, leaving his imprint on more than the sidewalk in front of Reuben’s. He prospered financially, but his marriage broke up after five years (and two daughters, both of whom have grown up to become world-class runners).

“I’ve always enjoyed life,” he told me, “but I didn’t understand then that what I was doing was very destructive, a kind of running away.”

In the early 1970s, he sold his company and became a partner in a commercial-development venture that went broke in the economic recession of 1973. Plumer married his secretary (his present wife, Charron), moved to Colorado and started over literally in a log cabin. There, he became a successful restaurateur and began to repeat the same cycle. “Slick Fred,” he recalls wistfully, “was about to lose once again some things that were very important to him. But this time, I knew how much it was going to cost.”

So he turned to the local United Church of Christ pastor for help--and found it, “although I hadn’t been to church for 20 years.”

There was no lightning revelation, no transcendent vision, “just a full acceptance of the responsibility for my actions that brought an incredible release I’m still trying to figure out. But I knew it was from a power beyond me.”

His wife realized that the change was real and profound, and she prodded him to pursue the goal he had always wanted: graduate school. But this time, he chose theology rather than political science. He enrolled in the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and got a janitorial job on the side, and Charron found secretarial work. Both of them got involved with the local United Church of Christ.

When Fred graduated, he badly wanted to work in an inner-city church, and he applied to several. When none of them came through quickly, he was approached by a small and struggling church in Irvine. He visited with enormous misgivings--”it was an area that seemed to epitomize everything we wanted to avoid”--but he found a group of “wonderfully creative, hungry people,” and he stayed.

That was six years ago, when the church consisted of 30 people meeting at a local school. Today, it is a vital group of 200 meeting in a new church structure that members built themselves--under the direction of a newly minted general contractor named Fred Plumer.

Plumer didn’t seek out a leadership role in the Measure N struggle. He says he first got involved when the Human Rights Ordinance was being drafted and a City Council member called to find out his position on it, then asked if he would round up support from other pastors to counter the aggressive opposition of the fundamentalist churches. He called “lots of pastors who either didn’t agree with the ordinance or said they didn’t want to touch it because it was too controversial. I felt pretty lonely.”

But he also decided to take a strong public position after “a whole lot of fundamentalists showed up at a City Council meeting to oppose the ordinance. There was a form of energy in that room that blew me away because it was so full of hate. It was my first experience with this sort of thing, and I found my voice shaking when I spoke out. It didn’t make me mad. It made my cry because the man whose teachings we all professed to believe and who taught us to love was being so badly distorted.”

He thought the controversy was over after the ordinance was passed, but it heated up even more when Measure N was put on the ballot. “I didn’t really want to get drawn into it again, but when I went to the gay pride festival and heard and felt the hatred of the protesters--all in the name of Jesus--I knew my moment of truth had come. I went to my board and announced from my pulpit that I was being pulled into this and I no longer had a choice. If it’s a problem, come and talk to me. Only two couples did--with thoughtful questions that we dealt with. But I kept asking myself if this was good for the growth of my little church--or for me. The church doesn’t look kindly on 49-year-old unemployed pastors.”

He has his answers now. The church grew by almost 50%, along with the resolution of the congregation. “The people in my church,” Plumer says, “became more lively and confident and clear that we had a role to play in the community and that role was connected to what I had been saying theologically.”

It continued to be a lonely path. Among his pastoral associates, he says that only Susan Klein from the Irvine Episcopal Church got into the trenches with him. There were threatening letters and threatening phone calls and personal attacks in the press. (A Register editorial called him “one of those handsome ‘progressive’ clergymen who can speak of unconditional love and send the church ladies into swoons”). But there was also a standing ovation for Plumer from the audience at a City Council meeting when he expressed disappointment at the passage of Measure N and spoke about “the hope of getting this community back into balance.”

“Most of the people who supported Measure N,” Plumer told me, “fall into one of three groups. First, there are a significant number of people who are confused about the issues and believe the lies and horror stories served up by Measure N proponents. Second, there are politically conservative people who don’t care about the basic issues but just don’t want to be told what they can or cannot do by any level of government. And, finally, there are the fundamentalists who are either afraid of their own sexuality or are caring, conservative religious people who have been brought up to believe that the Bible supports discrimination against homosexuals.”

From a dozen or so conversations with members of Plumer’s congregation after the Nelson lecture, I know that if an effort is made to restore the original Human Rights Ordinance in Irvine, they will go into the fray united, committed and battle-hardened.

“We feel very strongly,” Plumer says, “about standing in solidarity among these people as Jesus demonstrated over and over. When that happens, people move past themselves and find God in a very positive way.”