Tom O’Leary’s podium-pounding riles council members, but it gets results.

Soon after moving to the Los Angeles area in 1963, Tom O’Leary, then an employee of the U.S. Department of Defense, went for a drive with his wife, Dorothy, to find a place to settle down.

The search ended in Redondo Beach.

“I got to the top of Beryl Avenue and looked down on the ocean,” recalls O’Leary, now 75. “I said to my wife: ‘This is it.’ ”

It was a good move for the O’Learys, but not a happy one for Southern California Edison.

Since the early 1970s, O’Leary has led what at times has been a one-man crusade. The objective: to force the city to crack down on Edison for air and noise pollution from the utility’s Redondo Beach power station.

For years he seemed to march to the sound of a different drummer, but today residents and city officials appear to be falling in step. In little more than a month, City Council members have decided to:

* Prosecute Edison for violating the local noise ordinance.

* Oppose as environmentally unsound a merger between Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. that would boost electric output at the Redondo Beach station.

* Challenge Edison’s plans for local storage of large quantities of anhydrous ammonia, a potentially toxic substance, as part of a new pollution control system.

O’Leary prodded the council every step of the way, using old-fashioned political organizing and the confrontational, podium-pounding speeches for which he has become a legend in City Hall.

Some city leaders bridle at O’Leary’s methods.

“When you contradict him, he gets (angry),” says Councilman Ron Cawdrey, a frequent recipient of O’Leary barbs. “He’s a hard-headed Irishman. He reminds me of my father. There’s no reasoning with him.”

Still, Cawdrey acknowledges that O’Leary succeeded in getting the council to address tough problems stemming from the Edison plant. Mayor Brad Parton, describing an often-repeated scene at council meetings, agrees.

“It gets to be 11:30 at night and everybody’s ready to go home,” Parton says. “Then Tom starts walking to the podium and everybody’s thinking, ‘Uh-oh.’ His consistency and perseverance reminds us that these Edison issues are real, and we need to deal with them.”

For O’Leary, dealing with stubborn bureaucracies is nothing new. He worked as a management analyst for the Defense Department from 1954 to 1970, and as president of a Los Angeles area local of the American Federation of Government Employees from 1970 to 1974, he says.

Since retiring and immersing himself in community issues in his 70s, O’Leary, if anything, is putting in longer hours than when he was a salaried employee, say those close to him.

Dorothy O’Leary says her husband places and receives so many calls on council issues that she had to install a second phone line in their house.

“I’ve told him that if he had worked at his other jobs like he works at this, he would have been president for sure,” she says, adding that she sometimes wonders about his stamina as she watches him haranguing the City Council on local cable television.

“I do worry about it a little bit because he’s 75, and it’s upsetting,” she says. “But I know he’s getting his point across, and he’s very happy he’s doing it. He loves being in the middle of things. It’ll probably keep him living till he’s 100. He doesn’t have time to get sick.”

O’Leary had lobbied successfully to institute cable TV coverage of council meetings and to defeat a local redevelopment program. But all along, his main interest has been the Edison plant.

In the 1970s, his battles with Edison officials over soot fallout prompted Joe Richardson, a former equipment and control operator at the Edison station, to come forward with information supporting O’Leary’s case.

“I had a feeling this guy needed help,” recalls Richardson, now production supervisor for the city of Ventura’s Water Department. “He was right, and he was getting stepped on by the company.”

The council’s Sept. 25 decision to oppose the Edison merger provides a recent example of O’Leary-style lobbying at work.

For the meeting, he mustered spokesmen from several statewide groups that are fighting the merger, as well as locals from neighborhoods worried about the possibility of increased plant noise and air pollution.

After hearing their testimony--and several strident interventions by O’Leary--the council voted to oppose the merger, a stronger action than the city staff had recommended.

“Staff was giving the council an easy way out, a way of taking a firm stand but not taking a firm stand,” Parton says. “If (O’Leary) had not been so persistent, we might not have taken the extra step.”

To O’Leary, the key is unrelenting pressure.

“I don’t intend at 75 years old to become a diplomat,” he says. “I have seen people go to the City Council and make reasoned arguments and get nowhere. You know what impresses city councils? A great throng of human bodies looking at them.”