NEWSMAKERS ’90 : The Year’s Triumphs, Tragedies : Crime Won Rounds, but So Did Progress, Humanity

A year ago, Long Beach and Southeast cities stood with the rest of the world on the brink of a new decade and talked about a new beginning.

A couple of dreams came true--a 19-mile light-rail line hurtled Long Beach to the forefront of modern transportation, and two Latino council candidates broke a racial barrier at Huntington Park City Hall.

But many more hopes were crushed under the weight of a thousand problems one decade seemed to bequeath the next. Crime soared, graffiti exploded, business slumped and war loomed.

It was a year when a homeless man in Compton named Eddie Randolph was given a poignant burial by employees of a city that couldn’t help him. When one woman overcame a desert and a dictator to return safely home to a town where another woman--eight months’ pregnant--couldn’t survive the gang violence on her own street.

As ever, it was a year of laughter, absurdity, sorrow and despair. The homeless rose up, the sailors shipped out, a big building fell down.

Some La Habra Heights homeowners spent a year fighting over a couple of pigs, and a mouse named Mickey spent thousands of dollars planning a $2-billion amusement park it might never build.

So, in case you missed it, here’s what happened:

If there was one group that seemed to succeed above all the rest, it would have to be the criminal element. Crime rates shot up in nearly every city, gangs bred like bugs, taggers splattered graffiti all over lampposts, brick walls and freeways.

So common were murders and other violent crimes that only the weird, the comical and the unthinkable made the news, and there was never a lack for those.

Such was the case of Kentzie Pope, who was eight months’ pregnant when a gang bullet police believe was intended for somebody else struck her as she stood in front of her Long Beach apartment. Doctors kept her alive long enough to deliver a baby girl. Twenty minutes later, Kentzie Pope was dead.

There was Joseph Brian Socha, the man police say declared himself St. Peter, then went about town raping Long Beach prostitutes, slicing off their hair and carving inverted crucifixes into their backs. He has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.

There were Charles and Lena Mae Brantley, the Las Vegas couple police dubbed Bonnie and Clyde after they allegedly took $50,000 from 10 banks in 15 months.

Not a community escaped the explosion in violent crime this year. But in Long Beach, it took a quantum leap, greater than that recorded in any other major city in California. At the same time, state officials reported Long Beach police had the worst record for solving serious crimes in 1989, particularly rape, robbery and burglary.

The dubious distinction trained an embarrassing spotlight on Chief Lawrence Binkley, who some officers said was greatly to blame for low morale and wasteful deployment of officers. The chief responded that he has spent three years trying to shape up a department that the city has neglected for more than a decade. “We’re catching up and catching up is a bear,” Binkley said, adding optimistically that “help is on the way.”

Police departments around the county complained they were wracked with more complaints than their officers could handle. So crowded were the courthouses that some cases were tried in hotel rooms. In some communities, citizens took matters into their own hands.

Hawaiian Gardens turned for help to the Guardian Angels, a self-styled group of crime busters who patrol the streets wearing red berets and tough expressions. “We can’t afford to pay any more for law enforcement,” Mayor Pro Tem Domenic Ruggeri said after the tiny city, one-mile square, was hit with a crime wave. “We thought this would be a good idea.”

In one Long Beach neighborhood, a young father dressed himself in bum’s clothing and carried a walkie-talkie in search of kids scribbling graffiti. Little old ladies adopted the code names “Cagney and Lacey” and set out on patrol for suspicious activity.

In Naples, a neighborhood of islands where gondolas glide past picture windows, the rich considered hiring their own security guards to buy protection if the city couldn’t provide it. The idea was later abandoned.

The year 1990 came and went without anyone finding a solution to crime, homelessness, poverty, gangs. But a handful of otherwise anonymous people made a difference.

Two days before his 11th birthday, a boy named Terrell walked up to the Long Beach City Council and said he was tired of being harassed by gangs. Jeanne Corbett, a Downey housewife, filed one civil rights complaint after another and helped force the county to take costly steps to give handicapped students a decent education.

Mandy Halstead only lived to the age of 4, but she left a legacy. The county is finally putting a stoplight at the treacherous intersection where she was struck and killed by a car on the way to parents’ night at McKibben Elementary in an unincorporated area south of Whittier. “I’m sorry my daughter had to die to do it,” Terri Halstead said sadly. “But now other children in the community are safe, I hope.”

Not a single 911 dispatcher could understand Maria Salazar as she shouted into the phone in broken English that three masked men were robbing the beauty shop across the street from her Long Beach restaurant. None of the operators on duty spoke Spanish.

Salazar, an immigrant from El Salvador, promptly organized residents and businesses in her neighborhood and demanded that more bilingual 911 operators be hired.

For a brief period this year, even the dispossessed found a political voice, mostly through the efforts of a welfare mother named Martha Bryson. Out of a run-down one-bedroom apartment in Long Beach, her baby daughter in tow, Bryson organized a ragtag bunch of street people into a union of activists who demanded that the poor be treated with dignity. They protested the city’s controversial trash incinerator, the strict rules at a local shelter, the city’s lack of public toilets and a decent place to shower.

Several weeks ago, Bryson moved to a small town in Oregon, saying she was fed up with a city deaf to the needs of the poor. And most of her riled troops returned to a life of quiet desperation.

In schools across the southeast county, administrators looked to everything from bingo to uniforms to year-round classes to improve an educational system that seemed to be failing thousands of children.

In Compton, bulldozers at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School finally plowed down rows of shabby, hut-like buildings that had served as classrooms for scores of students. They were eroded by termites and dry rot. One expert likened the consistency of the walls to Jell-O. Teachers complained that the heels of their shoes sometimes poked through the floors. An engineering report had confirmed the buildings were an earthquake hazard. Still, it was three years before new portable classrooms were brought in to accommodate some of the county’s poorest children.

In Lynwood, school district officials struggled with dirty campuses, a lack of teachers and classrooms so crowded that the state fined the district $360,000 in 1989 for violating limits on class sizes. In desperation, the Board of Education spent $195,000 more to buy out the contract of Supt. LaVoneia Steele, who had presided over the troubled district for more than four years.

Inside classrooms all over the county, students struggled against shrinking budgets, overcrowding and teachers who couldn’t speak their language. At home, they fought poverty, gangs and, sometimes, hunger. Even so, many excelled.

Viviana Arellano was smuggled across the border at age 2 and grew up in a housing project in an area of Long Beach considered so violent that school officials built a 10-foot wall to protect students at a nearby school from stray bullets. She graduated from Jordan High School in Long Beach this year with straight A’s and a mountain of scholarships to UC Berkeley.

But perhaps the most extraordinary story of all is that of Jose Antonio Martinez’s remarkable quest for a high school diploma.

He left his job in a Mexican factory at 15 and came to America. He picked beets in Idaho, slept in his car, swept floors in Miami and saved enough money to enroll in Bell Gardens High School. With no family support and a few words of English, he held down a job in an office-supply store and maintained a B average. This year, at 19, he graduated.

“I knew that, no matter what, I was going to make it,” Martinez said. “I didn’t care if I had to wash dishes or sweep floors, I knew I could make it alone.”

The political winds seemed to blow in every direction in this neck of the county. A few veteran politicians were embraced by voters, several got the boot and a handful of veterans decided to call it quits.

In Huntington Park, Raul Perez and Luis Hernandez became the first Latino councilmen ever to be elected in that overwhelmingly Latino city. Their victories shattered a racial barrier in a community where an ethnic minority had become the vast majority, 90% of the population, but was still unable to cross the threshold into City Hall.

In Compton, longtime mayor Walter R. Tucker died of cancer at 66, ending three decades of public service. Known for wearing cowboy boots with business suits, Tucker remained fiercely loyal to a city nearly consumed by poverty and gang violence.

The year brought a string of resignations by veteran politicians such as Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins, D-Los Angeles, the senior black member of the House and the first black ever sent to Congress from a Western state.

Two of the founding members of the La Habra Heights City Council--Mayor Jean G. Good and Councilman Gene W. Beckman--declined to run again in the rural community, which pays $1 a month for the job. “Ninety-three cents after taxes,” Beckman noted.

Jacqueline Rynerson, who helped incorporate the city of Lakewood nearly 40 years ago, bowed out of public life after 12 years of City Council service. And Jan Hall, the only woman on the Long Beach City Council, decided three terms were enough.

In South Gate, the electorate placed three newcomers on the five-member City Council. The new regime brought a jolting shift in power and within months, the city manager, assistant city manager, city attorney and public works director had all departed.

State lawmakers may be fretting over a new law limiting terms of incumbents, but Cerritos officials already are living with it. Diana Needham and Barry Rabbitt, who had a combined 32 years of service on the Cerritos City Council, were forced out of politics after a Superior Court judge upheld a referendum barring more than two consecutive terms of service.

That was hardly the problem in Long Beach, where Mayor Ernie Kell, who has served for 15 years on the council, was elected to a second term as mayor. So close was the match, though, that Kell had already made a concession speech and said a sad goodby when a last-minute batch of votes flowed in and put him over the top.

“I’m winning the (expletive) thing!” an incredulous Kell cried, punching the air with a clenched fist and a little kick of his foot. “Bring out the cake.”

The threat of war hung over an Arab desert thousands of miles away, thousands of sailors headed to the Persian Gulf, and Long Beach was reminded that it is still a Navy town.

Not a single shot has been fired, but lives have been fundamentally changed. Steve Kennedy struggled to cook spaghetti dinners for his children when his Navy wife went to sea. Five-year-old Zachary Taylor was haunted with nightmares about his daddy’s ship blowing up.

Mary Rimdzius, a 45-year-old Long Beach widow who moved to Kuwait for a change of scenery, discovered that she was about to be taken hostage. She dyed her hair black, posed as a Bedouin, bluffed her way past Iraqi troops, crossed a desert and flew safely home to Long Beach.

The mere threat of combat temporarily spared the Long Beach Naval Shipyard from the Pentagon’s threat of closure and saved some 4,000 workers from the unemployment line. But it did little for the McDonnell Douglas Co., one of the nation’s largest weapons producers. The Long Beach plant laid off thousands of workers this year, and Pentagon audits said the defense giant, headquartered in St. Louis, is close to bankruptcy.

As talk of war escalated, so did the price of oil. That meant a little more money for Long Beach, which holds the rights to several wells, but far from enough to bail out a city so strapped for revenue that it dips into its meager reserves to pay for basic services such as police.

Which brings us to the mouse named Mickey. The Walt Disney Co. this year unveiled its plans to build a more than $2-billion theme park and resort in Long Beach Harbor. The revenue from such a project would send much-needed tax dollars flowing to Long Beach, Disney officials promise. But the company has yet to commit to build, saying it may opt to put its second West Coast theme park in Anaheim instead.

With the new decade came the usual share of scandals large and small, focusing the public spotlight on everything from the quality of care at a Long Beach veterans hospital to a couple of real pigs who live in La Habra Heights.

Psychiatric patients at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Long Beach committed suicide at an alarming rate, prompting temporary closure of the locked ward and a Cabinet-level investigation.

The roof of a recital hall at Cal State Long Beach, a building frequently packed with music students, collapsed on a summer morning, sending tons of concrete crashing onto 300 seats. The hall was empty at the time, but the brush with disaster sparked an investigation into the quality of construction at the $6.2-million music complex and the safety of students who use it.

Neighbors in La Habra heights spent a year battling over Elmer and Miss Piggy, a couple of miniature Vietnamese potbellied swine. Gerald and Kathleen Hartinger considered them pets but the neighbors considered them smelly. The Hartingers say they’ll leave their home of 18 years rather than give them up.

The pigs lost, but the bunnies won.

It’s been years since officials tried to thin out the infamous rabbit population at Long Beach City College, sparking a student-led Save the Bunnies campaign.

But bunnies did what bunnies do, and this year the neighbors around the campus were complaining of nibbled plants and lawns fouled with bunny droppings. This time, the campus moved dozens of them to a pleasant park in the South Bay. The students happily concluded that the relocation hardly made a dent. The bunnies declined to comment.

And speaking of hares--make that hairs--they were the year’s most bristly issue aboard the Queen Mary when Walt Disney Attractions, which leases the ship, enforced its dress code and insisted that everybody shave. Several employees said they’d be fired first. They were.

In sports, the major news was made at Cal State Long Beach, where George Allen proved that his corny sayings still inspire and motivate. Working daily from early morning to late night, Allen, 72, led the 49ers to a 6-5 record, their first winning season in four years.

While Allen’s presence alone gave CSULB more publicity than perhaps it has ever had, his wide receiver, Mark Seay, also drew national attention. Seay, who had not played since he lost a kidney as a result of a shooting at a children’s party two years, won his legal battle to rejoin the team, then played well enough to make the all-Big West Conference second team.

The 49er basketball team had its best season in 11 years, compiling a 23-9 record and advancing to the second round of the National Invitation Tournament. But then Coach Joe Harrington, who had rebuilt the program, quit to become coach at the University of Colorado.

Harrington was succeeded in April by his assistant, Seth Greenberg, who entered the 1990-91 season with a veteran team and great optimism. But the 49ers are only 2-5 and have given little indication that improvement is on the horizon.

In high school basketball, All-American Ed O’Bannon led Artesia High School to the state championship, then decided to accept a scholarship to UCLA. But in a summer pickup game, O’Bannon severely injured his knee and will be out at least a year.

After a five-year absence, Ron Palmer returned to Poly High School, coaching the Jackrabbits to a Southern Section basketball title in March. And this month, Palmer won his 300th game.

In football, undefeated Whittier Christian was the only area school to win a CIF title.

On to 1991.

Times staff writer Dick Wagner contributed to this article.