The Spark Behind Strict Smoking Ban : Bellflower: The town that normally resists change has stepped to the forefront by passing one of the state’s most restrictive ordinances against smoking in public.

Until recently, this was a town where change came in small, carefully considered and infrequent steps, and where the locals liked things just fine the way they were.

The main business district on Bellflower Boulevard looks much the same as it did in photos from the late 1950s, featuring storefronts with picture windows and old neon signs and places called Earl’s, Evelyn’s and Thompson’s. The Elks Lodge, easily identified by the American flag near its entrance, occupies a prime spot near the center of town, not far from a church with a marquee that admonishes passersby to remember that “Drugstores can give sleep, but only God can give rest.”

So how is it, some puzzled and angered residents have asked, that this town has passed one of the most restrictive laws in the state against smoking in public, one that bans smoking in restaurants and most enclosed public buildings.

The answer lies partly with 44-year-old Bob Stone, an insurance salesman, a member of the City Council and a reformed smoker.

There was a time, he recalled, when he thought he would die if he did not have a cigarette after a meal. It was like dessert, like the ice cream on pie, that first taste of smoke sucked deep into his lungs, and savored as it was exhaled through his mouth and nose.

It was a habit that he nurtured from the time he was a boy, and to which he became addicted by the time he left his teens. In 1972, when he was 18 years old, he watched his father, a heavy smoker, die of throat cancer. His tongue had been removed, his once-handsome face disfigured by surgical scars. Even then, though, Stone kept smoking.

In 1982--some 20 years after Stone lit his first cigarette, he quit.

“I was coughing when I woke up in the morning,” he said. “All of sudden I just grabbed ahold of myself and said “stop.”

“No Smoking” signs went up in his home and office. He stopped sitting in smoking sections of restaurants. And he began noticing the actions of other smokers, frequently being irritated by them.

Last summer, soon after Stone was elected to the council, a smoker sat in the nonsmoking section of a Lakewood restaurant and blithely puffed away despite repeated requests from Stone and the management to put the cigarette out.

A few months later, Stone reminded a woman standing in front of him at a grocery store that it was illegal to smoke in the store. He said she gave him a who-do-you-think-you-are-look before putting out the cigarette.

The last straw came at a Bellflower restaurant, Stone said. As usual, he was given the choice of “smoking, nonsmoking or first available.” As usual, he requested nonsmoking. And as usual, he said, he was told that there were plenty of seats in smoking, and that if he wanted nonsmoking he would have to wait 15 minutes. As he waited, he watched as nonsmokers filed in the door behind him and made the same request.

“Almost always, they looked at their watches and said, ‘OK, we’ll take first available,’ ” Stone recalled.

It was then he decided to approach his fellow council members with a plan aimed at drastically restricting smoking in public.

“I do understand that (smokers) have a need for a cigarette, and that they think they enjoy it,” Stone said “But they have to understand that 75% of us don’t smoke.”

Stone did not have to work hard to persuade his fellow council members that something had to be done.

“Stone got the ball rolling, but they were all concerned about it,” Deputy City Manager Mike Egan said.

Stone initially suggested that restaurant owners be forced to set aside 80% of their seating for nonsmokers. But the distaste with which all five council members view smoking quickly became apparent, and last week they gave final approval to a total ban on smoking in restaurants. The ordinance, which takes effect March 5, also prohibits smoking in most enclosed spaces to which the public has access.

Councilman John Ansdell labeled the smoking habit “disgusting,” while Councilman Joseph E. Cvetko likened it to spitting on someone. Mayor Randy Bomgaars and Councilman William J. Pendleton were less harsh, each condemning the habit as one that jeopardized public health. They noted that the American Heart Assn. recently listed secondhand smoking as the third most preventable cause of death.

Some of the council members had sought to restrict smoking even before Stone joined their ranks.

In 1988, Bomgaars and Pendleton met with City Administrator Jack Simpson to discuss the possibility of enacting some sort of anti-smoking ordinance in Bellflower. At the time, restaurants were free to do what they wished.

Bomgaars, a teacher, had never been a smoker, but he was hearing more every day about the health problems related to smoking and secondhand smoke. Pendleton, a Southern California Edison Co. crew foreman, started smoking when he was about 11 and quit when he was 24. A straight-talking man, he was more interested in the “human rights” part of the debate.

“My interest then was simple. What I do is my business, until it affects you,” Pendleton said. “This is not an issue of legal rights, it’s an issue of human rights.”

City staff gathered information on ordinances in other cities in the state and passed them on to the two councilmen, but Pendleton said, “it was one of those things that just died because there were not enough votes. It wasn’t a politically popular thing to support, so it just got pushed back into a corner.”

Perhaps, Pendleton said, it would have remained there, had not Stone brought it up again. But even Stone was unprepared for the council’s reaction to his plan. Instead of giving approval to his 80% seating plan for nonsmokers, Councilmen Cvetko and Pendleton suggested that the council “go all the way” and ban smoking in restaurants altogether.

Before the council gave its final approval to the ordinance, some residents, restaurant owners and lobbyists urged the council to take things slowly. Business would be hurt, they predicted. “What’s the rush?” one restaurant owner asked the council.

Council members said that no one wanted to alienate smokers but that the dangers of secondhand smoke could no longer be ignored.

Some city leaders from surrounding communities said they respect the council for taking a stand. Some called the step “courageous”; others said it was “extreme.”

“The issue of restricting smoking is very controversial,” said one city leader, who asked not to be identified. “It takes a lot of guts to do something that will anger a significant number of the population.”

NEXT STEP

The Bellflower City Council on Monday will consider excluding pool halls, bingo parlors, bowling alleys and some small restaurants with cocktail bars in the dining room from the smoking ban. Currently only bars, tobacco stores, malls, private offices and places of worship are exempt from the sweeping ban that goes into effect March 5. Council members, while united on the issue of banning smoking in all other areas including restaurants, have mixed feelings on whether places of business such as bowling alleys should be exempt.