Angela Alioto, Daughter of Ex-S.F. Mayor, to Seek Post

Promising to return this city to its old glory, Angela Alioto--the daughter of the feisty, two-term former mayor--announced Thursday that she is running for the post.

In Washington Square Park, the heart of San Francisco’s Italian community, the senior Alioto introduced his daughter, a San Francisco supervisor. “As of today we are stopping this dull race in San Francisco,” he said. “Angela has paid her dues to run for mayor of San Francisco. No official knows the ins and outs of the city as well as she does. She has great capacity for listening to people. She has mayoral stature.”

Not to be outdone by her father’s rhetoric, Angela Alioto, 40, explained:

“In 1967, my father ran for mayor during the ‘Summer of Love.’ Now I am running for mayor in the winter of our discontent. If things are allowed to continue, we could turn into what we fear the most--just another dull American city run by men in gray suits.”

She professed herself amused by a local columnist’s observation that if she were elected mayor “this town might be fun again. Imagine a city run by Lucille Ball.”

She and her father had supported Mayor Art Agnos, she acknowledged, but she said Thursday that the city is controlled by the bureaucrats out of step with San Franciscans, and that the very people who elected Agnos have found the doors at City Hall closed to them. “San Francisco has become mean-spirited, and I just can’t stand around and watch it happen,” she said.

Her father said he wrote Agnos a letter explaining his new allegiance to his daughter’s campaign, noting, “After all, blood is thicker than any friendship or politics.”

Other candidates are Agnos, Supervisor Tom Hsieh, Assessor Richard Hongisto, former Police Chief Frank Jordan--and perhaps another Alioto.

Angela Alioto’s brother, Joseph, has reportedly taken out papers to file for the race, but has not decided whether to run.

“It would certainly be different and it would certainly be unusual,” he told a local newspaper. “But I would not want to make the mayor’s race appear to be Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not.”

Times researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this story.