The Gadfly and the Clerk : Collect calls from Hawaii worth $30 piqued Frances Stiglich’s attention. Once she satisfied her curiosity, Hawthorne’s city clerk was faxing his resignation from his Big Island home.

With her gray, coiffed hair and sturdy chin, Frances Stiglich resembles a librarian with a penchant for shushing rowdy schoolchildren.

But give the 73-year-old Hawthorne woman the idea that a penny of her tax dollars has been spent frivolously, and she becomes a tenacious civic activist--a gadfly to some--who pores over city records with the diligence of a detective.

“I don’t care if it’s 10 cents; if they’re taking it from my pocket, they’re stealing it,” Stiglich said.

She says she inherited her stubbornness from her mother, who once hacked up her own floorboards with an ax to force her husband to replace them.

That sort of attitude led Frances Stiglich to uncover city phone records that eventually led to the resignation of Hawthorne City Clerk Patrick E. Keller. Keller, it turns out, had been living in Hawaii for four years, attending to his $600-a-month city clerk duties while selling houses and running a hair salon in Kailua-Kona, a haven for sportfishing on the Big Island’s southwestern coast.

Although the City Council had known that Keller was living in Hawaii, word did not leak out to the public until Stiglich began poking through some city phone records last month.

Several city officials said they had quietly asked Keller last year to either resign from the part-time elected post or move back to Hawthorne. But they didn’t press the point until Stiglich demanded to know at a City Council meeting last month why the city clerk’s office had accepted $30 worth of collect phone calls from Hawaii during a six-week period last fall.

Stiglich, who remains more piqued over the cost of the phone calls than the revelation that the clerk lived out of state, says she never dreamed that her probing would lead to the toppling of a public official.

“I didn’t think it was going to have such a big backlash, but I’m glad it did,” Stiglich said.

In fact, Stiglich says she wasn’t even looking for malfeasance in the city clerk’s office when she filed a request about two months ago for copies of a city phone bill dated Sept. 28-Nov. 6.

Instead, Stiglich was hot on the trail of the Department of Parks and Recreation to find out why the department was spending several hundred dollars a month on telephone expenses.

“To me, that was exorbitant,” Stiglich said.

It was only when she began scouring through the phone charges that she discovered the collect calls from Hawaii. And then she wanted an answer from the City Council: “Who is in Hawaii that’s so important that we have to accept their collect phone calls?”

The council members, who knew that the calls came from Keller and who described the charges at the time as reasonable, first said there was nothing they could do about Keller’s absence because he apparently maintained a legal residence in the city. When newspaper reports revealed that Keller used a friend’s address to meet the residency requirements, council members resolved to take action to declare the city clerk’s position vacant.

Keller, who lives in an ocean-view home about a mile from the black lava shores that line the turquoise-hued Kailua Bay, said he was totally in the dark about the controversy his absence from Hawthorne had ignited.

While the council debated the merits of having a city clerk living more than 2,000 miles from City Hall, Keller was visiting his wife’s family in Malaysia. He did not know that Hawthorne officials had left dozens of frantic messages for him at his office and nearby hair salon, which last year was publicized widely for its $50 eclipse-inspired haircut designs, including the aptly named “solar flare” and “sunspot.”

When he returned to Hawaii on Feb. 19 from his monthlong vacation, he called Hawthorne city officials and said he would resign immediately. In an interview in Hawaii on Feb. 20, the day before he faxed in his resignation, Keller described the job of city clerk as a burden and said he had wanted to retire since he moved to Hawaii in late 1987. But he said he decided to run again in 1989 “to help the city out” because no one else was interested in the city clerk’s position.

Stiglich said she is glad Keller agreed to step down, but she remains cynical about the City Council’s sudden willingness to take action against Keller.

“Why didn’t they do something about it sooner?” Stiglich said. “Somebody fell down on the job.”

Unlike Keller, whom friends and acquaintances describe as exceedingly glib, Stiglich is something of a rambler who occasionally loses her place in conversations. But the avid golfer and bowler nevertheless exhibits the tenacity of a bulldog in whatever task she sets before herself.

When her two sons were still in nursery school, Stiglich took a job as a “snooper” with the county tax assessor’s office, a name referring to the now-defunct position of household property appraiser. When the county stopped taxing household property in the late 1960s, Stiglich continued to work for the county as a receptionist until she retired in 1978.

A Minnesota native of Croatian descent who has lived in Hawthorne since 1944, Stiglich grew up in a family that believed there were two kinds of women: those who followed their husbands and those who spoke their own minds. The women in her household were of the second sort.

And according to Stiglich’s 76-year-old husband, Joe, a retired inspector for Southern Pacific Railroad, the tradition endures.

“I’m not interested in politics at all; that’s her affair,” he said. “We’re not even members of the same (political) party.”

From her carpenter father, Stiglich inherited a talent for working with wood. At 67, she decided to go back to school to hone her skills. Two years later, she received an associate degree in construction from El Camino Community College. She has a wood shop in the garage of her modest, pale green home where she makes contemporary-style desks, chairs and bureaus for her two sons and four grandchildren.

Although Stiglich says she was always interested in civic affairs, she didn’t take on the role of whistle-blower until early 1990, when she became upset to learn that a developer had proposed building a senior housing complex on a vacant lot near her home.

Stiglich, who believed that the complex would create too much traffic on her street, began attending City Council meetings to express her unhappiness with the project, which was never built.

Soon, her interest in city government expanded to other areas, and stops at City Hall became an integral part of her weekly rounds.

Her style, however, has not always endeared her to city officials.

Mayor Steve Andersen said he has talked to half a dozen employees at City Hall who have described Stiglich as abrasive, especially when she doesn’t get her way.

“She berates the City Council. That is her style,” Andersen said. But “on balance, I think raising public issues in a public meeting is a good thing to do. . . . I think she raises some good points occasionally.”

City Atty. Michael Adamson was less diplomatic: “She is not very patient or polite. She doesn’t seem to think we have anything to do or have any duties . . . (as if) we’re just waiting for her to come in and can mobilize our resources to cater to her every whim.”

Even fellow activist Martha Bails, who also regularly attends City Council meetings, agreed that Stiglich’s temper is sometimes a detriment.

“She gets upset too easily and that throws her off track, and it gets her so excited that she has to stop and cool down,” said Bails, who last month gave Stiglich pointers on how to interpret the city’s budget. “But if you provide her with the information she requests and don’t give her the runaround, she asks the questions pretty well.”

Stiglich, who says several strangers have congratulated her for making the public aware that their city clerk had moved out of state, admits that she is easily provoked to anger. But she said: “I feel I need these questions asked. I’m not the type that accepts anything.”

And just this week, she found something else to wrinkle her nose at.

This time, the subject of her scrutiny was a collect phone call to the city attorney’s office from El Segundo, a call that cost Hawthorne taxpayers exactly $1.51.

Adamson told her that the call had come from a staff attorney who needed to check on a case on his day off.

“Now I thought, ‘What is that for?’ ” Stiglich told the City Council Monday night. “So I called over there and it was the golf course, so then that kind of makes me mad. Now why is somebody calling from the golf course to the city?”