FIXATIONS : Costa Mesa’s Rabid Watchdog

If they ever had an Angriest Man in Costa Mesa contest, I wouldn’t want to be the one competing against Sid Soffer. The 59-year-old City Council gadfly says folks have never even seen him angry yet. If so, his version of placid runs just a little hot.

There have been times when he’s at the lectern facing off against the City Council--his beard jutting, eyes flashing and brows knotted--when all you’d need is a Kansas tornado behind him to recapture the fury of John Steuart Curry’s famous painting of John Brown.

“There have been a few times when the pitch of his anger has concerned me,” said Vice Mayor Sandra L. Genis, “as to, ‘Gee, will we have to have him removed?’ and also ‘Is this man going to have a heart attack right before our very eyes?’ ”

It is some curious dynamic of local government that seemingly every city has a self-appointed watchdog--never none, two or three, but always a lone soul--who gets up and puts his three minutes in on every topic that comes before a city council or planning commission. Some of them wouldn’t know if they had Cocoa Puffs in their hair, but they still wield their American right to expound on municipal bonds, dog waste and the color of fire engines.

If you’ve ever sat through a city council meeting--which generally are about as lively as an auto shop waiting room, except without the Snap-On pinup calendars--you know what a joy it is to see Mr. Grumpy amble up to the microphone for the nth time. I have a friend in another city who once offered such a fellow $10 just to shut up for an hour.

Me, I love the guys, because they’re our safeguard that, should our careful voting practices (such as selecting the candidate’s name with the most vowels) ever fail and we elect a total snake, then at least he’ll be hounded and needled for his whole time in office.

Soffer differs from many gadflies in that he’s bright, funny, articulate and passionate about local government and the scope of its activities, none of which keeps him from dispensing hell when he feels it’s warranted.

His favorite exchange took place with a former Costa Mesa mayor. “I was ranting and raving about something, and I called him ‘stupid,’ ” Soffer recalled, “And he said, ‘You’re out of order.’ And I said, ‘That’s OK. Tomorrow I’ll be back in order, and you’ll still be stupid.’ ”

Though there is no great love lost between Soffer and the current council’s Genis, she has visited several other cities’ meetings and thinks Costa Mesa is fortunate: “If we didn’t have Sid Soffer, we’d have somebody. And some ‘official gadflies’ are really boring, getting up on every issue and droning on.

“The thing about Sid is he’s clearly an intelligent man. He obviously reads a lot, obviously has a quick mind. However, I think that a lot of his energy is maybe misdirected. He speaks on a tremendous number of topics, and it’s usually not a big revelation. But every once in awhile he says something where I have to say, ‘Gee, I wish I would have thought of that.’ Unfortunately, because there’s so much baloney, those flashes of brilliance sometimes get buried.”

When he’s not at City Council meetings, Soffer runs Sid’s, a restaurant with the sort of dinner prices--$4.50 for beef stroganoff, $5.50 for top sirloin--that would be a great crowd-getter if he advertised them, which he doesn’t. For that matter, the windowless, solid-doored, poorly lit building shows no external glimmer that there’s a business within. The only sign reads “No Trespassing.”

“I had a ‘For Lease’ sign too that I’ve got to put back up again,” Soffer said, “Most people still don’t know we’re in here, and that’s the way I like it. Ninety-nine percent of the people coming in is clientele I had 15, 20 years ago, who found it by word of mouth.”

Soffer first became interested in government in the late ‘50s, and only then because government became interested in him. In 1958 the Korean War vet managed and part-owned a Laguna Beach coffeehouse called Cafe Frankenstein, which began attracting civic notice.

“I couldn’t even spell conservative, let alone know what it was, and then I come to find out that, lo and behold, Orange County is somewhat conservative.” (Soffer registers Republican but considers himself neither conservative nor liberal.)

“First of all I had a beard; that made me different. Then the chief of police told me, ‘I know you’re doing something, I just don’t know what you’re doing,’ because I was selling coffee for $1 a cup when restaurants were giving you all you could drink for free. He couldn’t get it in his head that the coffee wasn’t a front for something.”

He started going to City Council and Planning Commission meetings, and Soffer says he was instrumental in changing a Laguna entertainment law that at the time only allowed piano or organ to be played in most parts of town.

Soffer opened another Laguna club called Sid’s Blue Beet, which he moved to Newport’s Balboa Peninsula in 1960. In the 18 years he owned it (he sold the business in 1978 but still owns the property), he brought in a loyal crowd with entertainment that included jazz greats Art Pepper and Les McCann, comedians Lord Buckley and Steve Martin, flamenco guitarist Felipe Perez (who now plays at Sid’s) and Delta blues legend Son House. A tape of Mr. House’s emotion-drenched bottleneck guitar--recorded by Soffer at the Blue Beet a quarter-century ago--underscored our conversation.

It was in Newport that Soffer’s real battles began.

“The city of Newport went on a big drive to close me up that lasted for five years. It came to a head in 1965. They had all kinds of testimony from police officers that I was not cooperative with the Police Department, that I had lewd music, that three known narcotics users frequented my restaurant, that I brought a bad element into town, those kinds of allegations--and I beat them all.

“When that’s happening to you, you have no choice. They fiddle-diddled me around and finally I got sick of it and started pushing back. They had a council meeting and we had about 300 people show up and picket City Hall, the first time Newport had ever been picketed.”

In 1978 he began feuding with Costa Mesa over the collection of aging Cadillacs parked on his properties--which they had started towing away--and for a time he was a fixture at City Council and Planning Commission meetings in both Newport and Costa Mesa, sometimes going straight from one to another.

Though he’s cut back on the others, he’s hardly missed a Costa Mesa council meeting since 1978 and even sits in on their pre-meeting dinners. Over the years he has even come to consider some members, such as the present council’s Peter F. Buffa, to be friends.

Perhaps the most familiar words spoken in City Hall are, “Sid Soffer, 900 Arbor St.” as he identifies himself each time before launching into his latest effort to make government make sense to him. There is a certain weathered nobility to the man as he stands there in a white T-shirt and old corduroy jacket, alone against the leviathan that is bureaucracy.

It doesn’t surprise him that others aren’t as involved in their local government as he is.

“Certain cultures have been taught certain things by their government. People have been taught in this country that you can’t fight City Hall. They are afraid to get involved.”

Soffer thinks he has been able to effect changes on several fronts, most in safeguarding the rights of property owners from various city practices. He is currently on a campaign to get traffic signals synchronized.

More than that, he thinks, “people see now that you can get up and you can speak and make a mark. When I first started going to council meetings, practically nobody got up during the oral communication. Now they’ve got to limit it to 30 minutes because lots of people speak up.”

Since the meetings have been televised in the last couple of years, Soffer has become a celebrity of sorts, and people seek him out in the halls. “They want help because they’re afraid and embarrassed and don’t know if they can ask questions of their own government.”

He usually can be found sitting alone at the council meetings. His family, he says, is not very supportive of his civic efforts. “My wife is Japanese, and in Japan you don’t fight with the government. My daughter is embarrassed. She’s not exactly proud of her father. I just try not to think about it.”

Sometimes Soffer feels uncomfortable himself, when he has to express a view that is contrary to the other citizens at a meeting. But, he said, “it’s a lot more uncomfortable not to stand up. To see something and not stand up, that’s wrong in my mind.”

The obvious question is why doesn’t Soffer run for a council seat?

“Well, I walked once,” he said, adding that his solo election bid a few years back was halfhearted.

“I didn’t want the job, personally. I don’t want the responsibility, the time consumption. I feel I can get more accomplished now. I can say anything I want and the worst they can do is throw me out, where if you’re on the council, you should show a little bit of class.”

Lately he’s been amending his IDs at council meetings to say, “Sid Soffer, 900 Arbor St., still, “ his reference to the fact that he isn’t in jail yet. He is involved in a property dispute that could put him behind bars for six months. According to Soffer’s friend and fellow restaurateur Bob Roubian, owner of the Crab Cooker, “Some anti-Sid reporter called me and asked how I felt about him maybe going to jail. I said, ‘Good, I think he should go to jail.’ ‘How can you say that if he’s your friend?’ ‘Because it happens to all great men. Socrates went to jail, Jesus Christ, Aristotle, Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau. It’s Sid’s turn.’ All Sid is trying to do is keep America America.”