From Car Seat to Council Seat? : Fullerton Candidate Who Lives in a Chevy Champions Homeless Issues in His Campaign

Rand (Kye) Robson’s home is a 1972 Chevrolet Impala. He sleeps in the back seat, where he also keeps many of his life’s possessions: some clothes, important papers, blankets and books.

Admittedly, he’s lived a checkered life that has included arrests on minor charges, frequent job changes and general wandering.

But when he turned 30 last year, Robson says he began taking stock. He considered attending college but instead decided to run for Fullerton City Council, making him perhaps the first homeless person to run for a council seat in Orange County, although not in Southern California. (A Montebello man ran in 1985, finishing last in a field of six.)

“I think I can represent the community on the council. I’ve had common, ordinary experiences,” says Robson, hoping to leave his mark on the town where he has lived since 1982.

“Not all homeless are drunk and disturbing the peace,” says Robson, who has lived in cars, parks, buses and garages since the early 1980s. “I consider myself an asset to the community.”

Robson, who has mostly held jobs as a security guard or a day laborer, acknowledges that his quest is a long shot. He’s up against a field of 13 candidates, including incumbents and Fullerton Mayor Don Bankhead, who describes Robson’s quest for office as “an unusual situation,” adding “he’s certainly gotten a lot of publicity out of it.”

Yet for all of his publicity, Robson has managed to raise only $9 in campaign funds.

“I’m not counting on homeless people to vote for me,” he says jokingly of his natural constituency. “But Fullerton is not as conservative as it appears.”

Says Susan Oakson, director of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force. “It’s very exciting that (Robson) feels he wants to make a difference and have a voice in representing not only homeless people but different segments of the community.”

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Robson denies being “the homeless candidate,” but many of his campaign issues touch on his own existence.

Like affordable housing.

He says Fullerton should push home ownership as opposed to rent subsidies for the poor. Moreover, he says Fullerton is wasting too much time and money in lawsuits over housing issues, then those resources could go to solving housing problems instead.

Fullerton is one of the cities targeted by a Legal Aid lawsuit aimed at overturning a local ban on public camping, a case for which Robson helped find people to give depositions.

Orange County homeless activists estimate that from 10,000 to 12,000 homeless people live in Orange County. But the 1990 U.S. Census put the number at a little less than 2,000. Fullerton Police Chief Philip Goehring figures that there are about 70 homeless people in his city.

Robson sees himself as belonging to what he calls the “working poor.”

If he got an apartment, Robson claims, almost all his money would go to maintaining it.

“I’m too cheap to pay rent,” he explains. “I’m a single individual. By the time you subtract time at work, you’re paying an incredible hourly rate for an apartment.”

Especially when a good month working brings only about $1,000 after taxes, which would barely cover the average $778 monthly Orange County apartment rental.

If elected, Robson says, he’ll give the job full-time attention and live off the roughly $720 monthly council members’ salary.

He’s lived on much less.

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Robson spends his nights sleeping in his car, often parked in parking lots or garages. He likes his garages well-lighted for security, he says, because he’s a heavy sleeper.

“I once woke up to the sound of a hand coming though my window,” Robson says. “We both screamed bloody murder,” he adds.

Unless he’s working, he wakes up about 10 a.m. He usually heads over to the gym locker rooms at Cal State Fullerton for a shower.

After a simple breakfast at a doughnut shop, Robson usually goes to the library, where he reads up on politics in the Fullerton city government. He also takes long walks, works on his car or, more recently, prepares campaign signs.

For dinner, he’ll sometimes go to a food line at one of the local churches or he’ll buy a TV dinner and pop it in a microwave oven in the food court at Fullerton College.

At night, after dinner, often he’ll park under a city light and read for several hours.

When low on money, Robson says, he can put together a meal at a grocery store for $2: a roll from the bread bin, a can of processed meat, a quart of milk and a banana.

There have been times when he couldn’t even afford that.

“I’ve gone three, four days without food. After three days it doesn’t bother you,” says Robson, who makes it a point to shower every day, usually at Cal State Fullerton. He maintains a storage locker for the possessions he doesn’t keep in his car. He’s well-spoken and well-read. He even has a pager number and a post office box.

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Robson was born in Macon, Ga. His father was in the Air Force, and by the time the youngster began elementary school in Palos Verdes, he’d also lived in Chicago and Santa Clara.

An argument with his parents after high school graduation in Maryland left him sleeping in his car.

“The first time I ever slept in my car was in June of 1980,” Robson recalls. “I was just young enough to be dumb enough not to realize how precarious the situation was.”

Robson’s father, Clayton, now retired from the military and working in Washington, says he doesn’t know how or why his son chooses to live the way he does.

“We felt he ought to try it for a while and find out he doesn’t like it,” the senior Robson says. “He tried it and liked it.”

“I guess we accept his choice,” he continues. “He’s not antisocial in any sense, he’s not dangerous, he’s not dishonest, he’s not any of the things people presume people in that lifestyle choose to be. He just chooses not to have resources.”

Robson was clearly getting nothing accomplished in Maryland, living in his car. So at the beginning of 1982, his parents bought him a plane ticket to Los Angeles. The plan was for him to live with a brother in Fullerton.

But the brothers fought, and Robson was soon living in a semi-abandoned house near Cal State Fullerton with an assortment of alcoholics and drifters.

After a year or so, he left. He drifted around the country and married a woman who had just joined the military. But she couldn’t deal with his lifestyle, he says, and the two broke up after a year.

He received a letter, a year after they split, from a Louisiana lawyer claiming to represent his wife, Patricia Robson, in a divorce action, he says.

Robson never responded. As a result, he is unsure of his legal marital status, he says.

In 1989, he got a job working in security at MainPlace/Santa Ana. He’d work all night, getting off at 7 a.m. He lived out of his car for a time, finally setting up house in a storage area in Orange. He’d shower in a nearby trailer park.

But he soon ran into trouble with the law, arrested for trespassing while trying to sleep in an industrial area of Orange. After making several court appearances, Robson pleaded guilty to the charge.

“I got tired of going to court,” he says.

Robson was subsequently arrested for trespassing three times. The charges were dropped.

His most recent run-in with police came in April, when he was detained after spending an hour cleaning out his car in a public garage.

Robson left his security guard job after about a year. He went north again, working various temporary jobs in San Jose and the Grass Valley area. He returned to Fullerton in 1991.

“Fullerton is the only place in my adult life I’ve thought of as a home base.”

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Earlier this summer, Robson was down to his final few dollars. He’d been fired from a driving job in Anaheim; he says he didn’t want to pay for auto insurance, which the job required.

Unemployment was denied because it was deemed he had voluntarily left the position rather than fulfill the requirement of buying the insurance.

“The unemployment check, it didn’t show. . . . I finally went down there. They said they were doing a determination. I said, ‘Thanks a lot for letting me know.’ ”

That experience, among others, filled Robson with a desire to make government bureaucracy more open to people like himself.

In his campaign statement, Robson promises to “establish a system to make city government accessible, responsive and accountable to all citizens.”