McKeon to Saddle Up for D.C. : Elections: Fresh from a 25th District victory, the co-owner of a Western wear chain explores committee assignments.

Buck McKeon has a name that befits a cowboy-booted, Western wear haberdasher, which he is, more than it does a devout Mormon, banker and congressman-elect, which he also is.

And if timing is everything in politics, then 54-year-old Howard P. (Buck) McKeon--a self-described “non-professional politician” and conservative Republican--also has an instinct for sniffing out exactly when to seize the moment.

Example: When Santa Clarita became a city five years ago, McKeon decided to run for City Council. He got more votes than anyone else, making him the city’s first mayor.

Example: When redistricting gave birth to California’s 25th Congressional District a year ago, there was Buck McKeon again, shucking his expensive eelskin boots for political running shoes.

He won 52% of the vote last Tuesday, defeating Democrat James Gilmartin, a Santa Clarita attorney, as well as four other opponents. In January, McKeon will become the first to represent a district that previously included parts of four congressional districts and now encompasses the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys as well as the northern San Fernando Valley communities of Chatsworth, Northridge, Granada Hills and parts of Mission Hills and North Hills.

For Buck McKeon--businessman and family man, with six children and six grandchildren--the 25th District fits as neatly as those $375 Stetson and Resistol cowboy hats he sometimes wears and has marketed for years.

His new turf is top-heavy with Republicans and conservatives who needed no hard sell from a self-made entrepreneur whose retail clothing chain keeps adding stores even in a crippled economy. Howard & Phil’s Western Wear, which McKeon co-owns with his four brothers, now boasts 49 outlets in California and one each in Arizona and Nevada.

It helped, too, McKeon said, that he swam with--not against--America’s tidal waves of cynicism toward politicians.

“Actually, it’s that kind of attitude that got me to run,” said McKeon, who will be a rarity in Congress--a retailer among mostly lawyers and career politicians. “I see the problems we have in business--the problems that government causes for business. If they’d run the federal government like a business the last 20 or 30 years, we wouldn’t have the deficits we’ve had.”

Along the way, McKeon deflected salvos from Democrats who accused him of ducking too many debates (his campaign manager, Armando Azarloza, said McKeon participated in nine of 12 scheduled debates and forums) and of financing his $500,000 campaign with political action committee funds from sources as diverse as Caesars World Resorts and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

“He’s already well-to-do, so there’s no reason he needed money from PACs,” said Amy Jones of the Democratic Club of Santa Clarita Valley, adding that Gilmartin accepted no PAC money. “That was very disillusioning.”

Now, as McKeon and Patricia, 50, his wife of 30 years, start packing for Washington, he’s exploring possible committee assignments--notably Energy and Commerce (“My business experience would be beneficial”) and Public Works and Transportation (“We have real infrastructure needs in this district”), as well as Science, Space and Technology, and Armed Services, owing to the Antelope Valley’s aerospace and defense industries.

His No. 1 priority? “The economy and jobs,” McKeon said, adding that Washington needs to rethink the adversarial roles of American business and government.

“Now we’ve got Japan and the European Common Market to compete with,” he said. “The governments there are putting resources together and becoming a part of private industry--building up an airline or any other industry, pulling away market share from us so they can set any price they want, control the business and put us out of business.

“Let’s face it, we’re losing. You see General Motors and some of these other American companies running up tremendous losses. And then you look at the Japanese cars, which are subsidized by their country. That’s not fair competition.”

A second priority, McKeon said, will be to help community and environmental groups wage their long-running fight against a proposed Los Angeles County landfill that both the county and the city of Los Angeles want to operate jointly in Elsmere Canyon, a picturesque spot in Angeles National Forest, near Santa Clarita.

The proposed dump, he said, would “harm our water supply” and generate traffic that would, in turn, create air pollution and excessive noise. “It has to be detrimental to this valley,” he said. “To me, the idea is repugnant that you would take part of our national forest and transfer it for some land somewhere else and make that a dump. I don’t think that’s the purpose of our national forest.”

McKeon didn’t always oppose the landfill. But in 1988, when a resident named Jill Klajic vigorously fought the proposal, McKeon and two other council members changed their stance.

In 1991, after Klajic joined the council and was about to become the city’s current mayor, McKeon said publicly he didn’t think Klajic should serve as mayor. “She always refers to the council as ‘you.’ Never ‘we,’ ” he said. “When people talk about being a team player, it does not mean that you agree on things, but that you deal with each other respectfully. I see a lack of that there.”

Today, Klajic says she wishes McKeon well, adding: “We both have the best interests of this community at heart, but they’re often different interests. Buck and I share family and religious values, but on environmental and political issues such as accepting PAC money, we’ve been very far apart. I’ve great respect for Buck because he’s worked very hard.”

As mayor, McKeon excelled at resolving disputes while also upholding Santa Clarita’s reputation for colorful politicking. With his zest for red, he successfully pushed for red-striped buses. He also wears red ties and drives a red 1990 Corvette.

On occasion, he speaks conversational Spanish, which he learned as a young adult during his 2 1/2-year Mormon mission in New Mexico and Texas. “He once helped a Spanish-speaking woman make her point during a council meeting by asking her--in Spanish--to get closer to the microphone,” City Manager George Caravalho recalled. “You couldn’t help but be impressed by his stability and even-handedness.”

Now, as McKeon grabs the lance again and grapples with broader causes and issues, some friends worry that he will find Capitol Hill’s rough-and-tumble politicking too distasteful. After all, they contend, it’s not as homespun as, say, starting up Santa Clarita’s city government or the Valencia National Bank where he soon will step down as board chairman, or serving on the boards of the William S. Hart Union High School District (1979-87) and Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital (1983-87).

“Buck really doesn’t like the schmoozing, the fund raising and the compromising that go with politics,” said Allan Cameron, a community activist and Canyon Country resident. “In Washington, he’ll run into 10 million times more of that.”

However, Cameron said, McKeon’s “strong work ethic” should enable him to ride out the storms and retain his bearings, “but he still doesn’t like that politicking.”

McKeon himself acknowledges those red flags.

“When you work with people in business and on the school board, the bank board and the hospital board, everything is judged on its merits,” he said, relaxing between appointments at his Canyon Country campaign headquarters.

“I’m hoping that’s the way it’ll be in Congress. If I find out that it’s just ‘I do you a favor, you do me a favor’ again and again, I think I can function under that, if that’s the way it has to be. . . . But if it gets to the point where I feel I have to deal with corrupting influences, then I’ll let somebody else do it.”

Howard Philip McKeon was born Sept. 9, 1938, in Tujunga, where he grew up and was graduated from Verdugo Hills High School. He’s the eldest of five brothers in a family where retailing etched a lasting impression on young Buck, who got his nickname at birth when his father called him “my little buckaroo.”

Buck’s father, the late Howard McKeon, and uncles teamed up as grocery retailers. Then, in 1963, his father opened the original Howard & Phil’s (Phil is a derivative of Phyllis, Buck’s mother, also deceased) on Soledad Canyon Road, back when Canyon Country, too, had only just begun.

By then, Buck McKeon had dropped out of Brigham Young University in Utah--just a few credits shy of graduating--to marry Patricia Kunz, also a BYU student, and help operate the family business. They had been introduced in a hotel elevator in Salt Lake City by their fathers--both longtime acquaintances as bishops in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Patricia McKeon left college, too, before she and Buck were married and started their large family. As Buck and his brothers expanded their clothing business, Patricia focused on child-rearing. “If you don’t rear a responsible child, then the future is destroyed,” she said.

With all except their youngest child, Tricia, no longer at home, Patricia now serves on the Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital board, strongly supporting multiple roles for women. “You can rear children and work in the PTA and have a job. It’s a lot to ask a woman to do all those things,” she said, laughing. “But they’re doing it!”

In fact, Patricia said, she hopes to return to college to finish work toward a degree--perhaps when Tricia, now a high school senior, attends college, so they could graduate together.

That’s what Buck McKeon experienced in 1985, having taken courses at Cal State Northridge and in correspondence with BYU. There, at 46, he received a bachelor’s degree in business production, graduating with his eldest daughter, Tamara, who received her bachelor’s degree, and with her husband, who got his master’s.