As Mort Diamond Passes By

It was election day in Los Angeles, but Mort Diamond was treating it as nothing special. He was where he always is five days a week, peddling magazines and newspapers at t& L Newsstand in Woodland Hills, “the West Valley’s greatest indoor newsstand.”

I had expected he might be out roaming the 3rd District in his camper with the big sign on the back that says “Elect Diamond for City Council.” It was a sign left over from the 1989 election and, who knows, he might save it for the 1997 election, and the one after that too.

The reason Mort wasn’t doing any last-minute campaigning is because he couldn’t get the day off. “I’m a working man,” he says proudly, the way Harry Truman used to brag that he had risen to the presidency from a haberdashery in Independence, Mo.

Mort hasn’t always peddled magazines and newspapers. When I met him he had a hot dog cart at the corner of Sherman Way and Owensmouth, but he was eventually put out of business by county regulations he’d been fighting for years. That’s what politicized him in the first place and why he began running for a seat on the L.A. City Council.

You remember Mort. He’s the tidy little fat man who doesn’t drink, smoke, lie, cheat, steal or spit on the sidewalk, and believes those traits ought to be brought to City Hall.

He ran against incumbent Earth Mother Joy Picus in 1989, raised about $4,000 and got 1,419 votes. This year, he raised $750 ($200 of which was his own) and got about the same number of votes.

This almost proves Mort’s theory that people are getting tired of big-money candidates and eventually will elect the person who raises the least amount of cash. That’s not true yet, however.

I met Mort years ago when I bought a hot dog from him. I’ve been following his fortunes ever since. There’s something about a hot dog that unites people you meet on the street.

When he announced his candidacy for the City Council in 1989, however, his first fund-raiser was held in a pizza parlor, not a hot dog emporium. My wife, Cinelli, and I were on our way to someplace else but decided to stop by and see what was going on.

Over glasses of a thin red liquid the proprietor called wine (the candidate abstained), Mort explained how he was going to go about knocking Picus from her throne through the sheer power of honesty.

It would be a door-to-door campaign with a handful of equally honest supporters who, like Mort, were weary of gangs, drug dealers, tax collectors, dirty movies and store clerks who talked on the telephone while you were trying to get their attention.

When we left the fund-raiser, I said to Cinelli, “The man’s a dreamer,” and she said, “We need dreamers.”

True to his word, Mort stalked through the west end of the San Fernando Valley like a combination of Diogenes and Wendell Willkie, handing out flyers with often misspelled words and telling the people he met that it was time for the Diamondization of L.A.

He liked to say he was the “clean guy,” the Hot Dog Man who spoke for the people.

Well, he lost. While Mort was going from door to door, Picus was going from land developer to land developer, and, as it turned out, the people weren’t ready yet for a Candidate of the Poor.

“I’ll be in the runoff,” Mort said confidently, ringing up a sale at the S & L Newsstand on Election Day. He even had a speech written thanking those who had elevated him from hot dog vendor to serious candidate.

He would stand up in front of the voters and say, “If I win this election, I want you to know I got fat on my own and not on the taxpayer’s money!”

Mort laughed loudly at his own line, and so did his campaign manager, Joe Boyle, who had meanwhile wandered in. In addition to being his manager, Joe also constituted Mort’s entire campaign committee.

It was mostly just the two of them over the long, hard weeks of the campaign, scrounging for money and passing out flyers. Mort’s favorite spot was in front of a Hughes Market. Joe liked the Home Depot.

“What did we need with a committee,” Mort said, selling a racing sheet to a man who wished him well. “We didn’t have any money to do anything with.”

But still, he says, it’s been a good experience. “I’d ride down the street in my camper and people would wave and say, ‘Hi, Mort!’ and ‘Go get ‘em, Mort!’ ” He waves and raises his voice, as though he were the people and Mort Diamond was passing by. Then he says softly, “Good luck, Mort. . . .”

I left him that way, remembering the faces of the people, glorifying us all by the tenacity of his beliefs, a tidy little fat man who won’t let go.

Cinelli was right. We need dreamers.