For Bradley, It’s Now the Long Goodby

After 20 years as mayor of Los Angeles, the longest tenure in the city’s history, Tom Bradley is celebrating what also may be the longest goodby.

From block club parties to formal black-tie receptions, with big bands and hip-hop artists providing the beat, Bradley supporters are serenading their mayor out of office in a nearly continuous chorus of praise.

The latest came Saturday night, when about 150 Bradley boosters in black tie and sequined gowns embraced the mayor at a dinner on the 54th floor of the Wells Fargo bank building.

From this lavish banquet room Bradley could look over the skyscrapers and the downtown he helped remake and on the cardboard shanties of the homeless he could never find a way to remove.

The party was the ninth Bradley tribute in the last two weeks and one of 30 since the beginning of the year. Along the way, the mayor’s name has been given to the Civic Center Metro Rail station, to a pedestrian bridge at White Memorial Medical Center in East Los Angeles and to a planned International Center at UCLA, where his memorabilia will be displayed.

A beaming Bradley, 75, said Saturday that he never dreamed of asking that his farewell tour be pared back. “My whole life has been like this,” he said, “fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. It’s part of the joy of the office.”

The city may still be mired in recession and struggling for equilibrium after last year’s riots, but Bradley partisans have designed this series of celebrations leading up to the June 30 end of his reign to wrap themselves and the mayor in the warm glow of nostalgia.

“People want to let him know all the hard work has not been for naught,” said Linda Griego, a former deputy mayor who ran an unsuccessful campaign to replace Bradley. “I think he put Los Angeles on the face of the world map.”

Many have said they have trouble imagining a City Hall without Bradley--almost like another generation of Americans who could not remember a time when Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t President and Joe Louis wasn’t heavyweight champion.

The mayor first met the hosts of the Saturday night party--attorneys Melanie Lomax and Harold Becks, when they were infants. He would later appoint them to city commissions.

Caught between the city’s troubled past and the critical assessments of Bradley’s reign that will surely lie in the future, these lifelong supporters prefer to linger on triumphs. They speak of his opening city employment to minorities and women, his leading the boom-town growth of downtown in the 1980s and his presenting to the world a flawless and profitable 1984 Olympic Games.

Ebullient backers heaped such praise on Bradley Saturday, just hours after the two men who would replace him engaged in a bare-knuckled debate.

“It’s terrible how nasty this campaign has become,” Bradley said. “I couldn’t be happier that I am on the sidelines, watching the parade go by.”

The notoriously workaholic mayor seems prepared to leave for his job with a private law firm and to turn over Room 305 at City Hall to City Councilman Michael Woo or businessman Richard Riordan.

Organizations ranging from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Venice Family Clinic and the city’s Housing Preservation and Production Department have lined up to say goodby.

The settings of the tributes have ranged from relaxed luncheons to Monday night’s planned hip-hop party at a Hollywood nightclub, sponsored by a local radio station. A May 15 gala raised money for the UCLA International Center, where Bradley’s memorabilia--from his days as a UCLA track star, a Los Angeles policeman, city councilman and, finally, longest-serving mayor--will be displayed. His papers will be stored at the university’s research library.

Bradley was entertained by Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick at that event, hosted by corporate heavyweights--Arco chief executive Lod Cook, MCA chief Lew Wasserman and Tabu Productions Chairman Clarence Avant.

Perhaps the most touching moment of all the events came then, aides said, when the mayor watched old news footage showing him standing by his mother’s side as he was sworn in as a city councilman in 1963.

“I know and feel I’ve done the best I could,” Bradley said. “That’s why I can enjoy all this.”