L.A. Mayoral Race a Clash of Generations, Visions : Politics: Riordan and Woo were shaped by different eras. Now, their divergent paths have crossed.

If the 1993 Los Angeles mayoral race is a clash of generations, it was ignited decades ago when Michael Woo and Richard Riordan were born into two different worlds.

One is the only son of an only son of a Chinese immigrant, the other the youngest of an Irish-Catholic clan. One grew up on the pioneering West Coast, the other in the prim and proper East. One is the product of a long-hair, experimental college in the middle of the Redwoods, the other of a Jesuit education and the all-male eating clubs of Princeton. Riordan’s war was Korea and he went; Woo’s was Vietnam and he did not.

They are two men who came of age in remarkable times--times of Great Depression and sexual revolution, of Shirley Temple look-alikes and Hula-Hoop contests, of fireside chats and a man on the moon.

They are the archetypes of their generations, as dissimilar as Tom Mix and the Beatles: a 63-year-old Republican millionaire and a 41-year-old Democratic baby boomer whose divergent paths finally crossed.

The story begins May 1, 1930. It ends on Tuesday, when the voters will elect one of them mayor and hand the future of Los Angeles to a man with a vision shaped in some ways by the past.

*

Richard Joseph Riordan came into the world in New York City just seven months after the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the nation into what came to be called the Great Depression. A silk tie sold for 55 cents, a box of cornflakes for 8 cents.

An unemployment office on 6th Avenue not far from where Riordan was born once counted 5,000 applications for 300 jobs. But the children of William and Geraldine Riordan scarcely felt the misery inside their handsome stone and stucco home in the desirable north end of New Rochelle, a mile or two from Wykagyl Country Club, to which they belonged.

It was a suburb of New York so quaint that Norman Rockwell lived and worked there, occasionally using the townsfolk as models for portraits of Americana that graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Riordan’s father was, by all accounts, a remarkable figure. A high school dropout whose parents immigrated from Ireland, he worked his way up from stock boy to president of Stern Bros., a major New York City department store. He was a church and civic leader, active in charity work and politics. When he died of a heart attack at the age of 60, 2,000 people turned out for his funeral. The flags on New York City department stores flew at half-staff.

Riordan’s mother, a diminutive matriarch, died last week at theage of 101. Eight of her children lived to adulthood, but several others did not, including a daughter who died of a brain tumor at the age of 5 and a stillborn twin of her youngest son, Richard.

Growing up in the Depression, there were no weekly allowances for Riordan and his friends. They earned their spending money on newspaper routes and egg routes, and as caddies at the local golf courses.

Riordan spent a protected childhood behind the walls of the school run by the Church of the Holy Family, where his family attended Mass. The student body was a then-unique mix of wealthy, poor, white and black. The nuns were not above whacking their young charges to enforce discipline.

“It made me self-sufficient,” Riordan recently recalled of those years. “I used to walk or hitchhike the mile and a half to school. I dealt with kids of every ethnic and moneyed background. I was about the richest.”

By the time Riordan was 10, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal had begun to lift the country out of the Depression. Jack Benny and Fred Allen were on the radio. Americans were lining up to see “Gone With the Wind.” Most of the nation was blissfully unaware of a world power struggle. Until Pearl Harbor.

Riordan was too young to go, but old enough to know. The boy across the street was among the first to die as the United States launched itself into World War II.

The draft left plenty of jobs vacant for boys like Riordan, but gas rationing made it hard to get to them. “It was more that getting things was hard than that we were actually deprived,” Riordan said. “I never felt deprived.”

At 14, Riordan left one nest for another when he was sent away to Cranwell Preparatory School, a small boarding school for boys founded by Jesuit priests in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. Cranwell prided itself on its strict, classical education; there were classes six days a week and Mass five days a week. Four years of Latin were required. Coat and tie mandatory. Afternoons were given over to sports, evenings to study. Students were confined to campus except for an occasional outing.

“A lot of sports and a lot of studying. He was quite good in both,” said classmate George Gillespie.

Riordan rose to senior class president and co-captain of the football team. He played chess and bridge, sang in the glee club and took part in debates. “Many an opponent has fallen beneath his churning knees,” reads the yearbook prose.

Despite his father’s wealth, a teen-age Riordan made the unforgettable acquaintance of manual labor just after the war when he took a summer job at a 7Up bottling plant in New Rochelle, fitting dirty bottles onto racks for washing. The pay was 65 cents an hour and the pace was frenetic. In nightmares even today, he said, he still wrestles with 7Up bottles.

At 16, this product of an all-male prep school went on his first date, escorting Miss Kim Quimby to the Long Island Casino to hear Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra.

Riordan was being groomed for success; his prep school tenure had readied him for admission to Santa Clara University in Northern California, another all-male, Jesuit school. Life was going swimmingly. In the fall of 1950, he transferred to Princeton University.

Princeton in that era seemed to be doing its best to live up to its stereotype. The main preoccupation on campus for two years was the undefeated football team. There were formal dances, elaborate pranks and water polo in Lake Carnegie. James A. Baker III, the future secretary of state, was a classmate. These were America’s up and coming elite, the WASP Establishment that Riordan’s father so disdained. Riordan remembers feeling out of place.

“It was a cultural shock,” Riordan said. “Despite my childhood background, I wasn’t used to being around wealth, kids like that. . . . Santa Clara was sort of redneck--an Irish Catholic, redneck school that I fit in with.”

Riordan’s ambivalence about the Ivy League and what it stood for was evident in his choice of a senior year roommate: Ted McAlister, a scholarship student from Abilene, Tex., a self-described innocent who had grown up in a community that forbade smoking, drinking, even dancing. Intensely religious, McAlister recalls long talks with Riordan about ethics, morality and life.

Riordan’s friends say that same ambivalence may have been a factor in his dealings with Princeton’s eating clubs, the social clubs in which most undergraduates competed for membership. They say Riordan turned down an invitation from one of the snootier clubs in favor of Terrace Club, then considered less elitist. He seemed to be straining against the system, but disinclined to buck it.

(Even in adulthood, Riordan joined the California Club, then worked to open it to women and minorities. He seemed drawn to the Establishment institutions that his success gave him access to, but was somehow uncomfortable with what they implied. Similarly, while amassing a personal fortune, he has spent tens of millions founding learning centers and supporting a roster of charities.)

There was more to Princeton for Riordan than the social whirl. A philosophy major, he has said he transferred to Princeton to study under the great French philosopher Jacques Maritain. Widely viewed as the leading Catholic intellectual of the period, Maritain was one of the first 20th-Century philosophers to urge the church to be as concerned about humanity’s social and economic needs as about its soul.

Riordan says that he was profoundly influenced by Maritain. He produced a 150-page thesis on the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas, to whom Maritain had devoted his life’s work. Of the influence of Maritain and of his Catholic education, Riordan said recently: “What it did was teach me that there’s a truth in life, and that life should . . . be a quest for it, as opposed to the philosophy that what’s true for you may not be true for me.”

By the time he left Princeton, Riordan had accumulated a B average, he has said. His father’s death in 1950 had left him with a considerable inheritance. According to probate records, he received 6,000 shares of Stern Bros. stock to be held in trust until he reached the age of 30, and two other gifts of stock that were sold shortly before his 21st birthday at a value of $117,600.

He had also scored in the top 15% on the law school admissions test. But the invasion of South Korea in the summer of 1950 had disrupted his classmates’ dream of being “Princeton’s first normal postwar class.” By graduation, dozens of students had already left for the war.

Instead of entering law school, Riordan joined the Army and went to Ft. Sill, Okla., where he ended up in an advanced artillery course that kept him out of Korea until shortly after the cease-fire. He spent less than a year behind the demilitarized zone, then headed home for the University of Michigan Law School. He graduated first in his class and went on to make millions in leveraged buyouts and venture capital deals.

But on Oct. 8, 1951, as Riordan prepared to leave his Ivy League haven for the real world, an event was happening 3,000 miles away that would affect the course of Riordan’s later life: A woman named Beth Woo was riding in an old Buick to a hospital in East Los Angeles to give birth at dawn to a son she named Michael.

*

It was a day of record heat--105 degrees--when Wilbur Woo dropped off his wife at White Memorial Hospital and went on to work in the produce markets in the heart of Los Angeles. He was still at work when the news came a few hours later: a boy. It was the first and only boy born to a traditional Chinese family that had two daughters and had prayed for a son.

“You know how Asians are about boys,” his mother said as she worked in her son’s campaign headquarters in Chinatown one recent afternoon. “I was very happy.”

He lived with his parents and paternal grandparents in a graceful two-story brick house on Virginia Road in Wellington Square, a neighborhood of wide streets and palm trees a few miles from downtown. Two more sisters followed Woo and his gender was all the reason needed for indulgence.

When he was very small, Woo would refuse to eat unless his grandfather gave him a ride in the car, his mother sitting in the front seat beside him, shoveling cereal into his mouth whenever he opened it.

Although Woo does not see himself as the stereotypical Asian-American whiz kid, he loved to read and excelled in school. Even as a toddler, his mother said, he would push aside his toys and sit in a corner leafing through a magazine. He was never athletic and sprained his ankle “annually,” as he recalls.

While 1950s America was experimenting with the miracles of 3-D glasses and digging back-yard bomb shelters, Woo’s grandfather, a staunch anti-communist who came to the United States in exile during the revolution, was making sure Chinese tradition lived on in his household. Woo attended special classes where he learned to speak Chinese and eat with chopsticks.

When Woo was 10, his family moved 17 1/2 miles east into a brand-new house in Monterey Park, a budding community where Chinese-American families were to settle in great numbers. He entered Alhambra High School in 1966, a slender, bookish youth with slicked black hair and thick-rimmed glasses.

The new house sat on top of a hill and if Woo rode his bicycle halfway down from the crest, he would have had a breathtaking view of City Hall and an unfolding Los Angeles skyline six miles away.

Woo does not recall being much of a political animal in those days, although his activity list tells another story--speaker of the student body Legislature; Boy of the Month, January, 1969; state scholarship semifinalist; Junior Statesmen speaker; Writers’ Guild vice president, managing editor of the school paper.

Although his politics still aligned with his father’s--a staunch supporter of Richard Nixon--the 1960s were beginning to make their indelible mark. A candid yearbook shot shows an intense Woo in the senior courtyard at lunch, engrossed in a copy of “The New Radicals.”

During Woo’s senior year in high school, he lost his campaign for class president and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. If war united the country in Riordan’s youth, it was dividing it in Woo’s. This was a time to lash out in protest, cast off tradition. Lapel buttons became a vehicle of social and political expression: “Ban the Bra,” “Black Is Beautiful,” “Blowing My Mind” and “Burn, Baby, Burn.”

The drug culture was exploding. A three-day “super love-in” happened in Woodstock, N.Y. And Woo was beginning to rebel within the shelter of the Monterey Park suburb and the protective family that adored him.

He grew his hair long, stopped speaking Chinese and outraged his grandfather by dating non-Asian girls. When it came time to choose a college, he selected UC Santa Cruz, a 4-year-old campus that was shocking academia with its liberal philosophy, pass-fail grading system and student-taught courses.

“What could be more different from living in L.A. than going to a university in the middle of a redwood forest?” he said.

Still, he did not forget his roots. His grandfather’s struggle in exile in America led Woo to assemble and student-teach a course he called “Children of the Megalopolis,” which discussed the experience of the children of immigrant parents. (Years later, in one of his first acts as newly elected city councilman, Woo sought to have Los Angeles declared a sanctuary for political refugees.)

Calling himself Citizen Woo, he railed against society’s injustice in a campus newspaper column. He emulated the speeches of Robert F. Kennedy and volunteered in the U.S. Senate campaign of then-Rep. George Brown, the anti-war candidate. As a freshman, Woo attended his first anti-war protest in San Francisco in 1969, finding it “exhilarating.”

With the draft in full force, Woo applied for conscientious objector status, under which he would go to Vietnam but not carry a gun. The war ended before he was called.

“I was willing to be trained as a medic . . . but philosophically, I did not believe in using a gun to kill people,” he recalled in a recent interview at his Silver Lake home. “The ‘60s had a profound influence on me politically. I was becoming aware of the world around me and what injustices there were.”

He went on to UC Berkeley to earn a master’s degree in urban planning and developed his vision of a city that guides his candidacy today: a Los Angeles where invisible walls that divide the classes come down, where people of every ethnicity live together without fear.

He knew he wanted to work to change society, but he was torn between the desire to teach and the call to go out in the world as a public servant. A twist of fate decided for him.

Without a summer job in the summer of 1970, Woo volunteered to work for a little-known political candidate in Northern California. The woman who answered the phone was a former employee of state Sen. David A. Roberti. She suggested that Woo give him a call. It was the beginning of an eight-year career as a legislative aide that opened Woo’s eyes to societal nightmares--lack of health care for the poor, the plight of the mentally retarded in prison--and set him on the road to City Hall.

“Am I some kind of fallen hippie? I don’t really think so,” Woo said, riding in his car between campaign stops on a recent Sunday. “I didn’t use drugs, my hair wasn’t really long. But the political struggles of the ‘60s definitely influenced my values. I wasn’t black, but observing the civil rights movement from afar and getting a sense of the injustice that spawned the movement had a long-lasting effect on me. It helped me learn the lesson that there are a lot of people on the outside of this society who are not fairly treated.”

His blue sedan stopped at an African-American church in South-Central where he appealed to the congregation to make him mayor. He talked about the walls that divide the haves from the have-nots, the poor children in this town who have never seen the Pacific Ocean. The congregation cheered.

In closing, he reached back to the words of John F. Kennedy: “God’s work truly must be our own.”

Fiore reported from Los Angeles, Scott from New York City.