COVER STORY : Playing Her Own Tune : Sally Holguin-Fallon, a former piano teacher and the first woman on La Puente’s City Council, has struck a note of discord with her exasperated male colleagues.

A recent La Puente City Council meeting ran in dignified fashion--if you compare it with a food fight fueled by eighth- graders armed with mashed potatoes.

As the council discussed such issues as extending elected officials’ terms and regulating home businesses, novice Councilwoman Sally Holguin-Fallon continually interrupted. “But Mr. Mayor,” she would say, often speaking out of turn and ignoring the rules of procedure. Soon, councilmen were rolling their eyes or cutting her off before she could go further.

When the issue was whether to move to a new item, Fallon asked to stay on the same item; when it was a proposal to take a break, Fallon wasn’t ready for one. In the midst of a discussion over raising the cost of residential building permits, Fallon opposed any raise, as usual finding herself a one-woman minority. Mayor Joe V. Alderete exploded.

“Every item that comes up here, Mrs. Fallon, you knock down,” Alderete snapped. “You know, I’m up to here (holding his hand over his head) with knocking things down.”

Fallon tried to interrupt--again--but the mayor would have none of it, finally concluding, “We have to pay whether we like it or not; and if we don’t like it, move out.”

Shocked members of the audience murmured as Fallon, clad in the trademark hat she says she wears for courage, called out “Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor.” Alderete ignored her and directed the council to vote.

The onstage bickering continued, eventually infecting the audience.

When Alderete let Joyce Lingor, president of the senior citizens club, make an impromptu speech thanking him for reopening the club’s center, resident Robert Mandering shouted Lingor off the floor, pointing out that her comments were as out of order as anything Fallon had said. Lingor grabbed her sweater and papers and stormed out, pausing just long enough to smack Mandering on the back.

“Tonight was actually pretty calm,” Fallon said after the five-hour meeting.

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Sally Holguin-Fallon, a former piano teacher who unseated incumbent Manuel Garcia in April, made history when she became La Puente’s first female council member. Meetings have not been the same since.

Fallon fought her way onto the council with dreams of changing city government into a more feeling, innovative body that would bring people together, beautify the city and start a community theater. Instead, the councilmen isolate her, often ignore her and routinely kill off her proposals, saying that’s not what city government is for.

Fallon contributes to the rift by following her own style of city politics. Unschooled in the culture of council deliberations, she enthusiastically and naively plops her ideas onto the council agendas without setting up the support of her colleagues.

“I’d never put something on the agenda if I knew I couldn’t get it across,” said Councilman Louis R. Perez, who has been on the council for four years.

The results have frustrated and angered a council with its own way of doing things. Meetings that once marched along swiftly, smoothly, and dispensed with routine city business seemingly without dissent now last past midnight. Fallon may not get her ideas off the ground, but she is getting a community stage of her own to get them heard.

Fallon says her council colleagues suffer from a case of male chauvinism. They argue that Fallon has a big mouth, with neither the experience nor knowledge to back it up.

“She’s got to understand that we all have to get together in the way we act and vote. She’s got her own little agenda,” Alderete said. “It’ll be a matter of time, and then she’ll be a good girl.”

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There is a noticeable difference in agendas here. The councilmen talk about raising fees to balance the budget of the 38-year-old city. Fallon talks about having the city help residents swap services with each other, developing a community theater group and planting flowers at the entrances to the city, hoping it might lure business to the working-class town in which nearly three-fourths of the residents are Latino. All of her ideas have sunk so far.

At one council meeting, 18 proposals from Fallon were tabled indefinitely.

“She just doesn’t understand the correct way of doing things,” said Charles H. Storing, who has served 29 years on the council. “I can’t recall any new council member who was as aggressive and challenging as she is.”

Storing, whose thin frame shakes with frustration when discussing Fallon, sees those traits as obtrusive and embarrassing, but Fallon sees them as weapons with which to fight the status quo.

“I didn’t want my kids growing up believing they couldn’t be effective in our world,” Fallon said of her role on the council. “They said, ‘You can’t fight City Hall, you’re only one person.’ I wanted to show them one person could do a lot.”

That’s exactly the problem, said Alderete, who has been a council member since 1988 and mayor since April. “She’s trying to do too much,” he said. “She starts shoving and pushing. She’s got to understand: You can’t change City Hall in one day.”

Several of the city’s residents say Fallon gets in trouble not because she is trying to do too much, but because she is trying to do anything at all.

Businesswoman Shirley Hanson says she is no fan of Fallon’s and disagrees with the councilwoman on many issues, but she thinks the councilmen clearly refuse to consider any change--especially from a woman.

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“They’ve lost one of their men,” Hanson said. “And they do not like the idea of a woman who has power equal to theirs.”

Hanson lives in unincorporated West Valinda but has owned a clothing store in La Puente for 27 years and regularly attends council meetings. She scowls as she describes the councilmen’s behavior as “crass, abrupt, condescending, haughty and arrogant.”

Storing disputes that description, saying he has never heard any councilman speak rudely to or about Fallon. Yet, after one of the numerous times that Fallon interrupted the mayor at a recent meeting, Storing leaned in to his microphone and referred to her behavior as “a disease.”

Alderete freely admits that Fallon upsets him and that he sometimes shows it publicly. Before Fallon was elected, Alderete said, council meetings closed at about 10 p.m. “Now we never get out of there before midnight.”

Fallon keeps offering up her ideas, and her irritated colleagues generally table the proposals without discussion.

On the rare occasions when her motions are seconded, they die on a predictable 4-1 vote.

La Puente resident Penny Aguilar said Edward L. Chavez, a councilman since 1990, told her he would never vote with Fallon, regardless of the issue, because he did not like her. Chavez would not comment on the accusation at first, then later said, “I have no idea that I would say anything like that.”

Among the Fallon proposals that vanished was a plan to create an education commission of parents and students to serve as a conduit between the board of education and the council on issues of concern to La Puente.

“They won’t discuss these ideas because I’m proposing them. I’m the new kid on the block and I’m a woman, so they don’t want to listen to what I have to say,” Fallon said. “I’m probably moving too fast, but I don’t think we have time to move slow.”

The council does not table her items because she is a new member or a woman, Storing said angrily during an interview, but because they are “nonsensical.”

“The majority of things she proposes are not even within the jurisdiction of local government,” he said. “When she makes these proposals, there’s no form or substance to them, no backup information.”

Storing called the idea for an education commission an irrelevant issue. “We have absolutely nothing to do with education. That’s not within our realm,” he said.

Both Perez and Alderete say Fallon needs to be more of a team player in the way she votes.

But La Puente resident George Henley said he wonders if being a team player means that a council member should not question the majority or stand alone on an issue. Like Hanson, Henley says he is not necessarily a Fallon supporter, but nonetheless appreciates her effort to challenge what he considers a monolith of power.

Although most of the arguing during council meetings takes place between Alderete, who holds the gavel, and Fallon, who is usually out of order, there is a subtle chumminess between the two. For almost 10 years in the 1970s, he was a maintenance worker and she was a piano teacher for the Hacienda-La Puente Unified School District.

In private and between complaints, both Alderete and Fallon slip in a nice word about each other. “He’s a sweet man,” she once said. He called her “a wonderful lady.”

Still, kind words are unusual. In fact, Fallon said she was afraid of physical violence from her colleagues at one point.

She acted on that fear in anticipation of a June 28 closed session in which she wanted to discuss her opposition to an ordinance directing City Clerk Linda Groves to answer to City Manager Robert Gutierrez, rather than to the council.

At an earlier meeting, Perez had said the closed session, which only council members and the city attorney attend, would be “no holds barred.” Fallon said the statement made her nervous, prompting a call to police requesting that an officer accompany her--a request that was denied.

“I didn’t know what he meant by that, and you can’t take any chances these days,” Fallon said.

Fallon clearly feels uncomfortable around the other council members. She wears a wide-rimmed black or white bonnet to every meeting because she said it “puffs” her up and makes her feel brave. Her naturally shaky voice trembles even more when she talks about being seen as a troublemaker.

Fallon, who has lived in La Puente since she was 18 months old, said she was very shy as a youngster. “I was home-schooled until high school because I had very bad asthma,” she said. “I didn’t have any friends and I didn’t learn to have an opinion until I was 22 years old.”

Fallon, 48, met her husband Robert, a postal worker, the day she graduated from community college. They have three sons, ages 23, 15 and 6.

The time spent alone in the house as a child had at least one advantage, she said. It gave her the opportunity to learn and fall in love with the piano. She went on to be a piano accompanist for both of her alma maters, the Hacienda-La Puente Unified School District and Mt. San Antonio College.

Once Fallon gained her self-confidence, there was no turning back. She ran for a spot on the school board in 1989 and on the council in 1990 and 1992 but lost all three races.

“My mother said, ‘Sally, you’re beginning to look like a joke,’ ” she recalled. That didn’t deter Fallon, who tried again and won, unseating Garcia with 711 votes to his 609.

Her campaign became controversial when the Highlander Newspaper reported that she had an associates degree from Mt. SAC. David Garcia, the son of Fallon’s opponent, Manuel Garcia, said he called the school to confirm her degree and could not find any record of her graduation.

In fact, Fallon did graduate from Mt. SAC in June, 1968, college officials told The Times. She was not, however, issued a degree because she did not maintain the school’s minimum standard of a C grade point average.

Fallon said she did not remember if she got her degree.

“I knew I graduated, because it was the day I met Robert,” she said of her husband. “I was going to transfer my credits and continue going to school, but I got involved with other things.”

Today, “other things” include her role as a councilwoman and her desire to spruce up La Puente by planting flowers by the roads leading into the city “so people think it’s a place worth investing in.”

“Maybe some of her ideas sound a little crazy,” resident George Henley said. “But I’d rather see five Sally Fallons up there. At least she’s trying.”

Profile: Sally Holguin-Fallon

Occupation: La Puente city councilwoman

Age: 48

Family: Husband, Robert, and three children, ages 23, 15 and 6

Education: Diploma from Mt. San Antonio College

Previous Employment: Piano accompanist for the Hacienda/La Puente Unified School District and Mt. San Antonio College

Hobbies: Piano, needlework and sculpture

Volunteer Work: Organizing senior citizen singing groups throughout Los Angeles County

Top Goal on Council: To establish a community-assistance program whereby residents can swap services rather than pay for them.

Quote: “I have the ability to stick to issues, which is what I feel is my most important value to the community. I want to make life better for everyone . . . It’s all I really want to do.”