‘Crazy Bernie’ Is Crazy Like an Independent

Long before he was “Crazy Bernie,” before he advocated junking affirmative action, before he rolled the dice with Willie Brown, Assemblyman Bernie Richter lived what many Angelenos today would consider a dream life.

He grew up in the San Fernando Valley--back before there was a Ventura Freeway, when orange groves and vegetable farms covered the landscape, when clean air was normal, when the nearest neighbor might live a block away. The Richter family farmed 10 acres in idyllic Reseda.

“The Valley then was like Northern California,” recalls Richter, 63, who for the last three decades has lived in Chico, 90 miles north of Sacramento. “It was fantastic. Downtown Reseda had five stores.

“I used to have a Holstein steer I rode to (elementary) school. Kids who were more affluent had horses. I’d stake my steer out in a field, go out at noon and water it and ride it home at the end of the day. I remember some cruelty-to-animals woman stopping me one day and saying it was cruel. Those were the days.”

Richter’s dad, who had lost his sales job during the Depression, was a part-time handyman. He’d dig through trash cans for food scraps that Bernie could grind up for the chickens. He’d bring home old boards and pound out the nails. Says Richter, “I had to clean the crap out of the barn, rain or shine.” And also milk the cows each evening regardless of being a football star. For away games, the coach would reroute the team bus to Bernie’s home to pick up his all-league wingback after chores.

From these make-do, work-ethic roots, a young liberal Democrat evolved into a middle-aged conservative Republican. It’s not an unusual story.

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More unusual--and apropos, he says, to his attitude on affirmative action--Richter’s dad was a first-generation German who listened to prewar broadcasts of Hitler’s speeches. “Mom used to say we had no friends because dad ran everyone out of the house,” he remembers. “Dad would go on and on about how Hitler was an evil maniac who would destroy the world.”

Politics was a regular staple of the Richter dinner table. Kids were lectured about hate, prejudice and anti-Semitism. When Bernie entered UCLA in 1950 on a football scholarship, he was rushed by the major fraternities but declined all bids after learning none would admit minorities or Jews.

Richter also dropped football, he says, because he objected to players being paid under the table despite signing statements that they weren’t. “When I told (coach) Red Sanders,” Richter chuckles, “he looked at me and drawled, ‘Richter, I always did think you were a funny duck.’ ”

Richter and his siblings opened a carwash on Sherman Way in the late 1950s. He was incensed, he says, to learn that his black workers were discriminated against in restaurants. The Chamber rejected his attempt to fight it.

By 1966, the bucolic Valley of Richter’s youth was being paved over, and he left for Chico “to raise my kids in the kind of community I grew up in. It’s the best decision I ever made.”

Naturally, he had married his high school sweetheart. And they’re still married.

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“Crazy Bernie” was a tag Richter pinned on himself in TV ads for his video store; supposedly his wife thought he was crazy to sell VCRs at such a low price. Richter says he got the idea from the 1950s “Mad Man Muntz” used car ads in Los Angeles.

The “Crazy Bernie” label sticks with him in the Legislature. Basically, he’s viewed as unpredictable. Ordinary people might just consider him independent.

Richter’s first unpredictable act came when he stood on the Assembly floor in 1993 and talked shocked Republicans into keeping alive the Commission on the African American Male. “We cannot solve this problem until we are willing to discuss it,” he argued.

His biggest display of independence, however, was when he recently bucked the GOP caucus and ran for Speaker at Brown’s urging. No other Republican would support Richter; they believed wily Willie merely was trying to disrupt the GOP.

Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange) describes trying to dissuade Richter: “It’s like you go down to the crazy house to convince your friend he’s not Napoleon, and the minute you leave he’s back to being Napoleon again.”

Now Richter is back pushing bills to forbid governments and state universities from giving preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity or gender. He says this is the “colorblind” concept learned from his dad.

“Whether it’s called diversity quotas, reverse discrimination or anti-Semitism,” he says, “the obsession with group identity is inherently destructive.”

The word on Richter is he’s often hard to read. But he’s seldom boring.