Hundreds Pay Respects to Brown

Under wet, wintry skies, more than 300 Southern Californians--from political notables to domestic workers--paid their final respects Monday to former Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr., the patriarch of the state’s leading political family, who died Friday night.

For three hours, mourners carrying raincoats and umbrellas filed into the Pierce Bros. chapel in Westwood to view the open wooden casket, draped with a California flag, of the man who served eight years as governor, defeating Richard Nixon in 1962 to win his second term.

As a harpist played religious melodies and mourners shared condolences and swapped memories with members of the Brown family, who sat in the front row of pews in the small glass-walled chapel.

“When he’d laugh, he’d just roar,” said a tearful Tricia Kelly Carlin, one of Brown’s 10 grandchildren, during a brief eulogy.

“We thought he was immortal,” she added, as Brown’s widow, Bernice, and daughter Kathleen, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1994, listened intently.

Brown’s son, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., who himself served as the state’s chief executive for two terms, remembered his father as a humane, down-to-earth, optimistic leader.

“He was not a pretentious person. He didn’t even go to college,” Brown said to reporters outside. Asked about his father’s mixed emotions toward the death penalty, Brown recalled that the elder Brown, who died in his Benedict Canyon home at age 90 after a long illness, pondered cases one at a time. “He acted like a human being and not a machine,” Brown said. “Today, things have become very mechanical, very systematic, very professional, very Orwellian. I didn’t see that in my father at all.”

Among the well-wishers were scores of retired judges, business leaders, political figures and elected officials, including Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn, Los Angeles City Council President John Ferraro, Councilwoman Rita Walters, Democratic state Senator Tom Hayden of Santa Monica and Democratic U.S. Rep. Howard L. Berman of Panorama City.

“He’s the greatest governor this state will ever see,” said Hahn, who recalled meeting Brown in 1958, the year he was elected governor and began his campaign to build state universities, roads and water systems. “We’re still living off his vision . . . [as] the most inclusive governor the state had seen.”

Indeed, for all those who arrived in Lincolns or limousines, there were others who came by public transportation or on foot.

“He opened up white-collar jobs for black people,” said Jessie D. Peterson, a domestic worker in white tennis shoes who took a bus to the chapel. “People could get jobs building the buildings he put up and then could get jobs inside.”

Ricardo Valenzuela, a UCLA medical student dressed in a Mexican poncho, said Brown “was very much for the students. . . . We don’t have much voice anymore, especially with the regents and Gov. [Pete] Wilson.”

Martin and Lois Jones, both 55, traveled through the rain from Oxnard to pay their respects.

“We came by to say thank you,” said Lois Jones, who once worked as a secretary for the Department of Water and Power. “We were both born in Los Angeles, and he epitomized to me the best Los Angeles had to offer.”

Her husband, a retired real estate broker who wore a black jacket adorned with an NRA button, lamented that people have grown cynical about government because of the way it works for “special interests and not the public.”

“Pat Brown was the right man in the right place at the right time,” Martin Jones said.

“Pat Brown represented the era of the rise of the middle class when everything was better. I don’t think we’ll ever see days like that again.”

A funeral Mass for Brown is scheduled for 1 p.m. Wednesday at St. Cecilia’s Church in San Francisco. Private interment will follow.

Times staff writer Paul Lieberman contributed to this story.