Party Animals

When you’re the minority party--and Democrats in Orange County are--you’ve got to be prepared to work hard, take the hits and, most of all, hold fast to your ideals.

Like Marti Schrank does.

This year Schrank attended not only the Democratic National Convention but the Republican one as well. That was she driving around the San Diego Convention Center with her Clinton/Gore signs and marching wearing a cigarette-butt hat.

In more than 30 years of ceaseless activism in Orange County, Schrank has watched hundreds of local Democratic candidates fall to Republicans. Still, she believes that the more than 40 hours a week she devotes to Democratic politics--volunteering at party headquarters, registering voters, organizing rallies--is far from a quixotic venture.

“It’s definitely a challenge,” says Schrank, 59. “The fact is we are not the majority party, so we have to register people to vote; we have to have clubs, and we have to encourage people to stay involved.”

When she first voted in 1958 at age 21, she joined a local Democratic club at the same time. She began walking precincts on behalf of Democratic candidates as her parents once had, and she hasn’t stopped.

“There is no more devoted volunteer than Marti,” says James Toledano, Orange County Democratic Party chairman. “She’s working on politics from the time she gets up in the morning until she goes to sleep seven days a week.”

Her loyalty to the party grew deeper over the years--especially when, in 1969, she found herself the widowed, unemployed mother of a baby girl. Welfare, a creation of Democrats past, afforded her diapers and food until she found a job. She is retired after holding several jobs, including telephone operator, cocktail waitress and shop employee at Disneyland.

Her brush with poverty, she says, put her in touch with the frailty of the human condition, fortifying her compassion for the less fortunate and strengthening her commitment to the Democratic Party because she believes it’s the only one that will look after the poor.

That mission, the cause she holds most sacred of all, is important even in well-heeled Orange County, Schrank says.

She never misses an opportunity to point out to fellow Democrats and others that there exists a vast underclass in the county--farm workers and blue-collar wage earners--upon whose labors the local elite built their fortunes.

They are her passion.

As chair of Orange County Interfaith Committee to Aid Farm Workers, Schrank helps its 300 members lobby for better wages and working conditions. She lectures at local schools and clubs on the backbreaking work that goes into bringing local produce to the dinner table.

Schrank names Cesar Chavez as one of her heroes, still a source of inspiration to her three years after she marched in his funeral procession. She knew she was doing something important when, at a political rally in Los Angeles, Chavez recognized her in a crowd and greeted her, calling her by name.

It came as no surprise to those who knew her when Schrank, at a Democratic fund-raising dinner in San Diego, scooped up all the grapes that had been put out on the buffet table. After dumping them in the garbage, she chatted with hotel employees, explaining to them they should refuse to serve the fruit because their union had supported the grape boycott.

Later she went out to her van for a case of videos she carries with her about the United Farm Workers. She asked Bill Press, then state chairman of the Democratic Party, to direct the guests to her table to pick up a copy of the tape “No Grapes.”

“I was very disturbed,” she recalls. “You should not see grapes at any function of the Democratic Party.”

Her disagreements with the party are infrequent, though, and have never forced her to question her affiliation or determination to help Democrats get elected and keep local party members from losing hope.

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Schrank’s days often begin early, starting four days a week with the drive from her Fullerton home to open party headquarters in Santa Ana. Her tasks as a volunteer there change daily--organizing other campaign volunteers, answering phones, putting together rallies, even helping students from local high schools and colleges get information for term papers on elections.

Despite having served on the central committee for 16 years, receiving numerous awards for her volunteer work and being one of the most plugged-in people in Democratic circles, Schrank does not let the accolades go to her head.

No task--not handing out campaign buttons, not setting up chairs for political meetings--is too small to be meaningful, she says. Each duty and every small gesture, down to putting a Clinton/Gore sticker on her car, serves to remind other Orange County Democrats, and Republicans too, that just because they are surrounded doesn’t mean they have surrendered.

Like many other young Democrats in Orange County, Mike Monasmith says Schrank was the first person he met when he walked into headquarters the summer after graduating from UCLA. Monasmith told her he wanted to volunteer before heading to law school. She put him to work sending announcements of a meeting to central committee members.

Between envelope-stuffing sessions, Schrank counseled Monasmith, teaching him about the party structure in California. “Anyone who wants to get involved needs to know that, and you can’t get that knowledge from a book,” Monasmith says.

Four years later, Monasmith, 30, is the deputy director in California for Clinton’s reelection campaign.

“It all started with Marti Schrank,” he says. “She was the first person to put me to work. She is a pretty marvelous person.”

Years of involvement have given Schrank a deep knowledge of the party and its players. Her connections also won her a spot as a delegate to the last pair of national Democratic conventions.

She gets positively giddy dropping the names of all the national figures--including the president and first lady--she met in New York in 1992 and this summer in Chicago.

She can hardly keep still recounting that Vice President Al Gore hugged her at a reception in Chicago for the California delegation.

This year Schrank attended her first Republican convention. There was no hobnobbing on the convention floor, of course. She drove the streets around the convention center--her van adorned with Clinton/Gore signs--handing out stickers and buttons to Clinton supporters.

As part of her three-day taunt of the Republican Party, she constructed a cardboard cigarette butt to wear on her head on a march through downtown San Diego.

As important as Schrank believes politics is, she also thinks it’s fun.

Returning from a voter registration drive recently, for which she had to leave home at 4:30 a.m. and spend nearly 12 hours trying to convince newly sworn American citizens to register as Democrats, Schrank was giggling.

The best part? By her count, the Democrats’ signing up new voters outnumbered Republicans trying to do the same by about 7 to 1.

“It was wonderful,” she says. “We had so much fun.”