Down a Road Well Traveled

By the time I began paying attention to the great matters afoot in the city of Los Angeles, all I knew of the 12 years of the Sam Yorty mayoral administration was the dust it left in its wake--the wisecracks, the fables. I knew that Sam Yorty was among the last to pronounce the name of his city in old-white-guy fashion, with the second and third syllables rhyming with “dangle”: Los-ANGLE-es.

I knew that he was an affable guy who ran for office about 20 times--for the Assembly, for Congress, for mayor and for president--and switched from Democrat to Republican. He breezily played banjo on TV, with Johnny Carson on drums. He would just as breezily take a helicopter from City Hall to speak in the San Fernando Valley, his stronghold, the only L.A. mayor ever to hail from there.

Mayor Sam, Shoot-From-the-Lip Sam, the Maverick Mayor--Travelin’ Sam, who offered to pitch in and help LBJ during the Vietnam war, whose globe-trotting left the homebound joking that L.A. was the only city with its own foreign policy. Now it practically has.

We wouldn’t realize just how chatty and off-the-cuff he was until the years thereafter, when the Sphinx of Spring Street, Tom Bradley, presided augustly but glumly in City Hall.

It is 25 years since Sam Yorty was dis-elected and dislodged from City Hall by a different Los Angeles from the one that had put him there--another city, not his own.

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With his honor pushing 90 and the current Mrs. Yorty out of town, I scooped up the paper from the Yorty front step. It was the newspaper formerly known as the Valley News and Green Sheet, for the bilious paper stock it was printed on. When was the last time, I teased Yorty, that you subscribed to The Times?

In his answer was both glower and twinkle, glimmers of his relish for a fight. His feud with The Times was also legend. He sued the paper all the way to the Supreme Court and lost, over a Paul Conrad cartoon even more devastating than one from his quixotic run for the White House, showing Yorty campaign posters hung on tapped sugar maples and captioned: “The sap is running in the maple trees of New Hampshire.”

That doesn’t hang among the trophies on his walls, the medals from France, Brazil, Finland and Iran, the pictures of him with presidents and princes and pop stars. (Elvis Presley: “Very polite. A nice young man.”)

There, though, is the Times editorial from his first mayoral election calling him a political privateer. He foxed The Times then, and twice more, until 1973, when he lost bitterly to Bradley.

Those two elections redefined the city. In 1969, Yorty warned ominously of “special interests”--a black voting bloc ready to take over. He, Yorty, stood between the city and “black power, left-wing radicals and . . . identified Communists.” Yorty won. Four years later, the same tone backfired, and Yorty lost. The voter turnout in those two elections hasn’t been matched since, nor have the voters’ breaches healed.

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We spoke of matters done and undone. Police morale could be better. Mayor Riordan is doing “very well,” even though he was “foolishly afraid of putting anyone but a black in” as police chief. The City Council is its old ornery self, but maybe the charter reform that he, too, tried to get will change that. “Any man,” he once said, “who reads beyond the second paragraph of the Los Angeles City Charter would be out of his mind to run for mayor.”

He ran anyway. In those years, after smog shut down backyard incinerators, he campaigned on recycling. That got him on Johnny Carson, too. It was onerous for housewives to sort out metal cans and then keep them for a month before pickup. “That was the part I didn’t like. People didn’t understand that.” He labored for good sewers, city buildings, a convention center--mostly to make L.A. as internationally known as Hollywood and a gateway to Asia. His chief regret--I can see it in his face--was “when the Olympic Games were brought to L.A., they didn’t even put me on the committee.”

So what about this Valley secession talk by his own folks? For the first time, he struggles for a diplomatic tone. “It’s a tremendously hard job. When they try, they’d find out what they’re in for.” Perhaps, he mused, “they could be apart, but together, like boroughs in New York.”

We are not like New York in so many ways. Its mayors are powerful figures, memorable and remembered even when they’re ridiculed. L.A. mayors, good or goofy, vanish from memory, except for what bears their names. Tom Bradley has more than a dozen namesakes, beginning with the airport’s international terminal (curiously, Bradley ended up traveling about as much as Yorty, whose peregrinations he had so acidly criticized). All that bears the name of Yorty is a meeting room at the convention center. What, then, would he have liked? He is lost in wistful thought. There’s this water-reclamation center he’d built in the Valley. Wouldn’t you know, they named it after an engineer who’d never even visited it.