An Unforgettable Role in L.A.’s Wrenching Rebirth

I was mired in freeway traffic alongside the Convention Center, an enormous edifice for which Sam Yorty was a motive force, when I heard a radio announcer say that he was dead, and describe the onetime longtime mayor of Los Angeles as “colorful.”

Now, “colorful” is a word we use a great deal in this business, for it is as versatile as a roll of duct tape. Fiorello La Guardia was colorful, Elvis was colorful, Capone was colorful. We use it as a shorthand to denote someone who makes good copy; anyone more animated than Richard Nixon or Calvin Coolidge might find himself called colorful. Likewise, we use it for cover when the particulars--sexual tomfoolery, richly earned hangovers, borderline lunacy--might be too dangerous to print.

For Sam Yorty, “colorful” doesn’t begin to tell it.

For years, I had heard tales about him: “Travelin’ Sam,” hop-skipping to every one of L.A.’s 16 sister cities around the globe . . . the ready-fire-aim quotemeister who offered LBJ his advice during the Vietnam War. . . . Mayor Sam, who commuted to City Hall via official helicopter, and whose lady friends were lovely and legion.

Had that been all there was, “colorful” might have sufficed. But there was more to him than that. During his dozen years in office that bestrode the city not always like a colossus, modern L.A. was conceived and born anew.

The conception was a ribbon-cutting gala that promoted L.A. from an overgrown burg where they just happened to make movies to a metropolis with a Convention Center and a Music Center and a zoo and freeways and an identity that was more than a punch line. It was, says Beverly Ziegler, who worked some of Yorty’s score of campaigns, a city of wonders: “We didn’t even seem to have earthquakes back in those days!”

Yorty, in accents as flat as his native Nebraska, pronounced that Los Angeles in old-white-guy fashion, the second and third syllables rhyming with “dangle”: Los ANGLE es.

Then came birth, a wrenching transformation, achieved by law, through politics and civil rights, and by lawlessness, through the Watts riots. Afterward, after the blood was washed away and the umbilicus severed, the city began to grow again--a less tractable and more difficult city, yes, but more honest with itself. The new Los Angeles spoke its name with accents--many accents, from places far beyond Nebraska.

The first L.A., Sam Yorty helped to create with his boosterism and his energy. The second, he helped to create with his stubbornness and anger.

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Yorty’s last interview was probably the one he gave me a few months ago. His wife was away and his nurse had the day off and I suspect neither might have consented to such a strain on his system.

There was something of the old vigor and venom in his manner, yet this man white-haired and slow was hard to reconcile with the Mayor Sam of legend; it almost always is with these lions in winter.

Like a radio scanner searching for a strong frequency, Yorty’s career had moved steadily across the political band, left to right. He was a creation uniquely possible in California’s curious politics.

Here was a man who sounded the alarm about Hitler when the only other Americans hollering with him were the New York lefty intellectuals he came to hate . . . and yet 10 years after Joe McCarthy was in his grave, Yorty was seeing Commies on every street in South-Central L.A.

This was the man who won his first term as mayor in 1961 in part with the votes of blacks and Latinos, pledging to integrate the police and fire departments. By 1969, after the Watts riots, he was speaking ominously of “black bloc votes” and putting out bumper stickers with a black power fist labeled “Bradley Power.”

Sprung from the same soil as the prairie populist William Jennings Bryan, a young Yorty agitated for a 40-hour workweek and old-age pensions. In later years he derided the War on Poverty as a handout program that would delude the poor and bankrupt the middle class.

That Saturday morning, surrounded by the trophies of his prime and the impedimenta of his age, he lamented his legacy manque: He made L.A. an Olympic-class city and didn’t even get put on its 1984 Olympics committee. The only place in the city bearing his name was a room in the Convention Center. The city did not appreciate what he had done.

I didn’t tell him that much of what he had done was blotted by two ugly mayoral campaigns. The week before the first, which he won, Yorty-influenced weekly community papers ran the headline, “Reign of Terror Seen if Bradley Wins.” The second, in 1973, he lost, bitterly. Rather than having to see Tom Bradley sworn in, he left on a cruise.

Sometimes forces have to work in opposition to work at all. Sometimes things have to build to a breaking point to change. In physics, it’s called the tipping point just before a phase change. Perhaps L.A. needed to have a Yorty--both Yortys--in order to have a Bradley.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com