Tough Act to Follow

At long last, the folks in Culver City are saying goodbye to the old man they call Uncle Syd. Next Tuesday, as the fiscal year ends, the ageless Sydney Kronenthal will slowly don his blue blazer and walk for the last time from his office in the parks and recreation complex, leaving behind his post as city director of human services.

Funny thing, city officials quip, they didn’t even have to use those sticks of dynamite to get the old boy out--he left of his own accord. After 52 years in the same city department, all that time doing essentially the same job, Kronenthal is finally stepping down.

Since 1946, he has spent his life developing a growing parks and recreation system in a tenure that spanned the administrations of 10 U.S. presidents. He has attended more than 10,000 city meetings and lain awake too many nights thinking about how to run his little corner of the world more efficiently.

But not to worry, Uncle Syd says, he’s still got things well under control, including the appointment of a successor--a young whippersnapper with a mere 25 years of municipal service.

Kronenthal’s story is a testament to a lost ethic of permanence that seems alien in an era of diminished employment security and frenetic job-hopping. How on earth, you want to ask him, does somebody stay at the same job for 52 years?

“I just never wanted to leave,” says Uncle Syd, a self-professed workaholic. “Every morning, I just couldn’t wait to get to the office, to see what I could get accomplished that day.”

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Many mornings he was at work by 7 a.m. and didn’t leave until after midnight.

“Syd’s always in his office; you call him up, he’s there,” says Steve Gourley, a former Culver City mayor. “One night some of us were locked out of a candidates forum at a local park hall. It was after 8 p.m. when I called his office. But Syd was still there. He said ‘OK, kid, I’ll have somebody there in five minutes.’ And he did.”

Some officials say Uncle Syd hasn’t taken a vacation in 25 years. Kronenthal calls that a bunch of hooey.

“It’s only been 10 years,” he says.

Along the way he forgot a few important steps. For one, he never got married. Nor did he ever buy a house. For the last 48 years, he’s rented the same bungalow out behind the old widow’s place on Harter Street.

“I’ve just never been able to figure out how to divorce my life from the city’s life,” he says. “The city is my family. Really, it’s something I’d die for. When I finally retire, I’m going to have to find out who I am and who I really belong to.”

Who Syd Kronenthal is, friends and co-workers say, is a relentless go-getter whose obsessiveness helped establish some 14 parks, including one that bears his name. Not bad for a small suburban city of just five square miles and 42,000 residents.

Syd fought for the establishment of the city’s youth and senior centers, for soccer and baseball fields and better after-school care and youth job programs.

It wasn’t the life he had planned. He wanted to be a doctor. Born in Chicago, he started medical school and stopped during World War II to serve in the Army Air Corps. He was ready to return to school when he took a job as an assistant parks director in Culver City. After a brief hiatus with the Veterans Administration, working to rehabilitate wounded servicemen, he came back to City Hall.

His pet project away from the office has been his work at the Therapeutic Living Center for the Blind, a Los Angeles residence center and group home for blind people with other disabilities, where he donates time. His daily schedule also includes a walk through the senior center adjacent to his office, where he tells his stories and spreads his cheer.

On one of his recent tours, a woman who has just left the center pulls curbside in her car. “Don’t believe a word he tells you,” she warns a visitor jocularly after giving Uncle Syd a peck on the cheek.

For several years, friends say, Kronenthal has silently donated money to provide full college scholarships to needy students who otherwise might not have had the chance to go to school.

“Yeah,” he acknowledges wryly. “And my accountant just keeps shaking his head.”

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He keeps his age a mystery. Rumors place him between 70 and 80.

“He’s really a very private man in his own life,” says longtime friend Fred Cunningham, retired Beverly Hills city public affairs director. “But his giving money to the scholarships makes sense with Syd. With his not having a family, being a bachelor all his life, he just decided to go behind the scenes and do for his city what any good parent would do. He’s a remarkable young man. He’ll always be young.”

When Kronenthal looks back, he wonders if he listened too much to the doubters, “the ones who said, ‘Kronenthal’s gonna bankrupt the city, we’ve already got too many parks.’

“I should have fought harder for park space. And that includes punching out some of the city councilmen who wanted to stand in my way.”

Walking around the city’s parks and recreation complex, with its Olympic-sized public pool, he says: “This was all an empty lot when I came here. They all criticized me for pushing to build this place for $650,000. Now you couldn’t paint it for that price.”

Last week, Kronenthal attended his last City Council meeting, where officials threw him a party, and gave him a gold ring and letters from the surviving U.S. presidents.

“I’m pretty stoic, but I’ve got to tell you, it was hard not to cry,” he says.

He plans to devote his energies to charity, maybe take on another class at USC, where he has taught public administration for 35 years. The city’s historical society wants to get its hands on the mementos he’s collected in half a century of public service.

Regrets? “Oh sure,” he says. “Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have taken on a wife and have raised 10 kids.

“I guess it’s too late to find out though, huh?”