Day of Lightning, Nights of Thunder

Lightning flashed over the Sierra Nevada the day Tom Bradley died. Thunder rolled down over the foothills of Reno.

It was as though nature was acknowledging with roaring drumbeats that one of its treasured sons had fallen. What better place to proclaim that loss than over these tall and solemn mountains?

Bradley was not only a metaphor for an emerging Los Angeles but an icon for those who seek to achieve against overwhelming odds.

He climbed mountains of racial barriers higher than the Sierra and weathered storms far more violent than the one that pounded those mountains.

“What was he like?” I was asked a dozen times over.

The question was posed in many ways, first at a book fair in Reno where I was speaking about my 25 years in L.A. and later at a hotel in Nevada City where I’d gone to relax for a day.

It only occurred to me after the talk how much the city had changed during that period of time and how much a part of it Tom Bradley had been.

What was he like? He was like L.A., full of conviction and doubt, a dichotomy of strengths and weaknesses, a blend of bravado and timidity who rode the traumas of that change without being destroyed by them.

He was, well, like us.

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Perspective is hard to achieve when you’re in the middle of a storm. Getting out of town and looking back is necessary for those of us who write about L.A. And it’s necessary for those who used to live here.

A woman I spoke with who left just after the 1992 riots, chased away by dire predictions of a city dying, misses it now every day she’s away.

She had lived on the Westside and was certain, given the climate of the time, that L.A. would destroy itself and she didn’t want to be a witness to Armageddon.

Reno was her alternative to perceived chaos, a place on the other side of the mountains that was to be her Shangri-La. And Reno, she said, is a nice little town . . . “but it isn’t L.A.”

What she misses is the strength and the movement of a city increasingly dominating the world stage, the emergence of power from the ashes of despair. “There’s so much going on,” she said, “so much vitality.”

Then, given the news of Tom Bradley’s death, she and others wanted to know how much a part of the movement and vitality he had been.

I said that change would have occurred whether or not Bradley had ever existed. Like a child on the brink of adulthood, the elements of growth were already in place. We were flexing and bellowing, ready to be seen and heard.

What he contributed to the changes were the first notions of diversity that said we didn’t have to be all the same to create a strong, living city. It was OK to be black, to be Latino, to be Asian, to be white, to be female. It was OK to be us.

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What was Tom Bradley like? they asked.

I came to L.A. the year before he was elected and covered portions of his winning campaign in 1973. He was, I thought, as drab and passionless as a trout. I was wrong. The stoic manner concealed a fire in his belly essential not only to winning but, in the case of those who have suffered personal humiliations, to enduring.

“There’s no racial thing this time,” he said to me during the campaign, acknowledging the roar of the crowds that had turned out to greet him. He was thinking of the prior mayoral election when incumbent Sam Yorty had defeated him with a campaign of bitter racial invective.

Bradley stood before the crowds this time like a giant oak, responding to their cheers with only the smallest and unrevealing of smiles. Then he turned to me and said without preamble, “I’ve wanted Sam Yorty for a long, long time.”

It was a glimpse into the furnace that burned within Bradley, undamped by even the charges of improprieties that showered over him in the final years of his political prominence.

He acknowledged them in a mood of grace and atonement that concealed whatever pain he was suffering. Then he walked away.

So what was Tom Bradley like? “He was,” I told them in Reno, “the kind of person we all like to think we are, able to absorb animosities and not let them cloud our perspective.”

He presided over a city that endured days of lighting and nights of thunder and he never gave up hope that the storm would pass. On the day he died, the storm acknowledged that.

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Al Martinez’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.