An Affable Lungren Makes a Nostalgic Visit to Alma Mater

The other Dan Lungren showed up to campaign Friday, the former letterman who ogled girls on his high school “stag line,” tried to keep out of the hair of the prefect of discipline and recalls, fondly still, his football teammates of 34 years ago.

Lungren, the normally tough-talking attorney general and Republican gubernatorial nominee, took a sentimental journey Friday to the schoolyards of his youth. He sat in the high school classroom in Long Beach where he and his rowdy friends once earned a day’s detention for their entire class. He pointed out the room where he was when word came, in his senior year, of the assassination of his fellow Catholic, President John F. Kennedy.

And he was sent to the principal’s office--but only to sign his 1964 yearbook. “It was nice to get out of the principal’s office after going in,” he said.

The ends of campaigns are contests of pure will over exhaustion, of desire over brutal reality. And it is all the more difficult when you are trailing, when all anyone wants to talk about is how far behind you are.

In the midst of that strain, however, has come a different Lungren, refreshed and friendly, more the engaging person his friends describe than the unpredictable character who has haunted the campaign trail more than a year.

He was droll and funny, beginning just before he walked up the steps to St. Anthony’s High School. Are you going to do anything to change your campaign in the final days? a reporter asked.

“I thought I’d fire my whole campaign staff, get rid of my family,” he deadpanned, before laughing.

He was jovial even at the suggestion that he needs divine intervention. When Principal Cynthia Madsen pointed to a statue of the school’s patron saint, Anthony of Padua, and said prayers had been made to him, Lungren declared: “I need him! I need him! That’s good.”

But the candidate was also emotional when, at an assembly featuring the football team, he lauded the students.

“In some ways, it’s a lot easier to win than it is to lose,” he added. “It’s easier to be a front-runner. It is tougher to be behind. You have to work. A lot of people tell you you’ve got to quit.”

The passage seemed to speak of Lungren himself, but he good-naturedly laughed that suggestion off later. Nope, he said, it was aimed at the St. Anthony football team, whose record he had learned just before he started speaking.

“Two and five,” he said.