Playing Catch-Up in Drama Department in Laguna Woods

Four months into its existence and already the new city of Laguna Woods is providing quality laughs. So much for those of us who feared the former Leisure World folks would give us sleepy, stodgy city government.

How we underestimated them!

Case in point: Mayor James Thorpe resigned this week after Councilwoman Ann Snider suggested he gabbed too much at meetings.

Thorpe will remain on the council but announced his resignation as mayor at this week’s meeting. He then adjourned the proceedings, which had gone on for three hours. Snider, who said she was only trying to speed up meetings, said he was acting “like a little kid.”

Thorpe will be 64 in September.

The implications of Thorpe’s action are staggering.

Imagine how local government would change if excessive chatter became grounds for quitting.

Some councils need years to develop a flair for the dramatic. Laguna Woods has wasted little time.

The council joins an illustrious list of Orange County bodies that distinguished themselves in ways that transcended public policy.

The pantheon of local heroes would have to include Norman Eckenrode of Placentia, first elected in 1978 and still going strong today at 61. He and fellow council member Pete Laborde had a running feud, and one night in 1981, as Eckenrode tells it, they found themselves alone in a conference room at City Hall.

One thing led to another, and Laborde started swinging away, Eckenrode says. “I was born and raised in Watts. I knew how to defend myself pretty well,” Eckenrode says. “I was in a corner and he was pounding away. I swung and hit him once and knocked him over a conference table. I have to be honest. When he was going down, I said, ‘I’ve been taking a lot of s--- from him,’ so I hit him a second time. That’s when he went over the conference table.”

Of more recent vintage was Santa Ana Councilman Brett Franklin’s charge that fellow member Ted Moreno “hockey-checked” him when they passed in a hallway. Moreno denied the charge, saying they merely brushed against each other.

A less violent but equally passionate duel ensued in the 1970s between Anaheim council members Miriam Kaywood and devoted cigar smoker Bill Thom.

Kaywood was a nonsmoker who didn’t appreciate Thom’s cigar smoke wafting in her direction during council meetings. Eventually, she brought a fan that blew the smoke back into Thom’s face. Local legend has it that Thom once offered to buy Kaywood a three-dollar Havana along with an open-ended suggestion of what she could do with it.

That was reminiscent of an Irvine flap in the mid-1970s, when Councilwoman Mary Ann Gaido proposed a smoking ban. Among the dissenters was fellow member John Burton, who said that he was allergic to Gaido’s perfume.

All those combatants would have done well to follow the lead of the Seal Beach council, which in the early 1990s invoked a “time-out” period whenever members were getting too personal with each other. Even that, sadly, led to arguments over when it was proper to invoke it.

While Thorpe earns plaudits for his artful resignation, he still can’t touch former Garden Grove councilman Bob Dinsen in the imagination department.

A self-acclaimed champion of not wanting to raise taxes, Dinsen tried in 1988 to change his name legally to Robert Franklin “Taxfighter Bob” Dinsen. He didn’t follow through after a local resident said Dinsen was making a mockery of the election process and threatened to take the matter to court.

Taking nothing away from Laguna Woods’ debate over excessive talking, this is not new ground.

In the late 1980s, for example, Costa Mesa set a midnight curfew after some meetings were beginning at sundown and lasting till dawn.

Honest. Then-Mayor Donn Hall would seem to have been the master of understatement when he remarked in 1987: “It is unfair to many people to have them wait till 5 in the morning to speak.”

By resurrecting these moments, I in no way want to discourage the Laguna Woods council from carving out its own niche.

And even if we can’t always count on a council meeting like the one Anaheim had years ago--when a resident brought a baby elephant into chambers to prove it was a domesticated animal. . . .

Well, we can always hope.

So, hats off to Laguna Woods.

You’re off to a good start.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.