Fond Memories of a Good Man and a Great Lawmaker

“Isn’t that a bummer,” Ken Maddy said when I mentioned the cancer they’d found in his body just a week earlier.

This was last February, only two months into his retirement as one of the most respected legislators ever to grace California’s Capitol. Merely one month after signing on for potential riches with a big public affairs firm, Fleishman-Hillard. Shortly after becoming engaged to Marie Moretti, sister of the late Assembly Speaker Bob Moretti, one of Maddy’s best friends.

A bummer. Typical Maddy. As if he were talking about getting rained out of a golf round. At ease and putting the caller at ease. Calm, of good cheer, yet serious.

He explained what had happened: He’d had shoulder pains, especially when playing golf. Doctors couldn’t find the reason. Maybe it was tendinitis. Then while playing golf over the holidays in Palm Springs, he’d felt pain in his hip. Back to the doctor. X-rays. This time they found lung cancer. It had spread to his hip, then formed a large tumor by his shoulder.

No complaints. Maddy was being his classy self. Candid and realistic. He was going to start radiation that day. Also soon chemo. Yes, he’d lose his dark, slightly graying hair. “A bummer.”

Doctors couldn’t forecast his chances. Different people react differently to treatment. But he was hopeful, relatively upbeat. Maybe they could get it into remission. Maybe not.

Lung cancer, what an irony! He’d never smoked in his life. Perhaps it came from all those late nights down at Frank Fat’s restaurant, playing poker with his buddies. In those days, a lot of people smoked.

He’d fight this all the way. He loved life. Loved people and loved politics. He loved ponies, a lifetime passion, beginning as a teenage groom at Hollywood Park and ending as owner of a champion filly, Work the Crowd. There’d be chemo and more chemo. Surgeries.

It gave him only a few months. Maddy, 65, died early Saturday in a Sacramento hospital with Marie Moretti at his bedside.

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No superlatives can overstate Maddy’s effect on the Capitol and his colleagues.

He simply was one of the very best--of the last four decades, at least. A legislator’s legislator. A model legislator.

Popular, knowledgeable, trustworthy, conscientious, pragmatic. Superb strategist and skillful negotiator. Straight shooter. If there’d been more Maddys--if he’d been the voters’ image of the Legislature--we probably wouldn’t have term limits.

Maddy didn’t wield the big influence of Willie Brown, Jesse Unruh or David Roberti. Unlike these Democratic leaders, he was in the minority party.

But as the Senate Republican leader, Maddy was in on all the major deals, especially the budget compromising. Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), using a basketball analogy, recalled Saturday that Maddy was “the go-to guy” for Republican Govs. George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson.

He was a committed compromiser, devoted to problem solving and untangling gridlock. “These ideologues who come up here and tilt at windmills don’t contribute a whole lot, frankly,” Maddy once told me. “It’s a matter of what’s doable, what you’ve got the votes for.”

Philosophically, the Fresno lawmaker was considered a moderate, but his views ranged from libertarian to conservative. He favored abortion rights, gay rights and gun control. He also supported the two-thirds vote requirement to raise taxes, less government regulation and more water development.

Personally, I liked Maddy because he was easy to talk to and gave honest answers. No spin. He treated people with respect, whether a reporter, a governor or a waiter at Fat’s. And that’s also how he treated his profession.

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Maddy’s career had ups and downs. He ran for governor in 1978 and finished third in the primary. “He would have been one of the best governors in history,” Democrat Burton said.

Maddy had expected Deukmejian to appoint him as state treasurer in 1987. But the governor named a fellow Long Beach pol, Rep. Dan Lungren. In 1995, nine Republican senators ambushed Maddy and dumped him as minority leader. They didn’t think he was partisan enough.

Term limits ousted him from the Senate in 1998. Then came the cancer.

Maddy went into the hospital for the final time last Tuesday night. The next day, former Gov. Wilson called him.

“I just said some things I don’t say to men very often,” Wilson recalled. “He kind of responded in kind. And then he said, ‘I gotta go.’ ”

Yes, a real bummer. But not his life. Ken Maddy was a politician--and proud of it--who made a difference for the better.