Baxter Ward, 82; Political Maverick

Baxter Ward, the high-profile television anchor-cum-politician who served two terms on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors but failed twice in widely separated bids to become mayor of Los Angeles, died Monday. He was 82.

Ward, who was a county supervisor from 1972 to 1980, died in a Kirkland, Wash., hospital two weeks after he was diagnosed with lung cancer, said his son, Torrey Ward. The senior Ward moved to Washington state in 1994 and wrote an unpublished book about politics in Los Angeles and Seattle.

Edwardian gentleman. Unmuzzled pit bull. Diminutive, pale, immaculate “germaphobe” who wouldn’t shake hands. Maverick. A sincere and entertaining television anchor, able to deliver “hard news with a soft touch, camp with calamity, satire with sensationalism, fast-breaking news with fast break-ups.” Eccentric muckraker. Gadfly. Visionary who 30 years ago proposed high-speed trains on freeways and feeder trolleys on flood-control channels. Champion of the little guy. Loose cannon.

Those terms and more were used to describe Baxter Ward during his four decades on TV screens and in the public meeting rooms of Los Angeles. But politician?

“No. No,” the man who ran in half a dozen elections told a Times interviewer in 1988. “Politician? Heavens!”

Well, an unusual one at least. Ward refused to accept campaign contributions, running one mayoral campaign for $8,800 out of his own pocket. He wasn’t even sure he was a Democrat, once telling the Sherman Oaks Democratic Club he thought he was registered as a decline-to-state voter, until a member produced records proving him a sure-enough registered Democrat.

The dark-haired media don with the familiar baritone made his first bid for public office in 1969 when he ran for mayor. He finished third behind past and future Mayors Sam Yorty and Tom Bradley.

In 1972, Ward defeated incumbent Supervisor Warren Dorn and four years later won reelection to the 5th Supervisorial District covering parts of the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys and reaching into Pasadena, San Marino and Glendale.

He was ousted in 1980 by conservative Supervisor Mike Antonovich, and after several years’ hiatus failed to recapture that seat in 1988 and again failed to gain the mayor’s office in 1989.

Neither Ward’s supporters nor detractors ever were quite sure whether his tenure was good for the district, but they all knew he made it interesting.

Ward was largely credited with dislodging the cozy old-boy system of the board, previously known as “the five little kings” for supervisors’ power over individual districts. A gentleman in person, Ward was anything but courtly to his colleagues when he accused them of catering to special interests and publicized their campaign contributions from developers and others.

Former Supervisor Ernest E. Debs once complained that volatile board encounters with Ward left him feeling like a wet dishrag. Debs and two other county officials later filed disability claims, attributing their heart conditions partly to Ward.

Former Assessor Philip E. Watson sued Ward for defamation after Ward prompted the grand jury to investigate Watson. Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess, another target of several Ward investigations, called Ward “one of the most destructive men we’ve had in county government ... [who] did everything to destroy the public confidence and faith and belief in county government.”

Yet Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp defended Ward’s probe of Watson, saying indictments might have resulted had Watson not resigned. And health officials said Ward’s inquiry into nursing home mistreatment of patients led to dozens of prosecutions of poor operators.

“If the evidence were brought of fraud, theft, misuse, if there were scoundrels abounding, by all means those matters should be inquired into,” Ward told The Times near the end of his political career. “I think the public’s interests are to be protected as best the county can.”

Former Supervisor Ed Edelman, a liberal who served with Ward from his own election in 1975 until 1980, said Monday that Ward “was a colorful and unique elected official who cut an interesting swath.... I enjoyed working with him.

“He was a force to be reckoned with in the county. He was somewhat of a reformer, sort of a maverick. He did some things that were good, like bringing attention to mass transit, along with [former Supervisor] Kenny Hahn and me,” Edelman said. “On the other hand, Baxter sometimes stepped beyond the bounds of propriety, as when he had his investigators rifling the desks of employees. That was his zealot style.”

In many ways, Ward pursued his public duties as an officeholder much as he had pursued his version of news--searching for the dishonesty of politicians and bureaucrats and trying to help homeowners with zoning battles and high taxes.

Until Proposition 13 chopped property taxes and killed the project, Ward successfully launched the nation’s first county-owned commuter train. Critics branded the short-lived train between San Diego and Los Angeles “Baxter’s choo choo.” But the experiment did convince Amtrak to adopt the route.

After leaving office, Ward wrote a much-revised and oft-rejected mystery novel based on Proposition 13. The book, he once joked, “has been as unsuccessful as any of my transit efforts.”

Born Baxter Ward Schwellenbach on Nov. 5, 1919, in Superior, Wis., he grew up in Ephrata, Wash. (population 500), where his father became district attorney and later chief justice of the Washington State Supreme Court. An uncle, U.S. Sen. Lewis Schwellenbach, who served as President Harry S Truman’s secretary of Labor, caused Ward to drop the family surname so that his broadcasting career wouldn’t interfere with the senator’s work.

Ward landed his first job as a news announcer at Seattle’s radio station KRSC when he was 16. He worked there and in Spokane for three years, and studied sporadically at the University of Washington.

He spent four years and three months in the Army during World War II, as an infantryman stationed in Africa, Italy, France, Germany and England but never seeing battle.

After the war, he took classes at George Washington University and joined ABC radio and then its television station in Washington, D.C. He worked as a news reporter in Baltimore from 1952 to 1955, when he moved to Los Angeles.

For the next six years, Ward served as news director, producer and anchorman for KCOP-TV Channel 13. He found even greater public exposure as news director and anchorman for KABC-TV Channel 7 from 1962 until 1969, when he resigned to run for mayor.

“Only what interested Baxter got on the air,” said Jeanie Kasindorf, his sometime writer, in an article she did on Ward for Los Angeles magazine in 1970. That meant personal stories like a homeowner whose living room walls were cracking, rather than a new policy at the Department of Building and Safety.

Kasindorf described Ward as “unfailingly ahead of his times,” eager to people his newsrooms with women before it became fashionable because he considered them more efficient and reliable than men.

He loved Hollywood gossip, cold hot dogs and animal tales--owning at the time four dogs, five cats, one horse and one goat, she said. She described him as a terrifying taskmaster, courteous and caustic with “a quick mind and incredible memory.”

Between Ward’s failed first race for mayor and his election as supervisor, he served as news director and anchorman at KHJ-TV Channel 9. After he lost a bid for a third term in 1980, Ward returned to broadcasting as a news commentator for another three years.

In addition to his son, Ward is survived by his wife, Karen.