On the Mayor’s Street, Vacation Is a Quiet Time
Could you feel it? The ship of state--the ship of city--steady as she goes once more?
That’s because the captain is back at the helm. Jim Hahn has returned to City Hall. The mayor was on vacation for three weeks, which makes, in all, five weeks of vacation that he’s taken since he was sworn in six months ago.
Now I’m kicking myself. Why didn’t I run for mayor? I haven’t had a vacation for nearly two years. It’s a taxing job, columnizing. Maybe there’s a more restful line of work out there, like leading the nation’s second-biggest city.
A politician’s vacation is harder to pull off than a balanced budget. He runs the risk of looking too casual about the job, or sending a signal that things can get along fine without him. Before 9/11, George W. Bush spent 42% of his presidency on vacation or en route to one, and was mocked as a 24-7 leader: 24 hours a week, seven months a year.
Among L.A.’s mayors, Sam Yorty was savaged as Travelin’ Sam for his hither-and-yon ways. Tom Bradley, in one astounding stretch, spent two of eight years out of L.A., mostly out of the country, on trips always described as “city business.” No wonder they named the airport’s international terminal for him--it must’ve seemed more like home than City Hall. And Richard Riordan, who bikes, skis and ice-skates, caught flak for going to the places rich guys go to do those things, like the south of France and Idaho.
Hahn only went as far as Hawaii with the family in August, and stayed home for these three weeks while his kids were out of school.
Just what does a mayor do with three weeks, so close to City Hall and yet so far? On the principle that even a cat may look at a king, this cat spent one of her nine lives on the mayor’s street in San Pedro last week.
12:12 p.m. A Chevy SUV pulls up in front of a house where crossed candy canes still adorn the bottlebrush tree, and Christmas lights still drape the sedulously trimmed hedge. Since the Hahns bought the house in 1985, the year Hahn became city attorney, the garage has filled to the point that there is no room for a car. So an SUV and a sedan--both American-made, an article of political faith preached by Hahn’s father--sit in the stub of a driveway. The mayor parks on the street. He is wearing a sweatshirt and baseball cap in faded red. He glances into the garage and walks into the house.
This is a modest neighborhood where success can be gauged not by the smallish houses but by the biggish toys: satellite dishes, extended-cab trucks, an occasional boat. Hahn’s place has none of these.
I have been to other mayors’ homes. Sam Yorty lived for 37 years on an acre-with-pool spread in Studio City that he bought from Mickey Rooney. Bradley and his wife lived rent-free for 16 years like Mr. and Mrs. Havisham in the fading Getty House, a place appointed in the avocado-green tint that was the last word in home decor when LBJ was in the White House. Riordan had his Brentwood manor house with books, plural, and gardens, plural. And now here’s this ordinary house on a sliver of land in a genuinely middle-American neighborhood. The lord of this manor has been known to steam off his own wallpaper.
12:16 p.m. Hahn emerges with a cardboard pizza box. Will he put it in the brown trash bin or the blue recycling bin? It’s . . . the blue! Civic leadership by example!
12:45 p.m. I wait. I check phone messages and return calls, one of them to Riordan. Here I am, watching the man who spent his whole life hoping to be mayor, talking to the man who just decided last summer to run for governor.
12:53 p.m. I imagine Hahn laboring inside. Maybe it is here and here alone that he focuses best. Behind that door, this Perry Como of mayors may be a changed man, plotting his commanding urban strategy far from the distractions of phones and e-mail.
1:12 p.m. He gets in the Chevy with his daughter. They drive off. I lose them at the intersection. I return to the mayor’s street and, inspired by his garage, tidy up my car.
2:11 p.m. They’re back. The mayor totes bags inside (plastic, not paper) and returns for an armload of dry-cleaning.
2:47 p.m. The sun is hot. My mind wanders. That garage--is it a metaphor for L.A., big and cluttered but with room for more, and everything is there if you just know your way around it?
3:03 p.m. The mayor’s kids and their friends are playing around the Chevy, and they set off the alarm. They scatter. The alarm switches off in its own sweet time.
3:14 p.m. They set the alarm off again. This time the mayor comes out and zaps it off.
4:18 p.m. An ice cream truck burbles down the street, in time to ruin everyone’s supper. The chief executive of the City of the Angels is not tempted. The front door stays closed. The garage door stays open.
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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.
