Long Beach’s Steel Magnolia

It’s July 3 at Long Beach City Hall, and a piercing emergency alarm sends jittery staffers scurrying to the stairs.

Anchored in the stairwell is Mayor Beverly O’Neill. Like a regal room mother in a burgundy suit, the 71-year-old O’Neill smiles reassuringly, pats fleeing secretaries, shaken like the rest of the country by warnings of possible Fourth of July terrorism.

“It’s probably nothing,” she says to one as the alarm keeps wailing. “I wouldn’t worry,” she tells another.

This is not part of her job as the mayor of California’s fifth-largest city, but it is who O’Neill is. Such a gesture only begins to explain her remarkable victory last month as a termed-out mayor returned to office by 16,500 write-in votes.

The stunning upset made her belle of the recent national mayors’ conference and further sealed her image as an accomplished and stately municipal steward--although she’s prone to quote Mae West at civic functions.

Whatever one feels about her civic progress--and she has her critics--it’s hard not to find inspiration in the copper-haired O’Neill and her personal narrative: A devastating childhood with her father, the town drunk who eventually sobered up, and a mother who founded what became the family support group Al-Anon and ran it from the family’s living room.

O’Neill married her high school beau, put herself through college by working seven years at J.C. Penney, became a music teacher, founded a women’s center for returning older college students and rose to become president of Long Beach City College.

O’Neill’s first and only spin in politics has been as mayor of a city she adores. To those who courted her for higher office, she has graciously made it clear that she won’t leave her hometown.

“She loves Long Beach,” said daughter Theresa O’Neill, 43, a Los Angeles television writer. “First I said she replaced me with a schnauzer. Now I think she replaced me with a city.”

Even detractors acknowledge that O’Neill, who takes the oath of office today, has played feel-good ambassador for a city whose morale and finances tanked after the Navy shipped out and the aerospace industry was downsized. The twin blows claimed 50,000 jobs from the local economy even before the early 1990s recession rocked the city harder than most.

Understanding O’Neill requires knowing about her whole life, not just the public years, the four decades in which she rose to lead a college and a city.

Before she was born, her parents moved from South Dakota to Long Beach for a better life. But her childhood, she has said, was branded by the shame of her father’s drinking. She dreaded her own wedding for fear of a scene. From under this cloud, she and her mother, Flossie Lewis, eventually emerged into happier times.

O’Neill grew up Baptist, singing in the church choir. She sang the lead in musical productions, including Yum-Yum in “The Mikado,” at Polytechnic High School, where a classmate recalled her sunny humor and empathy. Under all that good cheer, friends and family say, was resilience; more than a few refer to her as a steel magnolia.

Being the child of an alcoholic leaves certain imprints, according to Al-Anon literature, which evolved long after O’Neill’s mother helped pioneer the concept after putting a 24-hour hotline in her home. One characteristic is overachievement. Another is self-reliance born of uncertainty. Both traits course through O’Neill’s life.

Take her college education. She earned not one, but five teaching credentials. She was certified for kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school and to act as a curriculum supervisor and general administrator.

A generation later, when her daughter graduated from USC and announced that she would become a writer, the need for a safety net echoed in O’Neill’s first thought: “You’d better get a job waiting tables. Just in case,” O’Neill said.

While growing up, her worldview was a small one. She had never been to a Chinese or Mexican restaurant before falling for the fellow high school senior who would become her husband, Bill O’Neill.

“He’s brilliant,” she said simply. “He finished college in three years and got his master’s in one. He had bigger goals than I did. He had visions of a great future, seeing the world. The world I was in, we planned for Saturday night.”

Bill joined the Navy, and the couple married Dec. 21, 1942, on his weekend leave from boot camp.

“Beverly spent our ‘honeymoon’ in a San Diego motel room,” Bill O’Neill said, “writing thank-yous.” Yes, he grinned, that is so Beverly.

Knowing the spouse behind the mayor reveals much about her. Now slowed by flagging health, Bill O’Neill, a retired USC English professor, is more of a bookworm homebody. He delights in his wife’s civic adventures, just as she enjoyed his academic capers.

“Beverly thrives off of working with people, whereas my work involved a lot of reading and writing, a more solitary existence,” Bill O’Neill said. “People ask me, ‘Doesn’t it bother you to be first man, walking down the beach with the first dog?’ But,” he added with a chuckle, “no, it really doesn’t bother me. What’s not to like?”

The couple, who have lived mostly in duplexes they rented or owned on the quietly rich Long Beach peninsula, will soon move into their first oceanfront home. The house was owned by a lifelong friend, the late niece of author Willa Cather. And fitting for a reader like Bill O’Neill, the property features a shack that was once home to muckraker Upton Sinclair.

This type of lore is what one acquires by living in one place. One also acquire friends, in O’Neill’s case principals, lawyers and bankers, among others. Such bonds accelerate a politician’s ability to get things done, O’Neill’s fans say. And she would add that it works both ways.

“I have people I went to high school with who call me up and tell me what I should be doing with the city.... For a city of a half a million people, it really is a very small-town feeling here, which is what makes it so special,” she said.

In fact, if ever you want to “get Bev’s ears back,” said Ray Grabinski, an outgoing councilman who lost the mayor’s race to O’Neill, “criticize this city or its people.”

Rarely does anyone see her temper flare, nor do they disrespect her in public. But at a public hearing six years ago on the future of the Long Beach Naval Station--preserve historic buildings that generate no city income or pave it as a lucrative cargo container dock?--you could see both.

PBS television host Huell Howser who had portrayed the issue on his show, came to side with historians who sued to block the dock plan.

“She was booed at. She’s not used to anyone saying boo. There’s another side of Beverly O’Neill that most people don’t see, and I saw that side,” said Howser, recalling that O’Neill was visibly rattled. “That’s not a condemnation of her, not a scathing rebuke. I want to be quoted saying there’s more there than what meets the eye. She’s a hard-nosed politician who’s used to having her way.”

One day “she called me in to work her Beverly O’Neill magic on me, to invite me into her inner sanctum to work her grandmother charming magic,” Howser said. “She basically felt the negative publicity was hurting the city, but she ... quickly saw that I couldn’t be charmed out of my position. Behind that office door of hers, there’s some nut-cracking going on. She’s a street fighter and a political animal.”

Ultimately, the property will be used by the Port of Long Beach, but O’Neill would probably dispute the last point, stating that she feels like a politician in name only.

But whatever its title, O’Neill has a gift for building relationships with officials in a position to help her city. One example: Andrew Cuomo, former Housing and Urban Development secretary.

O’Neill applied to HUD twice to win the city empowerment zone status, which can infuse cities with millions of federal dollars for renewal. She worked closely on the proposed zone, which encompass St. Mary Medical Center, with Cuomo, a Roman Catholic.

Long Beach was not chosen. The next time Cuomo saw O’Neill at a mayors’ conference he fell to his knees and said, “Forgive me father, for I have sinned.”

O’Neill later got sisters at the hospital to pose with her for a photo, wagging their fingers at the camera. She sent it to Cuomo.

“Dear Mayor,” Cuomo replied on HUD stationery. “Of all the agents, lobbyists, devices, and advocates used against me in my six years at HUD, never has anyone deployed the ultimate weapon: shame and guilt. And the nuns as ambassadors? Brilliant! I will do whatever I can do, so help me God! Best, Your Friend, Andrew.”

His vow to help O’Neill in the city’s next attempt for the empowerment zone was based on the hope that Al Gore would win the White House and Cuomo would still be around.

But the city never got the empowerment zone.

Still, O’Neill’s style of leadership and her reputation drew the interest two years ago of a doctoral student in UCLA’s school of education, Edward Ogle, who was casting about for a model of what he calls “transformational leadership.”

Ogle, associate vice president for academic affairs at Upper Iowa University, wanted someone who is successful but, more important, helps others succeed. He focused on O’Neill’s effort to found the Long Beach City College women’s center, which helped hundreds of housewives become community leaders.

After months of research, Ogle was impressed. “There was no end to the number of people whose lives had actually been changed by their experience with her,” he said.

The professors reviewing his dissertation accused him of canonizing O’Neill.

“There must be some negative. Where is the dirt?” they asked. He met again with O’Neill to ask about negative experiences en route to success.

O’Neill, he said, recounted one of the events that defined her early mayoral days--when it was rumored that the government would shut down the naval station.

“She thought about how she would want to be treated,” Ogle said, “and then went down and held the hands of workers as they watched the closures announced on TV.”

He refiled his dissertation with that addendum, and the panel, convinced now, approved it.

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Resume at a Glance

Name: Beverly O’Neill

Title: Mayor of Long Beach

Age: 71

Family: Husband of 49 years, Bill; daughter, Theresa.

Education: Long Beach City College; bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a master’s degree in counseling and guidance from Cal State Long Beach; doctorate in higher education from USC.

Career highlights: President of Long Beach City College; elected mayor three times, the second with 80% of the vote, the third time as a write-in. Also is president of the California League of Cities.

Quote: “I hope that people are proud to say they live in Long Beach. This is a very special place, an international city with great assets, but a place where everyone still knows where you ate lunch.”