Political Father Now ‘Good Dad’

Kevin Sweeney rolled back into Ventura County the other day, with his 16-year-old stepdaughter riding shotgun in their gold Honda hybrid and two long surfboards cinched to the top.

They stopped at an old hangout near the Faria Beach house that they rented the summer he taught her to surf. This time they were fulfilling a rite of spring by shopping for the right college for Hannah, who graduates from high school next year.

See a campus, hit the surf.

“Hannah and I are driving the coast and surfing along the way,” Sweeney said, laughing. “It’s a rough stereotype, but someone has to uphold it in California.”

It was a fitting return for the lanky red-bearded Sweeney, 44, now a Bay Area environmental consultant, whose love for things natural brought him to Ventura 15 years ago to help sow the seeds of a ballot-box revolution.

It also brought him back in 1995, after a stint in the Clinton administration, to raise a family and nudge along a local growth-control movement seen by urban planning experts as one of the most successful in the country.Sweeney came back this time not only to do his duty as a dad, but to promote a new book about his quest, as a boy, fatherless at age 3, who secretly sought out three father figures to serve as role models.

The thin memoir -- to be released before Father’s Day -- is the outgrowth of an essay Sweeney published following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He hopes to reach the families of World Trade Center victims and encourage men in their communities to reach out to surviving children.

“I do have advice for the men in the Bronx and Queens and Staten Island and all around New York and Arlington, [Va.] who might find themselves haunted by kids who keep hanging around, or look like they might want to: Laugh at the bad jokes and tell some that you remember from fourth grade; ask about their batting stance and whether it changes with two strikes; go to a movie -- even the new Martin Lawrence movie -- then go again. Look them in the eye when you ask how they’re doing.

“And remember: You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to show up.”

Sweeney, who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area community of Piedmont in 1999, will return to Ventura County next month for a bookstore reading in rural Ojai, where he put down roots a few years ago with his new wife, stepdaughter and baby girl, Julia.

His family would probably still be there, enjoying the slow life beneath giant oak trees, Sweeney said, had opportunity not knocked for his wife, Jennifer Foote Sweeney, a journalist who became an editor at Salon.com in San Francisco.

It was Ojai, in fact, that pioneered Ventura County’s slow-growth movement in the 1970s, halting the widening of two-lane state Highway 33 and thus blocking large-scale development.

While individual candidates and environmental groups scored slow-growth victories during the 1970s and ‘80s, it was not until Sweeney took control of the political arm of Ventura-based outdoor clothing company Patagonia that the greening of county politics became a broader campaign.

Only 30, Sweeney, former press secretary to U.S. Sen. Gary Hart, brought Capitol Hill savvy to a Ventura City Council election in 1989. The slow-growth candidates he backed sought to block construction of a new Cal State University campus on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

He schooled that group of Ventura activists -- including current Supervisor Steve Bennett, who co-founded the SOAR anti-sprawl movement years later -- in the nuances of grass-roots environmental organizing, and shocked the political establishment by sweeping a new council majority into office.

The next year, Patagonia helped bankroll the astounding upset victory by 25-year-old political novice Maria VanderKolk for county supervisor.

“I’m proud of the work I did there to get things started, but these guys have taken it to another level,” Sweeney said. “I had to pull the car over the other day to listen to Steve Bennett on a national radio program. I listen to him today, and I’m very much the student.”

While Sweeney was Patagonia’s point man, he would often sneak away to the company’s on-site day care center, where he’d hang out with the kids.

“I was conscious at the time of parenting,” he recalled. “I had a dozen nieces and nephews. And I thought, ‘I like kids. I don’t have any of my own, and I may never have.’ It was a blast.”

Unsuccessful in a run for Congress in 1992, Sweeney returned to Washington as the top communications aide to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. He helped reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone National Park and even occasionally counseled President Clinton.

“The wolf thing was just the most fun,” he said. “I got to help carry the third wolf back into Yellowstone, a 110-pound male.... I got to look into its eyes.”

By 1995, Sweeney was ready for what he describes as “intellectual crop rotation,” a change of climate and location that replenishes the spirit and produces new and varied hybrids of thought. Again he chose Ventura County, and Patagonia, where he would serve as environmental strategies director and where he honed the outdoor skills needed to use Patagonia’s clothing and gear properly.

“When I was growing up, I wanted someone to teach me how to climb and how to surf and to fish and to ski,” Sweeney said. “That was missing -- the comfort with nature that I figured you would have if you grew up with a dad. That’s one reason I went to Patagonia in the first place.”

Sweeney said he may have made his biggest catch partly because of that knowledge: “I gave my wife her engagement ring on the middle fork of the Stanislaus River in a fly box.”

As Sweeney started his married life, he brought his bride back to Ventura County’s rolling hills and towering mountains. For four years, they lived a charmed life. Hannah remembers lovingly her years at San Antonio School among the orange orchards of the east Ojai Valley. But she also recalls a huge challenge she had to overcome in junior high: The coach of her seventh-grade basketball team told her she wasn’t good enough to make it.

“On his own, Kevin made sure I made that team,” she said. “He taught me how to play basketball and softball. Once you learn [the basics], you’re good.”

These days, Sweeney works from his home near UC Berkeley, his alma mater.

As a consultant, Sweeney worked for Ford Motor Co. for 18 months before resigning in frustration last year because he said the firm was slow to adopt strategies to cut pollution. His current clients include Nike, which he advises on environmental issues, and the David & Lucille Packard Foundation, for which he writes reports on farmland preservation in California.

He took a month off recently to finish a year’s work on his book: “Father Figures, Three Wise Men Who Changed a Life.” To be released May 6, the book chronicles Sweeney’s Irish Catholic upbringing in working-class San Bruno, south of San Francisco.

It tells of a little boy who missed his father so much he set out at age 8 to pick three more dads from whom he could learn life’s lessons. He chose good, hard-working family men who treated his widowed and impoverished mother well.

The first possessed grace, style and a cool reserve, the second was always there for his sons and for Sweeney at their ballgames, and the third was former football lineman Chick Kelly.

It was Kelly, a broad-shouldered butcher who made sure the Sweeney family had plenty of meat on the table, who intervened after Sweeney drank too much beer during his first two years of high school.

“The way you’re acting is hurting your mother, and I won’t tolerate that,” Kelly told Sweeney. “I don’t think you’re becoming the man you want to be. You’re not on the way to becoming the man I know you can be.”

Sweeney straightened up.

Stepdaughter Hannah says she’s impressed, but not surprised, that Sweeney addressed his childhood loss by picking replacement dads.

“It’s so Kevin, because Kevin is so conscious of how he impacts everything,” she said. “A lot of stuff he’s talking about in the book -- the just showing up stuff -- that’s him.”

Sweeney is the “team mom” for Hannah’s water polo squad. For one of their tournaments he laid out a picnic of barbecued chicken, grapes and salad. He plays catch almost every day with Julia, 7.

And recently, as Sweeney surveyed the surf for a good wave, his stepdaughter whispered:

“He just works so hard to be a good dad.”