Bill Robertson, 89; Labor Leader and Power Broker Helped Bring NFL’s Raiders and Olympic Games to L.A.

Bill Robertson, a onetime bartender and bouncer who rose to become a major labor leader and power broker in Los Angeles and played a key role in bringing the Raiders football team and the 1984 Olympics to the city, died Friday afternoon. He was 89.

The silver-maned, gravelly voiced Robertson, who was former executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, and a close ally of the late Mayor Tom Bradley, died at Los Angeles’ Olympia Medical Center, where he had been admitted a week ago. The cause was complications from pneumonia. He also suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

“Bill was instrumental in helping Mayor Bradley turn a collection of local communities into one of the nation’s leading international metropolises, rivaled only by New York,” said Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a longtime friend of Robertson’s and a fellow member of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee.

Reinhardt said Robertson also helped achieve “full recognition for the rights of public employees for the first time in what had historically been an anti-labor city.”

Robertson also gained political cachet with state and national leaders, including former Gov. Jerry Brown, now the mayor of Oakland.

“Bill was really a statesman for the house of labor,” Brown said this week. “He was not a guy who yelled. He was always a gentleman, very careful and thoughtful.”

Bradley, who served five terms, appointed Robertson to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission and the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Commission, and Robertson served as president of each.

The longtime labor leader was also the last survivor of the original seven-member group Bradley named to persuade the International Olympic Committee that Los Angeles could capably host the 1984 games. It was a tough sell after the city, concerned about financial losses other cities had incurred while hosting the Olympics, refused to finance the event with taxpayer money.

Robertson subsequently served on the 22-member executive board of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee.

But an achievement he considered one of the proudest of his career was his role as chief negotiator in the $6.7-million deal in 1980 to bring the Raiders football team from Oakland to the Los Angeles Coliseum. He stepped in again later to persuade Raiders owner Al Davis to stay on and helped forge a public and private agreement to renovate the aging Coliseum.

When the promised stadium reconfiguration bogged down, Davis announced in 1987 that he would move the Raiders to Irwindale. They returned to Oakland in 1995. Robertson resigned from the Coliseum Commission, blaming the team’s defection on what he called the “blind leadership” of his successor as commission president, Alexander Haagen.

“Al Davis wanted the Raiders to stay in the Coliseum, and they would have done so if the Coliseum Commission had kept its promises,” Robertson said.

A native of St. Paul, Minn., Robertson lost both his parents when he was a child.

He spent time in an orphanage before going to live with an alcoholic uncle. Encouraged by an older brother, he became a voracious reader and thought about becoming a writer or lawyer.

According to Kelly Candaele, who worked for Robertson at the labor federation in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Robertson especially loved Mark Twain because he thought Twain “wonderfully captured the hypocrisies of American political and social life.”

“I suspect he also appreciated the colorful rogues who populated Twain’s novels because Bill met his share of wild characters during his union and political life,” said Candaele, who is now a trustee on the Los Angeles Community College District.

Robertson attended Marquette University in Milwaukee for a year but dropped out after an injury caused him to lose his football scholarship.

Married at 21, he soon became a father, supporting the family as a boxer and semipro baseball player and by working at Ford Motor Co. and Armour and Co. plants. But he developed a drinking problem, left his family and moved to Boise, Idaho, where he became a bartender and kept drinking.

In 1953, after a four-day binge, he sobered up and moved to Los Angeles, where he found work as a bartender and bouncer. After divorcing his wife, he gained custody of his children. He subsequently remarried.

As a bartender, Robertson became involved in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 694 in the San Fernando Valley and in 1957 was elected president. He was the local’s organizer for a decade.

In 1967, he joined the staff of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor as a business agent and was quickly assigned to coordinate the long, bitter and ultimately unsuccessful strike against the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. He also worked closely with public employee unions and became a major union spokesman during mass transit and other public employee strikes.

A hands-on union man even as he moved up the ranks, Robertson could be seen on the picket lines, coordinating major strikes.

After the death of executive secretary-treasurer Sigmund Arywitz in 1975, Robertson was elected to the top spot. He retired as head of the 700,000-member organization in 1993, the same year Bradley left the mayor’s office.

“I’d always had an affinity for trade unions because I had seen the difference between union and nonunion jobs during my work experience with Ford and Armour,” Robertson told The Times in 1982. “And Minnesota was always a liberal state and a good ground for trade unions.”

Robertson also demonstrated a lifelong affinity for bettering the lot of the poor, the aged, disadvantaged children and minorities. Nonabrasive, eloquent in speech and writing, he gained far greater clout in the community than many other labor leaders.

Robertson involved himself in Democratic Party causes and campaigns and frequently testified before Congress, the state Legislature, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles City Council.

He supported Bradley not only in his campaigns for mayor but also in his ill-fated 1982 attempt to gain the governor’s office and was courted by Democratic presidential, gubernatorial and mayoral candidates who knew his influence could boost a campaign.

U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said as Robertson hovered near death that the labor leader had provided strong support for the 1968 presidential campaign of his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who was fatally shot in Los Angeles the night he won the California primary.

“Over the years, I was constantly re-inspired by Bill’s dedication to the labor movement, his outreach to the hungry and homeless with United Way and his many other good works,” Kennedy said in a statement.

Robertson, despite his limited education, eloquently expressed his views on labor and civic issues in op-ed articles and letters published in The Times.

Concerned about a tent city set up for the homeless near City Hall in the winter of 1985, Robertson persuaded Bradley to authorize construction of a temporary plywood 138-bed shelter at Skid Row’s 5th and San Julian streets.

Robertson rallied volunteer laborers and secured union funds to buy the construction materials. Bradley, praising the labor leader’s effort, suggested naming the shelter Bill Robertson House.

Robertson also served on the city’s Environmental Quality Commission and the Los Angeles County Energy Commission, as well as on the boards of the California Museum of Science and Industry and the local American Red Cross and United Way chapters, and he was chairman of the board of Century Housing Corp., a nonprofit affordable housing lender.

His wife, Dresden Graham Robertson, said Friday that her husband’s “last good day” was Nov. 27, when he attended a Clippers game and “sat next to Billy Crystal and ate hot dogs.”

“When he came home, he was so happy,” she said. “He had such a wonderful day.” He fell ill a week later.

She said that although he was involved in the Olympics, the Raiders and many other things, the labor movement was “his true passion -- all the other things were offshoots.”

In addition to his wife, Robertson is survived by two sons from his first marriage, William and Robert; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Memorial services are pending.