An ex-outsider hopes to aid Glendale

Campaigning for a seat on the Glendale City Council over the last several weeks dredged up bittersweet childhood memories for John Drayman.

A candidates’ debate took him to the Oakmont Country Club, where his father wasn’t allowed to dine as a guest, let alone join.

An invitation to speak at a home in the tony Royal Canyon neighborhood turned out to be at his mother’s dream home -- the very one his parents had tried to buy, only to have the sale mysteriously fall out of escrow.

The reason: anti-Semitism. The Draymans were Jewish in a city then overwhelmingly conservative, white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. In fact, in the 1960s, the American Nazi Party opened its West Coast headquarters in downtown Glendale.

“My father was a patient, determined man,” Drayman said. His father started the photographic restoration business the younger Drayman now runs in the Montrose Shopping Park. “He understood the way to cope was to outlast those people, and he did. He became a parking commissioner, and he wanted one of his seven children” to run the city.

Drayman, whose 49th birthday is today, will get his chance when he takes a council seat this month. He garnered the top share of votes -- 23% -- among eight candidates, running on a populist, anti-incumbent platform. His aim: to make city government more sensitive to its citizens’ concerns and heal fissures among Glendale’s many ethnic groups.

Incumbent Dave Weaver won the other seat with 18% of the vote. The best-financed candidate, incumbent Rafi Manoukian, was edged out with 16% of the vote, despite his war chest of $223,000.

Three other Armenian American candidates were running for the council, possibly diluting the votes of the city’s Armenian community. People of Armenian descent, many from Iran, make up about 40% of Glendale’s population, the largest concentration in the country.

With the loss of one seat, Armenian Americans no longer hold a majority on the five-member council.

“People forget that there are a lot of factions within the Armenian American community, just like any other group,” said Will Rogers, who follows Glendale politics closely. “They didn’t get behind just one candidate.”

The Armenian community has evolved into a diverse group, with some in wealthy neighborhoods and poorer immigrants struggling in south Glendale.

Ethnic tensions have escalated, too. Simmering concerns about a ban on outdoor commercial grilling have raised hackles of Armenian restaurant owners, who believe the tastiness of their kebabs has been a casualty. Other residents get upset when the city’s U.S. flags are lowered to half-staff on Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day, in recognition of the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed from 1915 to 1918 by Turks.

And tensions have risen at high schools between Latino and Armenian students. The race for school board was also tight: Mary Boger won a seat with 31% of the vote, while Nayiri Nahabedian and Todd Hunt are still in contention for the other seat, with Nahabedian leading by 29 votes: 7,575 to Hunt’s 7,546. City Clerk Ardy Kassakhian said 2,000 provisional and absentee ballots are being counted to determine the winner of the second seat.

Drayman is president of the Montrose Shopping Park Assn. and campaigned door to door, avenging his narrow loss -- by about 500 votes -- in a council race two years ago.

Drayman said his first-hand experiences with anti-Semitism have made him that much more sensitive to what newer immigrants and residents may be feeling. A flood of immigrants to Glendale since the 1970s has transformed the city into a melting pot; by 2000, more than half of its 200,000 residents were foreign-born, with large Armenian, Iranian, Filipino and Arab populations.

“I understand that divide,” Drayman said, noting that he had lived through a similar division in his youth.

valerie.reitman@latimes.com