Inherent Vice

[Robin Landseadel]

	. . .A statue of a lonely hippie-looking guy wearing only a
	headband and a loincloth stands amid the ennui (and the hot
	dog cart). His name is “Fernando,” a rugged icon commissioned
	by Mayor Sam Yorty in 1968. According to its placard, he is “a
	symbol of the first inhabitant of the San Fernando Valley.” If
	Fernando could see, he'd see – alas – nothing much out of the
	ordinary. Business as usual.
	http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/and_that_s_the_name_of_that_tune/1753/

Sam Yorty, Mayor of L.A. from July 1, 1961 to July 1, 1973. A Democrat  
who turned Republican in 1972. The man in charge of L.A. & L.A.P.D.  
during the riots of 1965. It was Mayor Sam who [obviously in the  
pockets of Big Oil & Big Auto makers] made the L.A. freeway system the  
monster it is today.

	. . . In the 1969 mayoral primary, his popularity slipped well
	below that of Los Angeles City Council member Tom Bradley.
	The ensuing campaign between Yorty and Bradley, managed
	for Yorty by Jerry Pournelle, proved one of the most bitter in the
	city's history. Yorty painted his opponent as a dangerous
	radical, alternately of the black power or communist
	revolutionary varieties. While ludicrous — Bradley had spent
	much of his career in the Los Angeles Police Department — the
	charges resonated among fearful voters, and Yorty was re-
	elected.

	Despite winning another four years, Yorty showed obvious
	signs of boredom in his position. He ran again for governor in
	1970 but was handily defeated for the Democratic nomination
	by state House Speaker Jess Unruh, 1,602,690 (61.4 percent)
	to 659,494 (26.3 percent). Unruh in turn was defeated by
	Reagan, who secured his second term as governor by a
	smaller margin than his 1966 plurality over Pat Brown. Yorty
	began to leave all but the most important decisions to his staff. . .
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Yorty


	. . .Yorty was tagged with numerous nicknames, such as "Mayor
	Sam" for his folksy demeanor, and "Travelin' Sam" for his globe-
	trotting at public expense. Others include "Shoot-From-the-Lip
	Sam," the "Maverick Mayor," and "Saigon Sam" by those who
	claimed he was more concerned with South Vietnam than
	South Central Los Angeles. This moniker was also the result of
	his very vocal support of the Vietnam War and the fact he was
	spending so much time in South Vietnam. It was said Yorty was
	the only mayor with a foreign policy: "Bomb 'em back to the
	Stone Age" he said in regard to the Viet Cong in Vietnam. . .

	. . .Yorty began his career in politics as a liberal Democrat, but
	swung to the other end of the political spectrum over the course
	of his career, becoming a conservative Republican. His official
	switch from Democrat to Republican took place in 1972, when
	George McGovern won the Democratic presidential nomination. . .
	http://www.accuracyproject.org/cbe-Yorty,Sam.html

Mayor Sam was an evil little punk who consistently mispronounced "Los  
Angeles" just like these folks do [for obvious comic purposes]:

http://www.firesigntheatre.com/albums/hcyb2.mp3

Unlike Berkeley, with Telegraph Avenue & San Francisco with the Haight  
as population centers for freaks of all persuasions—L.A. is diffuse:

	. . .San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named
	places in California it was less an identifiable city than a
	grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-	
	issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to
	its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and
	headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten
	years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on
	which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or
	grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set
	the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital
	difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was
	invisible on first glance.
	The Crying of Lot 49, pages 13/14 [perennial Classics ed.]

L.A.'s Hippies hung out in Laurel Park, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Mt.  
Washington, parts of Hollywood, a few at campuses in Westwood &  
Pasadena, a few on the beach. One area of periodic concentration was  
the Sunset Strip on the weekends [resulting in "For What it's Worth"  
and, eventually, CSN] though the Renaissance Faire—then in Agoura, a  
town that resembled San Narcisco in so many ways—was an area of high  
concentration of Hippie culture. Thanks to the use of rent-a-cops in  
that sylvan glade, pot smoking, tarot card reading and body painting  
was out in the open and frequent at the Faire. Everybody's favorite  
Paranoid, David Crosby, even wrote a song about the Faire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AFlBoxsAkI

Speaking of paranoid . . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei-erw0P7JQ&feature=related

Unlike the post-People's Park display of muscle in San Francisco &  
Berkeley, there was no post-Manson crackdown of Hippies in L.A.  
Business as usual prevailed, Mayor Sam was too concerned with the  
"Negro Problem" to get overly concerned with those damned Hippies.

On Mar 4, 2009, at 7:06 AM, rich wrote:

> also curious to know what the LAPD did, if anything, post-Manson--did
> they crack down on the hippies even more (don't recall who the mayor
> was in 1970, anybody?)