Inherent Vice

[rich]

thanks for all this

that mayor.  what a dick!

back to watching Adam-12

rich

On 3/4/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> 	. . .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?)
>
>
>