CALIFORNIA: Sun and Shade

When Private Investigator Harry Raymond stepped into his car in Los Angeles one morning last January and touched the starter, a bomb under the hood blew skyhigh. After 150 pieces of glass and steel were picked out of him. Detective Raymond recovered. He had been working for a reform group, digging up dirt on the administration of Republican Mayor Frank L. Shaw. When two members of the mayor’s special police squad were convicted of the bombing, sky-high went civic indignation. A movement started for the recall of jowly Mayor Shaw. Last week Los Angeles went to the polls to decide simultaneously: 1) whether Mayor Shaw should be kicked out, 2) if so, which of three other candidates should replace him.

The issue was nonpartisan. Only serious contender for Mayor Shaw’s job was another Republican, 51-year-old Superior Court Judge Fletcher Bowron, the reform group’s accepted candidate. A worldly-wise jurist who was a Hearst court reporter before he was admitted to the bar, secretary to Republican Governor Friend Richardson when he was upped to the bench, Judge Bowron put on a whacking campaign. His platform: no campaign pledges, no campaign workers promised jobs, no contributions more than $1 (“No one can buy control of government for a dollar”). Up to his ears in the Bowron campaign was Writer Frank (Fun in Bed) Scully, who last month won the Democratic nomination for assemblyman in a Los Angeles district on an even more unorthodox platform: libel charges against any newspaper that supported him. His slogan: “Free Merriam” (the Republican Governor who has refused to free Tom Mooney). Candidate Scully ran a “shoestring” campaign, financed by a battery of pretty girls selling shoestrings for 10¢, held joint meetings with Candidate Bowron, contributed a jointly useful slogan: “Get shady people out of politics in sunny California.” Mayor Shaw gave up his 1933 slogan (“Throw the Grafters Out”), substituted “The Sun Still Shines in Los Angeles.”

When the sun had gone down and the shades of night had fallen on election day, Los Angeles had voted 2-to-1 to recall Mayor Shaw, given Judge Bowron an imposing majority over the mayor and his two other opponents, Alonzo Riggs, educator, and Albert Osterloh, retired tire manufacturer. This ended Frank Shaw’s troubles, started some for Mayor-Elect Bowron. Los Angeles voters also chose between two picketing ordinances. Sponsored by Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times and a group called Southern Californians, Inc. headed by retired Vice Chairman Paul Shoup of the Southern Pacific Railroad, one of these ordinances forbade picketing entirely unless a majority of a firm’s employes was on strike, forbade anyone except its striking employes to picket a firm, limited pickets to one to each entrance or 25 ft. apart; prohibited coercion, intimidation, home canvassing of workers, and even abusive language. A. F. of L. and C. I. O. both bitterly opposed this. The other ordinance, a compromise put forward by A. F. of L., prohibited disorder and intimidation but not minority or secondary picketing. The voters approved the first, turned down the second. For Mayor-Elect Bowron, this meant enforcing a statute which as Judge Bowron he had flatly condemned as unconstitutional.