The day the commies came to town

Early this week, I had lunch with two Newport Beach city managers -- and neither one was Homer Bludau. I even hugged one of them, which is decidedly not my normal behavior with city managers. I hadn’t seen this one for 40-some years. The last time we connected was to share a harrowing nationally reported episode of local history that was something less than a shining hour. So naturally, we reprised it over lunch. And there were even a few surprises

The victim of the hug was Bob Coop, city manager of Newport Beach from 1961 to 1964, and our luncheon host was Robert Shelton, who held that post for five years just before Coop. Besides a free-loading journalist, our group also included Coop’s son, Tuck, and Ray Watson, the only participant who had a bridge named after him -- among a good many other achievements.

Coop was on a tour of his past. He had left his Bay-area home in Walnut Creek to retrace his early life of public service, with his son as official driver and dispenser of irreverence when his father got carried away. This played out over lunch in between recollections of a time when ferreting out communists had replaced baseball as the national pastime, and a sizable contingent of local John Birchers were enthusiastic recruits to the cause. They were finding commies all over the place.

Coop and I arrived in Newport Beach about the same time, both of us blissfully unaware we were on the front lines of a war. I came out of what I thought was a conservative suburb of Chicago that looked like a liberal paradise up against the politics of Orange County. Coop came out of the spacey environment of Yugoslavia, where he had been sent by our State Department in between city manager jobs. So we both got blindsided by “The Day We Beat Back the commies in Newport Beach” -- which was the working title of the piece I would write about it later.

Given Coop’s background, it was natural that he would be approached for help when the State Department wanted to show five visiting Yugoslav mayors how we conduct local government in the U.S. When the feds came looking for hosts, Coop happily agreed to welcome the visitors to a City Council meeting, with strong support from all but one council member. And there the matter stood -- until word got out in the community that the commies were coming.

Quicker than we could say “criminalcommunistconspiracy,” a group calling itself Committee for an Awakened America was organized and scheduled a mass meeting to muster troops to turn away the Yugoslavs. A bewildered Coop attended the meeting to defend what he considered a routine courtesy in playing host briefly to the visitors. What better way to cope with communism, he asked, than to show them our system in action?

But the Awakened Americans weren’t buying into fraternizing with the enemy. Not even a little bit. Instead, they told Coop unequivocally that if the Yugoslavs appeared in Newport Beach, the local patriots would picket the City Council meeting and circle City Hall with placards, marchers and a sound truck accusing the city administration of being soft on communism.

Coop knew the protesters would follow through on their threats, and the city would be ridiculed as a result, perhaps across the country. The Yugoslavs were due in Los Angeles the following day, and compromise was clearly impossible. So Coop signed a joint statement of surrender with the committee chairman, then drove into Los Angeles to try to explain all this to the visiting mayors.

As a result, the mayors never observed our City Council in action. And, as Coop feared, the story was picked up across the country. Locally, the predecessor of the Pilot was filled with letters hammering Coop for caving in, and he -- with considerable justification -- was saying to his critics, “Where were you when I needed you?”

At the time, I thought that was the end of Coop’s story. But over lunch, he told us the epilogue. Without fanfare, at Coop’s suggestion, Charles Thomas, then the president of the Irvine Company, invited the visitors to a lunch and tour of the ranch, and they later hung out at a beach-front home, offered by friends of Coop, where they enjoyed the ocean they so much wanted to see. No pickets. No sound trucks. And maybe a tiny infestation of good feeling about America.

Coop moved on, but the end of his story was the beginning of mine. I was making my living as a freelance writer then, and the Yugoslav episode hit me as better than most science fiction. So I sold an article about it to -- of all places -- Kiwanis Magazine. As a condition of publication, the editors insisted on fictionalizing the names. Thus Newport Beach became “Middleburg,” Bob Coop became “Sam Workman” and my title was changed to “Middleburg Goes To War.”

That didn’t fool anybody at home. Two days after the article appeared, I got a call from a local resident saying he and two of his associates -- whose names I have long since forgotten, but I think one was a Kiwanis officer -- would like to talk with me. They came to my home to tell me that I had badly maligned Newport Beach, and they planned to get me fired, but first they would like to see the city and the views of the protesters properly represented in the same magazine. I told them I would put that suggestion before the editor for them, and I was sure it would get a fair reading. They said it wouldn’t be fair at all, because I was a writer and they weren’t. So I offered to help.

When the editors were bemused by this idea, I listened to my collaborators at great length, tape recorded what they said and reviewed the copy with them. They were pleased. The editors weren’t. They wrote -- rather eloquently for editors -- in a rejection letter: “Your job was well done -- so well done that the corpse is exposed in the bright sunlight for all to see. So we have decided to let Middleburg lie.”

I finally helped my new friends write a letter denouncing me, which was run in the magazine. For several years after, I would have coffee periodically with one of these men. We never changed either mind -- didn’t even dent them -- but like the Yugoslav mayors, we would go home feeling a little better about the humanity of the other side.

And, 40 years later, we would tell the story again over a nostalgic lunch.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column runs Thursdays.

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