The Talk of the Town : He's 'disruptive' . . . or 'energizing.' He's 'polished' . . . or 'abrasive.' But this councilman definitely isn't shy.

By EDMUND NEWTON

May 31, 1992 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

PASADENA — Everybody’s talking about City Councilman Isaac Richard.

Since he was elected last year, Richard has become the council’s most high-profile and quotable member. Nobody else comes close. He storms out of meetings, lashes out at colleagues, argues with constituents and talks loudly and vituperatively.

He has raised so many eyebrows lately that there’s a kind of consistently wide-eyed look around City Hall these days--the Isaac-Richard-passed-this-way look.

Depending on whom you talk to, Richard’s stormy presence is either “disruptive” or “energizing.”

Councilman Jess Hughston says it’s the former. “The council meetings have deteriorated badly since he’s come on,” contends Hughston, who stepped down as mayor last month. “He’s confrontational rather than being willing to discuss the issues.”

The most recent Richard performance occurred during a discussion about speed bumps. He wanted to slow traffic next to a park that draws a lot of children in his Northwest Pasadena neighborhood, but Hughston wasn’t convinced. Hughston wanted more information and he moved to table the item. There was a short, growling exchange, and Richard cursed and lumbered out.

Before that he sounded off about high-level appointments at the Department of Water and Power and the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center (Richard wanted blacks in those jobs) or Police Department “gang sweeps” (Richard wanted them stopped) or any of a dozen other issues.

When it happens, the councilman leans forward, dips his chin like a fullback ready for a handoff and charges. Combining lightning wit with a deep, simmering anger, he pummels his targets.

On the predominantly-white Tournament of Roses, the volunteer organization that stages the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl game, a hundred of whose members were packed restively into the council chambers: “They could fit all their minority members in the trunk of one of their cars and still have room for the Republican elephant.”

On a widespread perception that rioters in Los Angeles were “burning their own neighborhoods”: “It’s analogous to criticizing prisoners in a prison riot for burning their own mattresses. People don’t choose to live in the ghetto or the barrio. They’re forced to live there.”

On municipal government, as compared to private industry: “It’s like a big hospital for incompetents. They collect there like lint in a dryer.”

If his colleagues line up against him or--as occurred several times during Hughston’s tenure as mayor--the mayor seeks to cut him short, Richard is likely to stride out of the meeting, muttering and shaking his head.

There’s a double standard at work here, Richard contends. His colleagues ramble happily along, with no interruptions, he says. But when Richard does it, there’s a problem. “Suddenly, people are talking about this crazy man from Northwest,” he says.

Richard is unapologetic about stirring up the council and alienating some of his colleagues. “White people respond to political pressure,” he says. “As soon as you let up on the pressure, they lay off. That’s a given.”

Besides, Richard never claimed to be a compromiser or a coalition-builder. “I’m a terrible politician--and proud of it,” says Richard, who squeaked out a narrow victory in a run-off election in April, 1991, to become the third black person to serve on the council, and the first in the district that represents the wealthy Linda Vista-Annandale area.

He’s not there to be reelected, he insists. “I don’t even think about it,” Richard says. “I don’t want any decision that I make to have anything to do with my getting reelected.”

Behind all of the sound and fury, though, Richard has been pushing a program. His central concern, he says, is to bring a measure of power to the impoverished Northwest Pasadena community.

Thus, he has fought for more minority group members to be hired as city employees and for black businesses to get city contracts. He has challenged sweeping law enforcement practices in black neighborhoods and encouraged housing and employment projects in the Northwest.

And he has militated for a radical realignment of his district, which now encompasses not only Northwest Pasadena but the well-to-do hillside neighborhoods around the Rose Bowl. Richard wants the largely white Linda Vista and Annandale neighborhoods, west of the Rose Bowl, split from the black community to the east, leaving District 1 as a powerful black enclave.

The City Council will consider new district lines next month, including plans to make Richard’s district solidly black.

The idea angers white neighborhood associations, which face the prospect of losing their traditional control over the Rose Bowl just as the city is starting to usher rock groups and major sporting events into the stadium. “He (Richard) isn’t serving the whole district,” says Penny York, president of the Linda Vista-Annandale Assn.

A split District 1 also alarms some of Richard’s black constituents, who say the councilman is lobbying for a segregated, “plantationized” city.

Richard dismisses such charges from black people as irrational. “I’m willing to shove power down black people’s throats, whether they want it or not,” he says.

The black leadership in Pasadena has been “docile and genteel” up to now, Richard says, and it hasn’t worked. “This is a racist city,” he says. “We’ve got to turn that momentum around. It’s like turning a big steamboat around, with all of its inertia of bigotry.”

Even out of the spotlight, Richard, 34, is a volcanic presence, thundering at people on the telephone or pacing the floor in his living room. But a good-humored affability often takes over. He regales a reporter with stories of his isolated early years in Palmdale (“My mother called it Dogpatch”) and troubled student days in various Pasadena high schools and at Claremont’s Pitzer College (“People ask me if I ever did time, and I say, ‘Yeah, three years in Claremont.’ ”).

Some afternoons, Richard rides his Yamaha 1200 motorcycle over to Jackie Robinson Park, on North Fair Oaks Avenue, and throws himself into a pickup basketball game. With young black men from the neighborhood, Richard is good-naturedly pushy, challenging them and encouraging them at the same time.

“You tired already?” he chided one teen-ager, whom Richard had out-hustled in a game of one-on-one. “What are you--10 years old?”

Then he surveyed the activities at the busy park, which included a Little League game, several half-court basketball games and a drum corps practicing routines with a group of cheerleaders.

“Look at this,” he said animatedly. “They say it’s nothing but gangs around here.”

Richard used his easygoing talkativeness to help cool things in Northwest Pasadena after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial last month. He and Northwest manager Prentice Deadrick donned Malcolm X T-shirts and baseball caps and toured the area, talking to some of Richard’s basketball-playing friends.

It was a side of Richard that most people don’t see, Deadrick says. “He pulled kids over and started talking to them,” Deadrick says. “He’d say, ‘You need to go back and run some basketball and get it off your chest.’ There was one group that was harassing a white couple, and he started asking them questions. I didn’t realize he was as popular as he was.”

To understand Isaac Richard, you have to understand Pasadena’s fitful race relations over the past 40 years, friends say. Richard matured in an atmosphere of racial contentiousness in Pasadena, with civil rights lawsuits over segregated schools and gerrymandered electoral districts, and with a growing conviction on the part of many black Pasadenans that whites would never relinquish power to them.

“I see in Isaac the still-burning rage of a disenfranchised people,” says Councilman William Paparian. “He brings that to the council.”

Richard, the oldest of eight children, dropped out of three Pasadena high schools before gravitating to the Community Information Center and the militant sway of activist Michael Zinzun. From Zinzun, a former Black Panther who ran unsuccessfully for the Pasadena City Council in 1989, Richard learned about Mao Tse-tung and Karl Marx.

It was, he says, the perfect grounding for a would-be capitalist. “I appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism far better than some right-wing Republican who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” he says.

For all of his revolutionary rhetoric and his in-your-face political style, Richard nowadays is passionately pro-business. Says Bruce Ackerman, executive director of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, “I know when we go to him with an issue related to jobs and the economy, he’s pretty much predisposed to supporting it.”

Not that Richard spouts the Republican Party line, adds Mayor Rick Cole, one of Richard’s admirers. “The Republican view is one of trickle down,” Cole says. “Isaac is strictly a build-up kind of guy.”

Richard used his natural reading ability and a high school equivalency diploma to get into Pitzer, then won a scholarship to the Columbia School of Business. There followed four years as an investment banker with First Interstate Bank of California, during which the profession was beset with indictments and increased federal scrutiny.

“In 1985, if you told someone you were an investment banker, they’d introduce you to their daughter,” Richard says. “If you told them that in 1989, they’d call the police.”

Since 1989, when he quit his job, he has been tutoring and working as a real estate consultant. He says he ran for office only because no other viable black candidate volunteered. “I knew if we (blacks) ever had a shot at it, this was it,” he says.

Richard and his wife, Sharon Wooden, a lawyer in the office of the state attorney general, live in a small Spanish-style house on Forest Avenue. He says that his fling with electoral politics, from which he earns about $500 a month, has been a major financial sacrifice.

“The only people who can run for office now are rich people, retirees and rebels,” he says, falling easily into rolling alliteration.

The most frequent knock on Richard is that his well-meaning ideas get lost in his table-pounding rhetoric.

“You never know whether you’re going to get the Isaac who’s the polished, relaxed, brilliant analyst or the Isaac who kicks over chairs and pounds on the table,” Cole says.

“His style is abrasive sometimes,” says Councilman William Thomson, “and that gets in the way of his accomplishing anything.”

But Richard claims his political program has been extraordinarily successful so far. He got the city to make 84 mostly black and Latino temporary workers--a class of “untouchables,” Richard called them--permanent employees, and he has put the heat on city departments to use minority contractors. Above all, he has gotten the attention of Pasadena’s Establishment.

So some people call him “obnoxious.” So what. “People have been calling me that since I was a kid,” he says, laughing. “I’m a high-strung, animated, extroverted kind of a guy. Some people like me and some people don’t.”

There are some, black as well as white, who don’t. “He seems to be arguing quite a bit with the council down there,” says Stephen Mack, former president of the Pasadena NAACP. “I’m shocked at his attitude.”

But a lot of his Northwest Pasadena constituents are developing grudging appreciation of his style.

“He’s very gruff--not like the debonair, blue-eyed white boys,” says Harry Washington, a mortgage broker who lives in the neighborhood. “He doesn’t talk proper. And he lets you know what he thinks. If you like it, fine. If not, go somewhere else. But I think he’s better for us than anybody we’ve had up to now.”