A Hairy Dilemma : Refusal to Shave Beard May Cost City Employee's Job

A Hairy Dilemma : Refusal to Shave Beard May Cost City Employee’s Job

By GREG HERNANDEZ

Sept. 28, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ANAHEIM — Robert Patterson, who has worked crowd control at Anaheim Convention Center for the past nine months, is about to lose his job.

The reason? The salt-and-pepper beard that the 66-year-old La Habra resident has sported for close to three decades violates the city-run Convention Center’s recently revived grooming policy, which prohibits any facial hair other than a neatly trimmed mustache.

Flashing his employee badge with a picture of him in full beard, Patterson said Wednesday that the city should not change the rules for current employees.

“It’s very unfair,” he said. “This is me. This is the way they hired me. They can’t make this a retroactive policy. It’s not legal and it’s not ethical.”

Patterson was hired in January to work part time, an average of two days a week, for $7.26 an hour.

“I like working with the public,” he said. “I’m an extrovert by nature and like being around people. It’s an operation I’m comfortable with.”

The first sign of trouble for Patterson came Sept. 7 when a memorandum was sent to all crowd control staff saying there had been a “lack of enforcement” of grooming standards detailed in the “Anaheim Way Booklet,” a handbook for employees.

The memo, written by crowd control manager Kurt Lodes, outlines grooming requirements, including neat, natural haircuts, no elaborate jewelry or beards, clean shirts and black dress shoes.

The memo details a four-step process supervisors must follow with violators, effective Sunday. The first step is a verbal warning, the second a day without pay, then a week’s suspension and, finally, termination.

“One of the supervisors asked me if the policy was going to be a problem for me, and I said yes,” Patterson said. “There’s no way I would take it off.”

For one thing, he said, “I’d lose a wife if I shaved it off. A lot of people think I’m being funny, but shaving would cause me marital problems. My wife met and married me with a beard.” That was 15 years ago.

Convention Center General Manager Greg Smith refused to discuss Patterson’s situation this week, saying it was a personnel matter. Smith also refused to discuss the grooming standards in general because, he said, they relate to Patterson.

Patterson, an industrial engineer until his employer moved out of state several years ago, went back to school to become a real estate appraiser. But the market “dried up,” he said, and he was forced to find another job.

Now, he said, his firing is inevitable.

Patterson made his complaints public Tuesday evening at the Anaheim City Council meeting, prompting Mayor Tom Daly to ask the city staff for more information about the policy.

“There’s a famous amusement park in town that’s had an interesting experience over the years enforcing the beardless policy,” Daly said, referring to Disneyland, across the street from the Convention Center.

The amusement park’s policy forbidding employees to have beards or mustaches has led to several firings over the years.