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FIRST TERM AS MAYOR 209

whose appointee had resigned, and then confirmed by the council, or we would
use a ratings system. Knowing that Dave Doughman had the support of McKeon
and Darcy, and that Jill Klajic would have supported the nomination process
(because she wanted her own person on the commission), I voted to appoint him
to the commission without an interview by the entire council.
Randy Wicks, the extraordinarily fine cartoonist who stayed with The Signal
until he died, had fun with that. He showed a still shaking diving board labeled
“Santa Clarita City Council,” the splash of a new dive, and bathing trunks labeled
26
“appointment procedure” stuck on a nail at the end of the diving board.
While the lack of an appointment system drew fire from the press, the fact
was that is probably had very little affect on the relationships within the council.
We all knew that any system, or even an ordinance, that we adopted could be
overturned by three votes. The only point of adopting a system at all was to
require a separate vote in the future, should the majority wish to change it. A
separate vote would alert the public to the fact that a change in procedure was
being made.
When the reporters accused me of “flip-flop politics” it was because they
could not understand there was nothing political in what I was doing. All I ever
wanted to do was to get things done. The vast majority of the public equated
good government with solving problems and a lack of graft and corruption. I was
most interested in trying to create a tradition of good government. 27
While my interest in creating good government at the county level might have
led me to run for supervisor one day, I did not have the fire in the belly to take on
that huge task. Creating “the largest newly incorporated city in the history of
humankind” had taken eighteen years of my life. That was enough.
Meanwhile the Soviets were suffering from bad government. Our three
college students suffered day after day, following the news but not knowing how
their families were doing. At least the Santa Clarita Valley group which had been
in the Soviet Union on the day of the coup got out, and were able to contact home
within hours. Day after day, every time Zhenya passed a telephone she would
stop and dial home. The line was always busy. She tried perhaps fifty times a
day, for a couple of weeks. Finally she got through and talked to her father for
a long time. When she hung up, she smiled brightly and said, “My father’s a
revolutionary!”
Alexander Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad, had gone on television and said
that if the Communists succeeded in their attempted coup against Gorbachev there
would be an immediate move to confiscate dual-cassette recorders and end cable
television services. The Lindgardts had a prized dual-cassette recorder and cable
television, which showed “western” movies in the evening and MTV all day. I
often wondered how many people joined the huge demonstrations against the
Communists because they did not want to lose their MTV.
Zhenya’s father, Dimitri, had been a member of the Communist Party until the
day Gorbachev resigned his membership. A graduate of Leningrad State
University, Dima had been an engineer for the state firm of Rotor, which was in