The Mayor of Castro Street (23 page)

All this press and Harvey hadn't even announced he was going to run. With the battlelines so clearly drawn, however, the temptation provided irresistible, “I think representatives should be elected by the people—not appointed,” Milk said in his announcement speech at the San Francisco Press Club. “I think a representative should earn his or her seat. I don't think the seat should be awarded on the basis of service to the machine. Machines operate on oil and grease; they're dirty, dehumanizing, and too often unresponsive to any needs but those of the operator.”

Within hours of Milk's statement, Mayor Moscone had an announcement of his own. Harvey was off the Board of Permit Appeals; Rick Stokes took his place. He also appointed two more members of the old guard, veterans Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, to the Human Rights Commission and Commission on the Status of Women.

Harvey's campaign slogan soon appeared on buttons and posters all around San Francisco: Harvey Milk vs. The Machine.

*   *   *

Politicians have an aversion to deodorant,
thought John Ryckman when he met Harvey Milk. And this one's no exception.

One of the adoring little old ladies who were always whispering advice in Harvey's ear insisted that Ryckman would be the perfect campaign manager. Ryckman had decades of experience in Democratic Party politics. He'd been in his nice stable relationship for years. Besides, he knew all the rich Pacific Heights people who had lots of money to spread around the campaign. Ryckman never doubted that all this made him the perfect campaign manager for Milk; the question was whether Milk was the candidate for him.

Ryckman instantly felt uneasy about the hyperactive politician at their first meeting. Instead of boyishness, Ryckman saw something of a spoiled child, demanding nearly superhuman efforts from his employees, friends, and campaign workers. He ran off at the mouth with long trains of hyperbole. His temper flared easily—especially at his lover Scott—and he seemed inordinately preoccupied with minutiae, using only bottled distilled water for his ritual morning cup of coffee which, of course, had to be of an exotic blend mixed especially for his tastes.

The candidate seemed totally disorganized. His supporter roster consisted of a boxful of matchbook covers, bar napkins, and scraps of paper. Milk's business was in a shambles, no small consideration for a manager who had only handled campaigns with money. Harvey's ragtag corps of volunteers from Castro Street showed few signs of affluence. I'd have to be crazy to get involved with this campaign, Ryckman thought.

But Ryckman had liked lost causes ever since he had been a volunteer in Young Californians for Stevenson in 1952. The fact that the alleged new breed of San Francisco liberals would do something like sew up an election over a year in advance irritated his old-fashioned Democratic spine. And in the back of his mind, he could never forget the pained look on his lover's face when he talked about the awful hours of interrogation and trial during the proceedings that had resulted in a dishonorable discharge from the Navy. Steve never became the man he could have been because of that disgrace. Maybe if this uncouth, pushy New York Jew could do something to take a swipe at it all, well, maybe, it might be worth a few months. That's how Harvey Milk got his first professional campaign manager.

Ryckman knew he had made the right decision a few days later when a half-giggling store employee told him a new campaign volunteer had arrived at the Castro Camera headquarters. At the counter stood a pert young girl in her Most Holy Redeemer uniform, a wool hat, and school bag. Ryckman thought she might be a midget, but no, she was a sixth grader who had carefully printed out the volunteer card:

Name: Medora Payne

Age: 11

Occupation: School kid

What like to do: precinct work, fund raising

Medora's appearance marked the only time Ryckman ever called a prospective volunteer's parents to get permission. “She just loves Harvey,” Mrs. Payne explained. “She's been wanting to get involved in his campaigns for so long, we couldn't keep her away if we wanted to.” The precocious young Medora became a fixture at the camera store, bringing in her best girl friend from Most Holy Redeemer and bossing around any volunteers who might be indolent enough to lay back when there was so much work to be done.

*   *   *

Michael Wong was horrified when he came to Castro Camera to see how the spacious area behind the camera supplies should be organized into a campaign headquarters. Paint spilled from the ‘75 campaign's handmade posters stained most of the floor. Campaign signs, old brochures, and a thick coating of dust covered every square foot.

“Harvey is this how
you
people live—in pig pens?” Wong demanded.

“No, my little yellow lotus blossom,” Harvey grinned back. “We were waiting for our houseboy to arrive. There's the broom.”

The opening weeks of the campaign dissolved Ryckman's early misgivings about the peripatetic Milk. If Harvey shouted too loudly at Scott and his closest friends, he could also purr softly into the ear of any reporter who happened by—and usually come out of it with some good press. Milk demanded too much of those around him, but his demands of others paled in comparison to what he demanded of himself. Every morning at five-thirty, Milk rose to pump hands at bus stops, hit the coffee shops, attend an afternoon political luncheon, hit more bus stops, lecture at early evening candidates' nights, take in at least one bingo game and return to the headquarters at midnight to help volunteers lick stamps and seal envelopes. Harvey could bring a new twist to each day's campaiging. The arrival of the film
All the President's Men
inspired Milk to work the long lines of moviegoers each night, talking auspiciously of the dangers of too much power concentrated in too few hands. What intrigued Ryckman most about his new candidate, however, were the endless lines of Irish widows, stodgy merchants, and troubled teenagers who were always coming in to see Harvey and ask his help to solve this or that problem. Other candidates would have had flak-catchers screen out such nuisances since they were hardly the people with whom campaigns were won or lost, but Harvey always had time, sometimes putting important politicians and campaign donors on hold while he reassured a worried mother that he'd work on getting a stoplight installed near the neighborhood grade school. That, to Harvey Milk, was what politics was all about.

Milk frequently jawboned his volunteers straight off Castro Street if enough hands were not on board to get a task done, or if the volunteer was cute enough to warrant attention. Everybody got a task. Joggers were conscripted to run in marathons, wearing their “Harvey Milk vs. The Machine” T shirts. If a volunteer had nothing more than good penmanship, the worker went straight to the piles of personalized thank you notes Milk habitually sent out. Even eleven-year-old Medora organized a fund raiser geared for Milk's growing preteen constituency, and she proudly plunked the $39.28 she raised on the Castro Camera counter, dutifully reminding Ryckman to make sure it was properly reported on the campaign contribution forms.

The campaign, however, marked the first time Ryckman had to allow the business of serious politics take a backseat to practical joking. A close look at the issue of campaign posters, for example, revealed that Milk sometimes threw out the standard “Milk for Assembly” logo in favor of the more direct tag of “Ministry of Propaganda.” Someone bought a Mr. Machine toy robot for the camera store and Ryckman walked in to find his candidate entertaining Medora by holding mock debates with the obdurate wind-up toy. Soon, everyone was calling Wong the “little yellow lotus blossom.” Wong got even by dubbing Ryckman, “Ms. Ryckperson.” Ryckman tried to escape the Marx Brothers ambience by cordoning off his work space in the rear of the camera shop with some ancient swagged-back velvet curtains he ferreted from an old trunk. He noticed only several days later that Danny Nicoletta had put a sign over this office entrance announcing: Fortunes Told, 10¢—With Lipstick, 50¢. Amid the continual pranks, more than one Teamster volunteer shook his head with amazement as he walked in the headquarters to find an eleven-year-old bossing around a new Milk worker three times her age and clad in full leathers, while the candidate loudly insisted that Michael Wong should really be doing the laundry instead of the direct mail campaign.

*   *   *

The early months of campaigning inspired an optimism Harvey had never known in his previous ill-fated efforts. Ryckman connected Milk to what he called the NYJ—New York Jew—network in San Francisco, and though the machine had scared most contributors away from Milk, the few Harvey did gain made this the best financed campaign of his career. Milk's uncanny ability to grab the limelight continued to get the campaign favorable press coverage. At one fund raiser at the end of a long and bitter city strike, Harvey even managed to get his lone supporter on the board of supervisors, Quentin Kopp—a rabidly anti-labor spokesman—and a Teamsters official to shake hands with Harvey smiling on. Of course, Harvey made sure the handshake didn't occur until a news photographer was standing by.

It was too much to expect the Toklas club to even come near endorsing Milk, whom they had opposed in the two previous campaigns, but a cadre of Milk supporters there managed to deny Agnos the endorsement by a one-vote margin. The local California Democratic Council's endorsement was a cinch for Agnos, except that the vote took place in a grade school right next door to marijuana marketeer Dennis Peron's restaurant. Peron enlisted all ninety-five of his employees to vote that day, since Harvey had long ago formed them into their own Democratic club, and Agnos lost that endorsement. The odd thing that Harvey's friend Frank Robinson noticed was that the political victories that stirred Milk most came not from powerful political organizations but from the bus stops he worked every morning.

“Everything could be going against him, but he would come back to the headquarters jubilant because he had persuaded one old lady to vote for him,” Robinson recalled later. “It was as if every person he won over represented an important victory. Here he was, a gay and a Jew—a street radical at heart—and he was able to convince some little old lady that he was a decent human being worth voting for. Those moments meant more to him than anything else in the world.”

The only victories that rivaled his conversions at bus stops occurred when Milk brought a gay person into the political fold. Slowly, they straggled in, many to become the political leaders of the future. Tall, blond Dick Pabich wandered into the headquarters one day willing to do something, anything. At twenty, he was too young to know the times of Vietnam protests and civil rights marches. He had spent his college years at the University of Wisconsin as a glitter queen, affecting the then fashionable androgyny of David Bowie and Lou Reed. But the ongoing parties of his chic set, first in Madison, then in San Francisco, engendered only ennui as the fad passed. Harvey showed particular interest in Pabich—only later did Dick learn that the candidate liked thin, young, blond men—and sent him out doing what Milk considered the most valuable chore of any campaign, registering voters. Within a few weeks, Pabich found himself making decisions with Harvey's inner circle, amazed at how casually this unorthodox politician delegated responsibility.

An early poll showed that though half the voters were undecided, the half who had made up their mind favored Milk over Agnos by a two-to-one margin. Harvey knew for sure that he was making a major impact on the district the day he got a phone call from one of the most politically influential preachers in California. He was interested in helping Harvey canvass the precincts in the heavily black Hunters Point neighborhood. Harvey pulled Michael Wong aside after he got the call.

“Guess who is coming down here this weekend to work Hunters Point?” Milk asked Wong.

“Who?”

“That was the Reverend Jim Jones on the telephone. He apologized for not knowing I was running and said that he did not mean to back Art Agnos as much as he was doing.” Harvey could barely hold back his giggle. “He told me that he will make it up to me by sending us some volunteers.”

“He's helping Agnos and now backing you?” Wong asked incredulously. Jones was known for being politically savvy, so the notion of jumping candidates in mid-election seemed very improbable.

“Of course not,” Milk retorted impatiently, as if Michael should have known better. “Jones
is
backing Agnos and giving him a lot of workers, but he wants to cover his ass, so he'll send us some volunteers too.” Most politicians would do anything to get at the Peoples Temple volunteers who, for some reason, seemed so devoted to their leader. Jones' duplicity, however, only irritated Milk.

“Well, fuck him,” Milk decided. “I'll take his workers, but,” warning Wong for future reference, “that's the game Jim Jones plays.”

A few days later, Jones's confidante Sharon Amos called Harvey's friend Tory Hartmann and asked her to drop off a whopping 30,000 brochures at the Temple. Hartmann and Tom Randol loaded up Randol's pickup and took the fliers to the converted synagogue in the middle of the desolate Filmore district, which had been devastated by urban renewal a decade before. The pair started unloading the boxes when a gruff guard emerged from the locked door.

“What do you want?” he barked.

“We're just dropping off these brochures,” Hartmann assured him, trying her best to keep a chipper tone.

“Just put them down right there,” said the guard, gesturing to a spot well outside the locked compound.

“No, that's all right,” said Tory as she unloaded. “We'll carry them inside.”

The guard went inside, deliberated with superiors, and finally admitted Hartmann and Randol. As they carried the boxes in, they saw the door of each room was guarded by men who stood at attention, staring dead ahead like the soldiers at Buckingham Palace. This is a church? Hartmann thought.