Airport Czar : New Airport Manager Jan Mittermeier Has Come a Long Way

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  From the doorway to her immaculate beige-on-beige home, threeclocks are visible and a fourth is coo-cooing somewhere in the background.

Collecting timepieces is a hobby Jan Mittermeier shares with her husband of 32 years and is not, she says with a gentle laugh and a shy shake of the head, testament to an obsession with time.

Not that she’s not obsessed with it.

In fact, Mittermeier, 50, the highest-paid woman in Orange County government and, as of last week, the new head of one of the nation’s busiest airports, has been driven to the top of the heap by her perpetual fear of lost time.

“I knew I was starting behind the eight ball,” says Mittermeier of her venture, at age 34, into the professional job market after 16 years as a housewife and mother.

Mittermeier is now among a handful of women around the country in top executive positions in aviation. In her $91,000-a-year job, she will manage Orange County’s brand-new and expanded, $310-million airport, now the expected destination or departure point for 8.4 million passengers annually. Including general aviation flights, John Wayne Airport is the fifth busiest in the country.

She has come a long way from the studious girl who played clarinet in the Redondo Union High School band and dreamed of owning a cashmere sweater, then the rage. Money was tight for her family of three girls: her father, who eventually climbed through the ranks himself, was a construction worker trying to get by on an eighth-grade education.

That modest background, she readily acknowledges, is part of what drives her to succeed.

From a $12,000-a-year job as the county’s first female auditor 16 years ago, Mittermeier has risen to what is arguably the most politically sensitive job in county government at the moment and one fraught with career minefields.

Her much-criticized predecessor and former boss, George Rebella, quit abruptly two weeks ago, citing stress and illness. A week earlier, the new and expanded airport terminal had opened five months late and $17 million over budget.

It was a stressful time for Mittermeier, recalled a co-worker. Then in the No. 2 post at the airport, Mittermeier had received a hefty pay hike and had leapfrogged past her boss on the pay scale. His bitter jokes at staff meetings about his stagnating career made her uncomfortable.

And while there was no personal animosity apparent between the two, their management styles could not have been more different: Mittermeier insisted on following through to the minutest, sometimes maddening, detail, while Rebella delegated responsibility whenever possible, others on the management team say.

Mittermeier flinches when asked about their differences and brushes over the question of conflict.

“When he gave a direction, whether I agreed with it or not, I followed it,” she says. “He was my boss, and it didn’t matter whether I was making more money than he was.”

County officials are counting on Mittermeier to work out any remaining airport kinks--including a lawsuit brought by the contractor.

And she is not one to shy away from a good fight, recalls her former boss, Orange County Auditor Steve E. Lewis. Indeed, says Lewis, “She relishes it. If she gets into a battle, she’s going to win.”

In 1970, most housewives stayed home. Mittermeier, whose husband Ron owned his own printing company, did not have to work to get by. She wanted an adventure.

“It was more exciting than anything else,” Mittermeier recalled of the moment she finally decided to try for a degree and a career. “Most of the other women in our circle of friends didn’t work at all. They really didn’t believe I was doing it. They said, ‘Gosh, I’d love to do that, but I can’t.”

She had waited until Keith, her youngest, had started first grade. By then, Kevin was 10. She juggled her classes at Cal State Long Beach so that she could be home in the morning when her sons went off to school and in the afternoon when they returned.

Her teachers often urged her to switch majors because women weren’t being hired as accountants, she recalled. She refused and four years later finished her degree in accounting.

In 1974, she began making the interview circuit with competitors who for the most part were at least 10 years her junior--and male. Mittermeier had expected tough competition, she recalled matter-of-factly, and had prepared for it.

“I knew I was going to be competing with much younger people so I set out to make myself more competitive. I set out to get all A’s.”

She missed by one point in one class. In another class she managed an A despite a zero on a missed test. She had studied hard, but just as she picked up her pencil to begin, she was called from the classroom by a school security guard--her son had broken his thumb at ball practice.

The teacher did not allow make-ups, so Mittermeier had only one way to get an A: a perfect score on the remaining tests. She did it: “There was no margin for error.”

Despite her A average, however, Mittermeier found the interview process with private industry--even with some of the Big Eight accounting firms--degrading. Under pressure from the federal government, some firms were beginning grudgingly to hire “a token woman,” she recalled.

But prospective employers frequently asked her both how she would care for her children and whether her husband would permit her to work outside the home, questions now illegal under federal anti-discrimination laws.

Mittermeier turned down an offer with one of the major firms, she said, taking a job with the county because she had been treated more professionally.

As the first woman auditor in the county, Mittermeier faced some tense moments. When she entered a conference room for a high-powered meeting, men sometimes did a double take. Other times they would look crestfallen and say they had a joke (apparently off-color) they’d been planning to tell to kick off the meeting but would have to skip it.

Did they ever accept her as one of the boys and tell the joke anyway? “No,” answers Mittermeier. “They cleaned up their act.”

Mittermeier is soft-spoken, but people listen when she talks and usually regret it when they do battle with her. Co-workers are more apt to describe her as “respected” than “popular.”

“She knew or was smart enough to back off when she had to,” county auditor Lewis recalled. “But she was not a compromiser. She didn’t have to yell. People just knew that no one was going to beat her on anything.”

Despite Mittermeier’s impressive track record, she admits to self-doubts and a nagging fear of failure.

So driven is she to succeed, recalled a co-worker at the auditor’s office, that she was crushed when she was named chief of audits. She had been shooting for the deputy auditor slot, which would have made her second-in-command in the office.

“Lots of times, I’m real cognizant of three o’clock in the morning. I lie there, and I worry a lot and think about what I have to do the next day. And sometimes I can’t get back to sleep,” says Mittermeier.

“The idea that I would try my hardest and fail at something--I think that would be my biggest fear. Sometimes I have a hard time relaxing.”

That’s not hard to believe. Her home is fastidiously uncluttered. One small painting of flowers adorns a wall. There is no trace of dust, let alone cinders, in the fireplace. The only break in the otherwise linear home is a spiral staircase, striking in contrast.

Her jeans look ironed and her red crew sox match her turtleneck.

She works out to Jane Fonda in the morning, never diets but never binges on junk food, and has the lean, 5-foot-6, 110-pound body of a teen-ager. With loose blonde ringlets that soften her sharp features, she could pass for a good 10 years younger than 50.

She never watches television and rarely goes to movies. To relax, she reads mysteries and gardens. Pink and purple impatiens, arranged by hue, line the lawn, which is, of course, free of weeds and clipped like a flat-top haircut.

Mittermeier does not like to feel out of control, which leads to another slight fear of hers, one that might not even be worth mentioning were it not for her current job.

Now, don’t get her wrong. Mittermeier finds it thrilling to watch the sudden speed of a jet at take-off, a sight she says is “awesome.” And she does take commercial flights when she has to.

But Orange County’s new airport czar would just as soon stay on the ground. Flying makes her, well, not really afraid, but sort of nervous: “It always feels a little unnatural being 37,000 feet in the air and moving at 700 miles an hour.”