Inglewood Mayor Seeks 1 More Win : Former Football Star Edward Vincent Running for 3rd Term

Based on Inglewood Mayor Edward Vincent’s introduction to the city, it’s a wonder he ever moved there at all.

In 1955, Vincent was cruising with some teammates from the University of Iowa football team in town for a big game against UCLA. A squad car stopped them on Imperial Highway in Inglewood, and the white officer asked Vincent and his black friends what they were doing in the then-all-white city.

In the 3 1/2 decades that have passed, Vincent has risen to become Inglewood’s dominant politician, its first black mayor and an overseer of the very Police Department whose patrolman pulled his car to the side of the road.

His rise in politics has not been without blemishes, however. Vincent has been fined for financial improprieties, accused of election fraud and rebuffed by voters in attempts to quadruple his salary and to press the election to the school board of a close friend who died before the balloting.

Vincent, a county probation officer, is now in the midst of a campaign in which his stewardship is the focal point. While his opponents in recent weeks have limited themselves to veiled attacks on Vincent in candidate forums, the mayor has stayed home.

“Look around,” he said in an interview. “I don’t have to debate. The voters can see what I’ve done.”

What Vincent talks about most is not the city’s lack of problems but its approach to solving them. His campaign literature touts the All-America City award Inglewood won last year from the National Civic League for its fights against gangs and drugs.

Dividing up credit and blame among Inglewood’s elected officials is never clear-cut because behind the part-time mayor and his four part-time council colleagues is full-time City Manager Paul Eckles, whose salary of nearly $118,000 a year makes him the nation’s highest-paid city administrator.

Those who know Vincent the politician say he has risen by using the same fierce competitiveness that got Vincent the football player to the NFL.

It was a formative experience, one that comes up again and again with Vincent: His language is peppered with football lingo, his office is covered with sports memorabilia, and he credits football for getting him to college and out of the Ohio steel town where he grew up.

Although a knee injury ended his career with the Rams after a few games, former coaches recall that Vincent was a warrior on the playing field. Today, his political rivals also describe Vincent as a formidable opponent who is not afraid to campaign all night or go for the jugular to win.

Buoyed by nearly $100,000 in his campaign war chest--more than all four of his challengers combined--and backed by political power brokers like Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), Vincent is battling to become the third mayor in the city’s 82-year history to serve three terms.

Vincent said he moved to Inglewood in the late 1960s because he regarded it as a small, manageable city where one person could make a difference. He jumped quickly into civic affairs, founding a block club and following his two daughters through school in parent-teacher associations.

His school activism was his entree into the political system, and in the mid-1970s he was appointed to a vacancy on the school board. He served as school board president in 1978-79.

Lloyd Webb, the first black elected official in the city, was a colleague of Vincent’s on the school board. He remembers that he agreed with Vincent on issues related to desegregation rulings but clashed with him on appointments to school posts.

Webb said Vincent used his appointment powers as a board member to build his political base. Years later, Vincent would be criticized for using the mayor’s office to meddle in school appointments.

Vincent says the state of Inglewood’s schools is one of his biggest disappointments as mayor. He denies politicizing the schools or using them for patronage and says whenever he tries to help he is accused of interfering.

From the school board, Vincent broke into City Hall in 1979, winning a term on the City Council. As a councilman, he staged citizen protests against the prostitution along Century Boulevard and Imperial Highway, a problem he acknowledges is coming back. After four years as a councilman, Vincent launched his bid for mayor in what allies recall as round-the-clock campaigning.

Vincent, 56, a burly, gregarious man, generally receives credit for his role in Inglewood’s progress, particularly for attracting development to a city that lost much of its commercial appeal during the white flight of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Back then, longtime residents recall, unemployment was high and shops that used to bustle with customers were boarded shut.

Residential development has boomed so much in recent years that council members approved a moratorium last year on further apartment and condominium construction. The city’s budget remains strong, but the downtown commercial strip has not rebounded.

Once the heart of Inglewood, Market Street today is lined with swap meets and discount stores. A few blocks away is the former Sears complex, which has stood empty since the retailer moved away in 1988. One of the latest additions to downtown has been a theater that specializes in sexually explicit movies.

Crime remains a hot topic at the city’s block clubs, and several high-profile incidents have kept it in the forefront. In the past year, a police officer was shot to death by armed robbers, the first in the city ever to have been murdered. An elementary school student was abducted and murdered on his way home from school in May, and a hotel party last month erupted in gunfire and ended in the death of a guest.

City officials say Inglewood has the same woes facing all big cities, including drugs and crime, but it distinguishes itself from the others by innovative attempts at problem-solving.

At the All-America City competition, officials highlighted the city’s fight against drugs: a citizen-imposed tax that is earmarked for 20 new gang and drug officers, citywide anti-drug marches and a reverse-sting program with the theme “Behind Your Rock Could Be a Cop.” Vincent and the council backed all the programs.

Vincent’s detractors say Inglewood has improved but has a ways to go. They charge that Vincent clings to power like a bully and allows personal politics to influence decisions on running the city.

“The developers didn’t come in until Vincent came in,” acknowledged Frank Denkins, an Inglewood businessman who moved into the city in 1966. But that’s about all the credit Denkins will give Vincent.

“He does not serve the citizens of the city. He only serves the special interests. Everything he does, he does to get ahead.”

When he returns home to Steubenville, Ohio, Vincent drops the mayor’s title that he worked so hard to gain. There, he’s known among friends simply as “Pumpkin,” a nickname he picked up as a child because of the size of his head, friends say.

Few of Vincent’s teammates and coaches from those days had envisioned Vincent in the mayor’s office of a city someday. But if he plays politics anything like he played football, they say, it doesn’t surprise them a bit.

“He was as strong an athlete as I’ve coached,” said now-retired Abe Bryan, who headed the high school team in 1951. “He had that competitiveness about him that was way beyond average. He was one of the smallest athletes on the team, but he was the leader. Very seldom would anybody lick him in a one-on-one situation.”

That same gung-ho attitude continued when Vincent went off to Iowa with two childhood pals, Frank Gilliam, now the director of player personnel for the Minnesota Vikings, and Calvin Jones, a three-time All-American who died in a plane crash while returning from a Canadian Football League game.

Mention Vincent to retired Iowa coach Forrest Evashevski, and he remembers a 96-yard run from scrimmage in the 1954 Iowa-Purdue game that set a still-standing Big Ten record. “On a reverse, Eddie came through a hole, broke a tackle, eluded the safety and took it all the way. That Eddie had speed.”

But Vincent’s opponents now are not hulking defensive linemen.

Virgle Benson, one of four men challenging Vincent in the November election, also linked sports and politics during a recent campaign appearance. But instead of praising Vincent the halfback, the former councilman used the metaphor to push his campaign theme that it’s time for a change.

“Being a politician is like being an athlete,” Benson told members of an Inglewood block club. “You have to kick them out, bench them, or they’ll never leave the game.”

Vincent has suffered a series of setbacks during his second term.

He threw his political muscle behind Ervin (Tony) Thomas in 1987 and propelled the little-known candidate to the City Council with a 11th-hour absentee ballot drive. But challenger Garland Hardeman protested the results and a court ruling annulled Thomas’ election. The court found that campaign workers, including the mayor, pressured voters during home visits to cast absentee ballots for Thomas.

A new election held last fall brought Hardeman to the council.

Last June, Vincent continued to back Caroline Coleman, a longtime ally, for reelection to the school board even though she had died six weeks before the election. Coleman lost by a wide margin to Thomasina Reed, whom the mayor had criticized as an outsider.

But Vincent’s biggest problem has been money.

He went on unpaid leave from his $31,000-a-year job as a deputy probation officer when he took over the $10,800-a-year mayor’s post in 1983. He returned to work four years later after his efforts to quadruple his salary and make the mayoral job full time was defeated by a nearly 2-1 margin at the polls.

The mayor was later sued by the state attorney general’s office for double-billing travel expenses to the city and to his campaign fund during that first term. Vincent settled the case, the first such prosecution against a California elected official, for $4,851.

The Fair Political Practices Commission, the state campaign watchdog agency, also fined Vincent $16,000 earlier this year for not properly reporting 1987 campaign contributions.

Vincent’s rivals in this November’s election--who also include three-term Councilman Anthony Scardenzan, engineering technician John Murphy and police officer Carl McGill--have not brought up the fines specifically in recent campaign appearances, though they have criticized Vincent for what they call his lack of ethics and integrity.

Said Ollie Taylor, Benson’s campaign manager: “A mayor of a city is supposed to be of a certain stature. He continues to embarrass the city.”

Vincent vehemently denies wrongdoing and said he is a victim of campaign laws that even state regulators do not fully understand.

“I’m a big boy,” Vincent said. “I don’t cry. But I’ve gotten some real knocks in the paper. . . . I guess when you’re in the driver’s seat, you have to take the bumps.”

In his mind, Vincent divides the city’s residents into critics, who accentuate the negative, and those positive people working with him to make things better.

Vincent characterizes himself as Inglewood’s biggest booster, from the INGLEW1 license plate on his Cadillac to his support for community unity dinners, All-America City decorations and an annual Martin Luther King Jr. parade.

“I’m tired of people saying that they’re from inglewood “ -- whispering the name of the city--”when they should stick their chests out and say INGLEWOOD.”

Vincent says most residents are once again proud of their city, and another term would allow him to win over outsiders who wrongly associate Inglewood with nothing more than poverty, drugs and crime.

Standing outside his campaign headquarters late one evening last week after a campaign strategy session, the mayor responded to a question about the city’s higher-than-ever homicide rate: Forty-seven people have been murdered so far this year, surpassing the 46 slain in 1989, and if the rate continues it will top the record of 55 killed in 1980.

He frowned at the negative slant of the question as he planned his response.

Then he mentioned a recent Washington Post article that says Inglewood is the only city in the nation with a black population of at least 49% and a total population over 100,000 that is not declining in population--unlike cities such as Gary, Ind., and Savannah, Ga.

He also mentioned all the development along Century Boulevard during his term and the millions of dollars in noise abatement funds the city has received from the Federal Aviation Administration and Los Angeles International Airport.

Looking out across the darkened city, another thought came to him.

“Where else in America could you stand downtown in a predominantly black area at this hour and not be afraid? Answer me that.”

Earlier that day, Vincent had assessed his future as he paced around his ninth-floor office overlooking the city. Behind the desk are mementos of his playing days. The walls are covered with photographs of action at the two local sporting arenas--the Forum and Hollywood Park.

He expects to win the election, he said, and after that, “It’s time for me to look at some things. I’ve been here a while. . . . But I have to wait. Things will happen to me.”