Chapter 4

Ed in the Classroom

 From around page 3…

         With a few months of teaching under my belt, I came across a Los Angeles Times article about a guy who was “going to clean up California’s smog.”  He was running an initiative campaign to do that... 

Well, shucks, by doing college in Indiana, I had been educationally deprived of knowing whether the "initiative process” was good or bad, or even what it was.  Living in the Los Angeles areas, however, had taught me what smog was, and there was no doubt in my mind that it was bad.

With plenty of smog in the sky and not much on the initiative in any cubbyholes of my mind, I invited this guy who was going to "clean the skies" to bring his initiative process into my classrooms.

 He came looking like a barrel-chested bully.  He turned out to be a Santa Claus, used car salesman, maverick citizen, stand-up comic, teacher, muckraker and marvelous raconteur --- ensconced between pork chop shaped white sideburns.  He came in loaded for bear with facts about smog, corporate interlocking connections, payoffs, the bungling air pollution control district and stories that tied them together with humor and anger and captivated my students -- and captured me.

The fast-talking mouth belonged to Ed Koupal. People’s Lobby was his game...  I had him back often to speak to my high school and community college classes.  After only a few classroom visits I, and some of my students, took a seat in his classroom.  His classroom started with the large house he and his wife raised their family in and ran People Lobby’s from.  In time the classroom he taught from covered California, then stretched to Washington D.C. and at least 16 more states as well as nationally televised talk shows.

        In my classroom, Ed would bedevil politicians and at a high schoolers’ pace explain the importance of the initiative process in the evolution of our democracy. He’d use stories and jokes to paint the importance of political participation into their day dreaming heads.  And in conservative, suburban, Republican Glendora, he would tell why he began a Recall Governor Reagan campaign that had just barely missed (his team would say it was due to a rigged signature count) qualifying a recall Reagan campaign for the ballot...

By 1970 PL was running its second Clean Environment Initiative -- the first failed to qualify because PL was knocked off of shopping centers in its petitioning gathering efforts and because each collected signature then had to be tabulated and verified by the petition gatherers from huge Precinct Books.

        Mocking that system of “democracy in bureaucratic red tape and inaction,” Ed would explain how PL “changed that stuff,” by touting the efforts of the Lobby’s volunteer attorney Roger Jon Diamond.  Ed gave those students a picture of a twenty-six year-old attorney going before the California Supreme Court in a borrowed suit and winning the precedent setting Diamond vs. Bland I, 1970 lawsuit, which validated that shopping centers were the functional equivalent of town centers over the objections of shopping center owners who claimed property rights superceded signature gathering, or free speech, rights.  That ruling meant that the Lobby’s signature gatherers, whose ushering off of a southern California shopping center had prompted the suit, and any other signature gatherers, had a legal right to use shopping centers to assemble and collect signatures.