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EDWIN KOUPAL, PEOPLE'S LOBBY FOUNDER, ‘ONE OF GOD’S ANGRY MEN,’ DIES AT 48BY
AL MARTINEZ Times Staff Writer Edwin
Koupal, whose People's Lobby gave voice to the voiceless through the
initiative process, died Monday. He was 48. Death
came quietly in a hospital bed to the big and determined political activist,
who had been described as "one of God's angry men." Koupal
had been suffering from cancer, and on Sunday night decided he wanted no
further oxygen or intravenous treatment. With
him at the time was his wife of 27 years, Joyce, and a friend, Faith Keating. "He told us not to cry," Ms. Keating said. "He said he was satisfied with what he had done and what he had stood for. We played Benny Goodman tapes and drank wine. "He
didn't even die like anyone else." Koupal
-- ex-bartender, ex-used car salesman and ex-chicken rancher founded People's
Lobby in 1968 with his wife, and together they turned the initiative
process into a grassroots force that California had never seen before. They
sent an army of mostly young volunteers into the field in 1972 to gather
339,000 signatures and qualify the Clean Environment Act for the ballot. Koupal
hailed it as "the first successful
grass-roots initiative campaign in history" -- a campaign devoid of
special interest money. The
issue, Proposition 9, went down to defeat, but it clearly established the
lobby as a force to be reckoned with. Two
years later-and now boasting 20,000 members -- the Koupal organization
joined with Common Cause to qualify a political reform initiative for the
ballot, and it won. In
the months before his death, Koupal was pursuing yet another goal --
establishment of a national safe energy initiative campaign. He
and his wife had hammered out the platform of an organization called Western
Bloc and had already qualified the proposition in California, Oregon and
Colorado. Koupal
was a determined and effective campaigner whose passion for causes often led
him against the mainstream. Gov.
Brown said Monday Koupal "was a rare spirit who followed his vision with
a joy and relentless energy that this practical world finds hard to
understand." Koupal
had worked closely with then-Secretary of State Brown on the political reform
initiative, a campaign that more than any other brought Koupal and People's
Lobby into strident visibility. He
was a man of abundant drive, and those in his way found themselves in
the path of a hurricane. "I
never met anyone quite like Ed," said Thomas Quinn, chairman of the state
Air Resources Board and former assistant secretary of state under Brown. "He
was a strong human being, a dynamo, and he made gathering signatures an art.
To him, the petition was the highest form of democracy, the way people could
control government." Quinn
said that when the political reform initiative campaign began, he wanted
Common Cause involved in order "to keep those crazy Koupals in line. But
over the months I learned that it was the Koupals who kept the campaign in
line. "Without
Ed, victory could not have happened." Quinn
and others thought Koupal brought the techniques of a salesman to politics and
used them with conscience and wit. "He
became angry," Quinn said, "when that process was perverted and told
his petition-gatherers to always be honest. But he would also show me what he
had learned as a used car salesman. "When
you handed someone a clipboard to sign a petition, you handed it to him at
an angle so that the pen rolled into his hand. Once they had the pen, they
almost always signed." During
the course of the initiative campaign, People's Lobby and Common Cause were
often at each other's throats. Common
Cause was slow and deliberate
in its efforts, and People's Lobby -- led by the hard-charging Koupals -- was
an earthquake. Koupal
would angrily storm out of meetings between the two organizations during the
drafting of the initiative. A
third party said at the time: "Ed is a horse trader. When he threatens to
walk out he's just bargaining. It is irritating but effective..." Koupal
was born in Eugene, Ore. In 1964, he moved his family to Sacramento and to his
first confrontation with the Establishment. "We
found," he told the press, "that we
were paying for sewers, sidewalks and streets that we didn't have. On looking
further, we also found that seven houses which did have these things didn't
have to pay for them." The
Koupals went to court to fight an oil company's threatened takeover of their
sewer district, won, and were on their way. A
short time later, they tried to recall then-Gov. Ronald Reagan and failed. But
then People's Lobby was born, and the Koupals' energies ever since were
concentrated on that. What
the lobby became, by one definition,
was "not an organization, but two people -- Ed and Joyce -- with a lot of
true believers who follow an honest passion for political reform..." Koupal,
among his last words to his wife, said it differently. He said, "We've
got it made." He
also leaves three children, Cecil, Christine and Diane. Funeral services were
pending Monday. His
requiem is encompassed in an observation by Tom Quinn. "What
we have here," he said, "is the death of a salesman . . . in the
best sense of the word." ---------- "He worked indefatigably and selflessly to put the people back into democracy. More than anyone else he has revitalized the use of the initiative, referendum and recall and put these vital citizen tools back into the mainstream of state politics. He was a citizen's citizen." Ralph
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