John Van de Kamp wasn’t the attorney general when our newly blended family moved next door to him in 1971.
He wasn’t the district attorney, either.
He was a handsome young bachelor lawyer — didn’t you always think John Lindsay? — with a famous family name. Well, not just another downtown lawyer living in west Pasadena — he had for five years been the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles. And that very year he had been appointed head of the new Federal Public Defenders’ Office in L.A.
But we four teenage siblings didn’t know from lawyers. John was the fellow across the fence who came over to drink martinis by the Prospect Boulevard pool with my step-father, Al Hibbs.
Then, in 1976, when I was in college, he was appointed by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to fill an unexpired term as district attorney of Los Angeles County. In 1978, when I returned to the family pad for a post-college stay in the old room before finding gainful employment — Al charged me $100 a month for the privilege — John ran for and won a full term as district attorney.
In 1982, he ran for and won the first of his two terms as California attorney general, and for sure we had a genuine political celebrity next door to the family seat.
By then, swinging bachelor no more, he had married the charming and accomplished Andrea, and they had a wonderful little girl, Diana, who used to hop that wall and come swimming with my mother. She would hop that wall even when mother wasn’t there, recalls Rick Gough, who was renting a room and taking care of the house. “I was always afraid — the AG’s daughter over for a swim? What if something happened on my watch?” Rick recalled the other day.
It’s good for we unfamous to have famous friends. Normalizes the celebrity thing. John was at the time the only politician I knew well, and perhaps the very fact that he didn’t seem like a politician — wasn’t a glad-hander; didn’t seem to be “on” all the time; wasn’t always glancing over your shoulder for a more important person to visit with — is precisely why he lost in his bid to be governor of California.
I always thought he’d be a great governor. Scion of the bakeries and Tam O’Shanter Inn. We had John Muir High School in common, and he was a proud alum. But he also liked to talk about this wonderfully oddball school he went to before that, Trailfinders in Altadena, that emphasized camping and the great outdoors as well as academics. He told me several times that it was on those school trips into the mountains that he became an environmentalist.
Democratic voters looking for a governor favored tougher-cookie Dianne Feinstein in the primary. She ended up losing to Pete Wilson in the general. And so California history turned John back to Pasadena.
It was the state’s loss and our region’s gain. The hundreds of Pasadenans he counted as friends were so lucky to have him around in recent decades. He was always available to me as a journalist over the last 35 years as he worked as president of the State Bar and an overseer of the skulduggery-cleanup in the city of Vernon.
I wrote the other week about his important work to save open space and the statues of the Robinson brothers in the Civic Center. At that event he came up to a group I was talking with and I half-jokingly asked for itinerary advice for an upcoming trip to Italy. “John will know the inside scoop,” I said to the group with a wink. “As a matter of fact, you must get out to this wonderfully isolated church on a little island in the Venetian lagoon,” he replied.
It’s terrible for Andrea and Diana, and for all of us, to have lost John last week, aged just 81. He was in what seemed to be entirely good health. He went very quickly, after making such a difference in so many of our lives. When I wrote to my sister, a former deputy city attorney in Santa Monica, with the sad news, she replied: “John was such an inspiration to me and countless other attorneys struggling with what we could do to make a difference to individual victims negotiating the justice system. I have thought of him often after he wrote the recommendation that led to my career job. We give so many thanks for his life and his contributions.”
May California continue to know such servants of conscience, who give our politics and our culture a good name.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.
