What can we learn about a person’s legacy from a couple scarves, or maybe a playbill, or a roll of No. 2 pencils? At “The Honorable Beverly O’Neill Exhibition,” you might be surprised by how much.
An approachable leader who kept her home phone number listed, O’Neill’s life story began modestly in Long Beach and often paralleled the city’s downturn and subsequent upward rise.
For a dozen years, 1994 to 2006, O’Neill was the face of Long Beach politics as the city’s mayor. With a famous rah-rah spirit and unrelenting optimism, she was so well known — at times compared to Jesus and FDR, and called a civic superhero — that she won her third term as a write-in candidate, the only mayor in history to do so.
In her time, she’s credited with rallying the city’s economic revival after the departure of the Naval Shipyard and aerospace plants that shrank or closed. As President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, she regularly traveled to New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and later assumed the presidency of Long Beach City College — the first woman to do so.
But before O’Neill took her first spin at elected office, before she finished school, before she watched the twin blows of an outgoing Navy and downsizing aerospace industry rip 50,000 jobs from the local economy, she took on the role of Yum-Yum, a commoner who fell in love with the son of the Japanese emperor.
A talented singer, O’Neill assumed the role as a child in “The Mikado”, a comic opera about the absurdities of bureaucratic excess. It’s a talent she carried throughout her life — later as Annie, the amenable rapscallion in “Oklahoma!”, and even as a wedding singer in her teenage years, to earn her family some extra cash.
The exhibit highlights these and many other details about O’Neill, now 95, on her path to becoming mayor at the age of 60. Each small but interesting part of her life is now staged inside the Long Beach Historical Society at 4260 Atlantic Ave.
As O’Neill’s health has begun to decline, local historians, as well as family and former colleagues, have sought to find creative ways to canonize her life and legacy.
Julie Bartolotto, the society’s executive director, said the exhibit is drawn from several dozen boxes donated from O’Neill’s longtime home and her office at City Hall.
Together the memorabilia — notes, clothes, ephemera and photographs — chronicle her teenage years at Long Beach Poly High School, through Long Beach City College and Cal State Long Beach, and finally through her mayoral tenure and side passions post-retirement.
It was a Herculean effort, organizers say, to gather a lifetime’s supply of memorabilia — some 65 boxes donated — with help from city officials and O’Neill’s former staff, family and close friends.
“And that’s just in print, that doesn’t include anything on a CD or digital,” said Society Deputy Director Jen Malone
Together, the assemblage showcases a mayor who did it all.
There are letters from friends in Hawaii and hurricane survivors in New Orleans, from dignitaries overseas and industry captains from the region; from museum directors and professors, junior golfers and professional ball players.
There’s the scarves and ceremonial jacket she famously wore at the Long Beach Grand Prix. Season tickets for the now-defunct Long Beach Ice Dogs hockey team. Plane tickets from mission trips to China and Ireland. Notes from a park bench she helped dedicate in Hiroshima, Japan on the 60th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombing.
As mayor of Long Beach and president of the national mayor’s conference, she gave her fair share of speeches. A single address at the groundbreaking of the Pike at Rainbow Harbor in 2002. Or the five different drafts she prepared ahead of the 2002 State of the City Address, as she struggled to get the words right on successes in city redevelopment, crime rates and home ownership.
“I think it’s fair to say that anything that had to do with this city, she loved it,” Bartolotto said.
Within a month’s time in Spring 2006, O’Neill gave speeches before the National Press Club in Chicago, an economic forum in Las Vegas — given as President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors — as well as a televised sitdown with President Bush on the closure of the Naval Shipyard and days later on NBC Nightly News.
A lot of artifacts focused on O’Neill’s fight to preserve the city’s Naval Shipyard, including travel itineraries to Washington, D.C., where she frequently lobbied senators and presidents alike.
Of the many photographs — historians there say there’s thousands — is one that shows O’Neill crestfallen at the moment it was announced the shipyard was no longer going to be in Long Beach.
Other photos offered an optimistic O’Neill so many remember, of her gladhanding or walking stride with either Bush, Bill Clinton, Hugh Hefner, Arnold Schwarzenegger and countless senators — Dianne Feinstein was a big fan — as well as ambassadors and dignitaries. One picture shows her standing beside Margaret Thatcher, the ex-British Prime Minister whose reputation for toughness earned her the nickname “Iron Lady,” which partly inspired O’Neill’s nickname the “Steel Magnolia.”
There are also three little pencils, grouped in a stack and each with O’Neill’s full name typed across the grip. The pencils, Bartolotto said, were specially made for O’Neill’s famous 2001 write-in campaign alongside instructional pamphlets that showed people how to fill in their ballots with her name.
Next to that display is the blow-up front page of the June 2001 edition of the Press-Telegram, which confirmed O’Neill’s victory in the general election race with 16,500 write-in votes.
She remains the only third-term, write-in candidate to win as mayor in the country.
The exhibit will run through at least December. For those interested in visiting, the Historical Society is open Tuesday to Friday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit here.