Within Pasadena government, ‘Everything old is new again’
“City Records Hard to Get in Pasadena” — Houston Post, Nov. 4, 1963.
“Pasadena curbs access to data: Tax contract with mayor’s friend is the latest episode in a city that flouts open government rules” — Houston Chronicle, May 31, 2017.
In a long career as an itinerant newspaper reporter, Gene Goltz spent only about three years in Texas, covering southeastern suburbs for the Houston Post.
Yet the assignment clearly made an impression on him: Many years later, when he sat down to write a memoir, he titled it “The Pasadena Story.”
Goltz moved his family to Pasadena to begin his new job in the fall of 1962. In his book, he recalled his first sight of the place:
“Pasadena was a city of 70,000, a grubby, dismal, ugly place ringed with oil refineries and reeking of the sweet, rotten, heavy stink of oil. … The Goltzes drove up a dingy street filled with Chevies and Fords with their hoods up and grimy, greasy, bare-chested surly men with oil-greased hands tearing apart the engines, while young wives in sloppy slacks and blouses screamed at dirty little urchins running wild in the yards and streets.”
Things didn’t improve much for Goltz when he started asking about the use of $6 million in city bond funds. A whispered tip from a contractor, along with the city’s reluctance to cough up information, aroused the young reporter’s instincts.
His investigation would lead to the indictments of then Mayor James L. Brammer, his wife and four other people on charges involving the theft of more than $100,000 — about $800,000 in today’s dollars — from the city treasury.
Goltz’s reporting drew praise from the grand jury, the Texas Legislature and the district attorney. It also won him journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, in 1965.
Until my colleague Lisa Falkenberg won the prize for commentary in 2015, Goltz had the distinction of being the only Houston journalist to have won a Pulitzer. He would share in a second Pulitzer Prize for his role in covering the Detroit riots of 1967 for the Detroit Free Press.
It was in Pasadena, though, where Goltz developed the dog-witha-bone tenacity that any good investigative reporter needs. And in reviewing his Pasadena work half a century later, I’m struck by the similarities between Goltz’s stories and recent reporting about Pasadena in the Chronicle.
“At Pasadena: Not All Bond Money Used as Proposed” — Houston Post, Nov. 29, 1963.
“Pasadena spending fails to add up; Agency trumpets more funding for the north side, but records show otherwise” — Houston Chronicle May 15, 2017.
Goltz, working in an era before the state’s openrecords law, encountered closed doors, endless referrals, outright denials and threats. This year, the Chronicle’s Mark Collette and Susan Carroll, with the aid of the newspaper’s attorneys, had to seek help from the state attorney general when Pasadena officials mishandled or ignored their public information requests.
These obstacles didn’t prevent the Chronicle from reporting on problems including the use of a neighborhood grant program for political purposes, business ties between the head of a city economic development agency and an agency contractor, and a redistricting plan that a federal judge said disenfranchised Latino voters.
John Goltz, who was an infant when his father Gene was exposing corruption in Pasadena city government, retyped and self-published his father’s manuscript for “The Pasadena Story” years after the reporter’s death in 2001. I asked John Goltz what his father would have thought of the fact that reporters were still struggling to get information from Pasadena officials.
“He’d shake his head and say, ‘Everything old is new again,’ ” said Goltz, who works for the AFL-CIO in the Washington, D.C., area. “He might laugh about it, but he’d laugh with gallows humor.”
Of course, there are some differences between Goltz’s reporting in the 1960s and the Chronicle’s work of the past few months. The recent stories have not led to any criminal charges. And while our reports have prompted some complaints, our journalists have endured nothing like what Gene Goltz and his family went through.
Goltz’s wife picked up the phone one day and heard an anonymous man say he’d been hired to “get” her. At City Hall, a supporter of the mayor warned Goltz that he would “take care” of any reporter who wrote about him. And a city commissioner (the equivalent of a councilman today) punched Goltz in the nose when the reporter questioned him outside the grand jury room.
My colleagues and I have not been threatened, and our olfactory organs are intact. But it’s as true today as it was in 1963: Withholding information from reporters is a good way to ensure you’ll see a lot more of them.
When Gene Goltz moved to Pasadena, Johnny Isbell was in his early 20s, attending night classes at the University of Houston. Isbell was first elected to the Pasadena City Council in 1969, four years after Goltz won his Pulitzer. Now Isbell, at 78, is preparing to exit the stage after almost half a century as a dominant, controversial force in the city.
Goltz’s stories and the resulting indictments led to a new city charter and a clean sweep of Pasadena’s elected leadership. But today, the city government Isbell leaves behind seems to have forgotten the lessons from that long-ago scandal. The new mayor, to be chosen in a runoff June 10, will have a chance to reconsider them.