Fun with Sam and Jane, or how to run a city

Former Santa Fe Mayor Sam Pick’s tips on smart city management would include a section on the actor Jane Fonda.

Fonda doesn’t have anything to do with Santa Fe’s city government. She never has. But this is precisely why Pick remembers her, and why he says it’s still instructive.

Pick was part of the Santa Fe City Council in 1973 that approved a resolution calling for a boycott of all performances by Fonda, then one of Hollywood’s big stars.

Pick looks back on that decision and calls it grandstanding. City government is about providing smooth roads, clean parks, tidy medians, fast firefighters and police officers committed to keeping the peace.

City residents elected council members to make sure those services were efficient. But there was the City Council, obsessing about an actor who made a foolish decision on foreign soil.

Fonda had traveled to North Vietnam in wartime. She spoke against the fighting, and she called on American commanders to stop bombing non-military targets.

All of this would have been worth no more than a few turgid paragraphs on the inside pages of newspapers. Millions of Americans opposed the Vietnam War, and Fonda was with them.

But then Fonda sat at an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi. Photographers captured the moment.

She would say she initially hadn’t paid careful attention to her surroundings. Minutes afterward, it occurred to Fonda that she was about to become a villain.

“Oh, my God. It’s going to look like

I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes!” Fonda wrote in her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far.

Angry at Fonda, Santa Fe Councilman Clarence “Porky” Lithgow sponsored the resolution asking the public to boycott her movies.

Pick’s memory of his own involvement is foggy.

“I think I probably voted for that resolution,” he said. “There was probably a big crowd over there at city hall. And Santa Fe being the kind of community it is, I probably went along. No one is infallible, and I screwed up.”

Newspaper accounts say only one council member, Mike Scarborough, voted against the resolution condemning Fonda.

Pick, who went on to serve for 10 years as mayor of Santa Fe, says targeting the actor was politicking that achieved nothing.

“City government is a civic job. It is not a political job,” Pick said. “Every department is basically providing services. This is sidewalk politics.”

Now 85, Pick still watches how far mayors and city councils stray from their core mission.

Pick is backing the incumbent, Alan Webber, in this year’s mayoral election.

But, Pick says, he admires Webber’s only announced challenger, City Councilor Jo Anne Vigil Coppler.

“She’s very good. Was the city personnel director when I was mayor,” said Pick, who held the city’s top job from 1976-78 and again from 1986 to 1994.

Though Webber is his candidate, Pick criticized the sitting mayor for a recent foray into advising people on what to do with their guns. The mayor made firearms a topic of his “Webber Cast” video after mass killings in Atlanta and Boulder, Colo.

“The number one thing we can do today to prevent gun violence is for all gun owners to lock up their guns,” Webber’s administration stated in a news release summarizing his video.

Webber’s position will play well with much of his base. It will alienate others in Santa Fe and New Mexico.

Law-abiding gun owners aren’t about to lock away a firearm they say they might need instantly for protection.

Pick sees Webber’s comments as politicking instead of paying attention to city services.

“Locking up guns is not something the city needs to get involved in,” Pick said.

He sees few if any other candidates entering the election for mayor.

“I think it’s going to be a close race,” Pick said of competition between Vigil Coppler and Webber.

The efficiency and quality of services are what most voters will care about, he says.

That’s how it was in 1973, when the City Council approved its resolution aimed at hurting Fonda’s box-office appeal.

Santa Fe’s council was no match for a movie star, even one derided as “Hanoi Jane.”

Fonda had won an Academy Award for Klute before her travels to North Vietnam. She won a second Academy Award in 1979 for Coming Home, a movie about Vietnam.

Pick makes sport of his and his colleagues’ attack against Fonda.

Somehow, he says, she rebounded from Santa Fe’s attempt to destroy her career.

Ringside Seat is an opinion column about people, politics and news. Contact Milan Simonich at msimonich@sfnewmexican.com or 505-986-3080.