New Kid, Old Block -- The Perennial Outsider, Charlie Chong Moves Inside To A Seat On The City Council

THE TINY MAN WITH THE wispy beard had spent the good part of an hour spinning tales of politics and potholes, of his quixotic pursuit of neighborhood empowerment.

A hand raised in the audience. "Do you have a food taster?"

The question, from a West Seattle Lions' Club member, was not as peculiar as it might seem. As popular as Charlie Chong is out in the Wedgwoods, Wallingfords and West Seattles of the city, his reception downtown at City Hall has been, if not poisonous, no better than lukewarm.

He's been in Pothole Purgatory, suffering what Chong calls freshman hazing of the Seattle City Council's only senior citizen.

He shouldn't be surprised. Several of his new colleagues supported his opponent in last fall's election. During the campaign, Chong suggested christening particularly egregious potholes after council members. Lake Noland, Lake Chow, Lake Drago . . .

Chong is 70 years old and stands just 5-foot-6, so it seemed almost comical when some residents of City Hall's 11th floor considered changing the locks on their offices when he showed up in late November with a staff of two guys who had made their reputations as anti-government firebrands.

"There was incredible paranoia," said one city official. "People were terrified."

Chong did little to thaw the ice when he called his colleagues "a bunch of yuppies" and said he reserved the right to fall asleep in boring meetings.

But he has been doing his best to keep everyone awake.

First came contention over his swearing-in ceremony - he wanted to delay it to coincide with his inauguration party. Then there was the mini-flap over drug-testing of his two aides; he said if they were tested he should be, too. He wasn't. They passed.

And, of course, there were the snowplows.

In January, with memories of December's immobilizing blizzard fresh in Seattle's mind, Chong - a Hawaii native who never even saw snow until he was 22 - found a deal that would let the city buy some used snowplows cheap. But council members fiddled. First they had to teach the upstart a lesson in city politics: Everything must be studied, and then studied again, even as Bellevue was getting to the cheap plows first.

Eventually the Seattle Council agreed to enlarge the snowplow fleet, and members grudgingly admitted Chong - and public outrage - had bullied them into it.

SOME COUNCIL COLLEAGUES and others involved in local politics privately regard Chong as a blowhard and nitpicker. Yet few will speak publicly. This is a man they have to work with for months and perhaps years to come - his council seat will be on the fall ballot - and may need as a political ally.

"Charlie's a very interesting character for the media. He's a headline grabber," said one critic. "Charlie sometimes becomes terribly personal and he can be mean."

But colleagues say Chong - an ascribed Democrat - is smart and has tapped into an odd yet powerful coalition of neighborhood activists, Republicans, firefighters, and everyone who has deep suspicions about how city government is run. It would be a mistake to dismiss him.

"I think he's terrific. He brings a much-needed outside-of-City Hall viewpoint, one I more often than not agree with," said Councilwoman Jane Noland, who finds in Chong a political soul-mate. "I used to be pretty lonely out there, and he puts me more in the middle.

"It would be foolish to ignore him. He was elected by a wide majority."

Foolish or not, it's impossible to ignore Charlie Chong. He sprinkles his sound bites with his quick, often biting, barbs, and no one - particularly fellow council members - is immune. He's oft-quoted because he's just so quotable.

In speaking of sexual harassment in the workplace he told the City Hall newsletter: "If they want to pinch butts, let them do it in the unemployment line."

Plans for a new Seattle Aquarium? OK, as long as the fish tanks don't have retractable roofs.

Of his detractors? "They'd like to see me driving snowplows in an open-air stadium."

Chong was elected to fill the year left in the term of Councilman Tom Weeks, who resigned to work for the Seattle School District. He plans to run for a full term in the fall, and it's a good bet he won't go unchallenged despite a lopsided win last November.

With support based in neighborhoods across Seattle, he won with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Even his backers were surprised by how handily he defeated the establishment candidate, Bob Rohan.

Perhaps he earned the right to be a bit immodest:

"Here I am, a 70-year-old man in an ethnic group overrepresented on the City Council," says Chong. "I had just $50,000, no support from a political party and my opponent got the endorsements of both papers. How does a guy like me get to win? There's only one answer - people's discontent. Most people don't know me, but everywhere we go, what keeps coming back is how much people are depending on us. They want change. We've got to do it."

When he was sworn in, supporters hauled signs to the ceremony with the words, "To Simulate Resistance Is Useless." But the signs weren't raised; it was time to make friends and placate enemies.

This will be the tricky part: being something larger than a pesky gnat on the thin hides of his colleagues. Can Chong be an effective advocate for the neighborhoods that elected him? Will he join or build coalitions? Can he do more than make jokes and get headlines?

CHARLIE - DON'T CALL HIM CHARLES - CHONG was born on the island of Maui, the sixth of 13 kids.

His father, who worked as a bookkeeper for a sugar plantation, was Chinese, his mother Chinese and Hawaiian. Today Chong speaks neither language.

As he is inclined to do when speaking of his past, Chong digresses: "Can I tell you a story?" It is not a question.

He grew up in Plantation Village, living among Portuguese immigrants. One day in a high-school class he began to read out loud when the entire class burst out laughing. "I was speaking with a heavy Portuguese accent," said Chong. "They put me in a remedial program."

Chong left Hawaii in 1948, beginning years of a nomad existence that didn't end until he bought a huge brown house with broken shingles next to a ravine in West Seattle. The house eventually would make him famous. Or infamous.

After Hawaii he graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in foreign commerce. He was drafted during the Korean War and served two years in an Air Force intelligence unit.

"We were a bunch of young Air Force officers and we solved all the problems of the world every night," said Bob Hulbert, a La Conner farmer who served with Chong in the Korean War and remains one of his closest friends.

Hulbert, like many of Chong's older friends, was surprised when he decided to run for office.

"He's going to raise hell and I might not agree with him 100 percent," said Hulbert, "but you can't get around his independence."

Turning down a request that he make the Air Force his career, Chong went to work for one of his Georgetown professors researching international law. Then, drawing on his experience working for Dole in Hawaii, he took a job as vice president of a canning company in Minnesota. He worked there for five years and - after a hiatus in Hawaii - returned to Washington, D.C., and a job recruiting Vista Volunteers for the government's new anti-poverty program.

That work became his career. He learned public speaking as he visited college campuses to spread the VISTA gospel and trained community groups in San Francisco, Arkansas and Alaska. In 1970 he settled in Seattle as regional operations chief of the Office of Economic Opportunity, which managed federal anti-poverty programs. A year later he grew the wispy beard that became a trademark.

"I wanted to know if I could grow one," he says, "and the reaction was so adverse I kept it for spite."

John Shively, now Alaska commissioner of natural resources, calls Chong "a father figure to a number of us in community action and a wonderful human being."

"He always had a perspective on how the little guy views things."

Of all the people for whom he played mentor in his years working in anti-poverty programs, Chong perhaps is most proud of those he tutored in Alaska. Many, like Shively, have become the state's political leaders.

OEO, long a target of budget-cutters, struggled on as the Community Services Administration before President Reagan killed it in 1981. Chong closed the local office in 1983.

He was 57 and out of work. Downsized. Retired from the longest job he'd ever held.

ALTHOUGH HE DIDN'T KNOW IT at the time, the seeds of his political career had been planted in 1976, when he bought the big brown house near Duwamish Head, drawn to it by the huge oak tree out front - he's been told it's one of the largest in the Seattle area - and big windows that assuage his claustrophobia.

The house needs a new roof, which isn't particularly significant except that it threatened to derail Chong's political plans.

"For years people wanted me to run and I said if I had the money to run, I would fix my roof," he said. "They said if I ran and won, I'd have the money."

Thanks to his new $77,377 salary, a new roof is on the spring agenda.

Chong's political life began with a neighborhood fight.

"I was living like normal people. I didn't wash my car. I watched TV," he said. "Until a developer proposed to build in a ravine behind my house."

He and his neighbors rallied successfully to keep new houses out of the ravine, saving it as open space, and Chong became the campaign's spokesman. That led to his appointment to a citizens committee working on the 1989 King County open-space bond issue. He pitched in on other civic projects and eventually became president of the Admiral Community Council in West Seattle. Then came his best-known leadership role, opposing Mayor Norm Rice's plan to concentrate population in urban villages, of which West Seattle was to be one.

Along the way, Chong won and lost civic battles. The most visible was the doomed petition drive to keep the Frederick & Nelson store open. He admits now it was a lost cause.

Entering politics was far from Chong's mind when he lost his federal job.

He thought he'd write poetry when he retired, and he and his longtime partner, Mary Pearson, did write and publish a narrative poem on the life of the biblical Joseph, exploring how Joseph might have felt when told that Mary was pregnant and he wasn't the father.

It's a spiritual side of Chong not often seen in the tumble of politics. Yet his Catholic faith is an important part of his life. "There's no question, it influences much of how I think," he said, even though he disagrees with the church on many positions, including abortion.

Chong is an usher at Holy Rosary Church in West Seattle. His brother, Patrick, is Carmelite monk in Chicago.

"His mother was extremely strong with her Hawaiian sense of justice and humanity," said Pearson, 44, who met Chong 25 years ago when they worked together at the federal agency. "He got a lot of it from the Hawaiian culture and some from his mom. The current that runs through it is an incredible sense of love."

Chong lives with Pearson, her 88-year-old mother, their bouvier, Koa, and a foster dog the couple is tending for a friend. He has no children.

Chong drives a 1976 Buick and does not have (or want) a cellular phone. His telephone number is listed and constantly busy. Pearson would like a second line.

Chong reads prolifically: classics, science fiction, the entire Seattle Mariner lease during the Christmas snowstorm, often sitting on the floor and balancing on his heels in Pacific Islander tradition.

Each morning he exercises his aching back and is reminded of his first campaign, in 1995, when he ran for the City Council and lost badly to Margaret Pageler.

It was, literally, a painful experience. Waving a sign one cold day, he tripped over a curb and injured his back. One volunteer, Donna Rousseau, designed T-shirts imprinted with two angels and distributed them to a group of women who called themselves "Charlie's Angels."

Day after day they escorted Chong to his campaign appearances.

"He would have had a non-campaign," said Midge Batt, one of the angels. "I was so disillusioned with city planning. I thought this was a voice that could lead us through the maze. I worry he'll burn himself out. Have we thrown him to the lions? How long can he handle the stress of City Hall?"

Peter Eglick, a land-use attorney who represented the West Seattleites in their anti-urban-village fight, said he, too, fears that Chong will be caught in the bureaucratic crossfire.

"Most people in the city are asking the same questions as he is," said Eglick. "They want to know why the streets can't be plowed better, why schools starve and stadiums get all the money. I don't think he's a pushover and don't think he's in any sense someone who can be dominated. He is gentle and he is smart."

WHEN CHONG WAS ASKED the food-tasting question at the West Seattle Lions' Club meeting, he had a quick retort.

"Actually, they're more afraid of Matt."

That would be Matthew Fox, the pony-tailed rocker and civic thorn whom Chong hired as a staff assistant. He's an outsider who broke inside, and the fit is still a little snug.

Like the day in January when he plugged in his coffee pot and knocked out power to half the City Council offices.

Working as Chong's aide is the first job where Fox, 30, has ever worn a tie. His roommate had to teach him how to tie it.

Fox ran, and won, the campaigns against the Seattle Commons; he has railed against the city's poster and teen-dance-hall laws.

Nick Licata, a neighborhood activist, recalled a recent event where Fox showed up, his long hair electric, his eyes full of fire. "He had this menacing look, like Rasputin," said Licata. "You think, `I just hope he's on my side.' "

Chong's other aide, Jay Sauceda, was West Seattle chairman of Ross Perot's United We Stand organization and wrote a guidebook on access to government.

While Chong is old enough to be the father of some of his colleagues, he neither looks nor acts like a 70-year-old. Yet there are hints he came from a different era, a time before there was ever such a thing as being "politically correct."

At a recent outing to look at city potholes, he joked that if ethnic jokes weren't so politically incorrect, he could picture himself peering out of a very deep hole. "Look. It came all the way to America."

During his campaign his supporters were going to distribute fortune cookies with the message, "You can't go wrong with Charlie Chong" - until they realized some might consider it in poor taste. They used lollipops instead.

CHONG IS NOT A PATIENT MAN. He is in a perpetual hurry. His motto is a mantra: "First ask nicely, second ask firmly, third do what I have to do."

What he has to do isn't done quietly.

Last month he exploded at a council meeting over plans to give two street ends on the Duwamish Waterway to the Port of Seattle.

Chong, who opposed the deal, publicly called his colleagues and city staffers bribe-takers and liars. That prompted a strong rebuke from other council members, who said the incendiary remarks were out of line.

"The council's dinged as being too boring and too collegial," said Councilwoman Martha Choe. It's important to be able to air disagreements in public, she said - as long as they're respectful.

"You can disagree if you don't make it personal," she said.

Though few will criticize Chong publicly, some say his performance so far raises a fair question: If he continually finds himself on the losing ends of lopsided votes, how effective can he be?

As Choe says, "It still takes five votes. You can't be effective unless you work with the council and are able to make a case for the five votes."'

One longtime City Hall observer said privately, "He'll take on issues that are dumb issues. He could very easily become background music, white noise. If he votes no on every issue, he could be very ineffective."

But that may be what voters expected, the proverbial lone voice in the wilderness.

"I don't think Charlie was elected to compromise," Fox said.

Metropolitan King County Councilman Greg Nickels, whose district includes West Seattle, has tangled with Chong on the urban-village issue; political relations grew frayed when Chong worked for a Nickels re-election opponent.

Yet he said Chong's election is healthy for the city.

"The City Council has a lot of demographic diversity, but not obvious diversity in terms of thought," he said. "Charlie brings that and it's healthy. I don't think it's easy to get the city to hear you.

"The message his big margin of victory gave is that people are frustrated and want to know the City Council is listening and reflecting their values."

The night that he savored his landslide victory, Chong went back to the street, waving his signs at three busy intersections.

They were giant thank-you notes stretched as high as his soaring spirits.

"We've been lonely for a long time in the neighborhoods," he said. "Now we're going to shake."

Susan Gilmore is a Pacific Magazine staff reporter. Gary Settle is a picture editor and photographer for Pacific.