If I could go back to a decisive point in the past that would help me better understand Los Angeles political history, it might be to 1940, in a forlorn little homestead in the far San Fernando Valley, where a sharp little 3rd grader named Art Snyder would be arguing politics with his leftist father. Art saw in his parent everything he was not going to be — a half-educated man living hand to mouth in a tiny home improvised out of an abandoned street car, with visions of prosperity for all imposed on his own reality of abject poverty.
What I would have liked to have heard was the kid’s own vision of a just society, something I never heard him speak of in the thirty years that I knew the man. But I think I saw it in the 14th Los Angeles City Council District during his 18 years in office, from 1967 to 1985.
Snyder had a law degree from USC and served as an officer in the Marines. He could have done a lot of things with those credentials to make himself a pile of money, but instead he took a job in the office of eastside 14th District Councilman John Holland, whom he succeeded in 1967 as representative of one of the city’s poorest areas.