When President Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign advisers were planning a key West Coast swing through Washington, Oregon and California in mid-September 1980, they decided to hold the campaign’s 19th Town Hall meeting in Southern California.
The Town Halls were question and answer sessions with rank and file voters on topics of their choosing. Under the format, Carter would make brief introductory remarks, then take questions from the floor for about an hour.
Carter’s advisers sought a venue that was reasonably close to LAX and was in an area filled with diverse middle-class voters. They hoped to win back voters who had gone with Gerald Ford in 1976. Even though Carter won the general election, Ford won the state of California.
After considering sites from Santa Monica to Long Beach, they decided on North High School at 3620 W. 182nd St. in Torrance for the Sept. 22nd event, which would make him the first sitting U.S. president to visit a Torrance high school
The North High band immediately began practicing not only “Hail to the Chief,” but also “Georgia on My Mind” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” to play at the event.
School district officials were surprised by the choice of venue. Opened in 1955 in response to the postwar baby boom, North High was considered the most utilitarian of the city’s four high schools.
Very little had been done to improve the school in the 25 years since it had opened. The school’s gym was anything but fancy, and was among the structures scheduled to be improved under a hard-won $6 million facilities upgrade program.
The Town Hall came at a key point for Carter. The incumbent president had just withdrawn from a national debate with his Republican foe, former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan, the night before the Torrance appearance, in protest over the participation of third-party candidate John Anderson. The Torrance event was meant to counter criticism that Carter had ducked the debate.
In truth, Carter was in a weakened position in 1980. His inability to free Americans taken hostage by Iran in 1979 made him seem ineffective on foreign policy. A second gas shortage in 1979 had lingering negative economic effects. The U.S. economy also had become beset by “stagflation,” a combination of high unemployment, low economic growth and high inflation.
Carter also had to beat back an attempt by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to wrest the nomination from him at the Democratic National Convention a month earlier. So a lot was riding on events such as the North High Town Hall.
Students were dismissed early on Monday the 22nd ahead of the 1 p.m. event. Tickets for the 1,100 seats for Carter’s appearance had been made available to the community through a lottery conducted by the Daily Breeze. Seventy-five North High students also were chosen to attend, along with 25 city employees and 20 additional city officials.
Dignitaries in attendance included Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., former Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally, Congressman Glenn Anderson, Supervisor Kenny Hahn, State Treasurer Jesse Unruh, and Torrance Mayor James Armstrong along with the Torrance City Council.
Heavy security accompanied Carter’s motorcade from LAX, including helicopters and police protection. Sharpshooters already were in place on nearby rooftops, plainclothes officers were scattered among the attendees and police covered every inch of the campus.
Daily Breeze reporter Rich Connell noted that the event began like a splashy campaign rally, but became more serious with President Carter’s opening remarks.
The questions from the floor that followed covered a variety of issues and concerns, from the Iranian hostage crisis to taxing Social Security, from fair housing initiatives to Carter’s cancellation of the B-1 bomber program and its effect on the local aerospace industry. He also was asked why he had ducked out on the previous night’s debate.
Attendees from all sides of the political spectrum felt the President gave thoughtfully reasoned answers to their various questions. In a couple of instances where Carter didn’t know the answer to specific questions, he promised to find out and get back to the questioner.
The whole event ran like clockwork, ending at its scheduled time of 3:25 pm. Carter worked his way through the throngs of people inside and outside the North High gym. Those without tickets had been allowed to watch the arrival and departure of the President.
Carter’s motorcade left Torrance and headed for the next event on the campaign schedule, a posh Democratic fundraiser in Beverly HIlls that evening.
Carter’s re-election campaign hoped to gain ground against Ronald Reagan through appearances such as the one at North High, but Reagan’s home-state strength proved to be too strong.
The charismatic Reagan and his running mate George H.W. Bush carried the state by 17 percentage points in the general election, and soundly defeated Carter and his running mate Walter Mondale by nine percentage points in the national balloting that won him the presidency.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archvies.
Los Angeles Times archives.
Wikipedia.
Reader comments:
I read with great interest your account of Jimmy Carter’s town hall gathering at North High some 45 years ago. Conspicuously absent from your account was the large number of protesters on 182nd St, in front of the administration building. I was there, and gladly so. There was a lot of noise, some fighting, and a memorable day.
The “specific questions”: I remember one of them very distinctly, as it was asked by one of my school buddies from North.
John Cavanaugh
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Your story is timely, I attended that meeting and was thinking about what impressed me most just a few weeks ago. It was the security at the entry door. The Secret Service agent asked me several inane questions as he stared at the Rollei flash unit attached to my 35mm SLR. I offered to open the battery tube which looked like a stick of dynamite, but he declined. My answer to his last question resulted in his reply, “with that and a quarter I can get a cup of coffee”. I did so want to give him a quarter. Thanks for the flashback.
Lynn Lindhurst
