By Ken Stone
Times of San Diego
SAN DIEGO — In the summer of 1993, Democratic Rep. Lynn Schenk flew home to La Jolla with talking points on her lap. Reading them, she felt the urge to laugh or cry.
Having just voted for President Clinton’s deficit-reduction package containing $250 billion in tax increases over five years, the first female member of Congress south of Los Angeles saw this: Only the top 1% of taxpayers would get a tax hike.
She knew that wouldn’t go over well with her wealthy constituents — especially at La Jolla Rotary the next day.
“So I go to this Rotary meeting and I look out at a lot of older white men, sitting there grim-faced with their arms crossed in front of them,” she said in a recent interview. “I looked out at them and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s you and me.’”
How cold was her reception?
“It was terrible,” she recalls. “I still get shivers from the looks that I remember getting.”
In November 1994, those looks fueled defeat. In her District 49 race against Republican Brian Bilbray, she lost by nearly 5,000 votes.
Laurie Black, Schenk’s chief of staff, told me: “Had she beat him, I think she’d still be in Congress today. She was really doing a good job, good work.”
Schenk turned 80 in January. Were she in the House today, it would be her 17th term.
Before San Diego Congresswomen Sara Jacobs and Susan Davis there was Lynn Alice Schenk. Her single term of service is far from forgotten, however.
Honored in 2012 by the Women’s Museum of California at the San Diego History Center in Balboa Park, Schenk “forged a trail for herself and for the women who followed in her path. She embodied the election of 1992, which became known as the Year of the Woman,” said museum Executive Director Laura Mitchell in a Women’s History Month query.
“She is a part of the San Diego Women’s Hall of Fame, and we were thrilled to feature her in our 2024 exhibition about women who have led the way in public service in our region.”
Former TV news anchor Sandra Maas, former museum board president, said in a statement: “Lynn Schenk is a trailblazing icon. … She fearlessly championed equality, opportunity and progress. Her legacy is one of courage, perseverance and breaking barriers — not just for herself, but for all those who followed.”
The irony is that Schenk didn’t mourn her 1994 defeat.
“It was such a relief to lose,” she said. “I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed dealing with these important subject matters, but I did not enjoy the frustration of the back and forth (travel) every week (with ‘nonstop jet lag for two years’). It was really wearing on me, physically and emotionally and my family.”
Earlier (1978 to 1983), Schenk was Gov. Jerry Brown’s secretary of business, transportation and housing — the first woman to hold this Cabinet post.
In Congress, Schenk was instrumental in getting approved a new vehicle lane at the Mexican border — now known as SENTRI — which has been called a turning point in cross-border commuting.
She said she much preferred being chief of staff to California Gov. Gray Davis from 1999 until his ouster in 2003 (after she lost a bid in 1998 to become state attorney general).
Her old friend Black (who first contacted Schenk as a women’s studies student at San Diego State) told me: “The lane that goes from San Diego into Tijuana — that was Lynn’s legislation, really, and I would love to name it [for her]. I’ll put that on the record. I think we should name that The Honorable Lynn Schenk SENTRI Lane.”
Another admirer is Barbara Bry, the former San Diego City Council member who met Schenk in 1981 when Bry interviewed her for the Los Angeles Times.
“I was immediately impressed by her intelligence and command of a wide variety of information involving this [Cabinet] office,” Bry said via email. “When I was starting Athena San Diego in the mid-1990s, Lynn was our role model since she had been one of the founders of Lawyers Club, which was started in 1972 to advance the status of women in law and society.”
In 2007, Bry said, Schenk encouraged her to become involved in Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign.
“I raised money and volunteered in several states,” Bry said. “She is a lifetime honorary member of Run Women Run, a nonpartisan organization that I started in 2008 to inspire, recruit and train qualified pro-choice San Diego women to seek elected and appointed office.”
Schenk encouraged Bry to run for public office and backed her campaigns for City Council and mayor.
“Throughout her career, Lynn has been committed to advancing qualified women who were often overlooked,” Bry said. “I and many other women owe Lynn a debt of gratitude for all that she has done to break down barriers.”
Molly Bowman Styles, who was on Schenk’s congressional district office staff, recalls “a formative, whirlwind experience, filled with accelerated learning curves and countless mentorship moments.”
Styles says her boss made national news when she had “the audacity” to wear a hot pink suit to one of Clinton’s State of the Union addresses. “She couldn’t be missed, standing to applaud the president at intervals throughout the evening while surrounded by a sea of Navy blue suits!”
“Always polished and professional, Lynn seemed to live in her wardrobe of stylish, jewel-toned suits. My hunch proved correct when Lynn‘s chief of staff, Laurie Black, called me with an urgent request: Stop by the Gap store around the corner from our office, during my off-the-clock lunch break, to pick up a pair of khakis and a button-down shirt for Lynn to wear during a campaign photo shoot scheduled later that afternoon.”
Another congressional staffer was former San Diego Tribune reporter Mike Richmond, who recalled a mitzvah by Schenk, active in her Jewish faith.
Richmond, media coordinator for Schenk, called her a “stickler” for constituent services.
“One case that stands out that I brought to Lynn’s attention and drafted letters for her was that of a Marine Corps recruiting sergeant, Kenneth E. Bevil.”
Bevil had suffered brain and other injuries in a motorcycle accident in Washington state. Authorities concluded he lost control of the motorcycle and hit a guard rail.
“The Marine Corps concluded he was injured in the line of duty, and the injuries were not the result of his misconduct,” he said. “But a Navy Physical Evaluation Board found him unfit and he was discharged without any disability benefits after 14 years of meritorious service.”
Richmond prepared letters about the case, including an appeal to the Veterans Administration to review new evidence that a San Diego Marine legal affairs rep and private investigator had gathered.
“The new evidence found that Bevil had been the victim of a hit-and-run accident,” he wrote me from his home in Jupiter, Florida. “The result was the VA reversed its earlier ruling and granted Bevil a 100% disability rating. He received an immediate $25,000 retroactive check, plus monthly payments of more than $500 (at the time).”
Bevil wrote to thank Schenk: “Your letters have given me the strength to continue to fight a battle that should never been lost.”
Richmond also recalls Schenk writing legislation that transferred a parcel of land in the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge to nearby Imperial Beach.
“The parcel had been used by Imperial Beach Little League for T-Ball activities for years, but the ownership was contested in court and it appeared the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to eliminate the ball fields,” he said.
Passage of the legislation was a big deal for local kids.
“A celebratory ‘T-Ball Deed Ceremony’ was held at the ball fields Oct. 15, 1994,” where a framed copy of H.R. 4647 was presented to Little League President Anthony Gastellum, said Richmond, who split a House salary with the late Midge Costanza.
Journalist and author Judith Morgan, widow of Tribune editor and columnist Neil Morgan, brought Schenk’s career up to date.
“Lynn has never stopped being active, creative and influential,” Morgan said via email. “She’s currently a force on the UC San Diego Foundation Board of Trustees and has put energy and ideas into advocating for the on-campus Food Pantry, where undergrads on tight budgets can get healthy staples, rather than skip meals.”
Morgan recalls happy evenings at Foxhill — Helen and Jim Copley’s estate in La Jolla — where, after dinner, Lynn’s husband, attorney and law professor Hugh Friedman, “played the saxophone and Neil played the piano, while others sang, played drums or danced.”
In June 1969, a group of six women broke the downtown Grant Grill’s rigidly enforced policy of no women until 3 p.m. — ordering mock turtle soup for lunch.
“Even after that hour, women were allowed only if escorted by men,” one story recounted.
“The males-only policy, and a brass sign on the wall proclaiming it, remained until 1971 when two lawyers — Lynn Schenk, later elected to Congress, and Judith McConnell, now a Superior Court judge — threatened legal action.”
Today, Schenk does “gray-haired consulting, but you won’t see the gray.”
She consults for her relatives ‘ law firm but isn’t using her license dating to 1971.
“What I say is: I’m not practicing (law) — I’ve perfected it,” Schenk said.
She’s focusing on her nonprofit work after serving on corporate boards.
“I’m on the Rady Children’s Hospital board,” she said. “I was on the Sempra [board] for many years” and also Biogen IDEC. “I’m on the USD Law School Board of Visitors, and … just went off the Board of Overseers at Scripps Research.”
But she’s most well-known — and sometimes slammed — as one of nine members of the High-Speed Rail Authority in Sacramento. The project’s cost overruns, red-tape issues and failure to deliver on long-ago promises are infamous.
‘Schenk — though embracing the title “the mother of high-speed rail” for suggesting it to Jerry Brown in 1981 — is the only San Diegan on the low-paying board, which tilts north.
Former state Sen. Quentin Kopp of San Francisco wrote the bill that former San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson signed to create the authority, she noted. But the Northern California delegation “put their thumb on the scale” to favor NorCal routes.
“We go back to Sacramento to adopt the first phase … and guess what? It’s like a 7-1 vote that the San Diego and L.A. [route] was put in Plan B. … So that was how this happened and it’s very sad.”
I first contacted Schenk to talk about town halls. She held in-person gatherings several times a month and pioneered card-table meet-and-greets in her San Diego district.
She calls the early 1990s a different time — “the beginning of the nasty era. Yeah, because of [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich” and what Schenk derisively labels his “Contract on America.”
Between 1993 and 1994, she said, “you could almost feel the difference in the town halls. The first year people came and really wanted to have an exchange and, yes, some of it was emotional. Obviously, people care deeply about things that affect them, but it was mainly respectful.”
By the second year, “I could see the shift in people’s attitude,” complaining, for example, about not legalizing ferret ownership (which she pointed out was not a federal issue).
First Lady Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform “added a layer of emotion to it.”
Schenk wasn’t verbally or physically attacked, “but it was no longer a dialogue, a conversation and exchange.”
So Costanza — once called “the president’s window to the nation” when she was a Jimmy Carter adviser — helped brainstorm another way to take the district’s pulse.
“We called it a listening post,” said Schenk, likely the first member of Congress to do them. “And now it’s become ubiquitous.” After telling the House Women’s Caucus her practice, “it went viral and everybody loved that idea because it was so useful.”
With permission from supermarkets, they set up tables for one-on-one chats.
“It was very interesting because it wasn’t sort of a performance … and show, you know, that they can raise their voice,” she said. “People sat down, and in literally less than five minutes I could get a sense of what was on their mind, what was troubling them. And if you sat there for an hour or two, you got a much more yeasty, understanding of what was on people’s minds.”
She has vivid memories of the topics three decades ago.
“It was exactly what it is today,” she said, “They were worried about inflation and the price of food. They were worried about health care. I mean, that was just across the board.”
And folks over 50 would express “angst” about how life had gotten complicated.
“Don’t forget, this is before for media, computers, Internet, social media, but life is just so complicated that their stress level was such,” she said. “They no longer had time to just hang out with neighbors or friends on the weekend. They no longer had time to have a card game.”
Schenk recalled her parents.
“My mother was a manicurist. My father was a tailor — Holocaust survivor. Life was hard. But, you know, they could have dinner with friends, that old-fashioned European-style dinners … with a lot of laughter and they would play funny European games.”
What really stuck with Schenk was people leaving the security of a pension retirement for 401(k)s “and they were scared,” she said.
She recalls one man saying he’d never read The Wall Street Journal.
“I don’t know anything about stocks,” he told her. “Who’s going to help me?”
In recent days, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of East County has been hit for not holding town halls.
His press secretary told me: “I understand how this is in vogue right now, But in my experience, in-person town halls are very hit or miss. I’ve been to good ones with a lot of interesting dialogue and, unfortunately, others where a lot of people told us they felt left out and unable to find a way to join the conversation.”
Said Lynn Schenk:
“I’ve got to say grudgingly that I think Darrell Issa and his team are correct. I don’t think town halls are the way to do that anymore because they’ve become performance-based. People want to come and show how loud they can shout or how angry they can be or how insulting they can be.”
Costanza would handle federal red tape at the card-table outings, and Schenk would “get these thank-you notes that people couldn’t believe, [writing] ‘I actually got to sit and talk to my congresswoman and they actually did such-and-such.’”
Some people sat down and vented, she said, “but that was OK because they did it in a much more respectful way than at a town hall that second year.”
Schenk shares angst over the possible constitutional crisis created by the Trump administration.
“Let me put it this way,” she began. “I am generally an optimist about this country. I love this country. This country, you know, welcomed my parents and has given me, my brother, my family opportunities unheard of had they survived in Eastern Europe and lived under communism, like the rest of my family did.
“So, I’m an eternal optimist about this country. … Everything about it is aspirational.
“But I’m very, very worried,” she said. “I’m more worried about [Elon] Musk that I am about Trump. I just say in a nutshell. But anyway that’s for … another conversation.”
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Ken Stone is a contributing editor to Times of San Diego with which San Diego Jewish World trades articles under auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.
Remarkable.