Former St. Paul Mayor George Latimer reflects on a successful career

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George Latimer spent nearly 14 years as mayor of St. Paul, making him the longest-serving mayor in the 155-year history of the city.

But his record began modestly: Latimer, now 74, says he decided to take a shot at running for mayor in 1975 essentially because he was about to turn 40 and was hungry for a change.

He had a wife he loved (Nancy Moore Latimer, who died in 2006), five kids, a beautiful house – thanks to a thriving law practice focused on labor and union issues – but this irrepressible, blunt man who grew up in Schenectady, N.Y., with a Lebanese-Catholic mother and an English-Protestant father wanted more.

“While I had enjoyed the practice of law, I was looking for a change. I was even looking at a Bush Fellowship (for people in their mid-career phase). So I was driving home one day (in mid-1975) and heard on the radio that (Mayor Larry) Cohen was not going to run again, and I thought, ‘Why not?’ ”

Latimer had served on the St. Paul School Board and as a regent of the University of Minnesota, but other than that, he’d never been involved in street-level city politics.

No matter. Latimer tossed his hat in the ring – and promptly got lucky.

“The first election is always the most fun. I mean, I had no idea what I was doing in a campaign.”

His two opponents in the Democratic primary were Jerry Isaacs and Michael T. DeCourcy.

The name “DeCourcy” was well-known in St. Paul because of Michael’s mother, Elizabeth, who’d been on the St. Paul City Council from 1956 to 1962 and then a commissioner of the Ramsey County Board from 1967 to 1974.

Latimer says he registered 11,000-12,000 votes; DeCourcy got about 9,000 (“without really working very hard”) and Isaacs tallied some 10,000.

“I got lucky because I think a lot of those votes for DeCourcy (now a Ramsey County District Court judge) would otherwise have gone to Isaacs.” So, the upstart politician charged into the general election in April 1976 battling Republican George Vavoulis, who’d been St. Paul mayor from 1960 to 1966. (For the record, Latimer is close friends with George Vavoulis – son of his one-time opponent.)

“I think a lot of Democrats held their nose and voted for Latimer,” Latimer says. He won by about 2,200 votes out of 70,000 or so cast – a margin of 3.2 percent, according to election records.

But Latimer did a few smart things that helped him win that first by-the-seat-of-his-pants election in 1976.

First, he sensed that people wanted a change from the “fractious” political culture in downtown St. Paul that had led to a lot of inaction.

“Developments were not happening. There were a lot of empty holes in the ground.”

Latimer figured the best approach was to talk about “what a great city St. Paul was and how it could be even greater.”

And then this progressive-minded union lawyer visited as many business leaders in St. Paul as possible.

“One smart thing I did was that I went to business leaders in St. Paul before the election – I didn’t ask for their support – I just talked to them and let the business community know that they’d be more welcome in city hall than they’d been.

“So, without asking for their support – and never receiving it – I learned a lot from the business community.”

Latimer proceeded to etch his name in the political history books of both St. Paul and Minnesota. He would go on to win five more elections for mayor – 1978, 1980, 1982, 1983 and 1985 – and none of those was very close.

He did suffer one electoral loss, challenging incumbent DFL governor Rudy Perpich in the 1986 Democratic gubernatorial primary and having his hat handed to him, 57 percent to 43 percent.

His success as mayor came from focusing his considerable energy – as well as that of his trusted top staff and mostly willing city council – on development, filling those holes in the ground downtown, and on redeveloping much of the aging housing stock in neighborhoods across the city.

“I had a lot of terrific opportunities and I took advantage of all of them,” Latimer says. “And it was civil servants who brought a lot of these opportunities to me.”

Top-most among a staff Latimer describes as top-notch was Dick Broeker, who served as Latimer’s deputy mayor and was co-architect of the renaissance of Lowertown, the now-thriving arts-focused community adjacent to St. Paul’s downtown, as well as other major initiatives. (Broeker died of a heart attack at 62 in October 2004.)

In 1979, Latimer says, “I was floundering around – I didn’t realize it, but I was. When I talked Dick into joining my administration … that’s the best decision I ever made.

“Dick could talk to a guy laying a pipe in a ditch and he could talk to a pin-striped banker. He was an unforgettable force of brilliant kindness, humor and energy.”

Broeker also is the one who secured $10 million from the McKnight Foundation to kick-start Lowertown’s rebirth.

A list of Latimer’s successes as mayor is familiar to most familiar with St. Paul: Lowertown, the riverfront, District Energy (he championed the concept of hot-water heating to provide heat for downtown buildings), along with many downtown developments, including Town Square and the Securian Building.

Of course, not every idea or project went swimmingly for Latimer: Galtier Plaza has never been a success or come close to doing what Latimer had predicted it would. To this day, it continues to have difficulties.

But the bruising battle Latimer talks about now is the Job Corps building he fought to establish in the late 1970s.

While he succeeded – the Hubert Humphrey Job Corps Center stands at 1480 N. Snelling Ave., having helped more than 10,000 young people with a second chance at getting a decent job since 1981 – the neighborhood across from the Minnesota State Fairgrounds strongly opposed Latimer’s plan.

And there was an ugly, racial undertone to the controversy that upsets Latimer to this day.

During the heat of the battle, someone handed out to the mostly older residents of the neighborhood racist brochures carrying news photos of a couple young African-American men involved with a Job Corps program in Gary, Ind., in handcuffs after being accused of rape, according to Latimer.

“To work to cause such fear in people, I thought it was despicable,” he says. “I never mentioned it during the controversy, I never charged anyone with racism, but it was seething beneath the surface. But you never get anywhere charging people with racism.”

And Latimer did something that he says you have to do as a politician, if you want to serve with integrity: He pushed to do something in a neighborhood in which many people there opposed the plan because he felt strongly that it was for “the greater good of the community at large.”

Wy Spano, longtime lobbyist and observer of Minnesota politicians, says Latimer “was the model for clean, activist progressive mayors throughout the United States.  Not everything he tried worked well for St. Paul, but, like FDR on the national scene four decades earlier, George Latimer was willing to keep trying.

“It’ll be difficult for any St. Paul mayor to match Latimer’s positive impact on the city,” added Spano, now director of the Masters in Advocacy and Political Leadership (MAPL) Program at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

So, how did this son of conservative, apolitical parents (“all they did was work – they didn’t have time for anything else,” Latimer says), become a progressive, inclusive politician who’s still fighting the good fight?

(Latimer is one of six members of the board of directors of Preservation of Affordable Housing, the Boston-based national housing preservation organization whose latest move was last fall when it acquired a troubled low-income housing development called Grove Parc not far from the University of Chicago, where Latimer has done two fellowships.)

“I read a lot as a kid,” Latimer says, “When I wasn’t reading about Joe DiMaggio and other Yankees, I was reading Mark Twain.”

Latimer recalls being horrified by one piece Twain wrote about a group of U.S. soldiers in the Spanish-American War circling a volcanic crater and shooting the unarmed and helpless civilians crowded together inside.

Latimer also talks about working at a Jewish Community Center down the street from his house as a teenager in the early 1950s. He felt welcomed, learned how to be a coach and got paid for it.

Latimer also remembers seeing more than a few people who had blue numbers etched into their arms.

“Even as a kid you can see someone who’s been broken in their lives,” he says. “It wasn’t until later that I learned exactly what those blue numbers meant.”

Latimer’s parents – William Latimer and Dorothy Marie (Dolly) Nassar Latimer – never excluded anyone from their deli.

“There was a tolerance at our home and at the store … that was just very apparent. There was never a sense of ‘other.’ ”

It’s this sense of openness that Latimer says he’s carried with him and has served him well throughout his still-unfolding life.