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Born outside of Calvert, Robertson County, Texas

9.29.1998 - (DeadPool.org) Tom Bradley, the sharecropper's son who became mayor of Los Angeles and presided over the city for two decades of explosive growth and change, died on Tuesday at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in West Los Angeles. He was 80.

The cause of death was a heart attack. Bradley had been in poor health since March 20, 1996, when he had his first heart attack. Two weeks later, after he had undergone cardiac bypass surgery, a stroke left him partly paralyzed and unable to speak.

Bradley was mayor from 1973 to 1993, an era during which Los Angeles was transformed from a collection of suburban neighborhoods to what Bradley liked to call a "world-class city" with glittering skyscrapers, a dramatic new skyline and a vibrant downtown. During the Bradley years, Los Angeles surpassed Chicago to become the United States' second-largest city.

His election as the first black mayor of Los Angeles, which was then the nation's third-largest city and largely white, reflected a significant change in local politics in the United States. For most of that time, Bradley was an immensely popular figure whose stately bearing and placid demeanor seemed to reassure the residents of his increasingly polyglot city.

Soft-spoken and self-effacing, Bradley shunned some of the perquisites that his stature and office might have brought him. Calling it a foolish waste of money, he refused to use a cellular telephone that was installed in his car, a former aide recalled. Still, Bradley learned to move as easily in the society of the fabulously wealthy as he did in the world of the poor and disadvantaged from which he had come.

"There wasn't a lot of flash to him," said Dee Dee Myers, the former White House press secretary, who worked for Bradley in the 1980s. "Quiet determination was his hallmark. His enemies always underestimated him, but at the end of the day he was always the last one standing."

Despite a long period of relative harmony in the city, Bradley's tenure was marked at the beginning and at the end by racial strife.

He first ran for mayor in 1969, when the Watts riots of four years earlier were still an open wound in Los Angeles. He was painted as a dangerous radical by the incumbent mayor, Sam Yorty, and lost.

But by 1973, Bradley had forged a powerful coalition of black and white liberals and moderates, and soundly defeated Yorty to become the city's first black mayor. That he did so at a time when the black population of Los Angeles was only about 15 percent was a testament to his broad appeal.

In April 1992, as Bradley was mulling over whether to run for a sixth term, the city was roiled by three days of riots sparked by the acquittal of four white police officers who had been charged with the beating of an unarmed black motorist, Rodney King.

Bradley was deeply affected by the riots and, five months later, announced that he would not run for mayor again. "The April unrest tore at my heart," he said, "and I will not be at peace until we have healed our wounds and rebuilt our neighborhoods."

Like most in Los Angeles, Bradley was taken by surprise by the rioting. "He never really understood it," a friend recalled. "It was a tragedy in his life that you can't overestimate. It was like he was hit in the stomach with a two-by-four."

Since stepping down as mayor, Bradley was associated with the Los Angeles office of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, a San Francisco law firm that hoped to capitalize on his ties to Asia; Bradley had vigorously courted businesses in Pacific Rim nations on behalf of Los Angeles while he was mayor.

After his stroke, his activities for the firm were severely curtailed. Friends said he regained most of his mobility but never regained his ability to speak. Even so, he maintained an active social life, with a group of loyal friends sharing responsibility for taking him to lunch and civic events each day. Some friends read to Bradley regularly because, while his mind remained sharp, he could no longer read or write, said Wendy Greuel, a former aide.

At a recent lunch with former staff members, Bradley squinted his delight at jokes about himself, his shoulders heaving with the gaiety of the occasion, Ms. Greuel said

"His face would light up," said Ms. Myers, who had lunch with Bradley last spring. "He very rarely got discouraged."

The second of seven children, Thomas Bradley was born on Dec. 29, 1917, on a cotton plantation in Calvert, Robertson County, Texas. His grandparents were slaves, and his father, Lee Thomas Bradley, was a sharecropper who abandoned the family not long after they moved to Los Angeles, when Tom was 7.

His mother, Crenner Bradley, worked as a maid to support the children. Young Tom earned money with a paper route, and later as a publicity photographer for the comedian Jimmy Durante.

During the toughest of those early years, the family was so poor that Tom could not afford new shoes and socks. He lined his worn shoes with cardboard and vowed that when he got a job he would have an ample supply of socks, he once told an interviewer. "They became a symbol of my poverty," he said. "When I was on the police department, I can remember every sale that was held in downtown Los Angeles, I always managed to stop by and stock up on socks, it was like a security blanket. Then one day I noticed I had about 200 pairs."

Bradley entered the University of California at Los Angeles on a track scholarship in 1937, but dropped out after his junior year to join the Los Angeles Police Department, where he stayed for 21 years. In 1941, he married Ethel Mae Arnold, whom he had met at church when they were teen-agers. They had three daughters, one of whom died on the day she was born.

While working as a police officer, he went to law school at night and eventually earned a law degree from Southwestern University. Meanwhile, he was working his way up from walking a beat to the rank of lieutenant, the highest rank a black officer had achieved at the time. But in 1961 he concluded that he could go no higher, and quit the department.

He worked for a time for a law firm, but his real interest was politics, and in 1963 he ran for and won a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, to which he was re-elected twice.

In 1969, he made his first attempt to unseat Yorty, who repeatedly raised the issue of race and asserted that Bradley was appealing for votes to blacks and "left-wing militants." At the same time, some militant blacks denounced Bradley as a "white man's candidate" and referred to him as "Uncle Tom."

Bradley sought to play down race as an issue, but had little success. "I have no sympathy for lawlessness," he said, "but even less sympathy for injustice, poverty, unemployment and slum housing."

Four years later, with the race issue receding and Yorty under attack in personal and financial scandals, Bradley was elected to his first term as mayor. 

Non-confrontational and intent on building coalitions, he set out to revive the storefronts and small businesses that had been wiped out during the Watts riots, and to successfully position Los Angeles as the unofficial capital of the Pacific Rim for an era of burgeoning trade.

For years, as a new wave of Hispanic and Asian immigrants were drawn to the city, both residential and commercial development went virtually unchecked.

In 1982, with Los Angeles booming, Bradley tried the first of two attempts to defeat the incumbent Republican, George Deukmejian, for governor of California, but lost by less than one percentage point.

Bradley reached the height of his popularity when he brought the Olympic Games to Los Angeles in 1984. Despite a boycott by most of the communist countries, the Games went off without a hitch and showed off the glittering city to the world.

He had fought hard to bring the event to Los Angeles, but at the same time he forced a tough agreement with the International Olympic Committee to indemnify the city against any possible financial losses. The Los Angeles games were the first privately financed Olympics and it turned a huge profit.

His reputation buoyed by the Olympics success, Bradley was re-elected mayor in 1985 with 68 percent of the vote over John Ferraro, a conservative City Council member, who got only 30 percent. "Los Angeles is the city of hope and opportunity," Bradley said. "I am a living example of that."

With his profile high, Bradley ran against Deukmejian again in 1986, but was soundly defeated and vowed that it was his last attempt.

During Bradley's five terms as mayor, Los Angeles International Airport was renovated, the Port of Los Angeles became the biggest and busiest in the country, the city's financial and business district was revitalized and construction of a subway was begun.

But eventually, the years of growth for which Bradley could claim credit brought problems for which he was blamed. Pollution, traffic jams and overdevelopment had become major issues for Bradley in his later terms.

A symbol of propriety and ethics, Bradley felt particularly wounded in 1989 when newspapers began raising questions about his personal financial and business dealings. The stories, which prompted investigations by law-enforcement authorities, described how for years Bradley had been paid as a director or consultant for banks that did business with the city. Also, he had failed to disclose some investments and stock dealings.

Eventually he was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but he agreed to pay a $20,000 civil penalty for the disclosure lapses. And he conceded that he had made "an error in judgment" by accepting outside employment while mayor. The damage to his reputation had been done.

"It was the worst year of my entire life," Bradley, an intensely private man, told a reporter in 1990. "It went on and on, day after day, and you know you're literally helpless to do anything except ignore it and go about your business."

But more difficult times were ahead. The videotape of the beating of Rodney King, played over and over on television within hours after it happened on March 3, 1991, led to calls for the ouster of Daryl Gates, the city's combative police chief.

Hamstrung by a city charter that gave Gates virtual lifetime tenure, Bradley appeared helpless to act. He began working behind the scenes to put pressure on Gates and eventually moved to fire him, but was blocked by an increasingly powerful City Council.

Relations between Bradley and Gates were so strained that when the rioting first erupted in April, 1992, the two had not spoken for more than a year. Their poor communication was pointed to by a panel of inquiry led by William Webster, a former director of the FBI, as a factor in the city's inability to act quickly to quell the disturbances.

Bradley, badly shaken by the acquittal of the white officers, was uncharacteristically blunt in the hours after the verdict. At a televised news conference, he said he was "outraged" at the outcome of the trial. "Today that jury asked us to accept the senseless and brutal beating of a helpless man," Bradley said.

He regained his composure in the tumultuous days after the verdict and set about to bring calm to the city, but critics said he shared some of the blame for the riots in which more than 50 people died and property damage approached a billion dollars.

"He probably was outraged," said Ferraro, the city council president, "but he's the mayor of the city and he's got to keep his cool and calm." Bradley quickly got his anger under control, Ferraro said, adding, "I think he's shown some leadership since then."

Several days after the riots had subsided, as he began working on plans to rebuild the city, Bradley was asked whether, if he were not the mayor, he would be afraid to be a black man in Los Angeles.

"No," he said. "I would be angry."

Bradley is survived by his wife and their daughters, Phyllis and Lorraine.