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Roger Lapham soon found himself embroiled in the labor wars. From those struggles the Waterfront Employers' Association emerged regenerated and enlightened. Lapham provided some of the enlightenment: the conviction, soon adopted by other shippers, that employers had to accept collective bargaining.
Lapham was called to Washington to serve on the Defense Mediation Board, later the War Labor Board. Colleagues there remember him for his expert golf (low 70s), his prodigious jitterbugging at staff parties, his bluff, blunt honesty. They always knew when he was about to sound off. His neck turned red. The flush spread to his ponderous jowls, then he exploded, not with a single salvo but in a rumble of steady fire. He was an industry member but he was never industry's stooge. He wrote caustic and furious letters to Montgomery Ward's diehard Sewell Avery. He won the respect of every man on the board.
Then San Franciscans, tired of the fumbling of Angelo Rossi, asked Lapham to run for mayor. He accepted and San Francisco elected him.
Man in Brocade Pants. San Francisco had acquired a zestful extrovert as mayor. His neckties are notorious. One, which Sculptor Benny Bufano gave him, is of royal purple satin. On it Bufano painted a picture of St. Francis, symbols representing a bond issue and the Mayor's tree-planting program, and Lapham's solemn pledge, made before his election: "One Term Only."
On Sundays in his big brick house on fashionable Pacific Heights, Lapham pads around in striped golf socks, plum-colored silk brocade pants and a tentlike Chinese silk wrapper. He has four children, who call him "Pa," ten grandchildren, with whom he plays dominoes, making them put up 10¢ a game and no fooling.
Fun-loving Lapham gave fun-loving San Franciscans their money's worth. Last fall he made a swing through northern California in the interests of better town-&-country relationships. At Roseville, in the Sierra foothills, he kicked up his heels at a roadhouse dance with locomotive firemen and their ladies. At Yreka, he danced with assorted Yrekans and Indians until 4 a.m. When he stopped for a swim au naturel in the Trinity River, an Indian squaw and children stopped to stare. Lapham's companion was embarrassed. Said Lapham: "If that squaw hasn't anything better to do than watch an old fool like me in swimming, why, to hell with it—let her look."
Man in Office. Such cutups are only large Mr. Lapham's large way of relaxing. At his office in City Hall he is in deadly earnest. He boosted taxes to pay for such badly needed items as sewer repairs. He antagonized people by his refusal to waste time & effort on various impractical do-good stunts (such as Budde's "Dimes"); he declined to proclaim a "Day of Prayer," on the grounds that any San Franciscan who wanted to pray was at liberty to do so, any time.
He did what no mayor before him had done: he convinced the people that the only way to solve the city's transit mess was to buy out the privately owned Market St. Railway and unify it with the municipal trolley lines. It was in order to buy new equipment that he approved the fare increase.