(2 of 2)
While he sardonically remarks that "everyone is entitled to my opinion," Jarvis emphasizes that his success is the result of sheer stubbornness. The son of a state supreme court judge, Jarvis grew up in the mining town of Magna, Utah. After graduating with straight A's from Utah State University, he talked a local bank into loaning him $15,000 to buy an ailing weekly newspaper, the Magna Times. By the time he was 30, he had parlayed his purchase into eleven papers worth $105,000.
From the start, Jarvis was a dedicated right-winger. He and his father once campaigned for separate seats in the Utah state legislature, Judge John Ransome Jarvis running as a Democrat, his son as a Republican. Howard managed his father's winning campaign as well as his own unsuccessful one. At a 1931 G.O.P. convention in Chicago, he shared a suite at a crowded hotel with a California district attorney named Earl Warren.
According to Jarvis, Warren persuaded him to sell his newspapers and move to the golden land. "When I arrived there, I was wet behind the ears; all I had was money," recalls Jarvis. Nonetheless, he went on to make considerably more, first with an Oakland chemical firm and then after World War II, by running a chain of home-appliance factories employing 13,000 people. In 1962, fearing that the pressure would give him a heart attack (his second wife died of a heart attack), Jarvis decided to retire and planned an extended vacation.
He never left. A group of L.A. neighbors, incensed about high taxes, called on the old man for advice, and he soon found himself chairman of the United Organization of Taxpayers.
Jarvis, his third wife and her sister live in an unpretentious two-bedroom, $80,000 house (on which he annually pays $1,800 in taxes based on a 1976 assessment) in West Los Angeles. Though he was raised as a Mormon, he drinks vodka and smokes a pipe as well as cigars. He spends most of his days in a cluttered downtown office, dividing his time between his duties as un-salaried chairman of the taxpayers' group and paid director ($17,000 a year) of the Apartment Association of Los Angeles County, a landlords' organization. He devotes hours to unearthing new details supporting his case for lower taxes: he has determined, for instance, that the $8,000 sticker price on his Thunderbird includes some $4,500 of taxes and that 116 different taxes are levied on a loaf of bread.
There was a time when Jarvis would get up in the middle of the night to practice his speeches in front of the living-room lamps. Now he can count on the attention of his audiences. Groups in 40 states want the feisty Jarvis to give them a hand in promoting tax reduction measures. "I am going to help out in some other places," he says with atypical understatement. Batten down the hatches—Howard Jarvis is going national.