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The teamwork can produce even more impressive civic results. When Kroc in 1988 decided to donate $18 million, to start a hospice for AIDS and other terminally ill patients, O'Connor enlisted Killea, then an assemblywoman, to sponsor the regulatory legislation needed from the state. Just when everything seemed to be in place, Republican Governor George Deukmejian vetoed the bill. The team closed ranks once more. Copley and her editor in chief, former Nixon aide Herb Klein, agreed to turn some Republican heat on the capital by dispatching a ringing letter to Deukmejian. The Governor was sufficiently impressed to reverse his decision and sign the hospice legislation. "Now that is how you use power," says Kroc admiringly. "That is just the way the men used to do it when the old boys controlled the city," says a friend of Copley and Kroc, Del Mar marketing executive Sonny Sturn. "But the men would do it for a factory. The women do it for human services."
Another prominent O'Connor to Copley to Kroc triple play made possible San Diego's recent Soviet Arts Festival. The mayor first dreamed up the idea of a big 22-event festival with a flashy Faberge show couched among operas and ballets. But it took the money and clout of her two friends to surmount vehement opposition to it. Copley and Kroc covered half the festival's budgeted cost by anteing up $500,000 and $1 million respectively. Then Copley's opinion-making dailies swung behind it. To clinch the deal, Kroc kicked in with a $2.8 million Faberge egg she had bought at auction for the occasion in Europe.
Woman power in San Diego extends beyond this golden triumvirate. Four of the nine city council seats are occupied by women. So are the presidencies or chairs of the school board, the chamber of commerce, the Centre City Development Corp., both the Republican and Democratic county committees and the deputy mayor's post. Their rise, say these women, has been surprisingly unchallenged.
Growth is the most frequently cited explanation for woman power in San Diego. The shimmering harbor city grew nearly 30%, to 1.1 million in the 1980s and was transformed from a sleepy Navy town to a booming metropolis. It became second only to Los Angeles in the West and sixth in the country, ahead of both Detroit and Dallas. Its industry diversified into high-tech research as well as low-cost maquiladoras manufacturing across the border in Mexico. Unemployment, at 3.9%, came to stand well under the national rate.
The explosive growth extended the bleak stretches of treeless housing tracts, especially inland. It intensified the traditional local conflict between a laid-back resort atmosphere and a stressful development. It imposed urban ills like crime and overcrowded jails. But at the same time it threw open the doors of opportunity, creating a fluid new nonpartisan politics. And, in the absence of blue-blood dynasties like those in Boston or San Francisco, it engendered an unapologetic admiration for new money.