(3 of 4)
San Diego's three leading ladies did not always live in mansions in Point Loma and Rancho Santa Fe. O'Connor, one of 13 children of a local boxer named Kid Jerome, once worked after school as a chambermaid in the Westgate Hotel next to the City Hall she now occupies as mayor. She was a phys-ed teacher with a shoestring campaign budget when, at 24, she became the youngest-ever member of the city council. In 1986 O'Connor handily won the mayoral race, after the incumbent mayor was convicted of perjury. By then financing a campaign was less of a problem: she had married a banking and fast-food millionaire, Bob Peterson.
Copley was a secretary from Iowa who married her boss, James Copley, and at his death in 1973 hesitantly took over his press fiefdom. Surprisingly, for a reticent, private figure, she proved to be a hands-on publisher who expanded the Copley newspaper chain and quadrupled its worth to more than $800 million. Kroc, whose personal fortune is estimated at $950 million, was a music teacher and supper-club organist from Minnesota who married McDonald's founder Ray Kroc in 1969 and moved to San Diego with him in 1976 to run his newly acquired Padres. After Kroc's death in 1984, she turned his conservative Republicanism on end by contributing mightily to disarmament causes and to the Democratic Party itself. Her philanthropy is legendary. Once at a party at the house of Dr. Jonas Salk in La Jolla, so many other guests accosted her with solicitations for money that she excused herself and left.
For all their close personal and social ties, the three women hold very different political views. Democrat O'Connor and conservative Republican Copley like to kid about their inability to convert each other. "I haven't given up, but she never takes my advice," says Copley, smiling, about O'Connor. Neither does the liberal Kroc. What binds them, according to O'Connor, is camaraderie and a shared boosterism in regard to San Diego. Yet why do they do it? Part of the answer lies in old-fashioned values that Kroc and Copley attribute to their Midwestern upbringing, and O'Connor to a strict Catholic girlhood that taught "you have to give something back."
And why does San Diego cede them so much prominence? One theory is that in the Sunbelt perhaps more than other places, power is there for the taking. Says San Diego Tribune editor Neil Morgan, an insightful observer of the city: "Relatively few people really want positions of leadership here. They came here for the climate, for opportunity, for all those beautiful beaches -- not to assume responsibility."
Not everyone is enamored of the reigning matriarchy. Copley has been embroiled in a prolonged dispute at the newspapers in which labor accuses her of intransigence. Kroc, as a woman, finds herself even more maligned than other baseball owners in the current players' dispute -- the dugout being one of the last all-masculine bastions, even in San Diego -- and has been seeking to sell the team. As mayor, O'Connor gets most of the flak. Councilman Bob Filner, a fellow Democrat, accuses her of dodging systematic dialogue and instead "bullying people, one issue at a time." Some political regulars charge that she shuns partisan duties to concentrate on her "populist" appeal that one of them describes as "a mile wide and an inch deep."