By Bruce B. Brugmann

Back in the early fall of 1971, as the antiwar movement struggled against a seemingly endless war in Vietnam, the Bay Guardian was scouting about anxiously for some rays of hope for the November election.

We could find only two. One was the anti-high-rise movement organized by dressmaker Alvin Duskin. The other was the surprise emergence of a young ex-police officer named Dick Hongisto who had the guts to take on the city hall establishment and run for sheriff against veteran Matthew Carberry.

Hongisto, our editorial said, was "the notable exception" to a sorry batch of candidates and issues, and he laid out his impressive credentials to lift spirits during tough times: "For sheriff, we like Richard Hongisto, former police officer, member of the police community relations department, a reporter for Newsroom the past few months, a graduate student at UC Berkeley working on his doctorate in criminology, who at 34 would bring solid police experience to this critical post as well as good rapport with young people."

Duskin and Hongisto were taking on the establishment, each in his own way. Duskin was holding long, intensive strategy sessions that lasted well past midnight, with his forces gathered round a horseshoe table in his clothing factory. Hongisto appeared one night, invited by Duskinite Gary Near, and made the electric connection between the campaigns. He said plainly, in Hongisto-ese, "I'm running for sheriff. I support your cause. I hope you support mine. But I don't have time to sit around at meetings. I'm running to win." And off he went, never to be seen again at a Duskin meeting.

Duskin lost. Hongisto won, and the city has never been the same.

All his many friends have an interesting story about how they met Hongisto. Our meeting came through our bookkeeper, Annette Creel, who lived in a flat in Hongisto's house on Wood Street. She referred to Hongisto as a "good guy who you would never know was a cop," and one day she introduced us when he came into the office to deliver two tickets to her for a Janis Joplin concert.

Once Hongisto became sheriff, he would come regularly to our parties at the Bay Guardian office at 1070 Bryant St., just a couple of blocks down from the police station and the highway patrol. We would always put a sign on the door saying that the sheriff would be coming to the party at 9 p.m., and "NO POT SMOKING, PLEASE." Hongisto would always drop by, in a suit and tie, chat with people, enjoy himself immensely, and leave early. Only then would the pot smokers start in.

A liberal supervisor, who wasn't enamored of Hongisto, once told me, "You guys at the Bay Guardian invented Hongisto."

No, sorry; he was the kind of independent person and politician nobody could invent. He was sui generis, a San Francisco original with a flair for controversy and a mysterious and edgy mix of liberalism, pragmatism, and fiscal conservatism. (He was a landlord, the former owner of a grocery store called "Vote Hongisto Market" on the Daly City border, and most recently the owner of a security firm. He was also an early supporter of Harvey Milk, a rare white member of Officers for Justice, the group that fought to desegregate the Police Department, and an active supporter of lesbians and gays in law enforcement.)

Hongisto told me he liked to take lesser-known public offices and make the most of them. In the process, he would invariably take on the "establishment." As sheriff, he was the most progressive the city ever had, the "ice breaker" in improving and humanizing the jails, as his successor, Mike Hennessy, puts it. To dramatize his point about needing more money for the jails and less for the symphony, he told then-mayor Joe Alioto to "kiss my ass," a quote that ricocheted around the media in doctored form.

His most singular moment came when he went to jail himself for five days for refusing to obey a court order to evict elderly Filipino residents from their home in the I-Hotel. (Hongisto was right; it was a gratuitous eviction for a Thailand drug lord who owned the building as a tax shelter, and there was a telling hole in the ground for years.)

As a supervisor in 1988, Hongisto took on Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and led the charge to stop the city from signing sellout power-sale contracts with the Turlock-Modesto Irrigation Districts aimed at securing PG&E's illegal monopoly for another generation. (Hongisto was right; the city now realizes the contracts were a disaster and has worked hard to break them.)

In 1991, Hongisto ran for mayor, and the Bay Guardian put his picture on the front cover of our annual election endorsement issue. However, Hongisto mysteriously stopped campaigning. Later we learned that the Frank Jordan campaign had worked out a deal in which Hongisto would stay in the race but quit serious campaigning so that he would pull enough votes from then-mayor Art Agnos to force Agnos into a head-to-head runoff with Jordan. Jordan beat Agnos in the runoff.

About 10:30 one morning, early on during Jordan's term as mayor, Hongisto called me and said Jordan would be holding a press conference at noon to name him chief of police. "Damn, Dick," I blurted out, not overly surprised, "that may mean the end of your public career."

Alas, I was right. Hongisto, now at his most vulnerable as a liberal, highly visible police chief, ordered mass arrests of demonstrators following the Rodney King verdict. Then the Bay Times newspaper ran a front-page illustration characterizing his policy with a strategically placed erect baton and the headline "Dick's Cool New Tool: Martial Law." Some police officers quietly grabbed batches of papers from news racks but not so quietly that his enemies in the department didn't find out, and they spread the story in a sudden burst of free-press rhetoric. Hongisto denied he had ordered the seizures. But the Police Commission fired him after only 45 days on the job (in another stunning burst of passion for the First Amendment).

Hongisto the politician never recovered.

Hongisto died early Thursday morning in his Bayview apartment of a suspected heart attack.

A memorial will be held Nov. 29, 6 p.m., City Hall, rotunda, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Pl., S.F. A reception will follow.