The Rodda Memorial: Remarks by Tony Barcellos

As the junior member of Sen. Rodda's staff at the end of his tenure in the state senate, I had less experience than any of his other aides. However, I was given the opportunity to continue that service in other capacities and to regard him as a mentor and friend. The Rodda family generously asked me to contribute some remarks to Albert's memorial ceremony, which I was pleased and honored to do. What follows is a reconstruction of the sense of my remarks, which were not written down in advance.

The Albert S. Rodda Memorial Ceremony
Comments by Tony Barcellos

Friday, April 23, 2010
Sacramento City College Auditorium

When you have so many of Albert Rodda’s family members, friends, colleagues, students, and admirers in one place, there is no story, joke, or anecdote about the Senator that will be new to everyone. Despite that, I will not hesitate to tell you stories you have heard before.

Albert has taught me well.

I was privileged to work as a legislative assistant for the Senator and I am honored that the family asked me to participate in this memorial ceremony. However, being on the program after Greg Geeting, I knew that he would address some of Albert’s best-known stories and that I would have to be prepared to address others. As Greg observed, Albert was content to let others take credit as long as things got done, which is why so much legislation bears the names of his colleagues although much of the language came from the Senator. Greg also pointed out that Albert was an uncharacteristic legislator, a mild-mannered man who was easy to underestimate.

I point out that Albert was, in this way, a deceptive politician. Those who discounted him because of his meek nature soon discovered their mistake. He was a master of his craft.

In times of loss and transition, our culture has developed a ritual to comfort those who are left behind. We praise the departed and pay tribute to his accomplishments. We honor his character and his honesty. We catalog his kindnesses. We say that he will be missed. These are the things we do.

In Al Rodda’s case, however, all these things are true. He makes it possible for us to say these things in all honesty. That is a rare privilege.

Being a part of Senator Rodda’s team will always be one of the most important things in my life. It was during his final term in the state senate that I joined his legislative staff. The boss would sometimes forget that I was such a new arrival and would ask me if I remembered some issue or another from an earlier legislative session. When I pointed out that I had been on staff for only the last two years of his tenure, the Senator would say, “That’s strange. It seemed much longer.”

However, I had the honor of working for Albert in a number of different capacities. When Jess Unruh persuaded the Senator to join the treasurer’s office to run the Commission on State Finance, I was the only person from the Senator’s capitol staff who was asked to accompany him.

All the others had job offers.

Later, when the boss decided to run for the Los Rios board of trustees, I worked on his campaign. I know that some people—perhaps people in this room—approached Albert and asked him to head a search committee to recruit a candidate for Los Rios Trustee Area 5. “Look, Al,” they told him. “You live in Area 5 and you would be the perfect person to persuade a good candidate to run for the board from that area.” Of course, everyone approached by the Senator responded by saying, “Al, why don’t you run?” I’m sure the people who slyly maneuvered Albert into this position must have been quite proud of themselves, but did they really think they had him fooled?

I imagine he could have said, “Thank you, my friends, for talking me into doing something I was already thinking of doing.”

After the Senator’s smashing victory, I naturally asked him about the possible of a little political patronage for his campaign staff. “When do I get a faculty appointment?” I inquired. Albert was completely deadpan when he replied. “I’m sorry, Tony,” he said, “but we’re going to continue to hire people based on merit.”

It was another four years before I managed to land a position at American River College. The final stage of the hiring process was a one-on-one interview with the college president, Queen Randall. Of course, Albert’s name was included on my application as one of my references. I was happy to have his support, but it would have been impolitic and awkward to make too much of it. I was wondering the Senator’s name would come up and how I would handle it if it did.

I didn’t have long to wonder. No sooner had I been ushered into her office than Dr. Randall came sweeping around from behind her desk to shake my hand and exclaim, “Oh! I see you got to work for Dr. Rodda! Isn’t he the most wonderful man?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, he is!”

Yes. He was.

The Rodda Project: An introduction

It was my great privilege in 1979 to join the staff of state Senator Albert S. Rodda, a Democrat who represented the Sacramento region in the upper house of the California state legislature. I had been awarded a Senate Fellowship and Rodda's aides selected me from among the new cohort of Senate Fellows for a position in his office. Although it unfortunately turned out that Sen. Rodda would leave the state legislature at the end of 1980, I ended up continuing to work for him in various capacities for the next several years. When he took over in 1981 as executive officer of the California Commission on State Finance, an agency of the State Treasurer's Office, I was the only staff member from his State Capitol office who accompanied him (the others all had job offers!).

The drastic downsizing of the Senator's staff in that transition from dean of the State Senate to executive officer of a small state agency resulted in my becoming a useful thread of continuity between the old and the new, the keeper of many papers and files left over from his 22 years in the legislature. While the California State Archives has several feet of storage space dedicated to Senator Rodda's papers, my transitional role (together with my notorious pack-rat tendencies) has preserved a large and informal collection of the position papers and essays of Albert S. Rodda. With this posting, The Back Bench is inaugurating the Rodda Project, my modest effort to make available a trove of thoughts and writings from one of California's keenest participants in the policies and politics of a crucial quarter century. The Senator took office the year that Pat Brown was elected governor and he left the senate in Jerry Brown's second term. You may recall that in the middle somewhere was another governor named Ronald Reagan.

Albert Rodda focused on public education and state finance, in particular because he was a long-time faculty member at Sacramento City College, but he was involved in every major state issue during his more than two decades in office. Rodda was a remarkably self-effacing individual, especially considering that he rose to become chair of two vital senate committees, Education and Finance. However, it was always his nature to work quietly and without bombast. His writing style, as you will see from the postings to follow, had an academic bent, but he came by his scholarly tendencies honestly, having earned a Ph.D. from Stanford after his service in World War II.

The Rodda Project, by the way, is not in itself a scholarly endeavor, although I would be delighted if someday it were to inspire scholars of state politics. I will not be annotating the Senator's writings in any significant way, nor will I edit his words. I plan to limit my interventions to minor technical points, such as turning the underlined text of the Senator's typewritten papers into italics or correcting one of his exceedingly rare misspellings (not, however, “correcting” his sometimes idiosyncratic usage or word choices). When I have ready access to books or papers he directly quotes, I check the quotes for accuracy; as expected, departures from cited texts are both rare and minor. In some cases, I provide context with some introductory paragraphs.

As the Rodda Project slowly grows in content, I'll maintain and update a sidebar that will serve as a quick guide to the Senator's papers. I have no great overarching scheme in mind, although I plan to identify each document as specifically as possible. Since Sen. Rodda was very good about dating his papers and labeling them with the venue in which they were delivered (as speeches or position papers), it will be easy in most cases for me to include those labels in each post. As you can tell, these are the first tentative steps in a work in progress.

Albert Rodda is alive at the time of this writing, a frail and genteel man of 95 years who resides quietly in his home in Curtis Park, close to Sacramento City College and the campus administrative and classroom complex that bears his name.