Opinion: Two and a half winners in this week’s Opinion L.A. News Quiz
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We have results in this week’s Opinion L.A. News Quiz: One slam dunk, one squeaker and one stalemate.
Limerick honors easily go to Mariposa’s own Bob Arbogast, who provided the following succinct description of Detroit’s mayoral controversy:
There once was a mayor named Kilpatrick Who tried a political hat trick.Two cops got nine mil(Detroit paid the bill)And Christine is now known as THAT trick.
Competition in our caption contest was fiercer, but Pilar Mendoza takes the prize with the following:
I can’t believe you walk in LA! My administration could use someone like you...
Finally, the trivia question resulted in a no-correct-answer draw. To repeat the question: ‘Before 1993, when L.A. voters adopted term limits and Mayor Tom Bradley decided not to run for a sixth term, who was the last L.A. mayor to have retired voluntarily, without being defeated for re-election, recalled, or otherwise trying to regain the seat?’
We had one guess for Mayor Frank L. Shaw, but that is incorrect, since Shaw was recalled from office in 1938. Coming slightly closer to the mark was a reader who went with George E. Cryer. However, as the editorial board’s own Robert Greene explains, this one just barely misses:
Good guess -- but wrong -- on George Cryer. Sure, he left office in 1929 without trying to get re-elected that year, so he left office voluntarily. No recall, no defeat, no shooting himself to death in the council chambers (that was another mayor some years earlier). He was in the clear, retiring gracefully and without regret. For a few minutes. The guy just couldn’t get being mayor of L.A. out of his system. In order to qualify under our question, the mayor must have never again tried to regain office, and in 1933 Cryer tried to unseat John Porter, the man who succeeded him. Poor George didn’t even make the runoff. His best years as a cop, lawyer and elected official behind him, he remained in the background for nearly 30 years before dying in 1961 after an unfortunate encounter with a garden hose.
Our practice so far in the none-too-long history of the Opinion L.A. Quiz has been to eschew prizes for the trivia question, on the logic that it’s possible to Google the answer. But Greene assures us that the answer to this question is not Google-able, and the results so far seem to support his claim. So we’re holding this question out there, and the first caller with the correct answer will be receiving L.A. Times swag!
Again, here’s the question:
Before 1993, when L.A. voters adopted term limits and Mayor Tom Bradley decided not to run for a sixth term, who was the last L.A. mayor to have retired voluntarily, without being defeated for re-election, recalled, or otherwise trying to regain the seat?
If you’ve got the answer, send it to opinionla@latimes.com and you may be a winner.
Thanks to everybody for playing and we’ll see you next week.