Tuesday, July 1, 2003 Why did O'Neill reject a hero?   By Tom Hennessy Staff columnist Long Beach Press Telegram He was raised on small town values in eastern Colorado. In Cheyenne Wells, where his father belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and Lions Club, the boy was taught to do the right things and do them completely the first time around. "I was awakened sometimes at 3 or 4 in the morning if he thought that I hadn't done a good job with something." The lessons found their mark. So did the lessons he learned later during three decades as a U.S. Coast Guard officer. Today, he is retired from the military and deeply committed to civic involvement. It would take all of this column, in fact, to list the community boards and agencies he has served with distinction. Small wonder that he was named a P-T community hero a few years ago. If there were a contest to choose Mr. Solid Citizen, one of the finalists, by anyone's measure, would be Don Darnauer. What's going on? But a stranger watching Darnauer's treatment by Mayor Beverly O'Neill two weeks ago would have thought he was more pariah than hero. Seeming to let politics get the upper hand over deportment, she rejected Darnauer and Alan Burks as Central Project Area Committee nominees to the Redevelopment Agency Board. Angling for a merger of the PACs, the mayor made her move unusual by the Ozian fashion in which she carried it out; sounding more like the mayor of Emerald City than the mayor of Long Beach. She wanted four nominees, not two, she said. She was making the law retroactive to reflect that, she said. She did not want only white men as nominees, she said. Oz had spoken. And the message, to any civic-minded person inclined to help improve the city was a simple one: Don't bother. Don't get in the way. I don't know Burks, but I have known Darnauer for years, and am hard pressed to think of anyone less deserving of such treatment. On Saturday, he and I had lunch. It was plain that the wounds inflicted nearly two weeks ago were still there. We talked about his service to the city through the years, and I asked his reaction to what the mayor had done. "I couldn't believe it." he said. "I had high regard for the mayor. I think she is a classy lady. I supported her. We always had a pretty easy mutual relationship ... (But) I was very hurt by it. Friends have asked what she had against me. I didn't think she had anything against me." Darnauer has criticized City Hall and supported it; criticized the Port of Long Beach and supported it. He has done, as he puts it, "the heavy lifting;" thousands of hours of drudge and donkey work that too few citizens are willing to do - only to see it all nearly succumb to someone else's political snit. "I'm very disappointed at how political it all is," he says. "And the more powerful the board, the more political it is. To be on, say, the Harbor Commission, you have to really be political." Missed opportunity The Harbor Commission, in fact, would have been a perfect niche for Darnauer, His Coast Guard experience certainly gives him an edge over Doris Topsy-Elvord, who seems to have received the appointment on the basis of being a nice person. Darnauer, a pretty classy guy himself, steers the talk away from himself, saying retired admiral John Higginson would have been an even better choice. Admitting that he first thought of walking away from his civic life and duties after the O'Neill incident, Darnauer, 72, now says he has been talked out of doing that. "I was ready to cash it in, but I've gotten a lot of phone calls, e-mails and faxes. People are telling me not to give up. They are telling me that giving up is just what the mayor wants to see, and that she wants people she can't control to get out of the way. So, I've been convinced that giving up is the wrong way to go." He pauses, perhaps recalling those days in Cheyenne Wells when he was taught to do his work completely. Then he adds, "I'm not going to get out of the way. I'm going to stay involved." Tom Hennessy's viewpoint appears Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. He can be reached at (562) 499-1270 or by e-mail at Scribe17@aol.com