Downey doesn't know what it lost in Harold Tseklenis

Photo courtesy Rotary Club of Downey.

It’s impossible to write about Harold Tseklenis, who died on December 29, without writing about the city of Downey as well. They were as bound together and cinched as the loops in a Windsor knot.

Downey, once an orange grove and then a long-time pioneer outpost for adventurous flyboys, was full of vitality when Tseklenis, a recent MIT grad, arrived in 1959 with his young wife Anna to find it at the resurgent forefront of aeronautical science and technology, as it had been during WWII. 

There are generations now that have no memory of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, of Premier Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on his desk at a United Nations assembly and yelling, “We will bury you!” and a binary planet in which East and West glowered at each other across a metaphoric Iron Curtain, their cautious geopolitical chess moves underscored by the very real fear of nuclear annihilation.

After the Soviet launch of the spacecraft Sputnik in 1957, however, the U.S. went into scramble mode, not just to dominate the space race, but to develop missiles and aircraft lethal enough to pose as military deterrents.

That was the backdrop but not the complete reality of sunny Southern California, whose Mediterranean climate was like the nectar of the gods to Tseklenis, who was born in Greece (near Olympia, actually) and learned English in junior high not far from Boston. Douglas Aircraft, one of numerous regional aviation outfits that included Boeing and North American Rockwell, had built the blue collar community of Lakewood. Its professional class of lawyers, scientists, engineers and upper echelon executives, built modern Downey, often hiring architects to design the houses that went up on their spacious lots. (Tseklenis’ own house in North Downey was built from a Richard Neutra design.) With the good lives of an educated class came the amenities: quality restaurants, social clubs and community organizations, better schools, the pleasures and rewards of the arts.

All this is what gave Downey the reputation as the step-up city for the region.

For most of his adult life Tseklenis worked for the Fluor Corporation, traveling the world as a combined project manager, civil engineer and specialist in liquid natural gas technology. But his earlier life in Boston, with its abundance of universities, museums, art galleries and music groups like the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops—and its New England root in American philosophy and literature—deeply informed his cultural sensibility. His Greek origin had already shaped him as a man of the polis, the classically idealized city state, whose every citizen is morally obliged to try to perfect.

These are the unique qualities he brought to Downey, where he easily gained social and cultural prominence. He was an ardent supporter of the Downey Symphony, and served on its board. He vigorously supported the Downey Museum of Art. He was instrumental in the creation of the Art in Public Places program, in which developers of new projects were obliged to devote a small portion of their profits to the funding of public art. He successfully lobbied for an Arts Advisory Council, which would help the city council navigate the future of the arts in Downey. He was part of a group that raised $750,000 in a failed effort to remake the Downey Avenue Theatre, which was crumbling from neglect, into a venue for noteworthy independent and foreign films, arguing that a local audience of 1.5 million people deserved better than to have to drive to Pasadena or Santa Monica to see them.

His presence on the scene wasn’t limited to culture. As philanthropist and fundraiser, he was crucial to the construction and establishment of the St. George Greek Orthodox Church. As a concerned citizen (his sense of polis, once again) he represented the City of Downey in a regional consortium that included Caltrans, the L.A. Metropolitan Transport Authority, and the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, all of whom met to come up with an action plan to deal with the unacceptable level of air pollution generated by the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and trucks along the 710 corridor.

You’d think all these concerns fueled the outsized ego of a tireless self-promoter, but that wasn’t the case. Tseklenis’ beaming countenance lit up a room. He didn’t command attention as much as he invited it. I once saw him walking home along Rives Avenue with a bag of groceries in his hand and a half smile on his uptilted face, and was reminded of a line describing his countryman, the poet C.P. Cavafy, (paraphrased): “He cocked his gaze at a particular angle to the universe.”

Here the narrative changes and Tseklenis becomes Harold, my friend. We first met at a packed Community Redevelopment meeting in the Cormack Room of the Downey Library ten years ago. I was standing in the back next to a garrulous big man whose voice sounded like a barking seal. It turned out to be Downey councilman and future mayor Mario Guerra. A wiry white-haired gent seated nearby turned and said to him, “You talk, but you don’t listen.”

That was Harold.

We became friends, attending city council sessions, meeting at Mimi’s for lunch to compare notes. Soon those lunches became regular Friday dates, in which the comings and goings of the Downey establishment became a minor topic in his wide-ranging, ebullient discourse on his travels, his knowledge of history and world religions, what his childhood Greece was like under Nazi occupation, his love of art and music and his trips with Anna to New York to keep up with the latest, and all the hearty expressions of his joie de vivre that made hours pass like minutes.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the mutual disaffection between Harold and the city had already begun. With the gradual loss of the aerospace industry culminating in the ‘90s, Downey started to drift away from its core identity. So did its unimaginative civic leadership, which began to parcel out its lands in ad hoc deals with franchise outfits and developers. The scruffy old Vultee airfield, eventual home of the X-15 and the Apollo spacecraft, not to mention the test center for a hefty potion of the American aviation industry, was converted into a couple of shopping malls.

The Downey Art Museum, the oldest of its kind in Los Angeles County, was shuttered over a hissy fit between a publicist and the woman who ran it and lost her home trying to save it. Guerra, a uniquely vindictive public figure, insured that it would never reopen, even after a letter from then-state attorney general Kamala Harris found that there was no legal reason for it to remain closed.

The Art in Public Places program was raided for projects that have nothing to do with public art, like the absurd and embarrassing marquee sign on the Avenue Theatre, which will now house a pizza joint and mid-level restaurant and pub the avenue doesn’t need. The arts advisory council disbanded after its lazy, petulant, city appointed supervisor stopped holding meetings and complained that art was too subjective for anyone, especially the city, to judge.

Harold objected at city council meetings, but no one listened. Eventually, without persuasive evidence, the political establishment labeled him anti-city, when in fact he was the best friend the city ever had. Soon he began to give up. He still loved and supported the symphony and St. George’s church, and Downey itself. But he gradually withdrew from the Downey Arts Coalition, which he co-founded, weary of its pointless discussions and tepid ambitions. He gave me his official city notebooks, including the Downey 2025 projection plan, and clippings of his advocacy letters to the Downey Patriot.

“Maybe you can do something with these,” he said.

The city doesn’t know what it has lost, but I, and many others, do. He was a gentle, generous-spirited man who bore no grudges. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop missing those Friday afternoons at Mimi’s, when I could walk through the front door, and with sunlight streaming sideways through paneled windows, see him standing in the foyer, smiling, arms upraised Zorba-like from his thin frame ready for embrace, and hear him say, “How are you, my friend?”