Svorinich Council Campaign Aiming Toward Happy Days : Election: Borrowing a corny style from the sitcom, he hopes to unseat incumbent Joan Milke Flores in runoff.

Eager and relentlessly corny, Rudy Svorinich could be considered the Richie Cunningham of San Pedro. Indeed, his campaign for Los Angeles City Council often seems straight out of “Happy Days,” the sitcom about ‘50s-era high school students.

Svorinich, a lifelong San Pedro resident, exudes a “gosh darn, isn’t this fun?” attitude as he stumps San Pedro, hoping to upset 15th Council District incumbent Joan Milke Flores in the June 8 runoff.

More often than not, he runs into old friends and their families.

“Hey, you know Michelle Albano?” a man asks as Svorinich, 33, walks down the 10000 block of 8th Street. “She graduated with you, and I’m her father. Listen. You go ahead and put a sign here in this yard,” Mario Albano tells him.

And Svorinich’s parents often stop by his campaign office, staffed by volunteers who have known Rudy since childhood and stocked with home-baked coffee cake and bread. His mom and dad recount endearing anecdotes about a son who never caused them problems.

If Svorinich manages to unseat Flores, a three-term incumbent, it will be because of a vast latticework of relationships that he and his family have fashioned over seven decades in San Pedro.

Those connections, to be sure, only help Svorinich in a portion of the 15th District, which runs from San Pedro to Watts. Flores, who also lives in San Pedro, believes her strength elsewhere in the 15th will more than offset any threat Svorinich poses to her in that community.

But Svorinich, who owns a Wilmington paint store, says he has established strong support in Wilmington and is building ties to the northern part of the district.

“That’s Joan doing spin control because she knows she’s in the race of her life,” Svorinich said.

Svorinich acknowledges, however, that he is banking heavily on his San Pedro ties. Even a partial list of his community connections is dizzying.

Descended from a line of San Pedro fishermen and longshoremen, Svorinich says he has 250 family members in the harbor area. Both he and his father belong to Elks Lodge 966; Rudy Svorinich is a member of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce and a former member of the Rotary Club.

His mother and father have been active in Mary Star of the Sea Church for years, and many in his family are longtime members of the former Yugoslav-American Club, now the Dalmatian-American Club. Like his father, Svorinich is a past president of the club. His mother was three-term past president of the club’s women’s auxiliary.

Svorinich met his wife Deann at a dance at the club in 1988, (that’s also where his father Rudy Sr. met his wife Winnie in 1949 and where Svorinich’s maternal grandfather Jack Tomich met his grandmother Yasna in 1929). The club affiliation looks likely to pay off politically.

“I would say that most of the community that probably has any Slavic in them will probably vote for him,” said Vince Trudnich, club president. (An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people in San Pedro are of Yugoslav descent). Though the club does not endorse candidates, Trudnich is pulling for Svorinich.

Svorinich worked full time at the Industrial Paint Co. in Wilmington while attending Cal State Dominguez Hills. He stayed at the paint company after college, leaving in 1988 to work two years for then-state Assemblyman Gerald Felando.

In 1991, Svorinich bought the paint company from Walter Kemmerer, who, incidentally, has lived next door to Svorinich’s parents on Wycliff Avenue since Rudy was 2 and, of course, has a huge Svorinich sign in his yard.

Thanks largely to that background, Svorinich outpolled Flores on her home turf in the April 15 primary--and expects to do the same in the runoff.

He makes clear that his bid for office is not fueled by a dislike for the incumbent. “Joan is a great person. I like her just fine,” Svorinich said.

Referring to Flores’ losing bid for higher office last year and her delay in deciding whether to run for the council again, he added, “I went along with Joan to go to Congress, and I was one of her supporters. We all thought she was in, but she didn’t make it and then she didn’t know whether she was coming or going and I had to make a decision.”

While there are some philosophical differences between the two, no gulf divides Flores from Svorinich.

Both support hiring more police officers but oppose raising taxes on property owners to do so. Both are vociferously pro-business. Both opposed the city’s decision last year to take $44 million from Port of Los Angeles coffers to balance the budget. And both favor term limits for council members.

The differences, Svorinich says, may be subtle, but they are strong. While he and Flores might cut from the same areas of the budget, he would be more creative in finding private funding for projects, he said.

“I firmly believe that if a person doesn’t have a strong family base, and a person does not have a strong economic base and a person doesn’t have a strong religious base, then he should have me,” said Svorinich, who claims Flores has failed to be an aggressive advocate for her district. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Flores charges Svorinich is the one who lacks conviction. In a recent mailer to voters, she alleges that Svorinich--like Flores, a Republican--has changed his party affiliation five times since 1978.

Svorinich acknowledges all but one of the changes, but says they are proof of his claim that he is a political moderate.

“I was proud of being both a Democrat and a Republican,” he said. “I am most certainly not an ideologue. I could never be an extreme liberal or an extreme conservative.”

Flores says her strong suit is her districtwide name recognition and experience--something, she says, that Svorinich lacks. On primary night, Flores and her campaign supporters gave a cheer when it became clear that their runoff opponent would be Svorinich, not Janice Hahn, daughter of longtime County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. Svorinich, they said, could not possibly take the north end of the district.

“This is just great for us,” Flores said at the time. “He has no connections in the north.”

Svorinich, in fact, is not well known in the northern portion of the 15th District. People in Watts and Harbor Gateway barely know him, and there are precincts in Watts where he did not garner one vote during the April 15 primary. And some who are familiar with him still cannot pronounce his name, (it’s Sev-ORN-ich).

“Rudy’s very unknown in Watts and Wilmington and that’s where I did very well,” Hahn said.

Svorinich’s campaign coordinator in Watts is high school classmate Mark Iles, a Watts resident who was bused to San Pedro High School when he was a teen-ager.

“Most often I’m asked ‘Who is Rudy and how do you pronounce his name?” Iles said. “And my answer to people is, ‘He’s the same as you. His family are decent, upstanding and respectable people.’ ”

In San Pedro, Svorinich does not have to make that point. Driving back to his campaign headquarters on Western Avenue, he points out his campaign signs dotting nearby lawns and explains his relationship to the property owners.

“See that one? That’s Nick Fiamengo. He went to school with my dad. That’s a Chamber of Commerce friend and that one’s a friend from the Slav hall,” he said. “Oh, that really big one? That’s my grandmother’s house.”

L.A. Councilmanic District 15

Anglo Black Asian Latino % of total population 28.24% 18.91% 7.33% 46.31% % of reg. voters 49.77% 29.58% 3.11% 17.74%