NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune
San Diego City Councilwoman and write-in mayoral candidate Donna Frye addressed her supporters and the media during a lunchtime rally at City Hall last month.
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Nearly 40 years ago, Donna Frye tried to take a drafting class in junior high but was shut out by the old boys' network.
She and another girl were told there weren't enough drafting tables in the all-male class, so they accepted the teacher's decision and returned to home economics. She jokes it was her "first failed political action."
Frye, 52, would never stand for such treatment today.
Over the years, that reticent girl grew into an outspoken activist whose write-in campaign for mayor of San Diego has thrown city politics into an uproar. According to the official count, she lost the election. But an unofficial recount showed she would have won if the registrar had accepted ballots in which voters wrote in her name but left the oval next to it blank.
Now everyone is waiting while Frye and others involved in the political drama decide what to do next. One player, Santa Monica attorney Fred Woocher, could decide as soon as tomorrow whether to challenge the election of Mayor Dick Murphy in court.
Frye's detractors, including many in the downtown business establishment, say she doesn't have enough leadership experience to be mayor of the nation's seventh-largest city. They say her interests are too narrow and she's too liberal for San Diego.
"Donna Frye's campaign was not about the future of the city of San Diego or her vision of San Diego. Donna Frye's campaign was about Donna Frye," county Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring said. "Donna Frye is not ready for prime time."
But Frye says her strong showing in the mayoral election proved voters support her push for open government and a change in the culture at City Hall.
"People understand that this is not something that is just in my mind," Frye said. "It is me acting in concert with over 155,000 other people."
As she mulls her legal options, Frye is trying to balance the demands of those who want her to move on and accept the official results with those who are urging her to continue the fight. It has been a stressful process, she admits, even though in public she seems to have everything under control.
"Just because I'm calm doesn't mean I'm not hurting," she said. "It doesn't mean I don't have feelings and that this is not emotionally draining on me.
"It has been a struggle. I get exhausted, truly exhausted."
The personal journey that brought Frye within arm's reach of the mayor's office may have helped prepare her for the emotional roller coaster she is now riding. It included an abusive first marriage, being raped as a teenager and battling a drinking problem.
"She's amazed me, her capacity and how she's grown," said her husband, Skip Frye, who makes custom surfboards. "She rises to the occasion. She makes people believe her."
Though some find her style abrasive, supporters say a large part of Frye's appeal in the mayoral race was her down-to-earth personality and her determination not to assume a more detached persona for the campaign. At public events, she hugged friends and strangers alike and crouched low to talk to children face to face. When people called her Mrs. Frye, she asked them to call her Donna.
The day after the election, she was late for her own news conference because she was helping her husband and mother clean up after a broken washing machine flooded the dining room.
Throughout the campaign, Frye maintained her unorthodox attitude toward transportation – unorthodox, that is, by Southern California standards. She has never applied for a driver license, so her husband drove her to most of her public appearances and meetings.
Frye took driver's training in school, but she thinks she was asked to leave the class after she drove to the beach instead of taking the route the instructor gave her.
As she does with many of the choices she has made in her life, Frye just shrugs that some may find it odd.
"No one seems to like (driving)," she said.
By the time she was in high school, Frye had stopped bowing to authority.
Once, when she was a student at Midway Adult School in San Diego, she wore jeans on a rainy day, ignoring the dress code that required girls to wear skirts or dresses. When she arrived in class, a teacher told Frye she couldn't stay to take an exam. So Frye marched to the principal's office and was allowed to take the test.
Frye had transferred to Midway after her sophomore year at Madison High, where she felt lost in the crowded classrooms. By taking a heavy course load at Midway and evening classes at another school, she graduated a year early, in 1969.
Instead of going right to college, she moved out of her parents' house and held a series of jobs: working in a clothing store, helping out in an elementary school, cleaning hotel rooms, taking orders at a heavy-equipment rental company.
"I wanted to be an adult," she said. "My desire to be a grown-up overshadowed my desire for education at that point."
Her teenage years hadn't been idyllic.
While still in high school, Frye was raped by a stranger. She didn't tell anyone about it at the time and never reported the crime to police. But to this day she supports victims groups without making an issue of her own past. Twenty years ago, she wrote a letter to the now-defunct San Diego Tribune in which she identified herself as a rape victim and criticized a column that downplayed the criminality of spousal rape.
Once, when she was giving a city proclamation to a rape victim, she cried.
"That's so emotional for me, people being hurt, battered or raped, and how lightly people used to take it," she said later.
Frye met her first husband when she was working as a short-order cook and he was a customer. They married in 1974 and settled in Sacramento, where she earned an associate's degree at Cosumnes River College.
During this period, her interest in women's issues deepened, and she volunteered to register new voters. She made plans to continue her education and possibly intern at the state Capitol.
At the same time, however, Frye was becoming a heavy drinker, and her marriage was turning violent. She felt isolated and lonely, living so far from friends and family.
"There was something about the two of us – he wanted to control me, and I didn't want to be controlled. I knew how to push his buttons, and he knew how to push mine," Frye recalled, sitting in her living room with her dog, Diogenes, curled under her chair. "He was young and I was drinking too much, and I could be a real pain in the ass. It got ugly."
The couple divorced in 1979.
She moved back to San Diego and got a job in a dentist's office processing insurance paperwork. Later she worked at a gas station.
She met Skip Frye at a Pacific Beach restaurant in 1980. Skip was revered by local surfers for his second-place finish in the 1968 U.S. Surfing Championship and his expertise in shaping surfboards.
But his personal life had deteriorated, and he was living in a shack that didn't have indoor plumbing. The divorced father of three feared he was a step away from becoming homeless – in his words "pushing a shopping cart" – and credits his future wife with helping turn his life around.
"She took an interest in me and gave me self-confidence," said Skip, now 63. "She's really responsible for backing me up and getting me back on track."
Frye credits Skip with helping her get sober. About three months after she met him, she abruptly stopped drinking. She made the decision during one of her daily walks to Mission Bay, where she fed ducks.
"People don't stop doing those types of things until they think it is in their own best interest," she said. "Skip had walked out. He didn't want to be around me when I was like that. I didn't want him to leave, and I didn't want to die."
After several years of sobriety, Frye said she drank again – once, in the mid-1990s – when she was having debilitating migraines and prescription medications failed to dull the pain. Since then, she said she has been sober.
"I'm proud of that. I'm really proud of that," she said.
Although Frye has since found a migraine drug that keeps her headaches at bay, the pain can still take her down in times of stress.
On the day the Registrar of Voters announced the unofficial vote count showing Murphy had won the mayoral race, Frye was at home with a migraine so bad that she talked to reporters only by phone.
"It's important that I eat and I get adequate sleep," she said. "When I'm exhausted and I'm not eating properly, that's what happens to me."
Early in their relationship, Skip and Frye decided not to have children, but they have been unofficial parents to young people they've known.
"She is like a mom," said Marco Gonzalez, a longtime friend and head of Frye's legal team. "None of us feel weird about saying she mothers us and we look to her like a mom. She has the right things to say at the right time."
Frye's volunteer work for environmental causes turned into full-blown activism when her husband and other surfers started getting sick from being in the ocean.
The Fryes had opened their first surf shop in Pacific Beach in 1988. Two years later they closed it, and Skip and business partner Hank Warner opened Harry's Surf Shop, which they ran for a decade.
Frye, who had returned to college and earned a business administration degree in 1984, managed the retail side of the business. Between ringing up sales and taking orders for custom surfboards, she heard customers talk about getting sick from surfing in polluted waters.
When Skip became ill, she went to City Hall to complain about the problem. Nobody paid much attention to her, so she began immersing herself in water quality issues. In 1995, the Fryes founded the activist group STOP, Surfers Tired of Pollution. Donna Frye took wastewater management classes and attended a clean-water academy run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Her activism permeated the surf shop. Frye kept petitions and voter registration forms next to the cash register and encouraged customers to get involved.
To longtime friend Ryan Levinson, hanging out in Frye's store seemed like taking a course in "Activism 101."
"She would always say the same things, 'You have to tell the truth. Let the public know the process works if the people are heard,' " Levinson said. "She has an incredible ability to unite people and have people understand that they are empowered. And have them exercise that power."
Frye pushed government agencies to improve monitoring, post warning signs at sewer outflows and reroute polluted urban runoff into sewer systems. She spearheaded a program that documented health problems related to ocean pollution.
Her work was instrumental in passage of a state law that required regular monitoring of coastal waters and posting of signs when health hazards exist.
"Donna is very persistent, and she's very straightforward with her facts," said Carolyn Chase, chairwoman of the local Sierra Club's political committee who has known Frye for years. "If you have the right answers, the right data, you can get things done."
Frye took the lead in another battle in 1998 when she fought a ballot measure that allowed SeaWorld to exceed the 30-foot height limit that voters had approved in 1972.
Frye spent $492 of her own money to oppose Proposition D. SeaWorld spent more than $1 million. The measure won, but with only 50.7 percent of the vote.
"It was a loss with a silver lining," said Gonzalez, her attorney. "I think she got a lot of her current notoriety from leading that charge. It epitomized her David versus Goliath mentality."
When Valerie Stallings resigned from the City Council in January 2001, Frye decided to run for the seat.
At the time, Frye was happy running her surf shop and working as an environmental consultant. But she had begun to realize she could only do so much from the outside. To make big changes, she needed to become part of the system.
She defeated 10 opponents.
Although the national media has largely focused on Frye's surfer-girl image, she hasn't surfed in about a year and freely admits she never was very good at it.
Her tan, lined face reflects years of sun worshipping, including the days when she slathered on baby oil. She wears sunscreen now but still relaxes by falling asleep in the sun by her pool.
Pictures in Frye's home testify to the fact that she has had the same look for decades: long blond hair falling past her shoulders.
After she entered public life, people began hinting she should change her appearance, particularly her hair. She laughs off such comments.
"I remember talking to someone after a community event. This guy said, 'You are articulate. You are very smart. You know what you are talking about. You are good on the issues.' Just glowing praise. But then he said, 'You really need to do something with your hair.'"
Back in junior high, she remembers being called with another girl to the front of a home economics class. The subject was grooming, and the other girl was, Frye said, "absolutely gorgeous, perfectly coifed and dressed."
"Not that I wasn't well-groomed, but I certainly didn't look like her. I wasn't coifed," Frye said, speaking in her low, slightly rough voice that reflects years of cigarette smoking. "I remember being held up as an example of the way not to look."
Although Frye didn't change her hairstyle for the mayoral race, she found a way to keep it off her face.
After watching one of the televised mayoral debates, a friend suggested she tuck it behind her ears. The trick has come in handy.
Shortly before taping an interview with Paula Zahn on CNN in November, Frye aide Nicole Capretz, sitting in the TV control truck, whispered into Frye's earpiece: "D, your hair!" Frye immediately pushed it back.
It is a bit ironic that someone who was so eager to leave home as a teenager is back living in her childhood home in Clairemont. Shortly after her father died in 1998, Frye and her husband moved to be with Frye's 77-year-old mother, Laura Sarvis.
At least once a week, usually on Sundays, the three gather for dinner. Laura puts a nice tablecloth on the glass and rattan table. The Fryes wash dishes after the meal.
Frye brings home stacks of council documents to read most weekends. Late at night, her mother sometimes peeks into her room and tells her to stop reading and go to sleep.
A Jiminy Cricket figurine sits on Frye's nightstand, part of her extensive Disney collection. In the statue's drawer is a gold pin, inscribed "Official Conscience," that she sometimes wears to council meetings.
As she plans the next step in her political career, she says the cricket's advice to Pinocchio – "Always let your conscience be your guide" – will remain one of her guiding principles.
"I like the whimsy of it," Frye said. "I like the hope and, in the end, that good prevailed."
Karen Kucher: (619) 542-4563; karen.kucher@uniontrib.com
