Frank Ivancie, a conservative Democrat who was mayor of Portland during the 1980s, died on Thursday at 94.
Ivancie was a politician from a bygone era, when being mayor carried a different sort of gravitas, and when political deal-making was still sometimes done behind closed doors with the aid of liquor and cigars.
“Frank was a strong-willed person,” said J. Clayton Hering, a retired real estate developer and friend of Ivancie’s. “If you didn’t know him he might scare you. He was forceful.”
And Ivancie’s brand of politics is undoubtedly foreign to today’s Portland.
“It was such a different era in so many regards,” said Mike Lindberg, who served on the Portland City Council when Ivancie was mayor.
For example, Ivancie opposed the construction of Pioneer Courthouse Square, saying it would attract homeless people (he wanted to charge a fee for entry to the square). He vehemently supported construction of the Mount Hood Freeway through Southeast Portland; the city council killed the idea with Ivancie the lone dissenter.
He didn’t take kindly to the city’s pro-bicycle and ecocentric sensibilities. He tried to slash neighborhood association budgets in half. He opposed a citizen-run police oversight committee, even after Portland officers were found planting narcotics on suspects and caught dumping a dead possum in the doorway of an African American-owned business.
‘Fearless Frank’
In 1970, as the city commissioner in charge of parks, Ivancie had police officers clear out Vietnam War demonstrators from the South Park Blocks, which left more than 20 bloody and hospitalized.
“There were some heads banged in that incident,” Lindberg said of the park sweeps.
The episode helped earn Ivancie the nickname “Fearless Frank.”
The son of a Yugoslavian immigrant, Ivancie was born in Minnesota and served as an air corpsman in World War II. He became a teacher and principal in Burns and Portland and had 10 children with his wife, Eileen.
Ivancie told The Oregonian in 1976 that although he enjoyed a strong, supportive family with his wife and many children, he was a serious man who did not believe in having “palsy-walsy business” with his kids.
“A father is not a pal,” he told the paper. “I don’t have the time or inclination to be a pal.”
He entered politics by becoming an assistant to then-Mayor Terry Schrunk and rose to serve many terms on the city council.
Ivancie was a devout Catholic and “old-style politician” who governed through “the Robert Moses approach,” Lindberg said, in reference to the New York power broker who flexed his political might to pave vast swaths of the Big Apple to the detriment of the city’s poor.
Lindberg said his own story of ascension to the city council offers a good sketch of Ivancie’s politics.
The council appointed Lindberg, a liberal, to a vacant seat, with Ivancie the lone vote opposed. Once Lindberg was in office, Ivancie met with him and explained his vote against him was “just business.”
Ivancie became mayor in 1980 after defeating then-Mayor Connie McCready, who was serving a partial term after an appointment.
His tenure was defined mostly by the vast construction he oversaw or gave his blessing to: of the first MAX light rail line, to Gresham; of the Portland Building; of wells that serve as a backup to the city water supply; of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall; the Greyhound bus depot; the PacWest Center, U.S. Bancorp Tower and One Pacific Square.
Ivancie miscalculated when it came time for re-election as mayor. His opponent, Bud Clark, ran for mayor in part because of how Ivancie’s police force treated the Vietnam protesters at Portland State.
