Da champ.
Long live the new champ-een.
The bumper sticker that was born as a wisecrack – “Sometimes it takes a rocket scientist” – unintentionally or otherwise winged rocket scientist Dr. Steve Levin not only to victory in last night’s School Board election, but the catchiness made him the blue ribbon votegetter.
He started the evening with a 104-vote lead over runnerup/incumbent Kathy Paspalis after the absentee ballots had been counted.
He widened it to 179 votes at the next posting, when 10 of the 12 precincts had been tallied.
At the end, he strengthened his gap over Ms. Paspalis to 220 votes.
The happily crowded, brilliantly illumined Levin living room on Berryman Avenue was the kind of triumphant scene that many candidates only dream about.
Which brings us to the most brilliant mind now in public life in Culver City, the cerebral 54-year-old astrophysicist.
Judging by his slightly detectable attire, Ray Charles and Helen Keller could have picked him out of a crowd at Dodger Stadium – if the crowd had been blindfoled.
The congenial spaceman was attired in a red shirt so trumpet-blaringly vivid that drivers on Washington Place, blocks away, were shading their eyes late into the evening.
It almost was more tempting to interview the shirt.
Standing in mid-living room among his family and almost equally adoring supporters, Dr. Levin said that voters responded to him “because I ran a campaign that caught the spirit of what I intend to do on the School Board:
“We worked hard and we were positive. We involved the community, which is a priority.
“I knocked on doors and didn’t give up.”
Surely floating through Culver City’s many and varied neighborhoods does not come naturally to rocket scientists, accustomed to drastically different, far more ordered, controllable atmospheres.
Meandering through that sentence may have helped to explain Dr. Levin’s meteoric rise.
The Levins have been serial volunteers at their children’s schools, and a year ago they were voted Volunteers of the Year at Farragut Elementary,
Sharing his unique wisdom and his sui generis appeal as an outer space genius, Dr. Levin in the last 10 years may have spent more time in classrooms than teachers and students combined. He regularly talks to students at numerous schools about the latest adventures in and on the way to outer space.
Upon reflection, perhaps he was far better recognized than pulse-takers suspected.
Perhaps the achievement that made him crow the proudest was that “I tried to always be positive, never saying anything negative about anyone. I told everyone on my campaign that ‘I don’t want you saying anything bad about anyone else. We are trying to do good things. We want to get as many people involved as possible doing things.
“That works,” said Dr. Levin, “because that is what people want to see.”
