“Chet” Hoover, Longtime Rent Board Foe, Dead at 71

By Jorge Casuso

April 6 -- Chester Hoover Jr., a vocal opponent of rent control who was a staple of board meetings for a decade, died March 31 after battling leukemia. He was 71.

Services will be held Wednesday at 11 a.m. at Gates, Kinsley Gates in Santa Monica.

One of the last of a colorful cast of rent control foes, Hoover made it his civic mission to oppose and ridicule the local law, lambasting board members and taking every opportunity to make his position known.

A large sign with a hammer and sickle above the words “Soviet Monica Rent Controlled” was prominently displayed for years on his 47-unit building facing Palisades Park, and Hoover always addressed rent board members as “comrades” and commissars.”

“Chet Hoover was one of a kind,” said Robert Sullivan, a longtime friend and an owner of Sullivan-Dituri Realtors, who sold Hoover’s building two years ago.

“He has his unique beliefs, and in the forty years I knew him, he never wavered or compromised those beliefs,” Sullivan said.

“He was very, very clear on how he thought,” said Elaine Dobrin, who knew Hoover for 25 years. “He stood up for his principles.”

“He was a remarkable individual,” said Joseph Fitzsimmons, vice president of Sullivan-Dituri, who knew Hoover for 15 years.

A carrier pilot in the Korean War, Hoover began attending rent board meetings in 1989 after three commissioners refused to pledge allegiance to the American flag to protest U.S. policies in El Salvador.

For the next eight years, he and his sidekick, Al Kindt, who was also a war veteran, goaded the board, addressing them at every meeting. When the board ended the pledge with the words “with freedom and justice for all,” the two would chime in, “Except in Soviet Monica.”

“I didn’t spend four years as a Navy carrier pilot and four years in the reserves to see my country taken over by a bunch of communist radicals,” Hoover told The Outlook in 1995.

That year, Hoover calculated that his property on San Vicente Boulevard facing Palisades Park had lost $1,766,400 during rent control’s first 16 years.

“It’s wrong,” Hoover told the paper. “If we’re going to have a city provide housing for low-income people, have everybody participate, not just the owners.”

But despite his public persona, Hoover -- whose mother, Clo Hoover, was Santa Monica’s first woman mayor -- was an intensely private man, his friends said.

“I went hunting with him thirty to forty times. You never got inside of Chet,” said Jack Michel, a longtime friend. “He was a very private person,”

Friends also remember Hoover for his loyalty and sense of humor.

“He was an awfully good friend,” said Dobrin, who briefly worked for Hoover. “If he was your friend, he did anything for you.

“He had a terrific sense of humor,” she said. “He had you laughing no matter how you felt. It was always fun going to the office. Always made you smile. Kept you going. I’ll miss him.”

Born in 1932 in Louisville, Kentucky, Hoover and his family moved to West Los Angeles in 1945, where he lived in Pacific Palisades until his retirement in 2002.

He was an active Mason and member of the local Santa Monica Rotary Club and was involved in real estate development.

After retiring, Hoover moved to Palm Desert, where he spent much of his time playing golf and hunting.

Hoover is survived by his wife, Ulla, her son Nik and his wife and two children; three children, Chester Arthur Hoover III, Cathleen Ann Hoover Hedger and Clayton Allen Hoover; their mother Joyce Taylor Hoover; three grandchildren and a sister, Patricia Hoover May.

Memorials in his memory can be made to the Leukemia Research Foundation, 820 Davis Street, Suite 420, Evanston IL 60201 or online at www.leukemia-reserach.org/ donating.