Longtime

Ralph C. Dills, a Texas sharecropper’s son who became the longest serving California legislator, died Thursday in a nursing home in the Northern California community of Rocklin. He was 92.

His son, Gregory Dills, said the cause of death was old age.

“My father simply stopped breathing while sleeping, at 5:30a.m.,” he said.

A Democrat, Ralph Dills served Gardena, Compton and Lawndale throughout most of his political career.

He served in the Assembly for 11 years and in the state Senate for 32 years.

His accomplishments included writing the legislation that created Cal State Long Beach, and El Camino College, and facilitating the creation of the UCLA Law School.

He also sponsored bills that instituted driver’s education in high school and advanced collective bargaining for teachers.

Popular with the Japanese American community in Gardena, he was one of just two Capitol lawmakers to oppose the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.

He often told colleagues of his friendship with a community member, Joe Kubota, who had once loaned him money to attend USC.

The morning in 1942 that Japanese Americans were assembled for transport to Manzanar, an internment camp in the Owens Valley, Dills said, he drove Kubota to the assembly point at the Santa Anita racetrack.

Forty years later, Dills successfully wrote legislation, signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, that gave partial reparations to internees.

Born in Rosston, Texas, Dills moved to California with his parents and eight siblings when he was 15.

He graduated from Gardena High School in 1927 and earned a bachelor’s degree from UCLA, a master’s degree from USC, and law degrees from Loyola University and the University of the Pacific.

He was first elected to the Assembly in 1939. After spending 11 years there, he was a municipal judge in Compton for 14 years before returning to the Legislature in 1966 as a state senator. He retired in 1998 because of term limits.

In 1994, a victim of redistricting, he still managed to win in a new district outside his core area, using the slogan, “Too old to quit.”

An old-fashioned politician, Dills often was accused of catering to special interests, such as the oil industry.

He was once investigated by the FBI for vote-buying but was not charged.

And he usually spent most of his time at his 50-acre ranch in Loomis, in Placer County, rather than in his home district in Southern California.

Still, he repeatedly proved his political durability.

When Robert Pauley, son of oil magnate Edwin W. Pauley, moved into Dills’ Gardena district in 1974, he thought that, with ample money, he could defeat Dills in the Democratic primary.

But when the votes were counted, Dills had 56% and Pauley ran third with 21%. Another candidate got 23%.

“He was one of the toughest men in the Legislature,” Pauley said Thursday.

“He had support from the unions like none other,” Pauley said. “Our brochures had him in a black box, like he was deceased. But he beat me handsomely. He had an organization I underestimated.”

In 1982, another Dills primary opponent, life insurance underwriter Mickey Carson, sent a photographer to Dills’ ranch to get pictures of his “palatial” lifestyle outside the district.

“Call it a mansion, if you want,” he said. “All the newspaper reporters seem to be interested in is where I sleep.”

Conservationists accused Dills in 1994 of having the worst environmental record in the Legislature.

The senator acknowledged, “They were right. I did have the worst record.”

But, he said, in his old district, “I had oil, oil, oil. Tideland oil. Oil all over the joint. [And] I represented my district.”

In his new district, which included beach cities north to Venice, Dills switched to a pro-environmentalist position.

The League of Conservation Voters, which had endorsed an opponent in the 1994 race, gave him a perfect rating for 1995-96.

“I moved over to the beaches … where they don’t like oil,” Dills said.

“They want nice, clean fresh air and water…. [Now], I’m 100% with the environment,” he said.

Dills is survived by his daughter, Wendy Lewellen; two sons, Gregory and Leighton; and three grandchildren.

The family asked that donations in his memory be made to any Masonic order.

They said Dills was a 33rd Degree mason, in the Scottish and York Rites.

In the 1930s, the white matriarchs of tiny Natchez, Miss. — one of the 19th century’s wealthiest American towns thanks to the slavery-driven cotton trade — opened their stately antebellum mansions to save themselves from economic ruin. Tourism dollars flowed in, even if the prettified Southern history being sold ignored the immoral plague that built its riches in the first place.

By turns cheeky and disturbing, blunt and nuanced, Suzannah Herbert’s excellent documentary “Natchez” offers its own guided tour of a memory-challenged community (population: 14,000) struggling to reconcile its exquisite, carefully scrubbed façade with the inconvenient truths some would like to see better represented in the narrative.

That longstanding erasure has made Natchez a less commercially friendly prospect to younger generations of visitors. And meaningful progress turns out to be much harder than simply refashioning an exhibit or a docent’s spiel.

Can a place like Natchez — home to both a cherished tourist pageantry called the Pilgrimage and the slave market site called Forks of the Road — find a harmonious existence between its green-and-serene sightseeing pleasures and its terrible past? Its optimistic mayor seems to think so, if the first scene is any indication, in which he exalts a “new Natchez” at a spirited ladies’ luncheon held by the tour-umbrella association, the Garden Club, and featuring that group’s first Black member, Deborah Cosey.

Cosey, we learn, runs Concord Quarters, a burned-down plantation’s last remaining building, which once housed its enslaved. (She also lives there.) Centering the work and lives of these forgotten souls is a mission she sees as telling “the rest of the story.” In one tense scene with her white colleagues, Cosey winces at their version of historical enlightenment — the reclamation project is moving at a horse-drawn carriage’s pace.

The big house is still the main show, antiquated customs and preserved finery still the plot, even as some of these hosting descendants, faced with declining revenues, grasp that there’s an increasing awkwardness to the “Gone With the Wind” myth they’re peddling. Meanwhile, charming and knowledgeable Black pastor Tracy “Rev” Collins offers a lively van tour (“See the real Mississippi”), an educational reality check about slavery’s legacy laced with witty asides.

The divide gets more complicated when the documentary trails openly gay veteran Garden Club member David Garner, whose charity work benefiting the LGBTQ+ community would seem to point to an old world’s shifting tolerance. But when this outlier’s intensely Southern-fried tour patter reveals a chillingly deep-seated racism, it slaps you right back into sobriety about Natchez’s roots — a neo-Confederate mindset that doesn’t care if a camera is there to record it.

“Natchez” is full of quietly charged moments in dreamily scenic surroundings, one result of Noah Collier’s lush cinematography, deployed like a deliberately performative nostalgia that lets us know there’s always more to see if we look (and listen) closely enough. This stylistic approach allows Herbert to expertly avoid inadvertently selling Natchez itself, instead focusing on how this town’s peculiar relationship to an overwhelming past still lives inside those doing the selling.