Pubdate: May 15, 1998
Source: New York Times (NY)
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Author: Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.

WESLEY POMEROY, 78, SECURITY CHIEF AT WOODSTOCK

Wesley A. Pomeroy, a peace-loving peace officer who maintained order with
friendly persuasion at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San
Francisco and who later became a counterculture hero as the benign and
highly effective security chief at the 1969 Woodstock music festival, died
May 4. Pomeroy, 78, died at a hospital near his home in Hollywood, Fla. He
had retired in 1995 as head of the Dade County police review board. His
family said the cause was heart failure.

If Pomeroy had had his way, the revolutionaries of the 1960s would not have
had much to rebel against. That was because Pomeroy, a member of the
American Civil Liberties Union and an advocate of the decriminalization of
marijuana, was a law enforcement officer who viewed protesters as citizens,
not criminals, and whose approach to crowd control was to coddle, even if it
meant sharing police communications systems with a rally's organizers and
teaching angry counter-protesters how to set up picket lines. Pomeroy's
theories first came to national attention in 1964 when, as undersheriff of
suburban San Mateo County, he was put in charge of security for the
Republican Convention at the San Francisco Cow Palace. With the party deeply
split over a number of hot-button issues, there were fears that the
convention, which eventually nominated Barry Goldwater for president, would
disintegrate into factional clashes. But with Pomeroy in charge of a
security force drawn from 18 police departments, the convention was close to
a model of decorum. And when a group of teen-age girls did invade the hall,
and went limp, Pomeroy had them carried out on stretchers, not dragged off.

A native of Burbank, Calif., who attended Pacific Union College, Pomeroy,
who later received a law degree from the San Francisco Law School, became a
law enforcement officer largely on a whim. When he placed first on a civil
service test he joined the California Highway Patrol. After serving with the
Marines in the Pacific in World War II, he resumed his career and later
joined the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department.

His work at the 1964 convention was so impressive that in 1968 Attorney
General Ramsey Clark made him a special assistant to coordinate federal
anticrime efforts, including security at the national political conventions.
As he had four years earlier, Pomeroy helped make the 1968 Republican
Convention a peaceful success, but when he tried to arrange cooperation
between the Chicago police and various protest groups for the Democratic
Convention, his efforts were rebuffed by Mayor Richard J. Daley, making the
resulting notorious clashes all but inevitable.

By the end of 1968 he had been named the Republican member of the
three-member board formed to run the new Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration, but soon after President Richard Nixon took office in 1969,
he was replaced.

As a private consultant, Pomeroy, who later became a Democrat, was hired as
security chief of the Woodstock festival in Bethel, N.Y., where his
compassionate handling of hundreds of thousands of music lovers was credited
with helping to make the festival the peaceful love-in it became known as.
The work led to assignments as security chief at a Led Zeppelin rock tour
and other large events, but in 1974 Pomeroy returned to traditional law
enforcement as chief of police in Berkeley, Calif.

He returned to Washington in 1977, holding a series of posts in the Carter
administration, including assistant director of the Drug Enforcement
administration, something of an anomaly for a man who had been a board
member of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or
NORML, and who continued to call for decriminalization, joining the
Coalition Advocating Medical Marijuana as recently as last year. Before
being named director of the Metropolitan Dade County Independent Revi ew
Panel in 1983, he served four years as Deputy Director of the Michigan
Department of Mental Health; it was his long-held belief that the most
efficient way to fight crime was to deal with poverty, mental illness and
its other underlying causes.

It was a reflection of his effectiveness as head of the the Dade County
police review board that the mandatory retirement age for government
officials was repeatedly waived so he could remain in the job until illness
forced him to step down four years ago.

Pomeroy, whose first marriage ended in divorce, is survived by his wife,
Lonna Caroll of Hollywood, Fla.; three daughters from his first marriage,
Nancy Bucher of Palm Springs, Fla., Virginia Pomeroy of Germantown, Wis.,
and Victoria Pomeroy of Germantown, Tenn., and 11 grandchildren.

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Checked-by: "Rolf Ernst"