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The Historical Society of Long Beach honors the former Long Beach Mayor Beverly O\u2019Neill in Long Beach on Thursday, May 28, 2026. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.<\/p>\nWhat can we learn about a person\u2019s legacy from a couple scarves, or maybe a playbill, or a roll of No. 2 pencils? At \u201cThe Honorable Beverly O\u2019Neill Exhibition,\u201d you might be surprised by how much.<\/p>\n
An approachable leader who kept her home phone number listed, O\u2019Neill\u2019s life story began modestly in Long Beach and often paralleled the city\u2019s downturn and subsequent upward rise.<\/p>\n
For a dozen years, 1994 to 2006, O\u2019Neill was the face of Long Beach politics as the city\u2019s mayor. With a famous rah-rah spirit and unrelenting optimism, she was so well known \u2014 at times compared to Jesus and FDR, and called a civic superhero \u2014 that she won her third term as a write-in candidate, the only mayor in history to do so.<\/p>\n
In her time, she\u2019s credited with rallying the city\u2019s economic revival after the departure of the Naval Shipyard and aerospace plants that shrank or closed. As President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, she regularly traveled to New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and, earlier, assumed the presidency of Long Beach City College \u2014 the first woman to do so.<\/p>\n
But before O\u2019Neill took her first spin at elected office, before she finished school, before she watched the twin blows of an outgoing Navy and downsizing aerospace industry rip 50,000 jobs from the local economy, she took on the role of Yum-Yum, a commoner who fell in love with the son of the Japanese emperor.<\/p>\n
A talented singer, O\u2019Neill assumed the role as a child in \u201cThe Mikado\u201d, a comic opera about the absurdities of bureaucratic excess. It\u2019s a talent she carried throughout her life \u2014 later as Annie, the amenable rapscallion in \u201cOklahoma!\u201d, and even as a wedding singer in her teenage years, to earn her family some extra cash.<\/p>\n
The exhibit highlights these and many other details about O\u2019Neill, now 95, on her path to becoming mayor at the age of 60. Each small but interesting part of her life is now staged inside the Long Beach Historical Society at 4260 Atlantic Ave.<\/p>\n
As O\u2019Neill\u2019s health has begun to decline, local historians, as well as family and former colleagues, have sought to find creative ways to canonize her life and legacy.<\/p>\n
The Historical Society of Long Beach honors the former Long Beach Mayor Beverly O\u2019Neill in Long Beach on Thursday, May 28, 2026. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.<\/p>\n
Julie Bartolotto, the society\u2019s executive director, said the exhibit is drawn from several dozen boxes donated from O\u2019Neill\u2019s longtime home and her office at City Hall.<\/p>\n
Together the memorabilia \u2014 notes, clothes, ephemera and photographs \u2014 chronicle her teenage years at Long Beach Poly High School, through Long Beach City College and Cal State Long Beach, and finally through her mayoral tenure and side passions post-retirement.<\/p>\n
It was a Herculean effort, organizers say, to gather a lifetime\u2019s supply of memorabilia \u2014 some 65 boxes donated \u2014 with help from city officials and O\u2019Neill\u2019s former staff, family and close friends.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s just in print, that doesn\u2019t include anything on a CD or digital,\u201d said Society Deputy Director Jen Malone<\/p>\n
Together, the assemblage showcases a mayor who did it all.<\/p>\n
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Jackets and scarves once worn by former Long Beach Mayor Beverly O\u2019Neill are on display as the Historical Society of Long Beach honors her in Long Beach on Thursday, May 28, 2026. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.<\/p>\n
There are letters from friends in Hawaii and hurricane survivors in New Orleans, from dignitaries overseas and industry captains from the region; from museum directors and professors, junior golfers and professional ball players.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s the scarves and ceremonial jacket she famously wore at the Long Beach Grand Prix. Season tickets for the now-defunct Long Beach Ice Dogs hockey team. Plane tickets from mission trips to China and Ireland. Notes from a park bench she helped dedicate in Hiroshima, Japan on the 60th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombing.<\/p>\n
As mayor of Long Beach and president of the national mayor\u2019s conference, she gave her fair share of speeches. A single address at the groundbreaking of the Pike at Rainbow Harbor in 2002. Or the five different drafts she prepared ahead of the 2002 State of the City Address, as she struggled to get the words right on successes in city redevelopment, crime rates and home ownership.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s fair to say that anything that had to do with this city, she loved it,\u201d Bartolotto said.<\/p>\n
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Photos and a mock street sign honoring former Long Beach Mayor Beverly O\u2019Neill are on display at the Historical Society of Long Beach on Thursday, May 28, 2026. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.<\/p>\n
Within a month\u2019s time in Spring 2006, O\u2019Neill gave speeches before the National Press Club in Chicago, an economic forum in Las Vegas \u2014 given as President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors \u2014 as well as a televised sitdown with President Bush on the closure of the Naval Shipyard and days later on NBC Nightly News.<\/p>\n
A lot of artifacts focused on O\u2019Neill\u2019s fight to preserve the city\u2019s Naval Shipyard, including travel itineraries to Washington, D.C., where she frequently lobbied senators and presidents alike.<\/p>\n
Of the many photographs \u2014 historians there say there\u2019s thousands \u2014 is one that shows O\u2019Neill crestfallen at the moment it was announced the shipyard was no longer going to be in Long Beach.<\/p>\n
Other photos offered an optimistic O\u2019Neill so many remember, of her gladhanding or walking stride with either Bush, Bill Clinton, Hugh Hefner, Arnold Schwarzenegger and countless senators \u2014 Dianne Feinstein was a big fan \u2014 as well as ambassadors and dignitaries. One picture shows her standing beside Margaret Thatcher, the ex-British Prime Minister whose reputation for toughness earned her the nickname \u201cIron Lady,\u201d which partly inspired O\u2019Neill\u2019s nickname the \u201cSteel Magnolia.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are also three little pencils, grouped in a stack and each with O\u2019Neill\u2019s full name typed across the grip. The pencils, Bartolotto said, were specially made for O\u2019Neill\u2019s famous 2001 write-in campaign alongside instructional pamphlets that showed people how to fill in their ballots with her name.<\/p>\n
Next to that display is the blow-up front page of the June 2001 edition of the Press-Telegram, which confirmed O\u2019Neill\u2019s victory in the general election race with 16,500 write-in votes.<\/p>\n
She remains the only third-term, write-in candidate to win as mayor in the country.<\/p>\n