“I didn’t ride on the freeway five hours a day, five days a week, for the last 5 1/2 years just to generate a salary,” says outgoing City Manager Jerry Fulwood.

“It was a commitment to Culver City to do the right thing. That was what kept me here,” but that didn’t curtail clouds of floating rumors that he either was on the brink of resigning or was about to be shoved.

He never starved for critics during his term here.

Until his anti-climactic retirement announcement just after Monday night’s City Council meeting began, forensic scientists never found a sliver of evidence that Mr. Fulwood had even noticed the numerous arrows that came his way from the Council dais.

Uncommonly Direct

In unusually raw locution, at least for this very discreet, private circumspect person, Mr. Fulwood emphasized in his brief speech from his table that leaving and the departure date — probably in March or April, at the latest — were entirely of his volition.

While it was periodically reported that certain City Hall officials were trying to place at least one banana peel beneath his shoes, when he finally did reply in public, it was to say, from inside a velvet glove, that the terms were exclusively his.

Even in the slightly more relaxed atmosphere around him now that Mr. Fulwood has announced his retirement, when he is in a reflective mood, he stoutly maintains his Boy Scout-style posture and lexicon, even, or especially, in the face of a cynical world.

Who Knew?

The often stoic, frequently enigmatic and always gentlemanly city manager never betrayed the smallest emotion when very publicly confronted, periodically, over the years by present and former City Council members who did not seem fond of him and weren’t bashful in mounting stiff criticism.

Mr. Fulwood never budged, though, never shifted his gaze from his accusers.

All of the drama, every fibre of theatrics and emotion in these edgy confrontations came exclusively from the other side, never from Mr. Fulwood’s.

The moral and ethical values that he learned as the middle child growing up in a minority Bronx family in the 1950s still serve him as strongly today as they did 40 years ago when he began his career in the East.

He refers to values that today probably only are found in dusty Scouting handbooks.

“Integrity, honesty and truthfulness are very important to me,” he said in the stillness of his top floor office at City Hall.

“They are at the core of my being. They are why I am here, to do what is right for the city of Culver City. I always did what I felt as right for the city, what it needed.”

Achieving a Mission

Although he has been reliably generous in crediting peers and others around him, Mr. Fulwood said his arrival in ’03 coincided with a round of layoffs, Now, he declares proudly, he, and a crowd of “very talented” aides, have firmly stablized the city’s fiscal base.

He said that given the gravity of the situation he entered, he could not have afforded to allow himself to be distracted by criticism.

“Professionalism and protocol required that first you establish a foundation, and that is what I did,” Mr. Fulwood said. “You must have a foundation before the organization can move forward. If you allow yourself to be sidetracked while putting the foundation in, the city never will be able to take the next step. If I had let myself be distracted, I could not have made it to first base.

“Putting in the foundation created change. Change, many times, creates criticism. You have to expect that. If I were doing it for me, I would have looked at it differently. But I had a mission. That was what City Council brought me here to do. And I have not one boss, not two, but five, the City Council members.

“If five Council members had felt I was not doing my job, well, that’s different. One or two Council members, that will happen. See, I was constantly making changes, so it was not unusual to do some things that from time to time would irritate one or two of them.

“Therefore, I had to stay focused on my mission, on why the City Council brought me to Culver City.”

Where Does the Steam Go?

Did Mr. Fulwood ever feel a need to vent the feelings that likely were building a large bonfire inside of him?

To be succinct, no.

Although he is a regular runner and has other physical pastimes, he did not need an outlet where he could vent because:

“What was critical to me was my family support, Dana and my 10 grandchildren.”

In the next installment, Mr. Fulwood, who is 62 years old, will talk about the central role family plays in his working and domestic lives.