Photo by Joe Klein

If, like most people, you never make it to meetings of the San Diego City Council, you still probably have a mental picture of what the meetings are like: a little formal, a little dull. Indeed they are like that — but what you cannot imagine is how the atmosphere changes each time Rose Lynne approaches the microphone. Rose is seventy-two years old and looks her age, but her voice is firm. She boasts that she can offer relevant commentary on virtually any subject the council is discussing, but sometimes the connections between what Rose wants to say and what everyone else has just been talking about are apparent only to Rose. She stands there, lecturing insistently, passionately, about sprout farming or no-cost schools or "ombudscience," while people in the audience squirm or glower or smirk. The atmosphere of grown-ups engaged In serious business vanishes. Rose consumes all the attention, and sometimes it appears she will hold everyone in her space-time warp forever. If someone reminds her that she's spoken for too long, she usually gets angry; her voice grows shriller, even more importunate, a buzz saw from the Bronx that cuts and whines and creates a terrible tension: how can this ever end? Then, abruptly, she says thank you and scuttles back to her seat. But everyone knows she'll soon be back.

San Diego has other so-called gadflies who make a point of attending and speaking out at public meetings. But among them, Rose Lynne stands alone. City hall regulars say no one else comes close to exercising his or her right to speak anywhere nearly as often as she does — sometimes two, three, four times during the course of an afternoon council meeting. No one else has learned to "filibuster the whole city," in the words of former mayor Roger Hedgecock. Hedgecock claims Rose has cost the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in time wasted over the years, and he thinks the day may come when "she ought to be barred from the place altogether." Rose already has occasionally been removed bodily from meetings, and city rules and procedures have been changed in a specific attempt to thwart her. Yet she persists. indefatigable, shameless.

A good place to meet her for quiet conversation is on the mezzanine of the Pickwick Hotel downtown on Broadway. The lounge there is invariably empty, and seated in one of the fraying couches, leafing through some of her notes, Rose could be overlooked or mistaken for some retiring old lady. Her dress, in her words, is "not exactly Bergdorf Goodman, but also not a street woman's clothes, either." Often she pins some political button or other doodad to the clothing that stretches across her voluminous chest; one recent day, for example, she had taken a delegate's badge and ribbon from the Education Commission of the States meeting held last month in San Diego and transformed it to suit her purposes. She had glued the typewritten words "Ombudscast" where "Education" had been written, and she had typed her own identification, "O.C.S. — Rose Lynne — Ombudscast Commissioner." Probably the most distinctive thing about her, however, is her hairdo. It's gray with caramel-colored highlights, and she braids it and neatly pins down the braids so they crown a face that is eroded with wrinkles but pink and healthy. Rose comments that here on the mezzanine of the Pickwick she has delivered her two-hour course on "ombudscience" dozens of times. She gets by on her social security pension and the occasional contributions of supporters. enough to pay for her third-floor room upstairs. "I meant to stay for one night, and I've been here for three and a half years," she says. "If anyone needs proof that I'm nuts, that's it ."

She is joking, of course. Her puckish sense of humor is widely recognized at city hall. "Rose Lynne has more oneliners than Bob Hope;' says one council aide. This time, though, Rose's jest is more provocative, more ironic than usual. Some who know her are convinced that she is insane, literally. "She's mentally ill" is the affirmed opinion of Hedgecock (now a talk-show host for KSDO radio). "The woman should not be on the street." Rose knows that this opinion is widely held. "I've polarized an entire city hall," she says. "Many people think I'm a nut, and they don't understand what I'm doing. Why am I bedeviling these poor city council people?" But she claims many other city hall habitues love her work and think she's great, though most won't admit this publicly for fear of being shunned by their coworkers.

In turn, Rose also uses insanity to explain the behavior of many people toward her; she couches this in scientific terms. She's a great innovator, she explains, brimming with ideas that threaten many people because they would require change and growth. To avoid the pain that invariably accompanies such growth, many people shut her out by going temporarily berserk. They act irrationally, deny hearing or doing various things they in fact heard or did. "Probably ninety percent of the ills that we have is caused by lack of synchronization of the left and right brains as we plow under information and play games and go schizoid," she exclaims. "Literally schizoid!"

Here is Rose's explanation for how she got tangled up with the San Diego City Council in the first place. She says the first time she ever attended a council meeting here was in December of 1982. She had just retired from her lifelong home in New York City and had chosen San Diego as the place where she would write her magnum opus, a book detailing all her findings in the fields of behavioral science and communication. She says she strolled from the Pickwick Hotel over to city hall out of idle curiosity, but finding the council in session, she was moved to speak. She scanned the agenda to see on what topics she might be qualified to offer some insight, and her eyes alighted on an item relating to the expansion of San Diego Stadium.

If the stadium were being expanded, the city would doubtless need to expand the stadium restaurant, she reasoned. Addressing then-mayor Pete Wilson, Rose disclosed how she had learned that sprouts are "absolutely essential as fiber to prevent cancer and high blood pressure." She then asked Wilson to appoint a task force to meet with her for two hours and discuss how the stadium food might be made healthier.

She recalls that Wilson responded, "'You sold me .... I give you Councilman Cleator and Councilman Mitchell, and I put Mr. Mitrovich in charge.' A laugh goes up. Why are they laughing?" she says she asked herself. When she called George Mitrovich (then a member of the stadium authority board of directors) the next day, she got an answer. "He said the mayor was joking!" She still sounds appalled at the memory. "And I said, 'If it was a joke, I'm going to sue for $15 million for humiliation.' When she double-checked with Cleator and Mitchell, both avoided her, Rose recalls. "Cleator was in terror flight.... He doesn't know what I'm talking about! And that's the beginning of how I got mad. I went to city hall as a pussycat, and Wilson gave me a task force, and I turned into a lion."

Almost immediately, she conceived of a response that appealed to her even more than filing a lawsuit. "I determined that I was going to make them take that 120 minutes [Wilson's promised two hours] three minutes at a time!" (Three minutes is generally the length of time offered members of the public who wish to comment on council business.) A lifelong schoolteacher, Rose says her "inductive training" had taught her how to speak for short periods, then stop, then effortlessly continue her train of thought later. "That's their nemesis — that I know how to do this and be pertinent," she gloats.

She says initially she only planned to speak the forty times that would add up to the two hours, but events soon conspired to drag her deeper into city politics. Shortly after Rose's first council appearance, Wilson moved to Washington to begin his tenure as a U.S. senator and the race was on to elect a replacement for him. As Rose became acquainted with the many candidates in that election, she was disheartened to find that none of them seemed open to major innovations. "I never wanted to run for mayor!" she exclaims. Yet with teh stated goal of influencing candidates Hedgecock and Maureen O'Connor, she appeared on the March, 1983 primary ballot as "Rosalyn — Trainer of Great Mayors."

There is an explanation for why her name has varied over the years, though it irritates Rose when people concentrate on such picayune details, rather than bigger questions. She says her given name was Rose, but when she graduated from his school, she changed that to Rosalyn. She married a man named Switzen and thus was known as Rosalyn Switzen throughout virtually all her adult life, even though her marriage ended in divorce around 1949. But when she ran for mayor, she balked at the thought of her ex-husband's name appearing on the ballot. "I decided the smartest thing to do — and it was the worst mistake I ever made — was to go on the ballot with my first name only." This solidified the growing conviction in some quarters that she was a crackpot. 'Alison DaRosa I reporter for the San Diego TribuneJ actually insisted to me that I had no right to use a first name only!" Although this attitude outraged Rose, she changed her tactics when she later ran for mayor a second and third time (in 1984 and this year). "I had heard that the name Rose means 'love.' And I was being stressed and hated those people. And I mustn't hate people. So to remind me to love people. I decided to use Rose Lynne." That sounded like a more conventional name. and "every time I heard the word Rose. I would remind myself, 'Don't hate them. Don't hate them. Don't hate them. Love them."

Despite the stress of the campaign, by the time the 416 votes for Rose were counted, she had become thoroughly addicted to life at city hall. She says something else happened to make her feel this way. "The thing that happened was so shocking and classic that I was hooked — there was no way I could leave it." She says various city council members had begun to do "completely illegal stuff. They not only said I was not pertinent when I was pertinent, but they cut me off the microphone and they started threatening me with the police." Rose struck back. Not only did her attendance at city meetings grow even more habitual, but she also turned to outside forums, displaying a certain genius for wacky, attention-getting stunts. One time she handed out almost a thousand shiny new pennies to people passing by city hall. The pennies, she said, represented the one cent out of every dollar spent wisely by the council. Between meetings, she set up a sort of headquarters based around the staircase that leads up to the terrace-level conference rooms in the community concourse. She would paper the stairs, nearby columns, and other available surfaces with dozens of photocopied communiques she had prepared. She would eagerly explain her ideas to people who stopped by. "This was my polling place," she explained one day recently. "This was my research center. This was my newspaper. And it was very crude, but it was very big, and it was in color." Eventually city officials forbade her to use the concourse in this fashion more than six times a year. They cited a regulation Rose claims was passed specifically to muzzle her. (City officials say Rose was one of many people whose extraordinary use of the concourse prompted the change in regulation.)

On the twelfth floor above the concourse, in the city council chambers, things weren't going much better for Rose. Although she had run for mayor in order to "influence" Roger Hedgecock, she was bitterly disappointed when Hedgecock, newly installed in office, denied he had ever promised to take her two-hour "ombudscience" course (an intensive session in which she explains the development and alleged scientific basis for her major ideas). Today Hedgecock says not only did he never make such a promise, but by the end of his campaign, "I had determined I never wanted to talk to her ever again." Despite that attitude, Hedgecock says he later turned down an offer from City Attorney John Witt to seek an injunction that would legally bar Rose from city hall proceedings. Instead, "I just let her talk and then cut her off."

Things didn't imporve for Rose when Hedgecock left office and Ed Struiksma took over the running of the city council meetings as deputy mayor. Struiksma was known to blatantly throw out written requests by the "ombudscientist" to speak, and he routinely would warn Rose of the consequences for those who violated Section 402 of the California Penal Code by disrupting public meetings. Today Rose is so incensed by the way Struiksma treated her that she talks about having him sent to jail for his actions.

Her loathing for Struiksma was one of the reasons Rose rejoiced when Maureen O'Connor took over the mayor's office last month. There were other reasons, too. During her first campaign for mayor three and a half years ago, O'Connor unequivocally had promised to take Rose's two-hour ombudscience training if elected. Several elections later, O'Connor did take the mayor's oath of office, but a week after her swearing-in, she still hadn't set a date for the training session — a promise Rose Lynne was still holding her to. Nevertheless, Rose was warmed by the courteous, attentive response she was getting from O'Connor's new staff. "I am taking Maureen O'Connor and turning her into the greatest mayor in the country!" Rose was saying, buoyantly. "And that's a miracle!"

On the morning of July 19, she had even more reason to be chipper. That was the first of O'Connor's day-long meetings with concerned members of the public, and Rose had avidly signed up for the appointment available for 1:35 p.m. The fact she would only be allowed three minutes in O'Connor's presence didn't appear to shake her. "I'm going to ask her five questions," Rose confidently told O'Connor aide Lynn Sharpe-Underwood in the city hall lobby. Scrabbling through her big cloth bag, Rose extracted a messy piece of paper on which she'd scribbled the questions only minutes before while sitting in the Pickwick mezzanine. First, she read, she wanted to know if the mayor were interested in saving $60 million (Rose believes this can be done by instituting various innovations). Next she wanted to ask when O'Connor would be taking the two-hour training. She also wanted to know if O'Connor would fulfill another campaign promise to meet with ex-mayoral candidates Cleator and Floyd Morrow and "explore the inspector general concept for the city." For her two final questions, Rose announced she would ask if O'Connor would call a marathon thirty-hour "ombudscience training" for the city council members who are closed to new ideas and for the entire city staff (while those who are open can grasp the principles of ombudscience in two hours, others who are more resistant to change require the longer training program, Rose asserts).

Sharpe-Underwood would make a wonderful poker player. Respectfully attentive, the well-dressed young mayoral aide allowed no flicker of emotion to reveal her opinion of Rose's questions or the confusing welter of words that continued to issue from Rose as the two took the elevator up to the eleventh floor. Rose, on the other hand, was looking frankly happy. She had dressed up for the occasion, donning a calf-length print dress from India and pinning a bright red rosebud to the bodice. Once seated in the spacious anteroom of O'Connor's offices. Rose chattered nonstop. She commented that this was the best "open door" session she had ever attended; somehow, minutes later, she had wound her way into a long and convoluted anecdote about how she could have saved Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso's life (who died of cancer in 1981). But this was interrupted by a signal that her audience with O'Connor was at hand. First Sharpe-Underwood disappeared to brief the mayor on Rose's questions, and then Rose was summoned.

"Rose Lynne!" O'Connor exclaimed warmly, affectionately at the sight of the old lady. Rose in turn was beaming. But an instant later the smile was replaced by a look of horror at the sight of an old enemy, Assistant City Manager John Lockwood, who stood near the new mayor.

"Deadwood!" Rose cried. "It's Deadwood," she repeated, aghast.

O'Connor looked amused, if slightly embarrassed, and suggested an attempt at mutual civility. But for a short while Rose railed. "He's crumpled up my papers! He said he'd never listen to me! I don't know why you have him here. He's very negative reinforcement!"

The group assumed their seats and, with apparent effort, Rose summoned her attention to her five prepared questions. To the first, O'Connor replied that yes, she was interested in saving $60 million in tax dollars; she looked as if she hoped all the rest of Rose's queries would be as easy.

When would she fulfill her promise to take the two-hour training? "Now, Rose, you know I promised that I would take the training, and I will do so." A steely look had come into O'Connor's eyes as she explained she was trying to schedule in a host of commitments. Rose's time would come, but she would have to be patient. Cautiously, Rose griped about how Hedgecock had backed out on her, but she hastily reaffirmed her confidence that O'Connor would keep her promise and continued with her questions. When O'Connor said she didn't remember promising to discuss the inspector general concept with Cleator and Morrow, Rose chirped, "Oh yes! You said it in a public meeting."

"Well then, I guess I'll have to give Mr. Cleator and Mr. Morrow a call," O'Connor said, with a hint of grimness. Her voice turned openly negative at Rose's talk of thirty-hour training sessions with city council and staff members. The costs of losing the staff time, plus legal restrictions, would probably make such a thing impossible, O'Connor said. She briefly noted something on a yellow pad in her lap and told Rose her staff would further research this question.

Sharpe-Underwood and another aide had risen. Now O'Connor and Lockwood got to their feet. Reluctantly, Rose followed suit, talking at top speed about how previous administrations had treated her.

"Well, dear, it's a new city hall. Look, you're in the mayor's office," O'Connor said indulgently. Rose hesitated for an instant, then as swiftly as she always moves when she finally decides to yield, she smiled radiantly, pecked O'Connor on the cheek, and trotted out.

Yet she wasn't quite done with the mayor's staff. Downstairs again in the city administration building lobby, she asked when she might meet privately with Sharpe-Underwood. Patiently, politely, Sharpe-Underwood explained how the coming days would be her first official week on the job, so she would need a little time to get her bearings. But if Rose would call her on Friday, they could make an appointment then, she assured her.

Rose has a capacity for pressuring people - an ability that, when she decides to use it, is a sight to behold. Now she was pushing Sharpe-Underwood. It was imperative that they meet that week, Rose insisted, launching into a lengthy anecdote about the first time she ever talked to Dean Rusk on the phone; somehow the story was intended to illustrate Rose's skill at seeing when she was being led on by someone who had no intention of giving her what she wanted. Sharpe-Underwood calmly insisted she was doing no such thing. Rose yielded — but only a fraction. If she called Sharpe-Underwood on Friday, when would be the earliest possible time they could make an appointment for the following week?

"Rose, I'm sorry. I just can't say right now."

"Could it be Monday?"

To Sharpe-Underwood's continued refusals, Rose's tirade took on shadings of anger, near hysteria. SharpeUnderwood stayed courteously controlled as she walked Rose toward the door. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the ferocious pressure vanished. Amiably, Rose said she would call the aide on Friday, then she strode into the sunlight outside. "Wasn't that fascinating!" she exclaimed.

She was hoping to have Sharpe-Underwood take the two-hour training along with O'Connor. Rose brags that thousands of people have taken the cost-free training over the years. Probably her greatest student and disciple is a woman named Phyllis Bailey, who formerly directed a youth group in the South Bronx. There Bailey became acquainted with Rose's ideas and eventually grew so enthusiastic about them that the two women traveled the country together, spreading the word ombudsman. Today Bailey teaches sociology and psychology at Champlain College in Toronto, but she spent two months in San Diego last winter working on a book about Rose. Bailey believes Rose "has rea.y synthesized and advanced what has com! up in behavioral science in the last hundred years." She adds, "Rose's pace is so rapid, you can write a book a day on her work."

Locally, Rose claims city councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer and former councilman Floyd Morrow are among those who have taken her two-hour training. One city council aide who has experienced the session is Larry O'Donnell, an aide to Councilman Cleator. To explain why he enrolled, O'Donnell has to go back to a city council meeting last November when then-mayor Roger Hedgecock made a motion that Cleator be appointed special liaison to Rose Lynne. "It was a joke," O'Donnell says. "Pete Wilson had started it and Hedgecock was following along." (As an aside, O'Donnell adds, "If Maureen does it too, we're all going to parachute out.") As happened the first time Cleator was "appointed" to deal with her, Rose took the second appointment in utter seriousness. When Cleator wouldn't meet her, "She kept threatening to go to the grand jury," O'Donnell says. "Well, we didn't need that kind of thing." So he scheduled the two-hour session right before this year's February primary to see if he could placate the ombudscientist.

Though O'Donnell saw some of Rose's ideas as being impractical, he says he didn't instantly reject everything. In fact he says he looked "fairly seriously" at her idea that the city should have an "inspector general" to search for waste and mismanagement. (He finally concluded that function is already being filled by a program in the city manager's department that pays cash to people who come up with money-saving ideas.) O'Donnell says at the end of the two hours, Rose concluded he needed the expanded thirty-hour training. He in turn has concluded that one of Rose's worst faults is the way she constantly threatens people. "It's the terrorist approach to city hall. She's become like a microphone terrorist. That turns a lot of people off, though they do admire her stick-to-itiveness, She is funny. I think she's a real sweetheart, and if she could just control her temper a little bit, I think she could go far."

Assistant City Manager John Lockwood ("Deadwood!") views Rose in a different light. Lockwood concedes that the ombudscientist is well educated. "She has a good vocabulary. She's quick and witty; when she comes up with her little sayings, she's fairly clever," In the past. "I tried to be pleasant to her." Lockwood says. "I tried to be firm. I tried to be responsive. I tried to be understanding. And I have concluded that there is nothing any of us can do to maintain a positive relationship with her."

Besides the unpleasantness of experiencing Rose's wrath, Lockwood sees her as having a much more serious negative effect on city hall. He charges her with wasting not just a considerable amount of council and staff members' time but also so much public meeting time that public access to some issues is limited. "On more than one occasion. a portion of the council docket has had to be continued to a later date because she's taken up so much time," he says. Though Lockwood offers no comment on how the city should officially deal with Rose, he finally adopted a personal policy of refusing to respond to any of her questions or requests, refusing to meet or talk with her, and openly discarding any materials given to him by her. "I just don't think it's a productive use of my time to deal with her," he says. "I'm not mad at the lady. It's just sad .... And if you don't take that hard-shell attitude, she can just burn up more and more time."

City Attorney John Witt doesn't go quite as far as Lockwood in terms of his personal relationship with Rose. Witt says, "I have found that the best way to deal with her is to be barely civil.... I don't go out of my way to engage her in conversation, but occasionally I do find myself trapped in an elevator with her." However, Witt's position has led him to evaluate how the city should officially respond to Rose's behavior at public meetings. Although he says an injunction barring her from city proceedings is a potential option "if her conduct becomes continually disruptive and you can draft the affidavits to clearly show that," thus far his office has concentrated on helping the city council meeting chairmen control Rose's input through the threat of removing her from the meeting and filing a misdemeanor charge should her conduct become too disruptive. Witt says of Rose, "She's a little like a child who knows just about how far to push ... and now [with O'Connor as mayor} she has a new parent to test." He concludes that .. though she accuses everyone else of !lui. listening to her, her real character fault is that she doesn't listen to anybody else."

Though many people would agree with that judgment, Rose would be appalled by it. She claims she's more than willing to listen if somebody's got something to say. She believes, after all, that part of her expertise is as one of the world's top experts in communication.

Extracting from Rose the story of how she developed that expertise is no easy task. The explanation begins more than forty years ago, and Rose's preferred method for covering that ground is by recounting long, highly detailed anecdotes. She tells the stories with verve; the only problem is that she rarely makes clear the point of each anecdote or how it relates 10 the big picture of her overall intellectual development. She also says she's well aware that she flits from one digression to another. But her story is so big, she says by way of excuse. Here are highlights, based on at least a dozen hours of conversation with her.

She got her bachelor's degree in chemistry, with minors in biology and physics, from Hunter College in New York in 1941. But she says her thinking didn't begin to evolve in a dramatic new direction until a few years later. She had returned to school, this time to New York University, to get her master's degree in science education, and while there she became convinced of the overwhelming importance of teaching not just the facts of science but also the principles of the scientific method. "We all reason scientifically;' she says. "A baby reasons scientifically. He gets observational data. He tastes things. He spits them out. He verifies. He does the five steps of scientific method." The only reason he isn't a scientist is because the baby does these things unconsciously. But all humans get all knowledge, consciously or not, by employing the rud.iments of the scientific method.

The next important thing that happened was that Rose had a baby of her own and thus decided to work as a substitute teacher, a job that took her all over New York City and exposed her 10 five different classrooms of students each day. "That was the accident that made me the foremost expert of scientific method transfer in the world!" she says. "Remember Gregor Mendel, who had the pink flowers and the hybrids and the genetic theory of heredity? Well, he was a monk, and he was in the garden. If he had had generations of human beings every twenty years, he'd know nothing. But he had generations of green peas every three months." Like Mendel, Rose says her substitute teaching gave her fresh research subjects every day on which to test the question that obsessed her: how best to teach the scientific method. In the hundreds of different classrooms, "I made mistakes every single day, and nobody was there to bother me. How nice,"

Within a few years, she claims to have become an unofficial resource person, citywide, for New York City science teachers, and by 1947 she founded something she called the National Communication Laboratories to use as a sponsor for the questions that interested her. Increasingly that interest centered on problems of communication beyond just the transfer of scientific method, problems such as: how do you get groups to interact together? How do you communicate truly radical innovations? About this point in Rose's chronology the events - and the anecdotes — come thick and fast. She talks about being asked by McGrawHill to write a book (though it never got published). She tells of turning down a teacher-training job offer in 1950 at the Queens College School of Education because of her need to remain free to "take the problem of problem-solving where it takes me." She tells of declining another important offer to work with the head of science specialists for the United States government office of education in 1957 (this time her unwillingness to uproot her son and move him to Washington just as he was completing high school prevented her from accepting the offer). What she did instead, throughout these years, Rose claims, was to continue working as a substitute schoolteacher while offering formal and informal seminars throughout the country. "By this time, I am a trainer of trainers in group processes."

The next key breakthrough began about 1957, when she was conducting a series of group meetings. To make a very long story very brief, it finally dawned on her that people offer conversational and behavioral clues when they are closed to new ideas. "Anyone of these symptoms tells you that the person is in waking hypnosis, that they censor because they're sensing a threat." One example is what Rose calls Psychosomatic Fallout: yawns, coughs, sneezes, or other physical signs of wanting to avoid confrontation. Another she dubs the Busy Forever Signal — the repeated reliance on the excuse of being too busy to hear the new idea. Rose says right away she identified seventeen such symptoms; today she claims to have expanded that list to include more than a hundred. (Rose says she used this inventory of clues to determine that the candidates for mayor in 1983 were all "closed.")

Rose says once she began building this inventory. she took a giant step forward toward being able to effect important social change, a goal that was becoming increasingly important to her. Her ongoing research had established such things as the fact that only one out of twenty middle managers are open to new ideas, while one out of every four top managers is open. She thus knew. for example, that the best way to bring about major change is to seek out those one out of four top decision-makers who is receptive to innovation. Given the direction in which her ideas had evolved, it was inevitable she would fall in love with the concept of the "ombudsman" as it developed in Sweden in the early 1800s. In this model, ombudsmen are given access to the top levels of both government and the media and are thus empowered to cut through red tape and swiftly correct injustices. Rose felt she was herself more than a natural ombudsman; she had invented "ombudscience."

She's been on the stump for ombud science ever since, and she loves to heap upon new acquaintances stacks and stacks of literature that give some clue to the many byways to which her campaign for ombudscience has led her. That literature is as eccentric as is Rose herself. She very rarely distributes photocopies that resemble the original documents. Instead she has a passion for cutting and pasting to create great, messy, collageIike handouts. A typical one-pager might include part of a newspaper story or stories, fragments of New York state legislation she claims to have written, little cartoons, scraps of varied ombudsliterature. In the margins she commonly types and handwrites additional zingers like "A GRAND JURY INVESTIGATION IS NEEDED FOR FAILURE TO LISTEN TO $-SAVING IDEAS" or "WANT TO RUN FOR CONGRESS? .. FREE OMBUDSLAW TRAINING TO STOP WASTE OF LIVES AND TAX DOLLARS AND REDRESS SLANDER & LIBEL."

Often the snippets of information are tantalizing. One that looks particularly impressive is a reproduction of a listing of her accomplishments that appeared in the 1961 directory of Leaders in American Science. In many copies of this, however, Rose whites out words and phrases she doesn't like, such as her former surname, "Switzen," a practice she acknowledges tends to drive newspaper reporters crazy. Despite the fact that ombudscience has revealed that "only one out of every twenty reporters are open;' Rose has been the subject of favorable stories in newspapers as distinguished as the Washington Post and Newsday. That is, at least one collage of photo-reduced press clippings she has compiled indicates her renown; Rose says she no longer has ready access to the originals.

Rose says she realizes her handouts look sloppy - but that's because she lacks the time and resources to produce them professionally. "I know how to do beautiful stuff!" she complains. "But people hold it against me because I give out rough copies., .. They're the same people who would say that Einstein didn't comb his hair!" She reacts similarly when people try to tell her not to talk so fast. She knows how to talk more slowly, and she did so when she was traveling around the country promoting ombudscience, she claims. Here in San Diego, she's been driven to talking fast and furiously, however, "because you never know how much time you have to speak. You have to get it all in at once because you never know when you're going to be cut off." That's at least pan of the reason why her three-minute lectures often strike observers as being a blend of the outrageous with impenetrable gobbledygook; she's trying to cram it all in.

Sometimes well-meaning observers try to advise Rose she'd win more disciples if she would change her manner. What they don't understand, she retorts, is that she's tested various approaches over the years and has concluded it's often necessary to be confrontational. Her mission to the city council is not to be pelite: as she sees it, "my job is to enlarge people's threat fields so they can be seen. I teach that if you cannot reach a person because he's gone into waking hypnosis, you should raise your voice and, if necessary, scream." (And she commonly follows her own advice, literally. City Attorney John Witt says he often can hear Rose addressing city council committees, which meet on the second floor of city hall — even though Witt's office is on the third floor. "I can hear her through the ceiling, the concrete floor, the carpet, and all the air-conditioning equipment," Witt says.)

Aweek and a half after her pri vate audience with O'Connor, Rose was beginning to scream at the new mayor. The cause of the ombudscientist's anger was the fact that O'Connor aide Ben Dillingham had refused to schedule Rose for two consecutive hours with his boss but was insisting that the two women meet for two one-hour sessions. Rose had protested that breaking up the training in that fashion would be a terrible mistake, but her protests had been to no avail. So she was carrying her protest onto the council floor. On the afternoon of July 28, when O'Connor asked if anyone wished to ask for a continuance on any of the agenda items, Rose shot up.

"Okay, Rose, you better make it brief," O'Connor warned sternly, adding, "I have to have a little conversation with you because we have some problems. What is your continuance here?"

"I could talk on many items," Rose said,

"I understand," said O'Connor. "And because you haven't taken the two hours, you don't understand how you're wasting lives and wasting money. And August 16 [the date set by Dillingham for Rose's first hour with the mayorJ I need clarification. For eleven o'clock we're supposed to meet for one hour. We might call it the Dillingham Kill of innovations." Citing the agenda at hand, Rose singled out two items she was asking to be continued, one relating to a security guard service at the stadium and another relating to a city health plan (CITYMED). Rose continued, "I don't care what the thing is, whether it's open space or CITYMED or any item like Pinkerton's, if you don't give the young people, and you don't give 'em school credit for CAL Basic — community action learning basics - I'm the only one in the world that knows how to produce this. And if you don't sit down and find out before the budget starts and before you make these contracts, you're losing about two-thirds of your money that you're spending on Pinkerton's, on CITYMED health plan, on open space. And [ill you don't sit down before August 4, when Phyllis Bailey [Rose's discipleJ comes in from London, then you're just letting the budget go through. I don't think you're chicken. [ really don't; I think you've got integrity. But [ think Dillingham did this. You told me last Monday on your open meeting. You told me that you'd let Dillingham make the appointment with you!"

By this point O'Connor had been trying to interrupt, saying things like, "Miss Lynn" and "Okay, Rose." Succeeding at last at breaking in, O'Connor said, "We're talking about items on today's agenda. Please do not have our personal problems dominate ... "

"But you personally said Monday — in front of everybody at the committee meeting in the morning — you'd take care of it yourself. You gave me a subordinate. You gave me Ben Dillingham. Who gave me an ultimatum that was ridiculous and pathetic!"

"Rose, I will get back to you on that. I'm not going to waste ... "

"Personally. But not to Mr. Dillingham."

"I will get back to you."

"Hopefully today. Thank you!"

O'Connors office did get back to Rose on August I, and miraculously (in Rose's eyes) the mayor's office decided to yield and give the ombudscientist two straight hours with O'Connor. That session is scheduled to take place Saturday, August 16, from two to four in the afternoon. Rose has had other reason to be jubilant; not only will she, Rosalyn, Trainer of Great Mayors, at long last have an actual mayor to train, but O'Connor's office also gave the ombudscientist permission to invite whomever else Rose wanted to attend the session. As a result, Rose has been asking a specially selected list of movers and shakers that includes city school superintendent Tom Payzant, Police Chief Bill Kolender, and Congressman Jim Bates.

Such a group will be necessary, Rose states, for her to achieve her ultimate goal: a national ombudscast. The ombudscast, she explains (and has been trying to explain to practically everyone she's met for years), would be a one-hour program to be broadcast simultaneously over every radio and television station in the country, accompanied by front-page stories in every newspaper. For one solid hour, viewers would be enlightened by innovative. money-saving ideas on such topics as drug education and no-cost schools. With an ombudscast, there'd be no one to censor Rose, no one for her to have to yell at, no one suddenly to tell her that she was out of time!

Rose says it's going to happen this October - at least a local version of the national model — and she's been acting as though it's inconceivable that she won't succeed in pulling it off. Once in a while, though, she gives a hint that if the ombudscast doesn't happen this year, she will persist, aiming for next year or the year after. Patiently, as if explaining something to a child, she says she tries lots of things that don't work, "but I don't fail when something doesn't work. [ succeed when something doesn't work. The Edison story of the filament is there." Like Edison, she says she now knows 6000 things that don't work. "And every time something doesn't work, we throw it out and don't spend a million dollars on it. Eventually you're getting closer and closer."