Photograph Courtesy Larry Turner

Larry, holding daughter Zoey, at this year’s Rancho Bernardo 4th of July parade. Larry’s wife Cynthia is in the jeep (wearing a hat) holding their son Zac.

We’re counting down the days until the November 5th election, which in the mayoral race pits Democrat Todd Gloria against Independent Larry Turner. A known commodity, Gloria has been a city councilman, assemblyman and mayor, while this is the first time Turner has run for office. Many people have no idea about Turner’s backstory — the people and places that helped shaped the person he would become. So we asked writer Adam Behar to conduct a Q&A with him.

Photograph Courtesy Larry Turner

Adam Behar: When were you born?

Larry Turner: April, 1970

AB: So that makes you….

LT: 54

AB: What’s your astrological sign? It could decide the election.

LT: Somebody just asked me that yesterday at a big event. Taurus, and she said that was really good for a mayor, for a male, but if I was a female, Taurus would not be good. I don’t know what that means, though.

AB: I don’t know what that means either. Where were you born and raised?

LT: Mountain View, California. We spent the most time in Gilroy, up by San Jose, a place called Turlock. It’s just south of Modesto. My dad was in the car business, and he was always trying to buy a dealership. But he didn’t come from money — the far extreme opposite of that — and was always hustling to get rich. One of his first jobs was in the car business, around 16, at a Pontiac dealer. And he just loved that business and excelled in it.

AB: He did pretty well for himself?

LT: He did really well. For a while, he made it to, I’d say, upper middle-class. He always turned dealerships around and made them succeed. It was long hours, though. He worked his tail off on weekends too, always trying to make a better life for us. And because he was always searching for a new dealer he could turn around, our family was always moving to a new part of town, or to a new city.

Funny thing is, my dad heard me talking about this during my political campaign, and he was like, ‘Why are you saying that we moved all the time? We didn’t move all the time.’ And I was like, ‘Dad, we did,’ and he said, ‘No, we didn’t.’ We sat down to discuss it, and my wife was cracking up, because I don’t remember all the addresses, but I could remember that a house was green, or had shag carpet, or if it was across the street from a pool, and so on. We got a piece of paper and listed 20 some houses or apartments or duplexes that I’d lived in through high school.

AB: Was it difficult moving around so much?

LT: I didn’t know any better at the time, but in retrospect, it probably made being in the Marines, where I moved around a lot, much easier to adjust to.

AB: Was your mom a stay-at-home mom?

LT: Yes and no. She had different jobs, but half of the time she was at home.

AB: What kind of music did you listen to as a kid?

LT: Back then, it was just the hope of whatever was playing on the radio. How about you?

AB: 9IX, maybe a little KGB.

LT: My mom listened to old-school country stuff. Still today, every now and then, I listen to a classic country song, and I’ll know all the words, because they were playing it on the old AM station when I was a little kid in the car with Mom. But now, as an older guy, I’m discovering bands that I wasn’t exposed to, because we didn’t have access to the radio station or I was stationed in Korea or whatever reason, and now we have them all at our fingertips. So, I can listen to Led Zeppelin now. I remember about eight years ago, that song “Ten Years Gone” by Zep…I’d never heard it before, and now it’s like one of my favorite songs. And I can listen to some of the less popular AC/DC songs that are still really good. I’m listening more to ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s stuff now than I did back then, because I was just too busy or didn’t have the stereo equipment to listen to it back then.

AB: Did you have siblings?

LT: I had one brother. He died a couple years ago. Just a really weird situation. He had a swollen leg and arm and we’re thinking, no big deal; it’s cellulitis, right? He’s had it before. Pain’s not even that bad, you put heating pads on it…but this time, that’s not what it is, and the swelling continues and it ends up being a blood clot from cancers in his body. The doctors tell us he has stage four cancer throughout his whole body, and he only has two weeks to two months to live, so all we can do is get him hospice and morphine drip, and that’s it. And he’s dead in two, two and a half weeks.

There’s a big takeaway here for Turner and while it includes exercise and eating well, he’s a big believer in getting full-body scans in the hopes of detecting cancers before their symptoms emerge.

Larry grew up with one little brother. “We were very different. We didn’t fight or anything, but we weren’t like best friends. He was very artsy and I was very athletic.”

Photograph Courtesy Larry Turner

LT: I told myself every birthday it would be my present to pay for one of those scans to catch the cancers before I got any kind of symptoms. I mean, I got little kids I’ve got to worry about.

AB: What was your relationship with your brother like?

LT: We were very different. We didn’t fight or anything, but we weren’t like best friends. He was very artsy and I was very athletic. He was in all the musicals and played the piano and other instruments, and had a band or two, and was in all kinds of drama stuff. And he wanted to be an actor or comedian. And I was just all about the military and sports.

AB: What were your main sports?

LT: I wrestled as a kid through elementary school. That was my real passion. But when we moved to Turlock, they had no wrestling or football. But they did have soccer and basketball and baseball. I really enjoyed soccer. I was maybe even better at baseball, a really good hitter. I could have maybe played minor league ball, but I just didn’t like it as much as I really loved soccer.

Turner has childhood memories of being surrounded by an extended family of warriors who left an indelible impression on him. At family gatherings, the men would go out on the front porch at his great-grandma’s house, smoke cigarettes and tell wartime stories.

LT: That was just the coolest thing to me, was these tough guys. I came from a lot of tough people on my mom’s side — tough, hard men. My mom’s dad was one of the first frogmen. Just crazy stories that they should make a movie out of. I’d sit there hearing them tell their stories, drinking their beer and having their cigarettes. By then, they were all factory workers, but they were still just tough-as-nails kind of people. Many of them should have died a bunch of times, and they’re still around, just with a little limp. They just take a little aspirin or whatever.

My grandfather, my mom’s dad, one of the earliest frogmen, wrote a memoir of his war stories, smoking his cigarettes and typing with two fingers. I had heard that my grandmother burned it during a fight. But lo and behold, my uncle found it, and so I read it. He describes being in his first fight underwater with a Japanese frogman. I mean, this is his story. Nobody’s able to verify anything. It could be a bunch of B.S., but in the story, the Japanese guy stabs him in the shoulder. And then he fakes it like it hurt him more, so the guy comes in for another and then he stabs the guy good. My point isn’t to glorify the violence; it’s the unbelievable courage of a 17-year-old kid — in this case my grandpa — that draws me to this story. And holy crap, he’s doing it for his country. That generation blew me away. I don’t think I’m tough at all compared to those guys. It was just amazing, having that opportunity to talk to those guys on my grandma’s front porch almost every two weeks.

AB: What was your personality like as you were coming of age?

LT: I was a really good kid, and my parents made sure we were around other good kids. I joke that the worst kid in the group a lot of times would have been someone who had tried beer or a cigarette. There was no drug use, no drinking. A really bad thing we would do was maybe go toilet papering somebody’s house. Parties would be some pizza, and parents would be there just hanging out, watching a movie. It was really good, wholesome, kind of Andy Griffith Show kind of living.

AB: But eventually the young ones must leave the nest.

LT: I remember when I went to college for a little bit in San Jose, and I was seventeen, and, oh my God, what an eye opener it was to see the rest of the world. There were no parents around and I was working a part time job at a gym. You had people coming on to you, the open use of cocaine at the gym. It was crazy. I was a fish out of water there.

Turner was a Marine from 1992 to 2015. His decision to join the Marine Corps was shaped by the experience of his mom’s brother, Ron, who served multiple tours in Vietnam and had a successful career when he came home.

AB: So, you were a Marine for 23 years.

LT: That wasn’t my intention when I first signed up, though.

AB: What was the gig?

LT: The majority of my time, I spent in the intelligence field. I did a lot of interesting work that wasn’t necessarily what most Marines do. It was a small group of us that did that kind of work. I was stationed mostly on the East Coast when I first started off, different places in North Carolina and Virginia Beach and in D.C. I spent a lot of time up in Fort Meade, Maryland, where the National Security Agency is.

The second half of my career was mostly stationed in Hawaii, with a little bit of time in Korea. I became kind of a specialist for a little while on a lot of Asian issues that were going on at the time — and are still going on — with China and the Philippines and North Korea and Vietnam…the South China Sea drama. And I worked a lot with the Koreans, training their Marines and helping them build some schools to help their military get better. I wasn’t always in my uniform, doing a lot of that work, but it was just a fantastic experience. I just stopped telling stories to family and friends because I figured they would think I was making it up. They were just kind of outlandish, the things that we would see and do.

AB: And in 2015, you retired from the Marines.

LT: I had friends say, ‘You really need to go on vacation and decompress,’ because a lot of people are stressed out when they retire. I was the opposite. I was ready to take the uniform off and start right away doing something else. So, they offered me an opportunity to go to the [San Diego Police] Academy. It ended up that my friends who had warned me were right. Because once you’re a brand-new baby cop, there’s just no time to take a vacation. And it was a long time before I would get the chance to get some R&R.

Larry and Cynthia have been married almost eight years and have a little boy, Zach, and little girl, Zoe.

Photograph Courtesy Larry Turner

AB: How did SDPD compare to what you had just spent the last many years doing?

LT: People always think it’s an easy transition, because both have uniforms and both have stuff to do with guns. But it was completely different.

In the intelligence world of the Marines, Turner was working in what’s known as a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

LT: You’re in there with no light, I mean, there’s light bulbs, but you’re stuck in there all the time. So, the chance to be out in a patrol car with the windows down and listening to some music on the radio and going around meeting people, helping people, getting a chase every now and then, or a little skirmish with somebody once in a while, or helping some little kid out…it was just great being out of a building.

AB: You mentioned being on the SWAT team.

LT: I was the oldest guy to do it. I mean, there’s some older guys on the team who joined it when they were young, but I went through the Academy when I was 48 and that was pretty tough.

AB: What was the best part of being a cop?

LT: The immediate impact of helping someone’s life in that very moment. As opposed to being a Marine, at least in my experience as a quasi-diplomat and intelligence officer, where your negotiations with a country are also important but are going to pan out over the next couple of decades. The guy that’s beating up his girlfriend is happening now, and the chance to get her help is now. So, it’s the immediacy and the importance of the work.

AB: Did you ever have to fire your weapon?

LT: No, fortunately not. There was only one time that it came super close. Thank goodness I didn’t have to.

AB: Tell me about your family.

LT: Well, I got the two that are with me here right now. My little boy, Zach and little girl, Zoe. They are almost four and almost two. I got some adult kids from my earlier life in the Marine Corps, and they’re awesome too. I’m super proud of them.

Turner has a Mexican-born wife who speaks English as a second language (ESL) and is raising their little ones to speak Spanish first.

AB: How long have you and Cynthia been married?

LT: Seven years, almost eight.

AB: Where did you meet?

LT: At a coffee shop in OB. We just started talking and she was very beautiful and vivacious, full of life. And we started going out and we didn’t take long to get married. We were just together for a few months. She’s just amazing: super funny and has a great family and just really good people.

AB: What’s your favorite restaurant?

LT: I mean, there’s tons of good Mexican places, but my wife and mother-in-law make the best Mexican food.

AB: What do you do well as a dad, and what do you want to do better?

LT: The first time around, I was a young guy in my twenties and a little more concerned about the noise they’re making or that they’re climbing on something that they shouldn’t be. Now I’m just like, ‘I don’t care how loud they are, they’re kids, let them be loud.’ I don’t care. I dare them to climb higher on stuff that they’re not supposed to be climbing on. I changed a lot in that way, really letting them explore more. I am also not letting them play certain sports: too many surgeries, too many concussions, all that kind of stuff from the football side. And so just focusing back on like Jiu-Jitsu and wrestling and swimming, probably more than that other stuff. Not relying on the schools to educate the kids all by themselves. That is my responsibility, not necessarily that I’ll homeschool them or anything, but just becoming way more involved and as they get older, helping expose them to the broader world…not just the beautiful cities, places like Paris and Oslo, but also some of the grittier cities when they get a little older. Make them go on those backpacking trips through Europe when they get into college. Maybe we’ll go ride motorcycles through Asia one summer.

And I want to leave them financially…you know, everything’s good financially, we’re not wealthy, but leave them with a couple rental properties so they can make their determination on what they want to be. You want them to pick a career not because of how much it makes, but because they’re passionate about it. And even if it doesn’t bring in that much income, if they have a couple of rental properties supporting them, some other income sources that help pay for some hamburger and ramen noodles or whatever, they’ll be much better off. They’ll have money set aside, so if they’re mistreated by a job, an employer, you know, they can just say, ‘I’m out of here, man.’ If you don’t have to take that shit from anybody, you can be your own person.

AB: Do you like living in OB?

LT: Yeah, it’s just a really cool vibe. I’ve lived in a lot of places in San Diego and there’s pros and cons to every neighborhood. But there’s something about the peninsula area…Point Loma, OB, Sunset Cliffs, the vibe, everybody’s just a little more respectful. I love it. And I’ve always liked surfing and being near the ocean.

Turner has taken a hiatus from surfing, mostly because it’s too hard to fit into his schedule. But maybe there’s a political reason too. “The opposition can’t get bad photos of me wiping out and post them on a billboard,” he quips.

AB: Where are you on the ideological spectrum?

LT: I’m across the board on different things politically, which I why I’m running as an Independent. Some of my positions are viewed a little bit more on the right, and some more on the left. So, I never really fit in with any party or label. I looked at the Reform Party, the Republican and Democrat Party too. I could never find somebody with a platform that was like my platform, which was like the Golden Corral buffet: a little bit of everything you know, from all over — and then end it with the chocolate.

AB: I know you tend to be a bit more on the liberal side when it comes to the environment.

LT: That’s probably true. For one, my wife and I only drive fully electric vehicles. We’ve installed solar, we do riverbed and beach cleanups, and we act in many other ways in our personal life. We make it a point to not spread dangerous chemicals, that’s an important one. We do public education and outreach campaigns on everything from simple steps to protect the environment and keep our oceans healthy to proper forest care to regenerative farming

AB: How will that play out policy-wise if you are elected?

LT: When I’m mayor, I plan to make our public transportation safe and clean enough for us to let our kids ride alone; and I won’t tolerate empty buses spewing exhaust on routes nobody needs. I’ll focus on the preservation of our city’s green canopy that’s disappearing with this policy of “develop at all costs.” It’s great to worry about the climate decades from now, but it requires a realistic and achievable policy that is balanced with measures we must take today to clean up our current mess!

AB: How do you feel about the city’s adoption of a densification strategy?

LT: You’re seeing fancy high rises that contain a few affordable housing units – they’re not making a dent in the affordability crisis, and that shows they’re not that serious. The idea is to go in and tear down some of these older buildings and build something new with the tag of saying, ‘Hey, this is going to be great for the environment,’ and trying to look at ways to mitigate the emissions on the new construction and the new development. But stop right there, because there is no building as green as a building that’s already made, right?

Same thing with the green canopy. Every time they do these densification plans, it means tearing down all the old mature trees. It’s never taking into account parks and areas for families, playgrounds, it’s just cramming a lot of people in, and forcing this idea of fewer cars, fewer parking spaces…sure that’s a great plan for the future, and we need to move in that direction. But some of these ideas are a little bit too much, too fast for San Diego right now. And I’m saying that as a very environmentally conscious person who has no gas cars.

AB: What’s a typical way that you might spend a weekend?

LT: We’re either at the beach or walking around the farmers markets. That’s always fun. And we just put the kids in the double stroller, and go out hiking. There’s some trails out near the Alpine area. I like to put the little one in my backpack, and then the older one can do a pretty good hike or we take them jogging around. I like going to Lake Murray and Lake Miramar, and run around the lake with them in a jogging stroller. I just hate being inside. I don’t like them watching TV and stuff. We’re always outdoors looking for bugs, birds, snakes.

In the 1980s, it was all about lifting weights, gaining strength, and running marathons. My life changed so much having these two little kids, I really started thinking, Man, I’m a little older in life. I gotta live a longer, healthier life. I mentioned the thing about my brother and about getting myself checked out more. So I changed the way I eat. I changed the way I exercise. A lot of it’s just injury prevention exercises, to be honest. You know, there’s a lot of lower core stuff, lower back stuff, and then the funniest damn thing is just eating a little bit better. I haven’t felt better in my life than I do right now.

AB: What is your favorite word?

LT: It’s kind of an easy one: integrity.

AB: What is your least favorite word?

LT: Arrogance.

AB: Favorite color?

LT: Green.

AB: Favorite beer?

LT: Indio. It’s a Mexican beer that you can’t find in too many places.

AB: Favorite outdoor activity?

LT: Hiking and swimming.

AB: Favorite sound?

LT: My kids laughing.

AB: Sound or noise you hate?

LT: The jets flying over my house when I’m trying to have a conversation and we have to pause — that Point Loma pause.

AB: If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

LT: Just something like, “Good job, bro, you made the team.”

— Adam Behar