Elected attorney general in 1950, Edmund G. Brown in 1951 pushed to the forefront of state water politics by gaining appointment to the California Water Project Authority governing board.
At around the same time, in September 1951, Brown wrote to Jackson Police Chief George Milardovich.
Brown, according to author Allen De Grange, referred Milardovich to a report that a Jackson man named Red Kelliher tried to bribe a state district attorney's investigator Sept. 17, 1951 for advance warning of raids on a "Charter Club" in Jackson.
Brown's Sept. 21 letter states, "Whatever is meant by the term 'Charter Club,' it is perfectly certain that it is nothing more than a subterfuge devised to cloak an illegal operation," and urged that Milardovich "forestall this plan."
Milardovich needed little urging from Brown. He closed brothels and gambling houses in Jackson with vigor and kept them closed until the Jackson City Council fired him in August 1953.
Right about then, early in campaign fund-raising for the next year's election, would have been when Brown first arrived in the San Joaquin Valley town of Corcoran, to hob-nob with the biggest barons of big agriculture.
That venue was ripe for Brown to befriend corporate-cotton tycoon Clarence "Cockeye" Salyer. Salyer owned 88,000 acres. He liked flexing the muscle his position brought him, for example ignoring the law with impunity in using western Fresno County Sheriff's deputies as chauffeurs and tow-truck boys when on occasion they fished a boozed-up Salyer and his Cadillac out of an irrigation ditch, according to journalist Mark Arax. Salyer became instrumental in Brown's political campaigns.
In September 1952, when Jackson Police Chief Milardovich left town for a two-week U.S. Marine Corps Reserve training session, he returned to find brothels and gambling houses reopened. He re-closed them and continued cooperating with Brown's office. In early August 1953, the city council fired him.
Pat Brown, at that time, was using his state Water Project Authority board seat toward building an aqueduct to serve San Joaquin Valley agriculture interests and wealthy Los Angeles County suburbanites. The next month, in September 1953, Brown ordered a state probe into corruption on the Jackson City Council.
By 1954, when anti-gambling hero and friend-to-big-agriculture Pat Brown was re-elected attorney general, it's a good bet he was thanking Clarence "Cockeye" Salyer. By 1958, Brown was elected governor.
Corporate giant Salyer and rising politician Brown became so close that by 1959, Salyer had carte blanche to barge, unannounced, into Brown's governor's office, according to Arax.
At some point, being Brown's money man so entranced Cockeye that he had his son, Fred, ferry Gov. and Mrs. Brown by small plane from Sacramento to make the rounds of San Joaquin Valley agriculture operations, collecting bags of campaign cash from corporate-cotton men, according to Arax. Fred Salyer so hated being bossed by Bernice Brown on such journeys that he once refused to fly north to collect "that son of a b---- and his pushy wife."
Cockeye, according to Arax, shouted over the phone to his son, "I don't give a s--- what you think. That son of a b---- is our son of a b----. Now get your a-- up here and do it."
In November 1960, a $1.75 billion bond to build Brown's pet State Water Project was approved.
Scarcely a month later, in late December 1960 - perhaps still in a celebratory mood over new water rights that Brown's project would bring him - bourbon-drinker Clarence Salyer was arrested, dead-drunk behind the wheel of his Cadillac, by officers of the California Highway Patrol. Unlike Salyer's friendly county deputies, the Chippies were unimpressed and uncooperative. They arrested Pat Brown's bag man. Salyer threatened the officers on the way to jail, according to Arax, muttering that Gov. Brown, his close friend, would hear about it in the morning.
"You boys are history," he reportedly said.
According to Arax, it's likely strings were pulled by Salyer and Brown on Salyer's behalf in the DUI matter.
In getting elected governor, Brown relied on a monumental reputation as a crime fighter. Fittingly, Brown said of the State Water Project, "I wanted this to be a monument to me."
