Long before Ken Creighton had any idea what San Pedro was, he had already seen it.
Years ago, in a living room in Kansas City, he and his wife, Kathy, were scrolling through a carousel of his mother’s slides. Thousands of them, taken when his father was stationed at the naval base in the 1950s. One frame showed a big hill rising behind the base. Kathy told him to stop.
“You see that hill in the background?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’ve seen that for years,” he said.
“Do you know what that is? That’s San Pedro.”
“So, when I was a little kid, I actually saw San Pedro,” Ken says now, “but I had no idea what it was.”
He first visited as an adult in 2007 and was smitten. “I feel like I could send somebody a postcard,” he remembers thinking. “I felt like I was on vacation.” When his job at CarMax in Torrance opened in 2015, the choice was easy. He and Kathy sold the house in Kansas City and moved west.
Kathy, for her part, was coming home. Her roots here run deep and unmistakably Pedro. Her grandfather emigrated from Croatia in 1918, was a fisherman (his name is on the newly refurbished Fishing Industry Memorial), saved for a decade, then wrote back to the island for a bride. The woman who became her grandmother crossed the Atlantic with two other Croatian women. When they sailed into New York Harbor and saw the Statue of Liberty, they mistook it for the Virgin Mary and began to pray. Two weeks after arriving in San Pedro, she was married.
Ken took to the town immediately. “I loved it. People were nice,” he says of those first months. Sitting on a balcony overlooking the harbor, he began writing lyrics that became a song about the town, later rewritten as “San Pedro Strong,” produced by the Grand Vision Foundation in 2021 during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Kathy started signing him up for things. “You need some kind of release,” she told him. “Have you ever thought of being Santa Claus?” Before he could answer, she’d volunteered him. He’s played Santa at San Pedro schools and on Meals on Wheels deliveries nearly every December since.
Signing him up for Santa was no fluke. There’s a word that surfaces multiple times during our interview when they tell these stories—Ken got “voluntold”—and over the years Kathy has voluntold him into more of San Pedro’s civic life than he’d ever have signed up for on his own. And he rarely pushes back.
RUNNING FOR A CAUSE
The Honorary Mayor of San Pedro is a Chamber of Commerce fundraising title, not a political office. As Kathy puts it, “It’s a figurehead position to promote businesses for the Chamber. It’s apolitical. He can’t fix your potholes.” Whoever raises the most for their chosen nonprofits wins the two-year post. Two friends recruited Ken at once—Linda Grimes for the San Pedro Waterfront Arts District and Mike Caccavalla for San Pedro Meals on Wheels—and he decided to run, drawn by how neatly the two causes fit together in his mind.
“Meals on Wheels is creating comfort for people inside their home,” he says, “and the Arts District was doing the same on the outside with the murals.”
When he told Kathy he wanted to run, she asked whether he understood what he was signing up for. “I’m like, ‘No,’” Ken laughs. “I said, ‘This is a piece of cake.’ Then I realized exactly what it was like.”
What it was like, according to Kathy, was “planning a wedding reception every week.” From day one, they aimed higher than the usual playbook: a pancake breakfast at the Wigwam with a Girl Scout troop serving; a three-band show at El Príncipe; a dinner where local author (and former SPT columnist) Anthony Pirozzi raffled off signed copies of his book; a charcuterie spread from former Honorary Mayor Pam Costa; a whiskey tasting at the home of Lucrecia and John Jacobson; and a ‘60s dance to close the run.
“It takes a village,” Ken says. “I depended on my friends a lot.”
The contest’s rule is simple: whoever brings in the most money wins. By the end of the run, Ken had raised $32,000 of the combined total of $48,000, making him the winner.
MOMENTS WITH THE MAYOR
Ken assumed the job was ceremonial. (“Ribbon cuttings,” he says, when asked what he expected.) It was Kathy, again, who pushed. “You’ve got this position. You know a lot of people,” she told him. “Why don’t we try and raise the bar so that going forward, it really makes a difference in the community?”
One result of this thinking became Moments with the Mayor, a video series in which Ken visits Chamber businesses and, whenever possible, actually does the thing—kicks off his shoes for yoga at Purre Bare, stretches with Dr. Ja’nae Brown at Physical Therapy San Pedro, and soaks his feet at 6th Street wellness sanctuary Veda Babe, run by two Grammy-nominated twin sisters. He’s most drawn to the histories hiding in plain sight.
He’s filmed roughly 30 businesses so far, with nearly 500 Chamber members to go, and demand has outrun supply.
“Ken created the concept for Moments with the Mayor,” says Elise Swanson, president and CEO of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce. “It’s become so popular that we now have a long waiting list of businesses hoping to be included.”
What sets him apart, she adds, is simple: “He doesn’t just lend his name to the role. He shows up, gets to know the business owners personally, and puts real time into initiatives that make a difference.” (The series lives on the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce’s Facebook and Instagram.)
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME
At 68, Ken is technically retired, though you’d never know it. He manages the Wigwam Social Hall, sits on the San Pedro Meals on Wheels board, works as a referral agent for Lee Williams’ LA Move Realty Group, emcees Music by the Sea, hosts the open mic at the Grand Annex, and scoops litter boxes at Pedro Pet Pals with Kathy several mornings a week.
“I like living here for the unexpected surprises,” he says. Everywhere he goes now, it’s like Cheers. “You want to go where everybody knows your name.” When Ken arrived for our interview at Sirens Java & Tea, I watched owner Yolanda Regalado greet him with a warm “Hi, Mr. Mayor,” proving it really is the case.
If Ken is the public face, Kathy is a public voice in her own right. A multi-generational San Pedran, she’s also become one of the most prolific commenters on San Pedro’s local Facebook pages (she posts as Kathy Moretti Fordiani Creighton). When it comes to Ken, she still marvels that a self-described “new kid” walked into a famously locals-only town and was embraced rather than run off.
“You stepped in not even knowing that that was a thing,” she tells him, “and it worked out for you.”
Ken shrugs it off. “I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by immersing myself here,” he says.
Ask him to describe San Pedro in a word, and he doesn’t hesitate: “Welcoming.” His message to the neighbors reading this is just as quick. “Get out and support. This is where you live. Go out and spread joy,” he says, knowing how it sounds. “This sounds so naive, but go out and be happy.”
As Swanson points out, none of it pays a dime. “What many people don’t realize is that Ken is a volunteer. Everything he does comes from the heart.”
Which may be the most San Pedro thing about him: that a kid from Connecticut who wandered in a decade ago now loves the place like he was born to it. “I’m still at the doorstep of something that’s great,” he says. spt
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