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R on Loveridge’s first glimpse of Riverside came in 1964 from a passenger seat of a helicopter that had ferried him from the Los Angeles airport to a landing pad near Riverside’s Fairmount Park. Walking through the park, designed some 50 years earlier by the famed Olmsted Brothers, Loveridge admired the stately trees reflecting on Lake Evans and the blending of natural beauty with practical functionality. The people of Riverside care about this place, he thought.

The then-26-year-old Stanford doctoral graduate had a life-changing decision to make. Should he accept a position as a political scientist at the nation’s oldest public university, North Carolina at Chapel Hill? Or should he take a similar role at the fledgling University of California, Riverside, established just a decade earlier?

On a visit to the campus, Loveridge dined with UCR’s founding faculty members. He liked the small campus — serving about 3,500 students at the time — finding it reminiscent of his undergraduate days at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. But what sealed the deal was a long, persuasive letter from UCR professor and political scientist Francis “Hank” Carney that he received following his visit.

Loveridge arrived at UCR on a hot summer day in 1965. He parked his Volvo near the humanities building and got a parking ticket, even though the campus appeared to be deserted. He remembers those early years as framed by a backdrop of student protests for civil and women’s rights and opposition to the Vietnam War.

“I came across a student and asked her, ‘Why are you going to the protest?’” he recalled. “She looked at me and said, ‘If I don’t go, what would I tell my grandchildren?’”

At age 84, Loveridge continues to teach at UCR nearly 60 years later. He is now the university’s longest-serving faculty member.

Even with his six-decade tenure on campus, Loveridge is best known for his storied political career. With university approval, he served on the Riverside City Council for 14 years and then as mayor of Riverside for another 20. Through it all, Loveridge continued his work as a political science professor, teaching seminars on state and local government while on leave from UCR. As a professor, he brought his firsthand political experience to the classroom and his students into the corridors of government. By his own count, he helped some 3,000 UCR students secure internships in local, regional, state, and federal government.

While other UC campuses battled their host cities in land-use disputes, Loveridge fostered collaboration between Riverside and UCR. In the 1990s, for example, city support for the construction of the University Village mall near campus came with a requirement that the mall’s movie theaters double as classrooms. Under his watch, the UCR California Museum of Photography and the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts became part of the fabric of a revitalized downtown.

Loveridge’s political journey had humble roots, helping his mother, Doris, run for a school board seat by distributing fliers. As a high school student in Concord, California, Loveridge fondly remembers discussing school policies with his mother as she washed and he dried the dishes every evening. As the elected student body president at the University of the Pacific, Loveridge got called to the office of university president Robert E. Burns for holding forums that questioned the small university’s disproportional emphasis on football.

“Loveridge, what the hell are you doing?” he recalled Burns asking. “How dare you mess with football!”

Shortly after coming to UCR in 1965, Loveridge joined an urban coalition committee that sought solutions following the Watts riots that had occurred in summer. The following year, Loveridge took one of his classes to what he called the “political science laboratory” — the world beyond campus across the 60 and 215 freeway — to a campaign stop by gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan at an abandoned car dealership on University Avenue. Then famous as a movie and television star, the future president railed against student protestors at Berkeley and elsewhere, describing them as extreme radicals who needed to be dealt with harshly. Loveridge didn’t agree with Reagan but found him to be an articulate and captivating speaker.

“I’m standing in the back as he spoke, and some woman next to me rolled up her sleeve and said, ‘Look, goosebumps,’” he said.

In 1968, Professor Carney, now good friends with Loveridge, served as the Riverside County chair of Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign. “Personally and emotionally committed” to the Kennedy campaign, Loveridge watched Kennedy’s motorcade drive through Riverside’s East Side as people cheered before the candidate spoke to a packed audience at the Riverside Auditorium. After the speech, Loveridge and his wife Marsha met Bobby and Ethel Kennedy in front of the Mission Inn. Bobby Kennedy reached out and shook Marsha’s hand and wished her luck. Just days later, Kennedy won the pivotal California primary but was assassinated after finishing his victory speech at a Los Angeles hotel.

“So, our last images of Bobby Kennedy are those of the Mission Inn and him reaching out his hand,” Loveridge recalled in a UCR oral history project from the 1990s.

The tragic event did not leave him disillusioned — far from it. In the 1970s, after moving to a home near Mount Rubidoux in downtown Riverside, he found the city’s leadership lacking. The City Council, for instance, had voted to remove downtown parking meters but left up the unsightly metal poles. The downtown mall was all but dead, except for a few restaurants “that you probably didn’t want to go to,” he said. So, in 1979, he ran for the City Council seat that serves the downtown area. The professor-turned-candidate knocked on some 4,000 doors and got an education he didn’t quite expect.

“You’re essentially tutored at every single door that you knock on,” he said. “You’re talking to people, their families, and they have hopes and notions about what makes a good neighborhood and what makes a good city.”

Loveridge won and held Riverside’s Ward 1 seat for three four-year terms until 1993, when he won a citywide election to become mayor. A fixture of the seventh floor of City Hall, Loveridge was re-elected mayor another four times before stepping down in 2012 to head UCR’s Inland Center for Sustainable Development and continue his work as a professor. He never lost an election.

As a city official, Loveridge strove to bring together people with diverse backgrounds but common goals to solve problems through civil deliberations. No community, he said, is better than the collective force of its neighborhoods. So, he worked to uplift neighborhoods by increasing pride, identity, and security through the creation of neighborhood councils and crime watch groups. A decades-long effort to revitalize downtown Riverside began with the creation of the Riverside Downtown Association, a coalition of business owners, downtown workers, property owners, and city representatives, among other stakeholders.

A pivotable success was the reopening of the historic Mission Inn in 1993, which is now a downtown anchor of culture, commerce, tourism, and the venue for the annual Festival of Lights, attracting thousands during the holiday season. The hotel had been closed for eight years prior, surrounded by a chain-link fence, and, before then, was plagued by decades of mismanagement under both private and city ownership.

It would be one of several downtown successes. When a bank abandoned what is now the California Tower building, the city acquired the property and leased it to the state, bringing in several commercial businesses and eateries serving more than a hundred state employees, among others. The city also successfully marketed a portion of downtown as a judicial center, which involved Riverside County renovating and building new superior and family court facilities; the state building a division of the 4th District Court of Appeal; and the federal government building district and bankruptcy courthouses. These and other improvements helped Riverside win a coveted All-America City award in 1998.

Loveridge’s political career, however, then took a violent turn. In early October of 1998, as revitalization efforts were underway, a former city parks worker walked into a morning Redevelopment Agency meeting at City Hall and opened fire with a 9-millimeter handgun.