When veteran City Atty. John Sanford Todd was told that the new community center at Mayfair Park was being named in his honor, he wondered for a moment whether he was still alive.

"You're usually deceased when they name something after you," said the 72-year-old legal veteran who has been Lakewood's only city attorney since its incorporation in 1954.

But honoring Todd while he can still enjoy it was exactly what the City Council had in mind.

"That man has done so much for this city. If anyone was to be honored, he richly deserved it," Councilman Larry Van Nostran said.

Jacqueline Rynerson, a former councilwoman who has known Todd since the 1950s, said that without him Lakewood "might never have happened."

As a young Lakewood attorney in the early 1950s, Todd was a leader in the fight to stave off annexation by nearby Long Beach, which coveted the residential community and its giant Lakewood Center Mall, which developers Ben Weingart, Louis Boyar and Mark Taper had created out of acres of bean fields.

Todd devised what was called the Lakewood Plan, which made incorporation feasible by enabling the new city to contract with Los Angeles County for certain services, paying the costs of what it received and avoiding the extra expense of establishing its own independent departments such as police and fire.

The contracting concept, which Todd said came "out of the blue," rapidly spread beyond Lakewood. Within four years, there were enough such cities to warrant forming the California Contract Cities Assn., which today includes 76 cities, 53 of them in Los Angeles County.

Sam Olivito, the association's executive director, said there are some contract cities in every state, and virtually every city that incorporates today does so on a contract basis. "They have no choice. The economy warrants it," he said.

Todd said he had no intention of starting such a movement in the early 1950s--he was just trying to protect his town.

"Most young people like myself didn't want to be swallowed up by Long Beach and left out on a limb. We were concerned about being a little drop in the bucket," he said. By forming a city, "we felt we could have better control over services by having our own elected council, rather than making the drive to the (Los Angeles County) Board of Supervisors."

Lakewood voters went to the polls on March 9, 1954, and approved incorporation by a 3-2 ratio.