Having apparently operated outside of the city’s legal boundaries for the three or more years it has been in business, the little-known non-profit Star Prep Academy will come face to face with its judges for the first time at Monday’s Redevelopment Agency meeting at 7 p.m. in Council Chambers. Does the fascinating school merit compassion or punishment for evidently not complying with city rules and regulations? The low-profile Academy leads such a secretive existence, according to City Hall, that no one there knew about it until long after it had opened. Specific dates are shrouded in mystery. City Hall says the tiny, unusual school that emphasizes the primacy of the environment just sprouted up one day. No city permits, no notice, no announcement — then or now. Officially, the Academy did not exist. The city says it did not even know about the unusual school “for highly, highly gifted students” until last summer. This was at least two years after the Star Prep Academy was formally organized and fully five years after it admittedly began accepting students.
Drollinger Made Sense of an Oxymoron
In an age when cynicism is celebrated, hardly any modern man ever has been described as a philanthropic developer, a characterization many would call oxymoronic. Howard Drollinger, who personified the blue-collar city of Westchester more than any figure in its history, was a rare perfect fit. Demonstrably he was the largest landowner in Westchester throughout his life, and by reputation at his death, he was the city’s most generous citizen. Mr. Drollinger died of lung cancer last Sunday at 84 years old. Better known personalities nurtured airport-adjacent Westchester in its earliest days, the 1930s and ‘40s. Choosing the site of a onetime hog farm — at what now is the intersection of Manchester and Sepulveda — Fritz Burns, the most famous realtor of his day, built masses of private homes as the aerospace industry began its historic ascent.
The Invisibility of the Drollinger Legacy
In the Chapel of the Sacred Heart on the Loyola Marymount campus, a great man was to be eulogized this morning, Howard Drollinger, the father of the city of Westchester. He died of lung cancer last Sunday at home in Playa del Rey. The last time I saw him, more than a year ago, he was 83 years old and still reporting to his Sepulveda Boulevard office every day. Unlike many men of his advanced age, Mr. Drollinger did not come in to putter, to make an appearance so that the girls in the office, or other employees, would be impressed. Recalling the work ethic he learned as boy and man from his mother Ella late in the Depression Era when the family was living in the Fairfax District, he came to the office to produce.
Make Mine Gypsy Jazz in the Courtyard
Jazz is on the menu. The John Jorgenson Quintet will present hot gypsy jazz music on Thursday evening at 7 as this week’s headliner in the Summer Sunset Music Festival concert series in the Courtyard of City Hall. Mr. Jorgenson, the featured guitarist, was a founding member of the Desert Rose Band and the Hellecasters. For six years he was a member of Elton John’s band. Singers ranging from Barbra Streisand to Bonnie Raitt to Earl Scruggs have sought out Mr. Jorgenson’s guitar work.
Culver Crest Slide: The Quiet Tragedy Continues
The startling facts are that fully a year and a half after a disastrous hillslide triggered by a rainstorm, the five families in the higher-browed Culver Crest section of Culver City who were routed from their homes still are displaced. Their eventual return has been complicated by a jumbled network of lawsuits, against agencies and against each other. For City Hall, contacts are routed through the attorneys of the homeowners. Public Works Director Charles Herbertson tells thefrontpageonline.com that he cannot project a date when the owners may be allowed to come home. With the next rainy season not far away, the tragic hillside intersection of Tellefson Road and Bernardo looks like a scene out of Beirut. Since the morning of The Rainstorm, the hillside, said Mr. Herbertson, has remained pretty much untouched by human hands. What you see today is what you would have found in the beginning. In the muted glow of this morning’s dawn, the nude hillside that separates the three abandoned homes on top from the two abandoned homes below looks as if a prankster grabbed a boxfull of toys and turned it upside down. Whatever Mother Nature is capable of belching seems to be lying askew, defiantly, on the slanted, grungy ground. On this overcast morning, everything about the Tellefson-Bernardo intersection was dreary. As a tacked-on annoyance, the street up the hill has been closed off since a daunting, wet morning in February of last year when it all began.
Pete Pan and the Gang
The sweetest moment during the preliminaries at Monday night’s City Council meeting came when Dr. Sharon Zeitlin stepped to the microphone. Her mission was to hype interest in Saturday evening’s grandly climactic Peter Pan extravaganza at Veterans Park, starting at 5:30. In the last two summers, I have come to associate the doctor — she of the extremely long black hair — with more idyllic times, the chautauquas that our grandparents participated in at the beginning of the past century. At country estates or a large hotel in the countryside. The quiet, colorful settings were shamefully beautiful. Tall green grass surrounded by hundreds of acres of lush greenery, dense woods that sunlight barely could penetrate, and warm, cloud-dimpled skies. Ladies in long hair and ground-length dresses, light-suited gentlemen in starched white shirts, neckties, moustaches and perhaps straw-boaters. Aside from socializing, the occasions lent themselves to literary readings, plays, political and literary oratory laced with singing performances. The kinds of days that make you wish you had been there.
Kuehl? Not Exactly
One of my lesser moments in August occurred last Saturday morning in my synagogue. My wife introduced me to a couple who immediately conveyed the impression they were obnoxious. Bingo. Three sentences later, the wife said, “We just love our senator, Sen. Kuehl. She used to be on the Dobie Gillis show, you know.” Obnoxity obviously can strike at unexpected times. I wanted to parry, “Are you kidding?” This not only would not have been cool, it would have sparked further comments. Hurriedly pondering my options, I considered crumbling to the floor, as I did one time when a speech was nearing that I didn’t want to make. I thought of excusing myself because my wife was calling, except she was only six feet away and there would have been a ring of extreme insincerity to my insincere tone. A third option was to be perfectly earnest and explain that my personal supply of obnoxious friends and acquaintances currently was at capacity. I could not take on two more obnoxes. Through sheer good timing by my religion, the rabbi signaled it was time for silence and a blessing, an opening that I used to vacate the room.
John Weaver Letter: A Moment for Eloquence
Less than a month after an emergency brought him back into office, the once and present President of the Police Officers Assn. demonstrated last night in Council Chambers that he has not lost his touch. Leading a union — especially of tough police officers — calls for a strong sense of timing and the judicious use of flair. Jim Raetz managed to pull off both when he stepped to the speaker’s podium at the outset of the City Council meeting. Mr. Raetz’s union is in the midst of molasses-sticky contract negotiations with City Hall 14 months after the last union agreement expired. The thorniest condition of the latest proposal is for all members of the union, including retirees, to begin paying 5 percent of their healthcare benefits. Mr. Raetz has said this works a hardship on many retirees, especially those officers who retired 20 or more years ago. Last night he sought to make his point civilly, economically, with drama but not histrionics, all without antagonizing the City Council.
Thank Heaven for Little Dogs That Dont Talk
It probably is a good thing dogs can’t talk. Otherwise, some humans would be embarrassed by what their house pets would have to say about the peculiar behavior of their masters and mistresses. After watching the way assorted parties of upper and medium ranks comported themselves on Monday night in Council Chambers while debating where dogs on leashes may roam in this community, the four-legged observers of the City Council surely would have come away as confused as the more sophisticated two-legged observers. The Council, at great length, finally got it right, but not before a bucket of emotional blood had been spilled.
Of Mr. Bubar and Ms. Davisxx
Ah, the sweet irony of Stew Bubar’s latest qualitative contribution to the public discourse. The irony was sizzling when Mr. Bubar, one of the most provocative members of the School Board in Culver City, sat down to craft a well-constructed essay for last week’s edition of the Culver City Star. Speaking authoritatively as a longtime teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Mr. Bubar presented cast-iron arguments why the thuggish Mayor Wrong of Los Angeles should not be allowed to seize control of the LAUSD in his panting march toward ultimate power in the United States. I trust that Mr. Bubar, as a loyal Teachers Union member, has seen the same information that I have — that Mayor Wrong is a better bet to succeed in his coarse course toward becoming czar of LAUSD than October is to directly follow September this year. Natural opponents of Mayor Wrong’s naked grab are collapsing the way athletes do when the fix is in. Last Thursday, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, sensing the train was going to leave with the Chamber underneath it, hollered “me, too,” and desperately lurched for the greasy coat-tails of Mayor Wrong. But I digress.