News Articles

It is 10 days past the filing deadline for City Council candidates, and School Board member Saundra Davis says she wanted, badly, to join the field.

She said it in early December, late December and again in January as the clock tippy-toed toward the Jan. 11 filing deadline.

She was not being coy, she was deadly serious, Ms. Davis said at yesterday’s Dr. Martin Luther King celebration at the Senior Center.

After a thousand anxious moments were shoehorned into her perspicacious daily life, how did she ultimately decide not to run when all her instincts were in the opposite direction?

The turning point — from promising to memorable — for yesterday’s four-star tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King at the Senior Center came 30 minutes in. The documentary producer Orlando Bagwell pushed up the sleeves of his casual gray sweater and announced to the second consecutive capacity crowd of 300, “Now let me tell you who I really am.”

Once the normally low-key, middle-aged Mr. Bagwell gently, but quite firmly, seized the wheel of the all-afternoon program, Dr. King could have been pardoned for sitting up in his grave and smiling.

He fled gracefully, swiftly from three straight bone-dry, copy-kat biographies of him that were archly read by three politicians who made presentations but did not know Mr. Bagwell from Albert Vera.

Denied its desire last week to authorize transfer of its students into the highly desirable Culver City Unified School District, the petitioning Ladera Heights Civic Assn. is settling in for a long and energetic campaign.

Speaking in calm, measured tones, the president of the association says so.

After 2 1/2 years of dueling with various educational agencies, Ronni Cooper told the newspaper this morning that they have only begun to fight.

When the state School Board Assn. upheld Los Angeles County’s of vote two years ago to deny an attempt to transfer Ladera students out of the heavily criticized Inglewood District, the upscale Ladera community considered it a blip, not a roadblock, and definitely not the final resort.

Part 2

[Editor’s Note: See Part 1, “Did Suspect in Armory Murder Plan to Take Away Girlfriend’s Baby?”Jan. 16.]

In his most recent telephone conversation with his mother from County Jail late yesterday afternoon, murder suspect Scott Ansman unloaded a bombshell.

In a sharply abbreviated manner, he disputed a central claim in the case.

Despite a growing mound of contentions to the contrary, the 35-year-old National Guard sergeant insisted that the pregnant dead woman Culver City police found at the National Guard Armory on Aug. 24, JoAnn Crystal Harris, was not his girlfriend.

[Editor’s Note: This is the third and final installment in a series describing Culver City’s doubleheader Martin Luther King Day birthday celebration on Saturday night at 7:30 and Sunday afternoon at 2 o’clock at the Senior Center, and profiling one of the major organizers, the producer Bill Wynn. Part 1, “Dr. King Day Headliner Is Rich in Cinematic Accomplishments,” Jan. 14, and Part 2, “Backstage with Bill Wynn Before Culver City’s King Day Program,” Jan. 15.]

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Bill Wynn, the Vice Chair of this weekend’s Martin Luther King Day celebration (culvercity.org), was a teenager in the U.S. Marines, far from his New Jersey home, in 1957 before he came face to face with deeply embedded racial prejudice.

[Editor’s Note: Dr. Anderson, a candidate for the City Council, will host an introductory fundraiser for her campaign on Sunday, Jan. 27, 2 to 5 p.m., at the Sunkist Park home of activists Madeline and Paul Ehrlich, 11472 Diller Ave., across from El Marino Park. 310.837.5692 or pmsha@aol.com.]

U.S. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Culver City) will be the featured speaker one week from Saturday, on Jan. 26, at the rededication of the American Gold Star Mothers’ Rose Garden, scheduled to take place at the Culver City Senior Center at 11:30.

State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Culver City) and State AssemblypersonKaren Bass (D-Culver City) have been invited to participate.

Part 1

Sgt. Scott Ansman’s pledge to take away their unborn child from his girlfriend — because she allegedly was not taking care of herself the way a pregnant woman should — precipitated the final fatal fight between the lovers on the afternoon of last Aug. 24, according to the murder suspect’s mother.

Additionally, the National Guard veteran portrayed the victim to his mother as “a party girl on drugs and alcohol who was leading a wild life.”

A medical source said today that “the lack of pre-natal care greatly increases the risk of birth complications for mother and child. It also increases the chance of mortality.”

In an anticipated outcome, the state of California last week rejected an appeal by a Ladera Heights parent group to overturn a Los Angeles County ruling that denied an attempt to transfer hundreds of Ladera students from the Inglewood Unified School District to the Culver City district.

The Sacramento decision last Thursday appeared to be clear-cut.

The State School Board Assn. cast 6 “no” votes and 2 “yes” votes. There were 2 abstentions.

Despite the supposed last-resort ruling, the case still is breathing.

[Editor’s Note: Second of three parts. See Part 1, “Dr. King Day Headliner Is Rich in Cinematic Accomplishments,” Jan. 14.]

Every producer who can spell

s-h-o-w b-u-s-i-n-e-s-s

yearns — nay, prays — for the kind of fantastic, unplanned break that tumbled like golden fairy dust this week into the laps of Bill Wynn and the rest of Culver City’s Committee for Dr. Martin Luther King Day this weekend.

First of two parts

Oliver Bagwell is the headliner in Culver City for this coming weekend’s back-to-back celebrations of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday at the Senior Center.

Since the accomplished Mr. Bagwell’s name mainly sparks a large question mark in Culver City and elsewhere, now you have an idea of why King Day is held — and widely deemed necessary — all across the country every mid-January.