[img]1|right|||no_popup[/img]One afternoon several years ago, I spent an hour and a half interviewing the sometimes-courtly Bernard Parks in his Crenshaw district office. Arrow-straight, he entered the room precisely at the appointed hour. This would be our first sitdown. He reminded me of the wished-for kindly father-in-law I never had. In the midst of a hard-fisted kerfuffle at the time with County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and L.A. City Council colleague Herb Wesson, he spoke in almost delicate tones, as if we were in the presence of the Mother Superior at a nearby convent. The Chief, as I have referred to him, whether face to face or ear to ear, sat casually at the head of a long table. I had to hunch forward to basket-catch his barely audible, but eagerly forthcoming, comments.
He struck me as an aging Father Knows Best type, a polished low-key oldtimer spraying his collected wisdom as you would whiffs of cologne.
Shlepping this slightly counterfeit profile, Mr. Parks could have gone on the old television show “What’s My Line?” No one would have deduced that the Los Angeles Times’s axe-handled narrative last Sunday of his six-year, revenge-fueled decline on the City Council was a brilliant bullseye.
It is no accident that Mr. Parks’s namesake son, his chief of staff, majors in childish, embarrassingly untethered diatribes. He could stand 10 years of daily courtesy training, and still have trouble getting along normal, easygoing people.
Bernard Jr. is not adopted.
His temper was not inherited from Nathaniel Hawthorne or Willard Waterman.
After the first interview with Mr. Parks Sr., I made a number of periodic calls to his office, and his response was cordial each time – until I wrote something critical. He suddenly became permanently unavailable. Last year, Bernard Jr., with whom I previously had a thin, nodding acquaintance, jumped on the line when I called his father. Bernard Jr. employed language that may not be accepted on the San Pedro docks.
I glanced out my window.
A not-quite-ripe red apple was lazily falling from an aged tree.
