A brush fire with 10- to 20-foot flames scorched five hillside acres between the Palisades Bowl mobile home park and the Asilomar bluffs last Thursday, but a quick, area-wide response by firefighters contained the blaze in a little more than an hour. There were no injuries or structural damage, according to an LAFD spokesperson. “The helicopters knocked it down for us,” said Captain James Varney of Station 23 on Sunset, which was the first company to respond to the fire around 1:40 p.m. The helicopters arrived within 10 minutes of the call, Varney said. Three city helicopters and one county helicopter fought the blaze, flying to the Santa Ynez reservoir in the Highlands to fill their tanks, then taking turns spraying the water over the flaming hillside. The fire was caused by an overheated transformer in a power line which sent sparks into the brush. This occurred when DWP was working on power lines above the brush along the west end of the Asilomar bluffs above the Palisades Bowl, just west of Temescal Canyon Road and Tahitian Terrace. Seventeen fire companies from the L.A. Fire Department responded, as did two companies from Santa Monica, and four county work crews. The combination of heavy tinder-dry brush, deep terrain, and high winds endangered the homes above and below. “I could see flames threatening the top of the hill and the trailer park,” said Varney. Several companies were stationed at the top of the Asilomar bluffs near Porto del Mar to protect the homes just above the hillside. The fire came within 100 feet of Palisades Bowl, according to freelance photographer Jamie Budge, who has lived in the park for over five years. Budge said he first saw the smoke while riding on the beach bike path between 1 and 2 p.m. By the time he arrived home, he said he was surprised to see the fire fast approaching the mobile home park. “I got real worried when I saw that an ember had set a palm tree on fire. People were hosing down their roofs. If it wasn’t for the fire department, given the way the wind was blowing, it could have been a real disaster.” Firefighters stood on roofs hosing down a number of palm trees at the Bowl which had caught on fire. There was no structural damage at the Palisades Bowl, but there was damage to some outdoor carpeting and patio furniture. L.A. County camp crews cut a fire line all the way along the perimeter of the burned area, and were able to complete their work before dark. “We cut a little trench in case something rolled down, like a burning stump,” Varney explained. Some firefighters remained on watch into the night, in case there was something still smoldering that might have suddenly sparked. “I think we got lucky this was just brush,” Varney said. “It started with that little bit of sparking. People need to be very aware of anything out there smoking-hot exhaust, catalytic converters. And we need to keep our fingers crossed for rain.”

Repaving was completed on Sunset this weekend in the business district between Via de la Paz and Drummond, the first time this had been done for 18 years. On Saturday, the top level of asphalt was removed and broken up, to be replaced by fresh asphalt. The L.A. Bureau of Street Services plans to continue the Sunset resurfacing from Drummond to Brooktree in February.

Give the Palisades Dog Park a Chance

When the search for a dedicated dog park in Pacific Palisades began focusing on the infamous Occidental site along PCH, just west of Potrero Canyon, we had mixed reactions. On the down side, we recognized that the two-acre site would pose numerous problems: overlapping jurisdiction between Caltrans and the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks, the constant din of traffic, and the difficulty of driving down there from the Palisades. But we also knew that this rather forlorn location not only could be transformed into a landscaped dog park with ample room for parking, it was so far removed from any residential neighborhood, how could anybody possibly object? Well, naturally, we were wrong to underestimate how strongly Palisades homeowners will react to any perceived threat to their tranquility, as evidenced by the first letter in this week’s Letters to the Editor column. The author is a resident along Via de la Olas, the street that runs for five blocks along the bluffs directly above the proposed site, and her complaints have been reflected in a flurry of e-mails that surfaced from other residents in that area this past week. The battle began when Linda Renaud’s January 8 story (“Palisadians Dogged in Park Quest”) quoted Norm Kulla, acting chairman of the dog-park search committee, as suggesting that “Ideally, people would be able to access the site on foot from Temescal Canyon, the top of Potrero Canyon and the bluffs at Via de las Olas. There would also be car access from PCH.” This innocent observation drew a predictable response from neighbors, who envisioned swarms of dog owners parking along the Via bluffs and walking down the switchback trail to the dog park. By week’s end they were clamoring not only for preferential parking along Friends, Lombard, Swarthmore, Via de la Paz, Beirut and Mt. Holyoke, but urging one another to do whatever possible to stop the dog park from ever happening. This is a distressing turn of events that should never happen, and it won’t happen if the neighbors who are up in arms will realize that their objections are fueled by misconceptions and a lack of information. ??First of all, if the dog park location can indeed receive approval by whoever actually owns the land (the state or the city), a parking lot will be built adjacent to the park. ??Second, a fence will be built to ensure that dogs don’t chase rabbits or one another out onto PCH. ??Third, accessing the park along the roadway from Temescal Canyon shouldn’t bother anyone except the homeless who now try to live hidden away in the thick brush, and the one-mile hike from the Recreation Center down through Potrero Canyon to PCH will be too daunting for most people, especially those who simply want to let their dog run free every day or two. So that leaves the existing Via de las Olas trail that begins at Lombard and winds down to the highway. Here again, only the hearty dog owner will want to venture that time-consuming option, especially when he or she can simply drive down to the dog park (even though it means bucking PCH traffic). In reality, the Occidental site is the final option for dog-park advocates in this community. After studying and rejecting more than a half-dozen other possible locations, the search committee should be free to negotiate with various city departments and state agencies to work out a plan for this last patch of land-and they shouldn’t have to worry about fighting off the distant neighbors.

A Business Owner Recalls Some Old Village Friends

By JOHN F. HARRINGTON Special to the Palisadian-Post Ever since I can remember I’ve been in awe of fiction writers, those people who can create a book out of thin air. It certainly is not that easy. I know several such people, and their work is forged with copious blood, sweat, and tears. Such a person was Frank Gruber, who, with his wife, owned a book store on Antioch near my business on Sunset. She ran the bookstore, and Frank had an office in the back where he turned out many Western novels and screenplays. At that time, a particularly nasty, undisciplined kid lived here, and he took to stopping at the door of the bookstore and teasing Frank’s wife. Frank watched where the boy went after he tired of harassing Mrs. Gruber-he turned left on Swarthmore. When Frank had had enough, he enlisted the aid of his adult son. When next the punk bothered Mrs. Gruber, Frank and his son went out the back door and down the alley. They caught the kid and took him into Frank’s office and explained certain harsh facts of life to him. They may have kept him out of reform school. I never again saw him near the bookstore. One night I was listening to a late-night talk show when Frank and an American Indian were guests. The Indian reviled Frank fiercely, as though Frank alone was responsible for the bad treatment Indians suffered. Next morning I saw Frank as I was going to work, and said to him that I thought the Indian was going to shoot him when they left the studio. Frank laughed boisterously. “That was an act,” he said. “We’re very old friends, and he has been in every movie made from one of my books.” Another old friend was Ah Wing Young, who owned the House of Lee for many years. On his 60th birthday he gave a big party at the restaurant and invited everyone. As we left the party, I asked him if he would do the same thing next year. “No,” he said. “We Chinese celebrate a birthday only every ten years.” I had the pleasure (not to say experience) of playing golf with him the first and only time he played. It was the Optimist Club’s annual tournament at Riviera Country Club. Ah Wing used only a 5-iron for every shot, and scored 164, which must remain the all-time high at Riviera. It made for a long day, but he had a glorious time. The business community has changed drastically over the years I have been here. There was a time when rents were so cheap that someone wanting just to keep busy would open a little store, lose money for several years, quit, and give way to the next person. But that time is long gone. Merchants now are almost always pretty competent. They have to be. The rents are high and the price of commercial buildings, which rarely come on the market, are staggering. But business is good, and factoring that in, rents are not unbearable. A fact helping local business people is that the traffic is so congested everywhere that more people shop here to avoid having to go to Santa Monica or Westwood. We oldtimers who were lucky enough to buy homes here in the early 1950s, as I did for $17,000, have a huge paper profit, but nobody wants to leave. My first sight of California was when my amphibious ship came back after two years of action in the Pacific. I met my future wife, Celeste, when the Navy sent me to learn to be a 90-day wonder at Northwestern University’s Midshipman School in the heart of Chicago, at Chicago and Michigan Avenues, where the old Water Tower still stands. Celeste and I first saw Pacific Palisades in 1948 when we drove here from Chicago on our honeymoon. We knew immediately that it was the best place to live that we had ever seen, and made a pact to come back and settle here one day. The clincher was when our first daughter, Cathy, was born the day after Christmas with 11 inches of snow on the ground. Due to the weather I could not get to the hospital of our choice, and stopped at the first one I saw. Cathy was born on a gurney in the hallway. When things settled down I asked Celeste what I could get for her. “A ginger ale laced with two shots of bourbon,” she said immediately. We hoarded our money, and in 1954, with two children and one on the way, we loaded up our old DeSoto sedan and hit Route 66, and came here to stay. Celeste missed Chicago at first, so I urged her to go home for Christmas when Chicago was snowed in-a dirty trick but it worked. Soon her mom and dad would come out to visit during the winters, and eventually one of her brothers moved to Santa Barbara after visiting us several times. If I sound a bit smug about all this, it was at that time a daring move-and perhaps the smartest thing I’ve ever done. (John Harrington founded his camera store on Sunset in 1958. His daughter Cathy now owns and operates the store, where he still works most Saturdays.)

What surprised me about my one-day visit to Sacramento last week was realizing how far away it is from the Palisades, and I’m not talking about miles. Physically, from what I could see, the state capital is booming. There is major construction going on at the airport, the convention center was packed mid-week, and the bar in the lobby of my hotel was hopping at 2:30 in the afternoon. Traffic downtown was so bad it was easier to walk than to take a cab. While I found that the “suits” were not interested in talking about crime (they don’t have to: the CHP is everywhere), downtown felt as if it was on high alert, brimming in anticipation not of a terrorist attack but of an Arnold sighting at any time. Tourists visiting the capitol building, some from as far away as Japan, wanted to know if the governor was busy working in his office on the main floor. So did I. “Unfortunately, he was not in Sacramento that day, but in L.A. attending the World Affairs Council gathering, where he met with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. The governor reportedly asked both of them for more federal funds for California, at a time when President Bush is trying to rally support for his own agenda, including more defense funding and his proposed immigrant “guest worker” registration program. Invited to participate in the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s annual Governmental Affairs Day, I had the opportunity to get the latest scoop on Arnold and what is apparently going on from several sources, including recently elected Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Senate Majority Leader Don Perata, and Los Angeles Times political columnist George Skelton. Issues on their mind were term limits, redistricting, Proposition 56 (which would give legislators more budget power), and the governor’s Economic Recovery Bond (Proposition 57 on the March 2 ballot.) By the end of the day I felt like a capital insider. Not only did I have the early results of a poll indicating that the public is against the governor’s proposed bond initiative (44 percent No, to 35 percent Yes, with 21 percent undecided), I also knew where Arnold stays when he’s in town (the Hyatt across from the capitol), where he works out (the Capitol Gym), where he likes to eat (the Esquire Grill) and what he usually orders there (grilled salmon, $18). In his morning address to the 200 journalists who attended the CNPA event, Nunez (D-Los Angeles), who was elected speaker after only one year in the Legislature and officially takes over that position February 8, said the measure he uses when assessing government cuts is: “Is it fiscally and socially responsible? These are the questions that need to be asked every time.” While he did not explain how he reconciled that philosophy with the proposed 40 percent increase in some university fees, he did say that he found the new governor to be “very practical” and praised Schwarzenegger for wanting to “find a common ground” in a legislature dominated by Democrats. Perata (D-Oakland), who was elected in 1998, said that shortly after Schwarzenegger took office he welcomed him with three gifts: some wine, cigars and the Sopranos cookbook, recognizing Perata’s “Italian” roots. He amused the crowd when he quipped that he was the “powerful” chairman of the appropriations committee “until we went bankrupt!” On a more serious note, he said that as far as he could see the state has been “trying to manage growth” for the last 25 years, “ever since Proposition 13” diminished government coffers. On the question of term limits, Perata said we are now “all being governed by people who are either coming or going and everyone is looking for their next job,” which he did not view as a good thing. However, he did admit that term limits are what provided the opportunity for him to run in his district. What does he think should be done about them? “They should be longer. People like it once they get here [in Sacramento], whether they like to admit it or not.” Currently, an assemblymember can serve a maximum of three consecutive two-year terms, while senators can serve two consecutive four-year terms. The 120 elected officials in the legislature (40 are senators) all serve on working committees where issues are debated and voted on. Sometimes their work is overruled, either by the governor or by public initiatives, which Perata sees as a questionable process. He disdains “politics reduced to bumper stickers” and he does not think that “budget by the ballot box,”referring to the governor’s attempt to go directly to the people on the bond issue, is the best way to govern. Perata also said he is dubious of polls. “I don’t need a poll. I know what my constituents think. They tell me all the time.” On the proposed initiative that would allow budgets to be passed by a 55 percent legislative majority rather than the two-thirds now required (Prop. 56) Perata said he is “charmed by the thought that the public would want to give us more power than we have now” but “I don’t think it’s going to happen.” Senate Republican leader Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), a 12-year veteran of the Legislature, gave an analysis of why he thinks Gray Davis was recalled, saying that it basically came down to leadership, specifically the lack of it. His advice to Schwarzenegger: “Lead and the legislators will follow. And know when to say no, even to your own people.” Asked if he thought Republicans could take over both the Senate and the Assembly in the next decade, Brulte said: “Yes, it is possible.” He also thought redistricting should be taken out of the hands of legislators, which he sees as an inherent conflict of interest. Assembly Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakerfield) gave an interesting account of his first year in office. “What do you think they debate in Sacramento?” he asked. “Abortion? Guns?” He then recounted how he was surprised to find himself participating in protracted discussions on such things as cross-dressers (“Don’t ask!”), parrots (“You don’t want to know”) and the benefits of feng shui (“Don’t ask about that either”), which brought laughs from the audience. In the afternoon discussion on the state of California politics, the Times’ George Skelton, who has covered the Legislature for more than 40 years, was asked what was different in Sacramento since Governor Schwarzenegger took office. “What’s different is that it’s interesting. People are interested in state politics for the first time in many years. Even legislators are asking for autographs.” Skelton said that Schwarzenegger, like Ronald Reagan, can draw crowds wherever he goes. And like Reagan, the new governor knows how to take direction. “When his strategist says, ‘Let’s pay a visit to the local church,’ the governor says ‘At what time?’ Gray Davis would have said ‘What do you want to do that for?’ Davis never wanted to go anywhere.” Skelton thinks that Schwarzenegger’s popularity could be shorted-lived, depending on what happens on March 2. “Selling voters on $15 billion in long-term borrowing to pay for current government spending is going to be an uphill battle, considering that 44 percent are against the bond issue,” Skelton said, referring to the poll released that day to the media by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. “Is he going to sell the bond issue on Oprah?” asked Skelton. “In town hall-style meetings like he did during the election? On talk radio? What he needs is the support of Democrats.” Skelton said that, so far, he has had less direct access to Schwarzenegger “than to any other governor. I know that whatever he wants to do, he wants to do well, but I don’t know what his real priorities are. Does he have a plan B if the recovery bond fails in March? I don’t know. His entire political credibility is tied to his cuts and his pledge not to increase taxes. Whether he will or not remains to be seen. The problem right now, in this town, is that you can’t get two people to tell you the same thing. It’s difficult even to get figures verified. ” When I asked Skelton what he thought Maria Shriver’s role should be, amid reports that she has been working both behind the scenes in Sacramento while still trying to carve out a new role for herself at NBC, he suggested that of “a good wife. The governor needs her. And she wants to see him succeed.” Skelton noted that while the economy is already better than when Schwarzenegger took office, “the key for him is what happens on March 2.” This week, in fact, the governor himself was quoted in the L.A. Times as saying that if Proposition 57 and 58 both fail to pass, there will be “Armageddon cuts. Cuts in services that we don’t want to make.” Senate Majority Leader Don Perata (D-Oakland), speaking last week at the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s annual Governmental Affairs Day in Sacramento. Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton has covered state politics in Sacramento for over 40 years.