The Ballerina Clown Turns 25

Above the entrance to the CVS Pharmacy is a sight 

that will persuade you to get back on your meds.

RoadsideAmerica.com

By Delores Hanney

It’s as emblematic of Venice as Mickey Mouse ears are of Disneyland. The 30-foot tall jester in a tutu is peculiar, to be sure, but its consummate oddness somehow makes it a suitable avatar for this its unconventional hometown. 2013 is the silver anniversary of its flamboyant reign.

It stands there at Main Street and Rose Avenue, a full story above the sidewalk on its kitty-corner Renaissance Building perch. Designed by Santa Monica architect Johannes Van Tilburg and built by first owner Harlan Lee, the building is home to commercial enterprises – such as the CVS Pharmacy – to pricey condos, vacation rentals, and housing for low income seniors; in addition to its function as way-visible display space for the kitschy Ballerina Clown.

Created by Jonathan Borofsky in his Topanga Canyon studio, the wiggy sculpture is constructed of aluminum, steel and painted fiberglass. It was fitted with an electric motor that allowed the right leg to kick back and forth – ballerina fashion – until the mechanism was turned off in order that the hum not be a botheration to the lawyer lady living right behind it. Along with the tutu, its quirky ensemble includes a pair of white elbow-length gloves that some say look more like washing-the-dishes gear than glamour wear. Two barely noticeable tiny red tears appear to slowly slide down its face.

The sculpture was commissioned by the aforementioned Harlan Lee. Borofsky offered him three suggestions: one traditional, one less so, the third – and chosen one – clearly over-the-top. It therefore conformed to what Borofsky termed Lee’s “flair for stirring things up.” Demonstrating success for this very thing, it seeded a whole bunch of controversy including a petition to have it removed circulated by a little assembly of aspirant taste arbiters. The petition was countered by a review written by L.A. Times art critic, Christopher Knight, reeking with respect for the statue.

The piece is hardly typical of the artist’s work, which tends to be spare, streamlined and dynamic. Using names like I Dreamed I Could Fly or Human Structures, Borofsky has spawned ginormous public installations around the world: in Switzerland, France, Germany, England, Norway and Canada; in Japan and South Korea and China – not to mention all the stuff in private collections – thus staking out for himself a claim to art big kahunaship. Weirdly enough, he was not so famed here in the United States till around 2004 when a temporary installation of Walking to the Sky went up in New York’s Rockefeller Center.

Born in Boston in 1942, his interest in art began percolating to the surface early on: a predictable symptom of his DNA given that his mother was a gallery owner, an artist and an architect. Dad was artistic, too, but his field was music. As a child Jonathan Borofsky was especially inspired by a Paul Gauguin painting that hung at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; well, less by the image than its title: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? It triggered in him philosophical musings he would glom onto as the overarching theme of his future work, in which he seeks to explore these heady, meaning-of-life questions.

He received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, an MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, between which he sandwiched in study at the Ecole de Fountainebleu in France. In 2006 Carnegie Mellon conferred an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts.

Early in his career, he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Later he taught at the California Institute of the Arts, living, then, in a small funkadoodle apartment on the Venice boardwalk, there to soak up – he told me – the lightness, brightness and energy so different from the more muted tones of the east. Though unimpressive, the dwelling boasted a beach view from the window and outside the building’s front entrance the eccentric accumulation of amusement makers and vendors swirled and twirled like organisms in a tide pool.

The Ballerina Clown was always a salute to those gaudy habitués of Ocean Front Walk and – more deeply – a psychological “resolution of opposites.” At 25 familiarity with the bi-gendered statue and greater societal acceptance of sexuality as a continuum have reduced some of its original outrageousness factor. Today its symbolism may even be seen to have broadened, transmogrifying the sculpture into a visual celebration of diversity: that quintessential element at the core of the Venice, California experience.

Getting Around

By Delores Hanney

Always flush with imaginative ideas and the cash to fund them, Abbot Kinney – the milieu-maker of Venice, California – liked to do things with a flair. One of the most winning notions he brought into being, for his Italian-inspired settlement by the sea, was a pair of miniature trains. They were here from the very beginning in 1905, chugging over arching concrete bridges that spanned the canalways while circumnavigating the town site with frequent regularity. Initially they were tasked as the mode of transportation for schlepping prospective buyers of real property to check out the development’s offerings. Before long locals and vacationers were big enthusiasts of the five-cent service as well.

Even as Kinney’s ambitious Venice-of-America was still about the business of rising out of a marsh, he contracted with civil engineer John J. Coit to supervise the building of his Venice Miniature Railway made up of components similar to Coit’s own diminutive train then causing gladness at Eastlake Park in Los Angeles. Kinney commissioned two of them. Built by the Johnson Machine Works out of L.A. to a one-third scale, each consisted of a black Prairie-type engine and five 12-passenger cars that sometimes offered an al fresco ride, other times carried travelers beneath a fringed, awning-like top. Each one of the cars sported a lion’s head relief on the sides. And for a time, the dashing little engine from Coit’s Eastlake train lent a hand in Venice as a substitute.

By way of enrolling his younger kids into a kind of participation in the beachside resort venture, Kinney’s nine-year old son Carlton was listed as president of the Venice Miniature Railway on its State of California incorporation documents. Three years older, son Inne,s was named as Chief Engineer, though John Coit actually operated the railroad early on. Jauntily suited up in appropriately impressive uniforms, the boys were trotted out to take bows on ceremonial occasions or for visitations by dignitaries. One such event – in 1908 – was the gathering of 140 midwestern members of the National Association of Railroad Agents, at which time the annual inspection of Kinney’s Miniature Railway was executed for their edification.

A dog showed up one day and rapidly self-appointed himself as the mini railroad’s mascot. Buster Braun was a Spitz that had become dissatisfied with the situation at home after his people brought home a newborn baby. Hanging out at the roundhouse and riding atop the tender as the train percolated around town – at a normal cruising speed of 20 miles per hour – apparently alleviated the loving-attention deficit the new home conditions caused and gratified his breed’s natural herding instinct hereby undertaken, nontraditionally, with a rumbling mechanical assist.

Over the years the railway suffered a few modest catastrophes. Train number two smashed into an unseen-till-too-late grocery wagon witlessly left on the tracks. A boiler explosion took out engine number one as it was parked at the Windward Avenue turnaround. On another occasion a fire at the roundhouse caused heat damage to both engines when flames engulfed the building. The passenger cars were successfully hauled off to a safe spot. None of these resulted in human harm but a horse was hurt in the train-wagon collision.

On a more ebullient note, the miniature railway was a not unusual element in Kinney’s recurrent hosting of orphans for a day of jolly good fun in Venice: amusement-parking, hunting Easter eggs or whatever. The pintsized trains performed as a prop in train robbery spoofs carried out by passels of comely beachwear-clad cuties.

Though lacking the current tug of nostalgia blocked by their au courant status in Kinney’s time, trains still ranked high in appeal factor. Miniature trains, then as now, packed a special cachet. The photogenic images of the little Venice trains adorned copious quantities of postcards that were sent to friends and family by happy visitors and residents alike. They made tasty bait for attracting even more tourists and new dwellers to Abbot Kinney’s dream, where their own sprightly presence added to the environment’s inimitable élan.

They breathed their final chug as a Venice, California feature in February of 1925.

A Beach Head Write About the Beachhead

By Carol Fondiller

Frankly, I feel as if I’m viewing the decades of the Free Venice Beachhead’s existence on old celluloid film. Jumping and bumping with splats, cracks and flashes. Cutting through images that have been spliced together with cellophane tape being fed through the old moviola of my brain.

Who was that guy with the Jesus-length hair who was a master of lay-out? Can’t remember his name. And John Haag – “this paper is a poem” and through the four decades of its publication, there were poems in every issue of the Beachhead.

The remaining Beats watched with tolerant condescension as the collectives struggled to put this together.

The margins were never even, mis-prints, mistakes were always in abundance. Somehow, no matter now hard we tried to eradicate those cussed little errors, they’d pop up to be forever immortalized in print. Some contributors were really deeply hurt by what they considered negligence and disrespect for their articles. My thought was we gave voice to the voiceless. There were and are many voices in Venice who speak and are ignored. The Beachhead enabled those voices to be heard by a larger group than just their allies.

The Beachhead grew from a bothersome little rag to an influential voice in the community. Truly, the Beachhead worked locally and thought globally. The Beachhead was founded by the Peace and Freedom Party, but except for a few years, welcomed even political contributors to its pages. From polemics and theory to explanations of various laws and regulations and , of course, poems and stories to pro-renter and women’s movements, and anti-war activities, if it was happening locally, it was reported in the Beachhead.

The Beachhead ALWAYS had points of view. It reported events from a distinct populist, what is called leftist point of view. The Beachhead tried to be accurate in its reporting of facts. But it has always been pro majority of the people who inhabit this little blue planet, i.e., the low income folks who are struggling to stay housed, the people who are unhoused and the people who’ve lived in the area for years, but are being displaced because they don’t have $$$ to stay in their community because they have been told by landlords, the city, the state, etc., that they don’t count. (There are still renters who believe that they don’t have a right to voice their opinion, if any, about the direction of their community. The Beachhead still has a lot of work to do regarding consciousness raising about this).

Speak of consciousness raising, the Beachhead raised awareness about stalking and the vulnerability of the people to the dangers of this highly romanticized dangerous activity in a series of articles about the terror and disruption inflicted on a respected member of Venice and a collectivite on the Beachhead.

We used to lay out the Beachhead on the floor using glue, scissors, Xacto Blades and press tape. Oh, who could forget presstype – my nightmare. I don’t know who still uses it,  if it exists anymore – it consisted of a sheet of plastic with letters that are pressed down individually onto the paper, rubbed in, and a headline was created. That is, unless  parts of the letter fell off, and then the handy dandy black pen would come into play. My headlines were almost always crooked – sort of like a humpback whale swimming through the print.

When the Beachhead first came into being there were no computers. In the mid 70s the holy grail of print technology was an IBM Selectric Composer. I believe Moe Stravnezer and Linda Lucks were the proud owners. I never advanced to more than pen and pencil, having been intimidated at an early age with the typewriter ribbon and indentation. I am forever grateful to the people who slaved over my chicken tracks and transcribed them into print.

Now it is zipped through the computer straight to the printer, who mates with the disk and births many thousands of Beachheads.

The Beachhead has gone through many collectives and many changes, but the message remains the same: PEACE AND FREEDOM.

4 More Decades!

The New York Times and the L.A. Times try to be objective; however, in the face of injustice and greed there is no room for objectivity, but there is fairness. Thank Goodness the Beachhead hasn’t “balanced” discrimination with points of view from the KKK to balance out the view of racial equality.

There, I hope I’ve been clear.

 

This article is re-printed from the 40th Birthday Anniversary of the Beachhead in the December 2008 issue. 

Carol Fondiller (June 22, 1936 – January 9, 2010), pictured above, was the one and only Queen of Venice. She was one of the founders of the Free Venice Beachhead in 1968 and continued to be one of its wittiest, most prominent writers for the next 41 years.

this paper is a poem…

By Delores Hanney

Singing with the promise of passion, these five simple words composed the opening sentence of the Free Venice Beachhead’s inaugural issue, of which 10,000 copies were let loose upon the realm on December 1, 1968.   It was the golden age of the “underground” press, those years of love-ins, groovy music, psychedelics and flower power, of peace marches, draft dodgers, student uprisings and Democratic National Convention snarling; when fevered activists so raucously made their anti-establishment sentiments public.

And doing so changed everything!

The Berkeley Barb (1965-1980) may have been the earliest, the loudest and indubitably the most prominent, but no other counterculture rag – mainstream press either, come to that – could brag of such a strong poet’s contingent as the Beachhead; not to imply that a vigorous dissident factor wasn’t fully engaged. Nor was any other alternative press cooked up on a completely volunteer basis as the Beachhead was and is, governed by a fluid “collective” staff of equalitarians.

The first four-page issue commenced pretty gently: defining its purpose, “to create community;” inviting participation, “the next poem you read may be your own;” recounting, briefly, the beginning of Venice-of-America. Thus warmed up, it made good on its claim of an establishment-challenging persuasion with articles about police harassment, opposition to a Master Plan that took no account of whom the planning was for and cheerleading for secession from Los Angeles. Binding it together – like duct tape – was a scattering of local ads with downscale, wild-child panache.

Steve Clare climbed aboard the Beachhead brigade with the second issue. Additional high profile concerns, during his three-year tenure, were (of course) the Vietnam War and rallying support for the objectives of the Peace and Freedom Party.

Community organizing under the banner of “Free Venice” – an aim not necessarily synonymous with advocating succession – the Beachhead successfully promoted into existence the Free Venice Food Co-op, and the Venice Survival Committee, to provide people with information about their rights. Backing “Save the Canals” activities brought about a restoration on East canal that became a community center, embellished with a terraced bank of cheery flowers, housing a community switchboard and a communal vegetable garden.

During this era, Clare recollects, the Beachhead partnered with Echo Park’s, Common Ground, to have their separate publications printed as one – since it was cheaper that way – taking bimonthly turns to de-mingle the amalgamation for distribution. For this task or to review submissions – with a bias towards showcasing the community’s creativity and diversity – or to lay out the next issue, collective members gathered at the Peace and Freedom office in front of artist Earl Neuman’s studio. In 1970, the legal aid office became their meeting spot, thanks to a new connection with its director, Marge Buckley. After duties were dispatched, they repaired to the Saucy Dog on Pacific for a bit of collectivee bonding.

With a stint at The Great Speckled Bird – the alternative newspaper out of Atlanta – already a mark of merit upon his curriculum vitae, Larry Sullivan moseyed into town to join up with the Beachhead, an affiliation running through the 1980s. Development was a major concern during this period, especially the threatened development of the Ballona Wetlands, the critical rest stop for migrating birds that may have traveled hundreds of miles before dropping in for a snack and a snooze.

He remembers many successful Beachhead fundraising events, often organized in cahoots with kindred groups like the VOP Food Co-op, or the Venice Community Housing Corporation. But perhaps mostmemorable, ironically, was the dance party at The Church of Ocean Park, one Valentine’s Day, when just four folks showed up due to a rain storm of record-making proportions.

In his self-appointed role as institutional memory keeper, Sullivan has arranged for the archiving of his collection of 20 years worth of the Beachhead, along with a bunch of years of The Great Speckled Bird, within the non-civil rights portion of the progressive archives at Georgia State University.

Today, idealism leaking from practically every syllable, between 8,000-10,000 copies are printed each month, depending on the budget, to be dispensed by subscription and at approximately 125 pick-up points around Venice. Confronting issues such as the threat to the WPA-built post office or the attempt by the City of Los Angeles to impose a midnight curfew on the beach and Ocean Front Walk, the Beachhead still radiates sass and righteous anger. Its tone remains urgent. Poets and poetry and passion retain their positions of eminence.

Book Review: The Lure of a Land by the Sea

By Greta Cobar

Long-time Venice historian Delores Hanney did it again: published yet another wonderful Venice memoir, made up of over thirty “vignettes,” as she calls them. With grandiose vocabulary and in what could be called poetic prose, she tells funny and insightful stories from the times of Abbot Kinney’s arrival in Venice all the way to more recent events that long-timers might remember.

Venice is “the spot just before one falls off the edge,” according to Hanney, and her latest book, The Lure of a Land by the Sea, illustrates Venice characters and stories that most definitely have not just an edge, but an importance and a relevance that break through the geographical boundaries of what we call Venice.

The book starts, appropriately, with the beginning of our community, which established the way we do things by letting a coin toss decide where Venice of America was going to materialize. It could have been in Ocean Park, you know. “Abbot Kinney was a dreamer, and Venice-of-America was his most vivid dream,” writes Hanney. She goes on to give details of Kinneyland, such as the philosophy movement it was based upon,  which was meant to foster a sense of contentment, cohesiveness and belonging, “inviting surrender to a felicitous lifestyle.”

“To see Venice is to live!”, Kinney is quoted as exclaiming after he rearranged the marshland with a lagoon, canals, imported gondolas, singing gondoliers, even Italian pigeons.

Ever wondered who introduced Mardi Gras to the Venice scene? Read The Lure of a Land by the Sea to find out about Arthur Reese, “the first black businessman in Venice,” who was originally from Louisiana and for who “it would have been unnatural” not to come to Venice. The book beautifully describes his journey from shining shoes to cleaning houses, to winning the first prize in the Tournament of Roses, to assuming the operation of the Venice Boat and Canoe Company. And yes, he is credited with bringing Mardi Gras all the way from Louisiana to Venice. Read that vignette for inspiration!

It was August 1, 1905, in Venice, California, that octogenarians Susan B. Anthony and Caroline Severance were speaking about woman suffrage to the 3600 audience members that filled the local auditorium. “Nothing is impossible to organized womanhood,” Severance is quoted as saying. Indeed, on October 10, 1911 California became the sixth state in the nation in which women could vote, nine years before women’s voting rights would go national. Hanney proudly states in her book that “as the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in California is celebrated, these days more women than men are casting ballots.”

From inspirational stories of nation-wide relevance to funny anecdotes that might make you start laughing out loud as you are quietly reading, go on to the next chapter, “lions & tigers & bears, oh my!” to Al G. Barnes Circus and Wild Animal Zoo coming to Venice and “those times when elephants or camels escaped to thunder about on the pier and the streets.” From that story go on to the next, this time not about animals running wild among the humans, but about a well-known celebrity swimming with a certain dolphin every Sunday for nearly a year, “happily as a pair of sea otter sisters.”

Wanna know about the beginning of Harley motorcycle’s presence in Venice? In The Lure of a Land by the Sea, Hanney divulges how a 300-mile racing track was built in our 3-mile long community, and how Otto Walker claimed Harley’s first national win at that very race.

No, it’s not all happy stories, and December 18, 1929 was not a happy day for Venice. Oil was discovered offshore and within two years 450 wells were erected, “uglifying the once lovely shoreline, fouling sand and surf and the toes that might touch them with despicable tar-y blobs,” Hanney writes. To make matters worse, the money did not stay in Venice, but was redirected to fund a fishing pier somewhere else. Read the book to find out where.

After laughing out loud to being saddened, the reader of The Lure of a Land by the Sea might find himself shedding a tear while reading about President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066, which committed 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent to various internment camps. “The Japanese Venetians were ordered to gather, with only what they could carry, on April 25, 1942, at Venice and Lincoln Boulevards where they waited with quiet dignity in a long, long line before being hauled off by the busload to Manzanar, 230 miles northeast of L.A., high in the Sierra Mountains,” Hanney writes. Not coincidentally, just as we now have Suzy Williams as our beloved Songbird of Venice, so back then they had Mary Kageyama as Songbird of Manzanar.

“the beat of a bongo, the howl of a poet” is the title of the vignette about the Venice Beat Movement, which Hanney describes as “free of the inhibiting bondage of the conventional worldview … under the influence of this substance or that.” You might know about Larry Lipton and Stuart Perkoff, both of whom played a significant part in the Beat Movement, but did you know that there were not one, but two gathering spots called “Venice West”? Hanney gives details and locations for both.

The Lure of a Land by the Sea also tells the story of our Venice Poet Laureate Philomene Long, and how she jumped the covent wall of St. Joseph’s of Carondelet in Los Angeles to be “spirited off – in the dark of night – in a get-away car driven by sister Pegarty.” Hanney goes on to explain that leaving the covent did not represent an abandonment of spirituality, or even a rejection of Catholicism, and goes on to reveal Philomene’s new self-identification.

Nowadays one might think that surfing is inherent to Venice. However, as Hanney discloses in her book, the first surfer here was actually brought from Hawaii as a lure to potential buyers. He came here with his 200-pound, eight-foot-long wooden board of his own design.

Although many may have followed, the first Venice snake charmer was Carroll Shelby himself, who opened his Cobra manufacturing plant right here in Venice. His official mascot was a live cobra, which somehow escaped for a few days, and Shelby took drastic action upon its return. Read the book to find out what, and why Shelby moved out of Venice when his business went from a startup of nothing in 1962 to a $16 million company in ’65.

Hanney’s vignettes abound, entertain, inform and mesmerize. In “painting the town” she writes about Rip Cronk, who “came upon a mural-painter-seeking ad placed by SPARC” upon his arrival in Venice. The first mural he painted in Venice was Venice on the Halfshell and it was located in the old Venice Pavilion. According to The Lure of a Land by the Sea, Venice’s oldest mural is Edward Biberman’s 1941 “Story of Venice,” which all of us enjoyed looking at when visiting what used to be our historical post office. After the building’s recent sale into private ownership, the public’s access to its beloved mural was cut off. Hanney’s quote of Cronk as saying that “the community mural de-alienates and delineates the individual in society” is relevant to Venice residents’ current efforts to maintain the Biberman mural available for public view.

Hanney’s book tells so many more stories, divulges so many other secrets, and sheds light on so much history. To get the full details, get yourself a copy at Small World Books or Beyond Baroque.

Sister Act … With Murder

By Delores Hanney

I read about it in the National Enquirer: main Mad Man, Jon Hamm, has gone goofy for the Lennon Sisters. He’s acquired all their records and packs an urge to evangelize. Soon, perhaps, one of their era-appropriate songs will find itself in that singular position of honor wherein such period icons as Bob Dylan and the Beatles have already been celebrated, playing behind the credits for one of Mad Men’s episodic chronicles of the deliciously tortuous lifeways of a gaggle of 1960s ad makers.

The Lennon Sisters, you might recall, came to fame as a mid-twentieth century quartet of juvenile songbirds made legendary by their presence on a weekly TV musical-variety program, an entertainment type of considerable popularity during that age. The girls were homegrown products of Venice, California, a fact that astonishes many who consider them too oxymoronically wholesome to have sprung from such notoriously quirked-out soil. But there you have it: Venice has range!

For a generation, The Lawrence Welk Show – inaugural habitat of the sisters’ renown – was a Saturday evening staple epitomized by faux champagne bubbles drifting around like a luminous swarm of migrating butterflies, a heavily German-accented, accordion-playing big band leader-cum-host and a particular predilection for sprightly polka music.

A production of KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, it was broadcast locally from the Aragon Ballroom on the Lick pier in Venice, during its 1951 to 1955 incarnation. Later in ‘55 it went national on ABC, broadcast live from the Hollywood Palladium. In 1971 ABC canceled it; afterwards, till 1982, Welk produced the program himself for viewing on independent stations. With the persistence of gum on one’s shoe, the show is still seen in re-runs.

But back when Dianne Lennon was sixteen, Peggy fourteen, Kathy twelve and Janet nine, Lawrence Welk’s son, Larry, happened to catch them singing at an Elks Club soiree and with a quickness trundled them home to sing for his father. With equal swiftation they became fixtures on The Lawrence Welk Show, debuting on Christmas Eve 1955. “We’ve acted out our lives in stages, with 10,000 people watching,” they testify tunefully on their website regarding growing up so publicly.

Warmly welcomed into the home of massive multitudes each week via television, they also arrived as merchandizing tie-in items, such as storybooks and coloring books, paper dolls and TV trays. In 1956, they would also be carried home in the form of their first hit record, “Tonight You Belong to Me.”

But as in all fairytales there was a dark side – in this case a very dark side.

Chet Young was a certified “dangerously insane” psychopath within whose scrambled brain Peggy Lennon was his “true” wife and mother of his kids; the sisters’ dad was the bad guy who was keeping them apart. For months Young harassed the Lennon family: turning up on their doorstep, stalking, calling, sending letters. The last, unopened before his murder, pictured William Lennon with a gun to his head, beneath which the words “High Noon.”

And at noon on August 12, 1969, Young waylaid Bill Lennon as he left his job at the Venice Golf Club. After arguing briefly, Lennon turned away. Pulling a rifle from a sack, Young shot him in the back then put the gun to his temple and fired again. He escaped in an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Two months later he was found inside the trunk of said Oldsmobile, suicided using the same weapon. As a ghastly final touch he left a note for Peggy asking her to explain to the nonexistent children that he took his life because they couldn’t be together.

The Lennon Sisters quit the Lawrence Welk Show in 1968 and were set to begin their new program, Jimmy Durante Presents: The Lennon Sisters Hour in the fall of 1969, just weeks following the horror of their father’s murder. Undaunted as polar bears on an ice floe, they set aside their personal trauma to gutsily go forth with their commitment but were cancelled after a single season. During the next couple decades they were guests on all manner of TV variety shows, game shows and late night talk shows.

In 1994 they whiffled off to Branson, Missouri, where they assumed their position in the spotlight at The Welk Champagne Theatre for ten years or so. Younger sis Mimi picked up the slack with the retirement of Dianne and Peggy.

Now that Jon Hamm has come out as an avid admirer of the Venice-born sister act, the floodgates could open to whole new gajillions ripe for a hankering after their harmonic convergence.

Everything old is new again.

Not Born on the 4th of July

By Ronald McKinley

When I was younger, I celebrated the 4 of July as all good Americans did. I lit strings of firecrackers. I burned sparklers. I ate hot dogs, corn on the cob. In New Orleans, where I was born I would go to the French Market and buy a large watermelon. One hundred years before my birth the same market sold slaves.

I was born eighty-five years after slavery was abolished. Slavery was abolished eighty-nine years after America got its independence. As an African-American, it took me long a time to understand the implications. My ancestors were not freed when America was freed.

In Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland the fear of slaves on one hand, and the military potential of mobilizing slaves on the other, gave a peculiar twist to the logic of war. Virginia’s royal governor John Murry, the Earl of Dunmore, offered freedom to slaves.

“And I do here by further declare all indented servants, negroes, or others, appertaining to rebels, free that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty’s troops as soon as maybe, for the most speedily reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty to His Majesty’s Crown and Dignity.”

Dunmore’s proclamation triggered a mass escape. Lord Dunmore’s “Ethiopian Regiment” went to work pillaging patriot plantations, along the shores of the Chesapeake, to supply British ships with food. Some of the captured were put to death, some were sold up the river to slavers in the West Indies. Some were, at public expense, sent to work in western Virginia’s lead mines.

In Connecticut, the state with the largest slave population in New England, the legislature passed two important acts which paved the way for the recruitment of black soldiers: any men who procured a substitute would be exempt from the draft, and former masters who freed their slaves to serve in the Continental Army would be relieved of any future obligation for support. Any slave who agreed to serve would exempt both a master and his son. Whites who were drafted who did not own slaves often bought one. Some slaves were able to negotiate freedom as the price for their service. Some did not get this promise; however, others failed to get it in writing, and were pressed back into slavery.

The 4th of July is more than barbecue, hot dogs, and fireworks. “The Star Spangled Banner” should mean more than the opening of ball games. I want to be proud to be an American, even eighty-nine years after the fact. I have a higher standard for America. I live here. I give America my best, and want no less in return. Make America the true home of freedom, not more choices at the market, and two on the ballot. Put people before things. Make no man or woman a prisoner for thinking differently than you. Whole sections of America think we should imprison people for doing drugs. Deny adults who are not related the right to marry. Criminalize people without housing. Make corporations citizens. Bomb countries into the stone age. I try to be the America I want.

Make America the true home of freedom. Do no harm in speech or action to any living thing. Celebrate freedom from fear.

I have seen the auction block. I have been in the slave quarters. Do you feel free? Does Congress make you feel free? Does the Supreme Court make you feel free? Yes, we have a black president. Does he make you feel free?  b

4th of July in Venice, 1905

By Vanessa Cabello

Since so few of Abbot Kinney’s visionary buildings remain in our beloved Venice, we should cherish what we do have left, and what better time to so than July?  Did you know the Fourth of July has always been a big deal in Venice? That on July 4, 1905, the Tobacco millionaire turned real estate developer Abbot Kinney celebrated the Grand Opening of his Venice of America?

Indeed, the Grand Opening lasted almost the whole week! The celebration began on Friday, June 30, as workers completed building Venice of America, Kinney’s bold attempt at recreating some of Venice, Italy’s famous canal system here in Los Angeles County. But it was the Fourth of July that hosted the main event: the ocean waters pouring into the canals for the first time.

On June 30, at exactly 2pm, with the rise of the ocean tide, thousands of workers, locals and tourists gathered at the Grand Lagoon to watch Abbot Kinney’s wife, Margaret, turn the valve that opened the pipes from the ocean, and the newly built lagoon and canals began to fill.

In his book entitled Venice California, Coney Island of the Pacific, author Jeffrey Stanton writes, “Ocean water, streaming in through two huge pipes, began flowing at a rate of 500 gallons a second thus filling the canal’s central lagoon. With the majority of the canals filled and the pier completed, Venice, California was ready to celebrate.”

Stanton continues, “On July 4th weekend, the festivities featured something for everyone. Yacht racing, swimming races in the lagoon, band concerts, fireworks at the lagoon’s huge 2500 seat amphitheater were some of the many events that amazed and wowed the 20,000 spectators…Venice of America was a success.”

According to Tom Moran in his book entitled, Fantasy by the Sea, “The auditorium was filled to capacity.  Benjamin Fay Mills, an evangelist that Edward Everett Hale had labeled ‘the most wonderful preacher in America,’ addressed the crowd.” Moran also tells us there  was an invocation and the Venice Children’s Chorus sang patriotic hymns to the audience, while outside of the auditorium, up to 40,000 visitors strolled around the new resort, though many of the buildings and attractions were still under construction. Moran describes, “The tourists had begun arriving with the first green electric car from Los Angeles in the morning and the influx had not slackened throughout the day.”

Moran continues, “Realtors reported that 355 Venice lots had been sold in two hours…They went for gondola excursions and sampled the food at the Ship Hotel. That evening they listened to the music of Arend’s Venice Band and watched a display of fireworks above the swimming lagoon.”

Another book that highlights details from Venice’s Grand Opening celebration is that of Carolyn Elayne Alexander. In her book entitled Abbot Kinney’s Venice-of-America Volume One, she states, “Elaborate plans were made for a week of grand opening ceremonies, sporting events, cultural attractions and just plain fun. A Venice Yacht Club, organized at the Country Club, announced a regatta for the beginning of July.  The Southern California Swimming Association made plans for aquatic championship races and other events…”

One can only imagine the hustle and bustle from that day. The excitement, the joy, the hope. None of that really ever makes into the history books as it’s so difficult to capture those emotions.

Today celebrating July 4 may not be as grandiose or exciting as it was  back in 1905, but Venice still knows how to party. This year for the Fourth, my friends and I are staying local, taking a few days off to enjoy the Venice atmosphere at the beach. We locals all know the tourists still arrive by the busload and carload to experience some Venice magic. As we celebrate the birth of our nation, we will proudly remember to celebrate the Grand Opening of Venice too!

To learn more about the history of Venice, please explore the local history book collection at our local public library, fittingly named: the Abbot Kinney Memorial Branch Library. Below are some photographs from books in the collection which provide glimpses of the fateful Independence Day that started Venice Beach, and remind one of Abbot Kinney’s original slogan for his resort “To See Venice Is To Live.”

Ray Bradbury – Martian and Venetian: Gone with the Transit of Venus

By Jim Smith

On June 5, I was peering through Chuck Bloomquist’s telescope in his front yard as a tiny black dot – actually the size of the Earth – slowly made its way across the yellow-gold caldron we call the Sun.

At the same time, a few miles away, a 91-year-old man who had taken us to Venus, Mars and other worlds in his books was breathing his last. He had traveled across universes solely by the power of his mind. Now he was giving us one more amazing tale by hopping on Venus as it flew across the Sun. Only Ray Bradbury would think of such an appropriate way to make his exit.

Ray Bradbury was a novelist who wrote like a poet. His powers of description could transport the reader to Mars, Venus or to Venice, circa 1947.

He will long be known to the world as the author of The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, among other books of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Venetians will ever be grateful for his masterful description of a decrepit Venice of the late 1940s in the novel, Death Is A Lonely Business. This is a Venice that nobody comes to visit and where the fog rolls in every day and it rains a lot in the autumn that he describes.

It rained a lot on Venus, too, at least in a short story Bradbury wrote in Venice (probably while it was raining):

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.  –The Long Rain, 1950

That is how Ray Bradbury wrote. His powers of description were unmatched through 500 published works. He wrote every day, and still had time to carefully study the world around him. “If there were three of me, I could keep us all busy,” he once said.

In Venice, the young Bradbury was a self-described maniac, a true Venetian possessed by an enthusiasm for life.

“Venice is full of old people,” says Bradbury’s unnamed protagonist in Death Is A Lonely Business. They were old enough to have enjoyed the halcyon days earlier in the century when Venice was perhaps the most exciting place on the west coast. It is as if they had partied on the Titanic, but by the time Bradbury arrived they were clinging to rafts for dear life.

It is this atmosphere that is the foundation of Bradbury’s murder mystery where lonely people are put out of their misery by an unknown murderer. While this murderer was running rampant in Venice and in Bunker Hill, another community soon to be “renewed,” old Venice was experiencing its own death as Abbot Kinney’s Windward Pier and Amusement Park fell before an L.A. wrecking crew.

The Pier had been a center of Venice since its founding in 1905. Its rides, midway, movie theater and performance areas had set Venice apart from staid old Los Angeles.

The L.A. city fathers hated the libertine atmosphere of Venice and its Pier. When the Kinney Company filed routine paperwork after World War II for the renewal of its lease of the Pier (which Abbot Kinney had built), it was denied. The Kinney heirs had no clout downtown and could not save this part of Abbot Kinney’s dream. The destruction is portrayed in gruesome detail by Bradbury. Venice sank further into the fog.

This is the gloomy atmosphere that Orson Wells portrayed a couple of years later when he decided that Venice would make the perfect stand-in for Tijuana in the film, Touch of Evil.

It was also the perfect cover for the Beats, who were hiding out from 1950s mainstream America. It led Lawrence Lipton to call Venice, the “slum by the sea.” By the late ‘50s Venice had sunk even lower as more than half the great old buildings on Ocean Front Walk and Windward Avenue, including the imposing St. Mark’s Hotel, at Windward and Ocean Front Walk, were toppled by order of L.A. Code Enforcers.

I encountered what was left of this Venice when I arrived in 1968. An empty Boardwalk, cheap rooms, a pervading sense of poverty and decay. I loved it.

Bradbury had arrived in Venice with his family in 1942. They had taken up residence at 662 Venice Blvd. It was at this location that he began work on The Martian Chronicles, which is really a series of vignettes stuck together as a novel. Until recently, the family home had survived, and even sported a plaque announcing its literary greatness. In 2008, the historic home was bulldozed in a barbaric display of callousness to make room for an upscale art gallery.

Delores Hanney of the Venice Historical Society, who interviewed Bradbury, believes that at some point he moved into an apartment closer to the beach. In the novel – which is accurate in all other descriptions about Venice – the protagonist lived in a $30 a month room, across the street from a gas station and between the beach and the canals (A free Beachhead will be awarded the first person to identify this location.).

What else did Bradbury write while he lived in Venice? Probably a lot of short stories, like The Long Rain, which he attempted to sell to magazines. Some of them may have found their way into The Illustrated Man and other books. He was probably already thinking about Fahrenheit 451, which was published in 1953.

Bradbury left Venice in 1950 or ‘51. Venice of his day could accommodate a struggling writer, but having an author who was becoming a household name might have caused the stampede to the beach to start years earlier than it did.

Bradbury did not forget Venice. He returned frequently to bike or walk around his old home town. In later years, he spoke at the Abbot Kinney Venice Library under the auspices of the Venice Historical Society.

He wrote Death Is A Lonely Business in 1985. By then the circus wagons had been pulled out of the canals, the oil wells had given way to high-priced condos in the Peninsula, the Red Cars had stopped running, and those wonderful fogs had become infrequent.

Bradbury loved the Red Cars, and trains in general. He often took trains instead of flying. The man who traveled to other worlds in his imagination never learned how to drive a car. In low-income Venice of the 1940s, when he was growing up, it was a luxury most people could not afford. Besides, there was the wonderful Red Car system that would take you anywhere under the mountains. In Venice, then as now, one could quickly walk or bike anywhere.

In Death Is A Lonely Business, Bradbury’s alter ego says he wants to live forever. Ninety-one years is not forever, but it’s more than most people get. Even so, Ray Bradbury does have a shot at immortality through his books, which are as fresh and exciting as the day they were written.

For more about Ray Bradbury, see a 1963 film biography of Ray Bradbury, including shots of Venice: http://bit.ly/NJwFTq

A new short film based on Bradbury’s Kaleidoscope is currently making the rounds of theaters and film festivals. It was the Grand Prize Winner in the 2012 New Media Film Festival.  

Novel Explores Early Day Venice

Lions & Gondolas By Laura Shepard Townsend

Reviewed by Delores Hanney

Venetian Laura Shepard Townsend loves Venice and it shows. Opening the stunning mystical cover of her latest book, Lions and Gondolas, is something like stepping into a time machine to be whisked away – through a potent combination of painstaking research and elegant writing – to a viscerally felt presence in Venice, California, circa 1920, where a “perfumed gardens of the gods on the temporal plane of fantasy” aspect prevailed, according to an opinion in the Los Angeles Times.

Venice, indeed, radiated a heady blend of enchantment and excitement. With Townsend as guide, one revels in the splendid excesses: the chronic bathing beauty contests, endless parades of pretty starlets advertising new movies, and many reckless airplane wing walkers stealing our breath away. Thousands of twinkling lights lined the shores of the romantic canals. Everything and nothing were reason for a celebration, for which the whole town was swanned out in abundant embellishments by decorating maven Arthur Reese, to further heat up the happy quotient of the occasion.

Visionary cum founding father Abbot Kinney is all over the place: accessible, protective, cheerleading.  We roam U.S. Island at the confluence of three of Venice’s original canals, a compound of pretty, white-shuttered bungalows awash in lush plantings of colorful flowers. And also the pier with its concessionaires and rides and amusements, and the huge sea lion that served as the aquarium’s welcoming greeter.

Townsend also gives us the less jolly experience of Venice in the time of the swine flu pandemic, when folks scurried around behind the protection of gauze masks. Posted signs listed ways to avoid infection, including the rather mysterious injunction to “Drink plenty of water and keep your bowels open;” and roving helmeted patrols tacked bright green quarantine notices on the doors of those failing a health test.

Overlaid upon the compelling true-to-life Venice backdrop there’s a swell fictional factor to be avidly consumed.

Lions and Gondolas is sort of like Catcher in the Rye with a feminine persuasion. Its first person narrator, Angelica Grastende, is Holden Caulfield in a skirt, stomping about, all adolescent angst and alienation and narcissistic self-importance. But, whereas Holden had only coming-of-age madness to deal with, this poor babe’s teenage self-individuation process has the complicating issues of assimilation and skin tone to cope with, plus the whole contentious early-twentieth-century’s shifting paradigm regarding a woman’s place in the American social structure.

Favored by destiny’s consent – foretold in Grandmother Lena’s Tarot card reading – gypsies Angelica, her mother Ava, and grandmother, along with their pair of pilfered lions, arrive in Venice, three fugitives from a small traveling European circus (and Ava’s husband), panting with keenness to begin life afresh in the sun- soaked promised land on the Southern California coast.

The realization of the plan hinges on the transmutation of gentle Ava into “La Domadora,” the great tamer of lions. Expecting this radical a makeover seems overly optimistic, but it’s brought to fruition by the arrival of Mabel Stark, the honest-to-god, real life tiger trainer of global repute, who generously sets herself to the task of fairy god mothering Ava into a respectable trainer of large cats and a popular attraction on the Venice pier.

Meanwhile, Angelica flings herself furiously into reinvention as a typical American youth while constantly at odds with her Grandmother Lena, who is usually as cranky as a bear with a toothache and always haranguing about maintaining the traditional Romany ways. Rechristening herself Anne, in the way of most kids, she sometimes sells out on herself in order to promote a sense of belonging with her new, aggressively shallow teenage peers. But fortunately, she is blessed by the coming of a mentor, too, in the person of Abbot Kinney, assuming the role of wise, adoring uncle. Not that she always heeds his advice, to be sure.

Woven through it all are glowing bits of wisdom that make one stop short to reflect. “Now I know that love always possesses a fragility to it that lets it be forgotten in a breath,” for example. Descriptions of alluring grace call out for re-reading several times – for the pure joy of it – as well.

In this “memoir” of her early years in Venice, Angelica Grastende recalls,  “I first entered Venice, on foot, much like a pilgrim who enters a holy place, as a seeker, stirred with expectation.”

Immersion in Laura Shepard Townsend’s delicious second book in the Destiny’s Consent series, might cause readers to find themselves enjoying a similar sensation.

I did.