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After I columnized this week about the rigors facing first-year law school students, an Orange County woman e-mailed me the tale of how her son-in-law coped with the pressure: While a Chapman Law School student, he brewed beer in his campus apartment.
No way.
“My wife and I lived in a little townhouse, it had a garage and I was able to convert it into a brewery,” says Patrick Rue. “I didn’t have any hobbies, I was just studying and hanging out with my wife and sort of needed something I could do for myself. Throughout my three years in law school, I became more serious about brewing than I was about law school.”
Rue hung in and got his degree in 2006. Until his senior year, he thought he might be a real estate tax attorney. Then he noticed that “instead of studying I would be concerned what I’d brew for my next beer.”
Happy ending: A few months ago, he and his wife, Rachel, opened the Bruery in Placentia. While they typically sell to wholesalers, retailers or restaurants, this Friday from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. the Rues are having an open house so the public can sample their wares.
Any regrets about not pursuing law: “It’s something I can fall back on if I absolutely need to,” Rue, 28, says. “A lot of my law school friends are pretty jealous of me right now.”
Alice Gustafson saw one family-owned cafe tumble into the sea 20 years ago, so a little rent skirmish with Huntington Beach City Hall shouldn’t be that big a deal. But when you’re 77 and you’ve run your own Breakfast in the Park cafe since 1980, well, who wants to fight?
“My intention is to stay here till 2010,” she says of the quaint restaurant that sits in the city’s Central Park and is a habitat for ducks from the lake and customers’ dogs. “Then I’ll be 80 years old. I thought that would be a good retirement age. Everybody wants us here. Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t thank me for being here.”
Gustafson, whose late husband John operated the End Cafe before a 1988 winter storm took it and part of the Huntington Beach Pier into the Pacific Ocean, pays “rent” to the city as part of a sliding tax on her sales. The increase the city wants, she says, would double her monthly payment. “I can’t do it,” she says.
I can’t be objective about this fight, having long ago sworn devotion to her cafe’s big, fat cinnamon rolls. Gustafson owns the business, but the city owns the building and says she’s been getting a sweetheart deal for too long.
Gustafson disagrees. So is this the end?
“I don’t expect to leave,” she says. “I’m confident we can work it out.”
Photo: Los Angeles Times
It’s getting harder all the time to be a Good Samaritan. Not long ago, a dashing and thoughtful gentleman (OK, it was me) had finished dinner with an out-of-town friend and was returning to his car in the parking lot of an Irvine retail center.
I noticed a middle-aged woman unloading items, including golf clubs, from the back of her sport vehicle. I asked if she needed help and she said no, quickly adding that the steering on her vehicle had conked out and that she needed to call someone for a ride home. She was emptying the trunk to take the valuables with her.
Always on the lookout for ways to help my fellow citizens, I volunteered to give her a ride. “I don’t even know you,” she said, good-naturedly.
“I don’t know you either,” I said.
She was very pleasant, not the least insulting, but made it clear she wouldn’t be taking any rides from strangers on this night. We continued talking for several minutes, and the news somehow escaped that I wasn’t married and that she’d be happy to introduce me to some of her girlfriends. Introduce me to her friends but not accept a ride.
I didn’t want to meet her friends; I just wanted to do a good deed. For some odd reason, it annoyed me even more to find out she lived within a couple of miles of me, making the imposition on me next to nothing but potentially sparing her friend the hassle of leaving home at 9:30 at night to come pick her up.
Yes, I get it. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to roll the dice after dark in a stranger’s car. But while she retained her peace of mind, I lost something — the chance to exercise a basic human desire to help someone out of a bind and want nothing in return.
For some odd reason, that bugged me all the way home.
Some people want convicted child molester Sid Landau to die in hell. He says he expects to die in jail, although technically he’s in a state mental hospital and trying to win his release after being in custody since 2000.
Wherever he dies, the 69-year-old remains a classic study of what happens when the concepts of personal freedom and public fear collide. Landau has admitted to molesting 10 boys but was last convicted in 1988 and served out his eight-year sentence. Afterward, he violated probation twice — neither time for molestation — and was sent back to jail. Before his scheduled release in 2000, prosecutors petitioned to keep him in a state hospital as a potential threat.
Three times Orange County juries have heard his plea for release. He came closest the first time, in 2006, with 11 of 12 jurors favoring his release. But he needed all 12. The second time, jurors voted 8 to 4 to deny him. Last week, a jury did finally give him a unanimous verdict: Unfortunately for him, the vote was 12 to 0 to keep him in custody.
His attorney is appealing and says the strongest element was the judge’s ruling to let prosecutors bring in an outside expert to testify about Landau, rather than use a state mental health specialist.
Those are but details. What hangs over the case is the philosophy of fear. Or perhaps more accurately, the fear of the unknown. Most of us are aware of the legacy of repeat offenses from pedophiles, and it’s a chilling thought to free one who might strike again.
Yet, we also say we value personal freedom and paying one’s debt to society. It’s been 20 years since Landau was convicted. He did his time. No one can say for sure he’d molest again.
But because no one can be sure he won’t, we keep him imprisoned.
Deprive someone of their freedom for a heinous crime?
No problem. Count me in.
Keep them locked up for something they might do?
I’m not God.
We’ve all seen them. Some have elongated heads. Many have unusual-looking fingers. Some could pass for gorillas. Almost all appear to be over-caffeinated.
We’re talking about the folks with those hand-held signs that hawk products or tout businesses on our city streets. A common trick of the trade is to twirl the signs to attract attention. Most likely, it’s to relieve the incredible boredom the sign-holders must be experiencing.
Most of us either ignore them or find them mildly entertaining.
The city of Orange, however, is not easily amused. Citing residents’ complaints about people trying to sell mattresses, property, haircuts, massages and whatever else — creating distractions for drivers and inconveniences for pedestrians — the city council sallied forth months ago to do battle with hand-held signs.
On a 4-1 vote, with only Denis Bilodeau dissenting, the council asked its staff to draft ordinance changes to thwart the sign-twirlers. The loyal staff did its duty, sent a proposal to a compliant planning commission and then gave it to the council Tuesday.
The city sent code enforcement people to photograph the sign people in the act of being themselves. This was no rush job: the 41-page pdf file laying out the whole thing took someone a lot of time to compile.
In the end, council tabled the whole thing, meaning it’s probably a dead duck.
“I don’t want to spend any more time on this,” Bilodeau told his colleagues, adding that if someone wants to dress up in a clown suit on the corner of Tustin and Collins to entice him to get a haircut, let him try.
Read on »
Is there no escape? No place to hide?
For the sake of argument, let’s say some of us don’t want to be reminded every single hour of the day that the stock market is collapsing, taking our retirement income down like so much hair in the bathtub drain. Or that the economy not only does not rock, but is actually on the rocks. Or that a bank might turn out to be nothing more than a pretty building with no money in it.
What if we’d like to be blissfully unaware — at least for a few days — that instead of taking ocean cruises in retirement we’ll be living with relatives?
Good luck.
I’m trying to be one of those people. I don’t want to know how bad things are. At least, not know every hour or so. It’d be like your doctor calling you up several times a day saying, “You remember you have colitis, right?”
Turn on the TV, there it is. Talk radio, there it is. Pick up the newspaper, there it is. Talk to friends on the phone, there it is. The main headline in Wednesday’s Times: "Economic concerns deepen."
Even when you’re watching non-economic news on TV, those little trailers keep running across the bottom of the screen with the bad news, like dancing elves of torture. Or you’ll be watching a happy story on CNN or Fox and, before you can change channels, there’s the red arrow showing the Dow dropping again. How about a green arrow once in a while?
A couple of weeks ago, I told my financial adviser I didn’t want to look at my quarterly mutual fund statement. “Good idea,” he said. A few days later, though, when I said I needed to review my 401K at work but couldn’t do so without seeing how much I’d lost in recent months, he said, “We can’t hide our heads in the sand.”
To the contrary, sounds like an excellent idea.
I’ve long assumed that former Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona would plea-bargain the federal corruption charges against him, if only to avoid the likelihood of a stiffer sentence if convicted. The scamp in me, however, hopes he goes to trial, largely because some of Carona’s private comments — selectively released in court papers by both sides — read like something from a provocative movie trailer.
Good drama always blends multiple elements. Carona gives us plenty of raunch, a touch of defiance, even a hint of pathos. I can’t wait to get this guy on a witness stand! Sometimes he sounds like he just stepped out of “Pulp Fiction,” and other times he sounds like Rocky Balboa wondering where his life is going.
It’s hard to find a stretch of Carona transcript that can be included in a family newspaper, but let’s try: In one secretly recorded exchange with friend Don Haidl, Carona says, “The one thing that I will say, I may be a whore, but I never used my job to [mess] with people or to, you know, to twist somebody for something.... And that one you can hit me with sodium pentathol and put me in the box.”
In another exchange with Haidl on a different day, Carona apparently is talking about unfavorable press accounts: “[To heck with] you guys. By the same token, I’m happy to get in front of the camera at the drop of a hat and call b.s. on any of these things.”
He then concludes the thought by saying, “Now, my preference is I never draw my sword. My goal is, I might just walk away from this deal, fly off into the sunset, spend time with my kid, do whatever I want to do with the second half of my life and fade into anonymity. I don’t want to [mess] with anybody. I don’t need to be the big man on campus anymore. But while I’m here, I ain’t taking [guff] from anybody anymore. Because there’s nothing you can do to me.”
No one knows how the second half of Carona’s life will go. But we know this: He’s way too far down the road to fade into anonymity.
The children of John Crean, the Newport Beach RV tycoon who died last year, are in court fighting over whether their mother needs a conservator and who it should be.
The back-and-forth in the court filings in Orange County Probate Court range from the petty to the more bitingly personal. One of the disputes is whether John Crean’s gold-and-diamond belt buckle should have been melted down and the gems divided among the children so replicas could be made for them. Johnnie Crean says his mother wanted him to keep the belt and, because of its sentimental value, didn’t want it destroyed. He wanted to write checks to his siblings to make replicas.
From afar, it’s kind of funny because we all understand what family disputes can become. Likewise, we all know that words on papers — even court filings — can’t fully explain family dynamics.
But here’s something we can’t relate to: Johnnie Crean notes that separate trusts were established several months ago for the four children — and staked with $18 million each.
Which just goes to prove what the Beatles sang, money can’t buy you love.
Some of the postmortem chatter about Sandra Hutchens’ appointment as Orange County’s new sheriff focused on the notion that being a woman sealed the deal for her. I did some chattering myself but found that argument rather chauvinistic and unfounded.
But if the presumption is that Hutchens’ gender will bring a different kind of sensibility to local law enforcement, it bears repeating that of the two finalists, she was the only one who had ever shot and killed someone on the job. It happened New Year’s Eve 1980 when Hutchens was on patrol with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. The district attorney considered it a justifiable shooting, but a jury in a civil case awarded the dead man’s family $1.4 million, later reduced to $1 million after the county appealed.
An incident such as that, even from 28 years ago, usually translates to "street cred" for the top cop in a department. Deputies like to know that the sheriff understands what it means to have been in the ultimate life-altering situation. But Hutchens took it a step further in an interview recently with Times reporter Stuart Pfeifer. Enough of a step, in fact, to make you wonder about any new sensibilities that a woman might bring to the job.
"If I looked in someone’s personnel file and didn’t see anything in there, I’d wonder, ‘What have you been doing?' " she said. "I’d expect to see some more citizen complaints or use-of-force or something."
I think I know what she meant. (More after the jump)
Read on »
Dodged a bullet — I mean, missed a chance to do my civic duty last week — when my name wasn’t called for jury selection. I’m kidding; I’d like to be a juror someday. Kind of weird, but I suddenly got a little verklempt in the courtroom when Orange County Superior Court Judge Kelly MacEachern talked about jury duty being one of the country’s most hallowed responsibilities.
I’ve had two previous chances to sit in the box and was bumped both times by a district attorney’s option. They apparently don’t like things I’ve written about prosecutors, but what they don’t realize is that I’m perfectly willing to convict someone if the evidence, fairly obtained, is there. This time, they got the 12 jurors and one alternate they needed without my being called, so it was a morning down the drain.
However, the session did reinforce what a curse alcohol can lay on society. Because the case was a DUI, jurors had to talk about their own experiences to gauge whether they’d be biased. Of the couple dozen people who spoke, we learned that one woman’s brother-in-law was left a paraplegic by a drunk driver, another man’s brother was the drunk driver of a car that killed two people and that another middle-aged man, when he was 16, had to bail his father out of jail on a drinking-related charge. Another woman broke down crying while she attempted to discuss an episode from her past and was excused.
Pretty intense drama before lunch. Maybe there’s no way around it, but too bad that people think they’re heading for jury duty, only to find themselves on an “Oprah” show and recounting a terrible moment in the presence of total strangers.
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Veronique de Turenne
Veronique de Turenne is a journalist, essayist, book critic and blogger, and has been a staff writer at virtually every newspaper in Southern California. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank you note from him a week later. She lives in Malibu.
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