Hermosa Beach

Bigger, better museum to show off city’s history

by Robb Fulcher

Residents celebrating Sunday’s city centennial with fireworks, music and speeches will also be treated to a reopened Hermosa Beach Historical Society Museum that is triple its old size, with state-of-the-art lighting and layout to showcase exhibits that span the sandy centuries.

The 3,600 square-foot museum at the Community Center, on the corner of Pier Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway, will formally reopen 2:30 p.m. Sunday, marking five years of planning and three years of renovation work resulting in: open, airy rooms to encourage a smooth flow of pedestrian traffic, with ample space for the individual exhibits to stand apart; a museum-quality lighting system with soft, overall illumination punctuated by spotlights and floodlights to show off the individual exhibits; new wiring, walls and flooring for a clean, uncluttered look to help focus attention on the exhibits; a 250 square-foot vault for documents, photos and periodicals dating to the early 1900s, with the temperature and humidity controlled by $10,000 worth of state-of-the-art equipment.

The original museum was established 20 years ago to preserve and display the history of Hermosa’s beach and jazz cultures, and its commercial, civic and social legacies. It has operated since then in a 1,100 square-foot room where the girls’ gym used to be, back when the Community Center was Pier Avenue School.

The cement floor was sloped, and was grooved with drainage gutters left over from the girls’ showers. The cement walls defied efforts to mount or hang exhibits. The small room was piled with historical items that hardly stood out as individual museum exhibits.

“Everything we had was stuffed in there,” Koenig said.

The overall effect was more historical garage than historical museum.

Out with the old

The Historical Society decided enough was enough, and bent its will to the establishment of a new museum, convincing the City Council to hand over more of the Community Center’s ground floor for the expansion.

The Historical Society raised more than $150,000 for the project, including a $50,000 donation from Pink Store owner Barbara Robinson, $28,000 from the city, $15,500 from Hermosa Kiwanis, $10,000 from Chuck and Missy Sheldon, $5,000 each from Sea Sprite hotel owner Thelma Greenwald, Hermosa Pavilion owner Gene Shook and the Community Center Foundation, $2,500 from Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, and $1,000 each from Hermosa Cyclery and state Assemblyman Ted Lieu.

Howard Fishman, then a city parks and recreation commissioner, wrote grant proposals that brought two consultants from the national Institute of Museum and Library Services to advise the volunteer effort.

Historical Society President Rick Koenig recalled the surprise on the face of consultant Edra Moore, the curator of the Antelope Valley Indian Museum, when she saw the original Hermosa museum. “When I was driving her to the airport to go back home, she told me that when she first saw our museum, she thought it was the storage area,” Koenig said.

Volunteers including Koenig, 55, who has spent years in the construction industry, and John Macchia, Koenig’s partner in a current mold-detection business, spent countless hours remaking the expanded space. Tons of sewer and water pipes were torn out. New walls were prefabricated throughout.

Some 260 lineal feet of lighting was placed overhead, in a fashion inspired by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Hermosa Councilman J.R. Reviczky got the lighting fixtures at about half price, and installed the system for free. The whole thing wound up costing about 10 times less than it might otherwise have, Koenig said.

“That’s the difference between ‘wanty’ and Getty,” he said.

In with the new

The result is an open, airy museum designed to encourage a leisurely flow of foot traffic. Before entering, visitors see a small Native Southern California Plant Garden, with flora that the Native Americans of the Gabrielino-Tongva used for purposes such as medicine and weaving, long before white people arrived.

Once inside, visitors will see maps of the Tongva land, and items associated with the founding of Hermosa on April Fool’s Day 1901, six years before its incorporation as a city.

Moving past the “timeline wall,” still in the main room, visitors will see maps, photos and other items chronicling civic, social and structural change throughout the 20th century.

At one point, visitors will be able to don headphones and listen to vintage jazz recorded at the Lighthouse Café, via Bluetooth wireless technology.

Opening off of the main room is the “Commerce Room” with exhibits recalling the modes of local transportation and the city’s police and fire departments. The room also will contain one of the museum’s two wall-mounted 50-inch plasma TVs that can show hundreds of photos and maps on continuous loops.

Next is the walk-in “vault,” called the John Hales Room after the late amateur historian who kept the city’s most definitive archives of newspapers and other historical documents. Docents will help visitors find what they seek in the vault, and steer them to a desk-and-chair area nearby where they can study the items.

“We have South Bay Board of Realtors stuff in here,” Koenig said, waving vault-ward. “People love to look up their property and see when it sold for $20,000.”

Next, the visitors can enter the 1,100 square-foot room that was the old museum, now the Beach Culture Room that shows off the town’s rich history of surfing and surfboard building, beach volleyball and lifeguarding.

Visitors can move between the two rooms through a passageway fashioned from a lifeguard tower that stood on the beach at 16th Street for four decades beginning in 1951. Museum visitors actually enter the tower in the larger room and exit the tower in the Beach Culture Room.

A museum shop area will be stocked with souvenirs such as mugs, T-shirts and the book Images of America: Hermosa Beach by Chris Miller and Jerry Roberts.

Facing future

A week before the grand reopening, the museum was abuzz with sanders and saws. Cluttering the floor were pieces of the original fiberglass statue of the late surfing lifeguard Tim Kelly, which stood at the city pier for decades until it was replaced late last year with a bronze version.

It was not clear whether Kelly would be surfing again by Sunday, and certainly some of the volunteers’ projects will be completed at later dates, among them a full-size section of an old craftsman-style home.

And the volunteers must still work out how the building will be staffed with docents, and what its hours of operation will be.

But for sure, the museum will be open on Sunday.

Koenig said he was thankful for the chance to labor “in the service of history,” and looked forward to the museum’s long-awaited reopening.

“We are going to be really proud to show this to our community,” he said. ER

Hermosa Beach

King palm is planted at park for a colorful ex-councilman

by Robb Fulcher

About 70 people gathered at Noble Park on Sunday afternoon to dedicate a 15-foot-tall king palm tree to 1980s-era Councilman Roger Creighton, who passed away in August.

With a clear blue sky over their heads and a cold salty breeze nipping their noses, friends, city officials and civic leaders recalled the colorful Creighton as gruff, generous, irritating and thoughtful, sometimes all at once.

Longtime friend Kathy Midstokke, a former councilwoman and city clerk, told the assemblage how she came to know Creighton during political battles over the Noble Park land, which was the object of competing desires after a hotel was condemned there in the late 1960s.

“Roger said ‘You know, I think you’re a pretty good city clerk, but I’m going to have to sue you,’” Midstokke recalled. “That was the start of a friendship that lasted over 20 years.”

Vintage volleyball photographer Robi Hutas recalled Creighton’s informal greeting of “Hey, scumbag,” when the two would meet.

Friends who were privy to the details of Creighton’s stamp collecting hobby described his trips to the Pacific Northwest in search of stamps.

Steve Blaco said Creighton would make the trips with as much as $30,000 in cash for his purchases, a sleeping bag that he would snooze in near his parked car, and a shotgun “so no one would bother him.”

Bob Chisolm said Creighton once stopped for lunch at a small Northern California café on his way home from a stamp-hunting expedition, with his newly-bought stamps in one of two boxes in the back of his car. As Creighton was eating, someone broke into the car and stole one of the boxes.

“The box they stole was the one with his dirty laundry,” Chisolm said.

He also recalled the greeting “Hey pal” that Creighton would lay on his friends and acquaintances, when he wasn’t opting for the friendly insult instead.

“Sometimes things weren’t going so well, and the phone would ring, and Roger would say ‘Hey pal, how’re you doing,’ and it would brighten the rest of my day,” Chislom said.

Creighton was elected to the City Council in 1987 amidst decades of civic activism that continued almost until his death. In his later years Creighton cut a distinctive figure with his massive, 6-foot-4 frame, a growling voice and shaggy gray eyebrows beetling dime store eyeglasses. ER

Hermosa Beach

State’s highest court okay’s gymnasium at Valley School

by Robb Fulcher

I’m ecstatic, and you can quote me.”

A mostly completed gymnasium building at Hermosa Valley School has gotten the green light from the California Supreme Court, apparently ending a long and bitter legal struggle by opponents who argued that school bond money was improperly used.

Meanwhile, the gym’s walls are up, and workers are scheduled to put on the roof during the students’ holiday break. City school district officials hope the gym, in the southwest area of the third-through-eighth grade campus on Valley Drive, will be ready for use by early June 2007.

The state’s high court declined to hear the case against the gym, after the gym opponents’ arguments were rejected by trial court and appeals court judges as well. Because the state Supreme Court declined to hear the case, the gym opponents cannot seek to bring the case to any higher court, said Sharon McClain, the school district’s superintendent.

“I’m ecstatic, and you can quote me,” McClain said on Monday.

The group Citizens for Responsible School Expansion had argued that the school district improperly spent $13.6 million in voter-approved school bonds on the gymnasium project, which also includes classrooms and a library.

The citizens group had argued that the gym was omitted from a detailed list of construction projects to be funded by a 2002 city school bond measure, so the $13.6 million approved by voters should not be spent on the gym.

School board members said the omission was caused by a mix-up between the school district and Los Angeles County. School board members said they intended to fax a list that included the gym to county election officials, and cannot now determine whether the list was misplaced by the county, or never faxed to the county after all. School board members also pointed out that the gym was listed in ballot arguments for and against the bond measure.

The proposed gym was also the subject of numerous local newspaper stories during the campaign for the school bonds.

“The gym was no secret,” McClain said.

Many other school districts presented ballot information similarly, McClain said, and the Supreme Court’s decision should put to rest questions that might arise over other bond measures in the state.

Other arguments by the citizens group that the school district failed to mitigate parking, traffic and noise from the gym project also were rejected in court.

McClain said the school district spent about $140,000 fighting the group’s legal challenges.

District officials and Sam Abrams, chairman of a committee charged with overseeing expenditures of the bond money, have said the courtroom battles cost the district an additional $1.7 million by delaying the gym project. The school board delayed a round of competitive bidding by contractors to see how the lawsuit would fare in Superior Court, and when the project finally went out to bid, the costs had risen $1.7 million. ER

Hermosa Beach

Store clerk is stung by minor buying alcohol for the ABC

by Robb Fulcher

A Hermosa Beach store clerk was cited for allegedly selling alcohol to a minor during a sting operation by state investigators.

Investigators with the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) monitored minors as they tried to buy alcohol from 13 Hermosa stores in the Nov. 27 sting. The minors were successful at only one store, said ABC officials.

“That’s pretty encouraging, but we’d like to get that down to zero,” said ABC spokesman John Carr.

The clerk accused of selling to the minor faces a possible fine of $250 and 24 to 32 hours of community service, Carr said. ABC officials also plan to seek administrative action against the business, which could include levying a fine, or seeking the suspension or revocation of its alcohol-selling license.

The ABC has been conducting such minor decoy operations statewide in an attempt to reduce the availability of alcohol to minors, Carr said, adding that young people under the age of 21 have a higher rate of drunken driving fatalities than the general adult population.

More than 1,500 people died in alcohol-related traffic crashes in 2005, according to the California Highway Patrol.

The decoy operations have been conducted by law enforcement agencies throughout the state since the 1980s. In 1994, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously that use of underage decoys is legal. The decoys must not look older than their age and may not use fake identification. If they are asked, they must state their real age, and they must produce their own valid identification, showing they are minors.

“It’s all about getting compliance” from the stores, Carr said, adding that statewide sting results show that 15 to 20 percent of stores sell to the decoy minors.

Funding for the current decoy program was provided by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety.  Some minor stings target bars as well as stores that sell alcohol, Carr said. ER

Hermosa Beach

Hermosan helps Hollywood’s ‘Holiday’

by Robb Fulcher

Why Cameron Diaz needs Ed Kushins

When Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet wanted to swap homes in their major motion picture “The Holiday,” they called on Hermosan Ed Kushins to arrange the exchange.

Businesses usually pay moviemakers big bucks to “position” their products within major motion pictures, but not Kushins, whose company www.HomeExchange.com/  helps people temporarily swap homes with each other for inexpensive and luxurious vacations.

Sony Pictures actually came to Kushins, seeking his permission to feature HomeExchange in the “The Holiday,” which begins a limited release this weekend. The reason: the script for the film was written with HomeExchange as a pivotal vehicle through which Diaz and Winslet meet and interact, and writer-director Nancy Meyers was well into making the movie by the time anyone realized they had not secured the rights to use the HomeExchange name. So, Sony called and offered to promote Kushins’ business for free on the big screen.

Kushins said yes. But not right away, because he didn’t know details of the movie when he first heard about it.  “I thought, if this is a slasher movie and they do a home exchange and the whole family gets slaughtered, that’s not the kind of promotion we would want,” he said with a laugh.

Then he was sent the first 20 pages of the script.  “Obviously, it was going to be a lighthearted comedy,” he said.

Then he learned of the actors who had signed to appear in the film.  “Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black, Ed Burns?” he said, spreading his hands in a “who am I to argue?” gesture.

With Sony’s blessing, Kushins has been talking up the “Holiday” connection in media interviews about his business, interviews he began giving long before the movie came along. HomeExchange.com has been featured on NBC’s “The Today Show,” CNN and in National Geographic magazine. Between TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, Kushins gives two or three interviews a week.

“The Holiday” will give HomeExchange a second bump when it comes out on DVD next March, with Kushins and his company providing content for the “bonus features” section.  “It’s a really good opportunity for us,” he said.

Swapping homes

Kushins is president of HomeExchange, which has used the flexibility and low overhead of the Internet to vault to the top of the niche business of trading homes.

The exchanges work like this: a person or family in, say, Hermosa Beach decides to go on vacation in, say, Europe. The Hermosans look at the listings on www.HomeExchange.com/  find Europeans who want to visit California, and begin to e-mail questions and answers back and forth, and view photos of each others’ homes and surroundings.

If the two parties arrange a vacation swap, they can save thousands in hotel bills, enjoy the comfort and convenience of home, hearth and kitchen, and often become part of their temporary neighborhoods during their stay.

Home swappers tend to be hospitable sorts, and they often encourage their neighbors to introduce themselves to the vacationers, Kushins said. Instead of strangers who are renting the place down the block, the vacationers arrive as friends who have come to visit the neighborhood.

“By the time you arrange an exchange, you really know the people pretty well,” Kushins said. “Sometimes people say, ‘I don’t know if I want strangers staying in my home,’ but by the time you actually arrange the exchange, they’re not strangers.”

Building a business

Kushins entered the home-trading business in 1992 with a company that would be the precursor to www.HomeExchange.com/  In those days, before the omnipresent Internet, Kushins and his larger competitors listed their home traders in catalogues distributed through the mail. It was clumsy and expensive.

“That was a bit of a struggle,” he said.  Then, about 1997, the Internet busted out everywhere.  “Thank God the Internet came along and completely changed the industry,” Kushins said.

His company was lean and quick, and swooped in to make use of the new technology’s inexpensiveness and quick, supple interactivity.  “We were pretty aggressive about taking advantage of the Internet,” he said.

In 2003, he brought out HomeExchange.com, which he operates with minor partner George Balen of Manhattan Beach, and William and Martine Heinzer of Switzerland, along with employees Judy Saavedra of Redondo Beach and Julie Osborne of Hermosa.

Kushins and Balen make all the major decisions about how to change and expand the business, including improvements to the website, and Kushins said the streamlined decision-making has helped HomeExchange pull ahead of the field.  “Now we are the go-to place,” he said.

The company boasts more than 12,000 home listings in more than 90 countries, including 4,700-plus in the U.S., 1,400 in France, 500 in England, 450 in Italy, 250 in Spain, 200 in the Netherlands, 940 in Australia and 975 in Canada.

HomeExchange subscribers pay $59.95 a year and swap as much as they want, collectively arranging 40,000 to 50,000 exchanges per year.  Kushins produced reams of e-mailed feedback from satisfied subscribers, including one couple who plan to spend their entire upcoming retirement on vacation through HomeExchange.

Kushins said the severest difficulty anyone ever reports is that they might arrange a trade with a homeowner whose idea of a clean house is less than their own.  “And it happens, about two or three times this year, that somebody cancels an exchange at the last minute, for some reason, and leaves somebody hanging,” Kushins said.

In those cases, he said, he puts the word out for home exchangers in the area who might want to work an emergency swap. He’s had exchangers open up their second homes in a pinch, without even requesting a return swap.  “It’s really an amazing community we have here,” he said.

Home in Hermosa

Kushins grew up “a flatlander in Monterey Park,” and used to cut school and bum rides to the beach, where he determined to live one day.  “I used to pass by Mira Costa High School and I’d think, these guys are so lucky,” Kushins said.

Now it’s his turn.

“I feel just like I did when I was a kid,” he said, spreading his arms to embrace the early evening atmosphere around his walk street house. “I’m at the beach. Isn’t this great?!”

Kushins and wife Terry Hamilton swim in the ocean about five days a week during the summer in preparation for the annual International Surf Festival Pier to Pier swim, and they go down to the sand every day, summer or no.  

Kushins loves to go on vacation, but he also loves to come home. ER

Hermosa Beach

Sharkeez spared $800,000 in rebuild

by Robb Fulcher

The City Council on Tuesday cleared the way for a businessman to rebuild the fire-ravaged Baja Sharkeez restaurant on the Pier Plaza without paying as much as $800,000 toward additional parking-lot space in Hermosa. The popular eatery has stood in ruins since it was toppled by a spectacular early-morning blaze seven months ago.

“It’s time to get that pile of rubble off the Plaza,” said Mayor Sam Edgerton, who spearheaded the move to spare Sharkeez and other older Hermosa businesses from paying the high “in-lieu parking fees” to rebuild following calamities such as fires and earthquakes. “I’m embarrassed for the city.”

The Sharkeez rebuilding project has hung in limbo since the May fire, while city officials and owner Ron Newman debated whether the blaze damaged more than half of the 3,000-square foot building. Under the city’s old building code, Newman could rebuild his restaurant and bar without forking over the in-lieu fees, only if the building was less than 50 percent damaged. But if it was determined to be more than 50 percent damaged, he would have had to pay the extra money, which would go into a fund for future parking lots or parking garages.

The Tuesday decision by the City Council allowed Newman, and other businesspeople with buildings that don’t conform to the newer codes, to avoid the stiff fees even if the building is more than 50 percent damaged. The change puts older commercial buildings on par with similar residential ones, which have been spared any 50-50 tribulations since a 1990s council action, which Edgerton also had a hand in approving.

The Tuesday decision to roll back the parking fees was approved by a 4-1 vote, with Councilman Kit Bobko dissenting. He applauded the desire to get Newman and Sharkeez back in business, but wondered aloud whether this was the right way to go about it.

“I think when we start making decisions based on the people involved and not whether it is good policy, we put ourselves in peril,” Bobko said.

Edgerton argued that the high parking fees would prohibit Newman or any prospective buyer of the Sharkeez site, from building a restaurant there.

“If you charge $800,000 for parking you’re not going to get anybody,” Edgerton said.

The council’s action might end up applying only to downtown businesses, where no space exists for the owners to build parking lots. Following the decision, Councilman JR Reviczky spearheaded a move to study the other areas of town, in part to determine whether rebuilding issues are similar from area to area.

The council’s rollback of the parking fees was vigorously urged by the Hermosa Beach Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau, and the owners of the Comedy & Magic Club and Cantina Real restaurant on the Plaza, both of whom said they would not be able to rebuild if they had to pay the high parking fees. Comedy & Magic Club owner Mike Lacey said the fees could amount to $3 million if he had to rebuild after a fire.

Newman told the council that revenue from his other Sharkeez restaurants in Manhattan Beach, Huntington Beach and Newport Beach have kept him going while he waits to rebuild.

Outside the City Council chambers, Newman said it will take eight months to a year to erect a new Sharkeez where the rubble of the old one sits.

The 50-50 issue also has stalled fire investigators in their attempts to determine the cause of the Sharkeez blaze. They have been unable to reach the area where the fire is believed to have started without using heavy equipment, which would have made the 50-50 question more difficult to determine. ER

Hermosa Beach

Suspect: graffiti spree was an impulse

by Robb Fulcher

A 24-year-old man said he was acting on impulse when he and a 12-year-old boy spray-painted swastikas, swear words and punk band logos on buildings, stop signs, light poles, the Strand wall, a police car and other city vehicles in Hermosa, causing an estimated $5,000 damage.

“I feel really bad about it,” Matt Wicen said on Monday. “It’s not something that should happen in this community.”

Wicen, a sometime freelance writer covering punk rock for the Easy Reader, pledged to repaint and clean up private property not already repaired by city work crews.

He and the boy, an acquaintance of about two months, began the spree late Saturday night along Cypress Avenue, then swept through Clark Stadium to City Hall before turning west toward the ocean, Wicen said.  “At first I thought it wasn’t a very keen idea,” he said, but then he got into it.

The green and red graffiti decorated two Hermosa Beach Public Works vehicles and a police car at City Hall, and was applied liberally to Clark Stadium.  On Monday, city employees busily steam-cleaned a green swastika from a concrete trash can at Clark and painted over the painted letters “DGAF” and the logo of a local punk rock band on the wall of the announcer’s building above the Clark baseball diamond. The dugout and restroom building also were targeted.

Police said the suspects were not known to have any connection to the band, and DGAF is an acronym for “don’t give a f*ck,” police said.  HBPD Chief Greg Savelli said the graffito “F*ck Sharon Tate” was found on the side of a building. Tate, a movie actress, was murdered in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. She was eight and-a-half months pregnant.

Wicen said the Tate graffito referred to a song titled “Charles Manson is God,” and was not meant seriously.  Wicen and the boy were caught literally green-handed at 3:40 a.m. Sunday after a resident called in a complaint of a spray-painting in progress, HBPD Sgt. Paul Wolcott said.

Wicen said he and his accomplice were heading from the Strand to the ocean to toss the paint cans when two police officers appeared out of nowhere.  “We never even saw them,” he said. “All of a sudden there were two officers with their guns drawn, saying ‘hold it.’”

Wicen was booked on suspicion of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and felony malicious mischief, and the juvenile was released to his parents, Wolcott said. Wicen said he spent three days in jail before making bail.  “They are vandals,” Wolcott said. The cost of repairing the damage, including city employees’ wages, totals about $5,000, he said.

Wicen admitted responsibility for the spray painting. Police later drove him around town so he could identify other graffiti sites for which he was responsible, Savelli said.

City Councilman Kit Bobko, author of Hermosa’s recently enacted anti-graffiti ordinance, said he wants the suspects prosecuted to the full extent of the state’s anti-graffiti laws, which could include the revocation of Wicen’s driving privileges for one year.  To remove the graffiti, Bobko said, city crews had to be diverted from normal duties such as repairing streetlights.  “That’s what pisses me off,” he said. ER

Hit and Run into Home Injures Boy in Hermosa Beach

HERMOSA BEACH - A pickup truck crashed into a Hermosa Beach home today and injured a 5-year-old boy who was asleep in his bed. 

Firefighters freed the boy, who was trapped briefly in the wreckage, and paramedics took him to a hospital where he was treated for a broken leg.