For L.A. man, 93, life is a walk in the park

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And so, every evening, at his home just above Los Feliz Boulevard, Shankman sets his alarm clock for 5 a.m. Every morning, his eyes open five minutes before the alarm, and he sets off into the hills.

He has been walking for more than three decades, pretty much every day -- 42,000 miles, by his reckoning, the vast majority of it in Griffith Park. The circumference of the Earth is roughly 25,000 miles, "so I figure," he said, "that I'm on my second trip around the world, all in Griffith Park."

Shankman is among a handful of people -- like Charlie Turner, caretaker of Dante's View; and Louis Alvarado, the park's "honorary mayor" -- who have asked a diffuse, fast-paced city to stop and remember that one of the largest city parks in the world is smack in the middle of L.A.

Shankman's story is not one of physical prowess but of relentless dedication -- to an urban park, to the restorative capability of a nice walk and to Los Angeles and its extraordinary topography, to which he attributes most of the city's foibles and charms.

He has never graduated to backpacking, not for a single night. ("I like a bed.") In a time of ultramarathons, he rarely walks more than four miles at a time. Once, he did seven. ("Never again.")

In recent years, his pace has slowed to a shuffle, his size 8, resoled Eccos often moving just six or eight inches with every step. He figures his eyes and legs are racing to do him in; these days the eyes, beset with macular degeneration, are winning. One day, he said, he just won't be able to take his walk. When that happens, he's not sure what he will leave behind.

"I'm like the elevator operator in an old building," he said. "Everybody knows him. Then he retires. Nobody knows the new guy. Then they get rid of the elevator operator altogether. Next thing you know, nobody remembers there was an elevator operator to begin with. I've just been here for so many years. I'm not special."

Those who know him -- who see him every morning -- do not agree.

From his first days in the park, Shankman has been one of its great ambassadors.

He has held court about a field of wild mustard in Cedar Grove, about a colony of rabbits running wild above Roosevelt Golf Course, about the day he rounded a corner near Beacon Hill to find that a film crew had filled a hot canyon with fake snow.

He has picked up scores of stray golf balls and delivered them to a charity thrift shop, sprinkled seeds from a golden rain tree growing in his backyard and carried gallons of water up to nurture struggling fields of poppies.

The way his admirers tell it, Shankman has helped turn the park into a community, a place you go not to get away from the city but to revel in it.

By now, he is a fixture. The other morning, a group of power moms raced by. ("Hi, Sol!" they said in unison.) George DiCaprio, a comic book artist, the actor Leo's father and a park regular, pulled up his mountain bike to chat. Tom LaBonge, an L.A. city councilman in the hills for a workout, pulled over in his car when he saw Shankman.

"The sun is coming up," LaBonge told him. "We live to see another day!"

Shankman smiled and stepped onto a trail across from the Greek Theatre.

"I'll tell you something you're allowed to say when you're my age," he said with a shrug. "It's good for the ego. It really is."

He was never an athlete. "I might have been what you call a 'nerd' today," he said.

Shankman earned his doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of Toronto after studying the vapor pressure of sulfuric gas solutions. With his wife, Elizabeth Stern Shankman, a pathologist whom he'd met at college in 1935, he moved to Los Angeles after school and started working for a vitamin company.