What Makes It So Special? ‘The People’

Griffith Park is a pretty place, a pleasing place and a place to escape the vertigo and tumult of big city life. But beyond its spectacular geography and man-made amenities, it draws its distinctive vitality from the widely dissimilar types who frequent it.

Not necessarily those who throng the park on weekends--although they too are a component of its unique dynamics--but rather the melange of Angelenos for whom the park is essential to their very existence.

Some are spry, others frail. Some are poetic when they commend the park’s grandeur, others are speechless in the presence of it. Artists, gardeners, athletes and film makers are among the almost daily habitues who draw their own particular inspiration from Griffith Park. Some park regulars have invested time, sweat and money to celebrate it by leaving a personal imprint on the land. At least a few credit it with prolonging their lives.

Call them the People of the Park.

Alfred Kelly is 69, and his weather-beaten, gray-stubbled face reflects every year of it. He lives in Elysian Park and “works” in Griffith Park.

Each morning he puts on an old red sweater, rolls up one pant leg and rides his bike--a girl’s model--five miles to the park. He leaves the bike near a drinking fountain beside a fence that runs along the 13th fairway of the golf course. He knows that golfers inclined to hook will put their drive over the fence and quite often lose balls.

Kelly, a native North Carolinian who has a pronounced drawl, collects the lost balls. When he has found seven or eight, he goes to another side of the links and sells them for 50 cents apiece. He is proud of his product. “I never sell a cut ball. I throw them away.”

While searching for mislaid balls, Kelly carries an aged two-iron, although he has never been a golfer. He maintains that swinging the club through the grass as he hunts benefits his health. He demonstrated by whacking at an imaginary ball to the accompaniment of grunts. “It clears the lungs, he said.”

At day’s end, during his ride home, he stops for provisions--canned goods, fresh fruit and milk.

Kelly said that he has been bicycling for 40 years, and that during that time “I must have worn out 40 bikes.”

His shelter in Elysian Park is a plastic-covered trench, which he dug by hand. Flimsy in appearance, it is nevertheless, he insisted, a formidable sanctuary. “I never get wet. I never get sick.”

Kelly, who claims to have lived in Elysian Park since 1949 and to have swept parking lots for a living before becoming a lost-ball collector six years ago, said he makes about $4 a day. “It’s enough, that’s all I need,” he said.

The park rangers call them “the bongo people.” One ranger, John Arbogast, said: “If I don’t hear their sound--I guess you’d call it kind of a mixture of Latin and African--I just don’t think I’m in the park on a Sunday. If I ever go on vacation, I’m going to need to take a tape of them playing to remind me it’s Sunday.”

Sunday in the park with the bongo people goes back at least a quarter of a century. It began when someone, whom no one can remember, showed up in the central picnic area with a bongo or another kind of drum--no one remembers that, either. The bearer of the instrument sat beneath the shade of a tree and began thumping.

As time passed, the first musician was joined by others carrying percussion instruments and a Sunday-in-the-park tradition was born. It continues with an often changing cast, but it is centered around stalwarts such as Jerry Delaney and Roland Miles, both 32.

Delaney, an engineer for a cable television firm, has been playing in the impromptu sessions for four years. Miles, an employee of a computer distributor, has been playing for eight years.

On one recent Sunday, a substantial crowd gathered on the grass around the instrumentalists, who numbered about a dozen. A young couple reclining against a tree smooched to the beat while a middle-aged woman with carrot-colored hair, wearing cowboy boots and carrying a can of beer, weaved rhythmically among the music makers.

“We’re always improvising. It’s like an old-fashioned jam session,” Miles said.

“It’s a nice way to unwind on a Sunday morning,” said Delaney, adding as he nodded toward a paunchy, gray-haired man intently muscling a bongo: “You should talk to Freddie here. He’s been coming to the park on Sundays forever .”

Freddie paused, shook hands and said to a visitor, while swaying to the pulsing rhythm: “Sure, I’ll talk to you. But not now. I’m so into it, I can’t concentrate on what I’m saying.”

Erna Budzislawski probably is in her late 60s or early 70s. She refuses to reveal how old she is. “Why should I?” she asked. Budzislawski is a refugee from Hitler’s Germany and a widow.

Six days a week she goes to the park to hike. It is an enthusiasm she developed as a child in a small town in East Prussia. “As a young girl, my parents didn’t want me to go alone to the park or the forest. So I joined the Wandervogel , which means the ‘hiking birds.’ We hiked and we sang. I met my future husband in the club.”

Friends first introduced her to Griffith Park more than 30 years ago. “The park is so tremendous--it takes a long time to know the extent of it,” Budzislawski said, but she maintains that she has walked every accessible foot of it many times over.

“You meet your friends in the park, the old familiar faces. You meet and talk to them. ‘You are late today.’ ‘Hello, I haven’t seen you lately.’ You have so much in common. The joy of nature.”

Lives Nearby as Well

Her love affair with Griffith Park is this intense: After hiking one day 29 years ago, she noticed an apartment building being constructed nearby. She got on the waiting list and moved into an apartment the day the building was finished.

A small, spry woman, Budzislawski is known to park rangers as “The Candy Woman.” She carries small candies and bird food in little bags on her daily expeditions. “I feed the birds and I give the candies to the children I meet and to the park workers. But I always ask the children’s parents first if it is all right. I like people to smile.”

Each summer, she returns to Europe to hike in famous parks and forests. “When I go, I miss the people here; when I go back I miss my friends. I tell people there that Griffith Park is unique. It is so big. You can’t find another place like it.”

Edward Chapman, who is 73 and underwent a quadruple bypass a year ago, is one of the people Budzislawski often encounters in the park. “We always have a short conversation,” he said. “Another friend of mine there and I used to talk politics. But neither of us could see the other’s side. So we mutually agreed not to talk politics--so we could stay friends.”

Chapman, a tall, lean man who lives with his sister in a bungalow court in Hollywood, has been hiking in the park for 18 years, since he retired as a municipal employee in San Francisco and moved here “because the weather up north is lousy overall.”

He thinks the park may be what’s keeping him alive. After his operation, he said, “the doctor recommended that I continue” hiking as part of his rehabilitation. “About five weeks after my surgery, as soon as I was able to drive my car, I started back up, a little bit at a time.”

Long 1.4 Miles

Each day, Chapman deposits his car in the observatory lot and walks to the peak of Mt. Hollywood. A sign at the start of the trail says the distance is 1.4 miles. “I dispute that,” he said. “I think it’s longer. That’s been a point of dispute with a lot of people.”

He reaches the top in about 45 minutes, he said; the return trip requires about 30 minutes. “Then I get a cup of coffee in the stand near the parking lot.”

Along the trail, he said, he meets the young and the old, the strong and the not-so-strong. “A lot of them up there are a lot older than I am, 80 and over. You see a lot of heart patients. We call it ‘Cardiac Walk’ because there are so many people with heart problems. It’s a sort of health trail. The young people you see are usually jogging.”

Chapman, who has thin white hair and a Fu Manchu goatee, said: “I appreciate the fact that the park is so close to where I live. I’d hate to be without it. I’m tired of walking around on the streets and smelling the fumes.

“It’s always so nice to just stand and look around you when you get to the top. On a clear day it’s marvelous. You can see the snow-capped mountain ranges and Mt. Wilson in one direction and over the ocean to Catalina in another--usually after a good rain and wind that blows everything away.

What About Snakes?

“A couple of times I’ve seen fat rattlers on the trail. Especially on hot summer days when they’re out sunning themselves. But you leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone.”

Chapman takes a cane along on his hikes. “But I don’t need it. I just like something in my hands when I’m hiking. I don’t know what to do with my hands.”

After his operation, said Chapman, among his first hospital visitors were other hikers he’d met on the Griffith Park trail. “My friends were concerned when they didn’t see me for a few days. They called the house to find out what was the matter.”

Lucia Ruta is 35, perky and animated and the only woman among the city’s 26 rangers. She’s proud of that fact. Her beat is Griffith Park, and she adores her job.

For “six of the longest years of my life,” she said, she toiled as a secretary in her native Washington, drifting from job to job. But, she said, “I hated it. Eight hours a day of being stuck inside made me unhappy.”

She moved to Los Angeles in 1970 and took a job as a short-order cook until she got on with the Recreation and Parks Department as a gardener, the position at which aspiring rangers must start.

“It was dirty work but I enjoyed it. And I was stubborn--I didn’t want to go back to being a secretary.”

Dealing With Men

The roughest part of the gardening job, she said, was not the work itself but dealing with the majority of her colleagues. They didn’t like the idea of a woman intruding in what had been a male-dominated profession, she explained. Besides the harassment she suffered because of “the male ego and jealousy,” she said, she found herself being propositioned by co-workers “making passes right and left.”

Since she was elevated to ranger three years ago, she said, all that has changed. “Every day is a different experience. I love the park. It has so much to offer.

“I feel what I’m doing is more or less being a keeper of the park, a preserver of the park. I like the PR part of the job because I like dealing with the people who come here. They ask us so many questions; they think rangers know everything about the park.

“But sometimes I don’t have the answer. And that means I have to find out. So I learn something new about Griffith Park every day.”

Griffith Park is among the greatest things to happen to the film and television industries since the nickelodeon and kinescope. It rings with the sound and music of actors, directors and technicians busily doing their jobs.

Last year, the park was the backdrop for 114 television shows, 30 movies and 84 commercials.

“The variety of the terrain is what makes it so popular,” said ranger Ruta. “And it’s close, convenient and cheaper than other locations. You don’t have to go all the way to Death Valley or Big Bear to shoot rustic scenery.”

Directors as far back as D. W. Griffith (no relation to the parkland’s donor) discovered that. He filmed scenes for “The Klansman” and “Birth of a Nation” in the park. “My wife gets sick and tired of me interrupting a television show by saying, ‘There’s Griffith Park again,’ ” said Sheldon Jensen, the city official who oversees park operations.

Person in Background

He recently caught a “Murder, She Wrote” episode in which Angela Lansbury was riding along in a Mercedes. In the background, inspecting a tee on the golf course, he sighted a familiar figure. “It was me,” Jensen said.

Richard Ginevan, chief park supervisor, said producers have built “whole towns” in the park as movie settings. “Years ago, one movie company put up a gas station near the merry-go-round. A woman driving by pulled her car to a screeching halt, parked, got out and ran to the door marked ‘Ladies.’ When she opened it, all she found herself looking at was the rest of the park.”

Park rangers call her “The Dog Woman.” She is one of the homeless who sleep in the park. Where it is she camps for the night the rangers have never determined. But for five years now, off and on, they have seen her wandering during the day, always walking a different dog.

Ranger Jess Munoz, a veteran of the night shift, said: “We were talking once and someone said, ‘Maybe she takes ‘em back up where she hides and kills ‘em and eats ‘em.’ ”

Munoz said he has no opinion on the matter.

Almost every afternoon, Charlie O’Hara, 79, shows up at the golf clubhouse, although since his wife took ill a couple of years ago, he no longer plays the game. He spends an hour or so exchanging reminiscences with buddies of many years, including Ray Ditmore, 82, who retired in 1971 after 20 years as supervisor of golf at Griffith Park.

Oh, what yarns they spin.

O’Hara, a native of Rhode Island, first played golf at Griffith Park in 1931, two years after Ditmore became a gardener there. He remembers how thick the roughs lining the fairways were. “They didn’t tear the course apart in those days.” He also recalls the day he was on the verge of breaking 80 for the first time, “But I five-putted the 18th green. Next day, I played the same hole and birdied it.”

“When I first started here as a gardener,” Ditmore said, “they cut the fairways with mules, which wore big leather shoes so they wouldn’t ruin the grass. And they made tees to set the ball on out of sand. There’d be a big box of wet sand which you’d scoop up with a little gadget. Then you press the button and deposit a little sand cone on the ground.”

Brush Fire Erupts

Ditmore remembers standing just outside the clubhouse on an unusually hot autumn afternoon in October of 1933, “when a fire started near where the parking lot is now and the wind whipped it around and shot it up a U-shaped canyon.”

Twenty-nine park workers, mostly men employed as part of a work-relief program, died during the brief killer blaze that ate through dry brush and chaparral. “I remember hearing one man screaming, ‘My God. My family,’ ” Ditmore said.

The fire was succeeded by another disaster five years later. In March of 1938, a flood that caused bridges to collapse and highways to buckle and killed 30 people across Southern California, smote Griffith Park with its full fury. Residents of neighboring Los Feliz were evacuated and the waters rushing through the park swept away a 10-foot-tall statue installed three years earlier to great fanfare.

It was a monument depicting a Civilian Conservation Corps worker with an ax in his hands and it stood on the site of a CCC camp which, for a time, occupied a portion of the park.

“Odd thing about that 1933 fire,” said retired Ranger Bill Eckert, an expert in the botany of the park, “it took eight years for that portion of the park to come back to blooming. Except--and this is the odd thing--except for some wildflowers, which the fire caused to bloom because it killed all the other growth.”

For 13 years, Dino Daachs, 37, has been driving a Rapid Transit District bus route (No. 204) that goes along Vermont Avenue and enters the park at Los Feliz Boulevard before winding up to the observatory. It’s one of three RTD lines that enter the park.

Daachs’ route is a shuttle serving the observatory and the Greek Theatre. To Daachs, “it’s the best run in town.”

“I enjoy the people who go to the park,” he said. “Most of the time I get the seniors, especially the newly retired, because it gives them a chance to get away and go some place. Some ride every day. But I get hikers and tourists too.”

During summer, Daachs said, he often takes what truly is a “busman’s holiday” on weekends. He packs his wife and four children into the family car and they head for the park. “We picnic. The air is so clear.”

Captain’s Roost came first. Then Dante’s View. And after that, Amir’s Garden.

Each commands its own peculiar allegiance among dawdlers and hikers as the choicest spot in the park to climb to and dally a while. Captain’s Roost perches on the west side of Mt. Hollywood, Dante’s View is on the northeast and Amir’s Garden on another mountain that overlooks the zoo. The view from all three is spectacular. Each, with park permission, was carved from the wilderness around it and lovingly landscaped by a park zealot who then decorated his creation with benches and picnic tables.

The identity of the man responsible for Captain’s Roost, certainly more than a quarter of a a century ago, is a mystery today. No one, it appears, knows his name. Two longtime hikers in the park, Budzislawski and Rene Ortiz, 63, a native of Spain, say they remember the man and frequently spoke to him, but they differ on his origins.

Occupation in Doubt

Budzislawski’s memory of him goes back 25 years, and she recollects him as being “a man from the Balkans and probably about 35 years old.” Ortiz remembers him from 40 years ago and said, “Everybody used to call him captain because he was supposed to have been a captain in the Armenian army.” Still others contend that he was a former sea captain.

No doubts exist as to the originators of Dante’s View and Amir’s Garden.

Until his death seven years ago at 73, Dante Orgolini was a park legend. A native of Brazil, he was a professional artist who also happened to have a green thumb. When he turned 60, he invaded the high, wild ground, and during the next 13 years turned it into a multicolored mountainside patch which is maintained today by Orgolini’s old friend Charlie Turner, himself 80.

Many Hours of Work

Amir Dialameh, 53 and a native of Iran, started much younger on his garden, and works six to eight hours, seven days a week, improving it. He was hiking one day 15 years ago to the top of a rugged trail when he saw a spot that had been devasted by a brush fire. He thought to himself: “This is ugly. Somebody ought to build a garden here. It’s a gorgeous view. Let’s do it. It took me a year just to clean up the charred trees.”

Even if his mountainside showplace did not exist, Dialameh, handsome, gray-haired and expressive, would be a man of considerable dimension. He was once a customs officer at the Tehran airport and is an amateur painter and wine expert who works nights in a Hollywood restaurant.

He estimates that he has spent “thousands of dollars” planting the 50 varieties of plants on the two-acre plot in Griffith Park. “I don’t make much money. But I know how to save,” he said.

Sweet serendipity has made Dave Feliz a Griffith Park fixture for 13 years, the length of time he has patrolled there as a ranger. Feliz? The name has a familiar ring to it. And well it should.

Dave Feliz, 47 and a husky, good-humored man, is a direct descendant of Jose Vincente Feliz, the corporal who led the Spanish settlement of the Pueblo de Los Angeles and, as a reward, was given a land grant that encompassed what now is Griffith Park and the smart neighborhood of Los Feliz.

Feliz, a Recreation and Parks employee since 1959, says his Griffith Park assignment came about by pure chance. But he does feel a singular attachment to the land.

“Some of the time when I’m working out here on a horse, I think about my ancestors riding here and what it must have been like . . . ,” he once declared. “I’ll be out at one or two in the morning and there’s a breeze and the leaves make noise and it’s easy to believe it’s haunted.”