Some Nuggets Result From Desk-Top Digging

It is buff-colored! That’s the color of my desk top, discovered after winnowing through windrows of paper. The chaff filled two wastebaskets; the nutritious kernels I can hold in one hand.

This kernel is from Dr. John L. Schwartz, diplomate, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and publisher of “The Psychiatric Times.” Published in Santa Ana, this newspaper goes to 36,767 American psychiatrists.

Dr. Schwartz says in his letter to me that he was troubled by my column about Keith Demlinger, a young magician turned therapist who uses magic tricks to entertain and gain the confidence of his clients.

Demlinger’s educational credentials, he feels, are questionable. Further, he objects to Demlinger’s classifying psychoanalysis with palm reading and witch doctoring.

“Although, Mr. Demlinger may be a wise young man, psychotherapy is a very serious business indeed. It entails the meeting of a troubled patient or client (whose concerns are certainly painful and important) and a professional person, hopefully one with serious high-quality training and substantial experience to prepare for this important encounter. Does Mr. Demlinger understand that encouraging people to talk freely about their problems may entail substantial risks? Does he have carefully supervised clinical training, as well as a body of scientific knowledge that he has mastered to prepare him?” asks Dr. Schwartz.

Well, I trust that it was clear to those reading that column of mine that young Demlinger’s conventional academic and scientific qualifications come nowhere near those of Dr. Schwartz and others with equal disciplines.

Demlinger, by his own admission, is a kind of affable humbug like the Wizard of Oz. But he is serious about helping people to achieve healthy mental attitudes. He wisely refuses to counsel people with psychotic problems. Demlinger’s strength to “heal,” or resolve internal conflicts, lies in his own deep religious convictions, which he tries to instill in others as a means of self-help. Perhaps his method is shallow scientifically, but his motives are humanitarian.

I was interested to note that Dr. Schwartz agrees that “magic and ritual are important” as a means of establishing rapport with a patient. On top of this, the full weight of scientific knowledge, as well as “an important therapeutic modality,” must be applied by an appropriately trained psychiatric physician, he observes.

My next kernel in hand has to do with that revelation that visits all of us when hindsight shows us how we could have made a million dollars. Dr. William O. Hendricks, historian and director of the Sherman Library in Corona del Mar, brings such a revelation.

Dr. Hendricks says that if you took the little dirt road from Santa Ana around the east side of Upper Newport Bay, or rode the launch Flora, skippered by Frank Vallely, from the Balboa Pavilion, you could reach a tiny isolated community with a handful of cottages. There you could buy lots, with breathtaking sea views, for about $150 an acre.

That was about 1909. Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric cars went as far as the Pavilion then. But plans were announced to extend the tracks on a trestle across the bay to this place called Balboa Palisades. The eastern end of the trestle would connect with a canyon called Electric Way. A developer named George E. Hart was promoting sales in a 70-acre tract that had been part of the Irvine Ranch.

Electric Way is now Bayside Drive. The tracks were never extended. And the community there is now called Corona del Mar. Even as late as the early 1940s it was possible to buy lots in Corona del Mar for a paltry sum by today’s standards. The community’s growth did not begin until after World War II when a young couple built for themselves an adobe house that has become part of the Sherman Library.

My notes on Dr. Hendricks’ speech about Corona del Mar’s history before the Orange County Historical Society some time ago were among the kernels of my desk-top harvest. There are more, and I shall reveal them in the future. That is, if I don’t lose them again under fresh windrows of paper.