He’d Do a Headstand to Make the Rajneesh Deal
Here’s Rajneesh and his dog Spot.
Within hours of the announced sale of the 86 Rolls-Royce sedans owned by deported guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his Rajneesh Investment Corp., exotic car dealers and collectors from Saudi Arabia to Studio City were telephoning Rajneeshpuram, Ore., with their million-dollar bids.
But according to one dealer, they don’t have a prayer.
“I offered $3.5 million for the fleet, was told they wanted $8 million and, on an average, that’s more than some of the cars sold for when new,” said Rick Cole of Rick Cole Auctions, Studio City. Cole was hoping to have at least a half dozen Rolls-Rajneesh for his Thanksgiving Day collector car auction at Newport Beach.
Cole said he made his first offer by phone: “A woman up there asked me: ‘Would that be check or cash, sweetie?’ ”
Then he sent two representatives to Oregon.
“Most of the cars are 1984s and 1985s with a few ‘83s,” he said. “My people spent the weekend there going over most of them and they weren’t in the best shape. Some were damaged because they’d been driven off road. But others, we were told, are brand-new with special features and zero miles on them.”
Among those special features, reported other dealers, including Charles Crail of Santa Barbara, are trick paint jobs giving the appearance of orange flames or Oriental tapestry.
Thursday, a spokesman for the Oregon commune said one deal remains pending and the collection might be sold this weekend. But the closing price, according to Dhayan John, president of Rajneesh Investment, seems to have dropped. To a mere $5 million.
Cole, on the other hand, could salvage some business.
“They offered us 4,500 sleeping bags that had been used only once for a weekend love-in in the mud,” he said. “That was the only deal that makes any sense.”
Dread Begins at 40
Anxiety, dread, depression and erratic behavior that tend to descend on people as their 40th birthday looms has nothing to do with chronological age, according to Stanley Brandes. Blame it on culture, says the UC Berkeley anthropologist who, at 42, has had a couple of years to examine the situation from the far side.
Brandes has written a book indicting Western culture for festooning the 40th year with bad vibes. In “Forty: The Age and the Symbol” ($12.95, hard cover, University of Tennessee Press), the professor observes that in our culture the start of 40th year traditionally coincides with three new, and usually unwarranted feelings: 1) a sense of depression, discomfort and restlessness, 2) belief that the body is starting to fall apart, and 3) the need to make a professional change since it’s the “last chance” to escape the prison of an existing job. Those three illusions and others are promoted by all kinds of sociological props, Brandes said.
He cited scores of examples, some as specific as a shampoo advertised to “help bring bring back life and luster to hair over 40--and save 50 cents,” others as general as “the obsession of our culture for quantification.” Brandes noted that the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 set the 40th year as the first time you can sue an employer for picking on you for being over the age hill. He observed it was no coincidence that comedian Jack Benny made a national joke out of remaining 39 years old forever. Ronald Reagan resurrected the joke with more humor than accuracy for his 72nd birthday by claiming “it’s just the 31st anniversary of my 39th birthday.”
An Equal Among Piers
Russell Travis is an extraordinary fellow, but he is not pierless. He’s got pieces of the Santa Monica Pier stored in Bakersfield, Atascadero and on a ranch in Ventura County. Moreover, he has hunks of the Pismo Beach and Avila Beach Piers stashed in Pismo Beach and Atascadero. Travis, who teaches sociology at Cal State Bakersfield, paid $800 for about about 4 1/2 tons of Santa Monica Pier remains after the landmark was knocked asunder by heavy seas in 1983. He shelled out another $700 for “3 or 4 tons” of the Avila Beach Pier that suffered the rigor of the same storm, and for “a percent of the profits” the city of Pismo Beach gave him exclusive rights to roughly 6 tons of their pier, also victimized by the storm.
Travis got into pier collecting after studying collectors for several years as research for a potential book.
“I got so interested that I decided to collect something,” said the 48-year-old professor. “So I decided to collect some of the Santa Monica Pier. I grew up in Beverly Hills, and spent a good many youthful hours on the pier. Besides, I thought, ‘That’s real historic wood.’ So I collected some. I never thought I’d have more than one pier. But it was kind of exciting, so now I have pieces of three.”
From these remnants have come Le Pier, P.O. Box 578, Morro Bay, Calif. 93442. The company offers picture frames, desk pen bases and name plates fashioned from pier flotsam.
Is it selling? “Yes,” Travis said.
But who would want such stuff? “I don’t know,” he responded.
Quenching a Flame
Fresh from helping to lobby into existence California’s first child arson task force bill, San Francisco’s National Firehawk Foundation has produced a 10-minute videotape dealing with the problem of child arson.
Firehawk Foundation founder and board chairman Pamela McLaughlin said the tape was made in order to help raise public awareness of the problem--as well as the treatment that is available for what is basically a behavioral disorder.
“Arson is the major violent crime committed by juveniles,” said McLaughlin, “accounting for about $3 billion in real and indirect damages. At least 8,000 kids are arrested each year for arson, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Last month, Gov. George Deukmejian signed legislation creating a “Task Force on Juvenile Arson and Firesetting.” U.S. Senate hearings in April resulted in a proposed plan for a child arson initiative that would combine the problem-solving efforts of youth-service agencies as well as the insurance industry.
Before the California legislation and the federal initiative, McLaughlin said, many child arsonists were treated as “hard-core criminals” who were beyond any kind of help. “Their underlying problems were not recognized,” McLaughlin said. “The attitude was basically lock ‘em up and forget about ‘em.”
Now, she went on, “there is finally some recognition that child arson is basically the symptom of an underlying psychological problem.” The National Firehawk Foundation was started three years ago as an outgrowth of McLaughlin’s Firehawk program in San Francisco, the first effort anywhere to treat child arsonists.
Yard Workers
It seems that the family that rakes together stays together. When Hawthorne-based Mattel Toys asked first-, second- and third-graders across the country to “draw a picture of your family doing something together,” the winner and three others among the 12 prize winners chosen from 60,000 entries depicted their families working in their yards.
Two of the 12 winners were from the Southland. Jacob Cloud (Coby) Hernandez, 8, of North Hollywood won sixth prize, a $100 savings bond, with his drawing depicting the whole family--Coby (mowing the lawn), sisters Erin Lucy and Mary, his 97-year-old great-grandmother and the family dog, Scooter, at work and play in their big yard in North Hollywood.
It was a natural choice, Coby explained--”My dad’s a (self-employed) gardener.”
Seventh prize and a $50 bond went to Tim Lobner, 9, a third-grader at American Martyrs parochial school in Manhattan Beach, for his drawing of himself, mother Patricia, dad Bret and brother, Patrick, 3, on the ski slope at Northstar.
