Time in a Bottle: Heir Digs Into His Heritage at Anaheim Ancestral Home

Frederick Hermon, who thinks of himself as half hippie and half John Bircher, can best be described as, well, unusual. “I am not like other people,” he said.

For instance, four years ago he advertised in a local newspaper for a wife and married one of the hundreds who replied. Last week she filed for divorce.

Eleven years ago his grandfather died, leaving him an inheritance. Hermon’s first move was to buy a bicycle and ride it to Salt Lake City just to prove he could do it. Then he bought a boat just to visit Catalina Island.

Well, he’s been having a good time and hasn’t worked since, but now he’s just about out of money, forcing him to sell his share of the inherited Anaheim family home he lives in.

“All I’m going to get is $80,000,” he said. “I wish I had saved just half of what I inherited.”

And because of a family squabble, he doesn’t have any tangible remembrances of his grandparents. So he decided to dig up an old dump on the property, figuring he’d get a family history from what he found.

“You can learn a lot about someone just by the stuff they throw away,” he explained.

Hermon, 38, who was standing barefoot with three of his 10 cats on the freshly filled-in hole that was once the dump site, pictures himself as an amateur archeologist and said he once located an old Indian village in Mexico by using his own unorthodox method.

“I got loaded on a case of good Mexican beer and got a vision of where it was,” he admitted.

“I tried that trick again to locate the dump on this property (once an 18-acre ranch but now only half an acre) and it worked again,” he said, pointing to what was a 40-foot-deep hole he had dug by hand. He said he hit pay dirt, so to speak.

“What I really recovered,” he said, “was a large quantity of colored glass containers, but they helped me learn many things about my grandparents.” He said some bottles contained different kinds of medicine, including a cure for the mange, and some held fertility formulas. Many were liquor bottles, “but I don’t know if it was my grandfather or grandmother who drank.”

Looking to the future, he said he plans to move to a ranch in Colorado to get back to simpler times. “The pace is too fast for me here.”

He said he also plans to check into Alcoholics Anonymous to stem his beer drinking. “Look at me,” he sighed, “I weigh 250 pounds. That’s from the beer.”

When escrow closes and he moves, he’ll transport all the bottles with him. “I just want to see them preserved,” he said. “They’re all I have left.”

When Mary Lou Wilson, 70, and Albert E. Wilson, 72, of Garden Grove decided to renew their vows after 50 years of marriage, they felt that since the Rev. Glenn Tudor did such a good and lasting job the first time in Martinsville, Ind., they’d try to find him and ask him to do it again.

They located the retired minister in Las Vegas and brought him to Garden Grove where he married the Wilsons again, commenting: “This is the first time I’ve married a couple twice.”

You want to poke fun at Vonix Vom Schlangenbach because of his name? Go ahead, but he’s a German shepherd and the newest member of the La Palma Police Department as well as the partner of Officer James Roche. It’s not the original, but you get the same reactive feeling looking at the lighted model of the Statue of Liberty built for a New Year’s Eve party at Lake Park La Habra, a mobile home park.

Built by a group of residents headed by Edward Adams, it was such a hit at the party that the whole group ended up singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and other patriotic songs to bring in the New Year.

“We sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ too,” said park co-manager Joanne Hornburg, “but it came after the patriotic songs. We really got caught up in the whole thing.”

And the six-foot statue, made from chicken wire and papier-mache, still stands at the recreation center for people who want a look.

The park managers said they’d even be happy to loan it out to responsible groups.

What kind of gifts do some people give? Well, in the case of Mary Moore Young of Fullerton, it was a forklift.

The recipient, the Rehabilitation Institute of Southern California in Orange, had filed for a grant to buy the $13,000 forklift but it was’t approved, and Young, a longtime friend and volunteer, knew it was badly needed.

She put her deed in simple words: “I’m thrilled I’m able to do it.”

Acknowledgments--Buena Park Police Chief Robert T. Reber, Lt. Gary Rooney and officer David Willson were honored by the Automobile Club of Southern California for their 25-year on-duty accident-free driving records.