For Sale: Mayor’s Mansion
The listing reads like any other $3.2 million estate for sale in the La Playa section of Point Loma: 7,500-square-foot main house with three bedrooms, four and one-half baths, four-car garage, combination indoor/outdoor pool with a spa, complete security system, temperature-controlled wine storage room, sweeping bay view and a 1,300-square-foot carriage house that boasts its own two bedrooms and bath.
The sellers are hardly typical, though: They are San Diego’s Mayor Maureen O’Connor and her husband, businessman Robert O. Peterson.
Butler Realty, which listed the two-story, Spanish-style home on Aug. 20, has had a few inquires, “but no firm commitments” yet, according to broker Stuart Fox.
The city’s First Couple is said to be readying a move to another home on Point Loma.
Passing the Hat for the Cup
It sounded more like a fund-raising pitch than an award presentation and acceptance speech Thursday when real estate man Malin Burnham and yachtsman Dennis Conner received the Chamber of Commerce’s “Spirit of San Diego” award at the Chamber’s 116th annual meeting.
A video-tape program and a stand-up talk by Burnham urged the more than 300 faithful to “keep fund-raising going” in Conner’s effort to recapture the America’s Cup from the Aussies, who surprised Conner in 1983 with a dramatic victory.
Past winners of the Spirit of San Diego award include Pete Wilson, Clair Burgener, Joan Kroc and Gordon Luce. And it seems far-fetched to think that Kroc would have asked the audience to contribute to her anti-nuclear cause or to buy McDonalds’ hamburgers, or that Luce would have urged attendees to bank at his Great American First Savings Bank.
Chamber officials insisted that they weren’t giving the award because of some “future economic benefit.”
“It was given to them because of their courage and commitment from rebounding from a crushing defeat,” said spokesman Garry Bonelli. He quickly added, however, that the cup’s presence here would have a “significant impact on the community.”
Meanwhile, conservative columnist George Will shocked a few at the gathering when he offered that the populace has shown it wants big government and big government costs money. Conclusion: either cut spending, which Will said was unlikely, or raise taxes. That message doesn’t fit with the get-the-government-off-our-backs philosophy of many Chamber Reaganites.
Legal Eagle?
Albert Myrick Jr., the one-time self-serve gas station kingpin who last month was indicted by a federal grand jury for mail and bank fraud, is pitching hard his story that a decade-old drug-and-alcohol addiction was to blame for his business woes.
But some local attorneys maintain that Myrick is a smooth operator. For example, they say, in 1983, the prestigious Gray Cary Ames & Frye law firm had obtained a default judgment against Myrick in a civil lawsuit. Myrick, in an apparent attempt to outsmart them, retained T. Knox Bell, a Gray Cary attorney, to represent him.
The Bell hiring apparently fell through the cracks of Gray Cary’s routine conflicts-of-interest check. So, when partner Bob Ames attempted to serve Myrick with the default judgment, Myrick told Ames to give the document to his attorney, Bell.
Gray Cary had to resign from the lawsuit, and the plaintiff, Commonwealth Title, was forced to retain another attorney, Tim Fields. Fields collected on the judgment against Myrick, but the legal snafu gave Myrick an additional eight months of breathing room.
