Sculptor Working on Dinosaur Doesn’t Take Things for Granite

John Cody’s press clippings prove that he’s a premiere sculptor who sells everything he hammers out of stone, usually in serpentine, California’s native rock.

And that’s not bad for a New York City-born lad who took up pounding on rocks after dropping out of school at age 16. He spent most school days drawing pictures and refusing to do regular class work.

His parents also found that he was 75% deaf, an ailment that has since been repaired.

Cody, 39, never had a lesson in rock sculpting. “I guess you can say I’m self-taught,” he observed.

In fact, Cody said he rarely makes a plan for what he sculpts, instead forming his sculpture from the way the rock is shaped. “Somehow, I try to put my personal feeling in stone.”

Despite his success with a string of one-man shows and the accolades of stone-art critics, Cody said he feels out of place living in Buena Park, where he’s carving a triceratops dinosaur out of a 20-ton serpentine boulder for Knott’s Berry Farm.

Cody is most comfortable living in the backwoods in near isolation with his wife, Felicia, and their five children on 130 acres in the Los Padres National Forest.

“I used to look for rock quarries (in Los Padres),” he said during a break from his dinosaur. “And when I would come out of the hills, I always wondered why. So I decided to stay. My inner soul is in the mountains.”

Despite his love for that style of living, “it’s a hard life,” he said, pointing out that there are no schools or grocery stores nearby. It means that he and his wife teach his children through correspondence schools and they grow much of what they eat, he said.

“I’m really not comfortable living here,” said Cody of his monthlong, rock-carving project, which he expects to complete in early February and place next to the theme park’s Kingdom of the Dinosaurs.

The finished sculpture will have a jade color with strains of gold running through it. The final price tag will be about $100,000, he said.

The hunk of marble is 5 feet deep, 6 feet wide and 7 feet high, “and so tough we have to use diamond bits to carve it up,” he said, while brushing rock dust from his hair and clothes.

“What I do enjoy,” he said, “is having the people who come to Knott’s Berry Farm watch me do the work,” pointing out that he rarely has visitors to his isolated home where he usually does his sculpting.

Ten women gathered every week for seven months at Brenda Werbelow’s Anaheim home to create a quilt that they hoped would sell at auction for at least $400. They planned to donate the money to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Anaheim for its charities.

All their husbands belong to the club, said Werbelow, a veteran quilter of 12 years, who headed the group.

Well, they put the quilt up for auction and the successful bidder was Gene Brewer of Tustin, husband of Jody Brewer, one of the women who helped make the quilt.

The others workers were Grace Lowenstein of Orange; Millie Esten of Garden Grove, and Anaheim residents Elizabeth Fink, Barbara Gleason, Teddy Siegele, Diana Mosher, Paulette Crandall and Marjorie Rothrock.

The women thought they did a terrific job putting the quilt together, so every one of them bid for it.

Costa Mesa marriage and family therapist Jeanne Nelson teaches a 3-hour workshop called “Handling Anger in Relationships,” a course designed to help people identify why they become hostile with their partner.

“It’s easy to do a lot of blaming,” she said. “But we help them to find out what the real issue is.” She said most people taking the workshop are in the 30-to-40 age group.

Nelson said the gathering is an excellent starting point to stem the anger but that most people usually come individually. “It might be better if their partner came along,” she suggested.

When Steve Lawler of Costa Mesa won $2.2 million in a recent state lottery, he wasn’t the only winner. The 7-Eleven store in Costa Mesa that sold the winning ticket received $11,000-- 1/2% of the total.

What about Dean Reynolds of Costa Mesa, the employee who sold the winning ticket? “We’ll arrange a nice dinner for him,” said 7-Eleven spokeswoman Stephanie Nelson of Fullerton.

It was Willard Intermediate School in Santa Ana that raised $3,000 from its recent student jog-a-thon, not Williams School, which got the credit in an earlier column.