Hold That Tiger : “I just can’t walk away. . . . I’ve just gotta save that park.”

The telephone rings. A man’s voice says without preamble, “The damned fools are trying to do it to us again, when can we get together?”

“Who is this?” I ask.

“Melvin Perlitsh. They’re practicing politics in the toilet as usual.”

“Who is?”

“Burbank. They’re trying to sell that playground, damn them, and I’m not going to let them get away with it!”

“Perhaps, Melvin,” I say calmly, “you should start from the beginning.”

You remember Melvin Perlitsh.

He’s the wily old dog who battled to a standstill efforts by the San Fernando Valley Cultural Foundation to turn Warner Park into a center for the performing arts.

Melvin was not opposed to culture or even to the cultural foundation, which provides a daytime activity for lawyers’ wives. He just didn’t want the park ruined.

So he began a vigorous Save the Park campaign and was even arrested once, but his point was made. Vast plans for a cultural center are probably down the drain.

That arrest, by the way, was for distributing handbills on public property. The city attorney, having read the First Amendment, refused to prosecute.

What interests me about Melvin is that there’s really nothing for him in all this except the satisfaction of having saved a park.

That isn’t a lot when you consider the hours he puts in. He’s a retired postal worker, which gives him almost all day to fight City Hall, a condition that must terrify those compelled to meet his frontal assaults.

Perlitsh shows up at civic meetings spoiling for a fight. Silencing him isn’t easy.

His first arrest came years ago at a Burbank school board meeting where he was protesting plans to eliminate crossing guards at elementary schools.

Melvin was ordered to stop hoisting a sign at the meeting and responded by telling the board president to go to hell, which got the cops on him.

He was held in the slammer for four hours and later collected $20,000 for wrongful arrest.

Which brings us to the park in Burbank.

It is no big deal as parks go, occupying a small patch of faded green in an area occupied mostly by Latino families and industrial plants. Melvin lives across the street from it.

I agreed to meet him there because I was afraid not to. Right away, he began pounding his fist into a palm and telling me he would rather see Burbank in hell than see the park closed.

“I begged them once to keep this grassy area open for kids,” Perlitsh said, “and now I’m going to fight them to keep it open.”

The little patch of green was a playground once for an adjoining school. The school was closed about six years ago and sold to the city, which now wants to resell the land for industrial development.

When the school was shut down, Perlitsh waged a 2-year campaign to keep the playground open for kids in the neighborhood. The city grudgingly consented, but refused to maintain it.

As a result, there are none of the usual facilities that accompany parks in other residential areas: no drinking fountains, no toilets, not even trash containers.

Neighbors keep the park clean and vagrants out.

“The whole thing makes me madder than hell,” Perlitsh said.

He picked an ax handle up off the grass and, using it as a baseball bat, swung at a tennis ball that bounced a few feet in front of him.

Then he pulled the visor of his cap down over his eyes, set his feet and swung at another ball. The bat connected and the ball sailed off toward the far end of the park. That calmed him.

“I should’ve been a ball player,” Melvin said. “I love baseball. Sometimes I show the kids how to hold a bat and tell them about baseball. They call me the old gringo.”

“What else do you tell them?” I asked.

A shrug. “I tell ‘em, ‘Go home and tell your parents you love them.’ ”

The city promised that when the land is sold, $1 million will be put aside for a park elsewhere, but Perlitsh argues in unprintable terms that there’s no open land left in the area.

“Why are they doing this?” he asked. “There are 16 parks in Burbank, all of them manicured and neatly kept. We have nothing.”

A protest picnic will be held at the park Easter Sunday, at which time Melvin hopes to stir the neighbors into fighting fury.

“We’ll win,” he said as we parted. “I swear to you, we’ll win.”

I kept wondering why he was doing all this. There isn’t a hell of a lot of glory in saving a run-down park in a nowhere place.

When I asked him, he responded mostly in platitudes, but then added, “I just can’t walk away when I see someone in need. I’ve just gotta save that park.”

Maybe that’s enough.

If Perlitsh can pull this one off, years from now other kids might recall it was a scrawny old gringo who saved this patch of green for them.

That could make a small but measurable difference in their lives.

Melvin hopes they’ll hold the bat just so, hit a few balls in his honor, then go home and tell their parents they love them.