Solace for Silberman Comes From the Sole

Charlie Dozzell figured it was the right thing to do, so he didn’t hesitate. He headed straight for the federal courthouse in downtown San Diego on Monday to offer support for his longtime friend and customer, Richard T. Silberman.

When the two embraced, Silberman lost his public composure for the first time since his shocking arrest Friday on money-laundering charges.

“When a man is down real bad, like Richard is, that’s when he needs people,” said Dozzell, 70, who operates a shoeshine stand at the Town & Country Hotel in Mission Valley.

“When my daughter was so sick and needed a doctor, Richard offered to do whatever I needed to help her,” he said. “That’s the kind of man he is. All this other stuff on television and in the paper, that’s not Richard.”

For nearly two decades, Silberman has had a standing appointment on Saturday morning to have his shoes (mostly Guccis) shined. “When he didn’t arrive on Saturday, I knew something was very wrong,” Dozzell said.

A native of Little Rock, Ark., Dozzell was a dining-car waiter on the Rock Island Railroad and then a shoeshine proprietor at the Hanalei Hotel for 18 years before moving to the Town & Country in 1964.

In four decades in San Diego, he’s seen them all--lawyers, politicians, business tycoons, civic leaders. And he has also seen how even the mighty can fall.

For many years Dozzell had the town’s most respected banker as a steady customer: C. Arnholt Smith.

Calling the Literati

The Fessenden Review, the irreverent-irrelevant La Jolla-based publication that bills itself as “The Noisiest Book Review in the Known World,” has hit financial problems and asked its readers (whoever they might be) for help.

For 12 editions, the quarterly has provided scholarly insight into books that the larger reviews ignore: among them, minor works on environmental topics, offbeat poetry, Liberace and scientific concepts such as “randomly rotating phreatic fields.”

But now the capital assets of The Fessenden Fund, named for turn-of-the-century physicist Reginald A. Fessenden, have gone dry. A three-page, fund-raising letter has gone forth, on pea-green paper, complete with quotes from Malraux and Mailer.

The long-range future is uncertain but, at least, edition 13 will soon be available. Featuring reviews of “Red Flower: Rethinking Menstruation,” “The Faber Book of Seduction,” “Intercity Bus Lines of the Southwest” and “Flowers from the Royal Gardens of Kew.”

Speaker Out of the Cold

The Soviet invasion continues.

Vista High School next week is having its annual student body election, this year with a United Nations theme, so who better to invite as a keynote speaker than Stanislav Levchenko, the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect?

Levchenko, who recruited politicians and journalists in the Far East as spies, was given political asylum in this country in 1979. He tells all for $5,000 a lecture, plus expenses. Corporate sponsors are bankrolling his Vista trip.

SDG&E; in the Glare

Nobody said the utility business was going to be easy.

In a recent speech to an American Bar Assn. conference on electricity law and regulation, San Diego Gas & Electric Senior Vice President and General Counsel Stephen L. Baum warned his fellow lawyers to beware of a press backlash in the event of an attempted merger.

Baum said the SDG&E-Southern; California Edison merger attempt has produced “so much negative reporting that speculation within the company is that the local papers’ reporters have been directed to write one negative story each day about the merger.”

“Unfortunately,” he continued, “some employees are only too willing to assist by funneling internal gossip and documents to the press to fuel the fires.”

Edison executives are being driven batty by “living in a fishbowl,” Baum said. To SDG&E;, it’s business as usual.

“We’re used to it, having been company non grata for years.”