Hide-a-Hoop May Help Residents Play the CC&R; Game
Richard Jacklan used to work on military projects in the aerospace industry, top secret endeavors that he still won’t talk about in detail.
“I was into bomb fuses,” he tells me on the phone. “I was a warmonger.”
Then I drive to his house, in a tidy tract in Lake Forest, and he meets me in the driveway. He’s of average height, rather slight build, gray hair, wire framed glasses; not one to call attention to himself in a crowd.
He flicks out his cigarette, and we get down to business. No need for small talk when the seriousness of Jacklan’s latest project is so plainly clear.
“Here it is,” he says, pointing to the inside of his opened garage door.
That I can already see.
Jacklan’s newest invention--the patent, he says, is just about approved--glistens in the midday sun. It’s some 31 pounds of aluminum, fiberglass and steel.
This, suburban basketball lovers, is the Hide-a-Hoop. Once the garage door goes down, it’s as invisible to the neighbors as those dishes piled in your kitchen sink.
And that, as far as Jacklan is concerned, means the CC&Rs--the; covenants, conditions and restrictions of homeowners associations, for the uninitiated--should not apply.
“This started about a year and a half ago,” Jacklan says. “My son says that he wants to play basketball at home. He’s wondering why none of the houses here have basketball hoops. So I explain to him about CC&Rs.; So he says, ‘Well, can’t you do something?’ My son knows me. He knew I could.”
Talking with Richard Jacklan, I, too, have no doubt. He is a man obsessed with detail, somebody who keeps records--dating back years--of his ideas, his telephone calls and conversations.
He flips through one well-thumbed notebook to a page dated July 11, 1988. Here are the first sketches of the Hide-a-Hoop, the Murphy bed of basketball hoops, a design he has since revised four times. He went to the hardware store and bought what he thought he’d need and things have taken off from there.
“I thought it was such a good idea that I’ve been spending the majority of my time on this,” he says.
Now Jacklan and a silent partner have incorporated. Jacklan builds and sells the things right here in his home. He hasn’t made any money, as of yet, but he figures his timing couldn’t be more right.
That’s because Richard Jacklan, a man with a military mind, knows that it is a war out there. It’s just the battlefield that’s changed. In the fight against restrictive CC&Rs;, he says basketball lovers should arm themselves with a Hide-a-Hoop as their weapon of choice.
In his own neighborhood, for example, Jacklan has deployed the Hide-a-Hoop without a glitch.
When not in use, the contraption rests unobtrusively flat against the garage door. Once the door is open, you pull down the device and swing it forward. Rotating out, it locks into position. On Jacklan’s driveway, the hoop, complete with backboard, stands 10 feet from the ground.
“Now lots of neighborhood kids come here,” he says. “Sometimes there are lines of kids standing out there wanting to play the next game.”
But other homeowners associations, to be fair, might not be so easily inclined to roll over and play dead.
There’s an association in Dana Point, for example, that has rules against messy garages, uncoiled garden hoses, bike riding, skateboarding, for-sale signs, non-patio type items on the patio and any and all “offensive activities.” Basketball hoops, it goes without saying, are also taboo.
Resident Ray Baytala, a project manager for Fluor Daniel in Irvine, sent me a copy of these rules. Baytala doesn’t like them. The board of his homeowners association does. A homeowner battle, once again, has been joined.
And some of you may remember the Browns and the Pinks, the homeowners that I wrote about a few weeks back. The Browns, 78% of the residents in this particular upscale tract, signed a petition saying that they could live with portable basketball hoops in their midst.
The Pinks, four of whom happened to be on the association board, thought that hoops would lend a low-rent air.
At press time for that column, the issue was still unresolved. Now I’m here to report that after much deliberation, the board finally blinked.
The board agreed to allow hoops, albeit those that are portable and not attached to the house, to remain until the middle of June, “at which time it will be determined by the Board of Directors if there is a negative impact on the community.”
So I offer all this as proof, and warning, that differences of opinion within homeowners associations are not always easily resolved.
Which is why I thought that I’d pay Richard Jacklan a visit in the first place. Who knows? Maybe his Hide-a-Hoop can save a few lives.
Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.
