NEIGHBORS IN THE NEWS : Student Protest Art Gets Mixed Reviews on Campus

Greg Jensen, a 20-year-old art student at Moorpark College, has made a mark with his latest painting, now hanging from a wall of the Student Council office.

It depicts the Chinese student uprising in Tian An Men Square and student protests elsewhere in China and Bulgaria.

“I’m not really a political person,” Jensen says. “We’re living in a time when there’s so much change. I wanted to document it.”

Faculty members like the work. Reaction from students has been mixed.

“A lot thought it was too violent, too down to earth, too realistic,” Jensen says. “Some said it was the worst thing they’ve ever seen.

“It’s just ignorance. One person thought the Chinese man in the bottom corner was Muhammad Ali.”

Where are members of the Westlake High School Concert Choir and Vocal Ensemble going today? They’re going to Disney World.

They aren’t exactly champions yet, but 57 choir members were scheduled to fly to Florida Wednesday night to participate in Saturday’s Heritage Festival competition. The group will tune up with a little performance tomorrow.

“We’re going to perform with a high school there,” soprano Theresa Scott says. “They call it our sister school, but I don’t know the name.

Then comes the competition.

“Our first group competes at 8:30 in the morning,” Scott says. “So we’ll all be getting up at 5 to warm up our voices.”

How do you get your voice going at such an hour? Apparently by talking and singing and not worrying too much about waking the other hotel guests. “If we’re going to be up,” Scott says, “we might as well wake everybody up.”

As the choir members take a big step in their musical careers Saturday, so will Monty DeWitt, the principal clarinetist of the mostly volunteer Conejo Symphony.

After 26 years with the group, he will perform in his final regular season concert. In late summer, DeWitt, department manager of reliability and system safety for the Hughes Corp. is being transferred to Tucson.

“The symphony only started two or three years before I got there,” he says. “The originals are all getting funny-looking hair, it’s all gray and white.”

The 57-year-old DeWitt first picked up a clarinet in the seventh grade to play for the Citizen Symphony Orchestra in New York during World War II.

“It was just old people and kids,” he says, “Everybody else was in the army. It was a bunch of old guys with stogies. By about halfway through rehearsal you couldn’t see the conductor because of the smoke.”

After all these years, DeWitt says, he no longer gets terrified before performances. “My job’s not at stake,” he says. “You name it and I’ve probably done it wrong.”

As executive director of the Fillmore High School Alumni Assn., Conway Spitler spends most of his time trying to locate the 7,900 graduates the school has produced. He has found 6,800 so far. But it’s not always easy.

“We had one fellow from the Class of ‘38,” he says. “Everyone said he was deceased, so I made no effort to find him. One day he appeared and said, ‘I’ve been in Missouri all this time.’ So now I never put anyone down as dead unless I can verify it.”

Spitler wants to find ex-students to inform them of alumni activities. He would also like to get money from them. With 1,200 lifetime alumni members, the association has so far been able to raise $25,800. The money is used for 15 or 16 scholarships given at an end of the school year dinner.

“We used to invite the whole senior class. It was the last senior outing for the year. Now the seniors don’t care about it.”

If you’re a lost Fillmore High grad and want to be found, Spitler is at 524-2964.