Couple Bring Big Name Into Big-Time Benefit for Lestonnac Free Clinic
Looking for two to watch? Keep your eye on Allen and Susan Boerner.
Last year, the Fullerton couple donated a whopping $250,000 to the Lestonnac Free Medical and Dental Clinic in Orange, the biggest single gift in the facility’s 10-year history.
This year, they’re taking the clinic’s annual Cinco de Mayo benefit into the big leagues. Bye-bye entertainers of yesteryear. Hello hot talent. Up for easy listening on May 5 in the Grand Ballroom of the Disneyland Hotel: songbird Melissa Manchester.
Manchester’s performance fee is $25,000, more than twice the price of entertainers hired by the clinic for past galas. The Boerners wanted her for two reasons. First, she’s cookin’ (you saw her bring the house down on the Academy Awards). Second, she’s sensitive to causes for the disadvantaged.
“Melissa’s focus is the poor and the homeless,” Susan said. “If you look at her new video, ‘Walk On By,’ you see she’s taken an old Dionne Warwick hit and geared it toward her not wanting people to walk by the less fortunate. Her message is: ‘Don’t turn your heads away; help these people. ‘ “
If Manchester is big on helping the poor, Susan figures she’s got to be big on performing for a clinic that annually offers free medical treatment to 3,500 of Orange County’s indigent.
Clinic supporter Jerry Derloshon, a former president of the Lestonnac board, is thrilled that the Boerners want to take the Lestonnac gala into the big time. “They recognize that we’ve begun to attract a very sophisticated audience,” Derloshon said. “A star of Melissa Manchester’s stature attracts the kind of donor we need. We can’t feed them rubber chicken and the local Dixieland Band. We’ve got to put on a show as classy as our audience is.”
Susan is still shaking her head over the fact that the couple were able to land Manchester. “We got real lucky. Our date just happened to be between her nightclub engagements in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.”
Six hundred of the black-tie gala’s 1,200 available seats have been sold. And the remainder are going fast. Premium seats, located near and just above the ballroom stage, are selling for $200 each ($2,000 for a table of 10--the Boerners have snatched up five of these). Other seats are going for $150 each or $1,500 for a table of 10.
If you’ve partied in the Grand Ballroom, site of the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s annual Christmas Candlelight Concert and the dramatic soirees staged by Opera Pacific, you know there’s not a bad seat in the house.
At last year’s gala, Allen Boerner, president of Cambio Investments Inc., a real estate investment firm, was reluctant to bask in the glory that accompanied his huge donation. In fact, he admitted that he hadn’t really planned on giving that much money until he visited the clinic and “saw what (clinic founder) Sister Marie Therese was doing for the people--people who looked like they had one set of clothes,” Allen said. “I decided it was something I wanted to be part of. It’s something I can see, something I can feel.”
Hamburger mogul Carl Karcher introduced the Boerners to the clinic. “And Mr. Karcher is so persuasive,” Allen said. “And so is Stan Pawlowski (co-chair of last year’s gala with his wife, Theresa). And so is Sister--the master of all salesmen.”
Sister Marie Therese is happy to help serve Orange County’s poor. But she would be happier if she could help 10,000, she said.
“The clinic is a haven of love for Orange County’s poorest of the poor,” said the nun whom Carl Karcher has dubbed the “Mother Teresa of Orange County.”
“We try to rebuild their ailing spirits and make them humanly alive.”
Tidbits: Among those working hard on the Lestonnac gala dinner committee is Douglas David Daigle, president of Tridair Helicopters Inc. of Costa Mesa. Daigle heads a group of chopper pilots who call themselves the Rotorheads. Last year, they raised more than $100,000 for the Lestonnac clinic when they set the world record for “hovering” at Anaheim Stadium.
“The money is still coming in,” said Daigle, who expects total proceeds to be about $180,000. “It was our group’s first fund-raiser.” Rotorhead members include Ethan Wayne, son of the late John Wayne. “Ethan is a good pilot,” said Daigle, who says he taught Wayne how to fly choppers in the early ‘80s. “His dad had the first two helicopters out of John Wayne Airport in the late ‘60s. The Duke loved aviation. But he was never a pilot.”
Associate members of the Rotorheads include Forbes 400 developers Donald Koll and William Lyon, who regularly use helicopters to fly to Los Angeles. Daigle will never forget the night he flew onto Lyon’s private helipad in Coto de Caza, ready to whisk the retired Air Force general to the gala opening of “Phantom of the Opera” in Los Angeles. After Lyon and his wife, Willa Dean, hopped aboard in their finery, the chopper wouldn’t budge. Daigle tried to jump-start it with a car battery. No luck. “We ended up having to hop a limo to the airport and fly out of there,” he said. (For those of you dog-tired of fighting the freeway, a chopper trip to L.A. can be yours for $850 round trip.)