A Fine Party for the Hillsides Kids

A 12-foot purple papier-mache camel wearing a silken Oriental saddle blanket over its majestic hump guarded the entrance to “Midnight at the Oasis.” It smiled, showing glittering silver teeth.

This was a party for the benefit of Hillsides, a home in Pasadena for battered and abused children. Three hundred people wandered through the gardens of Ted and Sally Doll’s Pasadena home.

The gardens had been transformed into an Oriental retreat by Henry Bumstead, an Academy Award-winning set designer. Sumptuous rugs hung from the upstairs windows and spread around the pool deck and over the lawn. Strings of round clear glass lights festooned the trees and shrubbery. An orchestra played by the pool. Oriental street bazaar tents, frosted with gilt fringe and swagged with velvet, lured party-goers.

In the tents guests looked into the mists of the future with the help of a psychic, a handwriting expert and three fortunetellers. Or they could have their caricatures drawn. Or their pictures taken with their heads sticking through a curtain that held pictures of a belly dancer for the ladies and a harem guard for the gentlemen. And there was a real belly dancer who twisted sinuously in her gauzy harem pants while she played finger cymbals.

Merlin and Susan Olsen were honorary chairmen for the party. I don’t know of any time they have refused to lend their names and active participation to a good cause.

Sharon and Patrick Westmoreland were chairmen. They own the Roxxi restaurant and filled the hors d’oeuvres tables with toothsome delights to keep the guests busy until the “sultan feast” was served in the main tent. Television weatherman Dallas Raines and his wife, Danielle, are Hillsides friends and were honored guests.

One of the delights auctioned was a dinner party for six cooked in the home of the winning bidder by Jerry Johnston, David Coquillard and Susan Crummey. Johnston is president and CEO of the Mitsui Manufacturers Bank. Coquillard is a financial adviser and both are previous Hillsides board presidents. Crummey is the associate executive director of Hillsides.

It was a colorful, imaginative evening that raised more than $60,000 for Hillsides, not including proceeds still to be counted from the silent and live auctions.

Every dedicated organization tries to think of something different for its theme to catch party-goers who will spend money for an evening. Most of them are much the same and it takes as much effort to do a dull party as a good one. The Hillsides’ supporters stitched together an evening that was bright, entertaining, colorful, imaginative and tasty.

John Hitchcock, the executive director of Hillsides, told me about the facility. There are 63 children, aged from infancy to 18, who live in cottages on the 17-acre campus on Avenue 64 in Pasadena.

Hillsides was founded in 1913 as an orphanage by the Episcopal Church. One building has housed girls for 71 years. It is an institution of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and San Diego, but it operates as a non-sectarian refuge, taking any child who is sent by the courts and social worker in charge.

“These kids seem normal although all of them have been terribly abused, most of them sexually,” John said.

“The kids all call me Johnhitchcock as if it were one word. I don’t know how or when it started. One day I heard a little girl ask another, ‘What’s Johnhitchcock’s last name?’

“One of my favorite kids was a great little boy named Michael. He told his teacher that their stepfather was sexually abusing his little sister. His mother never forgave him.

“One of our teachers became very close to Michael and he to her. They were really friends. She left us for what seemed like a professional advancement but in six months she called and asked if she could come back. “Of course, I said, yes, and she adopted Michael.”

“One time I was talking to some children, kneeling down to be at their level and I heard one little girl at the edge of the group say, ‘Johnhitchcock, I love you.’

“She meant she loved being there. It was the first safe place she had ever known.”

I’ll bet she also meant she loved Johnhitchcock.