Unfavorite Son : Some Fallbrook Residents Say Town Is Getting a Bad Image Because It’s Also Home to White Supremacist Tom Metzger

It was just after 5 in the morning when Tomasa Covarrubias heard the moving van outside her Fallbrook home, backing its way down the road to the house of her infamous neighbor, white supremacist Tom Metzger.

She leaned out the window and silently watched as the figures moved to and from the van in the predawn shadows. But who in their right mind moves furniture before the sun comes up?

For Covarrubias and her neighbors, last week’s eerie scene was just another puzzling chapter in the decades-old story of Fallbrook’s mystery man.

He’s the 52-year-old local repairman who by day fixed televisions and VCRs for residents in his largely Latino neighborhood while moonlighting as head of a white supremacist organization that advocates violence against Latinos and other minorities worldwide.

He’s the former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who once made a run for Congress. Today, his White Aryan Resistance empire has a telephone hot line in 13 cities nationwide that receives a reported 650 calls a day. And his 30,000-circulation newspaper until recently had plans for a Russian-language edition.

But for the residents of dead-end Sunbeam Road, Metzger has been a man of very few words, a gruff, short-statured recluse who offered little insight into his notorious personal life.

“Over the years, there have been a lot of strange things that have gone on at that house down the road,” said Tomasa Covarrubias’ daughter, Minerva. “That whole family has been a mystery to most people in this town. It gets to the point where you don’t ask questions about what you see outside your window. You just don’t talk about it.”

Now, however, all around this rustic town of 9,000 located in the unincorporated nether lands of San Diego County under the shadow of Palomar Mountain, people are talking once again about Metzger the Mystery Man, Fallbrook’s native son gone bad.

Last week, a Portland, Ore., jury decided that Metzger and his followers should pay $12.5 million to the family of an Ethiopian man beaten to death by a group of skinheads allegedly incited to violence by Metzger and his organization.

Neighbor Carol Ashley’s reaction to the verdict was typical of most people here. Standing under the shade of an oak tree 20 paces from Metzger’s front door, the thin woman said she saw more of Metzger on the tabloid television shows like Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera than chatting over the neighborhood fence.

Or she would watch “Race and Reason,” Metzger’s television show that runs on cable television stations nationwide. “If I’d have known he lived here, I probably wouldn’t have moved on this block,” she said.

“But I guess everybody’s got their judgment day coming. He just got his a little sooner.”

In the eyes of most residents, the court decision has turned this tiny agricultural town upside down--shaking loose its pride like a thief might roll a startled businessman for loose change.

After all, Fallbrook is San Diego County’s answer to Mayberry RFD. Populated by wealthy retirees playing gentleman farmer and middle-class families steeped in agricultural values, the unincorporated town is situated on a main loop between two rural highways. It’s on a road to nowhere, locals agree. Nobody comes to Fallbrook by accident--you have to want to go there.

The village has tried to ward off runaway growth, but in past years the number of new fast food joints has grown to rival even the number of family-owned antique stores.

Fallbrook, however, is still a disarmingly friendly place where people say hello on the street and call you by your first name. The weekly newspaper bills the community as the area’s “Avocado and citrus empire,” a place where farmers drive tractors down Main Street.

On autumn Friday nights, hundreds like to gather in the grandstands at Fallbrook Union High School and cheer on their boys playing for the local team, the football Warriors.

And now, thanks to Tom Metzger, newspapers and television broadcasts across the land are associating their little patch of West Coast Rural America with a man who is associated with racial discrimination of the worst kind--violent supremacy.

Last week, all around Metzger’s adopted hometown, people were shaking their heads. At the gas station pumps and in the check-out lines at the local grocery store, at the mahogany bar at the Red Eye Saloon and at the coffee counter inside Harrison’s Drug Store, the locals were asking the same questions.

They expressed surprise at the size of the judgment. They talked about whether Tom Metzger was really guilty: Did he order those Portland skinheads to go out and kill that black man and, even if he didn’t, where was he going to come up with the money to pay for such a verdict?

“At the counter this morning, about 70% of the people were in favor of the verdict. Some thought there’d been some kind of mistake, and the rest just didn’t care,” said pharmacist Kermit Harrison, whose father opened the store--which still has its original soda fountain--back in 1945.

Most people, though, just talked about how much they didn’t know about Metzger. Or what a good deal they got last time he fixed their television.

Because, around Fallbrook, Tom Metzger isn’t known for peddling hate. He’s known as just about the best and fairest TV repairman in the area. You could give him the keys to your house in the morning, folks say, and your television would be fixed by the time you got home from work.

“He never did anything racial or radical in Fallbrook,” Harrison said. “If it wasn’t for what we saw on TV or read in the newspapers, we wouldn’t know he was any different than anyone else in this small town. He lived a quiet life with his wife and family, that’s all most people knew.”

For Minerva Covarrubias, the court verdict merely opened some new Metzger mysteries.

Attorneys say they planned to use the verdict to “clean Metzger’s clock,” by taking control of all of his assets, including his $90,000 home and adjacent television workshop.

So she wondered whether the van outside her mother’s window that morning could have been driven by Metzger himself in an effort to salvage his possessions. But the answer remained elusive.

No matter. Covarrubias smiled at the thought that Metzger’s time had finally come.

“We’re waiting for the trucks to come and just get him out of here,” she said. “This verdict is a victory for everyone, not just the neighborhood, but the whole town, the state, the entire country.”

Other townsfolk are simply hanging their heads.

As one grocery clerk said: “Every small town has a secret. And our secret for years has been ol’ Tom Metzger. Ours just wasn’t as well-kept as in some towns. But we’re still ashamed of it.”

Sean Mundell, who works in Harrison’s Drug Store, says Fallbrook has paid dearly for its not-so-willing association with Metzger, who 25 years ago bought a house just outside town and has since stayed put.

“My mom’s a realtor, and she loses a good 20% of her business when people find out who lives in this town,” he said. “They find out, and they just run away. It’s frustrating for her.”

The truth is, locals say, there aren’t any skinheads living in Fallbrook. And Tom Metzger doesn’t hold weekly meetings in the town square, either. But that doesn’t stop all the nervous questions from outsiders.

“The questions people ask you, you’d think that Fallbrook was his stronghold or something,” Harrison added. “Tom Metzger doesn’t run up and down the streets of this town like any boss man. Neither he nor his skinheads are running things here.

“In Fallbrook, Tom Metzger is a non-person. He fixes televisions, that’s all. People just don’t know him for the same things they know him around the rest of the country for.”

There are other Metzgers in Fallbrook, people unrelated to Tom who have grown tired of being associated with him. Near the cash register of Jan Metzger’s Village Yarn Shop, a no-nonsense sign has hung for several years.

“Before you ask,” it reads, “NO!!! I’m not related to Tom Metzger, the grand dragon of the KKK. My name is Jan. My husband is Don. ‘Tom’ is not my brother, uncle, cousin or relation by birth or by marriage. OK?”

Jeannette Langham, a store clerk, said Jan Metzger hung the sign because she got so tired of the doubters.

“People would stand outside her door, refusing to come in until they were sure she wasn’t related to Tom,” she said. “Boy, that used to burn her up.”

Locals aren’t just tired of hearing about Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance. They’re tired of reading about it too, said Don Lowry, editor of the weekly Fallbrook Enterprise.

The paper carried not a word about Metzger’s trial in Portland. And it won’t be publishing news of the court verdict in this week’s editions--not even a wire service version of the developments. Around Fallbrook, Tom Metzger just isn’t news.

“Frankly, most people are just embarrassed to have their home town constantly connected with this man and his brand of hate,” Lowry said.

“Every time you hear him mentioned on the television, it’s always Tom Metzger of Fallbrook. People feel bad about that constantly being pointed out. They feel it downgrades the community. So we try not to give him any more publicity than we have to.”

But in some corners of Fallbrook, Tom Metzger has his cautious supporters.

“He’s been living here for years, and all of a sudden, because of one court verdict, people are beginning to disassociate themselves (from) him,” said one neighbor who asked not to be named.

“They’re just afraid of being scandalized. He’s always been a good neighbor to the people around here. Nobody agrees with his beliefs. But, whatever he did, he certainly didn’t do it in Fallbrook.”

Al Diederich, manager of Fallbrook’s chamber of commerce, said that if any townspeople do believe in Metzger’s message, they’re not broadcasting it.

“Some people here have their own personal opinions about Tom,” he said. “And they keep them just that--personal.”

Diederich says he regularly receives calls from people nationwide who have seen Metzger’s cable television show and want to know his address or how many skinheads live there.

“I tell them that, around Fallbrook, we think skinheads are just abnormal. And I refuse to give out his address. I just hang up. But from now on, I’m going to tell them that Tom Metzger got what he bought.

“I’m going to tell them that I hope he moves out of town and comes to where they live, so he can break bread with other rednecks where he belongs. Because frankly, Fallbrook doesn’t appreciate anyone with a national derogatory reputation.”

Nowhere, perhaps, does Fallbrook feel the stress of Tom Metzger’s war on race more than on Sunbeam Road.

There, Metzger’s ranch-style house--with its satellite dish and surveillance camera--is the only one obscured by a fence that surrounds the front yard.

Until recently, Metzger still fixed TVs there in an adjacent trailer. He lives with his wife, Kathy, and his 20-year-old son, John--a San Onofre nuclear plant worker who was also named in the recent court judgment.

Not long ago, hatred reached out and took a return shot at Tom Metzger. In a recent newspaper interview, he described how an arrow from a high-powered bow pierced his front window, embedding itself in his living room wall, just two feet above his easy chair.

It is the same room where Metzger hangs his White Aryan Resistance flag--skull and crossbones on a black field.

The chair was empty at the time, and Metzger then said he was determined to find the attacker.

“We’ve got our feelers out,” he said. “You know, there’s a regular way, and then there’s the other way. You lay a little bread around, and you get some answers.”

Neighbors talk about some other mysterious things they have witnessed over the years.

Like the day years ago, during the time Metzger served as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, when they saw dozens of strange men wearing white sheets and masks line the street outside his home.

Or the walks he took around the neighborhood with his wife and prized Great Dane.

“He just kind of scared you,” Minerva Covarrubias said. “People would come to my house and say, ‘Does Tom Metzger really live here?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, right down there in the ugly house.’ ”

More recently, neighbor William Reuter has heard “Nazi music” coming from Metzger’s house next door, which once flew a Confederate flag overhead.

“You’d hear Nazi chants,” he said, sticking his arm straight up in a Third Reich salute. “You’d hear the Sieg Heil ,” the salute to victory used by the Nazis in World War II.

For his Latino neighbors, one of the Metzger mysteries was the fact that a man who advocated such violence against minorities lived in a largely Latino neighborhood, in a town where the percentage of ethnic minority students in the local high school district grew from 13% in 1970 to 35% in 1989.

Down at the Red Eye Saloon, they had an answer for that one. And the views of Metzger were mixed:

“Tom Metzger lived in that neighborhood a long time before those Mexican types ever moved in there,” said one man who claimed to have known Metzger for decades. “It was his neighborhood first.”

“He sold hate and violence against people he didn’t even know,” Keith Wasnich said. “How do you hate someone you don’t even know?”

Charlie Cramm added: “That guy deserves everything he gets. But the man has his supporters. I mean, he got 4,000 votes when he ran for Congress years ago. And some of his support came from people in this town.

“But I don’t like him. He’s nothing but a rabble-rouser. Fallbrook will be very happy to get rid of one Tom Metzger. We don’t need him.”