Gala Launches Pan Pacific as Charity Site

The Pan Pacific Hotel in downtown’s new, many-towered Emerald Shapery Center embarked Saturday on its maiden voyage as a venue for major-league fund-raising galas.

The Pan Pacific launched its two ballrooms and numerous smaller function rooms by--figuratively speaking--cracking the 12th annual “Mirage” gala for the American Cancer Society like a bottle of Champagne across the hotel’s prow. If a few equally figurative cracks appeared in the superstructure on this shakedown cruise, the party nonetheless went swimmingly.

The crystalline shapes and jewel-like color of the center’s towers are reflected in the names of the rooms used by Mirage, which took over the Emerald and Crystal ballrooms for the dinner auction and concert by headliner and old-line crooner Tony Martin, and the Diamond and Topaz rooms for pre-dinner cocktails.

During the cocktail reception, Mirage offered a “silent” auction of about 70 unusual and choice offerings that included an official Ronald Reagan tie bar complete with the presidential seal, similarly marked cuff links from Gerald Ford, a gem dig at Fallbrook’s Himalaya tourmaline mine and a 3-year-old registered thoroughbred filly, suitable, the program said, for racing, showing or breeding.

Event chairwoman Virginia Monday, reprising a role she has played for the cancer society twice before as well as for many other organizations, recruited a list of social and community leaders to staff the silent auction boards. This group included Kim and Marilyn Fletcher, Ken and Fran Golden, Charlie and Ann Jones, Paul and Janice Goldfarb, Bill and Ovie Jones, Serdar and Kara Kobey Canogulari and Michael and Marilyn Yeatts.

The event sold out at an attendance of 500. Monday said that an effort to put any more tables in the Emerald Ballroom--which, curiously for a hotel so devoted to gemlike green, is perfectly peach--would have resulted in gridlock. The Pan Pacific underwrote several major expenses, including the dinner (served at tables blooming with lush miniature gardens of birds of paradise and orchids) of salmon in pastry, beef medallions with an unusual “Pacific Rim cuisine”-inspired sauce of papaya and avocado, and clever, translucent chocolate tulips filled with mousse and fruit.

As at several past cancer society galas, a featured highlight was a live auction of just seven exceptional items, including an afternoon of sailing as the 17th crew member aboard America’s Cup entrant America-3, an expedition up the Snake and Columbia rivers following the route taken by Lewis and Clark, and a flight aboard Ernest Hahn’s private jet for lunch at the developer’s Chateau Montalena winery.

A couple of glitches, however, developed during this segment. The public address system malfunctioned and made auctioneers Bob Arnhym, Rosemary Logan and Clair Burgener sound as if they were speaking from inside an unopened can of creamed corn, and a whimsically minded fire alarm chose to go off for a minute or two. But the live auction netted a more-than-respectable figure in excess of $26,000.

Among San Diego services supported by the gala proceeds are the American Cancer Society’s Camp Reach for the Sky summer program for youthful cancer patients, counseling, transportation to treatment centers and education and early detection programs.

Mirage perhaps managed its greatest illusion by seeming to bring Las Vegas to San Diego. Immediately following the meal, guests crossed crossed the foyer to the Crystal Ballroom and were greeted by the Horace Heidt Jr. Orchestra, which opened the proceedings with “The Front Page Rag” and moved along swingingly to a particularly jazzy “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

All this was a warm-up for singer Martin, who has performed for more than four decades and offered more than an hour of his hits, including a tango called “I Get Ideas” that when first performed, Martin said, led staid Bostonians to demand his arrest. This never happened, and Saturday Martin set his voice free to range through the classics of his era.

Rochelle Swanson, statuesque in a gown the exact shade of the Emerald Shapery Center, attended with developer Sandor Shapery. The guest list also included event co-chairman Mel Katz and his wife, Linda; corporate sales chairman Herb Klein and his wife, Marge; Sid and Jenny Craig; Jack Monday; Jim and Norma Shiner; Bill and Ovie Cowling; Stephen and Lyn Krant; Neil and Sharron Derrough; P.J. and Lee Maturo; Betty Alexander and Jim McKellar; Joan Gregg Palmer; Bill and Jeanne Larson; Phil and Catherine Blair; George and Betsy Green; Ted and Sumiko Sonobe; Al and Susan Reese; Clinton Walters; Rose Romo; and John and Linda Burnham.

Auctions seemed quite the hot ticket last week. On Friday, the San Diego Oceans Foundation was host to its annual gala and auction on the docks and in the ballroom of Shelter Island’s Kona Kai Club.

A difference with this group’s live and silent auctions was that virtually every item had a nautical connection, an unsurprising fact given co-chairwoman Jane Fetter’s description of the foundation as “dedicated to the stewardship of our bays and waters.” Auction items were as glamorous as a cruise with Apollo astronaut Wally Schirra aboard his powerboat Splashdown and a high seas adventure on the tall ship Californian, and as prosaic as an hour of diving service and hull cleaning donated by Pinnacle Marine.

Called “Harbor Lights,” Friday’s version of the annual fund-raiser drew about 450 guests with such attractions as an on-the-docks cocktail hour replete with a nearly astonishing selection of seafood hors d’oeuvres, music by Blackthorns Maritime Band and, by no means least, tours of several yachts brought around specially for the event.

Guests dutifully pulled off their shoes before boarding Malin and Roberta Burnham’s Bert & I and Oceans Foundation President Art DeFever’s Dul-Sea, named in honor of his wife, Dulcie.

The evening also included dinner, dancing to Signed, Sealed and Delivered, and presentation of the 1991 Roger Revelle Perpetual Award--given annually to a San Diego noted for significant contributions to man’s ability to coexist with the marine environment--to Joy B. Zeidler, a professor of biology and director of the Pacific Estuarine Research Laboratory at San Diego State University.

Revelle, the prominent oceanographer and former director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was on hand for the presentation.

Ann Belus chaired a committee that included Linda Sue Warge, Marie Kelley, Bill Prichard, Bonnie Hage, Maurice Camillo, Barbara Ayers, Vangie Burt, Annabelle and Albert Gabbs, Olive and Otto Hirr, Peggy and Don Sloan, Gene Yee, Velynn Foote, Mary Lou LoPreste and Bill De Leeuw.