Golf Classic for Hoag: Tee Fortuitous
Thanks to the late, golf-loving Bing Crosby, Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach is going to have $500,000 for its emergency care center.
Along with the hospital’s 552 Club support group, Taco Bell Corp. will stage the Newport Classic golf tourney on Jan. 29 and 30 at the Newport Beach Country Club. The event annually benefits the hospital.
Where does Der Bingle come in?
“About 19 years ago,” says tourney chairman Hank Adler, “when Bing had his wonderful golf tournament in Pebble Beach, some of the guys who didn’t qualify decided to play in Newport Beach and make it a benefit for Hoag.
“They called the tourney the Little Crosby,” he says. “And that’s what it remained until about five years ago, when Bing’s widow had a falling out with the Pebble Beach folks.
“She decided she didn’t want the Crosby name affiliated with the tournament any longer, so we called ours the Newport Classic,” Adler says. In its 18-year history, the popular Pro-Am tournament has raised more than $1 million.
This year, Taco Bell Corp. has made a three-year sponsorship commitment to the 19th annual tournament--now called the Taco Bell Newport Classic--to help the hospital renovate and expand its emergency care unit.
“During a time in Orange County when emergency care centers are being closed by hospitals, Hoag has declared it has a responsibility to the community to continue to provide emergency care, even though it may lose money,” says Charlie Rogers, Taco Bell’s vice president of human resources. “Their mission attracted us. We plan to raise $500,000 over the next three years.”
Besides the two-day tournament, the fund-raiser will feature a Las Vegas-style cabaret show on Jan. 29 starring Ray Charles. The singer’s appearance is being underwritten by Pepsi-Cola (the Irvine-based Taco Bell is a subsidiary of Pepsico Inc.). The “uh-huh” girls of TV-commercial fame will be on hand to help with the event’s live auction.
Five thousand invitations have gone out for the $150 per-person gala--700 tickets have been sold--and 1,200 guests are expected.
Where do you put more than 1,000 guests? In a tent, of course. But not just any tent. Adler and his committee have located a 100- by 300-foot tent, “one of the biggest tents ever to be erected in Orange County,” says a gala planner.
Actually, three tents will be set up in the parking lot behind Neiman Marcus at Fashion Island Newport Beach. One will accommodate arriving guests. Another will house the event’s silent auction items. And the biggie (dubbed Club 552 after an earlier fund-raising campaign) will be where guests dine--on Southwestern, Italian and Pacific Rim-themed fare catered by David Wilhelm--and watch T. Graham Brown and Ray Charles perform into the wee hours.
The dress code? “Casual attire with flair,” state the shock-purple invitations. In Newport Beach, that can mean anything from designer jeans to ball gowns. (Watch for Adler and his executive committee to sport golf knickers. “We had green ones,” he says, “but this year we changed our colors for Taco Bell--look for us in black, teal and fuchsia.”)
“We wanted to take a great sporting event and make it a great social event for Orange County,” Rogers says. “We want this to be a world-class tournament, as big or bigger than New York’s prestigious Westchester Classic.
” That’s what’s going to help us make major money for Hoag.”
Uh-huh.
The buzz: Arts activist Janice Johnson and her husband, Roger Johnson--chairman of Western Digital--leave on Sunday for Washington to attend Bill Clinton’s inauguration. The Johnsons of Laguna Beach have been chosen by the Clinton staff to stay at the Grand Hotel, along with the rest of Clinton’s A-list (the savvy folk who make up his financial and transition teams). . . . Metropolitan opera soprano Deborah Voigt, an Orange County native, was feted Sunday at Diva restaurant by her father--Bob Voigt of Newport Beach. The gala dinner for family and friends followed her matinee performance of “Il Trovatore” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Next Sunday, the 32-year-old winner of the coveted Richard Tucker Foundation award will be honored at the Beverly Heritage Hotel by her mother, Joy, and the Affiliates of the Metropolitan Opera Orange County Auditions. A contingent of opera lovers is arriving from New York for the bash, and about 20 guests are coming from the Palm Springs area, invited by former Orange County resident Floss Schumacher. . . .
Thomas Hoving, the irrepressible former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, will lecture on his new book, “Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of New York,” on Jan. 24 at Le Meridien Hotel in Newport Beach. The speaking engagement is being sponsored by the board of trustees of the Newport Harbor Art Museum. “Behind the proper social veneers and pristine marble galleries, Hoving reveals the cutthroat precincts where the real business of the Met is carried out,” says the book jacket. Sounds delicious.