Exposes Come Naturally to Super Sleuth : Inquiry: Robert Penney Jr. uncovered city government irregularities in wealthy Bradbury. But digging and persistence into civic matters is only his latest obsession.

Historical sleuthing seems to be Bradbury gadfly Robert Penney Jr.’s natural calling.

Take the brooding oil painting of a young Civil War soldier that hangs in the foyer of Penney’s sprawling home. When he bought it, all he had to go on was the soldier’s name, awkwardly scrawled on the back by an unknown artist in 1864.

Now, Penney can rattle off the life story of German-born Peter Bender, mustered into the New York Volunteer Infantry as a shoemaker, later to become a drummer boy. Penney even knows who Bender married, what his children did for a living and how much it cost to bury him in 1940.

And he has all the paperwork to prove it.

These days, Penney’s passion has taken a political turn.

After rifling through a city trash bin, he pieced together enough incriminating evidence against Bradbury’s city manager to coax her resignation on April 13.

Acting on a hunch, Penney dug into the garbage with the help of his neighbor, Rick Barakat, and found tattered bank statements, covered in copy machine toner, allegedly documenting Dolly Vollaire’s purchases of luxury items and fine china or crystal on the city credit card. He took to the trash bin after the city had sent him copies of altered receipts in response to his public records request.

His persistence led to an audit of Vollaire’s spending habits, and the matter is being investigated by the district attorney’s office.

Only a month earlier, Penney found that county tax money was paying for private guards at Bradbury Estates, a wealthy gated enclave where about 100 of the San Gabriel Valley city’s 830 residents live. Over the past 14 years, almost $500,000 in taxpayer dollars has been used to pay for the guards. Penney’s findings prompted the city to stop the funding.

“By nature I’m a historian and, boy, I love it,” said the 65-year-old retired weapons manufacturer, who spent his days poring over hefty biographies, collecting Civil War-era art and tending to his avocados before a serendipitous encounter with one of Vollaire’s spending receipts led him to take on city government about a year ago.

Someone--he will not say who--showed Penney a receipt for a $400 cash advance Vollaire had drawn on the city credit card, and he set out with characteristic fervor to investigate her spending.

It is only the latest of Penney’s obsessions.

After he retired at age 38, he began restoring antique biplanes, later moving on to military vehicles and collecting antique model trains, tracking down everything from the original documentation to the original owners.

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Now, Penney is dead-set on “twisting the tails” of Bradbury’s powers that be. After 33 years in the affluent, semirural community, Penney says, it is time for a spring cleaning.

“Nobody’ll go over there and make a stink, because if you do, they’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks,” Penney said of city staff who were working under Vollaire’s direction in the three-room bungalow that serves as City Hall.

For the past 20 years, Bradbury has been run virtually single-handedly by Vollaire, who served as planning director, city clerk and finance manager in addition to city manager. Some residents have had enough.

Now, Penney has put off plans to move to Valley Center with his wife, Ruth, and sell the five-acre estate where they raised seven children and one grandchild.

They even got a decent offer on their 7,600-square-foot house a few months ago, but Penney has dug in his heels and says he has a job to do.

“My broker thinks I’m nuts,” Penney said. “But I’m going to see this thing through.”

In addition to probing city officials’ spending habits, Penney is hounding them to finish an overdue general plan, and include an affordable-housing element as required by state law.

The crusade has filled his days. Penney spent six hours piecing some of the single-sheet credit card statements together, and said he has worked at least 10 hours a day for the last five months investigating city finances. One lesson learned: Never iron a fax. It turns black.

His actions have not been warmly received by everyone.

After Penney sent a letter to the mayor and City Council members, in which he called the diversion of tax dollars to pay for the guards a “violation of law,” Mayor Audrey Hon’s husband responded by hiring an attorney.

“Your choice of language, both oral and written, in communicating your dispute with the City of Bradbury, is defamatory of both Mrs. Edward (Audrey) Hon and Edward Hon, M.D.,” Hon’s attorney, Jerry Wiley, a vice dean at the Law Center of the University of Southern California, wrote on USC stationery.

The letter calls for Penney to cease all oral or written “defamatory communications” with the city that identify Mayor Hon, or else agree to pay damages. It also demands $3,000 from Penney, to pay for “their present out-of-pocket expenses caused by your conduct.”

Wiley said Penney has been running around town, sloppily using the name Hon in connection with the Bradbury scandals. Some of Edward Hon’s friends believe that Penney is referring to him, Wiley said. That has been damaging to Hon’s reputation as an obstetrician, Wiley alleged.

Edward Hon, who served on the faculty of USC with Wiley for years, and is now a doctor and teacher at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, said he is not intent on collecting the money, but he thought Penney should apologize to his wife.

Even Hon, however, praised Penney’s persistence.

“I agree that Mr. Penny did something which is good for the service of the community, but I think he was unfair in putting my wife’s name on there if he did not mean her specifically,” Hon said. “All I ask is please don’t mention her name in this bad light, because she doesn’t deserve it, and it tarnishes my reputation.

“I love people who are committed to their craft,” Hon added. “If you are committed enough to search the trash because you have a burden for something, then that must be applauded.”

Some council members applauded Penney’s tactics.

“There are a lot of people who are now interested in city government who were not before. And that’s positive,” said Councilman Tom Melbourn.

Penney says his neighbors will not leave him alone.

His antique Army field phone has been ringing off the hook, and his visiting room has seen a steady procession of residents eager to demand answers from the city and launch a recall drive against the entire five-member City Council.

“Robert Penney should be called Robin Hood, because that’s what he’s doing, shooting down the head of Sherwood Forest,” said Donald L. Burnett, president of the Woodlyn Lane Improvement Assn.

In light of the two scandals Penney helped unveil, Burnett’s association mailed off a letter calling for the resignation of all Bradbury council members and an independent audit of the special tax district that financed the private security guards. Council members on Tuesday agreed to such an audit, and the mayor publicly thanked Penney and Barakat.

The Pasadena CPA firm of McGladry and Pullen-- which has conducted the city’s annual audits for years--has started reviewing Vollaire’s spending habits.

Penny, a Los Angeles native, had never before focused his historian’s talents on city government--he estimates that he has been to only about four City Council meetings. But obsessive dedication is a hallmark of his life.

After serving in the Army at the end of World War II, he became a successful entrepreneur, manufacturing military arms for the civilian market.

It was Penney’s company, Ordnance Optics in Los Angeles, that manufactured the scope on the carbine that killed President John F. Kennedy, and Penney himself who traced the scope to Lee Harvey Oswald. It is documented in the Congressional Record.

In fact, Penney has the paper to back up just about every task he has attempted.

He pulls out the old copies of Sport Flying magazine that feature his most grueling and detailed restoration of an antique biplane. After three years of constant work, he returned a 1930 Bull Stearman to pristine condition.

“I worked on that plane seven days a week, just like this project,” Penney recalled. He did more than rebuild it.

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Penney tracked down the original owner of the plane and its manufacturer, Louis Stearman. Then he located the original mechanic, and eventually tracked down the plane’s original logbook, documenting its first flight.

“I had every piece of paper,” Penney said. “When the FAA inspector came out, he said: ‘I have never seen a plane so well documented, like it just left the factory,’ ” Penney said.

Looking back on all the work, Penney has no regrets.

“I did what I wanted to do. I wanted to build an airplane.” It won a trophy at an antique airplane competition in Watsonville, Penney said. “Getting that trophy was like . . . getting that stuff out of the trash can.”