New Hands to Tend Hillside Garden : Griffith Park: At 88, Charlie Turner ends 15 years as volunteer keeper of Dante’s View overlooking the city. Riordan aide Tom LaBonge will take his place.
The time had come, Charlie Turner concluded, to end his 15-year reign as chief volunteer keeper of Dante’s View, a three-acre arboretum carved with sweat and affection from a Griffith Park hillside.
After all, Turner is 88 and suffers from arthritis in his right knee. Worse, nasty tumbles while gardening on the steep terraces landed him in the hospital with broken ribs twice in the last few years.
“I know damn well that if I try to keep working on these hills, I might not be so lucky next time,” Turner said, with the realism of his years and the conviction of a man who wants to continue his daily 1 1/4-mile uphill hikes to the shady enclave.
So, Turner passed the spade to another caretaker Sunday at a cheery ceremony attended by 50 friends and fellow nature-lovers. The occasion also marked the 29th birthday of the oasis perched 1,200 feet above sea level on the eastern flank of Mount Hollywood.
Below, the urban sprawl was encased in heat and a nasty smog. But the celebrants at Dante’s View were cooled by the sheltering eucalyptus and pine trees--and they were refreshed by the chance to salute Turner.
“In the kingdom of God, man is supposed to voluntarily give the best he knows how to the community. Charlie is one of those kind of men,” said David Lubin, an 85-year-old Hollywood resident who was a regular at the garden’s weekend cleanups and picnics.
For Turner, the unpaid years of picking up trash, watering bushes and welcoming hikers paid off in ways that his long career as an insurance clerk never did.
“I made more friends here than I previously did in all the rest of my life,” he said. That, he said, helped fill a gap for a man who never had a wife and children.
“I think the garden has a nice way of weeding people. The nice ones stay and the bums and the troublemakers go away,” Turner added, a hint of his English childhood lingering in his accent. A wiry man with the natural tan of a frequent gardener, he was wearing a blue souvenir cap from the Griffith Park pony rides.
Turner, who lives in Hollywood, was the second of the keepers of Dante’s View. He inherited the unpaid job in 1978 upon the death of artist Dante Orgolini--the well-remembered founder whose name graces the arboretum. On Sunday, a large photo of Orgolini was hanging from a tree that legend holds he planted.
The new keeper is Tom LaBonge, who grew up near the park and still lives in the area. LaBonge, 40, became one of its protectors during his 15 years as a deputy to Councilman John Ferraro. Last spring, LaBonge lost his own City Council race to former school board member Jackie Goldberg and quickly was hired as director of constituent service for Mayor Richard Riordan’s new Administration.
Five times a week, around sunrise, LaBonge comes up to Dante’s View. He usually picks up Turner, who takes a bus to Los Feliz Boulevard, and from there, LaBonge gives the older man a lift to the parking lot at the Griffith observatory. The friends hike up the dusty trail to the garden.
“I love the place and I love making it nice for other people,” said LaBonge, who is clearly in tune with the mayor’s philosophy of volunteerism. “If each of us has a little something extra to give, it will make Los Angeles the great city it really is.”
In July, 1990, the spirit of volunteerism at Dante’s View was sorely tested. A hillside fire--similar to the Malibu and Laguna Beach blazes of the last two weeks--ravaged that section of Griffith Park. Much of Turner’s slice of heaven was blackened.
Turner helped lead a painstaking replanting campaign, using private donations and municipal funds.
With his new title of keeper emeritus, Turner plans to visit the reborn garden every day, even if he won’t be shoveling topsoil there anymore. “I’m not going to stay at home and rust,” he said.
