Mountain Man’s Descent : Fired From a Job at the Top, He Took Fight to Court

Dan Turner was “the man from the mountain” to fellow employees at KCAL-TV, if they knew of him at all. While others worked in Hollywood, Turner lived on Mt. Wilson in the Angeles National Forest, guarding the station’s transmitter and enjoying his solitary life.

Perhaps it was inevitable that modern times would catch up with the 69-year-old loner, who could find his way down Rattlesnake Trail easier than Melrose Avenue. By the mid-1980s, automation had ended the need for full-time engineers to tend the 30 television and radio antennas on Mt. Wilson, and most companies had long since removed their live-in caretakers.

Turner was the last man up there.

His day of reckoning came in October, 1991, when he was called in by his employers and fired. Indeed, a moving van was already on the mountain, a supervisor said, to remove the belongings from his home of 18 years.

Turner’s job simply “didn’t exist any more,” said Jacob Yellin, senior counsel for the Walt Disney Co., which owns KCAL. “It was like having someone to maintain buggy whips when you now have cars.”

Getting fired is a blow to any worker, of course. But to Turner, it also meant he had to come down from the heights and enter Los Angeles of the 1990s. He had to cope with noise, traffic and the constant presence of other people.

Turner went into a tailspin of depression as he tried to cope. “I’m an outdoors type,” he said.

He also filed suit against KCAL and Disney for wrongful eviction and age discrimination. Although such suits are common these days, Turner did not seem out for revenge, like many others who file them. Nor did he really expect to get his job back, or his home by the transmitter.

As the case headed through the courts--and was set for trial last week--he hoped for something else: an outcome that would finance his way back to the life he had lost.

“You come down here, it’s like a rat race in the jungle,” Turner, a large-boned man with a gentle manner, said recently. He had rented a room in his sister’s home in Reseda, but felt out of place. “She’s got her rules,” he noted.

In contrast, the quietness of Mt. Wilson had been “like living in heaven,” he said. Turner didn’t earn much working for the station--$400 a week--but the mountain made up for that. “You’re 5,700 feet high. The air is clear. You’re up there like an airplane.”

He never tired, either, of seeing deer, raccoons, foxes and mountain lions. When he sat still, he claims, chickadees would come and sit on his finger.

Turner kept no pets, but befriended one coyote he called Susie, who seemed to be ailing after she had a litter of pups. “I gave her some food to kind of help her along,” he recalled. “A few months later I was walking around one night and heard a noise. I look around and here’s five of her babies prancing along behind me. . . . They wanted to let me know they knew me.”

A former tow truck driver and sometime gold prospector, Turner first went to Mt. Wilson in 1973 as a security guard at a mountaintop park. When a live-in caretaker at the TV transmitter retired, Turner replaced him, moving into the one-bedroom apartment there.

Turner provided security, helped station engineers who worked on the transmitter and kept the brush cleared. As technology improved, engineers operated the transmitter by remote control from Los Angeles, and Turner saw less of them. The same was true for other stations that beamed their signals from the mountain.

But Turner remained a fixture. “He was a nice chap, basically calm, but eccentric,” said Jean Biscayart, former manager of KABC’s transmitter. Turner pursued esoteric studies of vitamins, became a vegetarian and believed in UFOs, Biscayart recalled. But he also would help anyone who needed it.

That life ended two years ago, however, when Turner was called to Hollywood and told his job was over.

Stunned, Turner frantically drove back to Mt. Wilson, where the movers demanded to know where to take his furniture. Turner said he had no idea.

The events that followed provided some of the ammunition Turner planned to use at his trial: How he could not get everything into storage by nightfall, then returned the next day to find “they had a guard at the gate, and a new lock put on.”

Turner said he spent three days in his van, disoriented and upset. For a long time, he didn’t do much of anything. Last January, he finally got a job as a blood bank security guard.

Disney’s attorney was prepared to defend the station’s actions, maintaining that Turner had no right to stay in his mountain home after his job ended. Once Turner was let go, station officials believed it was unwise to let him back around the valuable equipment.

Yellin said, “What seems at first blush like a heartless act really had thought behind it.”

But with jury selection scheduled to begin last week, the two sides found common ground.

The company agreed to settle Turner’s lawsuit.

Under the terms, Turner could not disclose what he got. But he made clear, happily, that he would leave Los Angeles.

He said, “I’m going to find me another mountain.”