You Guessed! The Best of the Obsessed : Here’s a look back at a gaggle of local folks, from admen to a flag man, who made us smile.

Whatever else 1993 might have been, it was clearly a fine year in which to be obsessed. Our Fixations subjects in the past 12 months amounted to one very twisted horn of plenty.

We had idea people, such as Vladimir Lefebvre, the UC Irvine theoretical psychologist who has come up with an equation for human consciousness, and action people, including Reyes Serrano, the 92-year-old cowboy who remembers when all of Orange County was his to ride, and curses the fates--and, boy, can he curse--which deny him a horse now.

We spoke with admen John Gothold and Bruce Mayo, who hide playful tributes to the late country-rock legend Gram Parsons in their ads, and with Kathryn Lindskoog, who, though largely confined to her Orange home with MS, carries on a globe-spanning literary sleuthing, which she says exposed fraud in the posthumous works of C.S. Lewis.

We talked with Michele Devulder, a young woman with an Addams family-like passion for graveyards, and with Jan Knowlton of Anaheim, who claims harrowing repressed memories of her father as the Black Dahlia murderer. Peter Parker of Stanton stages an “adapted for the garage” version of “The Phantom of the Opera” musical at Halloween, while 99-year-old Newport Beach tap dancer Peggy Gene Evans was actually in the Lon Chaney silent version of “The Phantom.”

We happened across collectors, from the famed Dr. Demento and his million records, to Santa Ana’s Glenn James and his 50 ventriloquist dummies (he’s got 65 now), to part-Diegueno Indian Justin Farmer and the Indian baskets that talk to him.

Add a onetime O.C. punk club owner who runs with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, a would-be channel swimmer, a musical saw player, a woman with Elvis’ frying pans, a gent with the world’s largest collection of Marshall amplifiers, a millionaire cable TV chef, a toothless street proselytizer and varied others, and you’ve got one heck of an outfield.

We’d like to take this year-end occasion to recall a few of these folks and to follow up on the activities of some of them as well.

Those we talked with again were selected for two reasons:

A) They lead unique, fascinating lives, and; B) They were home when I called.

* We weren’t able to contact a couple of the most interesting ones. In August, we wrote about jobless single mother Pamela Pole, who had planned a relay swim to Catalina to raise finds for charity.

The funding never materialized, the other swimmers dropped out and Pole wound up attempting it on her own, without even the boat she’d hired to pace her. The Coast Guard, for fairly obvious reasons, had not approved her swim, and she didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble, so, alone, she jumped off Balboa Pier near midnight on Aug. 20 and began paddling.

She was our first Fixation to get a front-page headline in the Daily Pilot newspaper: “Woman Rescued During Mysterious Attempt to Swim to Catalina.”

Pole thinks she made it most of the way before the current carried her back, which others say is unlikely. She was found three miles from Newport nine hours after she started, suffering from mild hypothermia. The lovely twist to her story was that Jay Barnes, the sailer she’d hired to pace her swim, had gone searching for her when she disappeared, and, though he wasn’t the one to find her, they did meet up on land, fell in love, and he, as a ship’s captain, performed a marriage between himself and Pole at sea. When last heard from, they were living on Barnes’ boat in Newport Harbor, and one hopes they still are.

* Another phone-less Fixation was the mono-monikered David, a Christian ascetic of sorts, who camped, rain or blistering sun, at Orange County intersections with his Zen-like signs.

He’d told us he’d sometimes spend all day holding a sign with an incomplete message, such as, “Faith’s greatest weapon, Evil’s greatest foe . . .” “Then people come up asking, ‘What’s the last half of the sign?’ and I’ll go, ‘Purple lipstick remover!’ Haw! I like to tease them,” he guffawed.

When completed, that sign actually read “Faith’s greatest weapon, Evil’s greatest foe, Is to be ‘non-assuming’ and, Know what you know.” Like David’s dozens of other question-provoking signs, they were part of a philosophy that was remarkably well thought-out for a person who also admitted to wrestling with real live demons.

He said he would be tempted to sell his soul for some teeth, so kids wouldn’t look at the Stonehenge-like ruins in his mouth when he talked to them. After the article ran, kids driving by started yelling “Hey, Toothless!” at him.

Other readers, though, including Susan Menning of Costa Mesa, Orange dentist John Stewart and Newport Beach dental lab manager Shaun Keating, were moved to do something about his condition, and they spent weeks putting a new set of choppers in David’s mouth. When last sighted in August, David and his teeth were presiding over the corner of El Toro and Moulton Parkway in South County.

* Curiously, this column’s other article with bite was our feature on the garage-made cable cooking show of millionaire businessman John Crean and his partner Barbara Venezia. For a year the wisecracking pair’s “At Home on the Range” had been enthralling a cult audience on local leased-access cable with their culinary antics: cooking dog food, starting grease fires and sliding one or two recipes straight from the frying pan into the trash.

Despite such efforts, the show hadn’t attracted wider notice, and Venezia said they were considering packing it in, until the Fixations article ran in May, and, “things just went nuts,” she says. “I never understood the power of the press until that day. We had calls from literally all over the world and were on CNN, on ‘Eye to Eye With Connie Chung,’ on HBO entertainment news, and it got us on ‘The Home Show.’ ” (They are now a weekly fixture on the ABC program.)

It’s such heartwarming stories as this that make me wish we were allowed to take kickbacks.

The show--taped in the hangar-like garage at the sprawling Village Crean estate in Santa Ana Heights--had a recent setback when ABC decided to drop “The Home Show.” It will still air until April, though, and Venezia says it may survive in syndication after that.

In either event, “they can’t blame the Home Show cancellation on poor John and I,” Venezia jokingly insists, and says that, regardless, she and Crean will continue mangling meals on local cable (you can call (714) 495-2821 to find when it airs in your area) while searching for a national network.

Recent shows have featured recipes gleaned from the National Enquirer, such as Tony Curtis’ Beef Goulash, “And, for our big Christmas special we made that traditional dish, egg foo yong,” Venezia said. In January, the show will introduce a faux food critic, Elvin Sage (Eric Halasz of the Orange County Crazies) and a Wildest Thing in the Kitchen Contest, in which viewers recount their stove-top sins.

* Some time after the Fixations article on “I Love Lucy”-loving Chris Butler and his daughter Roxanne appeared in January, we got a call from the Montel Williams show wanting to get ahold of Butler. The 38-year-old single parent’s Garden Grove home is a veritable Isle of Lucy, with Lucille Ball posters, busts and games, a parrot that goes “Waaaaaaaugh” like her, and even a TV set and fridge just like the Ricardos had in their TV home. Butler and 6-year-old Roxanne have most Lucy episodes memorized and often go by the house where she lived in Bel Air.

Butler, a special-education teacher, says he and Roxanne nearly went to New York to be on the show but pulled out at the last minute. “It turns out they were trying to make me look like this crackpot nut raising ‘Little Lucy’ in a fantasy world,” Butler said.

“They’d asked me for the name of a few friends, to ‘corroborate my story.’ And then they called my friends, who then called me, saying, ‘They were really trying to make you seem like a psycho, putting words in my mouth and asking questions like, “Does he ever dress up like Lucy, or wear a red wig? Don’t you just want to take him out for a cup of coffee, sock him across the face and say, ‘Get a life’?” ’

So they dropped out. Instead, he says, the show “got this guy dressed as Elvis with a son he’d named Elvis. They made fun of him. They brought on a psychiatrist who said he was nuts, and the audience ripped him to shreds. We’re so glad we didn’t go.”

From the little I’d observed, Butler and his daughter seemed remarkably well-balanced, even if their fulcrum was the madcap Queen of Comedy. Of course, they spent the day after Thanksgiving “Waaaaaughing” along with the Lucy marathon on TV. And so what if they do hang out a bit at the coffee shop of Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel, just because Lucy co-star William Frawley had lived in the building?

“We’ve also been going by Lucy’s house a lot this year, probably every week. My daughter and I do a thing where we pretend we live on her street. We walk in the neighborhood so much that the neighbors think that we live there and wave.

“I know this might seem a little weird, but I’ve also taken to reading the cards people leave at her crypt at Forest Lawn. It’s really interesting what they will write. They’re always personal things, like people would write to a friend.”

* Perhaps Butler will run into Michele Devulder there some day. Devulder, 22, of Orange, has been attracted to the serenity of cemeteries since she was a child. She spends a lot of time at them, both looking for celebrity graves and cleaning the untended markers of forgotten unknowns (Windex works well on those problem graves, she has found).

Her favorite haunting ground of late has been Hillside in L.A. “It’s an excellent cemetery. I recommend it,” she says. “I recently saw Jack Benny’s grave, and this old man showed me where Lorne Greene is. On the way over we saw the Factors, the Max Factor family. Then all of a sudden there he was, way outside in a beautiful area, and it read ‘Here Lies Ben Cartwright of “Bonanza” ’ or something like that. And I’d heard Michael Landon was nearby.”

Is Hoss buried there too?

“I’m still looking for him.”

She’s now studying at Golden West College to be an aesthetician. She explained, “That’s doing facials and beauty stuff.”

On living people?

“Yeah. You need blood flow, so that doesn’t work on dead people. I was looking into doing makeup for dead people, but my boyfriend was against it.”

She isn’t without other grave goals, though. “I would like to set a world record of visiting as many graves as possible. The problem is, usually I do it alone, so how can it be verified?”

* We did speak with a few genuine record-holders over the year. One, Susan Jeske of Costa Mesa, holds the Guinness record for singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at public events the greatest number of times in a 24-hour period. She was also striving for the record of most times in a year. The Guinness Book people had told her if she sang it 400 times, they’d accept it (there is no previously established record). She only made it to 386, she says, and is hoping they’ll settle for that.

* One of the occasions she sang at was the unfurling of Ski Demski’s Guinness record-making flag at the Washington Monument in June. The third and largest of Demski’s stars and stripes, his Superflag 3 measures 255 by 505 feet, weighs 3,000 pounds and is made of 5 1/2 miles of 5-foot-wide nylon cloth. It is in the 1994 Guinness book as the world’s largest flag. Driving back from Washington, Demski was in a traffic accident, destroying his custom trailer, though the flag pulled through with flying colors. He will be appearing with a smaller, football field-sized flag at the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, and the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe.

As he has in the past, Santa look-alike Demski is running for mayor of Long Beach. He has a Letterman-like Top 10 list of why citizens should choose him when they vote in April, including that he would, 2) “Make the Pole (his 132-foot flagpole) a historical site, so Ski Demski can be buried in it when it comes his time,” and 1) “It will take a Santa Claus to turn things around in our city. With Ski Demski as mayor of Long Beach, it will be like having Christmas every day in his new workplace.”

As he always does at Christmastime, Demski has a 30-foot inflatable Santa mounted over his business. This year its beard is sporting a sign reading Demski for Mayor . “And I’m going to leave it up ‘til April,” he declared.

* Sometimes fixations compete with life. In October, 45-year-old Laguna Beach ultra-runner Fred Shufflebarger won his second Angeles Crest 100 race, which, as its title suggests, is a 100-mile off-road foot race with a couple of mountains thrown in the way. Last month, though, Shufflebarger only came in 10th in a 50-mile run in Texas.

“I’m not as motivated as I was,” he said. “Running may have to fall by the wayside. It seems like there are more important things in life, like earning a living. I realized retirement isn’t too far away, and I don’t have anything to retire from .”

Unlike less demanding sports, there’s no money in ultra-running. Between going to college and affording college, Shufflebarger fears he won’t have time to run.

“I’m mixed up right now. I’m 45 years old and running as well as I ever have. I’d hate to give up the degree of fitness I’ve found, and I know if I drop off now I’ll never get back to this point. But I have to make a living. I guess I’m going through the fear of it now, but it’s also exciting to face these changes,” he said.