COVER STORY : TOWN VS. GOWN : A groundless rumor raises the specter of racism and casts a shadow of suspicion over Temple City’s bridal shops

No one knows how the rumor got started.

Been around a few years now, Temple City residents say.

We asked the authorities to investigate, the city manager confirms.

There’s nothing to it, the cops conclude.

And yet it persists, casting suspicion on a group of hard-working people who have gone from bewilderment to anger as the topic refuses to die.

The rumor that hangs over Temple City goes like this: The city’s nine bridal shops are fronts for illegal activity, including prostitution and money laundering. Why else would there be so many within a square mile of each other? How else could they stay in business? What else could bring all that traffic of young men and women some evenings, when bridal shops are traditionally closed?

Oh, and another thing: All the shops are owned by Asian Americans.

The rumors swirl within a background of changing demographics: The historically white community has seen its Asian population swell in the last decade to more than 20% of its 31,000 residents.

Bridal shops even took on political overtones earlier this month when City Council candidate Joe Walker, 33, a crime analyst with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, distributed flyers that proclaimed: “Stop Bridal Shops. Investigate these businesses that are plaguing our city.”

Asian Americans accused Walker of racism; he said he merely worried that the bridal shops--which do a large business in rentals and services--generate little sales tax. He later apologized for the “discomfort and grief” caused by the word plague. He lost the April 12 election.

Nonetheless, civic leaders said his platform struck a chord, giving public voice to a private concern that has long gnawed at the innards of some residents.

“There is a minority who resent the Asians moving into our city, and perhaps for them bridal shops have become the symbol . . . of those demographic changes,” said Thomas Breazeal, a Temple City councilman.

Breazeal said he finds the rumors about the bridal shops “abhorrent, repugnant, unconscionable. I don’t know if I can adequately find words to describe my emotional feelings for someone who introduces racism into an election.”

But step inside Pie ‘n Burger, a 1950s-style coffee shop on Las Tunas Drive that is a remnant of Americana amid a thicket of signs advertising Asian businesses, and you meet the type of folks who took Walker’s slogans to heart.

“I think there’s dope going out the back door and prostitution in the front,” asserted Norman B. Stachler, a former Temple City businessman, when asked about the bridal shops.

Stachler, who raised his family in Temple City and later moved to Arcadia, said of Asian immigrants:

“They’re buying us out of our community, our city, our own golf courses. This goddamned town is ruined. It’s another Monterey Park. All the homeowners are moving out.”

Patrons at several other tables echoed Stachler’s remarks. A man who identified himself only as Bob said the United States should prohibit immigrants from buying property until they become citizens. The man, whose parents immigrated from Yugoslavia, accused Temple City of being too lenient with Asian immigrants.

“Those people are pretty shrewd,” he said. “The way they work, you don’t even know what they’re doing in (the bridal shops).”

The rumors are so pervasive that at least one bridal shop owner found herself fending off would-be johns.

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Vivian Viado, a Filipino American who owns Veekee’s Bridal Shop on Las Tunas Drive, said three or four men have called wanting to hire prostitutes. A car full of young men once pulled up to her store in the middle of the day.

“Where are the whores?” they asked as customers gaped in astonishment. “We’re looking for whores.”

“You’ve got the wrong place,” Viado told them. Her store of six years is exactly what it appears, she said.

“I hope they will investigate; we’re not hiding anything,” Viado said, waving her arm to encompass the floor-length wedding dresses, prom gowns, jewelry, slippers and veils that adorn the boutique.

Bridal-shop owners said the suspicions about them illustrate an ignorance of Asia and its customs, where entire city shopping districts are often devoted to one type of business. In Taipei, Taiwan, they said, there is one street lined with 30 or more bridal shops where customers can compare prices and styles.

“People want a one-stop shopping street; that’s one of our biggest selling points,” said Peter Zhang of Top Bo Bridal shop, which opened in a shopping mall on Las Tunas Drive six months ago.

Far from fearing that other shops would pose too much competition, Top Bo was drawn to Las Tunas specifically because of the plethora of shops, Zhang said.

When told about the comments of Stachler and others, Zhang shrugged his shoulders. “It’s sad that they feel like that. They should be more educated than that.”

Lucy Wang, 40, and her husband Daniel, 46, own Lucy’s Bridal, an elegant Las Tunas shop that features elaborate Marie Antoinette-like dresses trimmed with black lace. The Wangs studied photography in Japan, then ran a bridal shop in Taiwan for 15 years before moving to Southern California.

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After working at a one-hour photo shop for a year, the Wangs bought their own shop and spent long hours making it profitable. Then they bought a house in Cerritos, where they raised two sons. In 1992, they opened Lucy’s in Temple City, where the bulk of their business is wedding photography.

“The only thing we know is the bridal business and the photography business, so that’s what we did to make a life,” Wang said.

“American people don’t take too many wedding portraits but Chinese people like studio portraits, a lot of them, with different backgrounds and different poses.”

Unlike the corner liquor store or vacuum repair shop, she said, Temple City’s bridal shops don’t depend on local consumers. They attract brides from New York, Texas and San Jose, drawn by the city’s reputation as a wedding center.

Like many shops in Temple City, Lucy’s Bridal provides centralized shopping for wedding dresses and tuxedos (for rent or sale), wedding portrait photography, a gift boutique, jewelry and services such as make-up, hair-styling and manicures.

Some bridal shops estimate that 90% of their business comes from outside city limits. Working brides often make late appointments, which may account for the evening traffic. Many activities take place in side rooms or portrait studios that aren’t visible from the large display windows on Las Tunas Drive, which could give the impression that the stores are eerily empty.

In many Asian cultures, the bride changes three times during the wedding, going from a full-length, Western-style white dress to a traditional ceremonial gown and headdress (chosen from styles popular in the Ming or Ch’ing dynasties) to an elaborate banquet dress for the feast that follows the ceremony.

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Much of Wang’s business comes from elegant portraits that can cost $700 to $1,000 and require the entire day to shoot. Last week, Angela Lin braved the traffic from Orange County for a photo session at Lucy’s. She arrived with her fiance at 10 a.m. and stayed until 3 p.m., taking dozens of photos in her three wedding gowns.

“My friend told me the service was real good and it’s convenient; I can go to one place and I don’t have to run around,” said Lin as a hairdresser sprayed and curled her hair into a camera-ready chignon.

The prostitution rumors came as a shock to the Wangs.

“There are 17 nail salons, but they don’t complain about them, they complain about us,” Wang said. “When the police came, we didn’t know what had happened. We thought they wanted to protect us. Then we saw the Chinese newspaper” that reported on the rumors.

“Then we got very mad. We’re still upset.”

The controversy has united the bridal shop owners, who meet regularly to discuss how to improve their image and fight back. Some have proposed holding an open house to invite residents inside their shops to dispel the mystery.

While it might seem ludicrous to accuse bridal shops--purveyors of purity and romance--of harboring the world’s oldest profession, sociologists said that irrationality is a common response when people feel threatened.

“These rumors are the result of anxiety about . . . economic survival,” said Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University. He studies hate crimes and wrote the book “Gossip, the Inside Scoop.”

“Right now, people are very concerned about the influx of Asians and Latinos at a time when many Americans are unemployed,” he said. “They feel their middle-class lifestyle slipping away. This is a way to explain Asians being successful.”

Levin said urban folk tales, however bizarre, often continue to circulate until civic leaders make it clear they won’t be tolerated and take public steps to dispel them.

In 1969, he said, some Jewish boutique owners in Orleans, France, were attacked by a mob after rumors circulated that the shopkeepers were kidnaping Christian women into white slavery.

According to the persistent rumor, the boutique dressing rooms were really elevators that took women to a basement connected by a network of canals to boats that whisked the women away. Levin said the rumor turned to violence because leaders of the town never publicly decried the allegations.

In Temple City, civic leaders requested an investigation to resolve the bridal shop rumors. City Manager Denise Ovrom said she asked the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to look into the shops after receiving numerous calls from concerned residents.

“Even I’ve heard there’s illegal activity going on in bridal shops,” Ovrom said. “It’s not true, it’s just a rumor but it’s an unfortunate one because it hurts our downtown business community.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Patrick Libertone said he heard suspicious talk about bridal shops at homeowner and community watch meetings. After the city manager called, Libertone made unannounced visits to each shop, some more than once, entering at different hours and using the back as well as front door.

“Everything was on the up and up,” Libertone concluded.

Law enforcement officials said they are bewildered as to where the rumors started. The only link they can muster is that Temple City residents might be confusing bridal shops with a beauty shop that was closed down last year for prostitution. The Jai Alai Salon’s business license was revoked by the city attorney after the city and police received numerous calls alleging illegal activity there.

“I think a lot of folks felt that if it was occurring there it was also occurring at the bridal shops,” said Deputy Dwight D’Evelyn, a county sheriff’s investigator based in Temple City. “We’re not aware there’s any other businesses that are fronts for prostitution, but there are a lot of folks who feel if there are so many (bridal shops) downtown they have to be doing something illicit.”

That came as news to the Wangs, who were under the impression that their elegant storefront was sprucing up Temple City’s main shopping street.

“We came here, we brought our money from Taiwan,” Wang said. “We thought we made the city, the street look more nice.”