The Little Publisher That Could

The economy’s rotten. No one of sound mind would stake their savings on a publishing venture, right? And with an anthology of stories by former Peace Corps volunteers--a concept that sounds about as sexy as shredded wheat?

Meet the Kennedys of Santa Monica--Geraldine and Jim, publisher and managing editor of the infant Clover Park Press.

Having been warned by the pros that a Peace Corps book would be the kiss of death, the Kennedys--who met as Peace Corps teachers in Liberia in 1962--chose to bet their publishing future on “From the Center of the Earth: Stories Out of the Peace Corps.”

“Some people just have to swim upstream,” Geraldine says.

In the summer of 1990, they filed papers announcing the birth of Clover Park and set about gathering writers for this first book.

They had no overhead--their spare bedroom and converted garage are headquarters--and took no salaries. Still, they had risked $25,000, including start-up and printing costs, by the time the paperback came out the following summer.

They braced for the worst, but within 18 months it sold all 5,000 copies and is now in a second printing.

“We never had a bad review,” Geraldine says. A glowing critique in the Washington Post--hometown paper to a number of ex-Peace Corps-types--helped.

This is not a book of letters-to-the-folks-back-home but short fiction and nonfiction by 13 writers, many of whom have been published by major houses. For this project, they settled for modest fees.

By the time the book had paid for itself, and for some new computer software, the Kennedys began thinking maybe they really belonged in this business.

But for now, Jim says, “This is an adventure that happens evenings and weekends.” Geraldine has a day job as a principal planning analyst at UCLA. Jim, a former news director at KCET, is Clover Park’s chief salesman.

So how did a brash little press come to have a bucolic name like Clover Park? Well, in the ‘70s, Geraldine the activist led a victorious citizens’ drive that resulted in the creation of Clover Park in Santa Monica.

At the American Booksellers Assn. convention in L.A. over the Memorial Day weekend, the Kennedys passed out cards trumpeting Clover Park as publisher of “great books about life’s wonders and wanderings.”

Geraldine chose one of her own wanderings for Clover Park’s second book, “Harmattan: A Journey Across the Sahara,” published in hardcover last January. The introduction, by Peace Corps founding director Sargent Shriver, counsels: “Get it. Beg, borrow or steal it.”

It is Geraldine’s riveting account of crossing the forbidding Sahara in 1964 from the Ivory Coast to Algiers, a journey of 4,000 miles and seven weeks by train, bus, car and truck, with four other Peace Corps women.

In a land where women were all but invisible, they became known as “ Desmoiselles formidables .” Life, the New York Times and Newsweek made them minor celebrities.

Ever since, “during periods of unemployment,” she’d talked about writing the book. The success of the first one gave her the courage. Jim convinced her that it was time “to get this thing out of here.” Chapter closed.

“Harmattan” has sold more than 1,000 of the printing of 5,000. They’re on target for having it pay for itself by late July and “the company is now running on its own steam,” Geraldine says, having earned back their total investment of $50,000 in the two books.

Next: Book three. Geraldine wants to do books on multicultural topics and literary travel. And, as one who researches even a hangnail, she’d like to publish a series “for lay people who have chronic illnesses--questions they don’t ask the doctor.”

Can tiny Clover Park compete with the big guys for top writers?

That’s an issue, she knows. The Kennedys hope to attract writers who need TLC and a publisher that will respect their work.

There are hundreds of small presses, from the precious literati types to the how-to-ers. To succeed, she says, Clover Park will have to lead, not follow. “The 25 Ways to Save the Environment has been done. We have to be nimble and anticipatory.”

Queries from literary agents are starting to come in, as are unsolicited manuscripts. “Somebody actually sent us pornography,” she says. Not for Clover Park. Nor are computer books, which “wouldn’t hold my passion.”

Are there investors in their future? Not now. “Having our own money at risk kept us in tune to our decisions,” Geraldine says. Besides, “I like having control. . . . We have a line of credit and right now we’re able to handle it.”

Their goal is to publish six books a year. “Journeys to the Center of the Earth,” the sequel, is a distinct possibility.

Long Live the Ballroom King

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The King of the Stardust Ballroom is dead.

More than 300 friends gathered at the Mayflower Ballroom in Inglewood to say so long to Mike Johns, 80, who had danced his way into their hearts during 50 years as a regular at Myron’s Ballroom, the Ventura Club in Van Nuys and Ginsburg’s Waltz Palace.

“Seven nights a week you could see Mike dancing,” recalls his brother, Ralph, of La Habra. “During intermission, there he would be, all by himself, twirling on the dance floor for 15 minutes until the band returned.”

There was a cake inscribed to the king. And Ralph Johns brought a scrapbook of photos--Mike with bandleader Orrin Tucker of “Oh, Johnny!” fame, Mike with bandleader Freddie Martin. . . .

Tucker had placed the crown and velvet robes on Mike when patrons chose him as king of Tucker’s old Stardust Ballroom at Sunset and Western in the late ‘70s. Lola Cole of San Pedro, his frequent dance partner, was the first queen of the Stardust Ballroom.

Tucker opened the Stardust after playing a bandleader in the 1975 TV movie “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.” In the movie, shot at Myron’s at 10th and Grand (now the Shark Club), Maureen Stapleton played a 50ish widow who met a lonely mailman at the Stardust.

Most of these ballrooms are gone now, these places where men and women would find partners for a few innocent hours dancing the waltz, the fox trot, the samba.

“We’d always dance the Latin numbers,” says Cole, 71, who’s now into swing dancing. “We were just buddies. He went through a few girlfriends during that time.”

Their last dance together was at Johns’ 80th birthday, May 6, 1993, at the Mayflower. “After that,” Cole says, “he’d come on his crutches and just sit there. All his friends would come up and chit-chat. He liked that.”

Soon afterward, doctors diagnosed cancer.

By most measures, Mike Johns was an ordinary man. He quit school at 16 to work in the Pennsylvania tin mills, helping support a family of seven. In L.A., he made a living buying clothing wholesale and selling it from his car. (He’s remembered as a snappy little dresser.) He never married.

“It was his life, dancing,” Cole says.

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.