From a Real Grave Digger to a Lucy Lover, They Followed Their Bliss Instead of the Crowd
So they laughed when you started collecting “I Dream of Jeannie” lunch pails, wearing begrimed brain-tanned buckskins and living in a cave, did they?
Did they snicker as you walked a tightrope in flesh-toned briefs or started coveting Barbie dolls or running model railroad tracks through every room of your house?
Did they take bets on how soon your business would fail when you opened emporiums offering ducktail haircuts, old produce labels and $150-per-foot speaker wire?
Well, let them laugh. 1994 may not have been a banner year in the county on most other fronts, being bankrupt and all, but it did provide the breeding place for The Revenge of the Fixated!
When we started the Fixations column, it was done with certain fears that we would run out of interesting subjects after, say, three weeks, since Orange County is generally regarded as containing the originality and creative spark of a cinder block.
Yet here we are more than three years along, and O.C. has proven itself to be a seemingly inexhaustible trove of premium-grade weirdness, and 1994 produced a bumper crop. Launching this column we defined fixations as the “passions, hobbies, causes and predilections that get a bit out of hand in some people’s lives, perhaps certifiably so.” We’re talking here about people willing to flout convention to follow their inner voice, whether it leads them to collect Bozo the Clown icons or to write an exhaustive history of the postal envelope.
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The clearest sign of this year’s ascendancy of the weird is the Fullerton Museum Center’s exhibition “Gotta Have It! The Nature of Collecting.” The exhibit, which continues through Feb. 19, features 18 distinctive county collectors, several of whom, we are proud to say, are Fixations alumni.
One of our earliest subjects, Guy Ball, once had to keep his ultra-nerdy collection of ‘70s pocket calculators in a closet, and now he can proudly display them to the world within the ratifying walls of a museum. Not far from them is Roger Ellison’s 628-piece collection of rubber ducks, up from the 510 he had when we interviewed him a couple of years back.
One favorite Fixations subject was Chris Butler, who with his daughter Roxanne (who also collects Little Orphan Annie items) amasses anything pertaining to Lucille Ball. Several acquaintances have called him a kook for his devotion to Lucy (which includes weekly sojourns to L.A. to take Roxanne for walks in Lucy’s old neighborhood), and he scotched an appearance on the Montel Williams show at the last minute, he says, when he found they intended to portray him as a nut.
Does he then find some validation of his pursuit to have his Lucy finds featured in a museum next to other significant collections?
“It had a resounding effect on Roxanne, to see that she is part of a society that collects. But for me, this might not sound kind, but I don’t care about those other things,” he said with a laugh. “I looked around and thought, ‘Gosh, my stuff looks nice next to all this junk,’ and I suppose the other collectors probably thought the same of mine.”
Well, one man’s trash is another’s treasure. “Gotta Have It!” ranges from Edie Bonk’s giddy assemblage of Bozo items (featured in the Nov. 29 Fixations) to retired Marine Maj. Bill Mimiaga’s harrowing war mementos, which include a German concentration camp prisoner’s uniform, and a guard’s cap--one of half a dozen known to exist in the world.
When we first talked with Mimiaga two years ago, his primary collection was GIJoe dolls. Somewhat surprisingly, he proved to be a thoughtful history enthusiast, whose accurately garbed GI Joe dolls were part of a war-relics collection he gathered to make tangible the human condition in war.
He’s since sold off his GI Joes--raking in $52,000, in case the practical among you scoff at such collections--and traded his Marine major designation for a grad school history major at Cal State Fullerton. He’s reinvested most of his doll proceeds in his wartime collection. Though many of his items are irreplaceable, he’s pleased to have his collection on public display.
“Many of the things I have are very rare. Most were destroyed by the Germans or the governments that cooperated with them, because they were ashamed and wanted to forget,” he said.
Among the items: swastika-bearing Bosnian gear from when they, the current victims of “ethnic cleansing,” were themselves doing the same to the Serbs.
“These items are a way of remembering the events of World War II, and even the Civil War, that are still effecting us. For me to keep them to myself in a closet or shoe box is stupid,” Mimiaga said.
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“Follow your bliss,” advised the late Joseph Campbell, and he had something there. In a time when job insecurity is rampant, several Fixations subjects have parlayed their curious interests into careers.
Orange’s Jake Bricks, for example, got tired of the dirty looks his rockabilly buddies got in other barber shops, so he opened one of his own. There, his love for all things 1950s has created a time-machine vision of sartorial style, and customers flock to him.
We spoke with John Rosenfield, whose love of old guitars and rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia led him to a high-profile job as curator to the Hard Rock Cafes. Phyllis Estrella of Fullerton and her family parlayed a fixation on the zoot suits featured in the Luis Valdez play “Zoot Suit” into a flourishing rental and sales business, named El Pachuco, for the flashy drapes.
Alex de Ulloa and Tim Krehbiel, the owners of Anaheim’s Arrowsmith Automotive, weren’t hacking it in their white-collar jobs, so now they’re joyfully up to their eyebrows in grease, restoring 1930s woody wagons and cars they love.
Not everyone’s dreams have panned out so well. The second most quixotic fixation of the year was Walt Netschert and his Equalizer hat. Netschert, a.k.a. Captain Huff ‘n’ Puff, is an Orange-based engineer and smoking enthusiast who has devised a huge plastic hat with an air filter that makes it possible, he says, to light up anywhere without smoke escaping to offend others. Not that it’s without a social stigma of its own: Wearing it, you look like you’ve got an In-N-Out Burger stand on your head.
Since our article, he’s attracted some media interest--including spots on the CBS program “America Tonight” and Italian television--but has found nary a financial backer. He’s now hoping to interest Japanese investors, while soldiering on in his pro-smoking quest by finishing what he is calling his Martyr Kit for California Smokers.
He explained: “For restaurants that don’t allow smoking, you order their food to go, then in front of the place take out this red canvas bag that contains a TV-dinner tray with two ashtrays, a stool, and a canopy that reads ‘Exiled Smoker.’ ”
The most quixotic Fixation subject by far was Cliff Springmeier. If there’s anything harder than battling anti-smoking ire, it’s battling Mother Nature. For the past five years Springmeier has been building a remarkable, incredibly detailed model railroad world, running through nearly every room of his home and through his yard.
It’s some indication of his locomotive focus that when asked recently how the structure is doing, he started talking about how the outdoor scale model homes have weathered the winter. Meanwhile, the structure we meant, his Anaheim Hills home, is right on the head scarf of an ancient landslide. Part of his home has already shifted, and experts say the foundation has the potential to slide 12 feet in a minute.
That’s great come property assessment time, but it makes for precarious living. Springmeier says he sleeps near a door, but he continues working every day on his trains, which he hopes to have completed by summer. It’s a mind-boggling work, and, tremors permitting, look for a follow-up story when he’s finished.
My favorite dreams-to-riches story of the year is Gordon McClelland, who grew up in Orange when it was still full of orange orchards. Before he was in his teens, he was working in the packing plants, where he fell in love with the colorful fruit-box labels. He began collecting them and borrowed from their style when he was creating psychedelic rock-poster art in the late ‘60s. Now he has a flourishing business as the foremost expert and dealer of the highly collectible labels.
His was the first of a run of Fixations the past year that I look on as the California Idyllic series. There were only three subjects, but their lives were so rich that to me they captured this region’s golden days as a place of rustic splendor and infinite possibilities. Where else would it be possible, say, for McClelland to have been standing at sunset by Huntington’s Golden Bear on the Pacific Coast Highway in his dripping wet suit waiting for a ride, only to have legendary grizzled blues men John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed pull up and have a chat?
We also spoke with Costa Mesa’s Bud Browne, who was making surfing movies decades before the sport became a sensation in the ‘60s. Browne has photos of times when he was pulling lobsters out of local waters the size of a suit of armor breastplate. Now 82, he still bungee jumps and goes white water rafting.
Then there’s Laguna’s John Parlette, a sculptor and surfer. He is still able to enjoy the rustic Orange County he grew up loving, at least in his small corner of it, which is a shack built into a rock overhang in Laguna Canyon. From his cave-like digs, he has a commanding view of a still-unsullied part of the canyon that more than makes up for his lack of riches and conveniences.
In September, he told us, “if I should die today it would be with a big smile on my face, because of all the beautiful things I’ve seen. If I was making the corporate move to a little office in L.A. every day, I wouldn’t have been able to catch all those waves or watch the little opal eyes and eel grass and critters on the reefs, the leopard sharks, everything you see when the water’s clear. Those are the memories I have in my brain--all-star days.”
Not all of our subjects’ views of heaven are the same, but they all seem to share a similar vigor in pursuing their vistas.
Pat Quilter is someone who does lead the corporate life, heading Costa Mesa’s hi-tech QSC Audio, which just posted a $12-million month. But on weekends, he’s a mountain man, one of a growing number of folks who like to emulate the rugged lifestyles of American frontier folk. Quilter reports that since we wrote about him in February, he’s worn in and begrimed a new set of brained-tanned buckskins. (The hide is actually softened with gushy brains. He didn’t buy it at Nordstrom.)
“They won’t let me wear it to work anymore,” he complained. He does get to soil it up more, though, when working with a buddy to build a log cabin in a woodsy spot of San Diego County, using only hand tools. They are to the point of forging the door hinges.
We checked on the progress of a few other subjects. Tightrope-walking, 66-year-old Hendrik de Kanter sent out Christmas cards with a photo of him now riding a bicycle on a high-wire. The flamboyant engineer took up the skill at age 63 and continues learning new tricks, including roller-skating on the high wire that hangs 18 feet above a cactus garden in his Cowan Heights yard. He downplays his skills, noting that with the county bankruptcy, “everyone’s walking a tightrope these days.”
Event crasher extraordinaire Michael Minutoli reports that his list of celebrities he’s hung out with has expanded to the legal world, having met O.J. Simpson defense attorney Robert Shapiro at a recent charity function.
“His wife was very talkative,” Minutoli confided. He also met Frank Sinatra, and lived.
We received a how-I-spent-my-summer letter from one of our favorite Fixations of last year, Michele Devulder, a young Orange woman fascinated with graveyards and the dead. The letter detailed her visits in France to the graves of Jim Morrison, Moliere, Edith Piaf and others.
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Reached by phone Saturday, she advised, “you have to go to La Pere La Chaise Cemetery in Paris. It’s huge, and it’s so cool. It was musty and damp and dark and real old.” As at Disneyland, she says, “you have to give yourself at least two days to see it.”
Occasionally, being featured in this column has been a springboard for people. Not that they spring very far, mind you, but not everyone has the loftiest goals. Josef Rodriguez and his cousin, Alphonso Luna, are massive “I Dream of Jeannie” fans. Rodriquez reports that our September feature on the pair gained them an audience with “Jeannie” star Barbara Eden.
“She looks great,” Rodriguez enthused. “You can just knock decades off her age. She gave us each a hug and a kiss, and that was more than worth all the work we’ve done getting this collection.”
Keep dreaming out there. We’ll get to you.
