1994: A PORTFOLIO : From the Roar of the Earth in January to the Intrigue of the O.J. Simpson Case and the Passion of Prop. 187, This Year Was . . . : A Wild Ride

What kind of a year was it?

The kind that rattled us, stunned us, saddened us, amused us, confused us and horrified us.

It was a year that shaped our attitudes and influenced our politics; that tested our beliefs and challenged our ability to endure. It was a year that never let us rest.

If there wasn’t an earthquake, there was a flood. If there wasn’t a flood, there was a strike. If there wasn’t a strike, there was a murder. If there wasn’t a murder, there was a trial. If there wasn’t a trial, there was an election.

And always there were the media, thundering across a landscape of events like wildebeests on the Masai Mara, asking, telling, focusing, commentating, recording, televising, writing, speculating.

The eyes of the world turned toward Los Angeles with the January earthquake and never turned away.

It was as if 1994 had been deemed the birth of a new L.A., a different L.A., sired in a storm and born in chaos, with all the attendant pain, joy and recognition of life struggling to exist.

The earthquake was an announcement of that birth, an awesome, roaring, shaking, elemental force that let us know who was in charge around here.

It killed our people and destroyed our homes, but it never broke our spirit. And in the end, that proved to be a force almost as mighty as the energy that coursed through the shaky ground we occupied.

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What kind of a year was it?

It was a year that saw Heidi Fleiss, who once sashayed through town as a celebrity madam, brought down by a jury’s verdict, her smile fading, her head slumping, and her glory vanishing like Christmas glitter.

It was a year that saw Lyle and Erik Menendez in a courtroom spotlight for six months for killing their parents--often grinning, sometimes sobbing--only to face the rigorous prospect of new trials when separate juries announced they were hopelessly deadlocked.

And it was the year of O.J. Simpson.

Perhaps never before has the fall of a sports hero, a dazzling, sweet-smiling football Hall of Famer, been so closely chronicled as the fall of this man in this place.

We watched, simultaneously appalled and intrigued, as television followed the course of his white Ford Bronco for almost two hours, police in pursuit, until it rolled almost mystically up to the door of his Brentwood home.

We watched his arrest on charges of murdering his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, and we watched the endless pulse of events that are leading finally toward his trial.

We saw a swiveling, dodging downfield runner sitting stone-faced and silent in a courtroom chair, contemplating a future that had nothing to do with football.

Was that the whole year? It seemed that way sometimes, but it wasn’t, because this was no ordinary time. Life was on fast-forward in ‘94, blurred by events that moved with breathless speed, a montage of collapsed buildings, fallen heroes and sliding mountains.

Was nothing small and ordinary anymore? Whatever became of laid-back? What happened to mellow? When had life stopped being a beach?

We were super-wired to the politics of confrontation. Debate moved off the stage and onto the streets. Fists were clenched and banners raised as 70,000 angry activists marched toward City Hall one August afternoon in roaring protest to a state proposition called 187.

The initiative would deny education and most social benefits to illegal immigrants, a tactic its backers hoped would seal California’s borders to unlawful entry, lower the tax rate and damp the fires of gang warfare.

But those who marched through the streets called it racist and immoral, and rattled the city with a vow to see its proponents in hell. The measure won, but the fight goes on.

What kind of a year was it?

It was a year when even our fun was vaguely exhausting, when tens of thousands of visitors from every continent of the globe came to town to see eight games of World Cup soccer played at the Rose Bowl.

Spectators cheered in a dozen different languages, celebrants hit the streets and smashed windows, and Italians wept and moaned and tore their hair when a missed field goal gave the championship to Brazil.

Our emotions littered the streets when the crowds went home, but in a county of 9 million people, you don’t need tourists to create a crowd.

We gathered by the hundreds and sometimes the thousands to watch the stately, often glittery, occasionally noisy, visits of royalty to L.A. in ‘94--a Japanese emperor first, a British prince next, amassing an entourage of Hollywood celebrities the way a parade lures kids. It seemed like the parties would last forever.

What kind of a year was it?

It was a year that once more threatened nature’s calamity, and cameras turned anew to those areas devastated by the killing firestorms of ’93.

Rains fell, and the mountains moved in rivers of mud on Malibu, crushing fences and retaining walls, overturning cars, seeping into homes and ultimately shutting down Pacific Coast Highway, which only a few short months before had been clouded with smoke and clogged by firefighting equipment.

What kind of a year was it?

A year filled with so much more than could ever be summarized in these few words. It was a year whose magnitude requires strings of pictures, from faces etched with anguish to disasters so awesome they flash to the memory like bolts of summer lightning.

It was a year of violent emotions and dark clouds, of evenings as warm and sweet as honey in tea, and of realities as sharp and cold as the blade of a knife.

But, once more, we outlived gang wars, saw crime edge downward, tolerated political vagaries, battled the wolf at the door and emerged somehow intact, older, wiser and ready to go again. As a community activist, asked to summarize the year, put it: “We survived.” And so we did.

It was that kind of year.