Many Glued to TV for Trial but Some Have Had Enough

The television screen was a mere nine inches, the picture black and white, the reception snowy. Nonetheless, Encino boutique owner Gail Schenkman had perched the television on a glass display counter in her store Monday morning.

Hardly optimal viewing conditions. But picture quality was not at issue. The television was her window on the O.J. Simpson trial.

“Wait,” she shushed a visitor to her store, Necessities, as she leaned closer to the tiny screen. “It looks like they’re going to get started.”

Across Los Angeles, every manner of television picture flickered in every conceivable venue as people hunkered down, thinking that opening arguments in the most epic trial they probably would ever watch were finally getting started. No matter how long legal jockeying played on, an air of anticipation hung over their sets.

“We always turn the TV on for major events,” said Joni Aragon, owner of Joni’s Coffee Roaster Cafe in Marina del Rey. “Like the Rams, Raiders, the earthquake and O.J.”

Even a Westside psychotherapist planned for the Big Day by purchasing a miniature television to cart to work and mastering how to set her VCR to catch the moments she would miss.

When two patients canceled at the last minute, she decided to stay home part of the morning and watch. “I call them my O.J. cancellations,” said the therapist, who insisted on anonymity, saying it would not be good for patients to know of her intense interest in the trial.

The rest of the working masses improvised. If they couldn’t watch, they listened. In Sherman Oaks, carpet store manager Ray Chady propped a transistor radio atop a 10-foot pile of lush $2,000 Oriental rugs. “I’ll probably bring in a television set tomorrow,” he said. “Everybody is interested in this case.”

When Jorge Chacon, a custodian on the USC campus, could take a break, he took a peek at a dormitory television. Otherwise, he was hooked by earphones to his portable radio.

A longtime viewer of the trial, he spent four months on disability leave last fall watching the Simpson pretrial proceedings. “He’s guilty, I think,” mused Chacon, who counted himself a fan of the sports hero. “When he played football, he was my favorite.”

Elsewhere on the USC campus, jeans-clad students on breaks between classes (everyone swore they would not ditch class to watch the trial) gazed at televisions propped on microwaves in dorm rooms and made jokes about the droning commentary of news anchors and analysts.

Others made sure they did not miss a chance to witness history.

That includes Mark Ericson, who makes television infomercials, and still regrets not seeing the Beatles in their famous 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan show because his mother made him go to bed early. “So I missed the Beatles,” he said. “I don’t want to say that about O.J. Simpson. I want to tell my grandkids I saw everything.”

No matter what people had read or watched, regardless of whether they had already found Simpson guilty or not guilty, they wanted to see the lawyers finally play out their hands.

“I postponed handling any union business to watch this,” said Eric Tate, 26, a Pomona resident and Foothill Transit bus driver and union shop steward, after he finished his morning shift.

Jeneen Formosa, a 21-year-old Pasadena City College student studying to be a paralegal, planned to put the books aside to hear opening statements. “I’m excited about hearing them. I think it’ll be emotional.”

At USC, students who arrived long after Simpson had made himself a famous--and then infamous--alumni were watching with curiosity.

“I just want to see how they’re going to get him off,” mused 19-year-old USC freshman Jason Kirkpatrick, munching a cruller and watching his television set mounted high on a bookshelf over the door to his dorm room. “I’m pretty sure he’s guilty, but I’m positive that they’re going to get him off. I just want to see how they do it.”

Even those who decried the hype of the Simpson drama were inexorably drawn to it.

“It’s like a car accident: You don’t want to look at it but you do anyway,” said Arcadia resident Brian Van Buren. “I hate to admit it, but I set my VCR for four hours today to catch the opening statements.”

Alas, rapt viewers saw everything but the promised opening statements--which were postponed by mid-afternoon. Instead, it was a day of legal maneuvers and testiness--not much different from the past six months of legal proceedings.

“I had heard that opening statements and closing arguments are supposed to be the most interesting parts of the trial,” said Sam Taradash, an 18-year-old-USC freshman, on a two-hour break between Japanese language class and introduction to business marketing. “But so far, it’s just Judge (Lance) Ito talking about documents and what the rules will be.”

Taradash, whose small dorm room had the requisite computer on the desk and Sports Illustrated swim suit model of choice on the wall, chuckled at the mid-morning updates that news anchors urgently delivered. “This is really, really sad,” he said. “It doesn’t make me any cooler for sitting around and watching it.”

At the San Francisco Saloon, a West L.A. sports bar, bartender Terry Hughes fired up the television screen figuring the lunchtime crowd would be as hungry for O.J. as they were for food. Instead people walked in, glanced at the television, shrugged and went to their tables. Too much television commentary and no opening trial drama.

“They’re not getting down to what they were supposed to be doing,” Hughes said. “It’s the same old thing. So we all stopped watching.”

Still, many fascinated observers hung on every word of what turned out to be the pregame show.

“I’ve worked on many occasions with victims of domestic violence, children and adults,” said the Westside therapist, explaining her interest in the murders that prosecutors have portrayed as Simpson’s final act in a long, abusive relationship. “It’s so difficult to get them fair treatment under any circumstances.”

Of course, the months of motions, hearings and squabbles have left many tired and annoyed with the coverage.

“I’m O.J.’d out,” said USC freshman Kellie Williams.

Al Schmid, 85, slipped out of his home at the Santa Monica Towers, a seniors apartment house, to avoid the TV set his wife had commandeered for trial watching. He went to the library.

“I’ve had it up to here,” said Schmid, raising his hand to his chin.

Back on the USC campus, in freshman Dilini Imbuldeniya’s room, there was no interest in the television. Instead, she and her friends were poring over an item in a column in the school newspaper saying that the father of a USC classmate and friend of theirs had been cast in a made-for-television movie as none other than O.J. himself.

As for the trial, that was old news. “It seems like it’s been on forever,” said Imbuldeniya.

As if to underscore that sentiment, the campus watering hole, Traditions (by night a bar and grill; by day, a way station for students with takeout lunches) was a sight to behold at noon Monday.

Busy students ate sandwiches and spooned yogurt under a panoply of large television screens suspended from the ceiling--all of them dark. Not one television was turned on. Not one student seemed to care.

“They’re never on,” said 19-year-old sophomore Ashley Neilsson. “I forgot they had them.”

Staff writers Nancy Hill-Holtzman, Frank Williams and Peter Hong, and correspondent Chip Jacobs contributed to this story.