Ito’s Pasadena Neighbors Judge Him Positively

When a house on a quiet Pasadena block filled with smoke one night late last fall and four fire engines zoomed up, concerned neighbors gathered in the street.

Cathy Phelps was standing in the crowd as a jogger outfitted in running shorts and a reflective vest rounded a corner, stopped short, and asked what was happening.

“We chatted,” said Phelps, the Neighborhood Watch block captain, “and then I realized who he was.”

The curious jogger had lived in the neighborhood for years, but now he was one of the world’s newest celebrities--Judge Lance A. Ito.

Phelps didn’t mention that she knew who he was. “I felt like he was out as an anonymous person, and the last thing he wanted was to start talking about what was going on,” she explained.

The smoke turned out to be from a malfunctioning furnace. Ito jogged on.

Since he became immersed in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, glimpses of Judge Ito in the Pasadena enclave of Madison Heights have become about as rare as sightings of Judge Crater. Meanwhile, the most innocuous of old encounters, all but forgotten, are dredged up--imbued with the aura of revelation.

“I did see him driving once,” a lawyer down the street recalled with a laugh. “He was making a right-hand turn. I was making an illegal left-hand turn--and he stared at me!”

Still, his neighbors seem more bemused than titillated by Ito’s rise in fame. In an area of quiet streets, a low crime rate and enough solidarity to throw a block party in the late summer, Ito is as well-known for the handsome Craftsman house he shares with his wife--Margaret York, the highest-ranking woman in the Los Angeles Police Department--as he is for his judicial duties.

Cathy Phelps and her husband, Lew, so admired the Ito home’s dark, earthy color during their walks around the neighborhood that they painted their own Craftsman house the same way.

“At the time I didn’t know that was Lance Ito’s house,” said Lew Phelps, who heads his own public relations firm. Of course, when they had their house painted early last summer, Lance Ito wasn’t even Lance Ito , Simpson trial judge. Recently, yet another Craftsman house on the street was painted the same way.

“The neighborhood has begun to refer to having your house painted in this manner as being ‘Ito-ized,’ ” quipped Phelps.

“I’ve never seen the guy myself,” said the newest resident to adopt the Ito color scheme. But, because he has an address similar to Ito’s, “sometimes we mistakenly get his mail,” the neighbor said.

Even the volume of the judge’s mail is a topic for discussion nowadays.

“Not too much,” said letter carrier Joel Asuncion as he made deliveries on Ito’s block on Saturday. “About like others. Maybe a little less.”

Magazines?

“He gets Car and Driver,” reported Asuncion.

Ito may have less time for walks and jogs these days, but he has not become a recluse.

“He buys his glasses at the Price Club,” said one neighbor. “Nobody bothers him there.”

He is noticed, though, at the no-frills Price-Costco warehouse store in Alhambra.

“Those glasses you see on TV are Price Club glasses,” store optician Wylmarie Anderson confirmed proudly.

“He comes in here often,” Anderson said. “People recognize him. They make little jokes at the door when he shows his (membership) card. And that’s it. He seems to have a good sense of humor.”

It was a beautiful day in Ito’s neighborhood as residents strolled with their children and walked their dogs. Cats sauntered across driveways and porches.

With its leafy trees and wood-shingled and clapboard homes, it could be a neighborhood plucked from the Midwest. In fact, some of the houses are more famous than their residents. The recent remake of “Father of the Bride” was shot at one. Now they’re filming the sequel there. A gray house with a crisply painted white picket porch is popular for commercials and television shows.

Ito isn’t the only judge on the block. Retired Municipal Judge Samuel Laidig lives nearby. Ito is “very quiet. We don’t see him much,” said Laidig’s wife, Marne, a pianist. “My husband knows him. Ito was in my husband’s court way back,” when Ito, too, was a municipal judge.

During more normal times, others in Madison Heights have found time to chat with Ito about typical neighborhood things--particularly houses.

“I was going to get my house painted and he had just had his house painted,” said Ronni Bergman, a pediatric nurse practitioner, recalling a casual conversation outside Ito’s home about five years ago. “I said, ‘How did you find your painter?’ He said he had a couple of painters who didn’t finish the work. Finally he just decided to go through the Broadway (department store).”

By all accounts, Ito has won the respect, sympathy and protectiveness of his neighbors. When tabloid television reporters lurked too intrusively, “my wife threatened to have them thrown out,” said an investment counselor who lives across the street from the judge.

“Very nice,” he said in appraisal of Ito. “He smiles, walks his dogs.”