Park Leader in League of His Own

The sands of time lie uneven and thick beneath the slides and swings at Studio City Recreation Center. The grains pile up slowly but shift quickly with the tides of children and their imaginations.

A park sandbox anywhere is a haven and a palette, a place for kids and parents to laugh and dig for gold and build real relationships while they construct swirling castles of fantasy. A place for kids alone to win or lose their first games, their first friends.

The sandbox, grass and pavement at the Studio City park seem especially capable of this magic. And parents point to one man as the magician.

Park director Jon Klay is a humble man, shy in public when the subject isn’t T-ball or roller hockey, and not quick to take praise.

But he doesn’t need to talk. Parents do it for him.

Many say they love him like a son, or a brother, for the affection he’s lavished on their children. Which explains why they turned out 200 strong on a recent evening to fight for his job.

Klay, it turns out, is up for a transfer to a park in Sun Valley, which might as well be in the next galaxy to the parents in Studio City who will do anything to keep him.

The bureaucracy has responded with all the sympathy bureaucracies are famous for.

“I want to know where in any public employee’s contract it says you are guaranteed a job [in one place] for a lifetime,” said Olga Singer, the Department of Recreation and Parks official responsible for Klay’s transfer. “It doesn’t happen. We all get moved.”

Singer, who is 80, said she has worked in park management since 1937 and appreciates the heart and sweat Klay has put into the Studio City park--creating an exemplary environment for preschoolers, roller-hockey players and senior citizens. The park stages half a dozen theatrical productions each year, and even hosts a popular preschool co-op in one corner.

She said she wanted to move Klay to Sun Valley “to spread the wealth,” and that the reassignment was “only for the good of the department, not because of an idea that popped into our head.”

Shelley Gelber and Sandy Lavet aren’t exactly revolutionaries, but they’re mounting a rebellion against Singer’s point of view.

Both mothers of boys who pal around in a roller-hockey league of Klay’s invention, they rounded up hundreds of signatures on a petition the day after they learned of his scheduled transfer. Then they launched an end run around the bureaucracy by lobbying Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Feuer to take up their cause.

Gelber expresses heartbreak over the prospect of losing Klay. Wary of sounding like a whiny mom out only for her own kid’s interest, she still made an emotional appeal to Feuer and later appeared before the Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners.

“In Los Angeles to be able to develop positive, long-term relationships with people is rare and precious,” she wrote in a letter. “It really makes me very sad to think that because of departmental policy we would all suffer by the loss of this very special relationship with Jon Klay.

“Jon has love and concern for these kids. He has a relationship with the families as well. My kids love him. Is there really a valid rationale to start over and try to rebuild with someone new? If your marriage is working, do you think a change is warranted every six years just to bring in some new blood?

“I’m hoping this isn’t the message my kids ultimately learn.”

Gelber’s co-conspirator, Lavet, focuses much of her appreciation on the safety of the environment that Klay has created. The park feels like her own backyard, she says, and she considers Klay part of her extended family. She notes that the director has a college degree in psychology as well as physical education, and that his intelligence, leadership and compassion are mirrored in his assistants.

That’s a pretty good trick, considering the clientele.

Several celebrities’ kids play in the roller-hockey league, as do a couple of well-known child actors--although prima donnas are not tolerated--making the sidelines a secret favorite of star watchers. And sometimes one doesn’t have to go that far to brush shoulders with a Hollywood legend.

One day I found myself in the park men’s room with my 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter. My son was crying because the room was dark and cold and my daughter, perched behind me in a little red firetruck that she refused to get out of, was crying because her brother was crying.

*

Just at the instant of highest alarm, the door burst open and a high-pitched cackle familiar to moviegoers the world over filled the room.

“Classic! Just classic!” rasped roller-hockey dad Danny DeVito, dressed in his trademark Hawaiian shirt and dark sunglasses, and obviously delighted to come upon a real-life quandary that could have been a scene in one of his crisis-a-minute movies.

“Dad’s afternoon at the park! Classic! Ha ha ha!”

Councilman Mike Feuer’s children are too young to swing hockey sticks with the stars, but the prominent park goer has rallied to Klay’s cause. Observing that Los Angeles has less park acreage per capita than any other major U.S. city, the councilman said the parks department’s transfer policy is “misguided” if it fails to enhance neighborhoods’ sense of community.

“We’re trying to instill in residents of this city a feeling that they have control over the course of their lives,” he said. “We ought to encourage these parents who are doing things to accentuate their common bond.”

Feuer asked parks department chief Jackie Tatum for a monthlong moratorium on Klay’s transfer. That will end next week. Tatum said she has taken the issue “under advisement” and expects to make a decision soon.

Even if Tatum decides ultimately to transfer Klay, however, I’ll admit that as the father of preschoolers who are in a league of their own I won’t expect the park to change much.

I always thought Alberto the ice-cream man ran the place, and he says he’s not going anywhere.