Out, Out Brief Candlelight Bridge

At the intersection of Hubbard Street and Foothill Boulevard in Sylmar, there’s a Mobil station, a Shell station, a Jack-in-the-Box and a Subway sandwich shop anchoring a dull mini-mall.

Several miles to the southeast, where Van Nuys and Ventura boulevards cross, there is a Union station and a shop selling pizza by the slice, but any resemblance ends there.

Van Nuys and Ventura is the heart of Sherman Oaks, after all. At one corner a chic neon sign announces a jazz club, and a wide awning shelters readers browsing through newspapers from around the world. Across the way stands a glass-sheathed office building.

The jaded and unimaginative don’t usually look for connections between these two disparate worlds.

But Thursday night, the National Organization for Women linked them with candlelight.

It was part of NOW’s “unity” campaign inspired by the dissension that grew out of the O. J. Simpson trial. The Valley chapter planned to hold its monthly candlelight vigil at the Sherman Oaks intersection to appeal for help in the cause of Margaret Ovuoba, who says her five children were spirited away by her ex-husband to his native Nigeria.

Then a second vigil was thrown in at the last minute, the result of a serendipitous encounter in a beauty shop.

While having her hair done, one of NOW’s members saw a flier in the beauty shop seeking information about the suspected abduction of Sandra Navarez from a Sylmar Laundromat more than a year ago.

A crime long faded from the news reports, Navarez’s family is still dutifully posting notices, hoping to turn up hints, clues or witnesses.

“We felt even though we planned to do one at Ventura and Van Nuys, we really wanted to do one in Sylmar for Sandra Navarez as well,” said Valley NOW President Jean Morrison, a medical administrator who hopes to make a transition into paid organizing.

Rather than postpone either vigil, NOW ran them in tandem starting at dusk in Sylmar.

It turned out to be something of a communal scream.

At 5:30, all four corners of the Sylmar intersection were lined with more than 100 friends, neighbors and relatives of Sandra Navarez, including children from toddlers to teenagers.

They handed out fliers and waved banners at passing cars.

The signs of the NOW-affiliated said “Juntos en Contra Racismo, Sexo y Classes,” and similar sentiments in English: “Fight Bigotry and Racism Now” and “Stop Violence Against Women.”

But a majority of the signs had large pictures of Navarez and exhortations to call an information line.

*

As darkness fell, candles were passed out. Shielded from a chilly breeze by clear plastic cups, they flickered eloquently. Morrison, dressed crisply in a magenta jacket and black slacks and wearing a jewel in one nostril, stood out amid all the bustle, alternately talking on a cellular phone and reaching out to any stranger whose attention she could get.

Nearby, 39th Assembly District candidate Valerie Salkin also worked the crowd.

Councilman Richard Alarcon soon arrived and exchanged hugs with Navarez’s mother, Lupe Rodriguez, her husband Pete and several brothers, sisters and children.

Repeating his tale to anyone who asked, Pete Navarez said he has still not given up, even after a Feb. 2 appearance on the “Unsolved Mysteries” television show produced no new leads. He even hoped the vigil might reach the suspected kidnapper. “I pleaded with the guy, just tell us what you did with her,” he said. “If she’s alive, tell us. If you killed her, tell us.”

About 6 o’clock, Sandra Navarez’s cousins, Raymond and Ruben Sierra, started a chant, “Someone must know/Where did Sandra go?”

Soon the chanting spread to all four corners. It continued for 15 minutes.

Shortly after 6:30, Morrison drove off, leading a caravan to Sherman Oaks, which proved a far tougher environment for the cause.

When I caught up with them, Morrison and two other women stood on the corner with a man in a business suit.

He was Bob Hertzberg, a Steve Allen look-alike who is running for the 40th Assembly District seat.

Saying he was there in his role as an activist--not candidate--Hertzberg hugged anyone who would allow it and handed out leaflets pleading for help for Ovuoba, the Montrose woman whose children were abducted.

*

Eventually, the group grew to about 20. They unfurled a banner and lit their candles in front of the gas station.

Mercedeses and Lexuses paraded by. Few drivers paid attention.

Pedestrians walked briskly on their way to half a dozen nightspots or the glowing Tower Records store a block away. Almost all kept their eyes aimed straight ahead or down toward their feet.

People standing on the sidewalk with candles in their hand can be as unappealing as panhandlers, maybe even more so. You sense that if you stop and listen you’ll go away feeling worse about life without even getting the emotional rush of doing a charitable deed.

Likewise, the panhandler gets an immediate reward when his pitch succeeds. Those on a vigil may never know whom they have touched, or if they touched anyone at all.

I can’t forget the dozen or so men and women so many years ago who stood like statues every day at noon on UCLA’s Bruin Walk to protest the Vietnam War in silence.

I always hurried by them to my class, finding them a little weird. Today, I don’t think much at all about the chaotic clashes that soon drowned them out as violent protest swept the campus. But I still recall quite vividly those mournful faces.

Wondering who might be moved by this vigil, I waited until almost 8.

Hertzberg was the most aggressive recruiter. Stepping into the right-turn lane while bending to catch each driver’s eye with his most beseeching smile, he repeatedly thrust fliers toward closed windows.

A few opened, allowing him to put a piece of paper in just as the car accelerated around the corner.

The women hailed pedestrians. Their first catch was a young woman on a bicycle who seemed to have stopped to see what was going on.

She said she’d like to help but had homework to do and pedaled off.

Next, after pumping gas into a car with the license plate “HPNOTYZ,” an elegantly dressed woman walked over to ask for a flier, then drove away.

Then it happened. A woman in Oshkosh coveralls over a T-shirt broke into tears as she talked to Morrison and two others.

“I’ll do anything I can to help,” she said.

One heart was touched.

Then the participants drifted away, one by one. The flickering vision that so briefly brought two sides of the Valley together dissolved into the night, like a trail of smoke leaving a spent wick.