Blight Fighter : For 16 Years, Relentless Retiree Has Stripped Illegal Advertising From Power Poles in Hollywood

The vigilante patrol started on a cautionary note.

No, Steve Wayne wasn’t perched on the hood of a moving car like he sometimes is--one hand clutching the grille and the other clawing at utility poles with a garden rake. Not today.

Wayne was setting out to harvest the latest crop of illegal signs from power poles and traffic signals along Sunset Boulevard by hand.

“Goodbye. Don’t get arrested,” ordered Nancy Wayne, his wife of 35 years. “Be careful. Don’t forget your medication . . . don’t forget to take it.”

Good advice.

His one-man crusade against curbside blight has gotten Wayne arrested by police and threatened by sign-hangers. And don’t forget the two heart-bypass operations and his aorta surgery last year.

“I’ll just yank them down until I get tired,” Wayne said. “I got 12 signs yesterday. My record for one day is 25.”

That may seem like a modest boast. Except that Wayne, 75, has been ripping bootleg advertising off utility poles and corner traffic signal posts in the Hollywood area for more than 16 years.

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These days, such vigilance is more important than ever, in Wayne’s view. That’s because Los Angeles’ budget cutbacks have eliminated the jobs of the six laborers who cruised the city removing street-corner signs that hawked apartments for rent, computers for sale and show times for rock groups.

Last year, city workers confiscated 90,000 signs, assessing their owners a $194.20 removal fee for the first sign plus $1.60 for every duplicate found. But this year, only 2,100 signs have been removed by street maintenance inspectors, said Michael Lichlyter, a senior street use inspector.

“That means it’s up to us,” Wayne said as he steered through traffic in a car whose backseat was still loaded with yesterday’s sign haul.

“There, look at that corner, and over at that one. Wait a second and let me get these. Look at this--the people who put them up ought to be charged with malicious vandalism.”

A right turn on La Brea Avenue turned up more placards. They hawked such things as a condominium project, a moving company, a roofing firm. Each advertised locations, dates or phone numbers. Wayne grabbed all he could reach.

Suddenly, a beeper in his shirt pocket went off. It was a reminder to take a heart pill. Wayne popped one in his mouth and reached under the pile of signs in the backseat for a water bottle to wash it down.

The brightly colored plastic condominium signs were particularly irksome to Wayne. He peeled one off a power pole to reveal hundreds of old tacks and staples beneath it. Two more signs were on nearby poles. He ripped them down too.

“I talked to these condo people a couple of weeks ago and they said they weren’t going to do this anymore,” he frowned as he stuffed them behind the driver’s seat.

Not so, the condominium sales agent said later. “I told him I wouldn’t put them in Laurel Canyon, and I’m not,” said the saleswoman, who refused to give her name. The expense of posting the $2-per-copy signs and payment of an occasional $194.20 city take-town charge is simply the cost of doing business, she said.

Wayne said his sign blight tactic is a simple one: “If everybody just takes down one sign a week, we could clean up Los Angeles easily. It would be simple.”

But municipal officials say Wayne’s approach may not be legal.

For two months, city lawyers have been mulling over a request by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. to form a do-it-yourself sign patrol to yank down power pole advertisements in their San Fernando Valley community. They still don’t know what the answer is.

“We’re still dealing with the issue of any role citizens can play with city authorization,” said Assistant City Atty. Anthony Alperin.

The question is whether a sign stapled to a curbside pole is the advertiser’s private property or whether it can be considered abandoned property and removed, he said.

Privately, some city workers concede that homeowners could be helpful in cleaning away illegal signs. Provided they can do it without getting punched by sign posters.

“We certainly don’t want to see people getting into fistfights,” said Don Cocek, a deputy city attorney who handles illegal sign issues in Van Nuys.

That has almost happened a few times to Wayne, a former actor and tuxedo model and retired small-business owner. When a sign worker spotted him taking down freshly printed advertisements for a Wilshire Boulevard-area condominium project a year ago, the man screamed a threat to kill Wayne.

“I had a razor that I was using to cut them down and I told him not to come near me or I’d cut his neck,” Wayne recalled.

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Wayne’s obsession with illegal signs began in late 1979 after he noticed that music groups were advertising concerts by plastering flyers over Fire Department “No Smoking” signs in his woodsy Laurel Canyon neighborhood. As fast as he tore the flyers down, someone replaced them.

In 1980 an angry Wayne marched to the Roxie and Troubadour nightclubs and spray-painted “Keep L.A. Clean” on their walls. When he did the same thing at the Whisky a Go Go, a sheriff’s deputy arrested him on suspicion of malicious vandalism. He ended up pleading no contest to a lesser charge of disturbing the peace and was fined $130.

“I learned my lesson. I’ll never spray-paint again,” Wayne said, heading north on La Cienega Boulevard with his eyes still peeled for more illegal signs.

There would be no arrests and no confrontations this time.

Soon, Wayne was ready to call it a day. Back home, he would pull the pile of signs from his car and toss them into the trash.

“I don’t separate the plastic ones from the cardboard ones,” he said with a sheepish grin. “No, I’m not that died-in-the-wool.”