The Lights Brigade

The lightbulb king stepped back and surveyed his glittering realm.

For half a mile in each direction his snowflakes twinkled, his reindeer glistened--and his audience glowed.

By the thousands, visitors to Los Angeles’ first drive-through holiday festival were admiring the million lamps that are Raymond Juni’s responsibility this month in Griffith Park.

As many as 5,000 carloads of spectators a night slowly cruise through the free, mile-long display of lights that make up the largest local municipal Christmas season celebration ever.

“This is something the city should have been doing all along,” said Cheryl Reyna, who parked her car so she and her 3-year-old daughter, Crystal, could linger over the collection of 15-foot toy soldiers, animated animals and gaily lit Santas that make up the $310,000 Festival of Lights.

Until now, the city has never had the money to do that.

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But donations of cash from the Department of Water and Power for the lights, plus the loan of seven of the department’s portable electric generators to run them, has turned Crystal Springs Drive south of the Los Angeles Zoo into a winter fairyland.

Twenty-three park rangers, traffic control attendants and generator operators are keeping things moving between 5 and 10 p.m. nightly through Christmas Eve. It is Juni, though, who is keeping the lights burning.

The other night he tiptoed through a maze of peanut-size blue lamps spread out on the ground to simulate water beneath an 84-foot riverboat display. A red bulb the size of a Ping-Pong ball needed to be replaced near the center of the boat.

“Look, it’s God walking on water,” park traffic attendant Edgar Meneses joked. It turns out that is not an entirely inappropriate analogy at the Festival of Lights.

“I’m the bulb man. If they burn out, I replace them,” said Juni, of Van Nuys. “With some of the strings, if one goes out, they all do. Connectors short out. And sometimes the little computers that move things like the elephant’s trunk quit working and I have to fix them.”

Juni uses a bicycle to patrol the 20 separate displays--which include animated Santa trains, illuminated castles and electric zoo animals such as monkeys hanging from trees and a hungry giraffe nibbling on eucalyptus branches.

The bike keeps him from getting caught in the steady stream of spectators’ cars that take about 15 minutes to travel between spectacular tunnels of light at both ends of the route.

Some families make a U-turn and drive through in both directions. Others videotape the lights from their windows and through their cars’ sunroofs. Many park and walk along a lighted path to get a more leisurely view--or to set up tripods for time-exposure snapshots.

That’s what retired physician Paul Schaffer of West Los Angeles was doing as he trained his camera at a large Hollywood scene set off by simulated shooting stars.

“I never expected anything like this,” Schaffer said. “I’ll be showing these slides to my friends. They’ll be amazed.”

Theresa Romero of Alhambra brought a carload--her 7-year-old daughter Steffanie and 4-year-old niece Serenity, brother Carlos, 18, and 7-year-old Michael Aguilar. It was their third visit.

“We came Saturday and Sunday, but the lines were too long,” Romero said. “So we came back at 4 o’clock today to make sure we got in. We decided we were going to see this no matter what.”

Traffic coordinator Joanne Bolan said crowds have been larger than anticipated, even on rainy nights. Weekends have been busiest, with lines of cars waiting half an hour or more at both ends to get in. Roadside signs give estimates of how long of a wait to expect.

Bolan said early weeknight evenings are the best times to avoid lines. The site can be reached north on Griffith Park Drive from Los Feliz Boulevard and south from the Los Angeles Zoo off the Ventura and Golden State freeways.

Large buses, bicycles and skateboards are prohibited from the route. So are horses, as Erin Jarvis found out when she tried to ride her mount, Jasper, down the pedestrian trail.

Jarvis, a Burbank property manager, got as far as the first exhibit--appropriately a Western scene with cowboys, Indians, a stagecoach and flickering campfires--before being stopped.

“The one display I got to see is awesome. I’ll come back to see the rest of them in a car,” she said.

Spectator Eivor Nilsson, a trust officer from San Fernando, said the park setting is a perfect place for the exhibit. “It’s a great idea that should have been done a long time ago,” she said. “But better late than never.”

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Traffic attendant Victory Reyes said many visitors are surprised this is the park’s first holiday display.

“A lot of people have stopped to ask how long we’ve been doing this, saying that they’ve missed it every other year,” he said. “I tell them this is the first, but it won’t be the last. It’s good for the park. I definitely hope that the city does this again next year.”

City parks officials say they are already looking ahead.

This year’s displays were purchased for the city by the DWP in exchange for the right to promote itself on the route (the department is working to retain customers when electric service is deregulated starting in 1998). A dozen private firms signed on as sponsors to underwrite the cost of traffic control.

Parks administrators are hoping for donations that will add additional displays in 1997, said Joan Bullard, a spokeswoman for the city’s Griffith Park Centennial, which is being observed this year.

Back on Crystal Springs Road, meantime, a woman driving a pickup truck stopped next to festival producer Don Burgess of Glendale as he stood conferring with Juni.

“If nobody else bothers to thank you, I am,” she shouted out her window. “This was cool.”

Burgess and the bulb king smiled. Brightly.