Shear Ecstasy

In a city better known for strip malls and concrete, dozens of children sat down amid rolling green hills to watch a lamb lose its coat at the Pierce College farm Wednesday morning.

With a flock of children looking on, Bill Lander flipped a fleecy sheep on its back, held it in a headlock and peeled off its wool with electric shears.

The sheep’s protesting “baaaa” impelled one little girl, thinking more about the animal’s welfare than the sweater on her back, to ask: “Does that hurt?”

Agricultural technicians Lander and Joe Ortiz assured the girl that the shearing was no more painful than a trip to the beauty salon. But then, how many hairdressers wrestle their clients to the ground before shaving their stomachs? After a brief struggle, sheep No. 967 emerged from a heap of dusty wool as healthy as ever--if markedly smaller. She also looked stark naked, a point that more than one child giggled over.

“She doesn’t have any clothes,” said one boy. Without leaving a scratch, Lander shaved the sheep’s entire torso down to a fine fuzz--”Enough to keep her from getting sunburned,” said Ortiz.

Lander, who has raised sheep for 25 years, said they are sheared every spring to prepare for the hot Valley summer. The school will sell the wool from the college farm’s 60 sheep to a Northern California cooperative for about $1 a pound.

The sheep shearing demonstration gives children a history lesson in an environment often described as bereft of history, Lander said.

Joe Spano, a Calabasas actor who portrayed Lt. Henry Goldblum in TV’s “Hill Street Blues,” said he brought his daughter Liana, 2, to meet some “alternative role models” doing work that most Los Angeles children never see.

“I think it’s great to have a piece of rural life in the middle of L.A.; it’s great for kids to come out into all this space,” said Spano.

S.R. Silver said she brought her first-grade class from Ohr Eliyahu Academy in Culver City to see the demonstration because she wanted them to “see where things come from . . . They ought to know that food doesn’t only come from the fridge.”

After the shearing, the children queued up, grabbed handfuls of lanolin-laden wool and headed over to the spinning wheel. There, North Hollywood resident Elissa Lenard spun wisps of wool into yarn she will use to knit socks, hats, sweaters and rugs.

“Spinning wool is a stress-free hobby that takes my mind off my awful job,” said Lenard, a television producer.