The Store at the Corner

They call him Don Fernando.

He owns the market next door to the house he was born in 73 years ago in a community his father and mother had settled in a decade before.

Neighbors in the city of San Fernando describe him as a simple man who asks little and demands nothing, a gentle person of peace and dignity.

As an American infantryman in the Second World War, he was captured by the Nazis and held prisoner for six months until Germany collapsed.

After the war, he returned to his home and took over the store his father had opened in 1922, a small building at the corner of Kalisher and Coronel.

Don Fernando has run the market almost continuously ever since, except for a period last year when he was hospitalized for treatment of an aneurysm.

During his hospitalization, the family had the store remodeled, closing it while the work was being conducted. How long it was shut has become an issue of debate between the family and the city.

The family says three months, the city says seven. If the city is correct, the little store, about 600 square feet of home necessities that has been Don Fernando’s life for half a century, must be closed.

And therein lies a story of time and dedication.

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The future of La Mexicana Market is dependent upon a zoning law, and zoning laws are too often created in hell for the purpose of bending the will of the people to the whims of their government.

Don Fernando, whose last name is Garcia, wasn’t out of the hospital for a day when he received a letter from the city’s Community Development Department that threatened, in so many words, to shut him down.

It pointed out that his market was in a residential zone but had a “legal nonconforming status” because it had been there before the zone was declared residential. In other words, it had been exempt from the law.

However.

The letter went on to say that if a business with such an exemption ceases to operate for more than six months, it loses that nonconforming status and is in violation of the law if it stays open.

Don Fernando’s Market, the letter declared, had been found by the Community Development Department to have been out of operation for seven months during 1998 and its fate therefore rested in the hands of the City Council.

Additionally, since the market sold beer and wine, that license also would be automatically revoked unless the council decided otherwise.

The letter knocked Don Fernando for a loop. While he has turned over the operation of the market to others, he still considers the store his and wants it to remain in the family.

His is the wish of a simple man in a more complicated time.

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Last weekend, members of the family gathered 500 signatures on petitions asking that the market remain open. Among those observing in the neighborhood was City Councilman Doude Wysbeek.

A reasonable man, Wysbeek stressed that the law was clear . . . but its enforcement seemed extreme. “The market has never been a police problem and isn’t a gang hangout,” he said. “My inclination is to say keep it open.”

City Administrator John Ornelas also recites the letter of the law and says he’s waiting for the family to furnish proof of its claim that the store was closed for only three months for remodeling.

Ornelas suggests the owners are fighting to keep the market open because the business is for sale and a closing would intrude on its prospects.

Speaking for the family, son-in-law Hector Martinez denies it. While the business is for sale, he says, the property is not. “This isn’t about money. This is about keeping Don Fernando’s store open no matter who’s running it.”

There was a time once when neighborhood stores were a part of a less structured America. They weren’t chain stores. They were mom-and-pop places that sold cat food and bread and candy for a penny.

Don Fernando has seen them come and go and now stands in the way of a city that wants to roll over him too. I hope it doesn’t happen.

The neighborhood wants him there. The store serves a need. But even more important, a lifetime of working to build what he has ought to count more than a technical blip in a zoning law that threatens to take it all away.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Thursdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.