Effort to Find Poster Artist Bears Fruit

One of the joys of writing a column is being able to reunite twins who were born to a dying resistance fighter in wartime France and raised in orphanages 6,000 miles apart.

Maybe one day I’ll do that.

Until then, though, my joyous reunion story will be the one about the woman known as L.R. and the people organizing the California Strawberry Festival.

Now it can be revealed: L.R. is a Ventura illustrator named Lisa Ringnalda. On Thursday, before a lunchtime crowd of city officials and festival folks sipping strawberry daiquiris, she unveiled her winning entry in the festival’s annual poster contest. It’s a strawberry-field landscape anchored by a wooden crate packed with, needless to say, strawberries.

One day last October, L.R. rushed her poster into the festival’s Oxnard office, which was in some disarray after a recent move. A committee later chose it from among 41 other entries, but the business card L.R. had clipped to her work was lost.

“L.R., where are you?” festival officials wailed.

Actually, the wail was mine. Last month I wrote a column about the mystery artist and the berry festival’s fruitless quest for her. The next morning it was read by L.R. herself, who thought: Yes, I entered the poster contest. Yes, my initials are L.R., as inscribed in the bottom right corner of my painting. Yes, I am thin and blond, as described by a festival staffer. So, yes! I must have won the $1,500 poster prize, and my work will be enshrined in living rooms and on official festival T-shirts!

Ringnalda, 31, does illustrations for Trader Joe’s and has a children’s book in the works. She professes some small discomfort at having been so famously anonymous.

“I’m just not mysterious at all,” insisted Ringnalda. “I’m really not.”

Right. I wonder what L.R. would have to say about that.

*

Alert readers have called my attention to some urban myths I passed along as fact in a column this week.

Fine, I told them. But don’t you realize that I have the ability to write a column reuniting a bad trombonist with the junior high band teacher who started him down the misguided road to his pathetic career?

They didn’t listen, though. Instead, they pointed to three assertions in my piece about unfortunate public utterances. In a class at Moorpark College, I wrote, students learn that:

a) John F. Kennedy declared in a speech to thousands of Germans that he was a jelly doughnut.

b) Chevrolet’s Nova didn’t do well in Spanish-speaking countries because its name in Spanish means “doesn’t go.”

c) The “Got milk?” ads in Spanish said: “Are you lactating?”

Now here’s the rest of the story.

Two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, JFK declared in a stirring speech that the proudest boast in the free world was: “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

While a “berliner” is indeed a jelly-filled pastry, the statement also can mean “I am a Berliner,” according to Michael Wolff, a spokesman for the German consulate in Los Angeles.

“It was perfectly clear what he meant,” Wolff said, “and it was exactly what people needed to hear.”

As for the Nova, it sold well in both Mexico and Venezuela, its two main Spanish-speaking markets, according to the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society’s very wonderful myth-debunking Web site, https://www.snopes.com.

The society points out that Nova is also the name of a gasoline sold in Mexico. Moreover, assuming that Spanish speakers would steer clear of the Nova because it “doesn’t go” is like assuming that English-speakers would shun “Notable” dinette sets because they include “no table”.

Finally, there’s the alleged “Got milk?” flub.

In fact, the literal Spanish translation of the phrase would mean “Are you lactating?” However, it never appeared in ads, according to Lynn Williams, operations manager of the California Milk Processors Board, the outfit behind the “Got milk?” campaign. Early in its research, an advertising agency commissioned to tap the Spanish-speaking milk market discovered the potential embarrassment and came up with another slogan.

“We didn’t go down that road,” Williams said, “and we’re glad we didn’t.”