Floating a New Idea for Tall Ship

Larry Janss, heir to a California real estate fortune, could buy a yacht a month if he wanted to. Instead, he makes it possible for disadvantaged children to experience the thrill of sailing the sea on a 156-foot schooner.

Janss’ great-grandfather, Peter Janss, developed much of Westwood Village and donated hundreds of acres to the state in the 1920s to establish UCLA.

Janss, 54 -- a businessman, art collector and amateur photographer who lives in Thousand Oaks -- gives elementary school students the chance to sail on the tall ship Tole Mour. The trips are designed to teach children about marine life, navigation and teamwork.

Currently docked in Long Beach, the Tole Mour (pronounced toe-lee more) is the latest cause for the self-described “ultraliberal Democrat.” Although he grew up on his family’s 10,000-acre ranch in the Conejo Valley, Janss has often worked on behalf of the disadvantaged.

The married father of two grown sons is known as a passionate voice for struggling artists. As a teenager, he spent five months in Chile making a film about the nation’s Marxist government, and he raises money to help low-income children pay for excursions aboard the Tole Mour.

“I guess I have an overactive imagination,” Janss said recently in his Thousand Oaks office, filled with pre-Columbian artifacts, African sculptures and exotic artworks gathered on his journeys around the world.

“I get bored,” he said. “I love a white, sandy beach and a pink drink with an umbrella in it. Everyone does. But eventually I’ve got to do something. I can’t just be sitting on the planet, consuming its resources, polluting it and sleeping. That’s a shell of an existence.”

His efforts are focused on raising funds to relocate the Tole Mour from Long Beach to Channel Islands Harbor in Ventura County. The move would require his family foundation and another nonprofit to pay off the $1.5-million debt on the three-masted tall ship, allowing the educational venture to break even.

As director of various family foundations, Janss is adept at raising money and even enjoys it, he said. A decade ago, he persuaded family members to donate $250,000 to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza’s endowment fund, then the largest private contribution to the fledgling institution.

But Janss also took heat for sparring with officials over how much money local arts organizations should receive from the fund. He thought they should get more and his detractors, less.

After years of dissension, which Janss said contributed to the deterioration of his health, he quit the arts center’s governing board five years ago and walked away from an issue that had been all-consuming.

“I was more involved than any one individual should be involved in anything,” Janss said. “I fired my shots, but I saw the futility of it. I couldn’t see the forest because I was so involved with the trees.”

He was motivated by a strong sense of loyalty to the local arts community, with which he has been intimately involved since his teens and later as a black-and-white photographer training his lens on stark nature scenes, he said. His longtime commitment to the arts was recognized this year by the Thousand Oaks Arts Commission, which gave him the Excellence in the Arts Encore Award.

“It’s just some innate commitment and spirit within him,” said Ken Hopper, executive director of the New West Symphony in Ventura County. “He’s a very determined individual and very outspoken. Some people might get their feelings hurt, but even those who walk away know he’s a man of immense integrity and generosity.”

So deep is his commitment, Hopper said, that Janss and his wife, Marney, open their guesthouse to visiting musicians performing at the civic arts center. Hopper stayed there two years ago when he joined the symphony.

Janss represents the fourth generation of a wealthy Southern California family that has developed an estimated 90,000 acres in the state since 1910. Their holdings once included portions of Westwood, Monterey Park and the San Fernando and Imperial valleys.

Family members often found success along unusual paths, and Janss is no different. His great-grandfather, Peter Janss, was a physician who left medicine for development. Larry’s father, Edwin Janss Jr., was a passionate amateur photographer and collector of pop art.

The Janss family went separate ways after the death of matriarch Florence Janss in 1981, when the Janss Corp. broke up and most members redeemed their stock for cash or company assets. Edwin Jr. died in 1989.

Janss said a turning point in his life came at age 19 when he spent five months in Chile with his friend, filmmaker Saul Landau. The experience opened his eyes to the inequities of the world and turned him into a liberal, he said.

A television film he and Landau made in 1979, “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang,” won an Emmy for its depiction of a cancer epidemic in a small Utah town near a former government atomic bomb test site.

As a teenager, Janss dropped in and out of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia before deciding college was not for him. He spent the next 14 years hopping from one career to another, raising goats in New Mexico, making another film and buying a movie theater in Venice, Calif., that screened low-budget films. When the theater fell into debt, he and his partners sold the business, and Janss went to work for his father at an Idaho farm.

Eventually, Janss returned to Thousand Oaks, where he and Marney raised his stepson, William Morrow, now 28, and Andrew Janss, 20. In the last two decades, Janss has cultivated a variety of interests, including fund-raising for local arts groups, operating a Thousand Oaks nightclub and, more recently, attempting to revive a historic theater in Moorpark.

Janss had envisioned turning the Theater on High Street into a venue for first-run and classic movies, as well as concerts and plays. But its renovation cost more than he expected and, after sinking at least $1.5 million into the 1928 playhouse, he wants to sell it.

His focus has now shifted to the Tole Mour, which is partly owned by the School of the Pacific Islands Foundation, a family charity he oversees. The 50-passenger ship was built in 1988 to deliver healthcare and medical supplies to residents of the Marshall Islands, about 2,500 miles west of Hawaii. Tole Mour means “Gift of Life and Health” in the language of the islanders.

The ship later moved to Hawaii, then to Long Beach, where it ferries children to Santa Catalina to learn about marine science, sailing and oceanography. If the floating classroom were based in Ventura County, Janss said, more local schoolchildren would be able to take advantage of it.

“I’ve seen the magic the ship brings,” he said. “From spoiled-rotten kids swabbing the deck to inner-city kids who have never been on a boat before. It’s a great equalizer.”