Almost Famous

Los Angeles is full of characters. Anyone can tell you about Dennis Woodruff, “Melrose” Larry Green, the Archbishop Don “Magic” Juan. But what about those characters who don’t advertise themselves by selling autobiographical videos, or running for office, any office, or wearing full pimp regalia? In asking around, we found a city full of “nobodies” who are nevertheless well known. Many are fixtures in their corners of the megalopolis. Many are of a certain age--maybe you have to turn 60 before you really come into your own. Some have just found the path they were meant to tread.

Meet a few of our favorite people.

*

Ted Newland: Making water polo history

Steam rises off the pool as dawn breaks across the UC Irvine campus. Ted Newland has been awake for more than two hours, lifting weights while it was still dark as part of a fitness routine that also includes 500 to 800 push-ups a day.

In the pool, young men in Speedos work to refine their passing technique for the water polo team. On the deck, Newland, their 77-year-old coach, cuts a bizarre figure, sitting in a wheelchair, bundled in a blue jumpsuit and a pair of Ugg boots, the sheepskin clunkers Cameron Diaz helped turn into a fad. The wheelchair is a convenience, meant to save knees worn out by running. The fashion diva boots? “I’ve been wearing these for years,” he says.

Listening to Newland’s raspy voice and slipping a glance at his lean, muscled physique, it is hard to decide exactly what is most extraordinary about the man. There is the record: He has won three national championships and 714 games--more than any coach in collegiate water polo history--and he has trained 11 Olympians. Then there is the body. He’s a fitness freak who says he set his personal record of 5,600 consecutive sit-ups when he was 62.

“A lot of college guys can’t keep up,” says his grandson Ty, a sophomore on the team.

“I try to bury them in calisthenics,” Newland says. “I can say, ‘I’m 77 years old and I’m kicking your .... ‘ “

Finally, there is the brain. “I’m an ISTP. There aren’t many of us,” says Newland, using the nomenclature of the various personality typing systems that group people according to qualities of Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuitive, Feeling/Thinking and Perceiving/Judging.

Glancing at the pool, he reels off the players’ types--as determined by him and not by any of those multiple-choice personality inventories. “Everybody puts down what they want to be, not what they are,” he says. “You have to understand where people are really coming from--not where they think they are coming from.”

Figuring out where Newland is coming from isn’t easy for others in the water polo community.

“He does a great job with his players, has brought a lot of personality to the sport of water polo and has a lot of respect--particularly from the guys who played for him,” says Pepperdine Coach Terry Schroeder. But then he adds, “I don’t understand him all the time.... Win or lose, you shake hands. He’s someone who doesn’t always like to shake hands--especially if he loses.”

Behind it all is a fierce loyalty to his players. In 1991 Newland gave $20,000 of his own money to the Irvine program and started drawing his retirement pay instead of a salary. Now, with assistant Marc Hunt--a former player--reaching the stage of life when he needs a good income, Newland plans to step down after 39 seasons and become Hunt’s assistant, probably sacrificing wins that would have added to his record.

“I’m not doing this to win things,” Newland says. “I have a love affair with all my players. I tell them they’re worthless and lazy and don’t want to work hard. It’s not that I don’t like them. I want them to be successful.”

*

David Simpson: Finding the path of beads

As an Army MP stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco, he watched a first lieutenant put a gun to his head and shoot his brains out. A psych evaluation following the incident got him out of the service with an honorable discharge, and for the first time in his life he was free, his “Christian woman” mother, “psychodad” and Midwestern upbringing bobbing like flotsam in his wake.

Twenty years later, focus in, like a satellite picture from space, on L.A., Silver Lake, a Craftsman house on a corner, the darkly paneled parlor off the living room, to a long table where, under seraphs of cigarette smoke, a walnut-size “Tiffany” lamp sits on another, inch-high table, all perfectly rendered in glass seed beads and nearly invisible nylon line by David Simpson, now 40.

He sits in the dim light, barefoot in corduroy pants and a boyish striped T-shirt, placid yet impishly animated, his gentle sea-blue eyes exaggerated through his glasses, his long, graceful hands ever in motion. At the other end of the table, puffing toughly on a Kool, is Charles Mendenhall, a pugnacious 70-year-old in a Hawaiian shirt, a survivor of hard times himself, a gregarious talker whose stories range from the decade he spent in a Vedantic monastery to his P.T. Barnum-like escapades in the flea-market business.

“He’s like French bread,” Simpson jokes, “all crust on the outside and soft goo on the inside.”

“This team here has worked out really good,” Mendenhall says.

They’ve been together, personally and professionally, for those 20 years of freedom. Until settling here recently they were essentially rootless, crossing the country hitting college towns, New Age gatherings and flea markets, where Simpson first started doing his beadwork to kill time. Necklaces and bracelets gave way to captivating character pins, such as an R2-D2 small enough to swallow and a Dorothy complete with a Lilliputian Toto in her basket. It’s only recently that Simpson began making “nonfunctional” bead art: a matchbook-size handbag (sweetly complete with lipstick that opens, sunglasses, a cellphone and change purse), teeny silver toasters in which the toast has popped, baskets of fruit suitable for Barbie to bite into.

The artist takes commissions from patrons at the Melrose Trading Post flea market on Sundays, and last year he started a website, www.pathofbeads.bravehost.com, to sell his creations. Considering the time it takes to make a piece, he figures he might earn a few dollars an hour. But it’s not the money that counts. “It’s meditation,” he says. “I want to affirm that peace and harmony exist and I’m just sitting in the middle of it.”

The work itself is “all mathematics and geometry,” and Simpson rarely makes a sketch before he starts. Yet that tiny “stained-glass” lamp not only resembles Tiffany, it also displays the classic dragonfly design.

*

Arthur Nakane: More moves than Elvis

To hear Arthur Nakane tell it, his musical career has been a series of missed opportunities. He’s never fulfilled his lifelong dream of a spot on “The Tonight Show.” Francis Ford Coppola cut him out of the movie “One From the Heart.” His steadiest gig was 15 years playing Sunday nights at Shakey’s Pizza in Glendale.

Yet the Arthur Nakane One-Man Band has become a Southern California institution, a cult favorite from the parks of Pasadena to the TV studios of Hollywood. Nakane strums an electric guitar, plays bass with his feet, blows into a harmonica, shakes a spring-loaded tambourine attached to the mike stand and bangs a keyboard, wind chimes and cymbals with sticks attached to the guitar. His repertoire includes 2,000 songs--heavy on the Beatles and Elvis--that he sings in English, Spanish and Japanese, all in an accent that hints at his native Kyoto. He is full of puns, singing “Secret Agent Man” as “Secret Asian Man,” but empty of irony.

“I know musically I’m not that gifted,” Nakane says. “But every place I go, people just love my music.”

He learned to play the ukulele from his brother and picked up the guitar after watching Elvis. His father, a progressive educator, sent him to Canada to get his college degree, but after educational and immigration difficulties Nakane found himself in L.A., washing dishes in a Japanese restaurant on Crenshaw Boulevard. Then the owner invited him to sing in the dining room.

Soon he was singing in clubs and putting bands together, but he grew frustrated with his fellow musicians. Too many gigs were lost to their broken-down cars and breakups with girlfriends. In the early ‘70s he started to cobble together his one-man band, figuring out how to play each instrument and methodically testing each piece of his Rube Goldberg contraption.

Meanwhile, he kept his day job. Nakane was a Cal State L.A. student, a La Canada High School shop teacher, an L.A. Unified math teacher and a translator. (He also was my baseball coach when I was 10 years old.)

He has tasted fame. A producer who saw him perform on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica booked him on George Hamilton’s short-lived talk show. The bassist for Everclear spotted him and signed Nakane as an opening act on the band’s 1996 national tour. A UCLA film student made a 17-minute documentary about him, “Secret Asian Man,” which was shown at Sundance in 2000. At the end of each screening Nakane emerged to play, and ecstatic viewers literally danced in the aisles.

Today he has dozens of regular gigs: John Lennon memorials in Hollywood, the Pasadena Cherry Blossom Festival, Malibu’s Dolphin Run Festival, even birthdays at convalescent homes. And he performs regularly at the Santa Monica Pier.

Nevertheless, Nakane intends to retire the One-Man Band when he’s 70. There’s been a physical toll, and he has made his point.

“The whole idea I want people to see is that as complicated as things may seem, things are very, very simple. The key is not to doubt--or you’d never even get to the moon. All you have to do is learn one instrument at a time. Then keep on adding.”

*

JoDell Kasmarsik: No sweet rolls after 11 a.m.

JoDell Kasmarsik, now in her 40th year behind the counter at Pie ‘n Burger, hopes to chronicle her career in a book someday. She already has a title for it: “Do You Have a Pen?”

“This is small of me, but it’s become quite an irritation,” she says. When customers pull out their checkbooks, too often they find themselves without a pen. Because her boss won’t supply any, Kasmarsik brings in her own, but if she doesn’t watch them closely those pens go missing.

Years ago her pet whippet Lilly got ahold of one of her pens at home, and “she chewed it and she chewed it,” Kasmarsik says, starting to grin. “It was so disgusting.” Assuming the mangled implement was theft-proof, Kasmarsik brought it to the restaurant and told customers, “Well, it’ll write.”

Sure enough, somebody walked off with that pen too. “I’ve tried to get Lilly to chew more pens, but she won’t do it,” Kasmarsik says.

With her silver hair, tinted glasses and black-and-white garb, Kasmarsik is as much a fixture at the Pasadena landmark as its cheeseburgers slathered with homemade Thousand Island and stuffed into toasty buttered buns. The staff’s senior member, she waited on the current owner, Michael Osborn, when he was 9 years old.

“I love this place and I’m true-blue to my job,” says Kasmarsik, 68, a restaurant lifer since being hired at 17 as a “pie girl” running the display case at a Van de Kamp’s cafe across town.

Anyone who doubts her diligence should consider the cinnamon roll incident.

Back in the 1970s, a Tournament of Roses volunteer named Bruce used to come in for dinner and, just for fun, try to order a sweet roll for dessert, knowing full well that breakfast sales ended at 11 a.m. One night this wiseacre turned to Osborn and said, “Jo let me have a cinnamon roll.”

“I’ll never forget the look on my boss’ face--he was crushed,” she recalls.

At least until he realized the joke was on him.

“Bruce never got a sweet roll,” Kasmarsik says. “No way.”

Another house rule limits milkshakes to the rim of the fountain glass, but one of Kasmarsik’s colleagues is known for her swirling beauties that flout this dictum. Kasmarsik once told a regular who glanced admiringly at his neighbor’s shake, then ruefully at his own, “Well, go sit with Laura next time.”

One shift Kasmarsik may never forget came on a Sunday afternoon in October 1999. She’d just arrived and was putting on her apron when two masked men barged in, waving guns. The staff thought it was a Halloween prank, but the men ordered everyone to the floor behind the counter, robbed the employees and customers and emptied the register. Before fleeing, the robbers told everyone to stay put for five minutes. Of course, Kasmarsik got up right away to call the cops and her boss.

“I knew I had a job to do,” she says.

*

Petros Papadakis: Out of his head, onto the air

Lights flicked off in the cramped studio, a SpongeBob pillow at his feet, everything feels just right. With soulful strains of piano in the background, Petros Papadakis leans toward the microphone and murmurs, “Sam Cooke ... you know he was killed ... naked in a hotel

This somber observation is merely a prologue to a weekday radio show that quickly explodes in all directions. Papadakis launches into a history lesson, thrusting a hand in the air as he pays respects to the memory of Woodrow Wilson. Fyodor Dostoevsky gets him even more excited, out of his chair, screaming about his favorite author, who, he notes, was a “degenerate gambler.”

Then comes mention of the Lakers and some college football, because, technically speaking, this is sports talk radio.

In a realm of scores and statistics and guys debating earned run averages, Papadakis plays the stranger. His noon show on KMPC-AM (1540) might touch on anything from Bob Dylan to the Khmer Rouge, with a few ex-girlfriends thrown into the mix, the host warning his audience: “You people will be drawn into my creative universe.” It is the interior landscape of a 27-year-old former running back--”captain of the worst team in USC history”--who also happened to major in English and once wore No. 22 in honor of Joseph Heller’s novel “Catch-22.”

Not that Papadakis has forsaken sports. He looks the part in a T-shirt and sweat pants, tangled hair, and eventually finds his way to segments about local teams. But, he says, “if that’s all I wanted to do, I’d go live in a sports bar.” So the jock talk is infused with literary references: Kobe Bryant compared to the character Alan Breck Stewart on that sinking boat in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped,” a winning streak by the lowly Clippers equated with “the seventh sign of Revelations, the beast rising from the lake of fire.”

In essence, the show is about whatever happens to cross the host’s frenetic mind. Regular features include reviews of old movies and spoof songs he writes and sings. No topic is too personal, a stubborn bout of hemorrhoids once serving as the leitmotif for a week of broadcasts.

This quirky mix has turned Papadakis into an unlikely rising star. Not only has he attracted a cult following on radio, but FSN recently tapped him--with the proviso that he tone down his act--for a prestigious weekend gig on nationally televised football games. And what of the calls and e-mails from listeners who find him horribly irritating? He shrugs. “Too loud, too strange, self-absorbed ... that’s what I am.”

His daily show always ends with a pop culture report. Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday inspires a rambling homage to “the all-time weirdo writer of the ‘60s.” The subject matter gets Papadakis worked up again, pacing in the dark studio.

“C’mon, help me out,” he pleads to a demographic more accustomed to Shaq than Shakespeare. “The phones should light up when we talk about Vonnegut.”

*

Ruth Wilson: The woman who painted curbs red

Paul Wilson looked around the party and then back at his wife, glowing in a black dress and crystal earrings. “This is you too, Ruth. You are earthy and elegant.” She gave him her best wicked smile as he led her onto the dance floor.

The afternoon had been spent in earthier pursuits. They’d worked for hours collecting trash from the side of the freeway to fill an overly commodious hole in their backyard. Why not? The freeway needed cleaning and they needed landfill.

Neither the party nor the public cleanup were unusual in their mid-life marriage. Paul was well aware when he married Ruth that she didn’t just espouse full participation in Riverside’s community life, she lived it. The two once spent a weekend wrestling 50-gallon metal trash cans up a mountain. Vandals had released them from their chains and sent them crashing down the hillsides along the popular Mt. Rubidoux walking trail, and when the city didn’t take care of it, Ruth decided they should. On another day, she went out with a bucket of red paint to create some ad hoc parking restrictions on dangerous curves in her neighborhood.

Ruth J. Bratten Anderson Wilson, 82, might best be described as a professional rabble-rouser. She cut her activist teeth in the ‘60s by founding a grass-roots environmental organization called the Tri County Conservation League (Save the Santa Ana River). Her husband at the time, the first of three, was agreeable as long she was home by 3 to meet the children after school and got dinner on the table by 5. So, during school hours, she and two other housewives fought the Army Corps of Engineers to a standstill and kept Riverside’s river from meeting the Los Angeles River’s concrete fate. For this work, an annual conservation award was established in her name.

Her abiding interest is in women’s rights, but it has never ended there. She bused black kids to white schools in her Volkswagen van when school bus drivers went on strike to protest integration in the late 1960s, and was still fighting for civil rights in the 1990s by working to defeat anti-gay initiatives. She was nominated by California governors Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown to the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board and was its first female chair. She has run for and been elected, twice, a director of the Rubidoux Community Services District. She earned the title of master gardener from the University of California as well, and maintains a subtropical backyard jungle of flowers and fruit trees.

More recently, her many activities were dialed down to nearly nothing when she chose to keep Paul, terminally ill, at home for as long as she could. But he is now in a hospice nursing home, and Ruth is considering options for filling her newly freed time. She sees her ninth decade as a fresh page on which to start another chapter. I look forward to seeing what she’ll come up with, because this is my mother’s life story.

*

Jack Karlik: The dean of the handicappers

In the 1980s, Jack Karlik and his colleagues would gather around the lunch table in the Santa Anita press box, pooling their cash and plotting how to deploy it in the pick six. One day, after Bel Bolide keyed a six-figure victory for the gang, they sent two cases of champagne to the jockeys’ room. At the end of another big day, Karlik went around the press box handing out $100 bills. When he crushed a pick three on his own for some $30,000 and a colleague called him lucky, Karlik gave him $1,000 just to shut him.

“We did have those halcyon days where we hit for hefty figures,” says Karlik, whose voice booms despite a mild stutter. “I was betting with a lot more zest.”

At 72, Karlik is known as the dean of Southern California horse racing handicappers, literally. His colleagues have nicknamed him “Dean.” The Daily Racing Form’s “Sweep” (lead handicapper) for almost 20 years starting in 1963, he once nailed eight of nine winners to nearly live up to the billing. Karlik joined the Pasadena Star-News in 1983, and for the last decade his handicaps have run in the Daily Breeze as well.

On a cool, gray Sunday afternoon in the press box at Hollywood Park, Karlik grumbles that the game has changed for the worse. Crowds have dwindled in the age of simulcasting, he says, recalling the roar of 46,000 in the stands at Santa Anita when a filly he co-owned, Ms. Hapa Haole, aired by 14 lengths in her 1981 debut. On this day, just 6,504 are on hand.

A wealth of handicapping data online makes it harder to stay ahead of the masses, he says, and short fields resulting from a busier racing slate yield fewer juicy wagers. Even so, Karlik elicits respect for his insight into how a race is likely to unfold. Kurt Hoover, cohost of the radio show “Thoroughbred Los Angeles,” calls him “the best blackboard handicapper I know.”

Karlik’s penchant for picking favorites has earned him some ribbing around the press box. “Right in Dean’s wheelhouse,” Hoover says when a 4-to-5 shot tabbed by Karlik romps to victory.

Karlik’s age is fair game too. “Dean, when you first came around,” asks Mike Willman, Hoover’s jovial broadcast partner, “were they still clocking with a sundial?”

Born in the Russian Jewish enclave of Harbin, China, Karlik moved with his family to Los Angeles at age 6. He got hooked on racing as a senior at Fairfax High when he and his pals slipped off to Del Mar and bet the winner of the day’s last heat, Life Time.

Reflecting on a lifetime at the track, Karlik says his chief regret is staying single. But complaints aside, he remains devoted to his sport, doping out all 50 races on the Southland circuit each week and assigning projected odds and a pithy comment to each horse. “Racing has been my life,” he says, “and it’s been kicks.”

*

Paul Body: A life in film A woman’s blood-curdling scream rises from a corner of the store and a smile creeps across Paul Body’s face. He scans the few customers roaming the aisles, then turns his attention to the black-and-white images flickering on the monitor.

“You can’t get better than this on a Sunday,” he says, his raspy voice filled with satisfaction. “What’s better than watching ‘The Wolf Man’?”

A man approaches the counter, inquiring about horror movies set during the Christmas holidays. “I know there’s ‘Black Christmas,’ ” Body says, fingering the trademark kerchief around his neck. “Have you checked that one out?” Another wants to know if “Carnal Knowledge” is in. “Nah, man, we don’t have that anymore,” Body says. But he can barely contain himself when asked whether the Nicole Kidman film “Birth” is available. “Man, that’s still in the theaters,” he says with mock exasperation. “You better get on top of it.”

Located above a dry cleaner in a mini-mall in Silver Lake, Video Journeys has more than 30,000 movies on tape and DVD, and a devoted clientele. Body holds court on both sides of the counter, greeting familiar faces with an “uh-oh” as soon as they enter and addressing both men and women as “man.””I’ve only had two jobs,” says Body, who has lived in Los Angeles for all but two of his 57 years. “Or should I say, only two jobs that I really liked. This is the second one. I really love film, love talking about films.”

His favorites are French and film noir. “I love movies like ‘Out of the Past,’ ‘Once Upon A Time in America,’ anything by Scorsese.” Several times a day he has to answer the question “What’s new?” or “Is this good?” He tries to stay out of arguments, and is not too hard--at least openly--on the genres he frowns upon, such as “stupid teenage movies.”

“We always seem to be on the same page. I come to this store because I love the obscure stuff, and Paul seems to know what he’s talking about,” says one frequent customer, a screenwriter. He becomes a bit disgruntled, however, when Body recommends “Before Sunset” with Ethan Hawke, saying it’s “a good movie about France.”

Says the screenwriter: “Paul should know better by now. I don’t do Ethan Hawke or Claymation.”

There is one title that Body aggressively warns curious renters about--the 2003 French/English “Twentynine Palms,” in which a couple’s desert vacation goes very wrong. “I tell everyone if they see this movie with a date, it will destroy the evening and there will not be any fun,” he says, laughing. “If the couple is on a first date, the woman will never go out with the guy again.”

Though Video Journeys seems like the perfect job for Body, he might be more at home in a record store. Music is his true passion, his “religion.” He has thousands of LPs and CDs and thousands more 45s, much of it ‘60s soul music. “Sam Cooke is the man!”

That devotion can be traced back to his “first job” as a doorman at the Troubadour in the ‘70s. He served a rum and Coke to a surly Miles Davis. He saw Dylan closeup. He witnessed the early Springsteen.

Body himself was the drummer in the Sheiks of Shake, which played “psychedelic blues,” or, as he quips, “lots of songs with one chord--and that was a minor chord.” His musical performances these days are pretty much limited to occasional gigs with his accordion at the store. “I always play Christmas carols at some point during the holidays,” he says.