For City’s Top Booster, It’s a Labor of Love

Dante D’Eramo recalls sitting on the curb along Pacific Boulevard, awestruck as Huntington Park’s Fabulous Christmas Lane Parade rolled past. He was 9 years old.

“I remember thinking, ‘One day I’d like to organize that parade.’ Something about the way it looked, the happiness it created. I saw neighbors and friends clapping, rejoicing, and I thought, ‘That’s something I want to be a part of.’ ”

Today, at 66, as executive director of the Huntington Park Chamber of Commerce, D’Eramo (pronounced de-RA-mo) not only shapes the parade but serves as one of the most enthusiastic advocates for this 3-square-mile town southeast of Los Angeles.

In January, he celebrated 30 years with the chamber. This year also marks the city’s centennial, which gives D’Eramo the chance to honor the town he’s adored for as long as he can remember.

“Dante bleeds the chamber,” said Betty Monroy, president of the Huntington Park Sister Cities Assn. “It’s his entire life.”

Jessica Maes, who in the late 1990s served as Huntington Park’s first Latina mayor, credits D’Eramo’s dedication and promotional zeal with boosting the city’s popularity with businesses and neighboring Latinos.

She also lauds D’Eramo’s ability to adapt through the years, tempering his goals to fit the evolving population.

Huntington Park’s transition, from 99% white in the 1940s to 96% Latino today, mirrors that of many of its neighboring southeast cities, said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC.

Immigration reform in the mid-1980s allowed longtime undocumented residents, thousands of whom lived in Huntington Park, to apply for legal status, he said. This new law cemented the city’s position as a port-of-entry community for immigrants from Central America and Mexico.

As D’Eramo walked down Pacific Boulevard one day recently in an uneven gait, the result of an old football injury, he paused periodically to greet passing friends. He sees the promenade of restaurants and storefronts as an oasis, popping out among the warehouses of southeast Los Angeles County.

Though the town’s personality changed dramatically through the years, D’Eramo did not.

He’s never married. He lives in the same home his family moved into when he was 4, and he takes comfort in walking down the same street every day. D’Eramo stands out on the Boulevard, a tall, blue-eyed, fair-skinned man in a suit.

Born of Italian parents, Antonina and Pasquale, D’Eramo describes his family as warm, friendly and festive. The kind of family that routinely prepared extra food for the friends who would inevitably stop by each night.

D’Eramo says this sense of community led him to get involved in city groups at a young age.

He sang show tunes with the local civic theater and visited hospitalized children with the St. Matthias Church youth group. With the Junior Chamber of Commerce, he helped organize the first Greater Los Angeles Special Olympics and started a venereal disease hotline for teens.

He later put his knowledge of the city to use while working as a reporter for local newspapers.

All led to the day in 1976 when his editor, Tom McGiffin, suggested he look into the executive manager’s opening at the chamber. D’Eramo said he thought he was being given a story tip.

But McGiffin said he saw how much D’Eramo treasured the city, a quality the chamber wanted and needed.

Three months later, D’Eramo traded his typewriter for a chamber pin and never looked back.

At that time, the city was ripe for change. Back in the ‘50s, Pacific Boulevard teemed with shoppers toting bags into Woolworth’s and Montgomery Ward, but with the introduction of suburban malls in the ‘70s, these retailers abandoned Huntington Park.

D’Eramo needed to devise a plan that would embrace and capitalize on the city’s evolving demography.

Slowly, he tapped into the budding Latino community.

He pushed the City Council to team up with the Sister Cities Assn. and adopt two towns in Mexico, San Julian and Yahualica, to encourage a cultural exchange. They adopted a third, Puebla, shortly thereafter.

Then there was the parade. As of the mid-’90s, only an English-speaking station televised the event. His quick fix: ask a Spanish-language radio station to cover it as well. That way, anyone uncomfortable with English could turn down their TVs and turn up their radios.

But in D’Eramo’s eyes, the fun truly began with Cinco de Mayo in 1978. As part of the festivities, he flew in the folklorico dancers from Puebla, where the 5th of May battle was fought against the French in 1862. The popular event inspired a more encompassing annual festival, Sabor de Mexico Lindo, a food-filled fiesta honoring all things Mexican. A year later, he created the Carnavale de Primavera, a spring celebration to complement the fall’s “Sabor.”

Each event now draws more than 300,000 people -- five times the town’s population -- plus vendors from all over the country.

“It’s a way to expose people to all we have to offer,” he says.

Eventually, the Huntington Park Police Department asked D’Eramo to double the number of city blocks used for the festivals, to alleviate the density of the crowds, Lt. Cosme Lozano said. The police also increased the number officers on bicycles for added mobility.

The fiestas helped cultivate the city’s burgeoning reputation as a meeting place for Southern California Latinos.

“People relate Huntington Park with Mexico,” and often shop here for that reason, Monroy said.

The Boulevard once known for its dime stores and movie theaters is now a premiere destination for shoppers seeking quinceanera dresses and western wear, she said.

By creating and promoting events such as the festivals and parade, the city’s commercial appeal spiked, and within the last decade, D’Eramo helped bring in major national chains, such as Starbucks, Staples and Bally Total Fitness.

Monroy said many in the community felt a store like Starbucks would never work in Huntington Park, but D’Eramo and Maes kept pushing. Now there are two.

In the end, the new businesses have led to a 50% increase in taxable sales over the last decade, according to the city’s finance department.

D’Eramo and the chamber played an important role in that growth, said Olivia Segura, Huntington Park’s business development supervisor.

As he strolled down the Boulevard, D’Eramo said he hoped the new competition would encourage smaller shops to revamp. He points toward Dearden’s furniture store, its freshly painted facade a stark contrast to many of the strip’s deteriorating buildings.

“They’re going to want to keep up with the Jeffersons,” D’Eramo says. He pauses. “Or is it the Garcias?”

He laughs and continues on, walking toward the now-closed Warner theater, where he and his brother Adolph once watched a preview of “Rebel Without a Cause.” The real-life James Dean and Natalie Wood sat a few rows behind them, he said.

As part of the city’s centennial celebration, D’Eramo hopes to buy the theater and turn it into a youth arts academy.

He says the energy of dozens of visiting stars, Clint Eastwood, Clark Gable and Ernest Borgnine among them, still resonates within the draped walls, creating an ideal environment in which to study.

To buy and restore the Warner will cost about $10 million. For a chamber with a $500,000 budget, that’s no small sum. But D’Eramo is confident he can raise the money.

Many of his ideas, big or small, have occasionally raised eyebrows around town. The year he suggested that the Easter Bunny arrive on Pacific Boulevard in a helicopter, for example, gave even his most loyal supporters pause.

But he pulled it off, and “the kids went crazy,” he said. The annual event draws about 700 children.

“People may think I might be a little out there, but if no one will take that risk, then nothing happens,” he says. “I like to operate on that realm. Nothing’s impossible.”