Listen up, Costa Mesa: Here’s a Tijuana tale

Costa Mesa has been abuzz in the year or so since the mayor signaled a new, aggressive stance on illegal immigration. Will only criminals be affected, as he says, or will there be some spillover into the Latino immigrant community and business establishment? Is Costa Mesa headed for happier days or just more turmoil?

Let’s punt on that for today and instead listen to longtime Orange County resident Galal Kernahan, who swears everything you’re about to read is true -- at least, to the best of his memory. He tipped me off to the story out of frustration with the current state of Anglo-Latino relations and because, frankly, we all need a good laugh sometimes.

Kernahan’s story dates to late 1968, right after Richard Nixon’s election as president. On what he says must have been a slow night at Costa Mesa City Hall, the City Council voted to ask the president-elect to buy Baja California. As Kernahan came to learn later, the idea was hatched after a councilman came back from Baja and thought it was one heckuva tourist destination.

Kernahan had nothing to do with Costa Mesa politics but years earlier had made some friendships in Tijuana while working on a book about the city. One of them was with a man Kernahan remembers only as Chiquis, and who turned out to be the brother of the Tijuana mayor.

After the council’s action, Kernahan was in Tijuana and asked Chiquis how the locals would react to the idea. He told Kernahan it probably would mean students marching in the streets. “Why do people do this?” Kernahan says Chiquis asked him.

“We consulted about this down in Tijuana,” Kernahan recalls. “The idea arose: Well, why not make a counteroffer? It was just guy talk -- no big, profound anything. Chiquis was kind of upset about the council action; not so much furious, but just thinking it was dumb, dumb, dumb.”

From there, a plan emerged. They wrote a letter on phony letterhead that looked like it came from a reputable Tijuana citizens group. Chiquis wanted to send it to the mayor, but Kernahan says he suggested the Costa Mesa newspaper. “I told him to say [in the letter] that it should be sent to some competent city official of Costa Mesa but that you know of no competent city official. We kind of liked that.”

The offer, as Kernahan recalls, was 2,000 pesos for Costa Mesa. The letter stipulated that if the group could get the city without the council, the offer would be increased to 4,000 pesos. “A couple unsolicited offers came in from Mexico,” Kernahan says. “One guy back in the hills beyond Tecate said he’d throw in a big sack of beans.”

The local paper printed the letter. Did it touch off a border skirmish? A war of words? Ugly ethnic slurs?

Not exactly, Kernahan says. “A bulb went off somewhere, and the Costa Mesa mayor, who had a good sense of humor, said, ‘We might as well go along with the gag.’

“He sent an official letter to Chiquis saying, ‘If you’re really interested and it seems as though yours is a sincere letter, you really should have a chance before we go any further and negotiate, that you come up here and inspect the merchandise.”

Not missing a beat, Chiquis “brought along a delegation of two or three officers of this association he’d just made up,” Kernahan says, and they went to Costa Mesa. Kernahan says he knew the mayor a bit and agreed to act as an interpreter, if needed.

“So, Chiquis comes up, and they kind of hit it off,” says Kernahan, who remembers the mayor as being a good-natured barber with a gift of gab.

“Pretty soon, they were going around town and I lost them. Finally, when I caught up with them again ... they were lifelong buddies. I’m not going to say it was because of something they ate or drank, but nevertheless, the day turned out to be superb.”

Kernahan says the last time he saw the mayor and Chiquis, they were shooting pool in a local establishment. The tour apparently included a stop at the Fire Department, because Kernahan remembers Chiquis chalking his cue and saying to his host: “Six ball in the side pocket for that new fire engine you showed me.”

That’s as good a place as any to end the story, because who knows if the story will get even more flowery.

I did a little checking on Kernahan’s story and learned the mayor then would have been Alvin Pinkley, a druggist and not a barber. However, Bill St. Clair was a councilman and a barber, and Kernahan says St. Clair must the guy he’s remembering. Pinkley and St. Clair are both dead.

I ask Kernahan, now 81 and living in Laguna Hills, why he told me the story. “Old people like me look back and say, ‘There were some good times, and I’m sure we exaggerated them a bit, but people now get so stirred up and embittered. I don’t know what’s happened.”

Kernahan worries where the current dispute might lead. Of his long-ago tale, he says, “Something that could have left a bad taste turned out to be a seed for something that, unfortunately, didn’t last. But there came to be a wonderful bond between some of the people in leadership roles in Costa Mesa and the people in those roles in Tijuana.”

I don’t doubt Kernahan’s story about St. Clair, and here’s why: While reviewing now-yellowed Times files, I found a story from 1971. It identified a Newport Beach city councilman who had said several weeks earlier at a public meeting over a freeway issue: “Who the hell would want to visit Costa Mesa, anyway?”

Big mistake. The article described how, on the day the councilman had to renew his driver’s license in Costa Mesa, he was arrested by three stone-faced cops, who cited him for “being an alien without proper papers and impersonating a city official.”

The man who pressed charges? Councilman Bill St. Clair.

Those were the days, huh? When California-Mexico disputes made us laugh.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.