COMMUNITY COMMENTARY: Tour’s message was fair

I disagree with Sean Bersell’s criticism of the coverage of Glendale’s swastika lampposts on the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley’s “CV’s Dirty Laundry Tour” (“Tour visits CV’s seamy past,” Friday).

If the writer had been on the tour, he would have found that the message given about the lampposts was almost verbatim to what he wrote.

What makes the lampposts “infamous” and interesting is the controversy that has swirled around the symbol, plus the fact that people mistakenly confuse the lamppost decorations for Nazi swastikas, and the resulting brouhaha that Glendale has had to deal with.

An Internet search of “Glendale Swastika” turns up hundreds of websites with entries like the ones that talk about how in 1995 city officials issued a report on 930 cast iron lampposts decorated with swastikas throughout the downtown portion of the city, which an American company manufactured in the 1920s, and had nothing to do with Nazism. The information on the Web talks about how the Glendale Historical Society recommended preservation of the lampposts and how a complaint about the symbol was made by Jewish Defense League national chairman Irv Rubin, who was later arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiring to bomb a mosque and government office in California.

So, in effect, what is “disgraceful or untoward” about our lampposts is people’s mistaken reactions to them. That is what makes the lampposts “infamous.”

The information given on the “CV’s Dirty Laundry Tour” about the lampposts also included the observation that people will continue to freak out occasionally in the future when viewing the symbol. So if anything, our inclusion of the “Swastika Lampposts” on the tour can only help to educate. Sometimes the purpose of studying tragedies or mistakes in history is to prevent them from being repeated. Let’s hope our tour helped with that.

Also it should be noted that we in no way intended to trivialize the tragic events that we also cover on other portions of the tour. I think our tour guide, Gary Keyes, keeps the tragic events in context and separated from the absurd and humorous human mistakes that are also part of our “Dirty Laundry.”

I’m sure we’ll do the tour again next year, as it’s one of our most popular tours. I hope Bersell can join us and help us celebrate Glendale’s historic and beautiful lampposts in that portion of the tour.

On a side note, Keyes was one of my high school history teachers, and was one of the first to introduce me to the darker side of history. Through his teachings I realized that history is made by humans, and humans are imperfect, to put it mildly. So while we study and celebrate human achievements and triumphs in history, we should balance that with study of the mistakes and tragedies. We can learn just as much, if not more from the latter.