Yes on School Raises

Ari L. NoonanSports

I see where the School Board voted by a surprisingly narrow 3 to 2 margin on Tuesday night to present an early vacation plum to the 52 members of the School District’s management team. All of them will receive raises, from little ones to gigantic increases (43.8 percent). Aside from the fact this is their second raise of the school year, what really reddens the faces of the Teachers Union and other Board critics is that the increases are retroactive to last September.

The justification, like much of this School Board’s conduct, was lost somewhere out there in space where it gets hazy. How they love to operate deep inside of fog where the community cannot see what they are doing. Call it the Bubar Syndrome, to which we shall shortly return. From a sensitivity standpoint, the timing of the raises was poor. The wounds of the angry members of the Teachers Union still are healing from the most recent hostile negotiations. How about a breather period? What is the rush, guys? The only logical rationale is to slide one more raise under the door of District Supt. Dr. Laura McGaughey before she retires on the final day of last month. In honor of Flag Day, I don’t want to beat a comatose horse this morning about one more pay leap for the Super.

Shades of Gen. Custer’s Very Last Stand

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

• Summer Sunset Music Festival starts Thursday night at 7. (See schedule at the end of the City Council report.)

On a fine spring day a dozen Junes into the future, out on Jerry Fulwood’s sprawling horse ranch spread, Mrs. Fulwood will dash outdoors with amazing news for her long retired husband who is aboard one of his favorite steeds. “Jerry, Jerry,” she will cry out to the onetime City Manager of Culver City. ”The City Council took another vote to fire you last night.” Many more Junes into the future, as Mr. Fulwood’s funeral cortege travels anywhere but down Culver Boulevard, who will be surprised if the City Council still is researching legal remedies by which it can justify dismissal of the long gone City Manager?

The View from a Pickle Jar

Ari L. NoonanSports

Now what does Mehaul O’Leary do to make himself better known to Culver City voters? For almost three years, ever since the summer day that the 40-year-old Irishman became an American citizen, he has been driven by the notion of winning a City Council seat. On Monday night, though, he was rejected by the City Council for one of the numerous openings that were available on six different city commissions. And so, Mr. O’Leary finds himself standing in a tall jar of pickles this morning. Everywhere he turns, the air smells a little stinkier. When he finished third — one place out of the money — in last April’s City Council election, the explanation was that he had little name recognition. He was advised by presumably well-meaning persons that if he wanted to become a deserving, valid candidate for the City Council, he would have to earn his experience first. Start, said his unsolicited counselors, by serving on one of the city’s several commissions.

You Are Not the Keeper

Ari L. NoonanSports

What do you suppose happens to numerous men and women who, once elected to office, wear themselves out every day trying to throw a big, old Indian blanket over their professional activities. Not surprisingly, I have in mind the School Board. All five members probably could be re-elected for life, without resistance, if they would stand facing you and me when they make crucial decisions. After Board member Stew Bubar declined to a fulfill a sensitive but sensible request from my occasional colleague George Laase at a meeting last month, I wrote an essay seeking to encourage Mr. Bubar and the Board to provide the answer. Since three weeks have gone into the history books, it seems unlikely that Mr. Laase’s inquiry will be answered.

What’s a Mother to Do?

Ari L. NoonanSports

I have been in the newspaper business long enough to have witnessed paranoid editors refusing to run television listings. This was deemed to be a cursed act of aiding the enemy. The creative reasoning of my editors went this way: We had a limited audience of sports fans. If readers watched a ballgame on television, they would not feel compelled to read our less compelling game report the next morning. If we did not acknowledge a game was being televised, perhaps the reader would forget, and then he would have to consult our newspaper the next day. Newspapers remind me of the Democratic Party: They are constantly searching for enemies whom they can claim are preying on them.

Culver High’s Busy Drama Players

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

Don’t try to reach any of  the drama students at  Culver City High School the next two weekends — they are booked solid. Before the Young Filmmakers group from the Academy of Visual and Performing Arts takes this year’s film project, “The Rental,” to Sony Studios for its premier next Friday, June 16, some  students have  separate business to take care of this weekend, Friday and Saturday. Java Drama, the high school’s annual celebration of its drama students, serves up a blend of dance, film, theater, music and art with a tall cappuccino and sweets the next two nights at the Ivy Substation,

9070 Venice Blvd.

The doors open at 7 on Friday and Saturday, with performances at 8. This year’s show, Java Drama Dozen, is in the historic Ivy Substation at

9070 Venice Blvd.

Seating is limited, but reservations are available at www.avpa.org <http://www.avpa.org/>, AVPA’s Young Filmmakers have been hard at work, getting this year’s film project, "The Rental," ready for its premier at Sony Studios. The short film, about two men who don’t want to be seen renting the movie they want to see, is sure to have audiences laughing. The film will screen every half hour between 6-9 pm on Friday, June 16th at the Jimmy Stewart building (#24) on the Sony Lot (near the Overland security gate). This event is free and open to the public, although seating is limited so reservations for specific time slots are required (jbentley@avpa.org). Reservations must be for each person attending the screening because names will be verified against a photo ID at the gate.


Producer Phaedra Neitzel, left, applies makeup, while Director Jeffrey Goebert makes mental notes, followed by the story.

Anybody Want To Be a Journalist?

Ari L. NoonanSports

Timmy Rutten, the virulently anti-war media columnist for the Los Angeles Times, opened his essay last Saturday morning with a fib, a gross mischaracterization. This is what some liberal pundits tend to do when facts are inconvenient. This is what he wrote: “When two CBS journalists were killed and a third critically wounded this week, the war in officially became the deadliest ever for combat correspondents.”  Not a bad subject, if you glance at it fast. But it was a phony construction by the angry Mr. Rutten. Pure cabbage. He dreamed up the opening definition. By deliberately mis-labeling two obscure technicians, a television soundman and a television cameraman, as “journalists,” he slyly sought to buttress his jacklegged premise. He had to reshape the facts because there was no room inside the truth to tell the story.

 

Weissman, Milk and an Expiration Date

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

With reluctance, Andy Weissman, one of the city’s important voices, bid adieu to the seldom-noticed Civil Service Commission on Wednesday night. As if he were a half-gallon of milk, an expiration date was affixed to Mr. Weissman upon the completion of his second four-year term.In this case, three is a crowd. In the prime of a productive life, he would like to continue. He is not ready to wave his fedora to the crowd. But extended service has become a terminal disease. In the second decade of term limits in Culver City , he was pronounced professionally dead this week, at least Commission-ly speaking, to coin a term.

 

Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

After a relatively quiet period, gang life is making a comeback within the environs of Culver City. In the same week that the LAPD said Monday’s fatal shooting on the campus of Venice High School was gang-driven, the Culver City Police Dept. announced an alleged gang-tinted prize arrest of its own.

 

An Expensive Crime Wave 

If bail is reliably a yardstick of the seriousness of a crime, the record $3 million bail this week for a suspected teenage gang member makes his two known crimes the priciest in Culver City history.

Gay and Vulnerable

Ari L. NoonanSports

Making an encore visit this week to

111 N. Hill St.

, the most popular courthouse address in Los Angeles County , to serve as a character witness, rattled my soul. It was nearly as jarring as driving into a stubborn brick wall, but less painful than my last visit, to separate permanently from the Formerly Fetching former Mrs. Noonan. I came face to face this time with aching hearts from two groups I have harshly criticized, gays and Hispanics who are debatably legal immigrants. Peering into intensely emotional, private conflicts in their daily lives is dauntingly different from sitting in my Culver Hotel office, expounding abstractly about the conduct of their cousins. Watching these victims of asserted mistreatment writhe on the witness stand melted my feelings and softened my convictions. The tableaux had the effect of acting as a snow-plough, clearing the streets following a blizzard.