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Hours after last night’s Redevelopment Agency meeting, when the founder of the Star Prep Academy was ordered to close/move her beloved school(see story above), she was hospitalized with a stroke, according to a friend. Katia Bozzi already was recovering from a stroke suffered three weeks ago when she was felled again. This would explain why no one from the Bozzi family was on the campus, inside the Star Eco Station, when I dropped by this afternoon. When I mentioned to Mrs. Bozzi after the Agency meeting that I intended to visit the Academy today, she said, prophetically, she still would be too upset to talk. But that did not discourage me. I have spoken with a number of people in an effort to gain a better understanding of the three members of the Bozzi family, — mother, 30-year-old son Erick and 27-year-old daughter Katiana — who operate the non-profit Academy and the non-profit Star Eco Station on Jefferson Boulevard. No one seemed shocked that the apparently first-rate private school is being thrown out of its building, and probably out of Culver City. The most common explanation was that there isn’t a strong business mind in the family. “Katia is an educator, a sincere person, and most of all an idea person,” a longtime friend said. “She gets the ideas, and then she tells people to carry them out. Her job is not figuring a strategy. That’s what she pays other people to do. The Bozzis do important good in this and many other communities with their education programs, but they are not detail oriented.”

Based on our latest interpretation from City Hall: This may be the most valuable tip you receive this afternoon. If you live or work in Culver City and you want to start your own school — in your basement, in your sewing room, on the front porch — do it. Now. All you have to do is round up the children, 1 or 2 or 50 of them. Don’t worry abut punishment. City Hall no longer seems to take the permit process very seriously. I would assume, then, anyone who wants to open a school can. The school owner need not worry about the annoying, time-consuming prospect of following the city’s ordinances or California’s building and safety codes. No more standing in nagging lines at City Hall. Just fling open your doors and listen to your cash register start ringing. The case of the several-year-old Star Prep Academy — which may have followed this path — comes up at Monday night’s Redevelopment Agency meeting at 7 in Council Chambers. The Agency will be asked to make a decision about whether to punish the Star Prep Academy, which operates inside of the Star Eco Station, and evidently never has bothered to pull the necessary paperwork required of those operating a business in Culver City. Vice Mayor Alan Corlin said this afternoon he intends “to go against” the Academy, unless he learns “new and pertinent” information to the contrary. Another official inside of City Hall said the Academy should be closed, at least until it meets the permit requirements.

In the Chapel of the Sacred Heart on the Loyola Marymount campus, a great man was to be eulogized this morning, Howard Drollinger, the father of the city of Westchester. He died of lung cancer last Sunday at home in Playa del Rey. The last time I saw him, more than a year ago, he was 83 years old and still reporting to his Sepulveda Boulevard office every day. Unlike many men of his advanced age, Mr. Drollinger did not come in to putter, to make an appearance so that the girls in the office, or other employees, would be impressed. Recalling the work ethic he learned as boy and man from his mother Ella late in the Depression Era when the family was living in the Fairfax District, he came to the office to produce.

The sweetest moment during the preliminaries at Monday night’s City Council meeting came when Dr. Sharon Zeitlin stepped to the microphone. Her mission was to hype interest in Saturday evening’s grandly climactic Peter Pan extravaganza at Veterans Park, starting at 5:30. In the last two summers, I have come to associate the doctor — she of the extremely long black hair — with more idyllic times, the chautauquas that our grandparents participated in at the beginning of the past century. At country estates or a large hotel in the countryside. The quiet, colorful settings were shamefully beautiful. Tall green grass surrounded by hundreds of acres of lush greenery, dense woods that sunlight barely could penetrate, and warm, cloud-dimpled skies. Ladies in long hair and ground-length dresses, light-suited gentlemen in starched white shirts, neckties, moustaches and perhaps straw-boaters. Aside from socializing, the occasions lent themselves to literary readings, plays, political and literary oratory laced with singing performances. The kinds of days that make you wish you had been there.

One of my lesser moments in August occurred last Saturday morning in my synagogue. My wife introduced me to a couple who immediately conveyed the impression they were obnoxious. Bingo. Three sentences later, the wife said, “We just love our senator, Sen. Kuehl. She used to be on the Dobie Gillis show, you know.” Obnoxity obviously can strike at unexpected times. I wanted to parry, “Are you kidding?” This not only would not have been cool, it would have sparked further comments. Hurriedly pondering my options, I considered crumbling to the floor, as I did one time when a speech was nearing that I didn’t want to make. I thought of excusing myself because my wife was calling, except she was only six feet away and there would have been a ring of extreme insincerity to my insincere tone. A third option was to be perfectly earnest and explain that my personal supply of obnoxious friends and acquaintances currently was at capacity. I could not take on two more obnoxes. Through sheer good timing by my religion, the rabbi signaled it was time for silence and a blessing, an opening that I used to vacate the room.

Ah, the sweet irony of Stew Bubar’s latest qualitative contribution to the public discourse. The irony was sizzling when Mr. Bubar, one of the most provocative members of the School Board in Culver City, sat down to craft a well-constructed essay for last week’s edition of the Culver City Star. Speaking authoritatively as a longtime teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Mr. Bubar presented cast-iron arguments why the thuggish Mayor Wrong of Los Angeles should not be allowed to seize control of the LAUSD in his panting march toward ultimate power in the United States. I trust that Mr. Bubar, as a loyal Teachers Union member, has seen the same information that I have — that Mayor Wrong is a better bet to succeed in his coarse course toward becoming czar of LAUSD than October is to directly follow September this year. Natural opponents of Mayor Wrong’s naked grab are collapsing the way athletes do when the fix is in. Last Thursday, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, sensing the train was going to leave with the Chamber underneath it, hollered “me, too,” and desperately lurched for the greasy coat-tails of Mayor Wrong. But I digress.

Every day for more than a week, thefrontpageonline.com has carried hard-hitting stories on City Hall’s bitterly contested seizure of commercial properties belonging to Les Surfas, the harassed owner of Surfas Restaurant Supply, a 69-year-old Culver City business. Like a 105-year-old man suffering from cancer, polio, pneumonia and poison ivy, there are many painful parts to this story. This is the single most important issue in our community today — a classic confrontation, the muscle of government and redevelopment law vs. a lone business owner. Comes now a strongly held contrary view from one of the most powerful voices inside City Hall, Steve Rose, the Chair of the Redevelopment Agency.

By assuming the debatable posture of a dilettante on subjects as serious as world history, religion, war and conflicts between peoples, my worthy colleague Frederik Sisa lays bare a range of cerebral vulnerabilities that lead directly to embarrassing, not to mention erroneous, conclusions. His two most recent anti-war essays (“Here’s a Moral Judgment: War Is Evil,” Aug. 4 and Aug. 8) undeniably are the heavily fictionalized exercises of a theatrically trained theorist. History tells us that one who commits his creative hours to the performing arts learns to rely heavily on theory and fantasy in other dimensions of his life. It is an enormously feminized milieu, an alluring philosophy that denizens of the entertainment industry embrace, perhaps even more lovingly than their spouses. Living in a universe of fulltime make-believe, where everything is fixable and achievable, the highway back to reality becomes unappealing in the extreme. You become inured to papier-mache. Defects in life, they assume, can be corrected as swiftly and painlessly as a script is doctored. In their artful artifices, they suggest that America was founded by theorists and fantasy-makers, a concept that feels soft, cuddly, giggly.

In the spirit of Kindness to Anti-Semites Week, perhaps the five copycat punks Long Beach police swiftly arrested for hanging out at a synagogue at 3 a.m. last Sunday were merely pondering whether to convert to Judaism. Attempted vandalism is one of the charges against the punks. Sure the boys, ranging from 18 to 23, had five buckets of paint and tagging materials. But you know how tough it has been lately working in the extreme daytime heat. At least the punks were people of class. The cops found one of them hiding out, half-dressed, shivering and cowering, at the bottom of a stinking garbage barrel. Conversion may have been on the minds of the Long Beach punks since being Jewish is the hot religion of the season. The only glitch is that people get to assault you but you can’t fight back. The “international community,” code for Muslims and traditional European anti-Semites, will accuse you of engineering a “disproportionate” response, as it has for the last four weeks with Israel. Funny, though. Liberal journalists working for liberal newspapers, being foppish types,never have asked the Jew-haters what they mean by “disproportionate.” They know there is no rational answer to the question. This refusal to press the haters is like a reporter returning from a crime scene without the name of the victim. I am reminded of attorney Stephen Rohde’s appearance before the Culver City Democratic Club last month. In his presentation, he dutifully took the words of terrorists in condemning Americans. That is pretty unbelievable.