1975: Purse-Snatchers, Pollution, and Parlimentary Procedure

A look back at Lemon Grove, 37 years ago this week.

LMs and PKs: This edition was split almost 50/50 between stories about Little Monsters (LMs) and Perfect Kids (PKs).  

Max Goodwin's editorial was a page-long hand-wringer about the LMs, who smoked pot, swiped purses, skipped class, hung out in bars, scared their parents and did time in juvie. The saddest stories involved LMs, 13 to 16, under the sway of 17 to twentysomethings.  

By contrast, the PKs were Eagle Scouts, valedictorians, hospital volunteers, marching band stars, scholarship winners and budding writers, who did time in the library. The most inspiring stories involved PKs, 16 to 18, who rose up by their bootstraps past poverty and illness to heights of achievement.

Goodwin's take-no-prisoners approach opined: “These juvenile criminals committed 300 murders and 7,180 aggravated assaults. These figures show the rise of a new breed of juvenile offender—a tough, violent criminal with many priors before reaching age 18. The hard core needs to be placed with the general prison population.”

His figures reflected statewide crime, not just Lemon Grove, where pot and purse-snatching tended to predominate. Thank goodness for all those valedictorians or we'd have thrown ourselves off a cliff.

Treganza Makes History Again: Dr. Amorita Treganza, noted children's eye specialist, wrote a best-seller called, I Declare: You Are Now Duly Installed, a handbook of parliamentary procedure for clubs that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. She donated all of the proceeds to Lemon Grove Soroptimist, whose name means “best for women.”

The club’s Ilse Hanning announced a new Amorita Treganza Scholarship for needy women re-entering the workforce and requiring further education. 

“I am pleased, particularly since the fund will be perpetual and will grow as copies are purchased nationally,” Treganza said.

Breathless: 1975 was a banner year for pollution in California. Sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, smog, tobacco smoke, ozone and oxidants triggered a surge in asthma and other upper respiratory ailments.  

The California Medical Education Research Foundation urged voters to “picket, write letters, call radio and TV stations and implore elected officials to crack down on polluters. THIS STUFF CAN KILL YOU!”

Roofer Rates A+:  Huey Spratley, owner of J.H. Sprately Roofing in Spring Valley, was the first roofer in the county to clean up his act. He purchased a new, closed-system tar pot that concealed burning asphalt and incinerated harmful pollutants without releasing them into the air. He was ahead of the Oct. 31 deadline to eliminate open-burn tar pots and forestalled the potential $500 fine and/or six months in prison for polluters.

At issue was the thick, black, smelly smoke arising from tar pots on your roof. Just when you thought you were maintaining the homestead, in fact, you were poisoning your progeny and wrecking the planet. We can thank Huey, a 10-year roofing veteran, for helping to avoid this train wreck.

Tickets to Eden $1:  For a buck you got into the Garden of Eden at Mt. Miguel High's production of The Apple Tree, starring Bob Martin, 18, as Adam, and Swedish exchange student Dette Ohlsson, 17, as Eve.  

Festooned with fig leaves, the winsome pair enacted a three-part musical that took them from a confab with a serpent to founding the entire human race.

Written and composed by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, The Apple Tree debuted on Broadway in 1966 with Barbara Harris and Alan Alda as the ancestral duo, and was revived in 2006 to negative reviews proclaiming it “creaky with age.”

Well, hey, it's Genesis. But the Mt. Miguel production was a hit that kept the Drama Club in business for the next year.

Featherweights Spar:  The San Diego Coliseum hosted the World Featherweight Battle between Art Hafey, the “Irishman from Pacific Beach” against Julio Leal, “The Kid from El Centro,” in 10 rounds of boxing. Though rangy, with a “killer right,” Leal wasn't favored over Hafey, who had just won five straight contests in under three months and was viewed as the “100-pound gorilla.”

Oh, to be 100 pounds again, but not resemble a gorilla.

The Legal Life: Legal Notices, normally an impenetrable mass of verbiage, can sometimes be a gold mine of the human comedy, to wit:

The spectacularly named Vito Gemignano Di Spampinato declared that his fictitious business name, “Vito's Pizza 'N Pasta” had morphed into “Vito's Italian Delicacies,” but both were now rescinded in favor of “Vito's Roman Holiday.” Catchy and hinting of dining and bathing in the Trevi Fountain with Gregory, Audrey and Anita.  

Of the 17 Fictitious Name filings, we liked Vito's—but even more, we liked Betty Klinglesmither's throw-caution-to-the-winds approach with her “Acme Aqua-Motion, Lawn Service, Bakery Thrift and  Electronics Company.” Presumably, you could clean your pool, mow the lawn, eat day-old Danish and repair the TV all by stopping at Betty's on Jamacha Road. Whoa!

Dorothy Pennick, secretary to the Spring Valley Fire Protection District, risked verbal strangulation on behalf of authenticity: “I certify that I have compared the original copy on my desk with the foregoing copy adopted by the Board of Directors of the said district and it is a full, true, and correct transcription therefrom and of the whole thereof and in no way represents a false, mistaken, or ill-copied copy.” Copy that.

And the ubiquitous Fanita Ranch controversy in Santee? This 37-year-old “study in frustration,” as U-T San Diego recently put it, continues into the present, but got going in this edition of the Lemon Grove Review with 4.5 densely worded columns advertising “Fanita Rancho” parcels for sale to the highest bidder.  

The rancho contains the 1890 Old Mission Dam and dates back to the glory days of the Mexican Empire, 1821-1846. The controversy over how many houses to build on the old rancho continues to rage ...