JUDGE GARDNER -- The Verdict

Several years ago, I wrote a piece in this column about Balboa’s

peeping tom, the man who came down every Sunday on the big Red Car

dressed to the hilt -- double-breasted, blue sport coat, white flannels

and, most important, a straw hat like the one Fred Astaire wears when

he’s not wearing a top hat. This guy would get under the pier, lie on his

back, put the straw hat over his face and, through a slit in the top of

the hat, try to peek up about six feet to whatever space there was

between the 2-by-12s that constituted the floor of the pier. His idea, of

course, was to peek up through those cracks to see under a lady’s dress.

The whole thing was pretty ridiculous, although original. Finally,

the big kids on the beach decided it was their duty to end the whole

spectacle. They did it by throwing the guy in the ocean. It worked. He

never came back.

I now fast-forward a few decades to Lido Isle. On Lido Isle, in a

house facing the Bay Club, lived a man who put my poor Balboa peeping tom

to shame.

This guy had installed in his house a Navy periscope, a real,

honest-to-God periscope, the kind that when Cary Grant says, “Up

periscope,” the thing comes up through the deck so Cary can lean over and

look through the eyepiece and say, “Fire one,” and then the camera shows

the torpedo leaving the tube, and then we see the torpedo hit a ship and

blow it all to hell. It was one of those real, authentic periscopes.

Through it, one could see what was going on in the upper echelon of

the Bay Club apartments and see what people were doing when they didn’t

have the slightest idea that anyone could be watching them.

There was one important distinction between my Balboa peeping tom and

Lido Isle’s peeping tom. My Balboa peeping tom was the real thing. He was

interested in looking up women’s clothes for whatever sexual satisfaction

he could get.

The Lido Isle periscope man didn’t have the slightest sexual interest

in what he was doing. He did it for the amusement of his friends. He just

liked to see what people do when they think no one is watching. His whole

operation was a gag, and he justified it on that basis.

I hope he and his guests were properly amused but, in my book, they

were at least as pathetic as the little man under the pier.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge. His

column runs Tuesdays.