Trading picket signs for gardening tools

Danette Goulet

COSTA MESA -- Everything’s turning up roses for the Estancia High

School girls’ basketball team.

Instead of team parents selling fireworks at a Mobil gas station to

raise $4,000, Exxon/Mobil is donating the money to the program.

In return, the girls will beautify their school, starting with the

planting of a rose garden.

Players picketed the gas station at Harbor Boulevard and Baker Avenue

on Monday with signs that read “Honk if you support the Estancia High

School girls’ basketball team!” and “Down with Mobil!”

The girls created the picket line to protest not being able to sell

fireworks at the station as they have for the past five years. The

station owners, who bought the station from C.J. Segerstrom & Sons over

the last year, told the girls it would be unsafe to sell fireworks on the

adjacent property.”There was a change in ownership. It wasn’t that we

switched on the girls,” said Carolin Keith, an Exxon/Mobil

representative. “We understood the girls’ needs to have a way to earn

additional funds. They had counted on it and then, at the last minute,

they didn’t have it.”

Feeling for the girls and yet unwilling to cause a dangerous situation

or break corporate policy, executives from Exxon/Mobil and Estancia

Principal Tom Antal sat down and ironed out an agreement in no time.

“I think that the girls and moms were out there trying to solve

problems on their own, and I didn’t know about it -- so we didn’t have

the right people talking,” Antal said. “There were also key people

missing at the gas station and as soon as the right people got to

talking, it was all easily resolved.”

A $4,000 donation will allow the team to play in three summer

tournaments and buy uniforms, while their labor at the school will make a

memorial rose garden that has been in the works to become a reality. The

girls also will replant many interior trees and bushes.