On the fate of El Toro, J. Edgar Hoover and the Pinks

JOSEPH N. BELL

Writing obituaries for a commercial airport at El Toro has been a

cottage industry in these parts ever since Larry Agran turned his

first spadeful of mythic dirt for a mythic lake and -- while Costa

Mesa snoozed -- the Newport Beach City Council decided that

discretion was the better part of valor and turned its attention to

pursuing caps rather than pushing the edges of legal restrictions on

an all-out effort for El Toro.

The latest obit, offered on our Forum page the other day by Martin

Brower, summarily dismissed the El Toro airport as an issue that

should never have come up, which might surprise the people who twice

voted it in.

Apparently, no one has pointed out to Brower that as long as the

pressures on John Wayne continue to grow and the runways at El Toro

haven’t been destroyed, there remains a spark of life that makes

burial premature. The plug hasn’t been pulled on life support. Not

quite yet.

Hopefully this tiny flicker remains an irritant to our

representative in Congress, Rep. Chris Cox, who -- in the pantheon of

El Toro villains -- ranks very high. His years of blindsiding the El

Toro airport in Washington while he talked publicly about turning it

over to private interests here should be seriously eroding his local

support in an election year. But I can’t think of any issue -- or

degree of perfidy -- that would convince enough local Republicans

ever to jump ship. Or even to be bemused by the delicious irony of

Cox lobbying to add to the current noise at John Wayne by providing

gates to a new carrier that will offer him direct flights to

Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, back at the

ranch ...

The current legal maneuverings in the trial of the three young men

who physically abused a 16-year-old unconscious girl in a Corona del

Mar home, then had the arrogance to videotape this outrage for the

enjoyment of their friends defy both logic and justice.

Never has a prosecutor been offered a more buttoned-up case. The

crime is pictured graphically on the tape. Therefore, the only

possible defense tactic is to stop the tape from being offered in

evidence. So, a week of the court’s time has been spent listening to

experts debate technical glitches in the tape -- but to what end? No

one has denied the actions depicted on the tape, so why could

minuscule -- or even flagrant -- irregularities disqualify the tape

as evidence? The three defendants clearly wanted others to see their

fun. It would be criminal not to grant them their wish in court.

*

My keen ability to sniff out a story was bruised a bit two Sundays

ago when the Pilot devoted much of its front page to a visit by an

internationally famous lawn bowler to a local lawn bowling club in

Corona del Mar. Spokesman for the locals was my friend and

neighborhood godfather, Jim Altobelli. For several years, our poker

group has been meeting monthly in his home and scarfing down the fare

served up by his wife, Pat, and daughter, Gina.

I have listened to Jim’s lawn bowling stories for so long that I

lost perspective on their newsworthiness -- if not their charm. He

says he sensed that and took the story to the Pilot’s newsroom

instead of tipping me off. So, I missed a scoop. But order was

restored last Sunday when we put out the chairs in his frontyard for

the first time since last September and officially celebrated the

arrival of spring with a gathering of regulars and a splendid

assortment of food and drink.

*

The front-page story in the Los Angeles Times last week detailing

the voluminous file the FBI kept on Sen. John Kerry, mostly because

of his antiwar activities after he returned home from Vietnam,

reminded me of my own brush with the FBI for different reasons during

the same period.

I was sent to Washington by a national newspaper’s Sunday

supplement to do a profile on the FBI that the agency had cleared. I

spent a week being squired around by my own personal FBI agent, who,

at our last lunch before I headed home, told me that “the director”

was anxious that the story be accurate. I told him I only wrote

accurate stories, and he said in that case I wouldn’t object if they

saw the story before publication. I said if that was a condition of

their cooperation, I wouldn’t have come to Washington, and since it

wasn’t, I had no intention of running the story by them.

The following Monday, I went to work in Chicago from my suburban

home and phoned my wife at noon. She told me two men had been sitting

in a black sedan in front of our house much of the morning. I was

furious and went to the Chicago FBI office where a man I had flown

with in World War II was an agent. He calmed me down, checked it out

and returned to tell me these were, indeed, FBI agents and they had

staked out my home in order to recover some unauthorized pictures

they said I had taken. I told him the pictures had been given to me

without strings, were not classified and had already been sent to the

magazine. And that I didn’t want to find the black sedan sitting

there when I got home.

It was gone and never returned, but the story that appeared was

softened considerably from the one I wrote. I found out later that

the FBI had checked it for “facts.” The final irony was the letter I

received from J. Edgar Hoover telling me what a fine job I did on my

article.

*

Finally, we have the Pink Revolution, which is what I like to call

a dog-in-the-well story, the sort of emotional-grabber that provides

a welcome diversion at a time when real news is the pits.

The Pinks, of course, are the Ensign Intermediate School students

who challenged authority by deliberately violating a school rule --

which kids have been doing ever since I can remember. The principal

enforced the rule -- which principals are supposed to do. And the

media ran with a nonstory and got a lot of people fired up -- which

media people do whenever and however possible.

If the rule the kids violated is bad, it should be changed. If it

is right, it should be enforced -- and properly was. And if there is

an epitaph for this affair, it is that this, too, shall pass.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.