Farewells, both happy and sad

JOSEPH N. BELL

I didn’t get invited to Tom Fuentes’ going-away party as head honcho

of the Orange County GOP. Evidently the word didn’t come down to the

people making out the guest list. No hard feelings because I didn’t

have the thousand-buck tab anyway, but I could have managed the

“business attire.”

I learned about such details through an undercover agent who

smuggled a program of the evening to me. It offers up a truly

wondrous grab-bag of Orange County Republicans who showed the flag

for Tom -- from the true believers who manned his trenches to the end

to the pragmatists who figured out some years ago that the

Republicans were going to win state office only when they moved their

center from deep right field at least a smidgeon toward right-center.

Fuentes didn’t buy into that message until he found it expeditious

to climb aboard the bandwagon of that neo-liberal, Arnold

Schwarzenegger. Apparently there was some concern among the

pragmatists that Fuentes’ conversion might not be permanent, and so I

suspect his retirement was likely regarded with considerable relief

by a fair number of the power names listed on the program who would

never admit publicly to such heresy.

I have always appreciated Fuentes, admittedly as a matter of

self-interest. As long as he was the local go-to guy at election

time, we could count on him pushing candidates so far off to the

political right that they could only be loved in Orange County. The

most recent example was his strong support of Bill Simon, perhaps the

only potential candidate in the state of California who could have

lost to Gray Davis in 2002.

So a reluctant bon voyage to Tom Fuentes, sent on his way with

that thousand-dollar-per-head bash that must make him the best

financed candidate in history to run for a post on the board of

trustees of the South Orange County Community College District -- or

any community college board anywhere, for that matter. And welcome to

his successor, former Assemblyman Scott Baugh, whose credentials as a

moderate Republican would be highly suspect anywhere but Orange

County.

REMEMBERING CARRIE

For two years, I taught a class at UC Irvine called “The Motion

Picture in Contemporary American Society” in which some well-known

actors and directors -- Jack Lemmon, Frank Capra, Charlton Heston,

Jack Nicholson, among others -- came to the campus to discuss one of

their films with about 100 students. One of my guests was the actress

Carrie Snodgress, and I bring this up here because she died last week

at a youthful 57.

When she spoke to my students, Carrie had just been nominated for

an Academy Award for best actress for her work in “Diary of a Mad

Housewife.” I always took my guests out to dinner after the class,

and I remember Carrie especially because she wanted to continue our

conversation over coffee at home, and we talked far into the night.

Carrie was very young at the time, out of a small Illinois town

and the Goodman Theater in Chicago. She picked up on my Midwestern

background and seemed hungry for companionship outside the boundaries

of the Hollywood scene. She kept in touch after that night of talk

until she abandoned a booming career to move in with rocker Neil

Young and bear him a child. She came back to Hollywood years later --

no regrets, she said -- to character roles when that relationship

broke up, and she died, tragically early, of heart failure at UCLA

Medical Center while awaiting a liver transplant.

SMASHING FAIR IDEA

Assemblyman John Campbell has just come up with a smashing idea.

He wants to move the Orange County Fairgrounds -- on property that

the state of California owns -- from Costa Mesa to the mythic Great

Park in El Toro. That way we could be the only county in the nation

to have both a mythic park and a mythic fair, which sounds like a

Guinness record to me.

The only people I can think of with the $300 million Campbell

estimates the state could get for the land are developers, which is a

sobering thought. I would suggest that Campbell wait until the El

Toro runways are torn up before he moves on this. I suppose if the

land is sold while the park is still mythic, we could always stage

the fair in Larry Agran’s backyard.

WHO’S IN DEBT HERE?

The World War II planes came to town again last week, and we took

a very small person in our family to see them. The planes included a

B-25, a B-24 Liberator and a B-17 Flying Fortress. The latter two

were open for visitation for four bucks a head (two for kids).

Unhappily, there were no Navy aircraft in this billet. Our

3-year-old guest, whose name is Bobby, was fascinated by the

propellers and had to be repeatedly pried loose from hugging them.

The B-17 was off limits when we visited on Sunday, but the Liberator

was accessible. Sort of. We entered from the tail and exited through

the bomb bay, and I couldn’t navigate either one. So my wife took

Bobby aboard, and he peered down one of the guns and waved at me as

he passed through. The irony of my arthritic hip being unable to make

this trip was not lost on me.

Since all of these planes were airworthy, the operators were

selling rides on the B-17 for $400, and there were people at the

window buying on. When I got home, I tracked down my flight log books

and checked my military flying hours -- all in World War II. They

came to 1,742 hours which, multiplied by $400, would mean that in

2004 dollars, I owe the Navy $697,000 for rides in their aircraft. Or

maybe they owe it to me. I’m not sure. But at least it gave me

something to think about while my companions were exploring that

B-24.

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

appears Thursdays.