Voices: Those who knew Judge Robert Gardner remember his life

and times.

By:

My favorite Gardner story was when I was doing a surfing column for

the Daily Pilot in the early 1970s. He told me how, when he was my

age, he used to go bodysurfing at the Wedge in the morning, then bus

tables at a pier-side restaurant in the evening. After one pretty bad

tumble off a 20-foot wave in the shallow waters off the Wedge -- one

in which he swore he saw the sand crabs below scampering to get out

of his way -- he headed to work. While leaning over to serve a cup of

onion soup to a customer, he said, a half gallon of seawater poured

from his nose into the cup. The future jurist, a comedian even in his

youth, asked the startled patron if she’d like to have her soup

warmed up.

-- Steve Mitchell, managing editor of the Newport Communications

Group

Sorry to hear of Bob Gardner’s death. He was a good drinking buddy

of many OC Press Clubbers over the years.

Right around 1968 and ’69 he had a case in Superior Court that

went back to a massive roundup of The Hessians outlaw motorcycle gang

members after they’d seen one too many reruns of “The Wild Ones.”

Cops all over Orange County were involved, and they busted a bunch of

these bikers on all kinds of stuff growing out of a raid on a Costa

Mesa duplex where ringleader Thomas “Wild Mouse” Rundle shot a guy in

the face after losing a pool game earlier at some low dive.

They went so far as to cut the phone lines before kicking the door

in, so it seemed not a spur of the moment affair.

Rundle was a parolee already, so he was in deep, but when he

finally showed up before Judge Gardner for sentencing, he was

clean-shaven, short-haired, clad in a new Montgomery Ward suit and

clutching a Bible.

Gardner listened politely, if skeptically, to Wild Mouse’s spiel

about recognizing the error of his antisocial ways and seeing clearly

now by the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The judge then

observed that that load of crap might have sounded great to anyone

who didn’t have Wild Mouse’s rap sheet on the bench in front of him.

He gave Rundle -- a very small guy -- two to 10 years.

Wild Mouse made a comment. The female court clerk turned crimson,

but Gardner missed it. He asked her what Wild Mouse said. She turned

even more crimson and hesitant and finally asked if she could whisper

it into the judge’s ear.

Gardner broke into a broad grin as she repeated the vulgar

message, and she turned ever redder as it crossed her lips.

Gardner declared with a big grin, “Ladies and Gentlemen, this

court has just been asked to do the biologically impossible!”

-- Art Vinsel, who worked at the Daily Pilot from 1961 to 1963;

1964 to 1965 and 1969 to 1981