A Community in Harmony

“Don’t interrupt Mommy while she’s on the phone…Leave the kitchen please…Excuse me, my kids just left the house,” Jackie Shannon, adjunct professor at the California State University, Dominguez Hills, said as she put down the telephone to round up her two sons, ages 3 and 5.

Besides teaching music at the university and keeping an eye on her boys, Shannon still finds time to practice her skill on the French horn for up to three hours everyday and play in several community orchestras including the Carson-Dominguez Hill Symphony Orchestra.

photo from the City of Carson

Since 1972, musicians of all ages and from all walks of life have been joining together to form the Carson-Dominguez Hills Symphony Orchestra.

Even though Carson is most famous for having its politicians arrested and its council meetings broadcasted on YouTube, the semiprofessional community orchestra has also made a name for itself by winning the National Recreation and Park Association Arts and Humanities Award.

The orchestra has come a long way in its 35 years.

Les Woodson, a tuba player who has been with the orchestra from day one, said when they played their first concert, in October of 1972, they weren’t very good at all.

“There was a guy who wanted to start an orchestra…He had a big ego,” Woodson said of the orchestra’s first director, whose name he couldn’t even remember.

It wasn’t until 1975, when Frances Steiner, professional cellist, conductor, and adjunct professor at the California State University, Dominguez Hills took over as director that the orchestra started to improve, Woodson said. “(The orchestra) would not have survived,” he said.

It was under Steiner’s direction that the initially city-funded orchestra combined with the California State University, Dominguez Hills to become the Carson-Dominguez Hills Symphony Orchestra. The 50 to 60 members of the orchestra get paid a stipend ranging from $150-$200 per show.

Through the partnership, the orchestra gives university music students the opportunity to perform with seasoned professional and semiprofessional musicians, Hector Salazar, trombone player and assistant conductor for the orchestra said.

Salazar has been in the Carson-Dominguez Hills Symphony Orchestra for 20 years. He has been playing the trombone since middle school and he now teaches music and conducts professionally.

“Community regional orchestra is really important…They offer concerts to people who can’t afford to go to the philharmonic,” Salazar said.

Every year the orchestra puts on at least five concerts for the Carson-Dominguez Hills community, which include two evening concerts and three children’s concerts. They rehearse only five times before each show. Both students and community members are glad to have an outlet for their musical talent.

Shannon, a former professional musician, who now teaches music at the California State University, Dominguez Hills, and gives private lessons, said performing with her students helps her connect with them and reach out to the community through her music.

Shannon has been playing the French horn ever since elementary school, when she said she literally heard the instrument calling to her.

She said she remembers going to the school gym to hear a sampling of all of the instruments available at the school. It was the day when she was supposed to pick what instrument she was going to play for the school band. Before she even saw the instruments, she had already chosen.

“I heard this beautiful sound and I said I want to play that instrument,” Shannon said.

Shannon, whose husband plays trombone for the Beach City Sling Band, is already preparing her children to follow in their parents musical footsteps. Since her sons were 6-months-old, they have been taking piano and Orff music lessons. In Orff lessons, young children are introduced to music, especially percussion instruments.

Even though Shannon said Orff is basically a parent tapping rhythms on their baby’s back, she said she it gave her kids a goods sense of rhythm.

Meanwhile, Steiner, whose mother was a professional violinist and father a professional cellist, said it was never important to either marry a musician or push her daughter into music.

Since she was 15-years-old Steiner has been performing professionally; she started taking lesson at age 5. By age 21, she was a fulltime professional cellist. She has performed with orchestras on both the East and West coasts including at the Kennedy Center and the Los Angeles Art Museum. However, she decided that the life of a professional musician wasn’t for her and instead went on to study at the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Temple University, and several music schools in France, New York and Vermont.

“It was a competitive lifestyle…somewhat political,” she said of her life as a professional musician.

“I opted very early to teach and play,” said Steiner who, besides teaching at the university, also directs the Chamber Orchestra of South Bay and the Southwest Youth Music Festival Orchestra along with the Carson-Dominguez orchestra. She still finds time to practice the cello.

For many, being part of the Carson-Dominguez Hills Symphony Orchestra meant finding a place where they could keep their musical skills in tune.

“I always looked for opportunities to perform. I was determined when I got out of college to not forget my music like so many other people I knew,” Tuba player Les Woodson said.

Woodson, who is a financial advisor, started playing the tuba in high school.

His father was also a musician who played the violin and the piano and finished fourth in an international competition for barbershop quartets. His mother played the piano and his siblings sang in a choir. When Woodson was a child, his parents made him take piano lessons but he never enjoyed playing music until he found the tuba.

After high school, during the first years of the Vietnam War, he joined the National Guard Band. Woodson thanks the tuba for keeping him out of Vietnam.

“Tuba saved my life,” he said repeatedly. Woodson, who doesn’t live in Carson, drives 85 miles from his home in Crestline just to perform with the orchestra.

Woodson isn’t the only musician who goes out of his way to be a part of the orchestra. Joe Jackson, a tuba player for the Carson-Dominguez Hills Symphony Orchestra as well as a professional musician, music teacher, and steam train engineer for Disneyland also makes an effort to play with the group, which he’s been with since 1996.

“It’s really hard to juggle and sometimes I don’t juggle as well as I should. It really comes down to picking and choosing,” Jackson said.

Even with his multiple jobs and his wedding coming up in February, Jackson
makes time to practice from one to four hours a day.

He’s been playing tuba since middle school.

“I always liked things that were big. I saw the tuba and I was really impressed by its size,”

Jackson said. He went on to major in tuba performance at the University of Southern California.

Now, however, he said it’s the tuba’s sound rather than its size which keeps him interested. He often performs tuba solos for the Carson-Dominguez orchestra and freelances for other orchestras.

“I really enjoy solos, that’s really when I’m the happiest,” Jackson said.

Even if they have little else in common, for Jackson and the other members of the orchestra, it’s the love of music and the happiness they get out of it that bonds them together.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love it,” Shannon said.

Whatever they are in the rest of their lives-students, teachers, theme park steam train conductors, financial advisors, computer technicians, mother, fathers, sons and daughters, when they come together as the Carson-Dominguez Hills Symphony Orchestra, they’re all musicians.

“Orchestra is like a sense of family,” Salazar said.

Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn

from Babe's and Ricky's Inn website

It’s almost 10 O’clock, on a Monday night, and the street outside is quiet. But inside the door, which is just a little hole in the wall, life is teeming.

Like some kind of forgotten anthill or left over from the golden age of the Big Easy the legendary blues club, Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn, on Leimert Boulevard, still flourishes underground.

from Babe's and Ricky's Inn website

Like a queen with a bright purple beret of a crown, founder Laura Gross, 88, sits just inside the door adjusting the cover charge from $8 to $10 as she runs out of change. For 44 years, and two locations and the threat of bankruptcy, Gross has reigned over Babe’s and Ricky’s with an iron rule.

The mirrors along the back wall make the room seem bigger and fuller than it really is. Not that it isn’t full, people are lined up against the bar and almost every seat is taken. The crowd is a mix of college students looking for an old-school experience and middle aged patrons for whom this is probably a regular hangout.

The big red pleather booths are occupied by people just starting to feel the effects of their alcoholic beverages.

On stage, several bands play in succession. They’re good, but not what you’d expect for a blues club where legends like B.B King used to perform. Amateurs and greats alike still play here.

The musicians tonight are mostly young white males, but they’ve got soul. Some are eccentric, following in the modern “emo” style of young bands they are dressed in black, or skinny jeans, with hair just covering their eyes having perfectly mastered the look of socially competent “geek“, meanwhile one older artist expresses himself in a bright red sequined scarf.

There is a list by the door where musically talented club-goers can sign up to play the instrument of their choice.

A college student in a black and white striped shirt steps onto the stage for a turn on the drums. He is announced as a recently freed jailbird, the announcer enjoys the joke more than the crowd.

The drummer plays with the attitude of an entertainer, pulling faces, bopping to the music. It’s clear he’s played for crowds before and enjoys it. Every time he hits the drum the light reflected in it jumps to the rhythm of the music.

The other college students are cheering for him, whistling. Some are his friends, some are feeling their drinks. He’s good though, the job offers he gets when he steps down are proof of that.

Around 11p.m. dinner is served. From the back of the club, no announcement can be heard but word spreads and a lazy S-shaped line is formed from the front to the back.

You can serve yourself from dishes of collard greens, black-eyed peas, and potato salad, but two strict looking women, one of them Laura Gross, serve only one slice of hot link sausage, one piece of fried chicken, and one fried corn biscuit per person. It’s Jam Night so the meal comes with your cover charge. The regular menu has only three options, chicken wings, hot links, and fried fish.

You can order drinks all night, you may not get exactly what you ordered, but you’ll drink it anyway. The food is taken back to tables decorated with plastic white doilies and red, white and blue flowers.

The flowers match the dark red walls, covered with old photos and posters, and the blue Christmas lights, and the partly deflated red, white and blue, balloons that look like they’ve been left behind from some 4^th of July celebration a decade ago. Somehow, it just escapes being tacky.

From the corner of the middle wall, an old Central Avenue street sign juts out, reminding customers of the club’s first location. You know this place has history, even if you don’t know it.

As people finish eating they slowly trickle out. They come as much for the food as the atmosphere and music. Gross has something to say to everyone. She tells some college girls not to get fat and she tells the jailbird drummer to put on some weight.

It’s just about midnight and Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn is dying down, strange for a Los Angeles night club, but maybe not so strange for a bustling blues club left over from the 60s.

WRESTLING AND SHAKESPEARE AN INTERVIEW WITH SEAN LEWIS -one of the very first interviews I ever did (summer 2005)

A Lucentio of sorts, Sean Lewis may or may not have a romantic love interest but he is definitely in love with theater. You can hear the passion in his voice as he describes his journey from wrestling to becoming a successful actor, playwright, and producer of his own one man show.

Lewis, at age 26, has been acting for four or five years, he’s not sure. Originally from Pine Bush, New York he went to college at the State University of New York in Binghamton, New York. He had a wrestling scholarship until an injury ended his athletic career. In an attempt to get back in shape for wrestling, Lewis attended a movement class taught by an acting teacher. His teacher encouraged him to try out for Romeo and Juliet, where he scored the part of Lord Capulet. Before the part he had had no history in theater. Lewis says he “felt really lucky” and ever since then, theater has been the love of his life.

Initially Lewis says “Most of my family was like, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’” and ‘Stop messing around and get a job!’” but eventually they came around. To Lewis, it never really mattered what others thought: “I’ve always been the guy who did what I wanted and the rest of the family was left scratching their head.” Well, Lewis’ life proves that he knows what he’s doing.

Recently Lewis has begun sending out his play Forrestry, to theaters who might be interested in producing it. The play is the story of Edwin Forrestry, who is said to be America’s first celebrity. It is the story of Forrestry’s life as an actor in the 1800’s. One of the interesting events of the play is a riot brought on by a competition between Forrestry and competing English actor Maccready that became so crazy that the National Guard was called in to put it down. Lewis found the inspiration for this play while sitting in a fellow playwright’s house and flipping through a text book. The text book featured a picture of Forrestry whom Lewis thought “looked like a wolf man”, he became so fascinated by this actor and his acting style and life that it prompted him to write a play.

Another high point of Lewis’ life is his one man show based on character Sean Boogie, a name that originated from Lewis’ own nickname “Boogie”. The show is about a young white male who enjoys rap music and hip-hop and his encounters with a well- educated black professor. The play, which contains 15-20 characters all played by Lewis, deals with society’s portrayal of what it means to be “black”, and jokes about the idea of putting labels on race. For a long time before he actually wrote the play, Lewis had been toying with the idea of a one man show until one day a theater called him up and asked him to perform it. Even though Lewis had nothing prepared he said yes. The actual idea for the show came from a series of connections Lewis found while going threw his own slam poetry; before that he had no “blueprint” of what he would do. He will be doing a show this coming March from the 2nd-4th at the riverside theater, where he is also in the productions of Taming of the Shrew as “Lucentio, the young lover” and Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid playing from June 17th-July 10th. While looking in his backpack for the dates, Lewis comments that he is always scatterbrained and just found out about this night’s rehearsal this morning as he pulls random articles and papers out of his bag.

Throughout the whole interview his love for theater broadcasted loud and clear and I’m sure that Sean Lewis is destined to make his mark on the world of stage. During the end of the interview however, Lewis gave me his outlook on the ups and downs of acting. He says it’s like “making an agreement with the audience” “I’m asking them to believe.” He also says that it’s “such a joy for me.” He only wishes that more young people today would be interested in theater. I also asked him about his pre-show routine and he answered that it involved some stretching, vocal exercises, and running around, but that he doesn’t think about the show itself “some actors need to think about it, I need to not.” He says he’s been in a lot of good productions as well as some bad ones, and when you’re in a bad one it’s like “I just don’t want to be on the stage right now…(but) I might as well try and entertain someone.” Lewis also mentions that the rejection of not getting a part can be hard “and not getting it (the part), it’s like...you’re killing me, you’re killing me slowly,” and that there is a lot of competition involved “the acting profession can be like high school...Catty.” Another thing that he made clear is that the moving and traveling with the cast can be rough also, “If you have a really cool cast and you’re in a really cool city it can be great…But when you’re surrounded by bad people it’s like, enough of this I want to go home.”

In the Presence of “The Glo" : A Day in the Life of L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina

On February 10th I spent 10 hours shadowing L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina.

Short, stocky, dressed in a pink skirt suite and dark pink glasses decorated with rhinestones at the corners, “The Glo," as she is called by her staff, is a force to be reckoned with. But if you can get her brassy Senior Legislative and Press Deputy Roxane Márquez on the phone for the five minutes it takes her to determine if you’re a “dumbass” or not, I found she just might let you spend a day observing her at work.

(Photo from the official website of Gloria Molina)

The staff area behind Molina’s seat at the supervisor’s board meeting can only be described as tense.

In the middle of the meeting, Molina turned around to request something of her staff, a few minutes went by and nobody answered. That’s all it took for Molina’s temper to flare.

“Where the hell were you?” Molina said with controlled anger in her voice, “All I was asking for was a little help. You guys should be there when I call.”

Her staff, First District Operations Director Avianna Uribe, Senior Legislative Director Barbara Nack and Senior Health Deputy Amy Luftig Viste explained that they just switched places.

Nonchalantly, Molina replied that she wished they hadn’t made her yell in front of me.

“She’s tough. Once you work for Molina, you can work anywhere,” Avianna Uribe, first district operations director, said.

Molina’s wing on the eighth floor of the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration in downtown L.A. is for straight shooters only.

“I spent a whole lot of time not schmoozing. I spent a whole lot of time not getting cozy. The reason I don’t do that is because I want them to know…I’m here to make the best decisions for my constituents,” Molina said during an interview later that day.

“(Molina’s) agenda is very very important to me. I didn’t come here to amass power and go to parties and feel like a badass. I came to work for the issues,” Márquez said to me in her office, “…Gloria expects a lot of her staff because the public expects a lot from her.”

The Fluff

“Gloria hates the fluff,” Márquez said as we waited in her office for Molina to finish taking photographs with the winners of the 2008 Public Library Children’s Book Week Bookmark contest, “ I think the fluff is important. It‘s the only time people really get to see their public officials.”

The photo op was the first event of the morning.

Márquez pointed out Supervisor Michael Antonovich’s presentation of an adoptable pet at every televised board meeting, a part of the county’s Pet Adoption Program, as popular “fluff.” This week’s dog was wearing a tutu.

“I don’t like presentations, but when it’s children…” Molina later said in defense of the morning’s “fluff, “ I just think there are more pressing issues.”

“This isn’t about friendship and all that. This is my job. I have a set of friends. That’s a real important thing to me, to keep my distance, because then I become part of what I never liked about politics and that’s the political establishment that cruises and is glamorous,” Molina said.

“I don’t care that I called somebody a pinhead and I don’t care that somebody called me a name if I’m comfortable with what my outcome was…that’s what keeps me going,” Molina said

Though I was scheduled to shadow Molina for the entire day, I didn’t actually meet her until closer to noon.

Instead, the morning hours were spent listening to Márquez who has a talent for making “Fuck” sound different almost every time she says it by stretching it out and putting a different emphasis on the vowel.

The topic of the day --her irreverent view of life, love, journalism and politics and her reluctance to go home and cook dinner while her husband played with the cat.

“There’s a hierarchy. The better you understand it the better you can operate…nobody in the work world needs you. Nothing replaces raw experience.” Márquez said of the workforce in general, “I’m not going to bullshit.”

“It’s a dramatic environment. Inevitably at some point in time you’re going to have a conflict (in the office), “ Márquez said as she described both how she loved her job and how it could be stressful.

“There came a point where I took on too much and it was barely treading water.” Márquez took a six-week break and threatened to quit if she didn’t get a raise. She got the raise.

The Board Meeting















“She’ll come to you,” Uribe said as she and the other staff members took turns explaining different parts of the meeting to me. During the meeting we sat in the staff section behind Molina.

Molina was not pleased when I managed to make my way to her as she was coming from her seat.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Molina said tensely as she asked me to stay out of the way. Then she told her staff to “Take care of me.”

Eventually, Molina sat down with me for about 10 minutes during her break. She said she thought I was there for an interview and seemed surprised to hear that I was just shadowing and had no specific issues to discuss with her.

“I guess somebody doesn’t read her emails,” said Márquez who was my initial contact in setting up the shadow appointment.

“The boss is always right,” Uribe said with the same mix of respect and sarcasm that most of Molina’s staff seem to possess. They brushed off Molina’s demeanor.

On the other side of me, Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’ staff was considerably less tense. One of his staff members, who called himself “Bond, James Bond” and refused to tell me his real name, introduced me to Ridley-Thomas. I later found out that the staff member was Senior Advisor and Special Assistant Vincent Harris.

Compared to Molina’s all-business attitude, Ridley-Thomas was practically jovial. While Molina refuses to even get a Facebook account, this is a list of where Ridley-Thomas can be found online:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• YouTube
• Twitter

“I’m a really aggressive, pushy demanding, boss that hopefully leads by having that same standard, “ Molina said of herself later in the day, “My biggest problem that I have is the same thing that I hate about my father who has the same temperament. I go from one to 90 in seconds…don’t light that torch, man, because it will blow you out of the water,” she laughed.

An important item on the agenda was several representatives of A New Way of Life Reentry Project, an organization that tries to help convicts reenter the workforce.

They spoke on behalf of Gariner Beasley and opposed laws that would block convicts from filling certain jobs.

Beasley was convicted in the 1990s of raping two women while on duty as a Los Angeles police officer, recently it came to public attention when the LA Times reported that he was working as an X-ray technologist at County-USC Medical Center.

“Supervisor Molina kept calling Mr.Beasley a “rapist” and I think we fail to see that he’s been rape-free for the past 10 years,” Joshua Kim, an attorney for A New Way of Life Reentry Project, said.

To which Molina replied, “He’s been what? Do not use this gentleman. I use the word loosely…as your poster child.”

Behind the scenes, Molina’s staff was busy researching and emailing her possible responses. Senior Health Deputy Amy Luftig Viste said sometimes Molina uses her notes, sometimes she doesn’t.

“It’s not just about me. I need every single person on my staff to know that they’re as significant as me, if not more so,” Molina said.

After the public board meeting, the supervisors went into closed session to discuss a possible lawsuit against the state over funds owed to the county.

(Click the player to hear Molina discuss the closed session)

Meanwhile, Molina’s staff and I watched celebrity gossip in the break room. Even politician’s staff care about what happened between Rihanna and Chris Brown.

After Hours


(Staff group photo from the official website of Gloria Molina)

“I’d basically like to drop kick him from the eighth floor…I think that he’s a busybody, an arrogant dumbass and that’s just what I conclude because he’s so annoying,” Molina said to Policy and Political Director Gerry Hertzberg about someone who they’ve been working with.

They didn’t mention names and they didn’t go into detail, but it was after 5 p.m., we had just finished our interview and I had promised to sit quietly on the couch as Molina prepared to leave the office. Molina called Gerry into her office about three times in less than an hour to question him on various issues she was looking over, but for the most part she read her proposals and emails in silence.

Her office, spacious and organized, is decorated with art done mostly by Frida Kahlo and other Latino/a artists. Her books are also about Latin American culture.

At 5:10 p.m. Molina noticed a proposal she said she hadn’t approved earlier. She called for the person who was supposed to meet with her, but had she’s already gone for the day. Molina was shocked.

(District Map from the official website of Gloria Molina)

One of her field deputies went ahead on a plan to plant more trees in their district. Márquez, not knowing the whole situation, ran a press release without hearing from Molina.

Hertzberg was called in again. There was an email that Molina said she didn’t remember reading, but the staff remembered getting a reply. Hertzberg didn’t take the situation too seriously, they only have to pay for some trees, which everyone seems to think is a good idea.

It had been a long day, Molina couldn’t understand how a proposal was allowed to go through without her permission. Twenty minutes later, she dropped the issue and gathered her things to leave. The staff looked worried, they knew that Molina would bring it up in the morning.

Pleasantly, she turned to me and said, “ It’s like the rapist who got through (the employee screening), nobody knows anything, nobody asks. It’s about accountability.”

The Interview: L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina on the Issues

(photo from L.A. Times)

After a long day in the board meeting Supervisor Gloria Molina sat down in her office for a late afternoon interview with me. Behind her desk, she is nothing if not intimidating.

(Click player to hear entire interview or read below for interview highlights)

“Let me hear what you’re going to say,” Senior Legislative and Press Deputy Roxane Márquez said. She warned me that Molina was customarily tough on reporters and she would be tough on me.

“She’s intense,” Márquez said, “ She has been accused of leading by temper tantrum, she plays the card too often sometimes, but it’s ok because people are outraged by how cavalier the bureaucracy can be. In the Mexican and feminist groups the feeling is even more acute.”

“When I see my community being taken advantage of it just stirs in me a hostility and anger,” Molina said.

On the incorporation of East L.A.:

“I think that the group of people who are moving forward on the incorporation are good people who really believe in the romance of it…I know there isn’t a revenue base in East L.A to really sustain itself. Just like the woman who had the octuplets…”

“Now, saying all of that, I know that if I come out against it I can kill incorporation and I don’t wish to. I wish it to proceed forward, I think the residents are entitled to get all the information…Then I think the voters should vote and they should make their own decision…I don’t want to influence them.”

“They would have to change the zoning in a lot of areas. They would have to bring in more retail. The problem is it’s going to be a painful process,” Molina said.

On her tough attitude:

“They sometimes get upset with me because I’m so demanding but at the same time I would trade any of my staff people, that I’ve trained, for anybody else’s staff people. I think that I have, by far, some of the smartest brightest people. It was a tough road…but I bet ya they’re the brightest bulbs wherever they go because of our…boot camp,” Molina joked.

“I started out as a very very shy intimated individual, I was raised as that. But I’m really one of the products of the Chicano movement. I know government can change things.”

“I do give breaks, when people make mistakes the first time I don’t go after them, but when they make it the second and the third time…” Molina said as Márquez interrupted with, “ And then she says, I’m yelling at you, kid, the way Willie Brown (former speaker of the California State Assembly) yelled at me.”

Márquez confirmed that Molina does not come to work make friends. She said that for herself and the other staff for whom Molina was a political hero, it was hard to understand that she would never be their friend.

“But it’s not just about me. I need every single person on my staff to know that they’re a significant as me, if not more so,” Molina said.

On President Obama:

“We have just seen a president that I think has destroyed this country and a whole new leader that gives us an opportunity to really change everything that we’ve been doing…if he continues to be commanding about that leadership he can dramatically change the kind of respect… that we have for government.”

“It helps me, not having war and not being disrespected as a world power helps me because we can further our goals when it comes to dreaming about health care for everybody and talking about a fair immigration plan and talking about leading by example. Him trying to heal all of the disaster that the last administration left behind helps me. I feel more hopeful, I feel more patriotic, and I kind of feel very optimistic. A lot is riding on his very first steps… but so far everything looks good.”

“I have high expectations and I would continue to challenge even the president,” Molina said.

I wrapped up the half-an-hour interview soon after that, but not before she could tell me “You should know local government…and when you go meet with a politician you should know exactly what they do.” Considering her reputation, I got off easy.

(photos from the day)

Created with flickr slideshow.

Click here for recent and popular L.A. Times articles on Gloria Molina.

It May Be The Dawn Of A New Era, But First Let's Review Carson's Chronology of Chaos

Hopefully, the re-election of Mayor Jim Dear, who himself had a rocky first term, will bring political peace for the City of Carson. Only 41 years old, this city has seen more than its fair share of political corruption.(Photo from the official website of the City of Carson)

Timeline of Trouble

• September 10, 2002 former Mayor Michael Mitoma pleads guilt for defaulting on $3846 worth of taxes out of his official salary in 1995 and 1996, LA Times reports.

• November 22, 2002 former Mayor Daryl Sweeney and former Mayor Pete Fajardo are arrested and charged with extorting money from businesses for three years. Former council members Raunda Frank and Manuel Ontala are charged with related crimes, LA Times reports.

• January 30, 2003 Former Mayor Pete Fajardo pleads guilty. Former council members Raunda Frank and Manuel Ontala sign plea agreements, LA Times reports.

• July 30 2003 Former Mayor Daryl Sweeney pleads guilty, LA Times reports.

• February 15, 2005 The twelfth person is convicted in Carson corruption ring, LA Times reports.

• July 20, 2005 Robert Dennis Pryce Jr, the lawyer who brokered the $585,000 corruption deal, gets 6.5 years in prison, LA Times reports.

• In 2006 a political activist group called Carson Citizens for Reform begins a movement to recall current Mayor Jim Dear.

• October 2007- then Mayor Pro Tempore and former council member Elito Santarina says he witnessed Mayor Jim Dear call council member Lula Davis-Holmes a “bitch” during a private argument. Dear denies that this ever happened. (Photo from the official website of the City of Carson)

• November 2007- Council member Mike Gipson disturbs a council meeting by refusing to sit down and "challenging a member of the audience to a fight," as Dear describes it. (Photo from the official website of the City of Carson)

• January 2008- former Mayor Vera DeWitt charged with misdemeanor battery after hitting one of the mayor’s supporters on the head with a bunch of papers. YouTube video “Carson City Council SMACK” receives over 500,000 views.

• April 17, 2008 Former Mayor Vera DeWitt reaches court settlement to avoid criminal prosecution and jail sentence, LA Times reports.

• September 16, 2008 Mayor Jim Dear defeats recall bid, Daily Breeze reports.

After more than 7 years of political unrest, let's hope Mayor Jim Dear still believes the words he said in 2008-“I want to make Carson a great city, it can be done,” -despite having what he called a "dysfunctional" city council.

Gipson Returns For Another Round

Despite Mayor Jim Dear's efforts to unseat Council Member Mike Gipson, Gipson has been re-elected for another term on Carson's city council. This means that the newly re-elected Jim Dear will still be in the political minority.

(Unofficial results from the City of Carson website)

Election 2009

For this election, The Daily Breeze reported that Dear teamed up with Gipson's rivals, former Council Member Julie Ruiz Raber and incumbent Council Member Harold Williams, who sent out mailers blaming Dear's rivals for the council's "strife and discord."

In the same article, it was reported that an anonymous rumor was spread "drawing a link between Gipson and Bill Smalley, a political activist and a registered sex offender on the Megan's Law Web site."

The piece, titled "The two faces of Council Member Mike Gipson," was suspected of being Dear's work, but he denied it.

The Daily Breeze reported that "Gipson countered with a mailer accusing his opponents of mudslinging."

This is not the first incident of unpleasant rivalry between the two politicians

Past Conflicts

As reported in the Timeline of Trouble, in the previous post, in November 2007 Mayor Dear accused council member Gipson of "challenging a member of the audience to a fight." The disturbance was posted on YouTube.

Dear also said that Gipson acted in a threatening way towards him after the conflict at the council meeting. Gipson, in turn, said that he was threatened by one of Dear’s friends who said, “I’m going to get you.”

In 2008, Dear called Gipson a “nutcase” and a “phony” and listed Gipson and what he called Gipson’s “cult followers” as his main political rivals.

For his part, Gipson said, “I’m not against Mayor Dear… we can disagree without being disagreeable.”

Gipson and Dear also disagreed about the proposed incorporation of the 1,710-acre Rancho Dominguez area into Carson. Dear supported it while, in 2008, Gipson said "At this time, the city of Carson can not afford to annex the area.

The Possibility of Peace

A truce doesn't seem to be out of the question for these rivals. In 2008, Gipson said:

"We need to get the situation behind us and move on as a family...I pray for our city, I pray for the mayor."