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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Commemorating an Anniversary and a Death

Everyone loves an anniversary, so I’m not hesitant to point out that this column marks the fifth anniversary of Kaleidoscope: Our Changing Valley. Five years ago, when the Business Journal’s Publisher and Ye Olde Editor approached me with the notion of writing a regular column, I asked, “What do you want me to write about?” Innocently, they told me, “Whatever you want.” A journalistic zealot Naïf that he is, he had no idea that I would sully the pages of a respectable business publication with essays on typewriters, Ferdinand the Bull, Nebraska’s form of government, taking kids to a bookstore, the nation of Bhutan, and Michael Jackson’s funeral circus. Or that I would take on Angelo Mozilo, home-grown racists, and City Hall and Sacramento miscreants with the zeal of a television evangelist. They did not warn me that if I assumed the task of providing somewhere around 800 words each month, those words would be ensconced as far back in the paper as possible, serving readers’ needs by making those words easy to miss. Some things never change While our region’s financial situation has truly tanked in the past half-decade, many things have not changed in the past five years North of Mulholland: Bob Rodine’s moustache is no less luxuriant; Bruce Ackerman is no less suave; Woodbury University’s Don St. Clair is sponsoring no fewer Business Journal events; and Bert Boeckmann still runs the world’s largest Ford dealership. Another case in point: In June 2005, in that very first column, I wrote: “Maybe secession is a state of mind, a point of view…Perhaps we’ve become a separate city (made up of many communities) simply because it became so easy to live and work here. While taxes and government tie us to Los Angeles, perhaps we’ve become a separate city in our hearts and minds…and maybe that’s what matters most. “Maybe we should stop worrying about what Los Angeles is doing to us and start focusing on what we can do for ourselves. The result of too many people – and their cars – is that we’ve created our own de facto city. So let’s get on with building it.” Still good advice, if I say so myself. Bloomington The 60 or so columns I’ve written have just been published in book form. Most book publishers are located in New York, London, or other major metropolises (shouldn’t it be “metropoli”?). Not mine; my publisher – Author House – is located in Bloomington, Indiana! Selecting a title wasn’t as traumatic as I thought it would be. My natural instinct (of which I have so few) was to replicate the name of this column: Kaleidoscope. But finding cover art that would fit that title proved a challenge beyond the capabilities of my publisher, about 50 friends who wanted to help, and certainly me. So we settled on a title that I’ve used to describe Our Valley (drum roll, please): North of Mulholland, with a subtitle, Essays from the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. (You have to admit, “essays” sounds more elegant than “columns.”) A missing photograph More difficult was finding a photograph of myself for the inside back cover flap that showed me with a full head of hair, no wrinkles and a muscular build…oddly enough, no such pictorial representation of yours truly was ever unearthed. In case you think this fifth-year-anniversary column is a totally-lacking-in-subtlety plug…you’re right. My only saving grace is that all of the proceeds are going to a pair of my favorite Valley non-profit organizations, the Boys & Girls Club of the West Valley and New Horizons, which provides services to our community’s adults with developmental disabilities. If you want a copy, you can buy it online at Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. If you want to save a few dollars, you can buy it directly from Author House. Of course, if you really want to save money, you can contact me at the e-mail address below ($24 for the hardcover/$14 for the softcover, plus $3 shipping)…I’ll even sign it for you, which, of course, adds absolutely no value to the book. A Good Man, and a Great Man Speaking of anniversaries, it would be churlish not to mention the passing of one of Our Valley’s true greats, Coach John Wooden. He was but four months shy of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. I first met the Coach when I was editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin in the ‘60s. A picture of the two of us hangs on my home office wall; the basketball he signed to me has a place of honor in my bookcase; his autographed-to-me book is atop a pile of my favorite volumes…not because he was a man who coached basketball, but because he was a man who taught young people how to be adults. When Walt Disney died in December, 1966, Eric Sevareid’s on-camera CBS News eulogy concluded with “…we’ll never see his like again.” The same could be said of Coach Wooden. An anniversary is a time to celebrate the joys of today, the memories of yesterday, and the hopes of tomorrow. Author Unknown Martin Cooper is President of Cooper Communications, Inc. He is President of the Los Angeles Quality and Productivity Commission; Founding President of The Executives; Vice Chairman-Marketing of the Boys & Girls Club of the West Valley; and a member of the Boards of the Valley Economic Alliance and of the LAPD’s West Valley Jeopardy Program. He is a Past Chairman of VICA and Chairman of its Board of Governors and; Past President of the Public Relations Society of America-Los Angeles Chapter and of the Encino Chamber of Commerce. He can be reached at [email protected].

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