Editorial
Our town lost one of its most inspiring, indefatigable residents Monday afternoon when Harold Waterhouse, 94, passed away peacefully at a nursing home in Sherman Oaks. He and his wife, Edith, 90, had moved there just two weeks earlier from the home that he built on Wildomar back in 1947. We’ll publish Harold’s full obituary in next week’s paper, along with tributes by several of his friends. In the meantime, I’d like to recount a friendship that began when I became managing editor of the Post in May 1993, just a month after Harold and Lloyd Ahern received Citizen of the Year honors for playing key roles in the campaign to create a 35-foot height limit along the Sunset corridor through the Palisades’thereby thwarting construction of condominium and apartment buildings twice that height. I began working with Harold after he came to the Post with a new cause in early 1994: the restoration of lower Los Liones Canyon, a derelict piece of land that a local group wanted to transform into a botanical garden. But first, Harold was concerned about a broken gate that allowed him to enter the 8-foot-high concrete storm drain that runs from the Los Liones trailhead (opposite the Mormon Church) down to where it empties into the ocean below Gladstone’s parking lot, nearly a mile away. ‘The state should repair the gate to keep out younger explorers,’ Harold said, and he suggested we could photograph him at both ends of the storm drain to illustrate his argument. He was 83 at the time. Impressed by Harold’s unabashed enthusiasm, I drove to Los Liones with a photographer who took pictures of Harold squeezing around the entrance gate and entering the drain with only a long white pole to guide him through the darkness. ‘I bet my wife is worried sick’she knows I took off without my light,’ he said with concern, though obviously he was not about to spoil the adventure by going back home. After he waved cheerfully and disappeared into the drain, we drove down to Gladstone’s, and within minutes, Harold was waving to us from behind the iron gate guarding the drain’s exit. Unable to get past the gate here, he simply headed back up the mammoth drain, using the pole to feel the walls to know where he was going. ‘It’s dark as anything can be,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘There’s another drain at Los Liones and if I’m not careful, I could be lost forever.’ Back at the trailhead, Harold remarked that ‘it was all uphill coming back,’ and that he managed to get some spider webs in his hair. ‘But so what? It was a good workout!’ Through the years that followed, I enjoyed publishing Letters to the Editor from Harold and stories about his latest quests. In 1997, for example, he began leading weekly nature walks for seniors, who would rest at the end of the hike and ponder the mystery of life and death. A year later, he published a 119-page book, ‘Sensing the Omega: Voyaging to the Afterlife,’ which our reviewer Rev. Ignacio Castuera praised as an admirable distillation of years of reading, studying and probing the ‘not-so-easy-to-understand message’ of the French philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Harold, who had been active in California’s Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in 1982, embraced a global strategy as the millennium approached. He organized a group called Mature Active Palisadians in May 1999 and prompted them to write a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Vice President Al Gore that pleaded: ‘Please work to dismantle our nuclear weapons’ and Russia’s…We must buy Russia’s nuclear weapons and destroy them along with ours. Now! Today!’ After the 2000 election, Harold wrote an Opinion piece titled ‘How Clinton Could Save Our Lives’ that urged the president to start a campaign for the worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons while still in office. Earlier that year he left a similar letter at our front desk with a note attached saying, ‘I have sent this to Vladimir Putin!’ Right up until November 2 this year, this incurable crusader was writing letters to John Kerry’s campaign managers, trying to convince them that if their candidate would announce his determination to pressure every country into ‘verifiably destroying all of their nuclear weapons,’ this could win the presidency. Whenever Harold submitted articles and essays to the Post, I could count on getting two or three edited versions before I had a ‘final’ draft ready for publication. His wife once apologized for him in a note that said, ‘Disregard Harold’s last two envelopes to you. He is a ‘re-write man.’ Please consider this last submission.’ Following publication of one of his pieces, or a Page 2 column that reflected his anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons passion, Harold Waterhouse became our best door-to-door promoter. He would Xerox hundreds of enlarged copies of the story at The Letter Shop on Via, leave a copy at our office down the street, and then spend days walking his neighborhood and the Alphabet streets, hanging copies on doorknobs and urging residents to express similar sentiments to their political leaders. This citizen warrior with the incandescent smile never gave up hope, right down to the final days of his life when he asked a friend to hire a typist for his voluminous correspondence, and we should all mourn the loss of such a principled man who worked so hard in his belief that one man can indeed make a difference.
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