Ethel Haydon Upholds the Town’s Ideals

To be called a NIMBY is not a compliment. The term ‘Not In My Backyard’ often describes people who regard their own neighborhoods ahead of the greater good or, more to the point, don’t mind a cell tower as long as it isn’t in their line of sight. But before we denigrate NIMBYism completely, we should recall NIMBYs whom we credit for saving so much of our beloved natural heritage. Think of John Muir, who launched his campaign for Yosemite after living there for a summer. One of our own treasured NIMBYs, Ethel Haydon, has spent most of her 76 years in Pacific Palisades, which has certainly given her the bona fides to ‘help keep a community that people value and are willing to pay too much to live in,’ as she says.   Haydon, who was honored with the Pacific Palisades Community Council’s Community Service Award last Thursday, has been resolute in her battles to protect Pacific Palisades as a town where the mountains meet the sea.   From the time Haydon was three months old, she has known no other home but Pacific Palisades. Now the doyenne of Evans Road, she lives on an acre surrounded by riparian wildness, just north of Sunset. My visit with her started, naturally, outdoors, patrolling her property, which abuts Rustic Creek. While I stopped to admire the chicken coop filled with an exotic and colorful brood, Haydon related an early morning standoff she had observed between a menacing coyote and an owl. She confesses that she would spend all her time outside if she could. Haydon, nee Shanks, moved with her parents and two sisters to Pacific Palisades from Baltimore in 1933 at the height of the Depression. Her grandmother, an eccentric free spirit and smart businesswoman, lived on Chautauqua, which became home for the Shankses for the first three years before the family moved to a house on Hartzell. Ethel’s father, Walter, found work as an auto mechanic in the Standard station at Sunset and PCH and later owned Sam’s tool shop on Fourth Street in Santa Monica. The community of Pacific Palisades and the initial ideal for the town hold high ranking for Haydon, a conviction that has propelled her into battles to keep the mountains wild and the history of the town chronicled. She likes to call her activism a shock response. ‘The first thing that made me mad was when I was 5 years old,’ she recalls. ‘My dad and I went down Channel Road in Santa Monica Canyon to look at the flood damage caused by the rainstorm of 1938. I was on dad’s shoulders and so I could see the spot where we used to picnic at the beach was gone. I was devastated to see how eight feet of mud and debris had eroded away 12 feet of beachfront, destroying the beach where my dad loved to surf; he owned seven surfboards. ‘The second thing that made me mad was when the cross was removed from Peace Hill [at the mountain end of Via de la Paz, prior to homes being built] and my Palisades Elementary school friend David McGrath said, ‘That’s progress, what do you expect?’ I said, ‘but that’s Peace Hill; isn’t that what were all about? I won’t let that happen. Houses can’t be built on our mountains where I walk, where I see the wildflowers.” Haydon was not able to halt the housing development, but years later she did turn her attention to preserving the history of the town, joining Katie La Hue in the Historical Round Table, which became the Pacific Palisades Historical Society in 1972. Ethel served as charter president. The 1970s was a decade that challenged the core values of Pacific Palisades. ‘So many things needed to be done,’ says Haydon, who joined the Temescal Canyon Association (also founded in 1972), and was on the front lines fighting to protect lower Los Liones Canyon from an apartment development just above Sunset. Believing that in order to present a defense you must have a plausible argument, Haydon promoted the idea in the late 1960s that Los Liones would make an ideal location for an arboretum. ‘We went to Paul Priolo’s office (a state assemblyman from 1968-1980) and explained the uniqueness of Los Liones as a frost-free, north-south canyon. We had cleared the path for an arboretum with the director of the Los Angeles Arboretum and were proceeding with a health and welfare condemnation. ‘I remember saying to Priolo, ‘The public deserves Los Liones and you’d better give it to us!’ Even after the Arboretum pulled out of the project, saying they didn’t have any money, we then cited the fact that there was 10 feet of uncompacted soil in Los Liones, which made it unsuitable for a large apartment development.’ Los Liones was saved. In 1974, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors officially endorsed efforts by State Parks to acquire the rustic canyon and add it to the state park system. In 1972-73, Haydon got involved in the effort to downsize the scope of the Highlands residential development, an effort that was ultimately successful, but came too late to prevent that incursion into Santa Ynez Canyon and the foothills. When Haydon commuted, by bus, to L.A. City College after high school (at University High), she studied philosophy and gained a watershed insight. ‘It was the first time I heard that there were two possible answers to the same question: yes or no,’ she says. A subtle thing, but Haydon has applied this simple paradigm over the years to the campaigns she has fought in protecting her community. Not one to lead the pack, Haydon instead calls herself the Girl Friday, and is proud of her political acumen. ‘I taught Winston Salser how to do City Hall,’ she recalls, speaking of the Palisades resident who served as the second president of TCA and was a leader in the fight to minimize the development in the Highlands. ‘I remember his first appearance before the city council,’ Haydon says. ‘He was outraged: ‘They didn’t address me as Doctor!’ I told him to ignore that and figure out who was the highest in the pecking order. In the case of Marvin Braude, he learned that his chief deputy, Claire Rogger, was an important person to know.’ Salser, founding president of Amgen, learned his lesson well. He took pictures of a virtual build-up in the Highlands, and blew them up on a big poster board, which he presented to Braude at his office. The campaign was successful, forcing the developer, Chuck Chastain, to cut down the size of the lots, provide more street access and donate open space for public use. Haydon also takes credit for getting Braude elected. In a pre-election forum,’ she recalls, ‘five lawyers got up and promised ‘I’ll do this and I’ll do that.’ Then Marvin got up. He was earnest and he was honest!’ Haydon lent her stepdaughters to volunteer in his campaign office, while she hosted teas and coffees and passed around petitions to put his name on the ballot. Just 19 when she married Brownlee (who was 36, and died in 1982), Haydon grew up fast. She became stepmother to his two children, 10 and 14 at the time, and soon had two children of her own. Brownlee’s father, Eustace, was a minister and lived with the couple from age 80 until his death at 95 (in 1975). It was a pleasurable interlude for Haydon. ‘I used him as my philosophy teacher,’ she says. ‘I would ask him how to handle this or that situation in the most ethical manner. Some people have church; I had Eustace.’ These days, Haydon enjoys the haven that surrounds her and indulges her various interests with the ‘freedom to be myself.’ She sits at the Historical Society table at the Sunday farmers’ market, and notes a change in the nature of volunteerism. ‘In the 1970s there were so many things that needed to be done. Palisadians today are involved in their kids’ things, their own work, and paying for their home.’ When contemplating the essence of effective volunteerism, Haydon goes to the root. ‘You have to care about something,’ she says simply. But, Haydon’s seemingly simplistic statement has always been reinforced by her practical strategies.