Menu Passes from Farberow to Riordan By MICHAEL AUSHENKER Staff Writer ‘Some of you are probably wondering why a news anchor would be doing this?’ said a beaming KTTV News anchor Carlos Amezcua as he led a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Village Pantry and Oak Room restaurants. ‘Well, they promised me free food!’ So commenced the late afternoon fanfare last Friday as former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan hosted a block party to celebrate the grand opening of his two eateries on Swarthmore Avenue, just north of Sunset. Riordan, whose pair of restaurants have enjoyed a soft roll-out since mid-January, joined with family members, friends and residents as they enjoyed a free menu sampling at the Pantry and a no-host bar in the Oak Room. Special guests included Christine Devine, Amezcua’s co-anchor on ‘News at 10’; William Morris Agency CEO Jim Wyatt; and L.A. City Councilman (District 11) Bill Rosendahl. ‘This is the greatest place in Southern California,’ Riordan told the Palisadian-Post, when asked why he pursued the restaurant space on Swarthmore. ‘And Palisadians are the greatest people.’ Riordan, a Brentwood resident, enjoyed riding his bike to the Palisades and having breakfast at the former Mort’s Deli, which he acquired and began remodeling last spring when owner Bobbie Farberow decided to retire. She and her late husband, Mort, were active business owners and citizens in Pacific Palisades for more than 30 years. Bobbie, who recently sold her house and moved into a condominium on Sunset in the Palisades, was on hand Friday as Riordan called on the partygoers to embrace the community involvement inspired by the Farberows. He also directed them to the plaque on a wall in front of the Village Pantry that reads: ‘Mort’s Palisades Deli operated at this location from 1974 to 2007. Mort and Bobbie Farberow’s generosity and community spirit were an inspiration to all.’ Riordan told the Post that he hopes the Village Pantry will live up to the expectations of locals, who have fond memories of their beloved Mort’s. ‘We wanted a modern version of Mort’s,’ said Riordan, who also owns Gladstone’s on PCH at Sunset and The Original Pantry in downtown Los Angeles, He added that he felt ‘very lucky’ to have such ‘strong managers and a great chef’ in place on Swarthmore. ‘I think pairing the two restaurants provides great contrast,’ said executive chef Doug Silberberg, a Palisades Highlands resident and the former chef of Michael’s in Santa Monica. The Pantry specializes in breakfast and light lunch and dinner fare, while the Oak Room (now open 7 days a week, 5 to 9 p.m.) is a bistro. Amezcua, who until last year led KTLA’s ‘Morning Show’ for more than 15 years, told the Post that his long friendship with Riordan goes back to his KTLA days, when Riordan was a frequent guest. ‘He drags me from restaurant to restaurant to do the ribbon-cutting. I’m his trained monkey,’ Amezcua said, laughing. Riordan’s daughter, Patricia Torrey, who has lived in the Palisades with her husband Dana since 1994, credits her friend, Linda Davis, for coming up with the name The Village Pantry. Torrey said that she wants this Pantry to become ‘a place where people are happy to come to. We want to be a part of the community the way Mort and Bobbie were.’ Inside the Pantry, while greeting a stream of her former customers, Bobbie told the Post, ‘I’m very proud of Dick Riordan, Trish and everybody. I think they did a fantastic job.’ She added about her retirement, ‘Not working seven days a week is not a bad thing, I hate to say.’

After a mudslide in January 2005 that wiped out one lane on Paseo Miramar, neighbors requested the road be fixed, and city officials responded. Last Thursday, about 25 community members and city officials celebrated the construction of a new retaining wall, which will prevent future landslides from obscuring the road. ‘Community members had been complaining, so as soon as we got in office, we started working on it,’ said Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who won the election for the 11th District in May 2005. Wielding gigantic scissors, Rosendahl grinned as he cut a red ribbon last Thursday to unveil the new 110-foot wall to the public. The wall cost about $400,000 and was paid for out of the city’s general-fund budget. Construction work began in December and lasted through February. The Miramar Homeowners Association approached the city about the issue because the canyon road, located off Sunset Boulevard, is tight and curvy with limited visibility, said Bob Ramsdell, co-chair of the Miramar Homeowners Association. Drivers would round a bend and discover the road had suddenly changed from two lanes to one and there was an oncoming car. ‘It was a safety issue,’ said Audrey Ann Boyle, co-chair of the association. ‘It’s a narrow street, and we wanted to have it so cars could go by in a safe manner.’ There’s a favorite hiking spot on the top of Paseo Miramar that connects to Topanga State Park, so on weekends there was a significant increase in traffic, Ramsdell added. The new concrete retaining wall, with steel reinforcement bars, is 10 inches thick, 30-45 feet below the surface and 12 feet above ground at its tallest point, said Gary Lee Moore, city engineer. During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Rosendahl teasingly tapped the wall to make sure it was secure, and Moore assured him it would prevent slides. ‘This type of retaining-wall system is commonly used in the industry,’ Moore told the Palisadian-Post. ‘We have designed similar walls in other parts of the city. One example is the retaining wall behind the Chinatown Library on the corner of Ord Street and Castelar Street.’ About 17 employees from the city’s Bureau of Engineering managed the project and approximately 32 workers from Calex Engineering Company constructed the wall, Moore said. Rosendahl said he is pleased that the wall was constructed this year because the city is facing a $400-million to $500-million budget deficit in fiscal year 2008-09. Rosendahl thinks if another year had passed, the project might not have happened. Ramsdell said he is grateful for Rosendahl and his staff’s efforts. ‘They had a lot of people making phone calls four years ago, when there were rains and slides throughout the city,’ he said. ‘They recognized that this was a danger and responded to us.’

When sisters Nancy Proano and Martha Willis heard that state legislators might close Will Rogers State Historic Park because of financial woes, they wanted to help keep the park open. The sisters were among approximately 300 volunteers who spruced up the park on Friday and Saturday as part of the ‘Will Rogers Never Met a State Park He Didn’t Like’ event hosted by the newly formed Will Rogers Ranch Foundation. The foundation organized the event to give citizens a chance to show their love of state parks, said Will Rogers’ great-granddaughter Jennifer Rogers Etcheverry. ‘We want to make people feel like this is their park,’ Etcheverry said. ‘Next time they come to Will Rogers, they can point out what they did.’ On Friday, Proano and Willis, who live in Culver City and Lake Balboa respectively, slathered their paint rollers with primer and brushed the interior walls of the park’s main barn. ‘I love this park,’ said Proano, whose hair was flecked with white paint. ‘It reminds me of my dad who has since passed away. We used to hike, have picnics and watch polo’ It would be a shame if they closed it.’ California State Parks has proposed closing 48 of the 278 state parks and reducing lifeguard staffing at 16 beaches in response to Governor Arnold Schwarzengger’s request that the department reduce its general fund budget by 10 percent. The state faces a $14.5-billion budget deficit. Salaries are the largest part of State Parks’ budget and the closures would allow the department to eliminate 136 positions, said Roy Stearns, communication deputy director for California State Parks. This means the department could reduce its general fund budget by $13.3 million. However, State Parks would lose $3.7 million in revenue generated by day-use fees at the 48 parks. State legislators will decide later this spring or summer about whether the parks will be closed. If they decide to close Will Rogers, the property would revert to the Rogers family. Betty Rogers, Will’s wife, deeded the 186-acre property to the state in 1944 with that stipulation. ‘The family doesn’t want it given back,’ Etcheverry said. ‘The family wants to keep it open as a memorial to my great-grandfather.’ To provide additional funding for the park, Etcheverry formed the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation with Trudi Sandmeier, whose grandfather was Will Rogers’ personal assistant, and Todd Vradenberg, a member of the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation, which supports children and infants with pulmonary disease. Etcheverry is hopeful the foundation and state can partner to keep the park open. ‘We are working with California State Parks, and they are fully supportive of us,’ she said. ‘I am optimistic.’ The foundation is interviewing candidates for its board and will begin organizing fundraisers soon. Residents can become members for a fee ranging from $35 to $1,000, which also benefits the foundation’s efforts. Etcheverry hopes to raise enough money to restore the historic barn and all the rooms of the ranch house as well as open and operate a gift shop. On Friday, youth from the park’s Westside Riding School giggled and chatted as they cleaned the horses’ stalls inside Jim’s Barn (named after Will Rogers’ son). ‘I ride here, and I heard they might close it down,’ said Sophie Offer, a seventh-grader at Crossroads School. ‘I was really inspired to actually do something rather than just ride horses here. I wanted to help and make a difference.’ The 12-year-old has taken lessons from Westside Riding School instructor Dorte Lindegaard at the park for the past two years. Talia Lawrence, a 16-year-old at Wildwood School, also felt inspired to lend a hand. ‘I came here a lot as a kid for picnics and to ride horses. It’s a beautiful place with a lot of history and is one of the main reasons I decided to help preserve the parks,’ she said. Lawrence, a Mar Vista resident, started a campaign ‘Students Against the Closure of California Parks’ and created a Web site, www.saccap.synthasite.com, where she is selling buttons to benefit state parks. ‘These parks are indispensable to not only the people but also the wildlife,’ Lawrence said. On Saturday, Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton helped paint Jim’s Barn to show her support. Volunteers also restored the hitching rail that Will Rogers once used to tie his horse in front of his house in the early 1930s. They celebrated the completion of that project with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Councilman Bill Rosendahl. He and Councilman Ed Reyes wrote a resolution against closing state parks and reducing lifeguard staffing that the Los Angeles City Council approved on April 2. Volunteers received free lunch, T-shirts and bandanas from the Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation for their efforts. ‘I’m impressed with the number of volunteers, but I’m more impressed with what they got done,’ said Randy Young, a Pacific Palisades resident and historian who helped organize the event.

Guttenberg Short Circuits On ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Call him the ‘anti-Carolla.’ For the first three weeks of the ABC competition show ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ everyone’s favorite erstwhile honorary mayor, Palisadian and comic actor Steve Guttenberg, seemed to have all the right moves’and to lead in the popularity department. Coupled with exquisite choreographer Anna Trebunskay, Guttenberg, 49, held his own, even as one of his competitors, smarmy radio personality Adam Carolla, lobbed barbs at the affable actor. For a moment in time, Guttenberg charmed America, and not an episode of ‘Dancing’ went by when he didn’t mention his parents back East ‘ the reason, as Guttenberg told the Palisadian-Post on March 13, that he agreed to do the show. But the tango edition of ‘Dancing’ got the best of the ‘Three Men and a Baby’ star. America had voted. Within the opening minutes of the April 1 show (no joke!), Guttenberg was eliminated, despite the fact that he had gamely mocked his own image portraying an aspiring rapper in a ‘Dancing’ April Fool’s skit. Could’ve been worse, as anyone who caught this week’s Carolla fiasco knows, witnessing Guttenberg’s shock jock doppelganger in Zorro outfit and moustache, beginning his routine on a unicycle (!) and dancing like Frankenstein’s monster in a Dracula costume. The judges were baffled…or perhaps merely pausing as America caught its collective breath from laughing so hard. This is dancing? America’s love affair with Guttenberg seems to be over’for now. But don’t count the Gute out. To paraphrase a certain cinematic cyborg famously portrayed by our Governor, ‘He’ll be back!’

Santa Monica resident Joe Mifsud was at Coastline beach, across from the Getty Villa, on February 16, when he saw a skull in the rocks. ‘Oh, my god, it’s a human skull,’ Mifsud thought and he later told the Palisadian-Post, ‘I knew it was real.’ He ran to his car, grabbed his cell phone and called 911 to report that he had found a skull. Then he waited. ‘In a little bit, I saw three red-and-white helicopters come over and I thought that they were coming because of my call, but they flew over,’ said Mifsud who works for Palisadian architect James R. Stewart. After 45 minutes, no one had come, so he called 911 again and repeated, ‘There is a human skull on the beach.’ The 911 operator told him that there was no record of his call. ‘Do you think I’m joking?’ Mifsud asked. ‘I just don’t call 911 for a prank. There’s a skull.’ The operator advised him to retrieve the skull, before it washed back into the ocean. Mifsud went to the rocks, found a stick and picked the skull up with that stick and continued to wait. Finally two Malibu patrol cars arrived. When the officers saw the skull, which was missing teeth and a lower jawbone, they called homicide. ‘They didn’t seem prepared because they didn’t have a bag to put the skull into,’ Mifsud said. He was told that the skull had to be placed in a paper bag rather than a plastic one because of contamination, so he got one out of his trunk and gave it to the officers. Mifsud was told the reason for the 911-response delay was due to the location of that beach, which is on the borderline of city and county call areas. LAPD Homicide Detective Mark Lillienfeld called Mifsud the following Wednesday and a coroner’s team went to the beach to meet with Mifsud, who showed them the location he found the skull. No additional bones were found. Los Angeles Sheriff’s Homicide Detective Mark Lillienfeld, who was in charge of the investigation, was contacted by the Post. ‘It looks real,’ he said, ‘but we don’t know if it’s real or not until the anthropologist in the coroner’s office takes a look at it.’ The skull was sent to the office the third week in February, but it took several weeks for a result because of caseload volume at the L.A. County Coroner’s office. According to Lillienfeld, it is the largest in the world, performing more than 10,000 autopsies a year– the next closest is New York City with 5,000. On March 13, Lillienfeld had the report. ‘It was an adult male, most likely African or Asian American,’ he said. ‘The longest amount of time the skull has been in the water is at least six months, but not more than two years.’ He said there were no marks on the skull that would indicate cause of death, so it was listed as ’cause of death unknown.’ The skull was sent to the California Department of Justice DNA lab in Sacramento to see if DNA can be extracted that can be matched to men who are missing or were unidentified.