Nearly every day for the past 52 years, Lorraine Oshins has awoken to the sound of ocean waves crashing down on the beach below her home. From her bedroom balcony, her living room, her kitchen and her kitchen-adjacent sundeck she has a sweeping view from Palos Verdes to the coastal mountains in Malibu. Along with the view comes a nice breeze of fresh ocean air, a rarity in most parts of Los Angeles. Lorraine’s home, where she lives with her husband Ned, is hidden away in what she calls, ‘an obscure little corner of the Palisades’ at 283 Trino Way, just above the Bel-Air Bay Club. “The views of the ocean and beaches are spectacular from most of the residences on Trino Way,” Lorraine says. “Until recently, we knew most of the other residents in the neighborhood. It was truly a little island unto itself, unknown even to many other Palisadians.” Now, as the Oshins prepare to move closer to the Palisades village, this hidden retreat is on the market, listed at $3,195,000. In addition to the incredible views, the home features three bedrooms, two bathrooms, the sundeck and balcony, hardwood floors, a wood-burning fireplace and lovely gardens. Before moving to Pacific Palisades in the early 1950s, Lorraine lived with her first husband, Aris Anagnos, in Santa Monica, where they paid a mere $75 per month for an apartment. Soon they were ready to move into a house and they began looking for homes in Pacific Palisades and Rustic Canyon. “Why do you want to live in the boondocks?'” their friends inquired, believing them to be a bit crazy. Lorraine knew then, as she reiterates today, that “there has always been a strong community feeling here, and that always appealed to us.” While still looking for the perfect house, Lorraine and her husband rented an apartment on Haverford for $109 per month, where they stayed for several years, and started a family. Soon, they found their dream home on Trino Way. “The minute we saw this one we knew it was what we wanted,” Lorraine says. “It was perfect.” Son Demos Anagnos was nine-months old when they moved into the house, and daughter Thalia Anagnos was born a few years later. Demos, who attended Palisades High for two years before transferring to the Cate School in Carpinteria, now lives in Thousand Oaks and works as an attorney. Thalia, who graduated from PaliHi in the early 1980s, is a civil engineer and a professor at San Jose State. The hillside home on Trino Way was built in 1953 by Lloyd Jones, who had built other houses in the vicinity and specialized in hillside construction. The home had been on the market for one year when Lorraine and her husband purchased it. A native of Atlanta, Lorraine attended Huntington College in Montgomery, Alabama, where she studied linguistics. After graduating in 1944, she joined the Navy and was sent to New York. “I thought it would be very romantic to do something like training aviators to the Navy,” Lorraine recalls, “but as soon as they found out I had a language background I was sent to Washington, D.C. to work for Naval Intelligence.” In the final year of World War II, she worked from D.C. as a cryptographer, using her skills in French, Spanish and German language to help break enemy codes. She continued working at the job for several years before applying to graduate school. Years before, in 1929, Lorraine had taken a train trip with her mother and siblings to visit her grandmother in Los Angeles, a trip she had enjoyed and always remembered, prompting her to apply to UCLA. “Coming to California was a treat. I was rather glad I got accepted out here,” Lorraine said. She relocated to Southern California in the late 1940s and attended graduate school at UCLA, where she received a master’s degree in French language and met her first husband, Aris Anagnos, who had escaped Greece during the Nazi occupation and then joined in the British Army during World War II before eventually moving to Los Angeles to complete his education at UCLA. In 1952, Lorraine began a 40-year career as a high school (and some junior high) language teacher in Los Angeles public schools. She retired in 1992 from Hamilton High School. In the mid-1960s, after divorcing Anagnos, Lorraine met World War II veteran Ned Oshins through mutual friends she knew from her involvement in various women’s groups. They were married in 1966 and have been living on Trino Way ever since. Originally from Escanaba, Michigan, Ned had traveled to California several times after the war to visit various family members. “We shed our overcoats, discovered wrestling on TV and found California a convivial place to spend the winter,” he wrote in an essay about his first visit. He relocated to Los Angeles, graduated from Cal State Northridge, and became a businessman who had his hands in various ventures over the years. When he and Lorraine met, he was manufacturing plastic bubbles that were used on the roofs of homes. Later he began a public relations firm that represented architects around Los Angeles. He then returned to manufacturing, this time items for gardens, mostly plant pots. He also operated a bookmobile that sold books all over California. His final job before retiring was as a traveling caterer, in which he operated several trucks and carts that visited large office buildings in Westwood and Brentwood at mealtimes. Now retired, the Oshins are ready to leave their fantastic hillside residence. At 83, Lorraine still climbs around in their backyard–a steep terraced hill ascending to Arno Way–weeding and taking care of the landscaping, a chore that she is ready to give up. Her efforts, though, have resulted in a beautifully maintained yard. During the first winter Lorraine lived in the house, there was nothing on the back hillside to keep it from slowly deteriorating. She quickly had a steel-and-brick wall installed at the base of the hill all around the house and another one in front. Careful attention was also paid to landscaping, resulting in a stable hillside that has survived El Nino storms and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The Oshins will also be happy to give up the precipitous driveway that has become difficult to walk up and down, even though leaving the hillside means giving up their view. “It’ll be hard,” Lorraine admits, “but we’re getting to the point that we’re old and we thought a house in the village would certainly be better than a hillside lot.” The neighborhoods adjoining the business district seem an obvious choice for the Oshins, who spend every morning enjoying coffee with friends at Gelson’s or other cafes in town. Lorraine finds it hard to believe how much the village has evolved since she first arrived in Pacific Palisades. “The village has changed so much,” she says. “It used to be this tiny little village at the end of Los Angeles and nobody wanted to live out here.” Now, though, the Palisades has become a very popular residential destination. Currently on Trino Way, a large new house, complete with a basement, is being constructed. “It’s very shocking to me what they’re building,” Lorraine says. “This hillside is very delicate.’ Lorraine is further shocked, and admittedly disturbed too, that so many mansions are popping up in the community. ‘They’re building huge houses on lots that don’t accommodate them, giving the Palisades a different kind of look.” The Oshins have seen many other developmental changes in the Palisades, including the construction of Temescal Canyon Road from Sunset down to Pacific Coast Highway. “It was a beautiful canyon,” Lorraine says, “and I’m so sorry they ever did it.” She also is a bit weary of some newcomers, who she fears do not understand the principles on which Pacific Palisades was founded, principles she has been heavily involved in preserving. A former president of the Pacific Palisades Historical Society, Lorraine is a member of Palisadians for Peace and the Pacific Palisades Residents Association, and a past member of the Community Council. Regardless of new local trends, leaving the Palisades was never an option for the Oshins when they decided to put their house on the market. “It’s a friendly place,” Lorraine says, and she and Ned truly enjoy the strong sense of community that the town provides, as well as an established circle of friends and acquaintances and the close proximity to the beach, Malibu and Santa Monica. The Oshins hope to relocate to a home (with a flat yard) as close to the village as possible, preferably below Sunset. After some looking around they have found several prospects on Radcliffe Avenue, but are keeping their options open. In the meantime, they will continue to enjoy their breathtaking 180-degree view of the Pacific Ocean, remembering fondly the community they fell in love with, looking forward to remaining a part of it.

(Editor’s note: Dottie Weiler was a widow with five young children when she moved to an ocean-view house in Pacific Palisades in 1965. She lives in the same house today, with her husband, Allen Weiss, and this year is celebrating her 30th year as a real estate agent. Here is her story, as told to Managing Editor Bill Bruns.) By DOTTIE WEILER Special to the Palisadian-Post I was born and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I was a cheerleader in high school and a graduate of Cedar Crest College, a women’s liberal arts college. I married John Weiler, my high school sweetheart, after our junior years in college. I lived with his family during my senior year and John came home weekends from the University of Pennsylvania. We then moved to Ann Arbor where John studied for his master’s degree in business at Michigan and I took classes in opera appreciation. Our first child, Billy, was born in Ann Arbor. John eventually went into the family newspaper business, the Morning Call and Evening Chronicle, in Allentown. In 1965, John died suddenly of a heart attack. It was the hardest task of my life to tell the children (Billy, 10; Kathy, 8; Terry, 7; Kevin, 4; and Maura, 2) that their father had died. We were all in a state of disbelief. All of my memories in Allentown were of John and, typical of most women at that time, I depended on him for taking care of all business and financial decisions. I felt pretty desperate and vulnerable. Fortunately, a few years earlier, I had started performing in local musical productions at the Jewish Community Center. I was in ‘Guys and Dolls’ and I played Eliza Doolittle in ‘My Fair Lady.’ I had always enjoyed singing in church and college choirs, and it was great for me to have this newfound outlet. More importantly, I met Allen Weiss, who was the lighting designer for ‘Guys and Dolls,’ and we again worked together on ‘My Fair Lady.’ After my husband died, Allen wrote to his dad in Santa Monica describing my plight. Mort Weiss responded by writing a very kind and warm letter to me encouraging me to come to California and said he would help me get settled. Concurrently, Allen, recently graduated from NYU, was accepted into the graduate school of physics at UCLA. So, still pretty numb from the curveball life had thrown me, I placed a two-line ad in the local paper advertising the sale of my house and sold it to the first person who came to see it. Then I flew to California with Allen, met his dad, and went house hunting. I didn’t really know the Valley from Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Santa Monica or the Palisades, but Mort set me up with a young realtor who was none other than Jon Douglas, then working for George Elkins. Jon showed me property all over the Westside. I was hoping to find something for about $60,000, but it wasn’t easy because I needed four bedrooms and I wanted a big yard. He showed me a home in the Huntington Palisades, but it was $72,000 and I thought that was too expensive. Then Mort drove me to this area called Pacific View Estates (up above J. Paul Getty’s ranch), where they were literally taking orders. I signed up for a five-bedroom house with a huge yard and beautiful ocean and mountain views. It was $65,000. When my Allentown lawyer flew out to see the house, he thought I was crazy because the house I sold in Allentown was a gorgeous old Georgian colonial, solidly built, and just half the price. Nevertheless, in July of 1965, Allen and I packed my five children into my two cars, a Buick Riviera and a Dodge station wagon, and drove across the country to Pacific Palisades. The house was still two weeks from completion, so we checked into the Lindomar Motel at the corner of Sunset and PCH and drove the other guests to distraction while we waited for move-in day. I immediately enrolled Billy, Kathy and Terry in Marquez Elementary School and looked for a preschool for Kevin and Maura. Allen moved to Berkeley to work on his experiment at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. This was during the People’s Park era when students, including Allen, were gassed for expressing their views. It was also a time when one could fly up to Oakland for $20, and so Allen flew to L.A. frequently. Our friendship grew and in November 1969 we were married in my Pacific Palisades home. All the children took part in the ceremony performed by Ernie Pipes of the Unitarian Church. While Allen studied for his Ph.D. in physics, he accepted the job of heading up the science department at Windward School. Kathy and Terry, by then enrolled at Paul Revere Junior High, had come home to tell us about Shirley Windward and Carl Parsons, two of their teachers, who were starting up this school in Santa Monica. Even though I was always an advocate of the public school system, they convinced me they should transfer. It turned out to be a wise decision, and eventually Kathy, Terry and Kevin graduated from Windward. Billy graduated from Palisades High and Maura from Westlake School for Girls. Happily, all my kids graduated from college and all are married with one exception, and there are seven grandchildren. Family reunions are high on our list of vacations and we recently spent a week in Yosemite with 14 of the family. My first job after moving to California was as administrative assistant at Windward. For two years I answered phones, served as a liaison between faculty and parents, taught a yoga class and ran tennis tournaments as fundraisers for the school. After having a taste at working outside of the home, it occurred to me that I might be able to make more money in another type of profession. In 1977, I received my real estate license and started my career with Haddad Realty, a small office in the Palisades. Maura, my youngest child, was then in eighth grade, and I was ready for a change. I found the world of representing buyers and sellers in home purchases and sales exciting, and was thrilled when my total commissions for my first year came to $17,000. Over the past 30 years, I’ve had many challenging, interesting experiences in the field. I’ll never forget my first sale of over $1 million. It was in 1978. I had met my client while sitting on an open house in the Palisades. This was a very small house listed for about $350,000. I followed up the next day by calling the client who had left his phone number with me on the guest register. I showed him a few houses but nothing seemed to interest him. Then, I heard about a property that would be available to show for one day only, and it wasn’t advertised anywhere. It happened to be owned by a Windward parent whom I knew. The listing price was $1,100,000, and even though it was much higher than anything else I had previously shown my client, I had a hunch he would like it. Immediately after my client and his wife saw this beautiful Santa Monica home, they wanted to write an offer. The listing agent told me that there would be at least two other agents writing offers. I wrote a letter to my friends, the owners, telling them why they should choose my buyers. I was so happy when they selected my offer and I couldn’t wait to tell my clients. Then the euphoria deflated. My buyers had cold feet and wanted to cancel the deal. I immediately drove to their very humble home on Bundy Drive and sat down to talk with them. It turned out that their biggest concern was that they were moving so far out of range in price from all of their friends, they were worried about their friends’ reactions. I assured them that their friends would be thrilled to visit them in their grand, new home and would not think less of them for “moving up.” Happily the escrow closed and those clients have remained loyal to me over the years. After three years with Haddad, I joined Lelah Pierson Realty, spent three years there, and then moved to the Jon Douglas Company. He was eventually bought out by Prudential and then, finally, Coldwell Banker. In the midst of my real estate commitments, I still find time to nurture my passion for tennis, bridge, reading (I’m in three book groups, including one for just James Joyce), gourmet cooking, travel, and music, from opera to jazz. Allen and I joined the Riviera Tennis Club in 1985. Tennis is my favorite form of exercise–I try to play at least twice a week, in a doubles league and in special events’and much of our social life centers around our friends from the Riviera. When Allen retires as Director of Management Learning at a large aerospace company, I hope he will spend more time playing tennis. He also plans to expand on his love of photography. Every year at the Riviera, I’m also in charge of finding housing for more than 150 collegiate tennis players from all over the country who play in the Women’s All-American Tennis Championships at the club the first week of October. I place the girls in the homes of members for the week. Meanwhile, my love of singing led me to an interesting involvement in Chamber Music Palisades. Back when I moved to Pacific Palisades, I won the lead in “Little Mary Sunshine” at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre, and I started studying voice seriously, and opera specifically. But when the realization hit me that I would have to spend a lot of time away from home if I wanted to sing professionally, I stopped, cold turkey, and that’s when I got into real estate. I still love opera and most any form of music, but I never perform; maybe in a future reincarnation! Along the way, I met Dolores Stevens at the Unitarian Church where she was the choir director. I sang with that group for 10 years, until Delores left. She later co-founded a wonderfully professional organization, Chamber Music Palisades, with Susan Greenberg, and I have been an active board member the past seven years. In 2001, Chamber Music Palisades (with sponsorship at my urging by Coldwell Banker and manager Robert Sedway) began inviting the entire Palisades community, free of charge, to a yearly children’s concert at the Palisades Branch Library, featuring mini-musical productions of works such as ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and ‘Ferdinand the Bull.’ When the concert is held next month, it will again be ‘Peter and the Wolf,’ and families are forewarned that the ‘wolf’ (played by my husband) might be lurking around the library during the program. After all my years in real estate, I still find the business exciting and challenging, and I’m rewarded by helping people with their real estate needs. Of course, one thing that drives me crazy is when I find the perfect property for someone and they love it, but then a friend or mother and dad put the kibosh on it and all effort is wasted. What I love is the satisfaction I feel when I make a great sale either for buyer or seller and the client is very pleased during the process and at the end and lets me know it.

By MARCO RUFO Special to the Palisadian-Post Which market is your money on? The week of July 23-27 was hard to swallow for many stock investors. After the market plummeted more than 525 points over five trading days’including a 311-point drop on Thursday’the Dow Jones industrial average doesn’t seem to know which way is up. The truth is, most experts would say that real estate is still the most secure form of investing. Despite the slowdown in the housing market, which has been contributing to major stock-market losses on Wall Street, home prices haven’t collapsed. The National Association of Realtors reported the average sales price of an existing single-family home actually increased 5 percent since the start of the year. More than two-thirds of households own homes, as compared with only half owning stocks or bonds. Moreover, many stock-owning households have their stock funds tied up in a retirement account. All of the above indicates that housing has a substantial impact on economic activity, and is a good bet for investment purposes. Yes, you can attain considerable financial gain from either the stock market or real estate, but that doesn’t make deciding which one to invest in any easier. However, there’s a reason why sophisticated investors are becoming increasingly more comfortable with owning property. There’s an inherently large amount of risk associated with investing in the stock market and, as smart investors will tell you, real estate provides a controllable and even predictable source of wealth generation. Everyone knows someone who has made a good investment in property, someone who got in at the right time. Certainly the same can be said for stocks and bonds. It’s not unusual for financial reports to include “documented results” or testimonials from investors who have reaped significant gains through strategic planning and accidental market timing. Still, the risk factor is high. The stock market is an inconsistent, unpredictable, intangible asset that has little, if any, tax benefits. For decades, real estate has been the most reliable and dramatic wealth generator for millions of people. Despite the slump experienced in some recently booming areas, many parts of California continue to experience price appreciation. Real estate markets with steady, solid growth present little risk to mortgage lenders, so it makes sense for them to loan money to investors on attractive terms. And while banks may also loan money for other purposes, they are more willing to loan it to real estate investors because of the safety of the collateral: if for some reason the investor doesn’t pay, the bank still has a physical asset that has significant value. Another benefit of investing in real estate is that a property’s value will never go to zero, as some stocks have. That’s because it’s in limited supply, has universal demand, and is constructed from materials that are increasing in price, such as lumber, copper and stone. Real estate investors also have more control over their investment than stockholders. Although stock investments do boast high potential for lucrative returns, they’re unfortunately afflicted with volatility and suffer unpredictably sharp price fluctuations that often have nothing to do with the quality of the company or the competence of its management. In addition, the real estate market is stabilized by the simple fact that housing is a universal need. And with the population rising, and labor and building materials becoming more costly, real estate prices have nowhere to go but up in certain markets over the long term. In many areas of the country, real estate is appreciating at around 6 percent a year. And let’s not forget the added bonus of tax benefits when investing in real estate. When you sell stock in which you have a gain, you’ll be paying taxes– there’s just no way around it. But sell appreciated property and, if you do it right, you can defer your tax indefinitely. When you combine all the benefits of investing in real estate as compared to investing in stock, it’s apparent that real estate provides an ideal and profitable investment vehicle for those whose comfort level lies somewhere between low and no risk. Marco Rufo is managing broker at Miramar Coastal Properties in Pacific Palisades. Contact: (310) 552-3017.

By MICHAEL EDLEN Special to the Palisadian-Post As we move into the heart of summer and with the stock market having some problems, it may be of interest to look at what is going on in the Pacific Palisades real estate market right now. A ‘snapshot’ of July 2007 compared with July 2006 shows a contradictory pattern, and it fascinates many people who try to understand what is really going on today. July 2006 July 2007 % Change Number Sold 27 21 22% lower Number in Escrow 42 36 14% lower Median Sale Price $2,250,000 $2,150,000 4% lower Number Active as of 8/1/07 98 81 17% lower Although local sales were about five percent higher for the first half of the year (as compared to a year ago), they dropped by 22 percent in July. The market’s transition is also evidenced by the 14 percent fewer homes entering escrow right now. The odd observation is that sales prices were off only four percent in July, which is the same as the first half of the year. Economists have long expected all the recent bad news about the nationwide housing market. Many areas of California have even experienced large increases in inventory levels of unsold homes on the market, accompanied by increasingly lower average home prices. So why is the Palisades again outperforming so many other areas by having such a small average sale price decrease? Perhaps it is mostly due to the fact that substantially fewer people here have been putting their homes up for sale, resulting in 17 percent fewer homes available than on August 1, 2006. And why are fewer homes being put up for sale this year? One frequent answer I hear is the question, ‘But where would I move to?’ Even though many homeowners could benefit from a tax point of view, and could enjoy the use of a substantial freeing up of large equity positions in their homes, still they cannot imagine where else they might enjoy living. Even more longtime owners hesitate to sell now because of the taxes it would cost, even after considering the large tax exemption available and reduced long-term capital gains taxes. A summer seasonal slowdown is typical in Palisades home sales. However, a review of the 2006 vs. 2007 comparisons indicates that this summer may be the turning point here. If so, prices may still slip at about a four percent annual rate until some new equilibrium is reached. Michael Edlen provides real estate counseling services to prospective buyers and sellers through his affiliation with Coldwell Banker. More information is available on his Web site (MichaelEdlen.com) or by calling (310) 230-7373.