Dorothy Dickman and Patrick Klein Exchange Wedding Vows in Malibu Dorothy Cuyson Dickman, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Bardales of Portsmouth, Virginia, was married to Patrick Spillane Klein, son of Robert and JoAnn Klein, longtime Palisadians, on June 11 in Malibu. The ceremony was held at Our Lady of Malibu, followed by a garden reception at the Palisades home of the bridegroom’s sister and brother-in-law, Kristin and Adam Keefe. The bride, a pediatrician employed by UCLA Mattel School of Pediatrics, attended Stanford University and the University of Tulane Medical School. The bridegroom, an attorney, attended Corpus Christi, Loyola High, Stanford University and UCLA Law School. The maid of honor was Christy Lacey-Krietz. Aline Neuyen, Lilia Osterloh, Darcie Everett, Kristin Clark, Brooke Klein, and Kristin Keefe were bridesmaids. The best man was Mimmy Klein, brother of the bridegroom. Robert Thomason, Daniel Thomason, Adam Keefe, Brady Hiete and Brian Kirch were ushers. The couple enjoyed a wedding trip to Hawaii and now make their home in Westwood. Rebecca Ebin and Adam Gross Marry at Riviera Country Club Rebecca Saltoun Ebin and Adam Philip Gross were married on August 20 at the Riviera Country Club by Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller of Temple Beth Torah in Ventura. The bride, 24, is the daughter of Synthia Saltoun Siever of Pacific Palisades and Joe Ebin of Brentwood. She attended Kenter Canyon Elementary, Paul Revere Middle School, Palisades High School, and the University of Wisconsin’Madison, where she received her B.A. and M.A. degrees in French. The bridegroom, 27, is the son of Elliot and Laura Gross of Pacific Palisades. He attended Palisades Elementary, Brentwood High School, and UC Berkeley, where he received his bachelor’s degree in business administration. After college, he worked as a software engineer for Vivendi Universal and Idealab for four years. The bride’s brother, Jason Saltoun Ebin, was the best man. Adam’s sister, Sheri Roberts, was the matron of honor, and Rebecca’s cousin, Vanessa Moran, was the maid of honor. The groomsmen included Alan Roberts, Jamie Salka, Benno Ashrafi, Ardy Haghighat, Steve Lackenby and Frank Moran. The bridesmaids included Jessie Salka, Stephanie Krauss, Lauren Cohen, Lauren Weiner, Amanda Moran and Sarah Weiner. The flower girls were Elliana Bogost and Rebekah Blumenfeld, and the ring bearer was Joey Bongar. The newlyweds first met in 1994 when they were both on the tennis team representing Los Angeles at the Maccabiah Games in Cleveland. But it wasn’t until about six years later when they were dating that they soon found out that it was a real love match. The couple is currently residing in Claremont, where Adam is pursing a master’s of bioscience degree at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, and Rebecca is teaching French at Claremont High School and working part-time at the Summer Camp Gallery.
‘MAD TV’ Writers Talk to the Post
Playing straight man is never easy, but to be in that position when interviewing three comedy writers is nearly impossible: it’s hard to write while laughing. Palisadians Maiya Williams, Chris Cluess and Dick Blasucci all work on “MAD TV,” a one-hour sketch comedy show which airs Saturday night at 11 on Fox. They sat down at Mort’s Deli one Wednesday morning to discuss the show’well, almost discuss the show, which is in its 11th year. After sausage jokes, caffeine references, flying barbs and witty repartee, the three stopped just long enough so that I could get some facts about them and the show. Blasucci, one of the executive producers, has been with the show for eight years. Cluess and Williams are writing supervisors and have been with the show five years and four years, respectively. All three have extensive writing credits including “Night Court,” “SCTV,” “Charlie & Company,” “Fresh Prince,” “Newhart,” “Tracy Ullman” and “Rock.” Sketches include political satires, commercial spoofs, pop culture set-ups and parodies of film and television. Although not every sketch is a winner, the show is worth watching because the writing is intelligent and has an edge. Some of the humor is scatological, but sketches and jokes are not done for shock value. At times, the variety of topics the show spoofs, the amazing ensemble cast and the inspired moments are pure brilliance. TV Guide named MAD’s parody of “Felicity” one of the 50 funniest moments in TV history. “It’s become an alternative to Saturday Night Live for many baby boomers,” Blasucci said. “We’re starting to gear it so it’s not just for teenagers.” “We write for ourselves,” Cluess said. “If it makes us laugh, it gets on.” Williams explained there’s a large group of writers for the show, with a lot of different backgrounds. “Everyone has his own type of humor,” he said, “which means the sketches reflect those types: political, gross-out, smart.” When I said I had laughed at one of the recent sketches, Cluess was quick to jump in. “What made you laugh?” he asked, and without waiting for my reply he said, “I wrote it.” Turning to Blasucci, he added, “We’ve got to do something on the NBA dress code; it was in the paper this morning.” Although “MAD TV” is compared to “Saturday Night Live,” the resemblance has to do more with the fact that they’re both sketch shows. “We’re not live, which means we can take more chances,” Blasucci said. “We also have time to edit and can take out things that don’t work. We have more time to set up scenes.” “We also don’t have to rely on a guest star,” Williams said. “The sketches aren’t written for stars.” “The shows are two different animals,” Cluess said. “‘SNL” is driven by a guest host; we feature the cast. ‘MAD TV’ has half the number of writers they do and we’re driven by ideas.” Blasucci said that the show’s 15 writers have backgrounds that include the Groundlings, Second City, and some who have sitcom experience. Many writers at “MAD TV” were actors before joining the staff. Every week the writers work on three shows simultaneously. They put the final touches on the show that’s taping that week. They write close to 25 sketches for the following week, of which approximately 10 will be chosen. They pitch new ideas that could potentially be written for sketches the week after that. All three have high praise for the cast, calling it one of the strongest they’ve seen. The actors and writers are collaborative. In a pinch the writers perform on the show. “On sitcom writing, it’s the same characters you write for over and over,” Williams said. “And the situation is realistic. On ‘MAD’ you can write about anything. If you want a scene with a chicken, you put someone in a costume.” “There was a TV show about man vs. beast,” Cluess said, “where a man might race a horse.” “Chris and I wrote a parody of that show with Reba McIntyre playing ping-pong with a toad,” Williams said. “It’s a very inventive form,” Cluess said. “I get to write things you rarely do.” Williams is married to Patric Verrone, the newly-elected president of the Writers Guild, West. They have three children: Patric,10, Marianne, 8, and Teddy, 5. She is also a published author of “The Golden Hour,” a middle grades novel that was published in 2004. Her second novel, “Hour of the Cobra,” will come out next spring. She attended Harvard, where she was editor of the Harvard Lampoon for four years. Cluess is married to Joyce and they have two children: Jessica, a junior at Northwestern University, and Meredith, a senior at Marymount. He attended Fordham University and then served four years in the Navy as a hospital corpsman. He was the editor of the National Lampoon magazine. Blasucci is married to Beth and they have two children: Maria, a sophomore at Loyola Marymount University, and Anthony, who is working on “Family Guy” on Fox. Blasucci graduated from Southern Illinois'”The Harvard of southern Illinois,” he joked. “Many people thought it was as hard as an Ivy League school.” “We all ended up in the same place on ‘MAD TV,'” Williams laughed. “It shows I spent too much money to go to school.”
The Beatnik Artist and His Bunch
By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor Wallace Berman may be the most important unknown artist in California history. A leader of the postwar avant-garde, he was the founder and editor of “Semina,” a hand-printed, free-form journal that he produced irregularly between 1955 and 1964. He was also an avid photographer, collagist, and installation artist. His Los Angeles residences, first in Beverly Glen and later at the top of Topanga Canyon, were the center of beatnik life in Southern California. Since his death in a car accident on his 50th birthday, in 1976, his life, work, and contribution to cultural history has often been reduced to the annals of cult memory. A new Santa Monica Museum of Art-organized exhibition and catalogue, “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle,” brings him and 53 of his fellow artists and poets into the broader history of American life during the second half of the 20th century. Berman was born on Staten Island in 1926, but moved to the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles in 1936. After his father’s death the following year, the family moved to Hollywood. Although his parents were observant, he was not raised strictly within the Jewish faith or tradition. A lifelong lover of poker, pool, and ping pong, he was expelled from Fairfax High in 1943 for gambling. He entered the Navy after an arrest for possession of marijuana, but stayed in for only six months. Back in Los Angeles, he spent increasing time in the city’s jazz clubs, where he met Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. During this time Berman supported himself by working for a furniture company while immersing himself in the arts community. He made a passing attempt at art school, but dropped out twice. While waiting in line to see a film by Jean Cocteau, one of his favorite artists, he met Shirley Morand; they married the following year, 1952. With a $5,000 loan from Berman’s mother, the young couple bought a house at 10426 Crater Lane, in Beverly Glen. After Berman purchased a Kelly hand press through the mail, “Semina” sprung to life. The first issue included writing and art by Cameron, Walter Hopps, David Meltzer, Jean Cocteau, and Bob Alexander. Berman produced 150 copies. He published eight more issues, produced in Los Angeles and San Francisco over the next nine years. The work of Herman Hesse, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Bukowski, and William Burroughs, among many others, was included. Only one issue was bound; most consisted of an envelope filled with loose pieces of paper printed with contributors’ art and poetry. Berman mailed out “Semina,” free of charge to his friends and associates. With the exception of a few copies available at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, ‘Semina” could not be bought. Michael Duncan, co-curator of the exhibition, in an interview with the Palisadian-Post, spoke of Berman’s commitment to “multiplicity in the arts and multifarious forms of expression.” In Berman’s world, “art is made for other members of the group, not made for just the art or poetry world.” Berman believed art to be a “mysterious force,” in Duncan’s words, and therefore was hesitant about discussing the meaning behind his work. His skepticism of the commercial and academic art world was no doubt confirmed when his first one-man show, on view at the Ferus Galley in 1957, was shut down by the Los Angeles Vice Squad. Charged with obscenity, Berman was fined $150. The Ferus show included a cross, a series of paintings of Hebrew letters, and several other installation pieces, including “Homage to Herman Hesse,” the only piece from the exhibition that survives. It was a line drawing of a couple making love by the artist Cameron’from the first “Semina,” pages of which Berman had scattered throughout the gallery’ that the police arrested him for, not a photograph of a couple in a coital position on the cross, which didn’t register with the police. The show’s shutdown was devastating to Berman, who, disgusted with the whole experience, moved with Shirley and their son Tosh to San Francisco later that year. They did not return to live in Los Angeles until June 1961. Rebecca Solnit, in her book “Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era,” writes of Berman: “The Ferus show is the only time he left out irony and distance. He truly exposed himself, though it was another kind of exposure that got him into trouble.” He never tried to explain his work. Kristine McKenna, Berman’s biographer and co-curator of the exhibition, recently said in an interview with the Post: “Berman was very secretive in ways. He never discussed his work, never gave an interview, never kept a journal, and never taught a class. There’s no record of how he felt about his work or life. “Secretiveness was a strategy,” McKenna continued. “Berman was very strict about work, how it was shown.” He never stopped making art; he took thousands of photographs and spent his last years producing his Verifax collages, grids of different images taken from popular culture magazines, each framed by a photo of a hand holding a transistor radio. As Duncan writes in the show’s catalogue: “The structural device is a resonant metaphor for Berman’s broader role as a transmitter of images and ideas that were metaphorically ‘in the air.'” He never incorporated his own photographs into his collages. Yet it was seeing these photographs a few years ago that piqued McKenna’s interest in Berman. “I started looking at the negatives and saw he had connections with all kinds of people’ Jack Smith, Allen Ginsberg. I was surprised that he was a really good photographer. I wanted to show the photos.” At this time, she heard that Michael Duncan was organizing a show about “Semina,” that would, in his words, “do a social history of that time and an examination of the participants.” They decided to join together to curate the Santa Monica Museum of Art exhibition, which includes more than 300 works, approximately 75 of them by Berman. The show illustrates, as McKenna puts it, that “Berman was an important catalyst. He was the vibrating energy field at the center of it all.” It also sheds some light on some of the underground figures who are less well known along with better-known figures like Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Dennis Hopper, Michael McClure and Henry Miller. Curator Duncan notes that it took real “field work to find objects by some of these people.” One was John Reed, “a casualty of the group, who ended up homeless and with mental problems.” Duncan found two handmade books by Reed in the late curator Walter Hopps’ basement. Some things, even if found, could not be borrowed, such as a 1949 black painting with crucifix by Allen Ginsburg that was too fragile to lend. The artists in the exhibition were photographed by Berman, and those portraits, most of which were printed especially for this show, give the viewer a snapshot of how much Berman respected and nurtured his friends and colleagues. Duncan equates him with Andy Warhol, who shot two films at Berman’s Crater Lane house, and his infamous coterie of artists. Duncan said: “Warhol was more of a vampire; Wallace was more of a solicitor. He was a more lyrical, more sensitive artist. The comparison is interesting, for both had a close-knit group and used pop culture in new ways.” Berman’s untimely death further cemented his position as “a symbol for a whole era,” suggested Duncan. McKenna believes that many young Los Angeles artists think of Berman as an indisputable influence. With the exhibition complete and all of her interviews finished, she must now sit down and write her biography. She has collected so many differing points of view, so many different versions of Wallace Berman that she recently admitted: “I haven’t figured out how to resolve it.” While McKenna works to figure out the Berman she wants to represent in her book, the exhibition will embark on a national tour after closing at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. For now, it will be up to us to decide who he might have been. “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle,” curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna, is on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through November 26. Contact: 586-6488 or www.smmoa.org. The exhibition will then travel to Logan, Utah; Wichita, Kansas; Berkeley, California; and New York City. The catalog is published by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and D.A.P.
Spikers Swept Away in Semis
Photo by Rich Schmitt, Staff Photographer
When it was over, Palisades High players huddled together and consoled each other in the middle of the court. A few players, like seniors Alina Kheyfets and Kaylie McCallister, cried. The rest could muster only half-hearted smiles and blank stares. For the end came so abruptly that it took time for reality to set in. Coming off an upset victory at third-seeded Verdugo Hills, the Dolphins’ girls varsity volleyball team was riding high heading into Tuesday night’s City Section semifinal match against second-seeded Taft. However, the host Toreadors had something Pali’s previous opponent did not–versatility–and they used it to full advantage in sweeping the sixth-seeded Dolphins out of the playoffs, 25-18, 25-22, 25-17. “They definitely have more talent on the court [than Verdugo],” said Pali’s Teal Johnson, a sophomore outside hitter. “Verdugo had one good hitter whereas this team had two good outsides and a middle. They were on their home court, they had the crowd with them and they played well. I think we could have beaten them but it just wasn’t our night.” Taft (30-7) started fast, racing to a 19-7 lead in the first game. Pali began serving short to draw the defense up and the strategy worked as the Dolphins crept to within 23-16. However, they had fallen too far behind and Taft’s Kameron Thomas ended the game with a kill. The second game went back and forth, with neither team able to string together more than three consecutive points. With the game tied 22-22 and momentum in the match hanging in the balance, Taft’s Jessica Duran hit through a block, teammate Savannah Thomas served an ace and Samantha Potter followed with a crosscourt kill to give the Toreadors a commanding two-game lead. “It would’ve been a huge momentum turn if we could’ve pulled that second game out,” PaliHi coach Matt Shubin said. “But I give Taft credit. We knew what they were going to do, we just couldn’t stop it. They passed better than we thought they would and they played better defense. That’s the best team we’ve played all season.” Taft and Palisades did not play each other during the regular season or in tournaments, but Shubin studied film of the Toreadors and Taft coach Arman Mercado talked to Venice coach Alan Hunt and Sylmar coach Bob Thomson for a breakdown on Palisades. “The only thing I was told is that when Pali is on they can be real tough but when they’re off, they’re off,” Mercado said. “Our plan was to be patient and let them make mistakes. We had added motivation too because [Palisades] beat us here in the semis two years ago and some of our girls still remember that.” Pali libero Rachael Erhlich said the loss, though disappointing, cannot diminish a successful season. “I’m really happy with the progress we’ve made since the start of the year. It’s sad that the season is over but Taft had a lot of height and that caused us to lose a lot of points.” If losing game two did not deflate the Dolphins, the start of the third game did. Johnson was blocked on the first point and the Toreadors proceeded to win 11 of the next 12 points to take an unsurmountable 12-1 lead. “In rally scoring it’s really difficult to make up that kind of deficit,” Mercado said. “That’s why I kept my girls playing aggressively. I didn’t want us to let them back in it.” Sophomore middle blocker Alex Lunder led Pali with 10 kills and three blocks, Ehrlich had 12 digs and Kaylie McCallister served four aces. “Taft was a lot tougher than I thought,” Lunder admitted. “We were all a little tired at first from the long bus ride but we played ourselves into the match and had a chance to win the second game.” Jenna McAllister saved the first match point. On the next one, Duran hit a clean kill down the middle of the court to propel Taft into Friday’s finals at Occidental College. The best news for Palisades (17-4) is that Shubin told his players before the match that he would return to coach next fall. If he does, it will be the first time in seven seasons that the Dolphins will have the same coach as the year before. “This was a great experience for me and it’s a great group of girls,” said Shubin, who has also been hired to coach the boys’ team in the spring. “The seniors showed amazing leadership in adjusting to a new coach and the rest of the players are returning so Palisades is on its way back.”
Pali Tennis Poised to Reclaim Crown
At most schools, going six years between championships is no big deal. For the Palisades High girls tennis team, however, it has seemed like an eternity. Though they have come close several times, the Dolphins have not won a City title since 1998–the longest drought in the program’s storied history. Now head coach Bud Kling and his players are determined to put an end to that drought and start a new Dolphin dynasty. “This could be the year,” Kling said before the playoffs began. “We have a strong team, a deep team and we are solid in singles and doubles. No matter what kind of lineup teams throw against us, we should be ready.” As expected, Palisades (13-0) was named the top seed in the 12-team City (championship) division and the Dolphins justified their ranking with a 7-0 shutout of Western league rival Venice in the quarterfinals last Wednesday at the Palisades Recreation Center. It was Pali’s third win over the Gondos (10-5) this season. Singles players Katy Nikolova, Krista Slocum, Lotte Kiepe and Kathryn Cullen combined to win 48 of 54 games for Palisades. “You never like to play a team three times, but in this case it worked out,” Kling said. “I still would have preferred to play someone new, but we will for sure in the semifinals.” That team was fourth-seeded Bell, which beat No. 5 El Camino Real in the quarterfinals, 5-2. Palisades was a heavy favorite to beat the Northern League champion in a match played Wednesday at Balboa Sports Center in Encino (result unavailable at press time). If victorious, the Dolphins would play Friday at 1 p.m. at the same site against the Granada Hills-Carson winner. Palisades has won a Section record 17 girls team titles, including eight in a row from 1984-91. But since their last title, a 4-3 victory over Granada Hills, the Dolphins have in the first round once, three times in the semifinals and in the finals the last two years. They hope a third straight trip to the finals will be a charm. “We’ve won our league every year and we’re always seeded in the top three, so we’ve been a consistently good team,” Kling said. “We’ve come close several times, we just haven’t gotten it done. This could be our best chance.”
Hickok Second at City Prelims
Palisades High junior Kristabel Doebel-Hickok finished second in her heat in the girls’ varsity division at the City Section preliminaries meet Monday afternoon at Pierce College in Woodland Hills. Doebel-Hickok ran the three-mile switchback course in 19:29. She was 35 seconds behind winner Emma Hartell of Birmingham, the two-time defending City champion. Doebel-Hickock beat Hartell by 30 seconds in a nonleague meet at Griffith Park in October. Doebel-Hickock’s personal-best of 18:37 came at three weeks later at the Woodbridge Invitational in Irvine, where she was seventh out of 238 runners in her division. At the prelims, Birmingham finished with five runners in the top nine and a team time of 1:40:14, two seconds faster than the other heat winner, San Pedro. El Camino Real junior Sarah Roth won the second heat in 18:55. San Pedro runners took four of the remaining top 10 spots. Overall, Doebel-Hickok posted the fifth fastest time and easily qualified for this Saturday’s finals meet, also at Pierce. The girls’ varsity race begins at 9 a.m. Neither of the Dolphins’ varsity teams qualified for the City finals. Monroe, San Pedro, Birmingham, Taft, Garfield, Venice, Narbonne, Banning, Los Angeles and Belmont qualified for the boys while Birmingham, San Pedro, El Camino Real, South Gate, Taft, Granada Hills Kennedy, Roosevelt, Garfield, Belmont and Eagle Rock qualified for the girls. –STEVE GALLUZZO
Burke Eighth at City Golf Finals
Palisades High junior Kerry Burke shot an 89 at Balboa Golf Course (par 72) to finish alone in eighth place at the City Section Golf Finals November 7 in Encino. Gloria Park of Granada Hills and Jennifer Park of Fairfax each shot one over par through 18 holes, but Gloria Park birdied the second playoff hole to win the individual title. Granada Hills won the team championship. Burke, who finished one stroke behind Mary Oliver of Monroe, was Pali’s No. 1 golfer all season, finishing no worse than fifth in every league match she played. Although the Dolphins did not qualify for team competition, Burke represented them at the Southern California Regionals Monday at the Southern California Golf Association course in Murrieta. It was Burke’s second trip to the regionals and she shot a 100–an identical score to the one she posted on the same course last year when she qualified along with Pali teammate Stephanie Foster. Brianna Do of Long Beach Wilson won this year with a two-under-par 70. As a sophomore, Burke carded a 92 in the City finals at Balboa to finish sixth.
Sheree North, 72; Glamour Girl Became an Acclaimed Actress
Sheree North, a longtime resident of Pacific Palisades who started her career as a studio glamour girl but outlived her blonde bombshell image to enjoy a half-century career on stage, television and in film, died on November 5. She was 72. Born Dawn Bethel on January 17, 1933 in Los Angeles, North danced with the USO shows during World War II. Recalling that she started dancing at the time she started to walk, North said that she sanded floors and parked cars to pay for ballet lessons. Eventually North let go her dreams of becoming a ballet dancer and began working in local nightclubs and the chorus line at the Greek Theatre. Her breakout role on Broadway’a wild dance number in the musical “Hazel Flagg”‘earned her a Theatre World award and a chance to repeat her self-styled jitterbug in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis musical-comedy film version of the stage show. After her appearance on the initial episode of “The Bing Crosby Show,” on television in 1954, she received praise from critics for her comedic flair and for holding her own with Bing and Jack Benny. Her film credits quickly rose to leading-lady status, and she also appeared on stage in a number of popular musicals, such as “Can-Can,” “Irma La Douce” and “Bye Bye Birdie.” She also directed and produced several shows in small theaters, and in 2000 portrayed the Southern belle Amanda in a production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” at the Laguna Playhouse. In 1962, she also appeared in Barbra Streisand’s first musical,”I Can Get It For You Wholesale,” of which she was quite proud. North had originally been groomed to substitute for the more famous but often unreliable Marilyn Monroe, whom she did replace in the 1955 film “How to Be Very, Very Popular,” in which she outdanced and outshone the leggy Betty Grable. The actress gained her widest recognition on television, beginning in the early 1950s variety shows including Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town.” “She really became the Queen of the Movies of the Week,” said her daughter Dawn Bessire, of Santa Monica. “These were innovative movies that tried to convey new thoughts that were progressive and noteworthy.” North earned Emmy nominations for appearances on “Marcus Welby, M.D., and “Archie Bunker’s Place.” In 1974, she became a part of television history on the100th episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” when Ed Asner’s character Lou Grant fell for her as Charlene Maguire, a saloon singer with a past. Former Times television columnist Cecil Smith called North “a superb performer who gave Charlene the kind of acerbic sophisticated wit the series has not seen since the abdication of Rhoda [Valerie Harper] to her own show.” “She worked with all of the greats and was respected by her peers and all directors and producers,” Bessire said. “All that coming from being the blonde bombshell. Most of them never were able to make the transition.” In addition to Bessire, North is survived by her husband Phillip Norman of the Palisades Highlands; daughter Erica Torablas and grandson Dylan of Connecticut; stepdaughter Jessica Youd of Los Angeles and her three sons. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in her name to the Actors Fund of America Retirement and Nursing Home, 23388 Mulholland Drive, Woodland Hills, CA 93164. Phone: (818) 876-1888.
Ruby Gibson, 85; Popular Resident
Ruby S. Gibson, who loved her family, her country, her neighborhood and every dog she ever met, died October 5 at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She was 85. She had been living with daughter Sylvia Phelps and her family on Friends Street for the past 15 years. Born September 17, 1920, to missionary parents in Taiyuan-fu, the capital city of Shansi Province in China, Ruby was the youngest of four children. Her family left China two years later, because of political unrest in the area, and moved initially to Bakersfield, then to various towns across Wisconsin and Michigan as her father pastored in German-speaking churches. Ruby attended Central Bible Institute in Springfield, Missouri, where she met and married Philip Gibson, who had a lifelong desire to become a missionary. Phil and Ruby were missionaries in Mexico City and preparing to go to Argentina in 1944 when their first child, Steve, was born. When Argentina closed its doors to missionaries, the Gibsons returned to Southern California and started the non-denominational Village Church in Burbank. Phil preached while Ruby played the piano, organ and marimba in services, scrubbed church floors, entertained large groups and raised their three children, Steve, Susan and Sylvia. In the early 1950s, the church decided to start Village Christian School, which thrives today in Sun Valley as one of California’s largest private K-12 Christian schools. After Phil died of a heart attack at 45, Ruby worked at Glendale Adventist Hospital as an aide. She soon entered secretarial school and subsequently worked for Standard Armament in Glendale and Pathologists Clinical Lab at Glendale Adventist until her children completed college. In 1980 Ruby began working as bookkeeper for The Phelps Group, a family-owned marketing communications firm, initially located in Burbank. In 2000 she became the company’s first 20-year associate to retire. Living in Pacific Palisades, Ruby was known by those on the Via bluffs as the sweet lady who loved dogs and always had a smile and a wave for anyone who passed by. She was a woman of deep and abiding faith who lived out her beliefs with unfailing integrity, and she never tired of pointing out the beauty in the smallest element of nature. Each fallen leaf and cloud in the sky was appreciated. Ruby is survived by her daughters Susan Jacob (husband Richard) of Laguna Niguel and Sylvia Phelps (husband Joe) of Pacific Palisades; older sisters Erna Jeffrey and Mina Lewis; and nine grandchildren: Philip, Claire, Beth and Mathias Gibson; Andrew, Oliver and Thomas Jacob; and Doug and Emilie Phelps; and her little Shih Tzu buddy Tinkerbell. A memorial service is planned at Village Church in Burbank in late December.
