Following up on one of the top stories of the year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gets his point across’in a friendly way’to his predecessor, Gray Davis, at an L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce banquet in Beverly Hills.

Many women who have chosen to stay home and raise their children, who volunteer extensively in the schools and in community circles, suddenly find themselves wanting to re-enter the job market, but only on a part-time basis. They no longer have toddlers at home, their schools don’t always want volunteers in the classrooms as they did when kids were younger, and the idea of paying for college looms on the horizon. Two Palisades moms, Denise DeSantis and Marjorie (‘Boofie’) Graham, wisely saw an opportunity to start their own business, Business Talent Agency, that would utilize these women. Starting this fall, they have been matching moms with employers who are looking for part-time or replacement help. Many employers have shifted out of full-time employment and have opted to go with part-time help, mostly for financial reasons: they don’t have to provide health insurance or pension plans. Recently, a Newsweek article even gave the term ‘sequencing moms’ to those who are returning to work. DeSantis and Graham find that many of the women they want to place are highly skilled and held high-level jobs before they opted to stay at home. One was a producer at an editing house, another had a master’s in education, and yet another owned her own business. Some of the women are nervous about re-entering the job market after being out of the workplace for so many years. That’s where DeSantis and Graham feel they can be the most helpful, by convincing employers to hire the people listed with their agency. They point out that moms are experts in multi-tasking: running the house, coordinating homework and carpools, and juggling volunteer jobs. Most of the women that they are placing will be exceptionally loyal, with very little job movement because the women are not looking for full-time work that promises advancement. Graham and DeSantis met 10 years ago at Corpus Christi when Graham was Sunday School teacher for Denise’s oldest son. As their children grew, the two women stayed friends. Both had extensive work histories. DeSantis worked for Cushman & Wakefield in commercial real estate for almost 14 years, before she chose to do volunteer jobs like AYSO soccer, president of the St. Louis League at Corpus, and auction chair at the school. Her two youngest children, Isabella (‘Izzy’) and Vincent, attend Corpus and her stepson Peter is a freshman at Loyola. Graham retired last year after working for Coca-Cola for 23 years in various areas, including marketing and human resources. Prior to that, she worked with an employment agency placing fresh college grads with consumer product companies. Her son, Alec, attends St. Matthew’s. Chatting one day about what their next life move would be, the two women came up with the idea of Business Talent Agency (BTA). Since they had so many friends who were in the same position’between being a full-time mom at home and a mom needed at home after school’they felt there was a real need to pair them with businesses who need part-time help. They registered their business name in April at the Palisadian-Post and then spent the summer getting their Web site developed (www.businesstalentagency.com), as well as starting to make business contacts. Jolyon Gisselle, a senior vice president and wealth advisor for a major investment firm in the Palisades, says: ‘The whole theory behind hiring moms on a temporary basis is that there are a wonderful, bright, intelligent group of women who have had success in the past in the workplace, who gave that up to face the even tougher commitment of raising children. They find themselves wanting to continue that commitment, but still they’re interested in expanding their horizons and keeping current in other areas as well.’ DeSantis and Graham have held several meetings at their homes with women, listening to what they need, having them focus by filling out a form stating the kind of employment they would like, and then explaining how they can help get the women back into the marketplace on a part-time basis. Contact: 573-4282.

As we ring in the new year at the Palisadian-Post, we’re eager to learn the winner of our venerable First Baby of the Year contest. The first baby to be born to Pacific Palisades parents in 2005 will be welcomed in a special way, receiving toys, gifts, savings accounts and savings bonds while his or her parents gather gifts and services from more than 60 merchants here and in Brentwood and Santa Monica. Last year’s First Baby, Cody Robert Michaels, was born on January 1 at 1:50 a.m. and was the sixth First Baby in a row to be a boy. The last girl First Baby was Georgia Raber in 1998, who is now a first grader at Calvary Christian School. Cody Michaels, who lives with his parents, Pam and Robert, and 7-year-old brother Brandon in the Highlands, was the 50th First Baby since the Palisadian-Post contest started in 1954 (the contest was skipped in 1955). To be eligible, parents must have a Pacific Palisades mailing address (zip code 90272), and the time of birth and attending weight must be specified in writing by the attending physician. Candidates should contact the Post’s editorial department by calling 454-1321 (ext. 26), or by e-mailing Associate Editor Laura Witsenhausen at features@palipost.com. Other recent winners include Harry Haygood 2003, Skyler Kaplan 2002, Timothy Ellis 2001, Evan Epstein 2000 and Sammy Marguleas 1999.

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.

This Christmas season, Benjamin Grumbach, who grew up in Pacific Palisades, is celebrating at his family’s home in the Alphabet streets. Last Christmas the Army staff sergeant was serving in Iraq, where he spent most of the day driving around in a Humvee. ‘Probably one of the most dangerous things to do over there,’ he said, referring to the fact that the vehicles have been a favorite target of Iraqi militants since the fall of Baghdad. Grumbach said his duties last December 25 with the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade included visiting soldiers in various camps and safe houses, ‘shaking hands, wishing them Merry Christmas, taking photos of them, delivering their mail.’ At the end of the day, when he and the officers he was traveling with finally got to eat dinner, Grumbach was happy to see they were being served a traditional Christmas meal, which he ate out of a Styrofoam container, standing up, off the hood of his Humvee. ‘We had turkey and all the trimmings, ‘ he recalled this week. ‘It was okay.’ The Palisadian-Post has been following the journey of this one hometown soldier since the Iraq invasion began in March 2003. In his 11 months of duty there, Grumbach had a half-dozen assignments, starting with the takeover of the Bashur airfield in the Kurdish-controlled north that made headlines around the world. Other assignments include guarding the oil fields in Kirkuk, guarding an overcrowded detention facility, guarding a bank, and trying to stop looting. During that time, Grumbach often had to work in 120-degree heat, survive on MREs (prepackaged food), and had to take Cipro tablets when he became ill from dehydration. The only time he had to fire his rifle was in a 21-gun salute in honor of a fallen comrade in his unit. Last November, right after he came off a two-week furlough in Italy, his home base, he was stationed in Mosul. The job he enjoyed most while serving in Iraq was when he was asked to be the liaison between the newly created department of education and the city in Altun Kopre. ‘We had to go around to all the schools to see what materials they needed to repair their buildings. I learned a lot about their culture and how they viewed things. It was the most interesting thing we did over there.’ Grumbach, 27, enlisted in the Army right out of St. Monica High, and after eight years has risen to become section chief of an artillery unit. The oldest of four children, he decided to join the military after responding to an ad he saw in Sports Illustrated. The army was offering a free pair of socks. ‘When the socks came they weren’t even standard army issue,’ his father Curtis recalled. ‘But they did have ‘ARMY’ embroidered on them.’ Ben, however, seemed more interested in the information pack, which promised him the opportunity for adventure. He spent his 18th birthday in boot camp in North Carolina and since then has been posted to Oklahoma, Germany, Bosnia, Korea, North Carolina, Italy and Iraq. His sister Katie, 25, is in the Army Reserve. While Ben was in Iraq, his mother Debbie sent him numerous care packages (including homemade bread and his favorite sunflower seeds) and he sent gifts in return (a prayer rug for Katie, maps and knives for his brothers’Tim, 20, and Dan, 18’and some Iraqi money imprinted with Saddam Hussein’s face. ‘It isn’t worth squat but I thought you would get a kick out of it,’ he wrote to his family in June 2003.) When Grumbach left Iraq in February he was posted back to Vicenza, Italy, where his battalion is based. He said he was given ‘lots of recovery time’ and a chance to travel with his wife Jennifer, including scuba diving in Egypt. Grumbach’s next posting will be Afghanistan, starting in February or March. Asked if he would be part of the group searching caves for Osama bin Laden, Grumbach said he doubted it, since his specialty was long-distance artillery fire. Originally scheduled to leave the Army next August, Grumbach said his ‘new date’ is May 2006”but that could change again,’ referring to the military’s ‘Stop-Loss orders’ which prohibit soldiers from leaving the Army if their units are scheduled to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. If he does not get out in 2006, Grumbach said he will ask for a new tour of duty. His first choice is ‘back to Fort Bragg, where my wife is from.’

Thomas Cadmus, national commander of the 2.7 million-member American Legion, addressed Palisades Post 283 during an evening of festivities last Saturday at the Legion Hall on La Cruz. Cadmus, a United States Army veteran, was elected to his position on September 2 in Nashville, Tennessee, during the 86th National Convention of the nation’s largest veterans organization. ‘He gave us background on what he’s done so far and what he’s going to do,’ said Emil Wroblicky, 2002 Legionnaire of the Year. ‘He’s representing all of the veterans of America. He travels to wherever American soldiers are based.’ In his year as national commander, Cadmus has traveled to Korea (where he helped serve food to American troops during Thanksgiving) and plans to visit Japan and Panama.’He also has a lot of states to cover,’ Wroblicky said. ‘I’m not sure if he’ll make it to Iraq.’ Cadmus has also traveled to Washington, D.C., where he promoted funding and assistance for veterans in military hospitals. While in Los Angeles, he was hosted by Post 283 at the Bel-Air Bay Club and played golf at the Riviera Country Club. ‘He’s a great lover of golf,’ Wroblicky noted. Saturday evening, local commander Bill Branch handed Cadmus a $10,000 donation to the federal emergency fund and donated $10,000 to Department Commander Fred Walton for the state’s emergency fund. Cadmus, who joined the Legion in 1967, is retired from the Ford Motor Company where he worked on a variety of automotive projects during his 38-year career.