Sparkplugs: Littlestone, Cassidy

Grassroots activists Ilene Cassidy and Dick Littlestone were announced as Golden Sparkplug winners Monday and will be among those honored at the Citizen of the Year dinner on April 23. A Community Council committee reviewed nominations submitted on behalf of various residents of Pacific Palisades and decided that Cassidy and Littlestone best fit the Sparkplug criteria for having launched or completed a project in 2008 that benefits the overall community or affects a large group of persons. Cassidy is co-founder (with John Yeh) and most vocal leader of Friends of the Temescal Pool, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reopening the former YMCA pool in Temescal Canyon. The organization, launched last November, filed a lawsuit against the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and its partner, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, asking the court to order the Conservancy to negotiate a pool lease, pay to repair the pool, and make the pool fully accessible to the disabled. ‘Ilene is the embodiment of a sparkplug in the community by taking up the cause of the pool in Temescal Canyon,’ wrote Cecilia Peck in her nominating letter. ‘She didn’t get discouraged at the political tides blowing either way or the fear of failure but rather that it is a good thing for the community to have that pool as a resource for the young, the old and the impaired. She is looking for solutions and working to preserve and improve the community of Pacific Palisades.’ After seven years of planning, negotiating, cajoling and persevering, retired Army Colonel Dick Littlestone celebrated the completion of a new, landscaped-median at the broad intersection of Alma Real and Ocampo last November 8. Located near Littlestone’s home, the derelict median had long presented a weed-infested ‘welcome’ to drivers entering the Huntington Palisades from the business district. Finally, Littlestone decided it was time eliminate this eyesore and build a little garden with native plants, hardly realizing it would take so long to get the $75,000 project designed, approved by the City of L.A., built and funded.