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Backstory - Project 2

At the end of the last century, I was working at Hughes Electronics in El Segundo California. El Segundo is a post war LA suburb that you can see out of your aircraft as you sit on the south side of LAX. It’s marked by a few high-rise office buildings an oil refinery and a sewage treatment plant. That being said, it’s actually not a bad place, it has a nice beach, it’s near many things that are interesting to see and its kind of quiet and down homey for an LA suburb. For me, working in El Segundo was a way to get in touch with part of my past, as I was born in Torrance, my father in San Pedro. My uncle worked at North American in both El Segundo and the Downey plant during the 60’s and for most of the first 20 years of my mother’s life, she was never more than a mile from Rosecrans Ave.

I felt very much at home while I was there.

Since I was traveling on company money, I had a choice between staying at a hotel nearby or returning home each day. Returning home to Northern California wasn’t as odd as it seems, It actually was faster than my driving commute to the bay area. I would leave my house at 5:30 and arrive at the Hughes office at 7:45, having slept for the hour and 10 minute flight. Obviously, this was pre-9/11 as today it would take you that long just to clear security today. At the end of the day, I would reverse the process. Leave the office at 5:15 and be home at 7:30. Round trip flights for each were actually cheaper for the customer by about 100 dollars than staying over night. I didn’t mind the added luxury of having the little bit of time enough to have dinner at home, visit with the kids and sleep in my own bed everyday. Most of my consulting gigs have been in far off places like Pigsnuckle Arkansas or Boogerglop Yugoslavia, so being able to work as a consultant in the same time zone and be home every day was pretty cool.

Now, this is fine, but if you do it long enough it starts to take a toll, so I switched off and on with the traditional stay at a hotel and the ultra cool “fly home every day” plan. When I stayed in El Segundo, I found myself with lots of extra time on my hands. I’m also a bit of an insomniac, so I had a lot of time to fill. I also had a rental car, so what did I do? I drove around.

In my travels, I found the furniture factory on Figueroa that my dad worked at when I was a kid. I found an apartment in Compton that my family lived in after an abortive attempt to move to Nevada. I visited downtown LA to see some of the scenes of movies like “The Omega Man” and “Heat”. In one of my after work trips, I saw a building in downtown called “Clifton’s Cafeteria”. It looked like it had been there since the beginning of time. A week later while reading a book about weird things in LA, I came across the story of Clifford Clinton. Clifford Clinton was the owner of Clifton’s Cafeteria, a chain restaurant that started in the 1930’s. What I found most interesting is that this man created a restaurant chain in the midst of the depression that was based on the simple statement of “Dine Free Unless Delighted”. Soup lines, 20% unemployed and this guy decides to open a restaurant that actually dares you to not pay. What was amazing to me was that it apparently worked, because here I was 60 years later looking at the same company, with the same concept still in place.

At the time I thought to myself “ What balls this guy must’ve had”.

It turned out I didn’t know the half of it. At a time when LA politics was unbelievably dirty and the police force was in fact an armed gang, Clifford Clinton decides that he’s had enough with the corrupt mayor and starts a campaign to have him recalled. He starts and organization of fellow businessmen, engages the support of some in the media, even though the Mayor and the D.A. call him “public enemy #1”. The LAPD went so far as to bomb his house to stop him.

How did he do? He won! He took on LA City Hall, the LAPD and the LA Times and he won. Mayor Frank Shaw was the first big city mayor to be recalled by special election in a very long time and the entire LAPD was revamped after several of its leading officers were indicted and imprisoned because the corruption that Clifford “Dine Free Unless Delighted” Clinton uncovered and helped put a stop to.

I thought it made a pretty good story. There’s a lot to it. An honest family man risks his life to do his civic duty against a corrupt political machine and comes up a winner. He doesn’t become a celebrity or try to cash in on the fame; he just goes about his life. The story of Clifford Clinton is the story of “duty over self “and I think it’s a good story to tell.

When I was 12, I asked my dad a question about “doing the right thing”, I asked him, “ Should you always do the right thing “?
He looked straight at me with a laser like glare in his eyes and answered, “Yes”.
I pushed back and said, “Even if its hard"?
He grabbed me by the shoulders and held me about 6 inches from his face and said,"Especially if it’s hard, Frank. That’s when it counts the most."

When I was 12, my scale of “what hard was” was very different from what it is now that I’m 43. At the time he said what he said, I thought it was just parental gobbledy-gook, but now the older I get, the more I realize how right the old man was.

So it’s around the story of Clifford Clinton and the downfall of LA Mayor Frank Shaw that I’ve decided to try my hand at writing. Im not a historian and I want the flexibility to tell the story from my own perspective, so I will be telling a fictionalized version of the story. Since I’m also a part of the open source journalism world and I’m a blogger, I’ve decided to document what its like for me to do this. So, periodically I will post in this category what I’ve learned in writing this story, not just about the story itself, but the process of writing and what I’ve learned from the process.

Right now, I’m boning up on my knowledge of the Depression era with the book “The Great Depression”. I’ve also got an order in for Kevin Starrs The Dream Endures: California enters the 1940s.” I typically read 3 to 4 books a week, so I should be through with both of these this week. I’ve also decided that the story will be easier to write once I’ve got the characters themselves, So I’ve begun the process of creating backstory for each of the main characters in the story. The real life example gives me a pretty good template to start with as far as the main players, but I’m surprised at how much I have to fill in to make the story work. I’ve also created the story arc outline and I’ve created the first few chapters. My best estimate is that it should be in first draft status by the end of the year.

What’s the coolest thing I’ve dug up in my research this week? Telephone exchange names.

More to follow…

Posted @ November 16, 2004 11:10 PM | Project 2

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