End of Year Lists

TOP STORIES

The year's end brings, as usual, the obligatory backward glances at the annum gone by. Top stories of 2008, best of lists - movies, books, music, recipes and more - have been popping up on websites all over the Interwebs in recent weeks.

The Daily Bulletin has had several "look back" articles this past week. One, by Wes Woods II, covered his top Claremont stories of 2008. Woods had among his top stories: the failed affordable housing project on Base Line Rd., the medical marijuana issue, the Padua Hills Theatre renovation, and the Thanksgiving Pilgrim incident at Condit School.

Woods also listed the passing a few notable Claremont residents, including the painter Milford Zornes, Bulletin writer Leo Greene, and novelist and Pomona College visiting professor David Foster Wallace.

Woods also had a forward-looking piece about what might be the top issues for the city in 2009. Among these is the economic environment, which continues to deteriorate, as Woods' piece pointed out:

It's gonna be a tough year," Mayor Ellen Taylor said. "I'm hoping we can balance that aspect with continued service to our residents."

Councilman Peter Yao said the most immediate issue will be the amount of revenue coming into the city.

"Our majority source is Claremont Toyota and they're having a hard time," Yao said.

"Around mid-January, we will figure out what adjustments we need to make to finish this year through June, and what changes we want to make to next year's budget."

And David Allen had his list of "2008's Strangest News" for the wider area, including things from Ontario and Pomona. We won't spoil the suspense and give away Allen's Number One, but here's one Claremont-centric item that weighed in at Number Three:

3. HEAD CASE: A crystal skull on loan to a New Age shop in Claremont was reported missing by its owner, who believed the skull originated hundreds or thousands of years ago and had healing powers. The reported theft in April coincided with publicity for the fourth Indiana Jones movie. To my knowledge, Claremont suffered no stolen fedoras.

OUR LIST

Not wanting to miss out on all the rearview mirror glancing, here are some of the issues we thought were hot Claremont topics in 2008:

• Budgetary Problems - State and Local all thanks partly to a $42 billion state deficit, a recession, and a credit market freeze but mostly to:
  
  
• The Housing Market Crash that saw housing prices fall nationwide by large percentages. Loan defaults and foreclosures soared as the real estate bubble deflated. The housing market failure led to a domino effect that killed the credit markets. That in turn led to things like:
  
  
• The Failure of PFF Bancorp. - An Inland Empire institution for over 100 years, PFF survived the Great Depression but could not withstand the mismanagement of a not-too-smart board of directors who bet much too heavily on loans to developers and builders.
  
  The same sort of hubris expressed itself differently in the another local issue:
  
  
• The Affordable Housing Crash fueled by the bubbly, and unrealistic magical thinking of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters, who at considerable expense pushed a project that had no real hope of getting approved. The LWV and their leaders, Helaine Goldwater, Barbara Musselman, Sharon Hightower, and especially Claremont Mayor Ellen Taylor were most responsible for this particular debacle.
  
  Fortunately for Taylor, she only had two feet to fit into her mouth. It might have been much worse if her bipedalism weren't a limiting factor in her political missteps. As it was, her other big boo-boo was:
  
  
• Cookiegate - Ellen chased off a troop of Girl Scouts, first from the stoop of her Claremont Village office building, then from the street corner. We suspect this mini-scandal, which drew lots of local and national attention, might have factored into Taylor's decision not to seek re-election - though she'd never publicly admit it.
  
  Taylor's transgressions paled in comparison to:
  
  
• Xavier Alvarez - the gift that keeps on giving, conviction-wise. The South Pomona representative to the Three Valleys Municipal Water District board pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor for lying about receiving a Medal of Honor and now faces felony insurance fraud charges in LA Superior Court.
  
  Not all things rose to Alvarezian heights, but Claremont McKenna College did have to do some PR damage control for:
  
  
• Jonathan Petropoulos - the CMC history professor who stepped down from his position as director of CMC's Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights after news broke in CMC's student paper about an investigation into Petropoulos' role in the attempted restitution of a painting looted by Nazis during World War II to the work's rightful owner.
  
  Not all the news at the Claremont Colleges was such heavy stuff, though. There was, for instance:
  
  
• The White Party - A Scripps College dean read the wrong things into a party flyer, leading to a PC faux-pas.
  
  And in a similar vein:
  
  
• Pomona Alma Mater-gate - Pomona College's Alma Mater, "Hail! Pomona, Hail!" is slated to die a slow death, while Pomona's other traditional song, "Torchbearers," gets sent to rewrite.
  
  Not to be outdone, Claremont Unified School District had its own racially sensitive issue:
  
  
• Indian-Pilgrim War - elementary school parents take umbrage at a long CUSD tradition of kids dressing up as Native Americans and Pilgrims and end up offending other parents who rather liked the tradition.
  
  

We've no doubt forgotten one thing or another - the Wilderness Park bulldozing, for instance (how often does a city make an easily avoidable $250,000 goof in the middle of a financial crisis?) - and we'll almost certainly hear from our dear readers about our omissions.


IN MEMORIAM

We do want to note, as the Bulletin's Wes Woods II did, the passings of a few notable Claremonters in 2008:

• Milford Zornes - the long-time Claremont resident and renowned watercolorist died in February not long after his 100th birthday. Zornes' mural work can be seen in the lobby of the Claremont Post Office.
  
  
• Leo Greene - the Daily Bulletin columnist and Claremonter also passed away in February. Greene wrote about his coping with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in a Bulletin series called "Leo's Story."
  
  
• David Foster Wallace - Writer and Pomona College professor David Foster Wallace committed suicide at his Claremont home in September. Wallace was very popular with his students, and his death shook the college community. We found a March, 1997, interview Wallace did with PBS' Charlie Rose for those who never had a chance to meet DFW.
  
  
• Enid Douglass - A former Claremont mayor and councilmember, Douglass was a Claremont Graduate School alumna and helped develop an oral history program there. Following her death in mid-October, the Claremont Courier had a long obit on Douglass life and her many accomplishments.