LISTSERV - BULLAMANKA-PINHEADS Archives

When I was a senior in high school, I got a job as office boy for the Planning Department at Gruen Associates in LA. Victor Gruen, the founder (who had retired by the time I came around at the end of 1970), was the guy who invented the shopping center (this should count as anti-HP content). The Planning Dept at Gruen had hired a previous office boy from our HS, who had probably become a junkie or something, so they went back to our HS, who in turn went to the drafting teacher; or maybe they went to my guidance counselor who just happened to be married to a senior associate at Gruen.

My boss in the Gruen Planning Department told me (this was c. 1971) that this Histo Presto crap that I was interested in was a bunch of bullshit and would never go anywhere, and that he and the rest of the planners were going to put their freeways where they damn well pleased. When I got ready to go off to Arch School, he told me to stay away from fraternities; I listened to him on that matter. The boss also was a cousin of Emanuel Ax, and when EA played a concert at ASU during my years there, and afterwards I introduced myself as an ex-employee of his beloved cousin; needless to say, he was just sooooo excited to meet me.

So anyway, Pelli was the bigshot designer at Gruen during my years there (I worked for them for a few summers after I got out of HS), and knew me by sight (pretty neat, huh?). When Pelli gave a lecture at Columbia several years later when I was there, he recognized me, or at least pretended to, which was more than Fitch could manage most of the time, but what the hell. Anyway, to answer your question, at Gruen there was an office boy (this "boy" was a 45 year old Mexican guy with grown children) for the whole office; he used to drive the partners' cars to the carwash once a week or so, and I used to follow him in my '65 Falcon so that after he had dropped one car off at the carwash, I would drive him back to the office to pick up the next car. I think (but am not entirely certain) that Pelli had a red Alfa convertible; I think his batman, whose name is Freddy Clarke and is still Pelli's batman, drove a BMW, which always look like Corvairs to me.

As long as I'm dropping names from Gruen, while I was there the Graphics Department hired a girl a few years older than I (insuring that I had the hots for her) named Arlene Klasky, who has gone on to found and run the animation studio that used to do "The Simpsons," and now does "Rugrats" and a couple of other animated shows. Sigh. My ex-boss, EA's cousin, told me recently that he remembers her as having nice, uh, pecs.

Our office was in the same building as a company that owned a chain of big movie theaters, and we would see the big cheeses (but no movie stars, except Rosie Grier, who once tried to hit on another girl in the Gruen Graphics Dept after having met her in the elevator) coming and going. The biggest cheese at National General Cinema was a Mr. Klein, who as I remember drove his own Rolls. After a few years, another of my bosses from Gruen told me that Klein was the luckiest man in the world: in the midst of a very ugly divorce, his wife had dropped dead on the tennis court.