From the editor's desk

December 09, 2000

By Larry Wilson
Editor

ANNE Beall would be appalled to hear some of my news this week -- and thrilled to hear some of it as well.

But since Anne, the conscience and one-woman cleanup crew of my neighborhood, died late last month, aged 88, I can't share any of the news with her. I will miss very much Anne's passion for all the things that make Pasadena beautiful, from the grand to the finicky.

Until very recently, Anne and her husband John would take long walks on Saturday mornings through Linda Vista, where native-planted parkland just west of the Arroyo Seco is quite properly named after her. Our trash is picked up curbside each Friday; I don't get home until late Friday night. And if I hadn't pulled the barrels in off the street by morning, I would often encounter the Bealls in front of our house -- just checking to make sure the oversight didn't mean we were the victims of mass murder -- when heading down the driveway to pick up the newspapers. We'd have a nice chat and I'd sheepishly pull the ugly barrels in. John has died as well; the rest of us have to carry on in their spirit.

And I do feel I'm beginning to channel the anti-litter cause of the Bealls these days. Thanksgiving afternoon, the turkey in the oven, Phoebe and I took a long arroyo walk, all the way to the casting pond. When we got underneath the Pioneer and Colorado Street bridges, the one spot where the flood-control folks left the channel running free and unconcreted, it wasn't the full pond, the verdant plants or the charming ducks that I noticed. It was the trash: thousands of discarded drink cups, plastic bags, foam containers: the usual urban detritus. But such trash is even uglier in nature than in a downtown gutter. It was the only bad thing in an otherwise lovely day.

I mentioned that story at an Athenaeum lunch convened by Mayor Bill Bogaard this week to introduce The Trust for Public Land officials to Pasadena open-space advocates. Arroyo nabob Tim Brick passed my concern on to South Pas wildlife buff Ed Simpson. Ed came by the office with a video he'd taken of all the under-bridges trash we had seen and some still photos of the day he and Bee and some high schoolers picked up fully 50 huge bags of it. The awful news was that when they returned just a few weeks later, almost the same amount of trash was there again.

Why do people trash the arroyo? Well, some of the litter is purposely tossed there by fools. Some blows over the fence into the channel from the monthly swap meet and the dozens of other arroyo uses. Hell, the city allowed a massive used-car sale there the other weekend. After the 'SC-UCLA football game, I saw hundreds of beer cups in the paved channel. And Ed has a theory. His videos show trash entering from smaller storm drains that flow into the channel from all over town.

You know those "This flows directly to the ocean" signs at gutter grates, folks? That means you. Stop throwing stuff in the arroyo and in city drains unless you want finicky me on your driveway of a Saturday morning, tsk-tsking.

And my good news? Twofold: Ed has a simple plan to install nets in the pond that would pull out the trash. And at that open-space advocates' lunch, I learned that Pasadena is on the verge of getting its first new parkland in years if a deal to buy a vacant lot at busy Elizabeth and North Lake can be finalized. That's the spirit of Anne Beall at work.

-- Larry Wilson is editor of the Pasadena Star-News.