Cards and Letters Keep Coming In, From All Directions

I have a lot of letters stacked on my desk and stuffed into boxes. Some of these letters are well-thought-out, typed, with enclosures. These are from people who want to make a point, usually one that I didn’t happen to make myself in the column they are writing me about.

Then there are the little notes, handwritten, sometimes pithy, from people who just want me to know this or that, or else they’re looking for a favor.

I thought it was time to give you a sample. Some people like to read other people’s mail.

Allen Antoyan Jr. of Fountain Valley wanted to know, “How can anyone as ignorant as you write about something she doesn’t know anything about?”

Allen was referring to football and a column I wrote about the Pink Side of Sports. Allen thinks that I don’t know anything about football. If I did, he says, I would know that “some women are ‘in to it’ more than a number of men.”

“How would I know?” Allen writes. “It’s one of the reasons why I enjoy going to the USC football games. Because of the girls.”

I have a feeling that Judith Stamper, who wrote me from Costa Mesa, would not run into Allen at any of those USC games. Judith says that she, too, understands football.

“What I don’t understand is how the world will be improved by my sitting with my husband for hours on end, listening to the sportscasters say inane things such as ‘the defense came succinctly together.’ . . .

“My husband has a fine brain. He is not stupid, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why he wants to spend his time watching sports most evenings and all weekend. . . . My only hope is that my son will learn from me all the other worthwhile things there are to do with his time.”

One of the biggest reader responses came after I wrote a column about Dr. Charles Wesley Turner Jr. and his rush to deliver the first baby of the New Year. Turner gave the mother a saddle block, pulled her baby out with forceps, then ran next door to display the child before a crowd of worshipers at the Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim.

I essentially said that this was not a good thing.

With the exception of one male caller and the newborn’s aunt, who wrote from Boulder, Colo., to say that she found my column “very offensive and certainly as self-serving as you claim Dr. Tucker (sic) to be,” everybody else who got in touch with me agreed with my point of view.

Dr. Jose M. Cueto, a family practitioner in Santa Ana, wrote: “I agree wholeheartedly with your vote. It seems that tele-evangelism is the last (or first) refuge of the wicked.”

And Dennis Richards of Placentia said, “Dr. Turner has made a mockery of the basic Christian ideals to further his and his associates’ Melodyland Magical Miracle Tour.”

Another column, which focused on Caroline Youngquist and the Hemlock Society, a right-to-die organization, drew scores of requests for more information. Some people wanted to donate money.

One elderly man told me that he had been planning a trip to Denmark, with his daughter, to find out about euthanasia. Now he said he wouldn’t need to.

Some people called or wrote on behalf of an elderly parent, one for a companion dying of AIDS, but mostly people said they wanted the information for themselves. All of them wanted to control their own deaths.

It seems that many people could relate to the saga of the mothers fighting to bring basketball hoops to their upscale neighborhood. So far in the poll of public opinion, the mothers are on top.

“The Yups are out of bounds trying to pass off their foul line of pre-Celtic ideas and behind the back moves,” wrote Jeff Vassett in a letter he faxed me from San Clemente.

“We must guard against turning over the handling of this fast-breaking issue to the kind of slow motion thinking that could lead to a Wounded Knee instant replay.”

What that means, I think, is that Jeff wants the homeowners’ association in question to get with it and approve the hoops in a hurry.

Donna Drysdale of San Juan Capistrano wrote to tell me about her neighborhood, which to her relief has no homeowners’ association.

“This neighborhood is a little patch of what I would call the ‘salt of the earth’ in the middle of our ever-growing yuppified Orange County, and I for one have no intentions of leaving,” she said. “Bring on the basketballs.”

Other columns, about kids and guns, male batterers, and the stigma of being a man in the day-care field, have also drawn a lot of response. Readers were thoughtful, concerned and full of things to say.

Tom Chiaromonte, director of the child development lab at Fullerton College, said I should get back to him for more positive things to say about men in day care, while day-care worker Rob Weisskirch of Irvine wrote this: “Your stereotypical, irrational fear propagates the notion that men are violent, uncaring, sex-crazed individuals.”

So much for the mail this time around. Let me know what else you have to say.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.