NATURAL PERSPECTIVE -- VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

Twenty years ago, Vic and I moved to Southern California from New

England. We wondered if we would see movie and TV stars out here. We

quickly forgot about that as we formed friendships and got involved in

our community.

We were reminded last weekend of that naive speculation when we

attended a 70th birthday party for Flint Morrison at the Park Bench Cafe.

We know Flint as the voice of Huntington Beach. He’s the man behind

the mike on HB-TV 3, the man with a honeyed voice like slides up and down

the tonal scale like a fine trombone. We’ve enjoyed Flint’s televised

narration of the Fourth of July parade and watched him perform at the

Huntington Beach Playhouse in Stalag 17. It was Flint who interviewed Vic

on television the night Vic was elected to the City Council. Now here we

were, friends with a local TV star.

At Flint’s party, I thought about what was happening in the world 70

years ago. Movies had become talkies only three years before Flint was

born. A year after the “Jazz Singer” premiered, Pacific Coast Highway was

built across the sand dunes of Huntington Beach. Back then, our tiny town

was covered with more wooden oil derricks than houses. Local boys

splashed through dozens of fresh water ponds at the Bolsa Chica Gun Club,

serving as bird dogs for the wealthy scions from Los Angeles and Pasadena

who hunted there. The few people who bothered to come to Huntington Beach

did so mainly by trolley.

I thought about some of the other major events that occurred when

Flint was a toddler.

The “Star Spangled Banner” was adopted as our National Anthem. The

Empire State Building opened as the tallest skyscraper in New York. Ed

Sullivan and Jack Benny began broadcasting on that new entertainment

medium -- the radio. “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” and “The Lone

Ranger” debuted on radio. The first winter Olympics were held at Lake

Placid. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the

Atlantic.

That sounds like ancient history. Yet it happened in the span of one

lifetime. Then I remembered that Flint is the same age as Elizabeth

Taylor, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy; the same age as Johnny Cash,

Debbie Reynolds and Edward Kennedy. These people take the “age” right out

of septuagenarian.

Time tends to pass without our noticing it. Maybe that’s one reason to

celebrate birthdays. They help us mark the passage of time, rejoice in

surviving and note changes.

One thing that changes with time is that some of us become famous.

It’s remarkable how many people in the Huntington Beach/Fountain Valley

area are in the ranks of the readily recognizable.

The late Jack Kelly was on the Huntington Beach City Council and

served as mayor. We used to watch him on “Maverick” back in the 1950s and

1960s. Next thing we knew, we were trying to talk Jack into “voting

right” on wetlands issues.

We’ve partied with the twins Don and Dan Stanton. You may have seen

them as the pompous censors in “Good Morning, Vietnam” or the security

guard in “Terminator II.” Don was embarrassed when the director told him

to pick his nose while waiting at the coffee machine, but nobody noticed

that. All we saw was the evil terminator rising from the linoleum behind

him, morphing into twin Dan as he drove a blade through Don’s heart.

I was at physical therapy for my back in January while Mark McGwire

worked on an injury to his arm. I wanted to tell him what a thrill it was

to watch him and Sammy Sosa battle for the title of “Home Run King” in

1998. Maybe he would have enjoyed knowing how much pleasure he has

brought to us.

Among the other locally famous people are surfers such as Bob “The

Greek” Bolen, Corky Carroll and the late Tom Pratte, former executive

director of Surfrider Foundation. Seal Beach resident and surfboard maker

Robert August starred in “Endless Summer.”

Mystery authors Elizabeth George, Earlene Fowler and Pat Guiver live

here too.

Our next-door neighbor, Eric Coffey, is a junior pro surfer. He’s

going to be in a surf movie this summer and hopes to turn pro next year.

We speculated about how many other soon-to-be-famous people are in town

right now, attending school.

Somehow we’ve gone from wondering if we would ever see famous people

to living among them. * VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington

Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at o7

[email protected] .