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Wednesday, April 26, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Commentary...
The riots that brought us home to Sisters
By Jim Cornelius
News Editor
Marilyn and I will sit
down with our daughter
Ceili this week and watch
the History Channel’s “The
L.A. Riots: 25 Years Later,”
and the National Geographic
“L.A. Burning.” The history
has profound resonance for
her, though she doesn’t really
know it yet. For the 1992
riots that took more than 60
lives and cost over $1 bil-
lion in economic loss led
directly to the life she leads
today, preparing to graduate
from Sisters High School and
head off to the University of
Oregon.
I was working at a retail
store called Pachmayr on
Lake Avenue in Pasadena,
California, on April 29,
1992. We sold fine firearms
— mostly sporting shotguns
— Orvis clothing, books on
African history and hunting.
It was a fun job for a guy in
his mid-20s still trying to fig-
ure out how to turn passions
for history, firearms, the out-
doors and writing into some
kind of living.
That afternoon, I walked
up the street to get a sand-
wich at one of Pasadena’s
hundreds of delectable delis.
I walked in shortly after 3
p.m. — just in time to catch
a live report on the verdict
in the trial of four white Los
Angeles Police Department
officers in the March 3, 1991
beating of a black man named
Rodney King, who had been
pulled over in the northern
Los Angeles suburb of Lake
View Terrace after a high-
speed drunk-driving chase
by the California Highway
Patrol on the 210 Freeway.
Not guilty.
Every single person in the
city knew exactly what that
verdict, read in a courtroom
in Simi Valley, portended:
L.A. was going to burn.
Racial tensions in the
lead-up to the trial were
strung so tight the whole
L.A. basin hummed. You
could feel it even in the afflu-
ent northern fringe up against
the mountains where Marilyn
and I lived (not affluently, I
might add) and worked.
This was pre-Internet, so
the staff at Pachmayr gath-
ered around the radio and a
tiny portable TV somebody
went home and brought back.
Terrible things were hap-
pening to the south of us.
Marilyn and I went to her
parents’ house that evening
and sat transfixed in the den,
watching Reginald Denny
get pulled out of his truck
and his skull crushed with
a brick. Cars were pelted
with stones and debris and
fires broke out as wholesale
looting began — the liquor
stores in South Central going
first, and alcohol fueling the
inferno.
The LAPD was nowhere
to be seen, pulling out of
the South Central area
that was quickly becom-
ing a war zone. At Parker
Center (LAPD HQ), an
Back by
popular
demand…
French Dip
Sandwich
& Cotto
Salami
Sandwich!
enraged crowd, mostly but
by no means solely African-
American, was protesting in
an increasing state of rage at
a place that, for them, sym-
bolized an oppressive occu-
pying force.
We went to work the next
day with a pall of smoke ris-
ing south of us, and an elec-
tric sense of crisis in the air.
People from all over L.A.
were lined up to buy guns,
but California had a two-
week waiting period and they
were out of luck. Myself, I
had a pistol in my pocket and
had stashed my Remington
700 .30-06 in my little white
Toyota truck.
Early that afternoon,
we started getting reports
that rioting and looting was
spreading and that gangs of
young men were breaking
windows on Lake Avenue
a few blocks up. A retired
judge who was a regular
customer came by and told
us we had the legal right to
shoot anyone who crossed
our threshold with violent
intent.
To his everlasting credit,
Mark Baker, the co-manager
of the store, wasn’t having it.
He’d fought in Vietnam and
had shot people before. He
wasn’t interested in doing
it again. He pulled the steel
grate shut across the doors,
flipped the closed sign and
sent us all home. They hauled
the high-grade guns out to the
safe at the corporate head-
quarters and locked the store
up for the next few days.
Marilyn called me, ner-
vous. She was working
at a travel agency, also in
Pasadena, and she could hear
crowds of people yelling.
I told her to lock the doors,
stay put and I headed out to
pick her up, the rifle sitting
on the seat next to me.
We made it home safely
to her parents’ house, and
that was the end of any direct
encounter with the L.A. Riots
for us. Though it felt for a
few hours there that anything
could happen, nothing really
went down in Pasadena.
With work suspended, we
spent the next couple of days
watching TV news or sit-
ting in the next-door neigh-
bor’s swimming pool in San
Marino, watching massive
plumes of black smoke rise
across the basin below us to
the south.
It was the most surreal
four days of my life.
• • •
There is a tangled, sordid
and violent racial history that
built up into the explosion
of April 29-May 2, 1992. In
that era, the city was a swel-
tering mire of hate, despair,
rage, gangs and drugs. Every
actor in this epic drama had
reasons to feel aggrieved:
An African-American popu-
lation stuck in a seemingly
endless cycle of poverty,
apparent abandonment by
municipal government, and
a fraught relationship with
an often ham-handed and
unaccountable LAPD; hon-
est cops who were tasked
with a dangerous and virtu-
ally impossible job of polic-
ing a sprawling, violent city
with unbridgeable racial,
socio-economic and political
chasms; Asian entrepreneurs
who opened businesses in
the sorely underserved inner
city only to be confronted
with daily acts of theft and
intimidation.
(The most incisive look
at race relations in L.A. in
the late-’80s/early ’90s that
I’ve yet seen is in the fine
ESPN documentary OJ:
Made in America — a must-
watch. It brings in a seldom-
recalled incident in which a
female Korean shopkeeper
shot a young black girl in
the back of the head after a
scuffle over an orange juice
carton and was given a no-
jail sentence for voluntary
manslaughter.)
I loved Los Angeles; it
was the land of my birth,
after all, and the Angeles
National Forest was a won-
drous stomping ground. But
the human environment was
getting increasingly crowded
and ugly.
Marilyn and I married in
June 1993. By then there had
been a federal civil rights trial
of the four officers involved
in the Rodney King incident.
The run-up to that trial was
fraught with tension, too. I
had international media inter-
viewing me at the Pachmayr
shooting range about what
people were thinking and
See RIOTS on page 29
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