By Ronnie Shulgasser Santa Monica
In response to your “guest” contributor, Ted Winterer, and his revisionist history lesson concerning his Ocean Park Association (SMDP, March 29, page 5), a few observations.
While Winterer is an adequate story teller in his column, “Teddy’s Town,” I mean, “Our Town,” he expands his fiction when discussing this “new” community organization but fails to discuss its and his roots with the now shamed and defunct Ocean Park Community Organization (OPCO).
Winterer fails to mention that he was one of OPCO’s chosen ones and hand picked by OPCO’s disgraced chairman, Rick Laudati. Ted fails to mention that he was on the board of OPCO and had a direct hand in its operation and in its calculating drive for self-serving agendas while masquerading as a representative arm of the Ocean Park community at-large. And why wouldn’t he? I believe he lives in the same historic cottages as Ladauti’s and pushes the same “I got mine so you can’t have” agendas that reflect the same elitist hallmarks of the old OPCO and many of its former board members.
I do not know where Winterer is from. I would guess, unlike many others that have moved here and enriched this community, he is a recent transplant from outside California who has migrated to this great community along with his “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) agenda after staking his claim then appointing himself as Ocean Park’s historian, architect, civil engineer and civic planning czar.
As a third-generation Californian and Ocean Park native, I can say that at least from me and my neighbors’ perspective, the new OPA is simply an OPCO Light and is as out of touch with Ocean Park’s mainstream residents as its defunct older brother.
Sorry, but “Teddy’s Town” isn’t “Our Town” at all.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 17, 2006. Read the original PDF.