A Lesson In Mobile Phone History

Having attempted to live life a day at a time for the last 19 years, Lawrence also take dogs one at a time. Other folks seem to like a pack of them about, but there are rewards for having one dog to receive all the pet affection and attention.

Already lonesome for a pooch only two weeks after Junior’s passing, Lawrence started surfing the rescue listings for another Dobe mix. A stubby-tailed two year-old mutt named Cubby caught his eye, as he was described as a genial, friendly, medium-energy dog — a personality that Junior had exhibited and proved wonderfully compatible.

After the long trip from Fillmore, California — in the Heritage Valley along Highway 126 west of Magic Mountain — Cubby celebrated his new digs by jumping on the couch and nesting the slip cover to shreds, an inauspicious debut. But over the next few days, he has calmed splendidly and seems to be a genial gentleman and quite responsive to praise and affection (not as addicted to food as his predecessor, who also was known as Moochmaster J — but not averse to it, either).

Cubby seems to have a Dobe head on a Rottweiler-style body, which is a look that only a mutt lover would appreciate. Fortunately, Lawrence and Nicole are mutt lovers. Some of the stockiness already has disappeared, however, with the steady diet of four-mile walks that Cubby has embarked upon. And the house, so desolate with Nicole in Chicago and Junior dead, is once again feeling like a home. Companionship is one of life’s finest comforts.

Cancer has taken Junior T. Dog (the T. stood for “The”) of Banning, CA.

Junior was a muse, watchdog, jogger, hiker, chaser of cats, mellow dude and extraordinary companion. One of his many nicknames was “The Buddhist Police Dog,” given because he was such an amiable character for a Doberman-German Shepherd mix.

Everything you needed to know about Junior: cats, with their cynical disregard for territory, made him apoplectically agitated. But the one time he chased and caught a cat that was not feeling up to snuff enough to elude him, he simply rolled it over with his nose and came back tremendously satisfied at fulfilling a lifelong desire to catch a kitty. His attitude towards life seemed to be that it was a marvelous game.

With his black coat, barrel chest and fierce features, he looked like a killer — but Junior was a sweet dog who loved frolicking with other pups and was fascinated by children and horses. Cows, on the other hand, scared the daylights out of him, for reasons we could never fathom. The first time he encountered one on the Banning Bench, he hid behind me!

I will spare you the 1,000 cute anecdotes about my best dog ever, but sufficeth to say that they happened. He became such an integral member of the family that my music publishing company is named after him. He seemed to have inherited the best traits of both breeds — the playfulness of a Doberman without the one-person mania of a German Shepherd; the workmanlike focus of a Shepherd without the hyperactivity of some Dobermans, and a Doberman’s eagerness to please without a Shepherd’s desire to be in control. We could have named him Jackpot.

He was an amenable gentleman who did not climb on furniture or beds (except in the middle of thunderstorms, which scared him beyond measure, when he would suddenly want to be a 70 lb. lap dog), and one could leave a T-bone steak dinner on the low coffee table in the living room. Junior would lovingly gaze upon it, his nose sniffing a mile a minute, and perhaps even lick the table in an aromatic ecstasy — but never would bother it. He also wouldn’t eliminate in the house, waking me in the middle of the night if there was a rare emergency.

He was a crate dog, so there was no destruction when we were away. Junior went into his crate, where he felt safe and didn’t have to worry about guarding the house. He relaxed and perhaps gnawed on Big Bone, a beef bone so amazingly sturdy that it somehow survived his entire life. It was the only real bone he got after puppyhood. Because his kidneys were a bit suspect, he had to stay on a low-protein diet. Instead, he got low-protein treats to eat and had a half-dozen toys with which he never tired of playing the tug-of-war Bone Game.

Junior’s favorite activities were jogging up Montgomery Creek to Sunset Road and the mile climb to the Banning Bench that we sometimes extended to four- or five-mile runs in cooler weather; hiking the Pacific Crest Trail when it wasn’t too warm over there (partly because of his black coat, he couldn’t handle temperatures over 80 for very long, as we found out the hard way on the Ernie Maxwell Scenic Trail one summer afternoon), and eating. Another of his nicknames was Moochmaster J for his patient attempts to acquire leftovers, though he knew better than to panhandle company when they came for dinner.

I learned more about being in the moment from Junior than any yogi or Zen master could have taught me. He was there, period. He would try for an hour to wangle an invitation to go with us in the car — but he would sprint for his crate, when we announced that he had to stay home, as if it were the greatest opportunity of a lifetime.

Junior’s first sign of mortality came a few years ago, when Nicole discovered a tiny mast cell tumor that the vet successfully removed. A few months ago, he started to slow down and we embarked on a long, frustrating series of tests to find out the problem. It turned out to be lung cancer that likely had spread from a tumor elsewhere. He was only nine years old.

His suffering, once it started in earnest, proceeded at a very swift rate. After 10 days of it, Nicole flew in from Chicago and we took him to the vet the next day, when he had begun to grimace and whimper from the pain. He was emaciated, his flanks quivered almost constantly, and his abdomen was spasmodic (only 10 days before, he and I had walked a mile to visit the horse corral on Wilson Street).

Yet he would somehow find the energy to rise, stagger to his water dish — he had stopped eating, no longer able to digest food — and go out into the back yard to urinate. It seemed to be a point of honor for him to do so.

I stayed with him all the way — cheek-to-cheek, whispering to him stretched out on the examining table while the vet shaved his leg to find a vein and administered a barbiturate. Junior’s eyes glazed, he huffed four times and was gone. I was blubbering like a baby.

Then something unexpected took place. Junior’s body relaxed, and the hunched, misshapen look of terminal cancer disappeared. With his weight down, he looked for all the world like the charming little six month-old pup we had taken home from the Oasis Pet Shelter in North Palm Springs. I stopped crying and rejoiced in the sight of him at peace.

Junior is gone. I wish I could emotionally sprint ahead as he would have done, gleefully dropping the past to chew on the moment. But I am only a student of being in the moment, not the master. I will be wrestling with my ignorance for a while before I can be as good to go as the late, great Junior T. Dog.

Bobby Salgado, 68, was chairman of the Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians on and off for more than 30 years, until resigning this year. He lived like a big city political boss, and he’s going down like one.

According to the Riverside Press-Enterprise, Salgado will plead guilty to federal charges of accepting bribes and filing false income tax returns. In return, prosecutors will drop 34 of 36 charges against Salgado. While he could face up to 13 years in prison, prosecutors are expected to ask for a sentence of 7-9 years.

According to court documents, it appears that Salgado and his family were living beyond their means and running up credit card debt in the late 1990’s. He began to solicit and accept more than $800,000 in bribes from contractors to pay down his cards.

John Culton, a realtor who sold the Soboba tribe a country club in Hemet for $12.5 million, gave Salgado about half of the bribe money. He is one of four vendors who have pled guilty to charges connected to bribing Salgado. The others are concessionaire Armen Zennedjian and construction contractors Michael Yakovich and Keith Reilly.

A parking services contractor from Diamond Bar, Abbas Shilleh, has pleaded not guilty and will go to trial. He faces a charge of giving Salgado $50,000 in bribes to secure a parking services contract for Soboba Casino.

Salgado was perennially popular on the Soboba Reservation, in part for his defiant attitude towards non-tribal authorities. His verbal sparring with county supervisors, the FBI, which asked the federal government to shut down Soboba Casino in 2008, and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which exchanged gunfire with reservation residents on several occasions, did nothing to diminish his popularity.

But defiance of authority was only a part of the former star football kicker’s popularity, which led him to nine terms as Soboba council chairman. Salgado vigorously pursued 70 year-old litigation that sought to preserve the tribe’s water rights, which the council felt were abrogated by a Metropolitan Water District tunnel and other water use. The lawsuit was settled when the Soboba Settlement became federal law in 2008; it guaranteed the tribe 9,000 acre-feet of water a year. A previous court victory had awarded the tribe $12 million in damages for water usurpment.

Salgado was instrumental in opening Soboba Casino in 1995 and stewarded the 900-member tribe’s increase in prosperity — a stark contrast to times in Salgado’s youth when his family subsided on wild game, cactus and acorns.

Salgado’s leadership won him awards and was recognized by his peers.

“At the table or in a forum, he speaks with a dedication and understanding of the issues,” Agua Caliente Tribal Chairman Richard Milanovich told the PE. “And that’s why he’s always been admired and so forthright, to tackle such difficult issues and argue to achieve at times what was in the best interest of his people.”

It was only when Salgado faced criminal charges that stemmed from a complaint by Soboba tribal council member Michael Castaldo regarding alleged bribery that the long-time political boss of Soboba went on a leave of absence and eventually resigned from the council.

The tribal council, led by newly elected chairman Scott Cozart, issued a statement distancing it from the Salgado case — “This case represents the actions of an individual, and not those of the Tribe nor any other member of the Tribal Council. Immediately upon learning of the charges, the Tribal Council took action to remove the accused from its government, and address any and all possible concerns as they may relate to the Tribe’s responsibilities to its membership and any outside agency.”

Smack dab (you should pardon the drug reference) in the middle of a city council election, Calimesa’s moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries is expiring.

The moratorium issue was scheduled for a recent council meeting, but somebody forgot to put the ad in the paper letting everybody know, which is the law (maybe they were too stoned to remember?). Renewal of the moratorium has to be re-scheduled.

Calimesa, with fewer than 8,000 residents, is perhaps the quietest community in the Pass Area — many retirees, trailers, much open space (which Calimesans believe is coveted by the aggressive blitzkrieg forces of Beaumont) and not too much industry or commerce. There is George’s, a superior German delicatessen, however. You should go there and ask yourself, “What’s the wurst that could happen?”

It is a fairly good bet that few have ever mistaken Calimesa for Marin County when it came to ganja. Even the marijuana in Calimesa is quiet.

The city council election in Calimesa was so quiet that the city extended the deadline for filing. According to the Riverside Press-Enterprise, only three candidates had filed to run for two seats on the five-member council. Mayor Jim Hyatt was running for re-election, but Councilman Ray Quinto had demurred, because, he told the PE, he believes in “term limits.” Hyatt’s opponents in the race are John Keith and Jeff Hewitt.

Marijuana dispensaries have proven to be huge sources of revenue for some California cities. Redneck Ring politicians tend to shun them like the plague, however, preferring to inflict fees and taxes on local citizens instead of collecting sales tax revenue from dispensaries. Cancer victims and other ailing patients whose pain and suffering would be alleviated by THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, have to travel many miles to fill their prescriptions so that local pols can pose for holy pictures on their “moral high ground.”

Banning’s Redevelopment Agency has made the Los Angeles Times, and it ain’t pretty.

Following up the fiscal fiasco in Bell, two Times reporters looked at the peccadilloes of city redevelopment agencies throughout California. Banning’s, which had been investigated by a county grand jury, came under Times scrutiny for the purchase of the old All Star Dodge dealership property after the dealership went south.

Without having a real estate appraisal, the Banning City Council — sitting as the RDA, which is a common system in California — paid $1.2 million for the small, old dealership building and lot. At the time, the RDA may have thought it had a buyer in line for the property — but a deal didn’t happen, and the city has been stuck with the property, which remains vacant. With minimal transparency required by law, and RDA board members not talking about specifics, there is no telling if the RDA got played.

The Times article quotes Phillipp Goebbels, who runs The Banning Informer, a Teabagger-minded site, and Banning Mayor Bob Botts, a conservative Republican.

But facts aren’t worth much without their context, as Norman Mailer noted. What the Times article fails to mention is that the Informer is backing its own slate of city council candidates running against incumbents Botts and Debbie Franklin. Lyndon Taylor and Edward Wilson are conducting a predominantly negative campaign for office. They seem to be counting on public resentment of a large increase in utility rates to pay off a bond floated by the city to build a badly needed new police station, a swimming pool to replace an obsolete facility, and a modest skate park.

Corruption, despite innuendo from the Informer, doesn’t appear to be the Banning RDA’s problem — the grand jury investigation uncovered none.

But RDA staff turnover has been troubling. In the last decade, the redevelopment agency director’s office — like most senior management positions in Banning city government — has looked more like a revolving door, with directors and interim directors marching through at a disconcerting pace. Many of the staff hired were not from the Pass Area, not very familiar with it, and most lived miles away from Banning. Perhaps as a result, the RDA board (the city council sitting as such) often had to rely on questionable staff research to make decisions.

Redevelopment funds were given to the Banning Business Center, a large collection of “commercial condos” along Lincoln Street in south Banning, when its claim that there was a market for commercial condos in Banning was unfounded. Not one condo sold — the project became instant blight and stands unfinished. RDA staff had been ebulliently enthusiastic about funding BBC, which indicated that they had done little or no effective, independent research into the project.

Similarly, a façade project in downtown Banning resulted in a building that looks good from the outside, but stands unoccupied.

The RDA also bought the San Gorgonio Inn, a once-famous landmark restaurant that had gone out of business and deteriorated beyond restoration, for a substantial amount of money. The Inn stands on property next to Interstate 10, but a few blocks from the nearest exit — and the RDA seems to have no buyer for the property.

The utility rate increase that the Informer slate is using as an issue in its political campaign came about as a result of the real estate bubble bursting, not from political ineptitude or fiscal imprudence. The water utility bond was to be financed by existing income from water and wastewater bond — not by projected future income, which could be fudged (it would have been legal to use projected income, but the RDA board refused).

Bond experts considered Banning’s approach a conservative business practice and gave the bond a high rating. When the bubble burst and people began to lose their homes, however, income to the utility declined by almost a million dollars annually, forcing the city council to seek a rate increase to cover the lost income.

The other major activity of redevelopment agencies is the construction of affordable apartments for low- and middle-income residents. Banning’s RDA has had equally tough sledding in this area.

RDA directors inevitably have come up with sites on Banning’s East Side for affordable housing units. The East Side is home to Banning’s African American community, the oldest in the Pass Area, and also tends to be home to some of the city’s poor (unemployment in Banning ranges from 17-22 percent, depending on whose numbers you trust, and 70 percent of Banning Unified School District’s students qualify for free government lunches — a prime indicator of poverty). All of Banning’s affordable housing construction has been on the East Side, and residents of that area have had enough and oppose further construction there.

Despite ample open space in the rest of the city, especially on the South Side, the RDA has been mysteriously unable to construct any units elsewhere.

While the Banning City Council/RDA board is ultimately responsible for how the city is run, recent events seem to reflect the information technology slogan, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Banning’s city council will continue to have trouble deciding on projects if it continues to be given badly researched advice by short-term staff who are questionably acquainted with the city — no matter who is on the council.