WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: PETE KOKON : STILL Cookin’ After All These Years : Continuing a Storied Career That Began in the 1930s, Columnist Kokon Spotlights Outstanding Area Athletes

Pull up a chair, for Pete’s sake.

Pull up a chair and take a richly nostalgic journey back to a time when the San Fernando Valley was nothing but fig orchards, strawberry patches and orange groves as far as the eye could see--to a period when there were just five Valley high schools, and to get from Van Nuys to Owensmouth, as Canoga Park was known before World War II, one could not just motor along Victory Boulevard because it was interrupted by farmland.

Pete Kokon, a 1932 graduate of Van Nuys High who is 77 years young, embodies that pre-smog, pre-freeway era better than almost anyone, and the former sportswriter and columnist for the now-defunct Valley Times would love to take you back there with him.

The Valley is Pete Kokon’s oyster, has been for more than 60 years, back to when he and his two sisters farmed strawberries for their dad. After all, what self-respecting Valley high schooler from the 1930s on hasn’t heard of Kokon’s sports column--”What’s Cookin’ With Kokon”?

“Hell, yes, it was the bible,” said Johnny Sanders, a graduate of Van Nuys in the early 1940s and the San Diego Chargers’ general manager from 1976-87. “ ‘What’s Cookin’ was the big thing in the Valley. All the kids used to read it.”

Hearing that would tickle Kokon pink. Kokon (pronounced KOKE-un) wants nothing more out of life, it seems, than to help youngsters.

Kokon still writes his column for the weekly San Fernando Valley Sun. “What’s Cookin’ with Kokon” is touching Valley kids of the ‘90s in much the same way it touched previous generations.

He comes at you with the disarming innocence of a small boy, still fascinated with the sports world, still rooting for the local kids to make it big.

He can still be found at a Valley prep track meet, or walking the sidelines on autumnal Friday nights, perhaps watching part of his third high school football game that night. The players at Reseda High, under the guidance of veteran Coach Joel Schaeffer, know him respectfully as “Mr. Kokon.”

There’s no stopping the boundless energy of Peter Louis Kokon, the son of Greek immigrants, who lives on the same plot of land on Dickens Street in Van Nuys that his father purchased in 1926 to grow strawberries.

“Pete’s an amazing man,” said Steve Brener, former Dodger publicist who now runs his own sports-marketing and public-relations firm. “He really enjoys helping young kids. He took time to write about the kids in high school and local junior colleges. His enjoyment, I think, was more in seeing those kids coming up than it was in seeing the pros.”

The depth of conviction and warmth with which people extol Kokon speaks volumes for his influence.

“You want to talk about Pete Kokon, the nicest guy I’ve ever known?” Sanders asks.

“Pete Kokon is possibly one of the most charming men I’ve ever known, as far as being kind to people and caring for them,” said Thelma Barrios, editor and publisher of Mission Independents, which prints three weekly papers, including Kokon’s current forum, the Sun. “He has a wonderful image . . . like a father. He’s handled a lot of kids that needed guidance and didn’t have any other source.”

“The big thing about Pete that I always notice is that he’s still got the mentality of the old newspaper men from years ago when there were no drug scandals or recruiting scandals,” said Eric Sondheimer, a reporter for The National and one of Kokon’s proteges. “Everything was always positive with Pete. He always likes to remind me: Write something positive.”

And how does Kokon respond to such adulation?

He smiles in embarrassment, and his normally booming voice takes on sheepish tones.

“Aw, I just try to help the kids out,” he says. “I never wrote a bad word about anybody.”

He has been helping kids since 1936, when he used to pull up to the Van Nuys-Kiwanis playground in his strawberry truck, pile local kids in the back and take them to other playgrounds to play softball.

Kokon would resume his market run, then return to pick up the kids. Why?

“Just to do it,” Kokon said. “To give ‘em something to do.”

In 1944, Kokon spent a year coaching a football team at the McKinley Home, an orphanage in Woodland Hills. He took his squad to an undefeated record and gave the kids a big thrill by bringing along Sanders and Bob Waterfield, Valley prep legends at Van Nuys High, to help coach. And how did Kokon get involved?

“I just volunteered,” he said. “To help the kids out.”

But get Kokon going on the things he’s seen in the Valley in the past 60 years and you will have stoked the fire. He’ll regale you with names of great athletes of the past. He’ll tell you that Carl Ketchy and Jerry Mollett of Van Nuys and Bill Bowers of Canoga Park would form the best backfield in Valley football history. All played in the 1940s and ‘50s. Of more recent Valley stars, Kokon concedes, you could flip a coin between Anthony Davis and Charles White of San Fernando for a fourth position in the backfield.

Bowers holds a special place in Kokon’s heart. Kokon argued vehemently for Bowers to be named City Section football player of the year in the late ‘40s over Hugh McElhenny of Washington High, the future 49er great and NFL Hall of Famer. So who won?

“Well, Billy Bowers won because I yell louder,” he said.

“He fought for the Valley kids to get on All-City teams,” Sanders said. “It was unheard of for kids from the San Fernando Valley to get on All-City teams. Pete stuck up for us.”

Kokon tips his hat to the current generation of football players, saluting 1990 Sylmar High graduate Jerome Casey as the greatest all-around player--offense and defense--he has ever seen in the Valley.

“No question about it,” he says.

Get Kokon going on the days when softball was king in the Valley, and he’ll tell you with pride that 12,000 people showed up at a Valley locale to see a celebrity softball game to benefit the Damon Runyon Fund for underprivileged kids. Kokon played in that game with Eve Arden, Jack Carson and childhood friend Jane Russell, a fellow Van Nuys alum.

He also played on the well-known Van Nuys Food Mart softball team with Scotty Drysdale (Don’s father), Sanders and North Hollywood High athletic legend Lynn Grate. Or how about the time he played on the softball team for Carling’s Ale with Kenny Washington, Tom Harmon and Waterfield?

All the while, he played his first love, golf, with a passion. He won many an amateur tournament in his day and played with the likes of Johnny Weissmuller, Tommy Bolt and Jack Fleck (“I almost beat him,” he said.). He held the course record at Woodland Hills Country Club at one point.

So deep was Kokon’s love of golf and kids that in 1951, along with school administrator Bill Noble, he urged the City Section to include golf as a sport. The City agreed, starting a program that stands today. Kokon was an instructor of the early golfers, nudging some on to successful careers.

“Pete did us a lot of favors,” said Chuck Montalbano, the head pro at Riviera Country Club. “He was certainly one of the biggest supporters of golf in the Valley. He saw to it that we golfers always got our names in the paper, even the junior golfers.”

Kokon also taught the game casually. His students included the great Waterfield of UCLA and Rams fame.

“His nickname was Stoneface, you know,” Kokon said. “He used to say to me just five words all day. On the first tee he’d say, ‘Hi, Greek.’ And then on the 18th green, he’d say, ‘So long, Greek.’

“Finally, he says, ‘I’m gonna beat you one day, Greek.’ I said, ‘I hope you do, Robert. I hope you do.’ And he finally did one day--he shot a 71.”

In 1948, Kokon was traveling as a Rams writer with the Valley Times for a game with the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. Waterfield left Russell, his wife, with Kokon while he trained with the Rams.

“Oh, gee, it was the greatest week I’ve ever had in New York,” Kokon says. “She had just finished making that big picture, ‘The Outlaw,’ see, and she wanted to see all the Broadway shows like ‘Annie Get Your Gun.’ And she couldn’t go alone, so I was her bodyguard.

“Oh, gee, it was the greatest week I’ve ever had in New York,” he gleefully repeats.

Not one to be left out of any arena, Kokon tried his hand at promoting boxing in 1969 at the Valley Music Center with his friend George Parnassus. “What happened,” Kokon told Charles Maher of The Times in 1969, “was that two Greeks got together to get into the boxing business. Usually when two Greeks get together, they open a restaurant.”

And, of course, he was always the active sportswriter, heading out to the different high schools to meet the kids face to face. In the early ‘70s, he asked Ray O’Connor, the Taft baseball coach, if he could take a few grounders with the Toreador infield, shunting first baseman Pete LaCock aside to field grounders and take throws from Robin Yount, Charlie Young and Bill Spooner, members of perhaps the finest infield in Valley history.

Kokon immersed himself in Valley sports. He handicapped each event of the City track finals in the ‘50s, with a classic one-line analysis on each runner or jumper. “Plenty of moxie,” Kokon wrote about one runner. “Gorgeous George’ll be right there,” he wrote about another.

“What’s Cookin’ ” columns are filled with “Kokonisms” that never fail to produce a smile.

One column from the mid-’50s written in Kokon’s trademark three-dot journalistic style, reads: “Burt Purdue is a great runner. . .The young prep 880 man carries the colors of HARVARD BOYS SCHOOL located at the mouth of Coldwater Canyon in the ever lovin’ San Fernando Valley. . .James McCleery, one of the best track starters WHAT’S COOKIN’ has ever seen, and a professor at Harvard Boys School, brought young Purdue over to Van Nuys High Monday afternoon for a tuneup 880 against Van Nuys’ ace Tommy Anderson. . .Purdue is a little fellow who is all arms and legs when he runs. . .And is working like a tiger to get down to 1:53.8 to break the state 880 mark of 1:53.9 held by Lane Stanley, the Jefferson High Flash. . .”

Another gushes: “And how about the San Fernando Valley League SHOT-PUTTERS. . .Weren’t they amazing at the preliminaries. . .It’s almost a cinch for Ray Martin to win the Varsity Division and Dave Berkholz the Class C, all we need now is for Canoga Park’s Dave Davis and Bill Pogue and San Fernando High’s Jerome Mettina to let one loose out there about 50 feet and we’ll have three shot-put kings right from the Valley. . .”

As Kokon says, “If I couldn’t write anything nice, I wouldn’t write it.”

And legions of Valley prepsters have been grateful. Pete Kokon, it seems, is one of the Valley’s most recognizable faces. Almost anybody who has had anything to do with San Fernando Valley sports knows Kokon.

“He has such an amazing memory,” Sondheimer said. “He knows the name of every person that’s been around Valley sports. And they all know him. They come up to him and still ask, ‘Aren’t you Pete Kokon?’ ”

Brener, too, is amazed at Kokon’s sphere of influence. He likes to tell the story of the time he took a dozen or so sportswriters to the Dominican Republic to scout some Dodger talent one winter. They arrived in Santo Domingo and agreed to meet at a hotel bar before dinner. There was one man at the bar having a drink. He turned and stared at the group of sportswriters.

“Aren’t you Pete Kokon?” he asked.

Brener couldn’t believe it. The questioner was a Van Nuys High graduate whom Kokon once had mentioned in a column.

“He’s touched a lot of people,” Brener said.

That, more than anything, is how Pete Kokon would like to be remembered.

For all of Kokon’s stories from the past, for all of his associations with the Waterfields and the Harmons, he continued to do all he could to help the Valley and its folk. In 1947, he organized a day for Waterfield, Harmon and Fred Gerke, a standout running back with the Rams in ‘40s, to visit Valley war veterans in the tuberculosis ward of the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital. He still has a framed letter from the ward’s doctor telling Kokon how touched the men were to meet the great football stars and how much it meant to them.

Letters like that are what keep Kokon going. He treasures those things more than anything else--including his autographed pictures with his sporting friends such as jockey Chris McCarron, Tom Lasorda or Don Drysdale. More than his memories of sitting in Gov. Pat Brown’s chair for five minutes during a 1965 visit. Kokon is, at heart, a sentimental man and he would like to be remembered for his altruism.

In 1965, Kokon helped form the San Fernando Valley Football Foundation, which staged the first Valley high school all-star game. It is now known as the Daily News all-star game.

“We did it to help out charity,” he said. “And to showcase the kids.”

The kids, the kids, always the kids. Kokon is a veritable Santa Claus of Valley sports, spreading joy wherever he goes, giving gifts to kids, jovial and avuncular.

As Brener said, “There’s only one Pete Kokon.”

The city of Los Angeles recognized that too. Kokon has in his apartment an ornately decorated plaque from Mayor Tom Bradley in honor of Kokon’s years of service to the youngsters of the Valley. That too is a treasured item.

So where is Pete Kokon now?

“Why I’m at the same place I’ve always been,” he says, as if offended. “Right here on Dickens Street. The same place I’ve been since 1926.”

In a fast-changing world, that seems good to know. And if you stop by to visit “Uncle Pete,” as so many youngsters call him, there’s a good chance you’ll catch him hunched over an old manual typewriter, banging out another “What’s Cookin’ ” column in his feisty “hunt-peck-and-swear” typing style.

Ask him to show you his lifetime pass from the City Section. It is the most hallowed item in Kokon’s seemingly never-ending parade of souvenirs. Just this year, City Section Commissioner Hal Harkness presented Kokon with a beautiful golden plate engraved in his honor.

It reads, “To Pete Kokon: In grateful appreciation for outstanding service to youth.”

He handles it carefully, like a newborn babe. This is how he wants to be remembered.

So if you ever swing by, give it a look. And, by all means, pull up a chair. For Pete’s sake.