Column on Pesky Valet Parking Brings Speedy Responses

It has been some months since I’ve reported in this space on mail. I have a very large pile of letters on my desk, arranged so I have to look at them daily and suffer commensurately about my dereliction in not responding.

If I spent half as much time answering letters as I do feeling guilty, I’d be further along than dealing with the mail of last June, which is where I am now. But I’m determined--rather like the pile of unread New Republics and New Yorkers beside my bed--to get at these letters, and someday I will.

Meanwhile, I’d like to summarize some trends in the correspondence that seem noteworthy--and sometimes surprising.

Two quite disparate columns produced by far the most mail in the last six months: the column on valet parking and that on the AIDS quilt. Response to the former was totally one-sided, while the AIDS column prompted sharply differing views.

I touched an unexpected nerve with valet parking. A lot of people are as angry as I am about being forced to turn our cars over to sometime jockeys who drive the cars 20 feet and park them for us in frequently near-deserted parking lots.

Ray Kovitz, who once worked for The Times, wrote about looking into this practice some years ago and discovering that “the kids did not get to keep the tips but made an hourly stipend. Patrons who thought they were helping some poor student through college were sadly misinformed.”

Harry Prince of Laguna Hills chastised me for “overlooking the obvious method of cure. It’s very simple. Mention the offending restaurants by name. . . . Other restaurants would think twice before instituting a similar disservice to their customers.” (The point is well taken; I didn’t do it because I didn’t want to single out two offenders when so many are guilty of the same practice.)

And Myron Simon of Anaheim, who “dislikes having someone park our car,” described watching a TV news program “which stated that the person who owns the car is totally responsible for his car no matter who is driving it” and suggested I “investigate and give us a follow-up column.”

I did. I talked to Dan Angel who ran a highly successful Orange County valet parking company for eight years and got out of this business three years ago for the same reasons that are disconcerting a lot of us today.

Angel said there are three systems of valet parking now in use by local restaurants and hotels: the in-house method, in which the parking attendants are employees of the hotel or restaurant; legitimate valet companies that charge the facility a fixed rate for each car parked and who carry liability insurance; and marginal, often fly-by-night operators who may or may not have insurance and run their own show while the restaurant or hotel management looks the other way.

In the first instance, says Angel, customers can be sure who’s responsible, although whether or not attendants keep their tips depends on the policy of the facility; in the second instance, the customer can be assured that the attendants keep their tips and are also paid a minimum wage (“That’s the law,” says Angel simply), and that the valet company carries liability insurance (“Although,” points out Angel, “they are responsible only if there is negligence on the part of the attendant”); and in the third instance, virtually anything goes. Attendants may be stripped of their tips, insurance may be non-existent, and the operation could be pushing the edges of illegality.

Angel got out of the business when he found that he was being undercut by operators who were being hired with no questions asked at no charge to the facility. “There are all sorts of marginal people getting into this business now,” said Angel, “and it’s extremely difficult for a solid, totally dependable operation to compete as long as the hotels and restaurants are willing to look the other way.”

Angel suggested three questions consumers should ask parking attendants when faced with compulsory valet parking:

1. Is this an outside concession or part of the hotel or restaurant?

2. Do you have liability insurance?

3. Are you allowed to keep your tips?

Maybe if enough of us do this, the restaurants and hotels will get the word that we don’t like this gun at our heads. And that it may very well drive us to take our trade elsewhere.

Moving along to the column on the AIDS quilt, the response was deeply divided--and highly emotional.

On the affirmative side, here is part of what Mark Shier, rector of the Episcopal Church of St. Andrew in Fullerton, wrote: “So many times I have intended to write you in appreciation for this column or that. . . . What has pushed me over the edge from intention to action is the column on the AIDS quilt.

“Thank you. I have not yet seen the quilt because I dread the sorrow it will engender in me, much as I weep when I see the Vietnam War Memorial. Perhaps the grief at young life and talent wasted as well as the social and institutional rejection in both tragedies is the reason . . . I decided to write this on church stationery because I felt it important to say in this small way that there is another kind of minister of the Christian Gospel than Lou Sheldon.

“We are true in an imperfect fashion to the compassion and love commanded by Jesus. We are the majority.”

A common strain ran through the letters of those who objected to the quilts piece: that the people infected had brought on this suffering by their own behavior and were also putting others at risk, and therefore didn’t warrant compassion. Two examples will illustrate:

Barbara Thomas of Garden Grove wrote: “It saddens me that one of your knowledge could let himself be taken in by the sob stories about those who have AIDS.

“I have never believed that the disease was a curse from God. A loving God does not curse his creatures. However, like a good parent, He has warned us all about certain things that may be harmful to us. He gave us the Commandments along with a number of other guidelines and one of them was a warning against sodomy. . . .

“We do not have to condemn them. They do that themselves. There is no need to punish them. They do that themselves. But to build them up as heroes or long-suffering martyrs is to sell our whole civilization down the river.”

And H. Virginia Carter-Lee of Newport Beach wrote, in part: “Your recent bathos-filled commentary on the AIDS quilt compels this message.

“Unquestionably the AIDS patient deserves compassionate treatment . . . It should nevertheless be clearly understood that this terrible scourge is overwhelmingly the result of a deliberately chosen lifestyle and most of those who suffer from it are not hapless victims of circumstances beyond their control. . . .

“I opine from the unique perspective of one whose every immediate family member is a physician . . . I resent the daily obligation to assume risks in an atmosphere of uncertainty because of the legally protected HIV privacy status of patients.”

It isn’t my intent to get into a debate with letter writers here. But I would point back briefly to a recent column on critical thinking and the definition of “loaded” statements--in this case that ho mosexuality is a “deliberately chosen lifestyle,” a scientifically dubious assumption on which both of these arguments are based.

Jumping around in the space that’s left, I’d like to thank the letter writers and phone callers--all, oddly enough, men--who filled me in on where I could find string bikinis on Orange County beaches.

Several veterans of World War II also took umbrage at my column about the camaraderie at an art opening between American and German was aces.

Wrote Frank Bradley of Huntington Beach, who signed himself “USNR, survivor of Omaha Beach”: “As for this German, Hanns Scharff, I find it hard to believe that he was soft on all American POW airmen. As brutal as the German command was, some Americans must have been badly abused, both physically and mentally. As as result of their mistreatment, there must be some survivors out there today who would like to meet up with Scharff and beat the (writer put in a underscore line) out of him.”

And then, of course, there was the column about some of the influential people in my life.

I tried to explain at the end why I listed only men, even though women probably played a more significant role, but that didn’t placate several irritated female phone callers who weren’t buying this.

I’m not going to get into this one any deeper than I already have except to say that if I had listed only women, I doubt if any irate men would have called.

Perhaps the last word should be given to Alan Blum of Balboa Island who thinks I missed the plane in my comments about names for the facilities at our new airport terminal.

Wrote Blum: “After the airport reverts to its rightful name of Orange County Airport or perhaps another SUITABLE name, I suggest renaming the gents’ restroom Wayne’s John.’ ”