Plucky Banker Goes Through Life With a Banjo on His Knee

George Yellich doesn’t pick cotton or Lotto numbers, but this 67-year-old mortgage banker is a demon on his old banjo.

He frequently picks in the Northridge home where he’s lived since 1957 with his wife, Jean, a non-picker.

He sometimes picks at parties for his friends.

But every Wednesday evening, Yellich joins about 20 or so other members of the 24-year-old, Valley-based Banjo Band to perform at Skoby’s Country Inn in Chatsworth, aided and abetted by a tuba, bass, harmonica, washboard and occasionally a bazouka. The sounds are not to be believed.

“George Yellich came around about six years ago and asked if we would like to have his band entertain here once a week, and I agreed,” remembers Chris Skoby, the restaurant owner, who says the band has become a popular attraction with his clientele.

According to Yellich, the band got started in the Valley in 1970. “There were some banjo players who got together to play occasionally, and the band just grew from there,” he says.

As bandleader since 1987, Yellich gets to pick the music, orchestrate it and make tapes of his arrangements so that the other members, who range in age from 19 to 96, can learn the tunes by ear.

Some of his favorites are standards, like “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,” “High Society” and all the old Dixieland tunes that made him fall in love with the instrument in the first place, he says.

He explains his fascination with the All-American instrument by saying that in 1967 or so he watched and listened to a banjo player entertaining at a party and that it looked like so much fun, he went out and bought an instrument for himself. He’s been picking away ever since.

It was his teacher, Wayland Chester, who suggested that he begin playing with the Banjo Band.

About half the members of the band come from the Valley, and the rest from all over Southern California. About half are retired, and the others include a lawyer, rocket scientist, postal worker, actor and a keeper at the Los Angeles Zoo.

The group members donate most of the money they earn to charities, such as Rancho San Antonio Boys Home in Canoga Park and the Northridge Hospital Trauma Center. According to Yellich, the amount is not insignificant: about $67,000 in the past 10 years.

Yellich says the band has made appearances at Disneyland, the Orange County Jazz Festival and the Los Angeles Jazz Classic. The group also appears at Barbato’s restaurant in Northridge every third Thursday of the month.

But their longest run has been the gig at Skoby’s, where recently a little something extra has been added.

After the group’s regular performance, the band now often plays a little longer with Skoby’s son, Lou, 32, sitting in on bazouka (that’s the Greek pipe and funnel instrument, not the armor-piercing rocket launcher). Skoby describes the unique sound as “very good.”

Climbing the Walls

After several years working as a waitress, Monroe High School graduate Patty Wilson decided to become a paperhanger.

Not the kind who passes bad checks. The kind who decorates your home.

“I wanted to go into business for myself with something that didn’t cost too much to get started, and I knew a guy who was doing well in that business, so I decided to try it myself,” she says.

For a couple of years she apprenticed to another paperhanger. Then, once she had gotten her confidence and skills up, she went off on her own.

She says business was good at first, then she ran into the recession, but since the earthquake, she’s been as busy as a one-armed you-know-what.

Still it isn’t a job she plans to keep forever, she says. And it’s not because she’s fallen off her ladder or been bitten by pets or children.

“It isn’t the actual job that gets to you,” Wilson says, “but having to deal with some of the people involved.

“Not everyone understands why you can’t hang paper when there are people working on the floors or in other places. No one wants to understand when the job takes longer than you thought,” she adds.

But the biggest problem for Wilson is indecision. “I can’t tell you how many people just can’t make up their minds.”

She cites one Agoura family who asked her to put up a print in their kitchen. When the job was partially complete, the wife said she didn’t know if the print was right, so Wilson told her to think about it while she went out to lunch, and when she returned the customer said to go ahead with it.

“That night she called and said her husband hated the new print,” the paperhanger says, sighing.

She adds that the couple chose another print, and when she hung that, they didn’t like that one any better. They finally went back to the print they had on the wall originally.

After Wilson had hung paper for the third time, she says she told the clients she’d had it. Not wanting that particular kitchen to be her life’s work, she told them that if they wanted another print, they “should call somebody else.”

Second-Guessing the Almighty

Anyone else out there experiencing a summer bummer?

The kind that comes from contemplating what He was thinking when He ordered up the universe?

Example: Why are we healthy and spunky when we are children? Shouldn’t we be born old and creaky and get younger as we get older, so we really appreciate our health and spunkiness?

And, why do we finally get the answers to many of life’s mysteries about the time we develop osteoporosis and our brains have turned to chocolate pudding? Lot of good the smarts are going to do us then.

Most vexing, perhaps, is why children--who do nothing all year but bankrupt us financially, emotionally, physically and maybe spiritually--are the ones who get to go to summer camp.

Yes there are camps where grown male children pretend they are baseball players, and places called spas where Mom can get away from the kiddies. Who can afford the time off or money for such things?

Meanwhile, our children, in order to rest up from their grueling schedule of Chuck E. Cheese, soccer and Little League practice, get to go to specialized camps and do all kinds of things that we never got to do.

At Fairfield School in Van Nuys, they get to play with computers.

At Chatsworth Hills Academy, they have classes in Spanish and tae kwon do.

At the Andy Cano Training Stables in Chatsworth, the little darlings ride horseback.

River Runners in Calabasas offer white-water rafting, and Skateland in Northridge offers roller hockey camp.

At General Cinema Theatres Summer MovieCamp they get to watch silly movies and eat BUTTERED popcorn.

Why don’t people realize they are barking up the wrong age group?

It’s adults who are pushing the envelope on sanity.

Several calls to camps to see if they had ever thought about opening the camp to those 21 and older elicited the following responses. No names were taken because the respondents hung up too fast.

First respondent: “When you find a camp for adults, call back and let me know about it and see if you can get me a scholarship.”

Second respondent: “I don’t think that’s such a bad idea. You know, it’s adults who are all strung out and crazy, but the guy who runs this place lives somewhere back in the Ice Age and wouldn’t see the sense in that kind of thing.”

Third respondent: “I already take The Times. Are you trying to sell me an ad or something?”

Final respondent: “I can’t talk to you now. Someone’s eating the blue paint.”

Overheard

“You shouldn’t call that stock a lousy performer. Some stocks just get stage fright after they first appear on the Big Board.”

Woodland Hills stockbroker on phone to client.