A Small-Town Story Spins Into the Big-Time Blues

There are cities where people clash and clamor, where people collide with sputtering glee. Cities where people defy and confront just for the contact of it. Those cities are, ahem, not L.A.

Southern Californians don’t do contact well, which makes things interesting when an argument gets started. Why have icky, intimate face-offs when you can have an arms-length fight? Someone takes offense here, the norm seems to be to stew until you lose all sense of proportion and then, boom, in comes the third party--boss, lawyer, homeboy. Newspaper. Which prompts today’s L.A. story. Call it the Blues and the Councilman’s Wife.

“I’m a professional musician,” begins Jimmy Scott. “I’ve played with everybody from Little Milton to Solomon Burke. This year I’ll play the Long Beach Blues Festival. And for about 10 years now, I have also taught this guitar class, Guitar Made Easy. This happened about four weeks ago.”

Scott, 38, teaches at various locations. This was an extension course at West L.A. College, for guitarists age 10 and up. There were about 25 students, some of them kids. As usual, Scott--who is childless--ended class with an inspirational anecdote.

“Basically, the guitar is not something you can just pick up and play,” he says, “and it’s hard for people to see the end of the tunnel sometimes. So I tell them a story from 1976, when I was living in Louisville, Ky.” He was 15. He and his friends ditched school and went to a mall, where he saw a magazine with a cover shot of Ted Nugent, his guitar hero. When Scott sighed that he couldn’t afford the magazine, his friend shoplifted it as a present. Scott devoured it and ended up, years later, playing with one of the blues greats--Lowell Fulsom--featured inside.

“Now don’t you go shoplifting magazines,” Scott told his students, as usual, “but if a 15-year-old kid in a dead-end place like Louisville can end up a professional musician in L.A., you can learn this instrument and get to where you want to be, too.” It was the same speech he’d given for 10 years without complaint, until an 11-year-old boy, there with his mom and twin brother, asked the teacher if he’d ever returned the stolen publication. Unfortunately, the blues man answered: “I’ll take it to my grave.”

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The letter came via fax to the extension director: “I never would have anticipated that the class, Guitar Made Easy, would intersect moral considerations in relation to my 11-year-old twin boys,” it began. “I pay my money and spend my time on attempting to expose my boys to better circumstances than those which highlight ditching school and shoplifting.”

The letter, signed by Avis Ridley-Thomas--administrator of the Los Angeles city attorney’s dispute resolutions program and wife of Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas--went on for a full scathing page, noting, among other things, that African American boys like her sons couldn’t afford to view theft as lightly as a white guy like Scott. “If [Scott] believes he will want to continuously detail his previous (and perhaps current) crimes and moral indiscretions,” she complained, “I am sure that you will understand that I may not wish to have my boys continue to attend his class.”

She wasn’t asking for more than a tuition refund, but Scott wanted to respond. “I’d like to offer my apology,” Scott wrote back, unable to get past the letter’s officious tone. “I would like to, but . . . I cannot.” Who said he condoned crime? Where did she get off using her clout to malign him to a third party? And what was this business these days of going to the mat over every tiny offense? (He has a powerful point there.)

Of course, a short chat might have defused things. But no. This being L.A., Ridley-Thomas spoke only to Scott’s boss. Whereupon Scott called her voice mail. Whereupon she redialed his boss. Whereupon Scott e-mailed her husband. Whereupon she called the president and general counsel of West L.A. College. Whereupon Scott went to the press.

Ridley-Thomas--who is delightful in person--said she didn’t talk to Scott because she could feel herself stewing and wanted to think her reaction through. Also, she said, although her kids would never shoplift, “it’s a public institution, and teachers shouldn’t be showing children how to steal.” She said she offered to do a mediation with Scott, but dropped it after the e-mail: “He just freaked. I think his feelings were hurt.”

And Scott says his feelings still are hurt and he’s still stewing, both because of the letter’s “June Cleaver mentality” and the implication that a white guy on the South-Central blues circuit would be insensitive to African Americans. He wants an apology. She wants him to drop it. The college wants--what else?--everyone to get along. Preferably on their own and in private. Now that’d be a story, in L.A.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.