Curious to know what was happening at the O.J. Simpson trial, I headed up Main Street on a sunny Monday afternoon in February. As I approached the Santa Monica Courthouse, I saw a familiar face.
Walking his little dog was Ken Ober.
By 1997, most people probably had already forgotten who Ober was. But anyone who grew up watching MTV in the 80s would remember him as the guy who hosted the quirky game show “Remote Control,” which is probably best known for spawning the career of Adam Sandler.
As he walked past me, we both kind of nodded knowingly at each other. Because we both knew why we were there. The jury was deliberating on the Simpson case, and we both wanted to catch a glimpse of the craziness going on outside the courthouse.
Of course, it’d get a lot more crazy in a few hours.
My being there at that time was sort of a coincidence. Though, like many people at the time, I was fascinated with the case, I had wanted to return to California for other reasons. I had visited my friend Eric in Burbank in the late 80s, and I thought it was ok. I wouldn’t want to live there. But then in the 90s, the idea of California grew on me. The palm trees. The sun.
All that.
So I planned a weeklong sojourn, which involved taking a train from Chicago to Los Angeles. I didn’t even know where I was going to stay once I got there until some guy on the train recommended Santa Monica.
Oh — and it just so happened that the O.J. civil trial was going on there.
After seeing Ober, I continued to the courthouse where several bored media people waited endlessly for a verdict. Greta Van Sustern was taping a segment. Some guy from “Hard Copy” was fixing his hair while looking in the side view mirror of his news van. And foreign TV people speaking in Korean (I think) and German said stuff I couldn’t understand.
There was a guy playing guitar, another selling buttons, and a couple of other dudes holding up some sort of religious banner they had made just for the occasion. An older guy in a straw had wore a plastic Hefty Bag like a poncho. Taped onto it were the words “Not Guilty.”
Being a journalist, I had to ask: “Who’s not guilty — you or O.J.?”
“O. J. Simpson,” he said, very clearly.
He too had had a run-in with the LAPD, he said. Got messed up pretty good. So, of course, O.J. had to have been framed.
It was an interesting scene. But ultimately, I decided to rent a bike and see the really interesting stuff over in Venice Beach. Crazy place, that is. Muscle heads and women in string bikinis. I even saw that dude who plays electric guitar while rollerblading.
A few hours later, when I saw six helicopters in the sky, I knew it was going down.
I returned my bike and hussled down to the courthouse, where a crowd was already assembled. Word was out: The verdict was in.
Eventually, the crowd grew bigger and bigger — up to 3,000 people — as we waited for the parties to arrive. One man shouted, “Free the Juice!” which was met with jeers.
This was Santa Monica, after all. A different scene than the criminal trial.
Later, as we waited for Simpson and the Goldmans to arrive, people began to get surly. At one point, a man yelled, “Can’t we all get along?” And it seemed like a poignant comment until everyone turned and saw that it was the “Free the Juice” guy, who was dismissed a second time.
The Goldmans arrived first. While they were known solely because of their murdered son, when they stepped out of their cars, they were greeted like celebrities on the red carpet. People cheered and rooted them on.
They were heroes.
Some time later, O.J.’s limo arrived. When his chauffer stepped out of the vehicle, someone jumped the gun and shouted: “MURDERER!”
Then everyone stood on their tippy toes, creened their necks and nudged others in the crowd. A couple of guys climbed a palm tree. Because O.J. Simpson — the standout running back, movie star and accused killer – was about to exit.
When he did, it was like the crowd at Fenway reacting to Johnny Damon the first time he played in a Yankees uniform.
This was clearly not Simpson’s crowd.
When the cheering and booing were over, everyone waited. The two or three people who had radios or cellphones became the most important people in the crowd. And when the verdicts were relayed — a jury finding Simpson liable for murder – the place went crazy.
When the verdicts were read, the TV folks scrambled to get crowd reactions. Since this was Santa Monica, the few people of color in the crowd were likely to be interviewed by two or three crews. One disheveled-looking white guy looked at a camera and said, “O.J. Simpson gives killers a bad name!”
And, as I glanced at those choppers in the sky, I thought: Only in L.A.
Ken Ober died today. I’ll bet few people of my co-workers even know who he was. But to me, I’ll remember him as the psuedo-celeb who, just like me, found himself caught up in the whole O.J. hoopla.
Posted on November 17th, 2009 by Pat
Filed under: Songs in the Key of Life: My Musical Memoirs, The World According to Pat
I will long remember the day that the OJ verdict was read. My wife was having a colonoscopy at an area hospital. (Kind of a bad day to have an internal plumbing check when the entire world was wondering what was to become of the former star Buffalo Bills running back and ill-fated actor, I remember thinking.) I went into a room where another man was waiting for his down-scope time. A TV was on in his room, and he invited me in to watch. As we waited we made small talk. Turns out he lived up the hill from where we lived when we had a cabin out in the woods. Our neighbor, a contractor, had gone over to the guy’s house after learning it had been burned in a fire. I told him that our neighbor had actually been IN his house. They homeowner replied: WHAT GUY? Meanwhile, the TV coverage — boring but in an EXCITING way) was almost as great as OJ’s white Bronco drive through L.A. freeways the year before. Finally, the verdict was read and the guy — a prominent North County donor — and I shook our heads in disbelief. A sad day for justice. And weird. The world can be a very weird place!