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13. The Dirty Toilet Awards
- University of California Press
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159 chapter 13 The Dirty Toilet Awards Dorothy Green generally came across with a near-grandmotherly warmth so immediate that you half expected her to pull a plate of warm biscuits from her purse. Jamie Simons, among others, thought of Green as her “second mother.” In some cases, this might have been mere strategy, but it did come from a learned conviction that, if you wanted to sway the decision makers, at the very least you had to behave as though you respected them. That’s why Howard Bennett’s plan to flush their names down a john like used toilet paper had to be stopped. This was more than just juvenile; it was counterproductive. One other thing about the Dirty Toilet Awards: In her mind, they plunged so deeply into poor taste that she spat out her opinion of the affair as though a gnat had flown into her mouth. The awards were appalling, scandalous. You would think that Bennett had taken a bucket of malodorous sludge from the ocean floor and dumped it on Green’s Louis XV chair. 160 / The Dirty Toilet Awards But when she got beyond the taste factor, Green allowed that Bennett had the right to do this except for one thing: he still claimed the coalition as his own and continued to hand out pronouncements with twenty-seven coalition members listed on the letterhead, including the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters. This implied that the league supported such sophomoric shenanigans, and the nascent Heal the Bay, still loosely connected with the league, might be besmirched by any negative reaction. If the Bradley administration perceived Heal the Bay as being behind the Dirty Toilet Awards, it might never give the group a seat at the table. It was entirely possible that Green overreacted. Others found something amusing, in a low-class way, about dumping crude effigies of Bradley and the city council down a toilet—Bennett emphasized it was a clean toilet—and sending them a Dirty Toilet Award, suitable for framing or wiping . . . well, never mind. It was a visuals-galore kind of stunt, perfect for the cameras , which meant, of course, the press would report on his puerile theatrics with enough gusto that the public might be reminded that the EPA could still grant Los Angeles a 301(h) waiver. With perhaps a little too much bravado, Bennett also saw it as shaming the guilty characters involved into finally popping loose a few million bucks toward fixing the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant. The story from here is blurred by differing, imperfect memories . Bennett remembers that he and Bente invited Green and her husband, Jack, to dinner, where he announced the awards to the aghast Dorothy (Jack seems to have said little). The awards, he says now, were sparked in part by his belief that Green had done nothing publicly to advance the campaign, which is true. [54.173.221.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:05 GMT) The Dirty Toilet Awards / 161 The Heal the Bay committee had spent their meetings strategizing , developing goals, and naming themselves, without staging any television-friendly demonstrations. In any event, Green tried to convince Bennett what a horrible idea the awards were, and when he insisted on going ahead anyway, she told him, “I will have nothing more to do with you.” In Green’s slightly more dramatic version, Bennett blindsided her by inviting her to the awards ceremony with no warning as to its contents, and she stood in the back of the room shocked when he started sending the effigies into the bowl. For the record, when confronted with Green’s version, Bennett emphatically declared it untrue. But both of them had nothing other than their memories to back up their stories. Either way, on November 5 the awards went on as planned. Although he might have held the ceremony in a local Chevron’s men’s restroom just for yucks, Bennett once again rented a room at the Los Angeles Press Club. He borrowed an off-the-shelf, shiny white toilet from a friend who ran Snyder Diamond Plumbing , with the promise that he would return it in one piece, unused . The toilet simply sat on the dais, a conspicuous prop. The award certificates, which hung on a corkboard behind the toilet, were a bit crude, with a frilly clip-art border surrounding an open toilet and the inscription, in florid type: “Roll of Dishonor. This Dirty Toilet Bowl Award is...