The Memorial Wall

Donald Leo Hartenfeld passed away May 6, 2009 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. He was at home and at peace, with his loving family by his side.

Although not unexpected, his death was sudden. It is not his death, but his life that is to be remembered…a life that was filled with love, laughter, and an uncompromising devotion to family and friends. He was a warm, caring, sensitive, considerate, passionate bear of a man who enjoyed life to the fullest. Quick to offer a smile and a hug, Don was known to those close to him as a man who encouraged everyone around him to reach for the stars and to achieve things they never dreamed possible.

He traveled extensively and harbored a deep love of Berlin, his ancestral homeland and where he was stationed in the Air Force, and the Caribbean, where he frequently enjoyed many memorable adventures on trips and Windjammer cruises with family and friends.

Don was born June 13, 1928 in Sandusky, Ohio to Ervin H. Hartenfeld and Lucille H. (Neumeyer) Hartenfeld, the youngest of three boys. He graduated from Sandusky High School, Class of ’46 and attended Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean Conflict. Upon returning to the States, he enrolled at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio but longed for more after living in Berlin and visiting all the great cities of Europe. He answered a friend’s invitation to join him in Mexico City where he enrolled at Mexico City College and obtained a B.A. in Business in August 1956.

When he returned to the States, he bid farewell to Ohio and moved to San Francisco where he was employed by IBM as a Methods Analyst. He enjoyed an outstanding 23 year career with IBM, living in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and traveling extensively on behalf of the company. His travels enabled him to explore all of the United States and to widen his circle of friends. He embarked on a new career path in 1982 when he accepted a new challenge with Pacific Northwest Insurance in Portland, Oregon where he lived for nine years before retiring.

Retirement did not slow Don down as he moved to Palm Springs in 1995 and continued his travels. Don assumed an active role in his community. He was an Honorary Member of Palm Springs Leather Order of the Desert and a volunteer at Desert AIDS Project where he was named “Volunteer of the Year” in 2003.

Don was preceded in death by his parents, Ervin and Lucille Hartenfeld, and two brothers, Ervin John Hartenfeld and Rolland Benjamin Hartenfeld.

Don is survived by his life partner, George Puddephatt of Palm Springs; sister-in law Mary Alice Hartenfeld of Gahana, Ohio; nieces Barbara Hartenfeld of Phoenix, Arizona, Bonnie Darnell of Portage, Ohio, Gail Downing of Lewis Center, Ohio, Judy Baird of Stockbridge, Georgia, Pam Suver of Powell, Ohio, Lori Anne Miller of Castalia, Ohio; nephews Rolland E. Hartenfeld of Bellevue, Ohio, Jonathon E. Hartenfeld of Green Springs, Ohio; adopted son, Ruben Andreatta of Indio, California and a wealth of devoted loving friends throughout the U.S. and Canada.

A celebration of life will be held on June 13th at 4:00 P.M. at The Commissary, 69620 Highway 111 in Rancho Mirage, California. As a final tribute to Don and in lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in his name to the Parkinson’s Resource Organization

Our dear friend, Joyce, went home on June 1, 2010.

Born in Canada on the 156th anniversary of Beethoven's birthday, she had a passion for music. With a contralto voice, her singing choices embraced spirituals, oratorio, operatic arias, and show tunes. She directed choirs, particularly children's choirs. She sang in a wide variety of venues. She joked that she had sung in so many different churches that she was ecumenical. Joyce had a non-stop zest for life, even as Parkinson's disease slowed her mobility.

Her lifelong mantra was "Don't take life too seriously; you'll never get out of it anyhow."

For nearly 53 years, Joyce and her cousin and best friend, Grace, laughed, traveled, attended all manner of events, made friends and volunteered, as they together enjoyed life to the full. Yes, they did work once in a while as well. Joyce's favorite spiritual was Anton Dovrak's "Goin' Home" "Mother's there 'specting me, Father's waiting, too. Lots of folks gathered there, All the friends I knew…. Through an open door…. Goin' home."

Joyce leaves behind a lot of friends who have yet to walk the final mile, but she looks forward to seeing them again, too. 

"Thanks for the Memories!!!" - Grace

Richard Nelson Hester of Upland passed away on Sunday, November 30, 2014, with family at his side. He was born September 7, 1930, to Francis and Ruth Hester in Anaheim, Calfiornia. Richard grew up in Pomona where he became an Eagle Scout. He graduated from Chaffey High School. He is an alumnus of Chico State University where he was named to the Athletic Hall of Fame for his track performance, character and leadership. While serving in the Korean War he was awarded the Army Commendation for Meritorious Service. He taught biology, coached track and cross country at Chino High School and later moved to Don Lugo High School as a counselor. He married Barbara Fullagar in 1962 and for 52 years has been a caring and devoted husband. He is survived by his wife, Barbara; two daughters; Melissa Hunt (Vernon) of Yorba Linda and Susanna Kutches (Alex) of Bozeman, Montana; and grandchildren, Alexandra, Hayley and Faith Hunt and Kate and AJ Kutches; and many dear longtime friends. He cherished the time when family was together, especially at Lake Almanor. Memorial service will be 11:00, Saturday, December 20th at First Presbyterian Church of Upland. In additional to your memorial contribution, sentiments for the family can also be listed in the "comment" section below.

His dyspeptic morning show helped make WBAI-FM in New York a vibrant, eccentric, alternative radio haven. “I was the first angry man in morning radio,” he said.

Larry Josephson, a cranky practitioner of free-form radio on noncommercial WBAI-FM in New York who helped shape the station into a vibrant, eccentric, alternative radio haven, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 83.

His death, at a nursing facility, was most likely caused by complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter, Jennie Josephson.

Mr. Josephson, who later in his career produced and hosted public radio programs, mixed personal confession, satire, political talk, phone calls, music and puns in his morning program. He was considered a pillar of the station, along with his fellow hosts Bob Fass and Steve Post.

“But I was the first angry person in morning radio, and it was genuine,” Mr. Josephson told Newsday in 1989. “I couldn’t get used to getting up at 5 a.m., so, on the air, I’d slam down the telephone, throw fits, be late and be guilty that I was late.”

He added: “Today, Howard Stern is doing a bad imitation of ’60s me and getting a million dollars a year for it. I am getting nothing for ’90s me.” (He never earned much in public radio and died with very little money, his daughter said.)

Marty Goldensohn, a former news director at WBAI, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Josephson had been an independent thinker who “was not simplistic in his embrace of progressive ideas.”

“He didn’t go for rightist or leftist claptrap,” he said.

Soon after Mr. Josephson began hosting his show, “In the Beginning,” in 1966, The New York Times radio and television critic Jack Gould described him as “really less a disc jockey than an aural happening.”

He was inspired, for example, to play the Beatles song “Lady Madonna” over and over for two hours after its release in 1968, and to spend two days playing every available recording of “Celeste Aida,” from the first act of Verdi’s opera “Aida.”

Mr. Josephson opened one of his shows in 1967 with a version of “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” and declaring over it: “From the Chutzpah Room of the Hotel Sinai, it’s the music of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Orchestra. How ’bout that, peace fans!”

Frank Millspaugh, a general manager of the station in the 1960s and ’70s, said listeners had empathized with Mr. Josephson’s eternal grumbling about waking up early. But some board members of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns the station, were displeased with the countercultural tone of Mr. Josephson, Mr. Fass and Mr. Post.

“They wanted a more serious, more respectful sound to the station,” Mr. Millspaugh said in a phone interview. But when they understood how effective those hosts were in raising money for the station, “they softened their criticism.”

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Josephson served for two years as the general manager of WBAI, which routinely operated on a shoestring. During one urgent financial crisis, the station turned to listeners to raise $56,000 to meet its monthly expenses. Within four days, $25,800 had poured in, most of it cash.

“We will survive,” Mr. Josephson told The Daily News in 1976. “We have to raise more money and spend less. It’s just like New York City,” which was dealing with a much larger financial crisis of its own at the time.

Norman Lawrence Josephson was born on May 12, 1939, in Los Angeles. His father, Adrian, at one point owned a woodworking company; his mother, Marian (Tyre) Josephson, was a homemaker.

Larry had loved radio since childhood but did not initially pursue work in it. Instead, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied linguistics, then went to work for I.B.M. as a computer engineer in the New York area. (He did not finish his bachelor’s degree until 1973.) He began volunteering at WBAI in the 1960s and was hired to host the morning show in 1966 because, he said, the station couldn’t find anyone else who would wake up that early.

“I’m a night person myself,” he told The New Yorker in a short profile in 1967, “and the only conscious position I had was to be Against the Morning. What I didn’t realize was that there was a tremendous audience out there — I don’t know how many millions — with a tremendous need for someone to be natural, to be grumpy.”

He left WBAI in 1972 and hosted a program at KPFA, a Berkeley radio station also owned by Pacifica, before returning to WBAI in about 1974. He stayed for several more years, hosting “Bourgeois Liberation” on Sunday mornings before becoming an independent producer.

Mr. Josephson helped revive the comedy team of Bob and Ray by producing their syndicated “Bob and Ray Public Radio Show” and their Carnegie Hall shows in the 1980s. He also produced audiocassettes and CDs of their best routines.

“We’re doing this because I think they should be on radio,” Mr. Josephson told The Associated Press in 1984. “It’s as much for radio as for Bob and Ray. They need each other.”

Over the next two decades, he hosted and produced “Modern Times,” a national call-in show that was distributed by American Public Radio; “Bridges,” on which he interviewed conservatives like Milton Friedman, Charles Murray, Ralph Reed and Norman Podhoretz; and “Only in America: The Story of American Jews,” an eight-part documentary series whose guests included the Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Mr. Josephson produced nearly all of his post-WBAI work from a radio studio that he built in the third bedroom of his Manhattan apartment. He derived income by renting it out to others with projects to pursue, among them the BBC, the Boston Radio station WBUR, Al Gore, Samuel L. Jackson, Garrison Keillor, the CBS newsman Ed Bradley and the Rolling Stones.

The actor Alec Baldwin wrote in an email how pleased he had been to find a studio one block from his apartment. “I recorded countless projects there,” he said, including his podcast, “Here’s the Thing,” “and found Larry to be not just a great historical resource of all things related to radio but a lovely man as well.”

In 2012 Mr. Josephson performed a one-man, one-performance show, “An Inconvenient Jew: My Life in Radio,” at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village.

In 2018 he fractured a vertebra and needed spinal fusion surgery, prompting him, because of his precarious finances, to start a GoFundMe campaign. It raised nearly $28,000 to help pay for a home health attendant.

In addition to his daughter, Jennie, he is survived by his stepdaughter, Rebecca Josephson; his stepson, Gregory Alker; his sister, Susan Josephson; and two grandchildren. His marriages to Charity Alker and Valerie Magyar ended in divorce.

Mr. Josephson said in 1989 that public radio had let him say nearly everything he wanted.

“When push comes to shove,” he told Newsday, “I’d rather work for nothing and do exactly what I want without any interference from vice presidents or format experts.”

Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer. He previously wrote about sports media and sports business. He is also the author of several books, including “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.” 

Closing up one night in 1961, workers at the Original Spanish Kitchen on Beverly Boulevard set out silverware, saltshakers and napkins at each table and neatly stacked the chairs.

And there the settings and chairs remained, unmoved for more than a quarter of a century.

A “Closed for Vacation” sign, hung outside that night, gave no clue that the restaurant would never reopen.

So what happened?

One rumor held that the owner had been shot to death inside and that his wife had wanted the place left undisturbed until the killer was caught.

Some believed the restaurant was haunted. There were stories of knives flying in the night.

The TV show “Lou Grant” set a murder mystery there.

But there was a quieter explanation.

“The truth is,” The Times reported in 1989, “that this decaying building has simply frozen in time a moment of happier days in a love story of an elderly woman who has shut herself off from the world . . . “

The woman was co-owner Pearl Caretto. She and her husband, Johnny, had opened the restaurant in 1932, and it became a favorite of stars such as Bob Hope, Linda Darnell and John Barrymore. Mary Pickford, who had a special booth near the door, would bring in recipes.

Then in 1961, the husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and Pearl closed the restaurant to take care of him in their residence on the second floor. He died a few years later, and she could never bring herself to reopen.

“Isn’t it sad how so many people never find their one true love?” she told writer Michael Szymanski, who tracked her down in 1989. At that time the restaurant was still closed, tables still set. “And always, always, it ends in heartbreak. You’ll see.”

Caretto, who has since died, was living in an apartment by then, having moved away from the restaurant after it was vandalized. The family sold the property in the late 1990s.

All of this was a long time ago, and yet the restaurant’s mystique lives on.

Its sign is still standing, though it’s partly covered so that only the “Spa” in “Spanish” can be seen. Perfect for the upstairs occupant, Ona Spa.

“The neighbors wanted it left up,” explained Fabienne Dufourg, co-owner of Ona as well as Prive hair salon, which now occupies the former Spanish Kitchen space. A cafe there shut down.

When Dufourg reopened the building eight years ago, the rumors of ghosts were still alive.

“I am very grounded -- I don’t believe a word about ghosts,” she said. “My husband, he’s an artist. He believed it.”

But she converted one day in August. “It was very hot,” she said, and she was standing inside the building when “I felt like my legs were freezing.”

And, so, she said, “We did a clearing.” In other words, she hired a psychic from Arizona to check for poltergeists.

The psychic found five ghosts. “The ghosts were coming after my mother-in-law -- oh, it’s a long story,” Dufourg said. “There was a nasty one. I think he was a sort of killer from the ‘50s.”

The psychic, who charged $70 an hour, chased out the spirits in an impressive time of 30 minutes. These days, the building is ghost-free, more or less.

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Lane Lenhart, a manager at Ona. “Funky things happen once in a while, lights going on and off...”

Aside from the “Spa” sign, the old place’s name has survived in other ways.

A rock group christened itself Spanish Kitchen and posed by the building for a website photo. The group later dropped the name, but not because of ghosts. It seemed that people kept asking if it was a salsa band.

Meanwhile, a new Spanish Kitchen restaurant materialized on La Cienega Boulevard.

“I wanted to capture some of the romance of old Hollywood,” explained owner Greg Morris, no relation to the Carettos.

He didn’t inherit any ghosts, but he did meet a link to the Original Spanish Kitchen.

“The owner’s daughter came in and gave me a great paella pan with the name stamped on it,” he said.

Morris knows the real story of the old restaurant but enjoys listening to versions told by his older customers.

“I’ve heard stories that there was a Mafia killing there,” he said. “Or that the owner was a bullfighter, and his wife was a flamenco dancer and he killed her because he didn’t like her dancing.”

Morris added: “I never correct any of the stories.”