Of Ducks & Men

MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles is a wastebasket for crumpled lives. On its grimy benches and littered walks gather the old, the warped, the baffled, the embittered, the workless, aimless flotsam of a great city. A faded woman in an antiquated ball dress and long black gloves glides along, clutching a parasol. Two fat, coarse-faced girls stroll hand in hand. An old man sits limp and vacant-eyed, numbed by the weight of his loneliness.

Among the habitues of MacArthur Park is Spanish-born Raymond Lopez, 71, a short, swarthy man with moist eyes set over deep purplish pouches. A retired Hollywood hairdresser, Lopez began frequenting the park last fall. Unlike most of the other people who spent a lot of their time in the park, he found something to do. He fed the birds, especially the ducks. There were dozens of ducks living along the boat lake. Most of them had been abandoned by people whose children had received ducklings as Easter gifts. Lopez became fond of the creatures, and he took to buying 100 pounds of stale bread a week to feed them.

The Conspirators. After a while, Lopez came to know another park visitor who liked to feed the ducks, an elderly, Czechoslovakian-born widow named Venceslava Hanush. When Mrs. Hanush heard people at the park say that the sick or crippled ducks were going to be fed to animals at the city zoo, Lopez decided to take direct action. An old acquaintance who owns a ranch in Southern California promised to provide a home for the ducks. Lopez and Mrs. Hanush worked up a plan to gather up young or ailing ducks and transport them to the ranch. To help carry out the plan, they recruited another park frequenter named Steve Newrocky.

Late one night last May, the three conspirators began collecting ducks. They had put 17 ducks into pasteboard cartons when suddenly a policeman interrupted. He took Lopez, Newrocky and Mrs. Hanush off to jail.

Then began a prolonged display of myopic ineptitude on the part of Los Angeles officialdom. With the newspapers playing the story for laughs--it was a case of "abducktion," one paper said--the machinery of justice clanked ponderously into motion. Officials decided that Lopez and his friends would be tried on charges of theft. Lawyers solemnly prepared briefs, detectives determinedly interrogated witnesses. Until the very end, nobody in the city government who was involved in the case seemed capable of seeing that what was called for was not mechanical law enforcement but compassion and common sense.

In the Interests of Justice. Bewildered by the legal proceedings against her, humiliated by the gibes of other park habitues, Mrs. Hanush sank into despair. On the day set for the trial, she put on her best clothes, left a pan of birdseed on her hotel windowsill, and took a bus to San Francisco. She registered at a hotel, and from there she wrote a letter to Lopez. "Thinking about that terrible trial," she wrote, "I could not go on any more. Please continue your noble work. You know as we all know that we are innocent in the whole incident." Then she committed suicide by swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills.

The Los Angeles authorities moved resolutely against the two surviving defendants. The prosecutor produced a witness who testified that he had once seen Lopez trying to sell ducks at an open-air market. But the defense attorney, who had taken the trouble to investigate the story, demolished the prosecution by proving that the witness, a convicted forger, had been confined in a hospital at the time when he claimed to have seen Lopez at the market. Despite this setback, the prosecutor kept chugging along with his efforts to prove the defendants guilty.

Last week the jury went off to ponder the evidence against Lopez and Newrocky. Hours later the foreman announced that the jury was unable to reach a verdict. Then, at last, common sense asserted itself. Judge Bernard Schmidt, appalled by the overinflated proceedings, mercifully dismissed the case outright "in the interests of justice."

A free man again, Raymond Lopez walked to MacArthur Park, wiped off a bench and sat down. Wearily, sorrowfully, he spoke of his departed friend Mrs. Hanush. "What is wrong," he asked, "with helping things to live?"

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