People and Events

The formerly all-male Friars Club in Beverly Hills now has four women as members. One of them wants to use the club’s facilities, including the steam room. She is Gloria Allred.

The noted feminist attorney filed a sex discrimination complaint Monday with the state Board of Equalization, declaring, “I pay the same dues as the men, but I’m being denied the use of the health club on any basis whatsoever. Obviously, such second-class citizenship within the club could deter many women from joining.�

The battle for women’s equality, Allred added, “will not end until women are permitted both in the board rooms and the steam rooms.�

Allred has suggested scheduling separate days for men and women, or allowing them to use health club facilities together while properly clothed. Or the Friars could build a separate facility. None of that got her very far with club management.

There was no comment from the latter on Monday.

Under a Business and Professions Code rule that went into effect Jan. 1, the state can disallow business tax expenses at private clubs that discriminate.

The Long Beach Elks Club, Lodge No. 888, wasn’t having the same problem as the Friars, but declining enrollment finally compelled it to sell its landmark white-domed headquarters to a developer planning to put up a nine-story office building.

For those who enjoy that fiberglass elk crowning the dome at Grand Avenue and Willow Street, there is nothing to worry about. It will be mounted on a stone foundation in front of the lodge’s new--somewhat smaller--building next door. Ground breaking for the new structure is scheduled for June 1.

The elk has been through one attack by vandals, who managed to scale the dome and turn it upside down. “They chopped it down like a cherry tree,� said Harry Kayajanian, former grand exalted high ruler for the lodge. “But we restored it. I don’t know how they ever got up there.�

If you’re in the market for a concrete block at $250 or $300, the USC School of Architecture would love to hear from you. (Others would, too, no doubt.)

The school has formed Restoration Associates, an organization to support restoration of the Freeman House in the Hollywood Hills. The home was designed by the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright and built by his son, Lloyd Wright, in the early 1920s as one of three textile-block homes on which the elder Wright experimented with some low-cost construction notions.

The idea, says Jeffrey Chusid, a USC research professor who is spearheading the restoration project, was to use patterned concrete tiles, made from molds at the site by unskilled labor and knit together with steel rods. “It wasn’t,� says Chusid, “as easy as anticipated.�

Which probably explains why Harriet Freeman, who lived with her late husband in the house on Glencoe Way and who died two years ago at 93, complained in 1984 when she donated the place to USC:

“Our house took 13 months to build instead of the three months Wright assured us it would take.� She said that the famed architect promised to eat any of the cost over $10,000 but that it actually cost more than $25,000, and her husband, Sam, wound up paying. He died in 1981.

USC’s School of Architecture would like to use the place for seminars and research into the construction of such knit-block houses, but much of the concrete has deteriorated, water has reached the steel rods and foundations are sinking.

Mrs. Freeman gave USC $200,000 to help restore the house, but Chusid says “that’s nowhere near what we need.� Funds have come from foundations or private donors. For $250, Restoration Associates will be willing to let go of a concrete block made from one of the original molds. A special perforated block you can see through costs $300.

The political prank season got under way as the Voter Revolt to Cut Insurance Rates, promoters of a ballot initiative to roll back auto insurance premiums, announced plans to deliver a truckload of manure to the Wilshire Boulevard headquarters of an insurance company on Monday morning.

Farmers Insurance Group was picked as a target, said Bill Zimmerman, of Voter Revolt, simply because it is one of the companies supporting the insurance industry’s competing initiative that would install a no-fault system.

As it turned out, the Voter Revolt folks left their truck parked and simply tried to deliver a bucket of the stuff to the president of Farmers. Security guards stopped them at the door.

A spokesman for the No-Fault Auto Insurance Initiative said the stunt was in “poor taste� and “doesn’t advance any kind of public discussion.�