Protest Goes Off Without a Hitch

About 15 minutes before the man from the fumigation company was supposed to show up Tuesday, Shelley Ervin shut off Adelaide Capizzi’s battery-operated frog.

It’s green, about the size of one of those huge jungle toads you see in zoos, and it sits among potted geraniums on Capizzi’s front stoop. Any time someone approaches the door, the creature croaks an amphibious early warning.

“I like the frog too,” Ervin apologized, “but with all these people, all it’s doing is going croak, croak, croak.”

The people--about 25 strong--gathered at Capizzi’s home because they had been told to. Tuesday was the day a representative from Fume Works Inc. was supposed to explain how exterminators would tent part of the Huntington Landmark Adult Community to kill termites, and what the residents needed to do to prepare.

But Capizzi, her neighbor Harriet Ervin--Shelley’s mother--and some of the other residents already made their own preparations: Picket signs bearing such slogans as “No, no, we won’t pay, Fumigators go away,” “Stop forced fumigation of seniors,” and “We won’t pay to be poisoned.”

There they were, all set to rouse some rabble, and the Fume Works guys didn’t show up. Calls to the business were not returned. But for the protesters, the no-show hardly mattered. With the photographers, reporters and television trucks, it was a regular media event anyway, right there in Capizzi’s frontyard.

The protesters oppose plans to fumigate with sulfuryl fluoride, fearing the gas would leave a residue that could cause health problems. The protesters say they prefer alternative methods, such as microwaving or freezing.

Huntington Landmark officials declined comment.

Tuesday’s protest--in which some of the residents were to refuse to turn over their house keys--sparked a smaller, informal counter-protest. About 10 residents lined up across the street to view the goings-on and to tell reporters that the anti-fumigation folks weren’t speaking for the whole complex.

“It’s really a joke,” said Bea Wells, who has lived in the complex for 11 years and has had her own home fumigated. “Some of these people are so gullible. They scare them and get them all stirred up.”

Wells and the others dismissed the anti-fumigation folks as just a bunch of bored people looking for a cause.

“You got a gal with a powerful son who needs a cause,” Wells said, dismissing news coverage as having more to with who Capizzi’s son is--Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi--than with the protest itself.

“Gas-breathers,” countered protester Joan Custer, glancing back across the road at the pro-fumigation people. “They like to breathe gas.”

By 10:45 or so it became apparent that the briefing by the exterminator wasn’t going to take place. Crowds on both sides of the street began dissipating, the protest fizzling into just another day. Some of the protesters went off for their daily walks. Others headed out for errands. Custer took the picket sign from her husband, Charles, reminding him that he needed to leave soon to visit his hospitalized mother.