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So Euro: Dale Warner will help fight slacker librarian Ron Gonzales. Knights In White Everyone's favorite honkies are back and, this time, with a lobbyist--San Jose attorney and seasoned anti-reverse racism crusader DALE WARNER--and an ironic slogan: "God, I'm sick of white people." ANNE MAUREEN O'HEARN and her band of angry European Americans invaded Santa Clara County's Human Relations Commission meeting on Tuesday (March 26) to complain about their pet peeve: keeping Caucasian epithets out of the city's libraries and newsletters ("White or Wrong?" Jan. 24 and "Calling All Honkies," Feb. 14). "The Gonzales administration at taxpayer expense has published, printed, purchased and circulated a significant number of printed materials that include name-calling and defamation against the European American community," said O'Hearn, leader of the group Honky Gringo Pride, which formed on Feb. 3. HGP's slogan comes from a San Jose Department of Conventions, Arts & Entertainment film clip that offended O'Hearn recently with its attitude toward the light-skinned. Eyewatchers will recall that O'Hearn first caught wind in January that the public library stocks a book called Spanish for Gringos, a title she calls "contemptuous." She became angry enough to complain to her friends and to shoot off emails to Eye and City Councilmembers blaming Mayor Ron Gonzales for the book title. Nothing came of her complaints, save for a gentle letdown letter from public library director JANE LIGHT and a sympathetic response from San Jose Councilman FORREST WILLIAMS. "The Gonzales administration treats our legitimate complaints as jokes, which is another hate incident in itself," O'Hearn told the Human Relations Commission. Gonzo spokesman DAVID VOSSBRINK has patiently reported that stocking library shelves isn't in the mayor's job description. But HGP forges on. "We have retained a lobbyist to represent us in this matter, and we will press our claims for a slur-free City Hall in every legal way for the next four years, starting tonight," O'Hearn warned officials at Tuesday's meeting. Attorney Dale Warner told Eye on Monday (April 1) that HGP is going wide. The group began a semiglobal campaign against the Gonzales camp, by writing to the media in Iceland that "the mayor is stirring up dissension in the heart of Silicon Valley, and visitors are urged to ... stay outside San Jose." Warner says the groups plans to write to all European countries. "We're not calling it a boycott," Warner said, "but we're going to discourage people from coming to San Jose." Bob Kieve Naked Emotion It was the end of an era for "KARA of Santa Clara" this past week, when at midnight on Sunday, the old-school FM "soft-rock" station morphed into the Spanish music station KEMR in a $49 million deal that made station owner BOB KIEVE a rich--OK, richer--man. Kieve, the 80-year-old majority owner of the station, who retains local stations KRTY-FM (95.3) and news station KLIV-AM (1590), ran KARA like a family business for 30 years, even to the point of sharing with employees a chunk of the change he made selling the station to Hispanic Broadcasting of Dallas. Veteran morning personality KIM VESTAL did her on-air farewells Friday, while staffers, fans and well-wishers crowded the station. Vestal kept a stiff upper lip until the final minutes. "I said I wouldn't cry," she apologetically told listeners, "but now I'm ... I'm just looking around at all these people gathered here in the studio. And they're all ... they're all--" she groped for the right closing words--"naked." Cut to the song "Closing Time." Too Sexy for a Hotel? Recently Metro got booted from the Cupertino Hilton's lobby for, get this, puritanical reasons. Metro distro guy JORGE LOPEZ told Eye that while doing his usual delivery rounds one day about six months ago, he was stopped short at Cupertino's Hilton Garden Inn. "A person approached me, apparently a manager or supervisor, and told me not to leave our papers there anymore because of the content in the back pages," Lopez told Eye. The public decency champion expressed concern because the hotel operator saw kids laughing at sex-related ads at the end of 1-900 numbers. However, when Eye called the Cupertino Hilton, the front desk worker explained that guests were quite welcome to order porn films in the privacy of their rooms. So it's OK to buy porn from the Hilton, just not from Metro advertisers. And the hotel provides a copy of the yellow pages to its customers, which contains a voluptuous section of ads for strippers, escorts and nudie bars. The hotel manager, who declined to give his name, told Eye that he'd rethink the hotel's no-delivery policy, especially since, he added honestly, "the sex ads don't bother me, and our employees like to have the paper to plan their weekends." Is Nothing Sacred? Eye hears there was some gnashing of teeth at the San Jose Mercury News last week after former Merc staffer GLENN F. BUNTING (who now writes for the Los Angeles Times) scooped his old employer with a national story right in their own backyard. Bunting's March 24 exposé revealed the sordid story of sexual abuse perpetrated by two clergymen at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos. What made the case unusual, beside the fact that the victims were both mentally disabled adults, was that one of the holy feelers was actually convicted of a crime connected to the case last year (he's now free, having served out his six months of home detention). How the downsized local daily missed the story is something Bunting didn't want to touch when we caught up with him last week. But he didn't sound displeased that his old paper was forced to run an edited copy of his bylined Los Angeles Times story the day it broke. Bunting, an investigative reporter at large, says he found the story while working the pedo-priest beat in L.A. The story, he says, was waiting to be reported. A source gave him a tip that a priest had been convicted of a sex crime in Santa Clara County, but it hadn't been written about. He journeyed to San Jose in mid-February to check it out at the local courthouse. "I'll never forget when the clerk brought out the civil case; it was three volumes thick. I looked up and bingo--it was a gold mine." The reporting took a few twists and turns, but after five weeks of sleuthing and four trips to his old San Jose stomping grounds, Bunting had the goods, including evidence that church officials knew about the problems long before they were reported to the authorities. The Merc's damage control so far has consisted of blanketing the front pages with rehashes and several follow-up stories focusing on the bruises inflicted on the venerable Jesuit order and on good priests because of the perversions of a few. Bunting wouldn't gloat about the Merc eating his dust. "I feel very good about the way it turned out," he allows. Don't Forget to Tip: Leave messages by calling 408.298.8000 ext.213. Or . Send a letter to the editor about this story . [ Silicon Valley | Metroactive Home | Archives ]