Bob Simpson has a fishing story with a warm and fuzzy ending.
Simpson, an avid fisherman and president of irrigation consulting firm AquaSave in Santa Clarita, often took his two sons with him on angling trips. For the last adventure of their teenage years, Simpson took them for a week of fly-in salmon fishing in British Columbia.
They saw plenty of bears, deer and eagles, and his youngest son caught a monster salmon. But what impressed Simpson most was how he bonded with his children.
“‘Reeling in memories that last a lifetime’ – that’s how I describe it,” Simpson said. “Busy business people can lose sight of what’s important, but the time you spend making memories with your kids is a small sacrifice that you know is worth it.”
When Simpson, 55, returned home he spontaneously sat down at a computer and “journalized” the experience. He decided to self-publish his recollections as a book in 2008.
Out of the blue, a publishing company called and asked him to send the manuscript. Five months later, he received a confirmation letter that Tate Publishing company would print and distribute his work. On June 8, Simpson’s 90-page paperback, “A Canadian Wilderness Fishing Adventure,” arrived on the shelves of the major bookstore chains and in online bookshops.
Attorneys at Golf
It’s no secret that a lot of lawyers fancy themselves good golfers. On June 25, a competition billed as the legal industry’s first national golf tournament gave area attorneys a chance to tee off against each other for charity.
So who’s the best golfing lawyer in Los Angeles? Well, there wasn’t a definitive answer: Golfers competed in teams of two, with at least one lawyer on each team. But the winners were Doug de Heras, a partner at Long Beach-based Prindle Amaro Goetz Hillyard Barnes & Reinholtz LLP, and Geoff Joynt, a vice president at LexisNexis. The two shot a 68 at the Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles to win the first leg of the ALM/the Lawyer Invitational, and have qualified to play other regional winners at a national championship in West Palm Beach, Fla., in May.
“I couldn’t even pretend to be the best,” said de Heras, 40, who has a 5 handicap. “I just got lucky and had a good partner.”
De Heras, who was on the golf team at UCLA in the early ’90s, shot his first hole-in-one at another charity golf tournament just a week before, at the Old Ranch Country Club in Seal Beach.
“It was a lot of fun,” he said, “to get a hole-in-one on one day, which was awesome, and then win this tournament on another.”
Hitting New Heights
As a senior vice president at Wells Fargo Bank in El Segundo, Linda Russell doesn’t have to build houses. That’s fortunate, because she’s afraid of heights.
“I don’t even put the star on top of the Christmas tree,” admits Russell, 49.
All that may change thanks to a life-altering experience she had June 25.
Recently appointed to the board of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles, a non-profit specializing in the construction of low-cost housing, Russell was asked to help build 10 townhomes in Lynwood. Her task: putting up siding from scaffolding on the third floor.
“It was scary,” Russell recalled. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t say a few prayers while climbing up.”
Everything, however, ended well.
“Once I got up there and realized that I wasn’t going to die, it was very inspiring,” Russell said.
Now she thinks she can even put the star atop this year’s tree. But her husband remains skeptical about her construction skills.
“I need him to go to the next build with me so he can believe what I was doing,” Russell said. “He’s asking why I don’t do any of it at home.”
Staff reporters Joel Russell, Alfred Lee and David Haldane contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
