Interview/36″/dt1st/mark2nd

By ANN DONAHUE

Staff Reporter

Valet parking is, of course, an intrinsic part of Los Angeles life. Without giving it a second thought, Angelenos hand over their car keys to a perfect stranger and trust that it will be parked safely and returned to them.

Herb Citrin, 77, appreciates the fact that his employees are a part of L.A.’s landscape. Citrin, who parked cars for his father during high school and college, has built Valet Parking Service into what he says is the nation’s oldest and largest business of its kind.

Fifty years after landing his first client Lawry’s The Prime Rib at the corner of La Cienega and Wilshire boulevards Citrin tried to place his first listing in the Yellow Pages, but the phone company didn’t have a category for valet parking to list his company under. Citrin likes to say that they “named the industry after us.”

Question: You started out parking cars in high school and college. Did you ever think then that 50 years down the road, this was what you would be doing?

Answer: I really didn’t. I don’t think I thought 50 years down the road. In those days, I thought it would be nice to live to be 50. I thought I would like a career that had something to do with the entertainment industry, and therefore when I started at Los Angeles City College I was in their radio broadcasting and radio production program. That was before TV. I was there for two years I didn’t have enough credits to graduate when the Pearl Harbor incident took place. I joined the service about six months later and I enlisted in the Navy. When I got out of the service I had married my first wife and I was rather impatient, frankly, to make money. I thought that this might be a good way to do it.

Q: How did the business grow over the years?

A: It started out like a one-man show. There weren’t very many organized valet parking companies in those days. So I guess you could call me a perfectionist, I knew what I wanted to do that those other companies weren’t doing. I bought brand-new uniforms for my parking attendants at Lawry’s. They were all personalized with their name and the location. What happened is that other restaurants started coming to me, asking if I would like to handle their parking. Probably for about the first five years of business, I didn’t solicit anybody. At that point La Cienega had about 20 restaurants on it and I was known as “the King of La Cienega.” I got the accounts of about 90 percent of the restaurants on La Cienega Boulevard.

Q: How much do attendants get paid?

A: It depends on where they work and what their responsibilities are. On average, it’s about $6 to $7 an hour. They can keep their tips, suffice to say.

Q: Have you heard stories about any amazing tips?

A: I have a great story. One of the most fabulous, famous tippers of all time was Frank Sinatra. One night Frank came out of the Peninsula Hotel and he walks up to the lead parking attendant and he says, “What was the biggest tip you ever got?” And the attendant says “$100, Mr. Sinatra.” Then Frank goes and gives him $200. Then he asks: “Who gave you the $100 tip?” The parking attendant responded, “It was you, Mr. Sinatra.” On the other hand, the worst tipper ever was Rudy Vallee. He was a 10-cent tipper no matter what you did for him. I’ve parked a couple million cars in my day, and that man had a lot and he was a 10-cent tipper.

Q: Some folks might suggest that you’re taking advantage of a large pool of cheap immigrant labor. How would you respond to that?

A: Let’s put it this way: It is what one would call an entry-level job. We don’t discriminate. We don’t say we want whites, blacks, or Latinos when we advertise. Most of the people who come to us are recommended by cousins, uncles, brothers and they happen to be largely Latino. They have to have a good driving records, and we would hire whoever as long as they qualify. Our people can go up the ladder if they’re qualified for management. We promote them and they can make about $10 an hour as a manager.

Q: What happens if a valet can’t find the car?

A: We have a system where a car is scheduled to go in a certain numbered stall. The only reason we wouldn’t be able to find a car is if the parking attendant mis-parked it. For instance, the car was supposed to go in stall 135 and he parked it in 235. When that happens, the customer is going to have a long wait. We apologize and if the car has been mis-parked at one of the hotels, we offer them a drink on us. It doesn’t happen often, though.

Q: How did you decide upon the uniform, the red vests?

A: That happened after we’d been in business about 14 years. When we got the contract at the airport to do valet parking in 1960, there was only one other airport in the country that did valet parking and I wanted something distinctive that people could see.

Q: It seems that many more men than women work as valets. Why is that?

A: To tell you the truth, women simply don’t apply. We have quite a few women, but in most cases they’re cashiers. As far as attendant parkers are concerned, I wish we had more women because they seem to be safer. A little less reckless.

Q: I imagine you carry quite a bit of insurance. What happens if a car gets crunched?

A: We have heavy insurance. We have a person on staff whose primary job is claims manager. If it’s a legitimate thing that we wrecked, we let them go to a shop of their choice. When necessary, we provide a rental car. We do the right thing. Unfortunately, it does happen.

Q: How often?

A: More often then I’d want written up. (Laughs.)

Q: Do people accuse the valets of causing scratches and dents that were already on the car?

A: All the time. Our people are instructed to quickly inspect a car before they drive it off. On the back of every ticket there’s a diagram showing the four sides of every car. They’re supposed to mark it so when people come out and say, “Oh look, you damaged my left front fender!” the attendant can say, “We marked that when you first came in.” But sometimes an attendant fails to recognize a dent and then a customer comes out and they really try to get away with it. Who knows, maybe they did have the dent before and all of a sudden now they notice it?

The bottom line is, we probably pay thousands of dollars I don’t know how much exactly in claims we think are not valid, but we do it as a P.R. thing.

Q: How do you attract clients?

A: I think my biggest growth started after I had been in business about 10 years, when I actually started soliciting we have a marketing person and that’s his sole job.

Q: How many employees do you have?

A: 1,500. For those who actually park the cars, we have probably a total of eight hours of classroom training and practical training, driving safety instruction, etc. They must all have valid driver’s licenses and we check their driving record with the DMV. They all have to speak English well enough to understand and be understood. We’re heavily Latino so we have to check their green cards. We try not to let anything get by us. If they have more than two or three tickets, we don’t hire them. We probably wash out as many as we hire.

Q: If you could have any car, what would you get?

A: For fun, I’d like a Ferrari. A real hot Ferrari. But that only seats two people, and my wife doesn’t like to ride in the front. I would like to have one of the very expensive cars that look like tomorrow, you know, 22nd-century-looking. That would be my favorite car.

Q: What happens when somebody comes in driving a Ferrari like that and wants to valet park it?

A: One slip of the clutch and it could be horrendous, but we park the car. What’s interesting about Los Angeles is that valet parking is taken so much for granted. We’ve had people leave their car double-parked when the attendant might be busy dealing with another car, with the key in it, the engine running, and not even wait for a ticket. Sometimes, but not often, someone who drives in a car like that gets it stolen before the attendant even gets to it. People in Los Angeles, they could have a $100,000 car and they don’t even give it a second thought, they just leave it in front of the building and go.

Q: Where have you expanded beyond restaurants?

A: Today we actually have valet parking in four airports. The most successful of these is Burbank, where we started about six years ago doing 25 cars a day, and now we do 600 to 700 cars a day. Then we operate the parking at Oakland International, Reno and Seattle-Tacoma. We have House of Blues, the Peninsula Hotel, we have the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, we have Le Meridien. Also the Ivy and we handle Spago in Beverly Hills and in West Hollywood. We also operate in the San Francisco Bay area. We are the originators of party parking for special events. We have a lot of competition, but we started that in the mid-’50s, around 1956. We do all the parking at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. It’s very interesting. We started there when he opened in ’73, when he moved out from Chicago.

Herb Citrin

Title: Chairman, Valet Parking Service

Born: Los Angeles, July 30, 1922

Education: Two years at Los Angeles City College

Most Admired People: His family and Abraham Lincoln

Hobbies: Tennis, jogging, books and movies

Turning Point: Landing his first valet parking account at Lawry’s restaurant in 1946

Personal: Married, two children, six grandchildren