The Journey of Well Known Local Journalist Bondo Wyszpolski By Kari H. Sayers
The Journey of Well Known Local Journalist Bondo
Wyszpolski
By Kari H. Sayers
An old principle of journalism is that journalists write the stories without becoming part of them. But times have changes, and today the journalist is the story.
Many of you have seen Bondo Wyszpolski with notepad and camera in hand at all kinds of community events, ready for interviews and photo shoots for Peninsula People, now Peninsula Magazine, as well as their parent publication the Easy Reader in Hermosa Beach. With his tall stature and long graying hair, he’s a true original and hard to miss.
Bondo at the art show, receiving the City of Torrance Excellence in Literary Art Award, reading in his library, being interviewed.
“I have interviewed hundreds upon hundreds of people from the famous to the most obscure,” Bondo reminisced recently, this time on the other side of the interview table. “Most I never see again, but some have become good friends. And no interview is predictable. I interviewed June Wayne when she was having a retrospective show at LACMA—an established artist in other words—and we became good friends, a friendship that lasted until her death. I just looked at some postage stamps, and one featured American playwright August Wilson, whom I also interviewed. Then I interviewed film director, actor and writer Peter Bagdanovich.”
One of the more frustrating interviews was with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “He answered all my questions with only yes or no, while others talk and talk. An interview has to be a conversation.” Among the most memorable interviews are his interviews with local Playboy centerfolds!
Bondo has also reviewed thousands of plays, movies, concerts, books, art shows and operas. He prefers the Baroque operas by Henry Purcell and Handel, while his favorites among modern composers are Sergei Rachmaninoff and Ralph Vaughn Williams, and he also enjoys some African music. He favors the symbolic painters of the 1890s and though he studied the standard authors from Poe to Hemingway in college, he now reads mostly foreign writers such as Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Colombia, both Nobel Prize winners. In fact, it was after The Los Angeles Times published one of Bondo’s book reviews that Kevin Cody, the owner and publisher of the Easy Reader, hired Bondo full time as an arts and entertainment editor in 1993. Before that Bondo wrote for the now-defunct Beach Cities Newspapers.
Film is his passion. “I attend film shows at the South Bay Film Society, founded by Randy Berler. He shows art house, alternative, independent, and foreign films at the AMC theaters in the Rolling Hills Plaza and other venues, films you’re not necessarily going to see in a typical theater, more intelligent films, more intriguing but not necessarily popular films.” (Although the theaters have been closed due to COVID, they are now ready to reopen.)
What about the big Hollywood movies? “I see those too, and they’re exciting with special effects, but the stories are dumbed down. Of course, there are always exceptions. I’m speaking generally.”
Bondo has long been drawn to foreign films. “In college I watched filmmakers like Sweden’s Ingmar Berman and Italy’s Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini.” (Who can forget La Strada and La Dolce Vita?)
Bondo grew up in Palos Verdes Estates, attended Lunada Bay Elementary School, Margate Middle School, and Palos Verdes High School. His father was an aeronautical engineer who worked for NASA. “But I had zero aptitude for math and science,” Bondo lamented, shaking his head. His mother grew up in France and worked as a hostess at a French restaurant in Pasadena, a hangout for NASA scientists. “Some of the people asking her out were Nobel Prize winners,” Bondo said. “I could have had a Nobel scientist as a father”
Although Mrs. Wyszpolski was married to Bondo’s father for 60 years, she had been married previously. “She really had an interesting life before. She was actually born in Romania.” Bondo explained. “She had five siblings. Three of them were born in Pennsylvania; another sister was born in Romania, and one was born in France. She was quite influential in my life, more artistic. Whatever talent I have, I have from her.” From her, he learned French so he could communicate with his grandmother and cousins in France. She died at age 95.
From an early age, Bondo read monster stories and watched monster movies. He wrote even more monster stories—hundreds, he said, and knew early on that he was going to be a writer. But his parents shielded him from some films. “I remember my mother or my father said, ‘No, you can’t watch King Kong; it’s too scary.’ And I was thinking, ‘No, it’s not.’ I knew it wasn’t going to scare me.” The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was the most influential on him. “My parents took me to a theater in Baldwin Hills when I was seven or eight. Why there and why they chose that movie I don’t know, but when the cyclops first appeared, I all but jumped out of my seat. Years later, Bondo was lucky enough to interview Ray Harryhausen, the producer and animator of that film.
Bondo was an only child until he was almost ten years old. “I had all these toys; I’d build things, and I think it sharpened my imagination,” Bondo said. Then one brother came along and another one right after that.
He went to Old Dominion University in Virginia, where he majored in English. He wrote poetry in addition to writing for the school newspaper and literary magazine and used to go to the campus library and read and write until it closed at midnights.
He must have inherited his maternal family’s wanderlust, and although his travels were limited to the East Coast and France in his early years, as a journalist he took advantage of the many free press junkets offered him. “I went to the film festival in Vienna, Austria, one year, to Germany for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, to Belgium to see and write about different parts of the country and on a second trip to see Bruge and all the museums.”
He also went to Poland, the country of his paternal ancestors, to Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and a couple of times to Brazil where he was shown around in a helicopter.
But his most eye-opening trip was to Japan with a Japanese girlfriend he had met here. “I’m impressed with the Japanese sensibility, the subtle austerity, the muted colors, the writing, the food. The Japanese are not loud and obnoxious but kind and gentle.” Even so, the relationship didn’t last, and he married a woman from Rio de Janeiro instead, a Carmen Miranda lookalike, turban and all. “Like a true Brazilian, she wanted to go to the beach every day,” Bondo reminisced. “I’d take her there in the morning and pick her up after work. She was stunning, and every day she’d bring home a stack of business cards from men who had approached her.” Not surprisingly, she soon moved on.
Bondo has now reached the ranks of the septuagenarians. Although he has no plans to slow down, he wants to focus more on writing novels and curating art shows. “I always wanted to be a novelist, and I feel now is the time for me to get stuff done.”
His first novel is almost ready for publication. It’s a collection of 50 stories, some of which have been published in the Easy Reader. The stories are told by a group of aspiring writers having coffee together and discussing their story ideas. “‘And here’s my idea for a story,’ says one, and another says. ‘This is my idea for a story.’”
“I had a teacher once who said I was a very good writer and he knew Hemingway.” That gave Bondo confidence in his writing. If the teacher knew Hemingway, the teacher knew good writing. And Bondo is a good writer. In 2016, he received the City of Torrance Excellence in Literary Arts Award.
Bondo is almost ready for a second novel as well. “Hundreds of pages of notes going back 40 to 50 years, detailed notes, all typed up are waiting to be organized,” he said. “Ideas for an exotic, erotic book, not erotic in the commercial sense but in the sense of the symbolists of the late 19th century. The whole power of suggestion is really more interesting than spelling everything out. I always refer to writing as a texture and when I say texture, I mean the feel of the sentence, the rhythm, the cadence, really finding the poetry in how things are expressed. It may not be a good book but it’s going to an exquisite book.”
He’s also in the process of co-curating a local art show. “We were going to have its reception at La Venta Inn in Palos Verdes Estates, but I think we may have the reception in the Palos Verdes Art Center instead. The show is called ‘Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking?’” Bondo came up with all of the titles for the paintings, and the artists received their titles when they spun a wheel. Each then produced a painting and now local composer Brad Webster is writing the music, a short song for each work of art. “And I’m writing he lyrics. I look at the picture and I get a feel for it and write the words,” Bondo explained.
Thirty-five local painters are participating. The opening date depends on when things open up. “We were also going to have the show at the Malaga Cove Library too, but they’re not going to have any shows this year, probably the start of next year.” In the meantime, some of the show is available online at http://www.areyouthinkingwhatimthinking.art
Kari H. Sayers BIO
With a BA in English and an MA in linguistics from California State University, Long Beach, Kari Sayers went with her husband to Saudi Arabia, where she first worked as a music teacher at Riyadh International Community School and then as a journalist for the English newspapers the Saudi Gazette and the Arab News as well as in-flight magazines. When she returned to Southern California, she taught literature, college composition, and English as a Second Language at Marymount California University in Rancho Palos Verdes, while freelancing as a theater, classical concert, and opera reviewer for local newspapers and magazines in the Los Angeles area.. In addition to authoring the novels Roses Where Thorns Grow, Under the Linden Tree, and the soon-to-be-released Justice for Lizzie, all published by Melange Books in Minnesota, she is the developer and editor of the anthology Views and Values, published by Cengage. Now widowed,. Kari lives in the Los Angeles area.