Casey found his voice, shared it for the disabled 

Casey Rohrer

“If I could write everything I am thinking, my words would reach to the sky,” Casey Rohrer said in a 2016 documentary about a play he had written. At the time, his play, “Once Upon a Road Trip,” was in rehearsals with the Family Theater production company at the Hermosa Beach Second Story Theater.

“The play is about how it feels when you don’t have a voice,” Rohrer says in the video. He meant that literally. Rohrer was born with Cerebral Palsy. The disease deprives its victims of muscle control, with the notable exception of the eyes.

In 2010 a bench in Manhattan Beach’s Polliwog Park was dedicated to his grandmother, Beverly Rohrer, for her work on behalf of disabled students. Beverly Rohrer was the superintendent of Manhattan Beach Schools, and often took her grandson to the park.

After the dedication Roherer became an activist for people with disabilities. 

In 2016, he helped his mother Beth cut the ribbon during the opening of South Park in Hermosa Beach. He and his mother were involved in designing the play areas to be accessible to the disabled.

“All kids can play together now,” he said at the ribbon cutting, using his Tobii C12, an the same eye activated voice machine Stephenven Hawking used.

Rohrer spoke about his disability at his eighth grade graduation. That led to him giving motivational speeches at schools and conferences across the country, including one at a Microsoft/Tobii Dynavox conference in San Francisco. 

His most final effort on behalf of the disabled was helping convince the Hermosa City Council to approve a walkway on the Greenbelt that can be traveled by wheelchair.

Unfortunately, as Parks and Rec commissioner Barbara Ellman tearfully reported at a recent council meeting, the elderly and handicapped friendly walkway will came too late for its most eloquent advocate.

Rohrer passed away in April, at age 20. He had just completed the autobiographical “Casey: The Musical,” which he hoped to premiere this spring. The musical begins with his doctor telling his parents their son would never be able to communicate with them, and ends with the doctor  marveling at all their son had achieved. The songs are set to melodies (with permission) from the musical “Seussical.”

Sousa a celebrated ‘best friend’

Kevin Sousa

Among the many speakers who introduced themselves as Kevin Sousa’s best friend, Mike Collins was the only one to presume to know what Sousa would say to the estimated 500 mourners who gathered for his Hermosa Pier paddleout in June, one month after the popular musician and therapist passed away from Cancer.

“Kevin would tell us to feel the sun, and the sand, taste the air, and listen,” Collins said.

Collins said he was humbled by the way Sousa lived out his terminal years. 

“I never saw him angry, or afraid, or resentful. Judgment left his life. A friend described that time as Kevin’s ‘greatest hits years.’”

Among the “best friends” who recalled Sousa helping them to get sober was his youngest brother Peter.

“One day in the car I said to him, ‘You got the hair, you got the charisma. You’re a therapist, and a musician. Do women ever hit on you?”

“He’d been married 15 years. He said, ‘I don’t need anyone to tell me I’m the man. I know I’m the man.’”

“He was teaching me, we are enough.”

Sousa’s other brother Michael promised to carry on Kevin’s legacy, which he described as “Live in the now, and don’t take any shit.”

Charlie Cerussi  introduced himself as Sousa’s oldest “best friend.” They met at 18, at Villanova University. Cerussi was a bartender in the club where Sousa’s band,  Rugby Road, was the house band. The band reunited to attend the paddleout.

“Kevin was a rock star then,” recalled Villanova University friend Charlie Cerussi. “But he approached everyone with kindness, even before he learned the tools of a psychotherapist. I can’t visualize Kevin without a smile,” Cerussi said.

Following the “best friends” remembrances on the beach where Sousa learned to paddle and surf,  hundreds of “best friends,” many requiring the assistance of county lifeguards, paddled out to the end of the pier and joined hands in a circle.

The Baywatch Redondo water hose sprayed a sparkling silver arch over the paddlers as Collins returned his “best friend” to the ocean, and Sousa’s wife Patty waved a wand of purple smoke, like the one Sousa had recently taken to using during the close of his concerts. ER

Guild helped shape Hermosa

Don Guild

Don and Barbara Guilds neither sought nor received recognition from Hermosa Beach, where Don grew up and he and Barbara lived together for over 73 years. The Chamber of Commerce didn’t name them Man and Woman of the Year. They didn’t serve on city commissions, nor run for city council. 

But without the couple’s many unheralded political and financial contributions, Hermosa’s physical profile would be significantly different.

In the early ‘50s, they organized neighbors to block upzoning the north end of The Strand, from single family to high density. What might have been without that effort can be seen along the Redondo Esplanade, where old waterfront homes gave way to high rise condominiums.

In 1958, Barbara drew on her UC Berkeley engineering degree background to lead the fight against the Shell Oil ballot measure. If approved, Shell would have been allowed to drill in Hermosa’s tidelands.

In 2016, five decades after stopping Shell Oil, the Guilds used their knowledge of State tidelands drilling restrictions, to help defeat E&P Oil’s effort to drill into Hermosa’s tidelands.

Don Guild passed away from natural causes in March at the age of 95.

Don began working at  his father’s downtown Hermosa Beach drug store in 1951. Over the ensuing three decades, the couple expanded Drug Guild to seven Southern California locations, with over 1,000 employees. They also founded the Antique Guild in the former Helms Bakery location. It was 100,000 square feet, the largest antique store in the world. After selling their two companies they continued to ski and windsurf until they reached their 90s. 

Guild Drug was the prototype for today’s pharmacies, where the pharmaceutical sales are secondary to merchandise sales. 

Bettelu Beverly

When she peacefully departed life on April 11, Bettelu Beverly was just a week from her 98th birthday, an age at which, aside from her family, most of those who knew just who she was and what she’d meant to Manhattan Beach had already preceded her in death. 

For most of the second half of the last century, Elizabeth Louise “Bettelu” Beverly and her husband Robert Beverly were the kindly titans of Manhattan Beach. His renown as an assemblyman and state senator for 29 years and three-time mayor of Manhattan Beach was perhaps greater than hers, but locally, Bettelu was among the most respected and beloved figures in the community. 

“She was a true matriarch here in Manhattan Beach, whose reach went well beyond the Beverly family,” Councilperson Steve Napolitano said. 

Bettelu lived avidly. She raised four children, cared for several generations of house pets, helped organized her husband’s campaigns, ran a gift shop (first on the old Redondo waterfront and then in Manhattan Beach) called The Lemon Tree, and was an extremely active member of first the Dolphin Club and then the Neptunian Women’s Club. She worked locally on the Sister City program connecting Manhattan Beach with Culiacán, Mexico, and later served on the state Commission of the Californias establishing working relationships between California and Baja California, Mexico.

She was also a pianist, painter, and a ballet dancer. Most famously, she was superbly social, and loved Manhattan Beach. 

“She loved meeting new people and always found the good in everyone,” her son Bill Beverly said. “She rarely talked about herself and never talked behind people’s backs.  Instead she bragged about the successes of whoever was not in the conversation, and was particularly proud of her grandchildren and their many accomplishments.” 

Her son Bob Beverly, owner of the Shellback Tavern, said that his mother passed away with her usual social flair and impeccable grace. The last weekend of her life she enjoyed Easter dinner with her family, and shared a wine toast with her granddaughters. 

 “You know, all her friends are already gone,” Bob Beverly said. “So now she’s joined back with all of them.” 

Pat Dietz 

Pat Dietz, the iconic co-founder of Dietz Brothers Music in Manhattan Beach, passed away June 28 after being injured while saving his grandson from an out-of-control car in Torrance two days earlier. In that final act, Dietz left life with the same rare combination of selflessness, clarity of  purpose and almost mythically heroic boldness with which he lived it. 

Dietz was a classically trained musician who’d been in rock and roll bands since he was a teenager but realized early in life that he had no need to pursue fame and no desire to tour. Instead, with his brother John, he founded Dietz Brothers Music in 1976.  Rather than a life spent gigging on the road, they chose a life of making music together, with each other, their families, and their community.  The brothers built a homemade empire, a beloved local institution that has been foundational in the lives of thousands of musicians over the course of 47 years. 

“That part of it was really deliberate,” Pat said in 2016. “We consciously set this up so we would be around…I call the business the family farm, because it’s as close as I can get, living in the city.”

As superbly gifted as he was as a musician, Dietz held even greater sway as a teacher. Countless local musicians can trace their musical beginnings or later broadening to him as an instructor, holding court in his upstairs office at the DB compound. But what most would later come to understand is that Dietz didn’t simply teach musical technique. He was a rock ‘n roll Zen master who imparted life lessons with such humor and ease and rollicking storytelling that students would often only later realize he’d dropped actual wisdom on their doorstep, maybe in the guise of teaching bluesy chord progression or a telling bewildering tale about Lucinda Williams or his late great friend Kelly Preach. 

“He loved people who could tell a good story, and people who would listen to his,” said his daughter Kelley Dietz Johnson in her eulogy. “He loved to stop by for a visit, he loved to eat chocolate chips together late at night in the kitchen while we took turns cracking each other up, and he’d cry with you in a parked car somewhere when life was hard. When he laughed, you could see all the way back to his molars.” 

“He held all babies with their stomach against the inside of his forearm and their head in the crook of his elbow. He loved teenagers, and considered himself still 19 at heart. Somehow, he also made being a real adult look interesting, and possible.” 

John Britton 

Ten years ago, John Britton lost his right leg. As a lifelong athlete and coach of both the men’s and women’s El Camino College soccer teams, this could have been seen as a devastating loss. But not for Britton, a man who rarely, if ever, passed on a chance for a laugh. 

“I wanted to buy a new car,” Britton told the ECC Union newspaper. “They told me it was going to cost an arm and a leg. I bartered the guy down, so I gave him my leg.” 

Ian Haslam, the former dean of ECC and a longtime friend, said the joke was in keeping with Britton’s approach to life. 

“He was like that. He would laugh it off and make it light,” Haslam said. “The rest of us would be thinking it’s the end of life. Not him. He’s ready to play Special Olympics badminton with one leg.” 

Britton, who over the course of a four-decade coaching career became an iconic figure throughout the South Bay, passed away on April 11 after suffering a heart attack. He was 70. 

Britton was originally from Scotland. He coached at Mira Costa High School prior to taking over as both men’s and women’s soccer coach at ECC in 1996. He also coached badminton and was a full-time faculty member at the college since 1999. 

Gene Engel, a former football coach who worked alongside Britton for three decades, admired the way Britton worked with his teams. 

“The intensity was never obvious, if this makes sense. It wasn’t an in-your-face intensity,” Engle said. “Any coach I’ve ever known wanted to win, and wanted to see their players do the best they could, and so [with Britton] there was an intensity about that. But his intensity did not project out in such a way that it would put pressure on his athletes, where they would feel, ‘Oh my gosh, if I make a mistake, the coach is going to yell at me.’  He allowed them to have fun, and pushed them to be the best they could be.” 

Even more, Engel admired the way Britton conducted himself through life. 

“I’ve never known a single person who had any interaction with John who did not like him, or didn’t want to be around him,” he said. “Not a single person.” 

In 2022, Britton received an honor that represented a beautiful intersection of his passions —  his family and his sporting life. In honor of its 75th Anniversary, El Camino College named its top 75 athletes, both male and female. Britton was honored, as was his wife, Traci, for badminton, and his daughter, Jaymie, who played soccer at ECC. 

“So you had him, his wife and his daughter all inducted,” Engel said. “It was pretty special.”