by Mark McDermott
They were a bunch of old hands. Each knew the backroom byways of a world the average citizen was blissfully unaware of. Each had a different expertise. And every once in a great while they’d all get together to work on a different kind of heist.
They were no Ocean’s 11, mind you — nary a George Clooney among them — but they’d gather every other late Tuesday night in the dim light of the Mermaid Tavern and swap tales. And that was where the plan began to form. Their greatest heist.
It was 1993. Council meetings often went late into the night, yet by the time they were over council members were usually a bit too wired to just go home and go to bed. So they’d go to The Mermaid, the velvet-boothed old bar on the Hermosa waterfront (which literally had a backroom), served stiff drinks, and stayed open late.
“The Mermaid was the only thing that was open in town by the time we got out,” said J.R. Reviczky, the former Hermosa Beach councilperson.
It became a ritual of sorts with council members meeting up for some nightcaps, sometimes at the Mermaid, other times down the street at Critters. As Reviczky remembers it, on one of those late nights, they happened to be watching the television set at the bar and a slick commercial for the Toys for Tots program, a seasonal charity run by the U.S. Marines, flashed on the screen. For some reason it got everyone’s attention.
“Anybody know where those toys go?” someone said as the commercial ended.
“And we look at each other,” Reviczky recalled. “None of us knew where the toys went.”
Not that they thought anything was amiss. But these were policy-inclined people, interested in the nuts-and-bolts of how programs work. And so it got them all to thinking: what if we did something like that here, in the Beach Cities?
“So we decided that night 32 years ago to start our own toy drive,” Reviczky said. “And it started real slow, and real small. But it’s grown to huge proportions.”
The Beach Cities Toy Drive, which culminates with its annual wrapping party this Saturday at the Joslyn Center in Manhattan Beach, has become one of the signature community non-profits in the South Bay. It remains utterly grassroots. The Toy Drive has no flashy website; in fact, it has no website at all, just a Facebook page and a vast web of word-of-mouth connections, a social network unto its own, the old-fashioned way. There are no celebrity figureheads, just people coming from every corner of the community to do their little part. Because the Toy Drive happens with such understated regularity, the miracle it pulls off has become commonplace, but it is a miracle nonetheless. The upshot is that the Toy Drive, working with a carefully picked array of 10 other non-profits, delivers 4,000 to 5,000 toys into the hands of children whose holiday season might otherwise be bereft of presents — kids in domestic abuse or homeless shelters, in hospitals, or in families in dire financial straits.
Most of the people involved have put in 15 to 20 years, and both Reviczky and his former council colleague, Sam Edgerton, have led the charge for all 32 years, while another former Hermosa councilman, Pete Tucker, has been involved a mere quarter century (or so, he can’t exactly remember).
There is no fanfare and nobody gets credit. In true Christmas fashion, the ethos of the Toy Drive could be summed up in the lovely line from the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. “It is through giving,” the prayer instructs, “that one receives.”
Reviczky said that the drive has given him more than he can even articulate.
“I don’t know where you would ever get the satisfaction that my partners and I get doing this toy drive,” he said. “It’s a labor of love.”
Edgerton is the guy who first connected the dots. He’d just been elected to council the prior year. In addition to the many policy issues that come and go, every councilperson — and every mayor, a position that rotates among council members in both Hermosa and Manhattan Beach — hopes to leave some kind of lasting imprint, to start something on behalf of the community. A verity that is often lost in the hurly burly of small town politics is the people who serve in elected positions are usually doing it not for glory — there’s precious little glory on a council dais at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night — much less any sense of personal gain. Not always, but usually, council people are good old fashioned do-gooders.
Edgerton had two such ideas those first two years. He helped launch the Hermosa Beach summer concerts on the beach, and for years even served as its primary booker (a soul music aficionado, he brought in Sam Moore and Johnny Rivers, among others). When the idea for a toy drive arose, he took the ball and ran with it.
“I just said, ‘Why don’t we do a toy drive and wrap the toys, kind of use it as a marketing concept, so you feel like you’re wrapping a present for a kid that you know, even though you don’t,'” he recalled. “‘It’ll bring the community together for the holidays. And we’ll see if we can get some corporations to donate.'”
It brought the community together in ways that neither Edgerton nor his partners in crime could have envisioned. Redondo Beach already had a small toy drive, so Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach partnered on the effort, and still do — the wrapping party, which by now brings 250 people together each year — alternates between the two towns. That may be the culminating event each year, but the Toy Drive reaches into every corner of the community.
The original committee was chaired by Edgerton and included Reviczky, Manhattan Beach mayor Connie Sieber, Hermosa Beach treasurer Gary Brutsch and resident Vicki Garcia. The origin story, however, is a little hazy. But Edgerton is very clear that it did not begin at the Mermaid.
“Did you ever drink at The Mermaid? There was no TV at the bar in the Mermaid,” he said.
Edgerton said council members did indeed go out after meetings, but usually to Critters, former councilmember Bob “Burgie” Benz’s favorite fiefdom. In any case, the Toy Drive idea coalesced at another iconic spot from Hermosa’s yesteryears, The Hilltop Cafe on Upper Pier Avenue, according to Edgerton.
“Just like any good surfing story, there’s a lot of fiction about where the wave came from, and who named the pipeline The Pipeline,” he said. “The truth of the matter is it really started with Gary Brutsch and me in the Hilltop, and from there, I just added pieces. And the intent was always to distribute toys to charities.”
Edgerton does agree with the Ocean’s 11 comparison, however. He’s Clooney, of course, and while he might not buy Reviczky’s recollection of the origins, he does credit him as his longest running and trusted partner in this endeavor. Which is to say Reviczky is Brad Pitt.
“I’ll give that role to J.R., for sure,” he said. “And the hot looking babe, that’s Vicki, because she was a hot looking babe. Gary Brutsch was the screaming Black guy [Bruiser].”
Reviczky was the guy who answered the question, “Where are the toys going to go?” Through his late wife, Kathy, Reviczky was deeply connected to the local non-profit community, and to this day he handles relations with those non-profits.
“That’s the Ocean’s 11 part, right?” Edgerton said. “The guy who was going to crack the safe had to be a safe cracker, and know where to get the toys to. J.R. had a beeline through his late wife to some charities. That was really helpful.”
It is a team that never stopped growing. Among the key additions were Sandy Anleu, who ran High Five boutique in Hermosa in the ‘90s and started with a fashion show benefiting the Toy Drive and has now become essentially its social director. She, in turn, helped enlist the musician Jeremy Buck and his Rock for Tots concert on Pier Avenue, which began as a benefit for the Marine’s Toys for Tots and now is a key element of the Beach Cities Toy Drive.
“It really was a loose association of people, you know, who came together with skill sets,” Edgerton said. “And somehow, even though it’s the Crabby Committee, I affectionately call it, everybody hung together.”
The expansion
The toy drive’s growth has been utterly organic, fueled by chance encounters and unexpected connections that spread like roots through the South Bay.
Pete Tucker became the detail man — another safecracker in the Ocean’s 11 analogy. Tucker manages the unglamorous logistics that make the whole operation possible. He secures the giant roll-off bin from Athens Services trash company (donated for 15 years now), reserves the Hermosa Beach gymnasium every other year, arranges the banners on Aviation Boulevard and Pier Avenue, and even has a post-Christmas ritual of buying up wrapping paper at CVS for 20 cents on the dollar.
“The manager there said, ‘If you don’t take it, corporate will come — if I can’t sell it, they’re just going to destroy it,'” Tucker recalled. “So every year I go down, and it’s the same thing. He goes, ‘Yep, you’re here.'”
It’s all about asking favors in the spirit of giving. Tucker has since also brought Michaels aboard to also contribute wrapping paper, one of countless small but indispensable favors that come from all corners. But one of Tucker’s most remarkable connections came by pure happenstance about a decade ago at the Christmas Tree Lighting on the Hermosa Beach pier. A man approached Tucker at the toy donation booth.
“He comes up and says, ‘Hey, I want to donate some toys,'” Tucker recalled. “I said, ‘Well, okay. If you could help us out, maybe just drop them by the fire department, then we’ll put them in the bin.’ He goes, ‘No, I got eight pallets of toys.'”
That man was Greg Tucker (no relation), CEO of Bay Cities Container in Pico Rivera and a Hermosa Beach resident. Each year since, Greg has donated six to eight pallets — roughly 1,000 toys — that arrive shrink-wrapped and ready to gift wrap. Tucker borrows a friend’s bobcat truck with a liftgate and another friend’s pallet jack, and makes the pilgrimage to Pico Rivera.
“We call each other the lost brothers because we got the same last name,” Tucker said.
Like most everything about the Toy Drive, many of the elements come together almost automatically, or what Tucker calls “bulletproof.” He cuts and pastes the previous year’s emails to facilitate a lot of the process. And Tucker doesn’t even have to make the calls for favors anymore. His friends call him.
“I’ve got one guy that goes out to Pico Rivera, and he actually calls me about two weeks before — I think, gee, I better call him up,” Tucker said. “And he calls me and says, ‘Well, it’s that time of year. Are we going out there again?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ ‘No problem. I’ll get my truck and I’ll see you Friday afternoon.’ And I’ve got a friend who’s got a pallet jack, and I call him, and he goes, ‘Yeah, I wondered when you were gonna call me. It’s that time of year. You want to borrow my pallet jack, huh?'”
It’s those unseen hands — the guy with the truck, the guy with the pallet jack, the CVS manager holding wrapping paper, and countless others — that make the whole operation possible.
Steve Collins and his partners at Hermosa Cyclery have donated bicycles annually since 2005, when Tucker first asked if they could spare a couple bikes. In recent years, that number has reached 30 bikes, along with helmets. Collins, who inherited the shop with his partners from the late Harold “Schu” Schumaker in 2002, saw giving back as baked into that inheritance. He’d gotten his first job at the shop at 16, after being turned down twice, his mother driving him back for a third try until Schumaker finally said yes.
Collins isn’t someone who talks much about “giving back” — those aren’t the terms he’d use. But he’s a man who knows what it means to be given something: a job as a teenager, a trade he loved, eventually the shop itself. He’s grateful for his place in this community and for the fact that he gets to do what he loves every day. So the gift of 30 bikes each year — which take three mechanics a full day to assemble — feels natural and completely gratifying to him.
“We get these bikes wholesale, and we build them for free with our own labor,” Collins said. “It’s easy for us to provide a bike. We all remember vividly unwrapping the bike we got for Christmas when we were kids. It was one of the best days ever.”
Sandy Anleu started with fashion shows benefiting the toy drive in the mid-1990s, then found her niche buying skateboards and helmets for teenagers. She estimates she’s purchased about 3,000 skateboards over 30 years, spending roughly $2,000 annually from donations she helped generate.
“I realized there weren’t enough gifts for teenagers,” she said. “I thought that’s something that every boy or girl or even older kids will enjoy. And it’s very Beach Cities.”
Anleu also became the key liaison with musician Jeremy Buck, who started Rock for Tots in 2005 at the Lighthouse Cafe, initially benefiting the Marine Corps Toys for Tots. After meeting Anleu and Sam Edgerton, Buck shifted his annual concert to support the Beach Cities Toy Drive. The event, held annually on Pier Plaza in conjunction with the tree lighting ceremony, has become one of the toy drive’s major engines — this year’s concert raised $7,889 in cash and collected six huge boxes of toys. Part of what Buck raises also goes to Harbor Regional Center’s Holiday Help Fund, which helps families with children with disabilities buy food, clothing, and necessities. Buck’s son was born premature in 2020 and spent 34 days in the NICU, and Harbor Regional Center provided services to monitor his development. That’s why he added them as a beneficiary during COVID in 2020, splitting donations between toys (BC Toy Drive) and basic needs (Harbor Regional Center).
For Buck, who moved to the South Bay from Indiana 25 years ago, Rock for Tots has become more than a fundraiser. It’s become an annual homecoming.
“It feels like family,” Buck said. “I don’t have any family that lives out here, except my wife and kids. So this is the family that I got to pick or create or been blessed to meet throughout the journey. It really does feel like there’s something really special. It’s unlike other gigs. This one always has some deeper meaning.”
The concert brings together South Bay musicians who rarely get to perform together, all donating their time. Steve Aguilar serves as musical director, coordinating the rotating cast of performers. The raffle, which generates the bulk of the cash raised, features prizes including guitars from Guitar Center (which has donated 42 guitars over 21 years), a beach cruiser from Hermosa Cyclery, BeachLife festival tickets, and hotel stays.
“People who come to these, they have that feeling,” Buck said. “Like, wow, I’m connected to this. My heart is warm. I know I’m contributing however I can.”
Anleu’s partner, photographer Ken Pagliaro, documents the concert and wrapping party each year.
The network keeps expanding. Last weekend, 12 Bars of Christmas, a bar crawl through Hermosa’s drinking establishments, collected 680 toys. The South Bay Boardriders Club has been collecting toys at local surf shops for about five years through their Surfing Santa program. Anleu’s Lanikila Outrigger Canoe Club provides muscle on moving day, hauling boxes from the collection bins to whichever venue is hosting that year’s wrapping party.
Ron Newman, co-owner of Baja Sharkeez, has been coordinating food donations from local restaurants for at least 20 years, a job Edgerton calls “the unsung hero” role. In the early years, Edgerton handled it himself, which meant running around to collect food while everyone else enjoyed the party.
“You can’t even go to your own party because you’ve got to run around to all the restaurants and collect, and half of them had forgotten to give you what they promised,” Edgerton said. He nearly got into a fistfight with one pizza shop owner who forgot to prepare the promised pies. “I got your name on a T-shirt as someone who helped us out,” Edgerton told him.
Newman took over the food detail, with his nephew Lorenzo, who “when I met him was three feet tall, and now he’s six foot four,” Edgerton said. The restaurants get their names on the back of commemorative T-shirts, creating a tradition that mirrors AC/DC concerts (Edgerton just attended his first AC/DC concert, where he noticed the parallel) — everyone wears their oldest shirt.
The trust the community places in the toy drive manifests in small moments. Tucker saw a young boy bringing toys to the donation bin outside city hall earlier this week. “The kid said, ‘I saved up my money so I could buy them some toys, because I know they wouldn’t get any,'” Tucker said.
And there are moments when faith is tested. One year, Reviczky looked at the nearly empty collection bin and panicked.
“JR says, ‘Tucker, we ain’t got any toys,'” Tucker recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, it’s a toy drive. Don’t worry about it.’ About a week later, boom, that bin was full of toys.”
The toys ultimately go to 10 carefully vetted charities: The Salvation Army, Harbor-UCLA Child Crisis Center, 1736 Family Crisis Center, Richstone Family Center, Special Needs Networks Inc., Good Shepherd Center, The Midnight Mission, Los Angeles County Toy Loan Program, South Central Family Health Center, and Toys for Champions. Reviczky handles all charity relations and insists they distribute toys directly to families, not resell them.
“I just looked for charities that didn’t receive anything,” Reviczky said. “And I’d call up and say, ‘Tell me your story,’ and I kind of made it work.”
The wrapping party
The wrapping party is where all the work and all the personalities converge into something that is almost a miracle unto itself, both practical and celebratory. About 250 volunteers show up, many wearing T-shirts from previous years — there’s an annual contest for the oldest shirt, consistently won by Peggy Barr, who has a shirt from 1994. Newman, known as “the food wrangler,” is hustling around making sure everyone is well fed. Former Hermosa city attorney Mike Jenkins packs boxes with such efficiency that Tucker calls him “the box boy.”
“That guy can pack more toys in a box than I care to think about,” Tucker said.
Richard Montgomery, a former Manhattan Beach councilman, has been the city’s representative on the toy drive committee for 20 years, serving as host when the wrapping party rotates to Manhattan Beach. He was the only Manhattan Beach person on the committee until Jill Lampkin joined last year. His role has been recruiting corporate and volunteer teams that provide much of the wrapping power — Chevron and Skechers employees, the National Charity League (about 40 mothers and daughters), and MB CERT volunteers. MBFD firefighters and MBPD officers join in the wrapping effort. This year, Manhattan Beach Mayor Pro Tem Joe Franklin helped secure the Joslyn Center and a fee waiver from the City, which also paid for the storage pod behind the fire station.
Montgomery is one of the few toy drive volunteers who has witnessed the other end of the operation — the moment when families actually receive the toys at places like Midnight Mission and Special Needs Network.
“You’re standing there when they call the name out, and the family comes up, and they get these kids, you see the look on their face, like, ‘Thank you so much. I couldn’t afford to buy my kids toys, but you guys made it possible,’” Montgomery said. “Nothing beats that feeling when you’re seeing it happen right in front of you.”
For most volunteers, the gratification comes at the wrapping party. Kids sit on the floor wrapping alongside their parents. Groups of friends make it an annual reunion. The LA County Fire Department Station # 100, from Hermosa, stops by to help wrap when they’re not on calls. Music plays — Edgerton favors Phil Spector’s Christmas album — and for about four hours, roughly 4,000 toys get wrapped and sorted into boxes by age group.
Reviczky has been to many of the charity giveaways and watched children receive the toys.
“It warms your heart,” he said. “I don’t know where you would ever get the satisfaction. It makes your heart swell.”
Edgerton’s description of the wrapping party might best capture why the Beach Cities Toy Drive has endured for 32 years.
“Somehow it all hangs together,” he said. “And why it hangs together? Because when we do this, it’s spiritual. You do all this work, everybody’s yakking at each other, and then you have this wrapping party, and everybody’s hearts just melt. It’s this amazing feeling of doing something that’s so right, and so cool. You go home and you just feel like you’re totally fulfilled. It’s like a great day in America. That’s it.”
Unwrapped new toys can be donated through Friday, December 19, at the following locations: Manhattan Beach Fire Station One, 400 15th Street; Manhattan Beach City Hall, 1400 Highland Avenue; Los Angeles County Fire Station No. 100, 540 Pier Avenue, Hermosa Beach; and Hermosa Beach Police Department, 540 Pier Avenue (open 24 hours). The wrapping party takes place Saturday, December 20, at the Joslyn Center in Manhattan Beach from 10 a.m. until all toys are wrapped. Volunteers are welcome and should bring scissors, tape, and extra wrapping paper if possible. ER
