New Redondo Beach author Ashton Politanoff chronicles town’s past
by Garth Meyer Grasshoppers blew in to Redondo Beach from the southwest. Young boys gathered and sold them for chicken feed. Whale meat was available too, the papers said. Almost a hundred years later, a young man sat in a car in a mostly empty parking lot of the former Columbia Pictures studios in Culver City. The dome light on, it was early morning, and he was writing a short story in a journal. Once finished, he would go to his job as a production coordinator on Showtime projects such as “Californication.” Ashton Politanoff wrote a series of short stories that way, got one published in 2014 and is about to have his first book published August 14, “You’ll Like it Here” (Dalkey Archive, Dallas, Dublin) which stems from items in South Bay newspapers from 1911-18. The experimental novel comes with a list of endorsements, including William Finnegan, author of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning surf memoir “Barbarian Days.” Some of the incidents in Politanoff’s 218 pages are 100 percent true, some are half-true and other degrees. A woman did find a dead bird with white plumage, for example, in 1913 on Redondo Beach, but her subsequent bird hat was not shot at on Palos Verdes Peninsula…
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