Changing Face of San Pedro—
The Talented Mr. Retsek
KPFK’s “Car Show” Co-host John Retsek Lives Several Different Lives
—But Pedro is Home to All of Them
By Terelle Jerricks, Editor

     To call John Retsek a Renaissance Man would not just be a cliche, it would be seriously misleading. Yes, he is a 31-year veteran co-host of KPFK’s Car Show, a magazine writer, a biographer, a sailboat racer and Art Director at KCET-–among other things. But he’s not one to dazzle you with how multi-faceted he is. Never mind the Car Show’s legion of loyal fans—talk to people who’ve worked or sailed with him, and you’ll find that most only know a little of the other worlds he inhabits.
     San Pedro artist Ron Linden is typical in this regard. Linden had worked with, and under, Retsek at KCET for over 20 years before learning they shared an interest in sailing. Many other friends and admirers of Retsek are no doubt in the same boat. When Retsek, a bespectacled white-haired San Pedran in a Gilligan’s hat, greeted me at the KCET studio guard-shack for our interview, there was nothing about him to suggest how many lives he lives.
     Like many migrants that settled in Pedro before and after him, Retsek was chasing his dreams westward, escaping the rusting of the old industrial Mid-west, yet still connected to it. His arrival in San Pedro was, in many ways, a search for the home he grew up in. Though it is San Pedro’s harbor and water that Retsek associates with home, it is also the blue-collar realness of the people he associated with Michigan City, Indiana, that made him adopt San Pedro as his hometown. When I asked why he chose San Pedro, in jest, he responded, “because it’s not a Santa Monica or a Marina Del Rey.”
     Recalling memories of his old hometown, he noted how the town fell into an economic slump after the Pullman Standard Car Manufacture closed. All of the Pullman property was bulldozed, except a single building, which was turned into a mall. Everything else was turned into tourist attractions. Retsek says he likes the new Michigan City, but he has no intentions of leaving San Pedro. “You know, with all the changes that have occurred over the years, the population of Michigan City is not much more than the 50,000 it was during the 1950s,” he noted.
     Retsek had secretly always wanted to go west and work in film. He spent much of his early twenties traveling around Europe and the Caribbean before going to the Goodman School of Drama at the Institute of Art in Chicago in 1961. When he graduated, he packed his bags and went to the University of California Santa Barbara [UCSB] to work as a set designer for the Summer Repertoire Theatre.
     “I was offered an opportunity to earn a Ph.D. at UCSB but I had already realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as an academic,” Retsek explained. “I was already in the Scenic Artist Union from back in Chicago and ended up with a job at CBS.”
     Over the years, corporate American habits have increasingly crept into public media outlets. They’ve had to cut cost and a few corners to maintain sustainability to maintain the things that make public television special and much needed—those things being shows, documentaries, and films that broaden the collective experience of the American general public.
     The attraction of public television in the 1960s and ‘70s was the fact that “it was the most creative place to be at that time,” Linden recalled. “KCET, in the beginning, before it became corporatized, there was an allure of being with public television. By the 1990s that changed.”
     Linden, critical of some of the sacrifices made to the detriment of quality said, “It doesn’t make sense to have only 40 producers with the remaining being support staff personnel on the lot.” Linden noted, “We have the richest talent pool in the world [in Los Angeles] yet many of the shows are done somewhere else.”
     When I asked Retsek if working for KPFK and KCET still held the same allure as when he first went to work for them, he emphatically said, “Yes! It is now more critical, the challenges and the importance of it. One of the things we have to counter is the commercial media conglomerates and their lack of objectivity and [partisan politics].”
     Retsek broke into radio a few years after joining KCET when he made a guest appearance with Jack Kirkpatrick on Wina Sturgeon’s Consumer Report show on KPFK. The show received a huge volume of calls from people who had questions concerning new purchases, maintenance, or other matters of automotive concern. As a result, Retsek and Kirkpatrick were offered a car show of their own in 1973.
     “We were asked to do a show. We enjoyed periods of great success to periods that were not so successful,” Retsek said. “We went from one hour, to an hour and a half, to two hours, then back to one hour.”
     Last year, the Car Show found itself on the cutting block during one of KPFK’s ongoing upheavals. “I don’t know exactly what happened,” Retsek said. “Apparently some major backers of the show had stepped in and told them to leave the show in place.” The Car Show’s 31-year run is a monumental feat in and of itself, especially given KPFK’s notoriety for cutting programs and personnel for political reasons. It can currently be heard at noon on Saturdays.
     Retsek’s knowledge of cars and the automotive industry has been described as encyclopedic, yet he only pursues it as a hobby. He writes highly technical evaluations of cars in addition to historical and biographical sketches of racecar drivers and specific races driven in decades past. At one time, he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his childhood hero, Briggs Swift Cunningham II, racecar pioneer and sailing champ. Their differences in wealth pretty much nixed that aspiration, but Retsek got to do something that few others get to do—write an authorized biography on his childhood hero.
     “As a young man I would spend all of my money on fast cars and boats. Of course Briggs was a millionaire. I admired Briggs because he did all the things I wanted to do. Everybody around him remarked what a wonderful human being he was.”
     John Retsek’s hobby led him to preserve and immortalize the deeds and victories of racing and sailing legends that would have otherwise gradually faded the way most oral histories do. Soon after Retsek began hosting the Car Show he began writing for such publications as “Sports Car International,” “Sports Car Graphic,” “Motor Trend,” and “Road Test.”
     In many ways, Retsek’s journey is typical San Pedro in that he continues to speak the names of those who cleared the path he walks—he keeps their lives and deeds in living memory. San Pedro does that. San Pedro remembers its founders, remembers its struggles, and remembers its past and documents it on stone and concrete for all its progeny to see.
     The wood paneled walls of his office are covered with pictures of his family, his sailboats, and his original scenic paintings. All of it told me that art, speed, and the sea were the recurrent themes of his life. Retsek has owned several sailboats over the years and raced them in various competitions in Long Beach. He used to race in San Pedro’s Harbor back when it had a thriving sailboat racing scene. He ruefully recounted how many of the engineers who worked in the aerospace industry also built their own boats. The closing of many of the aerospace industry factories was a major blow to sailboat racing in San Pedro.
     The construction of Pier 400 and the California Least Tern Habitat killed inland sailboat racing in what was known as Hurricane Gulch, the center of C-class sailboat racing. The kelp beds, planted to protect the endangered species, was a nail in the coffin for San Pedro inland sailboat racing.
     Retsek’s latest boat is called the La Maria, crewed by his partners, Jesus Gutierrez and Richard Keller. In 1999, Retsek was nearly killed in a sailing accident on the La Maria. The mainsail was hit by a microburst of an El NiÒo squall, swinging the boom all the way around, knocking him into the water.
     “I was fortunate to have been wearing an automatically inflating life vest with CO2 cartridges. They had to pump a lot of water out of my lungs. I don’t remember much about what happened afterward. The accident was really embarrassing because I was only 25 feet from the slip.”
     After an accident like that, most people would think twice before getting back into the sea. But Retsek had no intentions of retiring from sailing or retiring period. He said he would retire later, much, much later. To just emphasize that point, when our interview was finished, he gave me a ride to my car in the silver Dodge Magnum RT. He gunned it, and the 5.7 liter Hemi V8 engine sucked me into the leather seat. Then he began braking just in time so as to not make mince-meat out of the little toy car in front of us.
     Retire? Nah, he’s not retiring any time soon. Right now, Retsek’s just having too much fun.

John Retsek. Photo: Lynn Nishimura, www.misaphoto.com.