[My encore of “Pomona A to Z” is complete, but here’s a followup column — originally published July 3, 2005 — of reader reaction to the series.
The comment from the Ontario reader really cheesed me off — imagine his chutzpah in thinking, after I’d devoted a year to writing favorably about Pomona, that I’d find his snobbish put-down of Pomona to be hilarious! — so it was with relish that I zinged him back. But everyone else was nice, and Judi Guizado’s letter is so brilliant I’m thrilled to re-present it.
As a final note, “A to Z” taught me a lot about Pomona and since then I’ve learned how little I knew when I wrote it. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading, or rereading, these columns anyway.]
Readers ‘letter rip’ on A to Z
With the 26-part series “Pomona A to Z” having ended, some readers are having trouble letting go.
“Don’t you have any more letters?” Pomona Councilman George Hunter asked me after Z for Zanja. “Could you do some diphthongs?”
Complex vowel sounds aside, I’m sorry to see the series end too. After all, for 26 Sundays I always knew where my next column was coming from. Now what?
“Perhaps you should reprise ‘A to Z’ for all Inland Valley cities,” C.J. Fogel, a former newsroom colleague, wrote to suggest. “Or how about ‘A to Z’ but using Khmer, the world’s largest alphabet? Moving on from ‘tha,’ we now have ‘pha’…”
Well, yours truly wrote about pho, so why not pha?
I brought my A-game to “A to Z,” hoping to have fun — and I did — while nudging people into looking at Pomona in a new light. It was successful, at least up to a point.
Jim Downs, a 28-year resident of Ontario, said he enjoyed reading about the valley’s other big city.
“I found out some interesting things about Pomona each week, and I even thought about going to see one or two of them,” Downs wrote. “But then I thought, ‘It is Pomona!'”
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
“An underrated city” is how reader David Fleury described Pomona, and he’s got it exactly right.
Fleury, who spent 24 years in Pomona, insisted he learned “so much” from my series, which is quite a compliment. He can’t have learned more than I did, though.
I knew very little about Pomona going into “A to Z.” Even now I know just a smidge — but it’s a good smidge.
Thanks to everyone who nominated people, places and things, by the way. True, I could have done the series without you. But it would have stunk.
Will there be another “A to Z”? Probably.
Downs, the Ontario resident quoted above, requested an “Ontario A to Z.”
With such a series, “we could discover some little-known or forgotten facts about Ontario with which we could wow and amaze our friends in other humdrum communities not nearly as interesting as our area! Whaddaya think?”
It’s a great idea, but I do have one worry.
What if people from Pomona refuse to check out the attractions because, after all, “It IS Ontario”?
You may recall that I stole the alphabet concept from a fine, funny PBS documentary by Rick Sebak, “Pittsburgh A to Z.”
I recently shipped off all 26 columns to Sebak, who was so excited he wrote me, then called me.
Turns out the Bard of Pittsburgh had already quoted me on the back of the DVD version of “A to Z” (available at www.wqed.org), and how cool is that?
Sebak called my series “totally fun to read” and encouraged me to do more. The “A to Z” concept, incidentally, wasn’t even his — a Pittsburgh museum official suggested it.
“You can’t copyright the letters of the alphabet,” Sebak added cheerfully. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a marvelous gimmick. Take it and run.”
When readers least expect it, I will.
But first, I’ll let two of you run with it. Because two separate e-mails from two separate readers took an alphabetical approach to critiquing my series.
Judi Guizado wrote:
“I found your columns to be amazing, beatific, classy, delightful, edifying, first-rate, groovy, heartfelt, interesting, joyful, kindhearted, laudable, masterful, neat-o, orderly, praiseworthy, quirky, reminiscent, scandalous — oops, sorry, wrong column; that one’s for Pomona’s self-imposed pay raise — transcendent, unusual, valiant, well-written, Xeroxable, yatterless and zestful.”
Guizado would like to thank the members of the Academy, plus Webster’s Thesaurus.
And Ruth Wells chimed in with this:
“Allen’s Bulletin Columns Did Effectually Furnish Great Highlights, Interesting Jewels, Knowledge Listing Many Nuances of Pomona’s Quintessence — Restaurants, Specifics of our ethnic citizens, Tableaus of Today, Unforgettable, Valued Works of the past, X-cellent Yarns, Zealously told.”
I’m awe-struck, blushing, content, dumbfounded, etc.
Now let’s let the alphabet rest a bit. We’ve given it a heckuva workout.
(David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, a workout for your eyes.)
