LBReport.com

Doug Krikorian's Viewpoint

Don Kramer Was A Character Like No Other With His Zaniness, Goofiness, Joyfulness, Kindliness Who Left All Who Knew Him With Lasting Memories Of Slapstick Antics And Mirthful Anecdotes

by Doug Krikorian
Special to LBREPORT.com

Mr. Krikorian, an award winning journalist and author of two books, earned multiple awards in his 22 years of writing for the Long Beach Press-Telegram and 22 years for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He is happily retired.



If LBREPORT.com didn't tell you,
who would?
No one in LBREPORT.com's ownership, reporting or editorial decision-making has ties to development interests, advocacy groups or other special interests; or is seeking or receiving benefits of City development-related decisions; or holds a City Hall appointive position; or has contributed sums to political campaigns for Long Beach incumbents or challengers. LBREPORT.com isn't part of an out of town corporate cluster and no one its ownership, editorial or publishing decisionmaking has been part of the governing board of any City government body or other entity on whose policies we report.

LBREPORT.com is reader and advertiser supported. Support independent news in LB similar to the way people support NPR and PBS stations. We're not non-profit so it's not tax deductible but $49.95 (less than an annual dollar a week) helps keep us online.
(August 27, 2020, 6:55 p.m.) -- My journalistic mentor, the late masterful sports columnist, Melvin Durslag, used to emphasize to me that the only thing worse than growing old is growing old broke.

Which, of course, is true along with the inevitable physical deterioration that conspires against your vanity and too often requires visits to doctors, which are reluctantly endured.

And then there is the inevitable chronological certainty of the deaths of parents and other family members and close friends, which always causes such anguish and sadness and always serves as a chilling reminder of your own mortality.

Actually, I have found the latter phenomenon to be more difficult to take than the former since I've long accepted the fact I no longer can do one-arm handstands or do 10 sets of 50 pushups in less than an hour, but losing those who have been such a sacred part of my existence leaves a lingering emptiness in my soul.

Sure, you live with it -- what other choice do you have? -- and eventually the shock and hurt of these increasing departures fades into idle moments of glad memories and sleep-induced dreams of joyful remembrances.

There are certain people who come across your path over the years who leave such an unforgettable impression, such a memorable presence, such a rollicking, hilarious, goofy legacy of mispronounced words, nonsensical statements, hilarious malapropos, head-shaking non-sequiturs, unconventional behavior, a ceaseless stream of losing sports bets and a heart paved with gold who would do anyone a favor oftentimes at his own inconvenience and monetary loss.

If there ever was a person who was the quintessential embodiment of a Damon Runyon character, it would be Don Kramer, my pal of 43 years who passed away the other day at 83 from congestive heart failure at his Long Beach home in El Dorado Estates.

He was known in my column as Donnie No Win for his mystical knack for picking the wrong side of an athletic event, but it was far more than his gambling misadventures that made him a revered figure on the Los Angeles sporting scene, among both athletes and especially among his colleagues in the ticket industry.

[Scroll down for further.]









The ad space immediately above donated by LBREPORT.com

I had seen Mr. Kramer at all the L.A. sports events for years as a young sportswriter -- I later would find out he was considered the best street ticket hustler in Southern California -- before I finally was introduced to him by a friend named Chuck DeKeado in New Orleans before Super Bowl XII between the Dallas Cowboys and Denver Broncos.

On the day of the game, I saw Mr. Kramer in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency holding a paper bag with $15,000 in it, offering people an outrageous $300 for $30 tickets as the tour company he worked for had come up short on a ticket order.

Mr. Kramer wound up buying the 50 tickets the tour company needed, and I wrote about it in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where I then was employed.

Since he was a passionate sports aficionado and since he was an avid reader of the Herald Examiner sports section and since we both resided in Long Beach, it was inevitable we'd strike up a friendship that flourished when I realized what a zany fellow he was (I've always had an affection for people who are slightly off-kilter, or, as with the case of Mr. Kramer, dramatically off-kilter).

When we went to dinner, which we did often during my years of bachelorhood, he would always stun our server by jokingly saying, "Please, hold the lettuce on my salad."

Mr. Kramer often asked one of our waitresses if he reminded her of Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, which would inspire laughter since Mr. Kramer had a closer resemblance to Mr. Clean.


Mr. Kramer's self-identifying car.

He wasn't a guy to shrink away from a challenge, and one afternoon back in 1973 he was at the old Al Brooks Ticket Agency in downtown LA when Harold Guiver, who later became a close adviser to Carroll Rosenbloom and then worked for Steve Rosenbloom in New Orleans, bet Mr. Kramer $100 he couldn't run from where they were to Long Beach. That was one of the few propositions in which Mr. Kramer emerged victorious.

"It took me I think six hours, but I did it and collected the money," he always said proudly. "Guiver had someone trailing me the whole time making sure I wouldn't cheat. I didn't and ran the entire 27 miles."

The founder of RazorGator Tickets, Mr. Doug Knittle, spent years working with Mr. Kramer, as well as berating him, screaming at him and laughing hysterically with him.

"I'll never forget the time we were at the 1998 World Cup in Paris -- and our office was robbed of thousands of tickets and more than half million dollars," relates Mr. Knittle. "But we still had thousands of tickets and over 12 million dollars in the safe and I decided to get it out to a safer place. So I put Don in a five-star hotel at the foot of the Champs-Elysees and Jardin des Tuileries, Hotel de Crillon, and had him watch over the tickets and money. He spent two weeks there.

"I told him not to call anyone and not to leave the room, yet every time I went to the room he was on the phone and even went down once to get a sandwich. I obviously screamed at him.

"Well, the French cops were investigating the robbery to make sure it was legit, and found out we were still filling orders. I told them we had kept thousands of tickets in the safe, and the robbers didn't get it. The cops wanted to see the tickets, so they handcuffed me and I was driven over to hotel and we went up to the room where Kramer, of course, was on the phone when we entered, and I loudly told him to hang up. The cops asked who he was, and Kramer replied, 'I'm Tom Cruise.' And all hell broke loose. The cops started yelling and I started yelling at Kramer. The cops finally calmed down, counted our money and the tickets, but eventually were satisfied we weren't trying to pull off a scam and left the money and tickets in the room with Kramer. I was so mad at Kramer, but that was classic Don Kramer."

Doug Knittle also recalls the time an English friend of his named Tom Riley was in his office alone with Mr. Kramer, who asked Mr. Riley where he was from.

"London," he answered.

"Oh, I have a home in Knightsbridge," replied Mr. Kramer, referring to the most exclusive neighborhood in London. "I don't get back there often. But the next time you're there can you water my flowers for me."

When Mr. Knittle got to the office that day, Mr. Riley told him he didn't know one of his employees had a home in Knightsbridge.

"I really screamed at Kramer for that ridiculous lie," relates Mr. Knittle. "Kramer at the time couldn't afford to live in a tent under the 710 Freeway, much less Knightsbridge."

Doug Knittle relates another amusing tale about Don Kramer, who grew up in the shadow of the Coliseum, was a waterboy for the USC football team in the late 1940s, and attended Jacob Riis High which was in South Central L.A.

"Kramer for a change won a big bet on the 1963 World Series in which the Dodgers swept the Yankees," he says. "But the bookmaker didn't have enough money to pay Kramer off, so he gave him his new Cadillac. So Don for a couple of weeks was tooling all over L.A. in a big, prestigious Cadillac. And one afternoon he parks the car in front of Murray's Drugstore on Santa Barbara, and goes in to get some papers and when he comes out the car is gone. It had been repossessed. The bookmaker had stopped making the payments on the car. Poor Don. Even when he won, he lost."

"Somehow, Don was up more than $100,000 a few years back on his book maker and he bet $60,000 on the second Sugar Ray Mosley-Oscar De La Hoya fight," says Gilbert Eshom, a long-time pal of Mr. Kramer and one of the top ticket touts in America. "Unfortunately, he picked Oscar Mosley beat him again."

P.J. Macaluso, former owner of the acclaimed Manhattan Restaurant in LaJolla and a long-time dabbler in tickets, recalls an incident involving Don Kramer that changed the way the Rose Bowl distributed tickets.

"The Rose Bowl people used to have a public sale every year," he says "So one year Don got the bright idea of renting a bus, and filling it with hobos from downtown L.A. He somehow rounded up 80 of them, gave each a bottle of cheap wine and had them line up at a ticket booth at the Rose Bowl. He scribbled an X on their shoes in white chalk for identification, and wound up getting about 80 tickets for his efforts. You must understand the Rose Bowl was then the Super Bowl tickets of its days. They were impossible to get. Well, we got them, all right, but Kramer didn't transport the hobos back to L.A. and they stayed all night at the Rose Bowl and made a terrible mess. The Rose Bowl people were furious. That was the end of Rose Bowl public ticket sales."

I'll never forget the time during my gambling years in the 1980s when I fibbed to my then live-in girlfriend and told her I was going to a friend's bachelor party in Phoenix, but, instead flew to Las Vegas with Mr. Kramer where we stayed at the El Cortez. The next morning I bet $3,000 on New England minus 3 against the Seattle Seahawks.

I thought it was a cinch -- I still was naive to the maddening fickleness of gambling -- but Mr. Kramer and I took the noon flight back to L.A. when the score reached 23-7 in the Seahawks' favor and we were destined to blow a lot of money.

After reaching LAX, we walked towards the exit, and stopped to peek into one of the lounges where I saw the NFL scores streaming across the TV, and one inspired me into a frenzy of ecstasy. It showed the Patriots winning 38-23 -- and my winning $3,000 unexpected dollars, an unlikely outcome which I would chronicle in my Tuesday Herald Examiner column.

Don Kramer was a lot of fun and inspired howls of guffaws from a lot of people, but he also was a kind man who once against my wishes volunteered to drive my mother from Long Beach to Fowler, which he did and which was a 460-mile round trip.

He is survived by his loyal wife, Debbie Kramer, and survived by a lot of cronies who had a deep fondness for him, and one, the wealthy UCLA booster, Angelo Mazzone, plans to have a party at his Brentwood estate to honor such a wacky, yet lovable man who never will be forgotten by those fortunate enough to have known him.


Debbie and Don Kramer

LBREPORT.com welcomes letters/responses/comments to Mr. Krikorian's viewpoints. Click here to read latest. Email yours to mail@lbreport.com Include your name for publication (just like he does.) Submittedd content subjec to editing. Ad factum (on the merits) welcome; Ad hominem (on the person) ignored.
Viewpoints and op-eds on LBREPORT.com are proudly those of their bylined authors but not necessarily those of LBREPORT.com or our advertisers. We welcome our readers' comments/opinions 24/7 via Facebook and moderate length letters and longer-form op-ed pieces submitted to us at mail@LBReport.com.

Sponsor

Sponsor

Sponsor

Sponsor


/center>

Sponsor

Sponsor

Sponsor



Previously by Mr. Krikorian:

  • My Beloved Long Beach: A Victim Of Irrational Government Overreach Beyond Reasoned Response To Virus
  • Speak Up, Mr. Mayor, On Governor's Unwise Edicts. You Can Do That And You Should
  • Hallelujah! LB Mayor Pleads For Sac'to Permission To Lift Closures That Needn't Have Occurred
  • Excuses By Long Beach Police & Poticians Dishearten Damaged LB Businesses
  • Mayor/Council Sounds Of Silence After LB Cops Let Some Pillage Our Village
  • Awaiting Governor's Dictate To Decide Fate Of This Year's (July 3) "Big Bang On the Bay"
  • Will LB's New School Sup't Allocate Untimely Pay Raise To Serve Students?
  • From Krikorian's Notebook: (1) LBUSD Mgm't Mulls Keeping K-5 Kids Indoors Without Normal Access To Playground, Cafeteria, Auditorium Activities; (2) And More...
  • From Krikorian's Notebook: When Will LB Police Chief Luna Come Clean About May 31 Downtown Long Beach Looting Frenzy?
  • Long Time Long Beach Resident Dave Lopez Climaxes Storied 48-Year TV Career
  • Ben Goldberg Exits Long Beach, Now Nearby Refugee In OC
  • I Never Thought I'd Live To See These...
  • Is Long Beach Destined to Become the City That Never Sleeps?
  • Long Beach Politicians Once Again Fail Long Beach
  • A 2 1/2-Hour Commute To Work A Joy To This 86-Year Old Gentleman
  • Memo To LBUSD Sup Jill Baker: Return The Kids To the Classroom!
  • Parklets! Three Cheers For Long Beach Politicians!
  • Sadly, Our National Pastime No Longer A Pastime For Me
  • What Next From Long Beach Health Boss Kelly Colopy, Hazmat Suits For Our Restaurant Servers?
  • LBPD Chief Robert Luna: Stand Up For Your Fifty Ousted Cops!
  • FDR's Grandson, Delano Roosevelt, Talks Democratic Party, JetBlue, Long Beach And His Life
  • Krikorian Notes: From LB's Elected Leadership's Reimagining Delusions To the Gaslamp's Outdoor Wall Video Band Show To The Ghastly USC Coach, Clay Helton
  • Long Beach's Renaissance Man, Chuckie Miller, Reflects On His Entrepreneurial Life And On Racial Inequity
  • Krikorian Notes: From Majority Of LB Teachers Skipping Classrooms For The Comforts Of Home To Dr. Jill Baker Becoming Another Maria Montessori To Terry Antonelli Discussing Resurrection of L'Opera To Mayor Robert Garcia Touted By MSNBC's Brian Williams As A Future U.S. Senator To Kershaw's Magical Transformation
    Support really independent news in Long Beach. No one in LBREPORT.com's ownership, reporting or editorial decision-making has ties to development interests, advocacy groups or other special interests; or is seeking or receiving benefits of City development-related decisions; or holds a City Hall appointive position; or has contributed sums to political campaigns for Long Beach incumbents or challengers. LBREPORT.com isn't part of an out of town corporate cluster and no one its ownership, editorial or publishing decisionmaking has been part of the governing board of any City government body or other entity on whose policies we report. LBREPORT.com is reader and advertiser supported. You can help keep really independent news in LB similar to the way people support NPR and PBS stations. We're not non-profit so it's not tax deductible but $49.95 (less than an annual dollar a week) helps keep us online.



    Recommend LBREPORT.com to your Facebook friends:


    Follow LBReport.com with:

    Twitter

    Facebook

    RSS

    Return To Front Page

    Contact us: mail@LBReport.com



  • Adoptable pet of the week:




    Copyright © 2020 LBReport.com, LLC. All rights reserved. Terms of Use/Legal policy, click here. Privacy Policy, click here