Mature Life Features

for a week,

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Perry Mason Still Lives in Ventura

By Beverly Rahn, Mature Life Features

VENTURA, Calif. —- One of the biggest mysteries to locals is why the ghost of Erle Stanley Gardner hasn’t lured more visitors to his home town. Hundreds of thousands of tourists and travelers, most of them from the sprawling Los Angeles metropolis an hour away, visit Santa Barbara next door each year, said Paul Navratil as we watched traffic stream by on Highway 101, better known as the Ventura Freeway. “And they just drive right by us to get there.”

We were sitting in the Pierpont Inn, where the creator of Perry Mason went for victory dinners after his successes in the nearby Ventura County courthouse. Gardner began his 150-novel career, which he launched with a short story using the pseudonym Charles M. Green, in his second-floor law office at California and Main streets overlooking downtown’s commercial core. He didn’t have to turn to writing to achieve success, according to locals. Ventura’s most famous resident was a good lawyer and probably would have become a California Supreme Court judge, but he preferred to be like his well-known creation – Perry Mason. To keep from getting mixed up, Gardner used the local courtroom, his office and the views from each of them as models for his settings.

Visitors to the courtroom enter the City of Buenaventura — that’s the official name of the municipality popularly known as Ventura — city hall through its bronze sliding grilled entrance adorned with depictions of lima beans. Ventura was once billed the lima-bean capital of the world. Railway officials shortened the city’s name because it was too long for their schedules.

Keeping an eye on the comings and goings in front of City Hall is a bronze statue of Fr. Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who founded Mission San Buenaventura in 1782. The mission, a half-dozen blocks below the civic center, features a triangular buttress across its face — a support installed after an 1812 earthquake fractured its face. Also visible are two metal crosses imbedded on each side of the front door. These are assurances that the building will remain operating as a Roman Catholic church into perpetuity.

Visitors can circle these two complexes on a variety of walking and motor tours of such attractions as blocks of Victorian houses, oil-boom mansions from the 1920s, flower gardens, some three-dozen antique boutiques downtown alone, and a meandering string of art studios, galleries and workshops.

Ventura’s oceanfront harbor, which offers marine diversions to please visitors of all ages, is embraced by a 150-year-old pier and some 30 acres of galleries, cafes and restaurants to suit all tastes. Boats shuttle several times a day to and from the Channel Islands for hiking, picnicking, snorkeling and camping. The price of whatever vessel you choose is worth it just to watch the porpoise pods slip, slide, slap, soar, swoop and swish all around your boat as pelicans patrol overhead. You’re also likely to encounter orcas or gray, minke, humpback or blue whales.

Twenty minutes southeast of town, the Ronald Reagan presidential library is enshrined atop a Simi Valley hill.