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CONDO SALES
WEEKEND EDITION
05.13.17 - 05.14.17 Volume 16 Issue 156
@smdailypress
WHAT’S UP WESTSIDE ..................PAGE 2 CHANGES AT LAX ..........................PAGE 3 POLICE LOG ......................................PAGE 6 CROSSWORD ....................................PAGE 9 BEACH GRADES ............................PAGE 10
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Santa Monica Daily Press
smdp.com
As Trump seeks billions for wall, US still paying for fence
Santa Monica’s oldest flame, The Tinder Box, dies out
BY NOMAAN MERCHANT Associated Press
BY KATE CAGLE Daily Press Staff Writer
Kate Cagle
UP IN SMOKE: The nearly 90-year-old shop closes for good Monday.
When Santa Monica’s oldest tobacconist, Edward Kolpin Sr., died in April 2007, he had a wish: that his little shop on Wilshire Boulevard would continue to sell handcrafted pipes, high-end cigars and custom blended tobacco for ten more years. When Kolpin’s daughter-in-law turns out the lights and locks the door one last time Monday, the nearly 90-year-old store will have fulfilled that promise. “It will be hard,” Jeanette Kolpin said as she held back tears and pulled out some pamphlets from the Museum of Neon Art. “But we will be immortalized.” On Friday, a construction crew used a crane to pull the old Tinder Box sign from its corner on Wilshire and Harvard St. It is now headed to Las Vegas where it will be repaired and restored and placed in the museum. The strip is perhaps a fitting resting place for what has been a symbol of Hollywood’s smoke-filled glamour since Ed began selling cigars to the stars in the 1920’s. Over the years, loyal customers relished Ed’s stories of famous actresses and actors and their exploits. He claimed to have once been flashed by Marilyn Monroe herself and to have skinny dipped in the Taj Mahal. SEE TINDER BOX PAGE 7
Kiwanis Club offers scholarships BY MARINA ANDALON Daily Press Staff Writer
The Kiwanis Club of Santa Monica is beginning a new scholarship program at this year’s 2nd Annual Santa Monica – Malibu Unified School District Visual Art Show.
The Kiwanis Club has been granting scholarships for over 60 years and this year they have decided to grant nine SMMUSD students a Visual Arts Scholarship of $250. “Kiwanis scholarships are awarded to support a student’s next step in using their talent,” said
Kiwanis Club Past Presidents, Jessica Handy. Each year the club awards over $120,000 to the community in the forms of grants, scholarships and sponsorships. On May 17, they will be giving away $2,250 in total to juniors and seniors within the
SMMUSD community. The money awarded to students is funded by Kiwanis Club member’s contributions, through the Kiwanis Charities foundation and their annual poker tournament
Before the wall, there was the fence. And the U.S. is still paying for it. As President Donald Trump tries to persuade a skeptical Congress to fund his proposed multibillion-dollar wall on the Mexican border, government lawyers are still settling claims with Texas landowners over a border fence approved more than a decade ago. Two settlements were completed just this week. The legal battles over a stopand-start fence that covers just a portion of the border have outlasted two presidents. If the Trump administration presses ahead with plans to build some version of the towering, impenetrable wall the president has promised, the government may have to take hundreds more landowners to court, perhaps even some of the same ones. The Secure Fence Act, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2006 with the support of many Democratic lawmakers, set aside money for fencing to cover one-third of the roughly 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) border between the U.S. and Mexico. About 650 miles of fence were eventually built, just 100 miles of them in Texas, which has the longest border of any state with Mexico. The uneven course of the Rio Grande, rough terrain and private land ownership created a host of engineering and legal obstacles and required hundreds of deals with individual property owners for some of their land. In the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost point of Texas where most migrants are arrested,
SEE SCHOLARSHIPS PAGE 3 SEE FENCE PAGE 5
Todd Mitchell
“ Your Neighborhood is My Neighborhood.”
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