A Battle of Wills Rages Over Downtown Junkyard

Life would be “ever so simple,” says E.L. Scholder, if the city and courts would leave him alone to run his used car and junkyard business as he pleases.

Unfortunately for Scholder, “life is but a compilation of rules,” said his attorney Richard J. Boesen. And it is not made any easier by a judge who is all over the 70-year-old Scholder “like flies over roast beef,” he said.

If ever there was a clash of unyielding wills, that battle is being fought alternatively in Scholder’s downtown junkyard and in the courtroom of Municipal Judge Robert Coates, a writer of sentimental poems when he is not meting out justice.

Every so often the fight shifts to the County Jail, where Scholder, the father of 12 children, has been occasionally locked up for a total of about 50 days in the last two years.

The old man’s jail time stems from a display of contempt for Coates’ court and for ignoring directives from Coates and the city to clean up the junk, old cars and a boat that have accumulated on his downtown lot, at Martin Luther King Way and 7th Avenue, and at two Ingraham Street residences.

Now, the curmudgeonly Scholder, who has long been a fixture in the used car business in San Diego, is facing a court-imposed deadline to clean up his downtown junkyard or go back to jail. The city attorney’s office has vowed to put Scholder in jail unless he removes all junk and inoperable vehicles by Sept. 15 from his downtown “used car lot,” which he has operated for five years.

Not surprisingly, at least to Coates and the bureaucrats who have been trying for two years through court orders or legal threats to get him to clean up his lots, Scholder has vowed to once again defy the powers that be.

“I’m not even gonna try. I’m gonna let them take the cars and junk away and put me in jail. . . . Hell, there’s a whole lot of nicer people in there than there is out here,” Scholder said.

At issue here, said Deputy City Atty. Diane Contreras, are violations of local zoning laws.

Scholder has a business license to operate a used car lot on Martin Luther King Way, but not a junkyard, said Contreras. Even if the junk was cleaned up, court documents show that Scholder would still be in violation because few, if any, of the approximately two dozen cars in the lot are able to be driven.

And much to the chagrin of Scholder’s Ingraham Street neighbors, he is violating another ordinance by cramming cars and a boat into his two residential lots.

“Life is so simple for Mr. Scholder,” Boesen said. “But he chooses to make it difficult, and he’s got a judge who’s all over him like flies over roast beef. It’s a test of wills here. You’ve got a guy who’s adamant in wanting to rehabilitate the man, and he (Scholder) is saying bull . . . to rehabilitation. We got two stubborn men and both of them are taking each other to task.”

Coates, who may have to send Scholder back to jail in September, declined to discuss the case on grounds of judicial ethics. But he did say that San Diego “is not a frontier city where we can permit things like stockyards, activities more appropriate to a rural setting, to be established as an individual pleases.”

While Coates declined to talk about Scholder, Scholder had no reservations about telling a reporter what he thinks of the judge.

“I don’t pay any attention to him. . . . There isn’t any doubt in my mind what that man’s crazy,” Scholder said. “If you tell me to go north and an elephant comes around and puts his trunk around me and takes me south, well, that’s where I’m going. Just because he (Coates) tells me to do something doesn’t mean I can do it.”

Besides, it is not his fault that the cars on his lot “are shot to hell,” Scholder said. He said that street people, “bums, actually,” sleep in the cars at night and vandalize them.

A court official familiar with the case joked that Coates is going after Scholder because the judge “didn’t like the accommodations” offered by the junk man’s cars when Coates spent a weekend on the streets two years ago--part of a much-publicized move to better understand the plight of the city’s homeless.

Boesen, who was unwittingly dragged into the fray, says he is caught in the middle between helping out Coates, an old friend who by all accounts is a sensitive man who likes to express his feelings in published works of poetry. Boesen is representing Scholder for free at Coates’ request.

Scholder’s case has been in the courts so long--the first criminal complaint was filed against him in 1979--and he has made so many appearances before Coates that neither Scholder nor Boesen is sure when their paths first crossed.

However, the two men agree that they met shortly after Coates sentenced Scholder to six months in jail for contempt of court in March.

Scholder recalls it this way: “I pleaded guilty to the zoning violations and appeared before Coates. He told me that he was going to give me four days in jail and five days out until I finished cleaning up the place. Well, before he was ready to sentence me he said, ‘I tell you what. I’m gonna give you 10 days in jail to start with.’ Then the . . . asked me if I had anything to say.

“Well, the man asked and I complied. I told him, ‘I’ve been before a lot of judges, and you’re the worst ever.’ I also threw in some other personal observations. He hit his desk so hard with the . . . gavel that I think he broke his . . . hand. ‘Contempt of court!’ he yelled. ‘180 days! Get him outta here!’ ” Scholder related, laughing.

According to Boesen, Coates called him at home later that night and asked him to step in and help the judge’s old adversary, who was in jail.

“I guess Bob was troubled by the sentence he imposed and asked me to help Mr. Scholder. I agreed to do it pro bono (free of charge) and thought I had convinced him (Scholder) that the easiest thing to do was to comply with the court’s order to clean up the lots. That way the judge would be happy, the city would be happy and Mr. Scholder would be out of jail,” Boesen said.

Scholder agreed with his attorney’s advice. He cleaned up another small lot that he had on 13th Street and for a while cleaned up his Ingraham Street lots. The 13th Street lot stayed clean, but before long, neighbors began complaining to the city that Scholder was again parking cars on his residential lots. Meanwhile, the downtown lot was never touched.

But in fairness to Scholder, his failure to clean up the lots is not because he did not try, Boesen said. However, the city attorney’s office is convinced that he did not try hard enough.

“In all truthfulness, the city zoning department has been thoroughly frustrated by Mr. Scholder’s non-compliance,” Contreras said. “This is a case where he has just been an uncooperative individual.”

Scholder, whose first name is Emery, says moving tons and tons of junk is not as easy a task as the city believes.

“It ain’t easy. Nothing in life has been easy for me. Sure, I can move all this . . . but where in the . . . am I going to put it?” he said.

Indeed, nothing in life has been easy for the gruff, straightforward Scholder, who readily spews out opinions on everything and anybody with all the confidence of a sinner in a confessional.

At the same time, nobody can say that he has not been creative in his attempts to comply with Coates’ repeated orders.

For example, before cleaning up the 13th Street lot, he put an ad in a local paper offering to pay buyers $1 per car as an enticement to persuade people to cart away the 50 inoperable cars on the lot.

“I figured that if I offered to pay them a dollar to take the cars, I’d get a flood of bums coming in and put the cars on the street so they could sleep in them. . . . For 50 cents each two bums could have a place to sleep every night. But talk about unreasonable people. The most reasonable of the customers that I got was a guy who wanted me to paint the car he wanted to take away because it was rusted,” Scholder said.

Later, he tried to move the used cars on his downtown lot by advertising a “two for one” deal.

“I thought that a buy-one, get-one-free deal would be a good move. But I got no takers,” he said.

Scholder does not think that potential buyers were discouraged by the fact that few of the cars he was selling would be able to make it out of the lot without the aid of a tow truck.

Were it not for a couple of bad breaks years ago, he probably would not be facing any jail time, Scholder said.

He said that he hopped a freight train in Colorado and headed for San Diego in 1935, spending his first night in the city on a bench at the Santa Fe train station.

After holding an array of jobs, Scholder ended up owning a machine shop on Union Street at the start of World War II. But in the midst of a “patriotic fervor,” he sold the shop to the government “for a pittance.”

Today, the property is a parking lot, owned by the state, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Twenty-three years ago he bought several acres of “sand and sagebrush” in Kearny Mesa, but sold the land for $35,000 when building codes made it virtually impossible for him to develop the lots. Today, the Pepsi Cola plant and a host of other businesses sit on the property.

In between, Scholder charges that he has been run off five used car lots in San Diego “by unscrupulous politicians and other communists.”

According to Scholder, in the late 1950s he turned down a $15,000 offer from the state for a lot that he owned near Pacific Highway and Washington Street. The state needed the land to build the Washington Street Bridge, said Scholder, so he took the state to court to force it to meet his $20,000 demand for the land.

As he has in most of his court cases, Scholder, who has a ninth-grade education, acted as his own attorney.

“I practiced a half-hour closing argument every night. I mean, I walked around my swimming pool every night and learned that . . . speech better than any . . . attorney. When it was my turn to do my closing argument, the judge looks at me and says that we were running out of time and gave me five . . . minutes,” Scholder said.

He won the case, but received only a $3,000 settlement from the jury.

“If that wasn’t a . . . conspiracy, I don’t know what was,” he said.

Scholder’s last lot was at Broadway and Kettner Boulevard, until the city forced him to sell it five years ago for $425,000, he said. After moving out of that location, he bought his current downtown lot for $325,000, he said.

If his life has been a series of bizarre ups and downs and near-misses in striking real estate riches, it is only normal that his church wedding would also be unusual.

Scholder said that his wife of 44 years, who is Catholic and has a degree in nutritional science, wanted to “sanctify” their civil wedding by marrying in church. The sacred ceremony came after the couple had had four of their 12 children.

“So, we got married in church, with four kids sitting in the audience. Now, how many people do that?” he said.

Daniel Scholder, who works with his father at the Martin Luther King Way lot, laughed at that story.

“That’s my father, all right,” he said. “Not only is he a propagator, and in some respects more Catholic than the Pope, but I don’t know anybody who is more adamant about standing up for what he thinks is right. The two of us will be here until they come to take us away, whoever they may be.”