Remembering Burt Sperber
By Jo Giese
This past Wednesday by first light, the sad morning of Burton S. Sperber’s memorial service at Forest Lawn, I placed a memorial wreath from Steve Soboroff and myself on the safety landscaped median on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
Without Burt’s partnership, leadership and enthusiasm, this highway median would never have been landscaped.
As president of the MalibuGreenMachine, a nonprofit, the first time I met with Burt at ValleyCrest’s headquarters in Calabasas, he personally greeted me in the gorgeous landscaped atrium. As he escorted me up in the elevator, he said, gruffly, “I’ve met with other community groups for years and nothing happens. I don’t want to waste my time and money—but mostly my time!”
“I don’t want to waste mine either,” I said.
Thus began a successful partnership that lasted four years and, with Steve Soboroff on board as chair of fundraising, we raised the money to landscape the Pacific Coast Highway median from Cross Creek Road to Webb Way.
Burt was always fun to be with. He usually answered his phone himself, and he loved to tell a self-deprecatory story. He never referred to himself as the CEO of ValleyCrest Companies, one of the world’s largest landscaping companies. He preferred to be known as the gardener, or maybe the head gardener. One of my favorite stories was about the time he and his wife Charlene were on a cruise in the Mediterranean. One night at dinner, a passenger asked him what he did for a living and when he said he was a gardener, the passenger snubbed him. However, when the ship pulled into port and Burt got off to buy some new clothes, the tourist noticed and said, “What’s a gardener doing in a fancy store like that?”
While the engineering and design were being finalized, and we waited for our permits so we could start the median project on PCH, Burt pitched in the resources of ValleyCrest to help the GreenMachine on other projects: one Earth Day we landscaped the rest area just south of Tunnel 1 on Kanan-Dume Road, and he provided the earth-moving equipment, plant material and experienced crew to assist in planting a sweet garden at the area next to the “Welcome to Malibu, 27 Miles of Scenic Beauty” sign just north of Trancas (it’s the area where busloads of tourists get their pictures taken daily).
It felt especially appropriate that it was wet and rainy when I placed Burt’s memorial flowers on the median, because it had been a drizzly, wet morning when Burt personally walked the old, weedy, ugly median and came up with the design. Perhaps most locals don’t know that Burt, who lived in Malibu, and not far from PCH and Webb Way, designed the project himself. He explained that the wavy lines of the pavers mimicked the waves of the Pacific Ocean.
It also felt just right to finally be able to place pretty, lovely, colorful flowers out there. Burt would have approved. He loved beauty and if he had a disappointment with our project it was over the constraints from the city and Caltrans that only allowed us to plant natives and native sympathetic plants.
“Weeds!” he called them.
He wanted pretty plants that would blossom and bloom with the seasons. However, he also explained that, like with any planting, it would look better when it grew in and matured.
Burt’s son, Richard, who now heads the business, was also involved with the success of our project. After the median was planted in May 2009, the narrow stretch closest to Webb Way looked scraggly. Richard personally saw that it was ripped out and replanted with a row of handsome agaves. Like father, like son.
At his memorial service, people spoke about Burt’s landscaping achievements around the world, from Abu Dhabi to the Grove in Orange County, to the Getty Center and the Las Vegas strip. But locally he might be remembered best for pulling off a highway project that had floundered for years.