“Face! Center! Low! Hit him hard!”
The shouts — a husky voice with a Southern surf bro twang — echoed in the dojo as a 4-year-old blond boy with a headband reading “Lil’ Dragon” punched up at a scowling mannequin.
“Kiiiiick! Don’t jump. Just kick. … Yeahhh!”
More shouts. A huge smile from the tiny boy, a karate student who says he’s almost 4 and a half, thank you very much. An even bigger smile from the shouter, sensei Gerry Blanck.
Nearly 11 months have passed since fire ripped through Pacific Palisades, and on this autumn Tuesday, Blanck was back doing what he’s done for 43 years — coaching toddlers, teens and grown-ups in the martial arts. For now, he is doing so in a temporary space in Santa Monica. His dojo on Marquez Avenue burned in the January firestorm. So did the homes of most of his students.
Like Eden Savoian, an 11-year-old Yoshukai green belt whose trophies and breaking boards burned in her dad’s house. And 60-year-old Tamar Springer, a black belt whose mother, overwhelmed by the stress of losing her longtime home, died three weeks after the blaze. And Theodore Read, a seventh-grader with a shy, braces-clad smile who confided in Blanck that he was struggling because his dog died in the flames.
Blanck’s classes have been a balm for his students in this worst of years. The sessions are loud, joyful, energetic — like Blanck himself, who barks commands as trainees smack each other with foam pads and laughs giddily when they do something awesome, like climb a rope all the way to the ceiling.
Families have leaned heavily on the ever-upbeat Blanck, the silver-haired sensei, so well-known in the Palisades that when he drives through town, people hang out of their cars to shout hello.
A former world kickboxing champion who came to the Palisades from the Florida Panhandle in 1982, Blanck has sparred with boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard. He trained actors Tom Hanks and Steve Guttenberg. And he taught actress Pamela Anderson how to kickbox when she was starring in “Baywatch.”
But now, at 71, Blanck is unsure what the future holds for his business, which already had struggled and downsized during the pandemic. Though he wants to, he is unsure when — or if — he can return to the Palisades, where construction fencing and a huge dirt pit mark the spot where his leased storefront martial arts studio stood.
Like so many of his students, Blanck and his daughter, who manages the dojo, lost their home. And while he’s not one for self-pity, he acknowledges that the loss has been a brutal double whammy.
“If I would have just lost my dojo, it wouldn’t have been so bad,” he said. “But I lost my place. Between those, I had everything. … I had amassed so much stuff over 43 years. Just to have it all gone except the suitcase I took — unbelievable.”
With so many students displaced, he’s grappling with the daunting question looming over other devastated small-business owners: Will enough families eventually return to the Palisades to keep the doors open?
“I of course want to come back,” Blanck said. “But I can’t come back if there’s no one here for my business.”
The Palisades fire destroyed an estimated 2,635 businesses in Pacific Palisades, according to researchers at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute and the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. It partially damaged an estimated 656 more.
Most, such as the Gerry Blanck Martial Arts Center, were so-called microbusinesses, with nine or fewer employees, and many were based in people’s homes, said Silvia González, director of research at the institute.
Small businesses “really contribute to the social fabric of our communities,” she said, adding that they “bring people together, whether it’s a coffee shop that’s owned by a couple, or this dojo.”
After the fire, Blanck’s friends and former students donated more than $60,000 to a GoFundMe for the karate studio. He used some of the money to replace kids’ burned karate uniforms, belts and nunchucks.
Blanck said that, right after the fire, a friend and fellow martial arts instructor near his native Pensacola, Fla., offered to let him teach in his dojo if he needed to move back home.
But families here pleaded: Don’t go.
“His dojo’s a community,” Springer said. “Karate is so much more than the sport. There are friendships. It has mental benefits.”
Springer — a lifelong Palisadian and documentary filmmaker — was in her early 40s, with two young kids, when she started training with Blanck 18 years ago. She won a bunch of karate tournaments and now teaches alongside him.
Springer lived for more than two decades in a condo on Albright Street. It burned. Her nonagenarian parents lived a few blocks away, in a house they owned for more than 50 years. It burned too. So did the two little homes her boyfriend owned in the Palisades Bowl mobile home park.
On Jan. 7, Springer planned to teach a kids’ class at Blanck’s dojo. But after the winds picked up, she drove to get her sister and her parents, none of whom drive, and her parents’ caregiver, who did not have a car.
Her father, Philip Springer, a composer who co-wrote the Christmas classic “Santa Baby,” was then 98. Her mother, Judith Springer, a longtime Russian translator, was 92. Together, they sped toward a Hilton hotel in Santa Monica.
At 5:17 p.m., she texted Blanck, listed in her phone simply as Sensei.
Where are you? she asked.
He responded: At the Hyatt, so bummed the Dojo is gone and probably my house too How about you?
She wrote: Condo burned down. Almost for sure my folks house too.
Blanck replied: Wow like everyone else I am so sad and devastated and have no clue what to do.
At the hotel, Springer’s mother struggled.
“Every day, she said, ‘I want to go home,’” Springer said. “She had some dementia, but she was aware of who I was, who we were. Very aware she wasn’t home.”
On Jan. 27, Judith Springer died. Shortly after losing his wife of 68 years, Philip Springer told his daughter he wasn’t giving up yet. Now 99, he plays piano every day.
By early February, Tamar Springer was kicking again with Blanck, who resumed teaching in Santa Monica.
“I thought: ‘I need to go out there and excel,’” Springer said.
Blanck used to think the pandemic was his business’ toughest challenge. He tried teaching over Zoom and did private lessons, wearing a face mask and hoofing it to as many as 16 homes a day.
With classes canceled because of public health orders, he fell behind on the $11,000 monthly rent for the dojo on Alma Real Drive, where he taught for decades. His landlord did not renew his lease, so he moved into a smaller, cheaper place on Marquez Avenue.
About three years ago, Blanck and his daughter, Danika Dallas, 33, moved into a rented two-bedroom apartment in a commercial building that included a hair salon and a clothing store.
There, he said, life was sweet. They were walking distance to all their favorite places. And they constantly ran into friends on the sidewalk.
On Jan. 7, after seeing TV news reports about people evacuating, Blanck started canceling classes and “just started slowly packing stuff up, like I was going to Florida for a week. Luckily, I took my world title belt.”
Blanck, his girlfriend and his daughter left when the smoke got so thick they could taste it.
“I’ve had dreams since then, where, in my dream, I’m back in my place, going, ‘Oh, I have a chance. I can take some stuff,’” Blanck said. “And then I wake up. To this day, I try not to think of everything I lost. But every day, something pops up.”
Such as all the trophies in the dojo and photos of kids winning their first awards; his old surf team jacket, which he’d kept since 1969; his poster for the 1969 movie “Easy Rider” autographed by the late actor Peter Fonda.
“Do you have anything like that? That you had that long?” he asked Springer during lunch at a local cafe.
She lost her kids’ baby clothes. Her own baby clothes. Her dad’s musical archives.
Their conversation kept getting interrupted by fellow Palisadians. Blanck wasn’t shy about asking what they’d lost.
A young boy strode up and fist-bumped Blanck. He went to Seven Arrows Elementary School, whose campus across the street burned.
“I’m trying to find a new dojo too,” Blanck told the boy, who nodded, brow furrowed, understanding.
Up walked Brett Duffy, a real estate agent whose son, now 23, took Blanck’s karate classes as a child. During one lesson when he was about 6, his son threw a fit. Blanck, unfazed, pulled out an old tournament trophy — almost as tall as the boy — and said, “Dude, this is for you!” The kid’s attitude immediately changed.
“As he grew up, he literally thought that he won that trophy in a tournament when he was a little kid,” Duffy said. “We never corrected him. He had this magnificent karate trophy in his room.”
Last year, Duffy told him the truth. He returned the trophy to Blanck, in case another kid needed cheering up.
Blanck pointed out the window, to the burned husk of a Berkshire Hathaway office, asking: “Your office was over there, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Duffy said with a rueful laugh.
Michelle Gurevitch strolled up to the table, too. Her son, Jack Gurevitch, was 4 when he started learning karate from Blanck, who always sponsored a local Little League team. This summer, Jack was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals.
“Unfortunately, you lost your place too, right?” Blanck asked, matter-of-factly.
“We did,” she said. “We lost our home.”
In public, Blanck is all smiles, all optimism. People seem to need that from him.
But at night, he has trouble sleeping, thinking about all that’s been turned to ashes.
“I sort of keep it to myself, I guess, and try to be happy,” he said.
Less than a month after the fire, Blanck resumed teaching at MuDo Integrated Martial Art in Santa Monica, where another sensei, Thomas Yi, offered space in his gym to help the fire victims.
At the dojo on a recent Tuesday, Blanck hooped and hollered as Eden climbed a rope to the ceiling. Next to the mat, her dad, Alan Savoian, smiled.
After his home burned, he said, he felt at ease being with other Palisades residents who understood what it has been like to be mired in such loss as the world moves on.
“No matter what your situation is, the whole world’s still moving, and the sun’s going to come up. And all these people [here] that are friends, we’re all dealing with it — but everyone else is just going about their life,” Savoian said.
“You’ve got to just push forward,” he added. And for his family, that means, in part, driving from his new home in Calabasas to Eden’s favorite place: the dojo.
Robert Read also stood beside the mat, watching his son, Theodore, kick and sweat. He was quiet. His grief comes in waves, and it had been a hard day, looking through photos of his burned home as he dealt with his home insurer.
Right after the fire, Read called Blanck to check on him, then put Theodore on the phone — a call that Blanck won’t ever forget. The grief-stricken boy was silent, Blanck said.
“I go, ‘How you doing?’ He wouldn’t talk,” Blanck said. “I said, ‘I know you lost your house. You lost your school. We lost the dojo. But your parents are OK. Your dog’s OK.’”
“My dog died,” Theodore corrected him. Jack, a 4-year-old Labrador retriever with the biggest, friendliest eyes, was gone.
Blanck was shattered. But “once he told me that, he could talk again.”
Father and son came back to the dojo as soon as classes started back up. Doing so has been therapeutic for both of them. When he was about Theodore’s age, Read lost his grandmother in a fire and has long been haunted by the memory of walking through her house in cinders.
Read is an introvert and has appreciated how fellow Palisadians have been open about their grief.
“I need to get out there and talk to people and socialize,” he said. “You can very much internalize things right now and go to dark places pretty easily.”
After finishing his class, Theodore walked over to his dad. Sweating. Grinning. He’s so happy to be back, he said, and appreciates that Blanck “doesn’t go easy on you.”
Read told Blanck that Theodore’s 12th birthday was the next day. Blanck, characteristically, shouted with joy: “That’s awesome!”
The post The Palisades fire was a body blow to this karate teacher. His new dojo helps kids heal appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
