Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 3, No. 9 - March 4, 2021
Inside
This Issue
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................8
Classifieds............................2
Entertainment......................2
Hawthorne............................3
Huber’s Hiccups..................3
Lawndale..............................4
Inglewood.............................5
Legals.......................... 5,6,7,8
Pets........................................8
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Mostly
Sunny
67˚/49˚
Saturday
Partly
Cloudy
63˚/49˚
Sunday
Partly
Cloudy
63˚/50˚
Lawndale Tribune
AND lAwNDAle News
Hawthorne Press Tribune
Featuring the Weekly Newspapers of Hawthorne, Inglewood and Lawndale
Richard Ewell, the First African
American to win a U.S. National Title
El Segundo Local J.J. Eboli Teaches
Kids to Write Music for the Big Screen
By Kiersten Vannest
Nestled in north El Segundo, little musicians
in the making practice piano and guitar
and learn to compose at a place called Little
Composers Academy. Their instructor? J.J.
Eboli, professional entertainment composer,
and musician.
Eboli was born in Brazil, growing up in
a very musical family. His mother and father
played instruments, along with all his
siblings and cousins. Family dinners were
a musical affair, as he describes, with each
member picking up a different instrument
and playing their own in-house concert just
for themselves. At the heart of all this was
his grand-aunt (his grandfather’s sister),
who was the former dean of the Music and
Arts School at the Federal University in his
home city of Porto Alegre, and who gave
them all lessons.
“Who doesn’t like to go to your grandparents’
house, right?” laughs Eboli, explaining
that his relationship with music has always
been relaxed and never forced, “I would eat
food and play in the yard and talk… all sorts
of stuff. And then, in the middle of that great
day, I had a piano lesson.”
Amid eating candy, playing, socializing,
and spending time with family, music lessons
were seamlessly worked in, which allowed
his relationship with music to be associated
with a sense of joy and calm. This is
something he hopes to bring to everyone he
teaches now. He’d rather create a player for
life, he says, than a competitive player who
will end up giving up the art.
As he grew older, he learned the violin,
which gave him the opportunity to play in
the youth orchestra as a teenager. He gained
a sense of all the instruments’ sounds and
how they sound in conjunction to create a
larger piece.
When it came time for college, Eboli
did not follow his path of music. He went
to school for advertising. With his musical
background, he ended up writing the music
for all the school projects, both for himself
and the students around him. This led naturally
to him writing music for commercials.
In Brazil, Eboli found much success in writing
for major commercials like McDonald’s
and eventually opened his own music house,
expanding his business and even teaching
music for commercials at the university
level. As his success grew, he began to ask
himself: what next?
“It would be either going to Rio or São
Paolo. Or should I go to L.A., New York, or
London?” Having done a cultural exchange
See J.J. Eboli, page 2 JJ Eboli, professional musician and composer.
South Bays’s Richard Ewell:
Figure Skating Trailblazer
By Duane Plank
When Richard Ewell was approached
about consenting to an interview with a
Herald Publications scribe that could lead
to a possible profile for the paper, he blurted
out just one incredulous word: “What?”
But after he recovered from his initial
shock, the trailblazing figure skater graciously
consented to a phone interview, in
which Ewell, the first African American
to win a U.S. national title in singles and
pairs figure skating, spoke of the road
tackled to achieve his triumphs on the
ice in national competitions, as well as
the time spent as a professional skater
working for the Ice Capades franchise
in the 1970’s and 80’s, and later with the
European tour troupe of Holiday on Ice.
Ewell, who was born in 1949, was raised
in the Los Angeles area. He said that he
started on the figure skating pathway
with a nudge from his parents from the
Midwest. Ewell said that he and his sister
Lynn would gripe about the alleged winter
cold in the air in Los Angeles winters and
try to use the mild weather as an excuse
to crawl back under their bed covers and
skip school.
But Ewell’s parents, who had experienced
actual cold weather in Missouri,
decided that they would expose their kids to
what the real cold felt like and took them
one day to the Polar Palace ice rink in
See Richard Ewell, page 4
Richard Ewell with Friends on the L.A Kings Ice Girls Squad. For Richard’s story, see yellow box below.