Former coach fights to protect Live Oak Canyon from proposed warehouse project

David Matuszak steers his white Toyota Tacoma truck up a gravel road past his house. He parks on a hill overlooking his beloved Live Oak Canyon.

“How’s it going – it’s been a while,” Matuszak says, shaking hands.

Matuszak is familiar because for 39 years he assisted former coach Jeff Stout with the powerhouse Yucaipa High baseball program. But baseball is not what is on Matuszak’s mind, though he wears a blue-and-gold Thunderbird ballcap.   

There is a push by Yucaipa city officials to build a fulfillment center in Live Oak Canyon not far from where Matuszak lives. Detractors of the giant warehouse project say it will cause air pollution and traffic congestion, destroy green areas, raise temperatures with its urban heat-island effect, and will be an eyesore.

“Bringing these Amazon-like warehouses into Live Oak Canyon would be sacrilegious,” said Matuszak, the president of Friends of Live Oak Canyon. “It’s not fit for the environment or the lifestyle. There are already traffic issues with the pumpkin patch. The warehouse would not just bring trucks, but the employees’ cars too.”  

The controversial project is not a done deal. It still must be approved at a city council meeting on Monday, Sept. 23.

“Redlands, Highland and San Bernardino used to be farmland and now the air quality is among the worst in the country,” Matuszak said. “They’ve built one of these warehouses off the Cherry Valley exit and it’s an eyesore.”

COWBOY UP

Matuszak on this day wears a plaid shirt, jeans and worn cowboy boots. He rocks his familiar gray mustache, looking like a septuagenarian Marlboro man. Occasionally he glances at the canyon below. There he often rides his horse Ala Blanco (White Wing, in Spanish) through chamise, buckwheat and coastal oaks and among quail, red-tailed hawks, deer, mountain lions and bobcats. He is not keen on a gargantuan fulfillment center sullying his paradise.  

The Pacific Oaks Commerce Center project, which would include two buildings of about 1 million square feet, would generate many truck trips into the canyon and wreak all sorts of havoc, said Matuszak. But officials think it will be a windfall for a city with financial problems.

Matuszak is unmoved.  

“It’s a horrible situation,” he said. “Yucaipa is rural and used to be all orange groves and chicken ranches. At our junior varsity baseball practices, a kid would hit the ball over the fence, and someone would retrieve it and come back with oranges stuffed in his pockets.”

MR. VERSATILE

Political activism aside, Matuszak is an intriguing character. Besides being a former teacher and coach, he surfs, he snowboards, he raises and sells German Shepherds, he participates in working cowboy rodeos, he makes gold jewelry, he’s an author and he’s handy with a hammer.   

Years ago, Matuszak built a hand-hewn log cabin from the ground up in Plumas County, about 90 miles from Reno. He still occasionally goes “off the grid” there.

An avid surfer too, Matuszak wrote the 1,488-page tome “San Onofre: Memories of a Legendary Surfing Beach.” The book discusses not only the famous beach but the history of surfing in Polynesia, Peru, and Africa; California surf culture; and its relationship with prehistoric man and 19th-century Spanish ranches.

Plus, surfing is gnarly, dude.    

“You sit on top of a surfboard and it’s akin to sitting on top of a saddle on top of Live Oak Canyon overlooking the San Gorgonio Wilderness,” Matuszak said.  “There’s a calm serenity of living in the moment that most people wouldn’t understand. Whether you drop in on a wave or are riding a bucking horse, you get the same adrenaline rush.”

HEALTH SCARE

While writing his surfing book, Matuszak attended a Buffalo hunt with indigenous friends in South Dakota. He returned and was loading some meat into his freezer when he became ill.

Matuszak had contracted a flesh-eating staph infection that advanced into his vital organs and was nearly fatal. He was put into a medically induced coma at Loma Linda Hospital. The odds on his survival were four percent.

Matuszak amazingly bucked those odds and lived to tell his story. Now he’d just like to keep those darned concrete warehouses and diesel trucks out of his cherished Live Oak Canyon.

“We need to nip it in the bud,” Matuszak said. “Banning did the right thing by putting a moratorium on the warehouses and we need to follow suit. We must decide that quality of life is more important than balancing the city budget.”