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Michael Shames can't stand bullies. As a teenager, Shames came to the rescue when ``a bully kicked his buddy Peter in the butt" during a basketball game. He shoved the brute into the fence and said: "If you ever do that again, I'm going to kill you," recalled longtime friend Peter Schacknow.
"The guy, who was bigger than both of us, was stunned," Shames said.
Now Shames is fighting a different sort of "bully"-one clearly bigger than he: the combined forces of San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison.
Shames, as executive director of San Diego's utility watchdog, Utility Consumers Action Network, strongly opposes the proposed merger of the two Southern California utilities.
``I do perceive utilities as bullies,'' Shames said. "Often they're stepping on people without even knowing it."
Shames, 33, began looking out for ratepayers in 1978, when he worked at the California Public Interest Research Group's telephone hotIine in San Diego. He fielded many calls from SDG&E customers, ``frustrated because their bills were going through the roofs."
Shames has always looked out for the ''little guys,'' according to longtime friends.
"I'm not surprised by what he's doing now,'' said Schacknow, a producer at CNBC-TV in Fort Lee, N.J. "Eddie (as Shames was known to his childhood friends) always struck me as one of those who would save the world for a living. I always thought he'd go into constructive rabble rousing. He didn't strike me as one who'd go into investment banking and want to make millions of dollars."
Shames confirmed that money isn't his key motivator. He left a private law practice, where he was making more than $60,000 a year, to assume the $32,000-a-year UCAN job in 1985. He now makes $45,000 a year.
But when Shames started his crusade for SDG&E customers via the Calpirg hotline, his time was free. He made ends meet by waiting tables at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor at night.
Frustrated utility customers weren't Shames' only callers at Calpirg. But they seemed to stand out, said Shames, adding that "SDG&E bashing" was then very popular. Customers were ``having boycotts, stoning SDG&E trucks and slashing tires.''
Fueled by customer complaints, Shames, a University of San Diego law student at the time, led...