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00bddf69b9bda5b0081396785532155d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2018/03/06/the-worst-customer-service-advice-of-all-time/ | 7 Pieces of Dangerous Customer Service Advice (Plus What To Do Instead) | 7 Pieces of Dangerous Customer Service Advice (Plus What To Do Instead)
On the subject of customer service, some of the received wisdom out there is flat-out wrong. The stakes here are significant; with the wrong customer service approach you can sabotage your business results in the short run and your company reputation in the long term.
Your Customer Is The Star: An eBook From Forbes How to make Millennials, Boomers and everyone in between fall in love with your business. By Micah Solomon.
So, let me highlight some of the customer service "truths" floating around out there that need to be rejected wholeheartedly, if you want to avoid damage to your cultural, organizational, and bottom-line results.
1. “Hire from your gut.” This advice can have catastrophic consequences. It’s dangerous both because it doesn’t work and because you may never realize how completely it’s not working, because it’s so easy to fool yourself, looking backward, that it does. This is because selective memory–a component of the psychological principle called the “self-serving bias”–tends to make us remember our triumphs (the times we got lucky following our gut) while forgetting the times that our gut led us astray.
So what’s the right way to hire? You need to get scientific about selecting (a better term than “hiring”) the right people for your customer-facing team. Here’s an article from me on this important subject.
2. “Script everything.” Scripts can’t solve every customer situation, because customers refuse to follow a script themselves! It’s essential to not only allow but encourage employees to be flexible in responding to a particular customer’s situation and mood, as well as their unique relationship to your company (among other factors).
3. “Script nothing.” It’s sexy to recommend this soundbite-friendly approach (and I tend to lean more in this direction than the other), but there are two problems here. First, consider all the time you’re wasting when you require employees to repeatedly reinvent what doesn’t need to be reinvented.
The second problem with anti-scripting extremism is that there are specific areas in most organizations (certainly this is true more for some industries than others) where scripting is essential: pharmacy and medical situations, security and safety related situations, government and ethically mandated privacy related situations, and others.
Shutterstock
4. “Do more with less.” This can be good advice if it’s intended as (and includes the resources for) an invitation to look for and test innovative ways of accomplishing customer-related tasks, such as process and technological improvement. But outside of that context, here’s the problem: There are many human-delivered aspects of customer service that can’t be whittled down without removing your core value to your customers.
Of course it’s more efficient to use an auto-attendant instead of having a live human operator. But is efficiency the main goal here? And of course it would be cheaper (in terms of resources) if you could answer customer emails in twelve hours instead of four, or let the phones roll over to voicemail now and then. But think of the mischief this can do to your business.
5. Customer service is “just common sense.” Don’t be fooled; although the greatest customer service-oriented organizations combine science and art to create an experience for their customers that can appear (to the customer) to be breathtaking in its simplicity, if you were to look behind the curtain, you’ll find it to be equally breathtaking in the complexity backstage that drives that simplicity.
6. “Metrics and ‘best practices’ like 80-20 are carved in stone.” There are some purported best practices in the world of customer service and customer support that are more like superstition. Consider a metric that is widely used in the world of contact centers: “80/20” — 80 percent of all calls should be answered in 20 seconds or less. This caught on because of its facile similarity to the Pareto Principle, but the last thing you should aim to do is to Pareto-principle your valuable customers (i.e., to neglect 20% of them). Always be cautious when you find best practices that are actually received wisdom, with no science or verified experience behind them.
7. “Customer service is essentially a frontline, ‘low level’ issue.” I wrote about this at length recently, but it’s an attitude that causes big, big problems. Although frontline, customer-facing employees are one of the most essential elements of great (and not so great) customer service, what makes service great, or prevents their greatness, also reaches much higher up in the organization. If the folks in the C-suite, including the CEO, fail to demonstrate that customer service is a priority and fail to model good internal and external customer service themselves, it probably won’t be.
Live Content: Micah Solomon Speaking Customer Service, Company Culture, and Innovation from Keynote... [+] Speaker Presentations Micah Solomon
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1a2dbea88556052f6640108231740296 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2018/03/10/the-customer-service-habit-initiative-drive-yourself-to-be-as-good-as-zappos-nordstrom-virgin/ | These Customer Service Habits Can Drive A Company To Rival Zappos, Nordstrom, Virgin | These Customer Service Habits Can Drive A Company To Rival Zappos, Nordstrom, Virgin
If you invest the time now to establish the essential habits of customer service excellence at your company, you can later sit back and, to a large extent, watch your business drive itself.
This is the approach I take as a customer service consultant. It's intended to give a company the legs it needs to continue in the right direction long after I have left the building. And my suggestion to you is the same: Focus on habits of great customer service, and you'll soon enjoy the dividends.
Calling some of the following items “habits” may be imprecise, but the idea behind every item on this list is similar. Each is a practice that has the potential to become a repeating ritual, an established standard, or, yes, a habit. Together, these can drive customer service excellence, and spare you from having to reinvent your service commitment or service practices every day.
• Compile a language lexicon for your company–and get in the habit of using it. This lexicon is a company-specific phrasebook (or even a single sheet of paper) with recommended and discouraged phrases, and it’s one of the first things I encourage a company to put together when I’m on assignment as a customer service consultant. For example:
Avoid: ‘‘You owe . . .’’
Try: ‘‘Our records show a balance of . . .’’
*****
Avoid: ‘‘You need to . . .’’ (This makes some customers think: ‘‘I don’t need to do anything, buddy—I’m your customer!’’)
Try: ‘‘We find it usually works best when . . .’’
****
Avoid: ‘‘Please hold.’’
Try:‘‘May I briefly place you on hold?’’ (and then actually listen to the caller’s answer)
(Although these three examples are simple and universal, your lexicon can also include more complex phrase preferences that are specific to situations that only come up in your particular industry.)
• Build the habit of “wow.” Wow moments, by definition, are unexpected instances extraordinary, memorable customer service. But just because they’re unexpected for the customer doesn’t mean you can’t plan for them. There’s a chalkboard in the Zappos contact center tallying all of the flowers, cookies, postcards and other “wow gifts” that have been sent to customers in the previous month and previous year. This isn’t so much intended to keep track of resources as it is to remind employees to keep up in their efforts to create “wow.” On a smaller scale, consider how a Nordstrom sales-and-service superstar like Joanne Hassis at the King of Prussia, PA location will maintain a pen-and-paper system to prompt her to send, say, Girl Scout cookies to faithful customers when they least expect it (and keeps track of their flavor preference to boot–Thin Mint? Tagalog?).
And you? What’s your habit of wow?
Shoppers leave and enter a Nordstrom store. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)
Your Customer Is The Star: An eBook From Forbes How to make Millennials, Boomers and everyone in between fall in love with your business. By Micah Solomon.
• Get in the habit of yes–“The answer is yes; now, what is your question?”–rather than looking for ways to say “no,” “we’re closed,” “not my department,” and so forth. This habit of defaulting to yes is an essential building block of a successful culture of customer service. At Richard Branson’s Virgin Hotels, defaulting to “yes" is considered such an important principle that the company’s done away with a half-dozen extraneous buttons on their guestroom phones and replaced them with a single big button with cartoonish red lettering saying “Yes!” Pick up the handset, press the “yes” button, and a Virgin employee with an audibly great attitude will do her best to arrange a “yes” for you, no matter what your request may be.
• Develop the habit of great hellos. The two easiest moments for your customer to remember (everything else being equal) are how they were treated at the beginning and ending of their time with you. So make it habitual to apply your best customer service skills in the very moments when you answer a phone or when a customer first encounters you in person.
• Create a ritual for goodbye. It’s easy to overlook the importance of the ending of a customer interaction, even though it’s one of the two most likely moments to stick in a customer’s memory. A solution is to build a ritual that commemorates this moment, whether it is sending a thank-you note, or having the person closest to the exit door being tasked with wishing the customer well, or cheekily unique like the famous CD Baby shipping confirmation. (Disclosure: A company I founded is now a sister company of CD Baby.)
• Become systematic about customer service recovery. Service recovery–pacifying and satisfying a customer when things go wrong–is hard enough without having to reinvent your approach every time. I recommend my AWARE approach, though there are multiple alternative frameworks that are excellent and time-tested. Here’s an article of mine that lays out this approach, and if you would like a formatted, print-ready version of the AWARE system for customer service recovery, let me know and I’ll send it your way.
• Develop the habit of 10-5-3. This is a way to get systematic about making customers feel acknowledged and welcome while they are on your premises. There are many varieties of the 10-5-3 approach; here is how it is practiced by GM Jeroen Quint and team at Hotel Irvine in Orange County, California, where every employee is expected to use the 10-5-3 system whenever they encounter a customer, as follows:
At 10 feet: Look up from what you are doing and acknowledge the customer with direct eye contact and a nod.
At 5 feet: Smile, with your lips and eyes.
At 3 feet: Verbally greet the customer and offer a time-of-day greeting (“Good Morning”). Use a tone of voice appropriate to your work area or where you encounter the customer.
• Implement and sustain the daily habit of a “customer service minute” or “lineup.” This may be the most important habit on this list, because it can support all of the others. A customer service minute is a very brief huddle or lineup at the beginning of each day (or shift) entirely focused on customer service excellence. Here’s an article of mine on what this looks like and what its value is.
• Develop the habit of “having the last word.” In every interaction with a customer, and every part of every interaction, make it habitual to answer any time a customer speaks to you. Two examples: When you tell a customer on the phone that you’re going to look something up for them, they’ll likely answer, “thank you.” You, then, instead of consigning them directly to dead air or hold music, should answer reply with “you’re welcome,” or “my pleasure” (not, by the way, “uh huh” or “no problem”; more on this here). At the very end of a conversation, a customer may say, “Talk to you Tuesday.” It’s now your turn to say, “Thank you for choosing us!” or “I look forward to speaking with you then!” rather than disconnecting without “having the last word.”
• Finally, develop the habit of saying “thank you” to employees. If you want to have employees make it a habit to deliver exceptional service, you need to make it a habit to recognize them when they do. Whether it is a thank-you note or public praise, build a ritual of showing your appreciation for those who support you.
Credit where credit is due: This article includes a contribution from Bill Quiseng, a thought leader you should be following at @billquiseng, as well as from the author, Micah Solomon.
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3ff924495bf4a8b57f828173d5755dac | https://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2018/07/13/messaging-and-the-customer-experience-how-bozeman-startup-quiq-helps-office-depot-overstock-com/ | How Messaging Transforms Customer Service And Support: A Visit With Bozeman Startup Quiq | How Messaging Transforms Customer Service And Support: A Visit With Bozeman Startup Quiq
Things have been looking bright for customers of Office Depot since last year, when the business messaging startup, Quiq, helped the company to add text messaging to their communication mix. According to Mike Myer, Quiq's founder and CEO, Office Depot customers no longer have to call or fill out an online inquiry form to find out, say, what a particular location has in stock or the status of an existing order. Today, that customer can send a text and have it answered by a helpful Office Depot employee almost immediately. (The first text reply generally gets to the customer within a minute, and the entire back-and-forth is usually completed in less than ten).
Office Depot (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
Skiers in Jackson Hole are in luck as well, says Myer, who spoke to me from Quiq's offices, located in the improbably booming tech hub of Bozeman, MT. Wondering about snow conditions or tram hours? All that’s needed is to text the resort for an immediate and up-to-the-minute response. For the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort Company, whose entire customer base is a certifiably mobile-only whenever they’re on or headed toward the slopes, this makes a lot more sense, Myer tells me, than a desktop- and email-based support approach.
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Gondola. (Photo by Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)
Your Customer Is The Star: A New Book From Forbes How to make Millennials, Boomers and everyone in between fall in love with your business. By Micah Solomon.
Overstock.com has also recently implemented Quiq’s solution and is now providing up-to-the minute order information via text. According to Overstock, the most quantifiable “aha” they’ve enjoyed from the new approach is the open rate: 98% for text messages as opposed to “in the single digits” for email.
Micah Solomon, Forbes.com: Tell me what Quiq is and what makes it special.
Mike Myer, CEO and Founder, Quiq: Quiq is a company in Bozeman Montana that’s focused on making people’s lives easier. You, me and nearly all the consumers out there lead a digital-first lifestyle, where we are always connected. People love text messaging (SMS, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, Web chat, etc.) because it’s convenient and fits in with the crazy pace of our lives. By bringing text to business communication, Quiq makes it as easy to talk with companies as it is with friends.
No one likes to make phone calls (let alone to customer service!) and waiting for an email response is like waiting for paint to dry. Messaging is also more efficient for companies since one agent can serve multiple customers concurrently, unlike phone calls, and there’s no seemingly endless back and forth with to solve even a single issue, like there can be with email.
Who are some of Quiq’s marquee clients?
Pier 1, Brink’s Home Security, Tailored Brands (Men’s Wearhouse, Joseph A. Bank), Overstock, Office Depot, Tile, Insikt, and about 80 other great companies.
If my readers want to see your technology in action, where can they look?
Here’s an example they can see for themselves. Go to http://officedepot.com on your mobile phone, you’ll see a Text Us link right next to the phone number at the bottom of the page, which is powered by Quiq. If you were to have a question about a product or order with Office Depot, all you have to do is use that link to get assistance.
There’s a lot of excitement (and apprehension) about AI and chatbots. Your solution takes a different tack. Is this a philosophical choice on your part, a practical one, or both? Tell me your thoughts here.
The hype curve for AI and chatbots is nearing the apex. But I wouldn’t say that these technologies are much help by themselves to true customer service at the moment. Most consumers (me included) can’t point to a satisfying interaction they’ve had with a chatbot that has solved a true, actual customer service issue. Getting the weather from Alexa is perfectly suited for a chatbot. Checking payment status or getting account info is harder, but within chatbot capabilities. Getting an actual customer service issue that requires troubleshooting resolved is orders of magnitude harder.
Quiq is in a great place at a great time because our success isn’t dependent upon how fast AI research is able to solve the chatbot problem. There is a ton of ROI and customer satisfaction to be gained from just adding messaging into existing contact centers with human agents serving customers via text messaging.
This doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to AI and chatbots, when properly deployed I think where they excite me most is in the realm of “bot fusion”: the fusion of chatbots and human agents. A lot of people think about chatbots as first handling the conversation and then passing it to a human if the bot can’t handle it. But we think that agents and bots can work together. There may be a specific dialog that a bot can handle during a conversation between the agent and customer. For instance, identity verification or return address confirmation. If the bot gets confused in its task, it can tap the agent for help. The fusion is the seamless transition of the conversation back and forth between the human agent and their bot assistant without the customer’s awareness.
What role will telephone and email support have in the contact center of the future?
In the future, I believe the majority of interactions in the contact center will be messaging, rather than phone or email. Frankly, I don’t see a need for email to continue to be offered for much longer as a channel in the contact center, since it is so prone to laggy, circular conversations. The phone will still have a place but only in a minority of interactions, and even these will likely start with messaging. Why will the phone still have value? Because there are, and will continue to be, situations in which the consumer wants to be solely focused on troubleshooting a problem. In these cases, speaking is likely to continue to be more efficient than typing. But, the voice conversation will be multimedia, meaning that the agent and customer will be able to text back and forth and view images and video at the same time that they’re on the phone call.
Any advice you can share for other entrepreneurs?
The biggest challenge for entrepreneurs is finding and hiring the right people who can stand side-by-side to build a business from the ground up. It isn’t easy work. My advice for entrepreneurs is 1) find a great market opportunity, 2) hire amazing people, and 3) set the direction. Then, get out of the way and let the magic happen!
What about working with investors and partners?
When working with investors and partners, you need to make sure you keep your focus. While investors and partners are important, they’re not building your product and they are not the ones buying it, so be sure to allocate focus to them in the appropriate proportion.
What is the competitive landscape for Quiq?
We think about our competitive landscape in three broad buckets: 1) legacy chat vendors, 2) CRM vendors with a messaging option, and 3) social vendors adding messaging. [An advantage of Quiq is that it was] built from scratch for asynchronous messaging, as opposed to adding messaging onto a synchronous system.
Our goal isn’t to displace existing CRM or customer support systems. Quiq integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle and internal systems. So, we’re only competing against other messaging solutions, not the incumbent systems.
Live Content: Keynote Speaker Micah Solomon on Customer Service, Customer Experience, Company... [+] Culture Micah Solomon
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1b64b5ff3c1b51ded688cc9107a237fc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2018/08/16/this-seattle-startup-uses-ai-to-personalize-customer-experience-marketing-at-gap-alaska-air-wynn/ | This Seattle Startup Uses AI And Machine Learning To Personalize Customer Experience, Marketing | This Seattle Startup Uses AI And Machine Learning To Personalize Customer Experience, Marketing
With all the tools and channels available to help brands reach customers, it still seems like most brands out there are floundering in their efforts do so effectively.
This is obvious to any customer who has purchased a product and then had ads for that already-purchased product follow them around the Web. Or has received identical copies of a promotional email at their work email address, personal email address, and former email address that forwards to that current account. Or any credit card owner who’s been urged to apply for a credit card they already have, every time they visit an eCommerce site. It’s a bit of a mess out there, with men being shown women’s products; teens being marketed bespoke business attire; and on and on and on.
Your Customer Is The Star: A Book on Customer Service from Forbes How to make Millennials, Boomers and everyone in between fall in love with your business. By Micah Solomon.
The issue comes down in large part to misuse and underutilization of data that could be providing a personalized experience, but clearly, in most cases, isn't. Why? Because data exists in different formats and with different ways of identifying individuals–a very tricky problem to overcome, says Kabir Shahani, the CEO of Amperity, a Seattle-based company co-founded by Shahani and Derek Slager. For example, “how do I know that Micah Solomon is the same person as M. Solomon? As human beings, we can intuitively figure out this problem by looking at a bunch of data about Micah Solomon and M. Solomon and finding the connection, the similarity.”
Kabir Shahani Amperity
Machines, however, says Shahani, historically haven’t had that capability; they don’t know how to discern identity based on context. And unless those systems can be taught to talk to each other and to interpret data with this level of human intuition and context, “a brand will never know that you already have the credit card, that you already bought that pair of boots, that the only time you shop for men’s clothes at Christmastime (and you’re doing it for your husband, not yourself), and that you delete all the emails that come to your work address without ever opening them. In a sense, systems ‘know’ this–in the sense of having this information–but it’s not all in one aggregated and actionable system. Each piece of information about you is scattered here and there and is, for the most part, unusable.”
Shahani certainly gives the impression of being someone who doesn’t talk about a problem without having at least some insight into what would serve as a solution. (Case in point is his previous startup, Appature, which quickly grew into a leading platform in healthcare for marketing automation, ultimately being acquired by the leading conglomerate in healthcare data, IMS Health, in 2013.) And his new company, Amperity, was built to solve this problem of identity. “We bring data together from a bunch of sources, undeterred by the variety of formats and the fact that there are no keys to link the data from one system to another. We apply machine learning to understand which records belong to which customers, taking into consideration the likelihood that certain names exist in certain zip codes and a whole bunch of other rich knowledge about people data. And we generate complete profiles of customers that include every interaction you’ve had with a brand, so the brand can stop treating you like a stranger in every interaction.”
The genesis of Amperity came about when Shahani and Slager, in a lull after Shahani sold Appature, began grilling CMOs on the subject and were “struck by how companies were creating marketing campaigns and customer experiences based on incomplete, inaccurate, and inconsistent customer data–and using a fraction of the data available to them.” These data limitations, says Shahani, meant that marketers had, at best, a partial understanding of their customers, which held them back from building enduring customer loyalty and delivering on their customer vision. This was exacerbated by the fact that the sheer volume and sources of customer data being generated was growing, nearly exponentially, every single day.
In technical terms, says Shahani, “the core of the problem was that companies lacked a consistent layer inside of the enterprise software stack where all the information about their customers reside. Our solution, Amperity, is what we consider to be the first true customer data platform (CDP) that uses machine learning to unify customer data with an accurate depiction of their customers.”
Amperity is less than two years in, yet it’s already being used by leading consumer brands including local Seattle favorites Alaska Airlines, retailing giant GAP, hospitality giant Wynn, and more. They’ve struck an exclusive tech-and-know-how-sharing partnership with Microsoft. And they’ve raised $38M in funding from investors including Madrona Ventures, Tiger Global Management and Joe Montana.
Live Content: Keynote Speaker Micah Solomon on Customer Service, Customer Experience, Company... [+] Culture Micah Solomon
And, smiles Shahani, “we’ve probably made a dent toward cleaning up your in box and personalizing—truly personalizing–your experience out there on the Web and in person.”
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32da1dc605a4f3d658742d87b261c935 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2018/11/08/a-surprising-new-way-to-grow-your-business-the-seth-godin-interview/ | The Seth Godin Interview: Growing Your Business Through The 'Smallest Viable Audience' Approach | The Seth Godin Interview: Growing Your Business Through The 'Smallest Viable Audience' Approach
If you haven’t been introduced to the workings of Seth Godin’s iconoclastic brain, here’s a peek: The contrarian marketer once turned down a likely opportunity to be on Oprah. To be clear, this was years ago, and, as I recall, my contact on Oprah’s team didn’t have every last “i” dotted and “t” crossed to finalize the opportunity, but it seemed like it would happen–if Godin wanted it to. But he politely made it clear he wasn’t interested.
“That was just me following the same advice I give to my blog readers, and that I explore in my new book [This Is Marketing (Portfolio/Penguin), which comes out this week]: focusing on what I call “the smallest viable audience,” rather than the mass of people who, for the most part, don’t care about what you’re trying to do,” says Godin, a bestselling marketing author (19 books, counting the new one, blogger (the most successful marketing blog in the world; just type “Seth” into Google and you’ll find it), keynote speaker, mentor, philanthropist, and all-around “ruckus maker.”
Seth Godin (Photo Credit: Jill Greenberg)
Godin says the mistake people make who are trying to market a product, service, or themselves, is "to make average stuff for average people," in a misguided attempt to please everybody. “Because of the way we grew up, we don't want criticism; we don't want failure; we don't want to risk an “F” grade; we don't want to get in trouble. So we sand the edges off our work to prep it for the largest possible audience. But the problem with the largest possible audience is you can't reach them, you can't delight them, you can't matter to them.”
This Is Marketing by Seth Godin: Cover (Photo Credit: Penguin/Seth Godin)
The smallest viable audience approach presented in This is Marketing is the remedy, says Godin. Here’s how it works: “If you can find an audience of people who, if they were to care about you, if they were to embrace you, if they were to dance with you, it would be sufficient to propel you to the next step, begin there. And if what you make and share with them is amazing, they will tell the others. And, if someone says, "I hate you. I don't like this. It's stupid," you get to say, "Thank you for letting me know, and I won’t waste your time, or mine, any further.”
“There’s so much noise in the world. It's become an epidemic, and it’s created a palpable thirst among consumers to not hear from people they don't care about. But if you have work that matters, then you can find people who care, without getting distracted by the nonbelievers.” The smallest viable audience approach means figuring out who the people are who care enough about what you’re selling to get in their car and drive five miles, or twenty miles, instead of walking across the street to buy something average–and committing yourself to focusing just on them.
Godin says he started taking his own advice on this fifteen years ago, and it was transformative: “It transformed my life to be able to say, "I'm not trying to get more people to read my blog. I don't want a TV show. I’m not trying to do mass anything." Instead of finding readers for my writing, I am doing writing for my readers.”
There are definitely days, says Godin, where you’ll think to yourself that it would be nice to break down and try a mass-marketing approach–to be interviewed by Oprah, for that matter–because of the ability to coast with the wind in your sails from the mass. But the work you’d have to do to get in front of the masses isn't worth it, because it hurts you with that smallest viable audience. Not necessarily because they’ll resent it (though they might), but because you’ll lose your focus on delighting the people who are looking to be delighted by you.
In This is Marketing, Godin shares multiple examples of businesses that have thrived with the smallest viable audience approach, but my favorite is how it’s proved its worth for another Godin family member’s enterprise. “My wife's bakery is called By The Way Bakery. It’s a gluten-free, dairy-free, kosher bakery. That’s a lot to stick to your guns to, because there are so many opportunities to broaden your approach and lose your focus, but it’s worked, because although there are lots of businesses that can make you a muffin, there are very few that can make you an absolutely delicious, gluten free, dairy free, certified kosher, blueberry muffin. So by making the decision, right off the bat, to be for someone instead of for everyone, she’s built the largest gluten free bakery of its kind in the world. She has four locations, 65 employees, and she's carried in 35 Whole Foods locations.”
***
“Smallest viable audience” is only one of many concepts covered in This Is Marketing; we definitely haven’t used it up here. Here’s where you can explore the rest.
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271ac90fd05e34e82a617d651b80cb65 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-19914-story.html | Woman Matador Slays Macho Tradition | Woman Matador Slays Macho Tradition
When Cristina Sanchez first ventured into bullrings with cape and sword, fans anticipated a bloody spectacle. They were sure the blood shed would be hers, not the bull’s.
She proved them wrong.
After slaying the required minimum of 60 small- and medium-size bulls as a novice, Sanchez was promoted to the rank of matador in Nimes, France, in May, becoming the first woman to achieve that status in Europe.
For an extraordinary performance, the crowd awarded Sanchez an ear from each of the two full-grown bulls--weighing more than a half-ton each--she killed in her graduation fight May 25. She was triumphantly carried from the bullring on the shoulders of her entourage.
Even before she became a matador, Sanchez had started building an international reputation. Last July, she fought as a novice in Mexico City’s Plaza Mexico, the world’s largest bullring. Critics said Sanchez impressed the raucous crowd of 40,000 with her skill.
Sanchez appeared hooked on the adrenaline rush.
“I need this in order to live,” she said then. “The bull, the danger, death, it’s all that I need. When you enjoy bullfighting, you become addicted to it.”
Sanchez’s initiation in Nimes paves the way for fights in the world’s most prestigious bullrings as a full-level matador against full-grown bulls. The last female matador was Maribel Atienzar of Spain, who gained the rank in 1981 in Mexico and fought bulls mainly in Latin America.
Fernando Fernandez, a TV bullfighting critic, said there is nothing, aside from macho attitudes among some men, that would prevent women from excelling in the bullring.
“Bullfighting doesn’t require physical strength,” Fernandez said, noting that a bullfighter tries to execute a ballet of graceful moves with a deadly animal.
Sanchez, 24 and 5 1/2 feet tall, said her sex makes little difference in the ring.
“I have to fight bulls the same as any other bullfighter, because bulls don’t care if you are a man or a woman,” she said in an interview.
After the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, laws prohibiting women from becoming matadors in Spain were abolished.
But changing macho mentalities is another matter. Until the early 1980s, the owners of bullrings in Madrid and Sevilla opposed female matadors and barred them from performing in their arenas.
Even today, one of Spain’s most popular young bullfighters, Jesulin de Ubrique, says he won’t fight in the same ring with Sanchez.
Manuel Alonso, director of the Bullfighting Museum of Madrid, also questions whether women have the skills to fight bulls.
“Women lack reflexes and physical training when they fight a bull,” Alonso said.
But Sanchez has converted many disbelievers.
“At first, the real aficionados went to see me only because they wanted to see a woman get gored,” Sanchez said with a smile. “Now they tell me: ‘We came to see a woman, and we have seen a bullfighter.’ ”
Encouraged by her success, eight young women are training to become matadors at the Marcial Lalanda Bullfighting School in Madrid, where Sanchez trained.
“I know it is not easy to reach Cristina Sanchez’s level,” said one of the students, Marta Munoz, 18. “But she has paved the way for future girls to become bullfighters.”
Sanchez is acutely aware of her role-model status. It’s something that inspires almost as much fear in her as a bull’s horns.
“I am afraid [of being gored]. Very much so,” she said. “But I also have a fear of not living up to my responsibility.”
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2e17aa732d4d722e28db518dc1d053dd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-19915-story.html | Loving Spouse Lays Wife to Rest in Their Backyard : Memorial: Dazzling flowers and a view of Narragansett Bay mark Anke Whalen’s Prudence Island grave. Her husband, Daniel, won permission from zoning board for unorthodox cemetery. | Loving Spouse Lays Wife to Rest in Their Backyard : Memorial: Dazzling flowers and a view of Narragansett Bay mark Anke Whalen’s Prudence Island grave. Her husband, Daniel, won permission from zoning board for unorthodox cemetery.
Daniel Whalen’s backyard has a flower bed, surrounded by a wall of flat stone laid by a mason. It’s filled with a profusion of tulips in dazzling colors, but there’s no headstone to mark his wife’s grave.
The view is of Narragansett Bay. The sound of a bell buoy clangs a blue note over the water and carries to his sloping backyard on tiny Prudence Island.
“I think this is a beautiful spot to be laid to rest for eternity,” Whalen said. “This is where my wife is buried, and I’ll be planted next to her--not anytime soon.”
Whalen drew raised eyebrows, and disapproval from some relatives, when he disclosed he wanted to bury his beloved Anke, his wife of 48 years, in the backyard of their island home. She died of cancer Oct. 28.
But the 70-year-old retired quality-control engineer won a fight with town officials for the right to walk up his steep lawn, say a prayer and talk to her.
“I knew some people would think I’m morbid, but I’ve never been quite concerned about what some people think,” he said when stating his case before the zoning board.
The board chairwoman got choked up when she heard his plea.
“It was evident that it was strong love for his wife,” said Wanda Coderre, whose voice still cracks with emotion when she thinks of Whalen’s presentation last December.
“Mr. Whalen and his wife were a very close couple. He was very emotional,” Coderre said.
After requiring that the burial be supervised by a funeral director, the board unanimously gave Whalen permission for him and his wife to be buried there, where they had spent half their married life.
Just 138 residents live on the seven-mile-long island, originally a community of summer cottages in Narragansett Bay. Over the years, owners including the Whalens enlarged their homes so they could live there year-round, timing their trips to the mainland with the schedule of the Prudence Ferry.
Wooded and remote, the island is a place where neighbors know each other well, but can hold them at arm’s length when necessary, Whalen said. The residents, who must possess a certain amount of independence to live on an island where the only commercial enterprise is a convenience store at the dock, rallied around him when he said he wanted to bury his wife on his property.
None of Whalen’s 22 nearest neighbors objected.
“Everyone on the island agreed with him,” said Fran Vada, a year-round resident. “We need a cemetery,” she said, by way of explanation.
Whalen met Anke, a nurse who had emigrated from Maastricht, the Netherlands, in Woonsocket soon after World War II. Whalen, newly home from the Navy, met her on a double date with his brother.
Nine months later they were married in his hometown of Millville, Mass. The couple traveled often, touring Europe and Anke’s homeland.
Their only son died nine days after birth.
The Whalens bought the island cottage in 1972 and Anke kept the yard full of flowers.
When she died, Whalen was devastated.
“He had a nice turnout at the funeral,” island resident Arlene Goulet said. “The whole island was invited. He put a sign on the dock.” More than 100 people came.
“She was a very nice lady; she loved her flowers,” Vada recalled.
Whalen has willed the property to his nephew, and should the family no longer want it, the parcel would go to the Prudence Island Conservancy.
But for now, he is content tending a garden for Anke.
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735961ef49603b16cd6aba51588998a2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-19916-story.html | Ex-Rep. Rostenkowski to Begin Prison Term in July | Ex-Rep. Rostenkowski to Begin Prison Term in July
Former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski will begin serving a 17-month federal prison sentence for mail fraud on July 22, U.S. District Court Judge Normal Johnson ordered Friday.
Johnson ordered the Illinois Democrat to report first to the federal prison medical facility at Rochester, Minn., because he underwent surgery for prostate cancer in May.
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e988d9a07d1bccc749a4b4a8d40a26a8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-19917-story.html | Body-for-Hire Puts His Soul Into the Job (But His Brain Costs Extra) | Body-for-Hire Puts His Soul Into the Job (But His Brain Costs Extra)
Maria Gonzalez loves to make a scene in public, but since her divorce, a ready victim has been hard to come by. So imagine her delight when she received a Paco Cao Rent a Body gift certificate for her birthday.
The piece of paper entitled her to one hour with a man named Paco Cao and the right to do with him what she pleased, as long as it didn’t involve sex or violence.
Gonzalez’s choice? She planted Cao on a teeming Greenwich Village street corner and yelled insults at him. (“Idiot” is the only one that can be printed here.)
Was it art? A spectacle? A philosophical exercise? Wackiness? You decide.
An art historian, Cao came to the United States from Spain to explore the connections between the marketplace and art. Now he has made it a full-time job with help from Creative Time, a nonprofit organization that sponsors public art projects in the city.
“From the end of 1993 until now, I study this,” Cao says in the awkward English of a newcomer. “It’s a big project.”
“Everybody is rented in a sense,” he muses. “Everybody is paid for work. We think we are free, but that is not a real truth.”
Cao is a diminutive man with round, wide-framed glasses that look too heavy for his head. His resolute countenance and earnest demeanor suggest he takes his weird vocation very seriously.
He doesn’t preach to his customers. He wants them to use their imaginations, and, to help them, he has produced a brochure with pertinent information about himself.
Take his body, for example: It’s 31 years old, leptosomic (slender) and psychologically stable (if eccentric).
For $35 an hour, Cao can be rented as a prop. Double that fee, and he’ll perform tasks and “engage in active and dynamic conversation with the customer.” For $150 an hour, the customer gets “total mind function"--say, Cao as a replacement at a business or social engagement.
Cao has placed brochures in libraries, stores and other public places. He gets calls every day, most seeking more information. So far, he has had more than 20 jobs--though none, alas, of the $150 variety.
Cao recently sat on the subway for three hours, holding a sign that said: “This body has been rented to stay in this place for three hours. Please don’t disturb the body or talk with it. If you have suggestions, write on paper below.”
One person wrote that Cao was a fool. Another said he liked his glasses. Several felt compelled to violate the instructions and offer warnings, such as: “Please, you don’t know. You are in the Bronx. . . .”
The subway assignment came from an acquaintance who rented Cao as “an intellectual exercise.”
Gonzalez’s sidewalk scene, on the other hand, was just for fun.
“I like making public scenes, attracting attention,” she says. “I thought that it would be funny to rent a man for an hour and play with him, yell at him. I used to insult my husband.”
Cao says it’s not for him to question his client’s wishes. And anyway, he notes, being humiliated on a street corner “wasn’t really hard. I was more like a character than myself. It’s my work, so I wasn’t embarrassed.”
Afterward, the two even had coffee together.
“She’s a very nice woman,” Cao says.
Then there are Cao’s institutional clients.
Trinity Lutheran Church in Brooklyn wanted to bring more drama to its Holy Week rituals, so Pastor David Anglada hired Cao to reenact the crucifixion of Jesus.
During Good Friday services, Cao entered the church with a cotton sheath around his waist and smeared with pig’s blood and dirt, lugging a 5-by-20-foot homemade cross made of splintered wood.
He spent the next hour strapped to the cross, which was attached to a beam in the front of the church. On Sunday, he returned in a white robe, to the applause of the congregation.
Cao reprised the sacrificial theme in a very different setting several weeks later, when he was hired by a sadomasochistic accessories shop in New York’s East Village, an anything-goes neighborhood.
His arms chained to the ceiling of a display window ringed with burning candles, occasionally writhing in a show of pain, Cao was again smeared with dirt and pig’s blood. His only garments were a white sheath and a black shoulder-length wig. Techno-pop music drifted from the store.
“I think it’s fabulous,” says store owner Arjan Khiani, whose skull is covered with tattoos. “I love the different emotions it creates in people. Some people don’t like it, but they stop and look, and they’re stuck here.”
Some passersby looked at Cao and kept going. Others were slowed by pure disbelief. “Oh, lovely,” one woman said in disgust. And then there were those who looked at Cao, then quickly pretended they hadn’t.
The next day Cao was his usual earnest self. He thought his performance was a success, though he was typically reluctant to define what he thought it was about.
“I try to give the customer exactly what they need from me,” he says. “It was hard work, but I think I did it.”
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d89f307b4341e0e4179e80ffda3d03e6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-19921-story.html | Farmers’ Face a Harvest of Dust in Great Plains | Farmers’ Face a Harvest of Dust in Great Plains
C.J. Rose squints beneath his sweat-stained cap and scans the sun-scorched wheat fields that support his family. What he sees scares him.
Dead tired and coated with dust, the lanky farmer-rancher has little to show for months of plowing and planting but a stretch of shriveled stalks of wheat embedded in crusty, parched earth.
“It’s been like the dream you always had has come to an end in a cloud of dust,” Rose says, his voice husky, his shoulders slumped in dejection. “What people don’t understand is I can work all year as hard as I can and I’m not going to get paid for it.”
Harvest has come to the Great Plains and fears of failure--or even total collapse--loom for thousands of wheat farmers and cattle ranchers struggling through one of the worst droughts this patch of the Panhandle has seen since the Dust Bowl. Oklahoma’s losses alone will exceed a billion dollars.
It has been a domino-like disaster: No rain means no grain. No grass for cows to graze. Lighter cattle mean lower prices. And less money means more trouble for Carl J. Rose, who works the same land his father tended and his grandfather homesteaded 75 years ago.
“It seems like the harder we try, the worse we get,” the 36-year-old farmer says, grabbing a chunk of cocoa-colored dirt so dry it slips through his fingers like sand. “I’ve never been so depressed in my whole life.”
Come July, Rose faces his first financial squeeze: $30,000 in bills. A small plot of decent-sized wheat he expected to salvage was destroyed, ironically, by water--a May hailstorm. He didn’t sell his cattle, either, because they wouldn’t bring what he owes on them.
So he trudges on, working a second job with the county road department, rattling along in his rusty 1980 blue Chevy pickup that has logged 200,000 miles and hoping his bank will help him hang on.
“I’d hate to leave,” says Rose, whose family name has been on the deed to this land ever since the county started keeping records. “I’ve got a little boy who’s 6 years old. All he wants to do is farm. I’d sure like for him to farm. I’d like for him to eat. You can’t do both. At least it seems that way.”
*
For many here, this will be a harvest of hardship.
In the Beaver County area, where nature’s caprices can make or break lives, only 1.6 inches of rain fell from October through April--slightly more than a quarter the normal amount of precipitation.
Oklahoma is expected to have its smallest wheat crop in 25 years.
Up to 85% of the county’s winter wheat--including abandoned acres--could be lost. Some area farmers, having endured drought, hail and a freeze the last three years, face a possible fourth straight disaster.
Already, trouble signs are evident along the two-lane blacktops that snake through this remote region, where the howls of coyotes pierce the night and a mere 6,000 souls share an area larger than all of Rhode Island (home to more than 1 million people).
Normally, the fields are filled with lush, golden grain so thick that it covers the ground like a blanket. Now, there are sickly, ankle-high strands of wheat sprouting from land with cracks so wide you can fit your hand in them.
This is ranching country, too--a roadside sign proclaims “Watch Your Curves, Eat More Beef"--but livestock dealers haven’t fared much better with cattle prices at a five-year low.
With pastures too dry for grazing and feed costs too high, many ranchers were forced to sell off herds at lower weights and cheaper prices--sometimes a half or a third of last year’s going rates.
“They don’t want to get rid of their factories. It’s their livelihood,” says Bill Skaggs, standing in his Beaver City Stockyards, surrounded by cowboy paintings, a mounted elk’s head and a stuffed coiled snake. “It’s really a Catch-22. They’re just doing what they need to survive. That’s all.”
But that’s become harder with increasing business costs: Fertilizer prices rose by as much as 75% and diesel prices by up to 50% over a year ago.
“It’s very hard to make it,” says farmer-rancher Jerald Radcliff. “You cannot stop the expenses. You spend $75 to $80 an acre to plant the crop, then you don’t get anything in return.”
The Drought of ’96 already has ravaged wide stretches of the Plains, causing staggering losses for parts of Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico and large sections of Oklahoma and Texas.
Texas, for instance, is enduring its second-worst natural disaster--behind 1983’s Hurricane Alicia with its $3-billion price tag. If there isn’t significant rain during the summer, the $2.4-billion drought loss could double by September, state experts say.
Oklahoma faces more dire predictions: State agriculture officials in May estimated drought-related losses at up to $1.2 billion, with about 10% of the 71,000 producers expected to go bankrupt or quit farming.
“If somebody gave up a piece of land 10 years go, there’d be a number of people waiting in line to farm it,” Radcliff says. “Today, you’d have to go begging.”
The drought inevitably brings comparisons to the “Dirty ‘30s,” the local nickname for the Dust Bowl days, when fierce winds whipped up clouds of dirt so dense it buried homes, turned roads into dunes and day into night.
Those scenes won’t recur. More sophisticated farm tools, replanting and different conservation methods reduce wind erosion and prevent the soil from blowing away into dust.
Still, some see that hard-luck era as the yardstick of endurance.
“I read the Book of James a whole lot,” says Guy Payne, a fifth-generation rancher who works a second job processing animals at a feed lot in Kansas. “It has a lot about trials and tribulations.”
“There’s guys who made it in the ‘30s,” he says. “There’s guys who are going to make it in the ‘90s. And I’m going to be one of them.”
*
Chris Smith didn’t make it.
After 13 years of building his cattle herd, Smith, 36, was forced to sell his animals this spring and give up the only life he’s ever had--and ever wanted.
His debts had surpassed $400,000, his bank wouldn’t give him any more loans and there was no grass to feed the cattle, no money to buy alfalfa and no way to make ends meet.
“It’s been an extremely painful ordeal,” says Smith, a short, husky man with a gentle manner. “It’s like when a loved one is dying of a slow cancer that is eating them away. The end is near, but you hold on as long as you can.”
Smith had been in trouble for a decade but thought he and his wife, Judy, could lease some grassland so that one day they could pass their farm to a fourth generation, their 14-year-son.
The drought changed that.
Smith fits into the category bankers say are at greatest risk: younger, highly leveraged producers who were on the edge even before the drought.
So on a morning in late May, Smith hauled the last 120 of his herd on a 25-mile drive from his home in Meade, Kan., to the Beaver City Stockyards, which has seen its business double in recent months.
Smith’s beloved animals were hustled into a ring as the auctioneer’s hiccuping patter filled the air. Tobacco-chewing buyers in straw cowboy hats and silver spurs quietly bid with a few hand signals.
Within moments, his animals were sold--for about 50% of last year’s prices.
“It was like selling part of my family,” Smith says, his eyes welling with tears. “But when the figures don’t add up to pay all the bills and a drought is facing you, you have to be realistic. You have to get what you can.”
He says he has reduced his debts to more than $100,000, but still worries. “You can’t breathe a sigh of relief because you don’t know what the banks are going to do,” says Smith, the father of four.
Smith hopes to make a deal with his creditors that will avoid bankruptcy, and he knows he’s in for a period of adjustment.
He admits, too, that he still is haunted by decisions he made that put him in this predicament, and he wonders if he would have been better off if he had quit earlier.
“Sure, you beat yourself up,” he says. “I second-guess everything. . . . But I don’t feel so bad, because the drought is pushing a lot of us over the edge. The one thing you can’t second-guess is the weather.”
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b3013d9f608943774bced051cc7627b2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20034-story.html | Finding a World of Change in Santa Ana | Finding a World of Change in Santa Ana
They moved into the city’s toughest neighborhoods two weeks ago, with their sleeping bags and wide-eyed idealism--20 college students from places including Olympia, Wash.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and Newport Beach, ready to change the world by summer’s end.
But the unpaid interns for Kidworks, a nondenominational ministry that sponsors the six-week youth program, got a sobering reality check their first week:
In Santa Ana, where two groups of students live, four people were killed in unrelated incidents last weekend, one of the city’s worst spates of violence in recent years.
Several students heard the shots at 11:20 p.m. in the South Townsend Street slaying and rushed into the back alley of their apartment where they found the 20-year-old victim; two of the students had never heard gunfire before.
A few days earlier, down the street from their Santa Ana apartment, a group of students saw a young man poke out of the sunroof of a passing car and fire a 9-millimeter handgun at another driver. No one was hurt in the 2:30 p.m. shooting.
Still, the students say the violence won’t scare them off.
“It’s frightening, and it’s scary, but it’s not something that would cause me not to be here, especially for the kids,” said Rochelle Johnsson, 21, who grew up in Findlay, Ohio.
“Every day, that’s what they face, that’s all they know. . . . Maybe I won’t totally understand what they’re going through, but I want to understand what their life is like.”
Kidworks, which began three summers ago, is a nonprofit arm of the National Institute of Youth Ministry in San Clemente. The $34,500 program is funded by donations and grants from sponsors including Disneyland and Mariners Church in Newport Beach.
Under the program, the interns run free day camps, with games, crafts and Bible studies for hundreds of kids at three sites. Three days a week, they erect circus-like awnings at low-income apartment complexes on Minnie Street and South Townsend Street in Santa Ana and Keel Avenue in Garden Grove.
This year, for the first time, each intern will pick three to five children for mentoring sessions on everything from table manners to how to address an envelope. They plan to take the kids camping and to the beach. At their apartments, the interns will organize classes on low-fat cooking, gardening and cosmetics.
“It means a lot that we’re here among them,” said Sara Villines, 20, a communication disorders major at Biola University in La Mirada. “We don’t drive back to our nice, fancy homes. We’re part of the neighborhood. We borrow their pots and pans.”
It’s the flip side of the self-absorbed Generation X lifestyle captured by MTV’s “The Real World,” a documentary-like program in which young roommates share hip, pricey digs in San Francisco or London. Kidworks’ interns joke that they are “The Real World,” in apartments with cockroaches, tattered screens and worn linoleum.
They cling to the hope that their summer stay will touch a few kids, even help steer some toward college if they talk it up enough.
“My biggest fear in relating to people is that I would be irrelevant,” said Kayo Nakamura, 24, a Huntington Beach resident, “but just the physical surroundings being the same--we wake up and see the same things--it makes it easier to bridge some gaps.
“Hopefully, they’ll remember that we all hung out.”
Some interns say they joined the program for the chance to see a world outside their fields of study, which include business, art and cosmetology. All say they are blessed and want to give something back to those who are perhaps less fortunate. (On Minnie Street, for example, 81% of residents didn’t finish high school; the per-capita income is $5,196, and 72% are immigrants, according to 1990 census figures.)
Four or five of the students cram into the one-bedroom, sweltering apartments that turn into kid magnets, with endless supplies of crayons, games and hugs. Bed means a sleeping bag or foam mattress; privacy means you crawl into the closet with a book and hope no one crawls in after you.
Landlords provide the rent-free apartments, where the students take turns cooking instant ramen noodles, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. Kidworks directors drop by groceries including rice and beans, or ethnic foods, with no instructions attached. They hope that students will go talk to neighbors and swap recipes.
Already, Sam Gonzalez, 20, misses his mom’s home cooking in Delano, Calif., and Katy Clark, 19, a competitive runner at UC Irvine, wishes she could work out at the university’s gym. Instead, she runs up and down a short stretch of busy Harbor Boulevard every morning.
But, students say the sacrifices are small in a place where 4-year-olds make do with a makeshift tetherball--a stuffed plastic grocery bag on a long string tied to the rooftop.
They get back tenfold, in the form of the paper plate art that the kids made to decorate their walls, by way of the neighborhood’s nighttime parties, with impromptu salsa dancing lessons in the courtyard, students say. And the kids give them their grade-school pictures, a cementing of friendship as sure as an engagement ring.
Joshua Cervantes, 9, says he doesn’t know what he would do this summer without Kidworks. The day camp gets bigger each time as more youngsters stumble across it.
“Sometimes, kids get lost, and they stay here because they think it’s the only place to be,” said Joshua, who wants to be a news reporter or veterinarian when he grows up.
On a recent afternoon, his grandmother, Margarita Peres, 80, watched the day camp’s games from a lawn chair in a patch of shade.
“They like us so well,” she said, nodding approvingly. “It’s like a family. We’re all here together.”
But parents of the interns don’t always understand the neighborhoods, said Eric Marsh, Kidworks’ director. He got a few panicked calls after the recent slaying on Townsend Street, but assured parents that Kidworks’ interns have never been hurt.
Still, “it’s a risk,” Marsh conceded. “Parents are paranoid, especially the ones calling from Ohio.”
Last week, he said, gang members broke into an intern’s car and stole her Christian music tapes--but later returned them when they found out the Toyota Corolla was owned by a Kidworks’ volunteer.
Santa Ana police counter that the interns are in no particular danger. The recent run of violence was “an anomaly,” said Lt. Mike Foote , one of the worst he remembers in 20 years on the force.
In fact, he said, the city’s crime rate is 36% lower than it was in 1990.
The interns are still wary, their antennas up.
On Townsend Street, neighbors left candles and flowers at the spot where the victim was shot in the head in an apparent gang-related shooting.
Intern Rebecca Lein , a nursing student from Orange, doesn’t need the reminder. Her nerves are jangled enough.
“I was wondering if, like, someone would be bursting into the apartment,” said Lein, 20, who describes her upbringing as middle class and sheltered. “Just like, ‘Why are you people here?’ kind of thing. ‘Get out of our neighborhood.’
“Inside, I was wondering if that’s how everybody was feeling. There was a little bit of panic. I wasn’t sure if this was going to go on every night.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Summer Fun
A nondenominational ministry called Kidworks is sponsoring free day camps for children. Here are camp locations; more information: (714) 554-7500
Santa Ana
* 1000 block of Minnie Street, in the courtyard; Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 3 to 5:30 p.m.
* 800 block of South Townsend Street, in the courtyard; Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 3 to 5:30 p.m.
Garden Grove
* Keel Avenue Park, at Keel Avenue and Clinton Street; Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 2 to 4:30 p.m.
Source: Kidworks
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bd9075a2b106e3aa45e756a52d93e88f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20035-story.html | Hearst Corp. Plans Spark Coastal Fight | Hearst Corp. Plans Spark Coastal Fight
For the better part of a century, the mountains and coastal moors that William Randolph Hearst regarded as the most beautiful countryside on earth has remained almost as wild and empty as when he first saw them.
Along with neighboring Big Sur, this is one of those epic stretches of sculpted rock, roiling sea and teeming wildlife that makes the California coast one of nature’s grand stage sets.
Yet this land is also private property. It is where the publishing magnate built his legendary castle and amassed a 77,000-acre ranch.
The castle was given to the state in 1958. But the ranch is now the focus of an ambitious development plan that is testing the resolve of policymakers to preserve a wondrous natural resource while upholding property rights.
“This is a classic test of the coastal act,” said Lee Otter, the California Coastal Commission’s senior planner for the central coast. “The challenge is to preserve what is special--the views and the sense of openness--while ensuring that there is reasonable economic use for the landowner.”
Near the historic village of San Simeon, the Hearst Corp. wants to build a sprawling resort community that would include a 27-hole golf course, two hotels, a dude ranch, an arcade of shops and restaurants and employee housing for up to 1,000 people.
Public access to the castle would not be affected.
The golf course is the most controversial element of the development. West of California 1, it would range across hundreds of acres of furrowed, salt-sprayed headlands perched over the Pacific.
The area has “golf written all over it,” according to one Hearst consultant. Company publicists are billing the project as “the next Pebble Beach.” It is a reference to the renowned Carmel resort that set an American standard for spectacular oceanside golf courses, draws more than 200,000 visitors a year and has helped make the Monterey Peninsula one of the more fashionable addresses on the West Coast.
The Hearst Corp. says the San Simeon development would generate $3 million in tax revenue for San Luis Obispo County and create an annual payroll of $13 million.
Nevertheless, the proposal has inflamed and divided public sentiment in nearby towns that have raised environmental and financial objections. Just down the road in Cambria, nearly 1,000 of the 6,000 residents have signed a petition opposing the seaside location of the golf course.
County Planning Commissioner Shirley Bianchi argues that the increased costs of municipal services would run the county a net deficit for 20 years.
The Hearst fight is part of a broader test of wills between forces fighting for control of the central coast.
The tension is palpable. Barbed wire and security patrols block traditional trails across miles of open country bought up by builders in recent years.
In Cambria, other pending developments could transform 1,000 acres or more of ranchland into suburbs and double the size of the town.
“If we say ‘yes’ to everything Hearst wants, how do we say ‘no’ to all the other developers waiting in line?” Bianchi asked.
For now, there are few signs of civilization along the 12 meandering miles of California 1 from the southern tip of Big Sur to San Simeon Point, where the Hearst Corp. wants to build.
The only buildings are a lighthouse, a general store and the weathered remains of a few 19th century warehouses built by William Randolph Hearst’s father.
But there is no lack of living things in the vicinity.
The Hearst property abuts the southern end of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, established in 1992 to protect an extraordinary array of marine life. The coves, marshes, tide pools and creek mouths on the San Simeon coast host a wealth of rare and endangered mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles and plants that wildlife experts say would not survive the typical pressures of commercial development.
The area is home to sea otters, brown pelicans, steelhead trout, black abalone, red legged frogs, southwestern pond turtles and tidewater goby (a small endangered fish). These days, the most conspicuous inhabitants are the elephant seals that began colonizing the beaches a couple years ago and today can be found by the scores spraddled along the shore.
On San Simeon Point, trees planted by William Randolph Hearst have become nesting sites for thousands of monarch butterflies. Clustered along the point are rare plants such as the endangered cobweb thistle, whose petals fold up at night, providing shelter from the wind for bumblebees.
“In the midst of all this, we’re gonna have thousands of people tramping across the bluffs, dunes and wetlands,” said Richard Hawley, a carpenter who heads up a local land conservancy.
Hawley and other environmentalists worry about polluted runoff from construction debris and parking lots, fertilizer and chemicals from the golf course and a pipeline that would divert huge quantities of stream water to hotels and restaurants.
Wildlife biologists are particularly concerned about the fate of local fish that spend part of the year in salt water and part in creeks such as Arroyo de la Cruz, from which the Hearst Corp. wants to pump water for the resort.
“It would be the end of the steelhead fishery,” said Jennifer Nichols, a biologist with the California Department of Game and Fish. “The stream is already dry part of the year because of pumping for the castle and the ranch.”
Steelhead trout populations have been declining steadily along the central and southern California coast, Nichols said. As a result, she said, the National Marine Fisheries Service is considering putting the fish on the endangered species list.
Hearst representatives maintain they have spent 11 years studying the impact of their proposed development and insist it would be done sensitively.
According to Hearst Corp. lawyer Philip M. Battaglia, monitoring wells have confirmed the presence of abundant water supplies beneath Arroyo de la Cruz; the design of the golf course would follow National Audubon Society guidelines for safe grading and drainage; coastal access would be preserved with the creation of a nature trail around San Simeon Point and new buildings would be hidden by trees and slopes.
Battaglia, who has represented the Hearst Corp. for 20 years, said the development, as currently planned, would occupy a small fraction of the entire Hearst ranch.
“For 140 years, as long as this land has been in the family, the Hearsts have been committed to keeping the vast bulk of it in agriculture,” he said.
“There is no reason to believe that commitment is waning.”
The natural splendor of the ranch today, Battaglia said, owes to the stewardship of generations of family members, starting with William Randolph Hearst, who ran the ranch as a wildlife sanctuary. Hearst was so obsessed with preserving the natural bountifulness of the place, biographers report, that he had food scraps left out for the castle mice.
In the 1960s, however, the Hearst Corp., which is controlled by family members, briefly explored plans to develop a city of 30,000 people on the ranch.
When the current proposal for the resort development was sketched out in the 1980s, San Luis Obispo County officials sought to balance the plan with zoning that dedicated the rest of the ranch to agriculture and open space. A few years later, county officials removed the zoning at the behest of the Hearst Corp.
The Hearst commitment to agriculture notwithstanding, Battaglia said, the corporation is adamantly opposed to zoning that would prohibit other uses.
Ultimately, how much development can occur on the land will be up to the San Luis Obispo County supervisors and the California Coastal Commission, where a new Republican majority has vowed not to interfere with the rights of property owners to build on their land.
Approval of all four phases of the resort complex could take years.
In the meantime, one lawsuit has already been filed, by the Sierra Club, challenging a recent decision by the coastal commission to close beach access to the public at the northern end of the proposed golf course.
A few weeks ago, the county Planning Commission tentatively approved the first phase of the resort amid the forest of Monterey pines, eucalyptus and cyprus overlooking the wave-carved crags and arches of San Simeon Point.
But in making their final decision, the planners will have to factor in the unsettled nature of the local geology. Experts have cited a complex fault system near San Simeon Point that they say is capable of producing tsunamis and a magnitude 7 earthquake.
Earlier this year, the county’s geological consultant advised: “I would recommend no human occupancy structures be built on San Simeon Point.”
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1570b991b885ced54b349cd541bce7d5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20036-story.html | Anniversaries Mark Golden Years in L.A. | Anniversaries Mark Golden Years in L.A.
At 21, Merle Levine had already seen more of the world than he wanted from the top gunner’s turret of a B-17 bomber. Like so many other American GIs just home from the war, he simply wanted to get on with his life.
Discharged two months after the U.S. dropped the atom bomb on Japan, he took his first step accepting a blind date with a pretty Venice High School graduate named Edna Levy, in the fall of 1945. The following March, between bites of a chopped liver sandwich at the old Simon’s drive-in on Olympic Boulevard, he proposed.
They wed 50 years ago today, on the last day of June 1946; the glowing 18-year-old bride wearing a borrowed satin gown, the groom in a rented tuxedo. They were one couple among tens of thousands who exchanged vows in Los Angeles County that year--a watershed for marriages, when weddings in California and across the nation hit a per capita peak never seen before nor since.
After marching off to war, an entire generation, it seemed, was marching down the aisle.
Elated over the Allied victory, encouraged by an expanding post-war economy and happy to be alive and in love, couples like the Levines tendered whirlwind romances into lifelong partnerships that conceived the nation’s baby boom.
Now, many of those same couples are celebrating their golden wedding anniversaries, recalling what was to many America’s golden era. The choices they made--how many children to have, where to live and work, and how to spend their money--shaped Southern California in ways that no one could foresee when they exchanged their vows.
“People used to ask Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman if they knew they were making a classic movie when they made ‘Casablanca.’ No, they were just going to work. And it was the same way with us,” said Merle Levine, now 71, of Van Nuys. “We just lived our lives, although I guess some people now would consider it a classic.”
With grateful soldiers, sailors and airmen returning home by the plane, boat and truckload, the number of marriages in the U.S. jumped 42% between 1945 and 1946. A total of 2,291,045 nuptials were recorded during the first full year after the war, nearly the number recorded in 1993, when the U.S. population had almost doubled.
Los Angeles led the state’s wedding boom. In 1946, the county issued 114 marriage licenses a day--approximately one for every 93 people.
By today’s standards, most of the weddings were simple affairs. Marie and Irving Young of Compton, friends since age 13 and now both 72, wanted to spare their parents the expense of a formal ceremony. So they eloped on a Saturday night in February 1946, accompanied by four friends.
“It was not the thing to do to go to a hotel and make a big splash. I remember three or four like that and everyone gossiped, wondering who they wanted to impress,” said Judith Berman of Calabasas, who married her husband, Barry, in her parents’ Chicago apartment on Dec. 22, 1946.
Having lived through the harsh economic conditions of both the Depression and World War II, young couples in the late 1940s did not expect material wealth when they launched their lives together, said Richard Easterlin, a USC economics professor and expert on the baby boom generation. Many did not have cars or jobs when they married and it was not uncommon for newlyweds to live with relatives for months or even years after their wedding as they waited for housing to be built and wages to be saved.
The labor market in 1946 was booming as companies converted from the war effort to servicing a peacetime economy. So finding a job with decent wages was comparatively easy.
“That is one reason the boomer parents had as many kids as they did,” Easterlin said. “They came to adulthood with fairly low material aspirations, but they had a relatively high amount of money.”
The Benjamins’ story is typical.
“I could have gone back to school on the GI Bill, but after five campaigns in the European theater trying to keep my fanny from getting shot off, I was ready to settle down,” said Melvin Benjamin, 74, of Tarzana. “You realized how good life was at home while you were away from it.”
Benjamin and his wife, Roz, married in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Sept. 7, 1946, five months after he got out of the Army. She was a 19-year-old secretary, the proverbial girl-back-home. Although they had dated only once before he enlisted, they came to love each other through letters exchanged while he was overseas.
Within weeks of their traditional Jewish wedding, financed largely by the money Benjamin made playing cards on the boat back from Europe, the young couple packed up their clothes, books and letters and moved from New York to Los Angeles, where there were more jobs.
“The community was young in those days and they welcomed young people into the city,” Mel Benjamin recalled. “Wherever I went to look for work, you had the feeling of, ‘Gee, we need new blood, new ideas.’ ”
He ended up selling textiles, a trade he still plies five decades later.
While jobs were plentiful, housing was not. The frenzied home construction--financed by the GI Bill--was just getting underway. The Benjamins had to pay a landlord a $1,500 “finder’s fee,” virtually all their wedding money, to rent a studio apartment with a fold-down bed a few blocks from Los Angeles City College.
Other couples made do with little, too. Unable to find an apartment, 21-year-old newlyweds Peter and Catherine Romano lived with her parents south of downtown for the first nine months after their July 21, 1946 wedding at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in East Los Angeles. The couple met dancing at the Hollywood Palladium in November 1943, while he was stationed at Fort Meyer in the Mojave Desert.
“We didn’t think about money. We started out with maybe $200 or $300 in the bank, although afterward it sure was important,” Catherine Romano said. Because they didn’t own a car--those, too, were scarce after the war--the Romanos took buses to work. She was a secretary at a car dealership and he installed equipment for Pacific Telephone.
For many couples, children quickly followed.
The first of Merle and Edna Levine’s four daughters was born in August 1947, 14 months after their first wedding anniversary. Their second baby followed two years later and the third two years after that. They waited another two years and eight months before they had their youngest daughter.
That pace was fairly average for the time. Soon, the Levines and the Benjamins and the Romanos were looking to buy their first homes. The San Fernando Valley, where affordable houses were being built at a furious pace, beckoned them all.
In 1949, the Levines and their two oldest daughters settled into a 1,300-square-foot house in Van Nuys, brand-new, at a cost of $9,500.
“Practically all of our neighbors were war veterans,” said Merle Levine, who worked with his twin brother at their father’s radio store. “In those days, you could buy a house on the GI Bill with almost nothing down, and if you had a house payment, it was $80 a month and that included the taxes and insurance.”
Recalled Edna Levine, “It was just a wonderful period in our lives. When we moved out here, the Valley was still walnut groves and apricot orchards and chicken ranches. I think all my dreams were evolving while I was living them.”
Many of these families prospered. The husbands, and sometimes the wives, worked at the same jobs for decades. They saved. They scrimped. As a result, their children grew up with an affluence their parents never could have imagined as kids, a standard of living aging baby boomers now find hard to duplicate.
“We have made a very, very nice life,” said Roz Benjamin, who went back to work as a secretary after the couple’s three children were almost grown. “We have a nice house with a nice swimming pool, I always feel grateful because I did not come from this background and neither did Mel.”
For a time, such conventional, Ozzie-and-Harriet-style unions fell out of favor with the baby boomers they produced. Company men such as Peter Romano, who stayed with Pacific Telephone for 36 years, moving up to a management job, and stay-at-home moms like Edna Levine were often pitied instead of admired.
But recently, the criticism has quieted and the conventions have made a comeback. As they celebrate their golden anniversaries, these marital survivors find themselves surrounded by awe-struck offspring who want to know their secret.
Simple but not easy: communication, mutual respect, shared goals, laughter and lots of it. These are the qualities long-married couples cite as the glue that kept them together long enough to reach a milestone just one out of five married couples can expect to reach these days.
To celebrate, the Levines will be toasted by 140 close friends and relatives during a dinner-dance at the Calabasas Inn. Area banquet facilities report more bookings than usual for golden anniversary celebrations this month.
Manny and Louise Pinsky of Woodland Hills, who met on a blind date near the Rose Bowl on July 4, 1942 and married three years and 11 months later, recently celebrated their 50th anniversary by renewing their vows in front of 148 teary-eyed party guests. The couple’s three children recited the ceremonial blessings, while Louise’s twin sisters, now 54, reprised their original roles as flower girls in pink dresses.
The bride’s siblings wrote a song to the tune of “My Darling Clementine” that comically summed up the couple’s post-war years--and unwittingly, the experience of so many others.
It went like this:
Off to war went Manny Pinsky
To fight for liberty.
Wrote love letters by the bundle
Because the postage, it was free.
To the alter, never faltered
Our Manny and Louise,
Then came Randy, Lynne and Margie,
What a perfect fam-i-ly.
Louise says the ceremony was even better than their first.
“The days just fly by very, very fast,” she said. “We are enjoying every minute we have left.”
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fa41271ba8d9a44003987a6615cd8533 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20041-story.html | New No. 2 Man in Russia Faces Uncertain Future | New No. 2 Man in Russia Faces Uncertain Future
Until Wednesday, he is busy saving Russia from communism. But what will Alexander I. Lebed--patriot, folk hero and indestructibly virtuous soldier--do next with the mighty political sword that Boris N. Yeltsin has put in his hand during an electoral battle for the Russian presidency?
Since the first round of voting June 16, Lebed has become the most powerful man in Russia after Yeltsin. Although the former general came in only third in that vote, Yeltsin conscripted him for the final campaign to beat the president’s Communist rival, Gennady A. Zyuganov, in the runoff Wednesday.
So honors have been heaped in Lebed’s lap. Yeltsin has given him the ill-defined but hugely influential job of Russian security chief. The president has sacrificed the top military and security men--Lebed’s rivals and personal enemies--who once had his ear. Lebed has been granted new powers to appoint the next army bosses and is now said to be lobbying for control of intelligence agencies. Yeltsin has even hinted that Lebed could be his choice as successor at the end of the decade.
As a preelection tactic, bringing Lebed under his banner has been Yeltsin’s masterstroke. Although fewer than half of Lebed’s nationalist supporters are expected to cast votes for the more pro-Western Yeltsin, the president’s overall ratings have soared as Communist resistance crumbles. The appointment may have secured the incumbent another term in office.
But it remains to be seen whether the 46-year-old onetime paratrooper will continue to be useful to the president after the election.
“I think there will be a lot of conflict. He’s coming into a job he doesn’t know, into an administration he doesn’t know . . . and he’s a cowboy,” said Michael McFaul of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Lebed himself clearly takes at face value the suggestion that, as an heir apparent, he could coast into the presidency in 2000. The former commander of the Soviet 14th Army in Moldova seems to want a chance to learn his way around the corridors of power and hone political skills that would set him up as Yeltsin’s inheritor.
Reveling in his new place in the Kremlin, Lebed is supremely confident that after Wednesday’s vote he will continue to be given free rein to impose his own program ending crime, corruption and the war in Chechnya.
“I have no fears, only a feeling of reality,” he told the Itar-Tass news agency Thursday. “A thief must be in prison, and a corrupt official must at the very least be removed from power.”
But the tasks Lebed has set for himself are so broad that they will inevitably cause clashes with Kremlin courtiers anxious not to lose their control over politics and the public purse. He has said his idea of national security encompasses “such things as our growing dependence on food imports, deteriorating inter-regional economic relations, capital flight from the country, privatization.”
It is Lebed’s plans to fight corruption that could bring him into conflict with Yeltsin. Time and again over the last five years, sleaze investigations have evidently been hushed up whenever they reached too close to Yeltsin’s entourage.
“You need very delicate instruments for solving this problem. You can’t do it with a sword,” said businessman Konstantin N. Borovoi, founder of Moscow’s commodities exchange. “One of the problems Lebed could face is that it will become clear to him that organized crime is connected closely to the president. . . . If he does his job right, he will create a lot of difficulties for the president and make a lot of enemies. He’s a very new person in the team, and they will eat him.”
Lebed’s political naivete may also drive a wedge between him and Yeltsin. He has spent the days since his appointment grappling publicly with issues of high politics that seem embarrassingly beyond his grasp, causing consternation among government officials and the president’s Western allies.
An imprudent prediction--of an economic crisis by the fall--earned him a rebuke from Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who responded by publicly calling attention to the security chief’s inexperience.
On Thursday, Lebed railed against foreign religious groups, calling Mormon and other “nontraditional” denominations in Russia “scum” and “mold.” President Clinton raised objections to the remarks on Saturday.
Lebed’s views on ending Russia’s unpopular war in Chechnya have also changed over time, said Sergei N. Yushenkov, a liberal member of the Russian parliament’s defense committee: “First he said he didn’t approve of using military methods in Chechnya. Then he said Russian troops should either win or withdraw. Now he wants a referendum to let the Chechen people decide on whether to stay in Russia. Which alternative he will choose remains unclear.”
Lebed has blown hot and cold about expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe. At times he is hostile to it, and at times he casually dismisses the whole issue by saying that NATO could not afford a move east anyway.
If Lebed runs afoul of other Kremlin players, he will have little protection. His new powers, granted by a stroke of the presidential pen, have no independent constitutional basis and could be taken away just as easily if Yeltsin, a consummate politician and in the past a fickle master, tires of him.
The vehicle of power Lebed is using--the Security Council, of which he has been named secretary--is a forum for Russia’s most powerful men to make decisions determining the fate of the country.
But in contrast to its Soviet predecessor, the Politburo, ultimate power in the council lies with the president, who must issue decrees to make its decisions come to pass. So Lebed remains directly dependent on Yeltsin.
“Lebed is apparently hoping to pull the real strings of power in Russia while Yeltsin officially occupies the throne, mostly indulging in tennis and vodka. But . . . Yeltsin has proven himself as the cleverest Byzantine-style statesman in Moscow. . . . Lebed may have been called to power only to take, eventually, all the blame for future Kremlin blunders,” said Pavel Felgengauer, political commentator for the daily Segodnya.
Some analysts suggest that personal chemistry will bind the men. Both are cast in the same hearty, no-nonsense, “real man” mold that warms Russian hearts. Yeltsin’s two autobiographies and Lebed’s recent “Ashamed for My Country” all feature episode after rollicking episode in which the hero-narrator takes on rogues and fools, puts them in their place and comes out on top.
The two have had similar careers, fighting back after bureaucracies seemed to have bested them. Yeltsin won the presidency of the Russian Federation after being thrown out of the Politburo in 1987, while Lebed surged back into power after then-Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev got him fired as commander of the 14th Army in 1995.
Although Yeltsin and Lebed have both taken pains to stress that they are looking for long-term stability, their shared taste for trouble and conflict seems an unlikely basis for a lasting partnership. Touchy and prone to standing on his dignity, Lebed may find it hard to swallow the humiliations that are the courtier’s daily lot, said Alexei I. Pedberezkin, ideological strategist for Communist leader Zyuganov.
Yeltsin “will never accept treating another person as an equal. Whether Lebed can stand it or not, I don’t know,” he said. Echoing the thought, Lebed told the weekly Moscow News that he would offer his resignation if his honor was besmirched in any way.
After the electoral need to keep Lebed happy at all costs has passed, Yeltsin might well find the most practical way to contain his popular security chief will be to focus his attention on a task he is uniquely well-equipped to handle: army reform.
The 1.5-million-man armed forces have fallen on hard times since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And under Grachev, almost nothing was done to give them a post-Cold War identity or even to allow them to feed themselves adequately.
Lebed has made clear what his gradual reform program would consist of: streamlining the armed forces’ five branches into three, moving toward professional units rather than an unwieldy conscript force and dropping attempts to keep the military to its Soviet-era size.
“Lebed has influence of his own in the army and the support of other influential figures,” Felgengauer said. “On this issue, at least, Lebed’s views are mature and settled. At long last, Yeltsin has a person in high office who understands the problems of the military. Lebed’s appointment creates the possibility that the Russian army will reform, rather than just mutiny.”
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189e7d7929c25d28fcf28a9ad0a00cb3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20042-story.html | State’s GOP Delegates Oppose Abortion Plank | State’s GOP Delegates Oppose Abortion Plank
In sharp contrast to their colleagues from some other states, a substantial majority of California’s delegates to this summer’s Republican National Convention oppose the party’s current strong antiabortion stand and would favor removing the issue from the party platform altogether, according to a Times survey of the delegation.
In the survey, conducted by the Times Poll, nearly two-thirds of the delegates responding said they would support Gov. Pete Wilson’s effort to replace the existing party platform plank, which calls for a constitutional amendment banning all abortions.
Barely 10% of the delegates who responded to the survey said they support such a constitutional amendment. More than two-thirds thought the subject of abortion should not be in the platform at all.
That stand is at odds with the position of the party’s all-but-certain nominee, Bob Dole, who backs the present platform language on abortion but has proposed adding a “declaration of tolerance” to accommodate party members with other views.
The California stand also differs sharply from that of several other states. In Texas, for example, party members last week denied delegate seats to several prominent Republicans because they do not oppose abortion. Antiabortion activists also dominate several other state delegations to the convention, which is scheduled for Aug. 12-15 in San Diego.
Wilson has been working on various proposals to change the current platform and has not yet settled on an approach, said his spokesman, Sean Walsh.
One reason the California delegation differs from others is that, in accordance with state political tradition, the members were handpicked before the state’s March 26 primary election by a small group selected by Wilson and his political aides in behalf of Dole. The former Kansas senator won all 165 delegate votes in the primary.
In some cases, however, former Dole opponents will be able to go to San Diego as alternates.
Wilson, who has long supported abortion rights, is the general chairman of the Dole campaign in the state and he was elected leader of the delegation at its only pre-convention meeting earlier this month.
Wilson-Dole aide Marty Wilson said the selection committee sought to include all factions of the party in California.
In fact, 19% identified themselves in the Times Poll as “very conservative,” a figure equivalent to the percentage of votes that conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan received in the state presidential primary.
“I feel we ran a pretty fair and open process,” said Marty Wilson, who is not related to the governor.
But Jon Fleischman, president of the strongly antiabortion California Republican Assembly, disagreed.
“The delegation is more representative of a Wilson-for-president delegation than it is a delegation that represents the spectrum of Republicans in California,” said Fleischman, an alternate.
Marty Wilson said attempts to accommodate all who wanted to go to San Diego were complicated by the fact that California has 36 fewer delegates this year than in 1992. Under Republican Party rules, states get more votes at the convention if they voted Republican in the previous election. As a result, California Republicans lost convention delegates when President Clinton carried the state in 1992.
Of the 165 California delegates, 123 responded to the survey. Thirty-seven declined to participate and five others were traveling out of the country or could not be contacted.
The delegation is considerably more diverse than Republican voters as a whole in California: 68% white, 6% black, 10% Latino, 9% Asian. Among registered Republicans in California, 87% are white, 1% black, 7% Latino and 3% Asian, according to the most recent statewide Times Poll, taken in March.
The survey, conducted by Times Poll Acting Director Susan Pinkus, interviewed delegates June 10-27.
Overall, the delegation is a relatively wealthy and well-educated group.
Nearly half of those who responded had family incomes of more than $100,000 a year and those delegates who did not answer the survey included a number of prominent and wealthy business people. More than seven out of 10 of the delegates have completed four or more years of college study.
The group is not friendly to Buchanan. Two-thirds said Buchanan, who caused considerable controversy at the 1992 convention with an address that declared a “culture war,” should not be allowed to give a prime-time speech at this year’s gathering.
Asked their preference for Dole’s running mate, the only person whom a large number of delegates supported was Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Even though Powell has indicated that he would not accept the job, 29% named him as their first choice.
Wilson was picked by 7%, and Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren was named by 6%. One out of four of those surveyed chose no one.
Only two delegates chose Michigan Gov. John Engler, whose name has often surfaced in speculation about potential running mates.
When asked about specific individuals who have been speculated about, 77% of those surveyed gave Powell a favorable rating. New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman was rated favorably by 65% and Engler by 50%.
Three Californians mentioned as potential running mates had less enthusiastic backing. Wilson had a 49% favorable rating; Lungren, 48% and Rep. Christopher Cox of Newport Beach, 18%.
On abortion, more than half the delegates surveyed said they thought that the “declaration of tolerance” compromise offered by Dole would help his chances of winning in November. Only 11% said it would hurt and 25% said it made no difference.
Generally, though, delegates thought jobs, education and economic issues were more critical to Dole’s cause than abortion.
Asked to name what they thought would be the most decisive issue in the campaign, 37% said jobs, 21% picked the federal budget deficit, 15% said the character of candidates, 13% said crime and 10% said education. Only 7% said abortion.
By a margin of 8 to 1, the delegates said they support the state ballot initiative that would eliminate government affirmative action programs, but only 5% saw it as a pivotal issue in the presidential contest.
By contrast, more than 80% said they considered illegal immigration as a more-than-minor issue in the campaign.
The Republican Party began running television commercials in California last week, accusing Clinton of increasing government aid to illegal immigrants.
Pinkus said the delegates are more optimistic about the economy overall than registered Republicans in the state are.
“For example, more than half of the delegates surveyed say California is not in a recession, while only 29% of Republicans surveyed in the statewide Times Poll conducted in March think that,” she said.
“And three out of five GOP delegates think California’s economy will get better in three months.”
By contrast, only a quarter of registered Republicans surveyed in March said they thought that the state economy would be better three months later.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
California GOP Delegates
This is a demographic profile of the state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention:
GENDER
Male: 57%
Female: 43%
****
AGE
18 to 30 years old: 2%
31 to 45 years old: 28%
46 to 64 years old: 48%
65 and older: 19%
Refused to answer: 3%
****
EDUCATION
Less than college degree: 27%
College degree or more: 73%
****
INCOME
Less than $50,000: 9%
$50,000 to $100,000: 25%
More than $100,000: 49%
Refused to answer: 17%
****
RACE/ETHNICITY
White: 68%
Black: 6%
Latino: 10%
Asian: 9%
Other: 2%
Refused: 5%
****
POLITICAL IDEOLOGY
Liberal/Moderate: 20%
Somewhat conservative: 55%
Very conservative: 19%
Refused: 6%
Source: Los Angeles Times Poll
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
How The Poll Was Conducted
The Times Poll contacted all 165 California Republican delegates to the Republican National Convention to be held Aug. 12-15 in San Diego, by telephone and fax, June 10-27. Of the 165 GOP delegates, 123 were surveyed, 37 refused and 5 were unavailable.
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8657712d9c25b6a74d1aa46cd276e0d0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20044-story.html | G-7 Nations, Russia Pressure Bosnian Serbs | G-7 Nations, Russia Pressure Bosnian Serbs
The leading industrial democracies and Russia threatened Saturday to reimpose sanctions on Bosnian Serbs and their patrons in Yugoslavia in a marked escalation of the campaign to remove top rebel leaders from power and eventually bring them to trial for war crimes.
Using a carrot-and-stick approach, the Group of Seven, joined at its annual summit by Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, suggested that economic assistance to all parties in the Balkan conflict will flow more freely if all elements in the convoluted Bosnian political and military scene comply with the peace accord reached in November in Dayton, Ohio.
Sanctions against the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia that in the past have included an economic boycott on all trade, with the exception of food and medicine, can be reimposed only by the top civilian administrator of the peace accord and the American military commander of the international force in Bosnia.
But the summit’s declaration makes clear to the Bosnian Serbs and their supporters in Yugoslavia that these officials will have the crucial support of the United States, Russia and other key players as they try to loosen Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s strong grip on power.
Karadzic and his military chief, Gen. Ratko Mladic, have been indicted for war crimes and are thus prohibited from holding public office under the Dayton agreement. Their refusal to step down has been a slap in the face of the international community and is seen as a destabilizing factor as Bosnia prepares for national elections Sept. 14.
“I hope Mr. Karadzic and anyone who would have influence on him will understand there are limits,” French President Jacques Chirac said.
Meanwhile, President Clinton, declaring that Bosnia “has moved from the horror of war into the hope of peace,” announced three programs for the struggling nation: $15 million to train demobilized soldiers to clear an estimated 3 million land mines; $5 million to help Bosnian women find jobs and create businesses in a country where many men were killed in ethnic fighting; and the establishment of an international commission, under former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, to resolve nearly 12,000 missing-person cases.
In addition, the nations present at Saturday’s sessions--Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States--recommended that NATO-led peacekeepers, including about 20,000 Americans, create “a safe and secure environment” for the Bosnian elections in September. Putting the troops on election patrol would be an expansion of their duties.
The summit’s declaration contained no deadline for the reimposition of sanctions against the Bosnian Serbs and the rump Yugoslavia, which now comprises only the republics of Serbia and Montenegro.
But Carl Bildt, the Swedish diplomat charged with overseeing the civilian aspects of the Dayton accord, has suggested that he might seek some measures as early as Monday.
Clinton’s national security advisor, Anthony Lake, did not quarrel with that possibility, but he said that Monday would not be a “drop-dead date.”
A White House official said that if sanctions are imposed, the first will probably be those that could take effect quickly, including a break in transportation links, a halt to financial transactions across local borders and a cutoff of petroleum deliveries.
“It has the potential for getting people’s attention, because the Serb economy, just having restarted, would stop in its tracks,” the official said.
Bosnia was initially expected to be the summit’s central issue. But the truck-bomb explosion that killed 19 Americans at a military housing complex outside Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday focused the spotlight during the early sessions--at U.S. insistence and with European grumbling--on terrorism.
The Group of Seven agreed to adopt a set of 40 measures, many of them vague, intended to restrict the financial, strategic and tactical operations of terrorists.
“It’s not the Cold War, it’s not World War II, but it’s an important part of our struggle to make this a civilized and sane world,” Clinton said at a news conference Saturday.
But he added: “We can’t make all the problems of the world go away.”
The summit’s declaration on Bosnia was an effort to use the leaders’ collective clout to persuade Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to end the reign of Karadzic and Mladic. Milosevic’s government was long a sponsor of the Bosnian Serb rebels, but he has recently promised to help remove the two leaders from power.
On Friday in Bosnia, Karadzic presided over a meeting of his Serbian Democratic Party and offered no suggestion that he intended to step aside, by Monday or any other deadline. On Saturday, he was reelected to lead the party.
The United States and its allies want to see Karadzic and Mladic “out of power, out of influence and out of town,” a U.S. official said.
“We think that is very important,” Clinton said. But he said that international peacekeepers, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia, will not be asked to seize Karadzic and Mladic by force. Instead, the troops have been instructed to take war crimes suspects into custody if they encounter them.
As the two days of G-7 diplomacy drew to a close, Clinton met briefly with Chernomyrdin. The Russian official was dispatched to represent Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who stayed home to campaign for Wednesday’s election.
Over the last week, Yeltsin has been laid up by what has been described as a sore throat. The frequently hoarse Clinton said he had no information that would suggest Yeltsin’s health problems were other than described, and he added that such an ailment was “something I can identify with before an election.”
On political matters such as Bosnia, the group showed little of the disagreement that marked its economic discussions Friday. But sharp differences remain over the renomination of Boutros Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general of the United Nations.
The United States strongly opposes his election to a second five-year term; France is equally adamant in its support of the former Egyptian foreign minister. Their differences were likely to be raised at a private dinner for Chirac and Clinton in Paris on Saturday night before Clinton headed back to the United States.
There was an awkward moment Saturday when Boutros-Ghali joined the government leaders at a meeting added to the summit agenda. His participation, along with that of the heads of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, underscored the increasing role the international institutions expect to play in a globally integrated economy.
The summit-ending declaration called for a deeper commitment to reforms at the United Nations, which the United States has complained is overstaffed and mismanaged.
On other issues, the summit participants:
* Acknowledged the security themes on which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu based his successful election campaign--but also supported the concept of “land for peace” that obliges Israel to relinquish territory captured from Arabs in exchange for a commitment to peace.
* Renewed pressure for the completion of a comprehensive treaty banning nuclear tests.
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05dd60216beec1f0d5dfab2d28e25f09 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20045-story.html | Clinton Calls for ‘Full Assessment’ of Saudi Bombing | Clinton Calls for ‘Full Assessment’ of Saudi Bombing
As troops began installing a 400-foot security perimeter around a military compound bombed by terrorists last week, President Clinton on Saturday appointed a retired general to carry out a “full assessment” of the attack and to review the safety of U.S. forces across the Middle East.
The installation of the widened buffer around the Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran was announced during a visit by Defense Secretary William J. Perry as part of a series of urgent steps to improve security at the post. Later, the base commander said he repeatedly sought permission to widen the buffer earlier this year but was turned down by the Saudis.
Officials say the proximity of the 5,000-pound truck bomb was the main reason for the high number of casualties Tuesday night, when 19 U.S. military personnel died and more than 400 people, including Saudi and other civilians, were wounded. The bombers backed the deadly truck into a fence only 35 yards from a residential building.
“We will do everything in our power to discover who was responsible, to pursue them and to punish them,” Clinton said at a news conference in Lyons, France, where he was attending a summit of the seven largest industrialized democracies.
He said he had appointed retired Gen. Wayne Downing, former commander in chief of Army special operations forces, to investigate the bombing and evaluate security measures at other U.S. facilities in the region to prevent similar attacks. Downing was ordered to report back in 45 days.
Saudi officials declined to confirm Perry’s statements Friday that investigators had indications of an organizational link between the bombing at Khobar and an attack at a U.S.-run military training center in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that claimed seven lives in November.
Four Saudis were executed last month for that attack. Saudi Arabia said then that it had successfully smashed a small “home-grown” terrorist cell of Islamic extremists confined to the oil-rich desert kingdom.
If investigators do establish a connection, it could indicate a broader plot than officials had previously described and raise anew the question of whether the bombers had any assistance from people or states outside Saudi Arabia.
Sources familiar with the investigation suggested that the Dhahran bombers may be connected to a group apprehended trying to enter Saudi Arabia from Jordan two months ago with high-grade explosives. While that shipment was intercepted, Saudi security forces feared that another one may have “slipped through,” one source said.
The incident set off alarm bells and caused an intensive security operation by the Saudis that was going on even before the blast at the Khobar complex, one source said.
At the blast site, investigators continued to turn up clues in the rubble, including a truck chassis and a Mercedes-Benz hubcap believed to have come from the truck that blew up, U.S. and Saudi officials said. The chassis carried the vehicle’s serial number, and Persian Gulf newspapers quoted Saudi officials as saying that investigators had the truck’s license number and were homing in on its owners.
Newspapers also said that a composite sketch of two suspects, based on eyewitness reports, would soon be published by the Saudi authorities.
On his one-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Perry discussed the terrorist threat with King Fahd and other senior Saudi officials in this Red Sea port.
He also used his visit to the blast site to boost morale among the young military personnel shaken by the attack, which sheared off the front of an eight-story residential building and sent killing shards of debris to several neighboring buildings.
“This bomb succeeded in causing great destruction, but it failed in its ultimate target. Because this attack will not drive us away,” Perry said at a news conference. The United States, he said, “will not be intimidated by terrorists or rogue nations.”
Clinton, who plans to attend memorial services for the blast’s victims in Florida today, echoed the sentiment. “Let me be clear,” he said. “Just as no enemy could drive us from the field in World War II and the Cold War, we will not be driven from the frontiers of our fight against terrorism today.”
On the campaign trail in Dallas on Saturday, Bob Dole, the likely Republican presidential nominee, called for a united American front against terrorism, saying that “when tragedies like this occur, we’re not Democrats, we’re not Republicans--we’re Americans.”
But he also suggested that Clinton’s defense policies had left Americans vulnerable to terrorist attacks like the bombing in Saudi Arabia.
At the base outside Dhahran, the principal security improvement will be the wider perimeter, to be completed within a week, around the complex, which houses about 2,250 Americans and a sprinkling of French and British troops. Increased patrols and relocating residences away from the perimeter were also ordered.
Speaking to reporters in Khobar, base commander Brig. Gen. Terry Schwalier said he had asked “many different times” for permission to widen the perimeter around the base, but Saudi officials refused, according to wire reports. He said the wider perimeter would have meant taking space used for parking near a park popular with locals.
Schwalier’s comments were the first disclosure that the military had considered the previous buffer zone of 80 to 100 feet insufficient. Earlier, U.S. officials had said the distance was sufficient according to a vulnerability assessment report based on last fall’s Riyadh bombing.
Also Saturday, the Air Force reported that an airman initially thought to be hospitalized was one of those killed in the blast and that one of those believed dead is alive but seriously injured.
Forensic teams said formerly unidentified remains were those of Airman 1st Class Christopher B. Lester, 19, of Pineville, W.Va. His relatives had been told that he was hospitalized in very serious condition.
Authorities previously believed the remains were those of Airman Paul A. Blais, who is assigned to Patrick Air Force Base in Florida.
Blais’ mother, Maria Taylor, reached at her home in Hampton, Va., on Saturday, said the Air Force informed her Friday evening that her son was alive.
“It’s a wonderful feeling. It’s the best day of my life,” Taylor said. She said Air Force officials told her that Blais was in a coma but that his condition was improving.
Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this story from Lyons, France.
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0fde8281e47c58ea7eb77626618b4242 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20046-story.html | Diving Right In : Water Rescue Training Grooms Newfoundlands’ Instincts to Save Swimmers and Boaters | Diving Right In : Water Rescue Training Grooms Newfoundlands’ Instincts to Save Swimmers and Boaters
It was crunch time Saturday morning and young Monty knew it. The water rescue test was just a few months away and his job was to prove, during a pretest run-through Saturday in Oxnard, that he should be allowed to take the test, that he was lifeguard material to the bone. Unembarrassed, Monty was drooling.
His coach stood with him on the shore, patting him on the back and whispering words of encouragement: “That’s it, Monty. Want to do it, Monty? Ready to do it?!”
In a flash, coach Peggy Lange gave the signal and Monty bounded into the ocean, his powerful dog paddle propelling him elegantly toward the float he was to bring back to shore. He grabbed the floating object effortlessly and raced it to Lange.
Another challenge successfully met, Montana the 7-month-old Newfoundland puppy was headed for the big league of official Water Dog certification in September. Back on the sand, Monty, who already weighs 140 pounds, wagged his furry black tail with glee.
Using Channel Islands Harbor as a training ground, a handful of Newfoundland dog owners from the Southern California Newfoundland Club gather several times a year--as often as once a week before a test--to teach their animals what mostly comes naturally to them: water rescue.
Dogs who demonstrate mastery in the junior division test are granted the title Water Dog; those who pass the senior division are called Water Rescue Dogs. Both tests of six skills each are sanctioned by the Newfoundland Club of America.
Practice drills are run over and over for the regular group of about a dozen dogs: bringing a life ring to a swimmer calling for help, swimming a line out to stranded boaters and then towing the boat to shore, jumping from a boat to retrieve a dropped oar, picking a swimmer in distress from those not in need of aid and towing the distressed swimmer to shore, and many others. Between the in-water days, the owners work with their dogs on land.
With webbed paws, muscular bodies that can weigh more than 175 pounds and a slobbery sweetness, Newfoundlands were traditionally as useful to farmers and hunters for carting and carrying as they were to fishing crews in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, for retrieving waterlogged nets and overboard sailors.
Throughout the upper United States and Canada, the dogs continue to be used for mountain and icy water rescues because their thick double coats protect them from the cold.
Newfies, as their owners call them, are now mostly bred to be beautiful, children-loving family pets. Nana, the dog in the children’s classic “Peter Pan,” was a Landseer, or black and white, Newfoundland. They were listed as the dog to own in the 1980s spoof “The Preppie Handbook.”
But more and more owners are determined to bring their bearlike dogs back to their roots.
“Hopefully, they won’t ever find a person in real trouble,” said Alex Rose, who along with husband, Rob Meadows, carts their two Landseers from West Hollywood to Ventura County each week for training. “But if something happens to somebody, they will have the ability to save them.”
Some of the animals don’t need much coaxing. Lange said one of her dogs, before it was trained, bounded into the ocean to “rescue” a child who was having a fine time in the water. The dog, she said, mistook the child’s laughing, yelling and flapping arms as signs of trouble.
Even puppies can be bad water playmates, nudging a perfectly capable swimmer away from the center of the pool and back to the safety of the side.
To make the most of the Newfie’s instincts, however, takes a lot of work.
From the moment the cars leave the freeway, the dogs can smell their beloved ocean water. Getting the animals to wait their turn on the beach and resist the temptation to swim every which way once they get in the water is as much of a challenge for many of the owners as teaching the rescue skills.
Rose’s dog Phinn, an 87-pound puppy, was more than happy Saturday to put a towline in his mouth and splash about. Getting him to swim the line out to her husband, however, was another story.
Rose tried pushing Phinn out while Meadows called to the happily frolicking dog. “Come on, Phinny!” he yelled to no avail. “Come to me!”
Exasperated with a trick that usually works, Rose attached Phinn to an extra-long leash and gave the end to Meadows. This time when he called the dog, Meadows gently reeled the animal in.
Then there was the retrieve-the-boat test. Phinn eagerly swam to the bobbing float, pulled it most of the way back to shore, but then stopped to walk around it for a while in the shallow water, shaking off a virtual flood as he took a winding path back to the eagerly awaiting Rose.
Rose, delighted when Phinn finally brought her the toy, was effusive with her praise.
“You can have a perfect Water Dog and then the day of the test, the dog has an off day,” said breeder Janice Anderson, Montana’s co-owner. “You’re nervous, and I think the dog picks that up and gets thrown off. They look at you like, ‘You want me to do what?’ and then just stand there on the shore.”
Some tests are particularly difficult. Dogs eventually learn to tow a boat parallel to shore when their instinct is to tow it in; they learn to swim with their handler to a given point, although their instinct is to herd the human back to the sand.
Newfie owners say they train their dogs because they enjoy doing it. But after paying as much as $3,000 for their animals, Newfie “parents” are notoriously obsessed with their pets. One member of the San Diego chapter even took his two Newfies to the Canadian province that gave them their name so the dogs could “get in touch with their roots.”
In the plus column, these lifeguard hopefuls don’t need sunscreen. No chance they’ll be babe-watching when they should be supervising swimmers. They don’t wear intimidating shades or neon nose cream. On the other hand, they tend to drool. And when they get out of the water, anyone near them gets a shower while they shake off.
“It’s worth it,” Lange said. “They’re just wonderful.”
|
d0127ccc722f89c3c5ea7eda944b17fd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20048-story.html | At Least 12 Fires Erupt Across Southland as Mercury Soars | At Least 12 Fires Erupt Across Southland as Mercury Soars
Hampered by unusually torrid temperatures, hundreds of Southern California firefighters parried numerous wind-lashed fires Saturday that destroyed or damaged at least 16 residences, blackened thousands of acres, jammed traffic and forced the evacuation of residents and livestock.
It was not clear what triggered each of the fires, which began breaking out one after another about midday Saturday as stifling, triple-digit temperatures settled in on some Southland communities, and downtown Los Angeles saw a 112-year-old heat record shattered.
By dusk, at least 12 separate fires had sprung up throughout Southern California.
By nightfall, firefighters had gained the upper hand on the majority, but not before the fires had left a costly trail of ruin.
An ornery blaze near the city of Industry kept 180 Los Angeles County firefighters at bay as it ripped through three residences, threatened nearby buildings and forced rescuers to escort about half a dozen horses from the area.
County Fire Department Battalion Chief Gene Wolf said it took 13 engines, five hand crews and three water-toting helicopters about two hours to control the fire, which started about 3 p.m and quickly ravaged a ravine thick with years-old vegetation. The blaze caused an estimated $1 million in damage, leveling two residences and two small structures, and damaging a third residence in a well-kept neighborhood known as Avocado Heights.
Jesus Rodriguez, 40, saw the smoke when it was about half a mile away and called 911. He, his five children and his wife could do nothing but watch as the crackling, hissing wall of flames advanced toward his house. By the time firefighters arrived, his four-bedroom home had been swallowed whole.
“Everything is gone, the photos of the children, important papers, everything,” said Rodriguez, picking through smoldering rubble for anything he could salvage.
“We will try to rebuild. What else can we do?”
As the flames marched toward the neighborhood, anxious residents packed cars and trailers in preparation for a quick getaway. Others grabbed garden hoses and climbed on rooftops to defend their properties.
“I never saw flames move so quickly,” said Hugh Boyd, 59, who packed the car as his grown daughter, Jamie, climbed on the roof and wet down the house, which was spared. “It scared the hell out of me.”
The fire also charred five acres of brush. No injuries were reported in Avocado Heights or in any of Saturday’s other blazes.
In Pomona, four homes were “destroyed or partially destroyed” by a brush fire near the intersection of Loma Vista and Val Vista streets, Wolf said. That blaze, which was ignited about 3:45 p.m., required 22 engine crews to rein it in, he said.
“Eucalyptus trees caught fire and helped spread it,” said county fire Inspector Greg Cleveland.
Near Temecula, a fast-moving wildfire marched out of control Saturday evening after it consumed or damaged at least three single-family houses and six motor homes, and prompted the evacuation of residents near the Pechanga Indian Reservation. Fed by warm winds of more than 20 mph, the fire also burned at least 2,500 acres and for several hours occupied more than 200 firefighters laboring under a sweltering, glistening sun.
To douse the obstinate flames, fire officials in Temecula deployed helicopters using giant scoops, dipping into the ponds of nearby golf courses.
Temecula residents Don Palmer and his girlfriend, Deb Siegmund, were at the movies when the fire that destroyed their house broke out about 1:30 p.m.
“We were watching ‘Eraser,’ and everything got erased out,” a stoic Siegmund said.
Their stucco ranch house, which Palmer built himself in 1987, sat on a hillside several hundred yards from the reservation. Returning from the movie, Palmer saw smoke coming from the tile roof of his house. “I walked up to the double French doors and I could hear the roof was on fire, but nothing was burning inside yet. I could hear the roof beginning to creak, then it caved in,” Palmer said, standing in front of the smoking remains.
The burned shell of a van and a motor home stood in Palmer’s driveway.
Neighbors told Palmer the fire started when a man began burning trash on the reservation, about 300 yards away, but fire officials had not determined the actual cause of the fire Saturday evening. Another house near Palmer’s, as well as a mobile home belonging to the man who was burning trash, were among those dwellings devastated by the fire.
Jessie Herrera, who lives on the reservation, lost her mobile home, as did her mother and four other mobile home owners she knows.
“I am just grateful that my family is still alive,” she said.
All told, 23 engines, four bulldozers and six air tankers had scrambled to the scene.
In addition to the Temecula blaze, the California Department of Forestry reported battling four other fires in Riverside County. Those destroyed 700 acres in the Banning-Beaumont area, including one structure; 40 acres and 12 abandoned sheds in Mead Valley; 300 acres and two structures in Anza, and an estimated 600 to 800 acres in Moreno Valley.
The U.S. Forest Service was handling a 400-acre fire in Bee Canyon, also in Riverside County.
In the Angeles National Forest northeast of Los Angeles, about 500 acres of brush and trees had burned in the Bichota Springs area, threatening cabins and other structures.
In Ventura County, about 150 firefighters and 18 engines worked to knock down a wildfire burning in the Topatopa mountains near Ojai. About 120 acres had burned by 8 p.m., but the blaze was moving away from homes and into Los Padres National Forest. No homes were lost. Fire officials investigating the cause of the fire noted that, earlier this spring, an arsonist set three blazes nearby.
In the Cypress Park area of Los Angeles, at least three homes were being threatened by a brush fire Saturday night and about 80 firefighters had been deployed.
Firefighters at work in L.A.'s Elysian Park area seemed to have better success than most of their counterparts.
Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles City Fire Department, said it took 135 city firefighters, aided by two Los Angeles County fire crews, two hours to extinguish a trio of brush fires that spread through nearly a dozen acres in rugged park terrain.
He said the fires were reported at 2:57 p.m. and the “key factor in gaining the upper hand was pinpoint precision water drops” from five Fire Department helicopters.
Although no buildings were damaged, Humphrey said, the “fire caused a traffic snarl on both the Golden State Freeway and the Pasadena Freeway as motorists craned their necks to watch.”
In fact, numerous area freeways backed up as the searing, dry conditions sent tens of thousands of people scurrying to area beaches for relief.
In Los Angeles, a temperature record that had stood since 1884 was broken when the mercury climbed to 98 degrees at the Civic Center. The previous high for the date was 94 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Temperatures in Burbank hit 101, said Curtis Brack, a meteorologist with WeatherData. The record there for the day is 103. Van Nuys checked in with 102 degrees, but it was not immediately known how close that was to being a record.
Meteorologists blamed the brow-soaking temperatures on a double high pressure system that positioned itself over a large portion of the Pacific Coast, trapping heat in the region like a giant furnace. Warm offshore winds blowing toward the ocean effectively shooed away cooler sea breezes, boosting temperatures as well, experts said.
Forecasters said today would bring more of the same--not exactly the sort of news the region’s weary firefighters wanted to hear. Even at those fires that were snuffed out, crews were expected to be kept busy throughout the night, doing cleanup work and ensuring that there were no flare-ups.
Times staff writers Jeff Brazil, Peter Y. Hong, Nick Green and Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.
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49e6dc27a5135eedfae430e9b391fdeb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20049-story.html | Wind-Fed Fires Break Out Across Southland | Wind-Fed Fires Break Out Across Southland
Hampered by record-breaking heat, hundreds of Southern California firefighters parried numerous wind-lashed fires Saturday that destroyed or damaged at least 15 residences, blackened hundreds of acres, jammed traffic and forced the evacuation of residents and horses.
It was not immediately clear what triggered the fires, which began breaking out one after another at midday Saturday as stifling, triple-digit temperatures settled in on some Southland communities and downtown Los Angeles saw a 112-year-old heat record shattered.
An ornery blaze near the City of Industry kept 180 Los Angeles County firefighters at bay as it ripped through five homes, threatened numerous buildings and forced rescuers to escort horses from the area.
Los Angeles County Fire Department Battalion Chief Gene Wolf said it took 13 engines, five hand crews and three water-toting helicopters several hours to control the fire, which leveled four homes and damaged a fifth in a neighborhood known as Avocado Heights. The fire also charred at least five acres of brush in the area. No injuries were reported in the fire, or in any of Saturday’s other blazes.
In Pomona, four residential structures were “destroyed or partially destroyed” by a brush fire near the intersection of Loma Vista and Val Vista streets, Wolf said. That blaze required 22 engine crews to rein it in, he said.
Near Temecula, a fast-moving wildfire marched out of control Saturday evening after it consumed or damaged six homes and prompted the evacuation of residents near the Pechanga Indian Reservation. Fed by warm, 25-mph winds, the fire also burned at least 1,250 acres and occupied more than 200 firefighters laboring under a sweltering, glistening sun.
To douse the obstinate flames, fire officials in Temecula deployed helicopters using giant scoops, dipping into the ponds of nearby golf courses. In addition, 23 engines, four bulldozers and six air tankers were scrambled to the scene.
Firefighters at work in the Elysian Park area of Los Angeles enjoyed better success.
Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles City Fire Department, said it took 135 city firefighters, aided by two Los Angeles County fire crews, two hours to extinguish a trio of brush fires that spread through nearly a dozen acres in rugged park terrain.
He said the fires were reported at 2:57 p.m. and the “key factor in gaining the upper hand was pinpoint precision water drops” from five Fire Department helicopters. That fire, too, had been fanned by steady inland winds, he said.
Although no buildings were damaged, Humphrey said, the “fire caused a traffic snarl on both the Golden State Freeway and the Pasadena Freeway as motorists craned their necks to watch.”
In fact, numerous area freeways backed up Saturday as tens of thousands of people headed to the beaches seeking relief from high temperatures.
Although crowd estimates were not immediately available, “it’s probably the most crowded day of the year,” said lifeguard Lt. Jon Moryl in Santa Monica. “Everyone knew when they woke up it was going to be hot. We’ve been busy since about 10 o’clock this morning.”
In Los Angeles, a temperature record that had stood since 1884 was broken when the temperature climbed to 98 degrees at the Civic Center. The previous high for the date was 94 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Temperatures in Burbank hit 101, said Curtis Brack, a meteorologist with WeatherData. The record there for the day is 103. Van Nuys checked in with 102 degrees, but it was not immediately known how close that was to being a record.
Meteorologists blamed the searing temperatures on a double high pressure system that positioned itself over a large portion of the Pacific Coast, trapping heat in the region like a giant oven. Unusually warm offshore winds that came from the desert and shooed away cooler sea breezes also boosted temperatures, experts said.
Forecasters said today would bring more of the same--news that was not good for the region’s weary firefighters. As it was, fire crews were expected to be kept busy throughout the night, doing cleanup work and ensuring that there were no flare-ups.
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144ce5d32832036a1b1802c046c09169 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20050-story.html | Water Rescue Training Grooms Newfoundlands’ Instincts | Water Rescue Training Grooms Newfoundlands’ Instincts
It was crunch time Saturday morning and young Monty knew it. The water rescue test was just a few months away and his job was to prove, during a pretest run-through Saturday in Oxnard, that he should be allowed to take the test, that he was lifeguard material to the bone. Unembarrassed, Monty was drooling.
His coach stood with him on the shore, patting him on the back and whispering words of encouragement: “That’s it, Monty. Want to do it, Monty? Ready to do it?!”
In a flash, coach Peggy Lange gave the signal and Monty bounded into the ocean, his powerful dog paddle propelling him elegantly toward the float he was to bring back to shore. He grabbed the floating object effortlessly and raced it to Lange.
Another challenge successfully met, Montana the 7-month-old Newfoundland puppy was headed for the big league of official Water Dog certification in September. Back on the sand, Monty, who already weighs 140 pounds, wagged his furry black tail with glee.
Using Channel Islands Harbor as a training ground, a handful of Newfoundland dog owners from the Southern California Newfoundland Club gather several times a year--as often as once a week before a test--to teach their animals what mostly comes naturally to them: water rescue.
Dogs who demonstrate mastery in the junior division test are granted the title Water Dog; those who pass the senior division are called Water Rescue Dogs. Both tests of six skills each are sanctioned by the Newfoundland Club of America.
Practice drills are run over and over for the regular group of about a dozen dogs: bringing a life ring to a swimmer calling for help, swimming a line out to stranded boaters and then towing the boat to shore, jumping from a boat to retrieve a dropped oar, picking a swimmer in distress from those not in need of aid and towing the distressed swimmer to shore, and many others. Between the in-water days, the owners work with their dogs on land.
With webbed paws, muscular bodies that can weigh more than 175 pounds and a slobbery sweetness, Newfoundlands were traditionally as useful to farmers and hunters for carting and carrying as they were to fishing crews in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, for retrieving waterlogged nets and overboard sailors.
Throughout the upper United States and Canada, the dogs continue to be used for mountain and icy water rescues because their thick double coats protect them from the cold.
Newfies, as their owners call them, are now mostly bred to be beautiful, children-loving family pets. Nana, the dog in the children’s classic “Peter Pan,” was a Landseer, or black and white, Newfoundland. They were listed as the dog to own in the 1980s spoof “The Preppie Handbook.”
But more and more owners are determined to bring their bearlike dogs back to their roots.
“Hopefully, they won’t ever find a person in real trouble,” said Alex Rose, who along with her husband, Rob Meadows, carts their two Landseers from West Hollywood to Ventura County each week for training. “But if something happens to somebody, they will have the ability to save them.”
Some of the animals don’t need much coaxing. Lange said one of her dogs, before it was trained, bounded into the ocean to “rescue” a child who was having a fine time in the water. The dog, she said, mistook the child’s laughing, yelling and flapping arms as signs of trouble.
Even puppies can be bad water playmates, nudging a perfectly capable swimmer away from the center of the pool and back to the safety of the side.
To make the most of the Newfie’s instincts, however, takes a lot of work.
From the moment the cars leave the freeway, the dogs can smell their beloved ocean water. Getting the animals to wait their turn on the beach and resist the temptation to swim every which way once they get in the water is as much of a challenge for many of the owners as teaching the rescue skills.
Rose’s dog Phinn, an 87-pound puppy, was more than happy Saturday to put a towline in his mouth and splash about. Getting him to swim the line out to her husband, however, was another story.
Rose tried pushing Phinn out while Meadows called to the happily frolicking dog. “Come on, Phinny!” he yelled to no avail. “Come to me!”
Exasperated with a trick that usually works, Rose attached Phinn to an extra-long leash and gave the end to Meadows. This time when he called the dog, Meadows gently reeled the animal in.
Some tests are particularly difficult. Dogs eventually learn to tow a boat parallel to shore when their instinct is to tow it in; they learn to swim with their handler to a given point, although their instinct is to herd the human back to the sand.
Newfie owners say they train their dogs because they enjoy doing it. But after paying as much as $3,000 for their animals, Newfie “parents” are notoriously obsessed with their pets. One member of the San Diego chapter even took his two Newfies to the Canadian province that gave them their name so the dogs could “get in touch with their roots.”
In the plus column, these lifeguard hopefuls don’t need sunscreen. No chance they’ll be babe-watching when they should be supervising swimmers. They don’t wear intimidating shades or neon nose cream. On the other hand, they tend to drool. And when they get out of the water, anyone near them gets a shower while they shake off.
“It’s worth it,” Lange said. “They’re just wonderful.”
|
9f0de694716a3c70483971f74e6a0964 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20051-story.html | Mexican Troops Search for Self-Styled New Rebel Group | Mexican Troops Search for Self-Styled New Rebel Group
Mexican army troops, helicopters and armored cars searched the wooded mountains of Mexico’s impoverished Guerrero state Saturday, tracking a well-armed group of masked men and women identifying themselves as a new rebel army seeking to overthrow the government.
Dozens of members of the group surfaced for the first time late Friday in full military uniform--most carrying AK-47 assault rifles and some with walkie-talkies--when they burst into a memorial service for 17 peasants gunned down last year by police in the village of Aguas Blancas.
The group’s sudden appearance comes as the Mexican government continues its prolonged peace talks with the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which rose up in the southernmost state of Chiapas on Jan. 1, 1994.
There have been persistent rumors and isolated press reports of armed rebel groups in Guerrero soon after the Zapatistas’ two-week shooting war left about 145 people dead in Chiapas, but none have previously been confirmed. And in a state with a history of banditry, drug trafficking and rebellion, the size of the new group’s threat--and whether members were actually rebels--remained unclear.
The group claims it has 500 members, but a brief government communique issued Friday night played down the incident at Aguas Blancas as a publicity stunt by a small band of activists. The statement said those involved would be charged with violating federal firearm laws. President Ernesto Zedillo issued no comment on the matter.
The government did seem to be taking the threat seriously, however, apparently driven by concern that a new guerrilla front could open up in a strategic state that includes the beach resorts of Acapulco.
The government statement said the army was being deployed to hunt the group, and the commander of Mexico’s 27th Military Zone--based in Acapulco--confirmed that a company of 99 soldiers, backed by helicopters and small armored cars, had been mobilized.
Late Saturday, the Interior Ministry said it knew of no further rebel activity and issued a statement declaring, “There is in the country a climate of tranquility.”
In sharp contrast to Acapulco’s tourist wealth, most of Guerrero lives in deep poverty, and popular outrage has spread through its grass roots since state police in Aguas Blancas gunned down the peasants, who were en route to an opposition demonstration on June 28, 1995.
It was at a service Friday marking one year since the massacre that the armed rebels made their debut.
“We are the Popular Revolutionary Army, and we come to offer wildflowers to the 17 campesinos who fell a year ago to the government’s bullets,” shouted one of the masked guerrillas, who identified himself as Capt. Emiliano.
During their 25-minute interruption at the ceremony, the rebels fired 17 shots into the air--one for each of the dead--and read a five-point manifesto. The document vowed to overthrow the nation’s “unpopular, undemocratic, demagogic and illegitimate” government and punish those guilty for the Aguas Blancas killings.
Known as Mexico’s White Water scandal--the translation of Aguas Blancas--the massacre was videotaped. An edited version released by state officials within hours was doctored to show guns in the dead peasants’ hands. When the unedited version surfaced earlier this year showing that the peasants were, in fact, unarmed, Zedillo personally ordered the Mexican Supreme Court to investigate the case.
The high court recommended in May that half a dozen state officials--including the ruling party governor--be charged with cover-up and obstruction of justice. But Guerrero’s state legislature cleared Gov. Ruben Figueroa of any wrongdoing earlier this month. Figueroa has taken a leave of absence.
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a041c47dc4d23c1e4f28a0eb1d00952e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20052-story.html | 2nd Hurricane in a Week Ravages Mexico’s Pacific Coast | 2nd Hurricane in a Week Ravages Mexico’s Pacific Coast
Hurricane Boris walloped Mexico’s Pacific coast with 90-mph winds on Saturday, flooding the lobbies of seafront hotels and tossing fishing boats against the seawall in this popular resort city.
A 6-year-old boy was killed when a roof collapsed in a working-class neighborhood, the Red Cross said. A second person in Acapulco was reported missing, but no details were immediately available.
Boris, the second hurricane to slam Mexico’s Pacific coast in a week, hit land about 60 miles northwest of Acapulco shortly before 10 a.m., the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The hurricane destroyed the homes of at least 100 people, downed trees and flung business signs into streets that were hubcab-deep in water.
Sheets of water blew off the ocean across the city’s seafront Costera Boulevard. Hotel employees with long-handled squeegees worked frantically to push seawater out of the open-air lobbies of luxury hotels.
No injuries were reported to tourists, who battened down in hotels, restaurants and bars, waiting until sunshine returned and they could return to the beaches.
“It just rained like crazy, and our electricity was out in the morning,” said Persha Carlston of Rochester, N.Y., in Acapulco to celebrate her 49th birthday.
Earlier last week, Hurricane Alma, with 100-mph winds, hit near the port of Ciudad Lazaro Cardenas, about 170 miles northwest of here.
It destroyed scores of flimsy houses and killed at least three people before heading back out to sea and weakening.
While causing havoc along the Pacific, the storms were welcomed in rain-starved northern Mexico, where a 4-year-old drought has decimated cattle and grazing land and been blamed for the malnutrition deaths of scores of children.
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4d71665a0f0739a82501128c2f5e4736 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20053-story.html | New Prime Minister Maps Moderate Path for Turkey | New Prime Minister Maps Moderate Path for Turkey
New Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, an Islamist governing with a pro-Western coalition ally, set out a moderate plan of action Saturday that was far from his often radical manifesto.
Erbakan charted a middle way between East and West in foreign policy, espoused free-market reforms and paid homage to the country’s secularist founder, Kemal Ataturk.
“Cooperation with both the West and with the Islamic, Central Asian and Balkan countries with which we have spiritual and historic links will be increased,” Erbakan said at a presentation of his new Cabinet.
Erbakan became the first Islamist leader of Muslim but secular Turkey on Friday in a coalition with conservative leader and former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, a U.S.-educated technocrat with close personal and political ties to the West.
Ciller is Erbakan’s deputy and foreign minister under a four-year rotating-premiership arrangement in which the Islamist is taking the top job for the first two years.
The Turkish establishment, led by the military, fears that Erbakan’s Welfare Party will impose religion on public life and break Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, from the Western camp. But there was little sign of that in the coalition accord read out by Erbakan.
The alliance’s plans to tame inflation and cut gaping deficits clearly reflect Ciller’s liberal economic slant.
In a reference to a recently signed military deal with Israel, he said he will abide by previous international agreements, “but permission will not be given for implementations that are against national security and national interests.”
The alliance was formed after nine months of political chaos following Ciller’s resignation as the head of a left-right alliance in September.
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b1823a471412e99d3e35fe5526cf3601 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20054-story.html | RWANDA : $1,000 Offered for Each American Killed | RWANDA : $1,000 Offered for Each American Killed
A Hutu rebel group has offered a $1,000 bounty for the head of every American killed in Rwanda, and $1,500 for that of U.S. Ambassador Robert Gribbin, senior Western diplomats said. U.S. Embassy officials in the capital, Kigali, confirmed the threat and said U.S. citizens in the country had been warned to take extreme care. The Western diplomats said the bounty was announced in a statement issued Thursday by a rebel group called People in Arms for the Liberation of Rwanda. The group was unheard of until earlier this month when it issued a statement saying it was fighting to topple Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government.
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be8dd72c091bf0c0d5ceb2ddefb0cde8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20055-story.html | LEBANON : Guerrillas Attack Israeli-Occupied Zone | LEBANON : Guerrillas Attack Israeli-Occupied Zone
As many as three Hezbollah fighters were killed when guerrillas attacked Israeli-backed militiamen in southern Lebanon, triggering Israeli air and artillery response, security sources said. The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said three militiamen of the Israeli-sponsored South Lebanon Army were wounded in the clashes. The combatants launched mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at daybreak in the eastern sector of a border enclave Israel occupies in the south. Israeli attack helicopters strafed retreating guerrillas.
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dc5380807f3bb1e96e3c436709608b63 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20061-story.html | NASA Says Columbia Crew Can Extend Mission, Set Record | NASA Says Columbia Crew Can Extend Mission, Set Record
NASA decided Saturday to keep the space shuttle Columbia aloft a 17th day, which would make the medical-research flight the longest in shuttle history.
Flight directors determined the U.S., French and Canadian crew had conserved enough power to lengthen the mission by one day. Columbia now is scheduled to land next Sunday.
In making the announcement, Mission Control piped the theme song to the movie “Mission: Impossible” into the shuttle’s laboratory as the seven astronauts worked.
A ground controller said: “Your mission, and we know you’ll be glad to accept it, is to extend to 17 days on orbit. Congratulations.”
The astronauts smiled, punched their fists into the air and exchanged high-fives.
They will continue testing how weightlessness is affecting their bodies. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is trying to understand these changes before sending crews to the planned international space station.
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6e5d09f74f9193289355c1cd812ffb3c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20062-story.html | Gore Calls for More Efforts to Link Schools to Internet | Gore Calls for More Efforts to Link Schools to Internet
Touting California’s high-profile “NetDay” last March, Vice President Al Gore and Education Secretary Richard W. Riley on Saturday urged parents, educators, community organizers and technology experts to launch similar volunteer efforts to bring schools onto the information superhighway.
Such access provides “a window that opens wide to a world of vast knowledge,” Gore told a conference convened here to help states plan grass-roots efforts to help connect schools to the Internet.
“But access is not enough,” Gore added. “We plan to use these new resources to revitalize classrooms--training teachers to use new technologies to stimulate their teaching and student learning.” He noted that jobs increasingly require computer skills and that workers who have such capabilities earn more money on average than those who do not.
Gore and Riley urged other states to follow California’s lead by sponsoring their own “NetDays” in October. Already, more than 30 states have scheduled such events.
In March, President Clinton joined 20,000 volunteers and 2,000 businesses in California to install about 6 million feet of wire linking classrooms in 2,600 schools to the Internet, an event that was described as a high-tech “barn-raising.”
Clinton has proposed a partnership between the federal government and the private and volunteer sectors to connect all of the nation’s schools with cyberspace. He has asked for $2 billion in federal funding over five years for the project.
The Clinton administration is pushing for free access to the information superhighway for schools. Current law gives schools and other education-related institutions the right to discounted rates, but Gore and others in the administration want a basic package of services to be provided at no cost.
Advocates say American children need exposure to cyberspace in school in order to compete effectively and to improve learning, productivity and performance.
Some critics have argued that computer access is worthless if a child cannot read, write or do math, and that education resources should not be diverted from the task of improving these basic skills.
Students across the nation currently make little use of new learning technologies, using them for only a few minutes every day, according to the Department of Education. Only 4% of schools have a computer for every five students, and only 9% of classrooms are connected to the Internet, the department said.
In schools with large numbers of low-income students, the statistics are even lower, the department said.
“Computers are the ‘new basic’ of American education, and the Internet is the blackboard of the future,” Riley said.
“I strongly believe that if we help all of our children learn the basics and become technologically literate, we will give a generation of young people the skills they need to enter this new knowledge- and information-driven economy,” he added.
Riley said the project would require a major commitment from sources beyond the federal government to meet the estimated $10 billion to $20 billion a year needed over five years for training and equipment.
“The challenge is a clarion call to local communities and states and to the private and nonprofit sectors from which leadership and initiative must come,” he said.
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66c2c183019f70add6bbd51f5e41ac4b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20063-story.html | NEW YORK : 1st Superman Comic Fetches $61,900 | NEW YORK : 1st Superman Comic Fetches $61,900
Steve Geppi knows the value of a good superhero. The owner of a major comic book company spent $61,900 for a copy of the 1938 comic in which Superman first leaped tall buildings in a single bound. Geppi outbid two other collectors at Sotheby’s sixth annual sale of comic books and comic art to win the rare Action Comics No. 1. Geppi, 46, now owns two copies of that 10-cent issue, which has a cover portraying the Man of Steel hoisting a car above his head. Several other selections from the so-called “Golden Age of Comics” also attracted heavy bidding. Over two days, buyers dropped $1.8 million.
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874283439aec3173e80b4b596b7f45ec | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20065-story.html | ILLINOIS : Rostenkowski Prison Term Begins July 22 | ILLINOIS : Rostenkowski Prison Term Begins July 22
A judge ordered former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski to report to a federal medical prison in Rochester, Minn., July 22 to begin serving a 17-month sentence for mail fraud. The Illinois Democrat, who underwent prostate surgery in May, wanted to report to a federal prison in Oxford, Wis., which is closer to his native Chicago. U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson granted him the extra time to recuperate but refused to allow him to report to Oxford. She also ruled that he will be paying for the costs of his incarceration. Rostenkowski, former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, pleaded guilty in April to two counts of mail fraud in a case in which he was accused of misusing his office and its perks for decades. He portrayed himself as a victim who did nothing different from any other member of Congress.
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0211f82c50ae3cf33c51975e4439b667 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20066-story.html | Man Mauled by Bear in Fair Condition | Man Mauled by Bear in Fair Condition
The condition of a man who was mauled after he climbed into the Manchurian brown bear enclosure at the San Diego Zoo was upgraded to fair following surgery, a hospital spokeswoman said Saturday.
The man remained at Mercy Hospital after surgery Friday to close a gash in his groin, said spokeswoman Linda Yamamoto.
He had been in serious condition but was upgraded overnight, she said. He was to undergo psychiatric evaluation, according to police.
Zoo authorities found the man sitting in a small pool in the enclosure that houses two bears. A female bear attacked him. Keepers used high-pressure hoses and fire extinguisher blasts to push and frighten the bears back into their dens.
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993737b7b124302a8283d84222885f4f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20068-story.html | Three Men Killed in Hit-and-Run Crash | Three Men Killed in Hit-and-Run Crash
Three Southern California men were killed in a hit-and-run crash early Saturday.
A Los Angeles Police Department spokesman said the accident occurred about 2:10 a.m. at Main Street and Adams Boulevard in South-Central Los Angeles when a speeding black Dodge Ram pickup ran a red light and slammed into a 1996 Volkswagen Jetta, police said.
All three people in the car were killed. The driver was identified as Thomas Leon Gibson III, 24, of Riverside. Also killed were passengers Faustino Sanchez, 24, of Los Angeles and Ernst Friedrich Allmendinger, 24, of San Bernardino.
No arrests had been made as of Saturday evening.
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babdb5fa7675727b03aa8ff418fde7db | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20069-story.html | CHESS : INTERNATIONAL NEWS | CHESS : INTERNATIONAL NEWS
The World Chess Federation (FIDE) world championship match has passed the halfway point, and Anatoly Karpov of Russia holds a 7 1/2-4 1/2 lead over challenger Gata Kamsky of New York. Karpov needs only 3 points in the final eight games to win the match.
Kamsky has played very aggressively in almost every game. This strategy has brought him two impressive wins, but it has also contributed to his five losses. So far, the match resembles the start of the first Garry Kasparov vs. Karpov match in 1984, in which the young, ambitious Kasparov fell four points behind in the first nine games. Kasparov then steadied himself with 17 consecutive draws. In a 20-game match, Kamsky does not have that option. He must keep slugging and hope for a miracle.
LOCAL NEWS
The U.S. G/60 Championship attracted a modest total of 97 competitors to Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood last weekend. Although the one-hour-per-game format allows more creativity than Action chess (30 minutes per game), it is too fast to appeal to devotees of “serious” chess (40 moves in two hours). Some G/60 struggles end with an appropriate result, but many degenerate into blitz play, where anything can happen.
Jack Peters took first prize at 7 1/2-1 1/2, a half-point ahead of GM Walter Browne, IM Anthony Saidy and masters William Longren and James Maki. Stephen Booth, Reynaldo Del Pilar and top expert Richard Mattern finished with 6 1/2-2 1/2. Del Pilar defeated Peters and drew Browne, but lost to Saidy in the final round. Even more unfortunate was Mark Duckworth, who won his first six games but lost all three on Sunday.
Class prizes went to: Jaime Salanga, Cid Sarmiento, Roger Smith and Aldrin Vidal, tied at 5 1/2-3 1/2 for best under-2000; Todd Adams, Jesus Fernandez and Donald Volkman, tied at 5-4 for best under-1800; Kevin Goroyan, Brian Havey, Iian Jablon and Terry Payne, tied at 4 1/2-4 1/2 for best under-1600; Miguel Lee and Evan Sofer, tied at 4-5 for best under-1400; and Daniel Gomez, 3 1/2-5 1/2, best unrated.
The Pacific Southwest Open, a seven-round tournament run by the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club, will be held July 4-7 at the Wyndham Hotel, 6225 W. Century Blvd. in Los Angeles. Entrants may choose a four-day schedule (two games on Thursday, Saturday and Sunday and one on Friday evening), a three-day schedule (three games Friday, two on Saturday and Sunday), or a 3 1/2-day schedule (same as four-day, except two one-hour games Thursday evening). For full information, call Randy Hough at (818) 282-7412.
The Court St. Chess Club will continue its series of four-round Action chess (30 minutes per player) tournaments on July 6 at the Carousel Mall in San Bernardino. The club hosts Action events on the first Saturday of every month. For details, call Robb McDermott at (909) 799-6487.
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09b419333838f9af49ae62c783e7715d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20070-story.html | Tiny Tim Involved in Electric Cart Incident | Tiny Tim Involved in Electric Cart Incident
Herbert Khaury should have tiptoed through the Philadelphia airport. Instead, the entertainer better known as Tiny Tim used an electric cart that ran out of control for more than 50 feet, injuring two people.
Khaury admitted to airport police that he had had two beers before seating himself in the cart Friday. The question was whether he tried to drive or was a passenger in a runaway vehicle.
As Tiny Tim, Khaury had one hit, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” sung in falsetto as he played the ukulele.
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d5f4b1ca88bbf384f48349238c7ce50d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20071-story.html | Condition of Man Mauled by Brown Bear at San Diego Zoo Improves From Serious to Fair | Condition of Man Mauled by Brown Bear at San Diego Zoo Improves From Serious to Fair
The condition of a man who was mauled after he climbed into the Manchurian brown bear enclosure at the San Diego Zoo was upgraded to fair following surgery, a hospital spokeswoman said Saturday.
The man remained at Mercy Hospital after surgery Friday to close a gash in his groin, said spokeswoman Linda Yamamoto.
He had been in serious condition but was upgraded overnight, she said. He was to undergo psychiatric evaluation, according to police.
Zoo authorities found the man sitting in a small pool in the enclosure that houses two bears. A female bear attacked him. Keepers used high-pressure hoses and fire extinguisher blasts to push and frighten the bears back into their dens.
The Manchurian brown bear is one of the larger of the Asian bear species, found primarily in China. It is not aggressive by nature but will respond to territorial threats. It prefers a diet of roots and bulbs.
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0599221ddbaff65420ef5a2961851e05 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20072-story.html | 3 Killed, 6 Hurt as Group’s Van Overturns on I-10 | 3 Killed, 6 Hurt as Group’s Van Overturns on I-10
A van carrying members of a San Bernardino youth group overturned on a freeway, killing three and injuring six, when the driver dozed off, the California Highway Patrol said.
The van was traveling about 75 mph when it went out of control Friday morning on Interstate 10 between Palm Springs and Cabazon.
“The van just started flipping,” said 17-year-old passenger Kevin Muldrew. “It was like a nightmare.”
“It was bouncing so hard every door fell open,” Muldrew said.
Two people died at the scene and a third died at the hospital.
Two passengers were hurt when they were flung 25 feet off a bridge to the bottom of a dry riverbed.
The Riverside County coroner’s office did not identify the dead Saturday, but relatives identified one man as Art Esquer, president of Canyon Lake-based Future Teens of America.
The nonprofit group offers youths a chance to earn money by selling candy. Candy bars littered the crash scene.
The driver, John Herreres, 25, of Lake Elsinore told CHP officers that he dozed off and awoke as the van was heading toward a center divider. Herreres lost control as he swerved from the divider and then overcorrected, CHP Officer Randy Dopp said.
Amanda Jones, 15, was listed in serious condition at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs. Eric Ward, 17, was listed in fair condition, a nursing supervisor said.
Jones suffered a broken pelvis and a concussion. Ward had a broken leg, fractured ribs and a collapsed lung.
A 19-year-old man was listed in fair condition.
Three others, whom the hospital did not identify, were treated and released.
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d2698d28e5c6cc76c2a3cf1747e18ac2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-20147-story.html | Rockets’ Red Glare | Rockets’ Red Glare
Costa Mesa is one of five O.C. cities that permit the sale of fireworks. The $450 licenses go to nonprofit agencies only. Buena Park, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Stanton also allow sales, but displays will fill the night skies Thursday from locations throughout the county.
Sales Boom
Number of fireworks sales permits issued in Costa Mesa:
1993: 30
1994: 37
1995: 39
1996: 42
Source: City of Costa Mesa
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32e92a5db6479b1d4947c372d1ceec50 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-22588-story.html | Medfly Blues: She was the only Mediterranean... | Medfly Blues: She was the only Mediterranean...
Medfly Blues: She was the only Mediterranean fruit fly found in the Los Angeles Basin since 1994. . . . But her timing was terrible. The fertile but unmated female landed in a Burbank trap the same day officials lifted California’s last medfly quarantine, declaring victory. New traps are quickly being set. . . . If another is caught, new eradication measures will be likely. (B1)
Valley on Wry: The Valley was mentioned along with some pretty big players on the world stage this week when news of its secession movement appeared in The Economist. . . . “To the secessionist ranks of the Quebecois and the Chechens, now add the Valley people,” the esteemed British news weekly observed. Apparently judging Valley separatists as determined as the others, it wryly predicted: “Even if this effort at secession fails, the Valley may make other attempts. If at first you don’t secede, try again.”
Good Citizens: Camp Max Strauss, the Jewish Big Brothers’ youth facility in Glendale, has a new a baseball field, basketball and volleyball courts and horseshoe arenas. . . . And what’s more, the 2.2-acre sports complex has “responsible” landscaping. The San Fernando Valley Chapter of the California Landscape Contractors Assn. coordinated the volunteer project. At Saturday’s ribbon cutting, chapter President George Pondella touted its drought-tolerant plants and water-budgeting sprinkler controllers.
80 and Counting: A grim milestone was reached in a takeover robbery at the Northridge Citibank Saturday. . . . It was the 80th bank robbery this year in the Valley. There were 45 Valley bank robberies in all of last year. (B3)
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0465e8c43b96bd93c3b5aa184632da59 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-mn-22589-story.html | Skeptics of Unusual Surgery Undergo a Change of Heart | Skeptics of Unusual Surgery Undergo a Change of Heart
When Dr. Randas Batista spoke at a Woodland Hills heart meeting last weekend, cardiologists clustered excitedly around him afterward, practically begging a photographer to take a picture of them with him.
But two years earlier, when the Brazilian surgeon had attempted to talk about his results at a much larger heart meeting in Boston, he had been shouted down and nearly ejected forcibly.
“They went wild,” Batista said. “They wanted to kill me.”
The source of their wrath was an unusual surgical procedure Batista had developed at his “jungle hospital” to treat people with enlarged hearts.
Contravening the conventional wisdom of heart surgeons, who preach that healthy heart tissue should be preserved at all costs, Batista cuts out large segments of the oversized heart and “throws them to the cats,” leaving behind a smaller heart that is able to pump blood more efficiently.
Batista has performed this “heart reduction” surgery on more than 350 patients, and the results, witnesses say, have been remarkable. Invalid patients who were on death’s doorstep have returned to work and are leading normal lives that they thought were forever beyond their reach.
The dramatic turnaround from rejection to burgeoning acceptance has happened in the last year, as more than two dozen heart surgeons from the United States and Europe have trekked to Batista’s tiny hospital to learn the technique and adapt it for their own practices. Skeptical at first, they have become proponents of a procedure that has the potential for treating tens of thousands of patients whose hearts are failing.
“This is a revolutionary change in surgical thinking,” said Dr. Ara G. Tilkian, medical director of cardiology at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills.
The technique “is going to change heart surgery in the same way that coronary artery bypass did 20 years ago,” added Dr. William J. Logue of Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, who has performed the surgery 11 times in Brazil and four here. “It’s a wonderful feeling to see patients who couldn’t walk return to a normal life.”
Proponents and critics alike, however, agree that it is still a highly experimental procedure that needs to be subjected to clinical trials before it is widely accepted.
“There is little or no documentation about his outcomes, only anecdotal data,” said Dr. Nicholas T. Kouchoukos of the Washington University School of Medicine, treasurer of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons. “It may be something worthwhile or it may be a total bust. We simply don’t have enough information yet.”
Surgeons are extremely interested in it, however, because there are so many patients who could benefit. Every year, cardiologists diagnose about 400,000 cases of heart failure in the United States, where it is the leading cause of death.
About 70,000 of those victims have enlarged hearts and are potential candidates for heart transplants, which until now has been the only way to treat the problem. But only about 2,300 actually receive a new heart each year, because there are so few donors.
Batista’s surgery could serve as an alternative to transplants for most of those patients, experts say, or perhaps as a bridge to improve the patient’s chances of survival until a new heart can be found.
The idea that an important new surgical technique could come from an unknown surgeon at the 200-bed Hospital Angelina Caron in tiny Campina Grande do Sul was unthinkable to most physicians.
A tall 49-year-old with broad shoulders and big hands, Batista is an engaging speaker who quickly won over his audience at the recent talk--despite the rejections he has received in the past.
Batista is a self-proclaimed heart junkie. “From the time I was a little boy, I’ve always dissected every heart I could get my hands on,” he said in a recent interview.
It was natural then that he became a heart surgeon. He graduated from medical school in Curitiba, Brazil, and spent 12 years in the United States, Canada and Europe in surgical training before returning to Campina Grande do Sul, a suburban village about 15 miles outside Curitiba.
His epiphany came one day when he saw a solitary water buffalo lying on its back in the forest. “That was unusual,” he said, “because water buffaloes are never alone and they don’t lie on their backs.
Approaching it, he noticed half of a coral snake sticking out from under the larger animal. “Obviously, it had bitten and killed the water buffalo, but had run the wrong way before the buffalo toppled on it.”
Dissecting both hearts, he found that, except for size, they were identical. “If you blow up a picture of the snake heart and place it beside one of the buffalo heart, you can’t tell the difference,” he said.
Further research indicated that this is true throughout the animal kingdom. No matter what size an animal is, the ratio of its heart’s mass to its volume remains constant. That means a bigger heart requires much more muscle to pump blood effectively. If the radius of a heart doubles, eight times as much muscle is required to pump blood effectively.
But when hearts become enlarged, whether it is from Chagas’ disease, a parasitic disease common in South America, or congestive heart disease, they deviate from that universal constant. They get dramatically bigger, but the amount of muscle doesn’t increase proportionately.
As a result, the organs can’t pump blood efficiently. Blood accumulates in the lungs, impairing breathing. It collects in the feet, leaving them oversized, black and cold. The blood doesn’t pump through the kidneys, so wastes aren’t cleansed.
Most victims are confined to their beds, unable to participate in normal activities. Half die within six months.
Because he treats many patients who have Chagas’ disease, Batista desperately needed a way to make diseased hearts work more efficiently. Experimenting with goats, he found that he could remove a triangular wedge from the wall of the left ventricle to make it smaller and thereby increase the force with which it expelled blood.
“I’m not God; I can’t give it more muscle. But I can make it smaller,” Batista said.
The operation, which takes as little as an hour, is performed without stopping the heart. Blood that leaks out during the surgery is siphoned off, cleaned and reinfused into the patient.
In a typical example of the procedure shown on video at the Warner Center meeting, Batista removed nearly a pound of heart tissue, the equivalent of a normal heart, from a heart that had grown to nearly 2 1/2 pounds in size. Sewn back together, the heart resumed pumping vigorously; the patient breathed easier and his feet rapidly became pink and healthy.
Most patients resume walking in as little as two days after the surgery.
From 1984 to 1995, Batista operated on 304 patients ranging in age from 8 months to 76 years. There were 32 deaths in surgery or in the hospital during this period, and perhaps as many in the six months following the surgery. But Batista said this is an extremely high-risk population that included mostly terminal patients.
“These people are already under a death sentence,” he said. “Half will be dead within six months, and all of them are confined to their beds with no way to help their families. This is their only hope.”
He said he doesn’t know how many died later because he doesn’t have the staff and there are no public health workers to monitor the patients after they return to their distant homes. Because most of his patients have received the procedure only during the last two years, there are few long-term survivors yet. But his first patient, a young girl who underwent the surgery in 1984, still survives.
Among the survivors, the repaired hearts are, on average, pumping three or four times as much blood through the body as they did before the surgery. Most have experienced major improvements in quality of life, and many have returned to work.
Most American surgeons believe the death rate could be much lower in this country, where the personnel and equipment are superior. “I know we should be able to do much better,” Logue said.
Batista’s first attempts to speak about his work and publish his results were met with rejection and derision because they flouted conventional wisdom. Journals sent his papers back. Meeting organizers would not even let him present posters. He has recently published some results, but only in obscure journals.
Frustrated, he prepared a short video on lung reduction surgery and tacked his heart research to the end. He played the tape while commenting on a paper at a session on lung volume reduction, eliciting a thoroughly negative response.
Now that other surgeons have visited his operating room and learned the procedure, however, there is growing excitement about the procedure.
Logue, who speaks Spanish, overheard two other South American physicians at a heart meeting discussing the technique and went to Campina Grande to see for himself.
He has since performed the surgery twice with Dr. Pablo Subiate at Holy Cross Medical Center and twice, on an emergency basis, at Good Samaritan. Surgical procedures, unlike new drugs, do not require approval from the Food and Drug Administration, so Logue and others need only to receive approval from their institutional review committees, who monitor human experiments.
One of their first patients was 62-year-old Theodore Sandoval of San Fernando, who had been told by his cardiologist that he had only a week to live when he underwent the surgery Feb. 15. Sandoval had been forced to retire from his job as a driver for an auto parts company early this year because of congestive heart failure. He was continually short of breath, had dizzy spells, and his weight had dropped from 145 to 104.
Today, he is “functioning well,” according to his wife, Darvi, and his weight, now 112, is climbing. “There are days when I feel much better than I did before the surgery and days when I don’t,” he said.
Batista also described the surgery to Dr. Tomas A. Salerno of Buffalo General Hospital in New York, who agreed to visit his hospital during a planned trip to Brazil. He was greatly impressed.
“It’s an incredible idea, and it is so simple that someone should have thought of it before,” Salerno said. “Of course, in hindsight, most good ideas are simple.”
Salerno and his colleagues have performed the surgery on 12 terminal patients at Buffalo this year. Seven of them are still alive and five have improved significantly.
The operation has also been performed at Yale University Medical Center, the Cleveland Clinic and several sites in Europe.
One of the success stories is James Absalom, 65, a retired grocery store manager from Youngstown, Ohio. Absalom was bedridden awaiting a heart transplant, when surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic suggested the radical procedure. He was able to go home 10 days after the May 23 operation.
“I’m feeling great. I really am,” Absalom said recently. “I’m looking forward to getting out and doing things that I haven’t done for years,” such as bowling and attending his grandchildren’s baseball games.
“The first question most doctors have is how much to take out,” Batista said. That has to be learned by experience, but the idea is to take out as much as possible to restore the heart to near its normal size.
“Several Brazilian surgeons who tried it called me to tell me that their patients weren’t recovering as well as mine,” he said. “When I examined them [the patients], it was clear that they hadn’t taken out nearly enough tissue, and I had to do the surgery over again. The patients got better.”
Critics and proponents agree that more studies of the technique are necessary, and clinical trials are being arranged in the United States and England.
“What we have here is truly, by and large, anecdotal reports” of the type that are often disproved when controlled trials are conducted, said Dr. Robert Michler of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. Michler is impressed enough by others’ results to consider performing the surgery himself, however.
“From my perspective, it’s still an untested idea,” said Dr. John O’Connell of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, who is a member of the American Heart Assn.'s advisory council on heart failure and transplants. “But there have been some promising early results. If this procedure pans out, there will be substantial benefit for people who need heart replacement.”
Both sides also agree that little is known about the long-term benefits and risks because most of Batista’s patients have received the surgery in the last two years. But even if the benefit proves to last no more than a year or two, that is a significant improvement, Batista said, because the patients are freed from their beds.
“Quality of life is everything,” he said.
Who are the prime candidates for the surgery? According to Logue, the best candidates are those with myocarditis, an enlarged heart caused by a bacterial or viral infection. Other conditions that would benefit include chronic mitral valve insufficiency, end-stage aortic valve insufficiency and cardiomyopathy of unknown causes.
“Eventually, it might be used to treat all types of end-stage congestive heart disease,” he said.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Smaller Is Better
Surgically reducing the size of the left ventricle, the main pumping chamber, on an oversized heart lets it contract more effectively and pump more forcefully.
****
How It Works
Reducing the diameter of a heart to a size more appropriate to its mass reduces tension on the walls and allows muscles to expel more blood.
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2faaca58709af554f1f05b90745df9f0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19941-story.html | The Reel America | The Reel America
Perhaps it was no accident that the movies began just as the American frontier was pronounced closed. According to historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose 1893 “Frontier Thesis” changed the face of American historiography, it was on the rugged frontier where Americans shaped their character and defined their values, where, indeed, they became Americans. Once that raw physical space was domesticated, the function of character-building seemed to pass to another frontier: the imaginative frontier of the movies.
The accompanying survey asking respondents to name films that express the American character, however, shows it is far easier to define character in theory than in practice. For one thing, national character is a slippery idea. Is there such a thing as “Americanness”? Even if they answered yes, respondents didn’t always clarify whether the character they were defining was an ideal or a reality, and if they regarded movies as mirrors reflecting our character in our daily lives or as dreams revealing our character as we imagine it.
This is the issue stoking the current cultural war over the movies begun by Dan Quayle and continued recently by Bob Dole. On one side are the “realists,” who believe movies reflect the way we really are, warts and all. On the other are the “idealists,” who believe movies purvey the way we like to think we are.
Though there isn’t necessarily a correlation between either view and a particular political orientation, conservatives tend to lament the realist position--because realism in Hollywood’s hands so often takes the form of criticizing American values or showing how short we fall; while liberals tend to lament the idealist position because idealism in Hollywood’s hands so often takes the form of glossing over what liberals see as the awful truth.
That said, what the survey suggests is that Hollywood has provided plenty of ammunition for both arsenals. Idealists can adduce movies like “Hoosiers,” about a ragamuffin high school basketball team, from a shoebox-sized town in Indiana, that pulls together to win the state championship. “It’s America,” crows Hugh Hewitt, host of PBS’s “Searching for God.” Or idealists can summon “High Noon,” which “beautifully exemplifies the classic American confrontation” between a heroic individual and a craven community (Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.).
Realists, for their part, can adduce “Taxi Driver” which, in novelist Carlos Fuentes’ interpretation, “announces that U.S. civilization can break down in the dark alleys of urban neurosis;” and in Michael Woo’s depicts how Americans’ love of freedom has “degenerated into alienation, urban anomie and even pathological violence.” Or “Dr. Strangelove,” which novelist Christopher Buckley says shows the “Reductio ad absurdum of the modern American military mentality.” Or Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” about police corruption in a Mexican border town. “We don’t like messiness or loose ends,” artist John Baldessari says. Or they can choose D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” one of America’s seminal movies though one that locates the country’s spiritual birth in white Southern resistance to freed black slaves.
If you scanned all these selections for key words, you would find the so-called traditional values well represented: independence, innocence, optimism, can-do spirit, honor and, above all, heroic individualism. But you would also find racism, corruption, ambivalence, greed, overweening ambition and violence. Not exactly a matched set of characteristics.
Yet, it is in the contradictory nature of our movies that we may discover who we are: a nation caught between definitions. In choosing “The Fountainhead” and “The Towering Inferno,” Terence Riley, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, takes just this approach. The first film, about an incorruptible architect who demolishes his own building rather than see it compromised, and the second, about a building that demolishes itself because of corporate greed and technological arrogance, are thesis and antithesis in America--"two irreconcilable sources of American cultural values, the individualism of Jeffersonian personal liberty and the idea of the shared destiny of Puritan theology.”
One can find other pairs here: “Taxi Driver” with “High Noon” contrasting misguided messianism with duty; “Deep Throat” with “Pretty Woman” contrasting sexual debasement with the fantasy of sexual redemption; “Singin’ in the Rain” with “Raging Bull” contrasting the exuberance of American energy with the explosive fury of that energy; “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” with “A Face in the Crowd” or “The Manchurian Candidate” contrasting populism with the potential for demagoguery in a democracy.
Rather than cancel out one another, each term in these pairs exists in a symbiosis with the other, just as America itself exists within a symbiosis of its nightmares and dreams, its fears and hopes. We all believe in possibility. As Atlantic Monthly national correspondent Nicholas Lemann writes, “The essential American thing is the preoccupation with individual opportunity.”
But at the same time we are also aware of the distance between ourselves and the success we desire--if only because so many movies have provided us a vision of glamour, power, love and self-realization that we know we cannot possibly achieve. Taken as an aggregate, our films provide a continuing negotiation between the real and the ideal, between our lives and our dreams of transcendence, between our own shortcomings and aspirations and the shortcomings and aspirations of the country. Indeed, the idea of negotiation itself may be more American than any of the particular negotiating positions.
A case in point is Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” This is the movie most frequently cited in the survey--presumably because Capra’s naive faith in America seems so quintessential a square in the American quilt. But for all its civic religion, with Jimmy Stewart gulping at the Lincoln Memorial, “Mr. Smith” is deeply cynical--the government is corrupt, the people are cattle and only the superhuman efforts of one man can shame them into action.
Similarly, Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” also cited here by several respondents, seems, in political analyst E.J. Dionne’s words, to have “everything”: “American ideals about love, family life, children, wartime heroism, localism, community-mindedness, loyalty, friendship and, most broadly, just who we think the good guys are.” But “Life,” which takes a man through his personal history and then shows how his community would have been different if he had never been born, is, at base, a bleak, noirish vision of small-town American life where every strophe is followed by a catastrophe, every dream dashed by reality.
If the tension between nightmare and dream is the fundamental feature of our movies, it may be because the movies themselves are genetically suspended between photographic reality and the manipulation of reality into something much larger, much better--an endowment that is nowhere more evident than in American films. It may be surprising, then, that only one respondent cited style as the defining characteristic of American character. “American movies look big,” wrote Richard Rodriguez. He goes on to connect the sheer size of American movies to an assertion of American ego. The movies literally make us bigger than life.
But while style may be an integral component of American character, it is not unrelated to content. The size, the bombast, the movement of our most popular movies are all in the service of an attempt to make reality conform to the dream even when, in the process, they often demonstrate that the feat is impossible. Whether realist or idealist, in almost none of these films do we find men or women in repose. Instead, protagonists as different as Forrest Gump, Jake LaMotta, Rhett Butler and Ratzo Rizzo, Clyde Barrow and Cool Hand Luke are all racing along the imaginative frontier, negotiating between themselves and their ambitions, trying to discover who they are and who we are and hoping against hope they’ll find what character really is. It’s the quest that’s so American.
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2f47d921ca7789fd4ada714bc7ad1c76 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19942-story.html | Psst, Wanna Read Your FBI File? Check It Out! | Psst, Wanna Read Your FBI File? Check It Out!
The work of two low-level gumshoes in the White House who got background files on more than 400 employees of past administrations has mushroomed into a major embarrassment for President Bill Clinton. What is still unclear is whether it was all a “bureaucratic snafu,” as the president maintains, or something more sinister, conjuring up images of President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies lists and the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover.
With all the brouhaha and congressional hearings, remarkably little is known, even inside the Beltway, about FBI files--who has one, what they contain, how they are (normally) protected, even what they look like.
Most of the files are right there in the fortress-like J. Edgar Hoover building on Pennsylvania Avenue, under lock and key. Physically, the files today have a stiff white cover, nine by 11 1/2 inches, and the secrets they hold are bound in place by ordinary metal fasteners. The files flip open at the top. Though many of the FBI’s records are computerized, the background files are not. The bureau is an old-fashioned place.
On the cover of each file are the words, “FBI HQ Investigative and Administrative Files.” A border of thick, black diagonal lines runs around the cover. Some particularly sensitive files bear a classification stamp, such as “SECRET.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has two main types of files. First, it has records of background investigations of applicants for employment at, or access to, the White House, and for jobs at a few federal agencies, such as the Justice Department, the FBI itself and the federal courts. Most federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the CIA, perform their own background checks. Second, the FBI has files of criminal investigations, including counterintelligence investigations of suspected terrorists or spies.
Typically, for a background investigation of a person up for a job on the White House staff, FBI special agents interview friends, neighbors and associates, and check the bureau’s own files to see if the person has a criminal record. According to FBI officials, the agents are alert, among other matters, for any contacts the person might have with foreigners, “details of applicant’s personal life that could be used to coerce the applicant,” any “psychological counseling,” “alcohol abuse, or illegal drug use,” membership in restricted organizations or “lifestyle” issues that might “compromise” them.
The files, in other words, contain gossip and raw data. The reports in the files are summarized and sent to the White House--including any derogatory information. On new investigations--but not, apparently, the old files sent to the Clinton staff--if something bad turns up, the files that go to the White House also contain the complete texts of the FBI interviews, sometimes with the source blacked out. Files, therefore, often contain unevaluated information. But the FBI insists any adverse information is checked further and “resolved whenever possible . . . to assure that the nominee’s character is not impugned by spurious information, rumor or innuendo.”
Those are precisely the morsels that were the coin of Hoover’s realm, the great source of much of his power. Hoover, who presided over the bureau for 48 years until his death in 1972, was, in the words of William C. Sullivan, one of his sycophantic subordinates and later a critic, “a master blackmailer.”
As Sullivan once explained, “The moment he would get something on a senator he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that . . . by chance [the FBI] happened to come up with this data on your daughter . . . . But don’t have any concern, no one will ever learn about it. Well, Jesus, what does that tell the senator? From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.”
Hoover’s name popped up often in the taped conversations that Nixon had with White House counsel John Dean during Watergate. “He has a file on everybody,” Nixon told Dean.
Indeed, the files were one reason that no president dared fire Hoover, though some would have liked to. In 1962, when the FBI chief learned that President John F. Kennedy had been consorting with Judith Campbell Exner, who was also a friend of mobsters, he could hardly wait to break the good news to the president. Hoover went to the White House with Exner’s file and had lunch with Kennedy, who cut off all contact with Exner in a phone call that afternoon.
Sullivan claimed there was a similar episode involving Nixon. In his book, “The Bureau,” Sullivan said an FBI agent in Hong Kong reported that Nixon, while a lawyer in private practice, and before he was elected president, spent time with “a Chinese girl named Marianna Liu.” It was the sort of report that made Hoover salivate.
“ ‘I’ll handle this one,’ Hoover said gleefully,” according to Sullivan. The FBI director, Sullivan said, took the report to Nixon and pledged never to speak of it. “It was one of his [Hoover’s] favorite speeches, one he gave often to politicians,” Sullivan wrote.
The bureau had other files for what, in retrospect, seem rather ominous purposes. For 31 years, beginning in 1939, the FBI maintained a Security Index containing the names of 26,000 Americans to be arrested in an emergency or in wartime--including thousands listed for “priority apprehension.” The Internal Security Act of 1950 authorized detention camps for suspected citizens. Six camps were actually built, but never used.
Hoover kept files on Hollywood stars, prominent writers, antiwar protesters, black activists and others. He even spied on the Supreme Court. Said one note in the FBI file on Justice William O. Douglas, “Douglas, of course, is crazy and is not in too good health.”
As it turns out, quite a few FBI files are not that secret, after all. In a small, windowless room at FBI headquarters there is a public reading room where visitors, by appointment, may read FBI files on individuals ranging from Marilyn Monroe to John Wayne, from Elvis to Einstein. All of these files were released under the Freedom of Information Act.
A file in the reading room on Lucille Ball, for example, says “Ball was registered as a Communist voter.” The file on Marilyn Monroe says, “Norman Mailer . . . an eccentric but well-known author” suggests in his biography of the actress that “ ‘right-wing’ FBI and CIA agents had a ‘huge motivation’ to murder Marilyn Monroe in order to embarrass the Kennedy family.” The Elvis Presley file notes that the rock star’s “gyrations” were the subject of public criticism. The singer has asked to meet Hoover. Elvis, the file says, “is certainly not the type of individual whom the Director would wish to meet. It is noted at the present time he is wearing his hair down to his shoulders and indulges in the wearing of all sorts of exotic dress.” The bureau got that right.
Among the other once-secret files available for perusal at FBI headquarters are those on Tokyo Rose, John Dillinger, Amelia Earhart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marcus Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Rita Hayworth, Ernest Hemingway, Adolf Hitler, Alger Hiss, Janis Joplin, Lee Harvey Oswald, Liberace, Pablo Picasso--and Hoover himself.
Contrary to popular belief, most people do not have an FBI file. A shoe salesman in San Jose or a farmer in Dubuque, unless he robs a bank in his spare time, will almost certainly not have an FBI file. But anyone is entitled to see his or her own FBI file by writing to the bureau under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts. Be prepared for a long wait, however. At the moment, the bureau has a backlog of 15,259 requests, including some from people curious to view their own files. But as the White House has discovered, reading FBI files may not always be such a great idea.
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f5628e15f079662a9985ef0e686fb24f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19943-story.html | The Deadly Rage Against Riyadh’s Repressive Regime | The Deadly Rage Against Riyadh’s Repressive Regime
The shocking terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia on an apartment complex housing U.S. Air Force personnel and their families suggests that America may have identified the wrong enemy in the Persian Gulf area. Since the Gulf War, the United States has followed a policy of dual containment against Iraq and Iran--deemed the key threats to regional security. But the real threat might be the rotting social structure of Saudi Arabia itself, exacerbated by a massive U.S. military presence.
Tuesday’s blast may begin the process of dispelling illusions. This is the second attack on U.S. facilities in Saudi Arabia in the past 12 months. On Nov. 13, 1995, a bomb exploded outside a U.S. training center in Riyadh, killing five Americans and two others and wounding 60 people. For the previous 60 years, such an attack was unimaginable, but it is only since the Gulf War that U.S. armed forces have been permanently stationed on Saudi soil.
In retrospect, the Gulf War, which seemed to entrench the U.S. position in the region, may have ultimately weakened it. An Islamist opposition has arisen in Saudi Arabia--partly in opposition to the U.S. military presence, which the Pentagon claims is necessary to carry out the policy of containing Iraq and Iran. Ironically, Washington’s strong desire to punish Iraq and Iran may be contributing to the undermining of political stability in America’s chief ally in the region.
The goal of the Islamist opposition appears to be the creation of a modern puritanical theocracy. In September 1992, 100 clergy members issued a document calling for removal of all government restrictions on Islamic clerics; the participation of the clergy in all government agencies, and the establishment of a supreme religious constitutional court to purify all laws. Other provisions called for censorship of foreign journalists and support of Muslim causes.
From London, an exile group, the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights in Saudi Arabia, has been bombarding the kingdom with faxes on such issues as government corruption and abuses of human rights, both of which are massive. As the director of the committee has stated, “Khomeini’s was a cassette revolution, ours will be a fax revolution.”
Of course, it is difficult to know for certain what is happening in Saudi Arabia, which lacks a free press, bans political parties and suppresses free assembly. The kingdom suppresses any criticism of the political status quo. It may be that those opposed to the U.S. presence are only a small minority. But because of its repressive system, the kingdom and its key allies, like the United States, would probably not know that major political change was at hand until too late.
In addition to the stationing of U.S. troops, regarded by many in Saudi Arabia as “infidels” on sacred soil, popular reaction to the cost of the Gulf War seems to be fueling discontent. Washington was in no position to pay for the Gulf War, so it imposed most of the costs on its key allies--with Saudi Arabia leading the list. It has been estimated that the war cost the kingdom $70 billion.
Meanwhile, oil prices, at nearly $40 a barrel in the early 1980s, fell to roughly $15 in 1995. A rapidly growing population must not only be fed and housed but pacified with lavish salaries and benefits--which in the past kept Saudi Arabia’s growing middle class politically quiescent. No longer. Perhaps 60% of the Saudi population is under 21. These young people are better educated than in the past but cannot receive the benefits enjoyed by their fathers because of fiscal constraints--yet the princes continue to live in luxury.
A shaken President Bill Clinton informed the nation soon after news of the bombing reached Washington that the perpetrators of this vicious act would be punished and he promised to elevate the issue of terrorism into the key point at the meeting of the G-7 nations in France. But the truth is that the leaders of the industrialized democracies are virtually powerless to deal with the problem of terrorism in the Middle East.
Military power is largely useless to combat terrorism unless it can be established that a state sponsored the act. When Iraq allegedly sent agents to Kuwait to attempt to assassinate former President George Bush, Washington ordered military retaliation against Baghdad. But there is apparently no evidence of state involvement in the current act of terrorism. Indeed, it would not be in the interests of Iraq or Iran to claim credit if either was responsible; it would be a sounder strategy to offer support that could not be traced. In this case, a private group, the Legion of the Martyr Abdullah al-Husaifi, among others, has claimed credit. It is unknown to U.S. intelligence, so its location has not been established.
Does this mean there is nothing Washington can do to lower the risk of terrorism in Saudi Arabia? Not at all. But the steps that can be taken will not provide the kind of satisfaction that retaliation could bring.
--Fighting terrorism in this case requires careful police work and greater intelligence efforts. Both are more effectively done by states in the area. Outside powers can assist, but not dominate. In this regard, an important step was taken when Washington encouraged a summit at Sharm-el-Sheik to rally behind the Israeli government, battered by terrorist attacks in the streets of Tel Aviv. States that have been enemies for decades met to discuss a common problem of terrorism. The fighting in Lebanon and the change in the government in Israel have temporarily halted that promising effort. Though it is unrealistic to expect cooperation among the area’s police and intelligence forces to proceed unless the peace process also proceeds, that kind of cooperation could be one of the desirable fruits of peace.
--The United States can attempt to shrink the target it presents in Saudi Arabia. There are now 35,000 Americans in Saudi Arabia, including 5,000 military personnel--a number of whom are women, whose roles in the U.S. military offend Islamic sensibilities. Are all of these people necessary? Can Americans do the job they have been sent to do while being less exposed? Are there correctable aspects of U.S. behavior that give particular offense to religious forces in the country? The main reason, of course, that there are so many U.S. military personnel in the kingdom is the Clinton administration’s policy of dual containment against both Iran and Iraq--a policy supported by no other major power. A number of states in the region, such as Qatar and Oman, want to open up a dialogue with Tehran. Should we continue to oppose that?
--Washington could ease Riyadh’s economic burden by ceasing to load down the Saudis with arms they will never use but which help the U.S. balance of payments. Washington has sold the kingdom more than $30 billion in armaments in recent years. Meanwhile, the Saudi government has a hard time finding the money to pay farmers the subsidies they expect. One must recall the fate of the shah, who made massive arms purchases from America at the same time he was strapped for funds to meet the wage demands of his oil workers.
--The United States could encourage a carefully controlled program of greater openness in Saudi Arabia. Experience in other areas of the world suggests that, while it is impossible to stamp out terrorism, it may be possible to dry it up.
Through negotiations on Northern Ireland, for example, the British and Irish governments are attempting to create a climate that will make it hard for IRA terrorists to continue to enjoy support from the general population. The Northern Irish reaction to the recent bombing in Manchester suggests this tactic may be making some headway. In the Middle East, Israel is fitfully embarked on a similar course. Through recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel attempted to dry up support for the terrorists and, notwithstanding terrible setbacks, it was making progress as the Israeli elections neared.
Saudi Arabia has made modest efforts at reform. In 1995, it underwent the most significant political shake-up in more than a decade--15 of 28 ministers were replaced with younger people. But the key ministries of defense, security and foreign affairs remained in senior hands; and a few years earlier, the king had ruled against the creation of an elective assembly as “un-Islamic and unsuitable.”
Terrorism is the inhumane weapon of the weak. Both our friends and our foes have used it. Israel adopted it as a tactic against the British, the Palestinians against the Israelis, the Vietnamese against the Americans and the Afghans against the Russians. The powerful, however, usually hold most of the cards. Terrorism can inflict pain--but it seldom can prevail. The powerful must answer this challenge by having the mental discipline to examine dispassionately the sources of the outrage fueling terrorist acts, by displaying the political courage to manage the emotional public reaction to terrorist acts and by mounting careful intelligence work to catch as many of the perpetrators as possible. Massive retaliation is usually counterproductive.
Precisely because terrorism is so advantageous to the weak, they will not give it up. We will learn this in the weeks ahead. Regrettably, terrorism is a phenomenon that the powerful can manage--but not eliminate.
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3b0483568b24438417b1a8b71dbe16cb | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19944-story.html | A Watershed Moment Is Here for the Public Schools of L.A. | A Watershed Moment Is Here for the Public Schools of L.A.
It’s a time of change for the Los Angeles Unified School District, as new leaders come into office in both the school board and the teachers union this week and the district prepares to pick its fourth superintendent in a decade. These important developments occur at a time when many parents are frustrated. Increasing numbers of children are falling below grade level. More employers are questioning the quality of LAUSD graduates. Public support for the schools is declining. All these sorry trends will continue without dramatic change in the board, the unions and, particularly, the district’s unresponsive bureaucracy.
Turning around the nation’s second-largest district requires that the board pick a visionary and resilient superintendent who demands higher student achievement and refuses to accept failure without consequence in the classroom. Teachers, administrators and students must be held to performance standards. Staff members, including top managers, must be vigorously evaluated.
The person who replaces the retiring Sid Thompson also should push for the spread of LEARN. This school reform--the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now--is beginning to show results on most campuses where it has been implemented, greatly encouraging both teachers and parents.
Clearly a commitment to results must begin with the selection of the next superintendent. First of all, the district should undertake a nationwide search for the best person available. Anything short of that would further erode the school board’s credibility and ultimately would undercut the person selected.
There also can be no appearance of a political deal. Insiders should have no lock on this job. The position of superintendent is one that must go to the man or woman best qualified to change a massive bureaucracy with an eye toward what is best for the students. What is best for the students is not necessarily what is best for the perpetuation of union or bureaucracy interests. The next superintendent must be driven by a zeal to bring the very best people to the key administrative jobs in the district and resist pressures to fill jobs on the basis of cliques or ethnic connections.
Outsiders should not be ruled out because the last outsider, Leonard Britton, quit not long after he was brought in nearly a decade ago after a successful stint in Miami. Britton faced a major disadvantage in that the Los Angeles school board wouldn’t let him choose his own management team. He was forced to depend on resentful competitors who had been passed over for the top job. The lesson from that debacle is clear: The district’s institutional culture won’t change if only the superintendent is changed. The next superintendent needs the latitude to select his or her own management staff.
The new board president is expected to be elected Monday. The position rotates, and Jeff Horton, a former teacher, is next in line to assume the helm from the hard-working Mark Slavkin. To encourage progress, the next president will need to hold the board and district employees accountable. He or she must challenge racial politics and disruptive micro-managing by some board members who pay more attention to a single principal than to the larger principles of education.
No reform can take place in the school district without the cooperation of United Teachers-Los Angeles. The powerful teachers union elects the majority of school board members and heavily influences how teachers relate to their jobs and each other.
The successor to the capable Helen Bernstein is Day Higuchi. The union’s primary mission is protecting teachers, but if UTLA can improve the quality of teaching, obviously the quality of overall education in the district will improve. All unions--including the teachers’, principals’ and support employees'--need to convince members of the importance of performance and accountability standards with teeth.
A new superintendent, a new board president and a new union leader can accomplish great change from the top down if this triumvirate truly collaborates to improve the schools. The right leadership will boost student achievement and restore public confidence. Bad leadership could worsen the exodus of schoolchildren and prompt even more voters to embrace either a breakup of the huge district or vouchers that would drain public education in Los Angeles. There are fine schools, inspiring teachers and good administrators in the LAUSD. But not enough. The status quo is indefensible. There are fine schools, inspiring teachers and good administrators in the LAUSD. But not enough. The status quo is indefensible.
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92ef3092605acedf625529bd074cdb29 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19945-story.html | Old, Alone and ‘Found Down’ | Old, Alone and ‘Found Down’
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week documents a growing problem for which the medical community has “no treatment plans”: an alarmingly high death rate in patients who were “found down"--unable to get up or even reach a telephone. Some patients had been on the floor for several days, and many of the deaths, said the study’s authors, were due to dehydration, hypothermia or infection.
An increasingly familiar sight in emergency rooms is the stuporous, dehydrated patient brought in by ambulance; “found at home” often is the only information immediately available. Most turn out to be people who lived alone.
Although our individualist culture is a primary cause, much can be done. In the short-term, doctors and the public need to be educated about small electronic devices that enable solitary elderly people to contact relatives, social workers or paramedics in an emergency. Early communication is crucial: Mortality in the study was 67% for those estimated to have been helpless for more than 72 hours but only 12% for those helpless for less than one hour.
The best way of protecting the elderly from the dangers of isolation is obvious: offering them more opportunities to live in communities that provide safety as well as independence. Today, many solitary senior citizens find themselves with only two stark options: living alone in an unsupervised setting or living with others in an expensive nursing home.
Fortunately, the marketplace has begun crafting a third option. Driven by the aging of America’s population (one in 25 Americans was 65 or older in 1900, one in eight is today, and one in six will be in 2020), corporations have begun investing in “assisted-living facilities” that offer supervision as well as group activities. But while these facilities are often marketed slickly--one calls itself a “cruise ship without water"--their quality is uneven.
Such facilities will never be able to compare with naturally evolving elderly communities like the lively Shalom Retirement Hotel that Lithuanian refugees from the Holocaust built three decades ago in Hollywood. But at the very least they should combine supervision with opportunity, enabling senior citizens, as the Roman poet Horace put it many centuries ago, to “pass an old age lacking neither honor nor the lyre.”
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df4e70b481f638c56f348ac221c6ead1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19946-story.html | President Clinton | President Clinton
* If the old cliche holds true--every knock is a boost--President Clinton is a shoo-in for reelection.
STAN M. FULLER
Hacienda Heights
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7cb27ac314dacbc0520e149b09082d82 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19948-story.html | Day Higuchi | Day Higuchi
* Thank you for your interview with Day Higuchi (Opinion, June 23).
This man should not be president of United Teachers-Los Angeles. He should be governor of California. Higuchi understands the commitment that must be made to education in this state.
Taxpayers cannot afford to use “bureaucratic inefficiency” as an excuse to underfund the state’s school systems. That course is selfish and shortsighted. If people think that merely ensuring educational quality for their own children (or grandchildren) by insulation from problem schools is a solution, they are wrong. California’s future success and prosperity are utterly dependent on the educational level of all its citizens.
WILLIAM LEIDENTHAL
Los Angeles
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5e6d40a3966966967f1c97c2af970714 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19949-story.html | Facing Illness With Friends | Facing Illness With Friends
* Re “Friends in Sickness and Health,” June 19:
My husband and I, with the help of our siblings and teenage children, manage the care of our elderly parents and in-laws, who suffer from various combinations of dementia, emphysema, stroke and chronic heart failure. It’s quite an effort, even with all our family members involved.
Sick, middle-aged single adults may get the help they need from friends now, when most of their contemporaries are healthy, but what about 30 years from now, when their friends are as infirm as they are? Who is going to take care of the huge number of frail elderly folks who have no children to rely on? Their friends’ children? Not likely.
MAGGIE PARKHURST
Glendale
* I know others in situations like Stephanie Dupin and Crystal Griffiths who may not have such exceptional friends, but who are still receiving extraordinary TLC. In my position as director of an entirely volunteer and nonprofit hospice, I hear stories every week about errands being run, Labradors walked, marigolds planted just outside a patient’s window, life stories recorded for posterity--all by trained hospice volunteers. The emotional and practical support offered by these remarkable people can only be compared to what the best of friends and family will give.
I write this letter to give our volunteers some deserved recognition, but also to encourage any readers coping on their own with the effects of serious or terminal illness to give us a call. There is no charge for our services.
WENDY EDWARDS
Executive Director
Hospice of Pasadena
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db8d114c1bb20c174c6d47705501045e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19950-story.html | Razing St. Vibiana’s and L.A. Landmarks | Razing St. Vibiana’s and L.A. Landmarks
* As evidenced by your June 25 article (“St. Vibiana’s Could Be Razed Next Month”), the archdiocesan juggernaut inexorably steamrolls toward achievement of its goal: complete demolition of St. Vibiana’s, whatever the means. Mayor Richard Riordan, the City Council and many other impressionable local politicians appear to be willing pawns in Cardinal Roger Mahony’s scheme. No doubt they will all count on the cardinal’s support for their next pet project.
With all the problems beleaguering the American Catholic Church these days, it is surprising that Pope John Paul II would permit one of its most visible leaders, Mahony, to behave as though he were some sort of underworld boss, threatening and muscling to get his way. As a Catholic and a lawyer I find the cardinal’s conduct most unfortunate. To me, the new cathedral (it will be built, and right where the cardinal wants it!) will serve as a monument to the cardinal’s capacity for worldly behavior. Has the “grace of God” ever looked so sordid?
THOMAS F. McNAMARA
Los Angeles
* “Conservationists vs. Progress” is a newsworthy subject now, and has been since I came to Los Angeles in 1948. Here in Los Angeles, the conservationists lose too many times for the good of the city. Our downtown place of worship is the latest subject.
I found a sure proof of our continuing losses to “progress,” while surfing the Net for California historic landmarks for a book I’m co-writing. When a historic structure has federal protection via national historic landmark status, progress can be thwarted while conservationists circle their wagons at some leisure.
I shouldn’t have been surprised (and wasn’t) to find that we had four national historic landmarks in Los Angeles and San Francisco has 17. I shouldn’t have been surprised (and wasn’t) that none of our oldest buildings--such as the now-famous, 19th-century church, older missions, buildings on Olvera Street, pottery manufacturing sites, aircraft facilities and landing fields, historic cemeteries, motion picture studios and architectural works by our best architects--are on the list. Until the peristyle end of the Coliseum was given national landmark status, we almost lost it to progress, too.
I am the conservation engineer for Watts Towers, one of the four national historic landmarks in L.A. My wife, Arloa, did the successful write-up for the Park Service, which gained this status for the towers, located at 1765 E. 107th St.
BUD GOLDSTONE
Beverly Hills
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461c496a556d3e7ee5001e97b261a740 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19951-story.html | Freedom for a Kingpin of Thugs | Freedom for a Kingpin of Thugs
Due to an inexplicable and unwise settlement, Emmanuel Constant, Haiti’s most infamous thug, has been freed from a U.S. prison. Constant was the founder and director of FRAPH, the largest paramilitary group in Haiti. He is accused in the Caribbean nation of having supervised the murder, torture and rape of thousands there.
Constant was arrested in the United States after the State Department declared him a threat to U.S. interests. Now that he has been released from a federal prison in Maryland, he might travel to raise funds among Haitian exiles worldwide or perhaps even return surreptitiously to Haiti to try to dislodge that country’s fragile democracy.
Constant gained notoriety in the United States when he led demonstrations at the Port-au-Prince docks that prevented the U.S. Navy from landing there in 1993.
Once President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was restored to power, Constant was ordered to appear in a Haitian court to respond to charges of human rights abuse. He fled to New York City, where he was arrested in May 1995.
His imprisonment was a blessing for the Haitian people but short-lived. U.S. officials say he was freed two weeks ago so Washington could avoid litigating a suit brought by his lawyers challenging the constitutionality of the statute under which he was held. The State Department should have fought against the release. Some human rights groups contend that the federal government released Constant to avoid the embarrassment that might have resulted from a trial. The ghost of his prior connections to the Central Intelligence Agency haunted Washington, they claim.
Constant still is required to report to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Washington should give Haiti another chance by biting the bullet, arresting him again and bringing him to trial under the International Convention on Torture. Another option would be to arrest him and deport him to Haiti, where he is a wanted man. Constant is a dangerous individual who should not be walking the streets of Haiti or the United States.
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94e8c71381b3aaf146a8675e58af9ed1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19952-story.html | City Hall Lobbyists | City Hall Lobbyists
* When I read “A Privilege Only Money Can Buy” (The Spin, June 23), one of those little cartoon lightbulbs lit up over my head. Which lobbyist should I contact or to which councilperson should I make a “contribution” to get my Silverlake-area street cleaned, as it hasn’t been swept in over two months? Despite my many calls to the street cleaning department, all they can tell me is that my street has no regular cleaning schedule.
I mistakenly thought my property taxes covered such services, but I’ll be willing to make a “donation” if you’ll point me in the right direction.
JOHN SHABOO
Los Angeles
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5d9019dcbff2b464cf71e655bf72df86 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19954-story.html | Recycling to China | Recycling to China
* “China Engages in Trash Talking Over Garbage” (June 16) did a good job highlighting the importance of the growing trade of recyclable paper to China. However, the article states that California is seeking to reduce the waste stream because of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requirements. In reality the California Integrated Waste Management Board is spearheading this effort because of state legislation authored in 1989 by then-Assemblyman Byron Sher of Palo Alto and signed into law by then-Gov. George Deukmejian.
Working with local governments, the waste industry, business and the public, the Waste Board has helped California achieve its first milestone goal of reducing waste going to landfills by 25% by 1995. Although getting to 50% by 2000 will be a challenge, we are confident that with the continued cooperation of Californians to reduce unnecessary packaging, reuse materials, recycle and buy recycled products, we can meet this goal.
DANIEL G. PENNINGTON
Chairman, Integrated Waste
Management Board
Sacramento
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7ef8337f0b69b87ceb1ddfdf1ec26aa4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19955-story.html | Computer Theft | Computer Theft
* Re “When Computers Ditch School,” editorial, June 18:
Thank you for calling attention to the problem of computer theft, which faces not just LAUSD, but all our schools. After thieves used hacksaws to rip our computers out of their supposedly “secured housings,” we were informed by police that nothing will stop these thefts; we can only hope to slow the perpetrators down.
Computers are rarely bought without lock-down devices; however, your editorial badly underestimated the cost of fully securing dilapidated bungalows with steel grills, doors, door frames, etc., much less with sophisticated alarm systems! We would all like to see every classroom involved in technology, but the fact is, the money is not there to support our efforts. If you had to choose between buying three computers or securing one classroom, which would you choose?
PAULA MAHAN
Venice
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a3ff6e2d97be8d276dc61a1111513122 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-19973-story.html | The Reel America | The Reel America
The Opinion Survey
The movies have long offered a refracted view of America. When Federico Fellini won his honorary Oscar, he explained the phenomenon: “I come from a country, and I belong to a generation, for which America and the movies were almost the same thing.”
If you were explaining the American character to a foriegner, what three movies best sum up the national persona, and why?
A selection of responses:
*
John Baldessari, artist.
“Hud"--Ambivalence--having your cake and eating it, too. The film features these oppositions: 1) Looking out for No. 1 versus doing the right thing; 2) Protecting nature versus making a quick buck, and 3) The business of America is business versus the business of America is the public good.
“The Hustler"--The desire to win and what that means and how it blinds us to other values.
“Touch of Evil"--Our sense of black and white morality and how the end justifies the means. We don’t like messiness or loose ends. Recent pertinent example: the Simpson trial. Our xenophobia-- if you act white and/or look white you are above suspicion. Otherwise you are up to no good.
*
Roger Wilkins, history professor at George Mason University.
“The Birth of a Nation"--It is like the United States: an ingenious technical and artistic virtuosity, yet the magnitude of the achievement is undermined by racism and cultural arrogance. That is a fundamental story of America--dazzling achievements undermined by a lack of humanity which flows from the cultural arrogance that made our forefathers think they had the right to move Native Americans out of the way. It is a tragic mixture.
“Casablanca"--Rick is our American male fantasy: tough and adroit socially on the outside and at the intersection of legitimate commerce, shady activities and the world of spies. But underneath he’s a sentimentalist--a good guy. People’s fantasies are revealing. That’s the America we told ourselves we were when we fought World War II. It’s who we thought we were up until the Vietnam War, which destroyed many of our illusions.
“Pretty Woman"--There is an American fantasy that says everyone is innocent--even prostitutes have hearts of gold and can be redeemed with the application of enough American money and charm. The defining moment of the movie was when the character played by Julia Roberts is in the bathroom. She wants privacy and Richard Gere’s character thinks something serious is going on; so he goes in and there she is--flossing her teeth. So we know she is not, deep down, a bad person. With Gere’s money and charm everything turns out swell and the pretty woman and handsome man will live happily ever after.
*
Wendy Wasserstein, Pulitzer prize winning playwright whose works include “The Heidi Chronicles” and “The Sisters Rosensweig.”
“Singin’ in the Rain"--Because of its exuberance and its love of the movies.
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"--Because it has to do with nobility of character and Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur as the smart woman reporter. But mostly it has to do with nobility and honor and individual rights.
“Pulp Fiction"--Because it has to do with the sexiness of violence.
*
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian novelist and 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature. His most recent book in English is “Of Love and Other Demons.”
“Safety Last” (Harold Lloyd)--An intrinsic part of the American character is its idealistic liberalism. The Founding Fathers introduced it in the nation’s governing institutions and it persists in the universities, in the arts and sciences and in the philanthropic spirit of the individual. It is a historic irony that this idealism has not found its way into the American political reality. I find this spirit in the films of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.
“The Loved One"--Americans believe happiness is attainable and anyone can achieve it. This belief allows them to feel happy without realizing how much unhappiness there is in the world. It has even made them unafraid of death because they know that once they’re in the casket they will be more beautiful and better dressed than when they were alive. There they are, all pink, with lots of makeup on their faces.
“The Gunfighter"--It’s about a gunfighter (Gregory Peck) who wants to retire but can’t, because all the new, up-and-coming gunfighters want him as a prize. It is the same with Americans. They cannot retire into isolationism. They are condemned to police the world. It is their fate, their destiny.
*
Isaac Mizrahi, fashion designer.
“2001: A Space Odyssey"--This movie perfectly represents America’s terror of the present and its belief in the mystery, promise and resolve of the future.
“Peyton Place” and “Return to Peyton Place"--The visual aspect of these movies offers us a glimpse of America at its happiest and most prosperous, in contrast with the script which portrays the misery of a typically provincial attitude that continually threatens to represent our national thinking.
“Sullivan’s Travels"--It’s the perfect story of how Americans deal with success: The guilt they feel over getting something for nothing or how nothing is worth having unless a struggle is involved. Somehow, Preston Sturges was stating that flatly and making fun of the statement at the same time.
*
Terence Riley, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art.
There are two movies that offer great insight into the conflicting cultural currents in American culture: “The Towering Inferno"and “The Fountainhead.” Both feature the tallest building in the world; however, they convey completely different messages. The former is a Puritan morality tale that emphasizes the sin of pride and its inevitable punishment. As with all such stories, the entire community is seen as at risk for the sins of the individual. Technology is seen as an evil tool for overcoming the natural order.
In “The Fountainhead,” the opposite values are celebrated. The individual is vested with such authority that the architect is excused for destroying a public project because it deviated from his design. The value of the individual in “The Fountainhead” must be protected from society--as opposed to the message of “The Towering Inferno,” where society must be protected from uncontrolled urges of the individual. Technology is seen as heroic, enabling the architect to achieve dominance over nature.
Ultimately, the films point to the two irreconcilable sources of American cultural values, the individualism of Jeffersonian personal liberty and the idea of shared destiny of Puritan theology.
*
S.I. Newhouse, chairman of Conde Nast Publications.
“White Heat,” “Night of the Hunter” and"D.O.A."--The first is about American business; the second is about religion and child abuse, and the third about energy in America.
Andrea Dworkin, essayist and novelist. Her books include “Pornography: Men Possessing Women” and “Intercourse.”
“Salvador"--Because it shows the ruthlessness of U.S. foreign policy with its slick topping of human-rights idealism. The restless edginess of James Wood’s character is an American prototype--I haven’t seen this temperament elsewhere. “Salvador’s” violence--in the way it is made as well as the story it tells--is also echt-America.
“Deep Throat"--Because it shows the callousness of the pornographic sexuality that has predominated in this country over the last two decades, the idea that sticking anything anywhere in a woman is fun, and what has become a characteristic contempt for both sexuality and women’s bodies.
“The Accused"--Because the film is an act of resistance to the American male’s enthusiasm for both rape and voyeurism. And because Jodie Foster’s luminous, unsentimental performance conveys a new truth: American women are not quiescent in the face of male violence anymore, and we especially reject rape as a male right. This film would not have been made in France.
*
Richard Rodriguez, essayist, author of “Days of Obligation.”
What makes American movies so “American” is not their stories but their look. American movies look big--that’s what the entire world knows, from Lima to Budapest. With each decade, Hollywood has expanded and expanded the boundaries of fantasy--from talkies to THX (“The Audience is Listening”); from the silver screen to VistaVision; from the early movie stars to the superstars.
We Americans are people who believe in the individual--the “I.” Movies have given us images that confirm our belief in ourselves. On the screen, Marlene Dietrich’s lips were 20 feet wide. Mickey Rooney had a smile as big as a Cadillac. On the screen the “I” was triumphant. Fred Astaire could dance across the skyline of Manhattan. The Edith Head chiffon gown was light as a cloud.
Don’t waste your time trying to remember the title of the John Ford-John Wayne Western--leave that to the UCLA cinema students. It was the entire genre of cowboy movies--the good and the bad--that gave Americans our sense of our own land, its epic size and sky. Without the movies we would have a lesser sense of ourselves.
Cinemascope. Todd-AO. 3-D. Cinerama. The bigger the screen the more American the movie. The best American movies--the ones we cherish--were the ones many saw in old movie palaces, before they were torn down and replaced by a cineplex. Worse, now, is watching a movie on a VCR. Arnold Schwarzenegger has shrunk!
But the other night, watching Tom Cruise in a crowded movie theater, you could feel the excitement. Who cared that the movie’s plot was confused? There it was, nonetheless--an American movie. Big screen. Big sound. And Cruise with a dimple deep as a well.
*
Farai Chideya, Generation X political analyst for CNN and author of “Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans.”
The first two films reveal our fears and paranoias, one shows America as we fear it will be, one as we wish it would be:
“Bladerunner” --This film’s vision of Los Angeles as a future dystopia--chaotic, polluted, overrun by technology, nonwhites and foreigners--reveals Americans’ deep anxieties that our culture is disintegrating. America from its inception has been an amalgam of cultures. One of our not-so-hidden fears has been that the constituent parts will swallow the whole--particularly that nonwhites will engulf “Euro-American” culture.
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner"--This film, with Sidney Poitier as the--gasp!--black beau of a white couple’s daughter, was progressive for its time. It’s not surprising that Poitier’s character was not merely man but superman--a hyper-polite, cheerful, comfortingly square guy who just happened to be black. This provides a useful look at our racial fantasy. Americans will tolerate human flaws and foibles among members of their own racial groups--but we expect perfection of others. The very American message in this film is: If there must be people of other races and cultures, please let them be as polite as possible.
“Superstar"--Unlike the other two, this film is fairly straightforward in its exploration of American neuroses. “Superstar” is a 40-minute biography of Karen Carpenter--filmed almost exclusively using Barbie dolls. Because the Mattel Corp. was not pleased that their best-selling toy was being used to explore anorexia, the film, by Todd Haynes (director of “Safe” and “Poison”) is rarely shown. “Superstar” has camp moments, but it is a heart-wrenching and emotionally intense exploration of the pressures of modern womanhood--career, family, marriage and, yes, eating disorders. It says a lot about the Barbie-doll perfection that the American media demands of women, and the realities that underlie those images.
*
Hugh Hewitt, host of PBS’s “Searching for God in America” and KCET’s “Life & Times.”
“Cool Hand Luke"--Paul Newman has set the mark for so long, he deserves top billing. Plus, this movie dented the language--"What we have here . . . ."--a considerable achievement.
“Hoosiers"--It happened. It’s thrilling. It’s America.
“Caddyshack"--Sure, no one in France will understand this. But at least three quarters of American men over 30 and under 50 understand the line, “I’ve got that going for me.”
Francis Fitzgerald, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.”
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"--Because it shows how American political instincts are different from European instincts. It’s a great exposition of what many have called the American civil religion. The Washington monument as church and the Senate rail as altar rail. Yet the denizens are hopelessly corrupt and can only be saved by an innocent from the backwoods. So Washington becomes the sacred ground that must be resanctified by this naive youth. This was the story Oliver L. North told so brilliantly, and every presidential candidate runs against corruption in Washington and presents himself as a non-politician. “Thelma and Louise"--It’s a road movie. Anyone can drop out, disappear and become an outlaw--civilization is that thin. European “road movies” tend to be pilgrimages--they are going to some place, as in “The Canterbury Tales.” The American road movies are stories of escape and going toward the unknown. The point is never the goal but what happens along the way. In those movies there is no tragedy of separation and no desire to return.
The tragedy of separation is in the immigrant experience--when people of tight-knit families and strong cultures lose their children to America. There are many great movies on this theme, but I choose “Mississippi Masala” because it is up to date. It shows this continuing story of the immigrant family losing their children to the world--and being Asian immigrants in the South makes it an original setting.
*
Danny Goldberg, president, Mercury Records.
“The Oxbow Incident"--Because it shows that the majority is not always morally right, hence the Bill of Rights.
“Woodstock"--Because there was a beauty to part of the ‘60s that people still care about, regardless of what pundits say.
“Searching For Bobby Fischer"--It shows that winning is important but not the only important thing in American dreams.
*
Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff.
“To Kill a Mockingbird"--This interpretation of Harper Lee’s novel of the segregated South reflects the fundamental American belief in the ability of the individual--one man--to make a difference. Atticus Finch, much like the Gary Cooper character in “High Noon” and the characters played by Gary Cooper and James Stewart in some of Frank Capra’s great movies, has the courage to stand up for right against wrong--and wins.
“The Grapes of Wrath"--John Ford’s classic film of the great John Steinbeck novel shows the indomitable spirit of Americans in search of the American dream--a better life for themselves and their children--as it reflects the traditional American sympathy with the underdog in society.
“American Graffiti"--George Lucas recreates small-town California in the early 1960s, where a young man’s ambivalence about flying East to attend college reflects the classic American conflict between home and the world beyond. Like “The Wizard of Oz’s” Dorothy before him, the Ron Howard character decides home is where he belongs.
*
Stephen L. Carter, Yale Law School professor and author of “The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law & Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion.”
“Pollyanna"--The ability of one compulsively optimistic little girl to change an entire town’s attitude about itself captures the American belief in the future as good and the individual as important. The key change in the story is that of Karl Malden, who plays the pastor of the local church. His preaching, in true American fashion, slips from pseudo-Calvinistic hellfire to a vague let’s-feel-good-about-ourselves Protestantism. (But note the strong anti-socialism theme: Pollyanna’s rich aunt, who owns everything in the town, gets to keep all her property but learns the virtues of noblesse oblige. Americans have never hated the rich, just envied them, and wanted them to be nice--Michael Jordan, not Dennis Rodman.)
“Unforgiven"--This portrays perfectly the American ambivalence about power. Clint Eastwood’s murderous gunslinger comes out of retirement to avenge a terrible crime, but of course, once called to arms, he cannot be controlled and a blood bath ensues. We like to see the guilty punished, but we are scared of the power that can do it, so we wrap that power in a tight web of constitutional restrictions. Thus we pretend to control the natural violence of the sovereign. When the violence slips through--the Rodney G. King beating or, a generation ago, the shootings at Kent State--we are capable of enormous outrage. But we are still generally glad that the capacity for violence is there--in case we need it.
“Star Wars"--This is the American film of the modern age. Good conquers Evil. Good is a handful of adventurers. Evil is a vast hierarchy. Good is plucky and individualistic. Evil is bureaucratic and arrogant. Good just wants to be free. Evil’s motive is a bit unclear--but isn’t it always? (Was world domination the only motive of communism?) Good does not want to fight, but Evil forces the battle. (Compare the famous line from Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address.) Good looks like us. (Well, in the first movie, the good guys, at least the humans, were all white. But this was fixed.) Evil wears masks. And, one more thing: Good always shoots better than Evil. That, too, is part of the American credo.
*
Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist and essayist. His new book is “A New Time for Mexico.”
“Singin’ in the Rain"--The supremely optimistic U.S. film. Almost Cartesian: I sing and dance, therefore I am.
“Citizen Kane"--But innocence can be lost and the American dream of happiness and success can founder in the warehouses of Xanadu.
“Taxi Driver"--Which announces that U.S. civilization can break down in the dark alleys of urban neurosis.
*
Angela E. Oh, head of the Korean American Family Service Center.
One movie that explains our American character is “Do the Right Thing.” This movie does a good job of raising the issue of race relations and the collage of our national persona. The perspectives of working-class whites, blacks and newcomers--all struggling with their common humanity and deep differences--speaks to what I believe is the greatest challenge facing this nation today. If we fail in meeting this challenge, we face a bleak future.
*
Christopher Buckley, novelist and editor of Forbes FYI. His most recent book is “Thank You for Smoking.”
“Smile"--A satirical gem of Americana. Bruce Dern plays a glad-handling, slap-on-the-back car salesman who runs the Young American Miss pageant in Santa Rosa, Calif. Barbara Feldon (remember her, from “Get Smart”?) plays a frigid former Young American Miss who’s so tight-assed that she drives her husband to drink and to shoot her (in the arm). What could be more splashily vulgar and American than a beauty pageant? And more innocent? It manages to display our worst and best tendencies simultaneously. And on this movie’s small stage both are deliciously amplified.
“High Noon"--The most distinctive hero in the American imagination is--as Henry A. Kissinger once unfortunately pointed out to Oriana Fallaci--the man who rides into town alone, saves the town and rides off alone. Gary Cooper, as the marshall who must save the town single-handedly, is also quintessentially laconic, a very American trait. He doesn’t have much to say--unlike the knights of old, who could be positively garrulous. But he saves the town and gets the blond (who ironically, in real life, went on to marry a European prince). And forget all that bull about how the movie’s subtext is the struggle of the blacklisted American screenwriter--screenwriter Carl Foreman was one of the Hollywood 10. The bad guys are not the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“Dr. Strangelove"--The mad U.S. Air Force general, Gen. Jack D. Ripper, played to lunatic perfection by Sterling Hayden, and his Pentagon superior, Gen. Buck Turgeson, played with brilliance by George C. Scott, (who went on to the starring role in “Patton,” my fourth choice) are the reductio ad absurdum of the modern American military mentality: One unleashes the Apocalypse and the other tries to turn it into a silk purse. Scott’s portrayal in particular captures the can-do attitude that has saved the world twice this century--and also brought it to the brink of annihilation.
*
Alexis Smith, artist.
“The Manchurian Candidate"--It’s a political movie where life imitates art all the time. And there is its checkered history: It presaged the Kennedy assassination and was pulled off the market.
The movie itself exemplifies both the best and the worst of the American character. In the best category, there is selflessness and heroism, patriotism and the redemptive power of love. In the worst, there is paranoia, greed, overweening ambition and a willingness to sacrifice the most sacred things for gain.
The other two are categories rather than actual movies. The road movie, of which there are a million examples, is a peculiarly American idea of leaving the old life behind, finding a new life and having all these adventures on the road that are significant and life-changing.
The other type that is incredibly critical is the cowboy movie. Probably my favorite--in that it is the most melodramatic--is “Stagecoach.” Cowboys and the American West are an incredible archetype for Americans but it colors the way people around the world see us. In Germany they have clubs where they study and re-create the culture of American Indians.
Both of these types of movies have the idea that you can change your circumstances based on what you do yourself.
*
John P. Sears, former political advisor to Richard M. Nixon and campaign manager to Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980.
“Gone With the Wind"--All things are transient except the indomitability of the human spirit.
‘Picnic"--It is admirable to follow your emotions, to take a chance, even though reason would dictate a different course.
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest"--Americans have a special love for the incorrigible. It makes communal activity difficult but saves us from being a country controlled by elitists.
*
Stanley Crouch, essayist and author of “The All American Skin Game.”
In the three films I picked, we see the effects and the expression of democratic power and democratic corruption within the context of the overwhelming American reality, which is miscegenation--both literal and cultural. None is a propaganda film. The meanings and mysteries of our humanity come before any manifesto.
First, John Ford’s “The Searchers,” a post-Civil War tale of the winning of the West, the demon of racism and the heroic ability to finally accept the complex mixtures of our identity--no matter how tragic the circumstances that create it. To understand one aspect of the soul of America is to appreciate how well Ford directs Vera Miles to display pioneer pluck, charm and earthiness, then sear away our innocence with her blood-thirsty racism. This masterwork also features John Wayne, one of our greatest actors, at the top of his craft.
“Touch of Evil,” an Orson Welles phenomenon, is about miscegenation, the entwining of juvenile delinquency, drugs and organized crime, as well as the corrupt measures a representative of the law will use to get his man. The great director’s understanding of this nation’s many intricacies are observed in how class and culture come together. The bloated cop and the Mexican criminal, the Jew and the Mexican investigator, the delicate technology of a shocking and brutal act, are all examples of his astute command.
In “City of Hope,” writer, director and actor John Sayles wove an epic picture of an Eastern city where labor, class, race, law, and politics are mixed so brilliantly that our faith in American aesthetic possibility is redeemed. Few post-Vietnam films are this good at capturing the layers of heartbreak, sleaze, nobility, disillusionment, romance, frustration and hope while moving us through ethnic groups filled with different kinds of individuals.
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Sammy Lee, Olympic gold medal winner in 1948 and 1952 for diving, and only Asian-American to be awarded the James E. Sullivan Award (1953) for outstanding amateur athlete.
“Forrest Gump"--Because our country is more involved in helping the disabled than other countries. We started the Special Olympics for kids who have mental and physical disabilities.
“The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938)--Because this best shows what we believe: that good always overcomes evil.
“Mr. Holland’s Opus"--Because you always hear of someone who wants to do something great--such as make a perfect 10 when you dive. This movie shows that even though you have those dreams, as a coach or teacher you extend that dream to others and help them to be the best they can be. Unfortunately, the American way of life gives less money to teachers and more money to the worst basketball coach in the country.
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James Truman, former editor of Details, now editorial director of Conde Nast.
“Rebel Without a Cause"--Youth as a cultural industry.
“Raging Bull"--Violence as a national art form.
“Risky Business"--The free market as fin-de-siecle theology.
*
Henry G. Cisneros, secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
“Stand and Deliver” explains our faith in education as the great equalizer that can change lives and make the American Dream accessible to all. The dedicated teacher who turns marginal students into top math achievers shows why we believe that no one’s life should be written off as hopeless--no matter what the record of past failures.
“Apollo 13" gives insights into the powerful American determination to succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds, and illustrates how extraordinary efforts, teamwork and courage have enabled our people to achieve so much.
“Shenandoah” illustrates the determination of Americans to risk their lives and sacrifice everything to stand up for their beliefs.
*
E.J. Dionne, author of “They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era” and “Why Americans Hate Politics.”
OK, maybe I’m sentimental, but you have to start with “It’s a Wonderful Life.” This movie has everything: American ideals about love, family life, children, wartime heroism, localism, community mindedness, loyalty, friendship and, most broadly, just who we think the good guys are. It also explains why Americans simultaneously love capitalism and are so critical of it. George Bailey is the good capitalist who gives of himself and helps create the Jeffersonian ideal of lots of small property owners. Mr. Potter is the bad capitalist who cares only about money; is happy to have people live in slums, and would sell his city’s soul to the gambling and liquor interests. We want our marketplace to embody Bailey’s values, not Potter’s.
Then, “All Through the Night,” my favorite Humphrey Bogart film. Bogart plays an organized crime leader in New York called Gloves Donahue. Gloves enlists in the anti-Nazi cause when the man who bakes his favorite cheesecake, a German immigrant, is killed after he stops playing ball with the Nazi underground. Bogart unites all of organized crime in New York against the Nazis, telling one of his enemies: “If these guys take over, you won’t know what a closed town is. They’ll tell you what time to wake up in the morning and what time to go to bed at night.”
But my favorite line--and the finest comment on party loyalty in all of American film--is at the end. Bogart finally catches the Nazi ring leader and has a gun on him. The Nazi, trying to win favor, says: “But Mr. Donahue, you should be with us, you’re a man of action. You don’t believe in democracy.”
Gloves looks coolly down his gun and replies: “Look, I may not have been a model citizen. But I’ve been a registered Democrat all my life.” The Democrats have never fully recovered from the moment that Bogart went to God.
Finally, “The Graduate,” as offering the best clues to the whys, wherefores and weirdness of ‘60s alienation. Sure, “Plastics” is a cliche. But it wasn’t before Dustin Hoffman did this movie. I also like his reply on having a half-baked idea. “Oh no,” he said, “It’s fully baked.” So we all claim.
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, historian, whose works include “The Age of Jackson” and “The Cycles of American History.”
“High Noon"--because it beautifully exemplifies the classic American confrontation: an individual standing up for what he believes against a craven and corrupt community.
“Glory"--because it shows with vivid artistry how whites and blacks can fight together for freedom.
“Nashville"--because it wonderfully reveals the crazed underside and incipient hysteria of American life.
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Marian Wright Edelman, president of Children’s Defense Fund.
“Glory,” “Eyes on the Prize,” and “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman"--Because its time to correct the misinformation about the 1960s and to revisit the lessons of our national history.”
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Michael Woo, former City Council member and businessman.
“It Happened One Night"--This movie expresses Americans’ native optimism within the context of the Great Depression. Far from presenting an attack on the inequities of a class-based society--indeed, even tycoons are shown as lovable--it offers hope that class divisions separating the rich (Claudette Colbert as a spoiled rich girl) from the working classes (Clark Gable as an irreverent newspaper reporter) can be overcome by the ingenuity, pluckiness, native wits and friendliness of individuals. It doesn’t matter who your parents are or how rich--people can find ways to get along, even in difficult situations. Americans have long cherished this assumption underlying their optimistic belief in the possibility of change for the better.
“Taxi Driver"--This is a pungent refutation of the optimism that characterized the period from the New Deal through the postwar economic expansion. Martin Scorsese shows that something about the American Dream is rotten. While “It Happened One Night” celebrates the joys of mobility, “Taxi Driver” argues that the sense of freedom that accompanies mobility has degenerated into alienation, urban anomie and even pathological violence. The easy relationship between men and women embodied in Gable and Colbert has devolved into Robert DeNiro’s sometimes comic, sometimes pathetic encounters with women in “Taxi Driver.”
“The Godfather, Part II"--An almost operatic vision of America, poignantly setting forth the hope of new immigrants seeking to make a fresh start in the New World, seeking to escape the violence, corruption and hypocrisies of their past--only to discover new sources of violence, corruption and hypocrisy in their adopted home. Americans yearning to justify their optimism are nonetheless struck by the movie’s insistence that fundamental evil cannot be escaped; on the contrary, it is passed on from generation to generation.
*
Lari Pittman, artist.
“All About Eve,” “Nashville” and “The Grifters"--The thread that goes through all three captures that special American pathology associated with self-determination, ambition and entrepreneurship. What unifies them is that wonderful, juicy, dark American subtext.
Donald E. Westlake, novelist and screenwriter. His most recent books are “Smoke” and “Baby, Would I Lie?”
The first movie I chose is “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” It is imbued with the can-do spirit of America, the conviction that all problems can be solved with a little determination and hard work. But it also contains the contradictory (and very American) idea that things don’t work out, but it hardly matters--grace and self-reliance are more valuable than gold; home and honor are most valuable of all.
Because race is the intractable problem that defines us the way class defines Britain, my second movie would be “No Way Out” (1950). It is intelligent and honest and even-handed. It is also overwrought and melodramatic, as it would have to be, being an American story about the intractability of race in America. Appropriately, it yearns for answers without finding any.
A part of the American character is anarchic and surreal, because America is a land of immigrants, who were (and are) leaving the known for the unknown, entering a space where anything is possible because everything is improbable. This surreal landscape has created much of our humor, so my third movie would be “Bringing Up Baby.” (It even contains a European who doesn’t believe there can possibly be a leopard on his roof.)
A fourth movie, to complete the picture, has not yet been made: The movie about Americans’ alienation from themselves, the movie that explains everything from the Unabomber and the militias to wilding and gangsta rap. But that movie doesn’t exist yet, because film is a reflective medium. It does not lead the way. It draws the map after the road has been taken.
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Carlos Monsivais, Mexican journalist, historian and social critic. His most recent book is “Los Rituales del Caos,” (The Rituals of Chaos).
“Gone with the Wind"--The preferred American way to understand epics is through a couple. Americans see history as romance. (Another way to understand epics is through organized crime: The Godfather.
“It’s a Wonderful Life"--Expresses the belief in the family as the space for utopia.
“Taxi Driver"--An institutional craze in America is the monologue of the loner, “Are you talking to me”?
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Anna Perez, former press secretary for First Lady Barbara Bush, now vice president of government relations at Disney.
“Citizen Kane"--A wonderfully entertaining movie and an always valuable reminder that a politically active and opinionated news media is not a new development on the American scene.
“Pillow Talk"--Doris Day’s perennial virgin is at least as Austenian as “Clueless’ ” Cher. Day, however, also had a great job and a great apartment, acquired as a result of her own wit and effort. Now, that’s a role model!
“Sounder"--An American “Les Miserables.” A stunning evocation of where we’ve been as a country, told, as the best stories are, one family at a time.
*
Nicholas Lemann, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and author of “The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America.”
The essential American thing is the preoccupation with individual opportunity; most of the other distinctive national obsessions, such as classlessness and populism, social and geographical mobility and black-white race relations, are its byproducts. What’s most difficult for non-Americans to understand about America is that it isn’t a pose. We really do believe that everybody should be able to transcend the circumstances of birth and fulfill some personal destiny.
I just saw a reissue of “The Last Picture Show,” which implies a good trio of movies because the characters in it watch snatches of two other pictures, “Red River” and the original “Father of the Bride,” in their town’s dying movie theater. “The Last Picture Show” conveys the overwhelming longing that Americans in obscure circumstances feel to find a connection to the big, glistening, national enterprise.
“Red River,” as it’s played here, is the Western as a dream of heroic conquest (and upward mobility)--remember cowboys were the underclass of the post-Civil War era--but here they get to be gods.
“Father of the Bride” is used as an excuse to flash the face of the young and staggeringly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor on the screen to symbolize to “The Last Picture Show’s” high-school boy heroes an incredibly alluring life of prosperity, refinement and sexual fulfillment that countrymen of theirs are somehow, somewhere living.
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A. Scott Berg, biographer, author of “Max Perkins: Editor of Genius” and “Goldwyn.” He is working on a biography of Charles A. Lindbergh.
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"--This 1939 ear of Capra-corn still offers defining images of this country. The American persona is optimistic, believing one person can make a difference and that our self-correcting government can overcome any evils. Jefferson Smith--the quintessential James Stewart/American Everyman role--voices these principles, along with every other watchword of liberty. And no matter what the scandal at hand--Watergate, Packwood, Claude Rains as the sell-out Sen. Paine--we still cheer every time the system works.
Many consider money the nation’s bedrock; and “Citizen Kane” examines America’s ambivalent feelings toward it. Like the fortunes of innumerable American power brokers, Charles Foster Kane’s springs from a lucky strike and just keeps mounting. In America, the sky’s the limit; and there is no end to Kane’s need to acquire. In its moralistic American way, this is a cautionary tale, reminding us that in selling your soul, money still can’t buy you love--or an election. (Nota bene, Ariana Huffington and Ross Perot.)
America was forged by immigrants who arrived dreaming of a better life, of second chances. This all-American redemptive theme reverberates throughout “Hoosiers.” Like countless American heroes before him, Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) rides into town, a stranger with a past. In America, people do not ask who you are as much as, “What do you do?” Norm coaches basketball, reconstituting a team from a group of disparate individuals. E pluribus unum. And almost every character--the coach, the sulky player who quit the team, the drunken father (Dennis Hopper) of another player--gets a second chance. Americans champion underdogs and cherish winners. These hoopsters are both.
*
Michael Ventura, novelist and essayist. His new novel, “The Death of Frank Sinatra,” will be published this summer.
“High Noon"--A town full of frightened people who back down and accede to evil, and an equally frightened man (Gary Cooper) whose sense of honor won’t let him cop out. He wins his personal battle but loses faith in his community. Nothing has changed; the townspeople will be just as chicken next time. In the last scene, the disgust on Cooper’s face when he throws his badge into the dirt is the price that many heroic Americans have paid.
“The Birds"--Even in our loveliest, most out-of-the-way places, there is a sense of an impending, irrational, implacable danger--we feel so guilty for something that we fear even the birds may turn against us. What else can explain our constant need for scapegoats, and our willingness to believe even the flimsiest lies if they offer temporary comfort?
“The Gay Divorcee"--The eternally popular Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals were made in the worst years of the Depression. Something lovely and reckless in the American character is always ready to believe that a song and a dance will make everything all right; that the pretty, silly lyrics are true, and if only we can find love the rest of our problems will take care of themselves. Every one of us knows better--yet that doesn’t seem to matter. But we’d better learn our problems won’t go away by themselves--no matter how well we dance.
*
Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"--Portrays American idealism, the belief that virtue will triumph over evil and that our system can work.
“To Kill a Mockingbird"--Shows the strong strain of racism in the American society and how deeply it is ingrained.
“The Grapes of Wrath"--Illustrates the drive and perseverance of poor and working class people in the search for human dignity and economic security.
*
Sean K. MacPherson, restaurateur, owner of Jones, Swingers, Good Luck Bar, Small’s K.O.; co-owner of Bar Marmont.
“A Face in the Crowd” shows the incestuous and dysfunctional relationship among America, its idols and the media. We see a man whose hunger for the nation’s adoration is eclipsed only by the public’s appetite to adore him. While the media fosters this relationship, we watch a nobody become a monster. As long as there is money to be made, nobody cares that he is a monster. But as soon as the public sees the monster behind the mask, they and the media abandon the man and leave only the monster.
Though “Easy Rider” is emblematic of the free-spirited 1960s, it also represents America’s tradition of “outsiders” relinquishing tradition. For generations, Americans have believed they can find themselves by traversing the country. Though Americans believe, “This is our land . . . " we see that, in America, this does not apply to all Americans.
“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” deftly depicts the American high school experience. Though scholastics are important to the American high school student, the real focus tends to be on the process of socializing--which in America is often done through sex, drugs and rock and roll.
*
Justin E. Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.”
“The Manchurian Candidate"--Because it dramatizes our obsession both with politics and with conspiracy theories.
“The Wizard of Oz"--For its humor, its mix of fantasy, the grotesque and satire, its faith in things always working out for the best, and the way it reflects our deeply held assumption, contrary to the facts, that we’re still a rural, “just folks” nation with a heart as big as Kansas.
“On the Waterfront"--The flip side of both Oz and the American gospel of success: the graininess and recalcitrance of urbanism.
*
Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, author of “The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White.
Praised at the Wilson White House, prized at the red-neck outhouse, “The Birth of a Nation” for the first time disseminated widely distorted iconic images from the national nightmare which would provoke, persuade and propel some Americans to fear, hate and mistrust others, from that time until now.
For the first time in movies, the bleak personal landscapes of “Nothing But a Man” revealed the affects of systemic, institutional racism on one generation after another. Then as now, families were destroyed and separated because their husbands, fathers, grandfathers, sons and grandsons were denied access to employment. It was clear from this film, that people of good hearts were, like characters in a Greek play, often overwhelmed by forces beyond their control.
“Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored” captures the resilience and culture of a people seeded in slavery, salted in Reconstruction and enduring until now. The film reveals that America melds all of its children to have the same dreams--though some dreams might never be fulfilled. The lives and loves of its characters reflected the triumph of the American character over the unceasing, mean-spirited American undertow.
*
Todd Gitlin, professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. His most recent book is “The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars.”
“The Candidate"--Which shows the quarrel in the American political ingenuity between idealism and pragmatism.
“Platoon"--Which exhibits the miserable consequences of classic American innocence and our melodramatic propensity to polarize good and evil.
“Bonnie and Clyde"--Which exhibits our rootlessness and ruthlessness.
*
John Gregory Dunne, novelist and screenwriter. His most recent novel is “Playland.”
I don’t really see movies as saying anything about America. A movie is a movie.
This survey was compiled by Kathleen Bueno.
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5de64c5dde4ef86e8fd72574b2e8944c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-20178-story.html | ‘Wedge’ Issue Corners Feinstein | ‘Wedge’ Issue Corners Feinstein
Republicans like California Gov. Pete Wilson have gotten so much political mileage out of the immigration issue that it’s easy to overlook the fact that many Democrats have done the very same thing. Granted, Democrats do their immigrant-bashing less crudely than, say, Pat Buchanan. But the message gets through anyway. Just ask California’s senior U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein.
Wilson was deservedly lambasted for using Proposition 187, the initiative aimed at illegal immigrants, to revive his flagging gubernatorial campaign in 1994. But how many remember that Feinstein also played the immigration card to win a close election that same year?
At least one of her television commercials--which near as I can determine aired only in the San Diego area, where immigration has long been a hot-button issue--was as crude as anything Wilson did. It showed Feinstein in the foreground, bemoaning the evils of illegal immigration, while people were seen clambering over a high fence in the darkened background. It looked like the former San Francisco mayor was running for immigration commissioner rather than senator.
And it’s worth remembering that her very tight race against Michael Huffington (who did his share of immigrant bashing, too) wasn’t decided until the closing days of the campaign, when it was revealed that Huffington, like Wilson, had once employed an illegal immigrant. All this background is by way of pointing out some poetic justice in the distinctly uncomfortable position Feinstein may find herself in as Congress completes its latest effort to fix the nation’s immigration laws.
In July, a House-Senate conference committee is scheduled to meet to reconcile the two versions of a 1996 immigration bill. The effort could bog down on any of several issues, but the most controversial is the Gallegly amendment, named for Rep. Elton Gallegly, a Simi Valley Republican. Dubbed “Son of 187" by critics, it would allow states to bar the children of illegal immigrants from public schools--the very provision of Proposition 187 that has kept it bogged down in the courts ever since it was approved by California voters.
The Gallegly amendment is opposed not just by education lobbyists but by most of the major police organizations as well. Groups like the Fraternal Order of Police are certainly not soft on illegal immigration. They just see no good coming from children being tossed out of schools and onto the streets. And White House spokesmen have warned that President Clinton may veto any immigration bill that includes the Gallegly amendment.
In response, some of Bob Dole’s advisors are urging him to use immigration just like Wilson did in 1994, as a “wedge” issue to divide a California electorate leaning (according to most polls) toward Clinton but still concerned about illegal immigration. That is why the presumptive GOP presidential nominee endorsed the Gallegly amendment on a campaign swing through California, and why the Republican Party has begun airing TV commercials here blasting Clinton for being soft on illegal immigration.
Now the question is, what will congressional Republicans do with the Gallegly amendment? Moderates like Wyoming’s Alan Simpson want to dump it so they can compromise with Democrats on an immigration bill that Clinton can sign. That way everyone can campaign this fall claiming they did something about illegal immigration. But GOP hard-liners are pushing to keep the Gallegly amendment, arguing that a Clinton veto would hand Dole a perfect issue to batter the president with in vote-rich California.
Democrats are acutely aware of the political danger. To keep Clinton from being maneuvered into such an untenable position, Senate Democrats are trying to organize a filibuster of any immigration bill that includes the Gallegly amendment. Two weeks ago, 42 Democratic senators, including Feinstein, signed a letter to the Senate leadership outlining their intent. That is just two votes above the minimum needed to maintain a filibuster under Senate rules. And guess who among those Democrats is considered a weak link in this defensive plan.
“Feinstein can be very dense on the immigration issue,” one worried Capitol Hill insider told me. “She doesn’t want to be be blamed for killing the immigration bill” if a filibuster succeeds.
That is probably because Feinstein is thinking about returning to California to run for governor in 1998, when Wilson’s second term ends.
Like many of her fellow Democrats, including Clinton, Feinstein no doubt wishes the immigration issue would just go away. But it won’t--at least not so long as gutless Democrats shy away from discussing immigration issues in all their daunting complexity and instead merely ape the shamelessly expedient stance of Republicans like Wilson.
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fbdf809d8678b695693a2ae6f6b63e25 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-op-20181-story.html | Hold Japan’s Feet to the Fire | Hold Japan’s Feet to the Fire
With problems in the U.S./China trade relationship taking the forefront of late, few people are aware that a time bomb was set to explode in Tokyo next month that could have resulted in U.S. sanctions against Japan. Although a last-minute agreement between President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto at the G-7 meeting in Lyons to postpone the deadline until July 31 temporarily averted a showdown, the two sides remain far apart.
In October 1994, U.S. and Japanese negotiators agreed on a series of measures that would eventually liberalize Japan’s insurance industry. Now, Japan’s Ministry of Finance is balking at executing the deal as agreed. In early June, the head of the Life Insurance Assn. of Japan told the Japanese press that it doesn’t matter what the agreement says, the Japanese industry is not prepared to live by it.
Since the failure of talks to meet the initial June 1 target date for resolving the problem, the Japanese insurance industry has been preparing measures that will nullify the deal, and will likely do more of the same at corporate board meetings. If this movement is not reversed quickly, President Clinton will have no choice but to impose harsh sanctions on Japan shortly after July 31.
The significance of this potentiality goes far beyond insurance or even U.S.-Japan economic relations. In April, President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto breathed new life into the troubled U.S.-Japan relationship by revitalizing the security agreements between the two countries. An important element of this was Japan’s pledge to supply U.S. forces in peacetime and to consider the possibility of a broader Japanese role in helping the United States maintain security in the Pacific. Their promises were presented to Americans as a major new commitment by Japan. But how really meaningful can such pledges be if formal, signed trade deals are simply ignored or circumvented.
The problem arises out of an attempt by the elite bureaucrats of Japan’s Ministry of Finance, (the same guys who gave Japan the bubble economy and $1 trillion of bad bank loans), to maintain their grip on power by continuing to control and manipulate financial markets.
Since the end of World War II, the Japanese insurance industry has been strictly regulated by the ministry with only a few Japanese companies licensed to sell traditional forms of life insurance and traditional nonlife products such as automobile insurance.
Foreign insurance companies (along with some smaller Japanese firms) were allowed by the ministry to offer only nontraditional products in niche markets such as personal accident, cancer and sickness insurance. This aggregation of nontraditional products now accounts for 4.7% of the Japanese insurance business, with foreign firms accounting for about one-third of the sector’s premiums.
As pressure built in the 1980s and early ‘90s for liberalization of financial markets, the Ministry of Finance announced plans for deregulation of the insurance business. But the plan was designed to enable the major Japanese insurance firms to move into the niche markets while their own traditional market was still protected. This was obviously a recipe to wipe out the foreign and smaller Japanese providers in the name of liberalization.
Consultations between U.S. and Japanese trade negotiators ensued and led to the signing of the October 1994 agreement under which the ministry agreed not to open the niche markets until the traditional segments of the market were deregulated.
Despite these agreements and numerous bilateral consultations since, the Ministry of Finance is now moving ahead in such a way as to target the niche sectors for initial liberalization while continuing to protect the majors in the primary sectors.
In what has become the classic mode of U.S.-Japan agreements, the ministry negotiators never gave written explanation of the agreement to their industry. Rather, vague oral briefings led to a Japanese view of the deal that is completely at odds with the U.S. view. Thus, for the past several months the U.S. and Japanese negotiators have been locked in an argument over the meaning of the deal they signed 19 months ago. Meanwhile, the Japanese majors are rapidly establishing subsidiaries to enter the niche markets as soon as possible.
It is imperative that Prime Minister Hashimoto bring his ministry bureaucrats under control and direct them to fulfill the agreement as signed. If he does not, the trust so essential to a healthy U.S.-Japan relationship and so recently rekindled will be severely undermined with potentially dangerous consequences.
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3b55539e5384c6e4032f8e5fa17d694a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-re-19882-story.html | Taking the Aquatics Plunge | Taking the Aquatics Plunge
When I first put in our elevated pools--one to be a fountain, the other, a quiet pond for water plants--I tried every aquatic and bog plant I could lay my hands on. A few years later, I had discarded most and settled on just a few of the “floaters.”
These nautical types include the showy water lilies, water snowflakes and poppies, plus such oddities as water lettuce, water ferns and hyacinths that actually sail across the surface. Serenely floating on the silvery surface of the water, these floaters are the most satisfying and turned out to be the easiest to grow and control.
Many aquatic plants are rampant spreaders. A single water iris, for instance, grew to fill more than a third of my 3-by-11 1/2-foot pool in one year. There’s not much point having water in the garden if you can’t see it sparkling between the plants.
Floaters are better behaved, even though a few spread quickly. Water hyacinth, for example, can cover a pool in a day, or so it seems, but it is easy to pull out and toss in the compost pile.
Floating aquatics will even grow in a big container filled with water. Before building my ponds, I grew these same plants in half-whiskey barrels and huge pots with their drainage holes plugged.
Container-bound water gardens should be about 18 inches deep and 2 feet across for lilies; some of the other floaters can get by in less. Inside these big pots, put the plants in smaller containers filled with soil, which is also the best way to grow them in a pond or pool.
People ask if there are filters or pumps in my pool and if you have to change the water often. No filters or pumps are required, and you should never change the water. All you need to do is add water as it evaporates.
Filters and pumps are required only if you crowd a pool with fancy koi. Fish are necessary for the pond’s ecology, but ordinary feeder goldfish or mosquito fish do just fine without aeration. The fish take care of mosquitoes and, along with water snails, eat most of the algae. Fish you must buy, but the snails usually come with the plants (they don’t eat living plants, just algae or decaying leaves).
Changing the water upsets the balance, and you’ll get lots of algae; needless to say, never add chlorine to the water. Aquatic plants, especially the floaters, need still, quiet water, which is why my fountain, though it merely burbles, is in a separate pool.
If there’s a secret to water gardening, it’s to keep about 75% of the surface covered with plants so they shade the water. That keeps algae in check, although there is usually a period in early spring when green water can’t be avoided. Once the plants are all leafed out, they cover the surface, and the algae goes away.
In my pool, water lilies--three kinds of so-called “hardy” lilies and one tropical--are the stars. They start blooming in April and don’t quit until November. The star-like flowers are big, dramatic and brightly colored. Although each lasts only a day or two, one follows another so they seem always in bloom.
To add a little variety, I also grow the lily-like water poppies (Hydrocleys nymphoides), water hawthorne (Aponogeton distachyus) and the delicate yellow snowflake (Nymphoides geminata).
The yellow snowflake has fascinatingly frilly flowers and lily-like leaves marbled with brown and green--a nice contrast to the green-tinged-red lily pads. The snowflake sends out long runners that make more leaves and flowers, so it tends to pop up between the lily pads.
Water poppies spread in a similar fashion, with smaller green leaves and pastel yellow flowers that resemble California poppies.
The hawthorne has elongated leaves and garlands of white flowers that bloom mostly in winter, when the rest of the pool is nearly dormant. Flowers turn into little plantlets that root and become new plants.
All of these float like lilies with roots anchored in soil about a foot under the surface. They are planted in their own pots filled with the poorest soil from my garden.
Aquatic plants that require soil need a heavy, bog-like clay to grow in. Never use regular potting mixes and add only fertilizer to the soil you dig from your garden.
I grow my lilies in tubs about 10 inches deep by 16 inches across (in a pool that is 18 inches deep). A lot of people use plastic washtubs found at markets and hardware stores. The other lily-like aquatics can grow in one-gallon nursery cans. Drainage holes aren’t required when gardening under water, so if there are any, block them from the inside with strips of newspaper so the soil doesn’t leak out.
I usually add about an inch of soil, then a layer of aquatic plant fertilizer, then the rest of the soil and the plant. Get the plants and pots soaking wet, then put them in the pond. They’ll make the water murky for about a day.
Most of these plants, including the lavender-blue tropical lilies, can grow for several years in their original containers, but the yellow and pink hardy lilies grow so fast in Southern California that they must be repotted each March.
This is a big job because the containers are heavy, and you need to find a place to dump the old, mucky soil (watch out, this black muck stains everything it drips on). Cut off all but about four inches of the growing end of the lily tuber and replant horizontally so the top is above the soil. Put it to one side of the container so it has room to grow. In mid-summer, push special aquatic fertilizer tablets into the soil to keep plants blooming into fall.
The tropical lilies and other lily-like plants need to be repotted only every few years; repot them like any other plant, except for the need for clay garden soil.
To keep the pool planting from becoming too one-dimensional, I grow parrot’s feather (Myriophyllum aquatica), a filmy foil for the large round leaves of the other floaters. It’s planted in a container, but it spreads well beyond, simply dangling its roots in the water.
Another floater requiring no soil is the tiny mosquito fern (Azolla). Somebody gave me a few once, and they quickly spread to cover the whole pool, which was too much of a good thing. Now I keep scooping them out so that only a few clumps remain to float among the lilies.
Resembling leaf lettuce, water lettuce (Pistia stratoides) floats freely with inflated sponge-like leaves.
Aquatic plants can be a challenge to find. There also are several water plant specialists in Southern California, including Van Ness in Upland, which also sells mail order; Sunland Water Gardens in Sunland; McDonald’s Aquatic Nursery in Reseda, and Laguna Koi Ponds in Laguna Beach.
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36b7f63815bfc27318faeccef1716089 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-re-19883-story.html | BOOMTOWNS | BOOMTOWNS
The five fastest-growing housing markets in the United States in 1995:
1. Las Vegas
2. Naples, Fla.
3. Phoenix
4. Atlanta
5. Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
Los Angeles was No. 88, one up from last-place New York City. Anaheim was No. 74.
Source: Chicago Title.
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ae517bb461dd93e70f97f9991bbae979 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-re-19885-story.html | ‘Cagney’ Wants Off Old Beat | ‘Cagney’ Wants Off Old Beat
Two-time Emmy-winning actress SHARON GLESS and her husband, producer BARNEY ROSENZWEIG, have listed their residence on Broad Beach in Malibu at $3.2 million.
Gless, who is in London starring with Tom Conti in Neil Simon’s “Chapter Two” at the Gielgud Theatre through July 13, is best known for her role as New York police Det. Christine Cagney in the 1982-88 CBS series “Cagney & Lacey,” co-starring Tyne Daly.
Rosenzweig was the show’s creator and executive producer, and he also produced Gless’ 1989-1992 CBS series “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” and four reunion “Cagney & Lacey” movies of the week (three have already aired).
The couple was married in May 1991, a few months before buying their five-bedroom Malibu compound, which is Cape Cod in style and has two guest cottages plus a main residence. The compound, about 4,000 square feet, has ocean and bay views.
Built in 1949, the houses have been updated and remodeled, sources say. Gless and Rosenzweig decided to sell the home because they bought a condo on Fisher Island, off the coast of Miami.
A fifth-generation Californian, Gless, 53, doesn’t plan to desert her home state, however. She and Rosenzweig expect to maintain an apartment in Hollywood.
“Barney and Sharon will be back in Los Angeles in the fall for USC football seasons. They attend every game, home or away,” their assistant, Ray Simmons, said.
Gless plans to go to the island in late July. “She hasn’t seen the condo yet, because she has been doing the play [and a serial drama for BBC Radio] in London,” he said. “But Barney has been there, having fun decorating.” The island is accessible only by boat.
The Malibu home is co-listed with Glen Meyers of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate, Pacific Palisades, and Pam Whitham of Fred Sands Realtors, Malibu.
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BERNARD LAFFERTY, late tobacco heiress Doris Duke’s former butler who settled with her estate in May for a $4.5-million executor’s fee and a $500,000 annual bequest, has purchased a seven-bedroom 11,000-square-foot house in Beverly Hills for $2.4 million, sources say.
Lafferty, 50, is said to have entered and closed escrow within five days of making an offer.
He had been living in Falcon Lair, where Duke died at 80 in 1993. Falcon Lair, overlooking Beverly Hills, was actor Rudolph Valentino’s home when he died in 1926.
Lafferty’s new home was built on almost 1.5 acres in 1990. It also has a pool, spa and sauna.
Sid Kibrick and Barbara Tenenbaum, both of Fred Sands Estates, Directors Office, were the listing agents, and Kibrick also represented Lafferty in the deal.
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MARCO PENNETTE, co-creator of the sitcoms “Dave’s World” and “Caroline in the City,” has purchased one of the original houses in Los Feliz for close to its asking price of $1.4 million, sources say.
Pennette, 29, also has a Studio City house, which has been leased.
His Los Feliz home was built in 1925 by Col. Griffith J. Griffith, who donated the land for Griffith Park in 1896.
Griffith built a guest house on his estate for his son, and that house is now Pennette’s main residence. It is a Mediterranean-style home on a hill, with three bedrooms in 4,500 square feet.
Paul Czako of Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills, represented Pennette; Deedee Howard and Josie Benjamin of John Aaroe, Beverly Hills, had the listing.
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d7dd7632d090a52b396ea2cc69308684 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-re-19886-story.html | Arts Center Tour Set | Arts Center Tour Set
The Los Angeles chapter of Commercial Real Estate Women will host a walking tour of Santa Monica’s new arts center, Bergamot Station, in conjunction with its meeting on July 9. The tour begins at 6 p.m. Cost is $27.50. For information, call (310) 358-5115.
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6ad35694894ec1f9f569a9875ef77da7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-re-19887-story.html | Southland Gold Rush : Southland home builders and architects take home bulk of Grand Awards at the 1996 Gold Nugget design competition : Southland Shines at Building Awards | Southland Gold Rush : Southland home builders and architects take home bulk of Grand Awards at the 1996 Gold Nugget design competition : Southland Shines at Building Awards
In one of their strongest showings in recent years, Southland home builders and architects won 27 of 42 Grand Awards at the 1996 Gold Nugget design competition at the 38th PCBC Western Building Show, the annual convention of developers and allied professionals from the 14 Western states and Pacific Rim countries.
The oldest and largest design competition of its kind in the United States, the Gold Nugget awards honor distinctive architecture and land planning in residential, commercial and industrial projects.
For the record:
12:00 AM, Jul. 14, 1996 For the Record Los Angeles Times Sunday July 14, 1996 Home Edition Real Estate Part K Page 2 Real Estate Desk 2 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction Winning design--The June 30 story on the results of the Gold Nugget design competition (“Southland Gold Rush”) carried an erroneous listing for the land planner for the Entertainment Center at Irvine Spectrum. The planners were Roger Seitz, Urban Planning & Design and the Irvine Co.
The contest is the centerpiece of the Pacific Coast Builders Conference, one of the biggest building industry conventions in the country, which ended Saturday at the Moscone Convention Center here.
The 33rd Gold Nugget competition drew more than 520 entries from the West, as well as from Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, Australia and Canada, among others.
Notable among Southland winners was the Costa Mesa architectural firm of McLarand, Vasquez & Partners, which won eight Gold Nuggets for design work that included the new headquarters building of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a custom home, an apartment project and several developer-built homes. McLarand, Vasquez won six top awards in last year’s contest.
Other top winners were the Irvine community Mahogany; its developer, Taylor Woodrow Homes; and its architect, Robert Hidey. Mahogany won Community of the Year and Home of the Year honors, and two of its homes were chosen as best in category. Taylor Woodrow won four nuggets for Mahogany and a fifth for its Mayfield development. Hidey won four awards for his Mahogany designs.
GRAND AWARD WINNERS
Home of the Year
Mahogany--Residence One, Irvine.
Builder / Developer: Taylor Woodrow Homes.
Architect: Robert Hidey Architects.
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International Housing Award
The American, Yokohama Bay, Japan.
Builder / Developer: Sumitom Realty & Development California.
Architect: Danielian Associates.
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1--Best Public/Private Special-Use Facility
Clark County Government Center, Las Vegas.
Builder: Perini Building Co.
Developer: Clark County General Sevices Department.
Architect: C.W. Fentress J.H. Bradburn & Associates and Domingo Cambeiro Corp.
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2--Best Public/Private Recreational Facility
Las Campanas Golf Clubhouse, Santa Fe, NM.
Builder: Bradbury & Stramm Construction.
Developer: The Lyle Anderson Co.
Architect: B 3 Architects Plus Planners/Berkus Design Studio.
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3--Best Office/Professional Building (under 100,000 square feet)
Foundation Health Care Facility, Yuba City, Calif.
Builder: Harbison-Mahony-Higgins.
Developer: Foundation Health.
Architect: Forrar Williams Architects.
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4--Best Office/Professional Building (100,000 square feet and over)
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Headquarters, Los Angeles.
Builder: Charles Pankow Builders Inc.
Developer: Catellus Development Corp./Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Architect: McLarand, Vasquez & Partners Inc.
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5--Best Commercial Project--Retail
Pattaya Festival Center, Pattaya, Thailand.
Developer: Central Group of Companies.
Architect: RTKL International Ltd.
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6--Best Rehabilitated Commercial or Industrial Project
Game Show Network, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Culver City.
Builder: Swinerton & Walberg.
Architect: Steven Ehrlich Architects.
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7--Best Specialty Project
The Entertainment Center at Irvine Spectrum, Irvine.
Builder: Snyder Langston.
Developer: Irvine Co.
Architect: RTKL Associates Inc.
Planner: David Baab & Associates.
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8--Best Custom Home (Under 6,000 square feet)
Peters Residence, Newport Beach.
Builder: JC Dyer Construction.
Developer: the Jim Peters family.
Architect: McLarand, Vasquez & Partners.
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9--Best Custom Home (6,000 square feet and over).
(Two Winners)
Private Residence, Scottsdale, Ariz.
Builder: Shiloh Custom Homes.
Architect: Urban Design Associates Ltd. Architecture AIA.
Burnap Residence, Sun Valley, Idaho.
Builder: Mash Construction.
Architect: B3 Architects Plus Planners/Berkus Design Studio.
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10--Best Renovated, Restored or Remodeled Residential Project or Single House
Hicks Residence, Carmel Highlands, Calif.
Builder: Merit Homes Inc.
Architect Fletcher & Hardoin Architects.
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11--Best Affordable Housing Project--Attached
Villa Del Norte, Rancho Cucamonga.
Builder: Prairie Pacific Investments.
Developer: North Town Housing Partners.
Architect: Pyatok Associates.
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12--Best Affordable Housing Project--Detached
Las Brisas, Duarte.
Builder: Las Brisas Homes
Developer: South Land Corp.
Architect: Paul Essick Architects.
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13--Best Apartment Project--1 to 3 Stories
Villa Coronado Apartments, Irvine.
Builder / Developer: Irvine Apartment Communities.
Architect: The KTGY Group.
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14--Best Apartment Project--4 or more Stories
One Park Place, Irvine.
Builder: Irvine Park Place/Copley Associates.
Developer: William Lyon Co./Citimark.
Architect: McLarand, Vasquez & Partners.
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15--Best Mixed-Use Project
Horton Fourth Avenue, San Diego.
Builder: Nielsen Construction Co.
Developer: Oliver McMillan.
Architect: Carrier Johnson Wu.
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16--Best Seniors Housing Project
Bracher Senior Housing, Santa Clara.
Builder: Segue Construction.
Developer: Bracher, H.D.C. Inc.
Architect: Barnhart Associates Architects.
Planner: Smith & Smith Landscape Architects Environmental Planners.
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17--Best Technical Achievement
No award given in this category.
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18--Best Residential Site Plan (under 25 acres)
The Fairways at Castle Pines Village, Douglas County, Colo. Builder: Genesee Co.
Developer: Castle Pine Village.
Planner: Downing Thorpe & James.
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19--Best Community Site Plan (100 acres or less)
La Primavera, Culiacan, Mexico
Developer: Copper Ind.
Planner: PBR
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20--Best Community Site Plan (over 100 acres)
CitraRaya, Jakarta, Indonesia.
Developer: Gputra Group.
Planner: RNM Architects Planners.
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21--Best Redevelopment Rehab or Infill Site Plan
Temple Edgeware, Los Angeles.
Builder / Developer: Miemann Properties Inc. & the Related Companies ???Cos.? of California.
Planner: Birbagroup.????CQ ONE WORD?
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22, 23--Best-Single Family (small lot) Detached Home (under 1,500 square feet)
Stony Brook--Las Trampas, Plan 1, Danville, Calif.
Builder: Pacific Union Homes.
Architect: McLarand, Vasquez & Partners.
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24--Best Single-Family (small lot) Detached Home (1,500-1,800 square feet)
Stag’s Leap--the Canterbury, Green Valley Ranch, Henderson, Nev.
Builder / Developer: Nigro Associates.
Architect: G.C. Wallace.
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25--Best Single-Family (small lot) Detached Home (1,801-2,100 square feet)
Stony Brook--Charlotte Wood-Plan 4, Danville, Calif.
Builder: Pacific Union Homes.
Architect: McLarand, Vasquez & Partners.
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26--Best Single-Family (small lot) Detached Home (over 2,100 square feet)
Greystone Landing--Plan 3, Huntington Beach.
Builder / Developer: Greystone Homes.
Architect: McLarand, Vasquez & Partners.
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27--Best Single-Family Detached Home (under 1,600 square feet)
Harmony Ranch--Plan 1, Delhi, Calif.
Builder: Florsheim Homes.
Architect: William Hezmalhalch Architects.
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28--Best Single-Family Detached Home (1,601-2,100 square feet)
Harmony Ranch--Plan 7, Delhi, Calif.
Builder / Developer: Florsheim Homes.
Architect: William Hezmalhalch Architects.
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29--Best Single-Family Detached Home (2,001-2,400 square feet)
Peregrine Villas at Grayhawk--Plan 1, Scottsdale, Ariz.
Builder / Developer: Geoffrey Edmunds & Associates.
Architect: RNM Architects Planners/Parady & Redder Architects
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30--Best Single-Family Detached Home (2,401-2,800 square feet)
Mayfield--Residence One, Irvine.
Builder / Developer: Taylor Woodrow Homes.
Architect: Scheurer Architects.
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31--Best Single-Family Detached Home (2,801-3,200 square feet)
Mahogany--Residence One, Irvine.
Builder / Developer: Taylor Woodrow Homes.
Architect: Robert Hidey Architects.
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32--Best Single-Family Detached Home (over 3,200 square feet)
Mahogany--Residence Three, Irvine.
Builder / Developer: Taylor Woodrow Homes.
Architect: Robert Hidey Architects.
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33--Best Condo/Attached Home (under 1,200 square feet)
Union Square--Plan 2, San Diego.
Builder / Developer: D.R. Horton.
Architect: Bowlus, Edinger & Starck Architects.
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34--Best Condo/Attached Home (1,201-1,800 square feet)
Atherton Place--the Ashfield, Hayward, Calif.
Builder: Regis Contractors of Northern California.
Architect: Seidel/Holzman.
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35--Best Condo/Attached Home (over 1,800 square feet)
Ludlow Bay Village Townhomes--Plan A2, Port Ludlow, Wash.
Builder: Costa Pacific Homes.
Architect: Iverson Associates Inc. Architecture & Planning.
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36--Summer Comfort Award
Las Brisas--Plan 3, Duarte.
Builder: Las Brisas Homes.
Developer: South Land Corp.
Architect: Paul Essick Architects.
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37, 38--Best Cluster Housing
Stony Brook, Danville, Calif.
Builder: Pacific Union Homes.
Developer: Charlotte Wood Developers.
Architect/Planner: McLarand, Vasquez & Partners.
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39--Residential Community of the Year--Attached
Parkwoods, Oakland.
Builder / Developer: Sares Regis.
Architect/Planner: McLarand, Vasquez & Partners.
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40--Residential Community of the Year--Detached
Mahogany, Irvine.
Builder / Developer: Taylor Woodrow Homes.
Architect/Planner: Robert Hidey Architects.
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f72ac08f648bab7f772b239329373023 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19956-story.html | Angels’ Loss Leaves Lachemann Burning | Angels’ Loss Leaves Lachemann Burning
There’s sweater weather, earthquake weather and, on a 91-degree afternoon at Anaheim Stadium, home-run weather.
Then again, the Oakland Athletics hit eight homers on a cool evening Thursday, so maybe the simple explanation is that the Angels’ pitching isn’t so hot.
The A’s chalked up three more homers Saturday, tied a major league record by hitting 18 in a four-game span and tormented the Angel staff for the third consecutive game in an 11-9 victory before 26,565.
The loss, the Angels’ fourth in a row, troubled Manager Marcel Lachemann so much he held a 35-minute team meeting to discuss the club’s erratic play.
The Angels are back to the .500 mark, 8 1/2 games behind American League West-leading Texas, after moving to five games over .500 and five games back on June 20.
Lachemann wanted to make it clear that such inconsistent performances are the root of the Angels’ lackluster play as the team approaches the midpoint of the season.
“If you told me before the season that at [this] point we would be 40-40 and asked if I would be happy with that, I’d say, ‘No,’ ” Lachemann said. “I think the expectations were not unrealistic when we started the spring. We felt we had a chance to win it. I still think we do.”
Running into a hot-hitting team like the A’s has only heightened Lachemann’s frustration and spotlighted the Angels’ inability to maintain a consistent course.
After winning 11 of 12, including seven in a row, the Angels have lost seven of nine.
“We’ve run through streaks pitching-wise,” Lachemann said. “The same pitchers not more than a week ago, were giving up nothing.”
Lachemann was speaking of Shawn Boskie, the starter in Thursday’s 18-2 debacle, Chuck Finley, Friday’s starter, and Jason Grimsley, who started Saturday.
Oakland dispatched Grimsley in the midst of a four-run fifth inning that enabled the A’s to rally from a five-run deficit. Grimsley gave up six runs on six hits, including a two-run homer by Terry Steinbach in the second and a three-run homer by Jason Giambi in the fifth.
Rich Monteleone struggled in relief of Grimsley, giving up the go-ahead runs. Chuck McElroy was fine. Troy Percival then gave up a three-run homer to Geronimo Berroa, and Oakland led, 11-7, in the eighth.
Like the A’s other homers, there was little doubt about Berroa’s 408-foot drive over the center-field fence.
“With a guy like that, there’s no way you can go up there looking for a breaking ball,” Berroa said of facing Percival. “Not from a guy like that. He made a mistake with me today. That one was hanging. I couldn’t miss that one.”
Steinbach and Giambi didn’t miss against Grimsley.
“Two pitches cost me five runs,” Grimsley said. “I make the pitches, I win.”
It looked pretty good for a while. The Angels came back from a 2-0 deficit with three runs in the bottom of the second, two coming on catcher Pat Borders’ two-run homer. Borders’ bases-empty shot to start the fourth got the Angels rolling toward a fourth-run inning and a 7-2 lead.
Bu it didn’t last. Oakland countered with four in the fifth and the Angels never recovered, seemingly stunned by the turn of events.
It shouldn’t have come as a shock that Giambi would homer. Seven of his past eight hits have been home runs. Plus, the A’s have hit 55 homers this month and lead the majors with 126 this year. They are on pace to break the 1961 New York Yankees’ big league record of 240 in a season.
“The balls carry really well here,” Oakland Manager Art Howe said. “Some of them wouldn’t come down. This is a pretty good hitting ballpark, to say the least.”
If the Angels did one smart thing it was that they didn’t give Mark McGwire much to hit, walking him four times in five plate appearances.
On the other hand, the Angels couldn’t seem to handle Giambi or Berroa.
“Hitting in front of McGwire they’re not going to be in a hurry to walk me to get to him,” said Giambi, who hit his 16th homer this season. “Looking back [on his recent hot streak], there have been a lot of balls in the zone.
“And, especially in the daytime, the ball flies here.”
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87bc7bf55a240d3cd74963ac681010a1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19958-story.html | Dallas Send Parks to Minnesota, Makes Room Under Salary Cap | Dallas Send Parks to Minnesota, Makes Room Under Salary Cap
The Dallas Mavericks traded forward Cherokee Parks to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Saturday in a deal that will put the Mavericks about $3 million under the new NBA salary cap.
For Parks, a first-round pick last year who starred at Marina High and Duke, Minnesota agreed to remove 2-6 lottery protection on the 1997 first-round pick Dallas acquired from the Timberwolves in the 1994 Sean Rooks trade.
Under the original terms, Minnesota would have kept the 1997 pick if it landed in the top six, in which case Dallas would receive the Timberwolves’ No. 1 pick in 1998 unconditionally. Now, Minnesota will keep the 1997 pick only if it is the No. 1 pick overall.
Parks played in 64 games for Dallas as a rookie, averaging 3.9 points and 3.4 rebounds. He scored a season-high 25 points with seven rebounds against Portland on March 17.
“Cherokee is a talented player, but with the additions of Eric Montross and Samaki Walker, there would have been less time for him,” said Keith Grant, the Mavericks’ director of player personnel.
“By not receiving a player in return from Minnesota, we have more flexibility under the NBA salary cap.”
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6a2d6b35b7cd0b385b0b8e80c1b4c0ea | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19959-story.html | BASEBALL DAILY REPORT : DiSarcina Decries Team’s Inconsistency | BASEBALL DAILY REPORT : DiSarcina Decries Team’s Inconsistency
With each passing losing streak, the questions arise: How does this one rank with the megaslide of 1995? And what do the Angels need to do to break out of their latest slump?
Shortstop Gary DiSarcina fielded the latest round of queries.
“The difference I see is that last year when we went through the rut, we wouldn’t reel off six or seven runs,” DiSarcina said. “We’ve been inconsistent all year this year. The only similarity is guys seem to be pressing, trying to do everything themselves.”
Starting a 22-game stretch against American League West opponents Thursday might have started the Angels on their way to their latest funk, he said.
“We started thinking, ‘We’ve got to do well now,’ ” DiSarcina said. “And when things don’t go well, things can go haywire. We’ve just hit the halfway point. We’ve got a lot of games ahead of us and a lot of time to do it [catch first-place Texas].
“We saw what can happen last year. It was the middle of August, we had the lead and it still wasn’t late enough. The biggest thing is to be consistent and not ride the waves up and down.”
DiSarcina committed his ninth error in 74 games, booting a seventh-inning grounder that enabled Geronimo Berroa to score Oakland’s eighth run. DiSarcina had only six errors in 98 games last season.
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Manager Marcel Lachemann offered this view of Jim Abbott’s first relief appearance in the major leagues:
“He looked a little better. Jimmy will be back as a starter and he’ll be back winning games. How long it’s going to take I don’t know.”
Abbott pitched a scoreless ninth, walking one in the Angels’ 6-3 loss to Oakland Friday.
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Randy Velarde extended his hitting streak to a career-best 16 games with an infield single and a run-scoring double. . . . Pat Borders homered twice in a game for the first time in a nine-year career spanning 837 major league games. He also homered for the first time since June 13, 1995, as a member of the Kansas City Royals.
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ae9cefb0fbf59625687792dcfd4ccd7e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19960-story.html | Lachemann Tells His Team to Relax, Have Some Fun | Lachemann Tells His Team to Relax, Have Some Fun
It was hard to tell what was hotter--the 91-degree temperature, the Oakland Athletics overcoming a five-run deficit to hand the Angels their fourth consecutive loss, or the 35-minute verbal lashing Manager Marcel Lachemann administered after an 11-9 loss.
Lachemann is not a screamer, like Earl Weaver or Dallas Green, nor will he physically knock down his players like Lou Piniella or the late Billy Martin.
But he did get some points across to a team that has given up 35 runs in the past three games and fallen back to .500.
“He told us the things that needed to be said,” said reliever Troy Percival, whom Geronimo Berroa stung for a three-run homer.
“When we lose one or two games, we can make it seem like 40. He reminded us we have to relax and play our game. But we also have to learn that if we lose that day, we can come back and win the next day.”
“He’s trying to give us some piece of mind,” said Rich Monteleone, the first of four Angel relievers who could not hold a two-run lead that starter Jason Grimsley left them.
“We know we have to come out and execute--do the job like we know how to do and have some fun,” said Monteleone. “That’s a key for us right now; to go out and have some fun. We can’t keep acting like every pitch or at-bat is our last.”
There have been several moments of fun for the Angels this season. But so far they have proven to be streaky, winning nine of 10 for 1 1/2 weeks, then losing six of seven. Currently they are in another slide, having lost seven of the last 11, and the Angels are in danger of falling out of sight in the AL West race.
Although he acknowledges the team’s “lack of consistency,” pitcher Mark Langston remembers the team’s big push in the division race last year came after the All-Star break.
Can lightning strike twice?
Yes,” Langston said. “There’s no real area you can point to, but I still think it boils down to pitching. The offense is fine. And I will still put our pitching up against anybody’s in the division--even Seattle’s if they get Randy Johnson back.
“The offense has been doing its job. It’s up to us--the pitchers--to step up. If we give this team a chance to win games, more often than not it will do so.”
Saturday, the offense broke out for nine runs and 16 hits, the ninth time the Angels have recorded 15 or more hits in a game. Normally it’s a good omen; before Saturday the Angels were 6-2 in those games.
But if you can’t keep the opposition from slugging the ball--Oakland hit three more home runs against the Angels Saturday, giving them 14 in the series with one game remaining--even a good offense will be overwhelmed.
The loss overshadowed catcher Pat Borders, who homered twice and had three hits.
“The last time I homered twice? Probably 1985, in [the minors],” said Borders, the first Angel catcher to homer twice in a game here since Lance Parrish on Sept. 9, 1991, against Minnesota.
“But a loss takes away everything good you did individually. There’s nothing good you can say about today. When you lose, it doesn’t matter.”
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824c6c61f63aa98cbf63f3018ab7b302 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19961-story.html | Rising Horak Takes Fall in Semifinal | Rising Horak Takes Fall in Semifinal
What goes up must come down.
Helena Horak, after rising to new heights, fell hard Saturday in the semifinals of the Southern California Junior Sectional tennis championships.
Horak, of Westlake Village, an unseeded player competing in the 16-and-under division, was defeated by unseeded Katey Becker of Orange, 6-2, 6-2, at Los Caballeros Sports Village.
Horak, 16, had only recently broken into the top 20 of her division after hovering near No. 25 for two years.
She was 18th entering this tournament, which also serves as a qualifier for the U.S. Tennis Assn. national junior championships later this summer.
By reaching the semifinals, Horak will probably get a top-10 ranking and a trip to the nationals in San Diego.
“I’ve had a really good tournament to this point,” she said. “I’m really glad I got this far.”
But Becker slammed the door on Horak, breaking her serve at the opening of each set.
Becker, who upset second-seeded Kari Olsen in the second round, overwhelmed Horak with a serve-and-volley attack. The 5-foot-11 Horak was usually on the run as Becker consistently hit the ball into the corners.
“I knew she was tall and had a powerful serve,” Becker said. “If I got a short ball, I either went to her weaker side or [to] the open side of the court.”
Needless to say, Becker got a lot of short balls.
She broke Horak’s serve five times in the match, three times in the second set. Horak could break Becker only once.
Five local players reached today’s finals, and top-seeded Geoffrey Chizever of Tarzana won the boys’ 10 title Saturday by beating No. 2 Yuichi Uda, 6-2, 6-0.
Third-seeded Dylan Mann of Canoga Park and Joseph Gilbert will face No. 2 Bryan Golledge and Sam Adam Webster in the boys’ 18 doubles final. No. 1 Darian Chappell of Camarillo and Jonni Seymour will play Allison Arvizu and Natalie Exon in the girls’ 18 doubles final.
No. 1 Nicholas Weiss of Calabasas will meet No. 2 Ryan Redondo after his 6-2, 6-0 semifinal victory over Drew Hoskins. No. 1 Jieun Jacobs of Valencia will play No. 3 Luana Magnani after her 7-5, 6-4 semifinal victory over Caylan Leslie in girls’ 14s.
Third-seeded Stephen Amritraj of Calabasas beat No. 2 Aaron Yovan, 7-5, 6-1, to reach the boys’ 12s final against No. 5 Doug Stewart of Malibu.
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b1e742be887055a19b58ecab47720065 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19963-story.html | Notre Dame’s Piedra Proves Again He’s a Hart Breaker | Notre Dame’s Piedra Proves Again He’s a Hart Breaker
The Notre Dame High boys’ basketball team should take along senior guard Jorge Piedra whenever the Knights play Hart.
For the second time this summer, Piedra beat the Indians with a last-second shot as he made a three-point basket with three seconds to play to give Notre Dame a 61-60 victory in the “War on the Floor” tournament Saturday at Sylmar High.
The Knights, who won three games Saturday to improve to 3-3 in the tournament, will play Rolling Hills Prep in the losers’ bracket consolation final at 8:10 tonight. Notre Dame reached the final by defeating Valencia, 50-47. Valencia missed a free throw and two shots off offensive rebounds in the last six seconds.
Notre Dame trailed Hart, 60-58, when Piedra stole a pass with 32 seconds left and sank the decisive three-pointer. He scored 31 points, including five three-pointers.
Earlier this summer in the Crespi tournament, Notre Dame beat Hart by a basket thanks to a last-second layup by Piedra.
“I love it,” Piedra said. “These kind of games are fun. It’s the reason why I play.”
Hart forward Cory Johnson matched Piedra with 31 points. The Indians played without starting guards J.T. Stotts and Jerry Owens.
Rolling Hills Prep 53, Alemany 49--Jesus Castillon scored 19 points and Justin Savitt had 12 in a losing effort for the Indians.
Valencia 51, Montclair Prep 38--Eskias McDaniels and Marc Sison each scored 13 points to lead the Vikings.
Alemany 56, Cleveland 51--Ryan Spencer scored 12 points, all on three-point baskets in the second half, to spark the Indians to a come-from-behind victory.
Rolling Hills Prep 49, Burbank 47--Juni Williams scored a team-high 15 points for the Bulldogs but was called for a double dribble with two seconds left and the score tied, 47-47. Robert Davis, who finished with a game-high 21 points, took the inbounds pass and hit a short bank shot at the buzzer.
Alemany 56, St. John Bosco 45--DeJon Lee scored 15 points and Castillon added 13 for the Indians, who led throughout.
Montclair Prep 67, Granada Hills 44--Rocky Steryo scored 24 points and the Mounties used a 24-7 surge in the first 10 minutes of the second half to break it open.
Rolling Hills Prep 51, Chatsworth 35--Monte McFarland scored 14 points for Chatsworth, but the Chancellors were eliminated.
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8c5c8bcd0da75b51918dce9067f6b88f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19964-story.html | Trouble Down the Line : Like His Nicaraguan Father, JetHawks’ Molina Finds Path to Majors Full of Cruel Twists | Trouble Down the Line : Like His Nicaraguan Father, JetHawks’ Molina Finds Path to Majors Full of Cruel Twists
Last Sunday was Father’s Day in Nicaragua, so Luis Molina made sure he called his dad in Central America during the week. After some aimless chitchat about the weather and family matters--the kinds of things people talk about when they’re trying to avoid much weightier subjects--the discussion turned to Luis’ physical condition.
Rubbing the uncomfortable neoprene brace that holds his left knee together, Luis cursed his luck. And two time zones away, his father, Julio, felt the pain.
On the last Sunday in May, Molina, the JetHawks’ starting shortstop, planted his feet to take a throw at second base during a California League game at the Hangar. A split second later, Modesto’s Jose Castro rolled hard into Molina’s left leg and the infielder collapsed awkwardly. It was a dirty play, Molina insists; just aggressive baseball, say others who were there. Either way, the play ended with Molina writhing on the ground in pain.
“I thought something was broken, the pain was so intense,” Molina said in Spanish.
It was worse than a broken bone. Molina suffered tears to his anterior and medial lateral cruciate ligaments as well as a medial meniscus tear.
“It’s probably one of the worst knee injuries you can have,” JetHawk trainer Rob Nodine said.
The previous inning, Molina singled to drive in a run and lift his batting average to .254, up 40 points from a few weeks earlier. Larry Beinfest, director of player development for the Seattle Mariners, the JetHawks’ parent club, long has said Molina “has some of the best hands in the organization. . . . Anything hit near him is an automatic out.”
And now Molina was hitting as well as he ever had in a four-year professional career. Finally, things were beginning to come together. Suddenly, it all came apart.
Perhaps bad luck is a family trait. If so, it has been passed down through the Molina clan because Julio Molina also knows about bad timing.
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Julio was a home run-hitting right fielder who had a cannon for an arm. On the Nicaraguan national team, he played with the likes of Dennis Martinez, Porfi Altamirano and Tony Chevez. But while those three went on to the major leagues, Julio toiled in obscurity for 14 seasons in what passes for professional baseball in Nicaragua.
“For me,” he says now, “the timing wasn’t right.”
Thirty years ago, at age 18, Julio Molina was good enough to earn a tryout with El Boer of Managua, the country’s most-storied franchise. At the time, Nicaragua was home to one of professional baseball’s top winter leagues and Molina seemed destined to test himself against major league stars such as Jim Kaat and Ferguson Jenkins. And if he distinguished himself? Well, a scout was sure to notice.
But that same year, 1967, Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza withdrew the government’s financial support and the country’s 11-year experiment with winter ball ended.
By 1973, baseball had rebounded in Nicaragua and the national team was among the best in the world, finishing second in consecutive world championships. Major league scouts returned in droves and the Baltimore Orioles snapped up young pitchers Martinez, 18, and Chevez, 19, while the Philadelphia Phillies took a chance on the 21-year-old Altamirano. But by then Molina, at 25, was too old to be considered a prospect.
“Besides,” he says, “I couldn’t go. I was married. I had kids. It would have been difficult.”
The major leagues, however, didn’t become a dream forgotten; simply a dream deferred. And Julio Molina took the first step on that new path in 1974 when Luis was born.
*
By the time young Luis had turned 4 civil war had broken out in Nicaragua, and the people of Chinadega, Molina’s hometown, were among the first to rise up against the Somoza dictatorship. The insurrection lasted 18 bloody months and claimed more than 55,000 lives before the government finally toppled. But peace was short-lived in Chinadega.
With the support of the U.S. government, remnants of Somoza’s deposed Guardia Nacional regrouped in Honduras and began to strike at towns close to the border. One attack, later traced to the CIA, destroyed the Chinadegan port of Corinto in 1984. In response to the attacks, a national draft was instituted and young boys barely into their teens were conscripted into the military.
Julio Molina had seen enough. Taking advantage of his wife’s Panamanian citizenship, he moved the family away from the war to Panama City. Luis was just a month shy of his 11th birthday, but his athletic talents quickly helped him win new friends in Panama where, as in Nicaragua, baseball is the national pastime. He was eventually selected for Panama’s junior team and, like his father, followed baseball to places he never could have visited on his own.
Unlike his father, Luis Molina was soon drawing the attention of professional scouts. The Seattle Mariners were the first to offer a contract, signing the 18-year-old infielder during a tournament in Mexico in 1992.
And he wasn’t the only member of the family to join the Mariners. Shortly after signing Luis, the club also offered Julio, a youth-league baseball coach, a job as a scout.
*
Luis Molina knew where he wanted to go--to a small patch of AstroTurf between second and third base in the Kingdome. A direct flight from Panama could have taken him there in a matter of hours, but the Mariners had a more circuitous journey in mind.
His first stop was Peoria of the Arizona Rookie League, where he batted .214 in 39 games. Next came stops in Bellingham, Wash., of the Class A Northwest League, two trips to the Class A Midwest League and a brief visit to the Arizona Instructional League, where he batted a robust .342.
Still there was something missing. “I would like to see his bat come along, and I think that could happen when he becomes stronger, more confident at the plate,” said Beinfest, Seattle’s director of player development.
If all went well at Lancaster this summer, Molina would move up to double A next summer, a promotion that would, in his words, leave him “a step away from the big leagues.” Now all that thinking is as scrambled as the inside of Molina’s knee.
“My plans are changing a lot,” he said sadly. “This is really going to slow down my career.”
The din of a radio, tuned to a JetHawks’ road game, provides the background noise as Molina, only 22, assesses the situation. Days like these can be the toughest because when the team is on the road Molina is left alone with his thoughts in the Lancaster apartment he shares with several teammates.
Although no one has given up on Luis Molina, Beinfest said the injury “does hurt his chances.”
The 90-minute operation to repair the ligament and cartilage tears went well, doctors say, and Molina has begun rehabilitation. If he makes normal progress, he should be at full strength by next spring.
“People want everything to be easy, but everything is not going to be a bed of roses. I know that. I’m not going to give up on baseball just because I hurt my leg. “If all this [rehab] is a success, I’m going to make it. . . . If not, at least I’ll be able to say I tried.”
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af5f45f2386d6ff4284ddd5f2d33e78e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19965-story.html | JetHawks Support Wooten in Rout | JetHawks Support Wooten in Rout
The police dog-attacks-padded-burglar demonstration in the middle of the first inning was a success: Nobody got hurt.
Then again, damage had already been done. And it would continue.
The JetHawks scored in the top of the first and went on to score plenty more in a 7-1 victory over the High Desert Mavericks before 2,838 Saturday night at Maverick Stadium.
The JetHawks (6-5) won their third game in a row thanks to a steady offense and the even-steadier arm of newcomer Greg Wooten.
Wooten (2-0) allowed eight hits in eight innings. He struck out three and gave up the Mavericks’ lone run, which came in the eighth.
He was teased by teammates for not logging a complete game, but his first two performances have been no joke.
“From a pitching standpoint, that’s what you want--consistency,” said JetHawk Manager Dave Brundage.
The offense was stable as well.
Shane Monahan led off the sixth with a single and scored on Jason Cook’s triple to the right-field corner. Cook scored three batters later on shortstop David Lamb’s fielding error to make it 3-0.
The Jethawks went up, 4-0, in the eighth on Doug Carroll’s home run, his 11th. They added three runs on four hits in the ninth.
The Mavericks (3-8) had two scoring chances in the middle of the game.
In the fifth, Lamb was thrown out at the plate trying to score from second base on Jesus Garcia’s single. Jesus Marquez made an accurate throw from right field.
“That was probably the turning point of the game,” Brundage said. “It could have been a 1-1 ballgame, but the momentum switched back in our favor.”
It stayed there with the help of another solid play from the outfield in the sixth. This time, Monahan caught Mike Berry’s shallow fly ball and doubled Doug Newstrom off first base. Newstrom likely would have scored when the next batter, Chris Kirgan, doubled off the center-field wall.
Wooten, who was called up from Appleton, Wis., and pitched his first game--a victory over Visalia--on Monday, is thrilled with the combined results: three earned runs in 14 innings.
“So far, it’s been great,” he said. “I’m not trying to strike guys out. I just throw my game and make them hit my pitches.”
JetHawks 7, High Desert 1
JetHawks: 100 002 013 -- 7 12 2
High Desert: 000 000 010 -- 1 8 3
Wooten, Thompson (9) and Augustine; Saneaux, Montgomery (8), Darley (9), Olszewski (9) and Newstrom.
W--Wooten (2-0). L--Saneaux (1-2).
2B: J--Cook, Marquez; HD--Berry, Kirgan. 3B:J--Lanza. HR:J--Carroll (11).
Records: JetHawks 6-5; High Desert 3-8.
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f7493b7d0ba02a208bb69449cc9e8b8f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19968-story.html | Huntington Beach Wins Its 15th Title in 18 Years | Huntington Beach Wins Its 15th Title in 18 Years
With the music of Soundgarden blaring from the loudspeaker on the sand, it was obvious this was no ordinary high school sporting event.
It’s surfing and Huntington Beach High, the West Coast’s perennial surfing school, won its 15th National Scholastic Surfing Assn. championship in 18 years Saturday at Lower Trestles.
Led by Mike Reilly, the Oilers actually clinched the high school title Tuesday with their powerful team advancing members through the various heats.
Huntington Beach finished with 117 points. Carlsbad was second with 92 points.
In the individual competition, Jeremy Sherwin of Encinitas San Dieguito won the boys’ title and Shelly Hayden of San Clemente won the girls’ title.
“It’s not like there wasn’t any competition at this event,” said Janice Aragon, NSSA executive director. “We had some fine teams from Carlsbad and San Clemente here. But Huntington Beach just has a very good team that takes its surfing very seriously. They are very impressive.”
Reilly, a recent Huntington Beach graduate, was instrumental in building the Oilers’ early lead in the six-day competition.
“I was surfing pretty good the first two days,” said Reilly, who failed to win his third consecutive men’s individual title. “I kind of had a bad day on Wednesday, but I picked up again going into the finals.”
Said Huntington Beach Coach Andy Verdone: “Each year this contest seems to get a bit harder. But we dedicated this [competition] to Justin Harcharic and that made the team work that much harder.”
Harcharic, a senior, was the Oilers’ No. 2 man. A car accident earlier this year kept him from competing in this event.
“He’s getting better and he’ll be back in the water very soon,” Verdone said. “But it was important that we won this as a team.”
Another priority for Reilly was the high school individual title.
Reilly went into the championship heat Saturday evening seeking his third national individual high school title.
However, Reilly was facing friend Iain McPhillips of San Clemente.
“Iain has been surfing really good at this competition,” Reilly said before the heat. “He wants it just as bad as I do.”
Reilly started with a bang, catching a nice left and performing a floater with some cut-backs. But after that wave, Reilly was unable to catch anything decent.
McPhillips was second behind Sherwin and Jessie Evans of Edison finished third. Reilly was fourth, followed by freshman Branden Tipton and Matt Shandbolt, both of Huntington Beach.
In the women’s open division, which included surfers of high school age and up, Jessica Wade of La Jolla was the runner-up.
Liz Bunch, a resident of Maui, was third and Kristine Webster of Del Mar Torrey Pines High was fourth. Alison Arvizu of Huntington Beach High was fifth and Nicole Cousimamo of Laguna Beach High finished sixth.
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5fb378b8beae4e9405884b793b5c0f1f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19969-story.html | Piranhas Lose Johnson, Game to Iowa, 56-50 | Piranhas Lose Johnson, Game to Iowa, 56-50
Kurt Warner threw for 306 yards and five touchdowns to lead the Iowa Barnstormers to a 56-50 Arena Football League victory over the Piranhas Saturday night at Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines.
Warner connected on touchdown passes of 23, 12, 14, eight and 36 yards.
Willis Jacox and Leonard Conley caught two touchdown passes each and Ryan Murray had one.
The Piranhas were dealt a serious blow on the opening kickoff when defensive standout Carlton Johnson injured his knee when returning a ball. He did not return to the game.
Johnson, a safety who leads the team in tackles with 51, will undergo an MRI today to determine the seriousness of his injury.
The loss of Johnson was felt right away as the Piranhas allowed a season-high 56 points.
On offense, the Piranhas did their best to stay in the game, scoring a season-high 50 points, including five touchdown passes by quarterback Scooter Molander.
Piranha receiver Adrian Jarrell had nine receptions for 90 yards and two touchdowns.
Molander also threw touchdown passes to Andrew Hill, Jerome Smith and Kevin Carroll.
The Piranhas fall to 7-3 after starting 7-0. The Barnstormers improve to 7-2, with their seventh victory in their last eight games.
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6b3f5839dbc7920dff00fa9c837b0965 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19971-story.html | Sorber Gets Goal To Help Wiz Beat Dallas and the Heat | Sorber Gets Goal To Help Wiz Beat Dallas and the Heat
Mike Sorber scored in the 39th minute to give the Kansas City Wiz a 1-0 victory over the Dallas Burn on Saturday night in a Major League Soccer game played in sweltering 104-degree conditions in Dallas.
Garth Lagerwey made four saves for the Wiz, who improved to 6-9 with their first three-point road victory of the season. Dallas dropped to 6-7 before a crowd of 9,615 at the Cotton Bowl.
Sean Bower assisted on the winning goal and also had two goal-saving blocks, including one in the 81st minute on Ted Eck’s shot.
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e0c64ab25a7b8a7f7877bee4c75e1f07 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19972-story.html | Edison’s O’Bric Wins Heptathlon Title | Edison’s O’Bric Wins Heptathlon Title
Edison standout Kerry O’Bric captured the heptathlon title at the junior national championships Saturday at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.
O’Bric posted the nation’s third-best hepthatlon score with 5,114 points.
Ashley Bethel, who will be a junior at Mission Viejo High in the fall, finished third with 4,991.
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d58108e59043859d4e8f1e0fc68eaa09 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19997-story.html | As Owner, He Wasn’t the Victor | As Owner, He Wasn’t the Victor
Pro football can be a very dangerous game. I mean, how’d you like to find yourself on the Chicago Bears’ five-yard line, third and goal, with a minute to play and the Bears four points ahead?
Or would you prefer to be fading back to pass with a guy they call the Refrigerator bearing down on you?
But if the game is tough on the field, it’s supposed to be a piece of cake in the front office. You know. You sit in your luxury box and entertain a dozen of your best corporate friends. You get the best tables at restaurants. Secretaries of state try to get on your jet to go to the Super Bowl, maybe even the vice president.
It’s the good life, right? The American Dream, owner’s division.
Well, don’t talk to Victor Kiam unless you want to be disenchanted. He owned the Remington electric razor company and a few other lucrative and thriving businesses when the ownership of the New England Patriot pro football team was up for grabs. The Sullivan family, which had owned it since inception, came on hard times--mostly through sponsoring a Michael Jackson concert tour.
Victor Kiam bought the Patriots. He thought it would be a nice hobby, might get his picture in Sports Illustrated. Movie stars promoting their pictures might be coming through and would like to see the Patriots play the Cowboys on a Sunday. They’d ring him up.
It looked like the good life. Money as far as the eye could see. The product was expensive, but depreciation was generous and compared to making razors, a glamorous way to make a living.
Then came the day when Kiam, so to speak, found himself on the Bears’ five-yard line. Standing there with the ball and no one open and a 350-pound lineman with a bad temper trying to get at him.
It all happened because of the league’s press rule. The one that said female sportswriters had the same access to men’s locker rooms after the game that men had. This was somehow thought to be because men had an unfair advantage in being able to get to the athletes before they had time to cool down, collect their thoughts. It’s a highly dubious proposition, but political correctness doesn’t always depend on reason.
What happened next was a now-infamous confrontation between Lisa Olsen of the Boston Herald and tight end Zeke Mowatt of the Patriots. Kiam was about to be tackled for a big loss.
In a postgame session in the locker room, Mowatt made what is, by all standards, a disgusting gesture toward Olsen. She was outraged and she said so loudly and publicly.
Well, it became a cause celebre. Some athletes fled into the night recognizing the affair for the ticking package it was. Some sided with Olsen, others sided with Mowatt.
Journalism rallied around Olsen. After all, freedom of the press was at stake here.
Soon, Kiam got drawn in. Not surprisingly, he sided with his player. He found himself quoted as calling the reporter “a classic bitch.” His denials--"I don’t use those words!"--were too late.
Lawyers came from everywhere. So did women’s groups. Depositions flew around like leaves in a high wind. Kiam’s public image was a shambles. Some of Olsen’s depositions seemed to leave questions.
In this one, it seemed, everybody would be a loser. The league levied fines, but there is some question as to whether they were ever collected. Olsen eventually took a newspaper job in Australia.
Meanwhile, back at the counting house, Kiam was like a guy in a bunker. Women’s groups called for a boycott of his razors and other products. Since he also owned Lady Remington jewelry company, this was not funny.
Lawyers’ fees were crippling. So was public obloquy. The more Kiam protested Olsen’s version of events, the more he emerged as a villain.
Kiam had always been an impetuous entrepreneur. After his wife had given him a Remington razor one Christmas, he liked it so much he bought the company. He did its TV commercials himself.
He didn’t always fare so well. He tells of mistakes he made. He had a chance to buy a product featuring a fabric that adhered to itself re-usably without zippers or tracks but he turned it down. It became known as Velcro. He also sold 1,000 shares in a computer chip company called Intel. He sold for $23,500. If he held, those shares would be worth $5 million today.
But he leaped at the chance to buy the Patriots. “I lost $30 million,” he ruefully confessed the other day. He tried twice to move the franchise, he says. He was turned down. He is currently suing the league because at least one of the owners who blocked him has since moved himself.
He finally had to sell the Patriots. He also had to sell part of his Remington holdings to make up for losses. The guy with the ball on the Bears’ five-yard-line had it easy by comparison.
Kiam, back to entrepreneurship, was in town with his newest product, EarPlanes, a device to banish ear discomfort on airline landings and takeoffs. He has kicked football.
In the musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” there is a lugubrious character playing the part of Sitting Bull whose constant complaint and refrain to those around him is the advice “No put money in show business!”
Victor Kiam wishes he had been listening.
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ef3b8e3b06e2ea64d5e052fa29689879 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-19999-story.html | HOTLANTA : Officials Sweat It Out as Even the Army Is Being Called Out to Beat the Heat | HOTLANTA : Officials Sweat It Out as Even the Army Is Being Called Out to Beat the Heat
In 1732, in an attempt to lure the world to the colony he founded, James Edward Oglethorpe described Georgia as “always serene, pleasant and temperate, never subject to excessive heat or cold, nor to sudden changes; the winter is regular and short, and the summer cool’d with refreshing breezes.”
Two hundred fifty-eight years later, in an attempt to lure the world to Atlanta for the Summer Olympics, Billy Payne assured the International Olympic Committee in 1990 that the average temperature between July 19 and Aug. 4 in 1996 would be about 72 degrees. He did not mention that those days would be “cool’d with refreshing breezes.” It was not necessary. The IOC was sold, awarding the Centennial Games to Atlanta over Athens, Greece.
Payne, president of the praying-to-break-even Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG), also predicted a sizable profit. So perhaps he was not trying to mislead the IOC. Perhaps he is simply bad with numbers.
In either case, National Weather Service officials confirm that the average temperature in Atlanta for the days of the Games is 70. That, however, is the low. The mercury stays there for about seven minutes, when most people are sleeping. The average high, they say, is 91.
Last summer, the average high during the 17 days of the Games was 97. With the humidity, the heat index topped 100 in the middle of the day almost every day. It was so brutal that ACOG officials canceled the final day of a venue tour for foreign journalists. The National Weather Service predicts a 37.3% chance that it will be that warm again this year.
But who needs meteorologists to forecast the weather in Atlanta? The city might be called Hotlanta because that is where the action is in the Deep South, but that nickname also could apply to the summer climate.
How hot is it?
“The Sweatlanta Olympics,” says the Economist. “It was not exactly chilly in Barcelona . . . or in Los Angeles in 1984, but Atlanta’s could be the most grueling Games ever.”
”. . . A temple-thumping, polluted, humid heat that saps your energy,” says the Times of London.
”. . . Soaked-shirt, parched-tongue, fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot,” says the Associated Press.
”. . . Bad for spectators and hell on earth for competitors,” says Sports Illustrated.
Even Payne now acknowledges that the weather is ACOG’s No. 1 villain.
Now that we have established that Atlanta is a hot spot, the question is what officials plan to do about it.
IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch said he believes he will be OK. “Maybe I will not wear a tie,” he said. But he has concerns that were passed along last month to ACOG about the athletes, spectators and even the high-tech scoreboards at the outdoor venues.
Responding that the organizing committee is ready for the challenge, ACOG spokeswoman Laurie Olsen said, “Between the city, country, state and a host of community groups, Atlanta is mounting an unprecedented effort.”
They are, literally, calling out the Army. The Defense Department is involved. So is the Salvation Army. And Red Cross and Blue Cross. If all else fails, they have asked for help from above. Twenty churches will be open at all times to provide air-conditioned shelter and water for visitors who have come to watch the Games, and even wayward marathoners.
That will not be an option for four-legged athletes, the horses in equestrian and modern pentathlon events. But they have not been forgotten. Animal rights activists raised concerns about the horses before anyone began talking about potential risks for two-legged athletes.
“We think we have done a tremendous amount of work to watch the only athletes in the Games who cannot say, ‘Stop,’ ” veterinarian Kent Allen said during an ACOG media seminar on the heat here last week. “But we do not intend to let these athletes run until exhaustion.”
After four years and $1 million in expenditures on a project to protect the horses, ACOG installed high-powered water mist fans at the site of the equestrian competitions, the Georgia International Horse Park in Conyers, Ga., lengthened rest periods and shortened courses.
They could not do the same thing for human athletes, but the men’s marathon was rescheduled from its traditional starting time, in the late afternoon so that it can conclude during the closing ceremony, to 7 a.m.
Many well-conditioned athletes might not be able to take the heat, especially in endurance events. Records in sports that require more than 15 or 20 minutes to complete are safe, Phil Sparling, a Georgia Institute of Technology exercise researcher told the seminar.
In late May, Adam Johnson withdrew from the final of a Miller Lite/AVP beach volleyball tournament at Atlanta because of heat prostration after the temperature soared into the 90s. At a track and field meet the previous weekend, Algerian miler Noureddine Morceli found the conditions so draining that he announced he would immediately move his headquarters from Albuquerque to Florida to prepare for the heat and humidity. As many as 2,000 athletes have been training in the Southeast for the same reason.
Archer Judi Adams of Phoenix believes some foreign athletes will not be able to adjust. “I know the Europeans don’t take to the heat,” she said. “They don’t usually drink water that much, so the weather will be a real challenge to them.”
Bengt Lager, a former Swedish modern pentathlete who has lived in Atlanta for five years, said that if the heat does not get athletes, the air-conditioning in all the indoor venues will.
“You go from the heat right into the cold,” he said. “If you’re sweating and sit too long in the air conditioning, it feels freezing. It’s an educational thing. You just don’t do it, even if it feels nice. You keep a sweater and a jacket.”
But at least athletes are in training. That is not the case for most spectators. At the recent 10-day track and field trials, when the temperature often was in the low 90s even in the early evening, 20% of the 283 fans who needed medical assistance had heat-related illnesses. Officials fear the percentage will increase during the Olympics, when spectators might have to walk several miles a day to events because access to venues by cars and buses will be limited.
“An elite athlete is a lot more prepared than the average blob who’s a spectator,” Dr. David E. Martin, a professor of cardiopulmonary care sciences at Georgia State University told the AP. “The spectators, in their own way, need to pretend they are Olympians and prepare. They need to start practicing walking three or four miles a day.”
With the tickets, ACOG mailed pamphlets prepared by Blue Cross-Blue Shield including tips to beat the heat. Included: Drink plenty of of water; wear light clothing, a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses; limit direct exposure to the sun between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.; use sunscreen; avoid excessive physical exertion; take periodic rest breaks. Also, limit alcohol consumption. No mint juleps.
Aware, however, that most spectators will not take the precautions, 16 public and private agencies are coming to the rescue. The Red Cross is setting up eight tents near the venues with free water, sponges and mist-blowing fans. The Defense Department is providing “water buffaloes,” big tanks usually more associated with fires than drinking water. The Salvation Army is organizing the churches.
The official bottled water, Crystal Springs of Atlanta, is supplying 4 million gallons of water, enough to fill 72 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to athletes and spectators. Teams of Rollerblading, toga-clad “Heatbusters” carrying four-gallon water tanks on their backs will tour high-traffic areas and spray spectators for free.
An act of God also is a possibility, although perhaps not a relief. On the day before the track and field trials, a thunderstorm bringing winds gusting at 43 mph and 1 1/2 inches of rain--another charming feature of Atlanta summers--blew through the city, knocking over a tent and slightly injuring four persons at the Centennial Olympic Stadium, shutting down the rapid transportation system for 12 minutes and temporarily knocking out 911 emergency service.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Too Hot To Handle?
If current weather patterns in the southeastern United States hold through early August, temperatures during the 1996 Summer Olympics may be among the highest ever. The Southeast, not known for temperate summer weather, is influenced by an area of high pressure known as the Bermuda High. Events will also be held in different cities outside Atlanta, including Athens and Savannah. Each city is affected by distinct weather characteristics due to local topography. A look at what athletes and fans can expect during the XXVI Olympiad:
The Impending Scorch
The National Weather service predicts that area temperatures may soar above record highs during the Olympics. A look at the average of record highs, from July 20 to August 4, for host cities:
Atlanta
Downtown Atlanta’s concrete streets and buildings hold heat, a phenomena called “urban heat island.” Expect outdoor stadium temperatures to be 10 to 15 degrees hotter than events held in suburban areas.
Average record high: 100.2 degrees
Record highs range from 98 to 103 degrees
*
Savannah
Proximity to Atlantic Ocean moderates temperatures but increases humidity. Site of yachting events.
Average record high: 101.8 degrees
Record highs range from 99 to 105 degrees
*
Athens
Located in hilly Piedmont Plateau, moderate weather influenced by southern Appalachian Mountains, Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Site of soccer semifinals and final.
Average record high: 102.5
Record highs range from 99 to 108 degrees
*
Chattanooga, Tenn.
Deep valleys and high ridges create varying winds and temperatures. Canoe and kayak events will be held on nearby Ocoee River.
Average record high: 101.8 degrees
Record highs range from 98 to 106 degrees
*
Columbus
Effects of terrain on weather is neglible; city is hottest and most humid in July. Site of softball.
Average record high: 101.1 degrees
Record highs range from 98 to 104 degrees
Why It’s Hot
Georgia’s weather is influenced by an area of atmospheric pressure known as the Bermuda High which pulls warm, humid air inland from the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The high pressure area, which will begin to diminish in early fall, is typified by mild mornings, warm afternoons with occassional afternoon thunderstorms and fair evenings.
Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1996 Summer Olympic Games Committee and National Weather Service; Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times
Countdown to Atlanta
* MIKE DOWNEY
With addition of Gary Payton, Dream Team might need diplomatic immunity. C3
* BASEBALL
This could be the last Games featuring an all-college team from the United States. C3
* OLYMPIC SCENE
A legal splash is embarrassing to U.S. swimmer Greg Burgess. C3
* GYMNASTICS
Mihai Bagiu hits the jackpot on the high bar and lands a spot on the U.S. team. C11
* SWIMMING
South African Peter Williams is making a case for a trip to Atlanta. C11
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9c8c0dd7ac862e60d9931d1166397b89 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20003-story.html | And Remember, You Can’t Spell O’Neal Without L.A. | And Remember, You Can’t Spell O’Neal Without L.A.
What will it take to bring Shaquille O’Neal to Los Angeles? Yes, an airplane, but what else?
Besides a multimillion-dollar contract to play for the Lakers, it seems pretty clear Shaq ought to realize right now that moving his base of operations to Los Angeles makes a lot of sense.
Somebody needs to put it all down in a list and in plain words to explain why he should be here.
1. Shaq loves Manhattan Beach, which isn’t that far from the Forum. Of course, neither is Inglewood. But Shaq’s agent, Leonard Armato, has a beautiful home on the beach at Manhattan Beach and Shaq can stay with him while house hunting.
Plus, Shaq can also practice his free throws at Manhattan Beach. From the pier, he can see if he can hit the ocean.
2. Shaq needs to be closer to the movie industry. His acting career began in “Blue Chips” and continues with the July 17 Touchstone Pictures release of “Kazaam,” in which Shaq plays a 3,000-year-old genie who is released from a battered boombox. This is the actual plot.
Shaq begins filming a Warner Brothers project called “Steel” on Aug. 7. It’s based on a DC comic book character named John Henry Irons, the first African American superhero. Shaq came up with the idea himself and is co-producing the movie with Quincy Jones.
3. Shaq needs to be closer to the music industry. After all, he is busy launching his new Santa Monica-based record label, called TWISM Records, which stands for This World IS Mine.
Shaq’s third album will be released by TWISM this summer, but he’s also on the lookout for new artists. Shaq already has signed a new group comprising three sisters and called S.H.E.
Shaq said S.H.E. sounded good to H.I.M.
4. Shaq will feel right at home on the freeways. At last count, he had a Chevy Suburban, a Mercedes sedan, a Porsche Carrera and a Chevy Tahoe. Shaq loves cars. California insurance companies are going to absolutely adore him.
5. Shaq loves club sandwiches and fettucine alfredo. Not on the same plate, of course. You just know he can find lots of that stuff here. Noted connoisseur George Raveling suggests the delightful club sandwich at Kate Mantilini on Wilshire. As for fettucine alfredo, there may be none finer than that found at Chianti on Melrose.
What’s more, one of Shaq’s all-time favorite restaurants is Georgia, also on Melrose, which features so-called “high-end southern” cooking, such as smothered lamb chops, cornmeal mush and black-eyed peas. Norm Nixon is a co-owner. Celebrities such as Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy, Connie Stevens, Lou Adler and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are investors and they’re just the type of company Shaq should keep.
6. Shaq will make headline writers fall in love with him all over again. “Shaq” is compact, won’t be confused with anything else, it rhymes with words like “flak” and “hack” and it fits a lot better than Abdur-Rahim.
Get ready for “Shaq Baq on Traq.”
7. Shaq can find plenty of clothes to fit him. When you’re 7-1 and a wafer-thin mint shy of 330 pounds, this is no tiny task. Shaq wears a size 56-long jacket. His neck measures 20 inches, his chest 55 inches and his waist 45 inches.
No problem. There is Rochester’s on Wilshire, which Shaq already has visited a few times. Now he can be a regular, like Vlade Divac, Elden Campbell, Eddie Jones and even Dennis Rodman, who is rarely referred to as regular.
Bruce Fitzgerald, who manages Rochester’s, said Shaq usually gets jeans and sport shirts and always makes a good impression “because he doesn’t come in with an attitude.”
8. Shaq can be instrumental in getting a new arena sold. Shaqdome: The House that Shaq Built. Those corporate boxes will sell like fettucine alfredo once Shaq is a Laker. Now figure the value of the Laker franchise with Shaq and without him. Bet you Jerry Buss already has.
9. Shaq can branch out into the restaurant business and buy L.A.'s two Shack restaurants, the one in Playa del Rey and the one in Santa Monica, then change their name to his liking.
The Shack in Playa del Rey is home to the Shack Attack, described by restaurant manager Mark Hoyt as “a heart attack on a bun.” It’s a quarter-pound burger and a Louisiana hot link sausage.
Hoyt said the Shack would welcome Shaq: “We’ll give him the first one free and then overcharge him like hell for the second.”
Is this a great town or what?
10. Shaq doesn’t have to worry about his every move being scrutinized as he does in Orlando. He would be a normal, if somewhat oversized, celebrity here.
Besides, Shaq would be following in the very large sneakerprints of two centers who also left their teams to join the Lakers: Wilt Chamberlain and Abdul-Jabbar. Didn’t they play on six NBA champion Laker teams?
Kazaam that, Shaq.
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d974650f28e8ba448f831a47f915612e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20005-story.html | Baseball’s Amateur Hour : This Is Probably the Last All-College U.S. Team to Compete in the Olympics | Baseball’s Amateur Hour : This Is Probably the Last All-College U.S. Team to Compete in the Olympics
USC outfielder Jacque Jones is sitting in the dugout at USA Baseball’s training facility and reflecting on the national team’s 36-6 record on the 1995 summer tour, including a four-game sweep of powerful Cuba.
“We have confidence and togetherness,” Jones said. “We know that if we play [the Cubans] tough and keep them close, they’re not invincible.
“We have to remember that.”
Said Cal State Fullerton outfielder Mark Kotsay:
“The Cubans know we can play, that we’re not just a bunch of kids. This is our second summer together, and we have a lot of continuity and experience that will work for us on and off the field. We’re not going to be intimidated [by Cuba] like a lot of international teams are.”
In final preparation for the Olympic Games and its Atlanta debut against Nicaragua on July 20, a U.S. team that Coach Skip Bertman of Louisiana State says has more offensive weapons than any predecessor had proceeded to enhance the confidence of last summer before receiving a dose of reality Saturday night.
The U.S., averaging 10.2 runs per game, had gone 18-0 against some of the teams it will play in Atlanta and stretched a two-year win streak to 39 games before losing to Cuba, 5-1, in Saturday night’s opener of a five-game series.
The Cubans bombed the U.S. and others in winning gold at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, then shook up an aging team in the aftermath of the U.S. sweep last year. They remain the most formidable hurdle, but not the only one for the U.S. in a field that includes internationally tested Japan and South Korea.
There is pressure on the U.S. in other ways as well.
This is probably the last all-college team to represent the U.S. and must perform well on its home turf to help keep the national pastime in the Olympics. There is no guarantee baseball will be on the program at Sydney in 2000. Three things are imperative, said Richard Case, executive director of USA Baseball:
1. A strong showing by the U.S., preferably a gold, to enhance worldwide visibility and underscore this country’s serious approach to what is basically its own game after being shut out on the medal stand in ’92.
2. Strong ticket sales for the tournament at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium (1.4 million of the 1.6 million tickets have been sold).
3. Approval by the International Baseball Assn. for the use of professionals in future Olympics at a Sept. 21 meeting in Switzerland.
Pressure? Bertman calls it prodigious, but said his team isn’t motivated to prove an all-college team, undoubtedly the last all-college team, can win the Olympics again, as the U.S. did in 1988, when Cuba boycotted. “A gold medal is motivation enough,” he said.
But that alone would not save baseball in the Olympics.
The IOC keeps dreaming of a dream team tournament featuring major league players.
The groundswell is such, said Case, that the era of an all-college team seems certain to end in Atlanta.
Aldo Notari of Italy, president of the IBA, agreed.
“I expect Atlanta to be the last Olympic tournament in which only amateurs compete,” he said. “It would be hypocritical to hold out.
“We want to see the best. The world wants to see players from the U.S. major leagues compete in the Olympics.”
With Cuba leading the opposition, the IBA failed by three votes in June of 1994 to approve inclusion of pros. Case, who is also secretary general of the IBA, expects September approval by at least 10 votes.
Money talks. If the IOC were to eliminate baseball from the Olympics, the IBA would lose a $1.5-million subsidy.
The IBA also realizes, officials said, that the 1992 U.S. Dream Team in basketball generated an estimated $80 million in additional merchandising, TV and other revenue for the IOC and other international organizations promoting the sport.
IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch has led the movement to get pro baseball players in the Olympics and has warned the IBA that baseball will be dropped if it doesn’t happen.
“Make no mistake,” Case said. “Samaranch wants a dream team tournament like basketball and hockey because he’s looking at the TV dollars.”
Anita DeFrantz, a Los Angeles-based member of the IOC, disagreed with that interpretation, saying Olympic television commitments have already been signed through 2008.
“It has more to do with the IOC’s change in philosophy,” she said. “We want the best athletes in the world. If we don’t have the best, why have it on the program? If other sports are open to pros, why not baseball?
“I mean, the notion of amateurism was created in this country and has largely worked because of the NCAA, but it’s long been outdated in the rest of the world.”
DeFrantz said she has tried to explain to her IOC colleagues that major league baseball is a summer sport that would be difficult and expensive to interrupt, but once the NHL agreed to shut down for two weeks to allow participation in the 1998 Winter Games, she was “essentially left without an argument.”
The IOC, she said, has promised Sydney it will set the program for 2000 by the end of this year, but even with IBA approval in September, there is no assurance that an agreement could be reached with major league owners to free major league players.
The most likely scenario for the Sydney Games, which begin in September, is a combination of college and triple-A players (minor league seasons end on Sept. 1), with a formula that might free major league players for future Olympics.
Case, resigned to the use of pros to save baseball in the Olympics, bristled at the idea of triple-A players, saying they are no better than the nine players on the U.S. roster who were selected on the first round of the recent draft.
“Nobody wants triple-A players,” he said. “Everybody wants the big show or a combination of the big-show guys and college players who would be more than the tokens that the college players were on the basketball Dream Team.”
Said Bertman, who recently led LSU to the College World Series title:
“Would a team of triple-A players be better than what we have? Probably. But would it be a Dream Team? No way. Would it be worth scrapping what we have for a triple-A team?
“I don’t think so, but this is being decided by the IOC, which means it’s being decided by countries like Zimbabwe and Tanzania that have no clues about the forces that drive major league baseball and know only what the Dream Team in basketball produced financially.”
The seasonal conflict is the largest hurdle confronting the use of major league players, but there are other issues:
--Who would represent the U.S. in Olympic qualifying tournaments and the international events of non-Olympic years?
--Would the pros swing an aluminum or wood bat in the Olympics?
--How would major league players, who seldom leave their homes without an appearance fee, be compensated?
“Let’s first make the pros eligible, then worry about the details,” said Donald Fehr, executive director of the players’ union. “We have players from 14 different countries in our membership and they have a high level of interest in wanting to play in the Olympics.
“It’s an issue we’ve discussed on a regular basis with the players. We’ve long felt that expanding the game into international markets is something that ought to be done, and the Olympics are the most visible vehicle. But unfortunately, the best athletes are not in the Olympics, and that’s bad for the Olympics and for baseball.”
Said Dodger first baseman Eric Karros: “It sounds great ideally, but in reality I don’t see it happening. From a business standpoint, there’s no way owners are going to shut down the season or let key players leave during the middle of a pennant race. I mean, look at this team. We have players from six different countries. We’d be devastated if they all left.
“It would be nice to see a dream team tournament, but if the whole idea of an Olympics is to bring everybody into the same arena, we have an Olympics at the major league level every year. We’re already satisfying the criteria.”
Dodger owner Peter O’Malley, a respected figure in global baseball, said it would be great to see his staff of international pitchers performing for their respective countries, but “working it out is a challenge. Perhaps it can be the first and best example of the partnership I’ve been advocating between owners and players.”
Both Fehr, who is expected to join the U.S. Olympic Committee’s board of directors soon, and acting Commissioner Bud Selig said they will be watching ramifications of the 1998 hockey shutdown for possible clues as to the direction they should follow.
“There’s no question but that we need to expand our horizons and move forward with an international strategy, but there’s inherent problems [with Olympic participation] that we have to look at closely,” Selig said. “The summer months are our best months. It would be extremely difficult to shut down the game or even let a player or two from each team leave. We’ve had a lot of contact with the IOC and USA Baseball and that will continue. Maybe we can find a way.”
In the meantime, Jacque Jones said the ’96 team does not dwell on the possibility that this could be the last all-college team or that baseball may not be played in the Olympics unless it’s played by pros.
He wonders, however, if the pros would value the experience, would feel the warmth he did when the torch was passed down the line of U.S. players before the Millington opener against Nicaragua in early June and a group of Little League players chanted “USA.”
“I got chills thinking what it will be like when 50,000 do it in Atlanta,” he said.
The ’96 U.S. team has 18 players returning from the ’95 national team. The coaching staff is the same.
Bertman sees no weaknesses but is concerned about the lack of international experience among his pitchers, primarily the likely starters: Kris Benson and Billy Koch of Clemson, the Nos. 1 and 4 players selected in the draft; Seth Greisinger of Virginia, No. 6, and R.A. Dickey of Tennessee, No. 18.
“The history of U.S. participation in the Olympics is that we’ve pitched well and played great D, but haven’t done much hitting against the Cubans, Japanese and Koreans,” Bertman said.
“This is the best hitting team we’ve had, including the 1984 team that had Will Clark, Barry Larkin and Mark McGwire. Some of the guys on this team will be household names in another five years.”
Bertman won’t project a lineup, but the outfield is expected to include Kotsay, Jones and a difficult choice from among J.D. Drew of Florida State, Chad Green of Kentucky and Chad Allen of Texas A&M.; Travis Lee of San Diego State will be the first baseman. Warren Morris of LSU is expected to be the second baseman, flanked by LSU shortstop Jason Williams. Troy Glaus of UCLA is making a big run at third base, or he could be the right-handed designated hitter. A.J. Hinch of Stanford and Brian Loyd of Cal State Fullerton will do the catching. Pepperdine’s Randy Wolf and UCLA’s Jim Parque, both left-handers, are expected to play spot roles in the bullpen.
The team is at 25 and must submit a roster of 20 with five alternates by Friday.
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e49ad1af6aa2ed8f22953c16699ec303 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20006-story.html | Dream Team Might Need Diplomatic Immunity | Dream Team Might Need Diplomatic Immunity
We have added another real charmer to our Olympic basketball team, in naming nasty little Seattle guard Gary Payton to replace Glenn “Big Greedy Dog” Robinson on the roster of “Dream Team III.”
This is the same Gary Payton you might recall from his collegiate days at Oregon State, the punk who threw a chewed piece of gum at an Oregon cheerleader and drop-kicked a ball the length of the court at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion. He was a cocky, mouthy kid whose role model was his father, whose personalized license plate read: “MR. MEAN.”
Our new star-spangled band will assemble this week in Chicago to begin training, then has exhibition games scheduled in places such as Auburn Hills, Mich.; Phoenix and Indianapolis. By the time they get to Atlanta for the opening ceremony July 19, I suspect one of our red-blooded Americans will have already head-butted a Russian or blind-sided a referee.
We have a strange habit of not caring what kind of character our hand-picked national basketball team possesses, as long as it can run, pass and shoot.
Once again, for example, our dream of a team includes that bad-act Charles Barkley, whose “Sir Charles” sobriquet remains one of basketball’s most objectionable misnomers, he being the same prince of a fellow who spat on a child, punched out fans in bars, elbowed an opponent from Angola and makes such delightful jokes as: “I hate white people.” (A joke that would have gotten a John Stockton or a Chris Mullin banned, had the shoe been on the other foot.)
One of the reasons we put Barkley on our U.S. basketball teams is that it’s the only way this guy’s team ever gets to win anything. Dream Team selectors feel sorry for him. Barkley’s college teams never won a championship, his pro teams never won a championship and he is about to abandon his current teammates to go lose with somebody else.
The only difference between Charles Barkley and Dennis Rodman is that Dennis is a winner. Rodman is the one who ought to be on our “Dream Team,” not Barkley.
Because attitude is clearly not a factor in selecting a Dream Team player, this team could have used Rodman’s rebounding more than Barkley, whose chronic back ailment will probably flare up again any day now. Of all the collegians they could have chosen last time, the coaches took Christian Laettner, another A-plus player with a D-minus personality.
Just before the last Olympics, Barkley said of our foreign opponents, “Why don’t they just take their . . . whipping like men and go home?”
It was Chuck Daly, the coach of our original Dream Team, who recalled how Barkley sat on the team bus wishing the games could be doubleheaders and wrapped up in one week instead of two, so he could go home. Of charming Sir Charles, Daly said: “The guy is fun. As long as you don’t have to deal with him every day, he’s great. He’s an MVP candidate, but he also could probably start the Third World War.”
Yes, that’s what we want from an Olympian.
Maybe at the U.S.-Russia exhibition game July 11, Barkley can call Boris Yeltsin a name and make Chernobyl jokes to the opponents while they take their whipping.
We already amputated some of the sorer thumbs of “Dream Team II,” notably Larry Johnson and Shawn Kemp, two of the players who did more trash-talking than the rest during a tournament in mid-Olympiad. Our current roster includes such upstanding individuals as Grant Hill, David Robinson, Karl Malone and Penny Hardaway, who refreshingly said in a recent interview: “When the day comes that I take the floor for our Olympic team, I’ll be the proudest basketball player in the world.”
Part of the thrill is getting to experience the Olympics for the first time, something Hardaway, Hill, Payton, Mitch Richmond, Reggie Miller and Shaquille O’Neal will do. We also get to witness the official coming-out party of Hakeem Olajuwon, U.S. citizen.
Payton was added to the team (over Kemp and others) because the coaches felt we needed a full-court defender, Stockton and Hardaway being better at half-court defense and Pippen being worn out and sore.
I only hope that in going for international success, we have no international incident. You can’t pay a fine at the Olympic Games if you embarrass your whole country and make a fool out of yourself.
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e0cd2f02a9902302867fb26c1d2042ec | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20007-story.html | Olympic Scene : Legal Splash Embarrassing to Burgess | Olympic Scene : Legal Splash Embarrassing to Burgess
Olympic preparation for a swimmer, ideally, does not include conferring with legal counsel 19 days before the opening ceremony.
For Greg Burgess, the out-of-pool developments last week included a continued effort by rival Ron Karnaugh to eliminate him from the U.S. team. Karnaugh’s manager, Bennett Raffer, sent a letter on Karnaugh’s behalf requesting sanctions against Burgess for violating the U.S. Olympic Committee code of conduct.
On Friday in Jacksonville, Fla., Burgess’ attorney, Hank Coxe III, said that after the Olympics he will file a motion to vacate the no-contest plea his client filed in March to misdemeanor charges of public drinking and providing alcohol to a minor. While the drastic action of dismissal from the Olympic team is considered highly unlikely, Burgess has been helped by a letter sent by Florida’s state attorney to the USOC, explaining that the charges do not involve moral turpitude and should not hurt his Olympic standing.
Burgess, who won a silver medal at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona behind Hungary’s Tamas Darnyi in the 200-meter individual medley, earned a berth on the 1996 team when he placed second in the 200 IM behind Tom Dolan at the trials in March. Karnaugh finished fourth but advanced to the first alternate spot after third-place finisher Paul Nelsen did not sign a form guaranteeing that he would continue training.
The USOC will not address the issue before Monday at the earliest. In any event, the recent uproar has been embarrassing for Burgess, 24, and has detracted from his preparation, said his coach, Gregg Troy of Jacksonville’s Bolles Sharks.
“It certainly has made it more difficult than what it needs to be,” Troy said. “But there’s not much we can do about it. I think it has been distracting in our training, not that his training hasn’t been good. But it doesn’t help when you read about yourself in the paper and come to practice 30 minutes later.”
Clearly, Burgess’ mind has not been totally focused on defeating world-record holder Jani Sievinen of Finland in the 200 IM. Troy and Burgess admit that a mistake was made but point out that the transgression doesn’t exactly put Burgess in the same company as Lawrence Phillips.
Raffer said he and his client remain adamant about pursuing the case, even to the American Arbitration Assn., if necessary.
“The strain is taking its toll,” Raffer said. “I talk to Ron every day, and if he wanted to back off then we would. We were urged in a nice way to back off by [U.S] Swimming and the USOC. If we lose, we lose. Ron was not brought up that if you see something wrong, you don’t do anything. We’re trying to protect Mr. Burgess from being another Bruce Kimball. . . . Ron is not the one who broke the law. My swimmer didn’t break the law.”
Kimball, a silver-medalist diver in the 1984 Games, spent more than four years in prison after killing two people and injuring four others in a 1988 alcohol-related driving accident.
Burgess’ supporters castigated Karnaugh. They say the campaign is one of self-interest, not altruism.
“It’s like the days of [Bjorn] Borg and [Jimmy] Connors, you’re pulling for one to win by the other losing by double-faulting or a foot fault,” attorney Coxe said.
Olympic backstroker Tripp Schwenk, a teammate of Burgess’ for a season at Tennessee before Burgess transferred to Florida, was outraged.
“He [Burgess] would never do anything to intentionally stand in the way of someone else’s Olympic aspirations,” Schwenk told the Florida Times-Union. “In my opinion, he [Karnaugh] is the biggest jerk in the world. If I get in hot water for saying this, that’s fine. Because Greg Burgess needs and deserves to have people on his side. . . . I think this whole thing has been blown out of proportion. I think it’s really sad that Karnaugh is allowed to go on this mission.”
FACTOID
Twenty days from today, at approximately 8:30 PDT on the morning after the opening ceremony, the first medals of the Centennial Games will be awarded. The event is the women’s 10-meter air rifle competition.
NEWSMAKER
Gwen Torrence was favored to defend the Olympic title in the 200 meters. Then she suffered a muscle strain in her upper left thigh during the U.S. track and field trials and failed to make the team in that event, finishing fourth by one-thousandth of a second.
But for every story of disappointment, there is another of gratification. The woman who edged Torrence in a photo finish to earn the third berth in the 200 was Inger Miller of Pasadena.
Miller, a 1995 USC graduate in biological sciences, had never reached the potential she showed at Muir High because of injuries. But she decided this year to concentrate on making the Olympic team, postponing her studies in veterinary medicine.
Five weeks before the trials, while driving home from a meet in Irvine, Miller swerved to miss hitting a box on the 605 Freeway and lost control of her Bronco, which overturned three times. She lost consciousness, had to be pried out of the totaled vehicle by firefighters and was hospitalized for observation.
“It was a nightmare,” she says. Fortunately, she escaped with cuts and scratches, received a few stitches on her shoulder and the back of her hand and was back at practice two days later in the pursuit of joining her father as an Olympian. Lennox Miller, a Pasadena dentist, won silver and bronze medals for Jamaica in 1968 and ’72.
LAUREL WREATH
With assistance from the Amateur Athletic Foundation in Los Angeles, Leslie Perry, a renowned storyteller best known for his expertise on the Negro baseball leagues, has presented a new program about the Modern Olympics--"100 Years of Glory"--to more than 40 schools and libraries in Southern California.
THORN WREATH
Atlanta’s City Council has approved a fare increase for taxi drivers during the Olympics, despite objections from the city’s Hotel Council and Convention and Visitors Bureau, which contends that the cabs are old and that the drivers are poorly dressed, unfriendly and often lost.
Olympic Scene Notes
U.S. women’s basketball center Lisa Leslie, formerly of USC, slammed a running, one-handed dunk during a recent intrasquad scrimmage in Chicago. Leslie, 6 feet 5, has not dunked during one of the team’s exhibition games. Her teammates say she is saving that moment for the Olympics. . . . Dave Johnson of Pomona, bronze medalist in the 1992 Summer Olympics, has retired from the decathlon after his sixth-place finish in the recent track and field trials. But he said he will continue competing in the javelin, setting his sights on the 2000 Games.
U.S. swimmer Amy Van Dyken has become a spokeswoman for an organization trying to defy the media vision of the perfect woman as Kate Moss or some other supermodel. “They wanted someone hearty-looking to do the job,” said Van Dyken, 6-0, 160 pounds. “I guess that’s me.” . . . The 13th and last roster spot for the U.S. water polo team went to Wolf Wigo of New York, the first player from east of the Rockies to make the team since 1956. Wigo, plagued by degenerative disks in his back since his All-American days at Stanford, was scheduled to undergo surgery last year but walked out of the hospital the day before so that his training for the Olympics wouldn’t be interrupted.
Kim Rhode of El Monte, the youngest member of the U.S. shooting team at 16, has established herself as a double trap shotgun medal contender in recent World Cup competitions with a gold medal in Italy and a sixth-place finish in Germany.
Times staff writer Randy Harvey contributed to this story.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
This Week
TODAY: Final day of U.S. artistic gymnastics trials in Boston, Santa Clara International Invitational swim meet and trials for equestrian three-day event in Dalton, Ga.; U.S. men’s Olympic soccer team vs. Saudi Arabia, Oneonta, N.Y.; U.S. baseball team vs. Cuba, Columbia, S.C.; U.S. softball team at St. Louis all-stars.
* MONDAY: U.S. baseball team vs. Cuba, Chattanooga, Tenn.; U.S. men’s basketball team opens training camp, Chicago.
* TUESDAY: U.S. baseball team vs. Cuba, Knoxville, Tenn.
* WEDNESDAY: Athletissima ’96 track and field meet, Lausanne, Switzerland.
* THURSDAY: U.S. baseball team vs. Cuba, Norfolk, Va.; U.S. women’s soccer team vs. Australia, Tampa.
* FRIDAY: U.S. baseball team vs. South Korea, Trenton, N.J.
* SATURDAY: U.S. men’s basketball team vs. USA Basketball Selects, Auburn Hills, Mich.; Bislett Games track and field, Oslo, Norway; U.S. baseball team vs. South Korea, Bowie, Md.; U.S. women’s soccer team vs. Australia, Pensacola, Fla.; Olympic athletes village opens, Atlanta.
* SUNDAY: U.S. baseball team vs. South Korea, Millington, Tenn.
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0efda01644f8253994293858530463fd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20008-story.html | Sampras, Graf Become Old Reliables | Sampras, Graf Become Old Reliables
While others around them lose their heads, Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf can be counted on to keep theirs. The defending Wimbledon champions seem to be the only tennis players here capable of playing up to their station.
The dust has settled after the first week of a very wild Wimbledon and the two top-seeded players remain, having won their third round matches on Saturday. After the upsets that have decimated the field this week, that’s an accomplishment.
This is the week that was: Eleven of the 16 seeded players on the men’s side were eliminated, either through defeat or injury. Among the wreckage were former champions Andre Agassi, Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg, French Open champion Yevgeny Kafelnikov and top 10 players Michael Chang, Jim Courier and Thomas Enqvist.
Half the top women have been eliminated, including the crowd-pleasing Monica Seles.
It is first time since seeding began at Wimbledon in 1927 that the second week will begin with so few seeded players.
Todd Martin, who won Saturday, is the only seeded player remaining in the bottom half of the draw. It is now possible for Martin to reach the final without having faced a seeded player.
Play will restart on Monday after the traditional first Sunday break, and the London oddsmakers, at least, will need the off day to regroup.
There was more destruction Saturday, as two more seeded players lost on the men’s side and one seeded woman fell. Magnus Gustafsson defeated 11th-seeded Wayne Ferreira, 7-6 (7-4), 7-5, 1-6, 5-7, 6-1. Patrick Rafter defeated 14th-seeded Marc Rosset, 4-6, 6-3, 4-6, 6-1, 6-3. Fifth-seeded Anke Huber could not overcome an upset stomach and Ai Sugiyama, 7-6 (7-3), 6-1.
“It’s been a strange Wimbledon, the strangest one I’ve been to in all my years coming to Wimbledon, with all the upsets,” Sampras said. “The soccer was so popular [the European Championships, which end today], it seemed like Wimbledon has kind of taken a backseat this year. But there are still a lot of great players still playing, and I’m still around.”
That comes as a great relief to officials at the All England Club, where the combination of the European Championships and fan indifference to the dominance of the lesser-known players has sent attendance down. Network executives worldwide too have mourned the exit of Agassi, who is said to be good for at least a ratings point.
Things seemed more normal with the steadying presence of Sampras and Graf, who aren’t troubled by the same upsets and injuries that affect mere mortals.
Each won Saturday to move into the quarterfinals. Sampras teetered at first, on a cold and gray day, but he defeated Karol Kucera of Slovakia, 6-4, 6-1, 6-7 (5-7), 7-6 (7-3).
Graf had less trouble defeating Nicole Arendt of New Jersey, 6-2, 6-1, although Arendt won the first nine points and the first two games. When Graf won the first point on her second service game, the Centre Court crowd facetiously applauded.
The tournament has a different shape to this point than last year, when form was rigidly followed. All four top-seeded players on the men’s and women’s sides advanced to the semifinals. The second week will be much more austere this time. Fans will have to content themselves with a men’s final 16 that offers only six of the top 20, a qualifier ranked No. 223, and only two players who have won Grand Slam titles, Sampras and Michael Stich.
No one has been able to analyze what has caused the upsets. It may be seen as several, coincidental bad days by top players. It may also be viewed as a kind of viral outbreak, where, once Agassi was felled by a qualifier, all the lower-ranked players took heart and gained confidence.
Martin, seeded No. 13, called the week “peculiar,” but rather than seeing the loss of the name players as a negative, he saw it as an added freshness.
“I think it adds a bit of interest to the game,” Martin said. “It’s nice to see new names and for the players, I think it’s great because there are a lot of players here that have done well who never would have experienced something like this.”
Stich agreed. “Nowadays, there are so many players who do well on grass and have a lot of confidence, it’s not surprising that the seeds are having a hard time,” he said.
Friday’s loss was the second-seeded Becker, who retired from his third-round match. Becker, after consulting with three German doctors in London with the German soccer team, was found to have partially torn the ulnar tendon in his right wrist. He was told that if he had attempted to serve Friday, the tendon would have ruptured.
Becker will be fitted with a plastic cast for four weeks and said he hoped to play in the U.S. Open.
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c6014c9efedff829febadb3f065281bc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20010-story.html | Gold Cup Field Is Minus a Big Cigar | Gold Cup Field Is Minus a Big Cigar
It has been 25 years since Ack Ack carried 134 pounds while winning the Hollywood Gold Cup.
When Jack Meyers, the racing secretary at Hollywood Park, loaded up Buddy Fogelson’s and Greer Garson’s recently purchased 5-year-old with four more pounds than he had carried in his previous race, trainer Charlie Whittingham danced around with the track’s racing office for a few days, debating whether to accept the weight assignment. Most people thought that Whittingham would run in the 1971 Gold Cup and Whittingham knew he would.
“In those days, you were stuck,” Whittingham said. “There was no such thing as putting the horse on a plane and going someplace else. If you went by train, it might take you a week or two to get there.”
With the lightweight Bill Shoemaker aboard, Ack Ack carried more than 30 pounds of lead--dead weight, horsemen call it--to make the 134-pound impost. They won by almost four lengths under a hand ride, taking home $100,000 of the $175,000 purse. Ack Ack, who won four times that year carrying 130 pounds or more, including a win with 130 pounds in the Santa Anita Handicap, got sick at Del Mar and never raced again after the Gold Cup, but at the end of 1971 he was voted the first winner of the Eclipse Award for horse of the year.
Today the Gold Cup will be run for the 57th time, with the winner of the $1-million race collecting $600,000. With Cigar, last year’s winner, on the sidelines, none of the eight contenders is carrying more than 121 pounds. Ack Ack’s Gold Cup record of winning under 134 can likely be carved in stone because this might be the last running of the race under handicap conditions.
Had the recuperating Cigar been ready to come West to try to match Citation’s modern record of 16 consecutive victories, he probably would have been given 131 pounds, one more than he carried in his last race. But a fact of racing life is that there are cargo jets and there are other rich stakes and no trainer is painted into a corner anymore. The owners of the few special horses, the ones the major tracks pine for, can pick their spots and easily opt for races run under more advantageous weight-for-age conditions. Cigar will fall into this situation if he runs at Del Mar on Aug. 10 in the $1-million Pacific Classic. Older horses will carry 124 pounds there; 3-year-olds will run with 117.
Daft is the trainer who doesn’t applaud the trend. “It never made any sense anyway, piling weight on horses,” Whittingham said. “Can you imagine any other sport doing it? If you have a title fight, does the champion have to fight with gloves that are heavier than the challenger’s?”
Trainer Richard Mandella doesn’t necessarily feel that handicap races should be abolished, but he does have a suggestion.
“Make all Grade I races weight for age,” Mandella said. “When horses get to that level, they deserve to go head-to-head with weight not being a consideration. Handicap racing isn’t even fair to the bettors. A horse might not be pushed as much as he ought to, because the jockey and trainer can be concerned about carrying too much weight the next time if they win by too much.”
Mandella would have saddled today’s high weight, Soul of the Matter with 123 pounds, but like Cigar, that horse has foot problems. Instead, Mandella will run Dare And Go, carrying 118 pounds, and Siphon, with 117. Tinners Way, two-time winner of the Pacific Classic and the morning-line favorite at 2-1, is also the high weight at 121 pounds. High weights haven’t done well lately: In the last eight runnings, only Cigar (126 pounds last year) and Best Pal (121 pounds in 1993) have won.
Dare And Go, winner of the Strub in 1995, is a consistent horse--six victories and 10 other in-the-money finishes out of 17 starts--but he hasn’t raced since early March and is coming into the Gold Cup off workouts. Because of ankle injuries, Dare And Go missed two important races this year--the Santa Anita Handicap and Cigar’s international coronation, the Dubai World Cup.
Siphon, a Brazilian-bred who has been racing in this country for more than a year, is the horse that lights up Mandella’s eyes. After leading all the way to win his last two starts, Siphon was scratched from the Californian--the race Tinners Way won--because of a bruised foot, but he has been training sharply.
Siphon has never raced longer than 1 1/16 miles for Mandella. Not many horses have won the 1 1/4-mile Gold Cup on the front end--Ack Ack was one--but it can be done and has been done recently by Slew Of Damascus, in 1994, and three years before that by the 27-1 Marquetry, ridden by David Flores, Mandella’s hire for Siphon today.
*
Jerry Bailey--who has won two of the last four Gold Cups, including Cigar’s victory a year ago--will ride Geri, Cigar’s stablemate, today after winning Saturday’s $200,000 Hempstead Handicap with Serena’s Song at Belmont Park.
Geri, who races for the Cigar team of owner Allen Paulson and trainer Bill Mott, ran at Hollywood Park last year when he was trained by Bill Shoemaker, and that allowance win in June was the second victory in a six-race winning streak. The streak ended when the 4-year-old colt finished third in the four-horse Pimlico Special on May 11, but Mott is throwing out that race because of the muddy track in Maryland and so are other Gold Cup trainers who fear Geri.
Serena’s Song is usually ridden by Gary Stevens, who underwent shoulder surgery two weeks ago. At Belmont, the 4-year-old filly sloughed off high weight of 125 pounds to beat Shoop by 3 3/4 lengths, running 1 1/16 miles in 1:41 3/5. Serena’s Song, paying $2.80 to win, won for the 18th time in 31 starts and the $120,000 purse sent her earnings over the $2.7-million mark.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Today’s Gold Cup
A look at the field for today’s $1-million Hollywood Gold Cup at Hollywood Park:
*--*
PP Horse Jockey Wt. Odds 1. Siphon Flores 117 5 2. Mr Purple Nakatani 118 9-2 3. Dare And Go Solis 118 12 4. Geri Bailey 118 7-2 5. Luthier Fever Desormeaux 113 20 6. Nonproductiveasset* Douglas 114 3 7. Tinners Way Dlhssaye 121 2 8. Helmsman* McCarron 120 3
*--*
* Wally Dollase-trained entry
Post time: 2:10 p.m. PDT
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393c755c3ea029c0690efe0cf6c1ee02 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20011-story.html | Williams Knocked Down to Size | Williams Knocked Down to Size
Tall beat small in the desert steam Saturday night as Henry Akinwande avoided the charging Jeremy Williams for two rounds, then slammed him to the canvas in the third.
Groggy, bloody and with a broken left middle finger the only reward for his aggressive efforts, Williams attempted to crawl to his feet as the count reached five and Akinwande towered above him.
Referee Raul Caiz stopped the fight 43 seconds into the third round, giving Akinwande the victory in a fight for the vacant World Boxing Organization heavyweight title--given up by Riddick Bowe recently--before 3,518 at the Fantasy Springs Casino.
“I’m 23 years old, I’ll be back,” said Williams (26-2), who was cut over his left eye and bleeding from his nose. “He caught me with a great shot. He was a lot stronger than I thought.”
The 6-foot-1 Williams, from Long Beach, spotted Akinwande six inches in height, many more in reach and 15 1/2 pounds, and attempted to nullify the advantage by charging at Akinwande from the opening bell, throwing looping rights at Akinwande’s head.
Williams, who has come up from the light-heavyweight division, also suffered his first loss to a tall fighter, Larry Donald, more than two years ago, but switched trainers after that loss and won 11 consecutive fights.
But, none against anybody as tall and talented as Akinwande, 30.
In the early-going, Akinwande (30-0-1, 18 knockouts) successfully blocked the shots or backpedaled away from Williams, who struggled to land cleanly, then rocked Williams against the ropes late in the second round with a long right hand.
Williams almost went down in the round as Akinwande cut loose, but hung on long enough to last until the bell, then told his corner he thought he broke his finger.
Williams, a late replacement for Alexander Zolkin in this fight, kept coming forward early in the third, but was finally stopped cold by a lashing jab followed by a right-hand blast on top of his jaw.
“I have been working with my new trainer on planting my feet more,” said Akinwande, who has never been known as a knockout specialist. “When they said Zolkin pulled out, they said to fight Williams just the same way.”
In earlier bouts, World Boxing Council strawweight Ricardo Lopez retained his title and stayed undefeated by dropping No. 1 contender Kitichai Preecha with a left jab, right cross, left uppercut combination in the third round.
After Preecha tumbled to the canvas, he tried to rise, but fell back on his hands and knees. Referee James Jen-Kin stopped the bout at 1:46 of the third, giving the 105-pound Lopez, from Mexico, a 42-0 record, with 32 KOs. Preecha, from Thailand, fell to 19-2.
In a heavyweight bout, Tony Tucker (53-5, 44 KOs), who once held part of the title, ended a three-fight losing streak by knocking out Dave Dixon (20-3-1), a late replacement, in the first round.
After the main event, Miguel Angel Gonzalez, slated to be Oscar De La Hoya’s next opponent, won a fourth-round technical knockout over Samuel Kamau. Gonzalez is 42-0 with 32 KOs.
Also, Oxnard junior lightweight prospect Robert Garcia won a third-round technical knockout over Jose Luis Madrid. Garcia is 25-0 with 19 KOs.
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3d065139823da247e55407344b2eb508 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20012-story.html | Germany and Czech Republic Meet for European Soccer Title | Germany and Czech Republic Meet for European Soccer Title
It is Europe’s strongest team against the upset specialist.
Germany aims for its third European title in its fifth final today against the upstart Czech Republic, which has beaten Italy, Portugal and France.
Germany will be without two of its most experienced and influential players, Stefan Reuter and Andreas Moeller, who are suspended.
The Germans almost certainly will be without injured captain and standout striker Juergen Klinsmann. He tore a calf muscle in a 2-1 quarterfinal victory over Croatia.
The Czechs were 80-to-1 shots when the 16-team competition started three weeks ago.
The Czechs advanced to the final by defeating France in a penalty shootout, 6-5, after a 0-0 tie.
The Germans also got a 6-5 tiebreaker victory, over England in a semifinal penalty shootout after a 1-1 tie at Wembley.
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6ee2cd3703ebf9bd62e5e267f251cfb2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20013-story.html | Divac, Hornets Open Dialogue | Divac, Hornets Open Dialogue
Vlade Divac took his first step Saturday toward accepting a future as a Charlotte Hornet, speaking by phone with Bob Bass, the club’s vice president of basketball operations, and Coach Dave Cowens and, just as important, agreeing to talk again today.
If this wasn’t a breakthrough, it was at least a thaw. Divac had refused to so much as entertain the possibility of leaving Los Angeles for the Carolinas or anywhere because he did not want to uproot his family from a city it has grown to love, and now he’s scheduling future conversation.
Hornet officials are encouraged, though still not ready to say the handshake deal that would send Kobe Bryant to the Lakers will definitely come off when salary-cap technicalities are cleared up July 9. They want to know that Charlotte isn’t giving up a tremendous prospect for the honor of getting stiffed.
Divac, an emotional player perhaps wounded by being traded, especially as salary-cap ballast to lure Shaquille O’Neal, might want to make sure he’d be wanted. As if the Hornets’ showing this much patience isn’t enough of a sign? So everyone talked, he felt better, they felt better, and the chances of the deal improved, a day after the possibility of it falling through emerged in Charlotte.
He’ll be wanted. Cowens, the rookie coach, is a former star center with the Boston Celtics who takes over a team that last season used Matt Geiger (respectable at 11.2 points and 8.4 rebounds in 30.5 minutes), George Zidek (4.0 points and 2.6 rebounds) and Robert Parish (3.9 and 4.1) in the pivot. The Hornets need this deal a million times more than they need Bryant, drafted for the Lakers anyway.
The Hornets want to finally give Larry Johnson a permanent move to small forward, so Divac would be the new anchor inside, maybe at center and maybe at power forward, which many believe is his natural position anyway. As with the Lakers, that could be decided on a game-by-game basis depending on the defensive matchups. Geiger is the other starter for now, but they also plan to be involved in the free-agent market.
Meanwhile, the trade would give the Lakers spending power starting July 9 that few teams could match, as if the clout of being O’Neal’s first choice should he decide to leave Orlando isn’t enough.
If the Divac deal goes through, the Lakers could offer O’Neal $8.53 million for 1996-97 with allowable increases of up to 20% of that figure every year through 2002-03, $95.5 million in all. If they were to renounce the rights to Elden Campbell, which they don’t want to do, and their other six free agents, the Lakers could put together a package that starts at $11.98 million for next season.
Figures obtained from league sources show that even the lesser amount puts the Lakers in the upper echelon for line of credit.
Seattle has $11 million, but the SuperSonics have very little actually to pay out because getting to that figure would mean renouncing Gary Payton and Hersey Hawkins, which won’t happen. The same goes for the Detroit Pistons, at $10 million on paper but $7.7 million in reality since Allan Houston is a keeper. Washington only gets its $8.2 million by renouncing (or losing) Juwan Howard, Utah its $9.5 million by cutting loose John Stockton, which will never happen.
Who has “real” money?
The New York Knicks, ready to say farewell to Derek Harper without regret, will have $9.4 million. The Miami Heat, with no need for Alonzo Mourning if it can land O’Neal, would renounce the Hornets’ former starting center along with Tim Hardaway to get to $13.2 million.
NBA Notes
The Dallas Mavericks traded forward Cherokee Parks to the Minnesota Timberwolves in a deal that will put the Mavericks about $3 million under the new NBA salary cap. For Parks, a first-round pick last year, Minnesota agreed to remove the lottery protection on the 1997 first-round pick Dallas acquired from the Timberwolves in the 1994 Sean Rooks trade.
Under the original terms, Minnesota would have kept the 1997 pick if it landed in the top six, in which case Dallas would receive the Timberwolves’ No. 1 pick in 1998 unconditionally. Now, Minnesota will keep the 1997 pick only if it is the No. 1 pick overall.
Parks played in 64 games for Dallas as a rookie, averaging 3.9 points and 3.4 rebounds. He scored a season-high 25 points with seven rebounds against Portland on March 17. It appeared likely he would be traded after the Mavericks sent their No. 6 pick in the first round and a first-round pick in 1997 to the Boston Celtics on June 21 for center Eric Montross and the No. 9 pick, which they used on power forward Samaki Walker.
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293881ae4cf2367bf5b13dbf58f92717 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20014-story.html | Sorber’s Goal Is Winner for Wiz | Sorber’s Goal Is Winner for Wiz
Mike Sorber scored in the 39th minute to give the Kansas City Wiz a 1-0 victory over the Dallas Burn on Saturday night in a Major League Soccer game played in sweltering 104-degree conditions in Dallas.
Sean Bower assisted on the winning goal and Garth Lagerwey made four saves for the Wiz, who improved to 6-9. Dallas dropped to 6-7, before 9,615 at the Cotton Bowl.
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03b1aa2c1d3cf22c4da29bfd57975f8c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20015-story.html | THE NBA / MARK HEISLER : A Keen Sense of Direction Comes From Lakers’ West | THE NBA / MARK HEISLER : A Keen Sense of Direction Comes From Lakers’ West
East is east but West is still best: There aren’t a lot of general managers who would have dared this one, trading one of the game’s better centers for a 17-year-old high school guard, but he’s Jerry West and they’re not.
No one had drafted a high school guard before, much less traded a real player for one, but if the Hornets can get Vlade Divac out of his bedroom (hint: try a two-year extension and some Serbian pastries), West will have.
West wasn’t the only executive who saw greatness in Kobe Bryant. Several others did too. They just weren’t willing to bet everything on it.
The new Net boss, John Calipari, worked Bryant out late in the game, fell head over heels and seemed set to take him. “You have to understand,” Calipari said the day before the draft, “we’re building for two or three years from now.”
On draft day, he let Kobe go by, making the safe pick at No. 8, Kerry Kittles, instead.
Imagine if Calipari had needed to trade Shawn Bradley for Bryant? He wasn’t even willing to trade Kittles.
This doesn’t mean it’s sure to work out for the Lakers, or even that it’s the percentage play. This is blue sky territory. No one knows how it will work out because no one has ever done it.
It will be hard for Bryant, who has no idea what he’s getting into, NBA father or no. He won’t play as much as he wants (no one else does so it’s asking a lot for him to understand) and he won’t be able to dodge the spotlight.
On his first Christmas away from home, he’ll be averaging about 3.4 points a game and people will be asking if he’s disappointed with his progress, wishes he’d gone to school, etc. These days in the public mind, and that of many professionals, “long-term project” means “You’ve got 18 months to dazzle me.”
It’s a rough life, even in pacific Los Angeles. After seven seasons here, the lovable Divac was bade a fond farewell by XTRA’s noted quarterback-dogger, who called him a playground term for coward, concluding: “Vlade, thanks for the memories, get your butt to the airport.”
Bryant’s upside, however, is greatness. Without a great player, the Lakers were merely respectable, which doesn’t pay off here. They had last season’s sixth-best record but there wasn’t going to be any sentiment for a parade or a rally unless fans could throw the players on the bonfire.
Respectability can be a hole. West has been trying to burrow out since Magic Johnson retired in 1991 and James Worthy’s wheels burned out shortly thereafter, leaving the Lakers star-less.
They were a .500 team a year later when they traded Sam Perkins, their best player, for untested Doug Christie and notorious Benoit Benjamin. West thought Ben might be useful in a small way (he wasn’t) and Christie might hit big (he didn’t). By making the deal, however, West launched the Lakers into their future.
If it were easy, someone else would do it. Denial is preferred, illustrated most recently by the Knicks, riding soon-to-turn-34 Patrick Ewing to the end of his contract; and the Celtics, bringing in their annual cap-eating veterans such as Dominique Wilkins and Dana Barros.
With a nod from Jerry Buss--he reportedly told his execs, “You know me, I’m a gambler"--West has just re-launched the Lakers in the highest-stakes roll of all.
They can now get $8.5 million under the cap but have only a chance, not an assurance, of getting Shaquille O’Neal. If not, they’ll try Juwan Howard but he wants to stay in Washington. If neither come, they’ll look for a bargain like Chris Gatling and hold the rest of their money.
Cap management, a phrase often uttered but seldom practiced, used to mean little since stars never hit the market. Now rookies are free in three years; in 1998 Joe Smith, Jerry Stackhouse, Antonio McDyess and Kevin Garnett, not to mention Penny Hardaway who has an out clause in his contract, could be there.
In the meantime, we can help Bryant with his arithmetic, or he can help us with ours.
WELCOME TO THE HOTEL CALIFORNIA
On the, uh, other side of town, the Clippers, underrated keepers of secrets, drafted Lorenzen Wright who is big, young, talented, personable and in the biggest surprise of all, wasn’t traded for three guys, one of them a free agent.
The only disagreement over Wright is how soon he’ll be ready. Elgin Baylor and Bill Fitch say he is as ready as Marcus Camby but, like Camby, might never be an NBA center. There are other admirers who think that even if it happens, it’ll take a year or two.
It’s an important distinction since the Clippers, setting up shop at the same time-worn stand, have decided among themselves they must make a run at the playoffs.
They were ready to trade their pick for a veteran and had a juicy one lined up, Portland’s Rod Strickland. They were reportedly near a deal--their pick and Malik Sealy for Strickland--but Blazer General Manager Bob Whitsitt pulled back.
For the Clippers, everything still depends on re-signing Brian Williams, amid reports that they’re tightening their belts (see: move to Anaheim deferred again) and won’t like it if he asks for $6 million.
If he goes, who cares how big, talented and personable Wright is? It’s like running water into a tub without closing the drain.
FACES AND FIGURES
As we ring down the curtain on another season of high finance and hijinks, we find the players caving in before David Stern’s lockout threat and at last signing a contract. Comment: What did you expect? Last summer’s coup leader, David Falk, has superstars to sign. No soap box for Michael Jordan this summer. . . . Leaving Indianapolis: Departing Mark Jackson thinks free agent Reggie Miller will remain a Pacer. “I think Reggie will want to be here,” Jackson said. “If the right offer is made, this is where he’ll probably stay.” . . . Nice defense: Denver Coach/GM Bernie Bickerstaff, defending the Jackson trade in which he gave up the No. 10 pick: “People talk about Mark Jackson not getting up and down the court but you look at what he did with the Knicks when Rick Pitino was coach.” Yeah, and that was only eight years ago. . . . The draft, reconsidered: Bucks wind up with Andrew Lang, Ray Allen and a 1999 No. 1 pick for Stephon Marbury so the deal looks better. In the second round, they get a point guard, Moochie Norris, who was expected to go in the first. . . . The 76ers get Ryan Minor in the second; before a disappointing senior year he was expected to make the lottery. On the other hand, the only thing separating them from the 6-6 and under league is Derrick Coleman, now in the 300-pound-and-over league. . . . Sayonara (?): Hornets bought out the final year of Robert Parish’s contract, meaning he could finally be through at 50 or whatever he is (actually only 42). They’re expected to renounce Kenny Anderson, who turned down $6 million a year in New Jersey and is unlikely to find anyone who’ll pay half as much. . . . Finding this poor doggie a home: The Charles Barkley sweepstakes continues. Charlie to Houston for Sam Cassell and Robert Horry foundered when Cassell, a free agent, asked for $7 million a year. This latest sends Barkley to Houston, Cassell and Horry to Denver, Dikembe Mutombo to Phoenix. Comment: Suns finally get a big man. Rockets get a third superstar for a last hurrah. Nuggets get bupkus.
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3b76928243f0f355c78129f8ad55b6ee | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20018-story.html | BASEBALL DAILY REPORT : Jo Lasorda Rips Replacement Talk | BASEBALL DAILY REPORT : Jo Lasorda Rips Replacement Talk
Manager Tom Lasorda, out of his hospital bed and walking Saturday, is scheduled to be released from Centinela Hospital Medical Center today.
It’s the best he has felt since being admitted a week ago when he underwent an angioplasty to clear a clogged artery, said Jo Lasorda, his wife. He still hopes to return to his job July 4 against the Colorado Rockies at Dodger Stadium but is awaiting clearance, as well as advice, from his doctors.
“He feels great, and he’s going to be stronger than ever,” Jo Lasorda said. “That’s what makes me so mad having people talk about him not coming back or who will replace Tommy. How can people do that? He’s just getting well. Can’t they leave him alone?.
“Look at how many people he has helped. How can anybody fault this man for doing everything asked of him? And now, people kick him while he’s down.
“It would be like someone dying and writing things while the grave is still warm. It’s unreal. I can’t believe anybody would give him anything more than encouragement.”
“Don’t make things worse.”
*
Mel Didier, longtime Dodger scout, telephoned Lasorda to offer inspiration and advice.
“Tommy told me he wants to come back this week,” Didier said, “but I told him, ‘Tommy, man, don’t come back so fast and try to be a hero. Wait until after the All-Star break [July 11]. We don’t want to be burying you and playing taps on your grave. Mr. O [Dodger owner Peter O’Malley] ain’t going to run you off.
“You’re going to come back stronger than ever.”
Didier, 68, who underwent surgery for prostate cancer Jan. 7, 1992, said he offered himself as inspiration to Lasorda. The cancer has not returned.
“They told me to exercise, watch my diet and keep my weight down,” Didier said. “Now look at me. I walk every day for 45 minutes, and the last three years have got stronger and stronger. That’s all Tommy has to do. He eats right, gets some exercise and he could be managing for a long time.
“I told Tommy if an ugly guy like me can do it, you can do it.”
*
Lasorda has a tear in his stomach lining largely because of the anti-inflammatory medication he has been taking for his arthritic knees, Jo Lasorda said, but it is expected to heal in two or three weeks. . . . Outfielder Wayne Kirby’s fly ball to center field in the sixth inning was the first ball hit out of the infield by Kirby and his predecessor, Milt Thompson, in 20 at-bats.
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354271c6a6310358fd5e95815cfdd04a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20019-story.html | Pettitte Gains 12th Victory as Yankees Defeat Orioles | Pettitte Gains 12th Victory as Yankees Defeat Orioles
Andy Pettitte insists his sore left elbow is fine. He won’t get an argument from the Baltimore Orioles.
Pettitte became the American League’s first 12-game winner Saturday, giving up only three hits in seven innings as the New York Yankees defeated the Orioles, 4-3, at Yankee Stadium.
Pettitte, who walked one and struck out four, lasted only 5 1/3 innings Monday in a loss to Minnesota after winning five consecutive decisions.
Pettitte said his elbow tightened slightly during the Yankees’ three-run fourth inning, which lasted 19 minutes.
“I’m not going to worry about it,” Pettitte said. “It was really bothering me in Minnesota, and I went out and pitched with it.”
Pettitte was held back three days between starts before his loss to the Twins, but now expects to pitch in the regular five-day rotation.
“He comes right at you,” said Baltimore’s Rafael Palmeiro. “You’ve got to try to jump on him early [in the count]. For a guy whose arm is hurting, he pitched great.”
Tino Martinez hit a two-run double, Gerald Williams hit a run-scoring double and Ruben Sierra had an RBI single for the Yankees, who expanded their lead over the Orioles in the East Division to 5 1/2 games in front of 45,295, the third-largest crowd at Yankee Stadium this season.
Cleveland 3, Chicago 2--Jim Thome’s two-run single with two out in the 10th inning kept the Indians alone atop the Central Division with a victory at Chicago.
The Indians, who had lost seven of eight games, trailed by a run and were two outs from being tied in the standings by the White Sox. But they rallied against Chicago closer Roberto Hernandez to tie the score in the ninth.
“We needed to win this game,” Thome said. “I felt a little [tension] in the locker room before the game. Hopefully, this loosened us up. Hopefully, we can play our game now and have some fun so we can go back to the way we played last year.”
Paul Shuey allowed Frank Thomas’ 22nd homer of the season in the 10th, but still got the victory with two innings in relief.
Texas 9, Seattle 5--Kevin Elster homered and drove in four runs, and Juan Gonzalez homered twice as the Rangers hit four home runs to beat the Mariners at Seattle.
“I don’t even try to explain Kevin Elster any more,” Texas Manager Johnny Oates said about Elster, who sat out most of the last three seasons because of major shoulder surgery. “There’s no explanation for what he’s done. The story hasn’t changed all year.”
Elster set a career single-season high with 56 runs batted in, and his three hits improved his batting average to .275.
Darren Oliver (7-2) gave up four hits and five walks in 6 2/3 innings as Texas ended a six-game losing streak in the Kingdome, including an 11-run loss Friday.
Milwaukee 7, Toronto 4--Kevin Seitzer hit a two-run home run in a five-run sixth inning and Scott Karl won for the fifth time in six decisions for the Brewers at Toronto.
Jose Valentin’s 11th home run in the fifth extended the Milwaukee team record for homers in consecutive games to 18 as the Brewers won their third game in a row.
Karl (8-3) gave up three runs and eight hits in seven-plus innings to win his third decision in a row.
Toronto rookie Marty Janzen gave up eight hits and six runs in 5 2/3 innings.
Boston 13, Detroit 6--John Valentin homered twice and Reggie Jefferson singled, doubled and tripled to lead the Red Sox over the Tigers at Boston.
Valentin hit solo home runs in his first two at-bats and Jefferson had a hit in all three at-bats for the Red Sox, who had nine hits for extra bases and 16 overall.
Detroit led, 6-2, when the Red Sox sent 11 men to the plate in the third inning, taking a 7-6 lead on Jeff Frye’s single. Boston added five more in the sixth to make to take a 12-7 lead.
Minnesota 12, Kansas City 7--Marty Cordova had four hits to extend his hitting streak to 23 games and Matt Lawton homered during a six-run third inning in the Twin victory at Kansas City.
Cordova’s hitting streak is the longest in the majors this season, eclipsing the 22-game streak of Baltimore’s Roberto Alomar. It was the fourth four-hit game of Cordova’s career.
Lawton matched his career high with four of the Twins’ 16 hits.
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2b508c6e5f31eecfe8a2fa7c6794fa9c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20022-story.html | South African Makes Case With Strong Showing | South African Makes Case With Strong Showing
Introducing Peter Williams, international swimming’s Don Quixote.
The pony-tailed holder of the fourth-fastest time in history in the 50-meter freestyle (22.18 seconds) doesn’t have the backing of his native country South Africa, spent the week leading up to the Santa Clara International Invitational pulling weeds in between training sessions in Lincoln, Neb., and plans to spend the Olympics camping in a tent somewhere in Montana.
Williams has been at odds with the powers that be in South African sports, talking freely and frankly about the problems within the system. He suffered a torn tendon in his left ankle three weeks before the March trials and could not compete. Since then, Williams, 28, has been waging a campaign to be put on the Olympic team--along with the help of the national coach and world-record holder Penny Heyns--yet to no avail.
Nebraska’s swimming Coach Cal Bentz said Williams’ performance here on Saturday greatly strengthened his case. Williams won the 50 freestyle convincingly in 22.73, not only falling under the Olympic qualifying standard but among the fastest 20 times in the world this year.
“He’s a person who is very principled,” Bentz said. “In my mind for him not to be in Atlanta is a travesty. And it’s a travesty that should set an example for all athletes, that they should be the ones who have the power, rather than the politicians.”
Said Williams: “That the trials is the sole selection meet, that in itself is crazy to me. In a country that has been out of sports for 30 years to have one sole meet, when you should be giving your younger swimmers an opportunity, which is what I was pushing for. But it doesn’t make any sense.”
After the disappointment of missing the trials, Williams only resumed swimming recently when Bentz called and urged him to return to Lincoln to resume training in a team atmosphere. Without any government funding or sponsorship, Williams said he has spent more than $20,000 of his own money to subsidize his training.
Before traveling to Santa Clara, he spent the last week working as a gardener between practice sessions, which made his time Saturday more remarkable. The second-place finisher, Bill Pilzcuk of Cape May, N.J., finished in 23.14. U.S. Olympian Gary Hall Jr. did not qualify for finals.
Swimming Notes
The race for the most impressive performance here is coming down to American sprinter Jenny Thompson and USC’s Kristine Quance. Thompson, who will be in the 400-freestyle relay in Atlanta, won the 200 freestyle Saturday in 2:00.05, her third individual victory in less than 24 hours. Quance, however, won two events in less than an hour--the 100 breaststroke (1:11.13) and the 200 individual medley (2:15.85).
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268581ef0092a30e67ae62defb3f0dca | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20023-story.html | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : U.S. Teams Get First-Round Byes | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : U.S. Teams Get First-Round Byes
The top eight teams gained first-round byes in a draw held in Marseille, France for Olympic beach volleyball.
Roberto Costa Lopes and Franco Vieira Neto of Brazil are top-seeded in the event, followed by three American teams--Carl Henkel and Sinjin Smith, Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffens, and Mike Dodd and Mike Whitmarsh.
The competition will be a double-elimination tournament starting July 23 with 16 teams in the first round.
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3aa881a3a6daf74d36cd15086e30a1a0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20024-story.html | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Kenyan Great Fails to Make the Team | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Kenyan Great Fails to Make the Team
Ismail Kirui, a gold medalist in the 5,000 meters at the 1993 and 1995 World Championships, failed to make the Kenyan Olympic team after finishing eighth in 14 minutes, 10.41 seconds at the trials in Nairobi.
Tom Nyariki was the surprise winner of the 5,000 in 13:28.30. Paul Bitok, the silver medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Games, was second in 13:29.25.
This year’s Boston Marathon champion, Moses Tanui, did not finish the 10,000-meter race. He pulled out before the halfway mark because of a left tendon injury.
The first two finishers gained automatic berths; third athlete is chosen through a wild-card system.
*
Don Myrah of Saratoga, Calif., overcame fatigue and former world champion Ned Overend of Durango, Colo., in Bellaire, Mich., to earn the final spot on the U.S. Olympic mountain bike racing team. Myrah finished in 10th place, earning enough points to pass Overend. . . . The Georgia National Guard may have found Atlanta’s cheapest room rates during the Olympics--$49 a day for a cell at the DeKalb County Jail. Guardsmen who will provide security during the Games began moving into the jail Friday. The 275 men who will provide security during the games have a floor to themselves, away from the inmates.
Perks--such as free meals and laundry service, not to mention air conditioning--make the jail a preferable location to the barracks and tents guardsmen are used to living in, said a spokesman.
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72b10bfdb6c006ddfd9cc92a9605c27e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20025-story.html | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Drug Ban Lifted for Australian Coach | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Drug Ban Lifted for Australian Coach
Banned Coach Scott Volkers was ecstatic with a decision that will let him be at poolside with his Australian swimmers at the Olympics.
Volkers had a two-year suspension by FINA, swimming’s world governing body, reduced from one year to seven months by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, meaning he is free to begin coaching in international swimming events starting today.
Volkers was originally suspended for two years by FINA after one of his swimmers, Samantha Riley, tested positive for the prohibited substance propoxyphene metabolite at a meet in Rio de Janiero last November.
Volkers appealed FINA’s decision to the court in May, claiming he had given the banned substance to Riley by mistake. The court confirmed Volkers’ guilt, but shortened the suspension, which began Dec. 1, 1995, by five months.
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2aafdc221230ed5f86ca81050b29e380 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20026-story.html | Bagiu Hits Olympic Jackpot on High Bar | Bagiu Hits Olympic Jackpot on High Bar
Above Mihai Bagiu loomed the high bar, the final piece of equipment that stood between him and the U.S. men’s Olympic gymnastics team.
Beyond it lay the fork in the road.
One path led to Atlanta.
The other led back home to mom’s.
Bagiu’s mission on Saturday afternoon, concisely put: Hit this for a 9.6 and you can pay the rent for one more month.
“Last week, USA Gymnastics told us, ‘If you don’t make the team, your stipend will stop,’ ” Bagiu said.
No stipend, no more apartment in Albuquerque, where Bagiu has been living while training with the Gold Cup Gymnastics club.
No more stipend, hello Mom and Dad back in Orange County, guess who’s moving back in?
“I’d have had to go back to L.A. and live with my parents,” said Bagiu, 25, who was born in Romania and raised, from the age of 8 on, in Orange.
“Now, it’s going to be a little easier.”
Bagiu staved off the wolves and the landlord by staying with a high-risk high-bar routine and pulling it off well enough for a score of 9.65. That moved Bagiu a fraction of point ahead of Josh Stein--0.584 to be precise--into the seventh and final spot on the Olympic team.
Bagiu’s 9.65 was the sixth-highest score of the day, a sloppy session that was marred by 15 falls. All told, there were only three scores higher than 9.7--and Bagiu had one of them, 9.737 on the pommel horse. The others belonged to all-around winner John Roethlisberger, who scored 9.75 on the high bar and 228.87 overall, and second-place Blaine Wilson, who had a mark of 9.787 on the rings and finished with an overall total of 228.16.
The rest of the seven-man Olympic team is John Macready of Los Angeles (whose overall score was 225.14), Chainey Umphrey of UCLA (223.06), Kip Simons of Ohio State (222.82) and Jair Lynch of Stanford (222.60).
Bagiu (221.33) needed to rally from a ragged start. In his first event, the floor exercise, he was flagged for stepping out of bounds, dropping his score to 8.725. In his third event, the rings, Bagiu failed to fully extend his arms on his first maneuver and was marked down to 8.75.
Following those mishaps with unspectacular scores of 9.15 in the vault and 9.0 in the parallel bars, Bagiu knew he needed something special in his final event. His high-bar routine qualifies. “Technically,” he said, “it’s one of the more difficult ones,” complete with a double somersault over the bar--a move called a “Kovacs"--and a triple-backflip dismount.
“I knew I was right on the bubble,” Bagiu said. “I must have went through the entire routine 100 times in my mind before I did it.”
The 101st time was the charm. Bagiu’s performance had the FleetCenter crowd on its feet by the time he landed, soon to be followed by a bear hug and giddy slaps on the back from Bagiu’s coach, Ed Burch.
The payoff for Bagiu was the last spot on the Olympic team and one more stipend check for $1,250. That will keep the apartment in Albuquerque fully furnished while Bagiu is in Atlanta. After that, there are perks--possibly as much as another $45,000 if Bagiu participates in a post-Olympic gymnastics tour this fall.
So, Bagiu picked a pretty good time to hit a Kovacs.
Roethlisberger and Lynch qualified for the second Olympics, Lynch after falling twice on a nightmarish high-bar exercise. Lynch’s high bar score, 8.1, was the lowest of the entire competition and forced him to scramble back with scores of 9.637 on the floor exercise and 9.625 on the pommel horse.
Umphrey was the only one of four former Bruins at the trials to make the Olympic team. UCLA teammates Chris Waller, Scott Keswick and Stephen McCain placed 10th, 11th and 12th, respectively.
Umphrey’s fourth-place finish was a vindication of sorts. At the 1992 trials, Umphrey just missed the cut, placing eighth--by .018.
“Less than a half a 10th of a point,” Umphrey said, still shaking his head at the memory. . . . It served as good motivation for me the last four years.”
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ad48c3eca424ff5ee8e60c2c7e2d8afe | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20027-story.html | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Brazil Ranked First but U.S. Gets Byes | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Brazil Ranked First but U.S. Gets Byes
The top eight teams gained first-round byes in a draw held in Marseille, France for Olympic beach volleyball.
Roberto Costa Lopes and Franco Vieira Neto of Brazil are top-seeded in the event, followed by three American teams--Carl Henkel and Sinjin Smith, Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffens, and Mike Dodd and Mike Whitmarsh.
The competition will be a double elimination tournament starting July 23 with 16 teams in the first round.
Gail Castro and Deb Richardson, Barbra Fontana Harris and Linda Hanley qualified for the U.S. women’s team, and Holly McPeak and Nancy Reno got the automatic spot.
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aa27cff9b6182ee7561e8171bfaee4bf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20028-story.html | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Kenyan Great Fails to Make the Team | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Kenyan Great Fails to Make the Team
Ismail Kirui, a gold medalist in the 5,000 meters at the 1993 and 1995 World Championships, failed to make the Kenyan Olympic team after finishing eighth in 14 minutes, 10.41 seconds at the trials in Nairobi.
Tom Nyariki was the surprise winner of the 5,000 in 13:28.30. Paul Bitok, the silver medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Games, was second in 13:29.25.
This year’s Boston marathon champion, Moses Tanui, did not finish the 10,000-meter race. He pulled out before the halfway mark because of a left tendon injury.
The selection format adopted was the first two to place gain automatic selection while the third athlete is chosen through the wild-card system.
The 800 meters was won by Kenyan Air Force officer Philip Kibitok in 1:43.80, the fastest time on African soil and the second fastest in the world this year. William Tanui, the 1992 Olympic 800-meter champion, earned a team berth with a second-place finish in the 1,500 meters.
Three-time World Championship 3,000-meter steeplechase champion and world-record holder Moses Kiptanui (8:14.30) finished second to 1992 Olympic champion Mathew Birir (8:14.23) in that event. Tegla Loroupe, the two-time New York City Marathon champion, finished seventh in the 10,000 meters but was included on the team, along with race winner Sally Barsosio.
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24a801a252ec520187806508cdd376dd | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20029-story.html | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Payton Officially Becomes Team Member | OLYMPICS 19 DAYS TO THE GAMES : Payton Officially Becomes Team Member
Seattle SuperSonic guard Gary Payton was selected for the U.S. Olympic basketball team Saturday in Colorado Springs, replacing Glenn Robinson, who has an injured Achilles’ tendon.
Payton, the NBA’s defensive player of the year and a three-time all-star, helped the SuperSonics to a 64-18 record and into the NBA finals, where they were beaten by the Chicago Bulls in six games. He averaged 19.3 points in the regular season, led the league in steals with a 2.85 average and ranked 10th in assists with 7.5 per game.
Previously announced to the Dream Team were Charles Barkley, Penny Hardaway, Grant Hill, Karl Malone, Reggie Miller, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal, Scottie Pippen, Mitch Richmond, David Robinson and John Stockton.
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d630eef97b8bfc12d59de60f7be55d03 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20030-story.html | Zulle Races to Win First Stage of Tour de France | Zulle Races to Win First Stage of Tour de France
Alex Zulle, last year’s runner-up in the Tour de France, won the cycling race’s prologue Saturday as five-time defending champion Miguel Indurain finished seventh.
Zulle, a Swiss, was timed in 10 minutes, 53 seconds over the 5.8-mile rain-slicked route through the streets and bridges of Den Bosch, Netherlands, which is southeast of Amsterdam.
“I didn’t think I could win,” Zulle said. “Because of the wet corners, I didn’t think I could make it.”
American Lance Armstrong, the 1993 world road race champion, was 24 seconds behind Zulle in 12th place.
Indurain, the last of the riders out in the individual time trial for the fifth consecutive year and wearing the yellow jersey as defending champion, was 12 seconds back. The Spaniard is attempting to become the first to win the Tour six times.
Chris Boardman, with two screws in an ankle fractured in a prologue crash one year ago, was second, two seconds behind Zulle.
Jurisprudence
Former Dallas Police officer Johnnie Hernandez, accused of trying to hire a hit man to kill Cowboy receiver Michael Irvin, wants his bail reduced and his lawyer wants to see the evidence against his client.
Hernandez, who quit the Dallas police force following his Thursday arrest, was in a private cell under suicide watch in the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, held in lieu of a $250,000 bond for the solicitation charge and $2,500 bond for the bribery charge.
“We’re working on setting up an examining trial right now,” said Hernandez’ attorney, Frank Perez. “I want to see that they do have probable cause to hold him, and it’s also an opportunity to see their evidence.”
Hernandez was arrested after paying an undercover officer, posing as a hit man, to have Irvin killed. While investigating the Irvin case, Dallas officers say they learned that Hernandez sold classified criminal records of an unidentified person to an undercover officer for $300 earlier this month.
Hernandez and his longtime girlfriend, a 24-year-old topless dancer, have been subpoenaed as witnesses in Irvin’s drug trial stemming from a March 4 party at an Irving, Tex. motel. The girlfriend, Rachelle Marie Smith, was a friend of the women caught with Irvin at the motel where police were called to break up a loud party. Smith was subpoenaed because her name appeared on motel registration records.
Sean Hutson, a former University of California at Davis football player arrested in March for theft of university electronic equipment, has pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor burglary charge.
Hutson, 25, admitted taking a computer, printer, television set, video recorder and portable stereo from a Hickey Gym office. Judge Timothy Fall granted Hutson probation on the condition that he complete a drug diversion program.
Hutson was the Aggies’ leading receiver over the first six games last season before mysteriously leaving school.
Pro Hockey
The Phoenix Coyotes reportedly are preparing to introduce Calgary Flames assistant Don Hay as their new head coach, according to the Arizona Republic.
The Coyotes scheduled a news conference for Monday but declined to say what would be discussed. Hay, 42, is expected to be in Phoenix for the conference, according to reports.
The Coyotes, the transplanted Winnipeg Jets, have been without a head coach since Terry Simpson was fired May 14.
Hay, who had two years remaining on his three-year contract with Calgary, was considered a leading candidate for the Phoenix job from the start. However, it appeared he wouldn’t get it after Phoenix balked at the Flames’ compensation demands before last Saturday’s NHL entry draft.
Calgary reportedly wanted to swap first-round draft choices with the Coyotes and receive Phoenix’s second-round pick in next year’s draft. Phoenix offered a third-round pick this year or next year.
The Republic said the Flames have agreed on a third-round pick in next year’s draft as compensation for hiring Hay.
Motor Sports
Two-time world champion Michael Schumacher captured a pole position for the third time this year, driving his Ferrari to the leading qualifying time for the French Grand Prix. Schumacher averaged 125.136 mph and is bidding for a third consecutive victory in this race.
Second-fastest qualifier for today’s race was Damon Hill, who has won five of the first eight races this season. Hill, who drove a Williams-Renault, was consistently faster than Schumacher on the first two thirds of the track before losing time on the final two turns.
Jimmy Vasser gained the provisional pole for today’s Medic Drug Grand Prix of Cleveland with a lap of 146.194 mph. Alex Zanardi, last week’s winner at Portland and Vasser’s Target-Chip Ganassi Racing teammate, was the second fastest qualifier.
“The key here, like a lot of races, is to be there at the end,” said Vasser, who earned one championship point for winning the pole. “This is a long race and you can’t do anything foolish at the start. Last year, I got a podium finish [third] because I was around at the end. I wasn’t all that strong, but a lot of things happened right at the end and it helped me out.”
Miscellany
Fired basketball coach Hugh Durham and the University of Georgia reached a contract settlement 15 months after Durham’s firing, according to the Athens Banner-Herald. The deal is said to be worth more than $500,000 to Durham, who coached the Bulldogs for 17 seasons before being fired on March 19, 1995. He was replaced by Tubby Smith.
Don Casey, who once coached the Clippers and spent last six seasons as an assistant with the Boston Celtics, has joined John Calipari’s staff with the New Jersey Nets.
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0c06aa142e710a4dcec0131a7c206def | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20031-story.html | History Barely Still on Souchak’s Side | History Barely Still on Souchak’s Side
The most surprised man in golf last Sunday wasn’t John Cook, who was playing so poorly three months ago he thought about quitting, then set out in search of the top 72-hole tournament score in PGA Tour history.
No, it was Mike Souchak, who was so sure his 41-year-old record was history, he didn’t even try to find out what happened.
“I’m still surprised he didn’t break it,” Souchak, 69, said last week. “No, make that shocked. He was playing so brilliantly. And, after all, that record was made 41 years ago. I thought it was just a matter of time.”
Souchak still has the record for the lowest 72-hole tournament score, 257, which he set in the 1955 Texas Open.
Cook parred the last three holes at the FedEx St. Jude Classic at the TPC at Southwinds in Memphis to finish with a fourth-round 69 and a total of 258.
Souchak’s mark is still in the books, which is nothing short of amazing, according to the record-holder.
“With all the good players today and the advancement of golf courses and golf balls especially, it’s just really surprising the record held up,” he said.
Souchak shot rounds of 60-68-64-65 in February 1955, at Brackenridge Park South, a public course in San Antonio. Oddly enough, Souchak was in San Antonio on Sunday for a golf outing to raise money for the Special Olympics when Cook was making his run for the record.
In his opening round, Souchak played his last 10 holes in 10 under par, his last six holes in seven-under and shot his 60 despite a bogey on the second hole. His 27 on the back nine is still the PGA Tour nine-hole record, since matched by Andy North in 1975.
A former Berwick, Pa., high school football star who played left end in Duke’s single-wing formation, Souchak is the co-owner of a golf cart preventive maintenance company in Clearwater, Fla.
He said he hardly ever keeps score any more, but he can break 80. Over the weekend, Souchak and his wife, Nancy, traveled to their summer home at Carmel Valley Ranch.
As for those four days in San Antonio more than four decades ago, they haven’t left Souchak’s mind.
“I’ll remember them to the day I go to the grave,” he said.
Souchak didn’t recall his record-setting 1955 tournament attracting much attention.
“That was 1955,” he said. “There were no big deals about golf back then.”
Souchak won $5,344.95 for the year in 1955, when he won the Texas Open and Houston Open. Cook won $243,000 for his victory Sunday at Memphis.
*
History is against Tom Weiskopf, who defends his U.S. Senior Open title next week at Canterbury Golf Club in Beachwood, Ohio. Only Miller Barber (1984-85) and Gary Player (1987-88) have won consecutive U.S. Senior Open titles.
*
Gary McCord’s new golf instruction book, called “Golf for Dummies,” has a forward by Kevin Costner and an endorsement by Hootie and the Blowfish.
Funnyman Irish golfer David Feherty recently critiqued the book: “Gary McCord is to English literature what Michael Jackson is to baby-sitting.”
Golf Notes
The Fathers of St. Charles charity golf tournament will be held July 8 at Oakmont Country Club in Glendale. The event benefits the Villa Scalabrini Retirement Center and Special Care Unit. Details: (818) 768-6500. . . . The 14th Tom Flores Boy Scouts of America invitational golf tournament will be held July 15 at Riviera. NFL stars will be paired with amateurs. Details: (213) 413-4400. . . . The second Blacks In Government golf classic will be held July 18 at the Navy Course in Cypress. The event is sponsored by the El Segundo Chapter of the nonprofit organization established in El Segundo by Department of Defense employees and benefits the Young Golfers of America. Details: (310) 335-3633. . . . The official charities of the Toshiba Senior Classic held in March--the Make A Wish Foundation, the National Dyslexia Foundation and the Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis Assn.--received $15,000 checks. . . . Tim Hogarth of Van Nuys, who graduated from Allemany High and Cal State Northridge, won the 79th City Men’s Golf Championship and credited UCLA golf Coach Brad Sherfy for a putting lesson. Sherfy also is the head pro at Mulligan Golf Center in Torrance.
The LPGA has added a $600,000 tournament, the Myrtle Beach LPGA Classic, to its 1997 schedule. The event will be played April 17-20 at Wachesaw East Golf Club in Murrels Inlet, S.C. It joins another new event on the schedule, the $650,000 L.A. Women’s Championship, which will be played Feb. 13-16 at Oakmont Country Club. . . . The county Department of Parks and Recreation will hold a public meeting to discuss the county’s golf course system at 7 p.m. July 10 at the Diamond Bar golf course. Details: (818) 821-4609. . . . Ray Hanes, 85, the former head professional at the Midwick Country Club in Monterey Park and at the Victoria Club in Riverside, a past president of the U.S. National Senior Open Golf Assn., and a life member of the PGA of America, died recently at his home in Indian Wells after a long illness.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Dead Solid Perfect
Record scores in an official, 72-hole PGA Tour event:
*--*
Score Player Rounds Tournament 257 Mike Souchak 60-68-64-65 1955 Texas Open 258 John Cook 64-62-63-69 1996 St. Jude Classic 258 Donnie Hammond 65-64-65-64 1989 Texas Open 259 Chandler Harper 70-63-63-63 1954 Texas Open 259 Tim Norris 63-64-66-66 1982 Greater Hartford Open 259 Corey Pavin 64-63-66-66 1988 Texas Open 259 David Frost 68-63-64-64 1993 Hardee’s Golf Classic
*--*
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df3012ab4e211fdfff58f441dfefc8e7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20032-story.html | Zulle Races to Win Prologue in Tour de France | Zulle Races to Win Prologue in Tour de France
Alex Zulle, last year’s runner-up in the Tour de France, won the cycling race’s prologue Saturday as five-time defending champion Miguel Indurain finished seventh.
Zulle, a Swiss, was timed in 10 minutes, 53 seconds over the 5.8-mile rain-slicked route through Den Bosch, Netherlands, which is southeast of Amsterdam.
“I didn’t think I could win,” Zulle said. “Because of the wet corners, I didn’t think I could make it.”
American Lance Armstrong, the 1993 world road race champion, was 24 seconds behind Zulle in 12th place.
Indurain, the last of the riders out in the individual time trial for the fifth consecutive year and wearing the yellow jersey as defending champion, was 12 seconds back. The Spaniard is attempting to become the first to win the Tour six times.
Chris Boardman, with two screws in an ankle fractured in a prologue crash one year ago, was second, two seconds behind Zulle.
Jurisprudence
Former Dallas police officer Johnnie Hernandez, accused of trying to hire a hit man to kill Cowboy receiver Michael Irvin, wants his bail reduced and his lawyer wants to see the evidence against his client.
Hernandez, who quit the Dallas police force after his Thursday arrest, was in a private cell under suicide watch in the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, held in lieu of a $250,000 bond for the solicitation charge and $2,500 bond for the bribery charge.
“We’re working on setting up an examining trial right now,” said Hernandez’s attorney, Frank Perez. “I want to see that they do have probable cause to hold him, and it’s also an opportunity to see their evidence.”
Hernandez was arrested after paying an undercover officer, posing as a hit man, to have Irvin killed. While investigating the Irvin case, Dallas officers say they learned that Hernandez sold classified criminal records of an unidentified person to an undercover officer for $300 earlier this month.
Hernandez and his longtime girlfriend, a 24-year-old topless dancer, have been subpoenaed as witnesses in Irvin’s drug trial stemming from a March 4 party at an Irving, Texas, motel. The girlfriend, Rachelle Marie Smith, was a friend of the women caught with Irvin at the motel where police were called to break up a loud party. Smith was subpoenaed because her name appeared on motel registration records.
Sean Hutson, a former University of California at Davis football player arrested in March for theft of university electronic equipment, has pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor burglary charge.
Hutson, 25, admitted taking a computer, printer, television set, video recorder and portable stereo from a Hickey Gym office. Judge Timothy Fall granted Hutson probation on the condition that he complete a drug diversion program. Hutson was the Aggies’ leading receiver over the first six games last season before leaving school.
Pro Hockey
The Phoenix Coyotes are preparing to introduce Calgary Flame assistant Don Hay as their new head coach, according to the Arizona Republic.
The Coyotes scheduled a news conference for Monday but declined to say what would be discussed. Hay, 42, is expected to be in Phoenix for the conference, according to reports.
The Coyotes, the transplanted Winnipeg Jets, have been without a head coach since Terry Simpson was fired May 14.
Hay, who had two years remaining on his three-year contract with Calgary, was considered a leading candidate for the Phoenix job from the start. However, it appeared he wouldn’t get it after Phoenix balked at the Flames’ compensation demands before last Saturday’s NHL entry draft.
Calgary reportedly wanted to swap first-round draft choices with the Coyotes and receive Phoenix’s second-round pick in next year’s draft. Phoenix offered a third-round pick this year or next year.
The Republic said the Flames have agreed on a third-round pick in next year’s draft as compensation for hiring Hay.
Motor Sports
Two-time world champion Michael Schumacher won a pole position for the third time this year, driving his Ferrari to the leading qualifying time for the French Grand Prix. Schumacher averaged 125.136 mph and is bidding for a third consecutive victory in this race.
The second-fastest qualifier for today’s race was Damon Hill, who has won five of the first eight races this season. Hill, who drove a Williams-Renault, was faster than Schumacher on the first two thirds of the track before losing time on the final two turns.
Jimmy Vasser gained the provisional pole for today’s Medic Drug Grand Prix of Cleveland with a lap of 146.194 mph. Alex Zanardi, last week’s winner at Portland and Vasser’s Target-Chip Ganassi Racing teammate, was the second-fastest qualifier.
“The key here, like a lot of races, is to be there at the end,” said Vasser, who earned one championship point for winning the pole. “This is a long race and you can’t do anything foolish at the start. Last year, I got a podium finish [third] because I was around at the end. I wasn’t all that strong, but a lot of things happened right at the end and it helped me out.”
Miscellany
Times columnist Jim Murray was named sportswriter of 30 years at the 30th Victor Awards in Las Vegas. The awards benefit the City of Hope Medical Center.
Fired basketball coach Hugh Durham and the University of Georgia reached a contract settlement 15 months after Durham’s firing, according to the Athens Banner-Herald. The deal is said to be worth more than $500,000 to Durham, who coached the Bulldogs for 17 seasons before being fired on March 19, 1995. He was replaced by Tubby Smith.
Don Casey, who once coached the Clippers and spent the last six seasons as an assistant with the Boston Celtics, has joined John Calipari’s staff with the New Jersey Nets.
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f4f18a4a39ef41a605b50aaf6ed0fe9a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-sp-20033-story.html | Norman Disqualified for Mislabeled Ball | Norman Disqualified for Mislabeled Ball
Greg Norman, who handled his historic collapse at the Masters in April so well, exited with equal grace from the Greater Hartford Open in Cromwell, Conn., after he was disqualified late Friday for using an improperly labeled ball.
Norman had informed golf officials that there might be a problem with the ball he was testing for Maxfli during the first two rounds.
Golf officials said the ball was physically identical to one approved by the U.S. Golf Assn., but was labeled with a stamp number that designated it as one not on the USGA’s list of conforming balls.
“You live by the rules of the game,” said Norman, in good spirits Saturday morning though the mix-up cost him a good chance to become the tournament’s first repeat champion.
Norman was five strokes off the lead at the halfway mark. He won the tournament last year with a course-record 13-under 267.
“It’s just an oversight, I think, by the research and development department of Maxfli, not understanding that the stamping has to be the identical stamping of the ball that has been approved by the USGA,” he said.
Maxfli tried reaching Norman on Friday night to tell him there might be a problem with the stamp on the ball. That phone call set off a chain reaction: Norman phoned Ben Nelson, the PGA tournament director, and Nelson called Frank Thomas, USGA technical director.
The USGA disqualified Norman because of the stamp.
Lee Patterson, a PGA spokesman, said tour officials had never heard of a similar disqualification.
“You know, I’m sure there’s going to be a few disappointed people out there--and a few happy golfers,” Norman said. “But the fact is, I could have easily won this golf tournament.”
D.A. Weibring shot an even-par 70 Saturday to take sole possession of the lead. He is at 203, one stroke ahead of second-round leader Kevin Sutherland, who had a 72.
Robert Gamez was at 205 after a 66. Mike Brisky, Tom Kite and Mark Calcavecchia are at 206.
*
Isao Aoki shot a two-under 69 to take a one-stroke lead over defending champion Mike Hill and Bob E. Smith after two rounds of the Kroger Senior Classic at Mason, Ohio.
*
Amy Benz shot a five-under 66 for a three-stroke lead in the ShopRite LPGA Classic at Somers Point, N.J. Her total of 12-under 130 is a tournament record and the LPGA’s lowest 36-hole score this year.
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1af8d95d20a2fe095fb73e33386127c1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-30-tm-19797-story.html | The Shape of Things to Come? | The Shape of Things to Come?
Nina J. Easton’s “civil society” is not, of course, a quick fix to all the social problems that we face (“The Year is 2016 and American Society Has Finally Become Civilized,” May 19). But it illustrates that conservatives do believe that if Americans have the will to come together and continually experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, those problems aren’t really as insurmountable as they seem to be today.
It is clear that welfare-state liberalism is waning for two reasons: First, it reacts slowly in the face of rapid change, and when it does offer solutions, they will be rigid, difficult to change and obsolete by the time they are finally implemented; second, the omnipotent government it favors retaining is hostile to the emergence of a civil society that would ultimately render much of a welfare state’s activities redundant.
Norman F. Birnberg
Long Beach
*
Easton has formulated a new and improved snake oil. She projects the same bland and shortsighted ideas that have dominated since the 1980s. In a world in which complex problems such as disease, war, corporate corruption, poverty and voter disenfranchisement dominate our days, do we really believe that Americans are ready to accept “plop-plop, fizz-fizz” answers?
To project the future, Easton should reject the assumptions of the past. The Global Village is not simply a Global Marketplace; there are actually complex social forces involved as well. Better “incentives” and technology won’t drive people away from the daily business commute into home-based, prosperous businesses. Skyscrapers and suburbs will not survive the eventual uprising that will result as the pundits and chess players continue to sell their greed as fiscal pragmatism.
We are on a course for disaster. If bleeding off needed basic resources to a bloated “Evil Empire” war machine could destroy the Soviets, what makes us think that our cruel, moralizing corporate charities will do any better? Is the private sector truly a messiah? Perhaps we should ask the former CEOs of failed savings and loans.
When are we going to admit that a strong and fair government is not the enemy? Jeffrey P. Colin
Upland
*
Easton offers an interesting futuristic vision of American society but neglects a possible trend that may radically alter the scenario: the increasing accumulation of private capital through tax changes favoring savings and investment and the transfer of the bulk of social insurance taxes into individual accounts. Examples would be MSAs and expanded forms of IRAs to supplement or replace Social Security. Such accounts could be available to reduce the risks of unemployment, sickness and disability, education and retirement, thereby replacing those government insurance schemes that consume the bulk of taxes. Also, private medical accounts would give individuals incentives to economize on use and discriminate on price. And, finally, the widespread accumulation of private capital could reduce economic inequality and help reconcile class conflicts over tax policy that restrain economic growth. Michael Harrington
Department of Political Science
UCLA
Easton’s article on America’s possible future was a balanced and accurate depiction based on current trends. Millions of Americans pray every day that much of what she described will soon become reality. Mark J. Christian
Los Angeles
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