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3d658914e45e8ddb8f1e510fc4e40672 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-780-story.html | Sierra Cahuenga District No. 15 of the... | Sierra Cahuenga District No. 15 of the...
Sierra Cahuenga District No. 15 of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs will hold its 35th annual convention Thursday through April 6 at the Hyatt Westlake Plaza in Westlake Village. Made up of 28 clubs, the Sierra Cahuenga district covers Burbank through the San Fernando and Antelope valleys, as well as Bishop, Independence and Mammoth, with a membership nearing 2,000. The theme for this year’s convention is “Voyage to the Stars,” which will feature reports by club presidents and district chairmen and the presentation of awards to clubs for outstanding volunteer service and civic projects during the past year. The “Sprinkle of Stardust Banquet” will be held April 5. For information about the California Federation of Women’s Clubs, call (818) 346-4125.
First Strike Rape Prevention, a division of Vision Empowerment, will give a series of free seminars at Cal State Northridge in an attempt to curb violent crimes against women. The next seminars will be held April 9 and 17 in the University Student Union, 18111 Nordhoff St. Reservations are required. First Strike Rape Prevention also has chapters at UCLA and Valley College. For information or to make reservations, call (818) 895-6102.
Medical Center of North Hollywood has contracted to sponsor a TESTING 1-2-3 health screening center in the Burbank Media Mall now under construction. The new facility, second of its kind sponsored by the medical center, is scheduled to open this summer. It is designed to provide easy, convenient access to free and low-cost health screening services. Featured will be an ongoing program of cholesterol, lung capacity, fitness, cardiac risk, cataract, glaucoma, blood pressure and blood sugar screenings at no cost to the public. The screenings and consultations include initial assessments for allergy, skin cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, eating disorders, varicose veins, bunions and chronic fatigue syndrome, among others. Medical Center of North Hollywood will provide the medical personnel and equipment. TESTING 1-2-3 has nine other health screening centers in California shopping malls.
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ae81aa8141200930855587e102176bbf | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-783-story.html | Woman, 77, Is Killed in Parking Garage Crash | Woman, 77, Is Killed in Parking Garage Crash
A 77-year-old Tarzana woman died Friday after her car went out of control in an underground parking garage, Los Angeles police said.
The woman, whose name was unavailable, died shortly after the accident in the 5400 block of Zelzah Avenue, Officer Jack Jung said. The woman was backing out of a parking stall when she lost control and backed the car into wall, Jung said.
She then shifted the car into drive, struck a pillar and hit a second wall head-on, Jung said.
Jung said he did not know what caused the woman to lose control of the car.
“It’s kind of puzzling,” he said.
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1544cb13f8f484888e68323019e34fe5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-809-story.html | Puerto Rico | Puerto Rico
Does Pat Buchanan’s column mean that 3.5 million American citizens residing in Puerto Rico are not as equal as the 240 million citizens on the mainland?
In that case, if Puerto Rico cannot be a state, let it be independent.
MINERVA FIGUEROA
Irvine
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d9c68dea678cf48754edf2386b1474a9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-810-story.html | Puerto Rico | Puerto Rico
In response to Pat Buchanan’s column on statehood for Puerto Rico (March 17), I think he misses the central issue.
That is, there are 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico who are American citizens, not Puerto Rican citizens or commonwealth citizens.
As such, they should have the right to request statehood. Not to accept this right denies their status as equals under federal law.
If the U.S. government were to accept a policy of status quo and therefore deny Puerto Rico’s right to become the 51st state, then it would, in essence, affirm that all Americans are not equal.
In that case, the moral thing to do would be to let Puerto Rico be free.
WALTER CUEVAS
Irvine
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80b980c04941a7ed045eaeb33724326d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-898-story.html | Trial Ordered in Kidnaping, Torture Slaying of Girl, 7 | Trial Ordered in Kidnaping, Torture Slaying of Girl, 7
A 55-year-old convicted sex offender was ordered Friday to stand trial in Riverside in the 1986 kidnaping and torture-murder of 7-year-old Phoebe Ho of South Pasadena.
Warren James Bland will be arraigned April 18 in Riverside County Superior Court on charges of first-degree murder with special circumstances that could bring the death penalty, said supervising Deputy Dist. Atty. Creg Datig.
Phoebe disappeared while walking to school shortly before Christmas five years ago. A highly publicized search for the child ended a week later when her body was found in a field near California 60 in Glen Avon. Expert witnesses testified that the child had been repeatedly raped, sodomized and tortured, apparently with clamps or pliers, before she was strangled.
Bland, an Alhambra man with a 26-year history of sex crimes, was on parole when the attack occurred.
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079bb70f73dc3a2c050242a8b7805cb7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-899-story.html | Athlete, Jailed for Week, Cleared in Robbery Case | Athlete, Jailed for Week, Cleared in Robbery Case
Robbery and assault charges were dropped Friday against Demetrius Boykins, a football and basketball standout at Gardena High School, who spent a week in jail before law enforcement officials determined he had an airtight alibi.
Boykins, who was charged with one count each of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon stemming from a Feb. 15 purse snatching, was playing in an L.A. City Section playoff basketball game at the time of the crime, authorities said. In addition, the woman who had identified Boykins as the robber said she made a mistake, Gardena Police Detective Mike Bartlebaugh said.
Boykins was arrested with three other men on March 22 on suspicion of committing eight armed robberies in which cash, jewelry and pro sports team jackets were taken from pedestrians. But police did not charge Boykins in any of those crimes. They also have released two of the other men arrested.
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84ca3283a34d2475e0e160dbbb5d35c0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-901-story.html | Bradley Received $25,000 in Gifts, Report Shows | Bradley Received $25,000 in Gifts, Report Shows
Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley received more than $25,000 worth of free movie and sports passes, clothing, travel and other gifts last year--an $8,000 increase over 1989, a new public report showed Friday.
The gifts were received in a year in which a City Hall ethics scandal prompted major voter-approved political reforms, including restrictions that will prohibit many such perks beginning this year.
Bradley received a $450 suit, a $200 pair of shoes, a $350 video camera--all from Los Angeles firms--as well as a $200 wristwatch from a New Jersey watchmaker. He also received thousands of dollars worth of tickets to Dodgers, Kings and Lakers games. The largest single gift was an $8,500 trade trip to Saudi Arabia last March, paid for by that country’s government.
The mayor listed the gifts and his personal investments in new, detailed disclosure forms required by Proposition H, a reform measure approved last June in the wake of an ethics controversy surrounding Bradley’s personal finances.
Bradley’s office declined to comment on the increase in gifts, except to point out that much of the value was in the Saudi Arabia trip and Dodgers tickets valued at $6,561. Bradley’s wife, Ethel, is an avid Dodger fan and regular user of the donated seats behind the team’s dugout.
Dodger Stadium seats and many other such gifts are likely to stop this year. The new law prohibits acceptance of gifts from any business or individual that has dealings with the city.
The mayor also reported Friday receiving $225,000 in income last year from a firm formerly headed by Ira Distenfield, a city Harbor Commissioner who abruptly resigned in 1989 amid news media inquiries into his attempts to obtain a city contract for a firm that employed him.
The income was paid by BLSH Inc., in which Bradley invested at least $100,000 in 1989. Distenfield was formerly president of the firm, which invests in litigation settlements. Bradley’s office declined to provide further details on the investment Friday.
Distenfield’s relationship with Bradley has been of interest to federal investigators, who have been conducting a probe of the mayor’s investments and activities. A federal grand jury in 1989 subpoenaed Bradley’s records from an investment firm where Distenfield served as a broker. Bradley and Distenfield, through his lawyers, have denied any wrongdoing.
The new reports are designed to give more details on the value of public officials’ investments. But they shed little additional light on Bradley’s overall worth because most of the mayor’s holdings were placed in a blind trust in late 1989.
Bill Chandler, the mayor’s press secretary, said the mayor is advised when the investments originally placed in the trust are sold. But Chandler said the mayor cannot list all his current investments because he does not know what they are.
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1ba7bcb5cf3297869f76a261574cf9e0 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-982-story.html | Shootings in El Toro Blamed on Argument About Revenge | Shootings in El Toro Blamed on Argument About Revenge
In the aftermath of a shooting that left two men dead and another hospitalized, sheriff’s investigators on Friday said the motive was one victim’s reluctance to join in a retaliation for a gang attack that left a friend paralyzed.
Duc Dien Tran Nguyen, 20, one of the survivors, remained in fair condition at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Nguyen’s father, Dai Tran Nguyen, 45, who was blind, died of a single gunshot wound on Thursday as he tried to come to the aid of his son during an argument between the young man and two of his friends.
One of the friends, Nhan Hau Duc Nguyen, 20, of Mission Viejo, then shot himself to death. Nhan Nguyen, who is also known as Alex, was not related to the father and son.
The other friend, Huy Anh Ngo, 19, of Rancho Santa Margarita, apparently was not injured and fled after the shooting, Sheriff’s Lt. Richard J. Olson said. Ngo, known to friends as Timmy, is being sought for his role in the episode but remained at large Friday night.
The shootings occurred in Dai Nguyen’s rented house in El Toro.
According to sheriff’s investigators, the argument involved the son’s reluctance to join in an effort to retaliate against some gang members who attacked his two friends last year. The pair were seriously injured, and Nhan Nguyen was left paralyzed from the waist down.
The tragic evening unfolded when both friends, Nhan Nguyen and Ngo, first drove to the home of Duc Nguyen’s girlfriend looking for him, Olson said. When they couldn’t find him there, they drove with the girlfriend to Duc Nguyen’s home on the corner of Sunlight Creek and Summer Creek in El Toro.
They were invited in by Duc Nguyen’s parents. But after several hours, the parents and their daughter went to bed, leaving the three young men and Duc’s girlfriend to talk.
But the conversation got heated when Nhan Nguyen and Ngo kept pushing Duc Nguyen to join them in a pay-back for last year’s gang attack outside a cafe in Westminster’s Little Saigon.
That attack led to the arrest of two suspects, but sheriff’s deputies did not have further information on them Friday other than to say that their criminal cases were pending.
When Duc Nguyen refused the pair’s requests Thursday that he join in the retaliation, he was shot in the left arm and in the stomach. His father was shot and killed as he tried to stop the violence.
Nhan Nguyen then shot himself to death, Olson said.
After the argument, Duc Nguyen’s mother, sister and girlfriend fled the house and sought refuge at a neighbor’s house, where they contacted sheriff’s deputies.
Sheriff’s Capt. Andy Romero said that although investigators have witnesses, each witness has given a different version of the shootings, making it difficult to identify the gunman.
“We’re going to have to decide who shot who based on a thorough examination of the evidence, and that includes the trajectory of the bullets,” Romero said. “As for now, we’ve got four witnesses with conflicting versions. They all say they saw things differently.”
An arrest warrant has been issued for Ngo, charging him with murder. He reportedly left the neighborhood in a gray, 1982 four-door Pontiac Bonneville, but the car was found Friday in Santa Ana.
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c8d74842bb20b19d9f9076a3b5bdb128 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-986-story.html | FULLERTON : Housing for Seniors Is Seminar Topic | FULLERTON : Housing for Seniors Is Seminar Topic
Looking for the right retirement home or housing arrangement for an elderly relative?
USC gerontology professor Jon Pynoos will discuss a variety of housing options and the broad range of services and features available to senior citizens on April 10 at Cal State Fullerton.
“Housing is very important to older people,” said Rosalie Gilford, a sociology professor and coordinator of gerontology programs at the university. “It has a direct impact on the quality of their lives. . . .”
Gilford said the free seminar will examine available housing options, from living in one’s own home to living in senior complexes with central dining and social areas to nursing homes.
The event will be held from 12:30 to 3 p.m. on campus in the Ruby Gerontology Center’s Mackey Auditorium. To register, or for more information, call (714) 449-7057.
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3a7198d9562e8b30ad635367945b8ee1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-990-story.html | Seal Beach : Clerk Wants Review of Ballot Arguments | Seal Beach : Clerk Wants Review of Ballot Arguments
City Clerk Joanne M. Yeo filed a petition Friday asking a Superior Court judge to review all ballot arguments and rebuttals for two measures to make sure none of the statements are misleading.
Yeo had filed a petition Thursday asking the court to change a ballot argument against Measure B-91, an advisory, non-binding measure that would list specific recommendations on the development of the Hellman Ranch property.
Yeo said she had some questions on all of the arguments and rebuttals, which were filed Thursday. The election is June 4.
The two rival measures seek to shape the future of the Hellman Ranch property. But Measure B-91 would be applicable only if voters fail to pass Measure A-91, which would clear the way for Mola Development Corp. to proceed with its controversial $200-million plan to build 329 homes.
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dbe0166da942cf05013ef0a7a26f67e6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-992-story.html | LA HABRA : Community Services Members Replaced | LA HABRA : Community Services Members Replaced
The City Council has appointed two new members to the Community Services Commission to replace Sharon Savage and Steve Anderson, whose terms expired this month.
The new appointees--Russ Robertson, a retired assistant director of personnel for Dunn & Bradstreet, and Mary Lou Knudsen, a director of the Anaheim Convention Bureau--will serve three-year terms on the commission.
A 20-year resident of La Habra, Robertson has served as president of the Community Resources Care Center in La Habra and of the Orangewood Children’s Home, a shelter for abused and neglected children in Orange.
Knudsen, who has lived in the city for 31 years, helped in the early 1980s to implement the North Orange County Regional Occupational Program.
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6134f7ff58916f7e6588e93661f1fe9e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-994-story.html | Countywide : Bad-Check Program Paying Off for All | Countywide : Bad-Check Program Paying Off for All
Six months into its new program to prosecute people who write bad checks, the district attorney’s office has returned to county merchants more than $110,000 in restitution payments.
“We’ve always had some (bad) checks, but before it was hard to get the customer to pay,” said Nancy Matsuoka, whose Laguna Hills Nursery received $175 in restitution in November.
“Before, we had to call the customers ourselves,” said Matsuoka, 37. “Now, all we have to do is turn (the checks) over to authorities.”
Since September, 1990, when the program was launched, district attorney’s investigators have processed nearly 17,000 bad checks and “the number is going up every month,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Bruce Patterson, who heads the program.
According to Patterson, his office recovered $35,633 for merchants this month compared to $3,327 in October.
“We were very optimistic and enthusiastic when we kicked (the program) off in the fall,” Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi said Friday. “It’s meeting all of our projections and expectations.”
Under the program, which has been started in 11 other California counties, authorities give offenders a chance to avoid possible criminal charges by agreeing to pay the merchant the amount owed, paying a $25 fee to the county and attending an eight-hour counseling class for an additional $50.
The county gets a percentage of the $25 administrative fee. The remainder and the $50 instruction fee goes to American Corrective Counseling Services of Santa Ana, which runs the counseling sessions.
The program is “one of those rare opportunities in the justice system where everybody wins,” said Don Mealing, who runs the counseling service.
“It helps the merchants because they get 100% of their restitution at no cost. It lightens the workloads of the D.A.'s office and law enforcement agencies. And, it even helps the (bad) check writers in that the program gives them guidelines on how to better manage their (checking) accounts and not do the same thing again.”
Offenders who have written bad checks totaling more than $750 or one check for $500 or more are not accepted in the program and must face criminal sanctions, according to the district attorney’s office.
Since October, about 1,285 bad-check offenders have attended the program, Mealing said.
According to Huntington Beach Police Sgt. Bill Peterson, who heads the Economic Crimes Unit, the workload of his detail has decreased about 30% since the the program began.
Dan Shaw, the owner of Stone Creek Market in Irvine, said he is impressed with the program’s latitude in handling checks no matter what the amount.
“We have returned checks in the amounts as low as $3,” Shaw said.
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6b61037d1c53d0178c68406293226d31 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-me-995-story.html | Tustin : Policy, Programs for Child Care Urged | Tustin : Policy, Programs for Child Care Urged
An ad hoc child-care committee has recommended that the city and the Tustin Unified School District work together to set a child-care policy and provide programs.
The committee’s report also recommended that the city expand its child-care directory and establish a child-care providers’ network for Tustin.
The committee concluded that child-care programs should be expanded for elementary school students, and that recreation and after-school programs should be added for youths in grades six through 12, particularly those in the city’s southwest neighborhood.
In preparing its report, the committee did an inventory of current programs and the people who use them.
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69d6266f6d2baa973073557652ddc687 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-722-story.html | ‘Miracle March’ Dissolves Criticism of S.D. Mayor | ‘Miracle March’ Dissolves Criticism of S.D. Mayor
One month ago, San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor risked the reputation of her native city in a high-stakes gamble on the elements.
As the rest of San Diego County and the region adopted mandatory conservation measures in response to the drought, she alone stuck with voluntary methods--her civic-minded constituents, she said, would rise to the occasion and conserve 30%.
In the ensuing weeks, she was embarrassed by revelations about her own water consumption--The Times discovered a second, previously unacknowledged water meter on her property that placed her among the city’s top 100 residential water users. She was ridiculed--painted by cartoonists as a naive, hypocritical zealot and chastised by one Los Angeles water official as obnoxious and insensitive.
But, as the month draws to a close, O’Connor says she’s been right all along. It has rained 12 of the past 29 days, depositing nearly 7 inches of water and making this San Diego’s second wettest March on record. The city of San Diego has met its 30% conservation goal. And the County Water Authority has opted to delay its call for 50% cuts--action that O’Connor says has “vindicated” her stand.
Some people are calling it the mayor’s Miracle March.
“Heavenly intervention is where she’s one up on me. . . . If she pulls off one more miracle, I’m going to convert to Catholicism,” said former City Manager John Lockwood, a Methodist, who publicly questioned whether voluntary conservation could achieve 30% cuts shortly before he retired this month. “I’ll never contest her again. If she says it’s going to snow on Mt. Helix, by gosh, I’ll get my skis out.”
Councilman Bruce Henderson, the mayor’s firmest ally on the voluntary conservation issue, lauded her for her bravery.
“She knows she doesn’t have a direct pipeline to God,” he said. “It takes tremendous courage to put your neck out like that. She was lucky it did rain hard. But, in truth, it wasn’t luck, it was a willingness to go to the Nth degree to make sure people’s jobs aren’t lost.”
He added: “If you’re going to make a bet with people’s lives, you look at the odds, because if the odds are it’s going to rain, that’s the way you go. . . . She looked at the odds. The odds were the drought would end.”
In fact, state and local water experts have said repeatedly that, although immediate deliveries to Southern California are likely to improve slightly as a result of the rain, the drought is far from over. By one estimate, it will take more than three years of normal rainfall to restore statewide water storage to desirable levels.
And, if and when it stops raining in San Diego County, which is still striving to save 30%, residents of the city of San Diego--the county’s largest water user--are expected to feel the pinch.
This week, however, San Diego’s mayor has taken time out from the crisis to revel in what she clearly regards as a personal victory.
“They literally threw the kitchen sink and my house meter at me,” O’Connor said happily this week. “The people do want to stand up and be counted. I don’t care what they’re saying about San Diego up and down the state. I’m proud to be your mayor.”
It’s not the first time O’Connor has defied both her critics and Mother Nature at once. In the fall of 1989, on the first day of the mayor’s prized Soviet arts festival, the noon kick-off opened to a drizzling reception. Just as San Diego’s image-makers began to worry that the $6-million festival’s soggy beginnings boded poorly for its 21-day run, O’Connor saved the day.
“Please,” she asked the crowd at the outdoor Spreckels Organ Pavilion, as dozens of Soviet Georgian Child Folk Dancers stood fidgeting on the wet stage behind her. “I told these dancers to come over in October because it would be sunny. I don’t care if it’s raining, it’s shining on San Diego.”
With that, the audience sat down and the rain stopped falling.
Lockwood, the former city manager, still remembers remarking on O’Connor’s canniness--and her luck.
“She announces a Russian arts festival, perestroika hits and the world changes,” he said. “If it had been a year earlier, it wouldn’t have worked. If it was a year later, there would have been the Lithuania situation. The window of opportunity was there, and she hit right in the middle of it.”
He added: “If airplanes didn’t exist, and she decided to go to London, inertia would take us all over there. . . . She does talk to somebody at a higher level than I do.”
There is good-natured debate over whether the mayor’s good fortune is a product of serendipity, Catholicism or educated guessing. But there is agreement on this point: the past month has been the ultimate test of her good luck streak, and she’s put it to good advantage.
At the end of February, as the first heavy rain in months began to fall, the mayor “strongly” suggested what other cities had required for months: San Diegans, she said, should turn off their automatic sprinkler systems.
A few days later, after the storm had deposited more than 3 inches of rain over San Diego, O’Connor praised San Diegans for saving an average of 34% during the first three days of March.
“The people are listening,” she said, dismissing the cautionary words of some of her colleagues, who said they doubted the saving potential of her voluntary program. “They are trying to solve this problem.”
Later that week, Mike Gage, the president of the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners, was quoted widely criticizing the mayor. He lamented what he called San Diego’s “fairly obnoxious disregard for their fellow Southern California cities” and was openly puzzled by O’Connor’s approach.
“I’ve always kind of liked her,” he said, "(but) I don’t know where she’s going on this one.”
The next day, O’Connor telephoned Gage, whom she had never met, and introduced herself as “the Wicked Witch of the South.” She made an appointment to correct Gage’s “misperceptions” and arrived armed with charts showing that San Diegans had conserved 34% during the first 11 days of March, while Los Angeles residents had cut back only 25%.
In the meantime, it had begun to rain. At a news conference in San Diego, the mayor made a prediction.
“I am an optimistic person, and I realize that,” she said. “But I’m beginning to think that the weather is a-changing, and you might be seeing the tail end of the drought, even though there isn’t anybody in the state that seems to want to admit that today.”
Evidently inspired by this statement, a San Diego Tribune cartoonist drew the mayor dressed in long robes holding a sign that said, “The Drought Will End Today.” Underneath, the caption read, “Her Honor the Optimist.”
But it rained the night of her news conference, and there was some drizzle the next day, a Thursday. It rained again Friday, and it poured on Monday. On Tuesday, there was so much rain that it set a new record for the date, March 19.
How had O’Connor known?
“A lot of people from the outside said she just said it was going to rain and crossed her fingers, and she got lucky,” Councilman Henderson said. “But that’s not how it was. She was talking to people who were observing weather patterns. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have some advice.”
As it turned out, the mayor’s sole adviser on local rainfall was a meteorologist named Harold Throckmorton, who teaches at Mesa College with O’Connor’s sister, Colleen. Throckmorton did not claim to be one of the region’s leading weather experts. In fact, he said he got a lot of his weather information secondhand, from the cable Weather Channel and the National Weather Service.
But he had a hunch--a “gut feeling,” he called it--that March was going to be a refreshingly wet month. And the mayor had taken that hunch and run with it.
She didn’t get far, however, before The Times discovered that she and her husband had consumed more than twice as much water as she had previously acknowledged. Because of a second meter on the mayor’s Point Loma property, more than half of her household’s water use had gone unnoticed for months.
The scandal became known around city hall as “water-gate” and now, a few weeks later, the jokes have begun. At an America’s Cup luncheon at the San Diego Convention Center this week, the emcee told the 800 guests that the door prize would be “a guided tour of Mayor O’Connor’s water meters.”
But the mayor was not fazed by the furor. Reached in Hawaii, where she was lobbying for San Diego to be the site for the 1993 Super Bowl, O’Connor said she was conserving 60% at home. Besides, she said, “Based on the present rains, and as far as I’m concerned, the drought is over. . . . A 50% cutback is not necessary based on the current rain we’re receiving that all the experts said would not come.”
This week, after the county water authority board voted to delay the imposition of a 50% cutback until at least April 15, O’Connor’s spokesman, Paul Downey, could barely contain his glee. The board made clear that its action in no way signaled the end of the drought. But Downey said their reaffirmation of the 30% conservation goal proved the mayor right.
“All along, she has been advocating staying at the 30%,” he said, repeating O’Connor’s oft-stated contention that 50% cuts should be avoided because they would mean the loss of jobs. “The people were laughing at her. And now everybody is having to come around to her way of thinking.”
“She’s extremely happy and feels that the water officials are finally vindicating her position. The public has always been on her side. . . . She’s known she was on the right track all along. She just hopes that some of the people up and down the state who have been bashing her may take a moment to thank her.”
Henderson said, “Maureen risked her head. And, in fact, if it hadn’t rained everybody would be pointing at her and calling for her removal because she hadn’t acted quickly enough. But, in fact, they acted too quickly.”
Meanwhile, at least one San Diego County resident expressed anything but gratitude for the mayor’s approach. Having grown up dependent on well water on a farm in Lancaster, Calif., lawyer Bob Geile of Cardiff told the county water authority board this week that he was appalled by O’Connor’s gamble, which he compared to a father taking his family’s yearly food money to the race track.
“You judge his actions not by whether he wins or loses,” Geile said. “The sin is committed when he lays down the bet.”
This weekend, there is a “very slim” chance of rain, according to National Weather Service forecaster Perry Schmeichel.
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c0a05e23ff76b2eae5929b90cd3840f1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-723-story.html | Pressman Charged With Shootings at Newspaper | Pressman Charged With Shootings at Newspaper
A pressman was charged with attempted homicide on Friday after he allegedly opened fire at a newspaper plant, injuring three fellow workers, police said.
Robert Rovinski, a 19-year employee of the Bucks County Courier Times, was charged with three counts of attempted homicide in the shooting of three men at the plant. He also was charged with a fourth count in the earlier shooting of his girlfriend, who works in the newspaper’s mail room.
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13136007cdd7cf4aaa34798edfc3faec | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-724-story.html | Jetliner Lands Safely After Systems Failure | Jetliner Lands Safely After Systems Failure
A Continental Airlines jetliner made an emergency landing after its hydraulics system failed, disrupting air traffic at Philadelphia International Airport for two hours Thursday evening, officials said.
The 321 passengers and crew of seven aboard Continental Airlines Flight 145, an Airbus bound for Houston from Newark Airport, were shaken but unhurt.
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75416575839247b8d41f0cb2f0b632d4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-848-story.html | It Was a Very Good Month, but It Didn’t End Drought : Water: A near-supernatural occurrence is needed between now and end of April to end crisis, officials say. | It Was a Very Good Month, but It Didn’t End Drought : Water: A near-supernatural occurrence is needed between now and end of April to end crisis, officials say.
Disc jockeys spoof it. Stand-up comics use it to refresh their jokes. Residents scratch their heads in disbelief as they see water cascading down their window panes.
Newscasters report mudslides and flash floods and warn of avalanches. Umbrella sales are up. And business prospects for nurseries are improving.
But still state and federal officials won’t budge: the Five-Year Drought isn’t over.
Although it seems ridiculous to residents who have been mopping rain off their doorways for the last month, state officials predict 1991 will go down as not just dry but critically dry. For 1991 to be the year that broke the drought, it would take something close to a supernatural occurrence between now and the end of April, they say.
Despite the March storms, California’s rainfall, snowfall and runoff for the year are still well below average. Precipitation in the four Northern California river basins that feed the major state and federal reservoirs is still only 61% of average. In October, at the beginning of the water year, officials estimated they would need precipitation to be at least 110% to 120% of average to bring reservoirs back to normal.
Even worse, the storms came at the wrong time. By arriving in one big chunk in March, they came too late to fill a critical reservoir that serves Southern California.
“We’ve added a very good month to what was basically going to be the worst year on record in terms of runoff, but it’s almost too little too late,” said Department of Water Resources hydrologist Gary Hester. “Even though it’s been one of the wettest Marches ever, it’s just that we had too far to come.”
David Kennedy, the department’s mild-mannered director, who is most likely to determine the magic moment when “it’s over,” has a terse answer for those who question him about the end of the drought. “It’s not likely to happen this year,” he says.
For the misery of the dry spell to end, Kennedy and federal officials said there would have to be enough water in the system to allow resumption of full deliveries to cities and farms. And before they will let that happen, and given the experience of four years of drought, they said, severely depleted reservoir storage would have to return to their statistically calculated normal levels. For reservoir levels to be considered normal, state officials don’t necessarily mean they have to be filled to capacity or even three-quarters full, just at the levels they would be at in a normal rainfall year.
Given usual April weather patterns and the amount of snow that is stacked up in the mountains, Kennedy said, that is not probable.
“We would need to almost double the storage we now have in our reservoirs to feel that the drought is over,” said Jeff McCracken, regional director of public information for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the Central Valley Project. The latest figures show federal reservoir storage now at 4.5-million acre-feet, when normal storage for this time of year is 8 or 9 million acre-feet.
In the state system, there are two big reservoirs that determine if it’s go or no-go for water deliveries: Oroville, on the Feather River in Northern California, and San Luis, next to the California Aqueduct just below the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Neither offers much hope for a return to the days when Californians could linger in the shower without guilt or fill their swimming pools without fear of engendering neighborhood hostility.
Kennedy said Oroville now holds about 35% of capacity and San Luis about 30% of capacity. By this time in a normal water year, he said, San Luis would be full and Oroville would be at about 70% of capacity.
“The measure of water supplies depends on how much water we have in storage, and the amount that is in Oroville and San Luis is still very low,” Kennedy said.
Only a month ago, state officials said water conditions were so severe they would have to cut deliveries to urban customers by 90%, and to most agricultural customers by 100%. Federal officials followed with an announcement that most of their agricultural deliveries would be reduced 75% and urban deliveries between 50% and 75%.
Now, in the aftermath of the March rains, both federal and state officials said they expect in April to announce some additional increase in deliveries, but nothing approaching normal.
“We still don’t see any way we can deliver any (water) to our farmers,” said Kennedy, adding that even an extremely wet April would probably boost urban deliveries to only 35% of normal.
These explanations, however, have done little to mollify many drought-weary Californians.
“People look outside their windows and see the rain, but they don’t see the reservoirs which are still not nearly full,” said Franz Wisner, a spokesman for Gov. Pete Wilson.
Indeed, in Marin County, residents who have been leaping puddles for weeks now have begun wondering when the Marin Municipal Water District will scale back its harsh rationing program, which allows each person just 50 gallons of water a day and is the strictest in the state.
Jane Lindsey, who tends bar at the 2 A.M. Club in Mill Valley, said patrons have been “grumbling for a week or so and asking how much longer this rationing stuff can go on.”
“I feel that the rationing is completely unnecessary at this point and is simply a way to make money for the water district,” Lindsey said, noting that excess water usage by customers is pouring money from fines into district coffers. “It’s been raining nonstop up here. This is a farce.”
In Southern California, attorney Larry Weitzman of Chatsworth agrees and insists that water managers throughout the state are overstating the crisis in order to justify the higher rates many drought-afflicted districts are charging customers.
“It’s ludicrous,” said Weitzman, who has been forced by rationing to reduce water usage on his Chatsworth ranch by 10%. “The fact is, this drought is over. It’s over. The politicians and bureaucrats won’t admit it, and are acting like this is the last time it’s ever going to rain in California. That’s because they want to raise our rates.”
His assertion is enough to make a state water bureaucrat blanch.
“It’s not over,” Larry Mullnix, a Water Resources Department deputy director, said emphatically. “It’s not over because we’ve only had one month--March--in which there is substantial precipitation in both rain and snow, and that does not make up for the lack of precipitation that we had in November, December, January and February. All it did was allow us to start recovering, but we’ve got a long way to go.”
The snowpack, even though it piled up in drifts at the ski resorts over the weekend, is not enough. It has about 20.6 inches of total water content--about 73% of average for this time of year.
“Things have improved dramatically,” Hester said. “But the question now is, ‘Has the hole we were in at the end of February been filled?’ And the answer is, ‘No, it hasn’t.’ ”
Hester said that because of the 4 1/2 years of drought that preceded 1991, this year’s rain and snowfall will produce even less runoff to fill the reservoirs--less than 50% of normal.
With the ground bone-dry, Hester said, the rains that preceded the March deluge soaked into the ground and produced just a trickle of runoff. Before a substantial runoff could flow into the reservoirs, the ground had to be thoroughly soaked, he said. Likewise, high in the Sierra, the ground is still dry, so when the snow melts much of it will be absorbed.
Even if California gets an exorbitant amount of rain in April and May, when the rainy season officially ends, quirks in the state’s water system prevent the rains from pulling the state out of its prolonged dry spell, Mullnix said.
And no matter what happens from now on, it will be impossible for the state to fill the San Luis Reservoir this year, Mullnix said.
Situated just below the delta, San Luis depends on giant pumps to suck water into the reservoir that is so critical to Southern California water supplies. But because the delta is also home and hotel to numerous species of fish and wildlife--some of which are threatened with extinction--how much water can be pumped from the delta, and when, is often governed by environmental concerns.
In normal winters, the rains come regularly in December, January and February, and with each rain, the pumps run around the clock at full capacity. But this year, those months were so dry that the state was prevented from pumping because a certain amount of freshwater had to be kept in the delta to hold back saltwater that tries to intrude from San Francisco Bay.
As a result, Mullnix said, the pumps did not run full bore until early March. By then, he said, because of mechanical limitations, they could not get enough water to fill San Luis even if they ran all day every day in March and April.
Larry Gage, who directs the operation of the State Water Project for the Water Resources Department, said the state is required to curtail pumping in May and June to protect striped bass, which spawn in those months, from being sucked into the huge machinery.
Similarly the quirks of nature, and man, have affected San Francisco, where water shortages are expected to continue despite the abundant March precipitation.
Officials in San Francisco say the Hetch Hetchy reservoir system, which supplies water for 2.4 million people in the Bay Area, is just 37% of its normal level.
“We’ve had the wettest March on record at Hetch Hetchy, but that’s on top of the driest October through February we’ve ever had,” lamented Leo Bauer, manager of water resources for the city’s Public Utilities Commission.
Bauer said the snowpack water content near Hetch Hetchy has improved markedly--from about 10% of normal one month ago to more than 60% of normal today. But because of peculiarities in contracts dividing the runoff from the mountains feeding the reservoirs, Hetch Hetchy may get only a small portion of the spring melt.
Officials said Hetch Hetchy receives only whatever water is left over after downstream users--namely, the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts--take enough to satisfy their water rights.
“It’s not as if there is half a pie and we divide that equally,” Bauer said. “They (downstream users) were there first, so they take what they’re entitled to during a certain period and we get what’s left over.”
Bauer said the equation is difficult to explain to consumers.
“Obviously people are scratching their heads and watching the floods and saying ‘You’ve got to be kidding. The drought’s over.’ But we feel that kind of thinking is premature,” he said.
California Drought Watch: A monthly look at the water shortage
Now being referred to as a “miracle” month, March’s rainfall has prevented 1991 from going down in history as the driest year on record. At the same time, it has failed to push the state above the critical level. Precipitation for the season measured at the Sacramento River Basin in now at 60% of normal, with about two-thirds of that falling in March alone. Precipitation in the Eastern Sierra was 10% of normal in February and is now at more than 70% of normal.
Coastal rainfall yardstick (As of March 29) A. Santa Barbara: 132% of normal B. Ventura: 120% of normal C. San Francisco: 73% of normal D. Los Angeles: 90% of normal E. San Diego: 144% of normal F. Santa Ana: 102% of normal Sacramento River Basin Driest season on record (1977): 11.3" Precipitation this season: 25.9" Precipitation in normal season: 42.9" Eastern Sierra* Driest season on record (1977): 9.0" Precipitation this season: 29.3" Precipitation in normal season: 41.0" Colorado River: A feared 25% reduction in Colorado River allocations will not happen this year, ensuring that Southern California will get the same amount it did in 1990. Although runoff into the river is estimated at 54% of normal, water is plentiful enough to continue sending states their allocations for the next few years.
The Bottom Line: While substantial, March rainfall has not ended the drought. To reach normal precipitation levels for the year, 26 more inches of rain would need to fall in the Sacramento River Basin, the main source of water for the state. In the highly unlikely event that normal rainfall levels for the year are achieved, it will still not be enough to replenish reservoirs and ground water reserves depleted over the course of the drought.
Water-Saving Tip
Fix leaks in your home or business. A trickle can waste 90 gallons a day, or 2,700 gallons a month. A drip can waste 50 gallons a day, or 1,500 gallons a month.
Viewpoint: “Great rain in one month cannot make up for five dry months following four dry years.” --Bill Helms of the State Drought Center in Sacramento
What a Difference a Month of Rain Makes
Sure, the drought is not over. But look at what March’s incredible rainfall and snowfall did accomplish:
* Many areas of the state, including San Diego, Ventura and Fresno, surpassed their normal rainfall amounts for the year. Los Angeles was on the verge as the month ended.
* Ventura and Chico set records for rainfall in the month of March.
* State and local water suppliers started talking about easing cutbacks on deliveries come next month. Water districts in some places began easing water use restrictions.
* Los Angeles was spared an increase from 10%-15% water rationing to 25%-at least for the time being.
* Recreational outlets at lakes and ski resorts were suddenly flush with business.
* Santa Barbara, its tourism hurt by the image of landscapes turned golden for the lack of water, has hills of green again.
The Drought File
Deja Vu: In March, 1989, also a drought year, precipitation in Northern California was 250% of normal, or 17.8 inches. This March it is 250% again, 17.9 inches.
Handel on the Drought: In recognition of the water shortage, radio station KKHI in San Francisco plays classical music with a water theme every afternoon.
Thirsty Farms: Agriculture consumes 80% of the state’s water allocations, but makes up only 2.5% of California’s overall economy.
Gulp: Gov. Pete Wilson and the mayors of San Francisco and San Diego were hit with media reports this month uncovering what appeared to be excessive water use at their homes.
Source: California Dept. of Water Resources, Santa Barbara Dept. of Water, Johnston Weather Watch, Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power.
BACKGROUND
California has never had four critically dry years in a single drought span, at least not since officials began keeping such records. The closest the state came was during the 1928-1934 drought, when two of the years in that span were declared critically dry. The current five-year drought has already made history. Authorities have declared 1987, 1988 and 1990 critically dry years and they predict that 1991 will be classified as critically dry as well. State officials define a dry year as one with a Sacramento River Basin runoff forecast (the Sacramento River Index) of 12.5 million acre-feet of water or less, and a critically dry year as 10.2 million acre-feet of water or less. The Department of Water Resources says that so far, the Sacramento River runoff forecast for 1991 is 8.9 million acre-feet. The runoff level for the years 1987, 1988 and 1990 was 9.2 million acre-feet. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons.
MEASURING THE SNOWPACK
This weekend, surveyors are trekking through the wilderness on cross-country skis, measuring the snowpack at 311 alpine stations between the Klamath River and the San Bernardino Mountains. Thrusting an aluminum tube through a drift at each stop, surveyors extract a core sample of snow and then weigh it to determine the water content. The data enables officials to gauge the runoff for each of the state’s critical river basins. The snowpack reading also is one of several measurements used to determine California’s water supply forecast. That forecast, which will influence how much water is shipped to the Southland this year, will be announced by the state Department of Water Resources on April 8. Here is a sample measurement from one monitoring station in the Sierra Nevada, where recent storms have increased snow by about six times the level recorded a month ago:
SNOWPACK: Statewide, the average snowpack has been calculated at 73% of normal, but will be updated with new information now being gathered.
MEASUREMENTS: Monthly measurements at the 6,800-foot mark on Echo Summit near Lake Tahoe found that the snowpack had increased from 12.3 inches in February to 76.7 inches. The water content of the snowpack increased from the equivalent of 3.4 inches to 20.4 inches. Normal would be about 29 inches. Although the increase is dramatic, state officials cautioned that readings at other stations might remain unusually low, causing the overall statewide snowpack picture to be less encouraging. “You can have very high readings at one station and very low readings at another, but you have to look at the average,” said Bill Helms, a expert on hydrology at the state Drought Center.
STORMS. Recent storms produced the sixth wettest March in California history.
WHEN WILL THE DROUGHT BE OVER?
Following are some conditions that have to be met before the drought can be declared over.
* If state and federal water officials are able to resume full deliveries to water districts.
* If federal reservoirs, now at 4.5 million acre-feet, reach 8 million or 9 million acre-feet.
* If the two major state reservoirs--San Luis and Oroville, now 30% to 35% full--reach 70% full.
* If 26 inches or more rain falls over the next few months into the four crucial rivers in the Sacramento River Basin: the Feather, the Yuba, the American and the Sacramento.
* If the Sacramento River Index, which measures projected runoff, reaches 13 million acre-feet; its current 8.9 million acre-feet is 47% of normal.
* If there is normal rainfall next year.
Source: Department of Water Resources’ Drought Center and hydrologists.
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06c8f3197ef02edb45d78b965befb9d8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-852-story.html | Lee Atwater, Tough Ex-Head of GOP, Dies | Lee Atwater, Tough Ex-Head of GOP, Dies
Former Republican National Chairman Lee Atwater, whose political career was shaped by ceaseless combat, lost the last battle of his life Friday to a brain tumor. He was 40 years old and is survived by his wife, Sally, and their three daughters.
“Barbara and I lost a great friend in Lee Atwater,” said President Bush, who chose Atwater to manage his 1988 presidential campaign and then to head the GOP. “The Republican Party will miss his energy, vision and leadership.”
For Harvey Lee Atwater, the pursuit of politics was crowned with victories but clouded by controversy and criticism. Without ever holding public office or even seeking it, he became one of the nation’s most prominent political figures, rising from the back rooms of local politics in his native Columbia, S.C., where he will be buried Monday, to the inner councils of the White House.
Along the way, he left his personal mark on American politics, for better, in the view of Republicans who shared in his success, but for worse, in the view of Democrats who were victims of his slashing style.
“While I didn’t invent ‘negative politics,’ I am among its ardent practitioners,” Atwater once conceded. Looking back on the tactics he pursued in 1988, he said: “Frankly I didn’t care what anyone called me so long as we won.”
But the pain and finality of his affliction caused Atwater to reconsider in the closing months of his life. Atwater told Life magazine, after recalling that in the 1988 campaign he had vowed to “strip the bark” off Democratic standard-bearer Michael S. Dukakis and “make Willie Horton his running mate”: “I am sorry for both statements, the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.
“Mostly, I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”
“We obviously were on opposite sides of a tough and negative campaign, but at least he had the courage to apologize,” Dukakis said Friday. “That says a lot for the man. My heart goes out to his family.”
“We should all remember the picture of bravery and regained perspective Lee brought us over these past months,” said Democratic National Chairman Ron Brown, who had the flag at his party’s headquarters lowered to half staff.
Former President Ronald Reagan, in a statement issued Friday, called Atwater “a true patriot” who “never lost the will to fight.”
The GOP had continued to call on Atwater’s combative spirit, even in the closing days of his life. A fund-raising letter sent out over his signature and received this week said: “I’ve never seen any political organization as out of touch--so far off the mainstream--as the liberal Democrats who control legislation.”
In part, Atwater owed his celebrity to his provocative and complex personality. He was intense, steel-willed and infinitely restless. Even when he was seated, his body was always in some form of motion. He talked in bursts and was given to biting rejoinders and harsh language that fostered his reputation as a master of political negativism.
When a political opponent complained that Atwater had spread the word that the opponent had undergone electroshock therapy, Atwater replied disdainfully that he saw no need to respond to someone who once had been “hooked up to jumper cables.”
Winning at politics was the focal point of his life, but he also had a deep fascination with music that emanated from the roots of the nation’s black community. His earliest ambition was to be a jazz musician, and he made an imprint on the Bush presidency by organizing and performing with his electric guitar at a post-inaugural rhythm and blues concert.
The intense public exposure he received often made him uneasy. Yet he craved the spotlight, once posing for a gag photo for Esquire wearing a pair of gym shorts with his sweat pants draped around his ankles.
But Atwater commanded attention on more substantial grounds. His success was a metaphor for the political era in which he thrived and helped to shape, embodying some of the major themes that have defined American politics and particularly the Republican Party that he led.
In the first place, Atwater was a Southerner. His lifetime spanned the transformation of his native region from Democratic bulwark to Republican stronghold in presidential elections. This heritage thrust him into the crucible of racial politics and taught him the strategies that Republicans used to make massive inroads among Southern whites by playing on their resentment of the Democratic-backed drive for integration.
Then, too, Atwater cast himself as spokesman for his own baby boom generation, which he believed held the key to the political future. “We are the most educated, most intelligent generation in the history of any society,” he once proclaimed to a group of fellow baby-boomers.
He believed also that this generation, because of its powerful acquisitive instincts, was bound to be drawn to the GOP, with its emphasis on economic growth and the promotion of affluence.
An additional significant factor in Atwater’s career was that he was a leading example of a new breed of political operator--the consultants who rove the political landscape like the hired guns of the Old West, trading on their acquired skills in the new technology of campaigning.
He was quick to grasp the potential for combining communications and polling techniques to gauge and manipulate voter attitudes. After getting a bachelor’s degree from tiny Newberry College in his home state, he received a master’s in mass communications from the University of South Carolina, then spent years in the political trenches, learning how to use the findings of opinion polls and focus groups to sharpen the point of political commercials and exploit the opportunities to win attention from the media.
He combined this savvy with an infinite capacity for hard work and a lust for victory and, during his first four-year cycle in the business, helped local Republican candidates in South Carolina win 28 elections. He followed that up in 1978 by steering Strom Thurmond’s Senate candidacy to a reelection victory with a whopping 56% of the vote.
Similar successes on behalf of Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and--after a stint as a White House political aide--in 1984, were enough to persuade then-Vice President Bush to recruit Atwater to lead his own drive for the White House.
Atwater brought to this effort the same clinical insight that had marked his early career. In midsummer of 1988, when polls showed Bush trailing Dukakis, Atwater kept his cool.
“What is important is who has control of the agenda for the last five or seven weeks, who is on offense and who is on the defense,” he said in an interview at the time. “We plan to be on offense.”
Accordingly, Atwater helped to persuade Bush to place heavy emphasis on emotionally laden issues known as “values,” thus fostering the impression that Dukakis was insufficiently patriotic and overly permissive. The most notorious example of this tactic was Bush’s focus on the case of Willie Horton, a convicted killer who committed another brutal crime when on a weekend furlough granted under a prison release program in Massachusetts, the state governed by Dukakis.
Because Horton was black, the episode led to charges of racism against Atwater, which he denied but which he had a hard time living down. Thus, last year, student protests forced him to resign from the board of trustees at Washington’s predominantly black Howard University, a position that he had hoped to use to advance Operation Outreach, the GOP effort to gain black support.
Atwater was in the midst of preparing for the 1990 congressional campaign when the illness that ended his career and his life struck him in March of last year. He suffered a seizure and collapsed when addressing a group of party fund-raisers here. It was his last public appearance.
The brain tumor was found to be inoperable. Atwater underwent intensive radiation treatment for months in an effort to bring the disease under control.
Last January, after being sidelined for months because of his illness, Atwater assumed the title of general chairman of the GOP, and former U.S. Trade Representative Clayton K. Yeutter took over as chairman.
“I really had only two goals in life,” he once said, “to manage a presidential campaign and to be chairman of my party.” Whatever else fate denied him, these prizes could not be taken away.
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8f17ba25b00c0e30c4ea18d39f3f4419 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-855-story.html | Forum Takes Canada’s Heartbeat : A former editor is traveling the country, sampling opinion to help the prime minister decide what to do about Quebec separatism. | Forum Takes Canada’s Heartbeat : A former editor is traveling the country, sampling opinion to help the prime minister decide what to do about Quebec separatism.
The province of Quebec threw down the gauntlet this week: It promised to conduct a referendum on the sovereignty question by October, 1992, and challenged English-speaking Canada to do something to stop it.
Baffled, worried and fed-up English-speaking Canadians are now waiting to see what their elected officials will tell Quebec on their behalf. One man who is helping to come up with a response is Keith Spicer, head of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future.
Spicer, 57, a former newspaper editor, was named last November to travel the length and breadth of Canada, listen to the grievances and suggestions of “ordinary Canadians” and report his conclusions in July to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Mulroney will then presumably use the findings to help decide what to do about Quebec--and to help solve some of the other problems plaguing this country.
For Mulroney, Spicer’s activities are a means of buying time to heal from the political body blow he suffered last year when his vaunted attempts to reunite Quebec with the rest of Canada collapsed. The Citizens’ Forum also lends a needed touch of populism to the Mulroney government, which has come under criticism for bringing elites and “old boys” together behind closed doors and attempting to settle Canada’s political rifts without counsel from the common man.
Spicer himself seemed at first to doubt that his efforts would do the country much good. He gave a press conference upon accepting the assignment and said he feared Mulroney’s people would hijack his findings and turn them to their own partisan purposes.
But since then, the canny, determined Spicer has plunged into his duties. For months, Canadians have seen him on the evening news, striding through airports in his trademark black fedora and long, flapping overcoat. Spicer has traveled to town meetings, set up satellite links and toll-free hot lines and taken thousands of letters.
Despite Spicer’s enthusiasm, controversy has trailed him. There have been flaps over the cost of the forum, initially estimated at about $8.5 million but now approaching $24 million. There have been complaints about the scope of its achievements: Spicer originally pledged to consult with 1 million Canadians but has heard from only about 150,000.
And jaded Canadians have predicted that, come July, the Citizens’ Forum won’t tell English-speaking Canadians anything they couldn’t have found out by going to the neighborhood tavern.
Canada’s main political ailment for the moment is, of course, the restiveness of Quebec. Yet when Spicer set out on his mission last winter, he began not in the Francophone province but in lonely Tuktoyaktuk, a native settlement on the Beaufort Sea in northwestern Canada. There, he surprised locals--who had wanted to spend the day telling him about their alienation from white, southern Canada--by asking them to bring their favorite poems about the country.
Southern pundits howled. The Toronto Globe and Mail took to writing doggerel editorials on Spicer’s activities. And in Quebec, sovereigntist leader Lucien Bouchard pooh-poohed the fledgling Spicer Forum as “a monumental waste of time.” Picking up the cue, few Quebecers have participated in Spicer’s town meetings.
And the criticism hasn’t stopped there. One of the forum’s 12 commissioners, Quebec newspaper publisher Robert Normand, recently charged that other unnamed commissioners were overbilling for their work and “trivializing” the Quebec sovereignty issue. He later backed away from charges of outright fraud. But that didn’t stop opposition politicians from seizing the opportunity to haul Spicer to Ottawa to make him testify on how he is spending the public’s money.
Spicer presented an interim report, which said Canadians were telling him that they were sick of politicians, opposed to giving Quebec any special treatment and ashamed of the country’s treatment of native peoples.
“I think 27 million (Canadian dollars) is an awful lot of money to spend to be told that people don’t like politicians,” scoffed Sheila Copps, deputy leader of the largest opposition party, the Liberals.
Spicer replied that the price tag wasn’t too big for the job at stake: that of saving Canada.
THE MIND OF CANADA
As head of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future, Keith Spicer’s job is to listen to the grievances and suggestions of “ordinary Canadians” and report to the prime minister. It has been a controversial project for several reasons:
THE COST
Original estimate: $8.5 million
Latest estimate: $24 million
THE SCOPE
Projected interviews: 1 million
Actual interviews: 150,000
MAJOR FINDINGS SO FAR
Canadians are sick of politicians
Canadians are opposed to giving Quebec any special treatment
Canadians are ashamed of the country’s treatment of its native peoples.
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93c0956fd1c6b1fc66803669bd94aa37 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-858-story.html | Fewer Pilgrims Take Part in Holy City Rites This Season : Good Friday: Mideast strife keeps many home. Security is tight on a day of Christian, Jewish and Muslim observances. | Fewer Pilgrims Take Part in Holy City Rites This Season : Good Friday: Mideast strife keeps many home. Security is tight on a day of Christian, Jewish and Muslim observances.
The Palestinian uprising and aftermath of the Persian Gulf War kept Christians away from the Old City of Jerusalem on Good Friday. Barely 1,000 pilgrims retraced Jesus’ footsteps to the cross.
Police wearing flak jackets thronged the walled city’s flagstone alleys as singing worshipers followed the Way of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
On Friday night, Jews here and around the world began celebrating Passover, and Israelis commemorated the deliverance of the ancient Hebrews from Egypt by opening their homes to newly arrived Soviet immigrants.
This year’s holiday holds special significance for about 210,000 of the Soviet newcomers, who are celebrating their first Passover in the Jewish state.
Authorities canceled police leaves and kept Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip out of Israel and Arab East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City, site of many Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy places.
Security was especially tight because the start of the Passover holiday coincided this year with the Christian observance of Good Friday and Muslim prayers on the second Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Police here have had to cope lately with a series of fatal stabbing attacks by Arabs against Jews.
Elsewhere on Good Friday:
* Pope John Paul II heard the confessions of 12 pilgrims chosen at random from among the thousands who flocked to St. Peter’s Basilica. A teen-age French girl and an Italian woman and her son were among those selected, as were pilgrims from Japan, Zaire, Poland, Canada and the Philippines.
* Hundreds of activists marked Good Friday in Germany by marching for peace and disarmament.
* Men dressed as imperial Roman guards nailed 10 men and three women to wooden crosses and hundreds lashed their own backs in Easter rituals across the Philippines.
Here in Jerusalem, Christians were outnumbered by Muslim citizens of Israel who poured through police checkpoints for Friday prayers at Al Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest shrine.
“I have never seen so few (pilgrims),” said Nayef Abu Mayaleh whose religious souvenir store had not seen a customer all week.
Instead of the thousands of foreigners of past years, only about 1,000 North Americans, Europeans and Filipinos joined local Palestinian Christians carrying wooden crosses in a procession led by brown-robed Franciscan friars.
Hotels reported that tourism, usually bolstered by the Easter holiday, was down because of the Gulf War and almost 40 months of Palestinian revolt against Israeli rule in the occupied territories.
The army banned all 1.7 million Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip from entering Israel at least until Sunday. The entire Gaza Strip was put under curfew, and Arabs also were confined to their homes in several major West Bank towns.
The moves were aimed at preventing unrest over the Passover holiday.
In Vatican City, John Paul II, wearing a dark mantle over his white cassock, heard the confessions of the 12 pilgrims for nearly an hour in one of St. Peter’s side confessional boxes.
The pontiff began the custom of hearing pilgrims’ confessions on Good Friday, shortly after his election in 1978.
Friday night, the pontiff carried a wooden cross symbolizing Christianity around the ruins of ancient, pagan Rome’s Colosseum in a candlelight procession. The traditional Way of the Cross rite took the Pope around the upper levels of the arena where Christians were once slaughtered and up steps to the nearby Palatine Hill.
Holding up the 6-foot tall cross, the Pope stopped for prayers at the 14 Stations of the Cross, each commemorating events from Jesus’ betrayal and arrest to his crucifixion and burial.
“On the cross the power of evil is overcome and hope springs anew in every suffering, persecuted, weary and despairing person,” the Pope said in his homily.
The Vatican’s Holy Week celebrations culminate on Easter when the Pope will say Mass in St. Peter’s Square and deliver his twice-yearly Urbi et Orbi (To the City and World) address from the central balcony of Christendom’s largest church.
Thousands of people are expected to pack the square for Sunday’s ceremonies.
In the Philippines, about 2,000 people watched men clad as Roman guards pound nails through the palms of 10 men in re-enactment of Jesus’ crucifixion outside San Fernando, 30 miles north of Manila. The men were raised aloft in the scorching sun for 15 minutes at a time on a small mound in a rice field.
Nearby, scores of men beat their backs with glass-embedded whips.
In neighboring Bulacan province, hundreds watched when three women were nailed to wooden crosses on a stage. Faith healer Amparo Bautista, 49, wore a white lace dress for her crucifixion.
“Let us ask for penance,” Bautista, a mother of four, enjoined her followers shortly before she was nailed to the cross.
Similar spectacles take place every Good Friday in towns and villages across the Philippines, Asia’s only Roman Catholic nation. Of the country’s 60 million people, 85% are professed Roman Catholics.
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f039e420a11016e006956d238a714b29 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-859-story.html | Irish Search Souls Over Uprising Anniversary : Rebellion: Freedom fighters of 1916 are glorified. But some say violence is nothing to celebrate. | Irish Search Souls Over Uprising Anniversary : Rebellion: Freedom fighters of 1916 are glorified. But some say violence is nothing to celebrate.
As so often happens in Irish pubs, the talk had turned to politics.
“The lads of the Rising o’ 1916, they were soldiers. They fought for a cause, for Irish freedom,” one flush-faced patron said.
“Och, true enough, Seamus,” said his elderly friend. “But honestly now, we ought to know in this day and age that shootin’ and killin’ isn’t the work of heroes. ’16 was different. They was all romantic, ready to throw down their lives for Ireland. Things aren’t that simple anymore. Never were.”
“Sometimes Davey,” his friend replied, “I’d swear you’d’ o’ wished the Brits had stayed.”
Such are the divided realities of Dublin today, 75 years after the city was plunged by republican revolutionaries into a bloody rebellion against British rule.
On Easter Monday, 1916, about 1,500 haphazardly armed men and teen-agers seized key buildings and declared a provisional government committed to “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland.” They held out for six days against British troops before surrendering, with more than 400 dead and much of Dublin in ruins.
Most citizens of the Irish Republic have traditionally recalled the “blood sacrifice” of the “Men of 1916" with affection, as a threshold event on the route toward eventual political independence. But today, on the eve of its 75th anniversary, two decades of death and destruction in neighboring Northern Ireland have injected an unprecedented level of national soul-searching into the Rising remembrance.
Some citizens have gone so far as to suggest, in the words of one letter-writer, “We have nothing to celebrate.”
“A lot of people would run away from the words ‘republican’ now because it has been contaminated and hijacked by a small minority in Northern Ireland who see violence as the way to achieve political objectives,” said Jim Mitchell, a member of the Irish Parliament and a former justice minister.
Mitchell, a member of the opposition party Fine Gael, has called for the Rising to be marked this year by a national referendum asking whether citizens oppose the use of violence to achieve a united Ireland--a vote, in effect, on the Provisional IRA. And a party leader, John Bruton, has proposed that any Easter observance should honor the rebels--and the 45,000 Irish who died fighting in British armed forces in World War I.
Ireland’s main ruling party, Fianna Fail, has always been considered the most “green” since its formation by Eamon de Valera, the only surviving commander of the Easter rebels.
Yet the current Fianna Fail prime minister, Charles J. Haughey, whose father was an Irish Republican Army commander, has sought to downplay the coming anniversary. Committed to European integration and to increased cooperation with former British foes, Haughey had reportedly favored no state Rising ceremony.
But under pressure from republican elements in his party and in Northern Ireland, he has allowed a brief military ceremony Sunday at Dublin’s bullet-marked General Post Office, which served as the 1916 rebels’ headquarters.
Predictably, the middle-of-the-road gesture pleased few and angered many. “The Easter Rising is something which causes great offense throughout Northern Ireland,” said John Taylor, an Official Unionist member of Parliament in Northern Ireland. His party represents most Northern Protestants, who are committed to remaining part of Britain.
“It does not help the prospect for talks between north and south that the present government in Dublin should involve itself in such a way with the Rising. . . . People on both sides of the border will not be able to make the distinct difference which exists between the old IRA and the Provisional IRA.”
Indeed, many here would argue that the old rebels fought as a stand-up army--the “gallant band with guns in hand” of republican folk songs--whereas the modern campaigners have used booby-trapped bombs, community intimidation and other decidedly unromantic means of warfare.
But others, from staunch republicans to respected academics, maintain that the activists of ’16 and ’91 are motivated by the same beliefs and goals--hence the feeling that, by cheering the Rising, they are endorsing the continuation of the Northern Ireland conflict.
Robert Ballagh is an Irish artist heading the 75th Anniversary Committee, which has planned events next week emphasizing the Rising as it is reflected in Irish song, poetry and art. He said the Irish “should have the confidence to celebrate our history instead of being riddled with guilt and doubt about it.”
“This should be like in America,” he said. “When you celebrate the Fourth of July, you’re not celebrating the killing of British troops. You’re simply celebrating your national independence.”
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4230a7d2f9442bc1b4bdf31fc9e980ec | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-860-story.html | Pentagon Voice Kelly Retires | Pentagon Voice Kelly Retires
Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, the Pentagon’s witty and acerbic spokesman on the Persian Gulf War, retired Friday after 34 years in the Army.
Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Kelly is an “authentic American folk hero” who had shown the world a “reassuringly human and feeling Pentagon” during the war against Iraq.
Kelly, 58, has signed with a New York-based speaking agency and could command prices as high as $20,000 per speech.
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82daf22581347ee9aa5542d525d1ea73 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-866-story.html | It’s Time for ‘Crisis'--So Andreotti Quits : Italy: The government collapses, but it’s business as usual. And the fallen government may well succeed itself. | It’s Time for ‘Crisis'--So Andreotti Quits : Italy: The government collapses, but it’s business as usual. And the fallen government may well succeed itself.
Americans who associate the idea of crisis with quickened pulses, tough decisions and wailing sirens may have trouble understanding what follows, but here is what has been happening in Rome these soft spring days:
All week, politicians of sober mien and myriad political coloration have been meeting over coffee to earnestly inquire of one another whether this is a good time to have a crisis. They decided it is.
So it was that Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti resigned Friday, not plunging Italy into political crisis, although that is what it is called. At best, it is a yawning crisis.
The Good Friday timing of the death of Italy’s 49th coalition government since World War II is evocative, for there is every chance that the wily, 72-year-old Andreotti will rise again for a seventh incarnation as prime minister.
Not on Easter Sunday--that would be unseemly--but perhaps sometime next week.
Andreotti resigned after Italian Socialists, his key partners in a five-party coalition that has ruled for 20 months, demanded new initiatives to confront knotty national political and economic problems.
Additional pressure for change came from Italian President and fellow Christian Democrat Francesco Cossiga, who had criticized Andreotti’s government as ineffective.
As a practical matter, Andreotti and all of his ministers remain in office, and the government continues to function normally in a caretaker’s role until a successor Cabinet is devised.
In the meantime, it is also business as normal for the 57 million Italians, who are by now not only inured but also indifferent to so-called political crises. Governments have fallen and risen in Italy--usually after a verbose round of musical chairs that brought little real change--on an average of once every 11 postwar months.
In resigning, the current coalition members--Christian Democrats, Socialists, Liberals, Republicans and Social Democrats--said they expect to collaborate once again in forming a new government. That would mean that, as so many times before, a fallen government would succeed itself.
Andreotti, who returned from a visit to the United States earlier this week, had hoped to paper over differences among the coalition partners with a Cabinet reshuffle that would have endured until elections scheduled for June, 1992.
The Socialists, under ambitious Bettino Craxi, himself a former and would-be prime minister, balked, however, insisting on new programs to deal with the government budget and organized crime, two perennial problems that have proved resistant to all previous attempts at control.
Craxi also seeks institutional reform to rationalize a political system beset by party bickering and fragmentation: More than a dozen parties and movements are represented in Parliament, but only three of them command any more than 5% of the vote.
Among the Socialists’ demands is a call for a national referendum that would change the present prime ministerial system of government to an American- or French-style administration headed by a directly elected president.
Many Christian Democrats oppose a referendum, preferring instead reforms that would, German-style, restrict parliamentary representation to parties with substantial national followings.
Cossiga, who was elected to his largely ceremonial post by Parliament, caused a political sensation last week by reminding Italians that he has the power to dissolve Parliament and to call new elections.
The government, he said, had become paralyzed by the bickering of political parties and had proven itself incapable of enacting economic or political reform.
Andreotti’s supporters point to a long list of important legislation over the past two years. Still, it has become clear to Italian voters that the current system of government, created as a determinedly democratic antidote to fascism, must be streamlined if Italy is to compete effectively in the new Europe.
Under the current rules, Cossiga will ask a candidate of his choice, probably Andreotti, to form a new government. That will trigger a windy round of meetings among coalition leaders whose echoes will, as usual, be unheard by Italians engrossed in the rites of spring.
BACKGROUND
Forty-three years ago, Italy, which had emerged from World War II a scarred and backward agrarian nation under a discredited monarchy, enacted a republican constitution that prescribed the broadest possible multi-party democracy. It has been government by fragments ever since; an alphabet soup of parties and movements sharing power and its spoils in a closed winners’ circle that Italians have come to know scornfully as partitocrazia-- aristocracy of the political party.
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bd55671a8545fc02c5cdc47aeacc3205 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-868-story.html | Half a Century Later, Ukraine Priest Goes Home : Religion: War and communism kept him out of his homeland. Now he returns to a church that has survived decades of suppression. | Half a Century Later, Ukraine Priest Goes Home : Religion: War and communism kept him out of his homeland. Now he returns to a church that has survived decades of suppression.
One clear autumn day in 1938, a newly ordained priest named Myroslav Lubachivsky rode a bus to the train station in the Ukrainian city of Lvov and there, two valises firmly in hand, embarked on a journey west that would last more than half a century.
“I thought I would be gone three years to complete my doctorate--five at most,” Lubachivsky recalled this week.
Events intervened: war, murder, mass deportations, decades of repression in a tortured land, all of it endured at long distance by a Ukrainian patriot whose odyssey-in-exile seemed unending.
It ends today. Lubachivsky returns to Lvov for the first time in 52 years, 33 of them spent in the United States as a pastor and teacher who often also drove his students’ bus to school.
Myroslav Lubachivsky is 77 now, a slender, cleareyed and self-effacing individual with a white brush beard and an ornate cross slung from his neck on a thick gold chain.
He is a cardinal, Major Archbishop of Lvov, a city he scarcely remembers, and patriarch of the small and stubborn Ukrainian Catholic Church, which does not celebrate its resurrection this Easter only because it refused to die.
Lubachivsky goes home again this morning on a chartered Soviet jet from Rome as a powerful symbol of change in the Ukraine and as fruit of an astonishing underdogs’ victory: The secret church he has led from exile survived 45 years of official proscription and unflagging police suppression.
For decades, underground priests, when they were not in jail or Siberia, led clandestine services for frightened but determined worshipers.
“For a full liturgy, people went to the fields or forest,” Lubachivsky said. “They held services in private homes, trembling, never sure whether the KGB was listening.”
Today in the Ukrainian republic, it is not only newly permissible but also popular again to be assertively Ukrainian--and in Lvov, where the mayor dreams of an independent Ukraine, to be a practicing Catholic.
What that augurs, in the present Soviet flux, is as uncertain as Lubachivsky’s own role in his rediscovered homeland.
“What will my job be? What can I do there?” he mused amid a flutter of movers at his apartment in Rome as he prepared to leave. “I have always worked hard. Is my hard work being rewarded now? I don’t know.”
As he returns to the restive, Texas-size breadbasket of the Soviet Union, where around 5 million people--about 10% of the population--are Catholics, Lubachivsky in a sense embodies the tumultuous 20th-Century history of both his republic and his church.
When he was born in 1914 in the small town of Dolyna near Lvov in the western Ukraine, it was an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When he was ordained in 1938 in Lvov, the Ukraine belonged to Poland, and it was a punishable offense to speak Ukrainian in the street. As Lubachivsky studied in Austria in 1939, Josef Stalin seized the Ukraine and made it part of the Soviet Union.
Then Nazi Germany invaded, and after the war communism returned with a vengeance. In 1946, Stalin officially dissolved the Ukrainian Catholic Church and declared it absorbed within the Moscow-obedient Russian Orthodox Church, which had broken with Rome in the 11th Century.
Lubachivsky could not go home. In 1947, he went to the United States to join a Ukrainian church that now has 210 parishes and around 150,000 members. He worked with Ukrainian refugees in Connecticut and at Ukrainian parishes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“I was always too busy to have much longing for home,” he said.
For 17 years he worked at Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian church and school in Cleveland, as preacher and teacher. “At first we had only a station wagon, but later we got a real school bus for me to drive,” he said. One of the organizers of today’s reception in Lvov is a woman who was once Lubachivsky’s student in Cleveland.
He went to teach at the Ukrainian seminary in Washington and remembers driving like a madman, church to church through the Virginia countryside, as simultaneous pastor of Ukrainian churches in Manassas and Richmond. He then taught in Philadelphia and Connecticut, and in 1979 was named Ukrainian metropolitan archbishop of Philadelphia by Pope John Paul II. Lubachivsky will leave his American passport at home today to travel on a Vatican document, but if he takes the wheel in the Ukraine, he will drive on his Pennsylvania license.
Being a bishop was good, Lubachivsky says, because it gave him his first real chance to travel through the United States. And it was bad because there were a lot of ceremonial demands on someone accustomed to being a working priest, and he never seemed to stop.
“My young staff could never remember that I am not a spring chicken. . . . Three or four events a day and then a banquet at which many stupidities were spoken and I was expected to speak as well. I told jokes--people remember jokes better than sermons,” he said with a smile.
On the death of Cardinal Josyf Slipyj in 1984, Lubachivsky became archbishop of Lvov, with headquarters in exile at the Vatican. And there, with the Cold War still raging, he seemed likely to stay. Slipyj, Lubachivsky’s predecessor, spent 18 years in Soviet prison and labor camps. He was one of the lucky ones.
Stalin began arresting Catholic bishops in the Ukraine in 1945. In 1947 one was murdered. By the 1950s, two bishops had died in prison, two in labor camps and two shortly after completing their sentences, paralleling the fate of more than 1,500 arrested priests and tens of thousands of Ukrainian Catholics transported east to Siberia.
Ukrainian Catholics clung to their religion in what John Paul would call “a catacomb church,” in which new priests were ordained and bishops consecrated in secret services. The clandestine priests led one life in Soviet society and a second in their church. The Vatican did not know who some of the bishops were.
“We are a simple people, and perhaps we are stubborn. But after 45 years of real persecution, I call the survival of the church a miracle of God,” Lubachivsky said.
When John Paul met 10 bishops from the Ukraine last year, he discovered that one went to work every day as a medical orderly, one as a collective farm laborer, one as a fish smoker and one as a professor of physics.
Repression eased under Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but as recently as 1989 a Ukrainian priest was drafted into the army for six months as punishment for publicly celebrating Mass.
Amid increasing agitation and assertiveness by Ukrainian Catholics demanding legalization of their religion, Gorbachev’s historic meeting here with the Pope on Dec. 1, 1989, effectively marked the end of official attempts to kill what would not die. The Communists should have known better than to try, Lubachivsky says: “The Romans tried for centuries to destroy religion and ended up destroying themselves.”
There are many pieces to fit back together as Lubachivsky heads home, including roiled relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, which is being obliged to return churches and other properties it inherited from the Catholics following the official proscription in 1946.
Time enough to deal with the problems when in Lvov, he says.
“It is still not a reality, so I can’t think so much about it. First, it has to be a reality.”
Amid frantic packing one afternoon in Rome last week, a beaming staff member brought the cardinal his visa to go home, 52 years later. Lubachivsky looked at it for a long time. “I am numb,” he said.
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8ab9e7365b1e02b0425dd041ebd3d643 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-873-story.html | AF Finds No Cancer Tie to Agent Orange | AF Finds No Cancer Tie to Agent Orange
A study of airmen exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War revealed links between the herbicide and some ailments such as diabetes, but no relationship with cancer, the Air Force said Friday.
The Air Force said its report, the fourth on Agent Orange and its dioxin contaminant, was the first large-scale scientific study to accurately measure the effects of the defoliant on health.
It comes two months after Congress voted unanimously to award permanent disability benefits to Vietnam War veterans suffering from two types of cancer they claim resulted from Agent Orange exposure--non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma and soft-tissue sarcoma.
The Air Force said it compared 866 airmen who sprayed Agent Orange--known as the Ranch Hand group--with 804 veterans with less exposure to the herbicide and lower levels of dioxin in their blood.
The study, conducted at the Armstrong Laboratory of Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, said there was “no evidence of a relationship between dioxin and cancer of any kind, liver disease, heart disease, kidney disease, immune system disorders, psychological abnormalities or nervous system disease.”
But it said increased dioxin corresponded to increases in diabetes, body fat, non-cancerous growths, cholesterol and white blood cell counts.
“These results suggest that dioxin may affect levels of blood sugar and fat and act as an irritant to the body,” it said.
It cautioned that the results should not be applied directly to all Vietnam veterans because most had less exposure to dioxin than members of the Ranch Hand group.
Another report, on dioxin’s effect on fertility and reproductivity, will be completed this summer, the Air Force said.
Agent Orange was sprayed by U.S. troops in Vietnam to remove jungle cover. Many veterans contend it is responsible for cancers, birth defects in their children and other ailments.
Congress has commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to conduct studies on possible links between Agent Orange and various diseases. Another study by the Centers for Disease Control was canceled in 1987, reportedly as a result of a White House strategy to deny federal liability in toxic exposure cases.
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b6e810c17148a21f802486c41f1fc240 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-876-story.html | Doctors to Remove Skin Lesion From Forehead of Mrs. Bush | Doctors to Remove Skin Lesion From Forehead of Mrs. Bush
Barbara Bush has a lesion known as a papule in the middle of her forehead that will be removed by doctors, her spokeswoman said Friday.
Mrs. Bush told her press secretary, Anna Perez, that the raised lesion is “not a big deal,” Perez said.
Papules are raised skin lesions that are usually benign and are removed by burning, freezing or excising and are then examined by a pathologist.
They are common to people who have spent a lot of time in the sun.
The papule was discovered during the 65-year-old First Lady’s routine physical examination Tuesday at Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
“She said she was fine. She got a clean bill of health,” Perez said of the First Lady’s overall condition. She said she did not know when the papule would be removed.
Mrs. Bush also was evaluated for her Graves disease, an immune system disorder that initially affected her thyroid and continues to irritate her eyes.
Perez said the First Lady no longer is taking the steroid prednisone to combat the condition, but her eye problem persists.
“She still gets some tearing, but not as much,” Perez said.
“Her condition is not any worse,” Perez said, adding that some manifestations of the disease were “self-correcting.” For instance, Mrs. Bush’s eyes no longer bulge out as they tended to do in the early stages of the disease.
She received a dose of radioactive liquid that rendered her thyroid inactive and cured that aspect of the disease.
Last winter, Mrs. Bush had surgery to remove a small skin cancer from her upper lip. The basal cell carcinoma was attributed to years of spending time in the sun, Mrs. Bush told reporters.
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b6a522e012451748d40c6a3f27a8cc97 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-878-story.html | Last 2 Bodies of 4 Boys Swept Into River Recovered | Last 2 Bodies of 4 Boys Swept Into River Recovered
Rescue crews Friday discovered the bodies of two young brothers who were swept into the gushing Calaveras River, the last of the four victims who drowned when they stumbled into the chilly water.
Searchers, who had worked through the night, discovered one body shortly after 11 a.m. They found the second nearby about half an hour later, several hundred yards from where the boys entered the rain-swollen river Wednesday.
The bodies were identified as those of 9-year-old Herbert Pich and his 8-year-old brother, Danalee.
Five boys--two sets of brothers--were swept into the chilly current Wednesday evening while holding hands and playing at the edge of the rain-swollen river near central Stockton. The youngsters apparently tried to wade to a small island in the middle of the stream, police said.
One child, 10-year-old Sitha Soun, was rescued immediately by a bystander, who saw the youngsters tumble into the water. But the onlooker was unable to reach the other four children, who disappeared.
Three hours later, police found the body of Sitha’s brother Vanna, 9, nearby. On Thursday morning, a police officer walking the bank half a mile downriver spotted the body of Charles Pich, 7, younger brother of the two boys whose bodies were found Friday.
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44710c7fb7aa4d865ca78d3d370c5e70 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-881-story.html | William Bache Fretter; Physicist Spent Half-Century Working in UC System | William Bache Fretter; Physicist Spent Half-Century Working in UC System
William Bache Fretter, physicist, vice president emeritus of the University of California system and a former chairman of the UC Academic Senate, has died in Berkeley.
Fretter, who began a half-century association with the UC system as a $30-a-month reader, was 74 when he died Sunday of respiratory complications.
He also had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Fretter served as top aide to former UC President David Saxon from 1978 to 1983 and co-authored a textbook with him.
A distinguished scientist whose research into cosmic ray physics was once praised by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Fretter taught at UC Berkeley for 32 years before moving into the executive offices.
He served as dean of the College of Letters and Science in addition to heading the Academic Senate in the late 1970s.
Fretter won two Fulbright Scholarships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1964, he was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor for his 20-year association with Paris’ Ecole Polytechnique under an exchange program.
After retiring as vice president, he was involved with a World Bank project to revitalize Chinese universities devastated by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Survivors include his wife, Grace, three children and six grandchildren.
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dc3dd83c6e4ae2f980d2e45f6b1a61d1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-883-story.html | * Henry J. Muessen; Operated New York’s Piel Brothers Brewery | * Henry J. Muessen; Operated New York’s Piel Brothers Brewery
Henry J. Muessen, 88, head of the Piel Brothers brewery, one of New York’s largest producers of beer in the first half of the century. Muessen joined Piel’s after repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and was president, chairman and chief executive when it was sold in 1962 to the American subsidiary of Drewry’s Ltd., a British brewery. He retired three years later from the brewery, which was founded in 1883. Piel’s developed the “Bert and Harry” advertising campaign, one of the first efforts to use humor to sell a product on television. The ads used the comedy team of Bob and Ray. In Stamford, Conn., on Monday.
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e0c57425d8f29c4361a0e913ff096e0d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-885-story.html | * Robert Satiacum; Indian Activist Became Fugitive | * Robert Satiacum; Indian Activist Became Fugitive
Robert Satiacum, 62, an Indian activist who for the last eight years was a fugitive from American justice. A former leader of Washington state’s Puyallup Indians, Satiacum led the charge for Indian fishing rights in the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s and ‘70s. Satiacum fled to Canada in 1982 while awaiting sentencing in the United States on racketeering charges that involved trafficking in contraband cigarettes, arson and the attempted murder of a rival tribal leader. He was captured in Canada in 1983 and jailed until 1987, when he won political refugee status on grounds that his activism had made him a target for U.S. authorities. But the decision was reversed by an appeals court and he was ordered deported. In 1989, however, while awaiting sentencing in Canada for molesting a 10-year-old girl, Satiacum disappeared again. He was captured last week and died in custody in Vancouver on Monday, apparently of a heart attack.
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907beb3302abb9bde9d57768665e0520 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-886-story.html | Smoke Bomb Forces Evacuation of 1,200 | Smoke Bomb Forces Evacuation of 1,200
A smoke bomb forced the evacuation of about 1,200 people attending a Good Friday service at the Crystal Cathedral, only a day after another smoke bomb went off during a live religious broadcast at a Tustin studio.
Police said a man in his late 30s or early 40s walked into the Crystal Cathedral about 12:30 p.m. Friday and attached a white satchel to the back of a seat in the rear of the auditorium and walked away. A security guard noticed the bomb and took it outside, where it exploded. The man who left the bomb escaped. Nobody was injured.
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d76c229d12e672be00567620e7bb5eb5 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-887-story.html | * Burton G. Tremaine; Collector of American, European Art | * Burton G. Tremaine; Collector of American, European Art
Burton G. Tremaine, 89, who with his late wife, Emily, assembled one of the finest collections of 20th-Century art in the country. Tremaine was the son of a co-founder of Nela Park, the company that later became the lamp department of General Electric. By the late 1980s the Tremaines had assembled a collection of more than 400 works by various European and American artists. In 1980 the Tremaines sold “Three Flags,” by Jasper Johns, to the Whitney Museum for $1 million, believed at the time to be the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist. In 1988, the year after Emily Tremaine died, Christie’s auctioned off 32 pieces from their collection for $25 million. In Rancho Mirage on Saturday.
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d66574796a04e4b721869259709487d6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-889-story.html | * Mildred Stombs Warenskjold; Opera Producer, Director | * Mildred Stombs Warenskjold; Opera Producer, Director
Mildred Stombs Warenskjold, 86, a producer and director of several opera companies in the San Francisco area before moving in 1952 to Los Angeles, where she was director of the Immaculate Heart College Opera Workshop for 13 years. She also organized several groups of singers who performed locally in chamber operas, almost all in English, which she wrote herself. One of her groups was the first U.S. organization invited to the Waterford Festival in Ireland. Among her pupils was her daughter, lyric soprano Dorothy Warenskjold, a star of the San Francisco opera company and others. In Northridge on March 9.
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55e2a61798c269232ac37e591bfdd82d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-892-story.html | Sharpton Joins Another Fight : Controversial New York Minister Receives a Mixed Reaction to His March on L.A. | Sharpton Joins Another Fight : Controversial New York Minister Receives a Mixed Reaction to His March on L.A.
It was shortly before 2 a.m. on Thursday and the Rev. Al Sharpton, fresh off the plane from New York, was raring to go. The controversial preacher and civil rights advocate threw open the drapes in his elegant 14th-floor suite at the Century Plaza Hotel and declared: “So this is how L.A. looks from up here. Where is Gates’ office?”
At that late hour, with a handful of aides and local supporters hanging on his every word, Sharpton wanted to talk strategy. He instructed them to bring a big wooden cross to the march on City Hall he was planning for noon on Friday--Good Friday. The timing, he said, was perfect: “We’ll say it’s the crucifixion of people of color.”
Then Sharpton asked if protesters had been attending court hearings for four Los Angeles police officers indicted in the beating of motorist Rodney G. King. When someone replied they had not, Sharpton shook his head and said: “That’s a strategic mistake. The first thing we do in New York is pack the courtrooms.”
Thus, the flamboyant minister, with his James Brown pompadour, his roly-poly figure and his penchant for stirring up racial discontent, descended upon Los Angeles to add his name to the chorus calling for the ouster of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.
And on Friday, true to his plan, Sharpton--followed by several hundred protesters--marched from City Hall to Parker Center police headquarters, where he presented a 6-foot-tall cross to a uniformed Los Angeles officer. He vowed to come back again and bring with him the huge crowds that he initially promised but was not able to deliver.
“We came in two days and brought hundreds,” he said. “We’ll come in two weeks and bring thousands.”
To the more mainstream black leaders in Los Angeles, this is hardly a welcome prospect. They have not exactly greeted Sharpton with open arms.
“We don’t need Al Sharpton and his brand of leadership to tell us how to do things in this city,” said Joseph Duff, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.
“I suspect he will be roundly rejected in Los Angeles,” said Mark Ridley-Thomas, who heads the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and who spurned an offer to meet with Sharpton.
“I think,” said Mayor Tom Bradley, with characteristic caution, “that what we need is an effort to heal this community, not something that is going to inflame them.”
But healing is not Sharpton’s style. Calm is not his style. “The Rev,” as his entourage calls him, grew up in a rough section of Brooklyn and still likes to shadowbox with his body guard. To Sharpton, life is a street fight.
“I’m the agitator,” he told a television reporter over lunch at a soul food restaurant in Compton. “I’m the guy that keeps the problem center stage. . . . You bring a fighter to a fight. You don’t bring a nun to a fight.”
Controversy--and the press--seem to follow Sharpton wherever he goes, and Los Angeles has been no exception. On Thursday morning, he showed up at the Los Angeles Criminal Courts building, where a judge was to set a trial date for the four police officers indicted in the King beating. The moment he stepped off the elevator and onto the 11th floor, he was nearly crushed by cameramen.
The reporters hammered him with questions, but Sharpton--encircled by the cameras--kept walking and remained silent. As the entire throng moved down the hall with him, sheriff’s deputies tried frantically to break it up.
“There are no press conferences allowed!” one officer shouted.
“We’re not having a press conference,” Sharpton replied.
“Well, you’re blocking our hallway, sir,” another deputy said. “You’ll have to move.”
Finally, the deputies directed Sharpton and his small group--a bodyguard and several local political activists who invited him here--into a private room. When the hearing began, the deputies escorted Sharpton into the courtroom, where he sat quietly in the back as Superior Court Judge Bernard Kamins set May 13 as a trial date.
Later, after a quick news conference outside the courthouse, his aides hustled him into a waiting car and drove him to Phil’s Coffee Shop, two blocks away. Sharpton said he is watching his diet and then ordered a bowl of Fruit Loops cereal. “I’m still a big kid at heart,” he explained.
Over breakfast, the man who has been dubbed “Reverend Sound Bite” for his ability to get on television, blamed reporters for whipping up public hysteria over his visit. He said he would like to point out an irony that he did not mention at the news conference because he thought it would be lost “in a quick situation where you need a sound bite.”
“The irony of it,” he said, “is that it is situations like this that make an Al Sharpton necessary. You know, they ask, ‘Why are you here?’ . . . If it wasn’t for police brutality I would never have had to assume the position I have in the American psyche. So the question is: Why wouldn’t I be here? If I didn’t come, a lot of blacks would say, ‘Well, how come Al Sharpton didn’t come out here?’ It’s like a Catch-22.”
Sharpton was invited to Los Angeles by Elizabeth Munoz, who ran for governor in 1988 on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, and Lawrence Grigsby, a community activist and lawyer who ran against Rep. Mervyn Dymally (D-Compton) last year.
He says he decided to accept their invitation after he saw Gov. Pete Wilson on television likening the anti-Gates movement to “a lynching.” It simply infuriated him, he says, to hear a white governor use that term to defend a white police chief whose officers had beaten a black man. The Pentecostal minister, who is facing trial on charges of tax evasion, said his trip was financed by the National Action Network, a group he founded to fight racism.
Sharpton, 36, gained notoriety four years ago for his role in the sensational case of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl who claimed she had been raped by six white men. Sharpton advised Brawley not to cooperate with investigators. Although a grand jury later concluded that the rape never took place, Sharpton maintains that Brawley’s story was true.
In New York, Sharpton has been involved in countless protests, always demanding justice for blacks. After white youths attacked three young blacks in Howard Beach, Queens, he led massive “Days of Outrage” demonstrations that halted subway service and shut down traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Even Sharpton’s harshest critics acknowledge that he touches a chord among the black community’s poorest and most downtrodden, that he speaks for people who believe they have no one else to represent them. “He tells it like it is,” said one young man who turned out to see Sharpton on Friday. “The other black leaders, they’re politically bought.”
By the time Sharpton arrived at City Hall at 12:45 p.m., the protest had been under way for 45 minutes. Several hundred people--many of whom had come in two buses that Sharpton’s organizers had sent from South-Central Los Angeles--were massed on the steps. Their chant was “No Justice! No Peace!” words that sounded more volatile than the more common refrain, “Gates Gotta Go!”
Sharpton wore his trademark jogging suit--this one black, fuchsia and lime green--and his brass Martin Luther King Jr. medal. (He said he wears the suits whenever he marches or there is a chance that he will be arrested. “No need to dirty up a good suit,” he said.)
As he stepped up to the microphone, someone handed him the cross. “We come to these steps on Good Friday,” he declared, “because 2,000 years ago they crucified Christ, and today they’re crucifying us.”
Carrying the cross on his right shoulder, Sharpton descended the steps and walked out into the middle of Spring Street. Followed by the throng, he marched toward Parker Center, holding up traffic.
As the crowd arrived at police headquarters, there was a moment of uncertainty. The doors were blocked by uniformed officers. Chanting “Free L.A.! Free L.A.!” the protesters were pressing in on Sharpton, who was ringed by eight Nation of Islam bodyguards. One of the guards whispered to Sharpton, asking him what he wanted to do.
“I just want to give them this cross,” he said, “and get out of here.”
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6d2c9c7c6aa2da885abd09e981cfab94 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-mn-976-story.html | Laguna, Irvine Co. Agree on Canyon Deal | Laguna, Irvine Co. Agree on Canyon Deal
The city and the Irvine Co. have negotiated an historic agreement that will allow Laguna Beach to begin buying 2,150 acres of Laguna Canyon for $78 million.
The pact, scheduled to go before the City Council on Tuesday, would set in motion the preservation plan for one of the last undeveloped coastal canyons in Southern California. The plan is based on an agreement in principle reached last October by the city, the company, environmental groups and Orange County officials.
In a related plan still under development and subject to approval by the Orange County Board of Supervisors and other agencies, the county will contribute $10 million toward the price of the land known as Laguna Laurel.
The county also will receive part ownership of the parcel, and manage what would effectively become a 15,000-acre regional wilderness park that would include Laguna Laurel and surrounding open space.
The latest round of negotiations to transform last fall’s three-page “handshake” agreement into a legal document tested the will of all parties to finalize the pact.
While the final agreement includes concessions on all sides that were not part of the original plan, City Manager Kenneth Frank, who negotiated on behalf of the city, stated in a memo to the City Council that the pact “embodies the concepts agreed to in October.”
Among the changes:
* Initially, the city will receive 400 acres less than anticipated after making its first $33-million payment June 30. The additional land will be set aside in case the San Joaquin Transportation Corridor is built and the alignment changes to meet environmental concerns. Parcels not used in that project would return to open space.
* In exchange, the Irvine Co. has agreed to cut $4.6 million from what could have been about $8 million in additional fees owed by the city in the second-through-fifth years of the contract. Also, the company has added 10 acres of property next to Laurel Canyon that was not part of the original land package.
* The proposed “regional greenbelt park” surrounding the city of Laguna Beach would bring together open space owned by different government agencies but would be managed by the county. Riding and hiking trails would connect the Laguna Laurel site to the county’s Aliso/Wood Canyons Regional Park, the Sycamore Hills property owned by the city, Bommer and Shady canyons in the city of Irvine, Crystal Cove State Park and Irvine Coast open space owned by the company.
* In an attempt to collect as much money as possible for the purchase, the city would transfer ownership of 84 acres to the state Department of Fish and Game in exchange for $4 million, which would become available in October.
An advisory group made up of representatives from the state, county, the cities of Irvine and Laguna Beach, and citizens would oversee policy issues relating to management of the park.
Negotiating team member Paul Freeman, who was hired by the Irvine Co. during the recent round of talks to act as liaison with all parties, said partial ownership of the land by other entities helps Laguna Beach raise needed money without compromising the basic goal: to keep the area as open space.
“Probably what you will have five years out is a checkerboard ownership with an integrated management plan, so that if someone comes up with the money, they are going to end up with a piece of the rock,” Freeman said Friday.
Most of the first $33-million payment will come from a $20-million bond issue approved by voters last November and also scheduled for a council vote Tuesday if the purchase agreement with the Irvine Co. is approved.
The city also plans to sell another $5-million bond package that would be backed by parking meter revenues, and spend $4 million in state park funds already received.
The county’s $10 million is expected to be paid out in four annual installments, with the first $2.5 million due by the first June 30 payment deadline. A private fund-raising campaign is already under way to help raise part of the $1.5-million balance due the first year.
As with the original agreement, if the city defaults on its payments, the Irvine Co. retains the right to proceed with its proposed 3,200-unit Laguna Laurel development. However, a new feature of the plan allows Laguna Greenbelt Inc., an environmental group, to take over the purchase if the city cannot meet the last payment due in 1995, provided the group has $10 million “in immediately available funds.”
Environmental groups were scheduled to review the agreement this weekend. Greenbelt President Elisabeth Brown said that while her board has not reviewed the final draft and was concerned about a couple of issues still unresolved Friday, she did not believe “there are any deal-breakers left.”
The San Joaquin Transportation Corridor became a key issue as talks progressed, committee members said privately.
Environmentalists and Laguna Beach officials, who are opposed to the transportation project, wanted to make sure that the final document did not facilitate the corridor. But the Irvine Co. and the county also wanted to make sure that the project was not killed, negotiators said.
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e57ab31c3a197b5eb102d9a4a12986b4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-697-story.html | UCLA Fans Better Off if They Look Ahead | UCLA Fans Better Off if They Look Ahead
I am tired of my fellow UCLA basketball fans dreaming of the good old days. The constant comparisons of every decent player and team to the 10-of-12 NCAA titles and 88-wins-in-a-row days do an incredible disservice to the program.
Coach John Wooden’s triumphs have been an albatross around the necks of every post-Wooden player and coach. No college basketball team will ever come close to those feats. North Carolina’s Dean Smith, as good as he has been, has won only one NCAA title.
DANIEL MICHAEL
Austin, Tex.
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dd01c67ffc98745614cb8866e489be3f | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-698-story.html | In Brief, Women Are Forgotten Again | In Brief, Women Are Forgotten Again
I figured The Times’ sports section was edging almost perceptibly toward sexual parity when I read the trivia question for today’s (March 23) Morning Briefing--"How many times has a USC basketball team reached the Final Four?”
I gave you too much credit. The answer involved, as usual, only the men’s team, which had appeared only twice, more than a generation ago. That fact that the women’s team won the championship twice in the 1980s and, if memory serves, also made it to the Final Four a third time during that decade, completely escaped your attention.
ELLEN ALPERSTEIN
Santa Monica
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55b5c76c76ab3b39f4e672641b6c8150 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-699-story.html | Well, What’s Wrong With Some Recycling? | Well, What’s Wrong With Some Recycling?
Mark Heisler leads off his article on the Lakers (March 20) by wittily wagging, the Lakers were “so far down they were getting their mail by gopher.”
If he was going to utilize that quote, he should have at least attributed it to its originator, Reggie Jackson. “Mr. October” made that pronouncement years ago. I know, because for years I carried around his witticism in my wallet.
CELIA TURNER
Newport Beach
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0a43310b6c6747575b5553e3645a1b27 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-700-story.html | Carrying a Big Stick in Future Negotiations | Carrying a Big Stick in Future Negotiations
March, 2000. The site: a major league spring training camp. The general manager informs a young man that his $6-million salary cannot be increased. He pleads his case by confirming rumors that the club is facing bankruptcy.
Jumping to his feet, the youngster says: “I’m happy with the $6 million, but I’m sick and tired of sharing hotel rooms on the road. Provide me with a private room and I’ll double my efforts and guarantee a World Series.”
They shake hands on the deal, and, as they emerge from the room, curious bystanders see a relieved general manager accompanied by a smiling bat boy.
RALPH MANZA
Leucadia
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2ebea32e2378d7b9abbc8a1d82cfea75 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-701-story.html | Arizona or Pasadena? King-Size Problem With Super Bowl Site | Arizona or Pasadena? King-Size Problem With Super Bowl Site
It is a sad day in America when the voting public becomes hostage to a private organization that dictates the way we should vote for fear of the loss of millions of dollars. As for this fan of the National Football League, I will not be attending any of the NFL games this season, because by doing so I would be telling the owners that it is OK to tell me how to cast my vote on election day.
KEVIN DOLL
Rancho Cucamonga
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6bd37ed855bfd944606fab4c2b66bcc3 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-702-story.html | Arizona or Pasadena? King-Size Problem With Super Bowl Site | Arizona or Pasadena? King-Size Problem With Super Bowl Site
Hypocrisy enters into the vote to move the Super Bowl to Southern California in light of recently publicized racism in the area. The Rodney King “incident” has been given enough exposure that no one can be ignorant of it. What about a prominent African-American athlete being thrown to the floor at LAX because he “looked like a drug-runner” or another being arrested on the excuse that his auto registration was about to expire? Are the powers that be aware of how much Los Angeles has paid out for abuse of minorities?
If the football organization really wants to make a statement about fairness and respect for races, let it reverse its vote and put the event into some area where all humans are treated with dignity and respect--if such a place exists.
RAY BRACY
Tustin
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4fe15123bf30e98a4c01c9dfd8ba8314 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-703-story.html | Did Dodgers Cut Their Own Heart? | Did Dodgers Cut Their Own Heart?
The Dodgers have made a lot of roster changes in recent years, but the one they shouldn’t have made was the releasing of Mickey Hatcher. Making him a coach was the least management could have done. Cold move, guys.
GARY TRAXLER
North Hollywood
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1b06113b96cce5a3d2f7229c6b41987e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-704-story.html | King Leading Boxing Down the Wrong Path | King Leading Boxing Down the Wrong Path
As a local boxing promoter, I feel it’s high time I spoke out on the current demise of professional boxing. What other pro sport would allow an ex-felon to control the time, date, place, participants and the outcome of many of its most heralded events?
Viewing Don King on the Tyson-Ruddock show--first waving Mexican then American flags, having his name tied to the Desert Storm effort, congratulating his winners, all with that maniacal grin--is too much to bear.
If King is allowed to continue controlling his fights, and if Congress fails to legislate honest management of pro boxing, the sport will soon be in the same league as pro wrestling and all pro boxers will have to carry SAG cards.
S. RICHARD SLADE
Santa Barbara
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acb66718bd87c5b2367a7a7a3fc4cb0d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-705-story.html | UCLA Fans Better Off if They Look Ahead | UCLA Fans Better Off if They Look Ahead
If Jim Harrick did not recruit Don MacLean illegally, then UCLA fans owe him their full support. If Harrick is guilty of an obvious violation and subsequent cover-up, then he deserves to be replaced. The obvious first choice lives in L.A., oozes charisma, can motivate talented players and is a proven winner.
Pay him what he requires and bring Pat Riley to Pauley.
RICH CHADWIN
Porterville
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4732dc2094507b4cc7939266d6143130 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-706-story.html | Are These Athletes Diamonds in Rough? | Are These Athletes Diamonds in Rough?
Your coverage of college baseball is totally inadequate. Take a clue from Allan Malamud and give the local teams the support they deserve. Box scores, photos, and conference game coverage are the minimum a paper such as The Times should offer.
ROYAL HARPER
Pacific Palisades
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c0c6c68c6a3a6faadb66339ca3d78578 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-707-story.html | The Cardinal Rules Over California Now | The Cardinal Rules Over California Now
Let’s see, the Stanford men won the NIT and the Stanford women made the Final Four. Now if only Stanford’s overhead rate charged for governmental research was one of which our basketball teams could be proud.
DICK STANFORD
Ontario
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7518b89e2793de6492deea92deff7f66 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-708-story.html | Reader Says Angels Don’t Have a Prayer | Reader Says Angels Don’t Have a Prayer
Evidently the Angels acquired Gary Gaetti to go along with their dozen or so other guilt-plagued, born-again repentants. Pity the poor baseball player who curses, is playfully vulgar or performs indecent pranks on his teammates. And how did Dave Parker end up on this sanitized crew?
DELL FRANKLIN
Cayucos
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69f47ab968a5b6da9c9d4ed9599b3d1c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-709-story.html | Clippers’ Success Just Around the Bend | Clippers’ Success Just Around the Bend
Am I dreaming? Did the Clippers make the front page of the newspaper? No, I wasn’t dreaming. They played the Lakers. Even after the Clippers defeated Portland in Portland (something they hadn’t done in 10 years), coupled with a Laker victory over San Antonio, the Clippers made Page 13 of your newspaper.
Wise up, Laker lovers. Your franchise is almost over. And when it is completely over, please don’t jump on the Clipper bandwagon, because you will definitely be reminded.
MIKE MILLER
North Hollywood
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0f81c781a9f4094e1238bfa54096edd7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-710-story.html | Mayor Wants Durslag on the Bandwagon | Mayor Wants Durslag on the Bandwagon
I thought that Mel Durslag would join the rest of us in expressing delight with our successful effort to win the 1993 Super Bowl for Southern California. Instead, Mr. Durslag wrote the astoundingly uninformed column (March 23) complaining that the 1993 Super Bowl game should be held in the Coliseum instead of the Rose Bowl.
Mr. Durslag apparently doesn’t know that the Coliseum will be in the midst of a full-scale, $200-million renovation in January, 1993, and will thus not be available for the Super Bowl. Surely Mr. Durslag’s memory is good enough to remember our recent winning battle to retain the Raiders. Because we won this battle, the renovated, state-of-the-art Coliseum will be ready to hold Super Bowls for decades to come.
TOM BRADLEY
Mayor of Los Angeles
Editor’s note: Mr. Durslag’s column was based on the premise that the Super Bowl in January, 1993, easily could have been played in the Coliseum before the start of any renovation.
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800cd267bfdf14658abdbaa28a001d79 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-711-story.html | You Can Almost Feel All of Their Hot Air | You Can Almost Feel All of Their Hot Air
Accolades to Jim Murray for his column (March 24) on Lou Duva and the fight scene. His relating of old fight managers and their schemes was a classic. Young readers of today got a rare insight (into) a sport when Mr. Murray portrays and relates to athletes of old.
PETER M. CAVALLO
Port Hueneme
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6ab8d7a7bfb1da355f896cb23f981622 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-789-story.html | Rasmussen, Like Every ‘Little Guy,’ Deserves His Day In the Sun | Rasmussen, Like Every ‘Little Guy,’ Deserves His Day In the Sun
It is nice to see that “the little guy” gets some attention from you.
While “little guy” might not apply in this case, Dennis Rasmussen is certainly not a household name. At least not yet. He goes out to the mound every five or so days and quietly gets the job done.
He is also the perfect role model for the kids, taking time out of his busy day to visit my high school English class. Instead of selling shoes on TV, he spends time with his family. He is one of the few athletes whose values surpass his ego.
SHAHIN BEIZAIE
San Diego
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27c328cf115d0839d427a2dd871571a7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-790-story.html | Can anyone in the new Padre management... | Can anyone in the new Padre management...
Can anyone in the new Padre management team explain to a relatively new Padre fan, one who yearns to point to their home team with pride, how that eager fan can do this after reading of Tempy’s treatment by those in charge? I thought the game of baseball was considered one for gentlemen and gentlewomen. The only feeling this fan has for the 1991 Padres is deep and abiding shame.
Maybe I should switch to football. At least the violence done to players is honest and open.
NOMA PINTO
San Diego
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2b08984c1d06756da5e6fcfac65d4f4d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-791-story.html | Chevrier Helps Gulls Hold Off Admirals | Chevrier Helps Gulls Hold Off Admirals
The Gulls’ domination remained the same. Only the face behind the goaltender’s mask changed.
Alain Chevrier, getting the start because Scott Brower was sidelined with a bad shoulder, turned away 26 shots Friday night to lead the Gulls to a 3-1 victory over the Milwaukee Admirals in front of 9,642 at the Bradley Center.
The Gulls kept alive hopes of earning the fourth and final playoff berth in the International Hockey League’s West Division. The Admirals (33-41-3), who could have eliminated the Gulls with a victory, have a three-point lead for fourth place, and each team has five games remaining.
With the stakes so high, the Gulls probably would have felt safer with Brower in goal. He had started all eight games this season against Milwaukee, going 6-1-1 (3-1 in the Bradley Center) and compiling a 2.73 goals-against average.
But Chevrier and the defense rose to the occasion.
“We played a good, sound, disciplined game,” said Gull Coach Mike O’Connell, whose team was coming off a 7-2 loss Wednesday at Phoenix. “We played it close to the vest. We eliminated their men coming into our zone, and we got the saves from Chevrier we haven’t been getting lately.”
Center Larry Floyd provided the offense, getting his 22nd and 23rd goals of the season.
“He’s been a consistent player all year--he’s taken pride in his job and he’s worked hard every night,” O’Connell said of Floyd, who leads the team with 53 assists and 76 points. “Consistency is something he’s done, but something we’ve lacked as a team all year.”
Floyd’s first score came at 8:11 in the first period, but three minutes later, the Admirals tied it on Andrew McBain’s goal.
Ron Duguay got the tiebreaker at 4:56 in the second period. The unassisted goal was his 15th of the season.
Floyd gave the Gulls’ defense some breathing room when he scored at 6:24 of the third period on assists from Mark Vichorek and Al Tuer. The Admirals had only six shots in the final period.
The Gulls and Admirals each play a division leader tonight. Milwaukee plays at West-leading Peoria, and the Gulls visit East-leading Kalamazoo.
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50e7c0ca03dad66768e3eb9c61bad80c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-795-story.html | PADRES : Schiraldi, Templeton May Be On Way Out | PADRES : Schiraldi, Templeton May Be On Way Out
Padre pitcher Calvin Schiraldi, from all indications, either will be released or traded, and could be just one of several veterans who will be informed of their dismissal when they report to the Padre camp today.
The Padres, according to a source, also will release either veteran shortstop Garry Templeton or second baseman Marty Barrett in the next few days. It’s quite possible, the source said, that both players will be gone before opening day.
It’s no secret that Padre Manager Greg Riddoch and the coaching staff are wary of Templeton’s attitude, and perceive him as a negative influence. There’s also questions among the staff whether he has lost some of his ability.
Templeton, however, has a guaranteed contract for $500,000. The Padres have tried to trade him to Texas, but Templeton rejected any attempts.
Barrett, who virtually is limited to playing second base, has disappointed the Padres with his range. Yet, they believe he could be a positive influence on the team, and his .276 batting average this spring indicates that he still can be quite effective as a pinch-hitter.
The Padre front office and coaching staff met late Friday after the Padres’ 4-1 victory over the Oakland Athletics to determine their latest round of cuts, which could affect as many as eight players.
Although no one was willing to say anything publicly, sources say there are several surprising decisions that already have been made:
* Paul Faries, considered a longshot for the backup infield job, has made the team despite batting only .158 this spring with four RBIs.
* Eric Nolte likely will be their fifth starter.
* Thomas Howard will make the team as a reserve outfielder.
* Greg Gross will make the team as a left-handed pinch-hitter.
Faries, because of his ability to play second, third and shortstop, won one of the reserve infield positions. Although he is considered below-average at shortstop, the Padres are willing to take their chances because of his versatility.
Nolte, 1-0, 2.25, according to sources, will be the No. 5 starter simply because the Padres can not option him to triple-A Las Vegas without clearing waivers. He was 2-11 with an 8.58 ERA last season at Las Vegas, but the Padres say his problems have been caused by a lack of confidence, not ability.
Howard, who’s batted .265 this spring, is expected to open the season with the Padres because he has little to prove in triple-A. He batted .328 with five homers and 51 RBIs last season in Las Vegas, and because he now is 26, the Padres don’t believe the lack of playing time will harm him.
Gross, 38, who did not play last season, remains the Padres’ only valid reserve left-handed hitter. He’s hitting just .111 this spring, but the Padres are providing him extra at-bats in “B” and minor league games.
And then, there is Schiraldi. He was scheduled to follow Greg Harris in Friday’s game, but he was summoned into Riddoch’s office in the afternoon, and was scratched.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Schiraldi said, “I don’t ask questions any more.”
The Padres have talked to Texas, and several other teams about a potential trade involving Schiraldi, but most teams believe that Schiraldi, 1-1, 6.52 ERA, will be released anyway. He earns $740,000 this season, and if he’s still on the roster by Wednesday, the contract becomes guaranteed.
“We talked privately with Cal,” said Joe McIlvaine, Padre general manager, “he knows what’s going on. . . . We’ve been talking to a lot of teams.”
Padre Notes
Greg Harris made the most impressive outing of the spring by a Padre starter Friday, throwing five perfect innings, and striking out four. “I tell you, you can’t pitch any better than that,” Manager Greg Riddoch said. . . . Padre first baseman Fred McGriff was hit in the right elbow Friday night by Athletic pitcher Curt Young, and is expected to be sidelined for at least one game. McGriff still has yet to hit a homer in 44 at-bats. . . . Padre second baseman Bip Roberts was sick with the flu, providing Marty Barrett a start at second base. . . . The Padres have three players listed among the top 100 prospects in Baseball America: “Reliever Rafael Valdez (36), starter Robbie Beckett (50) and first baseman Dave Staton (70). . . . Basketball coach Bob Knight, a close friend of Jim Ferguson, Padre media relations director, attended Friday’s game. . . . The Padres drew a spring-training record crowd 7,274 Friday at Desert Sun Stadium, eclipsing the previous record of 6,874 on March 19, 1988, against the Cleveland Indians. . . . The Padres will play the Athletics again at 12:05 p.m. (PST) today. Ed Whitson and Dave Stewart, each who will be the opening-day starters, are the probable starters.
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d87a5bdbd490efb224d2e18aebfd2c7c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-820-story.html | Canyons Discovers Its Ace in the Hole With Emergence of Shive on the Golf Team | Canyons Discovers Its Ace in the Hole With Emergence of Shive on the Golf Team
Chris Shive has done nothing but surprise Coach Gary Peterson since he arrived from Texas last year and joined the College of the Canyons golf team.
Shive came west on a lark, following his then girlfriend to school. When she tried out for the golf team, Shive played the course with her and told Peterson afterward that he wanted to join the team. By the end of last season, Shive was Canyons’ No. 1 golfer and placed third in the state tournament.
This year, Shive again is Canyons’ top player, helping the Cougars to a 14-8 record, and he twice has surprised Peterson and himself in the past six weeks.
For the first time in his career, Shive recorded a hole in one, scoring an ace at Rio Bravo Country Club in Bakersfield on Feb. 11.
In eight years at Canyons, Peterson had never had a player score a hole in one. Six weeks later, Shive struck again. On Wednesday at Spanish Bay Golf Links in Monterey, he scored his second ace.
Each time, Shive used an eight iron. At Rio Bravo in a Western State Conference match, he aced the 16th hole, a 163-yard par three, en route to a 74. In Monterey, his ace on the 158-yard, par-three 13th hole enabled him to shoot a 78 in the Don Borden Invitational.
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489814cae169f0a5e0fc5465d57bfc9b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-937-story.html | GOLF PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP : It Isn’t Easy, but Azinger Takes the Lead | GOLF PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP : It Isn’t Easy, but Azinger Takes the Lead
Paul Azinger made up four strokes on par over the last four holes Friday in the Players Championship.
It only seemed like more.
“It was playing so hard, every shot you picked up was like picking up two,” Azinger said after taking a one-stroke lead at the halfway point of the windblown $1.6-million Players Championship.
“The hardest I’ve ever seen it blow here,” Azinger said.
The winds were clocked at 40-45 m.p.h. when Azinger put his birdie-birdie-birdie-birdie finish on a round of 68.
He wore a puzzled expression as he attempted, then abandoned, an explanation of how it happened.
“I don’t want to say it was a fluke, but it happened when I wasn’t playing my best,” he said.
“The wind was almost at hurricane force and I was missing fairways left and right. There was no pattern to what I was doing.”
He birdied the last four holes he played and completed two trips over the home course for the PGA Tour at 135, nine under par.
Fuzzy Zoeller, a former U.S. Open and Masters champion, and Australian Steve Elkington shared second at 136.
Zoeller, who plays a restricted schedule because of his chronic back pain, had a 68 in the gale-force conditions. Elkington shot 70.
Bob Tway, who held the first-round lead with a 65, went 12 strokes higher to a 77. Mike Smith went up 13 strokes to an 80, and Bob Gilder shot 83.
Ian Baker-Finch, another Australian, was fourth alone at 138 after a 69. Curtis Strange, with a 68, led a large group at 139.
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23d345bf90fd87452d94204730dc1934 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-938-story.html | Fifth Consecutive Victory Doesn’t Mean Extra Rest for Clippers | Fifth Consecutive Victory Doesn’t Mean Extra Rest for Clippers
Clipper forward Charles Smith, suffering from tendinitis in his left knee, had hoped to get some rest after the Clippers opened a 19-point lead during the first half against the Dallas Mavericks Friday night.
But Smith didn’t get much rest in the second half.
Smith was pressed back into service after Dallas pulled to 80-77 two minutes into the final quarter.
Smith made four consecutive jump shots to key a 13-3 run as the Clippers extended their winning streak to five, 105-96, before 12,320 at the Sports Arena.
“It was crunch time and everybody has to elevate their game if they want to get the win,” Smith said. “That’s what I had to do, and we got the victory.”
It is the Clippers’ longest winning streak since October of 1985, when they opened the season with five victories. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1984, the Clippers’ longest winning streak is six, in December of 1984.
“We’re playing much better defense (during the streak),” Smith said. “We have some good scorers, but defense has been the key. Even without the five-game win streak, we weren’t a bad defensive team all season, but lately we’ve upped our defensive intensity and it’s been a great help.
“We’re definitely coming together. We’re playing good defense and no one’s trying to do too much.”
Smith played only 12 minutes in the first half after bumping his left knee. But he played 18 minutes in the second half and finished with a team-high 22 points, making nine of 17 shots. He also had five rebounds.
“Smith really carried them for a while,” Dallas Coach Richie Adubato said. “He’s an excellent player.”
Although the Clippers (28-44) are usually planning for the NBA lottery at this point in the season, they have an outside shot of overtaking Seattle (33-37) for the final Western Conference playoff spot. The Clippers play two of their final 10 games against Seattle.
“It’s personal pride that’s motivating our team,” Smith said. “We’re not out of the playoffs mathematically. It’s a longshot, but our team really thinks they can do it.”
Although making the playoffs is a longshot, the Clippers might be able to do it if Ron Harper continues to play well. Harper had 16 points, six assists and six rebounds in 37 minutes. He also had a steal and two blocked shots.
The Clipper bench has also played a big role in the club’s recent success. The Clipper reserves outscored Dallas, 33-17. Guard Tom Garrick had a season-high 19 points and two assists in 21 minutes and forward Ken Norman had 14 points and six rebounds.
“It was nothing spectacular,” Garrick said. “I had some open shots, and I took them.”
Winston Garland, who has started the last four games at point guard in place of injured Gary Grant, has had a big role in the Clippers’ recent success. They are 6-1 with Garland in the starting lineup. Garland had five points and seven assists in 28 minutes against the Mavericks.
The Clippers shut down the Mavericks in the second quarter, limiting them to 11 points.
“Our defense was really good again tonight,” Clipper Coach Mike Schuler said.
Clipper Notes
The Clippers finished March with a 9-8 record. Their nine victories tied the club record for most in a month, set in January of 1990. Clipper guard Gary Grant, who had loose cartilage removed from his right knee during arthroscopic surgery Thursday, said he expects to return for next Friday’s game against Seattle. Sidelined for three games, Grant said he will slowly work himself back into the lineup. “I don’t want to mess up the chemistry by trying to start,” Grant said. “I’d like to play 10 minutes a game and give Winston (Garland) and Tom (Garrick) a break.” Although he is unable to run, Grant will begin riding a stationary bicycle as part of his rehabilitation.
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40b26faaf4a20cd08b35bd7cb9807ca4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-941-story.html | SWIMMING NCAA MEN’S CHAMPIONSHIPS : UCLA’s Cecchi Pulls Off an Upset in 100 Breaststroke | SWIMMING NCAA MEN’S CHAMPIONSHIPS : UCLA’s Cecchi Pulls Off an Upset in 100 Breaststroke
Andrea Cecchi’s legs were suffering from oxygen debt as Eric Wunderlich closed in from one side and Mike Barrowman drew near from the other.
But when the threesome reached the finish, Cecchi, a UCLA junior, slammed his hands against the wall to win the 100-yard breaststroke in the biggest upset of the NCAA Division I men’s championships Friday night at Texas Swim Center.
Cecchi touched in 53.50, to 53.52 for Michigan’s Wunderlich and 53.54 for his teammate Barrowman, the world record-holder in the 200-meter breaststroke.
“He (Cecchi) is the greatest finisher I’ve ever seen,” UCLA Coach Ron Ballatore said. “Thank God for electrical timing.”
While Ballatore had an inkling that Cecchi could win based on his meet-leading relay splits, Cecchi based it on lack of intimidation.
“You never know if you can win or not, but I didn’t feel anyone was so strong that they couldn’t be beat,” said the native Italian.
Cecchi’s improvement bodes well for his Olympic dreams that weren’t realized in 1988, when he was removed from the Italian team because of a heart arrythmia.
“I’ve never had any problems with my heart,” said Cecchi, who has since been cleared by the Italian federation. “I am lucky.”
Three-time defending champion Texas was also lucky--and fast--in winning three of the eight events on the second day of competition to push its first-place total to 342. Stanford is in second with 290 points, followed by USC (221), Florida (220), Tennessee (168) and Michigan (150).
While Texas has scored 152 points on relays, Stanford’s four second-place finishes have resulted in 136 points, and USC has virtually eliminated itself from title contention with only 106 relay points. The Trojans got a lift, however, when Dave Wharton won the 400 individual medley and became the only swimmer to win four consecutive national championships in that event.
Wharton passed Michigan’s Eric Namesnik on the last 50 of freestyle to win in 3:43.28, a time that is shy of his 1988 American record of 3:42.23, but the third fastest ever.
Iowa’s Artur Wojdat won his second gold, rallying to beat Arizona State’s Troy Dalbey, 1:33.71 to 1:33.73, in the 200 freestyle.
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a094f2da3575ad8c77f52cec5ab06bc2 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-943-story.html | THOROUGHBRED RACING : East Meets West in the Derby Preps | THOROUGHBRED RACING : East Meets West in the Derby Preps
Trainer Dick Lundy has been saying there are more good 3-year-olds in the West than in the East. Jockey Chris McCarron says the crop of Western 3-year-olds is the deepest since he started riding in California 13 years ago. And Jose Santos, who is Santa Anita-based but also the rider of Fly So Free in the East, agrees with Lundy.
But nobody knows for sure.
“It’s more competitive in California, but that’s because Fly So Free has made it so boring by winning everything in the East,” said Jerry Bailey, who has ridden 3-year-olds on both coasts. “The only way to find out which group is better is to have them all run against each other. That’s what the Kentucky Derby is for, isn’t it?”
Racing fans may not have to wait for the May 4 Derby to assess the strength of the East versus the strength of the West, which before Unbridled last year had supplied the four previous winners at Churchill Downs. Today, there are two Derby preps, in Kentucky and Arkansas, that are more intersectional in makeup than any races for 3-year-olds this year.
In the $500,000 Jim Beam Stakes at Turfway Park in Florence, Ky., Apollo, considered one of the best 3-year-olds running in California, will face 10 rivals, including Richman, Hansel, Subordinated Debt and Discover. The first three have shown some ability, but they were no match for Fly So Free, the Derby’s future book favorite, at Gulfstream Park. Discover wasn’t quite good enough to beat Hansel and Richman when they were 2-year-olds, but the Cox’s Ridge colt scored a seven-length victory around two turns over the Turfway track two weeks ago in his season’s debut.
Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark., is running the Rebel Stakes, and trainer Wayne Lukas, who hasn’t missed starting at least one horse in the Derby since 1981, has shipped in Corporate Report, who is undefeated in two starts at Santa Anita. Lukas will also saddle Battle Creek, who ran some terrible races in California before he started winning at Oaklawn.
Arkansas horses are frequently sprinters who can’t hack the 1 1/4-mile Derby distance, and Fenter, the best local horse running in the Rebel, appears to be from that mold.
Quintana, another entrant in the Rebel, used to be trained by Lukas until he was claimed for $50,000 at Santa Anita last month. The son of Affirmed runs for David Cross, who saddled Sunny’s Halo to win the Rebel, the Arkansas Derby and the Kentucky Derby in 1983.
The Jim Beam is 1 1/8 miles, the farthest Apollo has been asked to run. He won four consecutive sprints, then barely missed hanging on against the highly regarded Dinard and lost the one-mile San Rafael at Santa Anita by a head.
Bringing Apollo to Turfway made good sense, because the Ohio River track has frequently favored speed horses. Last Monday, Apollo worked six furlongs in a blazing 1:11 2/5, galloping out an extra eighth of a mile in 1:25 3/5. “He obviously likes the track,” trainer Gary Jones said. “Anytime a horse finishes by getting his last three-eighths of a mile faster than the first three-eighths, you have to like the work.”
Whether the outside post position is likable is something else. In the nine previous Beams, the winner came from Posts Nos. 1 or 2 five times, and no one has won from as far outside as Apollo. Richman, who has been on the lead most of the time while winning eight of 12 starts, will break from No. 7 today.
“I love my post position,” Jones said. “He’s loaded (without waiting for other horses) and out right right away. He doesn’t have to stand in the gate, and that’s good for a speed horse. If I’m not in front, I can settle in behind whoever does make the lead.”
A week ago, Aqueduct officials called the trainers of several horses that had been nominated to run in today’s Comely Stakes, and didn’t find anybody that wanted to test Meadow Star.
However, four horses have been entered in the one-mile, $100,000 race, presumably to run for second place. Meadow Star, undefeated in eight starts, is expected to run against colts in the Wood Memorial, and that will determine whether she gets a shot at the Kentucky Derby.
One of the Comely entrants is I’m a Thriller, who has won two insignificant stakes. “I’m not crazy about running against Meadow Star,” said her trainer, Mike Kelly. “But unless I want to put her on a plane, this is where we have to run.”
In 1980, LeRoy Jolley trained Genuine Risk, one of three fillies to win the Kentucky Derby, and he also has Meadow Star. Jolley’s latest hopeful is not nearly the size of Winning Colors, the filly who won the 1988 Derby. Winning Colors might have been the biggest horse in the field.
“Meadow Star has grown physically,” Jolley said. “She’s a little stronger, but she’s still very young. She was a May 19 foal, so really she’s not even 3 yet.”
The first three finishers in the Santa Ana Handicap Feb. 10 are entered in Sunday’s $200,000 Santa Barbara Handicap at Santa Anita.
Annual Reunion and Noble and Nice finished in a dead heat in the 1 1/8-mile Santa Ana as Bequest was third, a length back. Annual Reunion and Bequest will each carry 117 pounds Sunday. Noble and Nice has been assigned 114 pounds and will be ridden by Alex Solis instead of Kent Desormeaux, who is recovering from a broken wrist. Desormeaux also would have ridden Apollo in the Jim Beam today, but he has been replaced by Chris McCarron.
Others in the field for the Santa Barbara, at 1 1/4 miles on grass, are Louve Bleue, 114 pounds; Appealing Missy, 116, and Marsha’s Dancer, 111.
Horse Racing Notes
Other Kentucky Derby preps today are the $150,000 Tampa Bay Derby and the $100,000 Cherry Hill Mile. Link, who was fourth in the Florida Derby, is favored in a field of nine at Tampa Bay Downs. The Cherry Hill, at Garden State Park, is a nine-horse grab bag that includes Fire in Ice, a Wayne Lukas trainee who has won five of 12 starts at six tracks.
He Is Risen, the Jim Beam entrant owned by former NBA referee Arnold Heft, was foaled on March 30, 1988, which was Easter. . . . Horses sometimes win after throwing shoes during races, but not Laxey Bay and Exbourne in their last starts. Laxey Bay, last as the favorite in the San Luis Rey, lost a shoe and hurt his foot. Exbourne, second in a photo finish with Forty Niner Days in the San Francisco Mile at Golden Gate Fields, also finished a shoe short.
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4fd8bc788b3bd1b1adc9d62c30fb0383 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-944-story.html | Winter Sports | Winter Sports
Julie Parisien of Auburn, Me., won the slalom in the North American Championship Series at Attitash, N.H.
Parisien, who fell during Thursday’s giant slalom, covered the 59-gate course in a combined 1 minute 36.16 seconds. Stefanie Schuster of Austria was second in 1:36.71 and Gabriela Zingre of Switzerland third in 1:36.72 . . . U.S. ski team veteran Tiger Shaw won a North American Championship Series slalom at Mt. Mansfield, Vt. Shaw, a two-time Olympian who will retire at the end of this season, put together two strong runs for a combined time of 1:50.31.
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c42bfb58594f171e676ddf2be084d238 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-945-story.html | TENNIS U.S. HARDCOURT : Seles, Graf Sweep Into Semifinals | TENNIS U.S. HARDCOURT : Seles, Graf Sweep Into Semifinals
Playing as if they will meet in the final, the world’s top two female tennis players, Monica Seles of Yugoslavia and Steffi Graf of Germany, easily eliminated their quarterfinal opponents Friday at the U.S. Women’s Hardcourt Championships.
No. 1-ranked Seles defeated unseeded Erika deLone, 6-2, 6-0. Second-ranked Graf beat No. 7-seeded Susan Sloane, 6-1, 6-1.
In today’s semifinal, Seles will play third-seeded Manuela Maleeva-Fragniere of Bulgaria, who beat sixth-seeded Lori McNeil, 6-3, 6-4. Also advancing was unseeded Julie Halard of France, a 6-1, 6-2 winner over Eva Sviglerova of Czechoslovakia.
Seles’ match against Maleeva-Fragniere will be a repeat of last year’s final, which Seles won, 6-4, 6-3.
“I will have to use every single possibility,” Maleeva-Fragniere said of the semifinal. “I’ll have to be aggressive.”
A baseline player, Maleeva-Fragniere said she wouldn’t rush the net but would try to keep the ball deep and force a rapid pace.
Maleeva-Fragniere said she might be able to defeat Seles but did not know if she could overpower Graf in the final the next day.
Graf lost only one point on her serve during the first set and only two during the second set against Sloane.
Should both Seles and Graf win, it would set up their first meeting in 1991.
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7e5979b84a317885629e51f6f3fcdb9c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-953-story.html | Rams Lose Newsome, Get 2 Free Agents | Rams Lose Newsome, Get 2 Free Agents
The Rams lost their second Plan B free agent Friday, safety Vince Newsome, but also signed two more and were set to sign another, former Ram punter Dale Hatcher.
Newsome, 30, a starter for most of last season before losing his job to Pat Terrell, signed with the Cleveland Browns.
Hatcher apparently has agreed to terms with the Rams and is expected to sign before the end of the free-agency period, Monday at midnight. Hatcher, who left the Rams during last year’s Plan B period to sign with the Packers, will replace last year’s punter, Keith English.
The Rams signed defensive end Gerald Robinson, left exposed by the San Diego Chargers; and linebacker Glenell Sanders, unprotected by the Chicago Bears. Robinson and Sanders are the fourth and fifth Plan B players signed by the Rams.
Robinson, 28, a 1986 first-round draft pick of the Minnesota Vikings, probably will be tossed into the competition for the starting job on the right side of the defensive line. Sanders, 24, is seen as a special teams player and backup linebacker.
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998a4a7b65695c333cc6636aec8d458c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-958-story.html | FINAL FOUR NOTES : UNLV’s Hunt Expected to Play Despite Injury | FINAL FOUR NOTES : UNLV’s Hunt Expected to Play Despite Injury
A strained shoulder ligament apparently has healed enough to allow UNLV guard Anderson Hunt to play in today’s NCAA semifinal game against Duke.
Hunt, who scored 29 points against the Blue Devils in last year’s championship game and was voted the 1990 Final Four’s most valuable player, hurt the shoulder against Seton Hall last Saturday. He missed two days of practice, then aggravated the injury during Thursday’s workout. On Friday, his condition had improved.
“He should be OK,” UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian said.
Also hurt is Rebel point guard Greg Anthony, who has a stretched hand ligament. Tarkanian said it affects Anthony only when he makes long passes.
Duke and North Carolina are without major injuries, but Kansas forward Richard Scott, who is averaging 5.6 points in a reserve role, suffered a sprained ankle during Friday’s practice. The same ankle was sprained about three weeks ago. Kansas Coach Roy Williams said he expects Scott to play.
Kansas won the national championship in 1988, led by forward Danny Manning, now with the Clippers. While acknowledging Manning’s contribution, Kansas forward Mark Randall, a redshirt that season, said it is often forgotten that four other players helped the Jayhawks earn the national title.
“People talked about Danny and the Miracles,” Randall said. “I thought that was a bunch of. . . .”
Randall said the 1990-91 version of the Jayhawks is similar to the Kansas team of several years ago. “We don’t have any individual stars,” he said. “The team in ’88 was also a Cinderella team. I’d like (this season’s) results to be the same.”
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e70e580342122810ee0099c1ffca8480 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-960-story.html | College Basketball | College Basketball
Ohio State basketball Coach Randy Ayers was voted coach of the year by the Associated Press. Ayers guided the Buckeyes to a 27-4 record and the co-championship of the Big Ten in his second season as coach. Ohio State was beaten by St. John’s in the Midwest Regional semifinals.
Ayers received 191 of 582 votes in a nationwide poll of sportswriters and broadcasters conducted before the NCAA tournament. Kentucky’s Rick Pitino was second with 94 votes, followed by Utah’s Rick Majerus with 89 1/2 and Nebraska’s Danny Nee with 65.
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3e424d24fd28b02188b54e3974d999d7 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-963-story.html | Miscellany | Miscellany
The NCAA was accused of enforcing credentials rules that limit coverage of its basketball Final Four by black-oriented news outlets.
The NCAA denied the allegations, saying minority media outlets are treated fairly.
The Indianapolis Recorder, one of the nation’s oldest black newspapers, said it was denied a request to have a photographer at the Hoosier Dome today and Monday night. It said the NCAA rules limit photo passes to publications with a daily circulation of at least 350,000 or a weekly circulation of at least 700,000.
The Recorder was given credentials for one reporter only.
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33591b56215b4756e5a9c8516ed5d6ce | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-sp-965-story.html | Maradona Faces Long Suspension | Maradona Faces Long Suspension
Soccer star Diego Maradona tested positive for cocaine Friday and will be suspended for up to two years.
The announcement by the Italian Soccer Federation came less than a year after the forward helped Argentina to its second consecutive World Cup final and Napoli to its second Italian League championship.
The length of the suspension will be decided by the disciplinary commission of the Italian League, which is expected to meet next week. Italian soccer regulations call for a minimum suspension of six months and a maximum of two years.
The ban automatically will be extended worldwide by the International Federation of Association Football, making the 30-year-old Maradona ineligible to play for Argentina in this summer’s America Cup, the South American championship.
Maradona could not be reached for comment.
Napoli reported Thursday that Maradona had tested positive after its 1-0 victory over Bari March 17. A second test was conducted Friday, and the Italian federation immediately made the announcement.
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9e6cd420b118a4cd3e9f7eaa850342ab | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-ss-1035-story.html | Commentary : Looking Inward at Sacred Times | Commentary : Looking Inward at Sacred Times
Jews began observing Passover Friday night and most Christians celebrate the culmination of their Easter season Sunday--as Muslins are halfway through their holiest month, Ramadan. The Times asked three clergy members to reflect on the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, which affected adherents of all three faiths who whare ancient religious roots.
Ramadan is for Muslims not only a time of fasting but also a month of prayers and charity. It is a time of joy and celebration.
People feel especially closer to God. As we experience God’s forgiveness and love in a special way in this month, we also try to forgive each other. Ramadan is also for us a time of self-discipline, self-examination and purification.
This year Ramadan has come when our emotions are mixed.
On the one hand, we feel a sense of thanks and satisfaction that our brethren of Kuwait are returning to their land and to their homes. We are pleased that their land is liberated from an oppressive occupation. We are pleased that the trauma and suffering that they experienced at the hands of Iraqi occupying forces in the past seven months are over.
But we are also sad that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of our Iraqi brethren have also suffered death and destruction as a result of the Persian Gulf War. The sight of the destruction of land, resources, environment and people makes us sick, depressed and angry.
However, thank God, the war is over. It is time now for all sides to think seriously what happened and why. It is time for all sides to repent before God, ask His forgiveness and work to remove all those causes that brought these evils and destruction to them, and to their lands. They must strive to build a better future, a future based on justice, human rights and on noble universal values and principles of Islam.
Muslims must know that they are one brotherhood. Kuwaitis, Saudis, Iraqis, Palestinian, Jordanian, Yemeni, Egyptian or Syrian, etc., are mere names for identification purposes only. Their ultimate allegiance must be to God and to values of their faith. They must learn to live with each other, forgive each other and forget their differences.
One may agree or disagree with the justness and the justification for the war.
I personally hold that this war was not necessary. If the liberation of Kuwait was our real aim, we could have achieved that through many peaceful ways without causing so much death and destruction.
Nevertheless, we do recognize that our U.S. troops are returning home with a sense of pride, with mission accomplished. They are coming home to a hero’s welcome. We wish them peace, as they deserve.
However, I hope that this experience will make neither them nor any American relish war and that we will not forget the sufferings we caused.
Muslims, Christians and Jews have all sinned against each other and against God. We must repent as Americans and must do it soon. In the future we must aim our efforts more toward peace, justice and reconciliation at home and abroad. Our government must pursue the cause of justice and peace in the world.
We should show the same enthusiasm, if not more, for peace that we showed for war.
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a295146ccb33462857b1d99610a3daec | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-ss-1036-story.html | Orthodox Churches Foresee Clash With World Council | Orthodox Churches Foresee Clash With World Council
Relations between the Eastern Orthodox churches and other members of the World Council of Churches have always been somewhat tentative because of differences in theology and practice. But after stormy disagreements in the final days of this year’s World Council assembly in Australia, many leaders of Christendom’s Eastern traditions see trouble ahead.
Orthodox representatives issued a three-page statement enumerating their concerns with the the Geneva-based World Council, predominantly a Protestant body.
Eastern Orthodoxy, which will celebrate Easter this year one Sunday later than western churches, already differs with Protestant bodies over the latter’s ordination of women and tendency toward liberal theology.
Father Leonid Kishkovsky, ecumenical officer for the Orthodox Church in America and president of the National Council of Churches, said the World Council “ought to take notice that the next seven to eight years are going to be critical.” That is the expected interlude before the next assembly is held. Kishkovsky predicted “a steady assessment of what’s occurring theologically.”
The Orthodox were very upset after a provocative presentation by South Korean feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyung, a Presbyterian.
Combining verbal fireworks with a performance by Korean and aboriginal dancers, Chung rendered a dramatic evocation of a female Holy Spirit. She linked that spirit to that of Hagar, the Egyptian slave woman in Genesis who Chung said was “exploited and abandoned” by Abraham and Sarah. Chung burned paper bearing the names of other exploited spirits, naming Holocaust victims, freedom fighters, murdered advocates of nonviolence, and others.
Most of the audience gave Chung a standing ovation, but many of the Orthodox--joined by some Anglicans, Lutherans and Africans--responded with shouts of “apostate,” “pagan,” “un-Christian,” and “syncretistic.”
Kishkovsky warned: “If the theological direction which was in part represented by Chung--and enthusiastically received by the audience--becomes the spirit of the next decade, then it’s a new discussion.”
In Canberra, Orthodox representatives suggested that the World Council has strayed from its fundamental goal of creating church unity and from its basic Christian framework. They noted that missing from council documents issued since the previous assembly held in 1983 in Vancouver, Canada, are affirmations of Jesus Christ as the world’s savior.
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08129297eb04ed391bcf92550b6851a4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-ss-1037-story.html | VARIATIONS IN TRANSLATION | VARIATIONS IN TRANSLATION
English translations of the Koran (also spelled Quran), the sacred scriptures of Islam, vary greatly. Here are two samples from three available translations--"The Holy Qur’an” by A. Yusuf Ali, “The Message of the Qur’an” by Muhammad Asad and “The Koran” by N.J. Dawood:
SURA (CHAPTER) 70:19-23:
Truly man was created very impatient; fretful when evil touches him, and niggardly when good reaches him. Not so those devoted to prayer.
--A. Yusuf Ali Verily, man is born with a restless disposition. (As a rule,) whenever misfortune touches him, he is filled with self-pity; and whenever good fortune comes to him, he selfishly withholds it (from others). Not so, however, those who consciously turn towards God in prayer.
--Muhammad Asad Indeed, man was created impatient. When evil befalls him he is despondent; but, blessed with good fortune, he grows niggardly. Not so the worshipers who are steadfast in prayer.
--N.J. Dawood.
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db6b9a6cbb03b2919f5dc38446d92a9d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-ss-1038-story.html | U.S. Muslims Work on New Koran Edition : Islam: Translation is aimed at making the holy book more relevant and comprehensible for the younger generation. | U.S. Muslims Work on New Koran Edition : Islam: Translation is aimed at making the holy book more relevant and comprehensible for the younger generation.
The most widely used English translation of the Koran, Islam’s holy book, employs an antiquated prose replete with “thees” and “thous.” Yet another popular translation uses colloquialisms so much that Allah tells Adam and Eve to “clear out” of Paradise.
Declaring that previous translations “have fallen far short,” the president of the Islamic Society of North America this month formally launched a unique project to produce a more relevant Koran complete with commentary.
Finding Scripture that hits a reverential but readable middle ground has been resolved in recent decades for most U.S. Christians and Jews, who can choose from a flood of new Bible translations.
But the problem is relatively new for the 4 million or so Muslims in America, who want the Koran, usually spelled Quran by Muslims, accurately translated yet rendered comprehensible for a younger generation.
Ahmad Zaki Hammad of Bridgeview, Ill., who will reduce his Islamic Society duties in order to serve as project editor in chief, said dozens of top Muslim scholars around the world have agreed to serve as advisers. The nonprofit Quran Project, which has a $460,000 budget for the first year, has set 1996 as the publication goal.
Hammad, 47, who holds a doctorate in Islamic studies from the University of Chicago and did graduate study at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, said he and four assistant editors in this country will do the basic work. “I will do most of the translating,” Hammad said.
“It needs to be done,” said Muzammil Siddiqi, the India-born director of the Islamic Society of Orange County. “The times and needs of people change, and the Koran has to be interpreted repeatedly,” said Siddiqi, an adviser to the project.
Some Muslim scholars say that an updated, collaborative translation could contribute to greater unity among North American Muslims of different ethnic back grounds. Nearly every English translation of the Koran has been done by individuals--both Muslims and non-Muslims--who lived in Europe, the Middle East or the Pakistani-Indian subcontinent.
The proposed new translation and commentary come at a time when American interest in Islamic beliefs has grown, spurred most recently by the Persian Gulf War.
“A lot of American people tend to educate themselves, so when they ask for information about Islam, we want to refer them to the Koran, which is the primary source,” said Jamal Badawi of St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Canadian scholar is another adviser to the Quran Project.
The Koran is not easy to read without historical knowledge. Muslims believe the Koran was dictated to the Prophet Mohammed over a number of years in the early 8th Century through the Angel Gabriel. Although Muslims say the Koran carries a universal message to humanity, the divine admonitions speak often to Mohammed’s struggles to establish a monotheistic faith on the Arabian Peninsula.
Rather than a chronological order to the suras, which are roughly equivalent to chapters, the Koran was arranged by length--the longest suras coming first.
A newly revised translation published this month by Viking-Penguin seeks to strike a balance between Shakespearean English and everyday language. Translator N. J. Dawood, who was born in Baghdad and lives in England, updated his 1956 version that sold more than 1 million copies.
“It’s a good literal translation and in contemporary English,” said Frederick Denny, who teaches courses on Islam at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
But it has drawbacks, Denny said. The Arabic text accompanying each page of translation is “small and not easy to read” and the verses are numbered only intermittently--making the edition of limited use for serious students, he said. For the person who knows little about the Koran or Islam, the edition is handicapped by the lack of introductory essays and a paucity of explanatory footnotes, Denny said.
One of the best introductions to the Koran, according to Denny and others, was written by A. J. Arberry in “The Koran Interpreted,” published in 1955. However, Arberry concocted a numbering system for verses different from the Islamic standard.
It may take a while for any translation to unseat the most popular translation by A. Yusuf Ali, a native of India who died in 1948.
The latest edition (which does not bear Ali’s name) was produced by Saudi Arabian authorities, who kept Ali’s translation but reworked the copious commentaries accompanying the text. (The last U.S. edition, which credits Ali as editor-translator, was published in 1983 by Amana Corp. in Brentwood, Md.)
The Ali translation retains words such as “ye,” “hath” and “thy"--language that Christians would compare to the King James Version of the Bible.
Some U.S. Muslims want to get away from the antiquated prose, but Siddiqi and others insist that is not necessarily a good idea.
“Many new converts, about half of them, prefer the older style. Apparently many were conditioned to that in churches that used the King James Bible,” he said.
Dr. Nazir Khaja, a Los Angeles physician who is president of the Islamic Information Service, said he agrees that translations that are too adventurous and less traditional-sounding may not gain wide acceptance.
“If it is loosely translated, it doesn’t give believers a sense of reverence for the words,” Khaja said.
Islamic scholars say that no one is talking about producing a “non-sexist” translation of the Koran that would avoid terms such as “mankind” and “man” when both sexes are meant--an approach that some new Bible translations have adopted.
However, Khaja said that American Muslims are delighted with their right to pick and choose among various editions. In some predominantly Muslim countries, he said, certain translations of the Koran are banned or otherwise unavailable.
“We have a great freedom in America to learn all we want about Islam and to study any translation,” he said.
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ad002f964c0b504786d6d7bf9268f5f8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-30-ss-1043-story.html | Commentary : All Faiths Must Have No Isolating Boundaries | Commentary : All Faiths Must Have No Isolating Boundaries
More than the calendrical coincidence of Ramadan, Easter and Passover draws us together. We are all also brothers and sisters in Abraham.
Our father Abraham was summoned to be “a blessing to all the families of the Earth.”
We are his family and are mandated to be a blessing to each other. Between us we can allow no smallness of faith and no pettiness in our relationships. Allah, God, the Lord we worship knows no isolating borders, no parochial territories, no exclusive geography.
Passover is not for Jews alone. We are reminded of this around the Passover table when we read from the common narration, “In every generation every human being is to regard himself/herself as if they have gone out of Egypt themselves.”
People of every nation, every religion, every race, have their memories of persecution and darkness. Everyone of us has tasted our own bread of affliction.
Now we have all lived through a fierce war won by heroic men and women who risked their lives to defeat a sadistic and cynical tyranny. Still, the best of wars are tragic necessities. War is a tragic admission of human failure.
Even in triumph, especially in triumph, my tradition will not let me forget the terrible price of winning and those who perished on the other side.
On this Passover eve, as on every Passover eve, we lifted the cup of wine to recall the victory of innocence over the pursuing predators of Pharaoh. At the mention of each of the 10 plagues, the wine is spilled from a cup, so the cup of victory is not filled to the brim. We recall the great rabbinic legend of the angels who in their partisan glee sought to praise God for the victory at the parting of the Red Sea. The angels were chastised by the Creator and Redeemer of all: “My children drown in the sea and you dare sing songs?” The angels were silenced. Though our cause is just and the sacrifice of our soldiers noble, we are muted. As we are instructed in the book of Proverbs “If your enemy falls do not exult; if he trips, let your heart not rejoice.” (Proverbs 24:17)
There is no full-throated singing in the synagogue on the last days of the Passover. Certain festival psalms normally recited at other holidays are deleted on the Passover out of respect for the drowning of Pharaoh’s followers. Having witnessed the death of God’s children, who can sing the psalm that exults “when I was brought low God saved us,” or the verse that contrasts the impotence of the idols of the enemy with the power of God when so many lie buried in the desert dust?
How can we worship? By looking to the future.
We recall the evil edicts of Pharaoh and the complicity of those who followed his orders. But we also remember the daughter of Pharaoh who stretched out her hand to save the child Moses, and we honor the memory of two Egyptian midwives, Shifra and Puah, who saved Jewish infants from Pharaoh’s decree of death at the risk of their own lives.
Those memories are the patrimony of all our children, to celebrate their spiritual kinship and destiny. Out of the desert storm, peace; out of the darkness of misunderstanding, compassion; out of slavery, freedom; out of division, the prophecy of Isaiah: “Blessed be Egypt my people and Assyria the work of my hands and Israel Mine inheritance”. (Isaiah 19:24).
At this season of redemption we face each other with a spirit of hope and greetings of reconciliation. “Salam alakum,” peace unto you.
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726fcf787c28c574b7fef2a367511af1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2272-story.html | Oh Lord, Save Me From New Grub Street | Oh Lord, Save Me From New Grub Street
I was living in my girlfriend’s apartment in Washington, D.C., which was so small that it looked like the place in which the Swede waits to die in “The Killers,” and I had some horrible irritable bowel syndrome that felt like a baby’s hand squeezing my intestines (from drink, the Doc said, but what did he know? I was sick from defeat, poverty, exhaustion, mind-numbing rejection from publishers--21 of them had just turned down my new novel. I drank to keep myself sane, as any right-thinking man would!).
And I had no money except what I could score off old editor pals at GQ and Rolling Stone who might give me a profile to do of some actor, for which I had to act humble and grateful but deep down inside a little dying animal voice is screaming, “Oh God, not another one of those”; I had already written soooo many profiles. I had even once been, God help me, a “hot” journalist, but that was three years and 10,000 hours of mind-numbing dull chitchat ago, and I couldn’t even bear to start another lead, “Cher is resplendent in pink!”
And so here I was with my rejected book, a book I knew was a killer, and yet, and yet 21 rejections. One editor even called me and said, “We love it, Bob, but we can’t buy it because it’s about working-class people and they don’t read books!” Oh Lord, this was a bad, bad time. I would stare down at my manuscript, all 400 pages of it, and think there has to be some way out of this, there has to be some escape, but what could it be?
After all, I was writing a book in 1983 about broken-down blue-collar guys from my old stomping grounds in Baltimore; what happens to them when the steel mill closes, and how their whole way of life--the life I knew in my past--was wiped out. Oh, nothing mattered to me as much as this book, and yet it seemed hopeless. This was the mid-'80s and Jayboy MacInerny was the King of the World with his sweet little wisp of a book about getting coked out in New York, and more power to him, he wasn’t even a bad guy for a Yupster. But I knew that I was doomed, like Algren or somebody, to this death in life, no money, no home, unless I could write a script or something, get out of D.C., ‘cause God knows I didn’t have any fiction left in me just then. Man, I was beat. Flat. Dolorsville.
So in the mornings my girlfriend went off to work at National Public Radio and I lay in bed drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes and tried to make calls to my old editor pals but was too defeated to even dial the phone most of the time and by 11, I would fall into a melancholic stupor and I thought this was it, this was the end. Maybe, what the hell, I’d turn on the gas, like in the old Depression movies. (“He’s all blue Sarge!” “Get the lawn bag, Riley!”)
Instead, I dragged my ass to the typewriter and kept retooling my dying novel, and when I got too depressed to do even that, I started reading. Reading had saved my life before. Once in Haight-Ashbury when I was thinking about putting a gun to my head, I read “The Moviegoer” in the downtown library reading room and managed to pull through.
Yes, I needed to read. That was essential. Reading was purification, everything else diversion from the facts. It was diversion that was killing us. I was sure of that. So I started reading. I’d read all day, anything handy. I mean I was too wasted to go through the books to get to one I wanted. I’d just reach in and grab one off the shelf and open it. That’s how I read all of “Fathers and Sons” by Turgenev, which brought tears to my eyes, and how I discovered the book that saved my life, more or less, “New Grub Street” by George Gissing.
I don’t know why the book was in my library. I didn’t remember buying it and I don’t think it was my girlfriend’s either. All I knew was that I started reading and I couldn’t stop. It was as if God had pointed me to it. This had happened a few times in my life and it’s why I believe in God, if you care to know, why I think he’s watching us, though maybe not all the time, and maybe we break his heart too often. But I started reading and I couldn’t stop.
The time is 1880. The place, London. Edwin Reardon is a serious writer in his 30s who’s managed to produce a couple of artistic novels. One of them, “On Neutral Ground,” has been somewhat of a small success, and for that brief time, Reardon is feted and meets a charming middle-class girl named Amy Yule. He knows he shouldn’t marry her; she’s young and thinks he is sensitive and talented, which he is, but he is also too sensitive, too brittle, headed for a lifetime of poverty. But she is in love and hopeful and he so needs hope that he marries her anyway, dooming them both to a poverty-stricken existence unless he can find some way out.
I would lie there in my unmade bed on those rainy Washington mornings and I would feel the creeping horrors come over me. It was as though Reardon was my fictional doppelganger. I read with a kind of ghoulish delight, and yet, yet also a sense of something else.
I didn’t understand what it was at first, but it wasn’t all horror; no, there was something--Christ--liberating about it. Because the book was done without sentimentality. Reardon was drawn sympathetically but his less “serious” friends also were fully realized characters.
There was Jasper Milvain, his dandyish publisher-editor knockabout in the world of the three-decker novel in London. Milvain is always coming around to Reardon’s miserable digs, encouraging him to “write for the market,” and poor, pathetic, ridiculous and noble Reardon is always saying, “Yes, yes indeed, but how do I do it?” And Milvain is always telling him to do something Gothic such as “The Weird Sisters,” and Reardon is dying to keep his middle-class wife who is too weak for this kind of existence for very long, and he wants to sell out. Oh God yes, let him sell out.
And he tries, he tries to write a novel about evil twins, “The Weird Sisters,” and I am sitting on the bed, with spilled ashes on the cigarette tray and my girlfriend is calling and asking me how I’m doing and I’m lying and saying, “Oh great, great, darlin’, everything is great now . . . Yes yes yes . . . I know they’ll see the value of my book soon, and meanwhile I’m going to write something commercial and it’s going to hit big, so big we are going to be like Scrooge McDuck taking baths in cartoon Grecian pools filled with gold coins. Don’t you worry.”
But in actuality, I’m going back to this horrifying book and Reardon is getting sick, and the other characters are these penny-ante journalists just like my old pals in New York, and they are fighting over who gets to do a book review for 20 pence, and hating, yes, hating and despising each other because some other wretch got the gig, and it’s so damned . . . God Help Me, funny.
Yes, I’m having this attack of screaming panic laughter, thinking, “It was always this way. No one has ever wanted literature. In those days they wanted music-hall guys and bloomer gals, and in these days they want Madonna and rappers who trill out doggerel to some cretin’s beat.”
This should make me more depressed, ready to go fully whacked out nuts, but it doesn’t and I don’t know why. So I put the book down and try writing something about it, and I think this: Knowing that George Gissing wrote this and suffered it, and died at 46 but his book still lives and tells the truth, this is what’s saving me. Why, it was like the blues . . . you see that? It was like reading the blues and my pain was suddenly lifted off my back by this totally honest novel.
OK. OK. OK. I don’t really know how these things work. That would take a pince-nez-wearing scientist with Ed Reimer eyes and eerie electrodes that measured galvanic skin response. I only know that it did work, you see? Because somehow as Reardon sank--and got sick and of course could not write “The Weird Sisters” because only true high-passion hacks can write true hack work--and as Jasper Milvain rose higher and higher by inventing a magazine called Chit Chat with short little articles, and pictures of celebrities going to and coming from the theater and clubs (which sounds, of course, exactly like People Magazine; “Grub” was written in 1891, so Gissing foretold our whole culture of celebrity and moronic illiteracy a hundred years ago), I began to have something of a religious experience. I knew that I would survive my 21 dead publishers. I knew that I wouldn’t drink myself to death, and I would make some kind of stand. The truth does that to me; it’s phony lying cynical optimism that kills.
I went back to work, and cut some of the b.s. out of my own book. You see, my book was grim, with touches of black humor. And what was wrong with it at first was that I was trying to pull my punches. I was trying not to go all the way to the dark. And after reading “New Grub Street,” I went back and instead, gleefully, doggedly made it darker still, until it shone like some polished piece of coal.
And two weeks later Joyce Johnson, herself a great writer, bought “Red Baker” for Dial Press. The book came out, and got great reviews, and though I never made any money on it, I ended getting a tryout writing for “Hill Street Blues” because of it. That worked, and I am no longer poor, and I no longer drink as much, and I even just a few weeks ago finished a new book of stories, and a novella. . . .
I don’t want to make any outsized claims. “New Grub Street” didn’t save my life all alone. But it helped. All I know is that it’s a great novel. It’s about art being trounced by the wagons of commerce, and it’s also grimly funny, and it’s how most real writers live their whole lives, even those sequestered in the comfy academies--maybe them most of all--desperate, afraid of the light going out without ever having written anything noble or true.
They say that in his own life Gissing was unable to accept success, that his marriages all were disasters and that he sabotaged himself whenever he was on the threshold of respectability. Maybe so, but in “New Grub Street,” he got it dead right: There’s no special pleading, no whining, and no quarter given. Which is how it has to be with real art.
“New Grub Street” is a great and true book. I owe you one, George, and we’ll have a drink one day together, when we’re all farthing-less in heaven.
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d0fe8fb1479a6f5acc8e891d966fc066 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2274-story.html | The Distance in California by CLARK COOLIDGE | The Distance in California by CLARK COOLIDGE
Do you see things then
do you see the clock
a riddled board with
butterfly lift points
the clicking in of motors
bring waters and the blade
Over the pool there is nothing
for millions of miles but
over beyond the house there is
a sun a bit closer
I have chosen the mouser
I have chosen the one with
the occasional voice
about as long as Egypt
and about as possible
From “Sound As Thought, Poems 1982-1984" (Sun & Moon Press: $11.95 paper). Coolidge, a jazz drummer in his early years, has published many collections of poetry since the mid-1960s. copyright 1990 by Clark Coolidge. Reprinted with permission.
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5377174191043fd96414337beebd83d6 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2276-story.html | THE COAST OF CHICAGO by Stuart... | THE COAST OF CHICAGO by Stuart...
THE COAST OF CHICAGO by Stuart Dybek (Vintage: $9.00). The characters in these interlocking stories learn the arts of survival growing up in Chicago’s poorer, immigrant districts. The narrator and his friends get by. When they discover that Mayor Daley has declared their neighborhood an “Official Blight Area,” they adopt “Back to the Blight!” as their rallying cry. But even in blight areas there are social codes that must be observed: In “Chopin in Winter,” a talented young pianist disgraces her family of Central European immigrants by having the illegitimate child of a black jazz musician. The music she plays during her lonely pregnancy seeps into the pipes and stones of the nearby tenements. Dybek manages to find a bleak poetry in the alienated, urban milieu he depicts: In “Nighthawks,” he describes the moon as having “gone through phases, diminishing like a stalled traffic light in the rearview mirror of a taxi. Now it’s less than a crescent, less than a smudged thumbprint of mother-of-pearl--only a shimmer, like the glint of neon on the surface of a cup of black coffee.”
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86d60f13508d0b8bb2f0310c5282806a | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2279-story.html | THE TRIAL OF LADY CHATTERLY: Regina v.... | THE TRIAL OF LADY CHATTERLY: Regina v....
THE TRIAL OF LADY CHATTERLY: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited edited by C.H. Rolph (Penguin: $8.95, illustrated). In 1960, Penguin Books Ltd. was brought to trial under British obscenity statutes because the publisher planned to release of an unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover.” This edited version of the transcript of the courtroom proceedings includes the testimony of such eminent witnesses for the defense as Rebecca West, C. V. Wedgewood and E. M. Forster. Overwhelmed by the literary equivalent of a Panzer division, the prosecutor shifted the focus of the case from the alleged obscenity of the book and Lawrence’s use of four-letter words to the adulterous behavior of Constance Chatterly. As the title suggests, Lady Chatterly herself seemed to be on trial. This clever strategy failed: Sir Allen Lane and Hans Schmoller of Penguin were acquited, and an unabridged edition of D. H. Lawrence’s novel was published in his native land for the first time. Thirty years after that landmark decision, when First Amendment rights in the United States are being attacked under the guise of public decency and family values, Rolph’s dispassionate account of the trial makes compelling reading.
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f795f5433c0cc0bafa1b242296270e4d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2280-story.html | THE WITCH OF GIVINGSNAKE AND OTHER STORIES... | THE WITCH OF GIVINGSNAKE AND OTHER STORIES...
THE WITCH OF GIVINGSNAKE AND OTHER STORIES by Robert J. Conley (University of Oklahoma Press: $9.95). The narrator of “Yellow Bird: An Imaginary Autobiography” sets the tone for this impressive anthology when he declares his allegiance to his ancestors: “My life itself is of little moment, and it would be a monstrous presumption on my part to present the world with the story of my life as something to take note of were it not for the fact that my story is a part of the story of my people. . . . I am a Cherokee, and my story is of the Cherokees.” Conley evokes tribal beliefs and traditions to create a world in which time is cyclic, rather than linear, magic enables shape-shifters to take the form of owls, hawks and wolves, and tsgilis (witches) can call down curses on anyone foolish enough to offend them. These deeply felt, often haunting portraits capture the sorrow and defiance of a people confronting the alien values of their conquerors.
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f6ac042fb0cc00ff60783c4f26841b0c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2475-story.html | NONFICTION | NONFICTION
EUROQUAKE: Europe’s Explosive Economic Challenge Will Change the World by Daniel Burstein (Simon and Schuster: $22.95; 363 pp.) Despite the melodramatic titles concocted to sell his books--this one quakes and explodes; his last featured an exclamation point and portentous words like “threat"--journalist Daniel Burstein is one of our most sober-minded writers on the “new world order.” Not one to be seduced by the latest buzzwords, he realizes that the mere popularity of American burgers and fries abroad does not ensure that we will lead the new order. Pointing out weaknesses in our economy, such as the lack of long-term planning and intercooperative research (which led to the recent failure of one of America’s only two supercomputer companies), Burstein suggests that the future belongs to the German model of capitalism. Still, he is optimistic that we can regain our competitive edge in the ‘90s, for Germany will be preoccupied with modernizing its eastern sector, while Japan will be hobbled by mercantilist, adversarial trading policies that have become anachronistic in the “borderless world.”
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004493ae0cccd35153ee3e30a98f7578 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2476-story.html | NONFICTION | NONFICTION
AMERICA’S MISUNDERSTOOD WELFARE STATE by Theodore R. Marmor, Jerry L. Mashaw and Philip L. Harvey (Basic Books: $22.95; 268 pp.). Only a few scattered voices were raised in the ‘80s in defense of welfare, most likely because liberals felt cowed by the deluge of critical studies that flowed from conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute after their funding increased tenfold in the ‘70s. Thus the mere publication of affirmative books such as this one is notable, but this work is particularly interesting because it preaches to the unconverted, acknowledging program weaknesses (we spend over 11% of our GNP to provide incomplete health-care coverage, for instance, while Japan provides universal coverage with only 6% of its GNP), but offering many persuasive statistics in welfare’s defense.
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1290db0b1f3125d8ebb4a14de2f79e98 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2480-story.html | NONFICTION | NONFICTION
WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE by Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 304 pp.). “Do you have no morals, no conscience?” psychologist Elizabeth Loftus is accustomed to being asked. When we learn that she is an expert witness who has used her research into the fallibility of memory to defend such clients as serial killer Ted Bundy and the McMartin teachers, we are inclined to muster the same righteous indignation. “Witness for the Defense,” though, reminds us that distinctions between criminals and the innocent are not as clear in the courtroom as they are in true-crime books. Loftus shows how easily our memory can be distorted by a prosecutor’s suggestions and by a hunger for revenge, which often generates a momentum that not even the suspect’s innocence can stop. Ultimately, though, Loftus’ reasoning is too inconsistent to convince us that her testimony on behalf of suspects is helping Justice. For instance, she usually decides whether to testify by asking herself, “What if he’s innocent?” but when one case touches her personally as a Jew--that of the suspected Nazi John Demjanjuk--she turns it down, asking “But what if he’s guilty?”
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284fa004ab5bfdd330be052b1ad61714 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2482-story.html | NONFICTION | NONFICTION
FLATIRON by Peter Gwillim Kreitler (The American Institute of Architects: 217 pp.; $29.95). Some buildings, like some actors, have magic in them, and if this exceptional compilation of views does nothing else, it demonstrates that New York’s Flatiron was as incapable of taking a bad picture as was James Dean. The tallest office building in the country when it was constructed in 1902, it had “an edge almost as sharp as the bow of a ship,” something that shocked observers and made it the sensation of its time. Photographers, however, fell immediately and forever in love. It is to the United States, Alfred Stieglitz told his father, “what the Parthenon was to Greece.” In Kreitler’s book, 15 years in the making, it gets the showcase it deserves.
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332d43db45a155afda18bbb2875176ba | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2484-story.html | NONFICTION | NONFICTION
WHY BLACK PEOPLE TEND TO SHOUT: Cold Fact and Wry Views From a Black Man’s World by Ralph Wiley (Carol Publishing: $15.95; 200 pp.). It is not easy to express how it feels to be a black man in the ‘90s: You see the pain of your brothers in the inner city, yet there are no longer any easy targets to attack in society and there is little gained by criticizing your own community. Sports Illustrated writer Ralph Wiley is one of the few who have been able to hedge this dilemma by finding just the right tone. As in the following answer to his book’s title, he skillfully marshals his anger into prose which achieves power through understatement: “You tend to shout . . . when a sweet grandmotherly sort has to tell you how black people once were chained in iron masks in the canebrake to keep them from eating cane while they harvested it . . . when you hear that grandmotherly voice and realize she was a girl who might have been your girl, and someone caused this pain on her lips, and nobody did anything about it but keep living.” Wiley sometimes succumbs to a blinding cynicism, implying, for instance, that novelist Toni Morrison would have won the National Book Award if only she, like writer Alice Walker, had included stereotypical portrayals of “abusive (black) men who beat their own daughters.” Yet this is but a slight flutter in a bold new voice.
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7efba08570179633372115d9d74d5f7b | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2485-story.html | Silly or Serious, but Always Stylish | Silly or Serious, but Always Stylish
Children’s books are changing more than childhood itself. Picture books are becoming more and more lavish on the one hand, re-telling old tales with often overdone virtuosity; on the other hand, they’re breaking out with strange, adventurous fare designed to put us all on “tilt,” as if graffiti artists were smashed between hardcovers. Kids’ books are no longer publishing’s great afterthought; artists and authors are trying hard; perhaps, occasionally, too hard.
If simple delight is what you are looking for, try The Cow Is Mooing Anyhow by Laura Geringer, illustrated with zany and unique flavor by Dirk Zimmer (HarperCollins: $14.95; ages 4-9). The cover says that this is a scrambled-alphabet book to be read at breakfast. The text, in couplets, takes us through the first meal of the day, when Mom leaves and a little girl is continuously interrupted in the following manner:
The big baboon, the big baboon,
doesn’t use a grapefruit spoon.
The yucca moth, the yucca moth,
chews right through the tablecloth.
Rhyming in children’s books is generally out of fashion, and for a long time so were alphabet books. But this one, penned by an editor, is rather hilarious and decidedly unpretentious.
Peter Hannan, author-illustrator of the Sillyville tales, must have been one of those kids who got sent to the principal’s office five times a day. He treats us to appalling honesty and the juiciest observations about adults. In Sillyville or Bust (one of four Sillyville books being released this spring by Alfred A. Knopf: $3.95 each; ages 4-7), the hero and his sister must ride home with Aunt Ida and Uncle Gus: “We were miserable. To call these people dull would be an insult to dull people.” Eventually the car crashes into a town called Sillyville, and everyone must do something silly or spend the rest of their lives in jail. “I’ve often thought of being silly as foolish and unproductive,” says Aunt Ida. The judge proclaims that the silliest thing he’s ever heard. Case dismissed.
Hannan has a Charlie Chaplinesque sensibility that one wishes would spread through the publishing world, like a virus.
On a more serious note is The Sailor Who Captured the Sea (HarperCollins: $15.95; ages 7-10) by Deborah Nourse Lattimore, an author-artist celebrated for vivifying tales from the Aztecs, the Minoans, the Mayans and other ancient cultures. In the prologue, we learn that this particular tale is taken from “The Book of Kells,” a text written by monks over a period of 100 years in the Irish city of Kells during the Viking invasions.
Exquisite, finely wrought borders decorate Lattimore’s parchmentlike pages, which tell the story of three brothers from Dublin in the year AD 804, each of whom works at the monastery and eventually contributes to the “Great Book of Gospels.” It is Broghan, the family sailor and the least artistic, who, through an act of heroism, is spared capture and allowed to discover his own gifts and finish the book.
The scholarship and the desire to share an unknown piece of Irish history is admirable here, and the story of perseverance a good one to read in these times.
Daisy’s Taxi by Ruth Young, illustrated by Marcia Sewall (Orchard Books: $13.95; ages 3-6), creates a strong mood in painterly illustrations. With sparse prose, the book tells the story of Daisy, who operates a water taxi from the mainland to a small island. What gives pleasure here is the sense of the passing days in this cozy water community. The rhythms of life, the harmony with nature and fellow humans, are nicely achieved, making the book almost a travelogue for the young. And we have Daisy, an independent female heroine doing hard work and liking her job so much that at the day’s end, when her husband asks what she wants to do, Daisy answers unexpectedly, “Take me for a row, dear.”
At first, Tomie dePaola’s Bonjour, Mr. Satie (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $15.95; all ages) eluded me. Mr. Satie is the uncle of Rosalie and Conrad, Midwestern children--actually, they are cats, but what does that matter? Uncle Satie comes for a visit directly from Paris with his friend Ffortusque Ffollet Esq., a mouse.
Uncle Satie talks of nothing but art, and continuously drops names such as Gertrude, Alice, Pablo, Henri. He tells of cafes and salons, and of Nice. “Was Nice nice?” asks Gertrude. “Nice was nice,” replies Henri. Stop! I thought. Although Nice is nice, would children know what this book was about, and would they care?
The richly painted illustrations mimic many of the great Cubist paintings, and re-create the sense of excitement about art that captured Paris in the early 20th Century. Aha! I was catching on. What dePaola is up to here is a picture-book dip into art history, and a visit back in time when art was the most discussed and most important event of the day, when people were passionate--they even argued over a painting!
Another aha! In “Bonjour, Mr. Satie,” we not only visit an extraordinary historical period, but we experience a completely different value system, a system where an artistic contribution has tremendous impact.
This short book makes one wish for some creative arguments about the current state of children’s literature.
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1e8b72469541e25f98b18d3c7db434d8 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2487-story.html | THE L.A. MUSICAL HISTORY TOUR by... | THE L.A. MUSICAL HISTORY TOUR by...
THE L.A. MUSICAL HISTORY TOUR by Art Fein (Faber & Faber: $13.95; 136 pp.). “If a rock star played, drank, lived, died, or threw a television set out a window somewhere in L.A.,” boasts this determined little guide, “this book has the whole story,” a claim there seems to be no reason to seriously doubt. Rock devotee Fine has painstakingly located and photographed about 200 places that played some role, however minor, in the history of rock. Though the book is heavy on necrology, listing grave sites and death sites for the likes of Marvin Gaye and Janis Joplin, it finds space for the house where “Louie Louie” was written and deals knowingly with such recondite matters as exactly which part of Sunset Boulevard (above) contained the original Dead Man’s Curve. Most astonishing of all, Fine insists that Vol. II is in the works.
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c74eeec3482acccf9d65c771b9968f97 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-bk-2488-story.html | NONFICTION | NONFICTION
IT WAS ON FIRE WHEN I LAY DOWN ON IT by Robert Fulghum (Ivy: $5.95). Fulghum’s laissez-faire perspective has secured him a place in best-seller history.
ROADSIDE HOLLYWOOD: The Movie Lover’s State-by-State Guide to Film Locations, Celebrity Hangouts, Celluloid Tourist Attractions and More by Jack Barth (Contemporary: $9.95). For those who are interested in where the deeds were done.
HOW TO RUN A SUCCESSFUL MEETING IN HALF THE TIME by Milo O. Frank (Pocket: $6.95). Tame the meeting monster--tout de suite--with this, and your Robert’s Rules of Order.
1991 TRAVELER’S GUIDE TO MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS edited by Susan S. Rappaport (Abrams: $12.95). Guide to traveling and permanent collections throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe.
THE FRUGAL GOURMET COOKS THREE ANCIENT CUISINES (Avon: $5.95). Culinary other lives (Greek, Roman and Chinese).
FICTION
THE EVENING NEWS by Arthur Hailey (Dell: $5.95). News anchor is confronted with story of a lifetime--his family held hostage by terrorists.
STONE CITY by Mitchell Smith (Signet: $5.99). Halls of learning are replaced by halls of hell for a college professor imprisoned on a manslaughter DUI conviction.
HOME PLACE by Dorothy Garlock (Warner: $4.95). After a woman’s death, her stepmother assumes her baby and marriage.
MASQUERADE by William X. Kienzle (Ballantine: $5.95). Father Koesler’s theoretical presentation at a writer’s conference takes a practical turn when mayhem strikes.
RAJ by Gita Mehta (Fawcett Columbine: $9.95). Relationship between a traditional Indian woman and her Westernized husband gives rise to personal, political and cultural conflicts.
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5febc569b203d2562ac4dc3ed8642371 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-ca-2178-story.html | RESTAURANTS : A Tradition Continues in a Museum Called Windsorland : Aficionados of the red-leather booth still flock to the Windsor | RESTAURANTS : A Tradition Continues in a Museum Called Windsorland : Aficionados of the red-leather booth still flock to the Windsor
It’s very, very red in here: red carpets and red-flocked wallpaper, red lampshades and reddish menus, red-glowing niches behind silvertone statues of beefeaters, red-leather booths that curve around you a bit like the teacups on the Mad Hatter’s ride at Disneyland. The acoustic-tile ceiling is painted the deep, rich red of a Lincoln Town Car, Bill Blass edition. When you trip down the few stairs to the Windsor, off a quiet street of residential hotels east of the old Ambassador, past the Holiday magazine award plaques and into the basement dining room, it’s a little like a journey back to the womb. Or at least to 1951.
Wilshire Center was once one of the tonier restaurant neighborhoods in Los Angeles, at least for aficionados of the red-leather booth. Now they’re all gone: the Coconut Grove, Bull & Bush, Chapman Park, the Cove, Perino’s, Vince & Paul’s, Edward’s, the Brown Derby--every remnant of old L.A. except for the Windsor and Taylor’s Prime Steaks.
The Windsor is one of the few restaurants that still has lawn jockeys outside by the door, in the style of New York’s “21" Club. The maitre d’ wears white gloves and a tuxedo; his minions push around gleaming chafing-dish carts. It serves cheese-bread instead of focaccia , vichyssoise instead of carrot-ginger soup, sea-breeze salad instead of warmed goat cheese and arugula. It’s among the most expensive restaurants in Los Angeles--$28 for a (bloodless) steak, $12 for a (dull) shrimp cocktail. It’s not listed in the current Zagat guide.
A massive, rounded bar, shaped like the prow of a ship, thrusts into the redness from a corner, all curvilinear dark woods, red bar stools, and--overhead--patterned glass tiles through which filter complexly red light. This is the bar nuevo -retro places like Hollywood Canteen and the Olive wish they had, patinated by decades of cigarette smoke, complete with (on weekends) a piano player who knows all the changes to “Night and Day"--a perfect backdrop for serious posing. The bartender mixes his $4 martinis mostly for the Brooks Brothers set and out-of-town businessmen who’ve dropped in from the Mid-Wilshire hotels, but most of the dinner customers look as if they’ve been coming here since early in the Eisenhower Administration. The Windsor is so hip, music-video directors have never even heard of the place, though it’s starting to catch on.
At one table, the captain pours bottled steak sauce into a silver tureen over one chafing-dish flame. Over another, he melts a lump of butter in a copper saute pan, stirring in mysterious spoonfuls from a phalanx of jars and bottles, jerking the pan back and forth to distribute the ingredients. When the butter is not nearly hot enough, he slips in a large, flat steak, cooks it just long enough to toughen the meat, pours in the steak sauce, then finishes the job with a glug of brandy that explodes toward the ceiling in an enormous fireball. Steak Diane might be gray, sweet and overpowered by a mustardy brown sludge, but the show is pretty exciting.
There are lots of shows here at the Windsor--the Caesar Salad Show, gritty and tasteless; the Sea Breeze Salad Show, a bland though refreshing and, well, breezy thing that involves sour cream and spices; the Steak Tartare Show, which is all right if you tell the captain to go easy on the salt. All involve a zillion little bowls of seasonings and complicated shmooshing techniques.
The Wilted Spinach Salad Show is quite good, possibly the best salad in the city in a category few still care to compete in, sharp with vinegar and rich with bacon pungency. Still, it’s disconcerting to see the captain tear open paper packets of sugar, the kind you get with your coffee in doughnut shops, and pour it onto the greens.
Even dishes prepared in the kitchen are elaborately garnished, arranged and replated at the table. The Windsor may not be the place to come if you like your sole meuniere hot or your duck a l’orange lightly sauced.
A cellular phone rings in the next booth, and a man we’ll call Doc reaches over to answer it.
“Whaddya calling me for if she’s dead?” Doc says, loudly, over the theme music to “Born Free.” “I’m not God, y’know . . . what am I supposed to do about it?”
The Windsor used to be renowned in certain circles for its wine list, and the thick document is loaded with such things as ’59 Beychevilles and ’64 La Tours, as expensive as a new clutch on a ’72 Citroen. The list also appears to feature a treasure trove of older Italian and California wines at reasonable prices, but both a ’75 Napa Cabernet Sauvignon and an ancient Gattinara haven’t so much aged as lost the will to live. There may be no wine bargains in Windsorland. Have another Manhattan.
Windsorland is the place to find museum dishes, the ones real gourmands were able to puzzle out 40 years ago--turkey Diablo; sweetbreads mascotte; breast of pheasant Queen of Sheba; crab a la Turque. Lobster thermidor, overcooked and drowned in a sweet, heavily liquored cream sauce, is pretty tasty against all odds, sort of a dessert lobster. Oysters Rockefeller are hot and briny under their mantle of spinach. Trout “almondine,” also overdone, is sauteed crisp but actually tastes a little like trout and almonds. (The garnish, a fried-potato basket filled with crisp potato strings, seems like something lifted from a 1953 issue of Gourmet.)
There are also museum desserts, if you remember to order them in advance: crepes Suzettes, cherries jubilee, giant logs of baked Alaska, all bathed in sticky pools of blazing liquor . . . the sort of flaming goo the Honeymooners might have eaten on anniversaries.
The Windsor just acquired a new owner, reportedly the first change in ownership since the restaurant opened 1950. There’s a new slogan, too: “The Tradition Continues.” But of course.
The Windsor
3198 W. Seventh St., Los Angeles, (213) 382-1261.
Lunch Monday-Friday, dinner Monday-Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $55-$99.
Recommended dishes: wilted spinach salad, $10; steak “a la tartar,” $25; crepes Suzettes (for two), $14.
RESTAURANTS: Articles that had been appearing in Sunday Calendar will move to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, beginning next Sunday.
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53fd69c0b3f8c0da4ca09c43662422d9 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-ca-2338-story.html | COMMENTARY : Why the Artist Can’t Draw--and Why We Shouldn’t Care | COMMENTARY : Why the Artist Can’t Draw--and Why We Shouldn’t Care
Some insist that most of the principal achievements of art since the 1960s add up less to a sign of the richness of contemporary culture than to an indictment of its utter bankruptcy. Various culprits are claimed responsible. One primary offense, the grumble goes, is that too few artists today know how to draw.
Generally, what is meant by the complaint is that few of today’s younger, widely acclaimed artists have learned how to draw in the traditional, academic manner. Rigorous, extended technical training in the manual skills of draftsmanship has largely disappeared from the curricula of leading art schools. Art, the thinking goes, is the worse for it.
A rising chorus of complaints about a perceived atrophy of contemporary drawing skills emerged in the past decade. It rode the wave of renewed interest in figurative painting that was a hallmark of the 1980s. Traditionally, drawings were most often meant to be steps in an extended process whose grand finale was a painting. So the Neo-Expressionist crudeness of much ‘80s figurative painting has been explained--by naysayers--as the result of a woeful “failure” in underlying drawing skills.
The appropriate response to this cavalier charge is, simply, bunk . Within the life of art today, the “fallen” place of traditional concepts of drawing is a false issue. Perfection in academic drawing skills is no more a guarantor of great paintings than failure in those skills promises bad ones. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the delightful exhibition called “Why Artists Draw: Six Centuries of Master Drawings From the Collection” contains many renderings in graphite, chalk and pastel that are, in an academic sense, exceptional, by painters of decidedly less than stellar reputation or achievement.
An adept, red-chalk study for an allegorical figure of Africa, meant to become a spandrel decoration, is a lively and cleverly composed invention by Carlo Maratta; yet, the artist, who had been the most fashionable Roman painter of the late 17th Century, ranks today as merely a pleasant Baroque artist whose star faded fast. Because no ideal and everlasting model exists against which all paintings may be judged, the appeal to drawing as a painter’s timeless anchor is bogus.
Aesthetic standards, which are multiple and sometimes even contradictory, are also temporal. It’s no accident that “Why Artists Draw” spans precisely six centuries, rather than four or 10 or some other number. For traditional drawing is a value that was forged in the crucible of the Renaissance.
Michelangelo is among the greatest draftsmen of all time. In 1563, the year before his death, he also took on a novel job. With Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, Michelangelo served as co-director of the new Accademia del Disegno--the first official art academy anywhere, founded that year in Florence by the painter and historian, Giorgio Vasari. The Academy of Design had a specific aim, which went on to shape the future programs of state, royal and even private academies that would spring up in Rome, London, Paris and elsewhere in subsequent generations.
Simply, the academy meant to elevate the hitherto rather lowly status of the artist, lifting him above the ranks of mere craftsman. The legendary, titanic struggles between Michelangelo and his papal patron in Rome, Julius II, are the most extreme demonstration of why the need was felt. Michelangelo--and Cosimo and Vasari--conceived of the artist as something different from what he had been throughout the Middle Ages: a hired worker, as would be found in any guild, whose job was the faithful execution of someone else’s artistic ideas.
How this transformation was to be achieved can be seen, in part, in the kinds of drawings that began to proliferate. As the separate categories devised for the show at the County Museum attest, drawings since the Renaissance have been of different kinds and have had several uses.
A compositional sketch was a preliminary step in an artist’s realization of a finished work in another medium, such as a painting or a sculpture. A figure study was meant to elaborate the precise details of figures that would appear in a final composition. Sometimes a figure study was just done as an exercise, as hand-eye gymnastics meant to hone an artist’s manual skills. Then there was the bozzetto , a final, highly finished composition, frequently used as a virtual transfer pattern for a fresco or a tapestry.
Certainly the variety of drawing types reflects the academic emphasis on practical study--on the traditionally demanding craft involved in making a work of art. But this new, loosely ordered variety reflects something else as well, something that was crucial to the aspirations of the emerging academy.
The status of the artist could not be raised merely by requiring practical study and expertise in craftsmanship. If artists were to do more than passively execute artistic programs laid out by others, it would henceforth be necessary to require a depth of theoretical and intellectual inquiry from painters and sculptors too. That could be accomplished through the study of history, myth, church doctrine, nature, mathematics and many other subjects, all of which would conspire to deepen and enrich the language of art. But it could also be represented in another way.
More than any other medium in the repertoire, drawing is the one in which the activity of the artist’s mind can register itself most directly, without intervention, in visual form. Points of view are worked out, possibilities tested, visual speculations made, decisions set down. Drawings are a kind of “aesthetic electroencephalogram.” They possess a liveliness unlike any other medium because, typically, they can be described as a direct transcription of artistic thought.
Compositional sketches, figure studies and the like record the processes by which that thought blossoms, develops and is refined. A new emphasis on drawing was one of several ways theoretical inquiry could be made demonstrably integral to art-making.
Needless to say, in the academic effort to transform the status of the artist from craftsman to creator, a certain degree of success is implied by the informal title Michelangelo (and a few others) acquired: He was called the “Divine.” Divinity is about as high as a pedestal gets. And if, today, some believe that traditional concepts of drawing have “fallen” far, it is from the pedestal first erected half a millennium ago.
Without explanation, the six centuries surveyed in “Why Artists Draw” peter out after World War II, coming to a screeching halt by 1960. The most recent works are small abstractions from that year by the sculptors David Smith and Eva Hesse. Because artists didn’t just suddenly stop making compositional sketches or figure studies, the date of the survey’s end would seem to be more than mere coincidence.
In part, the reasons “why artists draw” have changed dramatically in postwar generations. Another category of drawings identified by the show is those that are not made as a prelude to some other end but that are executed as an end in themselves. This is not a new idea, as sheets by Tiepolo, Ingres, Braque and others in the exhibition make plain. But, undeniably, the genre is prominent in the 20th Century and proliferates in contemporary art to a degree it never has before.
Why? The 1960s witnessed a profound shake-up in the hierarchy of artistic mediums. As it did, there was no reason a drawing had to be conventionally regarded as a first, second or third step on the road to something else--including the maker’s road to legitimacy as a bona fide artist. A number of useful explanations for this shake-up can be offered, but one in particular has to do with drawing itself.
The basis for realignment had been indeliberately prepared in the previous decade by the celebrated success of Jackson Pollock’s drip-paintings. The artist had made them, of course, by dripping paint in linear streams from the end of a brush or, more commonly, a stick onto unstretched canvas laid out on the floor. By the late 1950s, these shimmering skeins of paint had been acclaimed internationally as a monumental achievement.
Pollock’s drip-method has been described in many ways, but none has been so astute as that emphasized last year by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the artist’s biographers. Hovering above the plane of the canvas, moving his body, his arm and his wrist in a continuous and improvisational choreography literally suspended in air, Pollock, they said, was drawing in space. Where that drawing fell to earth became a painting.
In these stunningly beautiful works, no hierarchy of drawing and painting can be identified. Drawing and painting are instead inseparable, one irrevocably fused within the other. No “before” or “after” can be sorted out. And perhaps most important, drawing’s lively quality as the direct transcription of artistic thought now coursed through painting, too, generating an ineluctable electricity.
The proliferation, since the 1960s, of drawing as an end-in-itself therefore shouldn’t be surprising. Nor should the irrelevance of traditional forms of drawing to whole segments of artistic practice, including many varieties of painting. In a fundamental way, Jackson Pollock had brought the European tradition of drawing to a close.
Today, the significance of manual skill or craft in drawing is wholly dependent on the individual artist’s aim. Some need it, some don’t. After all, Pollock’s epochal triumph was arrived at in spite of a notorious “failure” on his part: In the academic sense, the artist couldn’t draw a lick.
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5e5ab991dc3eb477772589e805dd4a1e | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2404-story.html | Japan Must Take On the Burden of a Global Power | Japan Must Take On the Burden of a Global Power
Japan reacted to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by putting its head in the sand. Although it was quick to join the embargo against Iraq, it was slow to provide any kind of assistance, financial, moral or otherwise, to the emerging international coalition.
Japan did agree to provide financial support for the coalition, but only in response to intense American pressure and only after considerable hesitation. A total of $13 billion has been promised so far, making Japan one of the largest financial backers of the war, just behind Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
But the spirit behind the Japanese offer has been grudging and even mercantile rather then generous. Japan has acted more like a skeptical banker worrying about its investment than a world leader responding to injustice.
Through such conduct, Japan has revealed its unwillingness to accept the responsibilities attending global power. Its response is understandable but ultimately foolhardy andself-defeating.
From an economic point of view alone, Japan’s stake in the Gulf may not have justified war. Although Japan is dependent on the Gulf for oil, it is better equipped than the United States to handle higher energy prices and supply disruptions because it has a stronger economy and a functioning energy policy. To Japanese eyes, America felt compelled to fight for oil only because of profligate energy use. The Japanese regard this as an American problem, one that they have avoided through intelligent policy. They are not wrong.
And Japan does not share all of America’s foreign policy goals in the Middle East. Japan does not, for example, have America’s special relationships with Israel or Saudi Arabia. Japan’s primary interests in the Gulf are economic access and the political stability that makes this possible, interests that might have been well served by avoiding armed conflict and the regional chaos that inevitably ensued.
Japan’s attitude may be an outgrowth of the Cold War order in which the United States was the guardian of global security. But this attitude is obsolete. The Cold War is over. The United States is suffering from deep-seated economic difficulties and imperial overreach. Japan no longer has the luxury of being a free-rider--it must begin to assume a leadership role commensurate with its formidable economic strength.
Even from the point of view of self-interest, Japan’s attitude is shortsighted. There is a real danger that U.S. resentment over Japan’s behavior in the Gulf crisis will aggravate trade tensions on everything from semiconductors to automobiles. More and more Americans believe that Japan is an unfair trading partner--that its market is closed to American firms while its companies run roughshod over the open U.S. market.
So what should Japan do if it wishes to ease tensions with the United States and grow into a leadership role that befits its economic dominance?
At a minimum, Japan should lead an international effort to explore alternative arrangements, such as a Marshall Plan or the creation of a Middle East Development Bank, for the purpose of financing reconstruction in the Gulf. Japan should be the primary source of the necessary funds. And Japan’s contributions should be unconditional rather then tied to purchases of Japanese goods.
Japan should also take the initiative in defining common positions with Europe and the United States on a variety of unresolved regional issues, such as how to limit the export of high-technology weaponry to destabilizing local powers.
At home, the Japanese government should seek to generate domestic support for the participation of Japanese personnel in multilateral peacekeeping operations.
Despite a spectacular demonstration of America’s military might, the Gulf crisis also demonstrated that the days of American hegemony are over. It may have been unseemly for the world’s only military superpower to pass the hat for financial support from its allies, but it was unavoidable. The United States no longer has the economic wherewithal to be the sole or even the dominant provider of global security. And its will to play this role is eroding.
Even now, in the afterglow of military triumph, there are portents of resurgent isolationism in the United States. An increasing number of Americans resent the fact that Germany and Japan are thriving economically, while the United States is mired in debt and sluggish growth.
The challenge confronting America in the 1990s is to make the transition smoothly from hegemony to partner with Europe and Japan. To meet this challenge, America must be willing to compromise with its allies. Burden-sharing must not be interpreted to mean that Japan and Europe will simply shoulder more of the costs of America’s foreign policy objectives, even those that they do not share. Hegemony had its privileges; these privileges are gone.
But Japan, too, faces a transition. It must give up its comfortable role as an inward-looking trading nation and take on the risky and uncomfortable role of global power. Meeting this challenge, however, need not require that Japan become a military superpower. Indeed, given its history, neither Japan nor its allies would welcome such a development.
There are other, more beneficent, ways Japan can assume a global position commensurate with its wealth. Instead of investing its resources in military capability, as most economic giants have done, Japan should devote these resources to addressing global economic problems, such as developing impoverished Third World nations and protecting the ecosystem that Japan, along with the other industrial nations, has done so much to harm.
In the absence of a responsible and equitable partnership among the United States, Europe and Japan, the world is likely to become more unstable and less prosperous than it was during the heyday of American hegemony. So far, Japan has demonstrated little inclination to consider such a proposition or to see any such role for itself. It might consider taking a giant step toward assuming such a role by taking an active part in formulating and supporting a reconstruction strategy for the war-torn countries of the Gulf.
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54385a4ecbf97be90dc49fdd2f6cd5be | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2407-story.html | Mexico ‘Hedges’ for Higher Guarantee on Oil : Energy: The strategy secured a more favorable price on crude than it normally receives. Other oil-producing countries are expected to follow suit. | Mexico ‘Hedges’ for Higher Guarantee on Oil : Energy: The strategy secured a more favorable price on crude than it normally receives. Other oil-producing countries are expected to follow suit.
Mexico has locked in much of its budgeted oil income for the next six months and picked up an additional profit of at least $125 million by selling 100 million barrels of oil through apparently unprecedented trades on New York financial markets, according to Wall Street and Mexican government sources.
The trades in December and January, which took advantage of higher oil prices at the time, guaranteed that Mexico would receive $17 a barrel for low-quality oil that is now trading for much less. That will help the financially troubled Mexican government meet its budgetary projections, which are based on $17-a-barrel oil. Mexico gets about 35% of its government revenue from oil.
“We have to keep our economic program intact. That’s the point,” a senior official in the Mexican government said. “It’s an interesting use of certain tools that are there.”
“This is something that worked. It was a great trade,” a well-placed Wall Street source said. “It’s just the type of hedging that a producing government should be doing.” Hedging is a form of trading that gives a buyer or seller insurance against future price fluctuations.
Many analysts say they expect other oil-producing nations, including members of OPEC, to adopt a similar strategy in the next few years. Sources said the Mexicans are already considering more such arrangements. “They’re getting very market-sophisticated,” the Wall Street source said. “This is not a one-shot deal.”
By using commodities trading to fix prices months in advance, the experts say, producing nations could effectively set a floor for oil prices for the world.
“This will have a very arresting effect on senior management at other major oil countries,” said Daniel Yergin, president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates Inc. in Boston. “Instead of doing what they’ve done in the past, which is assuming an oil price and plugging it into your budget, what (the Mexicans) have done is gone much further than that. . . . Up until now, they’ve always struggled with what assumption to use in their budget on price. Now they don’t have to do that.”
Mexico executed the series of complicated transactions when oil prices were several dollars a barrel higher than they are now because of the Persian Gulf conflict.
Mexico received what now appears to be a favorable price because some purchasers believed at that time that oil prices would rise once war broke out in the Persian Gulf. If oil prices do rise substantially before the delivery date, Mexico will have forfeited some opportunity to reap an additional windfall. A source said the Mexicans had set up the deal to allow them to profit from a price increase as well.
Because Mexican crude oil is generally of low quality, its value is about $4 less than the world market price for benchmark high-quality crude. At current market levels, Mexican crude is worth an average of $15.76.
With the $17 guaranteed price, Mexico stands to collect an extra $1.24 a barrel when its oil is delivered.
The Mexican arrangement covers more than 100 million barrels of oil, providing a potential profit of at least $125 million at current prices--beyond the profit Mexico makes anyway from crude oil sales.
The Mexicans used the oil futures trading system that has sprung up in recent years involving the New York Mercantile Exchange and the complex related financial instruments offered by brokerages and banks to oil buyers and sellers.
Mexico produces 2.6 million barrels, or about 5% of the world supply, of crude a day.
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f7429421d59001f9bb89d0e8017a0692 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2410-story.html | Taking the Mystery Out of Stock Investments | Taking the Mystery Out of Stock Investments
When it comes to investing in the stock market, individual investors seem to seldom get it right. They rush to buy stocks when the market is about to peak. They sell stocks frantically when the market is in a free fall. And they often acknowledge that much about buying and selling corporate shares seems complex--sometimes even mysterious.
The truth is there is very little that’s mysterious about Wall Street. Anyone who has basic mathematical skills and a lot of common sense is in a position to buy and sell company shares profitably. The trick is knowing the rules, investment experts say.
The first rule, though, is to determine whether you are a good candidate for stock market investment in the first place. That requires some soul searching and honest self-analysis, said Ralph Bloch, analyst at the investment house of Raymond James & Associates.
“Ask yourself how you would feel if you lost 10% to 15% of your money. Would it change your lifestyle? Would it make you crazy?” Bloch said. “If the answers to those questions are yes, you don’t belong in the stock market.”
Why? Even though the stock market tends to outperform more conservative investments over the long haul, stock prices can be exceptionally volatile. If your blood pressure spikes with every market decline, the enriched return you might earn on Wall Street isn’t worth the emotional cost.
Moreover, if your investment horizon is short, you might be better off with a more stable vehicle, such as a certificate of deposit. Certainly there is nothing exciting or sexy about an insured bank deposit. But if the deposit is below the insured limit of $100,000, you never lose your principal. You also know from the outset exactly how much interest you’ll earn on your money over a particular period of time.
But if your time horizon is reasonably long and you are willing to risk losing some money, you are probably a good candidate for stock market investing.
Still with me? Now decide how you want to invest. Do you want to buy shares in a mutual fund so that someone else, who presumably is experienced and savvy, can pick the stocks? Or do you want to do the driving yourself?
If you opt for a mutual fund, you should examine three things. The fund’s record, its “load” or up-front fees and its continuing management fees.
Several companies analyze mutual fund performance. Lipper Analytical Services, for example, comes out with quarterly updates of how individual funds have done over various periods of time. A summarized version of these rankings is often published by major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times.
Consider funds that have consistently strong performance over longer periods--a year, five years and 10 years. Quarter-to-quarter performance should not be an issue when your time frame is much longer.
Costs should also be a consideration, since every dollar you pay comes out of your ultimate investment return.
The process is more difficult if you decide that you want to pick the stocks yourself.
To do this well, you need to become educated about the market, which will probably take several hours a week. Read financial publications, check individual stock prices and think about subscribing to an investment advisory service such as Value Line. (A subscription to Value Line will cost you roughly $525 annually.)
Through this research, you should learn what kind of volatility to expect and how to determine whether overall stock prices are cheap or expensive.
Although there are many ways to determine the relative costs of stocks, the two most widely used are price/earnings ratios and dividend yields. (Calculate current P/E ratios by dividing the per-share market price by estimated earnings. Dividend yield is determined by dividing the full-year dividend by market value.)
Generally speaking, when dividend yields are below 3% and price earnings ratios have reached 20, stocks are probably dangerously expensive. When P/E ratios are below 10 and dividend yields have risen to the 6% range, stocks are probably quite cheap, said Hugh Johnson, chief investment officer for First Albany Corp. in New York. You, of course, want to buy when shares are cheap and sell when they get expensive.
A cautionary note: Don’t invest on “tips.” Don’t invest without personally checking out the company and its history. And don’t invest with a person or company you don’t know.
Do invest in companies you understand.
You should be able to picture how this company fits into society today, and what it will be doing in the future. Think about trends and demographic shifts that will hurt or benefit this particular company, and then check out the company’s history.
Make sure the company has consistent earnings--10 or more years of back-to-back profit increases--and that it doesn’t slash its dividend at every hint of trouble. (You can overlook a bad year or two, but shouldn’t overlook indications of instability.)
Then compare the company’s traditional price/earnings ratio and dividend yield with today’s numbers. If the company’s shares are cheap by historical standards and there is no good reason for the low price--such as an earnings reversal--it may be time to buy. If the shares are expensive by traditional standards, consider selling.
Lastly, be aware of brokerage costs. Even with a discount broker, you will generally pay between $35 and $100 every time you buy or sell shares. This should not hinder reasonable trading, but it should be part of your analysis.
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2ba1f317bfc9c5895194cfe03804eaf4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2411-story.html | Trust Deed Unnecessary When Loan Is Paid Off | Trust Deed Unnecessary When Loan Is Paid Off
Q: I paid off my mortgage in August, 1988. However, when I asked my savings and loan to return the trust deed, officials refused, saying they are allowed to keep that document for six years and that I could get a copy of the full reconveyance from the county recorder’s office. I did. But what happens to my deed, and how can I get it now that my S& has been taken over by a bank? Do I need to get the trust deed back? --J. G.
A: Stop worrying! The fact is that you really don’t need that trust deed.
Remember, a trust deed is simply the document that pledges the home you are buying as collateral for the loan you are getting to make that purchase. Once the loan is fully paid off, you really need just two things: evidence that the reconveyance of the property into your name alone was properly recorded in the county recorder’s office, and the return of the promissory note that you signed pledging to repay your mortgage.
Since most homeowners these days don’t live in their homes long enough to repay their mortgages, these paperwork details are generally handled by escrow companies when the property is sold. However, a homeowner who prepays his mortgage--or resides in the same home for 25 or 30 years--should be sure to determine that his property reconveyance is properly recorded and that the lender returns the promissory note indicating that the loan has been paid in full.
Your letter does not state whether your lender returned the note. If not, contact the lender and obtain it.
Out-of-State Income Still Subject to Tax
Q: You recently wrote that the state of California doesn’t levy income tax on interest generated by bank accounts held by residents of other states. Does this mean that as a California resident I would only be required to pay federal income tax on interest earned outside the state? This sounds too good to be true! --J. M.
A: It is.
As a California resident you are liable for both state and federal income taxes on all your sources of income--salary, interest, dividends, commissions, bonuses, etc.--just as you have always known. Your obligation to the state of California is not changed by the location of your source of income; you still pay taxes to California on that interest. But it is also highly likely that you would not be required to pay taxes to the state where that out-of-state bank is located.
The issue raised in the earlier column involved a former California resident who still had bank accounts in the state. California tax law allows the state to levy income taxes on certain types of income earned by out-of-state residents. For example, recipients of pensions based on jobs held in California are obligated to pay California state income tax on those pension payments, even if the retirees move out of the state.
Similarly, out-of-state residents with real estate investment earnings and real estate sale profits in California are also subject to state income taxes. But this principle does not apply to bank interest earnings, stock dividends or stock sale profits.
Most states have similar tax laws on this matter. And, more importantly, they recognize the laws of other states. This means that, except in a few instances, taxpayers are allowed to deduct the pension income or real estate profit taxes paid to one state from their tax obligation to the state in which they now reside.
Tax Basis for House Is Original Purchase Price
Q: In my divorce settlement, I am getting the house. It has a tax basis of $240,000 but was appraised at $590,000 as part of the divorce settlement proceedings. Is the $590,000 my new tax basis? My accountant can’t seem to give me an answer. --J. W. W.
A: No. Section 1041 of the Internal Revenue Code is quite clear on this matter, and if your accountant can’t figure it out, perhaps you should re-evaluate his competency. Assuming you didn’t roll over a gain from the sale of a prior house, your tax basis in the house is its original purchase price, $240,000, plus whatever improvements were made to it.
Section 1041 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that if the marital home is sold from one spouse to another “incident to a divorce,” the selling spouse (in this case, your husband) does not have a taxable gain. Further, it says the buying spouse (you) keeps the original tax basis of the home, not its increased value based on the 50% sale that was based on the most recent appraisal.
These arrangements typically work to the advantage of the selling spouse. Our experts have repeatedly advised that because of the inequity inherent in these deals, the purchase price between spouses should be negotiable. Attorneys and accountants should be consulted before anything is signed to unravel tax ramifications.
By the way, the sale of half the house to your ex-husband does not trigger a reassessment for property tax purposes.
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62366d5ca5748a81c1c2c046e023a645 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2413-story.html | Big Losses and Big Lessons at the Movies | Big Losses and Big Lessons at the Movies
John Kluge, the richest American, is making money on “Dances With Wolves,” the Academy Award winner that has taken in $150 million so far at the box office. Yet Kluge still wants to sell his 68% ownership of Orion Pictures, the studio distributing “Dances.”
Chairman Martin S. Davis of Paramount Communications will meet with security analysts this week about his company, which is a longtime subject of merger rumors. However, Davis would have a hard time merging or selling Paramount these days because of an overhang of losses from expensive movies that bombed.
Sony, the Japanese consumer electronics company, is pouring money into enormously extravagant operations at Columbia Pictures and TriStar studios. Reportedly, it isn’t flinching yet, but movie industry insiders are taking bets on how long Tokyo will tolerate waste and excess in Hollywood.
Welcome to the money behind the movies, where “Batman,” a movie that has grossed more than $250 million, is still in the red--although one of its stars, Jack Nicholson, has earned more than $50 million from the film. Undaunted, the producers are preparing a sequel, “Batman II.”
Hooray for Hollywood, as the song says, where big names and big money provide a fascination found in no other business.
But it’s more than cotton candy. Movies today are a great American and world industry--and a leading U.S. export earner. And what’s happening in movies can offer you insights that apply to any business, or investment program. It can even suggest answers to such fascinating questions as: What is the future? And what do Japanese investments mean to Hollywood?
First, the biggest insight right now is that no matter how great the trend, you can lose money. Rising living standards and increased leisure time are trends the world over. From villages in Mongolia to the mountains of Peru, people want more entertainment programming, and so the market is growing for movies, TV shows, tapes and videos.
But that doesn’t mean making films is a sure way to make money. On the contrary, explains Art Murphy, an authority on the motion picture business at USC. The studio today lays out at least $30 million to $50 million to make and promote a picture. Then when it’s released, the studio must estimate from initial box office what the ultimate pay-back will be. Often those assumptions are harsh, and a potential loss must be recorded. It’s the movie equivalent of a dry hole in oil or mining.
Paramount last year produced some very expensive dry holes, including “Days of Thunder,” “The Two Jakes” and “Godfather III.” Now the pending losses dull its attractiveness to any merger partner or purchaser.
Why do movies cost so much to make? You’ve got to pay the help. There are relatively few global box office stars, and their agents negotiate deals giving them millions up front plus a percentage of the ticket sales. Sylvester Stallone had a $20-million participation in “Rocky V,” which lost money for the MGM-Pathe studio; Nicholson had a $6-million guarantee before his lucrative percentage of the gross on “Batman.”
Such deals are nothing new, of course. The fate of the old movie studios was sealed years ago when MCA’s Lew R. Wasserman “perfected the percentage deal and gave the stars new clout,” writes Neal Gabler in “An Empire of Their Own,” a good history of the film business. Today’s successor to Wasserman is agent Michael Ovitz, head of Creative Artists Agency, who not only puts together deals for talent but represented Sony in its purchase of Columbia and Matsushita, of Japan, in its acquisition of MCA.
Faced with such star-and-agent power, big backers such as Kluge are getting cagey. Kluge, 76, who immigrated from Germany as a youth and built a $5.6-billion fortune in broadcasting and cellular phones, owns 68% of Orion Pictures. But he has taken a separate, collateralized interest in two of Orion’s pictures, “Mermaids” and “Silence of the Lambs”, in return for an investment--an unusual arrangement for a studio owner. What’s Kluge’s game? He wants his money right off the top, just like the stars; he didn’t build a $5-billion fortune financing inflated egos.
Sony, meanwhile, is taking a bath with Columbia and TriStar, where studio heads are spending lavishly to redecorate offices and committing hundreds of millions to films such as “Hook,” an adaptation of Peter Pan with Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts and Robin Williams, and “Bugsy,” a gangster tale with Warren Beatty. When, inevitably, one of the big-budget films crashes, Sony may crack down on the spending. Coca-Cola, a previous corporate owner of Columbia, lost patience with the movies after “Ishtar” lost almost $40 million in 1987.
But Sony and Matsushita may stay around because they have another agenda. They are investing in Hollywood to learn about entertainment programming because they sense the way technology is moving. It is moving toward a mingling of computing and video.
Sony, for example, has a new product in Japan called Data Discman, a hand-held computer-cum-TV set that can hold the equivalent of 300 books--a library in the palm of your hand. Sony is working on new ways to adapt music and video to tapes, discs and computers.
And in the United States, hundreds of small firms are working on new combinations of video and computers. It’s a fledgling business to be sure; progress in these new media will develop over most of this decade. But interactive computer-video is the future. Someday the big global stars will be descendants of computer-generated Max Headroom--and that will reduce the bargaining power of the Stallones and their agents.
Significantly, John Kluge is backing the new technology with investments in small firms such as Image Entertainment, a laser videodisc company in Chatsworth.
Kluge is selling a movie studio but investing in laser videodiscs. Another insight from the movies: Smart investors look ahead.
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c364bc492b0faa8f6442db682cf9e56c | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2415-story.html | Morehouse Industries Inc.: The Fullerton-based industrial machinery... | Morehouse Industries Inc.: The Fullerton-based industrial machinery...
Morehouse Industries Inc.: The Fullerton-based industrial machinery manufacturer posted net earnings of $50,000 for the second fiscal quarter, contrasted with a loss of $136,000 for the year-ago quarter. Sales for the quarter ended Feb. 28 increased 5%, to $937,000 from $893,000. For the first half of the fiscal year, net income was $79,000, contrasted with a loss of $257,000 for the period last year. Sales were up 12%, to $1.9 million from $1.7 million. The company attributed the turnaround to restructuring and cutting fixed costs.
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6aca401efb1a864d89a5e1876081d0fe | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2417-story.html | TouchStone Software: The Huntington Beach software company... | TouchStone Software: The Huntington Beach software company...
TouchStone Software: The Huntington Beach software company said net income for 1990 totaled $133,000, contrasted with a net loss of $52,000 for 1989. Revenue more than doubled, to $3.5 million from $1.7 million.
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8ae1aa142b1f8294653350305ccf2101 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2419-story.html | Certron Corp.: The Anaheim-based manufacturer of audio... | Certron Corp.: The Anaheim-based manufacturer of audio...
Certron Corp.: The Anaheim-based manufacturer of audio recording tapes, videocassettes and floppy disks reported a net loss of $47,000 for the first quarter of fiscal 1991.
In last year’s first quarter, the company also lost $47,000, but that included extraordinary gains of $91,000 from a tax benefit and $131,000 from life insurance proceeds.
Sales for the quarter ended Jan. 31 totaled $4.1 million, a 25% decline from the $5.5 million posted a year earlier.
The company attributed the declines to a decrease in videocassette sales caused by a general softening in the economy.
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7217c4b7a9ce8b7d3022cad3e6b84bd4 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2432-story.html | America Electrical Names New President-CEO | America Electrical Names New President-CEO
Thomas A. Vogele has been named president and chief operating officer of New America Electrical Corp., an Anaheim-based manufacturer of speciality electrical equipment.
He succeeds Glen Mitchel, who was appointed chairman and chief executive.
Vogele had previously been marine products division manager, director of marketing and one of three members of the office of general manager for the company.
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1ce8b8057169b0d2af581c85f3aebbed | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2433-story.html | James J. Dal Porto has been named... | James J. Dal Porto has been named...
James J. Dal Porto has been named vice president of administration and finance for I-Flow Corp. and Kenneth W. Rake has been appointed vice president of engineering and product development. Dal Porto, who was named corporate treasurer last year, will continue in that position. Rake, who was appointed director of engineering last year, was previously director of product development for the medical devices and systems division of Baxter Healthcare. I-Flow Corp., based in Irvine, manufactures a drug-infusion system.
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ddacf7df247655943d64132d1463a1d1 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2434-story.html | Stephen Cameron has been appointed treasurer of... | Stephen Cameron has been appointed treasurer of...
Stephen Cameron has been appointed treasurer of the Fieldstone Co., a Newport Beach-based home builder. He was previously finance and investments manager, in charge of the company’s investment portfolio.
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0e423c4b55ec59f39d7ace51d8e458dc | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2435-story.html | W.S. Buttrill, formerly senior vice president of... | W.S. Buttrill, formerly senior vice president of...
W.S. Buttrill, formerly senior vice president of program operations at Loral Defense Systems-Arizona, has been named senior vice president of program operations at Loral Aeronutronic, Newport Beach. He will manage production programs and manufacturing operations. He joined the defense- electronics and space-communications company in 1989 after serving as an assistant director for Hughes Aircraft Co.'s missile systems group. In addition, Paul Siconolfi, previously vice president of the programs office, has been appointed vice president of business development.
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caeae73dd75976adbf5dbe50b9660203 | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2452-story.html | Hospital Firm Shows It’s Not Afraid of Risks : Health care: Community Psychiatric Centers is making money by accommodating the current cost-cutting climate. Some analysts foresee a shakeout in the industry. | Hospital Firm Shows It’s Not Afraid of Risks : Health care: Community Psychiatric Centers is making money by accommodating the current cost-cutting climate. Some analysts foresee a shakeout in the industry.
Community Psychiatric Centers shook the psychiatric hospital industry several weeks ago when it launched a radical new pricing system that will in effect push patients out the doors of its clinics as quickly as possible.
CPC’s marketing strategy marks a drastic departure for the industry. Instead of billing patients the customary daily rate, the firm is offering a flat rate for each case. In so doing, the Laguna Hills company takes the risk of absorbing any extra charges should a patient be hospitalized longer than expected or need to be readmitted. CPC has been doing a lot of risk-taking lately. Last week, the company made an unsolicited $1.1-billion bid to acquire the country’s largest psychiatric hospital organization, Charter Medical Corp. of Macon, Ga. Charter has so far rebuffed the offer.
CPC’s acquisition of Charter, if it succeeds, as well as the new payment system could help reshape the nation’s $5-billion private psychiatric hospital industry, now in a state of severe stress.
The operators of the nation’s 450 private hospitals are struggling to fill beds as they watch the market for their services shrink in response to efforts by the medical insurance industry to rein in runaway medical costs by diverting patients from hospitals to outpatient services.
More important, psychiatric hospitals are having to appeal to a new clientele--the so-called “utilization review” and “managed health-care” companies that employers and insurance carriers have hired to act as brokers between patients and health-care providers. These companies--which are playing an increasingly important role in determining the treatments that patients receive--have become popular with employers looking for ways to clamp down on unnecessary medical treatment and cut down on soaring medical benefits costs.
Some health care officials consider CPC’s buyout attempt the beginning of an industry shakeout that only the most efficient psychiatric hospital firms will survive.
“The psychiatric and substance abuse business is extremely precarious now except for a few very well-managed companies like CPC,” said David Langness, spokesman for the Southern California Hospital Council. “There is a major shakeout occurring in the industry.”
Analysts say CPC’s ability to control operating costs has produced the largest profit margins in the industry. The company, which earned $83 million on revenue of $381.1 million for the fiscal year ended last Nov. 30, has been able to thrive with relatively low occupancy rates at its hospitals because those hospitals were financed with company earnings rather than with debt.
Moreover, CPC’s hospital rates are among the industry’s lowest, a big draw for insurance carriers and their new efficiency experts.
Charter, by contrast, faces severe financial problems and an uncertain future, analysts say, because it failed to respond quickly enough to changes in the industry.
In 1988, when cost-conscious insurance companies and employers were putting a squeeze on industry profits, Charter’s management led a leveraged buyout of the company that left it shouldering a $1.7-billion debt. Charter lost $311 million for fiscal year 1990 and $46.5 million for the most recent quarter. Charter missed a debt interest payment last month. It has proposed a debt restructuring program that would give bondholders and holders of preferred stock a 73% stake in the company.
In addition to the debt burden, analysts say, the company also is laboring under excessive corporate overhead, a costly media advertising program and relatively high hospital rates that have resulted in charter losing business to less pricey competitors.
Insurance carriers and employers have good reason to worry about the cost of mental health treatment. A national survey by A. Foster Higgins, a New York-based medical benefits consulting firm, found that mental health costs increased 18% for all employers in 1989 and rose a whopping 47% at companies with 5,000 or more workers.
Many employers looking for a quick remedy are slashing psychiatric benefits. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, 77% of the nation’s employers in 1989 were imposing more restrictive conditions on hospitalization for mental illness and chemical dependency than on other medical insurance benefits; in 1980, 44% were doing so.
Increasingly, employees with mental illnesses or drug or alcohol problems who once would have checked into hospitals are instead being treated at lower-cost clinics.
Hospitals, in fact, are becoming the treatment location of last resort. At the urging of the insurance industry, patients are now being admitted only to treat severe mental health crises or drug withdrawal. Additional therapy is provided on an outpatient basis.
Psychiatric hospitals have responded by creating “partial hospitalization” programs that allow patients to be treated at a hospital during the day and to return home in the evening.
It was a case of bad timing that the demand for psychiatric hospitals began to shrink just after the industry completed a huge expansion of facilities. Many operators had expected an explosion of business after states began mandating employee mental health benefits. The industry had also hoped to benefit from a growing public awareness of mental health and drug abuse problems and a lessening of the stigma attached to psychiatric treatment.
During the 1980s, a flood of new providers rushed into the market and existing chains went on a construction binge. The expansion gained further momentum when several states, California among them, removed regulations that had prohibited new psychiatric hospitals from being built where there were already sufficient facilities.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the number of private psychiatric beds in the United States more than doubled between 1980 and 1988, from 17,157 to 42,615.
General hospitals got into the act too, converting empty blocks of medical and surgical beds into psychiatric wings in hopes of boosting their income. Between 1980 and 1988, the number of beds in general hospitals’ psychiatric units grew from 29,384 to 48,493.
The industry is now “wildly over-bedded,” said Richard Kunnes, chief operating officer for U.S. Behavioral Health of Emeryville, a managed-care provider specializing in psychiatry.
“I think you are just seeing the beginning of a deluge of managed care that will shut down a lot of these facilities,” he predicted.
Facilities that specialize in treating alcoholism and drug addiction are being hurt worst by the oversupply.
Ken Estes, spokesman for the National Assn. of Addiction Treatment Providers, said about 50 addiction treatment facilities have closed nationwide in the last two years and patient occupancy rates are “running at 50% to 60% on the average nationally and lower in some metropolitan areas.”
Psychiatric hospitals are having to work harder to keep their beds full because patients are being admitted for shorter stays. According to the National Assn. of Private Psychiatric Hospitals, the average stay for patients in psychiatric hospitals dropped from 30.5 days in 1987 to 27 days in 1989. The steepest decline was for teen-age patients, whose average stay shrank from 43.8 days to 35 days.
The impact of all this on patients is a matter of considerable dispute in the medical community. Critics complain that patients are being shortchanged in the name of cost savings, and advocates argue that it is often more effective to treat the mentally ill in less institutional surroundings.
“In the name of cost-cutting, what they are doing is service-cutting,” said Dr. Peter Gruenberg, president of the Southern California Psychiatric Assn. “There is no question that people are being discharged from hospitals before they are ready.”
But Dr. Alan Sazitz, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, said he welcomes the pressure being placed on psychiatric hospitals to intensify therapy. Sazitz said he has seen too many Instances of patients in psychiatric hospitals spending time watching television.
“I think in the long run the patients will get better care because the care will be monitored and the providers will be selected,” Sazitz said.
Another result is that companies such as Charter that depended on extensive TV advertising to attract patients are finding that this method is not working as well.
“Television advertising was very effective starting in the mid-'70s and worked probably very well until the mid-'80s. But with the growing use of managed care and HMOs, people don’t have the choice of where they will go,” said Estes of the National Assn. of Addiction Treatment Providers.
Chris Jorgensen, who has helped create TV marketing programs for the Comprehensive Care Corp. chain of drug and alcohol addiction treatment centers, credits advertising for “helping to defuse some of the stigma and denial” associated with alcoholism and mental illness.
But Kunnes of U.S. Behavioral Health contends that Charter’s TV ads not only swelled the company’s operating costs but also “tarnished the company with the image of hucksterism by trying to circumvent the physician community.”
James W. Conte, CPC co-founder and chairman, said he considers TV ads inappropriate for a medical company. “We still don’t believe in advertising to the ill: ‘Come, have your breakdown with us,’ ” he said wryly. Instead, CPC hospitals get patient referrals in the community through ties made with local clergy, police departments, schools, family counselors and medical professionals.
Mac Crawford, Charter executive vice president for operations, said Charter has changed its marketing tactics in the last year by slashing its TV ad budget, soliciting more referrals from physicians and trying to increase business with HMOs and other managed-care organizations.
“I think the demand for alternative treatment settings will continue to escalate,” Crawford said, “and we have to be more creative to address the demands of payers and payees and put people in the least restrictive environment that is medically appropriate to them.”
To meet those demands, Crawford said that Charter has developed partial hospitalization programs and established a separate group headed by a former executive in the managed-care industry to deal with the new gatekeepers of mental health care.
He also said Charter has reduced its staff to streamline its work force but that the company intends to maintain a higher staff-to-patient ratio than CPC does to ensure quality.
Peter Sterman, a western regional director for Preferred Health Care Ltd., a national managed-care company based in Wilton, Conn., said that CPC has been able to do well by “cutting corners” on staffing.
“CPC has done wonders financially in this market today when everyone else is having problems. But we have some concerns how they are able to do this,” Sterman said. “Often if there is a Charter hospital and CPC hospital in the same geographic location, my clinical case managers would tend to have a preference for using the Charter hospital because of the higher staff-to-patient ratios.”
But other industry observers see no problems with the quality of care at CPC facilities. Much of the company’s savings, they said, are the result of its keeping a bare-bones administrative and marketing staff.
The key to CPC’s future, analysts say, will be its ability to accommodate the cost-cutting priorities of the managed-care specialists in the insurance industry.
“CPC has been the first out of the chute in terms of approaching managed-care companies and insurance carriers in offering new products like partial hospitalization and innovative pricing,” said Kunnes of U.S. Behavioral Health.
“We decided to work with managed-care companies instead of opposing them,” Conte said. “In effect we are saying to the whole insurance industry that we are willing to talk with them about any reasonable form of payment for a reasonable type of care.”
About four months ago, CPC hired industry veteran John Randazzo to establish a managed-care division for CPC.
Randazzo said CPC realized that its patient referrals from managed-care companies had risen rapidly, accounting for 22% of CPC revenue in 1990, from 12% in 1988.
He said managed-care firms are impressed by the fact that CPC’s average daily rate is $500, below the industry average of about $600, and that the average length of treatment at a CPC facility is 21 days, compared to the industrywide average of about 25.
Randazzo also said that CPC is the first psychiatric hospital company to offer health care management organizations a “case rate” plan for psychiatric and substance-abuse patients.
CPC’s flat-rate payment plan is similar to the system that the federal government has established for Medicare recipients. That system, in effect since the early 1980s, has forced general hospitals to contain costs.
But CPC is not waiting to be pushed. “We are trying to eliminate the adversarial relationship hospitals have had historically with managed-care companies,” Randazzo said.
CPC’s bid for Charter is another part of its strategy to generate more business with managed care-companies and employee groups. CPC hospitals nationwide are only about 50% occupied. By adding Charter’s 88 psychiatric hospitals to CPC’s 50, CPC, which operates primarily in the West, hopes to expand its services nationwide. Steve Powers, president of Cronus Partners, a private investment bank that helped CPC put together the buyout offer, said that both Charter and CPC “are providers of the absolutely highest-quality care. The difference is Community is a low-cost provider and Charter is a higher-cost provider. And the future belongs to the low-cost provider.”
INTENSE COMPETITION IN AN INDUSTRY UNDER STRESS Community Psychiatric Corp. of Laguna Hills has made an unsolicited $1.1-billion bid for the nation’s largest private psychiatric hospital chain, Charter Medical Corp. One of the few financially healthy chains, CPC hopes to emerge from an industrywide shakeout as the No. 1 provider of inpatient mental health care. COMMUNITY PSYCHIATRIC CENTERS Headquarters: Laguna Hills Chairman and chief executive: James W. Conte. Operations: 50 psychiatric hospitals Employees: 6,374 Revenue: $331 million Earnings: $83 million CHARTER MEDICAL CORP. Headquarters: Macon, Ga. Chairman: William A. Fickling Jr. Operations: 88 psychiatric hospitals and 12 acute-care hospitals Employees: 13,700 employees Revenue: $1.28 billion Earnings: $357.7-million loss AVERAGE LENGTH OF STAY In days, for all inpatients 1987: 30.5% 1988: 29.1% 1989: 27% Source: National Assoc. of Private Psychiatric Hospitals GROWTH OF PSYCHIATRIC BEDS Private Psychiatric Hospitals 1980: 17,157 1982: 19,011 1984: 21,474 1986: 30,201 1988: 42,615* * Latest figures available General Hospitals with Separate Psychiatric Units 1980: 29,384 1982: 36,525 1984: 46,045 1986: 45,808 1988: 48,493* * Latest figures available Source: National Institute of Mental Health.
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a7536a7d31b382ad6cb0d5a18c1e8c1d | https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-31-fi-2511-story.html | Defying a Trend, Commerce Bank Puts Safety First : Finance: The Kansas City, Mo., institution is flourishing while others are failing. The secret is conservative management. | Defying a Trend, Commerce Bank Puts Safety First : Finance: The Kansas City, Mo., institution is flourishing while others are failing. The secret is conservative management.
Welcome to Commerce Bank, the safest bank in America.
While hundreds of banks around the country are failing each year--threatening a repeat of the savings and loan debacle--this one is flourishing.
Commerce Bancshares, the bank’s parent company, is making record profits after having doubled its earnings during the second half of the 1980s. And the bank itself maintains what analysts say is the cleanest balance sheet in the industry, with one of the fattest levels of capital reserves of any bank in the country.
All this has been enough to earn Commerce Bank the reputation of being as safe as, well, as safe as an old-fashioned bank. In 1989, a survey conducted by United States Banker magazine rated Commerce the “least risky” and “best” bank in America. Last year, Commerce Bank won again.
“I don’t think there is any question that it is the safest bank around,” says Robert Meeder, a Kidder Peabody analyst who follows regional banks. Joseph Stieven, a banking analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., a St. Louis-based brokerage, agrees. “It would be very difficult to find a more prudent management in banking today,” he says.
Analysts say Commerce’s success shows that despite the long-term economic squeeze that has plunged the industry into its worst crisis since the Great Depression and left the survival of many of the nation’s largest banks in doubt, conservative management practices can still make a critical difference. “If every bank in the country had acted like Commerce, we would still have had a banking crisis, but I think it would be on a much smaller scale,” says Kidder Peabody’s Stieven.
Commerce has kept its health mainly by avoiding the excesses that enticed so many other bankers during the 1970s and 1980s, during an era when the growing competitive pressures on the industry were leading many bankers to take greater risks to maintain their profitability.
The bank can trace much of its style to a deep tradition of sharp-eyed lending practices. In 1893, W. S. Woods, the bank’s founder, gave some advice to his nephew, who was about to set up a bank in Colorado: “I can forgive you almost anything,” he wrote, “but making bad loans.”
Nearly a century later, Woods’ descendants still run his bank--and still remember his cautionary words. Jim Kemper, the patriarch of the family today, just sent a copy of his great-grandfather’s letter to his sons, Jonathan and David, who are now running Commerce, as a reminder of the family’s deeply ingrained tradition of conservative banking. But the Kemper sons, the family’s fifth generation at the helm of Commerce, were already practicing what W. S. Woods preached.
The bank has always been closely linked to the local elite. Missourian Harry S. Truman, for instance, began as a clerk at Commerce Bank, and for decades the bank’s chief credit officer was local leader Arthur Eisenhower, brother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Over the generations, those family and community ties have helped Commerce keep its money close to the relatively stable economy of Kansas City--and out of too much trouble far from home.
“My father banked there, and I’ve had an account there since I was a little boy, and they have always been a conservative bank,” says Henry Bloch, chairman of H & R Block and a member of Commerce’s board.
In boom times, of course, the Kempers’ prudence looked much more like tightfisted parochialism. “We’ve been criticized in the past for our lending practices,” David Kemper concedes. “There have been times when people in town didn’t think we were doing enough” in terms of lending for local businesses, he says.
Still, when new fads in risky lending began to develop during the past 20 years, the Kempers did something most bankers seemed unable to do: They just said no.
In the early 1970s when other bankers were rushing to lend to Third World nations, the wary Kempers were pulling out of Mexico. The big New York banks saw Latin governments as guaranteed “sovereign” credit risks who were willing to pay high interest rates. The Kempers saw only trouble. Today, Commerce has only one foreign loan on its books.
Later, the Kempers, who own roughly 12% of Commerce and retain effective control of the $6-billion bank, cut back on agricultural loans early in the farm crisis and stayed out of energy lending; the bank has no oil and gas loans on its books.
More recently, the bank rebuffed repeated attempts by Wall Street investment bankers to get Commerce to help finance junk bonds for risky leveraged buyout deals. Although commercial banks are prohibited from investing directly in junk bonds, many provided other equally risky forms of financing for junk bond dealers that made their leveraged buyouts possible; those loans are coming back to haunt many of the nation’s biggest banks.
But when Wall Streeters approached Commerce, the Kempers weren’t interested. Loans for highly leveraged transactions account for just 0.5% of Commerce’s loan portfolio.
“We would get these Federal Express packages from New York in the morning, offering us a piece of some junk bond deal,” recalls 37-year-old Jonathan Kemper, president of Commerce Bank of Kansas City, a major subsidiary of Commerce Bancshares. “They would say we would have to give them an answer by the afternoon.
“We just decided not to play that game. We just don’t loan money for things we don’t understand.”
Jim Kemper, now 69 and the chairman of Commerce Bancshares, contends that the family’s innate caution has been bolstered by a few bad experiences. “My father lost a ranch to the government down in Mexico in the 1930s, so we never bought this idea that a sovereign government wouldn’t default on its loans,” he says.
David Kemper, the 40-year-old chairman of Commerce Bank of St. Louis, one of Commerce Bancshares’ two main banking operations in Missouri, has similar memories. “I remember my father saying 10 years ago that he never wanted to have to send the Marines in to collect on a loan,” Kemper says. “He was always very suspicious of Third World lending.”
But it wasn’t just Midwestern innocence that kept Commerce out of junk bonds and the like. Both Jonathan and David Kemper started their careers with New York banks before returning home to join their father; David Kemper also served briefly as a federal bank examiner in Manhattan. Both had hard-edged misgivings about the fever that seemed to grip the financial industry in the 1980s.
In 1988, for instance, long before Wall Street woke up to the full dangers of junk bonds, David Kemper wrote a satirical article published in the New Republic magazine, describing how everyone in America could get rich if only the government would agree to a leveraged buyout of the United States. To pay for the deal, he wrote, all we would have to do would be to sell off most of the West to the Japanese and the sultan of Brunei.
Although Commerce lost money on some commercial real estate projects that went bust, the Kempers generally stuck close to Missouri, lending money mainly to people and corporations in Missouri, where they knew enough about business conditions to understand the risks involved in the deals they were financing. And when they did suffer losses on loans, they had more than enough reserves to protect themselves.
“They are the envy of the industry when it comes to how low their loan losses are,” says banking analyst Meeder. “They have kept their loans diversified, and they have kept them with customers in their home market, which they know well.”
Analysts who keep tabs on the bank’s progress believe that the key to Commerce’s success has been that, unlike the managers of many larger banks, Commerce’s owners are also its managers; the Kempers have been willing to keep much of the family’s own money tied up in the bank’s stock.
“The management owns a lot of stock so they are real careful with their money,” notes Ken Puglisi, a regional banking analyst with the New York brokerage Keefe, Bruyette and Woods.
And with the family’s money locked up in Commerce stock, the Kempers tend to stick to the fundamentals of banking.
“You have to keep checking and rechecking everything you do and the loans you make, and it is important to go out and see people, to see how their projects are going,” says Jim Kemper. “It is hard work, but the people who run this bank have a lot of stock in it, and they don’t want to lose their money.”
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