05/19/04

LC040519

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

It's been ten years since Southern Californians got a rude wake-
up call. What have we learned since the Northridge quake and
are scientists getting closer to predicting temblors?

Dr. Lucy Jones>> We're more afraid of things you don't control
and earthquakes are the ultimate out of control experience. We
don't know when. That's why we want the predictions.

Val>> And then, historic churches, temples and synagogues. We
explore the beauty of sacred places in the City of Angels.

Those stories and more coming up on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> It was the most costly natural disaster ever for Southern
California and remarkably, even a decade later, some victims of
the Northridge quake are still trying to put their lives and
their homes back together. So what have we learned since that
fateful January morning back in 1994? Toni Guinyard says the
answer is plenty, but the lessons have been especially hard for
some.

Toni Guinyard>> It's been ten years since Southern California
residents were shaken out of their beds and frightened out of
their homes by the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake.

Linda Allison>> Well, my kitchen clock stopped the morning of
the quake at 4:32 and I just made a decision not to get it
operating again until my house was repaired.

Toni Guinyard>> Constant reminder for you, even though you
don't need a reminder.

Linda Allison>> Constant reminder, yes.

Toni Guinyard>> Linda Allison's Northridge home was yellow-
tagged. Her entry into the house was limited, but now a full
decade later, structural repairs still have not been made.

Linda Allison>> Fireplaces, there were two.

Toni Guinyard>> Go ahead and show us.

Linda Allison>> I was ordered by the city to bring them down
because of the severe damage and they were supporting beams to
the ceiling. I am still open all the way down to the foundation
underneath the house and I deal with rodents coming in and just,
you know, coldness and not being sealed up. It's still ten
years and I don't have the money to repair it and the insurance
company really pretty much closed my claim and has not followed
through on what I feel was their duty to do.

There is a major beam running across here that is supporting the
roof line of the house and it was in the brick fireplace which,
you know, supported the whole suspension of the roof which is no
longer there. I just have a temporary post here right now and,
if we had another quake, I hate to think what would happen. But
right now, it's the best I've been able to do.

This was a second fireplace that I had that also was a
supporting structure to the exterior wall. It was a load-
bearing wall and the bricks are no longer there for the support.
I'm just open to the attic space. Again, I have the problem
with the rodents and I also have water because this wall moved
out about a half inch. I have water when it rains. It runs
down the inside of the wall. You can see the stains from that.

Toni Guinyard>> So you have open spaces from your attic.

Linda Allison>> Open spaces to the foundation underneath, water
damage.

Toni Guinyard>> Water damage, rodents coming in, but you won't
move.

Linda Allison>> I won't move because this is my home. I have
too many memories, good memories, and I'm trying to rebuild them
back.

Toni Guinyard>> The damage and destruction caused by the quake
forced more than twenty thousand people from their homes. It
was the most costly earthquake in U.S. history with damage
estimates totaling approximately $30 billion dollars.

Dr. Lucy Jones>> If your building was not built within the last
few years, it is probably not as safe as it could be.

Toni Guinyard>> Dr. Lucy Jones is scientist in charge of the
U.S. Geological Survey's earthquake program in Southern
California. She is also on the California Seismic Safety
Commission.

Dr. Lucy Jones>> Los Angeles on average is going to experience
a billion dollars per year of earthquake losses. Los Angeles
County alone. That's a lot of money and that's a way to just
destroy the economy here. To not suffer those losses, we need
to be building those stronger buildings. We need to be doing
the retrofitting so that when the earthquakes happen, because
that is inevitable, we're able to keep on going.

Toni Guinyard>> Dr. Jones says Southern California has come up
short in its effort to retrofit. Even after the lessons of the
Northridge quake, all that could be done to make freeways, homes
and other buildings more resilient to earthquakes has not been
done.

Dr. Lucy Jones>> The fact is that no building code in the world
is retroactive. We have an earthquake. We see that a certain
style of building construction does poorly. We outlaw that form
of construction and all future buildings are built in a safer
way. But all of those previous buildings, unless they happen to
be where that one earthquake was, are still there.

Margaret Thompson>> That's what the house looked like once
before the quake.

Toni Guinyard>> The Northridge earthquake provided retired
professor, Margaret Thompson, one lesson she could have lived
without.

Margaret Thompson>> It was a long period to realize the amount
of damage. I made the mistake, you know, once the insurance
company came of believing what they said.

Toni Guinyard>> The foundation of the home she shares with
Marcia Brooks was damaged. Just months before the ten-year
anniversary of the quake, they finally settled with their
insurance company.

Marcia Brooks>> You're an emotional ping-pong. You go from
being totally helpless to learning a little more about what
happened and how you were dealt with. As you're learning, you
get some strength and as that strength comes in, you get angry.
You stand up a little straighter and you say, "God damn it, they
shouldn't have done it to us. They shouldn't have taken
advantage of us."

Margaret Thompson>> I was thinking the other day that maybe
ultimately true acceptance is when you recognize whatever it was
happened did happen to you. So it happened to you. Lots of
things happen to you. This happened to me. Okay, that's part
of my background, now let's move ahead.

Toni Guinyard>> For some earthquake victims, time is standing
still.

Linda Allison>> Some people's reaction is, why don't you get on
with your life? Why don't you just fix it and move on? You
know, a lot of people are not aware of the fact that, when your
home is destroyed and you had insurance and you expected them to
come through for you and they don't, how it does really stop
your life.

Toni Guinyard>> This at the same time geologists and scientists
are moving forward.

Dr. Lucy Jones>> The biggest change has probably been
technical, that because of the interest in the earthquake and
funding out of the earthquake, we've been able to develop a
whole new generation of sensors to record what goes on in the
earth's process and have made Southern California the ultimate
earthquake laboratory.

Toni Guinyard>> A laboratory that extends everywhere we look.
In this case, the San Gabriel Mountains along the Angeles Crest
Highway. Here geologist Lee Silver conducts a roadside class
offering the media a crash course in earthquake faults.

Lee Silver>> Each piece that I picked off has got a smeared
surface and you can see which way I spread the green smear. Can
you see that? Every one of these has a streaking quality. That
identifies those fractures as faults and the smearing is from
the two sides of the fracture moving past each other.

Dr. Lucy Jones>> What people would like to have is earthquake
prediction of the earthquake magnitude. You don't want a
prediction of every earthquake. There's going to be twenty or
thirty today in Southern California. You want to know which of
the twenty thousand we record each year is going to be the one
that's large enough to do some damage.

Toni Guinyard>> The power to predict earthquakes, despite the
lessons learned, is one thing we don't have. What we have are
memories of the morning the Northridge quake hit without
warning.

Val>> Many of the Northridge quake victims who got help from
the nonprofit group C.A.R., Community Assisting Recovery, are
now volunteering for that organization. In particular, they're
helping the victims of the recent fires.

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Val>> For decades, Americans have been fighting the battle of
the bulge and it seems the bulge has been winning. Obesity is a
growing problem in America, especially among children, so much
so that now federal agencies are launching campaigns for
nutrition. And as Gay Yee tells us, it's no longer kid stuff
when teenagers' weight starts putting their health at stake.

Michael Marcello>> Let's see how much I weigh today.

Gay Yee>> The morning weigh-in. Every time fifteen-year-old
Michael Marcello gets on the scale, he cringes.

Michael Marcello>> 237. Ways to go.

Gay Yee>> At over two hundred pounds, this isn't baby fat.

Michael Marcello>> It's really hard to lose weight even though
it's so easy to gain weight. It's like if you gain one pound,
it takes like a week just to take that off and it's very
difficult.

Gay Yee>> Michael Marcello is like a lot of young people who
have gotten swept up in one of America's fastest growing
epidemics: childhood obesity. In just the last twenty years,
the number of seriously overweight children in the U.S. have
doubled. Among adolescents, it's tripled. And if you wonder
how this could happen, just take a look at the typical American
diet.

Our great-grandparents would barely recognize what we eat and
how much of it we eat and they'd surely never understand where
we eat it. That's how much the country's diet has changed over
the past century. And it doesn't just look different. Today's
food is different. Much of it is highly processed, nutrients
get leeched out while fats, sugars and sodium get added. The
result? Today's food typically has more calories per bite than
it did generations ago.

Michael Marcello>> This would be my normal meal from In-N-Out.
Shake, fries and a hamburger.

Gay Yee>> All of which only adds to his health problems and
undermines his self-esteem when he's at school.

Michael Marcello>> You know, they make fun of me when I like,
you know, the seat would squeak or something like that. They'd
say, hey, fat boy, why are you making so much noise? Even the
teachers seemed to be like a little bit leaning towards skinnier
people and I was feeling that.

Gay Yee>> But it's not just bruised egos experts are worried
about. Doctors point to the medical complications that often
accompany obesity, sleep apnea, asthma, high blood pressure and
something that was almost unheard of among youngsters just a few
years ago, Type II diabetes.

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> This is a much, much more prevalent
issue than it ever was before. In about 1992 and 1994, most of
us would say at the most five percent of our patients had Type
II diabetes. Now we're looking at our own center one in four
children diagnosed with diabetes now.

Gay Yee>> The food industry spends $36 billion dollars a year
on advertising, much of it aimed at children, bombarding them
with messages to eat, eat, eat. And when they do, some get in
trouble.

Jenny Marcello>> We went to the doctor in June and I told them
Michael's now approaching 250. I'm scared. I do not want my
child dying on me.

>> How many of you know what Tybo is?

Gay Yee>> Michael's doctor referred the family to Kidshape.

Christianne Wert>> Kidshape is a family-based pediatric weight
management program.

Gay Yee>> It's an eight-week treatment program specifically
designed to help obese children lose weight.

Christianne Wert>> These children are referred to us when they
are greater than two hundred pounds. The problem really should
have been caught a long time ago.

Gay Yee>> There's help from registered dieticians --

>> Some of you give me an example of what might be a really
good goal for exercise.

Gay Yee>> -- mental health professionals and even fitness
teachers. And there is one key requirement. The whole family
has to participate.

Christianne Wert>> It's critical that the entire family adopts
healthier lifestyles because a child is not going to be
successful if they are trying to eat healthier, but everybody
else in the family is not.

Jenny Marcello>> And after working with him by myself, then it
became the parent-child confrontation.

Gay Yee>> At the beginning of the eight weeks, Jenny Marcello
told the other parents her years of trying to help Michael had
gone nowhere.

Jenny Marcello>> I could see him growing and growing and he
couldn't see himself gaining that weight. When he surpassed my
weight and he was younger than me, I said, oh, what is happening
here? I'm really out of control.

Gay Yee>> Jenny was told to give up control and instead become
more of a cheerleader and coach. Her biggest challenge?
Getting Michael out the door for a 3.8 mile walk every day.
Michael probably wouldn't have been this successful had it not
been a team effort. The whole family got with the program,
adopting not just healthier eating habits, but also a healthier
lifestyle.

Jenny Marcello>> So we've got cantaloupe, blackberries, apples,
broccoli..

Gay Yee>> The whole family is changing its habits, especially
at the supermarket. Now they buy fresh food and spend a lot
less time in the aisle with the frozen microwave meals.

Jenny Marcello>> And you have to really read the labels which
we learned at Kidshape that if you read the label now, you
compare the calories to the fat calories. There's only 240
calories in here, but of that, it's 45 fat calories.

Gay Yee>> Michael's dad, Sonny, is the cook in the house. Food
is prepared ahead. It's just as convenient as the processed
pre-packaged stuff the busy family used to eat, but without all
the calories.

Michael Marcello>> So I start out measuring one cup of rice. I
actually prepare my own lunches for school that are like
composed of vegetables, chicken, rice and fruit.

Gay Yee>> The changes in diet and lifestyle are paying off. In
just eight weeks, Michael has lost nearly twenty pounds.

Michael Marcello>> Finally now, after all this struggle, I
finally have found a way to get something where I can actually
begin to change myself.

Gay Yee>> Michael has learned lessons about food the hard way,
but he says his personal payback isn't what he sees on the
scale. It's what he hears now at school.

Michael Marcello>> Now I'm actually changing and people see it
and they realize that I am really trying and they respect me for
that.

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Val>> It stands to reason that the City of Angels might have a
few synagogues, churches and temples, but have you ever wondered
how many? Well, we met one photographer who compiled his own
list. His name is Robert Berger and his list turned into a book
of more than fifty historic places where Angelenos worship and
meditate. Vicki Curry shows us a few of these houses of worship
that are as diverse as Los Angeles itself.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> Los Angeles is a city of the moment, embracing
the pleasures of the present and brushing aside the past. But
there's a little-known secret about Los Angeles. This glitzy,
urban landscape also teems with a rich collection of religious
architecture. Los Angeles is home to more than two thousand
churches, synagogues and temples. Architectural photographer,
Robert Berger, recorded fifty-four of them in his book, "Sacred
Spaces: Historic Houses of Worship in the City of Angels".

Robert Berger>> We're not really great about saving
architectural history. Start looking around. The only
buildings here that take you back to the nineteenth or early
twentieth century are religious structures. The vast variety is
just amazing because Los Angeles has every immigrant culture,
everything you can think of, and they all have a temple or
synagogue or church built for the members.

Vicki Curry>> Berger focused on buildings more than fifty years
old and then visited over three hundred of them.

Robert Berger>> Well, I went to the library and did a little
research and then I just started driving around town. Every
dome or cross or beam in the sky, I went and investigated it.
My family's been in Los Angeles a hundred years and there are
just neighborhoods I'd never gone into and nobody's ever said
anything about it. It was really an eye-opener for me.

Vicki Curry>> What he found was an architectural record of the
diverse communities and cultures that built Los Angeles.

Robert Berger>> This being a melting pot, people coming in from
different countries into different parts of the country, they're
bringing their traditions with them. I think that what's makes
it so varied here. There wasn't just one people starting this
place. People came from everywhere and brought their traditions
with them.

Vicki Curry>> So, Robert, what church is this?

Robert Berger>> This is the Holy Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox
Church in Silver Lake.

Vicki Curry>> And what year was this built?

Robert Berger>> 1932. As you see, there are no traditional
pews in here. It's mainly pillows for kneeling and the rugs.

Vicki Curry>> And it's pretty small too.

Robert Berger>> Yeah, it's very small. I mean, you'd probably
fit a hundred people in here. That's one of the things that
struck me. The beauty in here is so intimate versus other
massive cathedrals like St. Vincent's are huge, so I like the
kind of dichotomy of kind of small, intimate religious places
versus the giant places. They're all spiritual and they all
have their special meaning.

This was actually a birthday gift from Czar Nicholas in 1917 and
it was carried over. The original parishioners came here
fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and this was brought
with them. It was a gift from the Czar.

Vicki Curry>> Berger discovered that many religious buildings
demonstrate the constantly changing demographics of Los Angeles.

Robert Berger>> Temple Sinai East was built in the 1920's.
When I shot it, it was the Philadelphia Presbyterian Church.
There are still icons from all the different religions there.
On the alter, there is a crucifix, a cross and a menorah right
above it and then, in the dome, in the ceiling, is the Star of
David and the tribes of Israel. There's another Russian
Orthodox one in Hollywood that's interesting. What started out
as a liberal Catholic church and then sort of changed, so it
went from this kind of mission style and then to a kind of
muscovite church. They changed it in the 1960's.

This is a very fascinating story. This is in Boyle Heights.
Back in the 1920's or the turn of the last century, this
community had about 75,000 mainly Eastern European Jews. It was
a very Jewish community, which is now all Latino. One of the
things that interested me in this project are places like this
where the demographics have changed dramatically and what
happens to those community centers.

Vicki Curry>> Right, so what happened to this place?

Robert Berger>> Well, it was used up until the Whittier Narrows
earthquake in 1987 and the main building here was condemned and
they did still hold services in the small building in the back,
which is the original building, up until the mid-1990's. Then
there weren't enough men for a service then, so they enclosed
that. But it wasn't secured well and that's why there is
graffiti and things and then part of the roof fell in.

Vicki Curry>> So when you set out to record religious spaces in
Los Angeles, you were interested in even ones like this that
aren't functional anymore?

Robert Berger>> This and St. Vibiana's downtown because you
don't know if those buildings are going to survive. They need
to be recorded for posterity and for history. I mean, it's
great that they are renovating St. Vibiana's. There are great
stories that things can be saved.

Vicki Curry>> Yeah, even if not for religious uses.

Robert Berger>> Right. I mean, any kind of adaptive use.
Without the buildings in the city, where's the history? There
is nothing left. How do you record your history? How do you
show the history of a city without buildings?

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> The sacred spaces of Los Angeles also illustrate
its architectural history. Many of these buildings were
designed by renowned architects such as Paul Williams who
created Second Baptist Church.

Robert Berger>> That one, I think, was his first major
commission he did with, I think, William Marsh. He's mainly a
black Baptist who moved to Los Angeles in the 1920's. Martin
Luther King spoke there as a Youth Day speaker and he also spoke
there again right before his assassination.

Vicki Curry>> Bethlehem Baptist Church was designed by the
noted modernist architect, R.M. Schindler.

Robert Berger>> I think it was his only church design ever
built. But the neighborhood is not a very good neighborhood.
It's like kind of near the city of Vernon. Every week the
building gets painted over and gets spray-painted again.

Vicki Curry>> John Austin designed St. Paul's Roman Catholic
Church.

Robert Berger>> He also did City Hall and the Griffith Park
Observatory also. That place has beautiful murals. The murals
there were done by John Smeraldi who also did the murals at The
Biltmore. The thing is, that place is unheralded. It's not in
any history books and the inside is gorgeous. They said there's
been no renovation. It's just spectacular inside. The Church
of the Epiphany was done, the early chapel, was done in the
1880's by Ernest Cockshead and, in 1913, Arthur Benton did the
main sanctuary. He's also the same architect that did the
Mission Inn in Riverside. His arts and crafts style with the
wood ceiling, it's really beautiful.

Vicki Curry>> This wouldn't be Los Angeles unless some of the
city's sacred spaces were connected to show business.

Robert Berger>> St. Mary of the Angels, that's where Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were married. The pastor there, it
was his provocation to minister to the motion picture community.
Father Dodd, who started that parish, actually played a pastor
in 380 films in Hollywood. He had some great connections there.
He was a Hollywood figure.

St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral was financed by a man who
owned a theatre chain in St. Louis, came out here and bought the
Fox West Coast chain in California which had 411 theatres and
they were going bankrupt. He rented all those theatres and he
actually hired some of the artists from Twentieth Century Fox to
decorate the cathedral. It's very theatrical. You can see the
tie-in between the movie industry and the decoration of the
church.

Vicki Curry>> Of course, many local churches and temples have
made appearances in the movies.

Robert Berger>> St. Brendan's in Hancock Park was in the final
scene of "War of the Worlds".

Vicki Curry>> The City of Angels may be known more for style
than spirituality, but Robert Berger hopes Angelenos will pay
more attention to their sacred spaces.

Robert Berger>> That's the thing. Los Angeles is not known for
its architectural history, but there is a great variety of
modernistic and baroque. It's all here, but people don't know
it. One of the reasons I do these books is to -- if you don't
drive through these neighborhoods, people who live on the west
side are not going to go to South Central to see places like
that. That's why I do it, to bring people into these houses of
worship they normally wouldn't see because it's not their
religion or outside their daily routine.

They're realizing, in these places they drive by every day,
there is something special inside that they never notice. They
drive by the buildings, it looks nice, but they keep going. Now
they're stopping to get out of cars and look. It's very
gratifying for me to hear that. In such a multi-cultural
society that we have, it's great to be everybody together around
aesthetics. I mean, everybody can appreciate what these places
are about and what they look like. I mean, I'm not a terribly
spiritual person or religious, but I mean the architecture and
the craftsmanship in these places are just amazing to me. It's
very stunning.

[Film Clip]

Val>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at
Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Philip Bruce>> Next time on Life and Times, sending tax dollars
to religious groups. Is it sound policy or just politics?

>> All of America knows that whomever is in office or power
pander to their constituencies. That's the truth, and right now
we know that the current administration panders to the religious
right.

Philip Bruce>> That's next time on Life and Times.