06/01/04

LC040601

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

A piece of local history that's about to come crashing down and
no one is protesting.

Mark Capelli>> It's pretty much unanimous that this dam has
outlived its usefulness. It doesn't really supply any kind of
water of any significance. It provides no flood protection.
The dam is really ready to come down.

Val>> And then, he's called The Greatest and we'll meet the man
who's his best friend and who has captured his triumphs over the
years.

It's all straight ahead 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>> A relic from the past is about to come crashing down in
the hills above the town of Ojai. It is a dam built along the
Ventura River. Originally, it was a sign of growth and
progress, but now it's regarded as a colossal mistake. Philip
Bruce took us to the scene four years ago and we thought we'd
take another look at the biggest dam in America that's targeted
for demolition.

Philip Bruce>> This is a place called the Matilija Valley and
this is a river that runs through it. Follow the water and
you'll find a path that starts high in the mountains of Ventura
County and zigzags downhill for about sixteen miles past Ojai,
the freeways and toward the ocean. It looks like a spot where
all is right with nature, but the danger to this river comes
from the things you cannot see and from the one very big thing
that you can.

This is the Matilija Dam, a monument of sorts to a bygone day.
It's been here for more than half a century, but today everybody
agrees it's killing the river and they say the dam has got to
come down.

Mark Capelli>> Well, the first thing to do is to figure out how
to get rid of the concrete that forms the dam and then also to
get rid of the sediment that's built up behind the dam.

Philip Bruce>> Nobody knows more about the river and the dam
than Mark Capelli. He's spent at least half his life worrying
about both.

Mark Capelli>> It's pretty much unanimous that this dam has
outlived its usefulness. It doesn't really supply any kind of
water of any significance. It provides no flood protection.
The dam is really ready to come down.

Philip Bruce>> The Matilija Creek feeds the Ventura River, but
the dam has become a giant barrier that interrupts the natural
flow of life. That includes most kinds of fish, especially the
once plentiful steelhead, now officially endangered and all but
invisible in these waters. And then there's the problem with
the tons of sediment that's collected behind the dam, so much of
it that the once bountiful reservoir has been reduced from seven
thousand acre feet of water to just five hundred acre feet.

Mark Capelli>> Sand and gravel, everything from silt to car-
size boulders, have been stopped by the dam and they're
accumulating behind the dam. So the reservoir itself, instead
of holding water, now holds mud and dirt and rock and gravel.

Philip Bruce>> People in Ventura County have known about the
problem for decades, but just this month they got an
environmental wakeup call. The Ventura River, long the source
of life and progress in this county, placed third on a list of
most endangered waterways in America and everybody knows why.
It's the dam.

John Flynn>> I think it was a mistake and we would never do
that again. It was a mistake. It was not useful as a dam for
very long or as a flood control device.

Philip Bruce>> John Flynn, a member of the Ventura County Board
of Supervisors, says the dam was a debacle almost from the
start. Built in 1947 to create a water supply for the booming
oil patch community that was then a dominant force, the
concrete giant quickly looked like a bum deal. It was built of
substandard materials and amid rumors of shady dealings. As for
worries about the impact on the environment, Ventura County in
1947 was no different than the rest of America. Nobody gave it
much thought.

John Flynn>> When I look at it now, I would say that mankind,
in this case, people in Ventura County, may have been thinking
well at the time, but maybe didn't think of all the consequences
of building a dam there.

Philip Bruce>> This is one of those rare environmental stories
where no real opposition has popped up to stand in the way of
getting rid of this dam, but there is an obstacle and that's
money. Back in the late 1940's, building it cost about three
million dollars, but today the cost of getting rid of the dam
could be fifty times as much.

This is how it used to look when the mountains of Ventura County
were free of dams and concrete. In those days, the river had an
unimpeded flow to the Pacific Ocean where it fed the beaches
with new sand. Look closely and you'll see a lady in a pretty
dress standing on the rocky riverbank sometime around 1880.
Back then and well into the 1940's, the river was filled with
steelhead, stringers-full just waiting to be caught. Those are
the days that John Flynn remembers as a little boy growing up in
Ventura.

John Flynn>> I used to walk across during certain times of the
year into that river and there would just be hundreds of
steelhead going up that river. They would hit your legs and
bounce off your legs, determined that they had a mission.

Philip Bruce>> Today, by some estimates, there may be as few as
fifty steelhead left in this same river John Flynn waded through
as a boy. And if the fish are gone, so is much of the beach.
The mouth of the Ventura River, not far from this spot, used to
provide seventy percent of the new sand here to replenish that
washed away by the ocean, but the dam stopped the sand from
washing downstream and now the beach is all the poorer for it.

Mark Capelli>> This is an example of the cracking the dam has
experienced. The dam has got an alkali aggregate reaction.
It's caused from mixing two different kinds of material from
different quarries.

Philip Bruce>> The good news is, experts say the dam is still
solid, just ugly. Long before the concrete has a chance to give
way, the county has promised to cut it out, blast it out or dig
it out. They've appealed to Congress to pay for it, since not
even a well-off county could afford to drop $150 million dollars
on a wrecking crew.

Once you get past all the practical concerns, things like how
they're going to tear down the dam and who's going to pay for
it, well, that's when the fun starts. Because that's when you
start looking around this place and wondering what it's going to
be like once all the concrete and steel are gone and the river
is back the way it used to be?

John Flynn>> You would never build a dam there today. The
people would not allow it.

Philip Bruce>> John Flynn says it was a different day and a
different time. Nobody ever thought that a dam could be bad,
but now that they know better, there's at least a chance to fix
it and the river that runs through this place may once again run
the way it was meant to.

Val>> It took nearly four years to come up with a demolition
plan that state, local and federal authorities could all agree
on. Now the only remaining challenge is finding the money to
pay for it.

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Val>> It's been six decades since the horrors of the Holocaust
after World War II were revealed to the world and since then
there's been a huge chasm between Germans and Jews, but there's
one organization in Los Angeles that is trying to bridge that
gap by bringing together the children of Nazis with the children
of Holocaust survivors. The program is called German-Jewish
Dialogue. Among its founders are Morrie Kagan and Cornelius
Schnauber. Morrie's parents are Holocaust survivors.
Cornelius's father was a Nazi. The two men are close friends.
I met them at the Max Kada Institute for German, Austrian and
Swiss Studies at USC where they told me about their lives.

Cornelius Schnauber>> I was born near Dresden, the East German
city, the beautiful baroque city of Dresden, and my father was
an early member of the Nazi party.

Morrie Kagan>> In many cases, as in my parents' case, they met
at a concentration camp. So you could always say that, if it
wasn't for Adolf Hitler, I would not be here today. A rather
sad statement, but in fact.

Cornelius Schnauber>> He was not ambitious as though he didn't
want to become one of the leaders, but when the Nazis took over,
he had a good job first in the Nazi unions and then later on
during the war in the Nazi Red Cross.

Morrie Kagan>> Eventually, though, they were separated and sent
to different camps. After the war, my father actually traveled
throughout Germany trying to locate my mother and eventually, of
course, did in the displaced persons camp outside of Munich.

Cornelius Schnauber>> My grandparents brought up the issue of
where did the Jews go? Where did they take them? Then my
father said they were deported to a foreign country, so he never
accepted the fact that Jews were intentionally killed.

Val>> Cornelius Schnauber was six years old when the war ended.
He became a noted intellectual and professor. He met his wife,
an American from Stanford, and they settled in Los Angeles.

Cornelius Schnauber>> And there was a drawing --

Morrie Kagan>> -- this is a pen and ink.

Val>> Morrie's parents also settled in Los Angeles. His father
was a jeweler and an artist. His work captures some of the
horrors of the concentration camps.

Morrie Kagan>> They were carrying a number of bodies to a
funeral pyre where they were going to be burned. Cornelius
Schnauber, who I also call my brother in history, came into my
life in late 1986.

Val>> That was when the German-Jewish Dialogue began. About
three hundred Germans and Jews have participated in these
intense conversations guided by specific rules. How do you talk
to each other with that kind of history?

Morrie Kagan>> Well, you know, it could be very easy to sit
there and point fingers at people, but we learned and we realize
that the people we're talking to were not the perpetrators.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Nobody who participated in the German-
Jewish Dialogue made me responsible for what happened during the
Nazi period, but I always have guilt feelings because I come
from the nation which put Hitler into power.

Morrie Kagan>> One of the key elements was how do we as Jews
and Germans define the term Nazi? We as Jews discovered that we
had a far broader definition of the term Nazi, as did Germans.
In the Jewish world, almost all Germans were Nazis and this
comes from the heart and the gut. It's a very visceral
response. Germans looked at it a bit more clinically. Nazis
were individuals who were members of the Nazi party.

Cornelius Schnauber>> You can say in one sentence that six
million Jews were killed between 1933 and 1945 and that's one
sentence, but each of those six million Jews was a person like
you and me and that I wanted to tell the future generation.
Don't take it just as descendants of home history books.

Morrie Kagan>> The Dialogue is not an intellectual
conversation. You are not there to be an academic. You are
there, you're speaking from the heart, you're speaking from the
soul.

Cornelius Schnauber>> You are at home, have a nice home
probably, and then suddenly in the nighttime, the SS knocks at
the door, pulls you out, puts you in a train where they usually
transport animals and then a concentration camp. Either you
were killed or you had to do slave labor.

Morrie Kagan>> Anger remains a very dominant factor within the
Jewish community to this day. Many, many Jews will not set foot
in Germany or buy German products.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Fortunately, during this Dialogue, many
of these angry people became, I will not say soft, but they now
have second thoughts.

Morrie Kagan>> It's important to know that the Germany of 1933
to 1945 is no more, that Germany today has transformed itself.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Let's say, if you're in Germany now and a
skinhead attacks you as a Jew, you can always get help from the
government. But at that time, and that makes you even more
frustrated, it was the government itself which killed and
discriminated against the Jews.

Val>> What was one of the things you learned that was kind of
revelatory for you in the course of the Dialogues?

Morrie Kagan>> Of course, we had much more in common than not.
Also, the fact that pain is relative. That is, I could feel my
parents' pain and I feel the pain of loss and I feel the pain
that I never knew my grandparents, that they died in those
years. That is my pain and I own that pain, but I also learned
that the Germans -- and we also have Austrians in the group as
well -- suffered from pain as well. The pain of shame is a
different kind of pain, but nevertheless a pain. So we had to
learn to value that as well.

Cornelius Schnauber>> I cannot put guilt feeling into the third
generation and not my goal either, but responsibility. I always
tell them that, if you are proud that you come from a nation of
Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Einstein, who had to escape
from Germany, then you also should take the responsibility of
what happened between 1933 and 1945 and work hard that something
like that should never happen again.

Morrie Kagan>> I'm afraid that anti-Semitism in the world is an
ongoing thing. It's been here for millennia and I don't think
that the German-Jewish Dialogue will end it. I'm not that
naïve. Although we learn from history, it tends to repeat
itself, so I can only speak for my generation and perhaps hope
that my son's generation, our children's generations, can learn
a bit more from it and teach that to their children.

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Val>> He's taken more than a million photographs of his best
friend. A little excessive, you say? Well, consider that the
friend is Muhammad Ali and the photographer is the legendary
Howard Bingham. These two have been pals for over forty years.
Now they're joining forces again in what may be the biggest
coffee table book ever published. As Philip Bruce reports, it's
a major milestone for Bingham after decades of training his lens
on the greatest of all time.

Philip Bruce>> When Howard Bingham took up photography, he
thought he was leaving heavy lifting behind, but then came
"GOAT", short for the Greatest of All Time, a heavyweight book
about the heavyweight champ of boxing. We thought Howard was
kidding when he hauled the book in on a cart, but soon enough we
discovered he wasn't.

Howard Bingham>> Easy now, because it's heavy.

Philip Bruce>> Yeah, thanks for telling me (laughter). At
seventy-five pounds, it's more of a coffee table than a coffee
table book and, as we struggled to get it out of the box, it's
clear that Howard is just a little anxious to see the finished
product for the first time. It's big, all right, but is it
good? We'll find out in a moment. But first, a little side
trip down memory lane when Howard Bingham met a young fighter
forty-two years ago.

Howard Bingham>> I was with a black weekly paper called the Los
Angeles Sentinel and my assignment was to cover this big loud-
mouth coming to town. I never heard of him before because I
wasn't interested in boxing then and I wasn't interested in the
Olympics. So I went to the news conference and introduced
myself and took a photograph and left.

Later on that afternoon, I was driving down Broadway in Los
Angeles and I saw him and his brother on the corner of Fifth and
Broadway just standing at the bus stop. I thought they were
waiting on a bus, so I hollered out and said, hey, you need a
ride? They said no, they were just hanging out. I said I have
some errands to run and, if you want to see Los Angeles and meet
some people, I'll take you around. So they said, okay, fine.

Philip Bruce>> That's how the friendship began and, from that
unlikely start, Howard Bingham has had a ringside seat to
history watching as a young Cassius Clay transformed into
Muhammad Ali. He's captured most every moment of it on film.
Reporters and photographers don't normally become best friends
with people they cover.

Howard Bingham>> Yeah, but Ali was a special individual. You
know, it was a great fortune for him to meet me (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> The images show that Bingham has the eye of an
artist and he could have hardly asked for a better subject. To
look at these photos is to peer inside the soul of Ali. His
triumphs and his tragedies went far beyond the boxing ring and,
every step of the way, Howard Bingham was there with his camera
with the kind of access that only a friend would have. What's
it been like being near him through this incredible life? I
mean, he has had a life that not only will go into the history
books, I mean the history is still being written.

Howard Bingham>> Oh, man, it's unbelievable. I think that I'm
the luckiest man alive, you know. What I do, how I do, you
know, I have to really thank him for meeting me and thank him
for giving me the opportunity to be your friend, and I was his
friend too. Just to have seen the world with him and to just
meet people, you know, kings and queens. You know, just
everybody all over the world.

Philip Bruce>> The fight pictures are what made Howard famous.
When Ali was King of the Ring, major magazines like Sports
Illustrated and Life couldn't get enough.

Howard Bingham>> All of the Ali fights were events. You know,
they weren't just fights, they were events. It was a place for
people to be even if they weren't at the fights. Just to be
around the hotels because they were all big shows. People would
come in dressed and to show off just to be seen. It's
wonderful.

Philip Bruce>> But the adulation of boxing was nothing compared
to the huge crowds that turned out when they went to Africa.
That's where Ali met Malcolm X. The trip changed the lives of
both men.

[Film Clip]

Howard Bingham>> That was when we saw Malcolm on the way over
to Mecca. We met and talked.

Philip Bruce>> We've seen that portrayed in the movie.

Howard Bingham>> In the movie, yeah.

Philip Bruce>> How accurate was that?

Howard Bingham>> Pretty accurate. Very accurate.

Philip Bruce>> That was a real milestone in his life. I mean,
that changed Muhammad forever.

Howard Bingham>> Malcolm too, yeah. Malcolm went over there
and said he saw Muslims in all colors, you know, so it was a big
experience for him. That's what changed him.

Philip Bruce>> How did he react to how he connected with not
just black kids, but white kids? In the late sixties, he stood
for so much for so many. I mean, what did that mean to him?

Howard Bingham>> Well, I don't think that even now he
recognizes how much influence that he's had on people all over
since he's been involved, you know, since he's been
controversial with the Muslims and with the draft and just with
everything.

Philip Bruce>> It's no wonder then that Howard is a little
nervous about the new book as the wrapping comes off for the
first time.

Howard Bingham>> Boy, you can get a hernia picking this up.

Philip Bruce>> You sure do. That is beautiful, gorgeous.

Howard Bingham>> This here is the 1967 fight with Ali after
knocking down the big cat, Cleveland Williams. Here we go.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

Philip Bruce>> This is it.

Howard Bingham>> This is it, Jack. I mean, Phil (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> The publisher has spared no expense. The book
is bound in Louie Baton leather by the same people who do work
for the Vatican. They'll only produce ten thousand copies.
Some will sell for $7,500 each and each one carries Ali's
personal autograph. But to Howard, the pictures are what
counts. He's one of two principal photographers. Will he be
disappointed at how it all turned out? Hardly.

Howard Bingham>> To see this and to know that this is going to
be here forever, you know, this is amazing.

Philip Bruce>> Even for the great Howard Bingham who has been
everywhere and seen everything, the experience is unique. His
photographs have been reproduced on these pages in flawless
detail and each one has its own story.

Howard Bingham>> And this is Ali's favorite photograph because
these are his idols. This was taken in 1962 in Los Angeles
here. Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Lewis, the dancer and the
puncher.

Philip Bruce>> Ali may be the star, but Howard Bingham is
clearly a featured player with some time in front of the camera
as well as behind it. There are many personal photographs of
the two friends sharing enough adventures for ten normal
lifetimes. To leaf through this book is to experience their
walk through history.

Howard Bingham>> Who else could you imagine that could warrant
a book like this that would ever sell at this price?

Philip Bruce>> And it's been an amazing journey for Howard
Bingham, almost unimaginable for a struggling kid from South Los
Angeles who flunked out of Compton Junior College and wondered
if he would ever land a real job. You've not done bad for a guy
who flunked photography class.

Howard Bingham>> (Laughter) No, knock on wood. As I said,
I've been a blessed human being. I'll be sixty-five in May and
I'm still going, and will go.

Val>> Howard Bingham has traveled the world with his camera,
but he remains a Los Angeles resident and his photographs are
often on display at community centers and art galleries around
the city. 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.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times, a former child actress is
crusading for animals, but stirs up old pain about the death of
a child.

>> I'm sorry if they have been drawn back in, but I don't feel
I drew them back in. The whole controversy of killing these
coyotes drew them back in.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.