06/24/04

LC040624

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Senior citizens blazing a trail where no others have gone before, but what's in it for retirees when they go urban?

Leonard Ellsworth>> I'm on a fixed income, right? But I still survive here. I couldn't do that like in Burbank or Los Angeles or Glendale. It's too high over there.

Val>> And then, he wrote songs about a troubled America and became a folk music legend, so how did Woody Guthrie also wind up with an FBI record?

Those stories and more 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>> Los Angeles and other cities are trying to revitalize their downtowns by attracting young hip singles, those creative professionals with no kids who love lattes and loft living. But one town in the high desert is taking a very different approach. Instead of yuppies, they're saying give me your retired, your elderly, your seniors on social security. I went to Lancaster to learn more about this unusual downtown development strategy.

Lancaster, about an hour's drive north of Los Angeles, but chances are you've never driven through its downtown. Once you do, you can't miss signs of what helped build Lancaster, but the era of aerospace is over and planners hope to usher in a new source of life. The key are folks like this gentleman. That's right. Lancaster city officials are betting the future of their downtown on the elderly.

Steve Malicot>> Well, it's pretty exciting. The city of Lancaster is really working very hard to develop this, what they call the downtown site.

Val>> Steve Malicot is head of Lancaster's Chamber of Commerce.

Steve Malicot>> They've torn down a lot of the old apartments that were here that were in disrepair, some of the old houses, and their redevelopment plan includes a Senior Center. We have one over here now, but they're going to continue to work that, and it's really going to be a very nice area particularly for seniors.

Val>> The idea is simple. There is already a post office, library, museum, Metrolink station and Senior Center, all within walking distance. Why not build plenty of affordable senior housing and make it a Mecca for the retired? Frank Roberts is the Mayor of Lancaster. How did you decide that would be your strategy?

Frank Roberts>> Well, we know that the population of this particular region and lot of regions of California are aging and it's because we live longer, we have better healthcare -- I'm sure that must be the reason -- but it wasn't too many years ago that sixty years old was kind of an old person. Now I'm seventy-two and I feel like I'm going to live another twenty years at least because I do everything I want to do and that's happening.

Val>> We stopped by the Senior Center just a few blocks off the main street. One of the busiest rooms was the pool room. Leonard Ellsworth is the kind of person Lancaster wants more of.

Leonard Ellsworth>> It's great country here. You know, especially you go shopping, you can go anywhere, you can drive anywhere. Not like Los Angeles.

Val>> Statistics show that, over the next fifteen years, the number of residents over sixty in Lancaster and Palmdale will nearly double, a fact not lost on City Planner, Mark Bozigian.

Mark Bozigian>> There are restaurants, there are pharmacies. It's more of an older type of downtown feel to it, fifties, sixties, seventies. So it's more of that quaint downtown feel, the mom and pop shop.

Val>> Which they feel comfortable with.

Mark Bozigian>> They would feel comfortable. I mean, a lot of communities try to build a fake downtown, if you will, to replicate it. Well, we have a real downtown, so we're just putting housing with it.

Val>> Affordable housing is the key to attracting seniors. That's why ground is already broken on this 116-unit apartment building. Soon this -- will look like this.

Mark Bozigian>> That will be a gorgeous, gorgeous Tuscan style villa type of apartments and they'll start at $560.

Val>> $560 a month for a brand new apartment?

Mark Bozigian>> Brand new apartments, absolutely gorgeous, brand new construction.

Frank Roberts>> Most of these senior citizens projects, the minute they get them started, there's already a waiting list for the people to get in.

Val>> The Transit Village, as they call it, will mean the demolition of older homes to make way for new parks, schools, a childcare facility and youth center, along with refurbished churches and a spruced-up commercial section. But seniors may not be the only ones drawn to the new downtown. Just a few blocks south of the main boulevard, you'll find a new coffee shop. Inside it looks like a set from "Friends", but its clientele is of all ages. Mary Faux is a long-time resident of Lancaster and owner of Perk Place.

Mary Faux>> And I feel right now it's really a place for everybody. I have the youth that come at night, I have the business people that come in the morning and then I have the seniors that come in the afternoon for lunch, sometimes for dinner. So it's a little bit -- what's cool is that even my seniors come in here and even with the colors, they have to think twice, but they still just think it's pretty great.

Val>> She's excited about the plans for downtown Lancaster.

Mary Faux>> Of all the places I thought about doing it in the Antelope Valley, this was the only place I considered because of the downtown air. I just love the downtown area. I could have gone to the west side of Palmdale. It's blooming like crazy, but downtown is where I want to be.

Val>> Whether Lancaster's metamorphosis succeeds will also depend on two other important services. One is medical care and the other is police protection. Mayor Roberts says medical care is not a problem.

Frank Roberts>> There's any number of doctors' offices available to them, I guess, in walking distance, but of course, the main thing is we have the large major hospital, the largest one and the only real major hospital in this region, and it's the Antelope Valley Hospital Medical Center.

Val>> As for safety, Lancaster's crime record has not been the best, but once again, Mayor Roberts is confident.

Frank Roberts>> We are going to be putting another group of deputies on the streets through Baca, who is the Sheriff of this county, and we do California Contract Cities through Lee Baca, so we'll be having about another third more deputies around.

Leonard Ellsworth>> How about Los Angeles? Take one of those cities, Philadelphia. There's plenty of crime there. Actually, this is a nice community. Besides, we've got the sheriffs. They're there. When I had my bypass, right? I called 911. I had to do it by myself. They were there within about five minutes. Saved me.

Val>> So how will Lancaster with a population of 130,000 finance this $125 million dollar project? The key, they say, is public and private partnerships and Lancaster is known for being developer-friendly.

Mark Bozigian>> We welcome development here. We fast-track development and we try to partner with quality developers. We look at it as the city can't do everything on its own and the Redevelopment Agency can't, so we bring in partners.

Val>> They also have plenty of sales tax revenues coming in from big-box stores that are proliferating on the west side of town. While Wal-Mart may spark a battle in other cities, not in Lancaster, who will have two of them soon.

Mark Bozigian>> And those type of big-box uses or large retailers generate sales tax which allows us to fund projects like this and public safety and such.

Val>> So there's no conflict or clash between these two sort of areas of town or styles?

Mark Bozigian>> No, not at all.

Val>> So what will downtown Lancaster look like in five to ten years?

Mary Faux>> Oh, I think this will be the place to be. The ambiance will be here. The atmosphere will be in this area.

Mark Bozigian>> People are living so much longer and the baby boomers are getting to be in their sixties, and the baby boomers have a much different expectation for retirement than probably their parents did and they're going to expect more activities, more city types of services, more socialization, coffee shops. They're much more active, so, yeah, we think it's a great mix.

Leonard Ellsworth>> I live in an apartment, but I'm on a fixed income, right? But I still survive here. I couldn't do that like in Burbank or Los Angeles or Glendale. It's too high over there. The rent's too high.

Val>> You're staying put?

Leonard Ellsworth>> Oh, yeah, I'm staying here. This is God's country.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".

Val>> At the height of the Great Depression when scores of people were looking for some new promised land, Woody Guthrie arrived in Los Angeles with a guitar and a trunk full of songs. Today he's remembered as a folk music legend, but as it turns out, the real Woody Guthrie was a lot more complicated than the friendly country boy he seemed to be. A new book tells the story. It's called "Ramblin' Man". The author is Ed Cray and he tells Philip Bruce a few of the things he learned about Woody Guthrie.

Philip Bruce>> Ed Cray, a lot of people think they know what Woody Guthrie was all about. There's a hobo poet laureate strumming a guitar up there, but you say there was a lot more to him than what we've seen.

Ed Cray>> There's a great deal more. First of all, Woody Guthrie was not born poor. He was born into middle class. His father was a very successful real estate agent in Okemah, Oklahoma. Woody, though not a good student, went through high school, didn't graduate, came out of high school with having two classes that profoundly impacted him. One was tenth grade English class where he learned how to put the commas and spell and semicolons. The other was a class in typing. Woody Guthrie was a speed typist.

Philip Bruce>> A skill that came in handy, I assume, later on.

Ed Cray>> Considering that he also had his logophilia, this love of words, yes, it was a great asset.

[Musical Clip]

Ed Cray>> Woody wrote about poor people. He wrote about the poverty he'd seen. That's what gave birth, in fact, to "This Land". It was an anecdote to the saccharine streams of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America".

[Musical Clip]

Ed Cray>> Ultimately, he came in 1937 to California and he saw the farmworkers' plight. Now these were the Okies, the Arkies, as he called them, the "Texicans".

[Musical Clip]

Ed Cray>> It was that vision of California, the different vision than the Chamber of Commerce put forward, that radicalized him and he became a very major advocate of farmworkers in organizing. Well, the people who were organizing the farmworkers were communists supported by liberals of all stripes and persuasions. John Steinbeck, for example, organized the John Steinbeck Committee to aid farmworkers. Woody worked with Steinbeck. He worked with any number of people in Hollywood whose names resonate to this day. Lewis Milestone, John Garfield, John Huston and, of course, the legendary now Will Geer, Grandpa Walton on that television show.

Philip Bruce>> But did he ever get pulled up in front of Congress or any authorities like some of these other people you mentioned did?

Ed Cray>> No, he did not, and the reason was pretty simple. The FBI which did track Woody -- Woody has an FBI record. Oh, it's about forty pages long and it's silly. It's just a waste of your dollars and mine. I mean, somebody told the FBI that Woody Guthrie was a hidden saboteur whose job was to dynamite something. It was ridiculous, it was just absolute nonsense.

[Musical Clip]

Philip Bruce>> But his politics were to the left of most people of the country at that time, were they not?

Ed Cray>> Oh, certainly. Not decidedly to the left. He was what, in the jargon of the times, the Communist Party called a fellow traveler, what later the McCarthyites would call a "comm-symp".

Philip Bruce>> Not a member, but a communist sympathizer.

Ed Cray>> Yeah. Never a member of the party. He was too undisciplined. He was never asked to be a member because you couldn't tell Woody Guthrie to do anything. He wasn't going to sell the Daily Worker on the streets of Brooklyn, but he certainly sympathized with the aims of the Communist Party in the United States, as he made clear, because Woody Guthrie was intensely patriotic, an intense American patriot.

[Musical Clip]

Ed Cray>> The FBI realized that Woody was sick. By the early 1950's when this Red Hunt was in full cry, Woody was already quite ill.

Philip Bruce>> In fact, he was developing Huntington's Disease which his mother had died from. Is that right?

Ed Cray>> Yes, exactly. That later would, in fact, this nerve disease destroyed him. The mind always worked. That's one of the great cruelties of this disease. Woody spent the last thirteen years of his life in hospitals. They couldn't do a damn thing for him, but his mind was always working.

Philip Bruce>> Do you think he would have been surprised that people still remember him nowadays? Was he aware of his legacy?

Ed Cray>> No, he was not. Woody was in some ways a very modest man. He wrote songs and never copyrighted them. He felt that, if you sang one of his songs, you did him a favor. He wasn't looking for immortality.

Philip Bruce>> What about money?

Ed Cray>> He never made much. In fact, any year now the Woody Guthrie Foundation earns more from Woody's tunes than any one year that Woody made in his entire adult life.

[Musical Clip]

Philip Bruce>> Well, the book is called "Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie". Ed Cray, thanks so much for spending some time with us.

Ed Cray>> Thank you.

[Musical Clip]

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> It took only 150 years, but Los Angeles's Chinese-American community finally has a museum dedicated to its own unique experience. The museum opened last December, but within just a few months, it has tripled in size. It now occupies all of this historic Garnier Building. I took a tour of the museum right before its grand opening.

The Chinese-American Museum is housed in the Garnier Building. It was built in 1890 by a French settler, but for decades it was leased to Chinese merchants, religious and civic groups and it is the last surviving structure from Los Angeles's original Chinatown. Sonia Mak, you are the Assistant Curator of the new Chinese-American Museum. It must be really exciting.

Sonia Mak>> Yes, it is.

Val>> And one of the most gorgeous exhibits is one by Tyrus Wong. Tell us who he is in case people don't know.

Sonia Mak>> Tyrus Wong is an early well-known Chinese-American artist and he's ninety-three.

Val>> Ninety-three years old and still painting?

Sonia Mak>> Yes, and is sharp as a tack. In the last thirty years of his retirement, he's been designing and building and flying his own Chinese traditional kites at Santa Monica Beach once a month.

Val>> At age ninety-three?

Sonia Mak>> At age ninety-three, yes.

Val>> But he had an amazing career. It started very young.

Sonia Mak>> Absolutely. It was a talent that his father encouraged from very early on. You can see in his work throughout this exhibit that he's always drawn on traditional Chinese painting styles at the same time that he's used what he's learned at art school, at Otis.

Val>> And people may also know his work because of his work in film. Disney pictures, right?

Sonia Mak>> Right, right. "Bambi" is an important Disney film that he actually designed the backdrops for. So if the backdrops in "Bambi" remind you of Chinese landscape paintings, it's because of Tyrus Wong. You know, beyond his work as an animator and illustrator, he's also worked as a production illustrator for Warner Bros. and he's painted murals and decorated restaurants.

Val>> People have probably seen his work and not even realized it.

Sonia Mak>> Exactly. You know, one of the things that he's mentioned to me about his long career as a commercial artist was that, amazingly, he was actually protected from a lot of the discrimination in the movie and entertainment industry by being an "anonymous" commercial artist. We wouldn't dream of opening a museum without having included Tyrus Wong. He's very close to us. He's very close to our hearts.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Now you also have a wonderful collection of photographs which documents the history, of course, of Chinese-Americans, yes?

Sonia Mak>> Right.

Val>> Where does it come from?

Sonia Mak>> This is a neighborhood stories exhibit and it's a photography exhibition about the four earliest Chinese-American neighborhoods here in Los Angeles. The original Chinatown, Market Chinatown, New Chinatown and China City. Now these neighborhoods existed concurrently, but some faded away. This photographic exhibit is about providing visitors with a glimpse of what those communities once were and how they began.

Val>> I see. So a glimpse into each one of the four.

Sonia Mak>> Right, exactly. New Chinatown, which we have photographs of over there, is the only community that continues to exist. You know, oftentimes when people ask us about what this museum is about, oftentimes we say it's about the American dream from the Chinese-American perspective. But I would say that it's not only about Chinese-American dreams, it's about Chinese-American realities.

Val>> Geneva Tien-Witzleben, nice to meet you. You are the educator for the Chinese-American Museum and this is a wonderful way to educate people. It's an actual store that existed in Old Chinatown?

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> Yeah, this is a re-creation of the Sun Ling Wo General Store and Herb Shop. Not only was it part of the original Chinatown, it was housed in this actual building that our museum is in. We have re-created the store to give it's face --

Val>> -- it really looks authentic.

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> Yeah.

Val>> But this is not real? This is re-created?

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> This is re-created, but actually the artifacts you see in the cabinet are from the late 1890's to the early 1900's, so these are actual things that were used in the community donated by community members.

Val>> I see. Were there photographs or something to guide you?

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> Exactly. We have very few interior photographs, but through oral histories, we know the multi-purpose function of the space. What was so special about the Sun Ling Wo store is that it was actually a real hub of activity in the Chinese community. If you look on the shelves, you can see that you could buy furniture, you could buy clothing, there was canned goods. In the herb shop, you could also practice Chinese medicine.

Val>> An herb shop?

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> Yeah, what was really beneficial for the Chinese is that they were able to retain part of their traditional practices here in the United States through services such as the Chinese herb shop. They could come here and get prescribed traditional herbs. They could use acupuncture, so this is a form of medicine that they brought with them.

Val>> And it's coming back these days.

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> Exactly. It's spreading to U.S. mainstream culture.

Val>> Yeah, we have many people draw upon Chinese traditional medicine these days.

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> So in this store, we're really trying to bridge the past with the present.

Val>> Why did it take so long to have a Chinese-American Museum? It seems so obvious to have one.

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> A lot of it was funding. That's a huge part. This is an historic building that we're in, so that's why we are officially a part of the city of Los Angeles. We had to actually purchase the space that we're in. We really had to work very hard to acquire all of these artifacts, to talk to community members and get their stories so we can figure out, you know, what were all the functions? What were these used for? What was our history here in Los Angeles?

Val>> What do you hope that it will bring and mean to the Chinese-American community here in Los Angeles?

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> The sense of really historic and special occasion for not only Chinese-Americans, but all people in Los Angeles because we are finally able to sort of take back this space that was historically ours, that we've established so much of our history and lives here, and share that with the general public. I think as people of color in the United States, oftentimes our history is forgotten and completely obliterated. So now here's an actual physical space where we can share that, where we can come and learn about that and hopefully it will continue.

Val>> Do you hope that it will inspire or trigger Chinese-American families to come forward with photographs and things that they may have that you never knew were out there?

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> Right. As the educator of the museum, our educational philosophy and guiding principle is to really use Chinese-American history, culture and experience as a vehicle through which to engage other people with that of their own. So not only other Chinese-Americans, but we hope that all the local Latino or Chicano population in the larger El Pueblo area will make them curious about their own history. How does that connect to our history as Chinese-Americans? The international tourists that come through here? We really want people to feel like they have ownership over this as much as we do.

Val>> Geneva, thank you so much. That was wonderful. Good luck.

Geneva Tien-Witzleben>> Thank you, Val.

Val>> The Garnier Building was owned by the city of Los Angeles, but by a unanimous vote of the Los Angeles City Council, the city donated the building to the Chinese-American Museum. Museum leaders were thrilled because this is the last remaining building from Los Angeles's original Chinatown. 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 familiar face with a hidden talent. It's a side of Dennis Hopper you won't see on the big screen.

Dennis Hopper>> To be an artist, to me, is a state of mind. It's just part of you. It doesn't really have much to do with anything else. It's the way you stay alive. It's your juice that keeps you moving, you know?

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