11/23/04

LC041123

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

This engineer designed the cheapest wheelchair in the world.
Now it's making a world of difference.

Don Schoendorfer>> The people we're trying to serve are
literally living on the ground. All we really want to do is get
them up off the ground, restore some dignity to them, give them
a chance for a better life.

Val>> And then, fans can't get enough of this famous detective.
We meet Los Angeles's foremost Sherlockian about the case of
"The Annotated Sherlock Holmes".

These stories and more 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.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> What can you do with $42.00 these days? Not much. Fill
up your tank, take the kids to a movie, or change a person's
life forever. That's what one Tustin engineer has been doing a
thousand times over. How? Take a look.

Don Schoendorfer is an MIT educated engineer from Tustin with
more than fifty patents for sophisticated inventions, but the
product he is most proud of is this: the cheapest wheelchair in
the world made from a three-dollar plastic lawn chair, bicycle
tires and a simple but strong frame. Cost? $32.00 plus $10.00
for shipping and distribution. Total? $42.00. And who would
want a wheelchair like this? Only about 150 million people in
poor countries across the globe.

Don Schoendorfer>> The people we're trying to serve are
literally living on the ground.

Val>> It all started back in 1979 with a vacation he and his
wife took to Morocco. They saw something there they'd never
forget.

Don Schoendorfer>> On a dirt road in the midst of sort of a
line of beggars, this woman using fingernails for traction
trying to get, with pretty much one hand, across the road.
There were carts being pulled by donkeys and there were people
and she's filthy because she's been dragging herself all her
life and she's not able even to become a beggar. She's so far
even beneath that trade and the beggars are all sneering at her
because she's distracting us. We're not looking at the beggars
anymore. We're just in awe of this woman and trying to figure
out what to do to help her.

Val>> Years passed after that vacation, but the image of the
woman never went away. Don vowed to do something, but first he
had to become independently wealthy, or so he thought.

Don Schoendorfer>> So I'm thinking, well, I'll just make all
this money first and then I can do these things that I want to
do without asking, independently. Then twenty-five years go by
and I'm not making this, it's not getting there. Meanwhile,
what I really wanted to do was being prevented. I was being
prevented from getting there because I had this imaginary
accomplishment to reach first.

Val>> More years went by. He was successful, but getting rich
was harder than he thought.

Don Schoendorfer>> Then I said, well, what if I didn't worry
about the money part of it? What if I just used the skills that
God gave me as an engineer? I started looking into something.
I didn't know what it was. I just wanted a change. Then the
idea of this wheelchair started to come back.

Val>> He began researching how many people in the world needed
wheelchairs. It was a staggering 150 million.

Don Schoendorfer>> Essentially half the population of the
United States are crawling on the ground or being carried or
living in their beds because they don't have a wheelchair.

Val>> Yet conventional wheelchairs have been distributed to
less than one percent of the people who need them. Don knew he
could do better, so he spent several months perfecting the
design. Then a group from his church was going to India on a
medical mission and he saw his chance to put the chair to the
test.

Don Schoendorfer>> The first wheelchair was for an eleven year
old who had been carried all his life. The second wheelchair
was for a seventeen year old girl who lived on a mat on the
floor in a mud hut. You pick these people up and they don't
know what's going on. Charity is a very uncommon thing in
India. You drop them into a wheelchair and you take pictures
and they think you're probably just going to take the wheelchair
back after you've gotten your pictures.

So they don't really understand until you drive away that it's
their wheelchair. Of course, there are communication problems
too because you don't know the language or culture or anything
else, so as we're driving away, the people are thanking us,
running after us, you know, starting to realize that it's their
wheelchair.

Val>> Don says the happiest moments of his life are often
followed by the saddest.

Don Schoendorfer>> Because as we looked around, there was a
camp for handicapped people in Rwanda and Angola, and the people
who got there first were the ones who were most mobile. So we
gave the four wheelchairs away that we had and we turned around
and there were probably another dozen people that didn't have
the mobility -- in fact, one lady was blind and she was just
sort of going in zigzags. She could hear the commotion and she
was trying to get to the place where we could get her a
wheelchair and we didn't have any left.

Val>> Although he may not look like it, Don is now a full-time
foundation director with a staff of three, a Board of Directors
and more than a thousand volunteers, like his friend David in
Mexico.

David Day>> Brother Don was making them in his garage and he
gifted me with a handful of them. I thought, you know, I don't
know. The people that I serve in southern Mexico just up from
Chiapas really need wheelchairs, but we loaded them up on top of
the van and drove them down to Mexico into the remote mountain
areas, and people were stopping us with needs.

Don Schoendorfer>> In most of these countries, there is no
social welfare system or medical system to keep them alive, but
there's a real burden to keep somebody who's handicapped alive
because you have to carry them. You have to change their
clothes. You have to take them out to go to the bathroom. You
have to do all this stuff. At first, we were thinking it's just
the individual we're helping. Then we realized that it's the
whole family that's enjoying the appreciation for this because
the wheelchair is taking the burden off of them.

Val>> Sometimes at wheelchair donation ceremonies, Don would
notice how many of the recipients were dressed up in festive
clothing and jewelry. He knew how poor they were and he
wondered how that could be.

Don Schoendorfer>> And I finally asked one of the mission
people that we were with and they said, "You just don't
understand. You really don't understand. This is their
graduation. It would be like your daughter or your son
graduating from college. They're graduating from their
immobility and from living on the ground. It might be the best
thing that's ever happened to them in their whole life."
They'll actually go out and borrow these clothes and they'll
clean them themselves and they'll dress up because it's like a
graduation. It's just amazing. Can you imagine getting dressed
up to get a wheelchair?

Val>> The wheelchair mission got rolling in 2001 and, since
then, it's gained speed. Year one? One hundred wheelchairs
were distributed. Year two? Five thousand. And this year,
21,000. Don's ultimate goal? To give out twenty million free
wheelchairs around the world.

Don Schoendorfer>> When I look at people who have a business
sense about them, they say this is impossible. You can't do
this. But I have a hard time explaining how we did it already
for three years growing by a factor of three. So it's a God-
sized goal and it's clear to us that it's a faith-based mission,
that we're not doing this on our own anyway.

Val>> As for his goal of being a millionaire, he is in a way.
Donations to the Free Wheelchair Mission are nearing two million
dollars. At $42.00 apiece, that's a lot of wheelchairs. You
tell the story of one man who came up and grabbed hold of the
wheel and wouldn't let go?

Don Schoendorfer>> Wouldn't let go. He wasn't like he was
wanting to fight about it, but it was something that, if I let
go, I may lose this opportunity to have a wheelchair, so I'm
just going to hold onto it. I was making adjustments to the
wheelchair and he was trying to help as best he could and he was
just looking up like, please, please. I could almost feel him
praying that he would get that wheelchair. So at the end, he
hopped right in it and away he went.

Val>> If you'd like more information about the wheelchair
project, you can go to Don Schoendorfer's website at
freewheelchairmission.org.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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and Times".

Val>> And now for an update on a past Life and Times story. A
couple of weeks ago, we brought you a report on the eleventh
hour efforts to save an historic theatre in the heart of
Fullerton. The Fox Theatre was built in 1925 by the same firm
that built Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, but it's been
closed for seventeen years, neglected and water-damaged.
Preservationists have been trying desperately to raise three and
a half million dollars to buy the theatre, but despite their
best efforts, they were still a million dollars short.

Announcer>> "Just imagine for a moment just beyond the iron
bars and all the graffiti is. . ."

Val>> Supporters have produced a CD to show what the Fox
Theatre could look like and they've made eleventh hour pleading
phone calls to donors. Supporters gathered several times in
front of the theatre and even stayed up all night to take
contributions, but the deadline to raise the money had already
been extended and could be extended no more.

Then last Tuesday, as if out of a movie, a man drove up to the
theatre, walked into the Foundation office and made a million
dollar contribution, cashier's check in hand. He had seen the
reports on TV and in the papers and he said he wanted to help.
One condition? He would remain anonymous. The theatre is now
in escrow and will be purchased by the Foundation. Their next
challenge? To restore the theatre to its former glory. That
will mean raising ten million more dollars, but they have time
for that and, in the meantime, the Fox Theatre has been saved
from the wrecking ball.

Val>> He's probably the best-known detective in the world and
you've seen him in various incarnations in film and on
television.

[Film Clip]

Val>> He is Sherlock Holmes and he's so vivid a character that
some people mistakenly believe that he was real. Now adding to
that impression is the publication of a two-volume set, "The
Annotated Sherlock Holmes", a collection of fifty-six short
stories by Holmes' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Patt
Morrison with its editor, Les Klinger, a foremost Sherlockian
from Los Angeles.

Patt Morrison>> When I was an adolescent, I had a crush on
three men. The first was dead, Rupert Brook, the poet. The
second was undead, Dracula. And the third, if he'd ever been
alive or if he was still alive, would be 150 years old now:
Sherlock Holmes. And Leslie Klinger, you have brought him to us
in a new incarnation, a new two-set volume of books. What is it
about Sherlock Holmes that, 150 years later, still holds on to
our imagination?

Leslie Klinger>> Holmes is this incredible character, always in
command, seems to know everything, and yet he is outside
society. He does his own thing. He's not bound by laws. He's
not bound by the rules of other people. He doesn't hold with
social invitations and niceties. He does what he thinks is the
right thing in any situation. Then I emphasize on top of that
we have the wonderfully appealing character of Dr. Watson.

Patt Morrison>> We love the Victorian era with the gas lamps
and the characters. It's so evocative. But Holmes has been put
into virtually every circumstance and every culture, been
translated into so many languages. He's in the future, he's
already in the past. He's just every man.

Leslie Klinger>> That's absolutely right. There are numerous
science fiction books that have been written about Holmes. We
have, I think, now over eighty languages into which the stories
have been translated and, of course, there are hundreds now of
films, very few of which are based on the original stories. I
think that the idea of a super-rational person, together with a
very human person in the form of Watson, makes an appealing form
for literature.

I think, frankly, that's the greatest contribution of the
stories to the mystery genre, the idea of having a very likable
narrator like Watson who tells these stories. That was the
great invention that hadn't occurred in earlier stories. I
mean, Holmes is not the first rational detective. That probably
goes to Dupin, Poe's creation. But there's no narrator of any
interest in those stories.

Patt Morrison>> How did you get hooked on Sherlock Holmes?

Leslie Klinger>> When I was in law school, I got a gift of the
William Baring-Gould annotated Sherlock Holmes and I got
addicted to the whole idea of this cult of Sherlock Holmes.
Because what that book did so well was added all of these
footnotes about the scholarship that had been done about
Sherlock Homes and introduced me to the world of Holmes beyond
just the bare stories.

Patt Morrison>> Some people just read the stories for the
enjoyment and move on and some people, like you, obsess about
this. There are questions that are eternally answered like, for
example, was there such a person as Sherlock Holmes? Those you
address in the specifics of what really amounts to a
concordance, the annotations.

Leslie Klinger>> The book clearly, we say, plays the game. The
game is Holmes and Watson --

Patt Morrison>> -- capital G, game.

Leslie Klinger>> Capital G, game. Holmes and Watson really
lived, these stories are true, so we studied these stories from
a biographical order or historical perspective. What I tried to
do in the book is to do that and present the full range of
what's now known as "Sherlockian" scholarship because there have
been thousands and thousands of articles and books written about
topics like the ones you mentioned. What I've also tried to
show in the book, though, is the other side that really appeals
to me, which is the byways of Victorian culture. These stories
are really microscopic views of aspects of the Victorian age
that we don't really know about.

Patt Morrison>> What kind of questions do lay people want to
know about Sherlock Holmes? Like was he ever married? Did he
ever have sex?

Leslie Klinger>> Well, we've addressed those as well and, of
course, there's also a lot of just glossary in the book because
we don't speak Victorian English anymore.

Patt Morrison>> More is the pity.

Leslie Klinger>> True. For example, one of the characters says
he was "blue ribbon". That's in the story called "The Cardboard
Box". That means that he was what we would say today "on the
wagon". He was part of a temperance group, the Blue Ribbon
Army. So we need translations of that. But, yes, there are
those interesting questions like who were Holmes' parents?
Where did he go to school? Was he ever married? No. Did he
have children? I don't think so. What sexuality was he? That
was an interesting one I got from several questions on a recent
book tour. Probably none is my answer to that one, by the way.
He just didn't really have time.

Patt Morrison>> I love these stories and, when I had finished
reading them all, I felt devastated. I even, in the interest of
journalism, had myself hypnotized to see whether I could forget
them and read them again and it sort of worked. But there were
some people who didn't like Sherlock Holmes and foremost among
them was his creator, Conan Doyle.

Leslie Klinger>> Yes. Doyle had another set of books that he
had written that he felt were his quality work. He was a writer
of historical fiction, novels like "The White Company" --

Patt Morrison>> -- "The Lost World".

Leslie Klinger>> "The Lost World", great science fiction. He
wrote a number of nonfiction books. The Holmes stories, I
think, he felt were beneath him. They were commercial pulp
fiction, if you will, and they were ways later in his career. I
mean, he was an extremely high paid writer. He and Kipling were
the two highest paid writers of the age. He did it for the
money.

Patt Morrison>> And then he killed him off.

Leslie Klinger>> Well, he killed him off in 1893 because he had
better things to do. That was clearly not a commercial
decision, but when in 1901 he had written the outlines of this
wonderful thriller, "The Hound of the Baskervilles", there was
no Sherlock Holmes in it when he first wrote it. His publisher
offered him a good deal of money to make it a Sherlock Holmes
story. I don't mean to suggest that Doyle wasn't making
artistic judgments. I think, when he thought about it, he said
why do I need a different detective? I have Holmes. I'll put
him in here. It was an enormous commercial success. Then, two
years later, the publishers approached him with a lot more money
and he was willing to start writing short stories again.

Patt Morrison>> Did people stop Doyle at the green grocers and
say, "You're a murderer"?

Leslie Klinger>> He had that problem. He had a wonderful
letter from some woman in England saying, "You brute." It said
that the young men of this city in London wore black armbands
when Holmes died. It's perfectly clear that the circulation of
The Strand Magazine dropped drastically. They lost twenty
thousand subscribers when the stories ended.

Patt Morrison>> Probably the best-known actors portraying
Sherlock Holmes has been William Gillette, Basil Rathbone and
Jeremy Brett. Who's your favorite?

Leslie Klinger>> I like Jeremy Brett, but it's not really a
fair comparison. First of all, I never had the opportunity to
see Gillette. There's no existing film of Gillette in the part.
The Basil Rathbone films -- Rathbone is a wonderful actor and I
love the character that he projects, but the scripts were so
awful. There were fourteen Rathbone films. The first two were
set in period, "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes". The others were all set in the
Nazi war era and it's jarring to me to see them.

Patt Morrison>> Sherlock versus Adolf?

Leslie Klinger>> Right. So the great appeal of the Jeremy
Brett series was that they stuck to the original stories. They
worked very hard to make the stories true to the scripts, true
to the stories. I also liked Brett's characterization, but the
combination to me is totally appealing.

Patt Morrison>> There are still letters addressed to Mr.
Sherlock Holmes that arrive at 221 Baker Street. His appeal is
transcendent and here you are bringing him to another
generation.

Leslie Klinger>> I'd like to believe that my book might do for
someone what Baring-Gould did for me, which is introduce me to
this wonderful set of stories and led me to a lifelong interest
in the stories and the age and the scholarship associated with
them.

Patt Morrison>> Leslie Klinger, for your book and your time, we
thank you very much.

Leslie Klinger>> My pleasure.

Patt Morrison>> And thank you for being with us on Life and
Times.

Leslie Klinger>> A real pleasure.

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

Life and Times
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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>> We're going to open up the Life and Times Vault and then
dig even deeper into California's past to a culture that lived
here thousands of years ago. There aren't many signs left of
its existence. To see them, you have to drive four hours
northwest of Los Angeles to a remote desert canyon. Saul
Gonzalez made that drive back in 1998 to see some fascinating
Indian rock art.

Saul Gonzalez>> It's dawn in the Coso Mountains of eastern
California.

Elva Younkin>> It's a beautiful place. It's very pristine in a
sense.

Saul Gonzalez>> The rising sun reveals a vast and ancient
landscape, one seemingly as old as time itself.

Elva Younkin>> You feel like you may be the first person that's
been here, except that you look around and you know that there
have been many, many people before you because of all this
wonderful rock art.

Saul Gonzalez>> Thousands of years ago, ancient Californians,
the Shoshone Indians, came to this place and turned their
attention from sheer survival to creation. They began depicting
the physical and spiritual worlds which they inhabited, turning
an entire canyon into a magnificent desert art gallery. First
discovered in the 1920's, it's the largest concentration of
prehistoric petroglyphs, or rock carvings, in the western
hemisphere.

Elva Younkin>> The Native-Americans believed that everything
had spirit and that spirit had something to offer them. It had
wisdom.

Saul Gonzalez>> Elva Younkin is an expert on ancient rock art.
She's been coming to this place since the early 1950's.

Elva Younkin>> The rocks really were more than inanimate
objects. They had a spirit and the Native-Americans were trying
to access the spirit by coming to the areas where they felt the
power in the rocks. One of the ways they tried to enlist those
spirits was by going through the veil, or the surface of the
rock, and getting to the spirit that's in the interior of the
rock.

Saul Gonzalez>> The thousands of art works etched into the
stones here were created to honor and contact the spirit realm,
a rite reserved only for the tribal holy man or Shaman.

Elva Younkin>> He was their leader. He had more power than the
average man. He was a protector to them. You went to him when
you had ailments and you went to him when you have him interact
for you with the underworld, or with the spirit world, in order
to take care of problems that you were having.

Saul Gonzalez>> It's believed many of these images are a record
of the journeys of countless Shamans into the spirit realm.

Elva Younkin>> One of the things that happens when you're in an
altered state of consciousness is that you may not remember it
clearly for very long. It's like a dream state. And so the
Shaman would very quickly after he came out of his state, would
put his imagery on a rock, what he saw when he was in his other
consciousness.

Saul Gonzalez>> One recurring image is that of the Big Horn
Sheep. There are herds of them depicted throughout the canyon.
At one time, archaeologists thought the images were created to
magically attract the animals so they could be hunted. That
view has changed.

Elva Younkin>> The Big Horn Sheep, at some point in time,
became a symbol for rain and the Shaman came into the canyon to
access the rain power which is in the rocks and the power he's
seeking is the power to make rain.

Saul Gonzalez>> Of course, this idea, like a host of others
developed to explain the meaning of these artworks, might very
well be wrong.

Lloyd Brubaker>> I wish I could go and talk to the artist. I
would not be at all surprised to find that the reason he did
this and what he was trying to portray was something that never
has occurred to me.

Saul Gonzalez>> Lloyd Brubaker is a naturalist and long-time
rock art guide.

Lloyd Brubaker>> You hear it every time when you bring a group
through here. They say, "Well, I think that what that it is -"
and they want to interpret it and, of course, the interpretation
is always in terms of our own society. What else have we got?
We can't do much more than that. And so as a result we come up
with ideas that may be as foreign to that poor Indian that did
it (laughter) as you can imagine.

Saul Gonzalez>> These works of art take us to the very edge of
human habitation here in California. It's estimated that some
works might even be sixteen thousand years old, three times
older than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Such a vast gulf of
years is, in fundamental ways, unbridgeable. What we know about
these ancient works of art will forever be overshadowed by what
we don't know.

Lloyd Brubaker>> People sometimes say that when you're the
scientist, you are supposed to know these things. No, no, the
scientist doesn't know things. What the scientist tries to do
is come up with the good questions. Boy, do we have good
questions around here (laughter). We got a lot of them.

Val>> Our thanks to the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest for
their help on that story. If you'd like more information on the
Indian art, you can go to their website at maturango.org. 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.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Philip Bruce>> Next time on Life and Times --

The secret to beating Alzheimer's and it may not take a miracle
drug.

>> The studies of successful aging show that it isn't all
genetics, that only about a third of it is genetic, but two-
thirds has to do with the way we live our lives. Are we
remaining engaged in an active lifestyle? Are we working with
other people? Are we remaining social? Are we remaining active
both physically and mentally? Those kinds of approaches are
going to help us live longer better.

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