01/21/05

LC050121

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

These veterans of the Iraq War expected problems on the
battlefield, but they were not ready for the trauma of coming
home.

Gerald Powell>> Here a situation or a civilian situation where
a car pulls up alongside of you on the freeway, it's just
another car in another lane, but to me it's a threat.

Val>> And then, a showplace home that once belonged to Barbra
Streisand. We'll tell you how you can see this art deco gem.

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.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> We learned from Vietnam that soldiers who see heavy
combat end up fighting two wars: the one on the ground and later
the one in their own psyche. Whether you call it combat fatigue
or post traumatic stress, the symptoms are the same.
Fortunately, the Veterans Administration is in a better position
to offer vets the therapy they need. As Stephanie O'Neill Noe
tells us, that's encouraging for one man from Pomona who never
thought he'd be hunting terrorists in Afghanistan when he signed
up for the Marines.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> When Marine Corporal John Hinds
enlisted in 1998, the United States was at peace. The Marines
for him meant an ability to earn money for college and to travel
the world.

John Hinds>> It was just fun and games, you know, kind of
shooting at paper targets and some aspects of it were like a
nine to five job. You would go and work hard for about eight
hours and then have the rest of the day off. But as soon as we
started doing the more serious operations in Pakistan and
Afghanistan, it ceased to be fun.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Immediately after 9/11, the Pomona
resident was on a ship among the very first soldiers
commissioned to the Middle East, his carefree time over and his
days instead spent hunting for the Taliban.

John Hinds>> I just remember being out there actually hunting
for somebody. That was very scary, you know. I wasn't prepared
to do something like that, but I just did it nonetheless, you
know. I tried not to think about those things as I was doing
it. I always told myself, well, I'll just deal with it later,
you know, and that's what I'm doing now.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Army Specialist, Gerald Powell, of
Palmdale is another peace-time enlistee. But in 2003, within
minutes of landing in Iraq, he found himself under intense fire.
Powell was among the GIs who stormed and occupied Saddam
Hussein's executive palace. During his year in Iraq, sleep was
a luxury he often went without.

Gerald Powell>> You just lay down and close your eyes. That's
all I can say. You know, you're not really -- We were maybe a
thousand off the hot zone, the wall we call it, and then we're
getting mortared every night and we were getting shot at every
night. This is during our down time. Then once we actually get
up on patrol, it would start all over again.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> But while he was prepared for combat,
he wasn't prepared for the return home to his wife and family.

Gerald Powell>> You don't realize that you've actually changed
until you start looking at the outside world. In your situation
or in a civilian situation, a car pulling up alongside of you on
the freeway, it's just another car in another lane, but to me
it's a threat. As a gunner, which I was on top of the Humvee,
outside on the top gun, I was basically scanning all the
vehicles that come near us. If anything got too close or I
thought was a threat, I would take it out.

John Hinds>> I'd be constantly scanning my surroundings and
kind of looking at people as targets and not people. Pretty
soon, it just started to get worse and worse and I'll leave it
at that.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Hinds and Powell are among a growing
number of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans now afflicted with
post traumatic stress.

Leslie Martin>> If you've been to Paris for a year, you have
some readjustment issues when you get back just getting used to
the language again, getting used to this new neighborhood which
was your old neighborhood. Well, if you go to hell literally,
it's really very reasonable that you're going to need some time
to readjust and you're going to need to be in a place where
other people get it.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Leslie Martin is a social worker who,
along with her therapy dog, Cassie, helps vets deal with post
traumatic stress. Until recently, the program at the West Los
Angeles Veterans Administration catered to about seventy mostly
Vietnam vets, but today a better understanding of the condition
and changes in the way therapy is offered has expanded the
program to seven hundred vets from eleven war venues. Key to
the program's success, she says, is strict confidentiality and
allowing the veterans themselves to guide the discussions.
Still, she fears, the stigma of post traumatic stress keeps many
needy vets away.

Leslie Martin>> Whatever branch of service you're in, if at
your exit interview they say, well, how are you feeling, son?
Are you feeling upset or this or that? No, sir. Good to go,
sir. Do you need me to go back, sir? Yes, sir, absolutely.
That is the military culture that we're experiencing. We want
people to know that you can say anything here because there's
stuff that happened.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Dr. C. Scott Saunders is Director of
Trauma Psychiatry Services at UCLA. In the early 1970's,
Saunders was at the forefront of identifying and understanding
post traumatic stress. His first patient was in 1972, a Vietnam
vet misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.

Dr. C. Scott Saunders>> What was known then? Very little.
It's a totally different ballgame. In the old days, they used
to spend a great deal of time trying to get people to tell their
story in great detail and all you did was make people more
miserable.

Leslie Martin>> We don't see that now. What we talk about now
is here and now. How can we help you set that broken leg that's
becoming your life? Because it's not getting better the way it
is.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Post traumatic stress is as old as war
itself. During the Civil War, they called it nostalgia and,
during World War II in Korea, they called it combat fatigue.
But one thing is certain. No matter what name it's given, if
left unchecked, it can deeply scar veterans and their families.
In therapy at the Veterans Administration, Powell and Hinds
along with other veterans from World War II to Iraq are learning
that those responses that kept them alive as soldiers can make
them feel like societal misfits even for those who fought
decades ago. Getting healthy means learning to manage the
anxiety, depression, mistrust and other byproducts of battle.

Gerald Powell>> It was scarier coming back. You know, it was
uncomfortable coming back home than actually being over in the
Iraq situation. It's uneasy, untrusting. It was just weird.
You know, I didn't trust my family when I walked in the door. I
didn't even trust my family.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> What brought you here?

Gerald Powell>> It was my wife. She couldn't understand I
would shut down on her. I was having issues. It was hard to
explain. It was just things that happened.

John Hinds>> I thought, you know, I'm a young guy. You know,
this is like a Vietnam problem. It's not a Desert War problem.
I think most people had that same thought and they continued to,
even those that are inflicted with illness.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Do you worry about the vets who are out
there who aren't getting help right now?

John Hinds>> I constantly worry about them. I constantly worry
about not just the people I served with, but everybody who's
going over there. This is a real big issue right now, post
traumatic stress disorder, and how to deal with it.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Hinds says he hopes that by sharing his
story, he'll be able to encourage more vets who need help to
seek help.

John Hinds>> A lot of the guys in these groups that she holds
are people of my age who were in the same situations as me and I
can really relate with them. Sometimes they'll be able to
express their thoughts in ways that I couldn't and I'll be able
to recognize that. Like, yeah, those were the words I was
looking for. You know, thank you. So it's been real good to
have that.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> It's estimated that one out of six of
the 150,000 troops now in Iraq will suffer the effects of post
traumatic stress. As for Powell, he says the therapy has
already helped him end four months of self-imposed isolation
and, while there's a lot about civilian life that still makes
him uneasy, he now says he has hope. For Life and Times, I'm
Stephanie O'Neill Noe.

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>> Our next story is about something that happens every
December around the holidays, but it's not your warm and fuzzy
holiday story. It's about a funeral service for more than a
thousand deceased individuals all at one time. As Vicki Curry
tells us, it happens at a cemetery you probably never knew
existed.

Vicki Curry>> At a busy intersection in Boyle Heights, cars
speed by an empty lot, but it's not as empty as it first
appears. Every December, a little-known ritual occurs here, a
funeral service for the unclaimed dead.

Phil Manly>> "We here commit to this resting place 1,606
individuals and symbolically scatter these green leaves in their
memory and on their behalf."

Vicki Curry>> This is the Los Angeles County Cemetery, the
final resting place for the city's lost and forgotten. It's a
small graveyard of mostly unmarked plots. There are no
headstones here and few visitors.

Clyde Emerson>> We basically bury the indigents. These are
people who have no known next of kin or whose next of kin cannot
or will not make funeral arrangements for them, so we're kind of
the cemetery of last resort for people like that.

Vicki Curry>> Clyde Emerson is Director of Decedent Affairs at
County USC Medical Center. He says the people buried here
include newborns and elderly, immigrants and homeless, and even
some John and Jane Does, bodies that were never identified.

Clyde Emerson>> The unclaimed dead come here. We cremate them
and we keep the remains for close to four years. We've held
them until now in case there are family members who want to
claim the remains. We keep them in urns -- some of them are
metal, some of them are plastic -- on the shelves here at the
crematory building.

Vicki Curry>> But if, after a few years, no one has claimed the
ashes, Emerson and two of his colleagues bury them in a common
grave. Albert Gaskin is the County Morgue Supervisor and has
worked at the cemetery for nearly forty years.

Albert Gaskin>> We try to bury in December just before the
first of the year. It's the end of the year and it's coming to
the new year and we have to make room for others, so we try to
do them on a yearly basis.

Clyde Emerson>> It was certainly a little bit unusual, the
first time that I was told that this was part of the job, to
transport the ashes from the building, to put them on the back
of a pickup truck, to take them down to the grave and put them
in the grave.

Vicki Curry>> Each urn contains a plastic bag of ashes and the
only individual item included in this mass burial is a tag
marked with an identification number assigned to the body.

Clyde Emerson>> Handling so many of them is certainly a pause
for thought. We have sixteen hundred this year and, in some
years, we have two thousand or more.

Vicki Curry>> It's a grim part of the job. A few days after
the burial, the staff voluntarily gathers again for the funeral
service. It's not part of their jobs, but they feel a sense of
obligation to unclaimed souls.

Phil Manly>> "Even though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil."

Vicki Curry>> Phil Manly is a hospital chaplain at County USC
Medical Center, as his father was before him. He's been
performing this annual service for more than thirty years.

Phil Manly>> I think that we should honor our dead and that
they should be buried or some recognition should be given for a
life that was lived.

Vicki Curry>> The funeral service was already a tradition by
the time Manly and Gaskin became involved with it over three
decades ago. No one knows how it got started, but this small
group continues to observe it every December.

Albert Gaskin>> Oh, I think it's nice, very nice, for the
amount of people that we have. It's sad sometimes.

Phil Manly>> It's always very special to me and one cannot help
but think about those folks. I mean, 1,606 people. What were
they like, what was their life like, how did they die? Each day
that we remain here on this life is a gift from God. I was very
pleased with the county when I found out that they were doing
these things for the homeless and people that would not have
been buried properly even and decently and in order.

Clyde Emerson>> Most other counties, at least in California
that I know of, have contracts with private mortuaries to handle
indigent and unclaimed dead and they don't have actual county
crematories and cemeteries, so it's kind of unique in that
respect.

Vicki Curry>> The Los Angeles County Cemetery dates back to the
late 1800's. Here and there, you can even spot a gravestone
from that time. The crematory was built on the grounds in the
1920's when the county began having mass burials. There's a
chapel inside. It isn't used anymore, but perhaps it was many
years ago.

Clyde Emerson>> Yes, we have a chapel here. I'm not quite sure
why it was built originally and maybe in the past they did have
services. There's a little foot-pump organ in there that
actually works to some extent.

Vicki Curry>> Some of the cemetery's history is hard to
determine. The earliest common graves are marked only with
identification numbers on crude stones.

Clyde Emerson>> The further back you go, the harder it is to
find out exactly where they are buried, although the written
records are quite good and quite complete for the whole period.

Vicki Curry>> Starting around 1960, Los Angeles County began
placing a year marker on the common graves. A few of the more
recent ones get the occasional visit from a family who knew the
relative had died, but couldn't afford a funeral.

Clyde Emerson>> So as we've seen, there are some graves that
are decorated by family members when they have loved ones buried
here.

Albert Gaskin>> There are some graves that we have where we
buried the deceased and the family want to come back and decide
they want to put a little plot. We have about three families
come about three or four times a year.

Vicki Curry>> But most of those buried here will never be
mourned by family or friends, only by a few county workers who
feel obliged to acknowledge these people whose death went
unnoticed.

Phil Manly>> A lot of these people were homeless, had no family
that they knew about or they had alienated themselves from their
families, so when they passed away, nobody really knew that they
even had left this life and that's why we do this is to maintain
the balance between life and death.

Phil Manly>> "I am the resurrection and the life. Everyone who
lives and believes in me shall never die."

Vicki Curry>> I'm Vicki Curry for Life and Times.

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's a hidden gem in Malibu, a beautiful canyon that
houses, well, houses. Five of them and they all used to belong
to Barbra Streisand. But now they're part of the Santa Monica
Mountain Conservancy and the public is invited in to see, among
other things, Streisand's fabulous art deco home.

Wind down a narrow canyon road off of PCH -- no honking, please,
the neighbors don't like noise -- and in a mile or two, you'll
enter Ramirez Canyon Park. It's more than a park. It's a
twenty-two acre compound that used to belong to Barbra Streisand
and her then husband, studio chief Jon Peters. Drive through
the gates and you'll feel like you're in a storybook.

It all started on Valentine's Day back in 1974. That's when
Streisand and Peters bought this home. Well, it didn't look
like this. It was a dull little stucco house that they
renovated - slightly. They dubbed this home "The Barn" and it
was Streisand's favorite. Over the next three years, as
adjacent properties became available, Streisand snapped them up.
But without a doubt, the crown jewel of the park is this: the
deco house. I got a tour from Outreach Coordinator, Joan
Pankrantz.

Joan Pankrantz>> This is the only pool on the property. It's a
black-bottom pool.

Val>> It's gorgeous, stunning.

Joan Pankrantz>> Isn't that gorgeous? This furniture here is
original, left by Ms. Streisand. You will notice across the top
there, that design. That was taken from panels from the
Atlantic-Richfield Building which was going to be demolished in
1968. It was an art deco building and Ms. Streisand got those
panels and, from those panels, got the design you see throughout
the entire house.

[Film Clip]

Joan Pankrantz>> This is original, this beautiful table. The
chandelier is original. Isn't that gorgeous? And in art deco,
you see a lot of step designs. You're going to see it
throughout the house like this doorway here into the dining
room, the step design?

Val>> Oh, I see, right.

Joan Pankrantz>> Even the chandelier. The detail on the
ceiling here is in the step design and if you look at the
upholstered walls of the dining room. We're in a tile room.
These are upholstered, so that helps with the acoustics and
also, as you look at the wall covering, you see that same design
throughout the fabric.

Val>> Streisand even tiled the floor to match the rug so that,
when the rug was sent out for cleaning, the design would remain
in the tile.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Now this is the formal entrance right here?

Joan Pankrantz>> Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Val>> Now this is what you see when you first walk in? This is
beautiful.

Joan Pankrantz>> When you first walk in, this is what you see,
yes.

Val>> And it's the largest home, you say, on the property?

Joan Pankrantz>> It's the largest home on the property. It's
over four thousand square feet.

Val>> The only colors allowed in the house were burgundy, gray,
black and rose. Even the candy wrappers had to match.

[Film Clip]

Joan Pankrantz>> This is the master bedroom and I love to bring
people in here. This is not part of the tour regularly because
I love to see their expressions. It's incredible.

Val>> She likes -- what is this color? Pink? Mauve?
Burgundy?

Joan Pankrantz>> Oh, I don't know. It's a pink.

Val>> But she never stayed here?

Joan Pankrantz>> Not that we know of. I don't know, I don't
know.

Val>> Maybe she sneaked in for a night (laughter).

Joan Pankrantz>> (laughter) maybe. Everything is automatic,
state of the art.

Val>> Yes, that ceiling alone.

Joan Pankrantz>> I have to tell you, Val, that in the 1920's,
that's when the ocean liners started and you really get a
nautical feeling here. You look at the porthole windows --

Val>> -- yes, you do.

Joan Pankrantz>> -- and the skylights.

Val>> Unbelievable.

Joan Pankrantz>> This is all hand-painted. This isn't
wallpaper. I thought at one point that was wallpaper, but that
has all been hand-painted on there.

[Film Clip]

Val>> This is what reporters do when the tour guide's not
around. For Streisand, a collection is like a movie. Once it's
done, it's done and she moved on to other interests. She
auctioned off her art deco collection in 1994 for more than six
million dollars. As for the property, she donated it to the
state in 1993. Now it's run by the Mountains Recreation
Conservation Authority who must keep it self-sustaining and open
to the public. Today a group of seniors from the Capri
Retirement Home in Newhall has made the one-hour bus trip to
Ramirez Canyon Park.

Tamar Freeman>> "Hello, I'm Tamar. Welcome." This outing that
we're enjoying here is part of our Senior Outreach Program and
it's made available to people who would otherwise not have
access to this beautiful, beautiful balance of nature.

>> It's so relaxing. The minute we got here, I just
practically oozed relaxation. I think it's a wonderful place to
live.

>> It's beautiful. The patio is gorgeous. Our lunch was
delicious and the fresh air and the sunshine was just impossible
to describe.

>> It reminds me a little bit of some of the ones I saw on the
islands.

Val>> What islands are those?

>> In the Pacific Islands. There are many Pacific Islands I
went to, Guam, Saipan, all of them during the war.

Val>> The park is accessible to seniors and to the disabled.
The more adventurous opt for a tour of the meadow.

Joan Pankrantz>> This is where the "One Voice" concert was
performed in 1986 and it was a PBS special. There was a full
orchestra here, five hundred guests. It was a catered dinner
and money was raised for the Democratic party. That was 1986.

Val>> The park has to raise its own revenue, so they host
weddings, events and small meetings to generate income. But on
a day like today, what they're really generating are memories.
How does it make you feel to sit out here like this?

>> Pretty independent.

>> It's gorgeous. Why did she ever leave here? (laughter)

>> Our hosts and hostesses were just wonderful. Hope to come
back soon.

[Film Clip]

Val>> If you'd like to find out more about the garden tours and
other activities at Ramirez Canyon Park, just go to the website
for the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy at smmc.ca.gov. 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.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

Banks are courting Latinos by doing business based on Mexican
identification cards, but are they also encouraging illegal
immigration?

>> Given the fact that we have a strong dependence on
immigration, would we rather have people living in the shadows
or would we rather have people joining the economic mainstream?

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