01/31/05

LC050131

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

The American dream may seem out of reach for low-income
families, but a new program is helping to make dreams come true.

Cerilo Robles>> You have to try hard. It's hard to get a
house, but if you want to buy it, you have to try hard.

Val>> And then, a side of Jane Goodall you've never seen. The
esteemed scientist talks about stuffed animals and why she
became an activist.

[Film Clip]

Val>> It's all coming up next 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>> For many Southern Californians, buying a home is not just
a dream. It's a fantasy that will never come true. It takes an
income of $75,000 these days just to afford an average priced
home, but we found a family who did it on much less and they did
it with the help of a home-buying program at the United Way.

The Robles family, Cerilo, Rebecca and their two boys, Alex and
Eddie, have managed to pull off a minor miracle in today's
housing market. With very modest incomes and no savings to
start, they have bought a home. Tonight after work, they're
giving it one last walk-through.

It's a two-bedroom, one-bath house in Watts. Price? $175,000.
The Robles family had no financial help from relatives. Rebecca
works at a daycare center and Cerilo works at a flower shop, so
it wasn't easy. In fact, research by the Center for the Study
of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University shows that, in
2001, incomes in Los Angeles County grew by only three percent
while housing prices soared by twelve percent. And while fifty-
eight percent of whites in Los Angeles County own their homes,
only thirty-eight percent of Latinos are homeowners.

The Robles are now among that thirty-eight percent. They
enrolled in a program called "Saving for the American Dream" run
by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles. Joe Haggerty is
President. The program combines matching grants with required
classes in financial literacy.

Joe Haggerty>> Well, you have to make a commitment to both go
to classes because you need to understand the whole lending, the
mortgage, the credit issues and you also need to know how to
keep up your home if you've never been a homeowner, and then you
need to be saving at the same time.

Cerilo Robles>> "If you want to stop by, we can show you
something."

Val>> Cerilo Robles has worked at the flower shop for fifteen
years. He says the United Way program, combined with help from
the city of Inglewood where they used to live, allowed him to
build a down payment. In less than a year, he had $17,000
saved. The matching funds were the key.

Cerilo Robles>> For the first six months, they said you put a
dollar, they put a five dollars. So every month, I put $300 and
they put up $1,500 a month.

Val>> The "Saving for the American Dream" program also taught
Cerilo about the complicated and often intimidating home-buying
process. He learned about credit reports, mortgage rates, loan
applications, realtors, escrows and home inspections and upkeep.
The "Saving for the American Dream" program normally spans two
years, but Cerilo was motivated and had his down payment ready
in less than a year.

Cerilo Robles>> If I stay renting, I never going to own
anything. If I decide to buy a house to get a better future,
the rent don't go up and I think it's all the way better to own
something.

Eddie Robles>> When he went to the classes, they give him
papers to like where the houses were at and I remember one day
they were teaching people what kind of tools to use.

Val>> Tools to do what?

Eddie Robles>> Like to fix the house.

Rebecca Robles>> And this is my bedroom.

Val>> As it turned out, the hardest part of the process was
finding a home for about $175,000 when the average home in Los
Angeles County is selling for $227,000.

Cerilo Robles>> I check a house for $210,000 in Los Angeles.
We liked that house a lot, but I went and I asked them how much
is my payment a month. They said almost $1,600. I say I cannot
afford that. I don't like to buy something that maybe one month
or two months and later, I'm going to lose everything.

Val>> The Robles' were willing to compromise. They had wanted
to stay in Inglewood, but couldn't afford it, so they looked at
other neighborhoods. This neighborhood in Watts was unfamiliar
and a bit of a concern for Rebecca. How did you feel when you
moved in? When you finally got this house?

Rebecca Robles>> I feel a little nervous (laughter).

Val>> A little nervous?

Rebecca Robles>> Yes. The first day I can't sleep.

Val>> You couldn't sleep?

Rebecca Robles>> No (laughter).

Val>> Why were you nervous?

Rebecca Robles>> Because I don't know the area, the neighbors
or I don't know, but right now everything is okay because
everything is quiet.

Val>> In fact, the Robles family will help make this
neighborhood safer. Studies show that the higher the level of
home ownership, the less crime. And homeowners are more likely
to be active in the community. Their children are less likely
to get in trouble and more likely to graduate from high school.
In other words, home ownership strengthens the social fabric.

Joe Haggerty>> We all have a stake in people owning homes. We
have a stake in the children having good educations and actually
we have a stake in them having pretty good jobs or having a
chance at a good job. It makes it a better community for
everybody and, with the mobility we have here in Southern
California, you can't think I live in a safe neighborhood and
nothing will ever happen to me. I mean, we need to be looking
at this in a broader way than sometimes we do.

Val>> Unfortunately, that social fabric has been wearing thin.
Low wages, rising home prices and a severe shortage of
affordable homes is locking a huge number of Southern
Californians out of the housing market. And although Latinos
comprise forty-five percent of the county's residents, only
seventeen percent of new mortgages go to Latinos.

Alex>> This is the house and my room. I want to raise the bed
up.

Val>> At the Robles home, the family is settling in and Alex,
who loves to draw, is already making plans for his bedroom. He
wants to build a loft to create more space. And Rebecca is
already thinking about adding on.

Rebecca Robles>> I want another room (laughter). Later for me,
I want one bedroom big, the bathroom I want bigger.

Val>> Some of Cerilo's friends can't quite believe that the
matching funds offered by the American Dream program were
grants.

Cerilo Robles>> I still talking to some friends and they don't
believe that I get the money. They say this is not free, it's a
loan, but I said I have the proof. I recommend the people to
buy a house because it's better for every family and, if they
need help, they can go to the same program that I went to.

Joe Haggerty>> You know, it's easy for charities to be
faceless. This puts a face on a charity and it lets a donor
know that I have helped this family and I have really helped
them in a long-term way. No band-aid.

Val>> With housing prices soaring and wages barely inching
upwards, programs like this may be one of the few ways working
families can ever hope to own a home, but when they do, their
futures will be changed forever.

Cerilo Robles>> It's hard, but you have to try hard. It's hard
to get a house, but if you want to buy it, you have to try hard.

Val>> Is it worth it?

Cerilo Robles>> Yes. I'm very happy (laughter).

Val>> So far, ten families have bought homes through the
program at United Way and, as for the Robles family, they moved
into Watts about a year ago and all the nervousness they may
have felt in the beginning has disappeared. They say they feel
happy, secure, and their neighbors are great.

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Val>> It's rare when an anthropologist becomes a household
name, but Jane Goodall is a rare woman. She grew up watching
"Tarzan" movies and vowed that she would go to Africa. Now at
age seventy, she's still on the road. Jane Goodall spoke
recently at Town Hall Los Angeles and talked with David Okarski
about her remarkable career.

David Okarski>> The Los Angeles Hotel where Dr. Jane Goodall is
about to address Town Hall is a long way from the Gombe National
Park in Tanzania. There in 1960, she saw a chimpanzee strip
leaves from a twig and use it to fish termites from a nest.
That simple observation shattered the scientific thinking that
only humans make tools. You just called yourself a rebel. How
so?

Jane Goodall>> Well, I suppose that like from the very
beginning, I did things not in the traditional way. You know, I
didn't have a degree before I went to study the chimpanzees, so
I did it all wrong. I gave them names instead of numbers and I
dared to give them personalities, minds and feelings. I went to
Cambridge and I was told there's no time for a BA, but go
straight for a PhD. You know, on an on, I've always done things
backwards.

David Okarski>> Her 1999 book, "Reason for Hope", and a
documentary film of the same name tell how Jane Goodall rose to
international prominence as a scientist, then transformed into a
tireless world traveler promoting animal welfare, conservation
and peace. How did you get from that point to this?

Jane Goodall>> It happened at the very specific moment when
there was a conference on chimpanzee behavior bringing together
all the different people who'd studied chimps across Africa. I
realized that, my goodness, the chimps' habitats are going, the
chimps are vanishing, they're being horribly treated in
captivity. So I went into that conference as a scientist and
came out as an activist.

I began traveling in the rainy states of chimps in Africa
promoting conservation and realized that so many of Africa's
problems were really caused by the unsustainable lifestyles of
the developed world. So I began traveling more extensively
there and developed a program to give young people hope because
I found so many were hopeless. It was that program, "Roots &
Shoots", that brought it to the attention of Kofi Annan of the
U.N. and he asked me if I'd be a messenger of peace.

"Roots & Shoots" is a symbolic name. Roots make a firm
foundation. Shoots seem tiny, but to reach the light, can break
through a brick wall. If we see the brick wall as all of the
problems we have inflicted on this planet, the environmental
ones, the social ones, crime, drugs, war, terrorism, it's a
message of hope. Hundreds and thousands of young people around
the world can break through and make this a better world.

David Okarski>> She's a harsh critic of war.

Jane Goodall>> My objection to war is because of this
devastating harm to everything that I love and, therefore, it
seems so important to find ways of doing things that aren't
exposing young people to be torn apart by bombs and guns of
whatever nationality. So it's just a whole general repugnance
of this way of solving problems.

David Okarski>> And yet, some of your studies of chimpanzees
led you to believe that somewhere in our DNA there may be a
predilection for behaviors that are at least very much like war
in the chimpanzee world.

Jane Goodall>> I think it's probably very true. Chimpanzees
can be brutal and it's a shock when we discovered that they have
a dark side just like us. But they also have very strongly
developed compassion and love and altruism in that society. So
if we have inherited from an ancient primate past, we've
inherited the dark and we've inherited the loving. So it's
really up to each one of us to push one out, one down, and to
develop the other.

David Okarski>> You've always had a very special relationship
with God and with religion and many people would not expect that
of a scientist.

Jane Goodall>> It's strange, actually, because right from the
beginning I found it was so easy to reconcile science on the one
hand and religion on the other. And the more we learn about
this amazing planet of ours and the universe and the
interconnection between the two, you know, the more mysteries
there still are. We'll never solve them all. The more wondrous
it is, the more I feel the presence of some great spiritual
power and that there is a meaning to our life on earth. I just
feel, for myself anyway, that I'd better try and do my very,
very best with this gift of life and the tremendous gifts that
I've been personally given.

David Okarski>> Are you still a vegetarian?

Jane Goodall>> Oh, absolutely. I became a vegetarian just like
that. I mean, most of my decisions in life just seem to come
like that. I was eating meat. Chimpanzees eat meat. And then
I read Peter Singer's book about intensive farming and, you
know, suddenly a piece of meat on my plate, unless it was from a
free-ranging animal or chicken or something, it symbolized for
me fear, pain and death and I didn't want to eat that.

David Okarski>> Must one be a vegetarian to be a friend of the
earth and of animals?

Jane Goodall>> I think what's really important is to eat meat
that's come from like happy cows, free-ranging creatures that
graze on the grass, hens that peck about in the farmyard.

David Okarski>> Did you bring Jubilee and Mr. H. with you on
this trip?

Jane Goodall>> I have Mr. H. He's in my bag behind me.
Jubilee is too old.

David Okarski>> The rebel scientist and messenger of peace
never goes anywhere without Mr. H. His tail makes him a toy
monkey, not a chimpanzee.

Jane Goodall>> The world is too big for Mr. H. and me alone, so
Mr. H. Junior is to help so that people can help to spread this
message. This is how Mr. H. used to look, exactly like that.

David Okarski>> Mr. H. Junior is for sale on her website,
janegoodall.org. All proceeds go to the Jane Goodall Institute.
How much longer will you continue to travel at this pace that
you keep up?

Jane Goodall>> This crazy three hundred days a year? It
depends on my body. You know, the world is so big and, if you
can go somewhere with a message of hope for young people --

[Film Clip]

Jane Goodall>> Everywhere I go, so many young people have lost
hope because they feel we've compromised their future. We have
four reasons to hope. The human brain. There are solutions out
there to many problems. People are beginning to realize the
kind of lifestyle that's unsustainable and try to leave lighter
footprints.

Then there's the resilience of nature. We destroy a place and
we can make it beautiful again or give it time and it will do it
itself. Animal species on the brink of extinction can be given
another chance, like the California condor.

And then there's the tremendous enthusiasm and dedication and
excitement and courage of children all around the world who are
busy changing the world as we speak.

[Film Clip]

And finally, what I call the indomitable human spirit. There
are people out there doing impossible things and yet they don't
give up. It can be people like Nelson Mandela who came out of
twenty-three years of imprisonment with the amazing ability to
forgive so that he could lead his nation out of the bloody
regime of Apartheid.

How can we give up when we have such capability in our own
species for the noble and the good and the loving? You know,
we're going through moral evolutions and we've got a long way to
go. We're not just beginning spiritual evolution. We had it
and we turned our backs on it in the West and I think we're
coming back to it again.

David Okarski>> Jane Goodall, thank you very much for taking
the time to talk with us today.

Jane Goodall>> Thank you.

Val>> Jane Goodall was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. If
you'd like more information about membership or future speakers,
you can go to their website at townhall-la.org.

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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Val>> The man you're about to meet raises the term "movie buff"
to a whole new level. He has amassed a collection of more than
six thousand films and he's found them everywhere from basements
to attics and even chicken coops. As Toni Guinyard tells us,
his big challenge now is what to do with this amazing film
collection.

Murray Glass>> I became a film buff and, to some degree, a film
historian and archivist and I just plain and simply love films.

Toni Guinyard>> On any given day, Murray Glass can be found
surrounded by film, sandwiched between ceiling to floor shelves,
housing reel after reel of 16mm films valued at one and a
quarter of a million dollars.

Murray Glass>> I have a library which goes back to before the
turn of the last century, films which were made as early as the
very earliest ones in the 1890's and on through the silent era
and the early sound era and up to and including films which were
made for television.

[Film Clip]

Murray Glass>> It also includes classics from all over the
world, from Germany, from England, from Italy, Japan, Russia and
elsewhere.

[Film Clip]

Toni Guinyard>> The collection of six thousand three hundred
titles in all make up the Em Gee Film Library. While Glass is a
chemist, collecting, renting out and caring for these films is
his life's work.

Murray Glass>> See this splice over here? That's what I
detected and you look at it and see if it's okay and, if it's
okay, you just continue. I have a very extensive collection of
Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Charlie Chaselow,
Hardy and many others. I just love particularly silent comedy
because I think that the works of some of these artists have
never been equaled, much less surpassed.

Toni Guinyard>> After a half century of spending his life
building his film library and sharing his love of film with so
many others, Glass is ready to call it quits, ready to give it
up.

Murray Glass>> I have reached a point in my life when I feel
that I ought to retire.

Toni Guinyard>> But his retirement has been put on hold until
one issue is resolved: finding a home for his films, and that
has not proved to be easy. You see, Glass is not about to give
up his collection to just anyone.

Murray Glass>> I have a list of universities who have told me
in no uncertain terms that they would love to have the
collection for a teaching tool. Unfortunately, each one of them
pleads poverty and would be very happy if somebody could be
found who would be an angel who would buy the collection and
donate it to their facility.

Toni Guinyard>> So he's on the hunt, quietly trying to find the
perfect buyer.

Murray Glass>> These are one-reel subjects. Every film in this
library is on a steel reel and it's labeled. It has a label on
the front and a label on the side telling what it is and a
catalog number so it's easily identified. These are feature
length films, an hour and up, also as with the others on nice
steel reels, fully labeled, front and side, and cataloged.

Toni Guinyard>> Rhoda Glass, Murray's wife, perhaps knows
better than anyone else what this film library represents. She
sees history at her husband's fingertips.

Rhoda Glass>> It's a magnificent collection. It has been
blood, sweat and tears. He's put a great deal of time and
thought. He works six days a week. He always has. And he
knows the ins and outs of the films. He knows the directors,
the actors, the better picture makers, the not so good picture
makers.

Toni Guinyard>> Well, if this collection is so important, why
can't you just donate it and not take any money for it?

Rhoda Glass>> I'd have to ask my financier (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> And I take it your financier is --

Rhoda Glass>> Murray Glass.

Toni Guinyard>> More than once, Mr. Glass has been asked why he
doesn't just donate his film library to a university. His
answer is economics. He simply can't afford to.

Murray Glass>> If I don't find somebody within the not too
distant future, I'll be compelled to dispose of the library by
auction.

Toni Guinyard>> Do you share his desire in keeping the
collection together?

Rhoda Glass>> Oh, yes. It would be terrible to have it -- it
would be a great loss to the, I won't say the film industry, but
to film history if it were to be disbursed to various and sundry
places.

Murray Glass>> It is my devout hope that somebody will be found
who would be generous enough and flexible enough and practical
enough to get this collection and make sure that it does go to
anyone of -- I have a list of seven different schools which
would be panting to have this collection given to them. My
primary clientele has been, over the years, teachers who teach
classes in film history.

Toni Guinyard>> As much as Murray Glass hopes to keep the
collection intact, he is driven by his desire to keep the films
accessible to the one audience he believes will benefit most:
film students.

Murray Glass>> If it was sold to private collectors, it would
go into private collections and then be screened by the
collectors themselves, maybe for a small circle of friends, but
would be the loss for the purpose for which I originally built
it which is mainly for discovery and teaching.

Toni Guinyard>> It was in a film history class at City College
New York that Glass was inspired by his teacher, avant-garde
filmmaker Hans Richter.

Murray Glass>> As any film history class would be, eventually
we got to the subject of Charlie Chaplin. I mentioned that I
had some Charlie Chaplin films at home, so he said, "Bring them
into class."

[Film Clip]

Murray Glass>> I went home that evening and I took a bunch of
these Chaplin films and pasted them together with Duco cement
and put them on longer reels and brought them into class. We
ran them off and discussed them and then, about a month later, I
got a check in the mail and that was my first film rental.

Toni Guinyard>> The year was 1946. Glass's hobby eventually
evolved into a career when he opened the Em Gee Film Library.

Rhoda Glass>> It's part of his body. It's part of his brain.
It can't be repeated by anybody. He's been consulted by people
writing books from all over the world. His name is pure gold to
archivists and he's brilliant in that field.

Toni Guinyard>> A field Glass came to respect over time. He
traces his enthusiasm back to his childhood.

Murray Glass>> My father bought me for my birthday present, one
time when I was about thirteen or fourteen, a toy projector, a
16mm projector, and he bought some films which were basically
just clips out of longer subjects. They called them toy films.
I started collecting those for a couple of years and I just
stopped.

Toni Guinyard>> And now he wants to stop again, this time to do
a little traveling and spend time with his wife, but first he
has to find an angel.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Murray Glass's collection also includes more than nine
hundred books all related to films, cinema or Hollywood. 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 --

Hospitals are clambering to hire nurses, but where can people go
for a fast-track nursing degree?

>> They took one look at me and said you might be interested in
an accelerated program (laughter).

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