03/23/05

LC050323

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

She was a Marine wife. Now she's a Marine widow. How do
families of the fallen make it on their own?

Michele Linn-White>> I have to leave in six months. I have no
security, no income. Sure, there are these benefits, but
they're not life-long. They're not permanent. You know, what
am I going to do in three years?

Val>> And then, they're bringing treasures from the ancient
world to build a bigger than ever reputation. How a small
museum is becoming an international player.

Those 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>> Until death do us part. It's a vow that's especially
poignant for wives who have husbands stationed in Iraq. So far,
more than fifteen hundred Americans have died in the Iraq War,
many leaving families behind. So how do the families survive
after losing a husband and father? Hena Cuevas brings us a
story of one woman at Camp Pendleton, a wife, a mother, and now
a widow.

Hena Cuevas>> This is how Michele Linn remembers meeting Aaron
White back in high school in Oklahoma.

Michele Linn-White>> We were in an English class and he
wouldn't leave me alone. I had a crush on the guy who sat in
front of me and he kept invading my space.

Hena Cuevas>> She never dreamed that, a few years later in
1998, they would end up getting married.

Michele Linn-White>> I think I was waiting to see what he was
going to say, if he'd say "I do" or not. He was worried that I
wasn't even going to show up.

Hena Cuevas>> White was a Marine and they set up life in Camp
Pendleton. Two years later, their daughter Brianna was born.
By then, it was 2002 and the United States was gearing up for
war in the Middle East. As a military wife, what did you think
when you first heard that the United States was going to get
into a war with Iraq?

Michele Linn-White>> I knew there was a possibility of going to
war and, if I married him, I still knew there was the
possibility because he was a soldier first. They all are, and
he wanted to go.

Hena Cuevas>> So in February of 2003, Aaron White left Camp
Pendleton for his tour in Iraq.

Michele Linn-White>> It was just like a goodbye. We kissed
each other on the cheek. He hugged Brianna. He did get a
little teary-eyed and then I went to the grocery store. That
wasn't very emotional because, you know, I figured he was going
to be back.

Hena Cuevas>> For three months, Michele and Aaron did what many
other military couples do. They exchanged letters, phone calls
and emails as often as possible.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> By then, little Brianna was about to turn one, so
Michele went to Texas to celebrate her baby's first birthday
with her family. They spoke with Aaron over the phone on
Brianna's birthday. Two days later while watching TV --

Michele Linn-White>> Earlier that evening, there was a clip on
the little black strip on the bottom of CNN saying that the
helicopter had gone down and the four crew members were dead.
It was a CH46 and I knew that he was flying that day. My sister
made the offhanded comment that that was Aaron's plane and we
all kind of, you know, laughed, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it
happens to other people. You know, it doesn't happen to me.

Hena Cuevas>> But it did happen to her. That day, May 19,
2003, Aaron White's helicopter crashed, killing everybody on
board. Aaron was twenty-seven years old.

Michele Linn-White>> When they came up to the door for that,
they didn't even call to announce that they were coming. They
showed up and I saw a chaplain, the Navy chaplain. You don't
have to say anything. When a chaplain comes to the door, you
know.

Hena Cuevas>> At that moment, she says her biggest concern was
protecting her young daughter.

Michele Linn-White>> I don't know if she sensed anything was
different because obviously my stress level went through the
roof. But, you know, I kept her on her schedule. She had her
naps, she had her playtimes, and she had her bedtimes because I
didn't want her world to fall apart.

Hena Cuevas>> Aaron's body was flown back to the United States
and buried in Oklahoma near his parents.

Michele Linn-White>> I went to Texas to celebrate her birthday
and ended up planning my husband's funeral.

Hena Cuevas>> In the middle of her grief, she also began the
process of signing up for benefits which included three year's
medical and dental insurance. She was also told that she would
have to move off base in six months. When did it finally start
to sink in?

Michele Linn-White>> It was maybe around that six month mark
that I realized. When his squadron came home and he wasn't with
them, you know, I realized. When I saw his picture on the
television and read the newspaper report and when I received
condolence cards from strangers. That made it real. When I
looked at Brianna and she looks just like him. That made it
real. Every day that he did not walk through the door, that
made it real. When my neighbor's husband came home. That made
it real. When I was like one of the only wives on the block who
didn't put up the Welcome Home sign. That made it real.

Hena Cuevas>> So when it starts sinking in after six months,
then it comes time for you to move.

Michele Linn-White>> Yes, and I thought I'm going to be
homeless. I have to leave in six months. I have no security,
no income. Sure, there are these benefits, but they're not
lifelong. They're not permanent. You know, what am I going to
do in three years when my daughter doesn't have health
insurance? What am I going to do?

Hena Cuevas>> She knew she wanted to stay in their house on
base, but the only way she could do that was to sign up for
school. So she enrolled in a criminal justice program.
However, now she has to pay rent.

Michele Linn-White>> It's really hard. I have to watch what I
spend.

Hena Cuevas>> After Aaron's death, Michele received a one-time
payment of twelve thousand dollars, but because Aaron was in the
service for less than ten years and his rank wasn't high enough,
she's not eligible for other benefits like his retirement. She
says her income is now less than half of what it was. It's so
little that she now qualifies for food stamps. She feels the
government has let her down.

Michele Linn-White>> The soldier works for the government, but
they don't have laws stating that, while you're a soldier, you
cannot be married. You know, everyone becomes part of the
military. The wives support the husbands, they move around and
then the wives and the children are not taken care of when
something happens.

Hena Cuevas>> Should people feel sorry for you?

Michele Linn-White>> I'm not looking for sympathy. I suppose
it's nice to have. I am looking for what is right and what I
feel is owed to me and everybody else who's lost a husband.

Hena Cuevas>> Among the things she treasures the most are these
photographs from an undeveloped roll of film that Aaron left
behind. The most difficult part, she says, is explaining what
happened to her now three year old daughter.

Michele Linn-White>> She has a little photograph that she
carries around and that's her daddy. She knows that he's daddy
and she knows that I'm her mommy, but I don't think she quite
recognizes the fact that her mommy is here and is a person and
that her daddy is not here.

Hena Cuevas>> Michele will finish her Bachelors in about two
years. Then she'll have to move off base. She'd like to find a
job around San Diego, but she knows it won't be easy. A couple
of letters she received from Aaron are included in a book called
"Voices From the Front: Letters Home From America's Military
Families", all in an effort to keep his memory alive.

Michele Linn-White>> With every little personal story that gets
out there, you don't just see a soldier who's going over there
and it's his job. You see the people that are left behind. You
see who he was as a person and that's what I want.

Hena Cuevas>> She also wants to make sure her daughter Brianna
never forgets the father she barely knew. I'm Hena Cuevas for
Life and Times.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Val>> It's a shocking finding. Life expectancy in the United
States is dropping. For the first time in two centuries, we can
expect our lives to be shorter by two to five years, and the
culprit? Obesity, especially childhood obesity which often
leads to diabetes. No one knows this better than Dr. Francine
Kaufman, past President of the American Diabetes Association and
head of the Center for Diabetes at Children's Hospital Los
Angeles. She is author of "Diabesity: The Obesity-Diabetes
Epidemic That Threatens America and What We Must Do To Stop It".
The title of your book, "Diabesity" is interesting because
obviously diabetes and obesity are so intertwined.

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Absolutely. We are looking at an
epidemic of Type II diabetes in this country, actually around
the world, and it is mirroring the epidemic of adult and
childhood obesity.

Val>> So obesity is the cause of diabetes? Because a lot of
people say, oh, it's genetic, there's nothing I can do about it,
but you're saying no.

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Well, it's both. You have to have the
genes and we don't know what those genes are and there are
probably many of them that confer risk for diabetes. Then you
have an operation of your lifestyle, so it's a collision of your
genes and your lifestyle. It's your lifestyle that you're
sedentary, you're not physically fit and you're eating too many
calories and inappropriate calories mainly as sugar and fat
calories.

Val>> There is an amazing statistic in here and that is more
than one in every three children born in the year 2000 will
experience diabetes in their lifetime?

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Well, that's the projection. If we
don't alter our course as individuals, as communities, as a
country, then it is anticipated that one in three children will
have diabetes sometime in their lifetime. So you can imagine
what that would do to the healthcare system, to the workforce,
to the number of children and adults burdened by this disease.

What I really try to illustrate in my book is a lot of people
think diabetes is not so bad, it's just a little bit of a
problem, you know, you don't have to eat so much and everything
is okay. Nothing is farther from the truth. Diabetes is a
devastating illness and I tried to illustrate the people
affected by this illness and show you that they lose their
eyesight, they lose their limbs, they die of cardiovascular
disease, of a heart attack or of a stroke.

It is not just a little bit of a problem. It is a huge problem.
The younger you are when you get diabetes, the greater the
chances that you will experience these complications during your
lifetime if you don't do something to manage it. The most
important thing to do is to change your lifestyle, to lose that
weight, to get physically fit, to get some physical activity and
to kind of, you know, deny this from happening to you and to
your loved ones.

Val>> Tell us about some of the young children that you have
actually seen with Type II diabetes.

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Well, we're seeing children -- I mean,
when I started my career, there were no children with Type II
diabetes virtually and now we're seeing a mini explosion of
them. They weight two hundred or three hundred pounds, they
come in with family members who have Type II diabetes --

Val>> -- Wait, I'm sorry. Two to three hundred pounds? How
old are they?

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Oh, some of them are eleven, twelve or
thirteen years of age.

Val>> Two to three hundred pounds?

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Yeah, and they've been on a course of
gaining weight. They're eating inappropriately, not getting
good physical activity for years beforehand. You know, one of
the points of my book is that it's a call to action for all of
us about how we live our own lives, how we lives in the context
of our family. But more importantly, what's available in our
community? Where we go to school? Where we go to work? What's
available from our healthcare system?

There are a lot of changes that need to be made and I want
people to realize that a lot of people who have diabetes don't
have the opportunity to make the right choices. They go to
schools in which there is junk food and soda and no physical
activity. They live in communities in which it's not safe to go
for a walk. I talk about one of my patients who has Type II
diabetes who tried to get on a good physical activity program.
She started walking in her community and got shot just taking a
walk in her community. So we have to make safe places for
people to get physical activity.

We have to look at after-school programs. We have to look at
where we work and what kind of environment we are working in.
Are there good food choices? Is there a chance to use the
stairwell and to get some good physical activity? Because so
many of us are working one job or two jobs, pick up your kids.
By the time you get home, you're exhausted. By the time you get
home, you've picked up maybe some fast food on the way and you
don't have the chance to make the kind of meal you wish you
could. So we're looking maybe where you work, you could buy
dinner for your family, inexpensive and a good way. Maybe
there's some neighborhood farmers market that could be there
that you could get these things right where you live.

Val>> In fact, you helped to get soft drinks off campuses.

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Well, I worked with Marlene Kanter at
Los Angeles Unified School District and she made some bold
initiatives and obviously Superintendent Romer was behind it.
We got rid of sodas in the Los Angeles Unified and a lot of
other school districts have mirrored that. We're now into
healthy vending. There are some bills in California looking at
getting back physical education, getting back physical activity
for our students. There's a lot that can be done and we can
work together and we can kind of change social norms.

We don't have to wake up one day and become elite athletes. We
have to wake up one day and say, you know what? Today I'm going
to drink less sweetened beverages. Today I'm going to get ten
minutes of good physical activity, and make these small changes.

Val>> Now you make a statement that sounds a little
superlative. You say that, unless we change our ways, diabetes
imperils human existence? That seems like such an overstatement
and yet --

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> -- well, I mean, I think it certainly
imperils how we live our lives today and what will happen to our
future. I mean, if we're talking about thirty percent of people
getting diabetes and actually today was released a New England
Journal article that talks about for the first time the life
expectancy may be lower for this generation compared to prior
generations due to obesity. So if we continue to go down this
course -- now a lot of us think we're going to go down this
course and pharmaceutical companies are going to bail us out.

We'll come up with a magic bullet or we'll just all have
beriatric surgery and get our stomachs stapled, but that's not
really practical for so many people. You know, it's too
expensive with too many complications. And we haven't been able
to find a magic bullet or maybe magic bullets. We take nine or
ten pills a day to combat our metabolism.

Val>> And that's going to have all sorts of side effects.
There's never a pill without side effects.

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Absolutely, absolutely. So what we
really have to do is we have to look at what is really happening
within our environment about the way we live our lives and start
to make small changes, incremental changes in our workplace, in
our homes, in our communities. You know, it would be great if
you go to church and you go for a walk at church. You go to
church and you have the right food serve to you in your faith-
based organization.

Val>> No more pancake breakfasts (laughter).

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Right, right. And you come to my house
and I'm going to show you that I really care about you. Not by
making you the most food possible, which was what my mother did.
I mean, if you didn't have seconds and thirds, she would feel,
you know, I failed as a host. But you're going to come to my
place and have a salad, you're going to have a small amount of
food and maybe we'll even go for a walk after dinner. I'm going
to do that because I really care about you and that's, you know,
the same way we changed social norms around smoking. We can
change social norms about our physical activity and about what
we put inside our bodies.

Val>> Dr. Kaufman, thank you so much for some great advice and
a wonderful book.

Dr. Francine Kaufman>> Thank you. Thank you for caring and
thank you for letting me talk about what I think people need to
do and what our leaders need to hear about what we need to do.

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

Val>> They are making a name for themselves by bringing in
treasures from all over the world. The Bowers Museum in Santa
Ana has managed to lure artifacts from China's Forbidden City,
Tibet, and the Middle East, things like mummies and the Dead Sea
Scrolls. For decades, the Bowers was just a small local museum,
so how did it get to be an international player? Vicki Curry
has their story.

Vicki Curry>> It may be the home of Hollywood, but even the art
world of Los Angeles has its share of stars, the County Museum
of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty. But thirty
miles to the south in Santa Ana, a new actor has come onto the
scene, the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art.

Peter Keller>> I did get tired when I first came here going to
Los Angeles, which I still go up several times a week, having to
explain what the Bowers Museum was because nobody had heard of
it.

Vicki Curry>> That's been changing in recent years due in large
part to the museum's president, Peter Keller. He joined the
Bowers in 1992 and has taken it from a small local museum to an
international player. When it opened in 1936, it was known as
the Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum, named for the man who
left his land to the city of Santa Ana.

Peter Keller>> The Bowers family willed fifty thousand dollars
to build a "fireproof museum" on what was the site of their home
at Twentieth and Main Street in Santa Ana. The city accepted
the gift, quickly built the museum and forgot one thing. What
do you display when you have a new museum? People from all over
Orange County donated mostly historical items, Indian artifacts,
to the museum. It stayed that way until the fifties and sixties
when the collecting expanded.

Our Pioneer Collection is one of our core collections developed
largely in the 1960's and it is one of the better pioneer
painting collections in Southern California. We got into beyond
California history and pioneer paintings basically a California-
based museum. We got into some of the cultures that reflect
California and we have major pre-Columbia collections,
California Indians, African art, oceanic art, Chinese art.

Vicki Curry>> From the beginning, the Bowers was a city-run
museum plagued with financial problems until 1986 when the city
decided to expand it and formed a nonprofit group to take it
over. They closed the museum and brought in Peter Keller to
launch the renovated and renamed Bowers Museum of Cultural Art.

Peter Keller>> In October of 1992, we opened the museum that
was six times the size of the 1936 structure. This is the
original 1936 auditorium of the Bowers Museum and one of the
hidden jewels is the ceiling. It was done as a WPA project and
it portrays the history of California. When we rebuilt the
museum in 1992, we actually had all of the ceilings in what we
call the historic wing restored. They wanted a museum that
would reflect its collections, the Bowers collections, but also
create a niche that wouldn't really have tremendous competition.
You know, it would be something new. So we really focused on
the cultural arts of the Pacific Rim, Africa and the Americas.

Vicki Curry>> It took some time for the Bowers to develop its
new character, but it all came into focus in 1999 when the
museum asked itself a key question.

Peter Keller>> What do you want to be remembered for on your
tombstone? We decided it was quality. If we're going to do
something, why not do it as well as anyone possibly could?
That's when we decided that we couldn't do it necessarily with
our own collections, so let's expand with other peoples'
collections.

Vicki Curry>> In just a few years, the Bowers has gained a
reputation for getting access to treasures rarely seen outside
their homes, like artifacts from the Forbidden City Palace
Museum in Beijing, the House of David Inscription from the
Israel Museum and relics from three institutions in Tibet.

Peter Keller>> The real passion for my job is the fun in
learning by traveling and meeting all these people and
negotiating these great exhibits and bringing them basically
back to the people in California.

Vicki Curry>> Many of the exhibits have brought the museum
attention, but also controversy. For instance, the show from
Tibet drew protesters who felt the exhibit avoided the politics
of China's occupation.

Peter Keller>> You know, they say art is supposed to stimulate
controversy and stimulate conversation. We try to do exhibits
that will have significant public appeal and, when you have an
exhibit that has significant public appeal, it draws people who
have a statement they want to make.

Vicki Curry>> Controversial or not, Keller welcomes the
interest. Yet the museum's practice of bringing in foreign
exhibits began as a fluke. Ann Chee, a Bowers board member
originally from Taiwan, was taking a trip back home and asked
Keller if he wanted anything for the museum.

Peter Keller>> At that point, I jokingly said get me a jade
exhibit. Well, two weeks later she came back in my office and
told me I had the jade exhibit. Now what? (Laughter) So that
was the beginning of a number of trips negotiating for that
exhibit in Taiwan and then that led to the Forbidden City and
the British Museum and on and on.

Vicki Curry>> Why is the Bowers able to get these rare objects
when other museums can't? Keller says it just takes
persistence.

Peter Keller>> Someone once said that eighty-five percent of
success is showing up. Certainly that was true with the Tibet
exhibit. I mean, it took seven trips to Tibet to keep that on
track because the Tibetans were so nervous. They'd never let
their national treasures out of Tibet before. I'd sign a
contract and the next thing they'd do was cancel it. Now I'd
have to go back and renegotiate and they'd cancel it.

Vicki Curry>> That persistence really paid off in 2003 when the
Bowers, after three years of negotiation, signed an historic
agreement with the British Museum. The deal allows the Bowers
to regularly exhibit antiquities from the London Museum.

Peter Keller>> We have a tremendous joint venture going. It's
the first of its kind that the British have ever signed and so
far we've had Egyptian treasures from the British Museum and now
Mummies-Death in the Afterlife. While the Bowers collections
are rich, on a worldwide scale when you're looking against
something like the Louvre or the British Museum or the Palace
Museum, we're tiny. So we decided that maybe the best way to
make an impact here in California was to partner with these
great institutions.

Vicki Curry>> The Bowers Museum has created a unique niche for
itself, one that's perfectly tailored for a key group of
patrons.

Peter Keller>> Everything we do, we look at our audiences and
one of them always has to be what's it doing for California's
school children, in what grade and where in the California
curriculum is this satisfying the standards? We reinstalled our
Indian gallery. It's now called The First Californians. So now
we have a seamless experience with the classroom for the third
graders. We then marched up the fourth grade with Missions and
Ranchos, fifth graders with Pioneer Paintings, and now we're
getting into the sixth graders with Mummies and pre-Colombian
cultures.

Vicki Curry>> From school kids to international audiences, the
Bowers Museum seems to be making a name for itself outside of
Santa Ana. I'm Vicki Curry for Life and Times.

Val>> Coming up at the Bowers, Egyptian mummies from the
British Museum. For details, you can go to their website or
give them a call. 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 --

He's been called a dreamer, a genius and a guru. Why are
thousands of people flocking to the California desert to see an
architect?

>> Human shelter is just a right, just like the human right of
government, for freedom, for food. Human rights for shelter.

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