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Life & Times Transcript

07/15/05

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Two out of three African-Americans fail the first time they take the bar exam unless they come to this man. What's his secret?

Al Jenkins>> I always say that some people believe that they can go to heaven, but nobody wants to die to get there. You have to learn the law to be a lawyer.

Val>> And then, she went after the best, the biggest and the most unusual, all in a quest for enlightenment. The story behind the garden paradise of Lotusland.

These stories and more 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>> Nothing puts the fear of God more into law students than the prospect of taking the bar exam. It's an excruciating test and many students have to take it two, three, four, even ten times before they pass it. The pass rate among African-American students is especially low unless they've got some help from a prosecutor turned teacher. As Hena Cuevas tells us, Al Jenkins is improving their chances considerably.

Hena Cuevas>> Al Jenkins, a former prosecutor, saw a serious problem in our legal system and decided to fix it not in a courtroom, but in the kitchen of his Los Angeles home.

Al Jenkins>> "Everybody turn to the first page in this document, last paragraph."

Hena Cuevas>> These law students are studying for the toughest exam of their lives, the bar. They're here because only thirty percent of African-Americans pass the dreaded bar on the first try compared to almost seventy percent for whites. The drilling coming from this man is precisely what they're here for.

Al Jenkins>> "All right. I'll be dictating, you be copying what I say."

Hena Cuevas>> Jenkins, sixty-nine and retired, takes a tough approach to coaching.

Holly Hightower>> One of my girlfriends said some guy said are you going to go to that mean guy (laughter)? She said, as long as we pass, we don't care, and we don't (laughter).

Hena Cuevas>> This is Holly Hightower's first session with Jenkins. Like two-thirds of black law school graduates, the bar is the one test she hasn't been able to pass yet. Next July will be her third and, she hopes, last try.

Holly Hightower>> At this point, I've got to cross my t's and dot my i's. I've got to really pay attention to what it is that I'm doing wrong with the essays.

Al Jenkins>> It's a dirty little secret that lawyers want everybody to think that law is so complicated, but it really isn't.

Hena Cuevas>> Most bar exam prep courses cost about two thousand dollars. Jenkins doesn't charge a penny and he doesn't have to advertise.

Al Jenkins>> It just evolved. The word got out that I was providing a free service that was allowing people to pass the bar exam. So you got to ask them. I don't know how they find me. The phone just rings and it rings and it rings.

Hena Cuevas>> And it hasn't stopped ringing especially after he was featured in an article in People Magazine. Now he's getting calls, some from as far away as Washington, D.C., but they have to be persistent since he doesn't own an answering machine and refuses to communicate via the internet.

Al Jenkins>> They have to let me harass them for one session. After that, they can then submit essays through the mail or call and ask questions by phone.

Al Jenkins>> "Read this paragraph."

>> "It is very important to note that sub-issues are every bit as important as the issues themselves when it comes for all concerned."

Hena Cuevas>> Twice a year, he offers three sessions a day starting at one o'clock and going until ten p.m.

Al Jenkins>> "Underline identify, underline analyze."

Hena Cuevas>> Passing the bar exam is what turns law school graduates into practicing attorneys. This building houses the offices to the State Bar of California. Membership to the Bar gives attorneys the right and the privilege to practice law in the state. According to a survey they conducted in 2001, less than three percent of the attorneys practicing in the state are black. Jenkins is determined to raise that three percent.

Al Jenkins>> "First page, read out loud to me, please, including the head notes."

Hena Cuevas>> Their first lesson? During the next few weeks, nothing is more important than this exam.

Holly Hightower>> "Your bar review preparation must take priority over all other activities. Family problems, money problems, problems with friends and emotional problems must be allowed --

Al Jenkins>> -- "must not."

Holly Hightower>> "must not be allowed."

Al Jenkins>> Why is it that the average person who wants to pass the California Bar believes they can do so without learning the law? I always say that some people believe that they can go to heaven, but nobody wants to die to get there. You have to learn the law to be a lawyer.

Karen Nobumoto>> "And did I show you this part in the D.A. notes?"

Hena Cuevas>> Karen Nobumoto is one of his success stories. She's a Deputy District Attorney for the city of Beverly Hills and remembers all too well what it was like to study under Jenkins.

Karen Nobumoto>> Grueling (laughter). He was very difficult, but in a very loving way. He made it clear that he had an expectation from me as a the student, which meant that nothing, even children, family, parents, nothing was more important for the next two months than studying for the bar exam.

Hena Cuevas>> Nobumoto graduated from law school in 1989. That summer, to prepare for the bar exam, she contacted Jenkins.

Karen Nobumoto>> I knew that Al was very successful because I'd worked with him through the minority Bar Association, so I felt like the best security that I could have was to do exactly what he told me to do.

Hena Cuevas>> And she did, writing essay after essay which she would drop off at his house.

Karen Nobumoto>> The next day, I could come back and pick up all the critiques and the essays and anything he suggested I do. If he suggested I do it, I repeated and corrected that exam or I dropped off seven more.

Hena Cuevas>> And all that hard work paid off. She was among the successful one-third passing on her first try. What do you think made the difference in you passing it the first time?

Karen Nobumoto>> Probably someone like that to scare you to death. He basically told me he expected me to study seventeen hours. I went, seventeen hours? How can I do that?

Hena Cuevas>> A day?

Karen Nobumoto>> Yes. How could I do that? But the fact was, since he had an expectation I'd go to seventeen, it scared me so bad that I never, on any day, studied less than twelve hours.

Hena Cuevas>> Fear is one motivator, but Jenkins also instills confidence.

Al Jenkins>> I always like to mention to them that dumb lawyers pass the bar all the time. There are an awful lot of dumb lawyers out there. Dumb lawyers pass because they know they're dumb, so they work hard.

Hena Cuevas>> Part of the reason so many blacks don't pass the bar, he says, is their own expectation of failure.

Al Jenkins>> They believe that there's somebody out there trying to keep this exam from them. It's my position to tell them that that is not true, that the bar is passable, that it is not the same as rocket science.

Hena Cuevas>> How do you convince them?

Al Jenkins>> Just talk to them and rant and rave. I scare them straight (laughter).

Hena Cuevas>> Jenkins graduated from Cal State Los Angeles with a math degree. His career change started with something most try to avoid: jury duty.

Al Jenkins>> Two weeks on jury duty, I said to myself, now that's what I want to do. It fascinated me.

Hena Cuevas>> So at the age of thirty-six, he went back to law school. He graduated from Loyola at forty, passed the bar on the first try and went to work in the D.A.'s office.

Al Jenkins>> I would meet students in the cafeteria around six-thirty and stay with them until about seven-thirty or eight and go to court. I'd meet them at lunch hour and then, at night, I'd tutor from seven-thirty until eleven. I did that five days a week, then I did it on the weekends.

Hena Cuevas>> He estimates he's tutored about two thousand students. Thanks to their hard work and his help, his success rate is seventy percent.

Karen Nobumoto>> He is a gift. For him to do this for so many years and have such a success rate, there's no reason not to participate. It's free, it works and it's done with love.

Al Jenkins>> People have offered to pay me and I tell them that money cannot pay for time. Time is more important than money and the impact I'm having, the legacy I'm leaving, is much more valuable than money.

Al Jenkins>> "Say again."

Holly Hightower>> "One thing is absolutely certain. You cannot pass the bar if you do not know the law."

Hena Cuevas>> For the time being, Jenkins limits his services to African-American students. There are enough of them to keep him more than busy for years to come. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Val>> And now for this Life and Times story update. You may recall that we told you about the Ennis Brown home designed by famed architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. The eighty-one year old home sits in the Hollywood Hills and, over the years, both the house and a retaining wall have suffered serious damage from earthquakes and heavy rains. Well, now the National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed the home on its list of the most endangered historic places in the country. This will help preservationists raise fifteen million dollars to stabilize and restore this textile block home. They say, unless repairs are made soon, a unique structure, part of Frank Lloyd Wright's legacy, will be lost.

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>> We here in Southern California are well aware that Latinos are a majority in Los Angeles, but we may not realize that Latinos are also a majority in small towns like Liberal, Kansas and Dalton, Georgia. It's that side of Latino culture that Los Angeles Times reporter, Hector Tobar, went in search of. He put his observations in a book called "Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States". You went on a major road trip, in a sense, visiting Latino communities throughout the entire United States. Well, what did you find?

Hector Tobar>> Well, I discovered that what we see in Los Angeles, you know, the Spanish-language radio stations, the Spanish-language newspapers, the soccer leagues, that sort of sense of Los Angeles as a Latino city, that that's being exported from Los Angeles across America to places like Rupert, Idaho and Dalton, Georgia, and that in a certain sense, Los Angeles is helping to define in the twenty-first century of what America is going to be.

Val>> So, in a sense, the communities that are created here by Latino families or whatever are literally moving to Idaho and Georgia and South Carolina?

Hector Tobar>> There are probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Angelenos who have relatives, cousins, uncles, brothers or sisters, who have moved to Clay County, Alabama, Memphis, Tennessee, Rupert, Idaho, to these different communities to sort of seek better fortunes because, you know, it's kind of hard to live in Los Angeles. The wages are good, but the cost of living is high, so people are looking for this sort of new frontier that they're going out to settle.

Val>> So what kind of welcome, if that's the right word, are they getting in these rural small towns?

Hector Tobar>> Well, I think at least up until very recently, the welcome was a big embrace. Places like Dalton, Georgia which is the carpet capital of the United States were just really happy to get these Latino families --

Val>> -- because they were workers, right?

Hector Tobar>> They're people who come to work in the night shift of the carpet factory or the jobs that nobody wants to do in the chicken plants. So in many, many small towns, there was a sense of like here are these newcomers, let's welcome them, they're hardworking families and let's see if we can make life better for them. In Dalton, Georgia, they spend more per student in the public schools than they do in Los Angeles by a factor of two or three.

Val>> But at some point, does this honeymoon period come to an end?

Hector Tobar>> Well, definitely it does. I think that when a city, for example, like Dalton becomes more than fifty percent Latino or a place like Liberal, Kansas also becomes more than fifty percent Latino and people sort of started to see some of the problems. You'll have a gang from Los Angeles and suddenly gang signs are seen on the streets of Liberal or, you know, a Salvadoran gang will appear in many small towns along the Eastern Seaboard. Then people start to say, well, wait a minute. This is a little bit more of a complex phenomenon than we expected to have.

In some towns that I visited in North Carolina and Georgia, there have been marches of the Klan. You know, people saying let's take back our country. Then more mainstream voices of people who feel that, you know, their Deep South is being changed. It's not my mother's Dixie, you know, and we need to sort of do something about this.

Val>> Now you mentioned the Klan. They actually had a specific march in certain towns to protest the Latino presence there?

Hector Tobar>> Oh, yes, they did, definitely. It was something that happened. In the late nineties it happened and it's happened since.

Val>> There's still anti-immigration movements even here in California. I mean, especially in California.

Hector Tobar>> Definitely there is a very strong anti-immigration movement and I think a lot of it comes from a sense that people have that their country is changing. That's part of what my book is about. The Latino immigrant comes to this country and his children really are changing the United States in very subtle ways. They're changing the civic institutions of this country.

They're changing the way of being a citizen because eventually the people who are here who have come illegally or who have come with, you know, papers that are going to run out or whatever, they're going to become permanent residents. They're already permanent residents. They're paying social security taxes and they are established institutions. Those institutions, whether it be the soccer league or whether it be, you know, the flea market on the weekends outside the towns, that is really changing --

Val>> -- or the Pentecostal storefront churches.

Hector Tobar>> Or the Pentecostal Evangelical churches. In fact, I visited recently the newest church in north Alabama which is a Latino Catholic Church. I visited the newest church in Dalton, Georgia which is a little cathedral. Actually, it was not a little cathedral. It was actually quite a large church that was built with the needs of the Latino Catholics who've come to the parish with their needs in mind. So there has been sort of this rebirth of a lot of religious institutions even.

Val>> Would you say that, in a sense, it's a positive thing that's happening? That in general, they are a positive influence in these small towns?

Hector Tobar>> What I think is that it's the same American story that's always been told. This is what I say in my book. What's happening in the twenty-first century United States is the same thing that happened in the nineteenth century United States except that, instead of Italians and Germans and Jews, it's Latinos.

Val>> And instead of New York --

Hector Tobar>> -- and instead of New York, it's Los Angeles, it's Dallas, it's Houston, and that in the same way that Italian immigrants left their mark on not just American civic culture, but just on American culture in general, that the Latino immigration is going to be something that shapes American culture in ways that are very profound and that we're just beginning to see. But at the same time, people come here to become eventually Americans.

I consider myself -- I grew up in Los Angeles when the public schools were the envy of the rest of the United States. I carried the flag in my elementary school in East Hollywood, California. I recited the Gettysburg Address. But at the same time, my father taught me to be proud of being a Guatemalan and that we had this history, this other history that wasn't in the textbooks, that was a part of who I am. I thought I was different that way.

I thought my father, who wanted me to always speak Spanish at home, was sort of an oddball, you know, because everybody wanted to learn English and stuff. English is the language of success. English is the language that you triumph in. But they also don't want them to forget where they came from and it becomes easier to do that when there are radios and stores. You know, that identity is definitely sort of more and more a viable option to consider yourself -- like I consider myself to be in my soul a citizen of the Americas and also an American citizen.

Val>> Well, Hector Tobar, thank you so much for a most enlightening road trip and putting it all together in a book, "Translation Nation".

Hector Tobar>> Thank you very much.

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>> She was an opera singer in search of spiritual fulfillment and the result? A garden paradise just south of Santa Barbara. I kept hearing about this place called Lotusland, so I thought I'd head north to Montecito to see it for myself.

Thirty-seven acres of botanical splendor. Sixteen different garden scenes, among them a water garden. Spectacular cacti. Roses, of course. Topiary, and even something called a Blue Garden. I got a tour of Lotusland from Nancy Wood, a trustee and long-time docent. The roots of Lotusland go back to the 1880's when it was a nursery, but it bloomed into Lotusland under the careful guidance and imagination of a Polish opera singer named Madame Ganna Walska who purchased the property in 1941 for forty thousand dollars.

Nancy Wood>> She was quite a star of her time, yes.

Val>> Tell us about her.

Nancy Wood>> She was very petite and beautiful and extremely charismatic and she was an opera singer, sort of by choice, and had a number of husbands.

Val>> About half a dozen of them (laughter).

Nancy Wood>> About half a dozen husbands, one of whom was Harold McCormick of the McCormick Reaper fame. She was not a botanist or horticulturalist, but she was very creative and had an idea of what she wanted. So she would be in the garden daily with the gardeners telling them what to do and helping them with the planting, so this became her philosophy of just enlightenment for herself.

[Film Clip]

Nancy Wood>> She loved jagged plants, very dramatic plants, and she was sort of the instigator of massing plants where, if one great dramatic plant was something, if you had seventy-five of them, it was even better.

Val>> Madame Walska's singing career was a mix of success, failure, triumph and dashed hopes and, along the way, men would fall madly in love with her, most of them rich. But underlying her beauty, charm and singing career was a desire to find spiritual truth and enlightenment.

Nancy Wood>> What drew her to Santa Barbara was her sixth husband who was a Yogi and who was known as the Great White Llama of Tibet and he was from Arizona. He convinced Madame to come to Santa Barbara to find a place of spiritual enlightenment and a retreat for visiting scholars.

Val>> The newest and most stunning landscape is the Desert Garden. Hundreds of cacti and all of them transported from a cactus lover's garden in San Diego.

Nancy Wood>> All of these plants belonged to one gentleman who lived outside of San Diego.

Val>> It's phenomenal.

Nancy Wood>> And he met Madame and said I'd like to give you my collection when I die. He turned ninety-four about five years ago. The most amazing thing about these plants is most of them he'd been growing since 1929 and forty percent of the collection he'd started from seed. So he would write to places, research stations like on the Galapagos Islands and they'd send him seeds of particular cacti. These are all cacti from the Galapagos. It took over two years for us to just move the plants from San Diego to Santa Barbara.

Val>> So he grew them down there and he moved them up here?

Nancy Wood>> And moved them up here in-toto and he had them lining. They were just cheek by jowl, a quarter mile driveway. You can imagine how packed they were. We have right now over five hundred plants and three hundred different species of cacti.

Val>> And they survived the moving.

Nancy Wood>> They did and they're even happier now that they're finally in the ground. Isn't that something?

Val>> It takes sixteen full-time gardeners and ninety volunteers to keep Lotusland looking beautiful and it's all done organically.

Nancy Wood>> We don't use any toxics or inorganics here at Lotusland. We're a totally sustainable garden, so we want to bring in nature's beneficial insects who are the best predators for us. So we bring in all kinds of wonderful ladybugs and lacewings and wasps. We'll vacuum them up every couple of weeks and release them in other parts of the gardens. As a side light, we've got monarchs visiting us for the nectar, so we planted the monarch host plant, the milkweed, and now the monarchs spend the winter here and we have a monarch nursery.

Val>> Did you say you vacuum up the insects?

Nancy Wood>> Very gently in a great big like power-driven butterfly net, very, very gently, so we don't hurt them and then we release them in other parts of the gardens (laughter).

Val>> So everything here is done naturally? No pesticides, no insecticides?

Nancy Wood>> No, no. We use things like vinegar which is great for killing weeds. Corn gluten, from what I understand, to help prevent weeds in the lawn, although someone just told me one day that there's no such thing as corn gluten, but that's what the gardeners called it. Lots of composting, compost tea. We have pumps that will "fertigate" plants. They feed and irrigate at the same time. The plants have responded just fabulously well.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Madame Walska also saw Lotusland as a place to conserve and preserve endangered plants. In fact, the thousands of species on this thirty-seven acres of land represent one percent of the world's plant population, some of which are extinct in nature or very rare, like these Cycads which date back to the Jurassic era, just one of hundreds of tree species at Lotusland.

Nancy Wood>> What's really nifty about the trees is the first owner who was the plantsman would invite officers from ships up to dinner because trains didn't come into Santa Barbara in the 1880's and the only way to get supplies in was via ship. So when the officers would come back as a return visit to, you know, thank him for the wonderful meal, they brought him trees and plants and seeds and cuttings from around the world. So that's why we have Chilean Wine Palms, Norfolk Island Pines, Dracaena Dracos from the Canary Islands that are all about a hundred twenty years old.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Madame Walska spent the last half of her life at Lotusland. Before she died in 1984, she established a foundation to maintain the property. If she were to see it today, would it be different?

Nancy Wood>> I think she'd be very happy. I really do. She probably wouldn't like the plant signs because she didn't like them interrupting the landscape. And I think she'd be especially pleased with our school outreach program we have with the fourth graders in Santa Barbara County. That's a marvelous token and it ties in with their science curriculum. It gets the kids very interested in sustainable gardening and how important plants are to our livelihood and they become junior botanists when they visit us and we just love it.

Val>> Ganna Walska. Did she ever find enlightenment?

Nancy Wood>> Actually, she did. She studied spirituality and all kinds of different religions throughout her life. After she came here, she discovered true happiness and serenity and her real passion in life was gardening, so she considered herself the head gardener and she lived here forty-three years. She died at the wonderful age of ninety-seven. Gardening is good for your health (laughter).

Val>> (Laughter) Clearly.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Lotusland is open to the public, but not all year round, so you should go to their website or give them a call for details and information. 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 --

They're a diverse group, but the one thing they have in common could make a big difference in your future.

>> Right now, I'm faced with a big challenge and I can either punk out and let this challenge just totally disrespect me and I lose all credibility within the hood or else I could stand up and go head up with this challenge, which I'm doing right now.

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

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