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Life & Times Transcript

09/13/05

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

For the staff at this New Orleans style restaurant in Anaheim, the hurricane meant taking action.

Angela Dean>> If it wasn't for this guy, I wouldn't be here. He made a phone call and made everything happen for us and we was able to get rescued.

Val Zavala>> And then, we step back into an elegant past to explore the life of an ambitious entrepreneur who saw early on what Los Angeles would become.

These stories and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> 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 Zavala>> It's a little bit of New Orleans right here in Southern California, yet the connection between this Anaheim restaurant and the French Quarter is more than just architecture. When Katrina hit, it also hit the staff of the Jazz Kitchen very personally. Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, has the story.

Roger Cooper>> After all the floodwaters, all of the destruction, after all the tragic images we've seen coming out of New Orleans, this is like seeing a ghost. Before your eyes, a vibrant, still-functioning part of the French Quarter, but this piece of French Quarter is almost two thousand miles from Louisiana. It's in downtown Disney, the entertainment district just outside Disneyland.

Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen is patterned after the famous restaurants operated by the Brennan family in New Orleans, such as Brennan's and Commander's Palace. So when Katrina struck, it also hit the people at the Jazz Kitchen very personally. Like many of the chefs and managers here, Mason Jambon is a native New Orleanian. You homesick?

Mason Jambon>> Yeah, I'm very homesick especially right now.

Roger Cooper>> What's it been like to be away and to see all the pictures?

Mason Jambon>> It's devastating. It really is. It's one of the more disheartening things I've ever experienced.

Roger Cooper>> Mason's memories of New Orleans go back decades.

Mason Jambon>> This is Orpheus which is Harry Connick, Jr.'s parade the night before Mardi Gras. After the parade, there's a big ball and she met me there and we had a wonderful time. This is outside the Superdome. I think this is the first time I brought her to New Orleans. We'd go to a lot of parades during the day and my son was in a walking parade.

Roger Cooper>> Your family has been affected?

Mason Jambon>> My family, half of them are staying in northern Alabama with friends and the other half is out here with me.

Roger Cooper>> To understand how much this hurts, you need to know how closely the Brennan name is associated with New Orleans.

Mason Jambon>> The Brennan family is probably the royal family of food in New Orleans. There's a lineage of chefs that have started at Commander's Palace. You know, some of the great chefs in the culinary world have come out of our kitchens.

Roger Cooper>> All those Brennan chefs, waiters, busboys and managers are now evacuees with no place to work. So Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen here in Anaheim is offering as many jobs as they can to fellow workers who have had to flee the city.

Mason Jambon>> We're bringing out about twenty of our employees from New Orleans, our chefs, our managers, some of our waiters. I put two of them on a bus last night out of Baton Rouge. We're very fortunate. The hotels around Anaheim have reached out and offered to provide temporary housing for them.

Roger Cooper>> The staff here at the Jazz Kitchen also decided to make a personal financial sacrifice.

Mason Jambon>> My management staff has decided to forego our bonuses, you know, so that we can support that salary while they're out here. We're just trying to do whatever we can to hold our group together right now. You know, the alternative is that we let people not get paid and their families that we've known -- I mean, I've known some of these people for fifteen years and that's just not an acceptable alternative.

Roger Cooper>> As it happens, while we were talking with Mason, an evacuated Brennan worker from New Orleans came through the door.

Mason Jambon>> My family is living with me and the young lady that just walked in is my front door manager from New Orleans, from Redfish Grill, and they're starting to come in.

Roger Cooper>> Hello.

Angela Dean>> Hello.

Roger Cooper>> Welcome to California.

Angela Dean>> Thank you.

Mason Jambon>> How are you?

Angela Dean>> I'm okay.

Roger Cooper>> Mason, who is this?

Mason Jambon>> This is Angela Dean. Angela is the front door manager at the Redfish Grill.

Angela Dean>> Hi.

Roger Cooper>> And now she's, temporarily at least, in California.

Mason Jambon>> She's out here with us. That's right. We're glad to have her.

Angela Dean>> This is my sister.

Roger Cooper>> Hi. Welcome. Stay with us a moment, if you will. What's your story from being there?

Angela Dean>> Oh, it was scary. It was real scary. If it wasn't for this guy, I wouldn't be here. He made a phone call and made everything happen for us. We was able to be rescued.

Roger Cooper>> Angela and hundreds of others sought refuge from the floodwaters at the Orleans Parish Courthouse and Prison, but they soon became trapped there with no help on the way.

Mason Jambon>> You know, a lot of people went there. It was a government building. It's a courthouse and a parish prison together. I had no idea Angela was there. My uncle is a deputy who was stationed at Orleans Parish Prison and he called me a couple of days -- I guess it was Friday -- and said you've got to help me. Nobody knows we're here and we have a lot of people here and there's no food and no water. I called Ralph and Ralph had some ties to some of the people in government, Governor Blanco and her people, and he called some people and they got some Wildlife and Fisheries guys to go in there. I had no idea Angela was in the building, but, you know, I'm very glad that we were able to get her out and get everybody out.

Angela Dean>> This guy right here saved us.

Mason Jambon>> I didn't even know you were there.

Angela Dean>> You made the phone call. Well, because you made the phone call, I'm here.

Roger Cooper>> The next arrivals here from New Orleans may include some of the city's great jazz musicians.

Mason Jambon>> We're getting calls from a lot of the musicians. Rebirth Brass Band and some of those guys are now looking for work. You know, they usually play in New Orleans. So I think we're going to get an infusion of talent very soon and some really good authentic talent.

Roger Cooper>> I wanted to ask you just because I'd be remiss if I didn't, what are your feelings about the response, of the time frame?

Mason Jambon>> You know, I think that there's a lot of blame to go around from the top down. There were two tragedies. There was the hurricane and the levee and then there was the way that the government across political lines reacted to that first tragedy. A lot of good people like Angela and her family and her daughter got left behind.

Roger Cooper>> In these times of tragedy in the Gulf Coast, people are trying to hold onto a bit of New Orleans any way they can.

>> And the first place we stopped was here for solidarity for New Orleans.

Roger Cooper>> For now at least, the Jazz Kitchen in Anaheim is one of the few places left to get an authentic oyster shooter.

>> Tomato sauce, Tabasco and oysters.

Roger Cooper>> And every Sunday for the foreseeable future, the Jazz Kitchen is throwing a fifty dollar a head jazz brunch. All profits will go to a foundation that will try to keep these displaced restaurant workers insured for the next year.

Mason Jambon>> The people that you saw leaving on those buses, that's what I worry about. That's the soul of the city literally and those people are what makes New Orleans great. You know, New Orleans is like gumbo. It's a lot of diverse elements, but when it comes together, it's great and phenomenal. My biggest fear is that a lot of those people are not going to come back. We're really working hard and we want to believe that we can keep this together and that we can get back in there and rebuild that city and make it an even better place than it was before.

Roger Cooper>> But for a time much longer than Mason Jambon likes to think about, the Jazz Kitchen in Anaheim, California may have to serve as New Orleans in exile. In Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Announcer>> 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 Zavala>> When people in the Gulf states talk about the big one, they mean a hurricane. When we talk about the big one, we mean an earthquake and we are overdue for the big one. So what can we expect? Hena Cuevas talked with earthquake expert, Lucy Jones, from the United States Geological Survey.

Hena Cuevas>> When you see something like what just happened in New Orleans and you follow earthquakes, what are your thoughts about the preparedness in California?

Lucy Jones>> I can see things happen that I think won't happen here because we have been planning. It also makes me aware that there are times when the disaster can overwhelm the existing systems and we've just got to do everything we can to make our system as strong as it can and therefore more likely to survive.

Hena Cuevas>> With something like this, is this a really good opportunity to have people then start thinking about what could happen here?

Lucy Jones>> I think that everyone in Southern California watching what's happening in the Gulf Coast is taking that step and thinking, well, maybe it really is going to be bad when we have that earthquake. I found it myself in ending up talking with my husband saying, you know, we really haven't been keeping up the water supplies. It's been a long time since Northridge. Everybody forgets. You know, my running shoes got out of the car and I really need to make sure they get back in. I hope everyone takes this opportunity because we are going to have a major disaster at some point. How you survive it is going to depend a lot upon the choices that you make between now and then.

Hena Cuevas>> One of the obvious differences between a hurricane and an earthquake is that we don't have warning.

Lucy Jones>> Right. We don't have that type of feeling. You know, here's the hurricane moving across and it's going to be here in twelve hours. We do sometimes have -- you know, we just had a magnitude 5 on the San Andreas. Our chance of the big one is up today and people should be aware of those things. But the preparedness needs to be somewhat different. You can't do it by leaving. It means, instead of having a hundred thousand people in the disaster zone afterwards, we're going to be having fifteen million.

Hena Cuevas>> You've been following all the different tremors and all the earth movements in California. What is the situation with the big one? What does the scientific community think?

Lucy Jones>> We know that earthquakes are inevitable. We see the rate at which they happen. As far as we can tell, there is not a buildup to the big one. Rather, there's an ongoing process. And the other part, in Southern California, we have over three hundred faults capable of a damaging earthquake, so we need to be concerned about the San Andreas because it's the biggest and fastest of the faults. But we can't put our planning only on that one because there are so many others that we need to worry about.

Now when we get to our biggest one, when we have the San Andreas event, we know that on average that happens once every couple hundred years. The last one was in 1857 near Palmdale. You go down by Palm Springs, there hasn't been one for over three hundred years. That doesn't say it has to happen tomorrow. We've gone three hundred years without one. But it does mean that's a very likely place for it.

One of the big issues is we'll be disrupting our infrastructure in a way that we did not with a smaller event like Northridge. Because the San Andreas surrounds Southern California and, when it moves, one side will be moved offset from the other side after the event. That means, for instance, pipelines that cross the fault will now be separated by twenty feet. They're probably not still going to be continuous after that process unless we mitigate. That's what science and engineering can do for us. We can tell you where the motions are going to happen and then we could go in and build the system that can handle that motion.

Hena Cuevas>> You described Northridge as a little earthquake. Can you describe the big one?

Lucy Jones>> Well, let's look at our history as the best way to understand what could happen. If you look over the twentieth century, there were six earthquakes that caused what would in modern terms be, say, over a billion dollars worth of damage. Northridge was one of those, so it isn't just a small one. But of those six, the 1906 great earthquake in San Francisco eclipses the rest of them. It really did pretty much eliminate a city. That's what we're seeing in New Orleans. It's the ability to take out a whole metropolitan area, and the 1906 earthquake did that. So those are the earthquakes that we're most afraid of.

When we get to our magnitude 8, that 7.9 and 8, the one thing is that they can probably only happen on the San Andreas fault. Because to be an 8, you need to have a very long fault and the San Andreas is really probably the only one long enough. But that also means that you need about two hundred fifty miles of fault length to get up to a magnitude 8. That means a two hundred fifty mile area is all going to be right on top of the earthquake and therefore we're going to see a much more extensive area of destruction than we see in something like Northridge which was really confined to a very small area. The earthquake is also going to last for a longer time because earthquakes don't happen at epicenters, but they begin at epicenters.

Then you essentially have a tear that rips down the fault and that travels at two miles a second. Through a two hundred fifty mile long fault, you need a hundred twenty-five seconds. That earthquake is going to last for two minutes. By comparison, Northridge lasted for seven seconds. So we're going to see a much bigger area involved. It's going to take much more time to bring in mutual aid because they're going to have to be coming from much farther away and we're going to have an earthquake that lasts for a much, much longer time.

Hena Cuevas>> When there is an earthquake of that magnitude, what is the range of the area that would be affected, as much as you can predict?

Lucy Jones>> Well, actually, we can predict the consequences of the earthquake very well. The only part we don't get is the time and, of course, that's the part that people want. But to have a magnitude 8 means that we'll have a fault about two hundred fifty miles long. The most likely one for Southern California is the San Andreas fault, say, from the Salton Sea up through Palm Springs, through Beaumont-Banning area, up through Riverside-Redlands, San Bernardino, Wrightwood, Palmdale, up to Fort Tejon. That's two hundred fifty miles. That's a section that we think has gone coherently in the past producing one magnitude 8 earthquake. Anywhere within ten or twenty miles of the fault from Fort Tejon all the way down to the Salton Sea is going to be as badly damaged as the worst part of the San Fernando Valley in the 1994 earthquake.

Hena Cuevas>> So anytime there's a big disaster like this one, it's actually good for you because you're able to get peoples' attention and kind of warn us?

Lucy Jones>> One doesn't want to enjoy anything that's happening here, but there is a positive side that we're watching California really wake up to the possibilities. It's much easier to carry that message that you need to be self-sufficient for a week when they sit and watch what's happening in the Gulf Coast. Let's not just study the earthquake. Let's implement the findings and we can reduce the losses. What I keep on trying to tell people is that the earthquake is inevitable, but the disaster is not and we have choices to make to reduce that.

Hena Cuevas>> Thank you, Dr. Jones, for the information and we'll pass it along.

Lucy Jones>> Thank you.

Announcer>> 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 Zavala>> When you think of Wilmington, what do you think of? Those smoky old oil refineries right alongside the 405 Freeway, right? Well, there is a side of Wilmington you wouldn't believe.

In the middle of a town known for its cargo ships and oil refineries is a home whose historic elegance would be impossible to replicate today. This is the home of a nineteenth century entrepreneur, politician and civic leader. It's a twenty-three room mansion built in 1864 just as the Civil War was ending and before the telephone was invented. It was built by a man whose imagination was as big as his ambitions, a farm boy from Delaware named Phineas Banning.

Michael Sanborn>> Farming was not for him and he discovers that at a very early age and, by the age of thirteen, he has left home.

Val Zavala>> Michael Sanborn has spent years in this house as director of the Banning residence, which is now a museum. So, Michael, there are eighteen room open in the house?

Michael Sanborn>> Yes, there are. We opened our first floor and our second floor for touring for the public. What we're in now is the parlor and, during its time, this was the room where Phineas Banning did his entertaining. During the 1840's, he's seeing Philadelphia change from a colonial sea town to a mid-industrial super power. In the 1800's, he sees the railroad coming in to Philadelphia. He sees the canal system. He sees the whole waterfront change and he sees what industry can do. This is what makes the most impression upon him as a young man.

Val Zavala>> Banning's first job was to move supplies from the East Coast through Panama before the canal was built and on to San Diego. He was only nineteen.

Michael Sanborn>> But something happens on that route crossing the Panama and that is that his employer dies. His employer dies, which leaves a nineteen year old in the middle of the Panama jungle with a load to deliver. He does do that, reputation preceding him, gets it through Panama and then to San Diego.

Val Zavala>> He then headed north to San Pedro. The population at the time? Fifty.

Michael Sanborn>> He also sees that San Pedro is a blank canvas. I can just imagine seeing that empty canvas and the wheels just start turning of what can happen here.

Val Zavala>> The resourceful young Phineas started a lucrative stagecoach route taking passengers and supplies from the harbor to downtown Los Angeles. Before long, he'd made a small fortune. He and his partners renamed the town Wilmington after Banning's East coast hometown.

Michael Sanborn>> The other really wonderful and important thing that we have here is indeed the first map of Wilmington ever made.

Val Zavala>> Banning became a state senator, but his political views weren't always popular. He was always anti-slavery, is that right?

Michael Sanborn>> Very staunch unionist. His views were very, very well known about supporting the unions. During the Civil War, Southern California is primarily southern sympathizers and he was in the minority. So his views were always outspoken in support of the whole union cause during the war.

Val Zavala>> After the Civil War, Banning set out to make San Pedro and Los Angeles a major commercial center. He traveled to Washington, D.C. and got funding to dredge the harbor.

Michael Sanborn>> The Father for the Port of Los Angeles is a really wonderful reference for him.

Val Zavala>> Along the way, he built this house and started a family. Life was obviously very different a hundred fifty years ago.

Michael Sanborn>> They were very musically gifted as a family and singing and playing instruments was always part of what they did.

Val Zavala>> That's a piano?

Michael Sanborn>> Piano, and what is behind us is a Melodeon which is an early organ. In this room, this is where, of course, all of the formal dinners took place. Not only that, but the everyday meals took place here as well.

Val Zavala>> Really? Look at this. This is how they would call the family?

Michael Sanborn>> Absolutely. This also had another purpose and this was to let the kitchen know with a series of tones that they were ready for another meal. Now a formal Victorian dinner could have as many as five or six courses and, when you came here for a dinner or a party, you were here for several hours. This was not a sit-down, eat and go.

Val Zavala>> Upstairs, the bedrooms are beautifully furnished with antiques and, wherever possible, with the original furniture.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Today the museum is supported by a dedicated group of eighty volunteers who help keep it in perfect condition. Just outside in back of the house is a former ranch office converted to a one-room schoolhouse. It's a popular place among the hundreds of students who visit the Banning home.

Joyce Seltzer>> The children come in and they put on a little bit of costume. We give them new names from an 1880 census.

Val Zavala>> Real names?

Joyce Seltzer>> Real names, Matilda or Wilbur. It starts a lot of giggling at that point (laughter).

Val Zavala>> Joyce Seltzer is president of the Banning Museum volunteers.

Joyce Seltzer>> They read from the McGuffey Reader. They do some arithmetic, no math, no computer.

Lisa Hansen>> We feel the presence of history here.

Val Zavala>> Lisa Hansen is president of an important support group, the Friends of Banning Museum.

Lisa Hansen>> And we would like everybody that comes through the doors to know about Phineas' entrepreneurial spirit and how he came here with a dream, a vision and a hardworking ethic and now he has created the third largest port in the world.

Val Zavala>> But Banning's life was not all about success. He lost a fortune in cattle raising. Seven out of twelve children didn't survive into adulthood. His first wife died young in childbirth and Banning himself didn't live long.

Michael Sanborn>> In 1884, he was in San Francisco and the story has it that he was stepping off of a cable car and was knocked to the ground by an expressway -- that's a kind of irony for you -- and he was run over and suffered with internal injuries.

Val Zavala>> He was on the mend, but complications set in. Banning died of pneumonia at age fifty-four.

Michael Sanborn>> This was a room that also unfortunately after he passed away, he did lay in state in here for several days and thousands of Angelenos came to the house just to pay their final respects to him. He was such a beloved and wonderful pioneer for the city.

Val Zavala>> In 1925, the home and the surrounding grounds were sold to the city of Los Angeles. Today it's run by the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Lisa Hansen>> We hope the kids will grow up to be whatever it is they want to be and have that entrepreneurial spirit that makes America so great.

Michael Sanborn>> So many people come to California with little or nothing and they have a dream. They want to make it happen and here is a success story from, you know, a hundred fifty years ago.

Val Zavala>> For information on the Banning Museum, you can go to their website at banningmuseum.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> 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.

Sponsored in part by:


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