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Life & Times Transcript

12/01/05

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

An Orange County election that should have been a shoo-in has turned into a horse race and it's all because of one man.

Jim Gilchrist>> I don't need this job, but my country needs me in this job.

Val Zavala>> And then, if at first you don't succeed, how an ordinary Joe turned Trader Joe's into a national phenomenon.

It's all 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 was supposed to be a fairly predictable race for a Congressional seat in Orange County, but then something interesting happened. A third candidate appeared, a controversial immigration activist, and now it's a race to watch. With only a week before the election, Roger Cooper sat down and talked with all three major candidates about the key issues, the main one being our border.

Roger Cooper>> As Americans begin to focus on next year's mid-term elections for Congress, the signs are already up in Orange County. It's a runoff in the 48th District. The seat in Congress came open after President Bush named Chris Cox, the district's long-time Republican representative, to head up the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Orange County has always been on the GOP's radar screen.

Martin Wisckol>> It would be quite an upset if a Democrat would win that district.

Roger Cooper>> As politics reporter for The Orange County Register, Martin Wisckol follows the 48th closely. He says this race is more interesting than most.

Martin Wisckol>> However, we do have a wild card in this race and that's an American Independent candidate, Jim Gilchrist, best known for his work along the border and illegal immigration activism.

Roger Cooper>> Jim Gilchrist, the Orange Countian who founded the Minuteman Project, got more votes in the primary than the leading Democrat, attorney Steve Young. But the most votes went to Republican State Senator John Campbell who fell just shy of winning the seat outright.

John Campbell>> I'm interested in keeping America free, safe and strong and seeing that our spending gets under control which it's not right now, that our taxes remain low, and that we have energy independence, and also that we secure our borders because border security is national security.

Steve Young>> I'm in this race because I'm concerned about the future of my children and my grandchildren. With the export of all of our jobs and outsourcing, I'm concerned we're not going to have a middle class for the future.

Jim Gilchrist>> And I'm running for God and country. I'm coming out of retirement to do this. I don't need this job, but my country needs me in this job. Essentially, I want to deal head-on with the so-called one issue of illegal immigration.

Roger Cooper>> And like any district in the nation, the candidates running in the 48th must address the issue that won't go away: the war in Iraq.

Steve Young>> It's a war that we shouldn't have been in, but our task that we have now is how do we get out? Unlike other people that I have heard, I have a plan that actually works and that is that we draw on lessons that we've learned in history with the Lebanon and Damascus civil war of the early 1980's. The only solution that worked there was bringing in the Arab League to negotiate between the parties and oversee a peaceful resolution.

John Campbell>> We are winning the war in Iraq and we are doing the right thing in Iraq. I think the job we're doing there is extremely important. I could show you here -- this is a postcard I just got in the last couple of days from a friend of mine who's in the military serving in Iraq. He says, and I want to read exactly one of the things he said here, "Don't believe most of the lame, negative TV coverage of this place. We are changing the world out here and giving a once-oppressed people a chance to join the modern world." Our mission in Iraq is an important one. It's an important one for the freedom of Iraq, but it's an important one for the freedom of the world.

Jim Gilchrist>> I side with the President on this. I believe, when you're fighting an enemy, people who literally want to kill you and want to destroy their own country, talking about these insurgents in Iraq, the only way to deal with them is first you don't tell them that we're going to be here up to a certain date and then we're leaving.

Roger Cooper>> In some parts of the country, some Republican candidates have begun to distance themselves from the President over the war. Not in this district.

John Campbell>> I think the foreign policy that the President of the United States has put in place has been frankly brilliant.

Roger Cooper>> In a case of impeccable timing, Gilchrist has managed to run just as immigration is ascending as an issue.

Martin Wisckol>> The immigration issue is very hot and the fact that he, in the primary, received fifteen percent of the vote shows how many people in the community will vote largely on that issue.

Jim Gilchrist>> Illegal -- and you notice I emphasize illegal -- immigration is a cause for our floundering public school system, certainly a threat to our middle class which is destined to shrink if we do not reverse this trend of American citizen middle class workers being replaced by economic refugees.

John Campbell>> We should secure our borders because border security is national security. We know the terrorists see Mexico as a place from which they can come into the United States in order to wreak terror on this country, so we will need to secure that border solidly with a fence, with border patrol, with more detention beds. And we also need to enforce our immigration laws on this side of the border as well.

Roger Cooper>> But Democratic opponent, Steve Young, says he has a unique business solution to immigration issues.

Steve Young>> We have immigrants coming across the border paying three to five thousand dollars each to coyotes to smuggle them into this country. I don't understand why we don't set up an immigration board on the border who says, "Pay us the three to five thousand dollars. If you want to enter our country, we want a photograph of you, we want your fingerprints, we want to give you a TB test. Tell us where you're going to live and where you're going to work."

Roger Cooper>> Another issue that President Bush has been criticized for is not taking environmental problems and global warming seriously. Democrat candidate, Steve Young, says global warming is real.

Steve Young>> I believe that we have scientific evidence to demonstrate that this is a real threat to our environmental future. There are those who deny its existence, those who say, "I'm going to follow the president." President Bush has admitted that he wasn't a very good student in school. He has yet to demonstrate that he's a very good student now.

John Campbell>> I don't understand why we're spending so much time and resources on this global warming issue which still has scientific disagreements and which we can't see or touch and which, even if we did everything we wanted to, we couldn't affect the whole world. When we still have smog, there is no disagreement as to the health problems. There is no disagreement as to where it is or what it is and there is no disagreement as to how to cure it. We should be spending our time and resources on that and not on global warming.

Jim Gilchrist>> I prefer to think that the global warming issue really is more of an act of God than an act of man. It might rise another degree over a century, but then it might go back for the next century after that by two degrees. I think it's self-adjusting. I think it's something that has occurred over eternity.

Roger Cooper>> But The Register's Martin Wisckol says, despite President Bush's problems and the concerns of Americans, Orange County is still basically conservative.

Martin Wisckol>> For the most part, I think if you want to find a Republican stronghold that remains strongly supportive of the administration, you can look to Orange County and find that.

Roger Cooper>> But is it possible that a Democrat could win?

Martin Wisckol>> Some of us who follow politics and would like to be surprised have put together different scenarios in which Gilchrist or Steve Young, a Democrat, might win. One of those scenarios is that Jim Gilchrist runs a very strong campaign and pulls a lot of Republican votes away from Campbell. They split the Republican vote and the Democrat is the beneficiary of that. Another scenario, perhaps a little less likely, is that the Gilchrist issue is so strong that he comes out the winner. However, either one of those, I think, would be quite a surprise.

Roger Cooper>> Voters go to the polls on December 6, but that will not end the campaigning because, the day the winner takes office, the election for a full term will be just eleven months away and another race for the 48th District will start again. 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>> Trader Joe's is an institution here in Southern California and, in fact, this is the very first Trader Joe's ever, the one right here in Pasadena. But did you ever wonder if there is a real "Joe" behind Trader Joe's? Well, there is, and you're about to meet him and his wife, Alice. Joe Coulombe and Alice have lived in their Pasadena home for twenty-four years and have been married for more than fifty. They met at Stanford and Joe started out in the corporate world.

Joe Coulombe>> I knew that corporate life for me was poison.

Val Zavala>> So they started a convenience store chain in 1958 called Pronto and worked for ten years to make it succeed.

Joe Coulombe>> And, for ten years, slugged that out until 7-11 came to town and we had to get out of the business.

Val Zavala>> So they reinvented the stores with an island trading post motif and, of course, a new name. And are you the Joe in Trader Joe's?

Joe Coulombe>> Yes. Alice wanted me to call it Trader Mom's (laughter), but she lost.

Alice Coulombe>> (Laughter) It made sense, and also we were young. I think it would be really hard to try and do this kind of thing once you were kind of settled and your kids needed more than one pair of shoes.

Val Zavala>> And what kind of customer did they have in mind? The over-educated and underpaid, like artists, journalists and teachers.

Alice Coulombe>> My parents were teachers and they always thought he got the idea from them (laughter).

Joe Coulombe>> Well, actually, I did. I was just helping the Stanford Business School magazine with an interview this morning and I said that many of my ideas came from watching Alice's mother struggle on her professor's salary at a time when professors made about as much as a journeyman grocer.

[Film Clip]

Joe Coulombe>> What we tried to do at Trader Joe's was to make it possible for a school teacher to come home every night and have a decent bottle of wine, a decent pound of cheese and a decent loaf of bread.

Val Zavala>> This is the first ever Trader Joe's on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena. It opened in 1967 and carried mainly wines, cheeses and bread. But in 1977, a major change in food pricing regulations led to a shake-out in the grocery business and yet another transition for Trader Joe's. More items were added, nearly two thousand, and they were always distinct from larger conventional supermarkets.

Joe Coulombe>> That is why Trader Joe's does not sell Coca-Cola because there is no way to be outstanding in Coca-Cola and make money and Trader Joe's makes money on everything it sells.

Val Zavala>> And yet the prices are very low. I mean, compared to whole foods and other --

Alice Coulombe>> -- they're the price they need to be. They're fair to the customers, but they're also fair for business reasons.

Val Zavala>> It's hard to imagine when you see a success story like Trader Joe's that it almost went under.

Joe Coulombe>> We almost went Chapter 11 at one point, okay (laughter)?

Alice Coulombe>> Partly because we started with a very small amount of money.

Joe Coulombe>> Yeah.

Alice Coulombe>> We saved five thousand dollars from my teaching third grade and borrowed five thousand from his grandmother and borrowed five from your parents and that sort of did it.

Val Zavala>> So you didn't have the big capital resources?

Joe Coulombe>> No, no.

Val Zavala>> It was literally mom and pop, it sounds like.

Alice Coulombe>> Truly, truly mom and pop, yeah.

Val Zavala>> Joe attributes the success of the stores to one basic thing: hiring good people.

Joe Coulombe>> The real secret of Trader Joe's and what really differentiates it from any other company, it has the best people in retail and that's true at both the store and the office level.

Alice Coulombe>> And they're proud of what they do.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Trader Joe's employees are among the highest paid in retail and that keeps workers around for a long time. Craig Arnold has been a store manager for ten years. Excuse me, a store captain.

Craig Arnold>> Actually, I was managing a Penguin's Frozen Yogurt two doors up from the Westlake store and liked it, but didn't feel respected. You know, so I quit right on the spot, went down and knew everybody at Trader Joe's and said, "Hey, can I have a job?" From day one, it was, you know, the best job I could have.

Val Zavala>> Although a lot has changed, one section has always been, well, developed, shall we say.

Joe Coulombe>> What we did every afternoon at the end of the workday at the office, we'd pull fifty corks and taste wine until we began to understand what it was all about.

Val Zavala>> Joe figures he's tasted one hundred thousand wines over his years running Trader Joe's, and what does he think of Trader Joe's famous Two-Buck Chuck?

Joe Coulombe>> People ask me all the time about Charles T. Shaw. The volume is so enormous that there is no continuity of character. So what I tell people is, when you buy a bottle, write down the date and the hour on which it was packed and then, if you like that, go back and buy from that same date and hour.

Val Zavala>> Can you do that? What do you have to do? Go through the shelves looking for --

Joe Coulombe>> -- no, it's on the end. I mean, they sell so much of it that they don't take it out of the cases.

Val Zavala>> Oh, got it, okay. It's on the case and you can see clearly.

Joe Coulombe>> Yeah, yeah.

Val Zavala>> In 1989 after running Trader Joe's for twenty-two years, Joe and Alice made a big decision. They decided to sell the hugely successful stores primarily because of tax laws.

Joe Coulombe>> I was approached and romanced over a period of two years by one of the richest families in the world and --

Val Zavala>> -- the Germans?

Joe Coulombe>> The Albrecht family, and finally we made a handshake deal. It was literally a one-page contract. They have never interfered with the management of Trader Joe's. Furthermore, I think they figured out that Trader Joe's is so successful that there's no point in interfering.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Joe went on to more interesting challenges, he says. After leaving Trader Joe's, he ran eleven companies helping many of them out of financial trouble. Now he's retired and has discovered a love of gardening.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> And he paints.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> And after years of developing a refined wine palette, he hasn't let it go to waste.

Joe Coulombe>> And then I have winejoe.com which I started six years ago to protest Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Wine Spectator and the whole concept of putting point scores on wine and the corollary to this which means that, when you judge wines that way, you will always favor alcoholic wines and, as a result, the alcoholic level of wine around the world is steadily rising, which I regard as, well, first of all, dangerous in terms of drunk driving and, secondly, it tends to produce, in my opinion, aesthetically lacking wines.

Val Zavala>> Alice is active in Pasadena charities, but her greatest passion is the opera.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> And do Alice and Joe still shop at Trader Joe's?

Alice Coulombe>> Absolutely.

Craig Arnold>> Yes, they shop in here, I'd say, once a week.

Val Zavala>> As regular old customers, sort of.

Craig Arnold>> Joe is always asking how things are going. He's still on the loop of, you know, how this store, especially this store, is going.

Val Zavala>> Although their three children have all gone into other fields, Joe and Alice are more than content with leaving behind a thriving chain of more than two hundred Trader Joe's markets across the country.

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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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is already being touted as a possible Academy Award contender. Steven Gaghan wrote and directed "Syriana" which stars George Clooney, Matt Damon and Jeffrey Wright.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Peter Rainer of The Christian Science Monitor and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Henry, please start us off with "Syriana".

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I'm a sucker for international thrillers, so I basically enjoyed this film which is a very complicated tale. It essentially has three main scenes. Matt Damon plays an international financier who gets connected up with an Arab prince. George Clooney is a kind of weary CIA agent, let's call him. In this movie, Clooney put on a few pounds for. Then Jeffrey Wright is the slick back-stabbing corporate attorney involved in the oil industry.

It's much more complicated than that and it's a very difficult film to follow. Steve Gaghan, who wrote "Traffic", directed it and he's not that really great a director. It's a little too complex material for him and the film is kind if politically na�ve. But there's so much going on. There's so much intrigue that I actually enjoyed it in spite of its faults.

Larry Mantle>> Peter?

Peter Rainer>> I think this is probably the most over-rated big movie of the year. It's the movie, I think, that a lot of people want to see right now because it's hyper-charged and, at least on the surface, it appears to be very political and forthright. But in fact, I don't really know if this movie is saying anything so all-fired new or different or explosive.

Essentially, it's saying that, you know, big oil is a big problem and that there are a lot of bad people in the world on both sides who are trying to get the most for themselves. It's not exactly breaking news. To get to that point, you have to work your way through one of the most convoluted plots of all times that probably even the writer-director doesn't quite get.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film this week is from acclaimed Irish director, Neil Jordan. "Breakfast on Pluto" stars Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Peter, your thoughts on "Breakfast on Pluto"?

Peter Rainer>> Well, this is Neil Jordan's latest shape-shifting gender-bending movie after "The Crying Game". Cillian Murphy plays a transvestite from a rather early age in Ireland who goes in search of his lost mother in London in the 1970's and gets involved with, among many other people in situations, the IRA. It has a big deal to do with the story of this movie. So in a sense, it's kind of a collage of different types of movies.

There's the transvestite looking love, there's the troubles, and it all kind of coalesces into something that really doesn't hang together. Individual parts of this movie, I thought, were pretty terrific and Cillian Murphy does a really first-rate oddball performance. But overall, I just didn't quite know what to make of it.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> It does have all those elements Peter mentioned plus the kind of glam background of the 1970's and it's kind of remarkable how little Jordan makes of all this. I mean, his character, Patrick, who wants to be called Patricia or Kitten, Murphy's character, kind of wanders through everything only really barely touched by what's going on.

I mean, supposedly he has this single-minded devotion to finding his mother and there are, you know, big scenes involving that search. But on the other hand, you know, at other times, he seems very disconnected to everything and things aren't even happening to him. They're just kind of happening around him, like he's never really directly involved in the IRA materials. So I thought this was a film that really never got off the ground.

Larry Mantle>> And finally this week, we have a film that stars the great British actress, Joan Plowright. "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" also features Rupert Friend in the cast.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Well, it would have to be a pretty good movie to overcome its name, "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont", Henry.

Henry Sheehan>> Well, this is a showcase for Joan Plowright, a great elderly British actress. The character she plays, Mrs. Palfrey, is a widow who decides that she wants to take over her own life and not be a mother anymore or just a grandmother, so she moves into this residential hotel where Anna Massey and Georgina Hale are playing their own versions on this character. It really doesn't amount to much.

She makes friends with a younger local writer played by Rupert Friend, who was Wickham in "Pride & Prejudice" and he did a much better job there (laughter). Here he's kind of a simp. You know, you don't really understand what the attraction is between them except it makes for kind of a sentimental mockish extended interlude. But Plowright is an incredibly subtle actress. I mean, there are moments where she has so much going on just in a simple conversation that she just gets totally caught up in her performance.

Larry Mantle>> She is a delight to watch. Peter?

Peter Rainer>> Yeah, she's pretty terrific and the main reason to see this movie. I wish people would stop referring to her as Lady Olivier as if she needed the honorific in order to be taken seriously. This film was directed by Dan Ireland who did a movie I loved years ago called "The Whole Wide World" about the guy who wrote the "Conan, the Barbarian" books with Vincent D'Onofrio.

He's very good with actors. He's not very good with camera, so the film has a kind of stodgy, over-prettified look. If this were a cheek, I would say it had too much rouge. But it does have some wonderful supporting players, as Henry mentioned. There's also an actor who died shortly after the film was shot, Robert Lang, who played the Major in the dining room where Mrs. Palfrey eats, and he's pretty terrific. So it has some incidentals along the side and then Joan Plowright in the center.

Larry Mantle>> Well, thanks for joining us for another FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Peter Rainer of The Christian Science Monitor. Please join us again next week at this same time for the next FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> You can hear a full hour of FilmWeek every Friday morning at eleven a.m. on KPCC public radio. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.

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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