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02/20/06
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
She's taken a little-known office and turned it into a position of power. What makes Laura Chick tick?
Laura Chick>> I'd prefer not to annoy people, but it just seems to be part of my job. So I guess my attitude is, okay, well, get out of my way.
Val Zavala>> And then, its three billion mile journey has ended, but the real work of the Stardust mission has just begun.
These stories and more next 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>> Her job is to make sure that your tax dollars aren't being wasted and she's made headlines doing just that. Her name is Laura Chick and she is Los Angeles's City Controller and a call from her auditors is enough to make any city department very nervous. Toni Guinyard spent a day with this sixty-one year old dynamo.
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Toni Guinyard>> She's a one-time stay-at-home mom turned political force. After more than a decade in Los Angeles city politics, Laura Chick is where she wants to be with exactly what she wants the most: power to change city government.
Laura Chick>> I'm the person going around City Hall and throughout the city asking the following two questions and answering them: How are we doing and how can we do it better?
Toni Guinyard>> Chick is the Los Angeles City Controller. She describes herself as a pit bull, a taxpayer watchdog keeping her eyes on how the city spends its money.
Laura Chick>> It's been far too long since someone shined the light of day in some of the dark corners of Los Angeles city government.
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Toni Guinyard>> Audit by audit, meeting by meeting, Chick is out to change how you view what it is she does. She'd love nothing more than to talk about her granddaughter, Morgan, but people inside city politics see her tougher side. Chick is talked about with both respect and disdain. You anger a lot of people.
Laura Chick>> Yeah, I do. I annoy a lot of people, I think.
Toni Guinyard>> Annoy, anger. You really get under their skin, yet you continue doing it.
Laura Chick>> Well, here's the very core reason why. Because I don't work for them. I work for the people of Los Angeles and I don't think I'm annoying them. I don't think I'm angering them. I think actually I'm doing my job the way they want me to do my job. So the people I'm annoying, I'm sorry. You know, I'm actually --
Toni Guinyard>> -- are you really sorry, though?
Laura Chick>> Well, I'm not sorry enough to stop doing what I'm doing, but, you know, I'd prefer not to annoy people, but it just seems to be part of my job. So I guess my attitude is, okay, well, get out of my way.
Toni Guinyard>> And that's the classic example of Laura Chick on Laura Chick. She is aggressive and makes no apologies for being so, not now or when she was on the City Council.
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Toni Guinyard>> She first ran for a city council seat in 1993 when she was forty-nine years old. Prior to being sworn into office, Chick raised two daughters, spent six years managing a family-owned clothing store, earned a Masters degree in social work and then stepped into the political arena. She served two four-year terms on the City Council, a position she says had clear restrictions.
Laura Chick>> On the City Council, you have to have eight votes to do anything. You have to get permission. You have to get votes. You have to get along. If you step out of line too much, they'll kill you. I mean, you won't get anything accomplished. You won't get anything for your council district.
Toni Guinyard>> After serving on the Los Angeles City Council, Chick walked away with the ultimate insider's view of City Hall politics and how the city of Los Angeles does business, the good and the bad. But that's just one of the reasons why she decided to run for the office of Controller.
Laura Chick>> As I watched charter reform and the public voting to change the city charter and I watched that new power of performance audits being given to the Controller's office, I said to myself, "Oh, I want to do that."
Toni Guinyard>> Chick was elected City Controller in 2001 and, with eighty-two percent of the votes, she was re-elected in 2005. The audits earned her a reputation and caught the attention of the news media.
Laura Chick>> I have been accused of being a media hound. I have been accused of, you know, getting too much good press. But I have to tell you, I absolutely understand the power of the media and I need to get the message out to the public. If I can't get people to pay attention to my audits, then they're not worth the paper they're written on.
Toni Guinyard>> When Laura Chick talks, people listen most of the time. On a Monday morning at a park, Chick scheduled a news conference at the climax of a trio of audits of the city Department of Recreation and Parks.
Laura Chick>> "I mean, it is outrageous that we have swimming pools that kids can't use."
Toni Guinyard>> You could count the number of reporters on one hand. Does that frustrate you when no one listens?
Laura Chick>> I think it's one of the big challenges for elected leadership to try and get the message out and it's very difficult to predict what media will and will not cover or what people are going to pay attention to.
Toni Guinyard>> Her quest to find waste and get people to pay attention has left Chick in a somewhat awkward position.
Laura Chick>> My audits have caused distress to people who have been to my home for dinner, but I can't and I will not turn away from publishing reports that are negative because they might be about someone I know and like. Is there anyone sacred that I would never touch? No, I don't have rules like that. I have the opposite. I have to go where the audit takes me.
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Toni Guinyard>> Among the places the audits have taken Chick and her thirty-member audit team are inside Los Angeles World Airports, the Port of Los Angeles, and the Department of Water and Power.
Laura Chick>> There's something I found in all three that absolutely was wrong and that was the way in which multi-million dollar contracts were being awarded to private sector companies.
Toni Guinyard>> Those findings have had a huge impact inside City Hall, but a Los Angeles Times article based on the DWP's payment for bottled water is what really struck a nerve with the general public.
Laura Chick>> The idea that they are touting our good quality of water and spending over thirty thousand dollars a year to buy Sparkletts bottled water for their employees, there's something very wrong with that picture.
Toni Guinyard>> Chick decides which departments will be audited based on risk assessments for liability, reports from whistleblowers and sometimes simple requests. And there is a rhythm to what she does. Audit, make recommendations, track implementation of the recommendations, and sometimes circle back and do it again.
Laura Chick>> But there's a very specific reason why I do that. Because I don't trust them.
Toni Guinyard>> She has her sights set on city pension funds, the fire and police departments, and the Departments of Transportation and Building Safety. But it's her focus on the Los Angeles Unified School District that's getting the most attention.
Laura Chick>> I'm asking. Okay, send me all of these audits for the last five years, but more importantly and what I'm really interested in, send me what you've done in response to those audits.
Toni Guinyard>> Are you determined to do that audit whether the district wants you to or not?
Laura Chick>> Well, I'm not going away.
Toni Guinyard>> That from a woman who describes herself as a very nice person who can be tough as nails.
Laura Chick>> They keep saying, "Go, girl, Atta, girl. You know, we are so happy that you're there. At least we can count on you to tell the truth." That really makes me feel good. It makes it all worthwhile.
Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard 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, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> The idea is mind-boggling. Launch a spacecraft no bigger than I am out into space, have it travel billions of miles and intersect with a comet, then come back to earth and deliver comet dust safely to the ground. Well, that's the mission of Stardust and it was an unqualified success.
The Stardust mission began in February 1999. A rocket launched a satellite with a unique mission: return to earth seven years later with dust from a comet two hundred forty million miles from earth. And how do you capture comet particles? With this. A material called aerogel. It looks like some special effect from a movie.
Don Yeomans>> This is silicon dioxide that's 99.8 percent nothing.
Val Zavala>> What does it feel like?
Don Yeomans>> Well, it doesn't feel like anything. I can't feel it. It's just like smoke, solid smoke.
Val Zavala>> Really light and very delicate.
Don Yeomans>> It's unbelievable stuff.
Val Zavala>> But it's real strong?
Don Yeomans>> Yeah. It's very strong. You can actually collapse on it very tough.
Val Zavala>> Don Yeomans is a comet scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in La Canada.
Don Yeomans>> It's very strong.
Val Zavala>> Strong enough to capture cosmic particles while traveling thirteen thousand miles an hour. And by the way, in space, that's the slow lane. Once in orbit, the spacecraft circled the sun twice to get in synch with the comet. It took five years of orbiting before the spacecraft rendezvoused with one of the oldest features in our solar system. Finally in January 2004, it sent these images back. And how big is this comet?
Don Yeomans>> Oh, about three miles. It's roughly spherical. It's made up of water, ice for the most part, and imbedded dust particles and it's a very weak structure. That was one of the major conclusions from the Stardust mission is that there were cliffs of about a hundred meters tall and this material would stand up much like a soufflé would stand up. You can actually poke your hole into a weak soufflé and you can have some pretty high ridges, but it's very weak material. The type of weakness we're talking about is very loose snow.
Val Zavala>> And while sailing through the comet's surrounding dust, the tennis racket-like probe filled with aerogel opened up.
Don Yeomans>> It comes in just like shooting BBs into a styrofoam cooler. The dust particles come in at six kilometers a second, roughly six times the speed of a high-speed rifle shot. These dust particles that are about the size of particles in cigarette smoke come in and they're captured by this very under-dense material and held without being broken up.
Val Zavala>> Now for the trip home, but not before the other side of the aerogel panel pocketed some regular old stardust just for comparison. The return trip would take two years. You have to have a lot of patience to be a comet scientist. What was your biggest fear about what might go wrong?
Don Yeomans>> Well, space is a very hostile place, of course. You've got particles that could take out the spacecraft at any time. You've got instrument problems that can't be fixed in the laboratory. You have to try and fix them through the radio system of the spacecraft. And there were some problems with contamination of the lenses of the telescope, but they were fixed by actually turning the heaters on and disbursing some of the contaminants that actually laid down on the lens of the camera. So all of this was done remotely and successfully and the mission went like clockwork.
Val Zavala>> And on January 15, 2006, the final stage began. The spacecraft approached earth and released the capsule containing the comet dust. The capsule, without any propulsion of its own, was drawn toward the earth, reaching speeds of twenty-nine thousand miles an hour, faster than any space object has ever re-entered the earth. The friction raised its temperatures to forty-nine hundred degrees.
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Val Zavala>> This is how the capsule looks through infrared cameras. In a previous mission, the parachute failed to open and the capsule came crashing to earth. Now hundreds of scientists are praying that this time the parachute would work.
>> "We have confirmation of the main chute opening (applause)."
>> All stations, the chute is open. We're coming down slowly."
Don Yeomans>> That was the release of all the anxiety and the applause in the control room and the scientists --
Val Zavala>> -- I know all you scientists can be awfully restrained.
Don Yeomans>> (Laughter) Well, I don't think so. Not in this case. The scientists were extremely happy. They were yipping as well and the navigators were going nuts, so it was a good time here at JPL.
Val Zavala>> The capsule's cargo is microscopic. Most of the particles are about one-tenth of the width of a human hair and scientists from around the world will be cutting them into even smaller pieces as they study these clues from our cosmic past.
Don Yeomans>> These comets, of course, are the bits and pieces that make up the outer solar system from four and a half billion years ago. So if we understand the makeup of these particles and the temperature environment under which they formed, we understand how the solar system formed some four and a half billion years ago.
Val Zavala>> So it's really like an historical record.
Dan Yeomans>> It is. In more ways than one, it's an historical record as to how the outer solar system formed and we're going to archive some of these particles in the curation facilities at Johnson Space Center so that, in ten, fifteen or twenty years from now when our instrumentation is that much better, we can pull out some other particles and subject them to these additional tests and analyses.
Val Zavala>> Scientists will be comparing these samples from the very outer reaches of our solar system to materials in meteorites that come from the inner solar system. All this will add to our knowledge of what space was like when our solar system was in its infancy.
Don Brownlee>> "We did this mission to collect the most primitive materials we could in the solar system. I mean, we went to a comet that formed at the edge of the solar system. It's the same class of body as the planet Pluto, except it was smaller and it was well-preserved. It formed far from the sun under very cold conditions and we're confident that it was made out of the initial building blocks of our solar system."
Joe Vellinga>> "The real touchdown is when we open it up and get the aerogel grid removed from the canister and hand it off to the science team who will be looking at it and figuring out how many particles we really did capture."
Val Zavala>> As for the spacecraft, it propelled itself away from the earth after dropping off its cargo and is headed back toward the sun awaiting further orders.
Don Yeomans>> The spacecraft is healthy. There is additional fuel and there is an announcement of opportunity for future missions. I would be surprised if someone didn't propose to use this healthy spacecraft to swing around the earth and retarget it for yet another comet.
Val Zavala>> The total miles traveled on this mission? Nearly three billion. And how long would it take you to drive that far at seventy miles an hour nonstop? A mere four thousand, eight hundred ninety two years. Add a few hundred years if you're on the 405. I'm Val Zavala for Life and Times.
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Val Zavala>> He's known as an NBA superstar, but did you know that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was also an author? He wrote the book, "Black Profiles in Courage", and it all started when he was helping his son with a project on African-Americans and discovered there was a dirth of information. We thought we'd open up the Life and Times Vault where Victor Abalos spoke with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about these missing pieces of American history.
Victor Abalos>> One example Kareem cited is this painting of the Battle of Bunker Hill shown here as it's used in most history books. But the uncropped original is a more revealing portrait, one that includes Peter Salem among the many African-Americans that fought for this country's freedom.
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Victor Abalos>> A lot of the figures that you write about are soldiers, men fighting in Revolutionary times through Civil War to World War I. But they're black men fighting for values like freedom which they don't enjoy yet in this country. What can you tell us about that contradiction?
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar>> Well, I think by blacks fighting in the military, it really underlined the whole issue of what is this nation about and really put the pressure on people who claimed to believe in the Constitution to actually make it work in real life. To blacks in the military after the Civil War up until like 1916, that was the only real profession that you could have as a black man in this country where you were treated unequal of the whites working at that level. That was really the only place in American society. The American military has really led the way in terms of understanding and making practical an egalitarian society even today as far as like integrating women and other minorities into all aspects of a profession. The military has led the way.
Victor Abalos>> Joseph Cinque was captured by slave traders in Africa in 1839. Cinque led a mutiny and ordered the ship back to Africa, but ended up in New York. Cinque was jailed for murder. His trial became an abolitionist cause nationwide. In 1841, the United States Supreme Court ruled Cinque was not guilty, the first time Africans were deemed by federal law to have the right to revolt, to be free. Joseph Cinque eventually returned to Africa.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar>> I think Cinque's story is so typical of what every black person feels when they are exposed to what happened to our race in being stolen from Africa and brought to America to serve financially to the people in the south as slaves. The whole idea that your life was taken from you in such a way that it is the most demeaning and it's a demeaning slow death. You don't just die. You're not kidnapped and killed. You're kidnapped and worked to death so that other people can be wealthy. The attempt to do that to Cinque just resonates within every black American. They see that as their ancestors' plight and they see that as a common experience.
Victor Abalos>> There is a lot of passion in the way you tell these stories, but the one thing that's missing is anger.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar>> I don't think that there's anything to be angry about because, as bad as it was in America for American blacks, America tried to fix it. Thomas Jefferson, the man who epitomizes the whole dichotomy of how Americans dealt with this issue, wanted slavery to end. He thought it morally corrupted the people who practiced it. He stated that and he tried to get the Continental Congress to eliminate slavery. At the same time, he was a slave owner because financially it was how he had to compete. It was a very complex issue, but he dealt with it straight up and wrestled with it. It was an issue for him his whole life.
James Monroe bought the land of Liberia without any real authority just because he felt that there should be some apparatus in place for free black slaves to return to Africa because it was right. The whole emphasis on those Americans who acted correctly with regard to the issue of slavery really doesn't get any focus either from our history books or the popular culture, again, because it's going to offend southerners. I think that's silly. I mean, there were a lot of heroic things done in and around those issues. I found out things about people that I would have never believed felt the right way on those issues. I mean, it's amazing some of the things I found out.
Victor Abalos>> In doing research for the book, what stories surprised you?
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar>> Well, take the personality of Wild Bill Hickok. Most people know him as a gunfighter, a gambler, a womanizer and a drunk. He was all things, but it was really in the last couple years of his life as he deteriorated. As a boy on his farm in Illinois, his family ran a station on the underground railroad. Hundreds of black people escaped to freedom using the Hickok farm as a transit point. We don't know anything about that.
The reason that he learned how to shoot and everything he had to do, he wanted to help his dad. People would come and try to recapture the runaways and sell them back into slavery -- it was very lucrative -- so his dad had to go around armed. His son, naturally wanting to help his dad, had to learn about firearms, etc. That's why he got into this whole lifestyle. That's why his whole life, he always looked at southerners with suspicion. I mean, there was a reason for it. An incredible story, one that we know nothing about.
One of the runaways stayed at the Hickok farm because she felt so highly about the Hickok family. She stayed at the Hickok farm through the Civil War and helped Bill's mother, who was infirm. That's how much she appreciated what she did. Then she eventually returned to her family in Alabama a year or two after the Civil War ended.
But there are incredible stories of camaraderie in Americans helping the downtrodden. You know, white Americans helping slaves. There was no financial reward in it. The only reward they got was doing the right thing. There's this incredibly huge amount of events there that nobody's every dealt with this. Not in our history books, not in the popular culture. I mean, there's a whole, huge amount of things that we need to expose with regard to this subject.
Val Zavala>> The book, again, is "Black Profiles in Courage" by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. 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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