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Life & Times Transcript

08/22/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

They don't like public schools, so they keep their kids at home, but should we foot the bill?

Christina Wartinbee>> You know what? If the brick and mortar public schools were teaching the way they should be teaching, we wouldn't be doing this. I would not be home schooling if the public and private schools were up to the standards.

Val Zavala>> And then, he's a television legend and a man about town, but for us Merv Griffin is a tour guide through Beverly Hills.

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>> Millions of kids will be headed back to school soon, but never will so many be headed home to school. That's right. An estimated two million children will be taught at home and the numbers are growing. But what you may not realize is that parents who choose to keep their children at home are making a dent in public school budgets. Gay Yee has more.

Gay Yee>> Steven Wartinbee is just like any other kid who rolls out of bed each morning to get ready for school. He brushes his teeth, combs his hair and has breakfast with his little sister. But when the cereal bowls are empty and the last drop of juice is gone, well, that’s when the morning routine here is a little different.

Christina Wartinbee>> "Let’s go to school. Ready?"

Gay Yee>> instead of heading out the door, Steven heads back to his bedroom. Five hours a day, five days a week, Steven is at school at home. He gets his lesson by logging onto the computer underneath his loft bed and Steven’s mom is the teacher.

Christina Wartinbee>> "Cells are the building blocks of life."

Gay Yee>> Christina Wartinbee says home schooling is her way of giving him the kind of education she couldn’t find elsewhere. Steven is a gifted student who skipped a full grade. Christina says the neighborhood public school in Glendale fell short. So did two private schools.

Christina Wartinbee>> We just were not happy at all with the quality of the education and the whole environment.

Gay Yee>> So public and private?

Christina Wartinbee>> Right.

Gay Yee>> You were unhappy?

Christina Wartinbee>> Yeah, and I always said I would never home school. I just can’t do it. I know my limits. I can’t home school.

Gay Yee>> Christina found the know-how by enrolling Steven in a cyber charter school called CAVA, short for California Virtual Academy. A company called K-12 provides all of the materials and lesson plans that meet state standards and then some and the best part is the price tag.

Christina Wartinbee>> The computer, all the materials, all the books, every single thing that you need comes to the front door.

Gay Yee>> Do you have to pay for it?

Christina Wartinbee>> It’s paid through our taxes, so I don’t pay out one single penny out of pocket.

Gay Yee>> Home schooling isn’t normally paid for with public money, but the Wartinbees’ classroom is because it’s classified as a public charter school. So the five thousand to seven thousand dollars in state funds that normally would have been used to educate Steven in his neighborhood public school instead is used here to educate him at home.

Christina Wartinbee>> "During your exercise, did you detect any changes in your body?"

Gay Yee>> On this day, the cyber school instructed Steven to perform a science demonstration to learn what happens when the body burns energy. He also has to fulfill the requirements in math, reading, history, even physical education.

Christina Wartinbee>> It basically is like the same as any kind of school that you have to have one hundred eighty days a year that you have taught. I believe it’s nine hundred hours for fourth grade of teaching time.

Donna March>> "Look at you. You got a hundred percent. Very good."

Gay Yee>> To make sure Christina and Steven stay on track, they meet with a teacher every month who checks on their progress.

Donna March>> They’re supposed to get an eighty percent or above to go on to the next lesson, so if I see something that’s, you know, lower, then I can like the next time I see the parent and the child at the face-to-face, ask the child some questions myself.

Donna March>> "What is the force pushing on a surface?"

Steven Wartinbee>> "Pressure."

Donna March>> "Yeah."

Steven Wartinbee>> It challenges me more because it’s not boring except for a couple of lessons, but most of it’s really good.

Gay Yee>> But not everyone in education thinks these virtual academies are a good thing. They say money being diverted to the home schoolers is money being taken away from the traditional public brick and mortar schools, which everyone knows are already suffering.

Wayne Johnson>> It takes money away from the local school districts, which are terribly under-funded to begin with, and if Governor Gray Davis gets his way with education cuts, they’re going to be far worse under-funded. He’s proposing a $2.7 billion dollar cut in the education budget for this year before June.

Gay Yee>> Wayne Johnson is President of the California Teachers Association. He worries that many of these cyber charter schools are operating below public radar with very little official oversight and Johnson claims the system is ripe for abuse.

Wayne Johnson>> The public schools of the United States, I believe, is the cornerstone of American democracy. I believe it’s built the strongest democratic system, the strongest economic system, and I believe that these virtual schools, charter schools, vouchers, are all a threat to the institution.

Gay Yee>> But Christina Wartinbee insists she didn’t abandon the public schools. It was the other way around.

Christina Wartinbee>> You know what? If the brick and mortar public schools were teaching the way they should be teaching, we wouldn’t be doing this. I would not be home schooling if the public and private schools were up to the standards.

Gay Yee>> For Steven, there are some added pluses of going to class at home. No more morning rush to get out the door and no worry of getting a tardy slip for being late. You get to sleep in?

Steven Wartinbee>> Not really. But it’s a bit better because, at my private school, I had to be there at 7:50 in the morning and here I need to be ready by 8:00, but I’m usually late. Sleep in.

Hena Cuevas>> And now for a Life and Times update. Last May, we brought you the story of how San Bernardino was debating a proposed anti-illegal immigrant initiative. Among other things, the proposed ordinance would have made it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented tenants, as well as prohibit the city from using tax dollars to set up day laborer centers.

In June, a judge ruled that there weren't enough signatures for a city vote. The man behind the failed initiative was Joseph Turner of the group Save Our State. Last week, Turner announced that he was running for a seat on the San Bernardino City Unified School District Board. He says he's running to fight the policies that aid and abet illegal immigration and to abolish bilingual education.

Val Zavala>> Plus, you may recall our story on Palmdale Airport's expansion plans. Last year, Scenic Airlines became the first airline in seven years to offer service from Palmdale, but those flights were cancelled in January for lack of passengers.

Well, now Palmdale Airport is getting a boost from the federal government. The Department of Transportation awarded the airport nine hundred thousand dollars to attract new airline service. The new grant will be used to bring other commercial airlines to Palmdale. The hope is to provide connecting service to cities like Dallas, Phoenix and San Francisco.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

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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>> Teachers, kids, astronomy buffs. How many planets are there? Well, if you answered nine, that answer is out of date. There are now twelve and that's because a committee of the International Astronomical Union has voted on a new definition of a planet and that new definition is inviting in three new members to our solar system. I got a chance to talk to the discoverer of the tenth planet right here at Caltech in Pasadena.

She's smooth, incredibly cold, wrapped in frozen natural gas and she has a moon nicknamed after the television Xena's sidekick, Gabrielle. And this is where she was first spotted. In the office of Professor Michael Brown, an astronomer at Caltech. These days, you don't have to be peering into a huge telescope in the wee hours of the morning to discover a planet.

Michael Brown>> The entire process -- one of the reasons that we can actually do this is because this entire process is run by computers and robots. The telescope is the Samuel Oschin telescope up at Palomar Observatory and it now completely runs at night with nobody there.

Val Zavala>> That's incredible.

Michael Brown>> If it didn't do that, we couldn't do this because I would have to be up there every single night observing all night long, every single night, and I'm pretty sure my wife would stop talking to me (laughter). In the morning, the computer gives me maybe a hundred images, little shots like this. These are the three little postage stamps of the sky in a row. Mostly you see stars. The stars are all stationary.

Val Zavala>> This is moving. One, two, three; one, two, three.

Michael Brown>> That's right. The only thing you can see, the computer has picked up something that it thinks is moving right there. So you look at that and you think there's nothing there. The reason you think there's nothing there is because --

Val Zavala>> -- Oh, my gosh, there's something right here?

Michael Brown>> Nope, because there's actually nothing there, so that's actually nothing.

Val Zavala>> For seven years, Michael and his colleagues scanned thousands of images like this one.

Michael Brown>> The next one, it will pick out another one where you can sort of see why the computer thinks something is moving, but there's nothing moving there. It's just that that star kind of smears into that star. There's nothing going on.

Val Zavala>> Wow, you've got to have an eye for this. Then on the morning of January 5, 2005, Michael's well-trained eye spotted something exciting.

Michael Brown>> When I saw this one, this one was brighter, almost the brightest thing we'd ever seen. Bright is good because bright means big. It was also moving about half the speed of anything we'd ever seen and that means it's twice as far away as anything we'd ever seen. So really bright and really far away means huge. I immediately did a quick calculation and then just picked up my phone and said, "Call my wife. I just found a planet."

Val Zavala>> She was the first one you called?

Michael Brown>> She was the first one I called.

Val Zavala>> And this is what the first glimpse of our solar system's tenth planet looked like. An orb three times as far as our furthest planet, Pluto.

Michael Brown>> This is the tenth planet. It's the brightest thing that we'd ever seen moving and it's moving more slowly than anything we'd ever seen also.

Val Zavala>> So everything else is stationary --

Michael Brown>> That's right.

Val Zavala>> -- that's relative to each other, and this one moves just enough for you to say --

Michael Brown>> That we really picked it out and said, "There it is."

Val Zavala>> After he phoned his wife, Michael sent off an email to his colleagues at Yale and in Hawaii, and the subject heading?

Michael Brown>> The subject heading was "why we get up in the morning" (laughter).

Val Zavala>> Oh, that's great. Followed by "New bright object. Please sit down and take a deep breath."

Michael Brown>> At that point, we kick into action everything that we can on the planet. We try to go observe it with some small telescopes to track down its orbit a little bit better. We observe it with the Hubble space telescope, with the Spitzer space telescopes, with the Keck telescopes. So the second we see this, suddenly our lives get much more complicated than they were earlier that morning.

Val Zavala>> Complicated in part by a basic question: is this new object actually a planet? You would think scientists would have settled that question by now. Not so. In fact, it was an issue back in 1930.

Michael Brown>> When Pluto was found seventy-five years ago, there was even debate back then whether Pluto should be called a planet, but there was nothing else to call it, so it was called a planet. Now there are more than a thousand objects in this region of the Kuiper belt out beyond Neptune right where Pluto is and right where this new planet is.

So people have been wondering, shouldn't we maybe call all of these things Kuiper belt objects and not planets? Scientifically, it sort of makes sense not to call Pluto a planet, but we have been calling it a planet for seventy-five years. Pluto has been a planet for seventy-five years. People don't want to get rid of Pluto.

Val Zavala>> Meanwhile, as the debate was in full swing, astronomers got an added bonus. In July of 2005, they discovered that the tenth planet has a moon.

Michael Brown>> That little spot of light right there is the moon to the tenth planet.

Val Zavala>> Ah, so once it had a moon, then that qualifies it more as a planet?

Michael Brown>> You know, a lot of people feel that way. I don't actually feel that way because Mercury and Venus don't have moons and about ten percent of the objects that we found out in the Kuiper belt, out in that region beyond Neptune, about ten percent of them have moons. Even very small ones have moons.

Val Zavala>> And they're not planets.

Michael Brown>> And they're definitely not planets. And scientifically, it's actually fantastic because having that moon means that we can track the moon around the planet and, by tracking the moon, how fast the moon is going around the planet, we can weigh the planet. If it goes around really fast, it's because the planet is very heavy. If it goes around slowly, it's because the planet is very light.

Val Zavala>> Oh, that's amazing. So the moon gives you all sorts of information about the planet that you could not normally have.

Michael Brown>> Exactly. You wouldn't have it otherwise at all.

Val Zavala>> And what would it be like if we were on this new planet?

Michael Brown>> If we were on this planet, we would be very, very cold. It's so far away from the sun. It's a hundred times further from the sun than the earth is. It's only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero. Right now, of course, it's as far away from the sun as it ever gets. It takes five hundred eighty years to go around the sun, so in another two hundred ninety years --

Val Zavala>> -- wait, say that again. It takes five hundred --

Michael Brown>> Five hundred eighty years to go around the sun.

Val Zavala>> For this planet to make one orbit around the sun?

Michael Brown>> Right.

Val Zavala>> So if I were standing on this new planet, outside of being extremely cold and probably dead in half a second, I would nevertheless see that the sun would be really, really far away? It would look like a star?

Michael Brown>> Yes. The sun would be the brightest star in the sky. It would be brighter than any stars that we see in the sky right now. If you took a pin and held it out at arm's length, the head of the pin would cover the disk of the sun. That's how small the sun would be.

Val Zavala>> But its moon is huge.

Michael Brown>> The moon is huge in comparison to the sun. It's interesting that, on the earth, the moon and the sun sort of look the same size in the sky. It's just a coincidence. From the tenth planet, because the moon is so much closer than the sun, the moon is relatively huge compared to the sun, although the moon is a very, very tiny moon around that planet.

Val Zavala>> Now the lay person out there says, "Oh, great. New planet. We get to name it." Do you get to name it? You discovered it.

Michael Brown>> It's funny. The official group that gets to name it is the International Astronomical Union. They sort of have the authority to name everything in the sky and they have rules. They have very strict rules for everything in the sky. The obvious rule for a new planet name is that it should stick with the tradition of the old planets. All of the first nine planets are named after Greek and Roman gods.

Val Zavala>> So, of course, my question is, what would you like it named?

Michael Brown>> My first choice would be Persephone. Persephone is the wife of Pluto and the myth actually fits very well with how the planet is in the sky. In mythology, Persephone spends half of her time in the underworld with Pluto and the other half further away. But it's just what this planet does. The planet comes in about half the time close to Pluto and the other half further away and back and forth.

Val Zavala>> Gee, if it was named Persephone, then that familiar grade school pneumonic, "My very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas", could be easily updated. Just add pepperoni to that pizza. Well, Michael Brown, thank you so much and congratulations.

Michael Brown>> Thank you.

Val Zavala>> That is quite a find.

Michael Brown>> It's been quite fun.

Val Zavala>> For more information on the new definition of a planet, you can go to the website of the International Astronomical Union at iau.org.

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>> He is one of Hollywood's most enduring personalities. Who doesn't know Merv Griffin? For years, he was a staple on television, so how is he doing now? Well, Patt Morrison found out when she got a tour from Merv Griffin of his favorite Beverly Hills spots.

Merv Griffin>> So this is Bedford. We're still in the flats of Beverly Hills.

Patt Morrison>> You're a regular Thomas Guide (laughter).

Merv Griffin>> I am a Thomas Guide. My son just made a U-turn on Wilshire Boulevard. Unheard of (laughter).

Patt Morrison>> Well, let's keep looking at more of your Beverly Hills.

Merv Griffin>> Oh, boy. Every street is a memory for me.

Patt Morrison>> You've been here in Beverly Hills longer than just about everyone else.

Merv Griffin>> It's strange. I'm eighty years old now, but my memory is fresh. I remember more names from those days, you know, the late 1940's and again the early 1970's, than I do today.

Patt Morrison>> What brought you to Beverly Hills?

Merv Griffin>> Freddy Martin's Orchestra. I was singing with Freddy Martin's band who was the Hollywood favorite orchestra. They played the Cocoanut Grove and we played there and there I sat every single night. I sat out in front of the band, you know. All the stars would come to me because Freddy was conducting to request songs. For example, Howard Hughes came every single night and always with a great beauty on his arm. He did have his tennis shoes on. Danced in his tennis shoes. And he always requested the same song.

Patt Morrison>> I should have known better.

Merv Griffin>> Memory is hot.

Patt Morrison>> And you moved to Beverly Hills when?

Merv Griffin>> I moved to Beverly Hills because we had a long engagement at the Cocoanut Grove and lived first on 204 South Reeves Drive. This is South Reeves, a block south of Wilshire, at the second building on the left. Pull over to the side here. There it is. Oops, there's an apartment here for rent.

Patt Morrison>> How much did it cost you?

Merv Griffin>> Twenty-eight dollars a week. It was just one room with a Murphy bed.

Patt Morrison>> Pulling it down out of the wall.

Merv Griffin>> Pulling it down and it had a little Pullman kitchen and a couch and that was it. I would get home at two o'clock in the morning when we finished at the Cocoanut Grove. I would drive back here. But the matre'd, Michael, at the Cocoanut Grove used to give me things for my apartment.

I didn't have a coffee maker or cups or any silverware or anything, so he'd just give them to me from the Cocoanut Grove. I'd be parked over here a block behind Will Wright's and then I would walk over here with my brown bag filled with all this silver.

Patt Morrison>> You looked like a burglar at three o'clock in the morning.

Merv Griffin>> And I got stopped by the cops. What are you doing? I said, I sing with Freddy Martin's Orchestra and I live right here. I'm coming home after work. Oh. Then I'd be praying that the bag didn't go rattle, rattle, rattle. It was all filled with fake silver (laughter).

It felt like a village. Even today, there's only thirty thousand people here. Lord knows in 1948 how many people were here. And Rodeo Drive was just a simple street with little stores, not very classy. All this on the right was all parking lot and then, of course, over on the left here where Louie Raton is now was the great Fred Hayman store. Fred Hayman really was the instigator of this becoming the great shopping street like Rome, like --

Patt Morrison>> -- Bond Street.

Merv Griffin>> Bond Street, Madison Avenue in New York. I did my whole show from here and we parked Rolls Royces across the street and I did the show from the front of all these Rolls Royces. As I would walk up and down Rodeo Drive, the various shopkeepers would come out and tell me about their stores. That was one of the first big promotions for Rodeo Drive.

Merv Griffin>> "Rodeo Drive is a mere two and a half blocks long, but because it's populated by the world's most lavish stores, it's been referred to as The Half Mile of Style, The Gold Paved Ride."

Merv Griffin>> I was the first to leave New York and do my shows here on a permanent basis. So I flew out. Tony and my wife, Julann, stayed back there until I found a house. The minute, the first day we moved in, I saw all these Hollywood buses outside and you could hear the man broadcasting. I said, gee, they find you so fast here (laughter). I was amazed.

It wasn't until I gave a party for Michael Caine. Then at the party for Michael Caine was James Bacon, the columnist. He walked in and said, "Whoa, Merv, I haven't been in this house since the murder." I said, "What murder?"

Then I started to realize why all the celebrity buses were here. He said, "Well, this is where Lana Turner's daughter murdered Stompanato." And here's the house. Then I moved up to what had been Leonard Firestone's estate and didn't realize that there had been a murder there. Well, not a murder. There was a shooting because the man was attempting to kidnap Leonard Firestone.

So then I had moved out from New Jersey on a farm where a very famous murder had happened, but I didn't know that before. Then we moved to a home that had no crimes. It's a lovely home. We got a divorce. So it was murder that was keeping my marriage.

Patt Morrison>> I gather.

Tony>> Maybe if they'd stayed married, there might have been a fourth murder.

Patt Morrison>> That's right (laughter).

Merv Griffin>> We'd have murdered you, you son of a gun (laughter). And here's my little house I owned for seventeen years.

Tony>> His grandkids, they called it Poppa's house.

Patt Morrison>> The Beverly Hilton.

Merv Griffin>> They couldn't understand why I had a buffet every day.

Tony>> They would say, "Can we go to Poppa's house? We want to swim in Poppa's pool (laughter).

Merv Griffin>> As you know, it was a very big honor that Beverly Hills named this little street here.

Patt Morrison>> Merv Griffin Way.

Merv Griffin>> Yes. It is one of the most traveled streets. This is your only real access. This is Santa Monica Boulevard -- no, this is Wilshire -- over to Santa Monica Boulevard without having to go all the way around the Beverly Hilton.

Patt Morrison>> So we are going home for you when we come to the Beverly Hilton.

Merv Griffin>> Well, yes. There's the man. Good to see you again.

>> We missed you.

Merv Griffin>> Thank you.

Patt Morrison>> Now tell me the history of the hotel. What was here before the hotel?

Merv Griffin>> It was built in 1955. Richard Nixon opened the hotel officially. He was Vice President under Eisenhower in the 1950's.

Richard Nixon>> "We have seen a great metropolis constructed in this era."

Merv Griffin>> I bought it in 1987. I sold "Wheel" and "Jeopardy" to Coca-Cola in 1986 and decided to head my life towards hotels, my second great love after, you know, performing.

Patt Morrison>> Well, you were at one point the biggest taxpayer.

Merv Griffin>> The largest employer and the largest taxpayer in Beverly Hills the whole time I had the Hilton.

Patt Morrison>> So this is your town.

Merv Griffin>> Well, it is. I grew up in San Mateo which I'm very proud of, but then when I left, I left being in the business and touring with the bands and then the contract with Warner Bros. and back to New York. I went back to New York for fourteen or fifteen years, back to do Broadway and records and started my talk show in New York. Then I finally just said I'm going home and came back to Beverly Hills.

Patt Morrison>> So this is home.

Merv Griffin>> It really feels like home.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> 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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