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Life & Times Transcript
4/13/07 Coverage of Town Hall Los Angeles speakers on Life and Times is made possible by a grant from the Boeing Company. Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- There are more single women than ever before. Cece Healy>> I love this lifestyle. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. I have the freedom to do what I want, when I want. Pearl Jr.>> With seventy percent of black women living without spouses, I think it's time to bring attention to it. Hello! Val Zavala>> It's half river rock, half adobe, and it was once the place to be seen in Los Angeles. A look inside the historic Lummis House. 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>> The traditional American family is no longer the typical American family. Only about a third are made up of mom and dad and the kids at home. What's growing is the number of unmarried women, in particular African American women. So what's behind this trend and are single women happy about it? Sam Louie has our story. Sam Louie>> Cece Healy is the quintessential twenty-first century American woman. She's worked in film and television production for more than a decade. Nine years ago, she was able to buy her own home in Laurel Canyon. Cece Healy>> I love this lifestyle. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. I have the freedom to do what I want, when I want. Sam Louie>> Cece is thirty-six, successful and single. She's not against marriage, but her parents encouraged her to dream big. Cece Healy>> I really want to get my career very well established. I want to be financially secure and happy with myself and then, you know, if I found a husband, that would be the icing on the cake. Sam Louie>> In fact, for the first time in history, Census Bureau statistics show that more women are living without a spouse than ever before. Ten years ago, that figure was at forty-seven percent. Today it's now at fifty-one percent. Bear in mind that the government considers anyone fifteen and older as marriageable. Still, there are more single women in our society than ever before. Dr. Judith Jackson-Fossett>> And the expectations around marriage are really quite different. Sam Louie>> Dr. Judith Jackson-Fossett is an Associate Professor of American Studies at USC. She says that women in the workplace see marriage as a relationship between partners rather than dependency. Dr. Judith Jackson-Fossett>> This is not a question of marriage being something that you needed to enter into in order to have the kind of security, let's say, that you would have needed in the nineteenth century or even earlier in the twentieth century. Sam Louie>> Dr. Jackson-Fossett says that she sees the trend towards independence in her own female students. Dr. Judith Jackson-Fossett>> Students are desperately interested in the nature of what they are going to be doing in terms of a professional life. Cece Healy>> You know, it's okay to get a career off the ground before you find Mr. Right. Sam Louie>> But finding Mr. Right is also taking longer. The Census Bureau reports that, compared to women in 1970, today's women are waiting an average of five more years before tying the knot. Cece considers that a good thing. Cece Healy>> I think women kind of want to date more and play the field and weigh their options before they get married. I think that hopefully will, you know, allow the divorce rate to drop and people to end up in marriages that they should be in. Sam Louie>> Cece lived through several divorces growing up and doesn't want to make the same mistakes as her parents. Cece Healy>> Having come from two parents that went through six marriages and five divorces impacted me greatly. It's a painful thing to watch somebody go through. Sam Louie>> The high divorce rate is another factor for the increase in single women. Dr. Judith Jackson-Fossett>> My thought is that that's got to enter into that number of fifty-one percent. So it's a question of, again, trying to get at what's underneath that metric and not simply focusing on that particular number. Sam Louie>> Dr. Jackson-Fossett also says that it's important to remember this broad category of singles includes divorced moms, women cohabitating with men, and a growing number of lesbian couples. Dr. Judith Jackson-Fossett>> To me, it's really illustrative of the kind of issues, the kind of pressures, on the state of marriage and on where we are. Sam Louie>> But being single is a different experience for many African American women. Census figures show that seventy percent of black women are unmarried. For many, it's not about independence. It's about an acute shortage of eligible black men. Pearl Jr.>> Right now, with seventy percent of black women living without spouses, I think it's time to bring attention to it. Hello! We're here. Black women need love too. Sam Louie>> Pearl Jr. is the author of a book by the same name. She wrote it as a plea to persuade black men to assume the role as head of the household. Pearl Jr.>> As black women, we are really overwhelmed. We are the mother, we are the father, we are the provider, we are the protector, we are the nurturer, and we just really have too much to do as black women. Sam Louie>> Unfortunately, Pearl says a disproportionate number of African American men are in prison and those who are available have not been taught family values. Pearl Jr.>> A lot of our sons don't grow up with a father. So if they don't see a man in a man's role who's loving, honoring, cherishing a black woman, he depends on the media to teach that to him, and the media right now is not very kind to black women. Sam Louie>> And, she adds, relations between women and men make a deep impact on the black community. Pearl Jr.>> It is a shared partnership and we need to get back to those family traditional values in order to uplift society because, right now, it's just such an imbalance. Fifty percent of our children, especially black children, are not graduating from high school. Sam Louie>> Jackson-Fossett says that black women are at a further disadvantage in interracial relationships. Dr. Judith Jackson-Fossett>> Interracial marriage, and I'm talking here about African American interracial marriage, is highest amongst black men and white women. Sam Louie>> Regardless of race, single women have made significant strides in two important areas. There are now more women on college campuses than men, and more single women have become homeowners. Terrie Williams>> I've noticed that my business in terms of single women buyers has increased tremendously. I would say it represents about a twenty or thirty percent increase in my business. Sam Louie>> Terrie Williams is a real estate agent for Prudential California Realty in the Larchmont district. She says that single women are the fastest-growing segment of homebuyers. Terrie Williams>> I think the most important aspects are feeling roots, feeling rooted to a community, finding a community that you feel safe in, that you want to raise your kids in, where there's a grocery story and, you know, a barbershop to get your son's hair cut. I think we all want that sense. Sam Louie>> But what do these trends mean for a larger society? What will higher educated, professional, home-owning women mean for the American family? Will it get stronger or weaker? What will women without spouses mean a decade or two down the line? While experts are still unsure if the trend will continue, it's clear that traditional gender roles will be displaced with new ones. Dr. Judith Jackson-Fossett>> Your husband is now both your lover, your financial partner, your intellectual, interlocutor, your companion, and you're asking everything of that person. Cece Healy>> "So are you guys about ready for me to come by?" Sam Louie>> As for Cece Healy, although she enjoys her freedom, she's still keeping her eye out for that special someone. Cece Healy>> I definitely do want to get married, but I definitely want to get married once and I don't ever want to get divorced. So, yeah, I'm going to take my time. Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> So what do you think of the trend towards singlehood? You can post your opinion on our blog. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog. 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 was a kid growing up in the working class town of Hawthorne. Today he's Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and he's also a renowned poet, scholar and professor with degrees from Harvard and Stanford along the way. Gioia started his career as a corporate executive, but left it to write and teach. Besides his own award-winning poetry, he has helped revive poetry across the America. When it comes to arts funding, the state of California ranks last among fifty states at three cents per capita. Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs is budgeted at ten million dollars compared to New York's hundred thirty million. Yet a report on the creative economy by Otis College of Art and Design shows it generates nearly nine hundred thousand jobs and a hundred forty billion dollars across southern California. I talked with Gioia at the Armand Hammer Museum where he was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. Dana Gioia, you have a big job. You are Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. A lot of people will wonder, well, what exactly do you do and what's your main mission? What's your main goal? Dana Gioia>> Well, I run the official arts agency of the United States, so my job is to support the arts in all of the states and jurisdictions which means every form of art in every place as well as arts education. The other thing I try to do is to actually change the public conversation about the importance of arts and arts education because, you know, we are the only organization that really covers the whole country. Val Zavala>> And you want to change the conversation from what people are talking about now to what? Dana Gioia>> I mean, a very simple way of putting it is that, for decades, the conversation about should the public support art has been really led by the people that oppose it. The critics of public support of the arts have really led the conversation. I think probably the most important thing that we've been able to do with the Endowment during my chairmanship is to really change the conversation, to talk about the importance of public support for the arts. Not simply in communities, but in schools and in terms of creating the kind of community people want to live in. Val Zavala>> When it comes to public support for the arts, Los Angeles as a city and California as a state are dismal. We give very, very little public money for the arts. How can you change that? That's a political decision. Dana Gioia>> Well, I think I can speak about California because I am a native Californian and I still have a house in California. Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. I mean, California five or ten years ago had really some of the strongest support for the arts in the country. Now it's really among the weakest. In fact, when I first came into office, one of my first jobs was to keep the California legislature from shutting down the California Arts Council, period. I mean, I would think of it this way. California is the size of a major European country and our California economy is fueled by creativity. Not simply in motion pictures, but in aerospace, in high-tech, in all kinds of things, even agricultural marketing. It seems to me that it's economically as well as culturally short-sighted for California to take arts education out of the schools, to take arts out of communities. It's a kind of economic suicide. Val Zavala>> So if you want to get more public support, basically taxpayer money for the arts, you're going to have to convince people that the arts are not just for elite, wealthy individuals, the Eli Broads, the BPs of the world, who are very generous. But they're way up here and the average person is saying, "Well, okay, they're taking care of the arts. I want my tax money to fill the potholes." Dana Gioia>> Well, I think the artists and art advocates have done a really bad job of explaining to the average people why arts are important. I mean, the average person believes that the reason you have arts education is to produce more artists and I think the average person believes we have enough artists already (laughter). The purpose of arts education is to produce complete human beings, to take kids and have them develop their talents, their skills, in a way where they can be successful members of a kind of twenty-first century economy. If we don't do this, we're going to lose a huge portion of this next generation of kids. They're not going to be operating up to their potential and that's going to have enormous social costs as well as lost opportunities. Val Zavala>> So give me some advice. Here I am, an individual. I live in Eagle Rock. I have a hundred dollar check to write out. Should I make it out to LACMA or should I make it out to the Center for Arts in Eagle Rock, my neighborhood art center? Dana Gioia>> Well, I think the strength of the American cultural economy is private support. I mean, private support is about ninety percent of the money that comes into the arts. People should support what they're passionate about. But I think something that we should think about is, before you go after the high-end, don't forget your own community because sometimes it's the grassroots organizations that are most desperately in need of the money and a small check to them may make a big difference. Val Zavala>> Well, that's the way I feel. When I got a solicitation from LACMA recently, I had to stop and think, "Gee, the new curator chosen basically by Eli Broad is getting paid six hundred thousand a year. My little fifty dollars isn't going to make any difference." Dana Gioia>> Well, the new curator, Michael Govan, who's the new director, is a fantastic guy. Val Zavala>> I'm sure he's worth the money. Dana Gioia>> Los Angeles is lucky to have this guy, but I think you're right in that it's important that we don't forget our own back yard. Sometimes the people that need arts the most are the ones that are, you know, really most marginal in terms of getting the kind of high-end support. What I've tried to do as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts is to take the best arts possible and bring them to communities which would never get them otherwise because that's really where they really have the transformative power. Val Zavala>> What kind of transformative power do the arts have especially for children at risk or the less privileged? Dana Gioia>> Well, let me just talk about myself. I'm a working class kid from Los Angeles. My mom was Mexican and my dad was Italian. There are and never have been cultural institutions in Hawthorne which is the town that I'm in. We had a great library and I was happy for that. I really had no idea what was ahead of me in life. I mean, to me the highest aspiration was to get a union job at a plant because that's what these working class people around me had. My exposure to the arts not only sort of expanded me intellectually and culturally, but it gave me in a sense a way of imagining all the future lives I might have led. If I hadn't had piano lessons from Sister Camille Cecile in second grade, if somebody hadn't donated a couple of Los Angeles Philharmonic tickets where I could actually go to this, if we hadn't been able to go to The Huntington and the Los Angeles County Art Museum, I would never be the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. I would never be a well-known writer. Those were the things that really opened up the potential for the future that my family, which was a great and loving family, could never have done on their own. So what I look on this for is really about opening your imagination to all the possibilities of the future, the possibilities of your life. If that isn't a good investment, I really don't know one that is. Val Zavala>> Dana Gioia, thank you so much for your thoughts and your time. Dana Gioia>> It's good to be back in my hometown. Val Zavala>> That's right. Welcome back. Dana Gioia was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. If you'd like information on future speakers and events, you can go to their website at townhall-la.org. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> If you were an artist or a musician or a writer back at the turn of the century, one of the coolest places to hang out was the Charles Lummis House. Well, now this unique home is more than a hundred years old, but it survived. It's a little hard to find, but as Vicki Curry tells us, well worth the effort. Vicki Curry>> Take a drive up the 110 Freeway just north of downtown Los Angeles and you'll come to a chain link fence. Take a look behind that fence. It's like something out of a storybook, a home unlike any you'll ever see, with two distinct personalities. Half Spanish adobe, half stone castle. Denise Spooner>> It's one of the really unusual features. You see a lot of stone houses, but none of them are quite like this one. Vicki Curry>> That's because this one was built by Charles Fletcher Lummis, a man who was every bit as unique and ruggedly individualistic as the home he built. He was a journalist, adventurer, early booster of Los Angeles and advocate of the arts and crafts movement. Denise Spooner is the Executive Director of the Historical Society of Southern California. She oversees the house Lummis called El Alisal, Spanish for "Place of the Sycamores". Denise Spooner>> He built the house in the late 1890s, but it continued to be a project of his into the 1920s. As we say, the house kind of grew organically. The arts and crafts movement was sort of a reaction to industrialization. So much of the house was built by hand, whether we're talking about the doors that Lummis actually planed and used in ads to fashion the doors by hand, hanging them by hand, pouring the concrete floors by himself. The beams in the house came from the Santa Fe railroad. So a lot of found materials that he re-crafted himself and then put into the house. People that were members of the arts and crafts movement advocated a closer relationship with nature, so the reason that the house was made of arroyo stone is because it's located right here on the banks of the Arroyo Seco River. Vicki Curry>> But the house is more than an architectural rarity. It's also a tribute to the west and the people that captured Charles Lummis's heart. [Film Clip] Vicki Curry>> He didn't come to this region until he was well into his twenties. Lummis was actually born in Massachusetts. Later, he was working at a newspaper in Ohio. This was in 1884 when he accepted a job at the Los Angeles Times. Denise Spooner>> And that was a really important period in southern California's history because it was really the first boom time where a lot of people from around the country were coming to southern California. Vicki Curry>> Lummis decided to tramp across the continent, as he called it, walking all the way from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. Denise Spooner>> And as he was traveling across the United States, he would send sort of dispatches to the Times and they would be published. So when he actually got to southern California, he was something of a celebrity because he had all kinds of different adventures on his way here. Vicki Curry>> Those adventures sparked a life-long love for the people and culture of the southwest. So he decided to share this love and, in 1914, he built the Southwest Museum on Mount Washington with his own personal collection of artifacts. Denise Spooner>> So this is the room that Lummis called his museum and it housed the collections that he gathered especially from a lot of the native people. One of the most significant features of this room, the one on which so many people always remark on, are actually these glass plate positives. They're actually pictures that Lummis took and they sort of are arranged in a way that replicates some of the journeys that he took across the southwest into Mexico and then into South America. Vicki Curry>> This is a man who loved photography and he photographed anything and everything. So he really helped to keep a record of those times then? Denise Spooner>> Oh, absolutely. Yeah, he did. Of those times of native people, of building the house, of people in Los Angeles, all the artists and poets and politicians, anybody who came to El Alisal. People like Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, anybody that was interested in the life of the mind and in arts at that time. Vicki Curry>> As an editor at the Los Angeles Times and later the magazines "Land of Sunshine" and "Out West", Lummis actively promoted and celebrated the southwest and its lifestyle. Denise Spooner>> People always associate southern California with the very things that Lummis advertised: sunshine, good health, lots of opportunities for outdoor living. Vicki Curry>> And that hasn't changed, but the bad news is that the Lummis House is changing. In fact, it's falling apart. Denise Spooner>> The house has suffered seismic damage as a consequence of earthquakes over time. There are two guest houses that are on the property that were multi-story actually prior to the Sylmar earthquake in 1969. Now it's just one story because the top floor fell off. Water intrusion is a huge problem. There is a leak right about here that creates what we call Lake Lummis in the floor. Vicki Curry>> Lake Lummis is the start of a lot of other problems. The water leaks are also causing mold and bacteria to grow throughout the house. Denise Spooner>> This is one of the rooms in which the damage that the house has endured is most clearly visible and it's visible in a couple of ways. First of all, on the walls throughout the room, you can see a lot of where there's been water intrusion. After the water actually dries up and evaporates, then what you're left with is the salt from the water and then it blasts through the paint and the plaster. So a lot of people come in here and they think, "Wow, why don't they repaint this place?" But the damage is way deeper than just repainting. We think that it's possible anyway that, in an earthquake, damage was done, but then because of the weight of the tower on the outside of the building, it's actually pulling this section of the building kind of apart. Vicki Curry>> Kind of ironic when you consider Lummis bragged that he built the house that would last a thousand years, but that's not going to happen without major restorations. Denise Spooner>> If we don't move forward with taking greater care of the house, then we will lose the Lummis House. All historic structures are like this, but if you don't ever do anything to them, then you shouldn't be surprised when they just fall down. Vicki Curry>> The house is owned by the city of Los Angeles which can't afford to repair it. Historic preservation is low on the city's list of priorities, so dollars are scarce. Any restoration of the Lummis House will probably cost millions and, even before that gets started, it will cost about two hundred thousand just to assess the house's condition. Denise Spooner>> These projects are very complicated. They're very time-consuming because what we're doing is not just shoring up the foundation of El Alisal, not just making it so that it's not unsafe, but really restoring it so that it really represents Lummis and his times. It's a physical piece of history that links people in the present to the past and helps them better understand how the past is connected to the present and the present is connected to the past. Vicki Curry>> And that's what's most important to the Historical Society of Southern California, saving the house in order to share it. I'm Vicki Curry for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> For more information on the Lummis House and restoration efforts, you can check out their website at socalhistory.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. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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