|
|
4/20/07
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
They thought they could live out their days in their mobile homes, but will a legal loophole force seniors to move?
Florence Cotton>> He doesn't give us the choice of staying here and keeping Los Angeles rent control, so there's a method in his madness.
Val Zavala>> And then, are these mummies hiding clues to the afterlife? It turns out that secrets of ancient Egypt aren't all about treasure.
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>> Mobile home parks are one of the few remaining affordable places to live in southern California. They're mostly clean, comfortable and secure, right? Well, maybe not secure. With land values going up, many mobile home parks are being sold and, as Roger Cooper tells us, that's disturbing news for the thousands of people who live there.
Roger Cooper>> Mobile home parks have traditionally served as one place seniors could find some relief from California's sky-high housing market. Mobile home residents own their home, but not the land under it. They must rent that.
In Orange County, eighty-four year old Steve Gullage has lived in his mobile home park in Huntington Beach for the past thirty years. At the Palisades Bowl near Santa Monica, Beatrice Prentice and Florence Cotton, now in their late seventies, are mobile home neighbors who have become fast friends. But now these seniors and others are worried about their futures.
Beatrice Prentice>> I don't want to go anyplace else. This is my home and I intended to stay here for the rest of my life. You can ask other people. They want to be here until they're carried out of here.
Roger Cooper>> At the Palisades Bowl, the owner has told Beatrice, Florence and other residents that he will subdivide the park. The mobile home owner gave them a choice. Either continue to rent or buy their lots, which for many would mean getting a loan.
Beatrice Prentice>> For people in their sixties, seventies, eighties, forget about the people in their nineties, to get into a mortgage and to be in debt is outrageous.
Roger Cooper>> So how about continuing to rent? Beatrice and Florence say that comes with a big catch. Their rent could double. That's because state law says, once a single plot in the park is sold, local rent controls come off. And with local control lifted, rent can rise to market value.
Florence Cotton>> He doesn't give us the choice of staying here and keeping Los Angeles rent control. So there's a method in his madness.
Roger Cooper>> Beatrice and Florence say their six hundred dollar rent will soar to twelve hundred dollars or more. They can't buy and they have no place to go.
Beatrice Prentice>> It does express what I think is the lowest point of what we can be as human beings and that is to take from the weak and the vulnerable to get rich.
Roger Cooper>> The problem is happening throughout California.
Senator Lou Correa>> "In the last year, this committee has received numerous complaints throughout the state about parks being converted to resident-owned condominiums."
Roger Cooper>> The issue was the subject of a special State Senate hearing recently in Sacramento. Robert Calderon of the California Mobile Park Owners Alliance told the panel that such conversions should be encouraged.
Robert Calderon>> "I just fail to see the problem here or the concern that we ought to have. This is a success story, not a problem."
Roger Cooper>> But Ventura County Supervisor, Steve Bennett, called the conversion law seriously flawed.
Steve Bennett>> "If this legislature does not fix this, this will explode. The economic incentives are simply too great for the park owners not to go this way."
Roger Cooper>> Glenn Bell leads a mobile home rights group which has been looking into the situation Beatrice and Florence face in Santa Monica.
Glenn Bell>> "It used to be in California when somebody like this treated our mothers this way, we as a collective society stood up and said, no, this is not acceptable. I stand here before you today and I say this is not right to do to my mother and I pray to God it's not right to do to yours. Thank you very much."
Roger Cooper>> In Orange County, the mobile home debate takes a different form. Here the issue is not rent control. It's more about rising land values.
Roland Chavez>> Over the last, you know, ten years, land values have more than tripled here in Orange County.
Roger Cooper>> Land broker, Roland Chavez, says that rising land values may tempt some park owners to close their parks and put the land to more profitable uses.
Roland Chavez>> When we evaluate an opportunity of that mobile home park, we look at it from the perspective of redevelopment for higher and a better use and that typically is a residential community.
Roger Cooper>> In 2004, the Huntington Beach City Council passed an ordinance protecting mobile home residents should their park close. Council member, Debbie Cook, says park owners would have to compensate residents for the value of their home.
Debbie Cook>> It would require them to either move the home within twenty miles of Huntington Beach or, if they can't do it because there's no space available, then to reimburse them for the cost of their home and at no time less than the value of a new mobile home.
Roger Cooper>> Park resident, Steve Gullage, lobbied for the ordinance. He says that it's virtually impossible to relocate to a new park these days and he argues that tenants deserve something for supporting the park owner over the years.
Steve Gullage>> We feel that we should get fair compensation so that we can stay off the streets. Most of us are seniors. In a matter of days, I'm going to be eighty-four years old. I don't want to be out on the street by myself. I couldn't survive.
Roger Cooper>> Vickie Talley is a lobbyist for park owners. She says that some park owners are suing Huntington Beach saying the ordinance takes away their rights.
Vickie Talley>> We're seeing that governments like Huntington Beach are passing these regulatory ordinances that are so far-reaching in terms of actually bordering on taking of private property.
Roger Cooper>> Support for the ordinance in the Council is not what it was. New member, Dan Hansen, thinks it was a big mistake.
Dan Hansen>> So in the event that there's a park closure, you have a tenant now who believes that they have some level of entitlement based upon simply a rental transaction.
Vickie Talley>> In Huntington Beach, we don't have any community owner indicating an interest in changing the use of the property today, but they want to protect their right to do that in the future.
Roger Cooper>> The suit against the Huntington Beach ordinance is still in court. Meanwhile in the State Senate, at least two bills are being introduced to address mobile home park conversions and rent control. That would be good news for Beatrice and Florence, although it may come too late.
Beatrice Prentice>> Where would we go? If we go into fair market value in this kind of community, we're talking about three thousand dollars a month. So we can't either afford a condo, we can't afford rental and, in a way, we feel like discarded people.
Roger Cooper>> 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, 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 scandal unfolding over the poor care that Iraq War veterans are getting at Veterans Administration hospitals may surprise Washington politicians, but it doesn't surprise veterans from previous wars who have spent years dealing with the Veterans Administration, people like John Rion.
John is a Vietnam veteran. He has diabetes and is ninety-five percent blind. He lives in Long Beach in a place called the Villages at Cabrillo, an apartment complex where about five hundred veterans live, many of whom are homeless. I talked with John about what he thinks of the reports about poor health care for American soldiers coming back from Iraq. Based on your personal experience, does any of this surprise you?
John Rion>> No, it doesn't because I've been experiencing this for forty-four years and I am not alone. There are many veterans that live right here that also have experienced this. For one reason or another, they'll find a reason not to qualify you for some of the Veterans Administration care and also increases in disability as a veteran becomes more severely disabled. You can apply for an increase, but they will find ways to deny the increase.
Through the American Legion magazine, they have stories about veterans that have gone their whole life trying to get their benefits through, trying to get their disability increased. The day after they die, the Veterans Administration will approve their application and then they don't have to pay it because the veteran is no longer alive. You can read this in the American Legion magazines every single month.
Val Zavala>> John's diabetes has taken a toll. His organs are failing and his legs are numb from the knees down. A toe will have to be amputated. He developed diabetes at age thirty-eight, but it wasn't the Veterans Administration who paid for much of his medical care through the years, though he fought in Vietnam from 1960 to 1966, and why is that?
John Rion>> Because I was not in Vietnam during the declared portion of the war, that I was not eligible for any of the benefits or any of the increases in my disability rating.
Val Zavala>> And yet you fought there for six years.
John Rion>> Yes, and I've been fighting the Veterans Administration, putting in appeal after appeal after appeal, for over forty years.
Val Zavala>> Fortunately, John was able to qualify for Medi-Cal to cover his dialysis. He could have done dialysis at the Veterans Administration hospital, but something happened that made him go elsewhere.
John Rion>> But the hospital dialysis center there is run by a foreigner. He came and told me one day when he got angry that he didn't like Americans. He just liked the money that he was able to make in this country running the dialysis center here.
Val Zavala>> That was at the Veterans Administration hospital?
John Rion>> That was at the Veterans Administration hospital, yes. And from that point on, I left. I figured that I don't belong there, that I wasn't going to get the care that I should be getting.
Val Zavala>> But there's one Veterans Administration program that John has been able to take advantage of. This is Jessica, a home care worker who comes in three days a week to help him with cooking, cleaning, shopping and daily chores. It's paid for by the Veterans Administration.
John Rion>> She's just been an absolute blessing.
Val Zavala>> Jessica came through a company called Home Instead Senior Care that provides caretakers for the needy. It's owned by Debra Teofilo who says that twenty percent of their clients are veterans.
Debra Teofilo>> We actually got a call from the social workers here at the Villages of Cabrillo in Long Beach. That social worker had already done a workup basically on John and knew that he would qualify. She knows a lot of what it would take to qualify. So what we do is, she knows that we have a very reputable home care company. It's international. We've got a lot of regulations.
A problem with a lot of veterans is they get this pension, but they hire caregivers that may be private or that may be problematic and may not be honest. We really pride ourselves on our reliability and responsiveness and trained caregivers. So we were able to help him with his paperwork and I understand that he had tried on his own and had been turned down.
Val Zavala>> John considers himself lucky. His problems are mainly physical.
John Rion>> The Veterans Administration, after the Vietnam War, found that there were a lot of veterans that were having psychological problems. They were shell-shocked. They opened up hospitals. They were almost like institutions. They were completely fenced in with high barbed wire fences. They had areas where the men could only go into a fenced-in area to be out.
There was a mental hospital about ten years ago. They also opened some of them up as medical hospitals along with the mental part of the hospital. When I first went to the one in Marion, Indiana, I was shocked with what I saw. I saw buildings with barbed wire fences around it to keep men in small contained areas. The ones that were not so bad were able to walk around the hospital grounds, but they weren't allowed to leave.
Val Zavala>> Were they getting treatment? Were they getting better?
John Rion>> They were being warehoused. The government didn't do anything more but to warehouse these fellows. This hospital is still in operation and they're still warehousing the veterans in these hospitals.
Val Zavala>> John's doctors have told him he has about six months left to live. He's remarkably at ease with that prospect. He has a deep faith in God and in the ability of people to make things better for veterans. So do you think it will change now that a lot of this is coming to light?
John Rion>> Only if the people cry out and demand change and write their congressmen and their senators and say that what is happening with the people in this country needs to be changed and we need to do something better for the American people.
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>> What would an exhibit of Egyptian antiquities be without mummies? Well, now there are more than a dozen mummies on display at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana on loan from the British Museum. Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, takes us inside to take a look at the Egyptian obsession with death and the afterlife.
[Film Clip]
Roger Cooper>> Dr. Peter Keller, President of the Bowers Museum, and currently the home to quite an exhibit. What's it called, Doctor?
Dr. Peter Keller>> It's called Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt.
Roger Cooper>> This is all from the British Museum?
Dr. Peter Keller>> Correct. It's one of the largest collections of Egyptian material outside of Cairo. Most of the material in this exhibition has never before been seen. In fact, one of the more fun jobs I've ever had was to go with the curators literally into the basement, the bowels of the British Museum, this great two hundred fifty year old museum, and select the objects for this exhibition.
Roger Cooper>> And look what you have selected. This looks big.
Dr. Peter Keller>> This is almost five thousand pounds and, believe it or not, it's a sarcophagus cover made out of basalt. It came over on a United Airlines passenger plane and, yes, he did have first class. This actually is the inner sarcophagus cover, so there was one larger than this that was buried fifty feet down.
Roger Cooper>> Tomb raiders have their work cut out for them.
Dr. Peter Keller>> They certainly did in getting him out of the hole.
[Film Clip]
Roger Cooper>> Peter, this is a boat from the British Museum and now at the Bowers.
Dr. Peter Keller>> It's a soul boat which is actually transporting the mummy in his afterlife across the Nile. The Nile pretty well divided the country. All the dead were actually buried on the west side of the Nile. If you died on the east side of the Nile, you needed to be taken into your afterlife and physically into your tomb on a boat across the Nile.
This is depicting the priest with his text blessing you as you're going across and the guardians, perhaps Isis and Osiris, taking the ride with you as well. Of course, you have the protective eye on the bow of the boat.
[Film Clip]
Roger Cooper>> And in this room, a rather old looking piece of wood here.
Dr. Peter Keller>> This is actually the best of our several coffins that we have in the exhibition. This, of course, would have been the inner coffin that actually held the mummy. The mummy would have been put -- you notice it's kind of narrow -- the mummy would be put in sideways with his eyes looking out through the actual eyes you'll see on the outside of the coffin.
Now what's fascinating to me about all this is that inside you have all the text for basically your manual for the afterlife. Everything you needed to get through into the afterlife is included on the inside of the coffin.
Roger Cooper>> What a handy thing for him.
Dr. Peter Keller>> Yep, a manual. Don't you wish we had one for this life?
Roger Cooper>> Exactly.
[Film Clip]
Dr. Peter Keller>> Well, this is one of my favorite items in the entire exhibition because it looks like it's a piece of furniture that would have been made today, yet it's at least three thousand years old. You notice this is a folding chair. So when the king or any of the royalty went off on a hunting expedition or a war, they had to take their folding chairs along just like we do.
Roger Cooper>> Now bring home to us what we are looking at. How old is this and what is this?
Dr. Peter Keller>> This is a three thousand year old mummy that was actually found in Thebes, the area of Thebes, on the Nile River on one of the British Museum expeditions. What's very interesting about this piece is that we did computerized CT scans on six of these mummies that revealed extraordinary detail.
With all six, we had the British Museum curators here, we had a team of radiologists, we had the technicians from General Electric and we had the mobile van, which made it very handy. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to bring all these to a hospital.
Roger Cooper>> That has to make these very real for you to see them that way.
Dr. Peter Keller>> Oh, it's incredible, and we do have the CT scans on exhibit as well.
[Film Clip]
Dr. Peter Keller>> Roger, this is Carol Hallenbeck. Carol is the Chairman of our docent program and they actually tour thousands and thousands of people here. Carol has given this tour many more times than I ever dreamed of, so I've asked her to say a few words about some of our pieces.
Carl Hallenbeck>> This is a mummy mask. The idea was to cover the face of the mummy with an idealized form so the mummy could then begin its journey to the afterworld looking like a god. Gold was the color of the faces of the gods, so they made this beautiful mask.
It has a scarab beetle on the top to show that it's related to the sun. It has beautiful engravings to show a beaded necklace. It has an ankh under the chin, the symbol of life. You would be honored to go into the afterlife with an image such as this.
This is a cobra. The marshy delta in Egypt was full of cobras. So to keep the cobra from biting them and their children, they made the cobra a god. You find the cobra on all of the headdresses of the Pharaohs. It's facing out. It can spit at the enemies of the Pharaoh and not harm the Egyptians themselves.
This is Osiris, the king of the dead and the ruler of the underworld. You will always find Osiris in every room of this exhibit. Notice that he has the shepherd's crook and the symbols of his kingship. He has an "atef" crown on his head. It looks like a bowling ball in the middle with feathers on the side and curling lamb's horns out each side.
This is a Stella. This is a way for the spirit of the dead man to receive the food that he would need to live forever. So over here on the left, you have the dead man. This is his wife bringing food. You can see the food piled on the table. The Egyptian art required all the food to be listed vertically. If it were laid horizontally, they would cease to exist. So in the afterlife, his spirit will be able to have all kinds of beer, wine, vegetables and meat to live forever.
We like to teach students a little bit about hieroglyphs. These hieroglyphs indicate that the king gives food and the spirit wanted food so it could live forever. The king gives food, and here you see the dead man's relatives bringing the food to feed the spirit of the dead man.
[Film Clip]
Roger Cooper>> Dr. Peter Keller, the beauty of this exhibit is that it will be around a while here at the Bowers.
Dr. Peter Keller>> It will be around for quite a while, two to five years.
Roger Cooper>> And the first of many things to come from the British Museum.
Dr. Peter Keller>> That's correct. We look forward to at least five to ten years of British Museum exhibitions and we're very excited about it because, of course, you're dealing with one of the oldest, greatest museums in the world right here in Orange County.
Roger Cooper>> Thank you so much.
Dr. Peter Keller>> Thank you.
[Film Clip]
Val Zavala>> Shakespeare once wrote, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." And that's what Cris Franco, a member of the baby boomer generation feels when he looks at youngsters these days. I'll let him explain.
Cris Franco>> I recently overheard some twenty-somethings dissing us baby boomers, blaming we seventy million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 for all the world's problems like pollution, war, karaoke. To you, I say, "Chill out, you spoiled little rug rats." We are an excellent generation who overcame obstacles and advanced mankind despite being forced to ride backward in the last row of the station wagon facing the cars behind us.
Our accomplishments are many. Boomers test drove today's classic toys like "Slip and Slide" sustaining paralyzing flesh burns from hitting a dry spot.
We were the first television generation. Long before the flat screen, our innocent eyes were subjected to RCA's round-edged color television. "Bonanza", "Flipper", Bewitched". It was like seeing everything through a fish bowl. It made no sense. Well, except for "Flipper". "Flipper, where's Bud?"
We turned the forgotten war into "Mash", a smash sitcom that lasted three times longer than the actual Korean War. Let's see if you YouTubers can even get "Operation Enduring Freedom" into syndication.
Boomers created the infomercial and that special studio audience double clap that could make six people sound like sixty. But wait, there's more.
You kids owe us a lot. Baby boomers served as the first diet soda lab rats sacrificing our taste buds so that you could enjoy today's miracle elixirs like Diet Dr. Pepper and Coke Zero that actually kind of sort of maybe tastes good.
And we made the world safer by rejecting popcorn over an open flame ala Jiffy Pop and introducing microwave popcorn. Non-fat, low-salt, butter-flavored and all. Still, be careful when you open that bag. Oh, hot.
Technologically, our advances are myriad. Only a few short decades ago, a television took five minutes to warm up. We had to learn the difference between the big hand and the little hand and cords kept us tethered to the phone.
Now look at us, getting tickets for driving under the influence of a cell phone. Cell phones are extremely distracting and they're all over the road with one in four drivers talking on them at any given time.
It was baby boomers who ushered in an era of tolerance. We found nothing strange about Bert and Ernie living together. They just like it. Get it? Felt?
So what does all this mean? It means it's time for a truce between boomers and all the X, Y and Z gens. If you stop blaming us for the state of the world, we'll share our pan-popped popcorn next time the microwave is on the fritz.
Val Zavala>> Oh, no, we won't. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. 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:
|
