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Life & Times Transcript

8/14/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

These days, it's called Vista Hermosa, but does Belmont by any other name smell as foul?

Howard Blume>> When you're talking about pushing five hundred million dollars for a school and it's not a Cadillac, you know, it's your basic Pontiac, it's just a school. It's pretty darn expensive (laughter).

Val Zavala>> And then, he's called The Singing Cowboy, but his reach stretched well beyond the range. We celebrate Gene Autry's one hundredth anniversary.

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.

[Technical difficulty]

Sam Louie>> . . . Joan Depew has been teaching in the district for thirty-five years. Never once has she had a classroom she could call her home.

Joan Depew>> The overcrowding relief has been promised and promised and promised since I was at Borrendo and that was, let's see, 1977 and this is now 2007. I'm still traveling. Thirty-something years later, I still have to travel from room to room.

Sam Louie>> When completed, the goal of Vista Hermosa is to cut the enrollment in half here at Belmont High. Joan Depew wants to retire soon, but she's willing to hold out for an opportunity she's never had in her long career.

Joan Depew>> I think I would like to go over to the new school and see what it's like to, you know, live like the other half. I think that would be great.

Sam Louie>> And have your own classroom?

Joan Depew>> My own classroom, my own storage area. Be able to put things up and leave them up.

Sam Louie>> The question remains, will four hundred million be enough for this project or will the cost creep closer towards the half billion dollar mark?

Howard Blume>> "I've got to come over to your desk and tell you something that might be newsworthy. Okay."

Sam Louie>> Howard Blume is a reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He has written extensively about Vista Hermosa High School.

Howard Blume>> It's a public sector tragedy that has worked out the way it has and there's no reason why this project should have cost anything close to what it did and the school should have long been opened.

Sam Louie>> Blume says that the public should not be surprised if the cost of the new school goes even further, beyond the projected four hundred million dollars.

Howard Blume>> If you added up everything associated with the project, you would count investigations, you would count lots of lawyers' fees and litigation. I'm not persuaded the district includes all of that in its calculations, especially in the first phase of the project. So it's hard to say. I think you could easily make a case that the cost surpasses five hundred million dollars.

Sam Louie>> And what is the public getting for a school that could cost half a billion dollars? Blume says not enough.

Howard Blume>> When you're talking about pushing five hundred million dollars for a school and it's not a Cadillac, it's, you know, your basic Pontiac, it's just a school. It's pretty darn expensive (laughter).

Sam Louie>> Monica Garcia is the current school board president. She agrees that the price is too high, but says the district has learned some valuable lessons.

Monica Garcia>> The lessons learned from the Belmont Learning Center experience have saved California and Los Angeles Unified School District a lot of dollars because we now are forced to evaluate the land before we start school construction. That was not the case back in the 1990s when this school was first purchased.

>> Well, the issues still are whether or not there is going to be honest disclosure of all the defects that went before and what's happening now. Whether the costs are going to be accurately disclosed to the Board, to the superintendent and the public.

Sam Louie>> School officials say that they now have a clear, transparent process open to the public and they feel Vista Hermosa, despite its size, will be able to meet the challenges of educating students for the twenty-first century.

Monica Garcia>> The twenty-eight hundred students? That's still a very large high school, but we have an instructional program where we are introducing small learning communities.

Sam Louie>> As for the safety concerns?

Monica Garcia>> Trust me, we absolutely value students' safety and I can tell you that there is no one who wants our students to be safe in this community more than I and our superintendent, Richard Alonzo, and the stakeholders of this community.

Sam Louie>> Teachers, students and school officials hope the worst of Belmont's problems are over and that the new name will put the troubled past behind them.

Monica Garcia>> Vista Hermosa means "beautiful view" and I think what that represented for the coalition at the time is the belief that this could be a beautiful view for our community.

>> It sounds like a developer's name that they would invent to market something and it's done a good job to change the image from the Belmont Learning Complex, but everyone still knows this place as Belmont.

Sam Louie>> As for ESL teacher, Joan Depew, she isn't focused on the name. Instead, she's looking forward to something more important.

Joan Depew>> So it would be delightful to have your own classroom. It would be wonderful. "Okay, do you remember the matching practice from yesterday?"

Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> So what do you think of Los Angeles's four hundred million dollar high school? You can post your opinion on our blog. Just go to kcet.org/lifeandtimes/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>> They say the best history teachers make the past come alive, but there's an even better way to learn history and that is to hear it from the men and women who lived it. Well, that's what's happening at a high school in Santa Monica where young people are talking to veterans of World War II and the two generations are literally making history. Toni Guinyard explains.

Toni Guinyard>> Students in Renee Semik's Santa Monica High School history class are facing an assignment like no other and they only have one day to prepare. They were assigned to interview people they'd only read about in textbooks, men and women with personal stories to tell about their experiences during World War II.

Wylene Hernandez>> "A lot of them were really, really young. You have to remember that too. You'll see from the pictures that they look like you guys basically."

Toni Guinyard>> The students would play a crucial role in the Veterans History Project developed by Congress. They get a crash course in how to take the oral histories of World War II veterans guided by Veterans History Project coordinator and Vietnam veteran, Becky James.

Becky James>> "There were quite a few of our soldiers who received their citizenship as part of fighting for our government."

Toni Guinyard>> And Project intern, Wylene Hernandez.

Wylene Hernandez>> "Trust me. Once you get going on the whole interview process, you're just going to come up with more questions. Ask them questions about. . ."

Toni Guinyard>> And they did. Questions about the soldier's lives on and off the battlefield, their thoughts on life and death. They jotted them down just in case one would be forgotten in a moment of nervousness. After all, the interviews would be videotaped and the oral histories preserved in the Library of Congress.

Renee Semik>> We had conversations about how this is going to be in the National Archives, the National Archives. You can look it up, you can have your kids look it up later, and you'll have access it and your name is going to be on it.

Stephen E. Sherman>> "My name is Stephen Sherman."

Toni Guinyard>> Twenty-four hours later, the visitors arrive. Aviation mechanic, Phyllis Capelle; Vern Peters, Stephen E. Sherman; Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient, Pete Howenstein; and Silver Star recipient, Bazooka Joe Pietroforte.

Joe Pietroforte>> "And I fought in 1944 with the 1st Infantry Division known as the Big Red One."

Toni Guinyard>> And then it happens. Talking, listening, learning about everything from the draft --

Stephen Sherman>> "Anybody from eighteen to forty-five, blind, crippled or crazy, went into the service."

Toni Guinyard>> To enlisting.

Vern Peters>> "And here was a picture of a sailor and he was stripped and had his white hat on and he was handling a big, about a three-inch, fifty-four inch ammunition round, and he was shoving it into the breach. And it said 'Join the United States Coast Guard'. Boy, that's me. That's how I joined it."

Toni Guinyard>> The questions lead to what happened on the battlefield, first-hand accounts you don't fully comprehend until you hear it from someone who was there.

Pete Howenstein>> "We'd march in the daytime and take over towns and we'd dig foxholes at night with a buddy. We'd stay in the foxhole below the ground so, when the shells were flying over the area, they wouldn't rain down on you. Some of the shrapnel would rain down on you and, of course, it would kill you or wound you very badly."

Becky James>> As far as I know, this is the first time that student volunteers from the VA have gone out into the community and actually helped other students learn how to do the History Project, which is exactly the way Congress envisioned it when they started this in 2000.

Joe Pietroforte>> "Bill and I are the only two soldiers in all the town."

Toni Guinyard>> We listen in on each interview, the conversation so vivid that you could almost see what the vets once saw. Their words transport them back to another time and place.

Joe Pietroforte>> "Boom, boom, boom, boom. They were firing into the trees deliberately to get that shrapnel coming down. Then you also had what they called buzz bombs which were rockets. You never knew when they were going to come down because they would just make a noise and you could feel the vibrations on the ground and then they would just come down."

Renee Semik>> I always say that, when you can meet the figures, it's so much more real.

Student>> "Were you scared?"

Joe Pietroforte>> "I'm sorry?"

Student>> "Were you scared?"

Joe Pietroforte>> "You didn't know what you were getting into."

Renee Semik>> When you get to sit down and really listen to somebody tell you a story and you realize, holy cow, that's your story. That is your history. You lived it.

Pete Howenstein>> "I put up with it. You have to, you know, just keep going."

Renee Semik>> It's not something we're watching in a movie. It's not something we're reading in a book. It's not a show I'm watching on television. I'm sitting across from that living person and listening to everything they have to say.

Stephen E. Sherman>> "I knew nothing about segregation and prejudice. When I went in, I was put into a segregated outfit, an all-black outfit. Immediately, it slapped me like a thunderbolt to know that we had to be separated in the service. I was in a segregated outfit during the whole war."

Student>> "Was it difficult being a lady? I mean, I know that's an interesting question because there weren't so many."

Phyllis Capelle>> "At first, you know, the Marines didn't think much of the women Marines. But after they saw them working and how well they worked, the accepted us. At first, they called us BAMs. I'm not going to tell you what their meaning was, but ours was "Beautiful Aviation Machinists".

Toni Guinyard>> BAMs. It's slang, an offensive term referring to women who had a role in the war.

Student>> "Whose plane were you fixing?"

Phyllis Capelle>> "That wasn't my plane, but I was crew chief on one just like it. Wherever it went, I went with them. We worked on where the planes landed and officers were coming to do business. One of them was Charles Lindbergh. I jumped on the wing and asked him if he needed gas and he said, 'Yes, Miss.' So then I gassed his plane and, when he came back, I signaled him out and he took off in the Corsair straight up. Usually they, you know, but he went straight up. I've never forgotten that.

Toni Guinyard>> As the veterans age, some details are not as clear as they used to be, which is why documenting the recollections now is being done with a sense of urgency.

Becky James>> When Congress started it, they realized that the World War II veterans are dying off at, I think they say, a thousand a day. It's important to get their stories.

Vern Peters>> "Is there anything I can tell you kids? Anything you want to ask me?"

Peter Howenstein>> "I got wounded in France with artillery shell. I was taking cover inside a barn and the artillery came through the roof of the barn and it got me in the shoulder. I still have the shrapnel in there and I got a Purple Heart for that."

Toni Guinyard>> The students hang onto every word. This is what they prepared for, a living history lesson.

Virgil Torres>> That's way better because you learn. You actually get something out of it, seeing with your bare eyes.

Hannah Park>> Yesterday I was so nervous and, you know, thinking about questions for like three hours. I didn't get to ask all of them because there was like fifty or seventy questions, but I'm pretty satisfied with everything.

Toni Guinyard>> Satisfied they were able to overcome their nervousness --

Student>> "Yeah, I had my question, but I just lost it."

Toni Guinyard>> And help document history. For one group of students, the dangers of combat was summarized when Bazooka Joe recounted what a soldier once told him.

Joe Pietroforte>> "He says, 'You're not so lucky when you get serious wounds, you know. You go back and they'll send you home.' He says, 'If you're real lucky, you get killed because actually living is harder than dying when you're on the line because every day is a sheer hell.'

Toni Guinyard>> A hell that is now documented by students who set out to do a history class assignment and ended up learning about the men and women who are a part of history.

Renee Semik>> If some little tidbit of fact about World War II sticks in their head, that's great, which I'm sure it will because it's so much easier to remember that stuff when you're sitting there listening to a person who lived it.

Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> The Library of Congress Veterans History Project is a searchable database, so you can go online and read about the particular stories of veterans. Their website is www.loc.gov/vets.

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>> Here's a question for you Hollywood history buffs. Which entertainer has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for every category of radio, recording, motion picture, television and theater? Well, I'll give you a hint. If he were alive today, he'd be a hundred years old. Vicki Curry talked with Holly George-Warren, author of the new biography, "Public Cowboy #1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry".

Vicki Curry>> Gene Autry is known mostly as The Singing Cowboy, but he also had a lot of business ventures that many people don't even know about. What was it that drove him to do so much?

Holly George-Warren>> Gene Autry came from a very impoverished background. He grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and, back in the day even before the Depression hit the rest of the country, that part of the country was already having to live under drought conditions. His father didn't spend much time at home, so Gene pretty much had to help support the family as a young boy.

His first job was for the railroad and he had ambition to have a comfortable life, to live a better life. Also, apparently he was not afraid to take chances. So whenever opportunities came his way, he wouldn't be afraid to just go off to New York City and try to make it in this huge city as this little farm boy from Oklahoma and Texas. He would try and that's how he got his first recording deals going. He just went kind of from there.

Vicki Curry>> So what was his first big break?

Holly George-Warren>> Luckily for Gene, in addition to being very industrious, very creative and artistic, he was a real gregarious, charismatic kind of guy that, you know, never met a stranger, as they say down south. He made friends very easily and, even beginning at the railroad, he would get these mentors who kind of took the place of the father he really didn't have as a stable figure.

There was a fellow named Jimmy Long who he met on the railroad. They started performing together and I think it gave him the confidence to think, "Well, maybe I could try to do something." Of course, with the changes going on at that time in the recording industry for the first time, country music and blues music were being sought out by New York record executives and there became a market for that type of sound and he capitalized on that.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> Throughout his career, he often seemed to be at the right place at the right time. How much did that contribute to his success?

Holly George-Warren>> Gene Autry definitely came along at the right time. You know, by 1929, which ironically he made his first recordings in October of 1929 when we had the stock market crash, but that proved to be very fruitful for Gene because he started recording for these companies that put out the really cheap discount records.

His records were available from mail order catalogs like Sears and Montgomery Ward, so they were able to reach people out in the rural areas. He also kind of offered a comforting presence to people who were really worried about where they were going to get their next meal because of the Depression. He went to Chicago and, beginning in 1932, had all these radio shows. People could hear him for free on the radio. Again, his popularity expanded.

Same thing when he came out to California. At that point in time, he came out in 1934, in July of 1934, for a little tryout really for Mascot Pictures. The studios were seeing that they needed a new gimmick. Well, Gene Autry walked right into that because the gimmick was singing cowboys in musical westerns. So he really created a brand new genre that just exploded in popularity beginning with "Tumbling Tumbleweeds".

[Film Clip]

Holly George-Warren>> They would use some of the songs that he had already sold lots of records and had sheet music and those would become the titles of his movies. So it was just this brilliant way of, you know, merchandising and tying in and one product kind of promoting the other. It was brilliant.

Vicki Curry>> Was he always a savvy businessman?

Holly George-Warren>> Gene Autry was a very smart man and he learned early on when he first started recording that it was very smart to own the copyrights to songs and to publish those songs. Early on, he started making money from owning the copyrights to songs that became hit records. That was something a lot of musicians didn't bother to do or didn't realize how lucrative that could be.

[Film Clip]

Holly George-Warren>> He saw everything as a kind of jigsaw puzzle and putting together all the pieces. He was actually one of the first movie stars to go out and really tour and promote the movies, but it helped him in other ways. It was promoting his records, his sheet music, and he would like just use one product to promote the other. Then later on, when he became one of the first movie stars to get into television, the same thing.

And he was doing a weekly radio show and recording records, plus overseeing some business concerns. He had already started buying radio stations beginning in World War II. So at this point, he had several radio stations, he had real estate, he had some other properties. The guy just never (laughter) -- I don't think he ever took a vacation really until the mid-1950s.

Vicki Curry>> Why did he have so many different kinds of business interests going on?

Holly George-Warren>> He realized that he needed to start saving for a rainy day. By doing that, he started investing in businesses. He did believe in investing in what he knew, so he started out by buying a juke box company and then that expanded.

He ended up buying radio stations in Arizona and he started making money doing that and realizing, by diversifying, he could provide income for the future when he wouldn't be able to sing anymore and be a movie star anymore. So it was very smart of him to do that.

Vicki Curry>> When he retired from performing, he went on to many other business ventures. What did he do after that?

Holly George-Warren>> Well, Gene pretty much retired from performing and entertaining pretty much in the early 1960s. That's when he began to focus entirely on his businesses and mainly on his baseball team, the California Angels. He loved baseball his whole entire life. I mean, going back to childhood, I got great stories about how much he loved baseball, so it was only natural that that's where he would invest his money.

But his main income was coming from some very wise choices he made in radio stations and also television stations, KTLA and KMPC in Los Angeles. He bought stations in San Francisco, Detroit, Seattle and he still had some in Arizona. These all turned out to be very lucrative for him. He sold these later at a great, great profit.

Vicki Curry>> Your book is very glowing of Gene Autry, but he also had a darker side as well.

Holly George-Warren>> I found it very kind of sad to find out what had happened to him, especially after World War II, with his propensity for alcohol. Gene became more and more dependent on the bottle and the drinking started to really affect his performances.

Also, even though he was married for forty-eight years, he pretty much lived like a rock star. He did have these little flings and then eventually he and one of his co-stars had an on-again, off-again approximately eight year relationship. He was no saint and it kind of, you know, made me like him even more really to find out that he was human.

Vicki Curry>> After all your research about Gene Autry, what do you want people to take away from your biography?

Holly George-Warren>> Gene Autry was not just some flash-in-the-pan singing cowboy or movie star who had his moment in the sun. His artistry and also many of his contributions to our culture are with us to this day. The whole country grew to love country music, thanks to Gene Autry, and it was really Gene Autry that helped to popularize the cowboy around the world. I hope people can see how he really changed our culture and helped to make us where we are now.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> The centennial exhibit of Gene Autry is up through mid-January. For details, you can go to their website at autrynationalcenter.org. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. 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.

Val Zavala>> Next time on Life and Times --

Californians buy these license plates to battle terrorism. Why isn't the money being spent?

>> They bought these license plates in record numbers and that money is still sitting in a locked box doing nothing.

>> I was just absolutely surprised because, if there's anything that Sacramento is good at doing, it's spending money.

Val Zavala>> That's next time on Life and Times.

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