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Life & Times Transcript

11/19/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

How scary is life in southern California? Look what it's doing to our kids.

Carrolle Simien>> They have symptoms of fearfulness and helplessness and horror because of traumas that they may have experienced in the community.

Val Zavala>> And then, "A horse is a horse, of course, of course, and no one can talk to a horse, of course", unless it's the man who played opposite Mr. Ed all those years. Now he's doing the talking.

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>> Post traumatic stress disorder. We usually associate it with troops coming back from war, but now researchers are finding it in a very different population: school children here in southern California. Many of them have witnessed accidents, domestic violence, even murders and now the question is how do we treat them? As Toni Guinyard tells us, PTSD is very different when it impacts children.

Toni Guinyard>> Throughout southern California neighborhoods, children and teenagers are being forced to deal with tragedies.

Davetta Campbell>> It's like violence, a fight or gunfire or shooting or something.

Toni Guinyard>> Mental health professionals say that what kids are witnessing in the streets or even at home is taking a toll, resulting in an increasing number of children being diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder.

Carrolle Simien>> They have symptoms of fearfulness and helplessness and horror because of traumas that they may have experienced in the community. They can be real or actual.

Toni Guinyard>> Carrolle Simien began seeing young clients with symptoms associated with PTSD long before the mental health community acknowledged it as a diagnosis for children in 1980.

Carrolle Simien>> They may have difficulty just getting themselves to school during the day, getting up, getting dressed, getting out. They could have sleep disturbance and, with PTSD, you generally do have dreams or maybe flashbacks of traumatic events that were life-threatening or they witnessed something that was potentially life-threatening to themselves or others.

Toni Guinyard>> Simien works for the Kaiser Permanente Watts Counseling and Learning Center, a facility that has been serving the community forty years. Retired founder and director Wilfred "Bill" Coggins was there from the beginning in 1967 when the center was housed in a prefab building. The structure has been relocated once and transformed twice. It now sits on the corner of 103rd Street and Success where Coggins spearheaded the treatment of mental health issues in this community.

Wilfred "Bill" Coggins>> There's a lot of conflict. There's a lot of violence. There's a lot of threat of violence. And there are a lot of younger people who are disturbed like that in a violent way.

Toni Guinyard>> Life and Times got a glimpse of the violence some children see when we interviewed then fourteen year old Franklin Arburtha in 2005. He witnessed the murder of a neighbor on Skid Row.

Franklin Arburtha>> He just started stabbing and stabbing her. Everyone just circled around her like it was a movie or something. No one tried to help.

Toni Guinyard>> He was inspired to make a documentary.

Wilfred "Bill" Coggins>> I think that we have to develop more sensitivity about what kids deal with and have to face every day.

Carrolle Simien>> We need adults to know that, you know, children aren't little adults. They are indeed children. They need direction.

Wilfred "Bill" Coggins>> I think that mental health issues within the school system as well as mental health issues within the community, of course, are often minimized or perhaps not even recognized.

Toni Guinyard>> The impact of trauma on students is finally being recognized, but it's happening slowly. Los Angeles Unified School District crisis counseling and intervention services field coordinator, Pia Escudero.

Pia Escudero>> In Los Angeles in certain areas, we have found that about thirty percent, one out of three, have symptoms of PTSD.

Toni Guinyard>> In 1997, the LAUSD began collaborating with the RAND Corporation and the UCLA Health Services Research Center. They developed an intervention program initially designed for ten to fifteen year olds called CBITS, an acronym for Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools. CBITS is evidence based, meaning it has been shown through scientific studies to produce consistently positive results.

Pia Escudero>> Many of our students that have PTSD or have symptoms that interfere with their learning are really flying under the radar. They're hidden in plain sight in our classrooms.

Toni Guinyard>> The school district wants to take a public health approach by first getting parental permission to screen every student, identify those impacted by traumatic events, and provide them treatment in a series of ten group sessions.

Pia Escudero>> They had seen people being shot at, they had lost loved ones, so our research partners helped us to start asking questions about how many students have had violent events and also about their symptomology. What are their symptoms? Are they sleeping well at night? Are they able to concentrate?

Toni Guinyard>> Over thirty thousand surveys were distributed to middle school students, kids who are only eleven years old and in the sixth grade. Of those who responded, ninety percent said that they've been exposed to some form of community violence. Just being exposed to community violence does not lead to an immediate diagnosis of PTSD. Students are screened using a seventeen question assessment.

Pia Escudero>> We ask students, "Have you been in a serious accident where you could have been badly hurt or could have been killed"? "Has anybody told you they were going to hurt you?" "Have you seen someone else being told they were going to be hurt?"

Toni Guinyard>> The screening takes about twenty minutes.

Pia Escudero>> Based on the yes and no answers, we can tell you whether a student has had an experience that is a traumatic event or something that could be something that we need to explore further.

Carrolle Simien>> They tend to bring out fearful interactions with peers, fearful interactions in the community, not having an adult that they can take their issues to.

Toni Guinyard>> You're worried about them.

Carrolle Simien>> Yes, yes, but I think there is hope.

Toni Guinyard>> A few blocks away, we found signs of hope. That's where we met a young woman with her mother.

Patsy Cole>> The violence, the gangs I knew she was afraid of, but I've always taught her to be encouraged no matter what she sees.

Davetta Campbell>> I focus on school. It's just like an educational life-changing decision for me. So I have to make that choice. Either deal with what's going around in my environment or drop out and, you know, become what my environment associates and peers do.

Patsy Cole>> I mean, she's been through a lot. Peer pressure, I mean, just depressed. I mean, she's been through the whole nine yards.

Davetta Campbell>> It was tough. It was tough, but I did it. I graduated with a 3.5, so I did it. I came out of there pretty good (laughter).

Toni Guinyard>> Now the goal is to ensure even the smallest of students have a fighting shot at success no matter what they may be exposed to. Vikki Franklin is the preschool manager at the Watts Counseling and Learning Center.

Vikki Franklin>> I'm a living example. I lived here. I grew up here. I walked these streets. I'm back giving to the community after receiving my Masters degree to come back and give to them, you know, what someone gave to me. I want these children to know that there is hope. Because they're in this community, because they see violence and abuse in the community, doesn't mean that this is the way their life is going to be.

Toni Guinyard>> Just by virtue of growing up in an urban community and perhaps one day witnessing a traumatic event doesn't mean they'll ever show symptoms of PTSD, but researchers know that it's possible and they're continuing work to find ways of helping students help themselves deal with life in the city. I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> So what do you think of PTSD in children? You can post your comments 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>> He could easily win the prize for the most corrupt politician in modern times in the Los Angeles area, but chances are that you've never heard of him. He's Albert Robles and the good news is that he's doing time behind bars, but not before gaining almost complete control of a small town and robbing it of millions. How did he do it? His story is fascinating.

From 1997 to 2000, Albert Robles was Treasurer of South Gate, a small town that straddles the 710 Freeway. Over those years, Robles managed to drain the city coffer of millions, smear the reputations of upstanding citizens and import a brand of sleazy politics that works in Mexico and worked for a while in South Gate. No one knows the wild story better than writer and reporter Sam Quinones. First of all, what's South Gate like?

Sam Quinones>> It's a working class town, about a hundred thousand people. It was a white suburb for many years and then, in the 1980s, became essentially Latino.

Val Zavala>> Tell us about Albert Robles.

Sam Quinones>> He was a son of a Mexican immigrant. He became City Treasurer, but really what he learned to do in South Gate was use Mexican political tactics and strategies to control the Mexican immigrant population politically in South Gate.

Val Zavala>> At first, this UCLA graduate was seen as a bright and up and coming City Councilman, but Robles proved to be incapable of compromise. And when he didn't get his way on the City Council, he ran for Treasurer and started taking revenge.

Sam Quinones>> He controlled the City Council. He had three allies who would do pretty much his bidding. With that, he attempted to kind of transform and take full control of city government, drain city resources, drain city budgets, which he did, and all for his own benefit.

Val Zavala>> Flyers started appearing in voters' mailboxes, always aimed at Robles' enemies. This one shows a fake drunk driving ticket and claims a candidate was an alcoholic. This one says a candidate fathered a baby girl, then abandoned her for a Norwegian bombshell, all lies.

Sam Quinones>> The most notorious really is that he accused one man of being a child molester and said that he had been arrested for child molestation at a birthday party in his pool. Utterly untrue. That man really had to leave town. It was an outrageous thing and still years later --

Val Zavala>> -- the man who was accused of child molestation had to leave town?

Sam Quinones>> Right, because --

Val Zavala>> -- He didn't sue him for slander or something?

Sam Quinones>> Well, they couldn't really quite prove that it was him. On the other hand, I think there's really no doubt in the minds of everybody that there was one guy doing this.

Val Zavala>> With his own people on the City Council, Robles started manipulating the city budget, inflating his salary, hiring staff he didn't need, using city money for Tony Robbins seminars and buying property in Mexico and, of course, buying people off.

Sam Quinones>> He would also give away real police badges. He had a big fight with the police. He gave away real police badges to secretaries, to other lawyers and so on. I mean, it was a brazen display of corruption, the kind of which you haven't seen in this area since probably like the 1930s.

Val Zavala>> Over time, Robles became more profane and threatening. He called fellow politicians a pig and a rabid dog. He threatened to have some of them shot. Insiders realized that Robles was a corrupt, out of control bully, but Robles was able to manipulate the average voter, positioning himself as a friend to Mexican Americans and luring them in.

Sam Quinones>> One of the things he began to do also was to give away stuff at election time. He started with a hot dog and a soda at the 7-11. That was one of his first times. He gave away plants the next time.

The time that I met him, he was in this parking lot over here. He had an enormous toy giveaway at Christmas. He was giving away three or four thousand toys at a time, had clowns, had hot dogs. Where all the money for this was coming from, no one really knew. But he understood that, in this area, there was a huge number of new immigrant voters.

Val Zavala>> That's what I was going to ask. Didn't the people get wise to this after a while?

Sam Quinones>> After a while, they did. That's why he's no longer in power. But for a long time, they simply responded as they would have in Mexico and voted against the guy who they thought certainly must be a child molester because it said so on a piece of paper or in favor of the guy who would give them toys and so on because that's kind of what the party that ruled Mexico for seventy-one years had done repeatedly, associated election with gift-giving.

Val Zavala>> He even went so far as to raffle off a house.

Sam Quinones>> He was a guy who understood that Mexican immigrants were kind of like just -- even though they're economically here and working and integrated, politically they were neophytes. They were novices.

Val Zavala>> Then finally in 2003, a coalition of seniors, police officers, business people and Mexican immigrants launched a recall campaign. Robles and his allies were ousted. The votes were eight to one against him.

Sam Quinones>> He's now serving ten years in federal prison for corruption.

Val Zavala>> Did he actually go on trial or did he plea bargain?

Sam Quinones>> No, no. He had a long trial in which they brought out all kinds of new things that had not really come out before, the amount of money he used from city coffers to pay kind of kickbacks, the amount of money that he spent on lawyers. He kicked ten million dollars or something like that over to local attorneys.

This is a city that, before that, had never had more than like a million dollar annual legal bill. In two years, they ran up a ten million dollar legal bill, a lot of which was to pay for his own defense in various things and to kind of get lawyers on his side and pay them off for certain things. Some law firms in Los Angeles have had to actually give that money -- one law firm in Los Angeles in particular has had to give a chunk of that money back to the city.

Val Zavala>> What law firm is that?

Sam Quinones>> Sheppard, Mullin, Richter and Hampton.

Val Zavala>> Really? That's a well-known law firm.

Sam Quinones>> Right, of course, yeah.

Val Zavala>> Given current migration patterns, Quinones says that sagas like the South Gate story may be repeated in other towns.

Sam Quinones>> The reason is, Mexican immigrants have kind of spread to small towns like South Gate. Again, they are economically very integrated in this country, but politically they're still neophytes very often and they're going to places that have never had a large group.

Most immigrants in the history of our country have gone to the big cities, Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco. Mexican immigrants are unique in that they're in large, large numbers going to small towns in the south and in the mid-west, California.

Val Zavala>> And those small towns are vulnerable to these kinds of characters.

Sam Quinones>> And also the folks who move to them --

Val Zavala>> -- are vulnerable to manipulation.

Sam Quinones>> They're not interested in politics. They just want to work. On the other hand, the problem is that South Gate showed that you can't not be interested in politics. You have to or you're going to get taken.

Val Zavala>> You're going to get taken big time.

Sam Quinones>> And that's exactly what happened here in South Gate.

Val Zavala>> What's South Gate like now? What do you think its future is?

Sam Quinones>> South Gate is wonderfully boring (laughter). It's a town that has come back from bankruptcy. It's a working class town. He took it to the verge of bankruptcy. No way it should be bankrupt. There's a lot of car dealerships, a very nice mall. It generates a lot of income, but he drained it.

So South Gate has really gotten back to the issues that any city should be dealing with which is, you know, potholes, issues of crime, development, all that kind of stuff, and less with loopy mailers and attacks on character that no politician, particularly no small town politician, should have to deal with.

It's become a rather boring town. Much to the credit of the current City Council, they've come back from bankruptcy and are now heading away from the precipice that Albert Robles took them to.

Val Zavala>> Well, it's a lesson learned, but a very important one.

Sam Quinones>> Absolutely, for the entire country really.

Val Zavala>> Sam Quinones, thank you so much for documenting that really fascinating story.

Sam Quinones>> My pleasure. Thank you.

Val Zavala>> The full story of Albert Robles can be found in the book, "Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration" by Sam Quinones.

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.

Toni Guinyard>> On Sunday nights in 1961 if you tuned into CBS, you would have seen a new show debut. It was about a horse who could talk and, over the next six years, "Mr. Ed" kept Americans entertained and wondering, "How did they get that horse to move its lips?" Our Val Zavala got some answers straight from Wilbur's mouth.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Alan Young has made an indelible mark on television history as Wilbur Post, the misunderstood husband who spent time in his barn talking to a horse. The year was 1961.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> But there's much more to Alan Young than the likable Wilbur and he tells his story in a book called "Mr. Ed and Me and More".

Alan Young>> "You want to read this with me? You don't want to read this? Oh, you've read it. Oh, I see."

Val Zavala>> I had the pleasure of meeting Alan Young at his home in Studio City where he dotes on his cats. At age eighty-eight, he warms up for an interview the old-fashioned way.

Alan Young>> "The teeth, the lips, the tip of the tongue. The teeth, the lips, the tip of the tongue."

Val Zavala>> The teeth, the lips, the tip of the tongue.

Alan Young>> My mother taught me that. She was a singer, but she didn't have a good voice.

Val Zavala>> (Laughter) Alan enjoyed early success in radio which swept him from his homeland in Canada to New York and eventually Hollywood. But in the late 1950s, he hit a slump. Then a call came. Would he like to play the straight man to a talking horse? The producer was George Burns.

Alan Young>> George Burns had said to Arthur, "I think you should get Alan Young to do this because he looks like the kind of a guy a horse would talk to."

Val Zavala>> So how did Mr. Ed talk? How did he talk on cue?

Alan Young>> I started a lie saying we used peanut butter under his lip.

Val Zavala>> I remember that. That was a lie?

Alan Young>> But that wasn't true, but it served the purpose. No, the trainer put a soft piece of nylon under his upper lip and he tried to get rid of it, that's all. But the main thing was that he did it on cue. The trainer would be lying on the floor and just tap Ed's hoof and Ed would start to talk. He'd tap his hoof again and Ed would stop.

[Film Clip]

Alan Young>> There was one scene where Ed had to enter and shut the door behind him and go to the filing cabinet, open it up, take out a bunch of carrots, close the filing cabinet, walk over to the desk and drop them on the desk and go back into his room. He did it in one take. After it was all over, the whole set burst into applause. It was just wonderful. Ed didn't take a bow or anything (laughter), but he just did his job.

Val Zavala>> And you had to be very particular about your lines, correct? If you changed the words or if you didn't do your lines correctly, it might mess up Mr. Ed?

Alan Young>> We had to be very careful about our lines because the man doing the voice offstage had the script and he had to answer, so we had to be very careful. I know one time, we finished the shot and I went to Arthur Lubin, the director, and said, "Arthur, I can do it a little better." He said, "I'm sorry, Ed was perfect." So we had to be as good as we could be every time (laughter).

Val Zavala>> One of the favorite episodes, in fact, you have a lot of pictures of it here in the book, is when Mr. Ed is out on the Dodger diamond.

Val Zavala>> Yes, we took Ed out there. They had just built the Dodger Stadium and the show was about Ed teaching the Dodgers how to play baseball. He enjoyed it until we had one scene where Ed hit the ball and made a homerun. He had to run around the bases and, of course, they've got grass there and it was just newly laid.

When a horse runs on grass, he tears up the turf. The shot was ruined by Buddy Bavasi, who was the manager or something of the team. He came running down screaming, "You're ruining our pitch!" So that stopped Ed's run around the bases.

Val Zavala>> You had a lot of great guest stars on your program. In fact, stars called your producers wanting to be on. You had a great showcase.

Alan Young>> Well, Mae West said she wanted to work with the strongest, best-looking leading man she could get. I said, "Sure thing", but she was talking about the horse (laughter). So Mae West came on the show and she was very cute and very nice. Clint Eastwood is a great guy and he was wonderful on the show.

Val Zavala>> Because he was in "Rawhide" at the time? Is that correct?

Alan Young>> Clint Eastwood was doing "Rawhide" at the time. Of course, he knew more about horses than I did certainly.

Val Zavala>> Alan grew up in British Columbia during the Depression. His father was a laborer. Money was scarce, but love was abundant.

Alan Young>> I can remember once when my sister was very quiet. She was older than I was. We were having dinner and I was slopping up whatever food I had in the dish. She said to me later, "Why do you make such a fuss about eating? Didn't you see mother and dad had nothing?" I said, "But they were stirring their food." She said, "They were stirring nothing."

I suddenly realized how wonderful they were. As I grew up, I began to respect my parents more and more. They put up with everything.

Val Zavala>> And how did you get to Hollywood from this isolated fairly poor boyhood in Canada?

Alan Young>> We had lots of fun in the family. My parents had great senses of humor. Dad got a radio from somewhere and I used to listen to a show called the British Empire program with all the British comedians and Harry Lauder, the Scottish singer. I would imitate them. Somebody heard me doing this and they said, "Would you like to do a show at the Caledonian Society for us?"

So I went and did this little thing, this recitation, and they paid me three dollars. Dad was there and he saw me opening this envelope with three dollars in it. He worked about ten hours at the shipyards scraping the bottom of ships for three dollars when he could get the job. So he looked at this and he said -- my real name was Angus -- he said, "Angus, you stick with this talking business because lips don't sweat."

Val Zavala>> Oh, that's the name of one of the chapters. I wondered where that phrase came from. Lips Don't Sweat.

Alan Young>> That's why I called the chapter Lips Don't Sweat because lips don't sweat. I think it's the only part of your body that doesn't sweat.

Val Zavala>> At age twenty-seven, an offer came to go to Hollywood where he got his first glimpse of California.

Alan Young>> And when I saw the palm trees and the oranges, I said, "This is where I'm going to live" and I tore up my return ticket.

Val Zavala>> So whatever happened to Mr. Ed?

Alan Young>> Mr. Ed was retired. I was part owner of the show by this time. We all contributed a few bucks and gave it to Lester Hilton to take care of Ed for the rest of his life. So Lester bought a little house in Burbank with a barn in the back and Ed lived in that barn all by himself with Lester for the rest of his life.

Val Zavala>> But he died rather sadly and prematurely.

Alan Young>> He died prematurely, yes. Lester had gone away for a vacation and I was out of town, so Lester hired a horse sitter to take care of Ed. Ed used to love to roll around in the hay, but he had very slender legs and a big body and he struggled to get up sometimes.

He was flailing around and the sitter saw this and thought Ed was having a fit, so he got a tranquilizer and gave Ed the tranquilizer and Ed just slipped away peacefully. He'd never had medicine before, so it affected him that way. It was kind of sudden and kind of sad, but he was peaceful.

Val Zavala>> So you're so well-known for being Wilbur on the "Mr. Ed" show. Do you ever get tired of that being the claim to fame, the thing that everybody always remembers you for?

Alan Young>> No, no. Gratitude for the job covers a lot of ego (laughter). He was the star and I love to talk about him.

Val Zavala>> Well, Alan Young, thank you so much for sharing some just wonderful, wonderful memories with us.

Alan Young>> Val, thanks so much. I hope you enjoy it and I'll write another one if you do.

Val Zavala>> Once again, the name of Alan Young's book is "Mr. Ed and Me and More".

Toni Guinyard>> That's it for tonight's program. I'm Toni Guinyard. For everyone here at Life and Times, thank you for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.

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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