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Life & Times Transcript

12/14/07

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 --

This bus driver does more than give kids a ride to school. She drives them to succeed.

Tanya Walters>> I go after the ones with the attitudes. "I don't like you" and I let them know I don't like you either, but that has nothing to do with what I see in you.

Val Zavala>> And then, you always knew it was cool to live in southern California, but did you know cool was born in southern California?

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>> This is the time of year when parents who can afford it take their college-bound kids on trips to check out prospective colleges. But for thousands of students who can't afford it, even applying to college is a stretch. Well, that's where Tanya Walters comes in. She takes kids on a trip that will change their futures. Is she a teacher? A counselor? A recruiter? As Toni Guinyard explains, she's none of these.

Toni Guinyard>> It's well before daybreak and the early morning silence in this Gardena bus yard is broken only by the sounds of drivers preparing to roll out. Just minutes into her shift, driver Tanya Walters takes part in the morning ritual, conducting the safety check on bus number 6308 before setting out on her fifteen mile long run. It's sun-up by the time Walters reaches the first bus stop. This is a job she and other drivers say they don't have to do, but they choose to do it. The reason? The kids.

Tanya Walters>> We're parents to these kids out here that don't have parents. We're role models to kids that don't have role models. We're teachers. We're their school bus drivers. We're whatever they need us to be.

Toni Guinyard>> Walters is the driving force behind the group "Godparents Youth Organization", or GYO. She founded it after she and some of the other drivers developed connections with the students who got on and off their buses every day.

Tanya Walters>> Your child steps on here. You don't know all the time what your child is capable of doing, but as school bus drivers, we see it. We see them when they change their clothes. We see that, when you drop them off, they get off. They don't even get on the bus. They walk away. Then you come and approach us like we're just school bus drivers.

Toni Guinyard>> They're more. Walters reached out to students, taking small groups on cross-country trips during their breaks from school. They were journeys exposing the students to a world outside their world, trips paid for primarily out of the bus drivers' own pockets.

Tanya Walters>> For the time being, we have to do what we have to do.

Toni Guinyard>> She scans the faces of the children who ride her bus searching for a child in need of inspiration, most of them oblivious that she's actually looking for the next student to invite on a road trip.

Tanya Walters>> I look and I listen for pain, so to speak. I look for the hopelessness. I look for the ones that have kind of like made up their minds to give up in life. I go after them. I go after the ones with the attitudes. "I don't like you" and I let them know I don't like you either, but that has nothing to do with what I see in you.

Once we pull that layer off of you, you're going to be all right because, if you're bad now and you don't have anything going for you, we help you change your mindset. You'll be fearless.

Toni Guinyard>> The next road trip is going to be a little different. All of the students will be high school juniors or seniors, fourteen kids from seven different cities, and all of them will have a 2.5 or lower grade point average. But what really makes the difference in this next trip is that the destination will be college.

Eddie Sampson>> We have city college, we have private college and we have the loans for the kids. They ain't no way they can not want to go.

Cathy Boulton-Taitt>> I think they're going to be thrilled and it's going to push them to want it even more and to do what they need to do in the high schools to get there.

Toni Guinyard>> Fellow school bus driver Cathy Boulton-Taitt is co-founder of Godparents Youth Organization.

Cathy Boulton-Taitt>> Through travel, Tanya and I feel that it would put it back into them to want to be more and to be somebody. But, of course, I think it starts with self. So if we start teaching them to appreciate themselves and what they can become, then going to college would be easier.

Toni Guinyard>> So they're heading to college to visit, a destination chosen after one student was accepted into Humboldt State University only to learn that financial aid for room and board had not been received.

Tanya Walters>> Here's a young lady that struggled, tried her best, got out of Crenshaw High, did everything she thought she was supposed to do and, a day or two before she was leaving, you're going to call her and tell her she doesn't have room and board?

Dale Evans>> We didn't even get to the school. They called us and told us. We didn't even get down there to the school and we had made plans to go to the school. They said, "Well, she doesn't have room and board." We have to find that off-campus. Well, that's going to be very expensive. It's like, "Well, we don't have anything for her and, besides, she's last on the list."

Tanya Walters>> She didn't know what to do, so what did she do? She came back home. So she never did attend Humboldt.

Toni Guinyard>> It was a tough lesson to learn. Walters changed the program because of it.

Tanya Walters>> We have extended our program to fly out with the kids that are in our program to be there the first day or two with them that go to college. They will know what they need to do to survive the first year of college.

Toni Guinyard>> It's a program Abi Ingleton had never heard of, but supports in theory. Ingleton is the Director of the Undergraduate Success Program at the University of Southern California.

Abi Ingleton>> College is about moving yourself out of your comfort zone. So when you are taking a student oftentimes who'd maybe never left their community that they've known all their life, that they've walked to school or taken the bus to school, that's all they'd known.

So when you take them out of that comfort zone and you give them a place and a mechanism and a means to have comparison, then that's what increases their landscape and increases their scope of thinking.

Tanya Walters>> "What test do you need to get out of high school?"

Student>> "The exit exam."

Student>> "SAT".

Toni Guinyard>> Walters is already getting her middle school passengers thinking about college.

Kyle Scott>> They expect greatness from me because they want me to be very successful because some of my family didn't go to college and they want me to be one of the children or one of the family members that does go to college.

Tanya Walters>> "Name three historical black colleges. Who can name three historical black colleges?" I'm just trying to spark hope and ambition and looking for personal initiative.

Toni Guinyard>> Walters conducts her classes on the way to and from school. She has a captive audience and makes the most of every second.

Tanya Walters>> "Nicole, do you know the thirteen original colonies?"

Nicole Twyman>> I didn't know what to say when she started asking us because most of the stuff I knew, but I didn't know it at the time.

Diamond Jackson>> It helps us, though.

Toni Guinyard>> How?

Diamond Jackson>> How she kind of like tests us. Even today, we might have a test on the thirteen colonies or whatever they're called.

Toni Guinyard>> At the heart of each interaction with students is a lesson. During the cross-country road trips, the focus is on sharing what little they have with others who have even less. The excursions -- they've been to twenty-three states so far -- have been the subject of news reports and magazine articles.

Tiana Neal>> I saw this magazine and I saw Ms. Walters and I asked her if it was her and she said yes. I saw another one and I saw Ms. Walters and I asked her and she said yes and I was like, "You must be really famous."

Toni Guinyard>> The media attention gives the impression that GYO is a big, well-funded organization. It's not. Members of the grassroots group spends half the day behind the wheel of a school bus, the other half planning for the next journey and encouraging youngsters who have the same dreams.

Nyla Cargill>> Going to college and majoring in drama and acting.

Toni Guinyard>> So many other students do.

Senta Tyson>> That's my dream for my daughter is to go to college, to pursue her dreams and go to college.

Cathy Boulton-Taitt>> Some of them think that I don't care about them, but my thinking is that I wouldn't be out there if I didn't. I have a family of my own and I do care. I do care.

Toni Guinyard>> They are driving buses filled with dreamers, students who may one day see a bit more of the world thanks to a few godparents who are more than just bus drivers.

Tanya Walters>> "Bye. Have a nice day. Watch your step. Thank you. Watch your step, Nicholas. Bye, Daisy. Welcome back."

Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard 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>> He sat in the anchor seat at NBC for twenty-one years. Tom Brokaw was raised in a small town in South Dakota, but he went on to become one of America's premier television journalists. His book, "The Greatest Generation", was a bestseller and now he's got a new book about the sixties.

It's called "Boom! Voices of the Sixties". Brokaw draws from the personal experiences of more than fifty Americans of every color, gender and background. Brokaw started out as a young reporter in the sixties and had a front row seat to this defining decade in American history. I asked him how time has changed our perception of the sixties.

Tom Brokaw>> What people forget about the sixties is that it was all-encompassing. Most folks think it really only addressed the Flower Children, so to speak, or the anti-war demonstrators, but it also was the decade through which people who went to Vietnam lived.

People who are on the far right as well as on the far left experienced the sixties. I wanted to make that clear to everyone that it was a much more complex decade than a lot of people I think now remember.

Val Zavala>> And you have an amazing range of people -- Karl Rove, James Taylor, Dick Gregory, Gloria Steinem, Jane Pauley, Delores Huerta. Did any of these people really surprise you?

Tom Brokaw>> No, I can't say that I was surprised. I think what I have been impressed with are two things. One is that a lot of the activists from the time now have a more honest evaluation of the mistakes that they made and they want to pass those lessons along to another generation.

To sum it up, I suppose most of them felt that they had tactics, but no strategy. They were very good at organizing things, but they weren't very good at following through.

Val Zavala>> Well, exactly. That's why I was interested in seeing Karl Rove. He was in here.

Tom Brokaw>> He was in high school in 1968. He was keenly aware of the election of 1968. He would go down to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City and hear Bobby Kennedy --

Val Zavala>> -- who he admired very much.

Tom Brokaw>> He admired him because he was iconoclastic. He was a guy who said, you know, if you got a student deferment, it's wrong because that means working class kids go and you don't go. He liked Nelson Rockefeller who was a moderate Republican because he was in favor of a voluntary Army. He was intrigued by the demagoguery of George Wallace. So, yeah, Karl Rove is another person who went through the sixties.

Val Zavala>> And, of course, we can't miss the parallels. In the sixties, we had a very unpopular war that seemed to have no end. Now we're in Iraq, a very unpopular war, and we seem to be caught in the quagmire. But why do you think in the sixties people took to the streets by the millions to demonstrate against it and that's not happening today?

Tom Brokaw>> I think the draft has a lot to do with it. A lot of the so-called moral outrage at the time, which was genuine I think on the part of the people, went away when they realized that they weren't going to be pressed into uniform and sent off to Vietnam and maybe die in the jungle. Now American citizens can decide whether they want to fight in a war because it's a voluntary military.

That brings us, I believe, then to another obligation as citizens. However much you hate the war, there are those families who have answered the call and you must reach out to them and let them know that it's not a two-tiered society, those who are in uniform and dying and those in civilian clothes for whom nothing is expected. No sacrifices are being made.

Val Zavala>> And in the sixties, society was polarized. Today we are deeply, deeply divided. Is it worse now than it was then?

Tom Brokaw>> It was much more polarized then than it is now. Of course, it was. It was very bitter. It was also polarized by race then much more than it is now. People have to remember that.

But what happened as a result of the sixties is that the ideological passions were so great and people were so determined to organize themselves around very extreme or narrow interests that we did become a society in which we retreated to the far corners of the room. There was not much interest in trying to find common cause.

Val Zavala>> But today, we have these divisions, red state-blue state.

Tom Brokaw>> Look, red state-blue state is overblown. It's become a shorthand that is not representative of the country. There is no redder state than Kansas. It has a woman who's a Democrat as governor re-elected to a second term. Arizona, another red state, a Democrat, a woman, elected to a second term.

Montana, a very red state, a Democrat as governor and a divided legislature. Mitt Romney, a straight-laced Republican, was a successful governor in our most blue state, Massachusetts. That should be a signal to the national party leaders that, out in the country, they've found ways of getting solutions to the vexing problems.

Val Zavala>> One of the great quotes you have in here is from an author who said that, meaning the sixties generation, "Ours is the last generation who is cooler than their kids."

Tom Brokaw>> My friend, Tom McEwen, who was a novelist in the sixties, had hair down to here, lived in Key West, smoked a little dope from time to time, hung out with Jimmy Buffett, married Jimmy Buffett's sister, was a very successful novelist with good reason, then a screenwriter.

He lives now in Montana where he's my neighbor and he's a grandfather. He talks about the fact that they could be cooler than their kids because their kids now have many more pressures on them than they had then.

Val Zavala>> And yet it's interesting that this sixties generation as parents produced what many people feel is a very conservative generation.

Tom Brokaw>> And some of that was a rejection on the part of the children of the boomers to what their parents represented to them. I had a young woman on the telephone saying to me, "My parents were the most narcissistic people in the world and then they got divorced and left me in utter turmoil."

Other boomer parents, once they got to be parents, became utterly controlling as parents. They pushed back against everything their parents represented. When they got to be parents, they hired soccer coaches and Kabuki coaches and sent their kids to kayaking camp and they had tutors for the SAT scores. They micromanaged every part of their lives. So as I say, it's very uneven terrain at that time.

Val Zavala>> So what do you think we've learned from the sixties or have we learned from the sixties? Because we are making --

Tom Brokaw>> -- well, we're still fighting our way through the sixties in many ways (laughter). It still defines a lot about who we are. I think we should probably have a national referendum, in a manner of speaking, in 2008 and certainly more conversation about what parts of the sixties are worth keeping and what we should leave behind.

People romanticize the sixties in many instances too much. Other people on the right condemn them far too much. Let's put it all on the table, see if we can have an objective discussion about the merits of the sixties, the advancement of civil rights, the advancement of women. So there are a lot of merits in the sixties that we ought to be cherishing.

Val Zavala>> So when it comes to your personal role in the sixties, were you a participant or more of a spectator?

Tom Brokaw>> Well, I was a weekend kind of faux participant. You know, I didn't really dive into the waters. I've often said I had one foot in the psychedelic waters of the sixties and one foot on the terra firma of the fifties.

Sure, I put on bell-bottom trousers from time to time and peasant shirts and went to the Renaissance Fair in Topanga Canyon. Yeah, I smoked a couple of joints that everyone else did. I inhaled, but it didn't define my life and I left it behind.

Val Zavala>> And you were just starting your career, a very professional career.

Tom Brokaw>> I was. I was here in the midst of it. I always felt that, as one of the younger reporters on the NBC Bureau out here, I was more or less a delegate to the sixties.

Val Zavala>> Tom Brokaw, author of "Boom! Voices of the Sixties", thank you so much for your thoughts.

Tom Brokaw>> My pleasure. A lot of what I went through happened here in California, so it's fun to come back here and talk about it.

Val Zavala>> That's right. Thank you. Tom Brokaw was a guest of Town Hall Los Angeles. If you'd like information on future speakers and events, you should 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
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You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> Mid-century modernism is making a comeback. That's just a fancy word for those kidney-shaped coffee tables that your parents used to have. But did you realize that a lot of local artists helped launch that style worldwide? And now a new exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art is taking a look at the "Birth of the Cool". Vicki Curry got a tour from the exhibit's curator.

Vicki Curry>> The architecture and design of the mid-twentieth century evokes a lifestyle of elegance, sophistication and glamour.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> A perfect mid-century modernist house is just like a stage. It's a stage for living. It just feels harmonious and serene and beautiful and elegant.

Vicki Curry>> And that's the feeling that curator Elizabeth Armstrong is going for in this exhibition. But she also included the painting, music and film of this time to show how all these different art forms overlapped to create a style called modernism.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> "Birth of the Cool" is about a sensibility, about a style, about a group of artists, architects, musicians who were all working together in the same time and place in southern California at mid-century, and trying to define that sensibility and also look at why we're so interested in it again fifty years later.

Vicki Curry>> The exhibit started with Armstrong's interest in a little-known group of local artists who were called Hard-Edge painters. They were first shown together in 1959 at what was then the Los Angeles County Museum.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> These painters have been so under-documented and under-recognized. There were great artists here and lots of great art being made, but California itself was not being covered the way, say, the art world was in New York, so we know less about it.

Vicki Curry>> Armstrong says the paintings, architecture and even music of the period all emphasized the idea that less is more, and they pay as much attention to the space between things as to the things themselves. A house flows from indoor to outdoor. Music is syncopated. And it's all very different from what was happening on the East Coast.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> It's hot, it's gestural, it's very expressionist. I mean, East Coast, be-bop, jazz. You think of a very dissonant and, you know, dynamic kind of music. California cool jazz tends to be a little more attenuated, a little smoother, a little more laid back.

Vicki Curry>> And the music gave the show its title. It comes from a Miles Davis album called "Birth of the Cool".

Elizabeth Armstrong>> I mean, cool, of course, is still a way to say that something's really good, but it also implies a certain detachment, you know, not trying too hard, a kind of under-stated quality, and that's sort of the vernacular cool. It's also a term we use in architectural history to describe a kind of classical formulism and purity.

So if you look at the paintings and the architectures, it's minimal. You know, it's a very pure aesthetic and that's considered cool as opposed to hot. I was really happy to find a word that had both a street meaning, a vernacular meaning, and a kind of formal and art historical meaning. I thought that was just really cool.

Vicki Curry>> Each art form gets its own space in the exhibition. There's a jazz lounge where visitors can listen to music and look at photographs of the musicians taken by William Claxton, a gallery of paintings, and a furniture display that includes architectural photographs by Julius Shulman.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> We also wanted to have a place or places where they all come together and this is one of several sections where, you know, you get a quintessential piece of furniture by Ray and Charles Eames, although we've installed it as if it were a wonderful art object on the wall, which it is.

Vicki Curry>> But it's a coffee table.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> Totally functional coffee table that you see in a lot of mid-century houses. I love it that it's next to this Greta Grossman lamp, but then next to this wonderful John McLaughlin painting. I made a decision long ago that the power of the show would come from these different disciplines, sort of charging each other and playing off of each other and the confluence between them.

Vicki Curry>> This image is on the cover of the catalog for the exhibition.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> This painting itself is both so quintessential 1950s because of the form and the palette and the energy of it, but also the sense of timelessness. The thing about Karl Benjamin, who was the youngest member of the group of painters we're looking at, is that he was self-taught. I think, more than any of them, in a way he could channel the vernacular, you know, the lava lamp feeling, the boomerang form. He brought those into the paintings, but in a very pure, minimal way.

Now that we sort of realize how much great mid-century modern architecture was built here and designed here and created here, it seemed logical to sort of look at the bigger zeitgeist and community of artists and creative thinkers. You know, I do hope that the show does make the case for this incredible traction in what was going on creatively in southern California at the time.

Vicki Curry>> Armstrong says that southern California's rapid growth and prosperity in the mid-twentieth century attracted artists and innovation.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> You have all the sort of industries that were built up around the war effort retooling and becoming fabricators that lent themselves beautifully to, say, the kind of chairs that the Eames's wanted to design or the kind of continuous sheets of steel and glass that the architects needed to make these perfect, pure houses.

Vicki Curry>> Hollywood's creative community was also a draw. Short films made by furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames are on display here and the exhibition shows how popular culture reflected mid-century modernism and how film and television promoted the style around the world.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> "North by Northwest", for instance, has a sort of famous mid-century modernist house and it becomes the stage for that very important film. Playboy magazine and a television show that Hugh Hefner had called "Playboy's Penthouse" and Hugh Hefner himself were great supporters of the jazz scene.

"Playboy's Penthouse" really captures some of the great performers from the period and you also get a sense of the style of, you know, the people at his parties. So we do include a lot of kind of cultural context in that way and it really adds to the whole show.

Vicki Curry>> That's the hope of "Birth of the Cool", to explore not just this style, but also the role Los Angeles played in creating it.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> I think many of us have always heard what a cultural desert Los Angeles was until recently and, by extension, southern California. I really wanted to test that. I think it is beginning to get the credit it's due.

Vicki Curry>> And that may be because mid-century modernism is hotter today than it was fifty years ago.

Elizabeth Armstrong>> It's becoming so popular, I think, because the paintings are great and the jazz sounds great and the designers were amazing. There's probably some sense of musing about what was that thing, that cool thing, that sensibility that was so serene and beautiful in the 1950s.

Val Zavala>> "Birth of the Cool" will be on display at the Orange County Museum of Art through January 6. For details, go to their website at ocma.net. 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.

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