It was 80 years ago that Jackie Robinson went to John Muir High School in Pasadena. He played shortstop and catcher on the baseball team. But flash forward to today: what about the team he played on, and the school he went to? Take a leap into a Los Angeles of the future it's unlikely any city will have changed more than Inglewood, future home to the new NFL stadium. We take a look around and talk with Inglewood movers and shakers. And we go inside the Eames House, one of Los Angeles' most important, most beautiful and elusive homes.
With a new field, Jackie Robinson's former baseball team hopes to win again
It was 80 years ago that Jackie Robinson attended John Muir High School in Pasadena. He played shortstop and catcher on the baseball team and stood out in almost every sport he could find time to play. Football, tennis, track, basketball — he was a brilliant athlete. In 1936, Robinson graduated Muir High and went on to break the color barrier in baseball, playing in six World Series and becoming the only player in Major League Baseball to have his jersey number universally retired—no player can wear number 42 now.
But 80 years on, what about his alma mater?
When Robinson came to Muir, the Pasadena high school was a destination for young athletes, dominating in nearly every major sport. Today, it's hard to imagine a Muir high grad playing in the major leagues.
Last season, the baseball team didn't win a single game. Just like the previous season.
The field at John Muir was even worse than the team.
Kevin McDade, number 7, is a senior at John Muir High School and a pitcher on the team. He watched players break bones on the field.
"Kids was getting concussions off of it, and everything, slipping off bases and all that," McDade says.
Weeds grew in the bullpen, a patch of dirt barely higher than the untrimmed grass that passed for a pitchers mound. The locker room was a swampy mess. A column in the LA Times last year put the state of the program in sharp focus. People called on the Dodgers to dig into their deep pockets and help the struggling Muir Mustangs.
And they did. The team poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into remodeling the facilities, with the boys varsity baseball team front and center. New bullpen, new dirt, new grass, new lawnmowers.
On the day it was presented to the public, Dodgers president Stan Kasten held a ceremony on the new John Muir High School field. He told the young players that even Dodger Stadium "is not any better than the field that we have right here."
Sure, the field looks great. But will it be enough to turn around the struggling team?
The John Muir of today isn’t the same John Muir it was 80 years ago. The school’s student body has gotten smaller and poorer, for one: Since 2004, enrollment's dropped steadily. 80% of Muir students are eligible for free or reduced lunches—that’s 15% higher than Pasadena’s district average. And baseball’s gotten more expensive: Gloves, bats, travel, little league fees. They add up over time.
"One of the biggest challenges is in the inner city that baseball has took a downfall in the past fifteen years. Here in Altadena, Pasadena, our boundaries, I don't think we field a senior league team, a pony league team," says Robert Galvan, head coach of the team.
Galvan also leads a team that's made entirely of black and latino teenagers in a time when baseball has become whiter and older. TV ratings for major league games have declined. In colleges, black and latino students made up less than 10 percent of Division 1 players last year. In comparison to football and basketball, scholarships for baseball are scarce.
Galvan knows a new field won't solve all that. But he says it's a start.
"If you give a teacher brand new books and material to teach, you're gonna bring students to the classroom," Galvan says. "Same situation here. You bring a good foundation, a nice little baseball field, you're gonna bring students that have a prior knowledge of baseball."
That idea is being put to the test this season — and things are looking brighter. Muir hired assistant coaches to help out Galvan, they're working with local little league teams to recruit new players. Last month, they won their first game.
On March 15, the new field made its debut, a home game against Compton Centennial. Bryan Barrios, the team captain, is pitching. And he's nervous.
"I just got some butterflies from warming up because, seeing all these people here. I've never had this much people here in one game," Barrios says.
In front of a large, excited crowd, Barrios starts off with a few nervous pitches and gives up a run. The Mustangs get a run in the 2nd then take the lead in the 5th. There are a few close calls, but Barrios pitches throughout the game and John Muir wins it 2-1, their first victory at home in a very, very long time.
The team is elated. Coach Galvan is too, but he's not letting it distract him from the road ahead. He's not ready to call the win a turning point for the John Muir Mustangs.
"Too early, too early. I mean, 80% of our kids are still in 9th grade, so I think the turning point will be when they're juniors and the guys coming up under them will fill in. It's a beautiful thing. It's a good future, promising future," Galvan says.
A rare visit inside the Eames House, hallowed ground for designers
Charles and Ray Eames were pioneering American designers whose most famous work is the Eames Recliner. The Eames were so famous, the chair got its own unveiling on NBC's Today Show in 1956.
They also designed the Case Study House #8 in the Pacific Palisades, then lived in it from Christmas Day, 1949, until they died. On the outside, the house resembles a stark, modernist home with no soft lines. But go inside, and everything changes, and Off-Ramp got a rare and privileged peek when we interviewed Daniel Ostroff, editor of the new "An Eames Anthology," and Charles and Ray's grandson Eames Demetrios, chair of The Eames Foundation.
If you've been inside your friend's Mid-Century Modern home, where the coffee table holds either a stack of Dwell magazines or nothing — but never a cup of coffee or the TV remote — you're relieved to walk into #8. It's filled with carpets, plants, art, books and soft places to sit.
The anthology is as thick as a 2TB external hard drive, but it collects just a small portion of the Eames' writings that, as Ostroff explains, illuminates their process, a process that valued evolution above revolution. "They used to say, 'innovate as a last resort,'" says Demetrios. "And what they meant is that when you innovate for its own sake, little bits of knowledge and wisdom that have been accumulated almost unconsciously by people can be easily lost. For example, I can make an innovative car tomorrow. It'll have 23 wheels and there'll be absolutely no point to it. What they tried to do with their designs was have a quality called 'way it should be-ness,' so if something was really well designed, the idea of it having been designed at all would not be apparent."
The anthology includes the narration for the Eames' movie explaining the molded plywood chair, in which they say instead of designing a chair for how people should sit, they designed one for how people do sit. It's revolutionary, alas, in some design circles. "It might sound revolutionary," Ostroff says, "but it's actually consistent with the overall Eames message. They were living it a time when there were far more choices than man had ever been faced with before, and Charles and Ray said that when you're a designer, you're on safe ground if what you focus on are people, the people who use your designs. And the fact that they didn't go beyond that is one of their gifts."
Members Appreciation Day, the one day a year you can go inside the Eames House, is June 20, but you need to sign up by June 15. Daniel Ostroff will be there, too, signing copies of "An Eames Anthology."
4 years after the repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell' much is left undone
Undertaking LA: A new funeral home for people who want to hold a funeral at home
Death and dying happened in the home for hundreds of years of American history. In the 20th century, the rise of the medical and funeral industries have taken dying and the dead body behind closed doors to be handled by “professionals.” — Undertaking LA
If you're a fan of Caitlin Doughty's Off-Ramp commentaries on death, you might have been wondering why she's been silent for a few months. Doughty, who gained fame blogging at The Order of the Good Death and then with the bestselling memoir, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory," has been working on opening a funeral home. Or rather, her idea of a funeral home, called Undertaking L.A.
For instance, Undertaking L.A. has a one-room office, unlike the sombre, stately funeral homes we're used to. "It's not like that, mostly because our funerals are going to take place in the family's home, so we don't need a big funeral home." The state requires an office (with a door), so they have one in a medical building on Santa Monica Boulevard where it intersects with the 101 Freeway.
The Order of the Good Death, which Doughty founded, is about getting us more comfortable with the idea of death — something our ancestors were accustomed to and dealt with in a healthier way — and as The Order puts it, "accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not."
(A home funeral, America, 19th century. Credit: The Order of the Good Death)
To that end, so to speak, Undertaking L.A. will help you plan and hold a funeral at your loved one's home. It will connect you with a co-op crematory or a burial ground near Joshua Tree if you want to be buried un-embalmed.
They'll show you how to wash the body, if you want, and show you that there is no law that you must use a standard funeral home. "That's definitely the first thing all of my friends say when I tell them I'm doing this," says Undertaking L.A. mortician Amber Carvaly. "Oh, I didn't even know that you could! Is that legal? That doesn't seem legal."
Carvaly was an apprentice embalmer at Forest Lawn, but she says it wasn't for her because she's a "big picture" person. "I liked being there from the beginning to the end." She remembers a case where she helped a man take care of his wife's funeral, "making sure that his wife was set up in the way that he wanted, that she had her favorite scarf. I had tied it on her head and made a beautiful bow. I liked being there all the way." And she wished she could have been there for the actual funeral.
While the two say the process of setting up Undertaking L.A. was extremely difficult (logistically, not financially), they were surprised by help they received along the way. "Because we are a non-traditional model of funeral home," Doughty says. "I was expecting the cemetery and funeral board and the local and state agencies to be slightly more unwilling to help us. Everybody's been very helpful. They seem to want us to succeed."
For much more of our conversation, listen to the audio at the top of the page.
Off-Ramp solves the mystery of Rose Hills Cemetery's giant neon sign
To Joseph Romero, a 30-year Pico Rivera resident, a huge neon sign — maybe the biggest commercial sign in Southern California — is very personal. It's the sign that stands guardian over Whittier's Rose Hills Memorial Park, more than a century old and the largest cemetery in North America.
"A couple of my friends are interned [sic] here," Romero says. "We've spent days of our youth here by the sign, and it does bring back memories of them, especially as one of my friends is buried within a hundred feet of the sign. It has a place in my heart, I can honestly say that."
How old does he think it is? "I assume that it's been there since the '50s," he says.
The story goes that Rose Hills' president John Gregg commissioned the sign in the 1940s. But exactly who manufactured it was lost to history — until we did some digging that surprised even the cemetery's PR man.
But first, let's talk about the sign itself.
Eric Lynxwiler, a historian with L.A.'s Museum of Neon Art, says a garish neon sign isn't odd in a cemetery.
"In the 1940s every modern business in America had to have a neon sign in order to say that they were a modern business."
But it sure is big. He compares it to the sign on the Bendix tower in downtown L.A.
"The capital letter B at the top is about 25 feet tall, but the letters below it are about 10 feet tall each."
But the Rose Hills sign's letters are each 19'6" tall — on average, much bigger than the Bendix sign.
(The neon sign atop the Bendix Tower in Downtown L.A., installed in 1930. Credit: J. Eric Lynxwiler/Museum of Neon Art)
But back to our mystery.
Nick Clark, Rose Hills' PR man, says he doesn't know how old the sign is or who built it.
"The people who know," he says, "might still be here at Rose Hills, but they're probably buried."
Clark also said that the sign has been moved a few times since the 1940s, and was briefly turned off during the energy crisis of the 1970s — until the FAA asked for it to be turned back on since pilots used it for reference.
Clark suggested we check with Power Up, the company that maintains the neon lights on the sign today. They didn't know how old the sign is or who made it, but in turn sent us to Quiel Brothers Sign Company, which cared for the sign before them. And that was the lead we were looking for, with a result that shocked Lynxwiler and Clark.
Quiel Brothers co-owner Larry Quiel found invoices and design cards from 1990 for an entire replacement of a wooden-neon sign, meaning the sign is really only 25 years old. Quiel explained the original wooden sign had to go because, "between the warping and the splitting they were flexing too much, breaking the neon on them." The wood letters were replaced with metal "open-channel" letters and new neon tubes.
(The original wooden Rose Hills sign. Date unknown. Note the serif points that distinguish the sign from its metal replacement. Courtesy Rose Hills Memorial Park)
But they did a great job. Lynxwiler says the sign has the craftsmanship of one built in the 1940s.
Says Rose Hills' Nick Clark, "We're the caretakers of peoples' memories, so we come to value things from the past and that are old, and having the sign here and now learning that it's not as old as I thought it was, it's a little disappointing."
(A recovered sign from Reseda's Lorenzen Mortuary,1950-2010, in transit to L.A.'s Museum of Neon Art. Credit: J. Eric Lynxwiler/Museum of Neon Art)