Mt Zion Cemetery, plagued by vandals and neglect ... Jim Beckler, last journalist left from the pressbox the day Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier ... meet Bleached and their three favorite LA LP's ... How "Toilet to Tap" helped kill reforming LA's looming water shortage ... an undiscovered mosaic mural uncovered in Downtown LA.
PHOTOS: Jim Becker, last surviving newsman at Jackie Robinson's Major League debut, remembers April 15, 1947
"The day sent chills up my spine, and 66 years later it still does. I always said, his failure would have been our failure, but the victory was his." - Jim Becker, AP writer
Jim Becker , shown above on the cover of his book Saints, Sinners, & Shortstops, worked for the Associated Press for almost 50 years, starting less than a year before Jackie Robinson made his Major League debut with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947. Although he was a cub reporter, the AP assigned him to accompany a beat writer to New York for the event because Becker was from LA and was familiar with Robinson from his college days.
Becker says he arrived at Ebbets Field about an hour and a half before the game started, and went down onto the field to watch batting practice. "The players were coming out of the Brooklyn dressing room one or two at a time," he said. "I looked over and saw this very black man in those starched white uniforms they used to wear, and I looked him and I thought this magnificent athlete, this courageous man, is carrying the banner of decency and dignity and fair play ... he's carrying it for all of us."
The game had been previewed extensively, and Becker says the New York writers, led by Red Smith, the hero of all modern sportswriters, were determined not to let it turn into a circus. Becker said, "A lot of us had just come back from fighting Hitler and we kinda thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to fight those insane racial theories at home, and we were determined to make it just another day at the office and, oh, by the way, there was a black guy at first base for Brooklyn."
The following paragraph contains language some readers may find offensive.
Sportswriters from other cities were another story. When the Reds came to town a couple weeks later, Cincinnati's Tom Swope, reportedly a virulent racist, 'looked around, and he said, “You’re a bunch of nigger-loving Jew Commie bastards,” and somebody knocked him down. And his glasses flew and he picked himself up and he picked up his glasses, and he walked back to his seat, and nobody said a thing.'
I told Becker I wanted to report his eyewitness testimony because we tend to think Jim Crow was ancient history, but Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier happened within living memory. "Yes, vividly living memory," he says. "The day sent chills up my spine, and 66 years later it still does. I always said his failure would have been our failure, but the victory was his."
Becker says the sportswriters who were there that day kept in touch through the years. When Lester Rodney died in 2009, he became the last. Jim Becker, a widower, long retired, lives in Honolulu, and still keeps his and his colleagues' original news stories from April 15, 1947.
A word about the images: Jackie Robinson was born in Georgia, but the family moved to Pasadena when he was 1. He went to John Muir High School, Pasadena Junior College (now PCC), and UCLA. These are a selection of photos from the LA Public Library's extensive and browseworthy online archive, with captions from the archive. Imagine of Jim Becker and friends courtesy Jim Becker.
Hometown Sound: Jennifer Clavin of Bleached on three of her favorite LA albums
The Los Angeles-based band Bleached formed in the aftermath of the punk band Mika Miko. Bleached is a power pop group in the vein of Blondie, the Kinks and the Shop Assistants. Ride Your Heart — their debut album — was just released and they're just about to embark on a 6-week tour to support it.
But while they're out of the road, what music is going to remind them of home? We asked singer and guitarist Jennifer Clavin to pick three albums that are important to her and the band:
Red Cross (AKA Redd Kross) - Self Titled EP
"I remember first hearing this when I was in high school living in the Valley. They're little kids and they're singing about really awesome things. Like 'Clorox Girls,' which is about going to the beach and bleaching your hair. And then 'S&M Party', I'm pretty sure you can guess what that's about. I was at a show and my friend's bands covered 'Annette's Got the Hits.' It's this really good poppy, short cute song and I was just like 'oh my God, I love this song!"
Rolling Stones - Aftermath
"They recorded it in LA, which I feel like just makes part of that whole Hollywood history, you know? All the awesome bands that came to LA and recorded. And it's one of my favorite albums. It has 'Under my Thumb' on it, which I think is one of the best written songs ever. Brian Jones is playing marimba in that song, which makes that song! That's why on our album we added marimba in one song — cause I'm so obsessed with that song."
Fleetwood Mac - Tusk
"When I first heard Tusk — it was the first Fleetwood Mac I listened to — my parents and I had just moved to the Echo Park/Silverlake area. They had had all their records in the garage, and I was like 'I'm going to through my parents' records and see what they have that I feel like I need to listen to.' I was looking and I found that Fleetwood Mac record. I know so many people that are obsessed with this band. I put it on and I was so obsessed! I stayed up all night sewing and just putting that record on repeat--even though it's a double disc."
Shameful neglect at East LA's Mount Zion Jewish cemetery (photos)
In a Los Angeles Times Column One story, Hector Becerra writes, "The neighborhoods of East L.A. and Boyle Heights have long served as an archive of Los Angeles’ multicultural history — Ellis Islands for transplants from the East and across the Pacific — and in more recent years, from Mexico. Nowhere is this more evident than in their graveyards."
He lists them. The Serbian and Chinese cemeteries, "sprawling Evergreen Cemetery," Home of Peace, where Hollywood moguls are buried. "And then there's Mount Zion, a graveyard with a hard-luck history."
Founded in 1916 to bury indigent Jews, Mount Zion — near where the 5 and 710 freeways cross — has been almost totally abandoned. The last burial, Becerra says, was six years ago, but that was an anomaly. The most recent dates on the other headstones are in the 1980s.
Vandals have toppled many headstones and tagged some, and somebody used them for target practice and apparently stole little ceramic picture discs of the dead.
Becerra couldn't track down a current owner. The last owner on record was The Masonic Association, which is defunct, and since 1974, the Home of Peace cemetery and the Jewish Federation, headed by Jay Sanderson, have provided maintenance.
Sanderson told Becerra, "It's an interesting moral dilemma if you think about it. We try to do the best that we can do. We can do more, yes. But the question is, what are we not going to be doing if we do that?"
As Becerra says, there's no money in a cemetery without a crematory, without burials. "You can't flip a cemetery," he says.
But didn't the article shame a politician or Jewish leader to step up, I ask? He got lots of calls from readers, some of whom said they'd try to mobilize help, and at least one politician, who didn't give a firm commitment.
In the meantime, the concrete continues to crack, the cypress trees continue to shed all over the place, and hundreds of graves remain desecrated.
To live and die in LA: Caitlin Doughty, star of YouTube hit 'Ask a Mortician' tours LA's oldest cemetery
Death is one of those things we don't think about much, until someone we know is dying. But Caitlin Doughty wants to change that. She's a licensed mortician in Los Angeles, and she's taken on a lofty goal: to make death a part of Americans' daily culture. She's using her blog and YouTube channel to help spread the message. Off-Ramp contributor Avishay Artsy caught up with her.
Doughty has provided an outlet for people to ask questions, and its popularity shows that people are curious to learn about something they often avoid. She's on her fifth YouTube episode, with each video getting tens of thousands of views. She said she gets all sorts of questions.
"Everything from really, really basic things – what is embalming, how do you cremate a body — to really interesting, weird, you know – if the zombie apocalypse happens tomorrow, what is the rate of decomposing bodies, or can you tattoo a corpse. The more ridiculous, the better," Doughty noted.
Perhaps it's the cheesy music and video effects or her comedic, truthful responses that make the subject more palatable to her viewers. But Doughty's own comfort with death came with time. Her interest was sparked by a traumatic death she witnessed when she was only eight or nine years old.
"I saw a girl fall from a balcony at my local mall and hit the ground – tremendous screams – it was a real, real turning point in my life," she said. "It was quite a psychological thing for me for quite awhile, and I think part of my interest in death might just be a way to figure it out."
Doughty took her fascination with her through college. After studying medieval history left her unsatisfied, she got a job as a crematory operator, earned a degree in mortuary science at Cypress College in Orange County and now works as a licensed funeral director in L.A.
On a visit to Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights, Doughty detailed one of the more hidden features of L.A.'s oldest cemetery.
"Every year, Los Angeles County cremates roughly about 1,600 indigent dead, so homeless, people who can’t afford to pay for a funeral," she explained. "They cremate them and they bury them in a mass grave here."
The burial place is surrounded by barbed wire fencing and flat ground markers that show the year each group was cremated. "It's not like 'Come one, come all, to see the indigent dead.' It's probably not something they're particularly proud of," Doughty added.
While the thought of thousands being buried together may seem morbid, Doughty gets philosophical. "We try so hard in our lives to keep control over our body, and control over individual selves, that the idea of just having everybody in a big pile is kind of strangely appealing," she said.
Her plan is to run her own funeral home, where the dead are buried naturally. Families could even help prepare the body. This runs opposite from the status quo, where bodies are chemically treated in various ways, placed in a big casket and locked in a concrete and metal vault to keep the body from decomposing. Doughty said she prefers natural burials.
"It's just body, dirt, ground, decomposition, done-zo. Two or three weeks, just a skeleton left," she said. "It’s what bodies are meant to do. It’s bodies in their natural state.”
Photos: Amazing mosaic mural discovered inside Downtown's Wilshire Grand Hotel
Last October, crews began tearing down the Wilshire Grand Hotel in downtown Los Angeles so they can build a 71 story hotel, retail and office space. During the process, an exciting discovery was made. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson has the story.
It was April of 2012 when Gregory Johnson--an interior designer from Koreatown -- was rummaging through the hotel's ballroom at a liquidation sale. At the end of the room, he saw a stairwell: "here was a sign that said "more" and just a handwritten arrow," said Johnson. "And it turned out to be the hotel's storage facility for like holiday things and the banquet tables. It was a really, really large space.
That's where he saw the mural: a fifteen foot wide mosaic mural, made of thousands of tiny glass tiles: blues, oranges, reds, blacks. A huge landscape depicting the oil industry as it was in Los Angeles probably in the late 50s, early 60s. Offshore wells either in Long Beach or Santa Barbara, oil tankers heading into port, sprawling refineries and finally--far off to the right--a truck gassing up at a nondescript station. Johnson fell in love, but went home without buying it.
"And I just kept thinking about it all night long," he said. "I mean, it just seemed so beautiful . And it just seemed like what would happen to it is either it would get destroyed or they would contact some salvage company and it would go back east somewhere or whatever."
After some wheeling and dealing, Johnson bought the mural for just over $5,000. Bu once he had the mural, there was work to do. First, it was dirty: The room the mural lived in wasn't always storage.
Up until the 1980s it was home to the Los Angeles Petroleum Club--for decades members and guests drank, and smoked next to the mural ... and it smelled like it. "I started with a toothbrush, because I had been in contact with a couple people who had installed these," said Johnson. "They said I had to be really careful about it. So I just spritzed on solvent, like lysol. Because it was so greasy."
But more importantly: how did it get there? And who created it? Johnson reached out to Lillian Sizemore — a mosaic artist and researcher in Sausalito She's made a name for herself in the mosaic community investigating the history and provenance of mosaic works. "The editor has termed me Miss Marble," said Sizemore. "Like Miss Marple, you know?"
When Sizemore first looked at the mural, she thought of a Millard Sheets--a giant in the world of LA mosaics. When it became clear they were looking at someone different, the leads began to dry up. Sizemore looked to a couple of Texas mosaicists who had similar murals behind them--no go there.
And this wasn't necessarily the work of a very experienced mosaicist. "Looking at the cuts and the way that they're placed," said Sizemore. "They're very random and you can tell that there's not a confident hand there. And the adhesive is probably some sort of basic Elmer's glue. So that sort of indicates right there that this was not a professionally executed job. The design is professional, but the technique is not."
It could've been anyone. An artist friend of the hotel owner. A college art student. But then — on the bottom right of the mural -- Johnson found a signature. "When I told [Lillian], I said I don't know if this is a joke or not," he said.
The name? John Smith.
"It's like a needle in the haystack here," said Sizemore. "But, as it turns out, once we had that name, both Greg and I were able to track down a John Smith who was an active artist in the LA modernist movement. But he was more known for tapestry and not for mosaic."
However, said Sizemore, Smith was mentioned a magazine article about mosaic work. That makes him the best lead, and his focus on tapestry means the inexperienced tile work makes sense here.
But still, nothing absolutely conclusive. Sizemore, Johnson and I have each tried to track down the artist or his family. So far, no luck. But a work of art this amazing deserves credit, so we're put the call out to you: do you know a John Smith who worked in tapestry? Or, even better, mosaics?
Please, let us know in the comments!
And for more on the mural, check out Lillian Sizemore's own exhaustive investigation at Mosaic Art Now.
Photos: What happened to Catalina Island during WWII?
After Pearl Harbor, WWII had arrived not just in Hawaii, but all the way to the California coastline. Just a quick ferry ride from Long Beach Harbor, Santa Catalina Island became an active military outpost, hosting the United States Maritime Service and even the precursor to the CIA.
John Borragina is the curator at the Catalina Island museum and put together an exhibit that looks at the Island during WWII. He says Catalina became the first line of defense for California during the war, "the Japanese were known to move from island to island in the Pacific, and there was a fear that if Catalina was captured, it would become a perfect launching point for attacks on Southern California."
The crystal clear waters off Catalina were the perfect training ground for the US military, including the Office of Strategic Services -- the predecessor to the CIA. While on Catalina, the OSS began training special forces soldiers with some of the most advanced maritime technology.
"They used this Lambertsen Lung, or Lambertsen Unit, on Catalina Island and they would do mock raids on Avalon, on Los Angeles Harbor. They'd also take little mini subs that were silent and could cruise at about 5-6 knots with a battery powered engine. They would stay at about 30 feet of depth but could sneak up underneath boats and plant limpet mines," Borragina says.
And then there were Frogmen: underwater soldiers that trained on Catalina and went on to inspire comic books and movies with their Aquaman-like abilities. Jim Watson writes for the Catalina Islander newspaper. He says the technology used on Catalina in training OSS operatives helped fuel the popularity of scuba diving too.
"Jacques Cousteau got involved here at Catalina during those years. And the reason for that is these Frogmen were training on rebreathing units during WWII and after the war was over it was like, well, lets turn these things for fun," Watson says.
But while the Frogmen were training underwater, the military started setting up radar and anti-aircraft guns around the island. The people who lived on Catalina got more isolated from the mainland. As tourism died down, some suffered economic hardship too. Families began leaving the island.
"Really what we see is families being broken up," says Borragina. "Certain members are able to stay and make a livelihood while the vast majority make their way to shipyards up and down the California coast looking for work."
Lolo Saldaña was one that stuck around -- he was just a kid during the war. He's a member of one of the island's oldest families. When the military came, Saldaña says residents were given a special identification card. They had to put roofing paper over their windows at night to keep light from spilling off the island and attracting an attack.
"Even though it was scary as hell, we as kids didn't know what the hell was going on," said Saldaña. He kept busy by milking cows and collecting eggs from friends' victory gardens. "My father had a victory garden in those days and he grew just about everything. He had wild boar and wild animals that were in Avalon. That's how we survived."
After the war, life slowly returned to Catalina -- and the tourists came back too. Some of the merchant marines decided never to leave -- they still live on the island today. Lolo Saldaña runs the barber shop in the center of town.
If you look hard enough, you can still find spent shell casings in the water off the Casino, or dilapidated barracks in the foothills -- remnants of a time when war came to paradise.
Whittier Boulevard - Part 3
Off-Ramp and Charles Phoenix visits the Home Of Peace Jewish Cemetery.
The beautiful Moorish chapel at the Jewish cemetery, across the street from the Catholic cemetery. Carl Laemmle and many other LA luminaries are interred inside.
PHOTOS: Instagram Challenge winner alters the LA landscape
Danny Medina rarely picked up a camera before he downloaded Instagram. Now he goes by @danstagram_ and he's hooked.
Like many Instagrammers, he started by taking photos of his dog, his food, his feet and some sunsets, but soon he was exploring the feeds of more established photographers on the app.
He combed through "hashtag bombs," those lengthy tags that people use to enter contests, name the apps they used to edit their photos, or just get more recognition from the Instagram community, and discovered a whole new photo world.
Medina's image of Flo's Cafe in Disneyland is the winner of our most recent challenge with Instagram Lovers Anonymous, "Neon Dreams."
The image stirred some controversy with a few commenters who claimed that the image wasn't made using a mobile phone, a contentious issue on Instagram since some users upload photos made with other cameras than the iPhone.
"There's people who use the big professional DSLR cameras and those photos look amazing, but it's kind of like cheating to me," says Medina. "I'm a purist."
Medina used the app Rays, which is developed by Digital Film Tools, to get that streaky light effect, and he often employs a few different apps to get his photo manipulations just right.
If you want to up your Instagram game, check out some of Medina's favorite apps like PicFX, Snapseed, Image Blender, Afterlight and Filterstorm.
And make sure to play in our next Instagram challenge.
Off-Ramp, by the way, Instagrams as @johnofframprabe.
Haefele: LA mayor candidates need to reconsider wastewater recycling
There’s a big question both Los Angeles mayoral candidates have been ignoring: the city’s shrinking water resources. It’s the hippopotamus in the campaign living room.
L.A.’s population is expanding, but L.A.’s prime water sources, the Colorado River and the Owens Valley, are draining away. You’d think it’d be the first priority in City Hall, but if Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti have mentioned it, I missed it.
Just a dozen years ago, the city’s Department of Water and Power and its public works department had a solution, based on a simple fact. Every day, the city of L.A. imports about 500-million gallons of water from its faraway sources in the Sierras and the Rockies. But then it dumps 400-million gallons of wastewater into the ocean every day. It stands to reason that if a significant amount of this water could be reused locally, we wouldn’t be so dependent on sources hundreds of miles away.
This is anything but a new idea. A 1931 L.A. Times article reported that even then, DWP’s top brass were experimenting with infusing 70,000 gallons of highly filtered and chlorinated sewer water into the subsoil of Griffith Park. The recycled water could then be accessed by wells and pumped into the city’s pipes. The Times story said the DWP believed “throwing away dirty water is as stupidly wasteful as the throwing away of dirty shirts.”
RELATED: KPCC's LA mayoral endorsement tracker
By about 2000, the same basic DWP plan had advanced to the point where it was about to make a substantial difference in the city’s water supply.
But then came the 2001 mayoral election, when then-Councilman Joel Wachs decided to make the recycling program, for which he had voted, a negative issue in his doomed campaign. He called recycling “toilet to tap,” and bussed in elderly nay-sayers from as far away as San Diego to testify against it. Wachs came in fourth in the primary, but he trounced the city’s best hope for an unrestricted water supply. Under winning Mayor Jim Hahn and his two-term successor, Antonio Villaraigosa, wastewater recycling was zombified.
The DWP’s new wastewater to groundwater system ran just 18 months, but spent millions on master plans and promised that more than a third of L.A.’s wastewater would be recycled in the near future. Los Angeles is still only recycling 1 percent of its wastewater — the same as 26 years ago.
Meanwhile, other municipalities are moving fast. Orange County now recycles up to half of its daily 200 million gallons of wastewater. Even the little Las Virgines District that serves Calabasas and Agoura is recycling 20 percent of its wastewater. One local water district actually buys 6 percent of LA’s wastewater, recycles it and sells it at a good profit to 17 southern L.A. County cities and unincorporated regions — none of them in L.A.
Why is L.A., with recycling deep in its DNA, falling so far behind? The “toilet to tap label” struck a chord, highlighting what they call the “yuck factor.” But we are already drinking recycled wastewater. There are at least seven sewer plants upstream on the Colorado River, for instance. And this never became enough of an issue to stop widespread recycling in conservative Orange County.
Bahman Sheikh, a water reuse expert involved in the L.A. recycling effort, says the problem is the city lacks the leadership it had under Mayor Tom Bradley and his then Public Works chief Felicia Marcus. He says “Water reuse is in our future. ... It cannot be avoided, it can only be delayed. The city is good at that.”
So, Wendy or Eric, will you stand up for L.A.’s water supply future? Don’t raise your hands all at once.