We mark the 20th anniversary of the 6.7 magnitude Northridge Earthquake by starting our show at the epicenter of the disaster; and we consider Sheriff Baca's sudden resignation.
Northridge Earthquake Anniversary: Are quakes the price Californians pay for paradise?
It's worse when it's dark, and it was dark at 4:31 in the morning on Jan. 17, 1994.
Sometimes you hear an earthquake before you feel it, that grind and rumble that wakes you up just a moment or two before the bed starts to dance beneath you — for 10 seconds, 20 seconds — and if you can grab a lamp and switch it on, then you can see the pictures banging against the walls, and everything around you is a cacophony of creaking and popping and jingling, the sirens and the dogs start wailing at the same moment, the wine glasses are smashing themselves in the kitchen, and the alarms on a million cars are going nuts.
Then it stops, 20 seconds or 30 or a minute later. And that's our trade-off. A half-minute of hell every now and then for a lifetime of paradise.
And then the moralizing begins. From the East Coast, from abroad, from the envious and the smug, we hear that earthquakes are divine retribution for the California lifestyle — payback for backyard swimming pools and sunshine and Hollywood, our souls' ransom paid to a devil in Ray-Bans.
They say that a California earthquake is penance — the one in 1994 killed at least 57 people — and yet no one looks at the brutal winters that torment the East and the Midwest every year. No one says those people were asking for it. The frozen pipes, the paralyzing cold — that's their punishment for having lilacs in the spring and fireflies in the summer and brilliantly colored leaves in the autumn.
Oh, no. The long, predictable slog of winter miser — of people dying from the cold, from icy car crashes and snow-shoveling heart attacks — that's just weather. The haphazard terror of an earthquake? Now that's the punishing hand of Providence.
And it's true that in a tornado, you go to the cellar. In a flood, you go to higher ground. In an earthquake, we just go along for the ride. Afterwards, we tell ourselves we'll be better prepared the next time, and to paraphrase Winston Churchill, we find a kind of exhilaration in coming out of that primal shaking unscathed. When two earthquakes rattled the Portola expedition on the same day in August 1769, Juan Crespi coolly noted in his diary that the soldiers bagged an antelope for dinner. Quote — it was not bad.
A couple hundred years later, Steve Martin was just as blasé in his movie "L.A. Story." When an earthquake strikes a group during brunch, the conversation goes on — Martin's character casually estimates the quake to be about a 4.0 on the Richter scale.
But here's the paradoxical thing about the '94 earthquake: Somehow, it helped L.A. to recover from the riots of less than two years before.
The riots shook the civic spirit in a way the earthquake didn't. The earthquake gave L.A. a way to pull itself back into shape, to push itself toward a shared purpose. The earthquake wasn't Providence punishing us, but in the riots, we punished ourselves.
The state's historian, Kevin Starr, told me back then that, "there's something depressing about an urban riot because that shows human failure. But an earthquake is an act of God."
And it gave L.A. the chance to show its nobler self in a natural disaster, so soon after the failings of a man-made one.
This is one in a weeklong series of stories on KPCC leading up to Friday's 20th anniversary of the devastating 1994 Northridge Earthquake. The series will explore the quake's history, its effects and its legacy. You can view more stories on our Northridge Anniversary page. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page, on Twitter ("@" mention @KPCC) and in the comments below.
PHOTOS: LA County Sheriffs through the years
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele calls LA County Sheriff Lee Baca's sudden exit a "puzzlement."
Related: Update: LA County Sheriff Lee Baca to retire at end of January
"All he would have had to do," Haefele says, "was pull a Lyndon Johnson and say, 'I'm not running anymore.'" Perhaps, Haefele speculates, he wants to give an underling the advantage of incumbency in the election. When asked about the suddenness of his decision, Baca said he'd simply decided he was part of the past of the department, not the future.
Haefele recalls that Baca entered office in a colorful fashion ... when Sheriff Sherman Block died in office just before the election. Haefele says Block himself had a famous exchange with feisty new LA County Supervisor Gloria Molina. Block had refused to answer Molina's public grilling, prompting Molina to call him "insubordinate." Block replied that for him to be insubordinate, he would have to be Molina's subordinate in the first place. Of course, the sheriff answers to the voters.
Check out the audio to hear Haefele and KPCC's Frank Stoltze talk about Baca's legacy, his weaknesses, and his strong points. Meanwhile, here's a random collection of LA County sheriff trivia, to accompany our slideshow:
- LA County has had 30 sheriffs, 2 of whom served non-consecutive terms, John C. Cline and William Hammel. 2 were killed in office: James Barton in 1856 (a shootout with bandits) and William Getman in 1858 (during a pawnshop robbery).
- In the 1800s, the sheriffs tended to hold office for a few years, but the 1900s saw 2 who exceeded 20 years in office: Eugene Biscailuz, who served from 1932–1958, and Peter J. Pitchess, 1959–1982.
- Biscailuz ascended to the post when Sheriff William Traeger, who had been USC football coach in 1908, won a seat in Congress after being appointed to three terms as sheriff.
- For his part, Biscailuz (he was of Basque descent) joined the department in 1907 and helped organize the CHP.
- You probably know Sheriff Pitchess name from the Peter J. Pitchess Detention Center.
Northridge Earthquake Anniversary: 'The epicenter's in my backyard'
Joe Sauer knew he faced the strong possibility of an earthquake when he moved into his house in Reseda* in 1971.
"This whole valley is susceptible to earthquakes," he said. "I've always known that. I'm a native Californian, so I know where the faults are."
But the epicenter of the Northridge Earthquake — a 6.7 magnitude disaster that killed 57 and injured thousands, did more than $20 billion dollars damage, ruined or damaged thousands of buildings, and closed some freeways for months — was in Joe Sauer's backyard.
Sauer lives in a one-story ranch house near the corner of Elkwood Street and Baird Avenue, off Reseda Blvd., and he still vividly remembers being woken at 4:31 a.m. on January 17, 1994. He speaks about it in telegraphs.
"Disaster. Very, very, very, scary. Things came crashing down. It wasn't a very pleasant time. I just stayed in bed. Rode it out. I didn't realize how much damage it did around the house. There was a lot of interior damage. Interior damage meaning everything fell down, especially in the kitchen. There was at least a foot of glass and everything on the floor instead of in the cupboards where they belonged."
Sauer says nothing important was damaged; his family was fine, including two young daughters. The neighborhood was calm; nobody slept outdoors for fear of aftershocks.
He points out an important earthquake fact: While it's interesting that his backyard was the epicenter, it's not very important, in the big scheme of things.
"By the time it reaches the surface, it shakes the outer area more so than the epicenter," said Sauer. In fact, some of the worst damage from the Northridge earthquake was far from the epicenter.
By the way, Sauer doesn't think he'll have any problem selling the house with the epicenter in the backyard when he's ready to move.
This is one in a weeklong series of stories on KPCC leading up to Friday's 20th anniversary of the devastating 1994 Northridge Earthquake. The series will explore the quake's history, its effects and its legacy. You can view more stories on our Northridge Anniversary page. Let us know what you think on our Facebook page, on Twitter ("@" mention @KPCC) and in the comments below.
*UPDATE 1/13/2014 : This story has been edited to reflect that Sauer's home, and the earthquake epicenter, is actually half a mile into the community of Reseda, not Northridge.
Corporate request to make a viral video makes Dylan Brody sick
I had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a corporate client who wanted me to write an online advertisement.
Here’s the thing, though. The guy who called me for the job didn’t say that he wanted me to write on online ad. He said that he wanted me to write a viral video.
Then he went on to say that the company had already allocated a million-and-a-half dollars to promote and distribute it to make sure that it went viral. He said it would probably get played on a lot of morning news shows and maybe even some of the late-night talk shows.
That’s how it works these days, he explained. It’s not like things just go viral. You have to have a whole machine behind them, make it a press event. It has to be newsworthy, he said, like that Jean-Claude Van Damme thing where he does a split between two moving trucks.
Video: Volvo Trucks - The Epic Split feat. Van Damme (Live Test 6)
The number of things that are wrong with his premise is so high that as I begin to think about enumerating them, they multiply exponentially in my head. Or rather, they would, if exponential multiplication could take place without a $1.5 million machine behind it.
Those of us who were alive in the nineties, when the first dot-com boom took place, will remember that originally “going viral on the Internet” was an expression coined to describe the process for a particularly funny, poignant or original post – often nothing more than a typed-text joke or story — to organically spread from one person’s email list to another’s, becoming part of the cyber-zeitgeist simply because people wanted to share it with one another and suddenly had a way of doing it.
Naturally, it wasn’t long before marketing executives saw this as a way of reaching a vast marketplace with very little expense. By 2001 or 2002 every young marketing executive was talking about how the key to Internet exposure was to put a video or an image on the web that would go viral. At least at that point the idea was still about creating something so interesting that it would “go viral.”
Now, with multimillion-dollar promotional budgets, companies have taken the organic process where humans share with other humans and turned it into a meaningless buzzword for market penetration via paid advertisement. Who would have thought it was possible to take something as natural as viral spread and turn it into something sick?
When he said that there was no money to pay me, but that it would be good exposure to a global audience, I told him I couldn’t take the job. I told him that he could spend his entire budget trying to make a commercial go viral or he could spend the money on a good writer and have something that stood a chance of going viral on its own.
Aw, who am I kidding? I asked for a few thousand dollars and wrote him a funny little video to shoot. If it goes viral, I’ll talk a lot about how it’s a thing I wrote. I suspect it will just show up to interrupt people’s Words With Friends games.
When I delivered the script and collected my check, we shook hands and I’m almost certain he gave me the flu.
Off-Ramp commentator Dylan Brody, author of "Writ Large," available on iTunes, could do the splits between a pair of Volvos if he wanted to.
Larry Davis: tears in his beer led to singing career - at 74
1/6/2014: UPDATE: Larry Davis, profiled on Off-Ramp in 2012, is out with his second album, "Larry Davis Too," available on iTunes and CD Baby, and I'm delighted that Larry chose to use my photo of him for the CD cover.
First of all, Larry Davis always smells great. It's some sort of cedar cologne. And looking at him, you'd never guess he's almost 75.
As he takes a break from recording his second album at Miles Recording and Mix, near the Capitol Records building, he laughs and refers to the old, probably offensive, saying. "I'm just not going to show you the parts that cracked."
Larry captivated me from the first time I heard him sing at The Other Side, the late lamented gay piano bar in Silverlake. His voice is a little rough-edged, which grabs your attention, and he almost speaks many of the lyrics of his songs - whether it's "It Isn't Easy Being Green," "Lush Life," or one of the highly suggestive (dirty) songs the crowd always loved to hear.
Larry sings like he's been doing it all his life. But his is another of those stories that prove F. Scott Fitzgerald was drunk when he said, "There are no second acts in American lives." Larry is on his third act ... at least.
Larry was born in Modesto, and raised in Iowa. There was a stint in the Air Force where his desire (and undoubtedly talent) in the area of modern interpretive dance was not fully appreciated. To say the least. Instead, he sang with the combo that played the Officers Club and enjoyed it. But not enough to seek out gigs when he left the service and started work as a graphic artist for ABC-TV in LA.
He stayed at ABC for forty years, retiring at 69. A few years later, his partner broke his back in a freak accident, and Larry found himself crying in his beer at The Other Side. He asked the piano player to sing Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady." "I will," he said, "if you'll sing 'Lush Life.'"
"I was just drunk enough," Larry says, "and just sad enough, to do it." He was asked to come back and sing again and became a crowd favorite. Eventually, recording artist Annie Miles heard him and took up "the personal challenge of getting an authentic version of his live performance into an excellent recording."
"Close Your Eyes," now out on iTunes, features Larry swinging on the title track and a couple others, updating "The Coffee Song" in a way we can't explain on the radio, and breaking your heart with "It Isn't Easy Being Green," which Larry says has become kind of an anthem for his younger gay fans.
"My whole approach is to have a conversation with the listeners. The words have to mean something to me." His style has changed since he sang in the Air Force, when he used to imitate Johnny Mathis. Then, he says, "I was singing words, and not really knowing the words." At 74, he has lived, and then some, and he knows the words.
Golden Road Brewing co-founder makes Forbes '30 Under 30' list
1/6/2014 UPDATE: Forbes magazine picked Golden Road Brewing co-owner Meg Gill for its Forbes 30 Under 30: Food & Drink.
Amid America’s craft beer explosion, FORBES reckons that Meg Gill, 28, is the youngest female brewery owner in the country. Her Los Angeles-based Golden Road Brewing is one of the fastest-growing; it produced 15,000 barrels last year and expects to double that output this year. Revenues exceeded $10 million in 2013, and Gill plans to expand her dozen-plus offerings outside her southern California base in 2014.
Here's Off-Ramp contributor Jerry Gorin's report on Golden Road Brewing, from 2012:
In less than three years, Canadian-born entrepreneur Tony Yanow has opened two successful bars and a brewery in Los Angeles, a town that's traditionally been a wasteland of beer culture. Like Red Hook in Seattle, Sweetwater in Atlanta, or New Belgium in Fort Collins, Yanow wants his beer to become LA's go-to local brand.
It all started in April 2010, when Yanow bought a little-known dive bar in Burbank named Tony’s Darts Away (no relation to Yanow). He revamped its kitchen and added 30 California micro-brews on tap. Suddenly, people were darting into Tony's Darts Away.
"We wanted it to be a community pub," says Yanow. "I was expecting crowds, but I had no idea the impact that Tony's would have on the community."
The bar created a huge buzz in Burbank, but it also drew in beer geeks from around the city thirsty for specialty ales and seasonal stouts. When Tony's first opened, it was still one of just a handful of LA bars with a decent selection of craft beers.
"I used to go to San Diego or San Francisco to drink," says Yanow. "If I'm going to take a cab to Santa Monica to go to Father's Office - that's a day trip - and I might as well go to San Francisco and go to Toronado. My wife and I would do that. And I wondered how it's possible that San Diego has seventy plus breweries, and the Bay Area too, but LA - which has twice the population of both of those put together times two - has no breweries. We had tiny breweries like Craftsman in Pasadena, but it's very small. And it just seemed like nobody had done it."
So Yanow stepped in. Within a year of opening Darts Away, he opened Mohawk Bend, a restaurant and bar in Echo Park focusing on California food and booze. And just a few month later, in September 2011, he and partner Meg Gill launched Golden Road Brewing so they could make their own beer. They brew a Hefeweizen, a brown ale, an Irish stout and more, but their signature beer is an IPA (Indian Pale Ale) called Point the Way. It's a low-gravity IPA, meaning it has relatively low alcohol, which Yanow says was a choice tailored toward the LA market.
"There's a trend right now in beer to brew the strongest or hoppy-est or fruitiest - everyone's going to extremes. I love those beers, but they aren't the beers you pick up a 6-pack of to go to your buddy's house and watch the game. And the truth is, at the end of the day, most people drink beer in that context - in a casual atmosphere, after work or something like that. We want to make beers that suit that vibe, that ethic, and the palettes of people in LA."
Yanow's interest in brewing an everyday 6-pack is a new concept in the craft beer industry, and maybe a little contrary to the idea behind craft beer, which until now has been to focus on quality and diversity of beer. Yanow says Golden Road has done those things, and that the brewery is now focusing most of its attention on distribution. It's rolling out its canned beer line in major grocery stores and boosting capacity from 8,000 to about 60,000 barrels a year.
"Meg and I kept asking ourselves," says Yanow, "how is it possible that we're in the #2 market in the country and there isn't a brewery brewing more than 2000 barrels within 100 miles (not including Budweiser and Miller). So a lot of people are asking us, 'Why are you guys starting so big?' Well we are starting pretty big for a craft brewery, but the reason is that we want to be LA's brand. LA doesn't have a brand. Any city in this country, you name a city, I'll name you the brand that's the local beer. We don't have it here yet. Hopefully we're making strides to be that brand."
Golden Road Brewing probably won’t displace Tecate and Bud Light in terms of pure sales in LA, but it has signed up more than three-hundred bars to pour Golden Road draught beers in LA County, and will sell canned beer exclusively in Southern California grocery stores.
To hear why Tony Yanow prefers canning beer over bottling, see our latest EatLA segment.
Do you think Golden Road can be LA's go-to beer? Have you tried any of their labels? Tell us what you think!