We talk to Dr. George Fishbeck, Los Angeles' most beloved weatherman, page through graphic novelist Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season and more!
Dr. George Fischbeck talks about his life 'In Weather'
Update: We were crushed to hear that Dr. George Fischbeck died on Wednesday, March 25. He was 92 years old. Here's Patt's 2013 interview with Dr. George:
Not only was George Fischbeck, also known as Dr. George, one of the most beloved characters on local television, he also an award-winning journalist and educator. Fischbeck spent the better part of 25 years on TV in Los Angeles.
The man with the bow tie and glasses is 90 years old now, but is still a character, a performer and a teacher. He has never pretended to be a meteorologist, but he does know how to get peoples' attention. And how to get them to learn and remember. Patt Morrison spoke to him about his new book, "My Life In Weather."
On being a weatherman and a teacher:
"Well, I couldn't do anything else. I come from a family of teachers, and I'll tell you one thing about teaching, if you can get a kid's attention you can teach them anything. You've got to do whatever you can to make sure they're listening to you and not doing anything else. And then you can teach them."
On doing the weather in the early news days:
"I knew everybody in the viewing audience. They were all my friends to begin with, and when I opened up and said 'my friends' they knew who I was talking to. And I've got their attention, and that's the whole secret."
On how doing the weather changed over the years:
"I started in the early days I was a weather forecaster with the National Weather Service. I put in my time down at the weather station three times a day. I had my maps and I'd take my maps, make Xerox copies and I'd put the maps on the air so people could see what I was doing. And now everyone does it."
Jeanne Cooper, RIP: 'Not Young, Still Restless' — Off-Ramp's tell-all interview
We got the sad news Wednesday that beloved soap star Jeanne Cooper had died. In her memory, we're rerunning host John Rabe's August 2012 interview with the daytime TV legend.
Oh, who knows if everything in 83-year old "The Young and the Restless" legend Jeanne Cooper's memoir, "Not Young, Still Restless" is true?
It's plainly labeled "memoir," and Cooper has paid her dues over 70 years in showbiz, dating back to her first school play.
Cooper was born in Taft, California and lived all over California. Her friends in Stockton - where she was happily ensconced in the local theater scene, a big fish in a little pond - kidnapped her and brought her to Hollywood. In 1953, she made her first movie, but she shot her first television episodes that same year, and it was in TV that she made her career.
"The Young and the Restless" debuted in 1973 and since the 1987-88 season has been the #1 daytime drama. And for all but a few months, Cooper has played Katherine Chancellor, the matriarch of Genoa City, Wisconsin.
"Not Young, Still Restless" is biting, frank, charming, bitchy, and immensely enjoyable. You find out about her parents, a strong, wonderful couple; her love life; her battle with booze; the famous on-air facelift; and her thoughts about the slow death of the soap opera. "It's not dying; they're killing it." And she feels the networks' treatment of soap operas is a slap in the face to the millions of people who have been loyal to the soaps - and the products advertized on them - for decades.
Her voice is a little ragged in our interview, because of all the talking she's done on the book tour, but her will is strong, and her personality is irresistible.
Will LACMA's new blueprint be grand, or 'glass underpants' — and does it matter?
Off-Ramp commentator and contributor Marc Haefele checks in with a commentary on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's plan to undergo a $650 million makeover.
The most trying thing about covering L.A. for an entire generation is seeing things that went badly the first time come around again. Like, the execs at the Department of Water and Power sneaking Sparkletts dispensers into their headquarters. Or, more recently, LACMA’s leader deciding it’s his duty to tear the place down.
The plan is to demolish two-thirds of the museum and build a new one — for a mere $650 million.
Last time it was a mere $300 million the LACMA board wanted to redo the place. That was just 11 years ago. The board proposed to reduce to rubble the original 1960s William L. Pereira galleries, as well is the Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer neo-Deco building of 1986. The $300 million would have spread Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’ parasol roof over a collection of new galleries. It failed to impress the critical public, of whom some —including me—wondered if that kind of funding mightn’t have been better applied to arts programs in the local schools, colleges and universities.
So the county cooled to Koolhaas. Now the demo sparkplug is Museum Director Michael Govan who, according to the Los Angeles Times, has been working ever since 2006 to accomplish what his predecessor failed to do.
Now, of course, we are talking a full two-thirds of a billion dollars, to be raised from people just like you and me — except with millions more to spend. Again, the Pereira and HHP buildings will get the chop. This time the favored architect is the Swiss Peter Zumthor, who’s kind of the Terrence Malick of his field: He’s done few projects, many of them thoroughly controversial — one recently was rejected by its intended Bavarian recipients, who called it “The Glass Underpants.”
Zumthor has done only two museums, both of them small, in Germany and Austria. I’ve never seen his work in person (I expect most of us haven’t), but from the photos on the web, Zumthor seems to like conventional modern exterior surfaces of concrete and glass, but does some really interesting interiors. We will have to wait for next month to see what he’s planned for our Museum Row. Maybe it will be tremendous, maybe it’ll be another Glass Underpants.
But that’s not the point, is it? The point is: Should our key museum be spending this kind of money on what is, after all, appearances, rather than content? According to the Times, there seems to be quite a lot of vacant space in the current museum, which that kind of money would do a great deal to fill up with worthy acquisitions or exhibitions on just about any scale. Donations on said scale to the above-mentioned nurseries of artistic learning would do more for Los Angeles as an arts center than would even a new museum designed by a reincarnated Michelangelo.
For that matter, what is wrong with the old museum? The Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer section got raves when it opened 27 years ago. The old Pereira buildings got panned, but they do a perfectly functional job of keeping the rain off the art and that art off the floor—and nowadays, the architecture of the '60s is coming back into fashion. What Govan and his ilksters seem to mind about our County Museum is its ragged sum of architectural parts, representing well over half a century of the diverse creativity of one of the world’s most stimulating cities.
But when you stop and think about it, what kind of museum could better represent the sprawling City of the Angels?
Interview: Love and Rockets cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez on Marble Season, his new book
Gilbert Hernandez is the co-author of Love and Rockets--the sprawling and influential alternative comic book series. Since 1981 Gilbert and his brother Jaime have written and drawn stories about art, love, earthquakes, revolution and more.
Gilbert's latest graphic novel, though, tells a much more focused tale: Marble Season is a semi-autobiographical story that follows 10-year-old Huey and his brothers in 1960s suburbia. Hernandez talked with Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson.
For those who aren't familiar with your work, or Marble Season, tell me about the book.
Marble Season is a book that took, say 50 years in the making. It's basically about a ten-year-old boy who grows up in the early 60s and he's trying to figure out what the world's all about. So he only understands comic books and horror movies and playing marbles.
It's about the neighborhood kids. It's just basically a semi-autobiographical story. What it's like to be ten years old, where you basically run the universe. There's no past, no future, nothing in between. You're just existing in this sort of imaginative state.
You said in an interview that your previous work was dense. And that you wanted Marble Season not to be dense. First off: I want to know what you mean by that, and I also want to ask how Marble Season differs from your previous work?
Well my earlier work was more dense, in the sense that there was a lot more panels, a lot more characters crowding the panels. Same with my writing: I was putting in 40, 60 words in a word balloon. And maybe there'd be three balloons in one panel.
And with Love and Rockets there were different stories going on at the same time too.
Right. What I wanted to do was have something read more like a comic strip, like Peanuts. Where it's just very simple and very easy to follow.
I was kind of excited when I read your bio, because you grew up in Oxnard. What was it like back then?
Oxnard is mostly an agricultural place. It's most notable for it's strawberries. You can still get the best strawberries in California in Oxnard! But it was pretty quiet growing up, and it was pretty quiet. We grew up in a pretty new neighborhood, so it was nice and clean, sparse. That was also what I was going for in the backgrounds and the settings for Marble Season.
I couldn't wait to get out of Oxnard, myself. As a teenager, it drove me crazy. It was fine for little kids, when you're just playing baseball and running around. But as you get older, you start to burn it out. And pretty soon it becomes claustrophobic. And you don't feel like there's any future there.
You were saying earlier that you tell the story from the point of view of a 10-year-old and that the 10-year-old is the center of the universe. Every time if you're going out, and you meet some parents or one parent with a kid. The parent's always fighting to get that kid to acknowledge adults—to not just stay in your own world.
It took me about two thirds of that book to realize there weren't adults anywhere. And I realized I was taken into that mindset!
Yeah. When you're in that zone, when you're in that part of your life as a kid. Parent's aren't around. They're just sort of in the way.
You were also saying earlier that you were taking inspiration from comic strips that you'd see in the newspaper. Peanuts also managed to keep adults completely out of the picture.
One thing that I saw in Marble Season that I did not see in Peanuts ever, I don't think, is that the characters at least in a couple scenes were pretty conscious of race. Huey's older brother Junior is accused of having a crush on a white girl. And that's the main thing: "I can't believe you have a crush on a white girl." Since it's semi-autobiographical, was that a big part of your childhood, too?
Most of that stuff comes from observation. I really didn't have to deal with that too much in my own crowd, because nobody really cared. But I would hear that. I would hear things like that. Like for example: The Beatles are introduced to some of the characters. For me and my little neighborhood kids, the Beatles were fine. We loved them. We thought they were great. But there were other kids who said "Oh, you're not supposed to like that music. That's what white people like."
So I'm just pointing that out—that was an attitude of the time for others. But you'd run into that once in a while. And yea, if you had a crush on a little blonde girl with freckles, eyebrows were raised.
What—if anything—do you want readers to take away after reading Marble Season?
I guess the main point is just that I'm still interested in the shared experience. I still want to connect to readers, to be able to relate. This is stuff you don't really see too much in movies. For example, if you try to get something done like Marble Season before it was a comic—like just an idea for a television show or a film—it's more compromised. It's like, "Yeah, you can have so much of that stuff but we have to have the slapstick and we have to have the funny voices and that kind of thing."
I think they would also want a huge narrative arc and a really overriding conflict to happen in that if they were trying to put it on a big screen. And I think that's one of the things that made Marble Season interesting to me. It's episodic. It's something that's ongoing. And it's like what life is when you're a kid.
Yeah, that's what I was going for. Basically, Marble Season is the moment you're ten years old. Only toward the end where he kind of hints that "Well, I'm not going to be a little kid forever. I hope I like it when I'm not a little kid forever."
Life after 'Gatsby': F. Scott Fitzgerald takes on Hollywood
After the critical and commercial success of his third novel, "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald had made it in the writing world. However, his career took a turn in 1937 when he moved to Hollywood to write scripts for MGM.
While he is said to have found the work degrading, he pocketed almost $30,000 a year for his services, which was quite a bit of money back then. You won't find too many blockbusters on his IMDB page, but it's notable that "Gatsby" is being released as a major motion picture for the fourth time.
USC professor and film historian Leo Braudy spoke to Patt Morrison at an old haunt of Fitzgerald's, Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood.
Interview Highlights:
On why F. Scott Fitzgerald came to Hollywood:
"He came early on and he worked on various things and hardly anything was ever made. The main result of really being in Hollywood were really his pet hobby stories about a screenwriter who failed in the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald failed, and sold out much in the same way that Scott Fitzgerald tried to sell out. And of course, the last unfinished novel, 'The Last Tycoon.'"
On the frustration that East Coast literature writers felt toward screenwriting:
"They couldn't actually do it and, in fact, a lot of the people that they had disdain for, the producers particularly, who they thought of as ignorant, actually had a better sense of what the public wanted than they did."
How did Hollywood regard these writers? They paid them tremendous sums. At one point Fitzgerald was getting $1,000 a week, which is really good money now days.
"They were living high, they were being paid very well, but they had this very corrosive disdain for what they were doing. Unless you could really get into it, unless you could feel it, you weren't going to do very well."
Should Hollywood have any regard for Fitzgerald as a Hollywood figure or is it all about his novels and short stories?
"I think he's part of that whole world, the people who came out from the east coast with their very different attitudes, people who came out and who made something resembling a life out here, but had these feelings of disdain towards the place."
Student veterans speak out about their experiences in higher education
After 9/11, a new GI Bill was introduced. It was supposed to offer the same kind of welcome that returning veterans from World War II received but adjusted to 21st century needs. Currently, about half a million veterans are taking advantage of this opportunity at pursuing higher education. However, a college campus can seem just as alien as the foreign places that vets had served in.
On May 7, 2013, American Public Media and KPCC presented a forum about the challenges that student veterans face. Several students, professors, and university staff members came together to talk about veteran issues on college campuses. The discussion was facilitated by Patt Morrison.
Kolin Williams, an army veteran and veteran’s counselor at Saddleback Community College spoke about some of the struggles that student veterans face. “Many veterans are re-entry students, and they’re not always good students. I find that most frequently, they typically struggle in academics,” he said. “Many use the GI Bill as a transitioning tool just to pay basic bills… [they] may not even believe that they belong in college.”
Marshall Lewis, a Marine attending Pasadena City College, believes that college can be mentally and emotionally hindering if veterans do not have a support system. “I was in the Phantom Fury, the Second Battle of Fallujah. I had a political science professor who was, second day of class I believe, speaking about the Battle of Fallujah…the professor from the bottom of the classroom looks up at me and says ‘hey, do you know that all your Marines and all your friends died for nothing?’” This story conjured up a lot of emotion in the room – gasps of disbelief and nods of familiarity.
At Fullerton College, a Veterans Resource Center with a camaraderie room offers the support system that student veterans need. “My first semester, I definitely had issues trying to communicate with other people. You just can’t relate to other students who are 18, 19, who are late, who are messing around on their phones,” said Mike Lee, an Air Force veteran. He said that the camaraderie room was a space where students could vent and talk to other people with similar experiences. It helped him get involved with campus life.
Now Lee is transferring to UC Berkeley and works at the Veterans Resource Center on campus where he helps students lay out a long term plan. “As soon as you can teach a vet how to plan their own courses, how they’re going to transfer and put their destiny into their own hands, they seem to flourish a lot more, because they know what needs to be done - not just past this semester, but next semester and the following semester. You essentially empower them to hold their own future.”
See more photos of the student veterans and their mentors on KPCC's visual journalism blog AudioVision.
'Where the boys did their funny stuff' -- Interview with author Jim Pauley on his book "The Three Stooges: Hollywood Filming Locations"
Three Stooges expert Jim Pauley has a book out on Santa Monica Press called "The Three Stooges: Hollywood Filming Locations." The book looks at many of the places in LA where the Stooges went to film their shorts in the 30s and 40s and includes both black and white stills and present day photos. Off-Ramp's Robert Garrova met with author Jim Pauley at Larry Edmunds Bookshop on Hollywood Blvd. to talk about his book.
Longtime Three Stooges fan Jim Pauley became a detective for his book "The Three Stooges: Hollywood Filming Locations." But instead of looking for crime scenes, Pauley sifted through black and white stills, library records, and talked with Hollywood historians to find where it was The Three Stooges went to film their comedy shorts in the 30s and 40s.
"It's really interesting to track down the locations. Where did the boys do their funny stuff? Of course they were in soundstages most of the time, but where were they outdoors?" Pauley said. "And if you love Hollywood and you love Los Angeles, it kind of ties in nicely. There's nothing like being where Moe, Larry and Curly were."
Pauley found some of the best spots in LA where the Stooges went to shoot. Like an outdoor staircase in Silver Lake, a business address on Larchmont Blvd and a spot next to the LA River along what we now call Forest Lawn Drive.
Pauley's book includes "Then and Now" shots too. On one present day shot, Pauley was even able to get Moe Howard's daughter, Joan Howard Maurer, involved. When Joan was 11-years-old, her dad included her as an extra in a short titled "Pop Goes the Easel."
"That particular scene involved Moe, Larry and Curly jumping through hopscotch chalked out on the sidewalk that the two girls had made. And as the boys run through, you actually see the two young girls in the background. Well also, there's a very important clue in the background and that is the number 107," Pauley said.
Pauley started to notice present day features at 107 Larchmont Blvd. that matched the ones from the short. He recognized the buildings, the windows, the rooflines, some of which haven't changed much over the years.
"Joan had seemed to think that the scene was shot at one of the Columbia Studios. But I was able to prove that it was actually shot at 107 Larchmont Blvd., which is still there today. The building is still pretty much the same, just some minor changes. I actually brought Joan back to that location some 65 years later and took a real great picture of her that is now featured in my book. A sort of 'Then and Now' shot," he said.
Pauley even proved some Laurel and Hardy fans wrong when he found another location: The Stooges steps in Silverlake. The steps are featured in a Stooges short titled "An Ache in Every Stake" in which the boys are ice men and have to deliver a heavy block of ice up a long set of stairs. The steps, contrary to what some other Hollywood buffs had thought, are actually located at 2257 and 2258 North Fair Oak View Terrace in Silver Lake and are still there today.
Aside from being a great read for Three Stooges fans young and old, Pauley's book is also a visual archeological dig through LA's past -- a time when the hills of Silver Lake and Echo Park were undeveloped and the LA River was concrete-free.