Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune ... another Hard Times update ... goodbye Cal Worthington ... the Congressman who arm-wrestled Putin ...
Please help identify Karen's 'typewriter bird'
KPCC's Karen Fritsche sent me the audio you can listen to, over on the left, and this note:
The first time we heard the typewriter bird was about 3 years ago. At first we thought it was our whacky neighbor, a restaurateur, working on his own Kitchen Confidential. But it was a bird that worked diligently right outside our window.
We’d lie in bed at 6am and hear it … like an electronic typewriter, tap, tap, tap. Sometimes fast, like he was on a roll. Sometimes slow, like he was thinking, constructing sentences carefully.
Allen and I would joke that he was working on the Great American Novel. One day, we didn’t hear him anymore, and we were bummed out. He must have writer’s block, we thought. Or a book tour, perhaps?
He came back the next year, prolific as ever, defying the cliche that the second book is the hardest. Clearly, he was working on a very personal memoir now, because his typing was much faster and more intense.
His appearances and disappearances have become an annual thing, and each year we welcome him back.
We’d kind of like to know what kind of bird he or she is. Is he making that sound with his beak or with his wings? On the other hand, we really enjoy thinking of him as the typewriter bird because it’s inspiring listening to him doing what he loves each morning.
So, if you know, or think you know, let us know in the comments section below.
(Please don't spoil the fun by telling us to go to Google or BirdSoundsRUs.com. We prefer getting real people involved.)
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher: I arm-wrestled Vladimir Putin ... and lost!
On Thursday, KPCC's Washington correspondent Kitty Felde talked with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher about the Russian proposal on Syria on chemical weapons, of which he very much approves. He also thinks that the Russians should be consulted and take a larger role.
When asked if he'd ever met Putin, he explains that it happened just once, shortly after the fall of the USSR. But then the story got juicier:
"About 1990 or 1991, communism had just fallen. The Soviet Union back now was Russia, and a group of young political leaders came into my office. They wanted to meet me because I'd been Reagan's speechwriter," said Rohrabacher. "I asked them, 'By the way I'm spending the weekend here, if you want to play some American football with me and my buddies?"
Three of his new Russian friends said yes, one of which was Putin.
"I didn't know who he was then. He was the Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg. That's all we knew, but he did have a huge bodyguard, so that did sort of give one a little hint that maybe he's more important than just St. Petersburg. So we went out and we played touch football and Scooter Libby was one of the players. A bunch of my right wing friends were there.
"We all ended up going to this Irish Times Pub afterwards. And we were having a little bit too much to drink, I guess. Anyway, we started arguing about who won the Cold War, etc. And so we decided to settle it like men do when they've had too much to drink in the pub. So we got to these arm wrestling matches, and I ended up being paired off with Putin. He's a little guy, but boy, I'll tell yea. He put me down in a millisecond! He is tough. His muscles are just unbelievable.
"So then his bodyguard gets up with this buddy of mine, says 'Oh I'll take him,' and my friend put [Putin's] bodyguard down. It was good. You know, he's a tough guy. And he's supposed to be a tough guy, that's what the Russian people want. But that's no reason why we shouldn't try to work with him.
'Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune'
Jury selection begins Tuesday in a trial that involves a 104-year old reclusive copper heiress, a mansion in Santa Barbara that hasn't been lived in since the 1950s, the Beethoven statue in Pershing Square, a 30-million dollar nurse, and a 300-million dollar fortune.
The descendents of Huguette Clark, who died in 2011, at 104, are fighting over her will, which cuts them out. Her story is told in the new book "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune," written by Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.
Listen here for my interview with Dedman, and on Tuesday, November 12, Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr. have a book reading at UCLA's Clark Library, founded by Huguette's older half brother William Andrews Clark, Jr., who donated the library to the university in 1926.
Five years after Lehman, an LA couple starts a new life
On September 15 five years ago, the investment firm Lehman Brothers collapsed, as appropriate of a starting point as any for the Great Recession.
Two years ago, unemployment was hovering between 9 and 9.5 percent. Everybody knew somebody who was either unemployed, underwater on their home, or both.
For Off-Ramp's Hard Times series, producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Kai Schmoll and Monty Phillips, a married couple living in Mount Washington. Like a lot of Americans, Kai and Monty had moved into the house of their dreams and soon found found out they couldn't pay for it. Monty, who had a stable job in the film industry, recalled the day he lost his job.
Kai and Monty tried to fight the foreclosure, but they soon gave up and moved out. Not just out of the house--they left the state of California entirely.
Now, Off-Ramp is looking at life five years after the recession started and checking in with families. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Kai and Monty to see how they've been.
As they said they'd planned in the original story, Kai and Monty moved to Asheville, South Carolina just under two years ago. It was a stressful move. "We were just in such dire straits at the time. Monty had lost his job in the film industry," said Schmoll.
For Kai, an actor, leaving behind Los Angeles and its film industry proved to a boon for his movie career. "I really thought I had given it up," he said. "There are a good number of television shows shot in the area. And the pool of talent down here is not as big as it is in LA. I mean, honestly, the part that I just played — if I had been auditioning for it in L.A., I would've been auditioning against several hundred other guys."
Monty, on the other hand, has left the film industry altogether. He makes and sells jewelry out of a studio in Asheville's arts district. While it's hard to find decent Mexican food in Asheville, they said, it's been very difficult adjusting to South Carolina's very different political climate. The state doesn't recognize their California marriage, though they're entitled to some federal benefits. "[South Carolina] used to be a progressive Southern state," said Monty. "And is now, I guess, what you might call a regressive Southern State."
Overall, both Schmoll and Phillips feel like they've recovered from the recession — that they're doing OK. "I'm just glad that the house no longer belongs to us, said Kai. "In retrospect, I wish that we hadn't exhausted out eighteen month safety net that we had. If I had known then what I know how, I just would've kept that savings intact and walked away from the house. And my credit would probably already be back to normal now."
Patt Morrison looks back at the life and legacy of Cal Worthington
Selling cars was a long way from Cal Worthington's career of choice. What he really wanted to do was fly planes, just as he had in World War II. Instead, he had to settle for becoming the best-known car salesman in the West.
The first of the million cars that Worthington said he sold was a Hudson Terraplane. He bought it, fixed it up, and sold it the next day for a $60 profit. He told me he had never made such easy money in his whole life.
From then on, he said, he was trapped in the car trade. He became the master of car salesmen, and the lord of the advertising airwaves. His cowboy outfits came from Nudie's — the well-known Hollywood tailor — and his accent was straight out of Osage County, Oklahoma.
Back when cars were cheap and TV time was even cheaper, Cal Worthington was a self-made star. His commercials ran for two, three, even four minutes. He told jokes. He pitched his patter about Fords and "Chivys," and later on, about Mazdas and "Tyotas."
He sang his jingle, the one imprinted on the musical memories of generations of Southern Californians: go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal. And mostly, he cavorted with his dog Spot who was sometimes a coati-mundi other times a hippopotamus or an alligator; anything from a goose to a gorilla, but never, ever a dog.
He was the TV wallpaper of the late-late show, and sleepless women would sidle up to him and let him know that they had spent the night with him - thanks to the television. He got invited to the famous sofa of that other king of late-night, Johnny Carson.
That first sixty bucks he made, he parlayed into millions. He got to become a pilot again, flying his own Learjet, visiting his dealerships from Anchorage to San Diego. He bought ranches in Idaho and Nevada and California, grew some almonds, ran some cattle.
RELATED: Cal Worthington, car dealer famous for 'Go See Cal' ads, dead at 92 (Video)
Over time, cars got better, he told me once; safer. More efficient. You take decent care of them, he said, there's a 100,000 miles in 'em. In the old days, you were lucky if they made it to 25,000.
He himself never had the pink slip to any one car, but he drove so many different models from his dealership that on any one day, he couldn't remember which one. He'd go to dinner and then forget what he'd driven there. Once, he flew into LAX and raised hell because he couldn't get the key to work. Turns out the car had a Worthington plate on it, but it wasn't the one he'd driven there.
He never did go into politics, even though, as he told me, he'd tinkered with the idea a time or two. He said he knew he could get elected because he knew how to put a man in his place with a little humor, make him look kind of funny without getting vicious and slinging mud like a lot of politicians do.
As TV spots grew more expensive, he said he couldn't afford to goof around any more. Thirty seconds is all about the hard sell, and Cal Worthington didn't like being on camera during a hard sell. He said it didn't look good.
Maybe it took him three or four minutes to sell a car, but it only took Angelenos a few seconds to recognize that jangly little tune, along with the much-parodied man who got rich with it.
Cal Worthington? He was big. It was the airtime that got small.