When I think of my Uncle Jim, I often remember him as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Jim Mathews, who died earlier this summer at age 77, loved to perform in community theater productions near his home in San Mateo. He sang in many shows and took on many roles, but his signature was playing the former president in the musical Annie, that classic Depression story about an orphan girl taken in by a rich capitalist, Daddy Warbucks.

Late in the show, Annie and Daddy Warbucks go to the White House, where FDR is considering a new program of social supports for struggling Americans. “I want to feed them and house them and pay them. Not much, but enough to send home to their parents,” Jim, as the president, would declare.

Through the song “Tomorrow,” Annie convinces FDR to go forward with this New Deal. Then, in the best moment of Jim’s performance, he would rise and start a solo.

When I’m stuck with a day

That’s gray, and lonely.

 I just stick out my chin and grin, and say…

Then he’d pause, turn to the audience and add, “Now sing with me! Republicans too!”

I share this memory with you now because so many of us are stuck in gray days. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, even here in friendly, bright California. The world’s awfulness often stops us in our tracks.

Jim had more than his share of gray days. He was injured at birth, and his parents (my grandparents) were told he never would walk (he did, with a pronounced prancing style, after a lot of therapy). He never married or had children (though his niece and two nephews, including me, treasured him as a quasi-parental figure). He never achieved any particular renown (though I’m trying with this column).

Far too often in the Golden State, and especially in Silicon Valley, where Jim spent almost all his life, the conventional wisdom is that you need a big and well-known technology, with venture funding and a giant brain, to shape the future. Jim’s example puts the lie to that thinking. He had a wonderful life, in a Frank-Capraesque way. Because he understood that life and technology, a subject he made a career teaching, are built out of small things. So are better tomorrows.

James Mathews was born in 1946 in Long Beach, one of Southern California’s bigger cities. His parents—a civilian U.S. Navy employee and a teacher—moved him to San Mateo when he was in elementary school.

San Mateo is a smaller city, of 100,000, but whenever I visited him there—which was often—he made the place seem grand. Wherever you went with him became enchanted. The little train and the big trees in Central Park. The playgrounds and fields at Hillsdale High and Laurel Elementary. The little branch libraries. His beloved College Heights Church, a highly democratic and informal place where almost every member of the congregation, adult and child, would talk during the service.

The church sat atop a windswept hill, with bay views so glorious that I sometimes wondered: Who needs heaven?

Jim’s magic was that he paid attention to little things. “Don’t step on those—they’re California poppies,” he once advised. “Those are the state flower!” And he engaged with everyone, even people who were scary. At Hillsdale High, Jim was no jock, and the 25-year-old football coach had intimidating intensity.  But instead of backing away, Jim volunteered to be the team manager and learned lasting lessons about teamwork from that coach, the future Super Bowl winner Dick Vermeil.

If you thought like Jim, everything seemed like an opportunity. Jim, who graduated from San Francisco State, eventually got a low-profile job at the College of San Mateo, a community college. Over 21 years, he and his colleagues found ways to add the best new computers and technology, ultimately creating a dynamic media lab. From there, he went to Baywood Elementary, where he created not one but two tech labs. He designed them to teach not just students, but teachers and parents. Jim insisted that students fix the computers themselves.

“Grandpa Geek,” they called him.

Technology, Jim would say, was not this big force to be feared or celebrated. Technology was really just a lot of little things, and the fun was to be had in tinkering, and figuring out how to use them together.

Speaking of fun, the most fun I ever had in my life was when Uncle Jim would visit Southern California and take my brother and me to Disneyland. I’d gone to Disneyland with other relatives, but it was boring—you’d wait in long lines for the biggest rides. But Jim took us to everything and emphasized the little treasures: the Enchanted Tiki Room, the rock formations on Tom Sawyer Island, the real-world potential of the automated People Mover in Tomorrowland, which he considered the best land. (He was right about the People Mover—they are installing a new one at LAX now.)

The little things that mattered most to Jim were charity. He looked for ways to help. He donated to the people at the door. And to the people who called on the phone. I once asked Jim if he was a soft touch. His answer: What’s wrong with being a soft touch?

Jim didn’t like it when people tried to take care of him, but he loved to help take care of other people.

Eight years ago, Jim, feeling a bit lonely after retiring and moving back into his deceased parents’ home, heard at church about a woman and her two young sons who were unhoused and needed a place to stay. He invited them to move in with him. They stayed for five years. He didn’t see it as an act of generosity. He was benefiting from this “house sharing,” from the companionship and help of his roommates.

Once, when I had dinner with all of them, Jim said he felt like a fool—for not having shared his home with people in similar circumstances many years earlier.

But Jim didn’t dwell on regrets. He was determined not to get bogged down with today’s problems. Because a new opportunity to help someone else will always present itself. And soon. Maybe even tomorrow, which is only a day away.

The post My Late Uncle Jim’s Life of Tomorrows appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For over 25 years I have asked my students in U.S. history courses the same questions about Jim Crow:

“Where does Jim Crow ‘live’?”

“When did it begin?”

“How does it work?”

Their answers almost always focus on Southern states. I have taught in California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota, places with well-documented histories of racial segregation and discrimination. A wealth of scholarship shows Jim Crow was everywhere. Still, students cling to a belief that the history of white supremacy is a Southern history.

To push back against these simplified notions of racial discrimination in the U.S., I’ve made it my job to write and teach about Jim Crow in unexpected places—including California. The state embraces its reputation as a site for progressive thinking, the birthplace of the hippies and the Black Panthers, and a “free” state from its 1850 inception. Yet the state also developed innovative methods for containing and restricting people of color in public and private spaces—methods that continue to stoke racism in California and throughout the U.S. today.

One of the most successful people who fought back against those methods was Loren Miller, a lawyer who worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Los Angeles. Using Miller’s mid-20th-century career as a lens to examine Jim Crow in California offers a sense of the breadth of this discrimination—and of the importance of acknowledging and understanding it.

Miller was born in Pender, Nebraska, in 1903 and earned his law degree from Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, in 1928. By the time he moved to California in 1929, the NAACP had been the leading civil rights organization in the nation for two decades, fighting to end discrimination, segregation, and lynching. The organization established a branch in Los Angeles in 1914.

In housing, neighborhoods, and schools, California had always excelled at creating white-only institutions. Its history of segregation began in the 1850s, when the state adopted so-called Black codes. These laws and practices kept African Americans out of a variety of places, from streetcars, theaters, and restaurants to political parties and witness stands, where they could not testify against white people until 1863. The state was especially proficient at creating white-only neighborhoods as it applied restrictive covenants and lending practices with aplomb.

Miller’s legal career took off quickly, fueled by the sheer volume of discrimination to fight in California. Between 1938 and 1948, when the Great Migration pulled thousands of African Americans to California, Miller appeared as the attorney in approximately 75 lawsuits involving discriminatory real estate practices. In December 1945, he won the Sugar Hill case, a decisive victory at the California Supreme Court that deemed restrictive covenants a violation of Black homeowners’ 14th Amendment rights. The case received extensive media attention, in part because one of the plaintiffs was the Academy Award-winning actress Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind. In 1954, along with Thurgood Marshall, Miller argued Shelley v. Kraemer, a landmark Supreme Court case in which the justices declared that the enforcement of racial restrictive covenants was unconstitutional.

Miller became the NAACP’s foremost expert on restrictive covenants’ legal intricacies and harmful effects in the U.S. In lectures to civic and human rights organizations around the country, he argued that the answer to most of the problems confronting Black Americans was “to find a solution to the complex housing problems that plague the urban Negro,” as he told a National Urban League audience in Pittsburgh in 1954. Housing discrimination led to other anti-Black practices and segregation, Miller noted—which kept Black people from achieving equality in education, the workplace, and beyond.

Miller never missed an opportunity to emphasize how dismal the situation was in his home state. “[M]ore Negro children attend all-Negro schools in Los Angeles than attend such schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Jackson, Mississippi, combined,” he told an audience at the Lake Arrowhead Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, in a 1963 talk titled “The Problems of The Negro in Southern California.”

And Miller knew, firsthand, that California’s Jim Crow, despite its legalistic and genteel packaging, could be as violent as that of the South—and as hard to combat. In 1946, his law firm had taken on one of the state’s most devastating instances of racial violence.

In December 1945, refrigeration engineer O’Day Short, who was Black, moved with his wife Helen and their two small children to a previously all-white part of Fontana, in California’s San Bernardino County, to take a job at a Kaiser Steel mill. Days after the Short family moved into their home, a menacing posse warned them to leave the neighborhood. The Shorts stayed put. On December 16, their house burned to the ground. Helen and the children died from “shock from extensive burns” shortly after arriving at the hospital; O’Day died several weeks later.

The threats, arson, and murders of the Shorts were almost certainly the work of Ku Klux Klan vigilantes. The so-called Second Klan had been active in the area in the 1920s and months after the fire at the Shorts’ house, the group staged a major recruitment drive in San Bernardino County.

Miller and his law partner Ivan J. Johnson worked diligently on the Short case, but it never went to trial. The San Bernardino County Coroner quickly ruled that the deaths were caused by a fire of “unknown origin,” refusing to admit the threats against the Shorts as evidence.

Rumors circulated among white neighbors and local law enforcement that the Shorts had started the fire when they lit their stove; the Black press, including the California Eagle (which Miller later purchased), devoted considerable coverage to debunking that claim. An interracial coalition of civil rights workers, labor unions, and religious leaders pushed for justice, turning the murders into a rallying cry to stop residential segregation and the revitalized Ku Klux Klan. In 1946, California Attorney General Robert W. Kenny promised an independent investigation into the murders, but the grand jury adjourned without issuing a report.

Miller and Johnson had a stellar record fighting Jim Crow in the Golden State. But in the Short case, there were no victories. As the Black newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel put it back in 1946, “All the Shorts are dead…Only Jim Crow is alive.”

When I teach my students about Miller and the Shorts, they begin to see that white supremacy had—and has—a long reach. The violence that Black Americans face today is rooted in their own backyards, and not just in the South. Understanding the pervasiveness of white supremacy and its “strange career” in unexpected places is crucial if we are to understand its resurgence today.

The post Look to California to Understand Jim Crow appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Growing up as a Chicana nerd, I never thought I’d write a book about myself, much less about Oxnard, where I grew up. This humble city on the Southern California coast was hardly the stuff worth writing about. Or so I had been taught throughout my elementary and high school years.

But then, as an adult, I began researching the late Chicana writer Michele Serros, who also grew up in Oxnard, and who deftly—defiantly even—wrote about our shared hometown in every work she authored, and I surprised myself. Discovering Serros sent me back home. I had planned to write a literary analysis of representations of Chicana adolescence throughout Southern California, using young adult novels set in San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Oxnard. I wound up penning a sort of memoir: confronting memories of pain, loss, and isolation that mirrored Serros’ own feelings of out-of-placeness in a city that has never quite welcomed Chicana misfits like us.

Mapping Oxnard’s presence in Serros’ work, and interweaving my own personal history, helped me understand what it meant to come of age in the 805 area code, and to consider Chicana adolescent identity and subjectivity.

Michele Serros’ school photos, from Rio Real Elementary in Oxnard. Courtesy of Michele Serros Collection, California State University, Channel Islands John Spoor Broome Library.

Oxnard is a curious sort of city. Known for its abundant strawberry fields and mild coastal climate, its main claim to fame these days is hosting the Dallas Cowboys’ yearly summer training camp. However, as scholar and Oxnard native Frank P. Barajas has written, places like Oxnard hold rich histories of community activism and political involvement. Oxnard was “founded” by white agribusiness settlers, but it was mainly Mexican and Japanese laborers who toiled in its sugar beet fields. While the Chicano Movement is typically associated with more famous parts of California such as Los Angeles, Oxnard too was the site of activism and political awakening throughout the 1960s.

Growing up I had heard stories of family members’ involvement with Chicano activist groups like the Brown Berets. My mother once shared that she and my grandmother sewed the hats my uncles wore with their cargo pants and white tee shirts—the preferred attire for activists during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But these were mere anecdotes I heard here and there. I never read anything about Oxnard’s history in my high school textbooks. I had the distinct feeling—even though it was never uttered aloud—that things like “history,” “culture,” and “literature” didn’t exist in Oxnard. Look elsewhere, my teachers implicitly said. Nothing for you here, the schools suggested. Move it along.

Michele Serros’ desk. Courtesy of California State University, Channel Islands Chicana/o Studies Department.

So perhaps it was not at all ironic that I only learned about Serros when I was working on a PhD in English, and that the discovery was purely accidental. I was researching contemporary Chicana literature; a library database search served up Serros’ most famous book, 1998’s Chicana Falsa, with its eye-catching subtitle: And Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard. The collection featured gut-wrenching and funny tales of speaking Spanglish, hating high school, accusations of being a “fake” Chicana, and of course, dreaming of one day getting the hell out of Oxnard.

The discovery that such a book even existed caught me off guard and made me wonder if I’d been kept from a juicy secret that I should have known decades earlier. When I told my mother about it, she casually said, “Oh yeah, I know Michele. She’s related to la familia Serros.”

That familia Serros? As in the guys who taught my twin sister and me how to swim at La Colonia pool, minutes away from my maternal grandparents’ home?  Yep, that one. Serros’s grandparents and great-grandparents, much like my own, migrated to Oxnard in the first half of the 20th century and lived in the Mexican barrio known as La Colonia. Oxnard was relatively small, hovering at just about 40,000 residents by 1960, and most of its earliest Mexican residents would have, at one time or another, known each other.

In the first half of the 20th century, Cristina Herrera’s family, pictured, lived in Oxnard’s La Colonia barrio—just like the Serros family. Courtesy of Serafina Herrera (author’s mother).

My Mamá Chonita and Papá Tomás, it turned out, had been close friends with Michele’s family. When I was in high school in the early to mid-1990s, Serros had already published Chicana Falsa. In the years that followed, she would publish other important texts, including How to Be a Chicana Role Model (in 2000) and even a young adult novel, Honey Blonde Chica (in 2006). Her works explored complex themes like identity and what it means to not readily be accepted as Chicana because of her struggles with Spanish. Like much Latinx literature, Serros embraced hybridity, even as she troubled identity terms like Chicana and Chicano. She died of cancer, at 48, in 2015. All this time, I had no idea about her family connection to mine.

When I learned about Serros’ work, I did something I’m still ashamed to admit. I tucked her books away in my shelves, occasionally reading them but choosing not to study them too closely for fear that they would dredge up unpleasant memories of Oxnard. Which they do. When Serros mentions Oxnard street names like Vineyard Avenue or landmarks like Plaza Park, I picture them clearly, a kind of familiarity that is akin to coming home. Except coming home isn’t always fun. Returning to Oxnard means having to relive the high school bullying, the invisibility, and my father’s abandonment. It means confronting pain.

Writing about one’s wounds is a tricky thing. It’s messy, even ugly. But it’s a necessary voyage, I learned as my book took shape, and Serros’ works loomed ever and ever larger. As I wrote about Chicana Falsa and her later books, I started to do so with an unabashed glimpse into my own Chicana teen years. How terrifying high school was for a quiet kid who struggled to make friends, the exact opposite of my popular older brothers, Chavita and Marcos, who everyone knew by name because they excelled in sports. Much as Serros’ poem, “The Best Years of My Life,” documents a facetious but all too real account of a Chicana teen lost in the crowd, I also was largely invisible in Oxnard High School, a place that rendered me not really Chicana. When Serros wrote, “Every day I dragged my feet in customized black and pink Vans (only thing about me the right color, right size),” she may as well have been talking about me, for no matter how you sliced it, I was never quite right in my classmates’ eyes. My classmates viewed me as the lesser kind of Brown because I was shy, awkward, and liked to read.

I attributed these painful years to living in Oxnard, a place I was desperate to flee the first chance I got—and did, taking jobs in Central California and Portland, Oregon that put Oxnard in my rearview mirror. Serros, too, yearned to escape, to live in a big city, to create art. But even as we drive away, we can’t avoid the rear view. My book taught me that. Oxnard taught me that. Michele Serros taught me that.

I live far from the city that raised me, but my hometown still resides in me. Readers may be uncomfortable with my refusal to romanticize a city I haven’t always loved, and that hasn’t always loved me in return. My family will likely struggle to understand why I have written these words, and why I chose to write them now. Call it a compulsion, an itch, a drive. Oxnard called to me, Serros called to me. This time I finally answered.

The post How Two Chicana Nerds Wrote Their Way Back to Oxnard appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It starts around 6:45 a.m.—a faint, faraway boom, followed by a low growl that makes my stomach tighten and hands clench. Within seconds, the growl turns into a low rumbling, then a loud rumbling, then an intensely loud roar and whine, up to 70 decibels, as a 737 shoots over its low path across the Mulholland Corridor.

This goes on constantly for the next four hours as the planes of Southwest and other airlines fly west from Hollywood Burbank Airport and over Studio City, where I live, and the homes of 200,0000 of my fellow San Fernando Valley residents, from Toluca Lake to Encino.

In the late morning, the frequency of these flights slows down, though they are joined by scores of helicopter flights that follow the same path. About 5:00 p.m., the 737s pick up their pace again, along with low-flying UPS and FedEx jets.

This goes on until about 10 p.m., when the celebrity and business flights enter the narrow airspace in droves, jetting to and from Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, or even Anaheim or Santa Monica. Things die down after 11 p.m., when only the occasional American or JetBlue flight makes a connection, or when Jay-Z needs to head out to a meeting in New York.

For many Angelenos, the Burbank airport is a well-loved alternative to LAX. But 7 years ago, a sudden shift in flight patterns at Burbank airport allowed for more flights and forced more of them south of the 101 freeway. Those of us living under the changed flight paths now contend with a new level of daily noise, air pollution, and a huge amount of black plane soot in our yards, trees, and plants.

Several activist groups have labeled this jet superhighway a “sacrifice zone”—a place where others profit off residents’ health and safety degradations. An estimated 10,000 school children live and study under this jet superhighway, which also spans 75,000 acres of Santa Monica Mountains parkland that is home to a dwindling wildlife population and draws hikers and others from all over Southern California.

How did a part of Los Angeles that is both densely populated and contains legally protected green space become a dumping ground for jet fuel soot and dangerous levels of noise pollution?

In late 2016, the Federal Administration of Aviation (FAA) shifted flight paths south ostensibly to save money on fuel and modernize its flight procedures. Most communities deeply impacted by this shift did not know about the change until it was too late for residents to file petitions or protest. One day in the winter of that year, several jets in rapid succession flew so low over our home that we thought there was military action nearby. Seven years later, 100 to 200 flights per day go directly or nearly directly over my home.

At the time of the change, this specific swatch of land was governed by some of the most vocal environmental champions in the Los Angeles—City Councilmembers Paul Krekorian and Paul Koretz.

They, as well as a deputy from then-Senator Kamala Harris’ office, attended meetings with the public about the new flight paths with and formal task force meetings with the public and the FAA from September 2019 to May 2020. Former Los Angeles City Attorney. Mike Feuer and current City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto have filed lawsuits against the FAA over the shift in flight patterns and the proposed airport terminal expansion, respectively. But those legal actions have not stopped the FAA.

Congressman Adam B. Schiff has asked the FAAA for a review of noise around the airport, and Congressman Brad Sherman wants the project halted until the FAA can reduce the noise and environmental impacts on the community. But the FAA informed Sherman that the recommendations made by the task force didn’t meet federal safety criteria. The agency recently issued a draft Environmental Assessment on the proposed changes to the airport’s southern departures. The public can submit comments until January 24.

Meanwhile, the airport is growing, with more flights now than in 2016. The airport’s proposed expansion of its NextGen satellite system, an upgrade to one of its terminals, and a change in airport configuration will almost certainly bring even more flights and more noise to the Mulholland Corridor.  The airport will also be using federal funds designated for its terminal expansion in litigation involving the project.

Who benefits from a larger, busier airport, and this flight path? Southwest and other airlines, which boost the tax revenue for the city of Burbank. No single community should have to bear the brunt of the airport’s noise and environmental impact. The airport should fairly disperse the flights and revert to higher altitudes.

Los Angeles City and County leadership, the state’s Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority all have stakes in the impacts caused by the Burbank airport. They may be the only people able to bring the federal regulators to the table. Meanwhile, my neighbors and I, as well as the animals and plants of the Santa Monica Mountains, are suffering.

The post No Sleep for Those Under the ‘Jet Superhighway’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In California, a land blessed with more than its fair share of winners, we learn our most important lessons by dwelling among the losers.

So, in this final week of the baseball season, your columnist visited the bottom of the standings in American League West to ask: Which pro sports owner is the more instructive California failure—the failed heir fleeing Oakland, or the billboard billionaire sticking around in Anaheim?

Bay Area fans and pundits already have their answer: John Fisher of the Oakland A’s.

The core allegation is that Fisher, the youngest son of the billionaire Gap founders and philanthropists, Don and Doris Fisher, is engaged in a ruthless campaign of sabotage—of his own team. His goal has been to alienate fans so that he can justify moving the A’s to Las Vegas, where he stands to receive hundreds of millions in public subsidies for a new stadium.

This has made him the most hated sports figure in Northern California, and singularly unpopular beyond. The Mercury News, distilling local sentiment, suggested that Fisher might be the “worst owner in sports history.” CBS Sports called him a human embodiment of “the depredations of shareholder capitalism” and suggested that describing his true awfulness would require the invention of a new pejorative.

To be fair, Fisher’s start with the A’s wasn’t bad. The team had several winning seasons after he became owner in 2005. But Fisher’s real goal seemed to be no victory but rather a taxpayer-supported new stadium. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for taxpayers, California and its communities have wisely stopped offering subsidies for those. Oakland officials did propose a massive entertainment development and ballpark on the bay, at Howard Terminal, near Jack London Square. But the deal wasn’t generous enough to satisfy the billionaire and his team.

At some point, Fisher seems to have concluded that he could only secure massive subsidies for a new stadium by moving elsewhere. So, in recent years, he stopped supporting the team, and started dismantling it. He raised ticket prices, while letting the stadium fall apart. And he got rid of all players who would give the A’s any real chance to win. As a result, they became the worst team in Major League Baseball.

Fans stopped coming, allowing Fisher to justify his decision, announced earlier this year, to relocate the A’s to Las Vegas. Fisher has refused to sell the team to anyone who might keep it in Oakland, despite campaigns by fans and local politicians. Fisher has even refused to give up a partial stake in the Oakland stadium and its land—a position that will make it hard to redevelop the area after its team’s departure.

Fisher’s behavior has been so deplorable that even a sports villain, Mark Davis—owner of football’s Las Vegas Raiders, which abandoned Oakland twice—was moved to say of the A’s under Fisher, “All they did was f—k the Bay Area.”

Fisher’s malperformance might seem hard to top, but he has real competition in Southern California:

Arte Moreno, owner of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Moreno is a different character than Fisher; a Mexican American from Tucson, he made his own fortune in billboards before buying the Angels in 2003.

Just as the A’s won during Fisher’s early years as owner, the Angels repeatedly went to the playoffs in the early years of Moreno’s ownership. But in the 2010s and 2020s, the Angels have become one of the most puzzling failures in the sport, with Moreno largely to blame.

The trouble in Anaheim was not Fisher-style sabotage. Moreno kept ticket prices affordable and spent money on his team. It was how he spent that money that’s been the problem.

The best baseball teams are deep, especially in pitching. But Moreno was obsessed with stars he could promote—the kind of star ballplayers that would be recognized on a billboard. This strategy produced a familiar sort of California inequality. Moreno, by multiple accounts, including his own increasingly infrequent public interviews, sought to build his team around one or two superstar players. He spent big money on huge contracts to established players, while neglecting homegrown talent.

The Angels became one of the most imbalanced teams in history. For the past 12 years, they have employed superstar outfielder Mike Trout, statistically the best baseball player of the 21st century. Five years ago, they picked up the most talented baseball player on Earth, the Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, a top-10 hitter—and pitcher. The only comparable player in baseball history is Babe Ruth.

Even with Trout and Ohtani, the Angels have been losers, making the playoffs only once since 2010. Why? Because beyond these players, and one or two other expensive stars, the rest of the team is well below average.

Moreno disinvested in minor league players who might have provided greater depth for the major league team. (In one case, he was accused of not providing them with enough food to eat.) And he vetoed trades of older players for younger, healthier athletes to support Trout and Ohtani. As a result, the two superstars seem overburdened; both ended this year on the injured list.

Angels fans—including your columnist, introduced to the game by grandparents who lived in Anaheim—rejoiced last year when Moreno announced he would sell the team.

A sale promised a more balanced squad and a fresh start in the community. Moreno infuriated many fans with his public backing of Donald Trump. He and the Angels were also at the center of an ugly scandal in Anaheim involving a stadium lease and development rights for stadium parking lots. That deal with the city ran afoul of state laws requiring affordable housing, and led to the FBI arrest and federal conviction of former Mayor Harry Sidhu.

Despite the scandal and the fan base’s desire for new ownership, Moreno took the team off the market earlier this year, and the future is bleak. Ohtani, frustrated at the franchise chaos and losing, is all but certain to leave to play for a franchise with better owners, perhaps the L.A. Dodgers or San Francisco Giants.

This season in the AL West, the A’s will finish last, and the Angels next to last.

All these two owners have given us this season are two very California models of failure. Fisher, a rich man who refused to invest in the team that was his asset, is all too much like the state of California, which refuses to put enough of its wealth in service of its infrastructure, its people, and its future.

Moreno, all too much like the state, devotes its attention and money to the very richest of its players, thus failing to recognize that California, like a team, can only win when the whole roster of people performs well.

Perhaps they’ll come to their sense while watching the balanced and well-managed Dodgers in the playoffs.

The post Which California Baseball Team Has the Worst Owner in Pro Sports? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This May, an email landed in my inbox. The correspondent, who’d come across my new book on the John Birch Society, wanted to share how members of this far-right anticommunist group won control of his local Parent Teacher Association when he was in kindergarten at San Rafael Elementary.

This was early 1960s Pasadena, California, during the rise of the Birchers. What happened then and there was a story unfolding in many communities around the country.

In one way, the story was similar to the pressures that schools are seeing now. In recent years, parents and activists—who, in many cases, are the ideological inheritors of the Birchers—have succeeded in getting large swathes of the country to vet what is taught and read in classrooms, to decide which students can use which bathrooms, and to determine what gender pronouns teachers can use with their students.

But there is at least one profound difference between today and the 1960s: the ferocity of response to such pressure campaigns. While today’s culture warriors often get their way in the schools, the Birchers ultimately failed to capitalize on opportunities like the one in Pasadena.

Why? The counterattacks were too strong. The so-called guardrails protecting democracy were also resilient. When the Birchers made inroads in the media, libraries, and schools more than a half-century ago, they were often stopped, and pushed to the margins. In this Pasadena case, the letter-writer told me, a grassroots effort, which included his mom (who had no apparent history of political activism before this), came together to win back control of their PTA.

His email reminded me how much of the work countering the Birchers occurred out of sight, by parents opposing what they considered an intrusion on their liberties and on their children’s access to a robust progressive education.

It’s this kind of mass mobilization and resistance that’s needed now to defend such ideals as freedom of expression, pluralism, tolerance, and multiracial democracy in America.

The Birch Society was founded in 1958 by 12 white men, mostly Christian and wealthy, including oil and gas magnate Fred Koch, and ex-candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the group’s leader.

But it only exploded into the American consciousness in 1961, when reporters and political leaders revealed to the public that Welch had formed a secret anticommunist society that saw conspiracies proliferating inside the United States. The Birch Society, which numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 members at its height in the mid-1960s, sought to impose its version of Christian morality on American public life. This included giving parents veto power over sex education, giving students easier access to approved pro-“Americanist” texts, and minimizing teachings that they considered antithetical to traditional morality and culture.

In this local work, the Birch Society, while overwhelmingly male in its national leadership, was powered by grassroots efforts by women who used their status as moms to claim a moral order and impose it on schools and communities. Their methods are reminiscent of those used by today’s Moms for Liberty.

Sometimes, the Birchers could win even by losing, inserting their issues into the public square and pushing the conversation in a direction they wished. But more often, the Birchers and their allies lost their fights to take over PTAs and school boards, and to force libraries to stock shelves with conservative tracts. These defeats were fueled by the concerted mobilization of institutions, individuals, and elected officials devoted to repelling the Birch-backed assault on progressive education.

For instance, when Birch leader Laurence Bunker won a seat as a trustee of his local library in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Bunker’s own Unitarian pastor, apparently chafing at a radical’s ascent atop the library’s administration, decided to challenge him in the next election. He ultimately assembled a coalition that unseated Bunker.

In other cases, institutions and their leaders organized the resistance. When Birchers and members of the American Legion in Paradise, California, charged that a popular government teacher Virginia Franklin had immersed her pupils in communist ideas (she exposed them to the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee), the community largely rallied behind Franklin. Her principal backed her, the school board cleared her of wrongdoing, the media painted her in a sympathetic light, and the courts later awarded her monetary damages in her lawsuit claiming defamation.

The relatively strong popular conviction that progressive education was a cornerstone of shoring up democracy also helped fend off the Birchers. This kind of education was venerated as a bulwark of democracy and individual rights against the ideas of fascism and communism. Progressive education had seemingly helped the United States survive the Great Depression and win World War II by building a corps of citizens who believed in the power of government to do good, felt devoted to their community, and contributed through military, federal, and volunteer service.

Such a broad-minded education was evinced by American philosopher John Dewey, who promoted his ideas in the early 20th century by establishing the Laboratory School in Chicago and publishing Democracy and Education. To imbue students with the values of democratic citizenship, they would be exposed to a range of ideas and perspectives, learn the importance of social equality and an informed citizenship, and explore both America’s greatest triumphs and its abject failures to live up to its ideals.

Though the Birchers never achieved the revolution in public education they hoped for, they did notch a handful of education-related wins. Notably, in 1962, they arguably secured their greatest victory when they helped elect Max Rafferty as California state superintendent of public instruction. Rafferty had drawn Birchers to his candidacy when he delivered a barnburner of a speech to the school board in the Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada, which borders Pasadena.

Titled “The Passing of the Patriot,” Rafferty’s address charged that the public schools were indoctrinating young minds in the poison of communism. The education system, he complained, was churning out a generation of “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs, whose favorite sport is ravaging little girls and stomping polio victims to death.” Rafferty’s broadsides succeeded in getting voters to turn against the ideals of progressive education in favor of a curriculum that favored pro-American tutorials where students would learn to be “militant for freedom” and “happy in their love of country.”

Such a win showed how, using the banner of parental rights, state power could be deployed to enforce a set of norms and values across public institutions.  And that same playbook—or at least something that reads like the old Birch playbook—has allowed for the rise of an Orwellian regime of bureaucratic censorship today.

But, as emails like the one sent to me this spring demonstrate, organizing, voting, and activism can counter far-right efforts to control public education at the community level.

Championing the idea of progressive education, in the Dewey tradition, is part of the ongoing work of defending democracy. Disinformation, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and economic and racial inequalities are rampant in the United States, making progressive education more relevant than ever.

It is needed, as well, to counter the declining trust in the nation’s democratic institutions and reject the growing intolerance toward people of color, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants.

This type of education can also help foster citizens who can tackle the country’s biggest problems. As one scholar put it, Dewey’s vision of a progressive education was to “produce an inquiring student who could change America.”

Though it is harder nowadays to use “sunlight” to expose the excesses of education extremists, it’s still possible to expose the radical nature of the project. If the extremism can be surfaced as an attack on the free exchange of ideas and facts, then some parents might be convinced to enter the fray to thwart the successors to the Birch movement.

The post A Mid-Century Playbook for Saving Progressive American Education appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Which region is the greater threat to humanity: Northern California or Southern California?

That’s the most urgent question raised by 2023’s great cinematic contest between Oppenheimer and Barbie.

Sure, these are entertaining films about a physicist and a doll. But both movies are also, in no small part, California-based stories about global nightmares, about the Earth-altering threat of bombs and bombshells alike.

Embedded in those nightmares are warnings about the damage that Northern and Southern California can do when we send our ideas out into the world.

Oppenheimer is the Northern California nightmare. While much of Christopher Nolan’s film takes place in New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were built, the most important moments occur at Berkeley, where J. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor from 1929 to 1943.

It’s there that he meets the Manhattan Project’s military chief, Leslie Groves, and befriends the physicist Ernest Lawrence (the Lawrence of the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab), who becomes a crucial collaborator in the Manhattan Project. In fact, the lab in New Mexico that produced the nuclear bombs ended up being managed by the University of California.

The whole endeavor is a quintessential Bay Area enterprise. Very smart people from around the world come together to rapidly create a disruptive technology, without fully appreciating its perils and complications until it’s too late. Oppenheimer has prompted comparisons to how Silicon Valley is now making available artificial intelligence tools available without understanding their consequences.

Among the nuclear age’s cultural and commercial products was Barbie (born in 1959). She, and the new film about her, are Los Angeles nightmares.

The director, Greta Gerwig, is a Sacramento kid who shares her home city’s loathing of all things L.A. So, her film pins most of the damage that Barbie has done on Southern California, where she was invented and manufactured.

Barbie, like Los Angeles itself, is a sun-splashed comedy with a dark noir heart. The central joke of the film is that when Barbie, in unexpected existential crisis, leaves the seeming perfection of Barbieland for “Reality,” it turns out to be L.A. Amid the city’s most unreal Westside precincts (especially Venice), Barbie learns of the impossible expectations her example places on women.

Barbie’s would-be boyfriend Ken, who is confined to hanging around the beach in Barbieland, discovers the possibilities of patriarchy after he falls in love with the phallic glass office towers of Century City. And when Ken takes those supposed Southern California values back to Barbieland, that utopia of feminism (with a set design that resembles Palm Springs) collapses. Soon, the various Ken dolls have imposed a bizarro dictatorship of men, who subjugate the various Barbies, who’d previously served as president and controlled the Supreme Court.

It might be wrong to think too hard about a movie as addled and antic as Barbie, but the film does reflect the Hollywood work realities of the women who made the movie. Gerwig, star-producer Margot Robbie, and their colleagues have had to navigate an entertainment industry dominated by dim-witted Kens. (The rest of L.A., thank goodness, is a bit more egalitarian, as Mayor Karen Bass and the all-female Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors can tell you.)

Both films, however, feel more than a little soulless. Barbie, for all its righteous feminism, is a corporate vehicle for selling dolls. It misses opportunities to make light of the cynicism of this American moment, when corporations try to talk like social movements, and social movements often behave like corporations. The anxieties of Barbie are firmly upper-middle-class and higher; none of the women or men of the film worry about what worries most Angelenos—scratching out a living in a too-expensive place.

Oppenheimer is even more callous. It’s a film about nuclear weapons that doesn’t show their victims. We never see the human horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is why the film can’t get screened in Japan), or the damage people endured because of their proximity to the testing of such weapons, from the South Pacific to Central Asia.

This distance from real-life human concerns is what makes both films so unsettling—and so convincing as apocalyptic documents.

Together, they offer a two-part scenario for the end of humanity. First, we grow divided and isolated from each other because of the unattainable lifestyles and cultural expectations that Southern California creates and promotes. Second, we kill ourselves with the technologies masterminded by Northern California.

The post Will SoCal’s Barbie Doll or NorCal’s Bobby Oppenheimer Destroy the World First? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Improbably, the best monument to the old General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys, California, sits in a garage in Jamestown, North Dakota—the final car produced at the facility that in its 44 years of operation manufactured 6.3 million automobiles and employed thousands in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley.

The red 1992 Chevrolet Camaro Z-28 with Heritage black racing stripes is owned by an enthusiast named Leonard Stevenson, who’s lovingly maintained it ever since he watched it roll off the production line on August 27, 1992. Three decades later, his “Last Camaro” is a symbol to a vanished era of labor and a tribute to a way of life in the mid-20th century San Fernando Valley—somewhat suburban and temperamentally apart from the rest of Los Angeles County—that has all but disappeared.

When the GM plant opened in 1947, the Valley was experiencing a period of rapid expansion—transforming from an agricultural outskirt of Los Angeles into a thrumming hub of industry to meet the ambitions of post-war America. High-paying union manufacturing and production jobs from GM and other companies, coupled with the cheap cost of land for housing and the opening of a major transportation artery—the Ventura Freeway—in 1960, put the peripheral L.A. suburb on the map.

The blue-collar boom went bust starting in the early ’80s. Los Angeles continued expanding and the cost of living rose. At the GM plant, there were years of layoffs and temporary closures, leading to picketing from workers of United Autoworkers Local 645. Finally, in 1989, GM announced plans to relocate Camaro and Firebird production to a new facility in Québec. Employees hoped the company would keep the Van Nuys plant operating; it still produced 406 cars per day, the equivalent of nearly one every minute. But by 1992, GM was no longer willing to bear the cost of assembling cars—any cars—in Southern California, and union power was on the wane, nationwide. Time had run out for UAW Local 645. Some 2,600 workers were employed at the Van Nuys plant when it shuttered.

Leonard Stevenson read the news of the plant closure in the trade magazines, sitting at his home some 1,700 miles away in Ankeny, Iowa. He’d already owned two vintage Camaros—a 1969 Z-28 and a 1991 model that he wrecked in a highway collision with a deer. He decided he’d buy the last car produced at Van Nuys as it rolled off the assembly line.

It was an outlandish idea, but Stevenson knew it was possible: In 1987, another GM customer had been allowed to walk the assembly line at the shuttering Pontiac, Michigan plant, and to purchase the last Buick Grand National. Stevenson launched a charm offensive, writing GM executives and asking, over a period of months, if he could have the Camaro. The car company eventually bit. Possibly its public relations team saw an opportunity, with Stevenson, to deflect attention from the closure and the thousands of layoffs.

At 5:30 a.m. on August 26, 1992, a plant executive greeted Stevenson in Van Nuys and marched him through the vast facility, following the assembly line until they reached the final car—the Z-28, its body already coated in a cherry-glossed red.

Unsurprisingly, the general mood at the plant that day was sour: the average length of service for Van Nuys Plant employees was 20 years and the average wage was $17 an hour—about $35 an hour in 2022 dollars. Now, it was all being ripped away. Some workers donned protest T-shirts—“GM Sucks,” “UAW Local 645– ‘Unemployed’ Auto Workers”—as they stood witness to the end of an era. “What is the American Dream now? Now they’re moving on and leaving everybody in the dust,” Ed Johnsen, a 16-year employee of the plant, told a reporter. He had met his wife, Patti, on the job.

Stevenson’s visit offered the workers a small ray of light. The PR plan had been for him to walk the assembly line to watch the car get built, snap some photos, and head back to Iowa: a feel-good story about a car collector taking home a newly prized possession. But then something unexpected happened. Stevenson watched as first one worker on the assembly line, and then another, and then another, put their signature on the component they installed on the Camaro. They all wanted their names on the last car they’d ever build.

The executives asked Stevenson if he wanted them to stop. But Stevenson said he was fine with it as long as the signatures remained on the inside of the car, so they were not visible from the exterior.

August, 1992: GM workers in Van Nuys, California send their plant’s last car—a cherry red Camaro—off in style. The car’s owner, Leonard Stevenson, is at right. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

More than 2,000 people signed the 1992 Chevrolet Camaro Z-28. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

Everyone wanted a final goodbye with the car before it left the lot. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

Autoworkers at the plant showed Stevenson how they did their work. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

The average length of service for Van Nuys Plant employees was 20 years and the average wage was $17 an hour—about $35 an hour in 2022 dollars. Courtesy of Leonard Stevenson.

And as the workers wrapped up, they also shared some of their knowledge with Stevenson. When it came time to install the car’s dashboard, technicians detailed precisely how they did it, showing Stevenson the computers that they used to confirm cars were built to specification. One worker even took off his Camaro belt buckle and handed it to Stevenson.

After the workers down the line signed the car, they turned in their badges and clocked out for the final time.

That evening, word spread about signing the car, and by the time Stevenson returned the following morning for the completion of assembly, he was greeted by many autoworkers who had previously turned in their badges. They’d all rushed back onto the floor to get a chance to put their own mark on the car. The drive shaft, the door panels, the transmission, the rear axle—all of it was signed. Painters left their marks, too, under the seat in silver paint, sealed in clear coat.

Overall, Stevenson estimates that more than 2,000 people signed his Camaro. In the weeks that followed, others sent him newspaper articles about the plant closure, and photographs of his visit. They wanted the last car to be a memento of what that plant had meant to them and their community.

The auto industry’s demise marked the beginning of the end of the Valley as a labor town. Automotive plants in L.A. suburbs of Pico Rivera, South Gate, and Commerce had all closed within the prior two decades; the Van Nuys Plant was the last facility standing.

Today, the Valley retains its outsider L.A. status in personality, but with the exception of the film and television industry, the working-class prosperity offered by those union jobs has vanished—as it has nationwide. As of 2022, the median home price in the San Fernando Valley sat at a whopping $901,500, out of reach for blue-collar workers.

When you talk to Stevenson about his trip to Van Nuys, it’s obvious how much the experience defined him. Over the years, he has reconnected with some of the autoworkers who made (and signed) his ’92 Camaro, and with the children of those autoworkers. “It’s brought me close to so many different people for different reasons,” he says.

To this day, former Van Nuys plant workers, who now live all over the country, have maintained communication via a 500-plus member Facebook group. They share former coworkers’ obituaries, and try to shore up missing connections, attending occasional in-person reunions and distributing commemorative T-shirts to keep the kinship and solidarity of their time at the plant alive.

The Last Camaro’s license plate is inscribed in their honor: 4UAW645—For United Auto Workers Local 645.

The post The Valley’s Last Camaro appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 1979, the year of Three Mile Island, I exposed another nuclear accident—another partial meltdown—in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It occurred at the Santa Susana Field Lab, a reactor and rocket-testing facility in the mountains between the San Fernando and Simi Valleys.

Back then, the story was both news and history. The Field Lab opened in 1947, at the onset of the Cold War, and the reactor accident happened in 1959. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and a nuclear contractor kept it secret for 20 years, but there was no denying the evidence we revealed on local TV, discovered in AEC archives by the watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap.

Today, that accident is still news, as Gov. Gavin Newsom appears to be backing away from enforcing a cleanup of nuclear contamination that remains on the site. Sixty-three years since the accident, Santa Susana should remind us of the perils not only of nuclear materials but also of our short memories. This story’s hardest lesson is that when dangerous secrets get buried you often have to keep excavating them, over and over.

In 1979, we showed pictures of broken fuel rods on the bottom of the reactor core.  Documents reported that the heat measured 1465 degrees Fahrenheit and was thought to be even higher. Splitting uranium atoms had melted both the fuel and the metal cladding, and highly radioactive gases were being released. It was an accident that wasn’t supposed to happen, and it continued for 10 days until engineers finally shut the reactor down. New equipment, including special cameras had to be developed to remove the melted fuel, and the video has been used to train nuclear plant operators for the future.

But, despite our revelations, the secrecy and denial continued. I was allowed onto the site and given a tour of the reactor building, which was being torn down. But when I asked about radioactive emissions, an executive for the Rocketdyne subsidiary Atomics International told me, on camera: “The potential hazard of major release into the environment was just not there.”

That was a flat out lie.

The Field Lab’s experimental reactor had no containment structure like the big domes at Three Mile Island. While it was out of control, radiation levels went off the scale and doors had to be opened for worker protection. Clouds of highly radioactive gases and particulates were released.

There were also three other accidents at the Field Lab’s 10 nuclear reactors. In addition, the Field Lab conducted some 30,000 tests of rockets for NASA and for military ballistic missiles before it closed down in 2006. Throughout the period, operators illegally burned radioactive waste and toxic rocket-fuel in open-air pits.

Over the years, residential development moved closer to the Field Lab, but no one ever told the public about the release of radioactive contamination which would remain dangerous for thousands of years. In 1989, a local newspaper reported on secret government studies showing extensive contamination at the site. That drew attention from unsuspecting homeowners, and a community group called the Rocketdyne Cleanup Coalition sprang up to oppose re-licensing of site facilities. Nuclear operations at Santa Susana finally halted in 1990.

But there was still no cleanup—even after UCLA’s School of Public Health, in 1997, found increased death rates of Field Lab workers due to radiosensitive cancers. Federally funded studies in 2006 and 2007 showed migration of contaminants into surrounding neighborhoods and an elevated incidence of key cancers in the community.

In 2007 and 2010, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office of Environmental Protection (CalEPA) negotiated agreements with NASA, the Department of Energy, and Boeing (which had bought Rocketdyne and inherited its liabilities) to conduct a full cleanup. The deadline for completion was 2017, during Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration. But there was still no cleanup, and remediation still hasn’t started—even though the federal Environmental Protection Agency reported widespread nuclear contamination in 2012.

Today, despite the agreements they entered into, NASA, the DOE, and Boeing have failed to carry them out, contending there’s little danger and claiming that full cleanup is too complex and expensive. But community outrage is building.

In 2014 four-year-old Grace Bumstead of West Hills, a neighborhood close to the Field Lab, developed a rare and aggressive form of leukemia. At Children’s Hospital, her mother, Melissa, met other parents whose children had rare cancers, too. Some of their kids died; the survivors will have health problems for the rest of their lives.

When the parents compared notes, it turned out that several of the pediatric cancer patients lived in the vicinity of the Field Lab, and since then more cases have emerged in the area. There are 14 with brain cancer in Simi Valley alone. Melissa Bumstead told me: “We kept meeting other families who lived near us and because childhood cancers are so incredibly rare, statistically, that’s not supposed to happen… so we started to wonder if there could be an environmental connection. That was actually the first time that I had heard of the Santa Susana Field Lab.”

How solid is the connection? Of course, it can’t be proven that a particular cancer came from the Field Lab, but the cancer-causing radioactivity and toxic chemicals that will continue to migrate off site are clearly a risk until it’s finally cleaned up.

Dan Hirsch heads the Committee to Bridge the Gap, which found the evidence of the meltdown in 1979.  Now retired as director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz, he is co-chair of the Santa Susana Field Lab Oversight Panel established by the state Legislature. He dug into risk assessments at the site submitted to the state by Boeing, which is now lobbying for a more limited cleanup than required by the agreements it signed on to.

Buried deep in more than 1000 pages, are estimates of contamination that L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl found “very disturbing.” She wrote to the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), citing Boeing’s own estimate that, “The risk after such proposed minimal cleanup would remain so high that every fifth person would most likely get cancer from the remaining contamination.” Kuehl calls that “mind-boggling” when “site cleanups generally aim for one in a million.” She concedes that no one would be living on the site but, “Our constituents live nearby where they can also be exposed.”

When Grace Bumstead developed leukemia a second time in 2017, she required a bone marrow transplant. Her mother Melissa organized Parents Against the Santa Susana Field Lab, started circulating a petition demanding enforcement of the cleanup agreement, and began tirelessly lobbying agencies at the local, state and federal levels.

In 2018, there was a new motivator of public outrage: the massive Woolsey Fire, which started 1000 yards from where the Field Lab reactor suffered the partial meltdown and which spread over 96,000 acres. The state agency responsible for enforcing the cleanup agreement, CalEPA’s DTSC, at first denied that the fire spread any nuclear fallout. But peer-reviewed scientific data later revealed that houses in Thousand Oaks and other cities were dusted by the Field Lab’s radioactive contamination in the smoke of the Woolsey Fire.

By 2020, Bumstead’s effort seemed to be bearing fruit. Jared Blumenfeld, Newsom’s CalEPA Secretary, talked tough in a speech to the Santa Susana Work Group, created in 1990 for state agencies to report to the public about the Field Lab. Blumenfeld deplored the delay in enforcing the cleanup, said Governor Newsom was “focused on action,” and that the DTSC would not give an inch when it came to holding polluters responsible for making things right. “Our job is to regulate, not to negotiate,” he said.

So what happened next?  Last year, DTSC did almost the exact opposite, making an explicit “offer to enter into nonbinding confidential mediation with Boeing” [italics mine]. The mayors of four cities, supervisors from both Los Angeles and Ventura counties, four members of Congress and U.S. Senator Alex Padilla have all since written to CalEPA Secretary Blumenfeld, advocating vigorous enforcement of the cleanup and asking why it’s still being delayed.

Why, when so many secrets have spilled out since 1979, when health risks appear so obvious—when Blumenfeld has spoken so strongly—would his DTSC defy its own legal enforcement obligations?

Blumenfeld has not returned calls from reporters. Hirsch chalks it up to “regulatory capture,” a situation that’s all too common, when agencies advance the interests of commercial enterprises instead of regulating them in the public’s interest.

More than 700,000 people now live within 10 miles of the Lab. This year Gov. Newsom will be up for re-election. Will his administration renew the commitment to enforce the cleanup? Or, will there be a deal that lets Boeing, NASA and DOE walk away from what Blumenfeld called their “legally binding” agreements to remove a continuing threat to public health and safety?

In the meantime, around Santa Susana, the pollution remains, and the human suffering continues. MSNBC recently aired In the Dark of the Valley, an extensive documentary about the Field Lab accident and the consequences for the Bumsteads and other families. Ever since, Bumstead says she’s been “flooded with messages about whole families who had cancer growing up here, and they thought it was just their family.”

Her petition has gone nationwide, and the number of signatures is now more than 750,000.

The post Why Is the Santa Susana Nuclear Accident Still Being Covered Up? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“You’re lucky to have freeways—when I was a kid, we didn’t have freeways,” she used to say.

But that didn’t stop my brother and me from whining about congestion on the 10 during long drives to see her relatives in Redlands. She’d respond to our complaints with the Southern California version of “when I was your age, I had to walk six miles through the snow.”

“I grew up in Hawthorne,” a working-class town near LAX, she’d remind us, “and when we went to Redlands, we had to go via Imperial Highway and other surface streets.” In her telling, the trip took three hours.

Mom is 75 now, and her memory isn’t great. But I’ve never forgotten her story, and for years I’ve wondered what such a trip would be like. So, with her encouragement—she’s a retired newspaper editor who taught me the old journalists’ adage, “if your mother says she loves you, check it out”—I decided to do the reporting. I would drive from Hawthorne to the Inland Empire city of Redlands without getting on a freeway.

The drive would trigger memories, inspire emotions, and serve as a reminder how, when you’re traveling in California, time can slow down even as it hurtles ahead.

I start near Imperial Highway’s western end in El Segundo, from the former site of the North American Aviation plant where Grandma Edith, my mom’s mom, once worked the assembly line. From that spot, I see the office building that is now home to the L.A. Times, the paper my mom and I both worked for when it was headquartered in downtown L.A. From El Segundo, the highway proceeds underneath the 105 Freeway, which effectively replaced Imperial as an east-west thoroughfare when it opened in 1993.

Imperial Highway—really a collection of four- and six-lane county roads and state highways, with stoplights—was first conceived of a century ago by agricultural and business interests who wanted to connect L.A. with farms around Brawley, 220 miles southeast in Imperial County.

But building infrastructure was never easy in this state of too-many local jurisdictions; construction on the highway got started in 1931 but wasn’t finished until 1961. The Imperial Highway my mom and her parents relied on in the 1950s and ’60s slowly became obsolete as long stretches of the highway were replaced or subsumed by other freeways and highways. Today, Imperial Highway doesn’t come within 100 miles of Imperial County; its eastern end is at the border of Anaheim and the city of Orange.

Heading east from El Segundo on Imperial, I stop immediately in Hawthorne, at a small apartment building that occupies the lot where my mom grew up. I also swing by the monument to the Beach Boys, whom my mom knew at Hawthorne High School. From Hawthorne, Imperial passes briefly through Inglewood and then makes its way through South Los Angeles, the section of Southern California that has changed the most, and most consistently drawn my attention, throughout my career.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

To drive Imperial Highway today is to see Southern California as an unhealthy empire, at war with itself. There are more check cashing places than banks, and more liquor stores, fast-food restaurants, donut shops, and smoke shops than I can count, most in small strip malls with names like “Imperial Plaza.” Their sun-splashed marquees mix with newer health clinics and gleaming schools—public, charter, private, and religious—often fenced off.

This streetscape reflects dueling impulses. Will health care and education save us before we eat and drink ourselves to death?

Just as in the rest of California, there is not enough new housing here. Homes along Imperial are often stucco and mid-century, their ugliness hidden behind uglier walls that block the traffic noise. The two public housing projects I pass—Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts—are in better shape than the apartments and motels around them.

East of South L.A., after grabbing a burrito at Plaza de Mexico mall in Lynwood, I can’t help but stop when I see the street sign for Gary Beverly Court outside of an empty Lynwood High School building. The high school has moved, but the street sign remains, in honor of a beloved principal who was shot to death on his drive home 20 years ago. I covered the case, which remains haunting and unsolved.

With a multi-car accident blocking Imperial ahead, I take a mile-long detour south into Compton, which allows me to visit the tombs of my great-grandparents. When I return to the road, I head through South Gate, and battle traffic. The retail shops become more frequent and more middlebrow in Downey. There, a sign points me in the direction of the museum memorializing the Columbia Space Shuttle, which my grandmother helped assemble later in her aerospace career.

Traffic is slow in Norwalk, with county government buildings and churches that have taken over old hotels, auditoriums, and restaurants. The drivers go so fast in Santa Fe Springs and La Mirada, the last two L.A. County cities Imperial runs through, that I move over to the slower right-hand lane.

Forty-one miles in, when I cross into Orange County in La Habra, Imperial looks more prosperous. There are a couple of tech firm offices, as well as high-end retailers, gyms and yoga studios full of pretty people, and an Amazon Fresh. I push through Brea into Yorba Linda for a bit, and see a few horse trails, along with signs for the Nixon library, devoted to the only California-born president, a kid from Whittier who weirdly embodied the promise and paranoia of his home state.

My total drive time, not counting stops, has reached two hours. And Imperial Highway would only get me halfway to Redlands, in the northeast corner of the L.A. basin that is part of San Bernardino County.

So, I turn north and head through Brea Canyon on a dusty, traffic-crammed road paralleling the 57 Freeway. Upon reaching the San Gabriel Valley, I take surface streets in a northeast direction through Diamond Bar, Pomona, and Claremont—passing a familiar mix of fast-food joints and donuts and schools.

Without a map, I drive in search of Base Line, where I’ll turn eastward. It’s the road my mom remembers most from those long-ago drives.

It also was once among the most important routes in all of California.

Indeed, Base Line is older than almost everything now standing in the Los Angeles basin. In the 1850s, U.S. government surveyors, charged with establishing an “initial point” for Southern California surveys (they chose Mt. San Bernardino), established a north-south meridian line and an east-west baseline to guide future surveys.

That baseline became Baseline, which today goes by various names—Base Line or Baseline, Baseline Avenue or Baseline Street, or, in Upland, 16^th Street. At the point beyond Claremont where I reach Baseline, I find a dustier, less dense version of Imperial Highway, with three lanes and too many liquor stores, but with more parks and trees and vacant lots. Just as the 105 Freeway shadows Imperial, the 210 tracks the Baseline corridor it replaced over the past two generations.

The housing is newer here—my mom recalls the Base Line as a strip of development and services, running largely through groves and farms. But the buildings seem sun-bleached and in need of repair—a reminder that California’s housing stock is older than that of the Rust Belt states.

I head through Upland, with ranch houses and a few parks, and then into Rancho Cucamonga, which seems to have an abundance of dental practices along Baseline. “Why all the dentists?” I ask myself, before answering my own question: it’s all the donut shops!

I am through Etiwanda and into Fontana before I spot new housing construction, a development calling itself “The Encore at Providence,” which sounds like the last song before the show ends and you get your audience with God.

But then in Rialto, Baseline becomes a divide. On the south side are homes, protected by sound walls. On the north side are warehouses. These facilities grow more massive as I move further east; the “Now Hiring” signs on their walls also get bigger as I head deeper into the Inland Empire, now an American center for logistics.

Sidewalks are replaced by dust, and the landscape gets browner, except for the brilliant green colors of Eisenhower High School. I feel like I’m in the country, with things spread out—until I cross the 215 and enter the west side of San Bernardino.

To this point, the roads have been relatively smooth, but San Bernardino is a poor city, even after emerging from one of America’s worst municipal bankruptcies in 2017. Baseline here is full of ruts and potholes, and my Prius bounces up and down. Many of the storefronts are empty. Even in the Inland Empire, one of California’s fastest-growing areas, San Bernardino seems stagnant; it’s been eclipsed by its inland urban rival, Riverside, which has grown faster and richer since the 1980s.

I’ve been driving for more than three hours, and I’m getting close to my destination. I head through the city of Highland, home of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, who sponsor the new event space back in L.A. that the media nonprofit for which I now work helps program. I drive a few miles past their newly renamed casino and I’m in East Highlands, where my grandmother, great-grandmother and other relatives worked in the orange groves and packing houses after arriving from Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl.

Courtesy of Joe Mathews.

The packing company provided a small green house for the family to live in here in East Highlands; that’s where my mom was heading from Hawthorne six decades ago. That green house, in a line of houses once known as the Green Row, is long gone, but I find the spot, on a hillside in a planned community.

Baseline dead-ends at an orange grove, which provides a bit of agricultural respite, and beauty, between the development and a dry hillside crisscrossed with hiking trails. Many of the oranges lay unpicked, rotting on the ground.

My great aunt and uncle, Fern and Don, remain in Redlands, near the 800-square-foot house my great-grandparents saved up to buy and which we would visit on those traffic-choked drives on the 10. I turn south, taking Orange Street through the Redlands downtown and up to the retirement community where Fern and Don now live.

More than eight hours have passed since I started. My total drive time, excluding stops, has been more than four hours. But the journey has felt even longer, with time moving in reverse as I retrace my mom’s family drives from six decades ago, and follow thoroughfares that date to the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries.

After navigating the community’s COVID checks, I knock on my aunt and uncle’s door. I hug Fern, and spend a half hour arguing good-naturedly with Don about what he’s watching on Fox News. But I am eager to get home, without delay.

In less than five minutes of driving, I’m on the 10, heading west toward L.A. This drive will take me only 90 minutes, because of some traffic around West Covina. The route is not particularly scenic. But as I drive home, I suddenly feel fresher and renewed—with new memories of Southern California surface streets, and with my mother’s enduring gratitude for our freeways.

The post Why I Drove 80 Miles Across Southern California on Surface Streets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.