THE SANDLOT GAMES OF AUGUST
By Bob Vickrey
Many years ago, and far away from the bright lights of packed football stadiums filled with cheering fans, there was another annual ritual playing out more quietly on sandlots in just about every Texas town across the state.
Thousands of boys like me, who had never played varsity football, gathered for our own version of the game on deserted and dusty schoolyard fields.
Houston’s scorching, humid summer months were hardly a deterrent for the boys of our town to assemble in the late afternoons and engage in competitive games of touch football. By early August there was already a sense of anticipation in the air about the upcoming fall football season, and many of us gathered as if we were training for the first game—even though few of us were actually members of any organized team. Read more
Law helps freelancers collect from deadbeats
BY MARY REINHOLZ
Another version of this article first appeared in The Villager, a downtown Manhattan weekly.
The Freelance Isn’t Free Act was implemented last year in New York City to benefit an estimated 500,000 vulnerable temporary or part-time employees in a variety of occupations from creatives to construction workers. Here’s hoping similar bills show up in other major cities where so-called “gig workers” congregate.
This transplanted California scribe remembers the way it was for independent contractors in downtown Manhattan when I frantically hustled assignments to stay afloat during the dark days right after 9/11, acting as a stringer for The New York Times and a couple of other daily newspapers.
My full-time writing / editing job at Graphic Arts Monthly had been abruptly eliminated during a company-wide downsizing by its corporate parent, Reed Business Information. During sparse work periods as a freelancer, I subsisted on a lot of cheap noodle dishes and paced the aisles of Jack’s 99¢ Stores for bargains. Con Edison once turned off my electricity because of late payment from an upscale magazine. Read more
Better Days: Journalist Lionel Rolfe Learns Old Age Isn’t for Sissies
Lionel Rolfe
Mary Reinholz
Pasadena Weekly, May 24, 2018
[Veteran journalist, author, and founder of Boryanabooks Lionel Rolfe was hospitalized in April with a spinal injury that had become infected that would not allow him to stand or walk. He has spent most of the time since in a nursing home, where he remains as of July 1.]
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One-time roving Los Angeles journalist, raconteur, author, news service reporter and occasional Pasadena Weekly contributor Lionel Rolfe is confined to a bed at a nursing center in Glendale, unable to stand and go to the bathroom without assistance.
The 75-year-old Rolfe was first transported by ambulance to Glendale Memorial Hospital last month and given morphine to relieve excruciating pain involving two fractured vertebrae that resulted from a 2017 fall in the kitchen of his Atwater Village apartment. This is the second time within a year that Rolfe has been forced to leave his home for emergency medical care after his back “stopped working,” he said.
“Basically, I’m strapped to the bed, and being given antibiotics,” Rolfe continued in a telephone conversation with this reporter whom he met while freelancing during the late 1960s at the Los Angeles Free Press and the Los Angeles Times. “They got me to stand up today, but it was very hard.” Read more
IS AMAZON BOOKSTORE THE NEW RETAIL MODEL?
By BOB VICKREY
Now let me get this straight; the corporate giant that virtually transformed modern bookselling into an online industry and drove hundreds of independent bookstores out of business—including our own Village Books—is now opening its own bookstore in the new Pacific Palisades Village?
The irony of this recent announcement is hardly laced with any subtlety. Amazon owner and founder Jeff Bezos once suggested that brick-and-mortar bookstores were practically passé now that customers could find any book they wanted online with a simple click of a button. And as we know, he turned out to be absolutely correct. His company essentially now owns a substantial segment of the retail book business. Read more
Dunga Brook Diary: Water Water Everywhere
Vicki Whicker
My new neighbor, Jim, seems to be a polarizing figure.
His house doesn’t have water because my house doesn’t have water, because the farmer who owns all the land surrounding our houses cut off my water…because he doesn’t like Jim.
No water.
There once was water…from a sweet, cold spring.
It flowed through a series of pipes across a field (now owned by Jim-hating farmer), across Dunga Brook (bubbling water), and into a holding tank in the basement of my (new, old) house. From there, it was piped through a few acres and into Jim’s house and the barn.
It is a mighty spring, with enough volume to quench the thirst of what was a 1,200-acre dairy farm. The water was shared like this because both of our houses used to be the homesteads of that dairy farm. Read more
LA City and County Celebrate First Successes in Reducing Homelessness
Leslie Evans
About 100 people attended a May 31 invitation-only event outside the PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) offices at 340 N. Madison Avenue where the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority released the results of its 2018 Los Angeles homeless count. Some 8,500 volunteers over three days in January covered every census tract in the county. The results, along with thousands of interviews with homeless people, have been under analysis by statisticians at USC.
For the first time in four years the numbers went down instead of up. The gains were modest – 3% fewer homeless in the county, 5% fewer in the city – but at least the motion was in the right direction.
By now everyone has seen the gross numbers. For the county, the homeless are down from 55,048 in January 2017 to 53,195 in January 2018; for the city, it was a little better, dropping from 38,138 to 31,516. We will dig into the details further on. Read more
ELUDING MY NEMESIS: JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
Authors John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
By BOB VICKREY
Upon entering the Presidential Suite of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was immediately struck by the imposing figure of famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith engaged in conversation with renowned historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Galbraith’s towering presence at six-feet-nine made me momentarily forget that this man of 90 plus-years was still making the rounds at publishing events. It was almost twenty years ago when he was the guest speaker at Houghton Mifflin’s national sales conference meeting.
During his long, illustrious career, many of his books had been published by our company and that evening’s cocktail party held in his honor afforded us an opportunity to meet the former Ambassador to India and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Read more
ROBERT F. KENNEDY’S ASSASSINATION: THE MORNING AFTER
By Bob Vickrey
For many of us of a certain age, the year 1968 was a year like no other.
The Vietnam War had quickly escalated after the January “Tet Offensive” by the North Vietnamese army, and at one point that year, more than 500 American soldiers were losing their lives each week in a war that had already been deemed by many Pentagon officials as “unwinnable.”
Back home, college students were staging protests against the war on campuses all across the country. Civil unrest in our cities had often turned confrontational and violent.
Civil Rights demonstrations were being met with police resistance, as they resorted to fire hoses and batons in their attempt to quell protesters. Read more
Tom Brokaw hit on #MeToo when I was a young reporter
Mary Reinholz
First published May 1, 2018, in The Villager, A Manhattan weekly.
Tom Brokaw
[The writer says when she was a reporter in Los Angeles, Tom Brokaw — after helping her get a police report for a story she was doing for the L.A. Free Press — made a sudden unwanted sexual advance: He tried to put the moves on her, abruptly embracing and French kissing her, she said.]
A recent e-mail from the Newswomen’s Club of New York reminded me that I had been confirmed to attend an April 5 panel discussion called “#MeToo for Journalists: Where have we come from and where are we going?” at The New York Times’ skyscraper, that glassy and classy 52-story edifice at Eighth Ave. and 40th St. Read more
Dunga Brook Diary: BINGO
Vicki Whicker
May, 2011
After a sparse farm to table dinner, and after a mean (Jim=ruthless) game of BOGGLE, in the semi-dark of his “rustic” farmhouse (because, no electricity/no running water), right before I’m to trudge up the dark and dusty stairs for an unsteady sleep on an unstable old bed, Jim nonchalantly says, “I’m leaving at four a.m. for The City, can you feed Ichabod, tomorrow?”
Did he say leaving? At four a.m.? He’s leaving? For The City? This house has no locks, is missing windows, and he’s leaving at four a.m.? For NYC? That means I’m going to be asleep, no, scratch that, lying awake in the dark for at least two more hours before sunrise…ALONE. And then, if I’m not murdered, I have to go to that barn? For three feedings? Holy F! I can hardly say no, right? I can’t be responsible for the death of a baby goat, can I?
“Sure, no problem.” I hear myself saying. “But I’m staying at a BNB tomorrow night, so…I won’t be around to take care of Ichabod after that…I’m catching my flight back to L.A.” Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
