THE JEWISH CITIZEN

Pulling up the sticky vestiges of the past

By Donald H. Harrison

LOS ANGELES—In the atrium of the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries, there is a plaque in appreciation of former Los Angeles County Supervisor Edward Edelman's role as a champion of museums throughout Los Angeles County. These not only include the Page Museum and its neighbor in Hancock Park, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but also the Hollywood Bowl museum that is named in his honor.

I thought it ironic that a museum dedicated to the ice age flora and fauna
Donald H. Harrison

sucked into the asphalt that still bubbles from the La Brea Tar Pits today also disgorged from my memory the story of my introduction to the interrelated worlds of journalism and politics. I was a reporter and editor on the UCLA Daily Bruin in the 1960s, and like many of my fellow students, I commuted each day from home. There were on-campus parking lots, but they lacked sufficient space to accommodate the automobiles of all the students. Having few options, the students often parked their cars in the tony Westwood neighborhoods near UCLA, including H/solmby Hills, then as now an exclusive neighborhood.

In reaction, the residents lobbied their representative on the Los Angeles City Council, Rosalind Wyman, the wife of the Democratic party Eugene Wyman. She helped them get the city's parking enforcement department to post their streets with "no parking" signs. The students who could not find on-campus parking were caught in a vise. Efforts by the student body president Jeff Donfeld to get Wyman and the residents to relent were unavailing. Then came the intervention of the Bruin Young Democrats, led by Howard Berman and Henry Waxman, who today are both ranking members of the U.S. Congress.

They got behind the upstart city council candidacy of Ed Edelman, who lent a sympathetic ear to the student complaints. A campaign to persuade students who lived in dormitories, fraternity and sorority houses, and nearby apartments to "register on campus" was conducted. "Dump Roz," was the rallying cry, which we on the Daily Bruin strongly endorsed. I can't claim that we were the only reason that Edelman upset Wyman, but our effort contributed to the launching of his more than 30 years in public office, first on the Los Angeles City Council and later on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Seeing the plaque in this Jewish public servant's honor gave an inter-religious feeling to the Page Museum, which is named in honor of a donor who made his fortune packaging dried California fruits under the brand name of Mission Pak, a name inspired by the California missions.

Nancy and I visited the Page Museum with our 6-year-old grandson, Shor, who found learning about the ice age in California an enjoyable activity. One of the exhibits has a number of poles which can be pulled out of simulated muck only with considerable effort. The exhibit gives children a feeling for how difficult it might be to extract oneself out of the asphalt should one fall in. I later explained to Shor that for the animals it would have been even harder as they themselves were in the tar, not on the side of the pit trying to pull some other animal out.

A movie at the museum dispels two common misconceptions. The first was that the asphalt worked like quicksand, sucking the animals into its deep. In fact, all it did was glue the animals in place where, unable to eat or drink, they died. Sometimes as they moaned and howled in distress, they attracted predators who jumped on their backs and feasted on them. As often as not, those animals soon found themselves in the same predicament as their prey. The flesh eventually rotted away from the dead animals, and their skeletons toppled into the asphalt, those of predator and prey being mixed in an eternal death embrace.

The second misconception is that the animal known to scientists as a smilodon--a name that makes me grin obediently—is called a "saber tooth tiger." In fact, it is more properly known as a "saber tooth cat."

STATES OF DRESS—The reconstructed skeleton of a Columbian mammoth and a life-size
and befurred American mastadon are among exhibits at the Page Museum

The museum includes the reassembled bones of composite ice-age creatures—the scientists really don't know in a tangle of skeletal remains which femur belonged to which animal—and to make it all more realistic for visitors, there are reconstructions of animals as they might have appeared with fur. One dramatic exhibit is a saber-tooth cat on the back of a ground sloth. In the background, there is an artists' conception of some of the other animals who might have had ringside seats to the death struggle.

There also is a "fishbowl paleontological laboratory" where visitors during the summer months can see scientists at work classifying the bones. If you follow the pawprints of a saber tooth tiger imprinted onto a walkway you will come to Pit #91, where volunteers extract bones from the asphalt following all the meticulous procedures demanded by archaeology. Robert Spellman, the guide who took us around, also volunteers at an astronomical observatory. A man who likes to look up and down, he says such activities "are all part of the same thing."

That his speculation. My own speculation is about how the small decisions we make that can have large consequences. Had Roz Wyman heeded the distress of the students at UCLA, perhaps Edelman never would have been elected. And then, who would have been the champion of Los Angeles County Museums? Would such treasures as those offered to the public by the museums at Hancock Park even be here, or would they have become enmired and eventually extinguished in the asphalt of indifference?

Harrison is editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World







Those Jews and their Christmas songs

By Bruce Kesler

SAN DIEGO--Last December I wrote “Why Chanukah and Christmas Go Together.”
The triumph of the spiritual over defilers, the centrality of morality over the lures of transitory excuses, appeals to us all.

And quoted Albert Einstein: "There are two ways of looking at the world: Either you see nothing as a miracle or you see everything as a miracle."

This year, as I strolled through the mall, I started thinking about famous Christmas songs. After a little research (here and here), I discovered that most of our favorites came from Jews.

In America, a majority-Christian country, Jews have enjoyed freedoms we’d been denied elsewhere for almost two millennia. Jews have expressed their appreciation, among many other ways, in contributing the following loved Christmas songs:

White Christmas
Christmas Song
We Need A Little Christmas
Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer
Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree
A Holly Jolly Christmas
The Christmas Waltz
Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow
Silver Bells
I’m Getting Nuttin’ For Christmas
Santa Baby
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
Sleigh Ride
I’ll Be Home For Christmas
It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
There’s No Place Like Home For The Holidays
Do They Know It’s Christmas (Feed The World)

Thank you for sharing.

Kesler is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California







SAN DIEGO JEWISH WORLD THE WEEK IN REVIEW

MONDAY, DECEMBER 24
Donald H. Harrison in Los Angeles: Religious study in hall of African mammals
Sheila Orysiek in San Diego: A Jewish child grows up on Christmas Eve
Ira Sharkansky in Jerusalem: An Israeli view of the 'settlements'


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 23
Shoshana Bryen in Washington, D.C.: On Putin, Time's 'Person of the Year'
Donald H. Harrison in San Diego: Jury service left editor with mixed feelings
Rabbi Baruch Lederman in San Diego: A child's possession held for safekeeping
Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal in San Diego: Why is Judah represented by the lion?
Ira Sharkansky in Jerusalem: Want better health care? Make aliyah!

FRIDAY-SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21-22

Dov Burt Levy in Salem, Massachusetts:: Those three soldiers on my refrigerator
Sheila Orysiek in San Diego: Putting icicles on a friendship
Eileen Wingard in San Diego: Foxman warns of growing anti-Semitism

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20

SPOTLIGHT ON SAN DIEGO JEWISH ACADEMY:Students at San Diego Jewish Academy showcased as artists and as arts critics; three teachers in arts program introduced
Harry Doshay:
Across the Universe shallow, pointless
Jazz lures Collins from metal
Alexa Katz:
Music Within triggers the emotions
Arts Collective is forerunner of school-within-school
Wood teaches photography as 'painting with light'
Daniel Penner:
Neil Young en concierto
Serj Tankian—Elect the Dead
Michelle Rizzi:
Across the Universe blows 'em away
Kipperman advocates for out-of-the-box students
plus
Donald H. Harrison: SDJA Arts Collective photo essay

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19

Garry Fabian in Melbourne, Australia: Former judge faces prison in traffic case ... ... Ex South-African wins ABC writing competition ... Hardliners may exploit conference ... The next chapter in the Toben saga
Donald H. Harrison in La Jolla , California: Capturing the Jewish experience on posters

SDJA Student Quarterly:
William Bohannon: Rabbi tells Jewish views on same-sex marriage
Eitan Frysh: Fresher school lunches promised for next year
Michelle Rizzi: RIP GossipGirl


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