How Pigs, Pollution & People Taint Our Fruits And Veggies

Ashley Armstrong's parents haven't let her eat green salad in five years.

While other parents struggle to get assorted greens into their children's bellies, the Armstrongs have left salad off Ashley's plate since September 2006, when the E. coli from a bag of spinach nearly killed her. Then 2 years old, Ashley was left with just 10 percent kidney function.

 

"We were totally naive," says her mother, Elizabeth, who now serves on the board of the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention, a public health advocacy group. "We assumed that the food we bought at our grocery store was safe. We assumed that the FDA, or whomever, had checked to make sure it was safe. We've since found out that's not the case."

Inspectors failed to pinpoint the exact source of the E. coli outbreak that killed three people, sickened 205 and cost the spinach industry $100 million. About a mile from one contaminated spinach field, however, they found a wide range of suspects: high levels of the bacterium in free-range angus cows and their dung, and its genetic match turned up in local feral pigs, soil and surface water.

"There were so many different possible sources that we couldn't say for sure how the spinach got contaminated," Michele Jay-Russell, a food safety specialist at the University of California, Davis, told HuffPost. "But it raised awareness that cattle and wildlife intruding into the field or waterways could be risks for moving pathogens into the produce environment."

As far as Elizabeth Armstrong was concerned, all that mattered was that "somehow poop got in the plant."

It wasn't an isolated incident. Foodborne pathogens strike roughly one in six Americans every year, sickening 48 million, hospitalizing 128,000 and killing 3,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And choosing local and organic options, even going vegan, isn't enough to guarantee safety. Between 1998 and 2007, produce sickened almost 27,000 Americans in the course of nearly 700 foodborne illness outbreaks, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The nonprofit group suggests that produce outbreaks now surpass the number of outbreaks originating in poultry, beef, pork or eggs.

In their wake, these waves of outbreaks helped prompt the U.S. government to implement new regulations, including some standards specific to produce safety.

Contaminated fruits and vegetables tend to be those that grow closest to the ground -- bean sprouts, lettuce and the like -- as evidenced recently by the suspected contamination of California romaine lettuce via manure-laden lagoons and of Oregon strawberries from deer feces.

Now, America's most deadly known foodborne-illness outbreak in more than a quarter-century has added a new danger to the list: cantaloupe contaminated by the bacterial infection listeria. Since the end of July, at least 28 people have been killed and 133 sickened after eating cantaloupe grown at Jensen Farms in southeastern Colorado. (An average produce outbreak can be linked to 39 illnesses, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.)

"We have rarely, if ever, seen this pathogen in produce," says Sandra Eskin, director of the food safety campaign with the Pew Charitable Trusts. This outbreak marks the first documented case of listeria in cantaloupe.

Only since the 1990s has produce emerged as an "important vehicle of transmission," says Jay-Russell, noting the heightened attention after the 1996 outbreak of E. coli in Odwalla unpasteurized apple juice.

One of produce's problems is that people tend to eat it raw, and therefore it misses a "kill step" such as heating or cooking. Jay-Russell says that means that oversight has to focus on the entire "food continuum, from the fields to the fork."

LISTERIA LESSONS

In Centennial, Colo., Jeni Exley, her husband and their college-age daughter ate cantaloupe from Jensen Farms with no ill effects. In nearby Littleton, however, Jeni's 84-year-old father, Herb Stevens, was not so lucky.

Before his bout with listeria, Stevens was independent. Since battling the infection, with its attendant fever, muscle aches, diarrhea and other symptoms, he requires daily nursing care and a walker.

Stevens and his wife hadn't worried about their cantaloupes. The elderly couple always bought by the half: not so much that they'd have to throw any leftovers away; cut open to offer a sneak peek inside. But listeria is invisible to the naked eye and easily transferred by knife from the rough, contaminant-inviting surface into the flesh. Once inside, the fruit's low acidity further encourages the bacteria's growth.

According to a federal report released last Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration, the state of Colorado and Jensen Farms narrowed the listeria outbreak's root cause down to poor sanitation inside a packing facility used by the farm. Tests by the investigators, including experts in agriculture, veterinary medicine and environmental health, ruled out contamination in the farms' fields and irrigation systems, as well as any links to adjacent land use or animal intrusions.

Any of these pathways were reasonably suspect in this case, given listeria's widespread presence in the environment. Research led by Martin Wiedmann, a food science expert at Cornell University, found the pathogen in samples collected throughout New York state -- from sidewalks, parks, ponds, rivers, even the middle of state parks. Another study found that farmers brought listeria home on their clothing and shoes. To a lesser extent, listeria even landed in nonagricultural homes.

The pathogen is persistent, even hardy, withstanding cold temperatures and showing an ability to survive more than a decade indoors. "Bacteria are always trying to be one step ahead of us," says Jay-Russell of UC Davis.

Fortunately, as pervasive and aggressively adaptive as it is, listeria is typically only dangerous on the order of billions of cells, Cornell's Wiedmann said. And only certain subtypes, such as the monocytogenes strain identified on the cantaloupes, repeatedly appear in human outbreaks.

Jensen Farms adhered to safe practices in their melon production operations, such as the use of drip irrigation and plastic mulch to keep cantaloupe from resting directly on the soil, according to Michael Bartolo, a senior research scientist at the Arkansas Valley Research Center in Rocky Ford, Colo. However, there was still plenty of room for contamination.

On Wednesday's media call, Sherry McGarry of the CDC described a few likely culprits in Jensen's packing facility. The building's poor design allowed water to pool on the floor, and the lack of a pre-cooling procedure may likewise have helped incubate bacteria in condensation on melons moving from the warm outdoor air to cold storage.

Of course, that first microbe had to come from somewhere. McGarry suggested that low levels of listeria may have originally been present in the fields and subsequently been carried inside. A truck used to haul culled cantaloupe to a cattle operation was also parked adjacent to the packing facility, suggesting that feces may have hitched a ride.

"The investigation is still open," says McGarry. "There may be details that we are unable to provide at this time."

THE FOUR W'S

A wide range of human and environmental factors can in fact open the door for listeria, E. coli, salmonella and another foodborne pathogens to invade the human body. Eskin points to four general categories that account for most foodborne illness outbreaks: water, waste, wildlife and workers.

Pathogens don't live well on produce that is exposed to the sun and hot temperatures -- unless there's lots of water around.

In the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont farmers are tossing out perfectly good-looking potatoes and winter squash. The farmers know that if floodwaters come in contact with the edible parts of plants, there is danger of contamination from overflowing septic systems, wastewater treatment plants or soils laden with feces from dogs, deer or cattle. Even planting seeds during or after a flood can be risky.

Those factors are all key to pathogen development and spread, but scientists see one consistent starting point. "It's safe to say that most pathogens that make humans sick begin in the gut of an animal," says Pew's Eskin.

Many animals harbor and deposit microbes that are harmful to humans, but not always to the animal itself, explains Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. From an animal's intestinal tract, the toxins can travel into feces and then onto an agricultural field through grazing, water irrigation or as fertilizer.

Close proximity between crops and cattle, especially if the grazing cattle are upslope of a field, may be particularly dangerous for produce. In 1985, the first reported outbreak connecting listeriosis to food was traced back to sheep that grazed in the vicinity of a cabbage field harvested for coleslaw.

Wild animals poop, too. "We don't grow food in a sterile environment or in a bubble. It's outside in the dirt," says Jeffrey LeJeune, a professor of food science, environmental and animal health at The Ohio State University. "If a bird flies overhead and decides that it's had enough to eat, it could leave a deposit on a melon or a tomato."

Fences can be helpful, but such restrictions on wildlife movement are controversial among ecologists. Jay-Russell suggests other approaches that have been adopted by many California growers, such as avoiding planting where there is a major wildlife corridor and walking the fields before harvest.

Other species aren't always responsible for contamination. Human waste, a likely contributor to this year's bean sprout E. coli outbreak in Germany, is also a consistent threat to the food supply. Produce can be at risk if a single worker doesn't wash his or her hands thoroughly.

"How many people touch a cantaloupe between the farm and table? A whole lot more than the number of armadillos that do," LeJeune says. "If we could solve all the problems of all of the animals, the problem wouldn't go away."

RECALLS PROMPT REGULATION

 

The government recently caught on to the fact that investing in prevention could pay off in terms of both lives and money saved. A 2010 report published by the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University estimates that foodborne illness linked to produce costs the United States almost $39 billion a year.

"In the last three or four years, the CDC and health departments have picked up outbreaks that five years earlier would have never been detected," says Doyle.

They are also detecting the outbreaks more quickly, thanks in part to increasingly sophisticated DNA fingerprinting tools. In the case of the listeria-contaminated cantaloupe, agencies came together with a "quick and effective response," says FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg during a media briefing last Wednesday.

Yet many experts say the real measure of progress is not the ability to detect outbreaks, but to prevent them in the first place.

In January, President Barack Obama signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act, which establishes regulatory standards for the safe growing, harvesting, sorting, packing and storage of fresh fruits and vegetables. FSMA takes into account both manmade and naturally occurring hazards, and includes requirements to ensure the safe import of food from foreign facilities.

In effect, the new law reverses the orientation of FDA's food safety activities from reaction to prevention. "That's huge," says Eskin. "By starting at the beginning of the food chain rather than the end, hopefully they'll need to do less responding down the road."

For example, the law will require inspectors to make regular visits to fields like Jensen Farms to identify sources of contamination before it has an opportunity to make anyone ill -- similar to regular restaurant inspections. It will also create the first-ever mandatory national safety standards for produce.

"Lessons from [the listeria] outbreak speak to the urgency we have in implementing the FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act, which gives FDA much-needed tools to build a new prevention-focused food safety system," said Hamburg. Since 1998, the FDA and USDA have issued guidance on "Good Agricultural Practices" for producers to follow, but such urgings have no enforcement behind them.

As they finalize the new food safety laws, Jay-Russell says federal regulators should draw inspiration from the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, which California and Arizona put in place after the 2006 spinach E. coli outbreak. Experts from the two states, which produce 90 percent of the country's leafy greens, developed a wide range of food safety metrics, from how often to test irrigation water to the optimal method of composting and proper use of animal manures. Further, leafy green growers generally plant and grow in Northern California between late spring and fall, and then move on to southern California and Arizona for the winter to avoid floodwaters.

Despite its promise, some experts still have concerns over the new federal regulations. The FSMA exempts small farms, where contamination can easily go unnoticed.

"I'd love to say that if you grow food in your backyard and raise your own cows, you'd be safe. But that's not the way it is. Both small and large producers have to take precautions to keep feces out of our food," says Bill Marler, a lawyer who made his name as the "E. coli guy" representing victims of the infamous Jack in the Box outbreak in the early 1990s. He now represents dozens of victims and families affected by the listeria outbreak.

The outbreaks that make the news tend to be the big ones, and usually associated with large producers. "It's easier to pinpoint an outbreak when it poisons hundreds of people," Marler says.

United Fresh Produce Association spokesman Ray Gilmer says he agrees that "small farms shouldn't get a pass on food safety." Other than their opposition to this exemption, the lobbying group, which represents farmers, grocers and restaurant chains, is all for beefed up regulations. Gilmer said, "The produce industry came to the cumulative realization several years ago that it is in everyone's best interest to pass a new law and ensure consistently high enforcement of the best possible food safety standards."

As long as the new rules for production practices are "scientifically valid", he suggests there isn't anything they wouldn't be willing to do.

Lack of funding is also a threat to FSMA implementation. The House recently voted to cut 2012 funds for the FDA's food safety program, despite the agency's request for a raise to cover increased costs for improved technologies and more inspections, up to once every three years for facilities deemed high-risk.

The FDA only inspected about 15 percent of U.S. food production facilities in 2010. Before this year's outbreak, Jensen Farms had never hosted a federal inspector.

Eskin tells HuffPost that Pew advocated for "higher minimum frequencies for facility inspections." Still, she says, there is no "magic number."

"We have seen outbreaks at plants that were consistently inspected," adds Wiedmann.

Wiedmann suggests that it is most vital to invest in research, technology and tools to help producers develop safe systems. "If the government has the ability to quickly and effectively detect an outbreak and trace it back, then companies know that if they do something wrong, they will get caught," he says.

"The hard truth," says Wiedmann, "is that 100 percent safe food is virtually impossible as long as we grow food exposed to the environment."

LAST LINE OF DEFENSE

No matter how rigorous or enforceable the regulations, experts caution that some factors will always remain out of the government's control.

Food safety education for consumers, including proper hand and produce washing, "cannot be overemphasized," says Bruce Kaplan, a retired veterinarian in Florida and advocate for One Health, a movement that recognizes the interconnectedness of human, animal and environmental health.

Keeping animals healthy is also key. "It's a very small world and we're all interconnected in it," says Eileen Choffnes, a scholar and director of the Institute of Medicine's Forum On Microbial Threats. This December, the forum is slated to host a meeting on One Health's ability to improve food safety.

Vaccinating cattle against infection could help, according to Thomas Besser, a professor of microbiology in the Food and Waterborne Disease Research Program at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. So can simply providing them with contaminant-free food and water.

Unfortunately, developing an effective vaccine and providing cattle with "microbiologically clean water" are proving to be difficult tasks, Besser says, given how easily food and feces can contaminate an animal's drinking source. He is currently looking into alternative watering systems that go beyond the bucket, such as training animals to drink out of a hose or press a lever to get water.

Another lingering mystery is the apparent seasonality of microbes in some animals. Cattle in particular have been found to shed more pathogens during the summer and fall, notes Jay-Russell. E. coli nearly disappears in the winter.

"This seasonal variation is a big question," says Besser. "If we can find out what causes the summertime increase, and depending on what that is, we might be able to reduce the number of cattle infected by 90 percent."

Research into animal biology could help identify new strategies to prevent or treat listeria as well. Unlike other pathogens such as E. coli, listeria can sicken both humans and animals, explains Jay-Russell. Because sheep, goats and cattle develop similar symptoms to humans, she suggests studies of this parallel animal disease could lead to a better understanding of human illness.

A One Health perspective is useful in solving such puzzles, suggests Kaplan.

"Had One Health principles been implemented 50 years ago, there would be many people who would not have suffered, not have died needlessly as they continue to do," he says.

The latest deaths linked to the listeria outbreak from tainted cantaloupes were reported on Tuesday. It is "too soon to declare the cantaloupe outbreak over," given the long incubation period of the pathogen, Barbara Mann of the CDC said during last Wednesday's media briefing. Plus, there appears to be a steady stream of outbreaks to take its place.

"It seems that every couple of months, there is yet another foodborne outbreak, and it usually has a fairly large footprint, either in terms of the number of people sickened or the geographic range of product distribution," says Choffnes. "Even a single event can have a very large impact on not only human and animal health, but the economy."

Shortly after the cantaloupe recall came announcement of a listeria-based recall of chopped romaine, caught early thanks to a newly launched federal research effort to gauge food-safety conditions surrounding leafy green vegetables. And late last week, another sample test by the FDA uncovered contamination in bagged spinach, resulting in another preemptive recall.

"Food is not as safe as we think it is," Elizabeth Armstrong says. Shopping at a grocery store for her family, she says, is now "an act of faith."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/produce-contamination-illness-listeria-infection-loop_n_1033152.html

Ron Paul Defends Gays In The Military

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said that heterosexual military servicemembers were "causing more trouble than gays" due to their superior numbers in an interview with the Iowa State Daily released Wednesday.

"Well, like I said, everybody has the same rights as everybody else, so homosexuals in the military isn't a problem. It's only if they're doing things they shouldn't be, if they're disruptive. But there's ... men and women getting into trouble with each other too. And there's a lot more heterosexuals in the military, so logically they're causing more trouble than gays. So yes, you just have the same rules for everybody and treat them all the same," he said, according to the paper.

Paul was one of five House Republicans to vote for the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which officially ended in Septmber, and among 15 House Republicans in December. "To discharge an otherwise well-trained, professional, and highly skilled member of the military for these reasons is unfortunate and makes no financial sense," he said in May.

When asked by the Iowa State Daily on his position on gays, he said, "You know I just, I don't think of people in little groups like that. I don't think of people as 'gay' here and 'black people' there, or 'women' over here."

"Everybody is an individual person, and everybody has the same rights as anyone else. The government has no business in your private life, you know, so if one person is allowed to do something so should everyone else. The whole gay marriage issue is a private affair, and the federal government has no say."

Paul voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, which would have added an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage. However, he continues to support the Defense of Marriage Act, which disallows the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions and allows states not to recognize another state's same-sex unions. He has said that the legislation protects a state from having to recognize another state's definition of marriage.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/ron-paul-gays-military-dadt_n_1032990.html

Monsanto & "Frankenfood"

Monsanto, as you may know, is the focus of a recent documentary called "Food Inc.," a film unveiling the truth about America's genetically modified (GMO) food chain. Monsanto's GMO corn is banned from the European Union and Monsanto’s rBGH, the bovine growth hormone that produces more milk from cows, is banned in 31 countries because of the health risks — particularly beast cancer and prostate cancer. Those countries include 27 European nations, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Canada. rBGH is also believed to be the cause of premature development in women.

Wikileaks released a cable stating that the U.S. State Department planned on retaliating against France because France rejected Monsanto's GMO corn, and the U.S. government was afraid that the ban could reverberate across the European Union. Apparently the U.S. Government is concerned that Monsanto's presence in Europe could shrink because of France’s reluctance to subject its citizens to genetically modified agriculture.

The government of India has filed suit against Monsanto for what they refer to as "biopiracy," taking indigenous plants and inserting genes into them and then patenting them as intellectual properties forcing Indian farmers to have to pay for that which was formally free.

Vanity Fair did a wonderful exposé in 2008 on the plight of the U.S. Small farmer. In it, Monsanto is accused of polluting the U.S. agricultural chain by allowing GMO pollen to drift on to small U.S. farms against the wishes of the small farmers and then suing the small farmers when it's discovered that their crops violate U.S. patents owned by Monsanto. It's not that the farmers are pollinating it themselves, it's that the pollen finds its way on to the small farms whereby small farmers are completely unable to stop it. In short, Monsanto is accused of predatory agricultural practices further eliminating the small U.S. Farmer from the U.S. food chain.

Forbes also did a wonderful exposé on child labor in India and found that Monsanto uses child labor in their cotton fields. The excerpt:

"Jyothi Ramulla Naga is 4 feet tall. From sunup to sundown she is hunched over in the fields of a cottonseed farm in southern India, earning 20 cents an hour. Farmers in the Uyyalawada region process high-tech cottonseeds genetically engineered to contain a natural pesticide, on behalf of U.S. agriculture giant Monsanto. To get the seeds to breed true the farmers have to cross-pollinate the plants, a laborious task that keeps a peak of a dozen workers busy for several months on just one acre. And to make a profit the farmers have to use cheap labor. That means using kids like Jyothi, who says she's 15 but looks no older than 12. (Monsanto points to papers indicating she is 15.) To harvest the bolls three months later, the farmers use cheap labor again, not the machinery that is used to pick cotton in the U.S."

Monsanto's website responded to claims that it uses child labor by suggesting that when children offer up their labor freely, that it's okay so long as it doesn't "interfere with their educational opportunities." The excerpt:

"At Monsanto, we support the employment of young people who have freely chosen to work in the agricultural industry — either on a seasonal basis to earn extra income or as a full-time vocation — so long as it is legal and does not interfere with their educational opportunities.

Greed has an insatiable appetite, and it’s clear by that very excerpt that values play no role in Monsanto’s business practices when it interferes with profit. Those values, or lack of, are set by Monsanto’s board.

Jamie Hubley, 15, Commits Suicide After Bullying

A gay 10th-grader killed himself this weekend after complaining about bullying at his school on the Internet, where he made a last blog post tagged as “suicide note.”

Jamie Hubley, 15, was out to friends and family in Ottawa, Canada. He had been taking antidepressants and was trying to get professional help. But on Friday, he updated his Tumblr blog for the last time and said his goodbye, before being found dead on Saturday, according to the Ottawa Citizen.

“It’s so hard,” Hubley wrote. “I’m sorry, I can’t take it anymore.”

Hubley’s death follows closely behind that of Jamey Rodemeyer, the 14-year-old student who had also written about life at school on the Internet. Groups such as the Trevor Project, which offers help to teens thinking about suicide via its Lifeline at (866) 488-7366, had worried that Rodemeyer’s high-profile passing could trigger a series of suicides called a “suicide contagion.” Hubley never wrote about Rodemeyer. But he spoke candidly about his own depression.

Hubley described having a problem with cutting that left his arms scarred, and he praised his parents in his final note but said he couldn’t wait the three years before he’d graduate from high school.

“People said ‘it gets better,’” Hubley wrote, likely having seen the video campaign meant to encourage kids to outlast bullying. “It’s fucking bullshit.”

Rodemeyer had also seen the It Gets Better videos, having even made one himself, but he hanged himself from the family swing set when it seemed bullying at school was endless.

Hubley said he was seeing a psychologist, was on medication, but his problems didn’t disappear. He talked more frequently about feeling ostracized and alone than being bullied.

“I hate being the only open gay guy in my school,” he had written earlier. “It fucking sucks, I really want to end it. Like all of it.”

But he was certainly bullied.

“Being open does not help at all,” he wrote before the school year started. “Yeah, someone will call me a fag. But one after the other, after the other … I can tell on them … Yeah. But they don’t give a shit. They’ll come back after their suspension (fun day at home, free day at school) and continue calling me a faggot. I’m not ready.”

http://news.advocate.com/post/11580677515/jamie-hubley-15-commits-suicide-after-bullying

New York Times Review Of 'The Rosie Show'

Among the Lectures, a Bit of Shtick

Rosie O’Donnell’s new talk show, her first since 2002, is shown live and offers a mix of standup comedy, music, dance and one-on-one chats with celebrities about menopause creams and breast reduction. Especially compared with the solemn, mostly repurposed fare that clutters the rest of OWN, “The Rosie Show” is colorful and spontaneous: the funny cousin who shows up for a family ceremony late and lets suitcases of clothes, shoes and presents spill out all across the living room floor. 

 

It’s not perfect television, it’s amusing television, and a reminder of why so many other OWN programs, beautifully shot and expertly produced, seem so dull. 

Ms.O’Donnell’s debut on Monday preceded the premiere of another OWN show, “Oprah’s Lifeclass.” These are lectures built around clips of old interviews with the likes of Jim Carrey, J. K. Rowling and Ellen DeGeneres that Ms. Winfrey, seated in an armchair, uses to illustrate an “Aha!” moment. 

Mr. Carrey, for example, told Ms. Winfrey in 1997 that he had visualized success and willed it to happen, writing himself a $10 million check as inspiration. Ms. Winfrey this week described Mr. Carrey as one of “our greatest teachers.” 

Ms. Winfrey also used her own past as a morality tale, showing her famous weight-loss reveal in 1988, when she dragged a red wagon laden with 67 pounds of fat; on “Lifeclass” she said it illustrated “the false power of ego.” (She didn’t explain why it was any less egotistical to brag about feeling less compelled to lose weight.)

“Oprah’s Lifeclass” is “The Oprah Winfrey Show” with the life sucked out of it. Episodes of that series are also being reshown on OWN. And the best of them reveal all too clearly that her success didn’t spring solely from the New Age-y self-improvement lessons, but from Ms. Winfrey’s spirited interactions with guests and audiences. She wasn’t always so spiritually “mindful.” A lot of the time she was irreverent, bold and even at times shocking. 

Ms. O’Donnell isn’t Oprah Winfrey, but she has a friendly rapport with guests like Russell Brand, Wanda Sykes and Roseanne Barr, as well as people in her studio audience, who ask questions that she answers in the style of the old “Carol Burnett Show.” Ms. Burnett is not Ms.O’Donnell’s only role model. She has often said she wants to recreate the kind of fun, easygoing talk show Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin used to host in the ’60s and ’70s. And like them, Ms. O’Donnell is willing to be silly, be it singing with shirtless male dancers or hosting nutty quiz rounds with celebrity guests. 

The celebrity interviews are relaxed and often quite intimate. She and Ms. Sykes discovered that as little girls, they both fantasized about having children, not with a husband, but as single mothers. “I guess that’s what little lesbians tell themselves,” Ms. O’Donnell said. 

Ms. O’Donnell always makes a lot of Spanx jokes, but even she seemed a little taken aback by the singer Gloria Estefan, who confided that she wears Spanx with a crotch opening and thus doesn’t need to use paper seat covers in public toilets. 

There is a redemptive thread to this talk show as well, which is perhaps a requirement for all OWN programming. Ms. O’Donnell left “The View” in 2007, after only a year as a co-host, in semidisgrace after publicly feuding with Donald Trump and her fellow hosts Barbara Walters and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

That debacle led to a confessional memoir, “Celebrity Detox,” about her struggles with fame and anger, themes that pop up as self-deprecating jokes in her stand-up comedy. 

On the premiere of her show on Monday, Ms. O’Donnell performed a mock cabaret number with her own lyrics to “The Night Chicago Died.” (“Remember my problems on ‘The View’/I told Hasselbeck a thing or two.”) 

She also discussed rehab with Mr. Brand, a former drug addict, and breast cancer with Ms. Sykes, who caught hers early and is in full recovery. But serious issues don’t get in the way of what Ms. O’Donnell does best: amiable, free-floating conversation that seems unscripted and unpretentious. 

“The Rosie Show” is an OWN program that doesn’t ask viewers to look inside themselves; it just entices them to watch. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/arts/television/the-rosie-show-and-oprahs-lifeclass-on-own.html?hp

Bishop Indicted For Failure To Report Abuse By Priest

The Roman Catholic bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Robert Finn, and the diocese he leads have been indicted by a county grand jury on a charge of failure to report suspected child abuse in the case of a priest who had been accused of taking lewd photographs of young girls. 

The indictment is the first ever of a Catholic bishop in the 25 years since the scandal over sexual abuse by priests first became public in the United States. 

Bishop Finn is accused of neglecting to report abuse that occurred as recently as last year — almost 10 years since the nation’s Catholic bishops passed a charter pledging to report suspected abusers to law enforcement authorities. 

The bishop has acknowledged that he knew of the existence of the photos last December but did not turn them over to the police until May. 

During that period Bishop Finn and the diocese had reason to suspect that the priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, might subject a child to abuse, the indictment said, citing “previous knowledge of concerns regarding Father Ratigan and children; the discovery of hundreds of photographs of children on Father Ratigan’s laptop, including a child’s naked vagina, upskirt images and other images focused on the crotch; and violations of restrictions placed on Father Ratigan.”

The indictment was announced on Friday by the Jackson County prosecutor, Jean Peters-Baker. It had been under seal since Oct. 6 because the bishop was out of the country. He returned on Thursday.

“This is about protecting children,” Ms. Peters-Baker said. 

The bishop and the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph were charged with one count each, a misdemeanor.

Bishop Finn appeared in court at 1 p.m. and pleaded not guilty, as did lawyers for the diocese.

Bishop Finn said in a statement, “We will meet these announcements with a steady resolve and a vigorous defense.” 

He said that he and the diocese had given “complete cooperation” to law enforcement. He also pointed to steps he had taken since the scandal first became public, which included commissioning a report to look into the case and reinforcing procedures for handling allegations of abuse.

Father Ratigan was arrested in May and has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of taking indecent photographs of young girls, most recently during an Easter egg hunt last spring.

His case prompted a civil lawsuit filed in August that asserts that between December 2010 and May 2011, Father Ratigan attended children’s birthday parties, spent weekends in the homes of parish families, hosted the Easter egg hunt and presided, with the bishop’s permission, at a girl’s First Communion. 

The case has generated fury at a bishop who was already a polarizing figure in his diocese, and there are widespread calls for him to resign. Parishioners started a Facebook page called ’”Bishop Finn Must Go” and circulated a petition. An editorial in The Kansas City Star in June calling for the bishop to step down concluded that prosecutors must “’actively pursue all relevant criminal charges” against everyone involved.

Stoking much of the anger is the fact that only three years ago, Bishop Finn settled lawsuits with 47 plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases for $10 million and agreed to a long list of preventive measures, among them to report anyone suspected of being a pedophile immediately to law enforcement authorities. 

Bishop Finn, who was appointed in 2005, alienated many of his priests and parishioners, and won praise from others, when he remade the diocese to conform with his traditionalist theological views. He is one of few bishops affiliated with the conservative movement Opus Dei. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/us/kansas-city-bishop-indicted-in-reporting-of-abuse-by-priest.html?_r=1&hp

Rosie O'Donnell Is Back (With A Little Help From Oprah)

Finally, the Oprah Winfrey Network has something like a twinkle in its eye.

“The Rosie Show,” which premiered live from Harpo Studios on Monday afternoon, has been touted as Rosie O’Donnell’s much-anticipated return to television, which may be overstating the case slightly. In the 10 years since her syndicated daytime talk show “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” ended, the former stand-up and sometime film star seemed to be going out of her way to shake off the “Queen of Nice” mantle she had crocheted for herself while sweet-talking celebrities for six seasons.

In 2006, she got cranky and righteous, locking horns with Elisabeth Hasselbeck on “The View” before walking off in a huff. She produced and starred in a Lifetime movie, launched a variety show so terrible it ended after a single episode, and wrote a memoir about how awful it was to be on “The View.” None of which guaranteed or even hinted that O’Donnell would be the one to haul up OWN’s disappointing ratings.

Which “The Rosie Show” might just do. It had a not-bad, pretty good, kinda funny, sort of smart debut. Not the sort of thing that would rock a major network back on its heels with joy, but it certainly provided an oasis of humor and sunshine amid OWN’s endless replaying of the self-congratulatory final episodes of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

It was “nice Rosie” who showed up, in Diane von Furstenberg shmatte, as she said, and Prada boots, with the best hair cut she’s had in … well, ever, and the easy, zingy showmanship that has kept her afloat in fans even during the rocky years.

Wisely, she opened with a little stand-up, and sure there were Spanx jokes — the woman just cannot get over Spanx, which is of course a funny word and something to which many OWN viewers can relate — but it was lovely to see her back behind the microphone doing Penny Marshall impersonations and poking fun at herself for “the chubby person’s shirt pull.” There were questions from the audience — "just like Carol Burnett but not really because she’s a genius, and I’m just me” — which unfortunately included fellow Oprah acolyte Suze Orman (who seems to have it in her contract that she will show up on every OWN show or else).

Orman’s question led to a mildly hilarious song about how O’Donnell came to Chicago set to the tune of “The Night Chicago Died” (which, for TV critics of a certain age, alone made the show worth watching) and accompanied by a group of chorus boys who were soon shirtless, allowing Rosie to sing that “It’s true I’m gay, but I’m not dead.”

The rest of the show was devoted to official first guest and new O’Donnell “crush” Russell Brand and his admirable ability to act like a semi-strung-out dingbat while talking most sensibly and articulately about topics as diverse as the playing out of the commercialistic age, the emptiness of celebrity culture and the benefits of being a three-time winner of the Shagger of the Year Award. He also brought with him a pre-taped mini-tour of Friendly House, a recovery center for women, which allowed him to publicly advocate for recovery and praise its admirable director, Peggy Albrecht, but in a way that made a nice point about recovery without getting too maudlin. "This is the first time you’ve appeared on television fully clothed, isn’t it, Peggy?”

Which was a good thing, a tremendous thing because more maudlin is not what OWN, with its endless rotation of heart-wrenching/breaking/string-tugging reality shows, needs. Yes, O’Donnell and Brand were talking about addiction, a Winfrey-approved topic, but in such a lively way that people might actually listen. “When I was a drug addict, actively,” said Brand, cutting mercifully to the chase, “I was very annoying.”

Things ended in a very Rosie way, with a game show called “The Ro Show” during which Carol the receptionist began losing badly to the Stanford-educated doctor, so O’Donnell started cheating, which gave the whole thing a nice Password-at-home feel. Sure, the set is absurdly purple, and the Woman For Which the Network is Named showed up at the end.

But it was such good clean fun that for a moment one was allowed to forget that next period it was back to the life-lesson-learning grind, with “Oprah’s Masterclass.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2011/10/rosie-odonnell-returns-to-tv-with-a-little-help-from-oprah.html

Born Without Arms, Man Plays Guitar With Feet And Inspires Students

Tony Melendez struck an inspiring chord with Florida students when the armless man shared his musical talent.

WATCH: Man Born Without Arms Plays Guitar With Feet

Armless Man Plays Guitar

Melendez, who was born without arms and with a club foot, recently visited John Carroll High School and played the guitar with his feet, WPTV reports. 

"I turn pages in a book, I can string a guitar, I could tune it, what a hand could do, this foot could simulate," said Melendez, who ditched his artificial limbs at a young age.

Melendez, who lives in Branson, Mo., embraced his disabilities at a young age and learned to play the acoustic instrument with his feet. He shared a message of self acceptance and perseverance with the Florida teens.

John Carroll senior Ryan Caddell said he was inspired that Melendez could:

"Turn it into something positive like that. It sends a really good message out to everyone who is watching."

Melendez plays more than 150 concerts a year and has performed for Popes on five occasions, according to the news network.

Read more: http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/region_st_lucie_county/fort_pierce/toe-jam%3A-guitarist-plays-with-his-toes#ixzz1aOyx1f9G

Woman stabbed by husband is saved by breast implant!

In another installment of our occasional series of breast implants meeting violent ends: A Russian woman stabbed by her husband was probably saved by one of her rather large breast implants.

Plastic surgeon James Wells holds a saline implant, left, and a silicone implant. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

The 40-year-old Moscow woman's husband was allegedly aiming for the heart when he sunk a knife into her chest during a domestic dispute. But the knife was blocked by the silicone implants -- which, somewhat ironically, her husband had requested she get some five years before.

Though the contents within the woman's left breast did not leak, a plastic surgeon did remove and replace it. That's probably wise, because any cuts to the surface of the implant could cause the fluid to leak out, which can cause "a decrease in breast size, change in breast implant shape, hard lumps over the implant or chest area, an uneven appearance of the breasts, pain or tenderness, tingling, swelling, numbness, burning or changes in sensation," according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Silicone breast implants are meant to be pretty durable. But they're not indestructible. Take a woman whose implant exploded during a game of paintball, as I blogged earlier.

The Russia incident isn't the first time a breast implant has taken one for the team. A Times story credited Lydia Carranza's implant with possibly saving her life when a gunman opened fire in the Simi Valley dental office where she worked.

But Scott Reitz, a firearms instructor with 30 years of LAPD experience, added at the time, "I don't want to say a boob job is the equivalent of a bulletproof vest. So don't go getting breast enhancements as a means to deflect a possible incoming bullet."

Lest we forget, breast implants come with their own risks, as the FDA points out. Just something to bear in mind.

http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-breast-implant-stabbed-russian-woman-20111007,0,5423103.story

LAX: "Behind The Scenes"!

  It's a Thursday evening, and the landing lights of incoming LAX flights glow like torches from Westchester to the San Gabriels. Torch one, 200 lives suspended in air. Torch two, 500. Torch three, 350 awaiting their return to loved ones, bosses, business meetings, auditions and, for many, the soul-saving comfort of their own pillows.

Planes from around the world line up at LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal. The terminal's food court is a good hangout spot for long layovers. It has the nicest views, most food choices and comfy seating.

This high-wire act is more than just symbolic of the seventh-busiest airport in the world. It speaks to the risks involved, the importance of procedure, the crushing, timed-to-the-minute routine.

Perhaps no entity in the world juggles as many disciplines as a major airport: security, meteorology, technology, mixology, pipe-fitting, sharpshooting, sushi making and more.

But who runs LAX? Bill, the fire captain. Gary, the luggage supervisor. Max, a Belgian Malinois with a nose for bombs — imperfect strangers you hope know what they're doing, got enough sleep and can put your worries ahead of theirs.

On average, LAX handles almost 1,700 takeoffs and landings a day (even more during holidays), and firefighters will respond to at least one of them at full throttle — they make one to two emergency calls a day here — part of the largely invisible world of numbing protocol and screaming scramble that keeps an airport humming.

As passengers, we breeze through this place almost 61 million times a year, hoping/praying/trusting that the people behind the scenes know what they're doing. But a modern airport shouldn't be such a mystery. With that in mind, here's a glimpse at the people who make LAX go and the daily challenges they face:

The 'war room'

Open since December, the Airport Response Coordination Center, or ARCC, is the airport's central nervous system. Operators here control the stoplights outside the terminals to regulate vehicle flow. From here, an incident desk deploys plumbers to the flood in a restroom in Terminal 2 or a leaky water fountain in Terminal 3.

In a smaller room steps away, a police officer checks hundreds of surveillance cameras that monitor entrances, checkpoints and runways. Zooms in, zooms out, tilts down, pans left. What's he looking for? Anomalies. Anything that doesn't make sense in the normal flow of a gigantic airport.

Every ID swipe is tracked, any ajar door. Pull a defibrillator out of its box and an alarm rings here.

In an emergency, ARCC goes into war-room mode, and staff from the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Security Administration, Airport Police and other agencies that run LAX move to an even tighter work space where they can work elbow to elbow and make decisions instantly from big-screen info they all share.

Where the units once operated independently in seven locations around the airport, they now work together at the ARCC, where an 8 a.m. meeting of the various agency reps kicks off each day.

Today, a Tuesday, LAX will see about 170,000 passengers, enough to fill a large stadium about twice over. A change in wind direction means the airport is on an "east traffic" flow, so planes are taking off to the east and landing from the west, opposite the norm.

Other than that, it seems to be a routine day, says Rodney Thompson, one of eight LAX duty managers employed by Los Angeles World Airports, the city department that runs the airport. Terminal 3 is being pressure washed. Fire sprinkler work will shut down parts of Terminals 5 and 6. An onramp to the 105 Freeway is closed — not under the airport's range of control, but a situation that will affect traffic flow.

Out on runway 24L, meanwhile, airport operations superintendent Michael Corlett calls the control tower for clearance, then speeds down the runway at 70 mph in a Crown Victoria, looking for debris or signs of runway deterioration, stopping quickly to pick up a stray 2-inch bolt on a taxi way.

The stultifying routine of a 24/7 operation, open every day of the year, and busier on holidays than any other time, is validated by such little discoveries as a 2-inch bolt that, in the wrong spot, could shred the tire of a 747 touching down at 200 mph.

A dog named Max

American Airlines employee Julio Ortiz is what the airline calls a "yada," sort of a concierge who works the Terminal 5 kiosk area, helping folks check in. Brandishing a hand-held computer, he can do just about anything someone at the ticket counter can do. The goal: to move people through the terminal and out to the concourses as quickly as possible.

That's good business, but it's also part of an overall security strategy. After 9/11, a RAND study on LAX called terminal areas prime targets for car and truck bombings. Staffing was increased, and self-help kiosks were added, all designed to speed the flow of passengers from the curb to the gate.

As you head to a TSA checkpoint, you might meet Max, a Belgian Malinois whose job is to detect explosives in luggage. Leave your bag unattended, then Max's snout will be there. Abandon your car at the curb for more than a minute, he or one of his canine colleagues, all TSA certified and tested annually, jump on that too.

Employed by the airport, not the LAPD, the Airport Police cover a 9-square-mile area around LAX, patrolling terminals, eyeing fences, stopping cars with expired tags, keeping vehicles moving. Their station is a mile from the terminals, and though officials won't say exactly how many officers are on patrol, the staff numbers in the low hundreds.

Even an officer's movements are monitored by undercover officers who make sure that Airport Police don't fall into routines — when they take their breaks or go on their rounds — that could be discerned by terrorists.

Augmented by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI and Homeland Security, LAX is among the most heavily patrolled and relatively safe chunks of Los Angeles. Airport Police Officer Lance Schoenbaum says he spends more time helping travelers locate their vehicles in the parking garage than chasing bad guys.

"But you get everything here," he says, citing purse snatching, employee disputes, unlicensed cabs and heroin smuggling. Anything that happens on an aircraft is the FBI's responsibility, but the Airport Police usually respond first.

As police states go, the airport may not be especially menacing. But make no mistake: LAX is definitely a police state.

Passing through security

Airline security begins the moment you make your reservation and your name is checked against a TSA list. But the heavy scrutiny is done at the TSA checkpoint, staffed by shifts of 45-60 workers, where you are asked to remove your shoes, empty your pockets and put your carry-on items in plastic bins on a conveyor belt that takes them to be scanned.

The chatty TSA screener who initially checks your boarding pass? He's sweeping an ultraviolet light over your ID to be sure it's valid. He also may be trying to engage you in conversation as a way to detect any telltale nervousness or psychological issues.

"We had a big push for customer service, because customer service is a layer of security," says Ivan Cikos, TSA screening manager for Terminals 1, 2 and 3.

To ward off the side effects of too much routine, screeners are rotated every 30 minutes among the various checkpoint tasks — X-ray monitoring, conveyor-belt duty. Screeners also are tested every day by a "plant," who attempts to subvert screening procedures. Those who fail the covert tests typically receive remedial training, and such failures are taken into account during annual recertification.

The new full-body scanning machines are the result of those plants, says TSA spokesman Nico Melendez. Tests found too many prohibited items going undetected, he says, so late last year, 22 of the machines were installed in about half the airport.

For several years, LAX has also used specially trained "behavioral detection officers," who keep an eye out for unusual conduct.

Always a work in progress

Terminal 6 is a mess right now, more like an experience in a developing country.

Eventually, it will be the province of Alaska Airlines, but until renovation is complete later this year, this maze-like area of power tools and open ceilings is what you'll deal with.

It's a lesson in the various frustrations of this place. As airports go, LAX, which entered the jet age in 1961, is an antiquity. From taxi ways to terminals, it's all squeezed into one of the smallest footprints of any major U.S. airport: 3,425 acres compared to Dallas-Ft. Worth's 18,076. There is nowhere else to go but up.

Ideally, a terminal is closed during renovation, but the airport is too busy for that. So upgrades are done in small bursts.

You wish it all looked like the Tom Bradley International Terminal, already roomy and undergoing a $1.5-billion expansion to add nine new gates to accommodate bigger aircraft .

Terminals 4 and 5 are where mega-players American and Delta lease space from the Los Angeles World Airport and, by virtue of their size, run these areas as if they were their own.

Then there are Terminals 1, 2 and 3, co-ops really, where smaller airlines share what feels like a shoe box.

Annual passenger volume is still below what it was before 9/11: 61 million now, 67 million then. Yet the airport, which is celebrating 50 years of jet travel, makes more than $100 million in profit annually on fees it charges airlines to use its facilities.

That success springs from a hyper-technical, vigilant, fiercely proud workforce that gets a lot of important things right yet is unable to deliver passengers to long-term parking in a relatively efficient manner.

Lot C is a grim, sun-baked prairie served by shuttle buses that arrive unreliably and are too frequently driven by operators whose unsmiling faces often are the first and last ones you see at the airport.

The simple task of changing airlines can be an ordeal as well, requiring a walk outside amid diesel fumes and blaring horns.

"Let's face it," says aviation consultant Jack Keady. "No matter how pretty anything inside LAX is, the penal gray exterior, noise and crowds outside downgrade it."

Where do I go now?

For even the experienced traveler, the variety of check-in options, bag drops and self-help kiosks at LAX is mind-boggling.

All told, there are 92 ways to check in among the airlines in the cramped domestic terminals. United alone offers nine ways to begin your flight.

The quality of the directional signs to the various check-in options varies significantly as well, but a walk-through finds that Southwest's are dramatically clearer and easier to follow .

One particularly confusing facet is the checked bag drop-off. In some terminals, you can check your bag curbside. At other times, you tag your bag at the counter, then lug and leave it at the TSA X-ray machine in the terminal lobby. Occasionally, the counter agent tags the bag and puts it on the conveyor belt behind her, just like in the good old days.

The airlines call this third method in-line baggage-check, and it's one of the reasons the Bradley terminal, where the procedure is routine, functions smoothly by comparison. The in-line baggage check is slowly being adopted for domestic carriers, but implementation has been spotty and slow.

For checked luggage, every suitcase, every set of golf clubs, every wedding dress must pass through a detection device that checks for explosives.

When the scanner detects something suspicious, lights flash and the TSA attendant pulls aside the bag, swabs the exterior for explosive residue, then opens it up and digs in.

On a Thursday morning, the alarm goes off. It turns out to be a tool belt. The attendant places a piece of paper inside the luggage announcing that it has been inspected, closes it up and sends it on its way.

A netherworld of conveyor belts takes the bags to a loading dock, where they are placed on carts and taken to the gate.

At the gate, handlers follow a loading sheet telling them where to place bags in the aircraft's belly.

"Take a pencil and put your finger underneath — that's your center of gravity," luggage crew chief Gary Adams says. By balancing the load on planes as much as possible, he says, airlines can maximize aerodynamics and fuel use.

The gate keeper

If an airline had a chess master, it would be American ramp manager Pat Boylan, a 32-year veteran responsible for making the minute-by-minute decisions on when a plane should leave the gate.

This is acid-reflux work. There are dozens of audibles he can call. Gate changes require the redeployment of cleaning crews and caterers. If passengers were delayed by long lines at a TSA checkpoint, does he send the plane anyway, placing those late-arriving passengers on the next flight?

On a wall behind his workstation, a sign: "Flying is the second greatest thrill known to man. Landing is the first."

After Boylan decides to send a plane on its way, he gets clearance from the main control tower, which takes charge of the taxiing aircraft and queuing it for takeoff. Six-inch slips of paper containing each flight's route and aircraft type are passed to controllers as the plane leaves the gate. One controller may handle the taxiing process, another the actually takeoff. Out on the runway, it's first come, first served for takeoff.

Incoming flights, meanwhile, are picked up by LAX controllers while the planes are seven to 10 miles out, taking over from regional or national command centers.

The arrival of the gigantic A380s, with their 800-passenger load and 18 restrooms, is still an event, impressing passengers and air professionals alike. But the planes are so new that, in an emergency, LAX firefighters would not be able to reach the aircraft's second level to evacuate passengers.

This worries Capt. William Wick, one of the leaders in the firehouse that serves LAX. It worries him a lot. Because, in a potential emergency, access is everything.

'Here, you assume the worst'

Fire Station 80 is a gleaming, just-opened-in-November building positioned so that it can reach even the farthest point in the airport in three minutes, an FAA requirement.

"The urgency here is a little different," says Capt. Brian Allen, one of Wick's colleagues. "When you get an alarm at a regular fire station, you have an idea right away of what it'll be. Here, you assume the worst.

"It's a frickin' ballet, let me tell you," Allen says of the scramble to get to the airfield.

The alarm sounds about once or twice a day, usually as an Alert 2, the lowest level. An Alert 2 indicates a potential aircraft problem such as a sensor showing a faulty hydraulic system or a compartment door that didn't shut.

Alert 3s are the real deal, a full-on emergency, and months go by without one. The tower usually determines whether an alert is a 2 or a 3, though a pilot can also make that determination.

But even an Alert 2 can be cause for concern; for instance, when a sensor detects a problem and the pilot circles the plane, full of fuel, back to the airport, landing "heavy," Wick calls it, which in turn causes the brakes to overheat.

"That's probably our No. 1 call," Wick says. "They come in hot and fast. They have not used up all their fuel so they're hard to stop."

In most cases, firefighters will circle the plane after it has landed and use an infrared temperature device to detect abnormal heat sources. Black is OK. White is hotter.

Because crashes are rare — the last commercial crash at LAX killed 34 in 1991 — the 14 firefighters on duty at Fire Station 80 use an edge-of-the-airport training area to practice live burns and strategies.

One February morning, they gather to study the video of a 737 exploding into flames after landing on Okinawa in 2007, an Alert 3 situation that would probably require additional off-airport firefighters. Four people were injured in that explosion.

Wick's crew studies the video for wind direction, whether smoke is coming out the door, whether the pilot — the last to leave a plane — has abandoned it. Then they head out to their training area, where they put what they've learned to use, blasting water at a makeshift fuselage in what they call a "pump-and-roll" tactic in which the rigs move around the wreckage as they hit it with water.

On the way back to the fire station, Wick spots one of the new A380s that land about four times a day.

"How are we going to get 800 people out of that plane?" Wick asks. "See those three doors on top? We can't get to that."

LAX, which just approved the purchase of four new fire trucks, is in the process of ordering a stair truck, Wick says. At present, a cost analysis is being done on the stair trucks, which must be custom made.

"They get it," he says. "They know we really need that thing."

And like the many passengers he protects, Wick waits.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-lax-20111002,0,5015960.story?page=1&utm_medium=feed&track=rss&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20latimes%2Ftravel%20%28L.A.%20Times%20-%20Travel%29&utm_source=feedburner 

At 102, therapist is too busy to stop working

Hedda Bolgar thrives with grace, beauty and, just maybe, a little magic

Lately I've been wading into streams of mail from readers approaching death. Some are fighting it, some are afraid, some are ready to go.

Hedda Bolgar receives an Outstanding Oldest Worker Award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. In her speech, she talked about how there’s dignity and purpose in work, and grace in aging.

And then I heard from two readers with an update on Hedda Bolgar. I wrote about the Brentwood therapist three Septembers ago, when she was 99 and still seeing clients. Bolgar, now 102 and still on the job, was just honored in Washington, D.C., where she received one of two Outstanding Oldest Worker Awards given this year by the organization Experience Works. She shared the spotlight with a 101-year-old man who's a custodian at a Maryland post office.

When I called Bolgar's home number, she picked up right away, sounding fresh as a daisy even though she'd just gotten home from D.C. Her calendar was a bit busy, with clients coming in four days a week. And Bolgar is preparing a spring course she'll teach on the trauma of forced migration, an issue she believes the psychoanalytic community has failed to adequately address.

But she managed to fit me into a small hole in her calendar.

Bolgar, who fled Europe when Hitler entered Austria, was dressed smartly and looked beautiful, and not a day older than she did on my visit in 2008. Back then, she told me matter-of-factly, "I've lived through revolutions, famine, war. Things like that." She also said she was "put on this earth to accomplish certain things" and "I'm so far behind, I can never die."

Not much has changed.

Though she says she's slowed down a bit, Bolgar is still involved with the Wright Institute, a mental health training and service center she founded in the 1970s, and with the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, which she co-founded. She also still maintains ties with a psychotherapy clinic bearing her name, which was established for clients who can't afford treatment elsewhere. And Bolgar will be featured in an upcoming documentary on aging by filmmakers Laurie Schur and Lisa Thompson (for a sneak peek, go to http://www.beautyofaging.com.

Bolgar also spent a lot of time with researchers who quote her extensively in two new books: "The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action," by Michael J. Diamond and Christopher Christian; and "Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Traumas of Terror in the Americas" by Nancy Caro Hollander.

And at 100, Bolgar became computer savvy, exploring vast Internet catalogs on psychoanalytic research. She uses the email address Hedda101 because Hedda100 was taken.

"That woman is amazing," said Lita Levine Kleger of Experience Works, the nonprofit senior advocacy group that honored Bolgar. "She speaks extemporaneously and eloquently." And when Bolgar arrived in Washington, said Kleger, she made it clear she had work to do: keeping her obligation to clients back home by conducting therapy sessions over the phone.

In her speech in D.C., Bolgar talked about how there's dignity and purpose in work, and grace in aging. But she recognizes that not everyone is as lucky as she's been.

"I always introduce my lectures by saying that old age is really a wonderful experience as long as the body ages well and you don't have serious economic problems," she told me. As I have seen lately in writing about the diminished lives of suffering older folks — including my father — not everyone is so lucky.

The older she gets, Bolgar said, the more she appreciates her parents. Her mother was the first female journalist and war correspondent for a Swiss newspaper, and her father was a historian, labor leader and resistance fighter.

"What I grew up with was, if there's an unmet need in the world, you try to meet it, and if there's a problem, you try to solve it."

Bolgar's home today is a meeting place for colleagues and friends who embrace that ethos. She's not shy about her conviction that Native American poverty is an enduring American tragedy, and she has no kind words for the "lemmings at the edge of the cliff" who are cheering calls to shred Social Security and Medicare and shrink support for public education. Bolgar said it puts her in mind of the marauding gangs in Doris Lessing's "Memoirs of a Survivor," a dark fictional take on the breakdown of civilization.

That healthy cynicism and unflagging energy make Bolgar the envy of at least one longtime client. He's a man in his mid-80s who tells Bolgar he's chronically miserable and in failing health.

"He wakes up in the morning and all he wants to do is die or go back to sleep," said Bolgar, who has suggested that he do something useful, like reading to the blind or helping out at a school.

To him, said Bolgar, "I am a magical person. He wants the magic. I tell him there is no magic and he cannot accept it. He can not accept that he's old."

Bolgar said she's not afraid of death, "not that I want to accelerate it." She hopes it's not too "undignified or painful." And she wants to believe death isn't absolute finality, noting a mystical theosophy concept that the energy of each human — a permanent atom — endures.

If her life becomes about coping with pain, and she is "no longer using my body as an agent for social action," maybe then she'll be ready, Bolgar said. But not now.

Having twice shared the privilege of her company, I'm not sure I buy Bolgar's claim that there is no magic. Call it what you will, but she has something besides the luck of good genes. Her fountain of youth is a rare potion of curiosity, compassion and social responsibility.

Three years ago, Bolgar talked about all that she still hopes to accomplish. This time, she put it like this:

"I'm too busy to die." 

 http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1002-lopez-bolgar-20111002,0,5869414.column