Contents
1. Transcript
1.1. Session 1 ( May 30, 2007)
-
COLLINGS
- OK, good morning, Joe. This is Jane Collings interviewing Joe Linton at
his home on May 30th, 2007. And why don't we just plunge right in and
talk about when and where you were born?
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LINTON
- OK. Well, I was born in Portland, Oregon and that was on August 28th,
1963, which is actually the day of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream"
speech and the March on Washington and all that stuff. Not that --
whatever, not that I had anything to do with that, but I've been happy
when I hear, oh, it's the 40th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream"
speech. That's my 40th birthday, but my parents actually grew up and met
in Montebello and only briefly moved to Oregon and then moved back by
the time I was four, so I feel like almost a California native, but
happen to have been born in Portland.
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COLLINGS
- And what kinds of things do your parents do, or did your parents do for a
living and for hobbies?
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LINTON
- Well, my father was a mechanical engineer who designed air conditioning
systems for large buildings, and my mother was at the time a homemaker
and I had an older brother and subsequently two -- a younger brother and
then a younger sister. My father was an alcoholic and was mentally ill
and would periodically be hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia. He's
passed away now, but largely he was absent and my parents were separated
when I was four or five and then divorced when I was nine or ten, so I
didn't spend that much time with my father. I spent a lot of time with
my mother and I think my mother was always very hard-working, very
patient, very giving, read a lot -- like influenced me to have a lot of
knowledge and culture, used to drag all of us kids to the art museums
and see, like, Ingram Bergman's Magic Flute and stuff like that. We all
complained, but I think it's made me comfortable around the arts and
around the city, having had my mom expose me to those things.
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COLLINGS
- Well, she sounds like a bundle of energy, if she was working and had four
kids and driving them to Ingmar Bergman movies.
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LINTON
- Yeah, well, it's interesting. I had said to her, well, after college --
I'm really grateful that you exposed us to all these things and that
it's really made me comfortable in those circles, and she said, oh, I
didn't really -- I mean, I did it for you, but I did it for me, for her,
because she needed those things and we were with her and so that's where
we went together.
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COLLINGS
- Well, what kind of background did she have, that she had this interest in
the arts?
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LINTON
- Well, she went to Occidental College and studied history there, and I
subsequently went to Occidental College and she -- that's a good
question. I mean, her mom was a nurse and her father, my grandfather was
a paint chemist. Her mom died before I was born so I never knew her, and
I don't think that they were especially cultivated folks but I think she
-- she took -- when she was in college she took a year abroad in Europe
and then when my parents got married they went to Europe for like a year
and a half for their honeymoon and so I think she, through college and
-- I'll have to ask her how she got all that stuff that she definitely
-- I mean, she still -- she goes and sees a lot of plays and she's
coming up on Friday and we're going to go to the County Art Museum, so I
mean, she's still -- sort of a lifelong thing that she has. I'm not
exactly where she gets it.
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COLLINGS
- OK, did she meet your father at college?
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LINTON
- She actually grew up across the street from my father and they didn't --
he was like seven or eight years older, whatever. He was the son of her
high school principal and she knew him some, like as a neighbor more,
and then didn't really date him until she got to college.
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COLLINGS
- All right. So what kinds of things do your other -- your brother and your
-- did you say you had two sisters?
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LINTON
- Two brothers and a sister. So my older brother Matt -- it's funny,
because I think two of us sort of got this "get out of the suburbs" bug
and two of us sort of settled into the suburbs. We grew up in Orange
County, largely in Tustin, so Matt, my older brother, is an electrical
technician who fixes traffic signals and owns a home in Buena Park and
is very active in his church and is married and has a little daughter
born this year, or late last year. I forget. Recently. Within the last
year. (laughter) So, and I'm second and then my younger brother -- I
always feel like I sort of got out of the suburbs into the city and my
younger brother sort of got out of the suburbs into the wild, and so my
younger brother studied soils and got his Ph.D. and works for the
National Forest Service in Sequoia National Forest and before that
worked at Zion -- er, worked at Bryce Canyon in Utah, and he's also
married with kids. And then my sister married a pastor and is still in
Orange County and is relatively conservative and suburban and she's a
homemaker. She also teaches part-time at her kid's school, at a
Christian school in Orange County.
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COLLINGS
- So was the church an important aspect of your family life, growing up?
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LINTON
- Somewhat. Early on, we didn't really attend a church and then around
fourth or fifth grade I think my mother took us -- shopped around a
little bit for churches and we settled at Tustin Presbyterian Church,
which was definitely a big influence on me and I think on all of us. I
got very involved in youth group activities there and it became pretty
much social outlet growing up. I was both the athletic kid and a brainy
kid, and kind of bit neither of those, so church is where I ended up
fitting in a lot, and I think it's also sort of where I picked up a
sense that I wanted to do something that was to give back to society, to
save the world, whatever in some ways, so my younger brother describes
Tustin Presbyterian Church as "high on fellowship and low on dogma," and
it was a good social setting and there were work camps and stuff where
we would go to -- we went to an Indian Reservation in Arizona and an
orphanage in Mexico and other places and actually did work for a week,
whatever, building things and stuff like that, so it was sort of a good
sense of you could have a good time and enjoy yourself giving in the
situation, and actually, I just got back from a week away from a wedding
last week of the son of my high school pastor. Rex McDaniel was the
pastor at Tustin Presbyterian Church from when I entered high school
through my college years and was a big influence on me and sort of a
father figure growing up. My parents were divorced. My dad wasn't -- I
mean, I would see my dad, sometimes once a month but then he would go
into the hospital and we wouldn't see him for a while. (laughter) I
definitely saw him some, but not all that regularly, and Rex sort of --
Rex and I would have breakfast once a week and talk about our dreams and
what's going on and like actually interpret our dreams and I was
involved in -- I was actually the junior custodian at the church and I
would clean up after events and whatnot and I got a job as one of the
leaders of the summer youth program, what's called Junior Fun Club.
-
COLLINGS
- All right!
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LINTON
- Yeah, it was the fifth and sixth graders, and so I was a counselor and I
was -- I ended up being the director of all the counselors, like of a
squad of volunteers, and I think we had sixty or seventy kids and eight
or nine or ten high school volunteer leaders and I worked that job
through I think after my freshman year in college, even, was the
director there, was initially the assistant director and then the
director, but I think Rex was always very -- Rex and I would read books
and discuss To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm trying to think of what other --
and sort of, who was somebody who, like my mother, read a lot, wanted to
discuss and kick around ideas. It's funny, because he's become a little
more conservative and we hang out. He's actually moved away to
Washington D.C. either just after I got out of college or around that
time, and then both his kids came back to California, and then so he and
his wife are now in South Pasadena, but it was actually (inaudible), so
his son got married the last week and so I was hanging out with Rex and
his son Brian and their family.
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COLLINGS
- So do you remain connected to that church?
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LINTON
- I don't. I think, like I was saying, I had a hard time fitting in in high
school and so church became a place where I was affirmed as a leader and
did well and was successful and filled that niche and I got to college
and I felt successful and confident and the church people in college
seemed more singularly focused, whatever, and less social and less
interactive and all kinds of folks were successful and smart and so I
had a more -- I was more popular and fit in well in college, and didn't
-- early on, freshman, maybe sophomore year, I would go to Christian
group meetings and stuff, decreasingly frequently, and not -- I mean, I
consider myself agnostic now and not -- I mean, I kind of -- I mean, I
always had doubts and I wasn't sure, and yet church was a good place to
fit in and then as it became whatever, as I needed that social space
less, the religion kind of fell away and stuff like that, but as I said,
I think I got values and, you know, like humanitarian which is
interesting it's not really -- it should be like spiritual, but it's
humanitarian values from Tustin Presbyterian Church and from Rex and
from activities that we did there.
-
COLLINGS
- So were those humanitarian and social values something that comes from
that particular church? I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with Presbyterianism
per se. Or was it really coming from that pastor?
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LINTON
- Well, I think -- I suspect some of both, definitely. I mean, I think more
that pastor, and I think that, like, my sister's husband now is a
Presbyterian minister and is very conservative and less about service
and about -- I don't know, a little more judgemental and stuff than what
I remembered growing up at Tustin Presbyterian Church, so I'm not sure.
I think that while I was in college, I also became more -- I mean, I
grew up this kind of sheltered suburban kid, and I got to college and
kind of saw the city and saw human rights and all kinds of history and
stuff that I hadn't really been aware of, politics, just generally that
I hadn't been aware of, and I think -- had a hard time and I became more
aware of the small-mindedness of the church in some ways. I don't know
if small-minded is -- conservatism probably is a better way to say it,
of the roles of women, attitudes towards gay and lesbians, just limits
to kind of intellectual questioning, kind of like this -- I don't know,
I got to a point where, and I still feel this, that nothing should be
ultra-absolutely. Even environmentalist dogma shouldn't be -- whatever.
We should always be listening and adjusting and figuring out a fit and a
mix more than laying down a law, kind of.
-
COLLINGS
- And how did your mother choose this church? Did she choose it for the
social values?
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LINTON
- It's a good question. I'm not sure how she chose it and what's
interesting is, so she taught Sunday school. I'm not sure how she chose
it, but I'd like to talk about what her experiences were there. All the
kids kind of jumped in. Actually, my older brother a little less than
myself, my younger brother Mark and my sister Liz. But the kids became
pretty attached pretty quickly to the activities. My mother taught
Sunday school and as a single parent felt very ostracized in some ways.
She was told -- she was a great Sunday school teacher and we would
assist her different weeks. Each one of us would go into her class and
stuff and the kids loved her and she did a great job and yet she was
told that the best Sunday school teacher would be a husband and wife
team and stuff like that, and so she felt like as a single woman she
wasn't affirmed and so she graducally -- I think she was active for
maybe four years or something and then kind of I think as we got into
high school -- as I got into high school and my other brothers were
younger and older in their places, whatever, she sort of dropped out of
church but we remained active and she was supportive of that but not --
but withdrew herself, whatever. So still told us there and got whatever,
supported us in being active there and encouraged that, but she felt
that discrimination and I think that was some of my -- she talked about
that to us, and that was some of my -- and I had kind of feminist
awakening in college and I think seeing how difficult it was for my mom,
that she would be working two jobs and going back to school and having
to borrow money from her father and not -- whatever, just that she --
whatever, she worked really hard and got very little and she was on
Social Security for a little while at that point and people -- I forget
who she was saying. Somebody was critical of that, and you know, we
needed that I think, so it's not -- it's sort of...
-
COLLINGS
- That was from your father. Was it (inaudible) his disability?
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LINTON
- I think so, too. He had -- actually we ended up getting money from -- he
first -- and it's a genetic disease that he had that made him crazy, but
his first manifestation of that was in the war in Korea, and so he had
veteran's benefits but I think it was just -- I think the money my mom
got was that she was -- I think she was in school full-time and she was
working as, like, an emergency room clerk in the hospital, you know, and
raising four kids and teaching Sunday school all in the middle of that
or whatever. And she -- I think it was just like AFDC or something. I'm
not sure exactly what it was, but just poverty money more than -- I'm
not sure, though.
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COLLINGS
- So that was her job, she was working in an emergency room?
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LINTON
- Yeah, she ultimately -- she went back to school and she had studied
history at Occidental College and then had dropped out her senior year
to get married to my father and they took off for a year in Europe and
so she was kind of all but degree at Oxy and then she went back to Cal
State Fullerton and she got a degree in library science and started
working -- she actually was driving a bookmobile for a little while, and
then worked at that public library in Tustin and then at the school
district, central library for Tustin Unified School District and worked
at the medical center library at UC Irvine for maybe almost twenty
years, I think, at the -- a long stint there, so...
-
COLLINGS
- And you also suggested that she was involved in the oral history program
at Cal State Fullerton?
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LINTON
- Yeah, the way I remember this is that in fifth grade we were in this --
what's it called? They changed names while I was there. Anyways, like,
gifted and talented program. I can't -- oh, well. There was an acronym
for that and I don't remember what it was now.
-
COLLINGS
- GATE?
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LINTON
- Yeah, but I think it was ALP. Advanced Learning Program, and then I think
it changed to GATE or something like that, anyways, but -- so we were
bussed to a school not too far from -- just across town, across Tustin,
which was small and the teacher, Mrs. Kinch, I had for fifth grade, had
these mini-courses where parents and friends of parents who specialized
in their field would teach a class to groups of students and we would
have these big sheets on he wall that said, you know, "Marge Linton is
teaching oral history," you know, "sign up," and so we -- what I
remember, we interviewed -- we actually interviewed a friend of mine's
mom who had been in the Japanese internment camps in World War II, and
then we went to like a retirement home and interviewed some other
elderly Japanese Americans, too, so it was neat because it was very,
whatever. My mom kind of taught us and we had to actually come up with
questions that we were going to ask the person and then ask them, and it
was very -- not sure if that was Miss Kinch's doing or my mom's doing,
whatever, but it was definitely like the kids were in charge but there
was a sense that we couldn't just go in there and wing it, that we had
to actually think about what we were going to do, but it wasn't just
watching my mom interview somebody. It was us interviewing somebody.
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COLLINGS
- So when you were in high school, were you starting to think about what
you might want to do with your life?
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LINTON
- Yeah, I mean, in high school I thought -- I mean, I was always good at
science and I thought I wanted to be a physician because I thought that
would be a good way to help people and potentially I could go to the
Third World somewhere and help poor people and sort of -- I think it's a
very -- you know, had been doing these work camps for with the church
and stuff, so I think I had this sense of doing good is, like, going
somewhere else and charity, you know, helping them, stuff like that. So
that's what I -- I'm not sure how early on that was, maybe junior year
in high school or something.
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COLLINGS
- (Your mother) is working in a hospital.
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LINTON
- Yeah, I think though she was -- well, she was working in the emergency
room. That was a very -- it was kind of a clerk job and not -- I don't
think it's something she identified with too much, but -- gosh, I'm not
sure when she -- I'm trying to think of when she started working for the
medical center, because I worked there briefly after college and she was
definitely established by that time, but I don't think that she was -- I
think she was working for maybe for like the school district library,
the central library, a thing called the Instructional Resource Center,
the IRC, for my later high school years. But I'm not totally sure
whether these things match up. But I'm not sure that -- even though she
worked in a -- she worked in a little community hospital that was sort
sleepy and -- I don't remember being inspired by that. It seemed more
like a church thing, that I was -- that's how I thought I could help
people, and I think the other thing I was thinking of was being a
teacher at the time, like a high school teacher, because that was
another thing where I saw people helping people, so I think it was more
-- I mean, I think I still had a pretty narrow orbit. My range of vision
of what one could do to help people was -- hadn't seen what a city
looked like, or what politics was yet.
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COLLINGS
- What were your friends thinking of doing when they were in high school?
Did they ever talk about what they were going to do?
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LINTON
- I'm trying to think of who I -- I mean, I think the sense was that we
needed to, like, I had a friend who played a trumpet, whose dad was a
lawyer, who planned to be a lawyer. Kyle Tonokawa, he was always going
to be like an engineer or something, like scientific, but I think that's
similar to his dad too. I mean, I think we kind of saw in our families
maybe what we could do, but I don't remember a lot of really strong -- I
think the sense was that we needed to do well enough to get into a
decent college, to do something good.
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COLLINGS
- So, I mean, Oxy is really expensive now. I don't know how it was at that
time. Was that a problem?
-
LINTON
- Well, not too bad, although I mean, I ended up with a bunch of student
loans and stuff, but the -- I mean, a couple things helped it. One is
that there were some veteran, disabled veterans benefits that I got
financial aid from Oxy. Got a tiny bit, actually got a Presbyterian
church scholarship the first year, but I had kind of -- like I said, my
horizon was pretty narrow and my mom had gone to Oxy and she would take
us to, like, theater during the summer there and there's a big outdoor
Greek bowl theater and so her brother had gone there. Rex, my minister,
had gone there, and it was sort of like, oh, you should consider Oxy. I
also remember thinking, I was playing water polo and swimming at the
time, and I was good enough to be a good whatever, a good high school
player, but not good enough to go to -- like, if I had gone to a big
university like UCLA or something I might have been able to like pick
one of those, swimming probably and really work at it and barely make
the team or something like that. Like I could've been a really small
fish in a big pool, as they say, or going to Oxy I would be able to swim
and play water polo, and so I -- I think we took some -- I think I
looked at like Berkeley and stuff. I mean, I went -- I took a couple
trips and explored -- I think UCLA and Berkeley, but I applied early
decision at Oxy and went over the financial aid stuff and it looked like
it could work OK, and I was accepted early decision and so I went there
without even applying anywhere else, it turned out, so -- and it was --
the other thing, too, I mean, it was close enough to -- it's like 50
miles from home, so it's like it's not -- whatever. I was far enough to
be on my own, but I was close enough that I could get home when I really
wanted to and stuff like that, so it was a good distance. I don't think
I was ready to go to Berkeley or go to New York or something like that,
you know. I think that was a big enough leap for me to go to Los Angeles
from Tustin.
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COLLINGS
- OK, so here you are at college and you're starting to hear all these
other kinds of ideas.
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LINTON
- Well, I think one of the -- so there were two seniors that I had known
from Tustin Presbyterian Church who were at Oxy , Leigh Evans and Carri
Patterson, and there's was woman who they hung around with, so I was
hanging around with them some, and there was a womean, Janette
Sadik-Khan who they were hanging out with who was really sharp and
attractive and was leading the campus against Apartheid in South Africa
and trying to get the Occidental College to divest its investments. And
gosh, I remember a conversation with her saying -- and she was very
political and very sharp. She just got appointed by Bloomberg to head
the Department of Transportation in New York City, like a month ago. I
lost touch with her, but she has a distinctive name and I saw --
anyways, I saw that in an announcemnt from the Bike Coalition equivalent
group there called Transportation Alternatives, and I remembered talking
with her about politics and telling her I think people really need to
get their act together before they get all political, and she was very
-- she could've said, oh, you're a foolish freshman from the suburbs,
but she said that part of how you get your act together is to get
engaged in your community and your politics and stuff, and I still
remember too, there's a big -- I think it's called "O Day", this, where
a lot of alumni come back to the college and celebrate the college
birthday and stuff, and there was a ceremony at lunch and the ceremony
ended and she ran onto the stage and grabbed the microphone and her
voice was kind of trembling and she said, like, there's a lot to
celebrate about Oxy and it's great, but there's some things we need to
change, and apartheid and divestment and it really took guts and poise
and it wasn't -- she wasn't like screaming into the microphone or
something, too. She was very measured, but still very rebellious and,
like, daunting kind of in a way. So I think -- I mean, I think some of
my -- as I was becoming a little, and I remember the summer after my
freshman year, just saying like, wow, you know, there's all this
politics stuff that you know, and I feel like telling her, you know, I
want to do good stuff and I feel like I just don't know politics, and
how do I -- what should I be doing to get up to speed, and stuff like
that, and so she actually gave me recommendations on subscribing to --
there was a couple things. The one I remember was ADA, like, Americans
for Democratic Action, or whatever, and reading their newsletter, so
it's like this one. And so I even remember, too, like I had -- the water
polo team would go back to school in, like, August and school wouldn't
start until September, and we would have like a month of training camps
and I remember having, like, subscribed to these things and getting them
out of my box with the water polo team, and people were like, hey,
what's that? What are you reading? And I'm like, oh, it's Americans for
Democratic Action, and so starting to feel like, oh, this is my politics
and this is something I can share and influence, and I remember actually
I can picture his face, but telling that to a freshman, being like
probably a sophomore, maybe a junior, and them being like, "Oh, wow,
that's cool that you subscribe to that," and feeling like I was starting
to know something and was starting to pass that on. I think, too, that
Oxy didn't have -- so I got involved in student government my junior
year, and...
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COLLINGS
- Had you done that in high school?
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LINTON
- No, I hadn't. You know, I ran for -- I ran for I think, like, vice
president in junior high and in, like, eighth grade and lost in a
two-person race, and...
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COLLINGS
- Why did you run?
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LINTON
- Became discouraged... You know, it's a good question, because I think I
was still pretty socially backward. I was a geek, kind of. I mean, I was
athletic, but I was still -- I would sit around and draw and stuff in
junior high. That's what people knew me for. I'm not sure what inspired
me to run. I think it was a sense of -- I think it's more like a
popularity thing than anything. I think I thought that, oh, maybe I
could be a little popular and this is something that I could do, and I
think it was another thing too, where I think there weren't a lot of
people running and stuff like that, and I thought, well, I could do
that, but I lost and didn't. So in high school, I didn't do it at all.
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COLLINGS
- So when you were at Oxy and you said to -- Janette, was it?
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LINTON
- Janette Sadik-khan, yeah.
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COLLINGS
- That you have to get yourself together -- one has to get oneself together
before you can think about helping others? Is that what you said? What
did you mean by getting yourself together, and then also, you were
already planning that you were going to help others, like possibly by
being a doctor or something.
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LINTON
- Yeah. Well, I think it had to do with -- I mean, Rex and I did a lot of
kind of growth stuff around, like, interpreting dreams but also like
Jungian psychology and kind of -- gosh, there was a lot of stuff that I
don't remember that well, but I remember talking about, like, I
statements, like somehow -- that as you're talking with someone, instead
of accusing, to found stuff in "I" and like that.
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COLLINGS
- I feel that that is (inaudible), yeah.
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LINTON
- Exactly, and now it's like non-violent communication, there's a bunch of
things I've studied, that say that too. But it's like -- so that was
some of the work that Rex and I would read about and discuss and think
about, like, interpersonal communication and journaling, trying to
understand what am I thinking, what am I going through in this
situation, so that was more -- that was the work I'd been doing more,
wasn't political. It was more getting in touch with one's self, you
know.
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COLLINGS
- And you felt that this work needed to be complete before moving to
another stage?
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LINTON
- I guess. Looking back at myself, I think I just didn't know anything
about politics, whatever, and had to -- and here was this woman who was
-- definitely had her stuff together, who I was trying to have something
to say to, so I don't know that I was thinking. I mean, I think it was
just -- I don't know. You're right, I did in the long run want to be a
doctor and want to help people, so I mean, I wasn't -- but it wasn't a
political things so much.
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COLLINGS
- So then here you are and you become attracted to politics and then you
decided to get involved in student government, so this is a new
direction it sounds like.
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LINTON
- Yeah, and I think too, what -- something that helped a lot, too, so I ran
for -- there was, like, we call it the "seven-person junta." I ran for
what was called publications director, which was responsible for the
college newspaper and was part of like a seven-member board that was
responsible for all the student government, and I ran against one person
and I won that time. (laughter) And I think that summer they needed
somebody -- the summer before my junior year, they needed somebody to
represent Oxy on what what was called the Los Angeles Collegiate
Council, which is theoretically all the student body presidents would
get together and meet, but there was no -- whatever. In theory all seven
were equal, although there was a guy, Breck Tostevin who was really
sharp and really political who was kind of the head of the seven-member
junta more or less, whatever. I was definitely in there but I wasn't
leading the show. But I think other people were away for the summer and
there was a couple meetings to go during the summer and I could make
them from -- I was down in Orange County, and I actually met a lifelong
friend through this, a guy named Joe Krovoza who was at Pasadena City
College at the time and was planning to transfer to Oxy and did, and we
were college roommates senior year, my senior year at Oxy, both of our
senior years at Oxy. And these were all much bigger colleges than Oxy,
whatever. Maybe not all, but almost all, and folks like weighing in on
MTA, transportation issues and how that affects students. On statewide,
there was a big -- there was a big push to begin charging at community
colleges and to raise tuition rates at Cal States and UCs, and private
colleges were affected to in some reduction of scholarship moneys
(inaudible). And so there was a very -- there was like a state-wide
campaign and politics and it was -- I think it was more role models,
too. It was like Jeanette Sadikan(?), who has seen these folks who were
no smarter than I was. (laughter) (inaudible) But who knew the politics,
and who were keeping up with these things and making a difference and
organizing students on their campuses around issues that were occurring.
I mean some of the things were really small, like parking and stuff like
that, whatever, like we had a huge thing about -- I think the UCLA
people let it on like that, whatever, the city couldn't ticket without
cleaning the street, whatever. Anyway, stuff like that, so I mean, some
of them were small issues, but even like Olympics, we wanted student
involvement and discount things when the Olympics were kind of in '84
and stuff like that, but it was a good -- it showed me, whatever, that
there were active engaged political people out there and. again, people
like Joe Krovoza who I became friends with who -- who were engaged and
sharp and showed me ways to do things, and counted on me for things and
that I could deliver, and stuff like that.
-
COLLINGS
- And what did you call it? The seven-person -- seven-member junta?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, that was called the SCC. That was at Oxy. That's the Student
Coordinating Committee of the Associated Students of Occidental College.
I think there were like two policy, a secretary. I was publications. I
don't remember what the other three positions were, but we had a budget
that we controlled. We appointed a lot of people to run film series and
speaker series, stuff that we funded. We hired the editor of the
newspaper and made decisions on (laughter) I made a bad decision on --
like, the typesetting machine was wearing out, and becoming unreliable,
and we had to decide to make a big expenditure on a new typesetting
machine, like in '84, just like three years later, computers would be
(inaudible) we invested in a big new typesetting machine, because we
didn't see that coming. But it wasn't -- I mean, I think that -- it
actually got disbanded at Oxy recently, I read, because they challenged
the administration on things. We weren't pushy. I mean, we could've been
pushier, probably, but I think that -- I think what it did -- I mean, I
think it was good for -- you know, we were seven people who were
deciding -- I forget what our budget was, but it was like, I want to say
like thirty or fifty thousand for a year, or something. I mean, it
wasn't -- it was pretty big potatoes to me at the time. (laughter) And
there was -- I mean, there was a lot of interest. I think we actually
started a thing that also got disbanded, like a student senate that was
mostly designed to try to activate more folks into politics of the
college.
-
COLLINGS
- So with all of this activity, what were you starting to think you might
do when you -- what was your major at this point? Was it still history?
-
LINTON
- I majored in biochemistry actually, so -- and never really wavered from
that. I did -- well, I was doing sports, whatever I was doing, waterpolo
in the fall and swimming in the winter, and then I actually did track in
the spring to lift weights, whatever, on my off-season. And so I hadn't
done a lot of art, and I had focused, and early on I took a lot of
science, whatever, had to get all my pre-med and stuff out of the way,
sort of. And so, by junior and senior year, I still had whatever, like
one track worth of science stuff that I was finishing, but I ended up
with a lot more electives and stuff at that time, and I ended up taking
history of human rights in Latin America, and more like contemporary
novel and -- I'm trying to think -- didn't take that much real politics,
but I started to -- and I started to take more art classes. I had a hard
time taking art classes because a lot of them were like afternoon
studios and I had sports practice at the time, but Oxy started a program
with Art Center College of Design where I could take night classes
there, and taking art classes at art center and taking some art history
too, at Oxy. And I think I was like one class short of an art minor,
anyways.
-
COLLINGS
- Sounds like you were incredibly busy.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I think -- it's funny, because I think that I peaked junior year. I
think I was really busy junior year, and I started to -- I started to
become a lot more -- whatever, I had always sort of said, OK, I'm going
to do science and I'm good at science and I think I've got -- I got
straight A's in math and in physics and mostly in chemistry. I think I
was freshman chemistry of the year person. You know what, I was. I was
freshman chemist of the year, and I was freshman of the year, whatever.
I got good grades early on, and then I kind of -- the beginning of my
senior year I took the MCAT and I started to be less sure that -- I
mean, it became more -- I mean, I always had a lot of interests, but
politics was definitely ascending. Art was ascending, and the sense that
science was the only way I could do something good for the world was
sort of crumbling, you know. And so I wasn't as sure -- like, I thought
-- at the time, I decided kind of, OK, I'll take a year off and I'll
work and I'll go back to med school later, and I think even during -- I
actually never graduated from college. Oxy has these things called comps
[comprehensive exams] that are your master's thesis, whatever, and so
for chemistry I had to do a...
-
COLLINGS
- Master's? Or is this for Bachelor's?
-
LINTON
- For Bachelor's. I had to do a -- take this national exam, which I did
fine, and I had to do a presentation on a current topic of research, and
I didn't work hard enough on it and I kind of -- most of the chemistry
students were not that good public speakers, and I thought, oh, I'll be
able to ace this because I can actually explain things and stuff. And I
didn't -- I don't think I did that badly, but I didn't have enough -- I
didn't prepare well enough, and so I was then supposed to take that
half-hour talk and turn that into a paper and add more detail to it, and
I never finished that paper. I thought I was going to do it in the
summer, and I never finished it, so I never actually graduated.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, when you were thinking about being a doctor, were you also sort of
thinking about what kind of salary a doctor would make? Was that kind of
consideration an issue for you?
-
LINTON
- I mean, insomuch as it would be good to have somewhat comfortable salary,
that was fine, I don't think I was thinking of it. I mean, I think I was
thinking that I would be, whatever, going to Nicaragua or something and
being a doctor and so I didn't think it would be a huge salary, but I
thought it would be something where -- I think part of it was, so my dad
as a mechanical engineer, he would go crazy and be in the hospital for
six months and walk out and be able to walk into a job and make good
money, whatever, very easily, so I think I saw being a doctor as
somewhat similar to that in that if I ever needed money it shouldn't be
too hard to make decent money as a doctor.
-
COLLINGS
- But as you went through college, that became less of an issue for you, it
sounds like.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that I ever -- I'm not sure that it was -- I
think I never -- I didn't see myself taking a vow of poverty or
anything, but I didn't -- I don't think the reason I wanted to be a
doctor -- or the reason I wanted to be a doctor was never to make money
hand over foot. It was to be comfortable enough, but to be able to do
good stuff.
-
COLLINGS
- So what did you think, then, you were going to do?
-
LINTON
- Well, I kind of wasn't sure. I felt like I had a lot going on and that
held my attention better than science did, and I felt like to be a
doctor would be very demanding and focused in a way that I felt like I
didn't want to be that focused on that. So I took some time off. I got a
job working at UC Irvine at the hospital in a clinical laboratory and
ended up -- I actually worked Sunday through Thursday and so I would
come up to L.A. on Fridays and check out art galleries and do whatever.
I think I was exploring the city and stuff, so I moved back into Orange
County and moved out for a little while and then moved back into my
mom's for a little while, and I -- the idea of going back to school
became less and less of a -- I was doing my art, I was volunteering.
Trying to think. I got involved in Green Party stuff, although that was
more -- yeah, that was when I was in Santa Ana. I mean, I moved out from
my mom's to this old neighborhood in Santa Ana, near downtown Santa Ana.
Gosh, like the late Eighties are all a blur now. I mean, I left college
in '85 and I moved to Long Beach in 1990, and yeah, I mean, I was taking
-- I was taking some night classes at Art Center still, and I was -- I
think I was kind of groping for where I was interested in the
environment, but not finding things really where I was. And I think the
reason -- I mean, ultimately, I moved to Long Beach, I got involved in
L.A. River issues, which felt very -- like, the environment, but right
here, in the city, and not the rainforest or global warming or something
far away.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, something gigantic and far away, yeah.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, so -- but I was doing -- I was, like, walking, volunteering walking
precincts for Democratic candidates in Orange County and these neighbors
of mine were a gay couple that were very involved in Democratic Party
stuff and would talk with them about politics stuff. One of them was a
civil rights lawyer. Actually, he got elected to office in West
Hollywood later, but they were these good radical gay -- well, they
weren't like ACT-UP or anything, but they were politically engaged,
smart, gay, open. I forget all that. So I worked in a laboratory. There
was a job that opened up in the computer department supporting the
laboratory and even though I wasn't qualified for that I ended up
getting that job and making more money and learning a skill that was
more portable, too, so then I -- ultimately I worked on computer systems
for hospitals, starting at UC Irvine and then I was recruited by a
hospital in Long Beach and then by Children's Hospital in Los Angeles,
so -- and I was always -- I mean, I did well and I worked hard and
people -- whatever, I was smart and creative and in some ways I was like
the -- there were, like, programming people who really couldn't talk to
people in the computer department, and then I was sort of the interface
person who would be out talking to the lab and talking to the nurses and
talking to the physicians and understanding what they're asking for and
what the systems were capable of.
-
COLLINGS
- Wow, that's so valuable.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, kind of interfacing people-wise and stuff, so I think I was good at
that stuff, but I remember thinking -- we would have these big system
implementations that we would work for a year on, and then put in an all
night for weeks. We were like debugging and stuff, and I remember
thinking after a couple of those, if I were to put this sort of effort
into my art or into my politics, that I'd really have more to show for
it than into implementing a new computer system for a hospital. Which
wasn't bad, or whatever. I mean, I was glad to be doing something that
was about helping people, about health ultimately, but it was definitely
just a job, although I think I worked hard and did well. How are we
doing?
1.2. Session 2 ( June 12, 2007)
-
COLLINGS
- OK, good morning, Joe. It's June 12th, 2007, Jane Collings interviewing
Joe Linton at his home. And we left off last time with -- we had talked
about your early life and education and your post-college computer
analyst work, and this time we were going to start talking about your --
the beginnings of your real work as an activist.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, well, I think that -- actually, it's funny, because I think it
actually worked well as a model for me to have -- to be working a job
for 40 hours a week and then doing lots of art and activism on the side.
And I mean -- well, I got involved in Friends of the L.A. River in 1993,
when Lewis MacAdams, the founder of Friends of the L.A. River, came and
spoke in Long Beach before I'd even moved here to Eco-Village. And it
sounded -- well, it appealed to me because I had biked. I was bicycling
-- at that point, too, OK, so even before that I'm thinking -- I mean, I
started to have some environmental consciousness and interest, but I
wasn't -- I hadn't really -- I think I was kind of looking around for
something, for a cause to make mine, and so -- but I had begun to --
when I moved to Long Beach, so I was living in Santa Ana, working at UC
Irvine Medical Center. Then I moved to Long Beach, was working at Long
Beach Memorial Medical Center. So I had had a car, actually, when I was
living in Santa Ana, although I did bike a lot, and I did even walk to
work some days, which would take me, like, 45 minutes and it would take
me ten minutes to drive. Anyway, so I was sort of experimenting with not
driving, and I guess in 1991 was the Gulf War, so I was working at the
hospital in Long Beach and I was -- when I moved to Long Beach, I
deliberately moved somewhere where I could get to work without using my
car, just because I was thinking it would be good to take the bus. I was
actually in a good -- I could take the bus or the train really easily
and I could even bike along the L.A. River to work, although most days I
took the bus or the train. But I would go to the corner and take
whichever bus or train came first, so...
-
COLLINGS
- That's a great situation.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, so I figure -- I was sort of -- you know, I was considering giving
up my car for -- mostly for environmental reasons, and the first Gulf
War, I believe that was '91, like February '91.
-
COLLINGS
- January 15th.
-
LINTON
- That's right, that's right. And I had actually -- so I was actually
really busy at the hospital, implementing a new computer system or
something right at the beginning of '91 and I wanted to be more involved
in the kind of anti-war stuff but I was too busy at work and I had -- by
that time, I believe I started working at the hospital in Long Beach in,
like, Fall of '89 or so. Actually, what does it say on my resume?
(laughter) What do I claim? 1990. Yeah, it was either the end of '89 or
beginning of '90 that I moved to Long Beach. And so by early '91 I had
basically -- gosh, I think I put 1,200 miles on my car in the course of
a year, and that included like a 300 mile road trip, whatever, so I had
-- I had gotten into the habit of just not using a car, and so I decided
that for the first Gulf War that I would -- that I couldn't get to the
protests but I could unload my car, and not -- whatever, I felt that
we're, today, as we were then, fighting foreign wars for oil and that
part of my contribution to not supporting that way, maybe actively
opposing that war, would be to get rid of my car. So I got rid of my
car. I believe it was March 14th, because I remember it was a month
after Valentine's Day. Somehow I remember that. Anyways, but by that
time, I had -- I mean, once I had my commute down without a car, it's
pretty easy to do the rest of my trips, to the store or to entertainment
or whatever, and I was living in the west side of downtown Long Beach,
very near -- like downtown Long Beach is kind of a hub of transit, so --
and by that time, too, I was riding the bus a lot and I was drawing a
lot on the bus. I would draw pictures of people, draw bus interiors and
stuff, so I've got lots of those. So -- and I would read, whatever. I
think time spend on the bus is not a burden, whatever. It's time that
you get to, whatever, that you get to relax, you're not stressed. It's
time that you can...
-
COLLINGS
- Depends on how crowded it is.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, exactly. (laughter) If you can't find a seat, it's less of that,
but it's generally -- it's a time when you can -- when I spend either
reading or sketching and sometimes meeting people and talking with
people and observing the city around me and stuff like that. But yeah,
it's funny because when I did -- when I moved to L.A. and was riding the
bus from here to Children's Hospital, a lot of times it was much too
crowded to sit down and I noticed I drew less.
-
COLLINGS
- I would think so! (laughter)
-
LINTON
- Yeah, but so, I think that that was -- and what's interesting about that,
too, is that I knew -- I mean, I (inaudible). Actually, there's a
Greenpeace book on the environmental impacts of the car. I'm trying to
think of other early literature that informed me of that. I mean, I kind
of knew that cars were a big problem and I was -- I thought of it mostly
in terms of oil and in terms of pollution and I think now I've come to
embrace -- well, water quality is a huge one that I wasn't aware of at
the time, and permeability and stuff like that. I mean, if we're really
looking at a healthy Los Angeles River, we're going to need to have a
whole lot less cars in the Basin, and a lot more permeable surfaces and
whatever. There's actually a lot of connections between cars and rivers
in a way, cars and problems in rivers. But I think what I was -- what I
hadn't realized too, at the time, was sort of cars' impact on cities. I
mean, I grew up in a suburb and kind of just assumed that, you know,
everyone would have a car and that cars were an integral part of human
civilization or something, and I think as I read different things, and
there a -- I think it's a Berkeley or San Francisco study about people
not knowing their neighbors on streets with heavy traffic versus knowing
their neighbors on streets with lighter traffic and things like that, I
think I've become a lot more aware of how our urban quality of life is
impoverished and public health impoverished by a preponderance of cars.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you know anybody else who was giving up their car?
-
LINTON
- You know, I didn't. I think it was a kind of fun thing to be sort of
maverick and do something that would surprise people, but I mean, I -- I
mean, around, like, '95, '96, I started getting involved with the Bus
Riders Union and I met a few people there that were -- that had chosen
to not have a car. But I mean, I had -- I think I -- there's the
statistic that in L.A. County there's like 400,000 people without a car,
so people would (inaudible) have a car and say, "Oh, he's one of the
only people without a car!" And I'd say, well, no, there's about 400,000
of us, so it's...
-
COLLINGS
- How is that number -- how is that counted?
-
LINTON
- I think that's a census number, but I think it's based on -- I actually
think it's -- I think it's an undercount, I've come to think -- that
it's based on people who -- it's based on, like, boardings of the bus
system and not -- anyways, I think it's based on bus system, on people
that are dependent on the bus system in L.A. I think it's a number from
MTA. But yeah, I didn't really -- I mean, a lot of -- I think it's
actually something that's sort of -- it's a frustration to me that
within Los Angeles environmentalist circles, I believe they're -- and
even in peace circles, whatever, I think there's a disconnect with
realizing that if we are to -- like I said, if we're going to have
healthy rivers, if we're going to have peace and (laughter) we're not
going to be going to other countries and bombing them in oil-rich
regions and Colombia and Nigeria and Iraq and you name it, we're going
to need to -- I mean, we should be connecting -- I mean, I think at the
time, too -- I mean, I was starting to read stuff about how -- like, how
do our lifestyles impact the environment? I think I was -- some of the
early environmental activists I came in touch with was, like, Green
Party and started to hear about things like the rain forest and saving
wilderness and stuff like that, and I wasn't -- that didn't appeal to me
that much. I was much more interested in how do we and how do I live in
a city and look at what my impact is.
-
COLLINGS
- Do you remember what it was when Lewis MacAdams spoke that particularly
appealed to you?
-
LINTON
- Well, I think part of it was similar to what I just said, was I had been
biking -- well, as a kid, I biked along the Santa Ana River to get to
the ocean. It would take us like an hour, and we would -- my brothers
and my friends, whatever, we would get on our ten-speeds and ride and
ride and ride and get to the ocean and be exhausted, and that river is
concrete with a bike path along it, and so -- and when I moved to Long
Beach I was maybe a quarter mile from the L.A. River, maybe less. And it
had a bike path along it, and it was largely concrete but it's actually
-- in Long Beach there's an estuary which is about almost three miles of
unpaved bottom, so you actually get a lot of egrets and herons and stuff
like that. So I'd seen these big white birds. I didn't know what they
were, but I didn't even know that that was the Los Angeles River. I just
knew that's where I could catch a bike path that would take me north. So
Lewis MacAdams -- I think what was so -- there was Lewis MacAdams and
Martin Schlagader and Jim Danza and I think there was a fourth gentleman
too. And they were actually dressed up, and I remember Lewis was
wearing, like, a vintage tie and kind of artsy and poetic -- he's a
poet, and wasn't -- was both not talking about like a faraway
environmental cause, but talking about an environmental cause that was a
quarter mile from where I lived, and was creative and had an energy that
wasn't -- I don't know, I think some environmentalists can be sort of --
and probably I could be this way, too. Like, oh, I'd better not pollute.
Well, I can't eat beef, and I can't do this, and I can't do that, and
I've got to recycle.
-
COLLINGS
- (inaudible)
-
LINTON
- Yeah, exactly, they're sort of -- yeah, I call it, like, the monk
complex. Like, oh, I've got to give this up and give that up, whatever.
And it's sort of -- I think there was more of a joy and a creativity to
what -- especially what Lewis was saying, but all three of them -- gosh,
I can't remember the fourth one. Anyways, all four of them, even the one
I don't remember, but -- so they were having a fundraiser. There was
actually -- there was a proposal that the county and the Army Corps were
working on that would build parapet walls along the river ten feet high
that would further -- that would prevent flooding, but that would
further separate communities from the river and they were looking for
support from different groups, and I was part of a group called LBACI --
it was called Long Beach Area Citizens Involved and I think we were just
sort of realizing that, like, citizens has come to be sort of an
exclusive word that I don't use.
-
COLLINGS
- You mean in the context of the immigration debate?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, exactly. So, it's something -- actually, I'm really careful to say,
you know, resident activism and not citizen activism. There's a broader
global citizen thing, but it tends to be -- it tends to be a word
that...
-
COLLINGS
- It's become a very charged word.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, yeah, that excludes certain people, but the group was called Long
Beach Area Citizens Involved, and it was kind of a broad-spectrum lefty
group that was looking at schools, looking at gay rights, looking at
environmental issues in Long Beach, looking at elections, endorsing
candidates and doing phone banking and stuff like that to get
progressive candidates, especially within the City of Long Beach, and so
that was a good -- there was a guy, Paul -- actually, there is this guy
Paul Burton -- Burden, or Burton? Burton, Paul Burton, who was a
musician who played a lot of benefits and was very much like an artist
in the service of the cause, who actually -- he's the one who told me
that Friends of the L.A. River would be at that meeting and wanted to
make -- he thought I would be interested in that and wanted to make sure
I was there. Little bit older than that, maybe ten years older than I
was. Maybe fifteen. Anyways, had two young kids and his wife was a
teacher and they were living in an old house in -- more or less in my
neighborhood in kind of southwest Long Beach. And so he was sort of a
role model person who was both -- they were kind of -- LBACI had a lot
of kind of straitlaced -- a lot of retired people. In fact, the group's
folded since, because they didn't -- it aged. It was founded out of the
McCarthy campaign in the early 70's.
-
COLLINGS
- Oh, that's very interesting.
-
LINTON
- And so there was sort of this upwelling of liberal fervor in Long Beach,
and they actually accomplished many things. Like Alan Lowenthal, who's
now a state senator, was -- LBACI helped get him elected to the city
council in Long Beach and he went on to the state assembly and student
senate. So the group was able to -- especially at the local level, at
the -- gosh, there was a school, in the school board in Long Beach and
in the city council in Long Beach, we would endorse candidates and in
close races I think we helped make a difference. So -- but there were
also sort of the, like, Food Not Bombs anarchist collective folks, too,
who I hung out with a little but I wasn't as -- I think I was a little
more established and stuff, whatever. It was funny, I remember showing
up to table for LBACI and so I sort of had these three worlds in a way
that I went in and out of, that I had activists, I had artists, and I
work in hospitals, and I remember showing up at a tabling event for
LBACI and I had come straight from work and somebody who I was tabling
with -- can't remember who she was, anyways, but said to me "Why are you
all dressed up? You're an artist!" (laughter) As if I shouldn't be
wearing a tie and whatever, slacks and button-down shirt, so I was -- I
mean, I did hang out with -- there was a guy Rain -- gosh, there was
this tall guy. I forgot his other name. Anyways. There were some of the
anarchist folks who I would run into, like on the bus, and talk to and
stuff. There were some of the anarchist folks who I would run into, like
on the bus and talk to and stuff, but I think I was too -- I think I
smelled too establishment for them in a way, or whatever.
-
COLLINGS
- Tell me about this anarchist group.
-
LINTON
- They basically -- I mean, they were kind of -- they all wore black and
they did scavenging and stuff. They were like, oh, let's dumpster dive,
so I wasn't ready for that. And they would actually go to the farmer's
market on Fridays and get leftover food and then cook food for -- I
believe we served food on Sunday mornings. I forget, exactly. So there
would be, like, cooking parties. They all lived in a big, like -- well,
I shouldn't say all of them. A bunch of them lived in a big kind of
anarchist house, so I would go over there sometimes and help prepare
food for Food Not Bombs, but it wasn't -- I think, whatever, I think
that my -- culturally, I wasn't quite in that milieu as much.
-
COLLINGS
- Did they have a (inaudible) political position, it sounds like?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, although they were -- I mean, LBACI was definitely about, OK, we're
incremental, getting people elected and stuff, whereas Food Not Bombs
was a little more -- actually, some of them were car-free and stuff, and
like I would run into them on the bus and stuff, but they were a little
more like drop-out and do your... Oh, there was this organic gardening
group that some of them were part of, whatever, where we would -- it's
called Long Beach Organic, where there was this big vacant lot near
Signal Hall, actually, near the hospital where I worked. And we
converted that into a community garden and did tons of mulching and
chipping (laughter) and stuff like that. Anyways, and...
-
COLLINGS
- That doesn't sound very anarchic.
-
LINTON
- Well, but it's sort of this very do-it-yourself culture. I mean, it's
funny because there's a lot of -- I'm around people in that culture --
there's a good friend of mine, Federico, who lives here at Eco-Village
who's very, like, sew your own clothes, build your own bike, and I'm not
-- I mean, I -- whatever, I can fix basic stuff on my bike, but I don't
-- there's a thing called the Bicycle Kitchen where a lot of these guys
go to and, you know, take cast-off bikes and rehab them and it's like,
when something's seriously wrong with a bike, I take it to the bike shop
and I get it fixed. So I'm not -- I'm not quite as -- whatever. I mean,
I do have a sense of there -- I mean, there's different approaches.
There's, like, let's get a park built. Do we just go and cut down the
fence and plant our own trees and whatever, or do we knock on the doors
at City Hall and line up funding and get the city to build it, and I
tend to be the second of those approaches, of assuming that we can be
more -- well, I don't want to dis the other approach, whatever. I mean,
I think it's good to have multiple approaches. I think that Malcolm X
made Martin Luther King much more effective, so I think having different
people out there pushing in different ways is excellent and necessary.
But...
-
COLLINGS
- Now, are you aware of whether this anarchist group worked with other
groups in the L.A. area or were they just sort of kind of on their own?
The reason I think of it is because I was talking with Ruth Lansford of
the Friends of the Ballona Wetlands, and as she described the Wetlands
Action Network, it sounded like there was sort of an anarchist component
there, and I was wondering if...
-
LINTON
- Well, there were definitely -- I remember this one, like a gathering
thing, like there would be Green Party gatherings and some of them were
involved in Green Party. I mean, I think that they were hooked into
different sort of activist networks in L.A. I mean, it's not --
anarchist doesn't mean, you know, whatever, no structure. I think it
means no structure that, whatever, you build your own structure, kind
of. But I actually don't -- well, I know them that well. It was a circle
that I was on the periphery of, and some -- whatever. I think it was
something -- it was a group of people who thought not having a car was,
of course, that's the way to do it. It's living very cheap, and stuff, a
lot of them. I mean, it's clever, whatever. I mean, I shouldn't say it's
clever, even. It harkens back to, whatever, thousands of years ago or
something. You had to make your own clothes, you had to do your own
transportation, you had to catch your own food, whatever, and so it's
not as -- whatever. It makes a lot of sense, I think, although as a
suburban white kid, it -- you know, some of it was a little bit...
-
COLLINGS
- Took a little getting used to.
-
LINTON
- Yeah. Yeah. But...
-
COLLINGS
- So, at what point did you learn about Eco-Village?
-
LINTON
- So, what happened was, I had got a supervisor who I wasn't getting along
with at the hospital at Long Beach, and I'd been recruited by a couple
hospitals, one in New York, and one in San Francisco, and thought --
anyways, had also had a call from Children's Hospital to do kind of
moonlighting for them, and so I was looking at -- so I was actually
considering going to New York. They had actually made me an offer and
everything, and then I thought, well, let me check with L.A. and see if
that's closer to my mom and my family and my brothers and sisters and
stuff, but whatever. So I checked in with these folks that I had done a
little bit of moonlighting for, and they offered me a job and so I
started commuting, actually, from Long Beach. It would take an hour and
a half on the train and bus and it was -- it was actually good. I did a
lot of drawing and a lot of reading, but I didn't -- I definitely wasn't
able to spend as much time on, like, activism in Long Beach and stuff,
so it was clear that I was going to move to L.A. I mean, and I had
expected that, whatever, but I hadn't immediately moved, so I started
looking around for places, and I was kind of looking at places in
Silverlake and I definitely wanted to live without a car because I had
been doing that already for five years and I -- so I was looking around
for places, and another -- an environmentalist, Regina, and I don't
remember her last name, had taken a tour of Eco-Village and said, well,
if you're looking at moving up to L.A., You should check out this
Eco-Village thing, and I actually took a note at the time and I didn't
think about it too much, but I had been looking around at -- well, I
actually was looking at some places in Silverlake and I was also looking
at some artists' lots downtown, and where I had lived in Long Beach was
-- it was like a storefront which was sort of an artist's loft inside,
whatever, but it was also in a neighborhood and there were lots of kids
and I had a ping pong table in my place and all these young Latinos
would come over and play ping pong and do art and stuff like that, yeah,
so it was -- so I had both, at like funky space, high ceilings and
everything, but I also was in a neighborhood and so as I was looking at
places in L.A., I was finding, you know, housing-type space in a
neighborhood or lofts that were in a wasteland in a way, and that were
actually not that transit-friendly, whatever. There was a lot that I
actually really liked. They had a big outdoor garden space in downtown
L.A. that was near the L.A. River, actually, anyways, near Santa Fe and
the Ten freeway, is that? Anyway, it's near Santa Fe and, like, Olympic.
But it was a mile from the nearest bus stop or something, or maybe a
little bit less. But it was just like, and there was nobody living
around there, it felt like, in '96, and so I came to Eco-Village to
visit and there were people without cars, there were people gardening,
and actually at the time I was -- I had on the roof of where I was
living in Long Beach, I had a big garden and I was also gardening some
at this organic garden, community garden place, and so I just felt more
-- actually, it's funny. So I talked to Lois, and I said I might be
interested in living here, and she showed me -- they were just in the
process of acquiring the building next door at 117, and it was thrashed,
and looked awful, and I said, you know, well, where might I live if I
was going to come to Eco-Village, and she showed me a unit in that
building. I think it was actually even before, before CRSP [Cooperative
Resources and Services Project] had purchased the building. It's right
around that time, because I think they were -- I think they had already
bought it by the time I moved into the neighborhood, but I think when I
first was looking, they hadn't yet bought it and I remember my heart
sinking, like oh god, I can't live in it. It was like thrashed and small
and I was used to these funky art spaces, and I was like, I don't want
to live in that building! So, I ended up first moving into a fourplex on
White House Place.
-
COLLINGS
- Those are some nice buildings down there.
-
LINTON
- Yeah. It was actually a Korean landlord, and it was mostly South Korean
families in the two buildings that he owns, and I lived there from '96
to 2000. CRSP [Cooperative Resources and Services Project] purchased
this building, I believe, in '99 and I was -- there's a woman I was
dating at the time, Michelle Mascarenhas, who's a food activist and so
we were planning on moving in together, and so we felt like it would be
good for us to have a space that wasn't her moving into my space or me
moving into her space. So that's when we arranged to move into this. So,
I've been living here since '99, but yeah, I think -- so Eco-Village,
it's -- I'm a little bit mixed on Eco-Village. I don't want to dis it
too much, but I moved up here thinking, OK, I'm going to work really
hard for Eco-Village and that'll be kind of my environmental cause, and
I had a lot of conflict with Lois. I found it difficult to get -- to
feel like my energy was appreciated and was going toward -- was actually
moving things forward. For a while, I wasn't -- I mean, I would still
come to, like, potlucks and some events and stuff, but I wasn't really
participating very much. I mean, there was a point early on where I was
helping rehab units and all kinds of stuff, and then I kind of -- I
mean, Lois and I have a lot of differences. I mean, I tend to be an
incrementalist and say, OK, what can we do now. And Lois, I mean,
there's this streets project that we're working on that's...
-
COLLINGS
- That sounds like a great project.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, so it's like -- what's been tricky is to be...
-
COLLINGS
- Could you describe the project?
-
LINTON
- Yeah. So, it's called Shared Streets. It actually grew out of a -- there
was a councilwoman Jackie Goldberg's office, initiated what's called --
a specific plan that's called the Station Neighborhood Area Plan, that
called for increased density around transit stops along the red line, in
this neighborhood, and then also traffic calming within existing
neighborhoods to favor pedestrianization and slow cars down, and so we
-- that idea appealed to me a lot. I'd been reading -- I mean, I'd been
bicycling and reading a lot about kind of urbanism and how to get people
out of their cars and part of it is to kind of foster, whatever, to make
it safer and greener and stuff for pedestrians and less easy for cars to
speed through. So, we worked with the Councilman's office and the DOT
and whatnot and actually wrote most of the application to get the MTA
for funding and we got funding approved in -- I think we put in the
application in 2000. I mean, and we did a bunch of the work in '99 to
kind of outreach to the neighborhood, and we had a big kind of planning
session in the street and had people give input on what they wanted. I
mean, it was mostly Eco-Villagers but it was also some Korean and some
Spanish-speaking neighbors, and so we did an application and we got
funded, although it was near the low end of the funded ones, so it was
funded in 2001 with 2005 funds, so -- and then the state didn't have as
much money, so it got pushed back and we didn't really push for it
politically, which could've moved it up potentially but anyways, I got
busy with other things, but there's actually a designers meetings this
Thursday to look at so-called final designs, although we've looked at
what was supposed to be final designs and we didn't like them.
(laughter) So we'll see.
-
COLLINGS
- What didn't you like about it?
-
LINTON
- Well, they'd actually looked at -- so, we're looking at doing -- looking
at making the street better for pedestrians. We're got -- we've got two
lanes of parking, and two travel lanes, and they'd actually looked at
removing a lane of parking and giving only a little of that space to,
like, giving like two feet of the seven feet that's allocated to parking
to pedestrians and the other five feet of it to cars that are coming
into our neighborhood, so we were actually in some ways widening the
street for cars, which is not...
-
COLLINGS
- Is just the opposite of...
-
LINTON
- Yeah, exactly. We're just going in the wrong direction. So that was the
problem with the last design. And it's also sort of a -- I mean, in some
ways -- I don't park, whatever. I'm not a big fan of parking. But
parking is an amenity for local residents, and widened streets is an
amenity more favoring pass-through traffic, whatever, favoring people
who don't live here. So I felt like it's sort of -- I mean, we discussed
it. Well, this was the hard part, like, Lois is like let's put a lake in
the street and let's close it and let's, you know, whatever -- you know,
very idealistic, kind of what I call a "whole-hogger," whatever. It's
like a term from the 1800's about somebody who was for temperance 100
percent and no exceptions.
-
COLLINGS
- Is that where the expression "whole hog" comes from?
-
LINTON
- I think so. It's from Christmas Carol, is where I learned it, reading
Charles Dickens.
-
COLLINGS
- That's interesting that you should make the analogy with a temperance
word. Very nice.
-
LINTON
- But it's sort of like, I think that -- I mean, I think that if we -- I
kind of, my mental calculation is that we can probably -- and parking's
pretty tight on this street, but at the same time, the census shows that
we have something like 56 percent of people on the street, many of whom
are seniors and children, who don't have a car. So it's actually -- we
in this census tract, our majority doesn't use that street for driving
or parking, so I think we can get away with taking away 10 to 20 percent
of parking and if we get more landscaping, more sidewalk, sort of
miniparks and a safer, beautiful street, and whereas I think Lois tends
to put out things like, oh, let's take away all the parking, you know.
Let's make our street car-free and it's like, eh, I don't think -- I
mean, I'm not opposed to that, personally, but I think that makes for a
-- a project that will, whatever, potentially courts like a backlash
and...
-
COLLINGS
- Some of the neighbors wouldn't like that.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, exactly. A lot of the neighbors wouldn't like that, so anyways --
so it's stuff like that where it's sort of -- the other thing is, Lois
-- like, I tend to think, OK, if we can get the city to build this
project here, and if it's successful, it's something the city can do in
other neighborhoods. And if we do -- Lois tends to say, oh, well, let's
do it for half the price and all the neighbors will do it and we'll just
get -- we'll pour the concrete ourselves and (inaudible) and it's like,
that may be less replicable, and the idea of taking away all the parking
is even less replicable in other neighborhoods too, so I think I'm more
conscious of a shorter horizon of saying, you know, what can we do, kind
of within existing constraints in the next three or four years, versus
-- in the next, you know, three or four years versus what's -- I don't
want to call it utopian or whatever -- what's idealistic and, you
know...
-
COLLINGS
- Who was the spokesman for this project?
-
LINTON
- Well, that's another thing that's tricky. I mean, something -- in some
ways, I am, but I mean, it's not -- we don't - well, it's another issue
I have with Lois. Lois is very willing to say "the community wants X,"
and I'm a lot more willing to say, "I think X would be appropriate. I'm
in favor of X," so I'm not willing to speak for the community relative
to what we want in the shared streets. I'm willing to take information
to the Eco-Village community, which isn't the whole community and get
our buy-off on it, but there isn't a spokesperson, and I mean -- I think
I was the -- you know, in '99 and 2000, when we were pushing for funding
and stuff on the project and got the MTA funding, I was certainly the
lead, you know, volunteer on the project, but I mean, it's not -- I
don't think that I have the, whatever. I don't think that gives me
authority to say this is what's in it and this is what's not. I mean, I
think it's important to have an open process with dialogue and input and
from Eco-Villagers and neighbors, whatever.
-
COLLINGS
- So who will meet with the designers on Thursday?
-
LINTON
- Lois, they called Lois and said we'd like to meet with you, and Lois
e-mailed Eco-Village people and said "does anybody want to come to
this?" So -- which I don't think's a very good process, frankly. I mean,
I think there should be a meeting open to the community, but we tend to
be -- we Eco-Village residents tend to somewhat swamp those meetings
anyway in our neighborhood. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- With sheer numbers.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, so -- which is OK, whatever. I mean, it's not -- I'm not opposed
to, whatever. There's some organizers who like, oh, you should just get
people together and whatever they want to do, you should do. I have
ecological and urban values that I'm pushing, but I want an open process
that nobody feels like they weren't part of, you know, or weren't at
least -- wasn't open to them.
-
COLLINGS
- Are you the only person at Eco-Village who has your background in terms
of neighborhood activism, as you described in Long Beach?
-
LINTON
- Well, I think no. There's, I think, more -- of people who moved into
Eco-Village to be part of it, more of us have activist backgrounds and
they vary.
-
COLLINGS
- But activism in the planning sense?
-
LINTON
- I mean, I think like, Yuki from Communities for a Better Environment -- I
mean, there's a bunch of folks who work for non-profits that do
environmental work, that work on campaigns and projects and I don't -- I
mean, all our flavors are a little different, and I think I've been,
whatever, knee-deep in it a little longer than most people, but I mean,
I don't -- I think it's -- trying to think of who else has similar,
whatever. There's Dore, who runs environmental programs for Korean Youth
Community Center, and there's -- all these groups kind of weigh in on
stuff in their areas. There's another guy Ron who is co-founder of the
Bike Coalition with me. I mean, I think I'm unique among Eco-Villagers
in many ways, but I think a lot of us have activist backgrounds that
look at how do we make communities environmental, but I mean, different
people -- Lara has worked with co-ops and stuff like that, so it's sort
of different. It's all different shades but it's not that, whatever. I
wouldn't say my experience is unique or exceptional.
-
COLLINGS
- Is this project a done deal, or could it possibly crash because of some
of these conflicts in terms of the vision?
-
LINTON
- Oh, I think it could crash. Actually, there's a bike path project that
just crashed, that the environmentalists couldn't get together on. It's
a similar dynamic where the county -- I mean, yeah, there are deadlines
on funding, and when a governmental agency commits to something and then
comes to an impasse where they feel they can't show progress, sometimes
they do forfeit the funds. I mean, I think that's unlikely, but it does
happen.
-
COLLINGS
- You think there'll be a compromise in this case?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I mean, I think that their plans will be better, but it's like,
it's been really difficult for me to work on this project because -- I
shouldn't say because. I become frustrated because I go to a meeting and
we've kind of sat down with the city and said let's do X, Y, and Z and
so -- and then they go back to the drawing board and they come back, and
sometimes I find things that I'm frustrated with what they did, but we
come back to the table and Lois said, "Oh, let's do a lake, and let's
close this, and let's" -- you know, and it sort of -- we actually had
discussions of let's close the street in '99, and we looked at -- as a
community, we looked at -- I expressed that, if we close the street, (a)
it takes a year to get the permit to do that, so it would make the
project longer and we thought it was right around the corner, and (b)
it's probably not that replicable in other neighborhoods and stuff, and
we were looking at this broad -- not that broad, whatever --
community-wide plan, like a four-mile linear plan for a corridor,
anyways. And we made certain trade-offs saying, OK, we think we think we
can get rid of this much parking. We think we can -- and I kind of led a
process of -- you know, probably what I should've done is documented
that really well and then just pull it out when Lois says let's do a
lake, and say "look, the community consensed on this," but I mean, it's
just tricky because it feels like we kind of have parameters and then
it's still like all over the board and it's a lot of energy to try to
rein that in and move the project forward and it's still -- it's still
messy, and it's not -- it's also sort of -- sorry, there's a lot of
baggage here. (laughter) But I mean, I worked for the city for two
years, for Councilman Reyes, and there are ways of doing things where
you have the city build it and then you plant other trees, whatever. And
it's like the city has a law that says you can't plant fruit trees as
street trees, and yet, we go into a meeting and every time Lois says,
"Oh, you've got to plant fruit trees," and every time I say, well, can
we plant half the trees and then you guys look the other way and we'll
plant fruit trees, and yet every time Lois -- well, I should say every
time. Many times, Lois is telling the bureaucrats, who can't -- I call
it "the person who can't say yes." (laughter) It's like telling the
person who can't say yes, "You need to do X," and there's no way. It's
like, illegal in terms of -- I mean, the city staff is not going to
break the law no matter how many times you tell them that you think they
should. (laughter) So there's sort of a -- I feel frustrated in those
situations, like -- so anyways. And I don't disagree with Lois, but I
want to take that concern and say, OK, how do I get fruit trees in with
the least headache and make it happen? And it's not telling city staff
that they need to plant fruit trees. It's telling City Staff leave these
areas unplanted and when you're done we'll come in and plant fruit
trees. There's ways to do it that are not that hard, so anyways. But
it's sort of -- I find it difficult.
-
COLLINGS
- What's your view on that LAUSD property on the corner? Do you have a
position on that?
-
LINTON
- Well, I'm actually really -- that was one of the things that -- that's
another thing that I'm very frustrated with Lois about. I mean, we
actually cut a deal with the school district and Jackie Goldberg's
office where Lois was supposed to work with the CRA to purchase that
building, and Lois didn't follow up once it was kind of out of danger.
That was in, gosh, '97 or something? And then, you know, school district
had elections and the new president came in and the school district was
not going to endorse, saying we're going to tear it down and we were all
aghast that the agreement to save it had all fallen through, but we
said, "OK, let's roll that rock up the hill again together," and we
formed a committee, the Eco-Villagers. It must have been, like, 2000 or
2001. And we've kind of formulated a strategy on what we're going to do
and Lois -- we decided to look specifically at political pressure, on
[inaudible] and we were meeting each week and we had certain tasks that
we were going to follow up on that we agreed to, and Lois would go off
each week and do all these things completely different than what we had
come up with as a team. She spent all this time on trying to get the
building declared historic and it's like -- we had kind of said -- and
we had looked at different strategies and said, well, let's start with
this one, and she had just gone off the page and done all her own
things, and there was a point where I just said, look -- and hadn't
followed up on things that she had said she would, so it was like, if
you're not going to -- and that wasn't the first time. There was
actually a whole -- when the building was first purchased -- anyways,
I'll finish the LAUSD thing quick and then go to the other example, but
so, I just said, look, if you're not willing to operate as a team, then
you should do this by yourself and I don't need to be involved in it.
But a similar thing had happened when our first manager, handyman person
left not long after we purchased the building, whatever, like three or
four months in. We had a group at that time of like five folks who were
the building committee. I mean, now the building committee is still
called the building committee although it's like the community meeting.
But has 20 or 30, anyways, but we would meet and figure out what needed
to be done on the building and so the manager left and Lois said, oh, I
don't think we need a new manager. We'll just all do it as volunteers
and we'll get done whatever needs to get done and we have a lot --
there's a lot of knowledge among us, and we don't need a building
manager. And there were five people in the room and Lois, and all five
of us said no. We need a manager. We don't want to get called at 2 a.m.
I don't want to get called at 2 a.m. when there's a toilet stopped up,
whatever. You need a manager and yes, tap into volunteers and cultivate
them, but let's hire a manager. And Lois was like, no. Lois prevailed
and the building committee within a month ceased to exist because it was
really clear to all of us that it didn't matter what we said. And then
three months later, Lois was exhausted by having to unclog toilets at 3
a.m. and said, "Oh, I think we need to hire a manager." But I mean, it's
frequently the case that Lois gets an idea in her head and doesn't
really listen to -- is not a team player, basically says no, this is
what I've decided and it doesn't matter what the community wants or what
this medium I'm in wants. So I mean, I find that really deflating of
efforts, whatever, of trying to work together on things because it's
sort of -- she just does what she wants and doesn't listen. And maybe
that's what it takes to be a visionary and to do something that doesn't
exist.
-
COLLINGS
- That's what I was going to ask you. Does a group like this need a
visionary leader who is on fire? Or maybe they only need a person like
that at a certain point?
-
LINTON
- That's what I would say, is that to bring an organization from zero to
one requires a certain energy that's not necessarily the same energy to
bring it from one to two to seven to three hundred, you know, and I
think that there's a lot of Friends of the L.A. River, Eco-Village,
there are a lot of -- Bus Riders' Union -- there are a lot of founders
who are strong-willed, creative, visionary individuals who don't always
create structures that will sustain themselves in the absence of a
founder.
-
COLLINGS
- That's an interesting subject.
-
LINTON
- (laughter) Yeah.
-
COLLINGS
- We're at 55 minutes and I know you always say that you only have an hour.
Do you want to stop now?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I think we should stop now, because I've got to...
-
COLLINGS
- You've got to go.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I've got to get a bite to eat really quick and then go.
1.3. Session 3 ( June 19, 2007)
-
COLLINGS
- OK, today is June 19th, 2007, Jane Collings interviewing Joe Linton at
his home, and Joe, we were going to start talking about your involvement
with Friends of the LA River, but I just wondered if you would want to
follow up with how the Shared Streets meeting went last Thursday,
because we had sort of ended up talking about that project.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I think too, weren't we going to mention the Arroyo Seco Bike Path
project?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, indeed. I was going to ask you about that.
-
LINTON
- So the Shared Streets meeting. It went pretty well. I actually was
running around to get this clean-up event ready that happened on
Saturday, so I didn't -- I had to skip our early, but yeah, we're
working on finalizing some of the designs, working with the city to
finalize designs for traffic coning, greening, pedestrianization project
on the street, and basically there's a drainage issue with the
Eco-Village that we need to look at. The way rainwater comes out in the
street, there's actually a pipe that runs from the courtyard that puts
excess rainwater onto the street.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, wasn't there a project at one time to -- is that over there on the
far end of the Eco-Village site? Wasn't there a project to take out some
of that asphalt along the side of the building and have the water drain?
-
LINTON
- That's the thing we call the Northside Garden. We did a native plant
garden and reformed the north side of the building to soak in more water
and slough off less water, and so -- but it's not -- it's actually --
this, the drain that's -- that was draining to the back of the building,
(inaudible) and there is some drain there but it overflowed and it ended
up flooding the strip mall that was built behind it that's kind of at a
low spot. So, we've done a little bit of looking at some storm water
stuff, but not -- in a big storm we still have some small issues. And
it's more on the strip mall that was built after our building was, not
taking into account that (inaudible). In some ways, the buildings that
were built in the 20's (inaudible) but...
-
COLLINGS
- So is this why Lois wants a lake? (laughter)
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I mean -- basically, it went pretty well, just because it was
focused on resolving certain details, but Lois was sort of saying, oh,
we can catch all that storm water. We don't need an outlet. We can run
water -- basically, if you don't put some sort of outlet, we end up
having the potential of having storm water running across the sidewalk,
of focusing storm water and running it across the sidewalk, and that's a
liability issue that I don't think we or the city necessarily want. And
even in nature, there's an outlet usually. Well, I guess like Mono Lake
there isn't, but the rivers -- not all storm water soaks in, and nature
designs systems where water infiltrates but then water runs off, and so
we need to figure out how that runoff will work with this project.
-
COLLINGS
- OK, so it sounds like things are moving along in a satisfactory fashion.
-
LINTON
- Yeah. Do you want me to talk about the Arroyo Seco?
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, why don't you go ahead? Because we were going to pick up the...
-
LINTON
- Yeah. That's been a frustrating process, actually. There was -- the
county -- there's a short bike path in the Arroyo Seco that exists
today, and the county got funding to extend that, and they had initially
proposed putting the bike path along the top of the channel and it's a
tributary of the L.A. River. It's concreted in the area where the bike
path was funded. They had initially proposed putting the bike path along
the top of the channel, which would have taken out a bunch of trees that
had been planted by Northeast Trees and folks trying to green the Arroyo
Seco, and so a few advocates had pushed, at the time we heard about
this, running the (inaudible) proposed, running it down in the channel
and for environmental reasons the county said "OK, we'll listen to you
and we'll put it in the channel." The process wasn't very broad at that
point. They had kind of shared it with some folks and we had said do it
differently, and they had responded, which was good, but when they
published their final plans to put in the channel, other activists --
largely a guy named Tim Brick, who's the head of a thing called the
Arroyo Seco Foundation -- said, "You're putting more concrete in the
Arroyo Seco. For environmental reasons, don't do it that way." And it
ended up being -- I mean, what was frustrating actually was that the
county -- I think that -- I mean, the environmentalists weren't all on
the same page, but it was more or less like ten to one, I think, or
something. It was a large majority saying this isn't restoration, this
isn't perfect, but this will take an inaccessible closed-off area and
open it up to bicycling and whatever. This has some goods and it's not
everything we're looking for, but some people, largely Tim Brick,
opposed it and the county I think wasn't -- I mean, at some point, we
should've. Well, I'm trying to blame the county when I shouldn't,
whatever. The county ended up not building it and giving the money back,
because they felt like whatever they did they were going to be
criticized. So we were unable to build a consensus on the enviro side.
-
COLLINGS
- Have you found particular people that you've worked with in the county
that have been particularly prone to see your point of view, real
allies?
-
LINTON
- I mean, some. At the time, the person -- the elected officials tend to be
more responsive, some of them. I mean, some of them aren't. And then the
city bureaucrats tend to be pretty -- (inaudible) bureaucrat. As much as
I (inaudible) with the city staff, they tend to be a little less
forward-thinking or whatever, tend to be sort of "this is how we've done
it and we don't want to change that," so...
-
COLLINGS
- Because I know Dorothy Green was talking about how people that she had
worked with within government and particularly engineers over the years,
over a 20, 30 year span had -- she found that as a rule, were becoming
more environmentally aware and easier to work with.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I would say that's true overall. I mean, it feels like still that
it's sort of -- I mean, and there are some. I mean, and I think of like
Carl Blum and stuff, who was the head of County Public Works.
-
COLLINGS
- Who worked with Andy Lipkis on the storm water project. Exactly.
-
LINTON
- (inaudible) So there's some converts that do get it, and there are some
people within the system that are trying to do really good things too. I
mean, I don't want to dismiss everyone. But it's like, when -- I don't
know. The leadership, in some ways, like the innovation or doing things
that are a little bit outside of the box, even that have been done in a
hundred other cities, tends to come from advocacy groups and not from
within the civil servant establishment.
-
COLLINGS
- So in this particular case, the people that you were working with at the
county just couldn't resolve the dispute between the Arroyo Seco
foundation and the...
-
LINTON
- And a half-dozen other groups that were pushing for the project as
redesigned, yeah.
-
COLLINGS
- So they just pulled out.
-
LINTON
- Yeah. Well, they ended up -- and they were facing a deadline to say "you
need to turn in final plans and make progress on this or you lose the
grant." And they ended up losing the grant.
-
COLLINGS
- So what -- do you have any idea what the feeling of Tim Brick and the
Arroyo Seco Foundation was as a result of that, whether they saw that as
a triumph?
-
LINTON
- Oh, I think he saw it as a victory, yeah. I mean, and Tim's a friend.
He's a good person and he's got the right interest in mind and stuff
like that, but I think in some ways -- he lives in Pasadena. He's very
much about naturalizing the Arroyo, which is easier to do upstream than
it is to do downstream, because there's less tight development, and he's
holding out for a project that really removes concrete from the Arroyo
and naturalizes it, which I wholly support also, so I don't meant to
cast him in a bad light or whatever, but...
-
COLLINGS
- Are you finding that your incrementalist view tends to put you at odds
with other advocacy groups that you work with?
-
LINTON
- I mean, now and then, yeah. I mean, I think that -- I think I'm much more
willing to sort of compromise and get something done, and I think that
there are often people who have been at it for longer who have kind of
sunk in their heels and said this is the only way it can be. But I mean,
I don't mean to characterize -- those folks have done a lot of good, so
I don't mean to characterize them negatively. I mean, I don't think it's
-- I think we need people to dig in their heels. That's (inaudible)
should be, but yeah, at times. I mean, I think everything's different.
There's times when I'm pushing for something to be more -- there's the
North Spring Street Bridge project that's an old 1927 bridge that the
city wants to widen from, like, 50 feet wide to 90 feet wide, and I
think they should, whatever. In the case of car capacity or parking
capacity, I tend to be on the don't give up an inch side, but not
completely uncompromising, and I think other environmentalists tend to
drive and tend to not see a wider road as such a horrible thing as I see
it.
-
COLLINGS
- Well, there seems to be a bit of a contradiction here. On the one hand,
you have, as you characterized it last time, an incrementalist view in
terms of dealing with the city and the county, but on the other hand you
believe that an environmental activist should live as they preach, so to
speak. So you sort of have these two threads running, which is
interesting.
-
LINTON
- Well, I think it's -- there's an Alice Walker quote that I actually
really like. (inaudible) with her. I think that if we want to bring
another world into being, we need to try to live in that world to the
extent that's possible in our world today. And I don't think that
contradiction is such a bad thing, whatever, that we should be able to
hold kind of multiple truths. But I think that wanting -- you know,
holding myself to living a certain way, strongly, and only insisting
that a bureaucracy take a couple of steps at a time, I see those as OK.
I don't think I could -- I want to be effective and I want to
(inaudible) build momentum by actually achieving things, so I think it's
OK to have those -- with those small steps comes momentum and
understanding and that fosters further progress, I think.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, OK, that's a good way of putting it. So, just sort of touching back
a little bit, we do need to get on to the Friends of the LA River, but
we were talking a little bit about Eco-Village last time, and I wondered
if you would describe any changes that have occurred in the culture or
the structure in the ten years, little over ten years that you've been
involved?
-
LINTON
- Well, I think that there's -- let's see. I think that the -- I mean, I
think that some of the problems are still around, but I think as we've
-- gradually, Eco-Village has sort of grown in number, and in growing in
number that has brought more people who are involved and who are
initiating different things and bringing different ways of accomplishing
things and approaching things, and I think that that breadth has taken
-- has made some conflicts inherent a little less prominent, that if
there's only four or five active people, and two of them can't agree,
it's harder to move forward, and if there's 30 active people and two of
them don't agree, somebody else will figure out how to move on
something. So I think there's more -- I think there's a better sense of
-- we'll call it "multiple centers of initiative," that you don't have
to spend three hours processing stuff at a meeting before you take out a
fence, whatever. Especially before you do something that's not
reversible, that you should just go ahead and talk with people about it,
try it, and that that's OK, and I think we would've spent -- ten years
ago, we would've spent two weeks talking about the fence and six months
coming to a fence policy and now, it's like there are people who just
say, "You know, I'm thinking about taking out this fence, and if any of
you wants to come down on Saturday, we'll do it, and if anybody doesn't
like it, we'll put it back," and it's like, it's probably a good way to
do it, because it's not -- it's not a -- I tend to be a pretty rules
person, like wanting everybody to know about stuff and wanting us to
agree on something before we do it, but I think it's kind of good.
There's a guy, Federico, who's sort of a Colombian anarchist punker, you
know, who's kind of very do-it-yourself and it's good to have --
whatever, just to have different ways of approaching things.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, do you tend to have a number of -- it sounds like there are a number
of people who are involved in Eco-Village who have a professional life
as an environmental activist or activist as well? Is that something that
has -- I mean -- that has grown over the years?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I think -- I mean, I'm not sure that it's, like, people have come
here who weren't -- well, actually, I did -- who weren't professional
activists and became professional, you know, maybe not their paid
career. But yeah, there's a lot of folks who work in non-profits.
There's teachers. There's a couple others. There's one person who works
for a councilmember and somebody like that. So there are -- yeah, you
know, it varies. Like, there's nurse, there's -- I mean, I guess all
those are -- it's not -- plenty of people who are involved in their -- I
mean, there are some students. I'm trying to think of, what do we all
do? Like, bike messenger. So there are plenty -- there are quite a few
of us who work for non-profits and then we sort of recruit each other
and stuff like that.
-
COLLINGS
- And perhaps you bring some of those skills into the -- running the
Eco-Village and the negotiations that take place at Eco-Village.
-
LINTON
- Well, I think it works both ways, too. I mean, I was at a meeting of a
thing called Green L.A. that's sort of a coalition of heads -- or mostly
not heads, but the environmental and environmental justice organizations
in L.A., and kind of brought some of our, like, consensus
decision-making to this meeting and stuff, where there was sort of a
split, so I think our non-profit and urban work affects -- comes back to
the Eco-Village and our Eco-Village work comes back to our community.
-
COLLINGS
- So what is the consensus process at Eco-Village?
-
LINTON
- We use -- I mean, a lot of groups typically use Robert's Rules of Order
and voting and quorum and whatnot for making decisions. We use a quorum,
actually, but we make decisions by consensus and a lot of groups, a lot
of kind of anarchists and intentional communities and eco -- many eco
groups like Green Party and stuff use this, although many like Friends
of the L.A. River or Bike Coalition or Livable Places don't. They use,
like, Robert's Rules of Order, but consensus, I mean, there's a lot
written on consensus. But the sense is that if we vote on an issue,
potentially we have 51 percent of us who feel good about it and 49
percent who feel awful about it, and then it can be difficult to
implement and if we are able to come up with something that everyone in
the room can stand for, can consense upon, then we'll have more energy
and a richer proposal to implement, and it tends to a take a little
longer on the front end, but on the back end you really have everybody's
buyoff and you're not trying to -- and you've hopefully, we've hopefully
incorporated the concerns of folks who wouldn't have initially supported
the proposal to the point where we've got a proposal that everybody can
support.
-
COLLINGS
- So you keep going until you have, for the most part, consensus on any
given issue.
-
LINTON
- Yeah. There's a thing called a "stand-aside" and there's a thing called
the "block," and if there's an actual block, if somebody feels that for
a reason of related to the community's values and not just to that
person's preferences, that this proposal goes against those community
values, they -- and individual can say "I'm blocking this," that I feel
this consensus is wrong for the group, and then you don't move ahead for
a while.
-
COLLINGS
- Until that block is resolved.
-
LINTON
- Right, and hopefully you work with them, that person, and tweak the
proposal and achieve a compromise (inaudible). There's also a thing
called the stand-aside where somebody says, "I'm not really for this,
but I'm OK with it moving forward," but those are both pretty rare at
Eco-Village. I mean...
-
COLLINGS
- And does there tend to be any negotiation, like "I'll go with you on this
one, but I expect you to go with me on that one?"
-
LINTON
- I mean, a little bit, but not in a sense of like a lot of city council
stuff is like vote-trading. So it tends to be more like, I think we
should really be doing X, but because you're concerned with this I'm
willing to scale it back, or whatever. I mean, it tends to not -- you
tend to not -- I mean, I've never heard of any at Eco-Village, like, of
one vote on one position for a vote on another on the vote committee.
But I mean, there's certainly -- we had a decision last night about
short stays. We were having a funky issue where -- we frequently have a
situation where somebody comes and stays for a month or two months,
three months or six months, and they frequently decide that they want to
stay longer and we end up not having, I think -- I mean, Chris is here
because let him have a short stay here. We've got three short-stays
already in the building in their own units, and Chris, so we've got four
right now. And we had trouble, where we had a couple with kids come out
to L.A. from Memphis and I agreed to give them a short stay and weren't
-- they were hoping to move in and stay. So anyways, they ended up
moving back to Memphis and not being that comfortable with L.A., but
there was some conflict and some difficulty and there was a lot of
pressure for us to say at the end of the month, to say "OK, you're in
because you don't have a place to live in L.A.," and whatever, so we've
sort of -- we're trying to not -- it became -- this is a long story, but
the short story is...
-
COLLINGS
- No, it sounds very interesting.
-
LINTON
- In some ways, short stays become like a short-circuit of the actual
membership process, and so if somebody comes and lives here for three
months, gets to know everybody, more likely than not they get in,
whatever, and some of the best people in the community came in that way.
There's the guy Jimmy [Lizama]who started the bicycle kitchen, and Yuki
[Kudikoro], who works for the Communities for a Better Environment. I
mean, there's some really good people who we approved as short stays who
then decided that they wanted to stay here.
-
COLLINGS
- So you're saying that you're for a touchback provision. (laughter)
-
LINTON
- Yeah, so -- I think it's really delicate, because I think it's actually
good for us to rope in some of these good folks in L.A. by winning them
into a short stay and then keeping them, but at the same time it's been
really difficult especially with out-of-town folks, so we kind of said
we weren't going to -- what's funny is, we discussed this but we didn't
actually set it as a policy, so it's sort of this standing issue but
it's unresolved in some ways. So we said we were going to -- and so, let
me back up just slightly. So what happened was, we started to have
really big discussions on short stays, because we were assuming that,
well, this person may well get in easily, so we should be (inaudible)
their short stay to make sure they're good, and then it's like, wow,
we're spending an hour on this person who's going to be here for two
weeks, or something. So, we decided -- or I shouldn't say we decided. We
discussed and provisionally kind of used this as a policy, but we
haven't actually approved this policy, so that we would only approve
short stays of folks who were not intending to become permanent members,
so the situation we were having last night was a person who was here in
the past for five years, who was involved and active and a member in
good standing, left and went to New York for three years, got married
and went with his wife there. They got a divorce and he came back. He
moved in and said, "Oh, I'm not really intending to be a member," and we
said OK, no problem, put him on short stay. And then in three months, he
said, "Oh, I want to be a member," and we were sort of -- some folks are
saying, well, he should move out and re-enter the process. Some folks
are saying he should -- we already know him and we should just let him
in, so it's a little bit tricky and yet we don't -- whatever, because of
the awkwardness of some of the short stays wanting to be here and not
having a lot of options. So what we approved was that we extended his
short stay by three months, and we said that doesn't really establish a
precedent, but there were some folks who wanted to be more explicit
about that we reserve the right to not extend the short stay again, and
it's like, in other words -- we always had that right. We don't need to
make any more -- we don't need to put whatever to strain this
relationship that we have with him, whatever, and it's already tricky
and he knows it's tricky and whatever. We're open with him about it,
what issues (inaudiuble).
-
COLLINGS
- Now, why would somebody need to leave and sort of re-enter the process.
Is there a waiting list?
-
LINTON
- Some, yeah. There's -- that's actually another issue contendent to --
there are -- there's about a half-dozen people that are candidates right
now, and we tend to -- the minimum time we request somebody is three
months, and we're trying to put a maximum of six months to actually --
we want to have people come here and be involved in stuff, sort of as
they're entering the process, so we get to know them, they get to know
us, and so we do have a pretty extended process (inaudible). And at
times there's a (inaudible) waiting list, but right now, there's
actually -- there's all these short stays, which indicate empty units in
a way. And there are a bunch of people in line to get in.
-
COLLINGS
- So the concern with the short stays kind of grandfathering in is that
they perhaps change the culture of Eco-Village in unintended ways?
-
LINTON
- Yeah. So there's also -- there's a -- you'd call it, like a schism or a
conflict. There's a difference of approaches in accepting members, and
Lois and I stand at the poles of it. Surprise, surprise! (laughter) And
I tend to think that if we have a wonderful, vibrant, active culture of
participation, that new people will walk in and will absorb that culture
largely, and contribute to it, whatever, not that they won't bring
something to it. And the contrast to that is Lois feels like we need to
be really screening people and finding individuals who are already
highly versed in conflict resolution and permaculture and community
living and whatnot, and so -- and I mean, the truth is somewhere
in-between those. We shouldn't be letting in just everybody, and we
shouldn't be screening so tightly that we never get anybody in. But I
tend to -- you know, I tend to think this person's interested and
there's no way that us hanging around with them for three months and
asking them some questions that we're going to be able to screen out
who's really good and who's really bad, and there's people who -- I
mean, there's Jimmy Lizama, who started the Bike Kitchen, who's actually
not -- it's funny, there's these people on the periphery a little bit at
Eco-Village who are -- he doesn't come to a lot of meetings. He doesn't
come to that many potlucks, but he's great and he has fantastic energy
and he started this Bike Kitchen and that's attracted Summer and Aurisha
and Federico, so whatever. That's just been -- that's one of the best
and diverse energies that we've had at Eco-Village since it started.
It's the Bike Kitchen, anyways, and when Jimmy was applying Lois was
concerned that -- here's someone who was very interested in bicycles
that didn't have a car, which already is as Eco as you can get, as far
as I'm concerned. But he didn't even know any permaculture or consensus
or whatever. He didn't have a -- he wasn't part of this sort of -- I
want to call it like upper class white permaculture eco-mode. His father
immigrated from Honduras and he grew up in this neighborhood. He's just
got great energy and it wasn't easy to get him accepted, and I think
even Lois would say today that he brings a lot to Eco-Village, but he's
not the mold that we would we were looking for in a way. So I think we
need to be really careful about pre-conceiving what we're expecting.
-
COLLINGS
- What's the average age at the moment?
-
LINTON
- Around here it's like late twenties. I mean, there's a lot of -- there
are a lot of folks not far out of college.
-
COLLINGS
- OK, I was just wondering if that was an issue for Lois, perhaps. It
sounded like there might be an issue of looking for people with more
life experience. You mentioned the conflict resolution and background.
-
LINTON
- Perhaps, although there are -- I mean, there are -- I mean, the contrast
I would put -- and this is the person who was going to grad school at
UCLA who was in his early 20's, this guy named T.H. who is a musician
and has done all kinds of solar and composting toilets and was on the
face of it, like, had everything you could be looking for -- it seemed
like -- in an Eco-Villager, and he was so absorbed in all the 800
projects that we almost never saw his face here. I mean, and he was a
good guy and people, whatever -- I don't begrudge him being here, but he
wasn't -- on paper he looked like this is the perfect -- and Lois was
like, "He's already an Eco-Villager," (inaudible), and so -- I think
it's hard to tell on the way in whether -- how well somebody will fit,
what kind of energy they'll bring, how involved they'll be, how many
slots the have in their life to dedicate to community, and I think how
they'll grow into it, too.
-
COLLINGS
- When they come, is there any kind of like probationary period?
-
LINTON
- Well, now there is. We just did a thing where we're accepting people for
six months provisionally. In fact, the first members we just approved
like a month ago for them to be full-fledged, in less than a year.
-
COLLINGS
- And once they come, they tend to be approved after the six-month period?
-
LINTON
- Well, we've only had one. So far we're one for one.
-
COLLINGS
- OK. (laughter)
-
LINTON
- Well, I expect that it's -- I mean, I think part of it is too, sometimes
-- (inaudible) on their consensus. Sometimes new people come in and want
to say, "Oh, I don't think we should be doing it this way," and what the
provisional says basically is that they can't block for six months, and
so it doesn't really -- I mean, most people don't block ever in their
life, so it's not -- I don't think it's all that, whatever. It's not
such a strong provisional thing anyway. I mean, they participate and it
feels like they're full-fledged. I had forgotten, actually, that they
hadn't been, you know, fully enabled. So...
-
COLLINGS
- Well, this has been a really interesting discussion. Do want to get in,
start talking about...
-
LINTON
- The river?
-
COLLINGS
- Yes, OK. I mean, because we only have now, like, 20 minutes. Why don't we
just do a little intro to your work with Friends of the L.A. River?
-
LINTON
- So let's see. I mean, I got involved in river stuff -- I think I talked
about it (inaudible).
-
COLLINGS
- You talked about how Lewis MacAdams had come and spoken and you talked
about your early days riding your bike down to the sea.
-
LINTON
- So, I got a taste for it when I was in Long Beach, and then in '96 I
moved up to L.A. and the group met up here and stuff, and then I started
going to more, attending meetings and was asked to join the Board of
Directors and there was this bike (inaudible) called Critical Mass that
happened on the last Friday of every month that I got involved in, and
then I started thinking that that was a good -- basically just said, OK,
here's where we're going to meet on this, at this time and people just
show up. And so it was sort of like a way to organize a lot of people
without putting out a lot of effort, and so I thought there could be
sort of a similar way to organize people on the river, and that it would
be -- like, Lewis MacAdams had always said, when people would say "Well,
how do I get involved," he'd say "go down to the river and walk along it
and see what it says to you." So kind of combining those, I started a
series of walks along the river. It was in '98, '98 or '97. It was the
third Sunday of each month. They're still happening. There was one
yesterday, two days ago. And basically I would just go and scout out
locations, where we're going to talk to the (inaudible) and different
folks who knew about the river and got some locations and used places
where we'd done clean-ups and whatnot, so -- but then I started to
explore more and find other places that we perhaps hadn't, and tried to
-- kept up with if there was a proposal to do something along Compton
Creek, then I would try to steer in a walk along Compton Creek and
stuff, so -- and a lot of times, too, I would get -- early on I would
get kind of experts to come and talk. There was this guy Dan Cooper, who
knows all about the birds, and there was the city bike program director
who would talk about the bike path plans and stuff like that, so -- and
early on, we didn't have a lot of people. The first block had two
people, you know, so it had like five or six early on, and then there
was a series of events that we did in conjunction with Occidental
College, with what's now called the UEPI, the Urban Environmental Policy
Institute. Different name -- then it was like the Pollution Prevention
something. Anyways...
-
COLLINGS
- With Robert Gottlieb?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, with Bob Gottlieb. So, we had this big program from here, from
mid-'99 to mid-2000, where we had historians talking about the river,
poets doing poetry about the river and movie-makers talking about the
river's role in movies and all sorts of different events over the course
of the year, that had a big mayoral debate about the river as its
concluding event, and whatnot. And as part of that, whatever, the walks
were in the mix with all those events and we started getting more people
at the walks and there was a big controversy over this site of the
cornfield [Not a Cornfield] that's downtown. One of the walks was there.
That was the biggest -- we had, like, 120 people at that, because it was
-- people had heard about it, and didn't know where it was, so I kept
doing those walks. I mean, I did those walks for about five years. Yeah,
2002, I started working for Councilman Reyes, working on river issues,
but through having -- I mean, early on (inaudible), I would pull up a
schedule, whatever, six months in advance, and at that point I would go
and explore and find out a bunch of places, and then I would go down and
check it out, a day or two before the walk and get a speaker and I used
to do a lot of prep, and then by the end of the (inaudible) it was,
like, I know where that is. I'll just show up there, whatever. So I did
all those. We had those walks for a long time and ended up exploring a
lot and finding places and (inaudible) places and also people who showed
up on walks tended to -- there was the head of the local Trust for
Public Land, ended up coming on a lot of walks, and I would pump him for
information. So developing relationships with people who came on walks,
who provided me additional information, so -- and then that led to
writing the book, so then people would ask "where can I go and bike
along here, where can I go and do this," and so I was sort of the person
who answered a lot of those questions when people would e-mail friends
of the L.A. River and stuff, and so I started to develop -- we got a
little bit of money, I think it was from Fox Studios, that was going to
fund creating a book of walks, and we tried to kind of self-fund it. We
wrote a grant. I did a couple of sample chapters and wrote a grant. We
didn't get it, and then I started working for a Councilman Reyes and I
was (inaudible) river and environmental issues (inaudible), so I mean, I
was doing river work but I wasn't doing it with Friends of the L.A.
River anymore. I mean, I resigned from the board. I didn't want to have
any conflict of interest, but I continued to work with them on their
issues, but worked for the councilman. But then after I left Councilman
Reyes's office -- actually, Lewis MacAdams shopped around the kind of
sample stuff I had done with publishers that he was familiar with, who
all said no, and then he also sent it to Wilderness Press, who
ultimately published it, which does a lot of trail guides and
guidebooks, and they -- it was kind of up their alley, and they do a lot
of Northern California books and they were looking to beef up some of
their southern California offerings, and so they contracted for it and
so that's when I really started working on it. That was November of
2004, and I was -- I committed to having it done by June 1st of 2005,
and I wasn't -- I was kind of trying to make a living doing
illustration, but I was pretty much living simply and not -- working off
some savings, some meager savings.
-
COLLINGS
- So you were working on the book full-time at that point.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, pretty much from -- yeah, January through almost August, I was
working. Well, actually in August I started working for Friends of the
L.A. River, but yeah, January through August I worked on the book
full-time.
-
COLLINGS
- And were you doing the drawings throughout the process?
-
LINTON
- Not -- not so much. Actually, I initially started -- I initially kind of
picked sites and started roughing out chapters at home, and then I did a
lot of reconnaissance, so I would go out on a bike and check out
different sites and walk around and make notes of things that I wanted
to draw people's attention to, and check my directions and stuff like
that, and then as I -- once I had the text pretty far along, then I
started to do illustrations actually out on the site, so then I would
take out my pretty much finished text and my -- and go and do some
drawings, and then kind of the last thing I did was do all the maps, and
directions.
-
COLLINGS
- So did you ever get a sense, as you went through your process, of how
understandable the directions and the -- I mean, were you getting
feedback?
-
LINTON
- Some, yeah. I had an editor who was really good, actually, so once I had
it all more or less done, then I turned it in a big chunk with all the
(inaudible) and all the text to an editor, and she was really good about
removing stuff that didn't need to be there, and making it -- I mean, I
have tried to make it relatively jargon-free and very accessible for the
public and stuff. And I think most of that was my doing, but I think the
editor really helped on that, too. So...
-
COLLINGS
- But did people, like take these walks based on the directions and were
able to find everything?
-
LINTON
- Only a couple. No. For the most part, no.
-
COLLINGS
- Just wondering! OK, so going back to the tours that you led, and you said
that the participation build up over the years. What parts of town were
people coming from? Did you have a sense of who you were drawing for
these events?
-
LINTON
- Yeah. I mean, it's funny, because I would say largely, like, maybe 50
percent to two-thirds tend to be, like, seniors -- tend to be retired
folks who were interested in taking a nature walk. And sometimes they
would be surprised by the concrete river in downtown or something like
that, but I would get them listed in, like, the L.A. Weekly and various
places, and then so some just random folks, some what I call "creek
freaks," like people who came consistently and stuff. But I mean, not a
hundred percent, but largely it was older folks interested in taking a
walk and seeing nature.
-
COLLINGS
- So were these...
-
LINTON
- And where they were from, too, is -- I mean, a lot of folks were -- I
mean, it varied, too. I mean, there were more folks from places like
Eagle Rock and the valley and stuff than there were from actual, like,
most of the sort of more Latino majority neighborhoods that were
actually walking, although there were -- it varied, like, doing a walk
in Long Beach or doing a walk in the valley or in the Glendale Narrows
would draw a different crowd. And there were some -- you know, there
would be -- some people brought kids, some people -- sometimes there
would be a college student working on a paper that wanted to know about
the river, or there would be bicyclists. It varies a little, but the
mainstay was older folks.
-
COLLINGS
- And did they -- do you have any sense of whether some of these older
folks who were the majority would then perhaps join Friends of the L.A.
River or participate in any way there?
-
LINTON
- Some. There were definitely folks who came on walks and got involved and
definitely people who joined. And we used sign-in sheets to add to the
Friends of the L.A. River database to outreach to people. Yeah, I mean,
there would be -- yeah, it's funny because these days, I'll meet
somebody and they'll say, "Oh, I came on a walk. You led me on a walk."
I thought they were a couple years ago or something and it's like
there's a lot of people -- I mean, it would be consistently like 30, 20
to 30 people on a typical walk and occasionally more, so I can tell you
many of the people I talk to, but there were plenty of people on plenty
of walks that I don't really know who they are.
-
COLLINGS
- Just was wondering how that fed into the organization. So initially, you
said Lewis MacAdams told you to go down to the river and see what it
said to you, and what did it say? (laughter)
-
LINTON
- That's a good question because I don't -- I mean, I think it -- I think
it just feels like this kind of, I want to say alien place, but it's
more like the city is an alien place and the river is really the place
that is. But it's this place that's relaxing and that different species
and that just doesn't look like the rest of L.A., and that's what L.A.
looked like 200 years ago, you know, at least what parts of L.A. looked
like.
-
COLLINGS
- And the reason for the...
-
LINTON
- I don't know. What's funny is that -- I remember, too, early on there was
a guy Martin Schlager who was the executive director of Friends of the
L.A. River and he saw that I biked and he said, oh, you know, I'm really
looking for somebody to be the bike guy for Friends of the L.A. River.
And I didn't really -- like, I identified more as an environmentalist
than as a bicyclist at the time, and I felt like I didn't want to be
pigeonholed as the bike guy and stuff, and I wanted to be -- I felt like
that would be a peripheral role. And I am that role today, whatever. I
mean, I represent that role today to a large extent, so it's funny that
I -- early on, I thought that wasn't what I would do. But I don't know,
I think that part of it was sort of -- it's a fun thing to just explore.
I mean, I think a lot of my role was sort of, I would go out -- I was
working in the hospital and I would go out on a weekend and think, hmm,
I'm going to go trace the Tujunga Wash and I would go and bike along it
and just kind of zigzag and cross it and check it out and try to see
were there parts along it, were there places, was there enough room to
put a bike path along it, and stuff like that. So I would end up sort of
exploring L.A., and not long after I'd moved here, really, just sort of
-- it was one thing I just would -- it's like I don't do that often
enough, (inaudible), but it's like it was a handle on which I kind of
cruised around the city.
-
COLLINGS
- Did you at that time ever predict the great involvement of the city
council and improving the river?
-
LINTON
- Well, it's something we've been pushing for and that we -- I mean, it
doesn't surprise me so much, but I don't know, it took a lot of pushing.
But I mean, I actually -- when I started the city council, well, the
county approved the master plan in 1996. And there's a lot of funky
jurisdictional issues with the river that the federal and the state and
the local and the county versus the city and all kinds of private
property owners versus public easements and stuff like that, so the
county actually came on -- the county and the state actually came on
earlier than the city and so it's good that after -- and so there were a
few folks who -- in the city council where not supportive at all of the
river, when I was getting involved in the mid-90's, and then term limits
kicked in and there was sort of a whole new crop of council folks, a new
mayor, and there was pretty broad support and the question was just,
like, how much of that is lip service and how much of that is really
real, and it's -- there are still advocates who feel like that plan has
a lot more concrete than we'd like to see, and stuff like that, so it's
still -- I mean, there's still a lot of ideas floating around like
putting in inflatable dams, because we don't really have a river unless
there's a whole bunch of water standing there, and I feel like, we're in
a semi-arid area where our river has a lot of water in the winter and
not that much water in the summer, and that's -- if we're really going
to connect with our place where we live, we need to look at a river that
has three or four feet of water and say that is a river, and not put a
dam in, whatever, and I think the plan, the L.A. River Revitalization
master plan by the city, is -- it's a big step in the right direction,
has a lot of good stuff in it. It has -- especially the five nodes where
they're looking at doing big interventions. Those I think are really
good and really smart, at least four out of five of those are really
good. But there's a lot of places where they're saying, you know, pretty
much leave the channel as it is and do kind of landscaping along the
top, which is what the county plan called for in '96, so it's not a bad
thing if today the area's fenced off and we're going to open up the
(inaudible) and make a park, but I think I want to see things go further
than that plan. But I mean, I'm not against the plan. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- We're now at an hour. Would you like to...
1.4. Session 4 ( June 26, 2007)
-
COLLINGS
- This is Jane Collings interviewing Joe Linton at his home on June 26th,
2007. And Joe, last time we talked about the book that you wrote as a
result of your involvement with Friends of the Los Angeles River, and
you talked about the -- and you said that you had done it as -- it came
out of your work doing the tours, and then today we were going to talk
just more generally about Friends of the Los Angeles River, and last
time you had suggested that you might be interested in talking about, in
the context of FoLAR, how the urban needs of a river sort of compete
with more environmental concerns.
-
LINTON
- Well there's -- I mean, somebody asked me not too long ago, what's the
biggest problem -- what's the biggest obstacle to restoring the L.A.
River. And I had to think about it, and I came up with, like,
single-minded thinking. I think that when the river flooded in the
Thirties and earlier, the engineers decided that it could only -- it was
only good for one purpose, and that was flood control. And today there's
still a lot of single-minded thinking, and there's still flood-control
folks who say it's only good for flood control. But there are
environmentalists who say we can't have anything other than habitat
restoration and there are sports enthusiasts who want soccer fields and,
you know, bicyclists who only want bikes, and it's really -- I think to
-- I mean, we're -- it's hard to -- well, I shouldn't say it's hard to
talk about restoration. It's misleading, I think, to talk about
restoration in a, like, historical restoration sense. The river moved
around. The river flooded. We're not going to restore the --
historically, what it did.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, wasn't it really more of a flood plain than even an actual river
in many spots?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, it was definitely a braided channel and it had areas where it
flowed one year, and then another area where it flowed the next year, so
we can restore a lot of environmental function. We can have fish
habitat, we can have groundwater recharge. We can have overall more
habitat and more recreation and it's probably -- I like to say it's more
like a garden then, like, a wholly natural thing, in that the hand of
man, the hand of humankind will be there a great deal to ensure that it
doesn't wander around like it did, but I think that if we are able to,
as much as possible, to open up the bottom of the channel and, where
possible, move the concrete out a little bit. We can have (inaudible)
ecosystem at the bottom and still have a reinforced channel, so a lot of
the -- you know, the city just came out with this L.A. River
revitalization master plan, and it has -- many environmentalists were
critical of it, in that it doesn't restore enough areas, and yet it's --
to actually just commit to doing parks along the top and bike paths and
doing large-scale restoration in a number of areas, I think will be a
big step in the right direction. But I mean, it is really a debate and
it's a good debate, because there are -- there's a rich urban mix of
uses that likely includes a lot more environmental function, but other
types of parks, soccer fields, and even some housing and some compatible
businesses. I don't want to see, like, Disneyland out there on the
river, but I want to see, you know, cafes and kind of activity. I think
if we -- it's difficult to do, like, pure nature in the middle of the
city because it ends up being a place where homeless folks and gang
members hang out and stuff like that, so if we try to just -- if we try
to say -- if we try to have single-minded thinking toward the river and
say, "All we can do is pure restoration," we're going to end up with
these areas that have very little activity, and then -- and then those
may end up being security risks if we haven't solved those problems at
the same time.
-
COLLINGS
- So you have to deal with the flora and the fauna. (laughter)
-
LINTON
- Yeah, so I think cafes, bike rental places, educational centers, stuff
that actually generates more trips and more people will be very
compatible. I mean, and some housing overlooking portions of it. So,
but, I mean -- and there are -- well, there are environmentalists who
are like, you know, don't -- who are no housing, don't do a development
plan, and you know, but I think it's -- I mean, I'm glad that they're at
the table and the discussion, but it's -- anybody who says you can only
do X, or I'm only -- I can only tolerate X is not seeing the richness of
what the river can mean to Los Angeles.
-
COLLINGS
- So it's interesting because your environmentalism is always in the
context of an urban environment. You always seem to bring that urban
planning piece to your environmental focus, and that seems to be sort of
ideally suited to working with a river that runs through the second
largest city in the United States. Are you suggesting that these other
forces are ignoring that piece?
-
LINTON
- Well, (cough), pardon me. I think that actually when environmentalists
are able to work, and this is really true about bicyclists, are able to
work with a broader coalition, is when we become effective. In the
struggles for Taylor Yard and the cornfields, Friends of the L.A. River
was able to work with the Chinese groups and the homeowners and the
public housing and to build a broad coalition that included traditional
enviros and environmental justice groups, but a much broader range, and
so I guess I think that the -- I tell bicyclists, like if we walk into a
room, if bicyclists walk into a neighborhood council meeting and say,
you know, we want you to do a bike path or bike lanes here, because
bikes are so great, we're going to be in the small minority, and if we
walk into a room and say, well, this happened on Silver Lake Boulevard
bike lanes, the plans here show more cut-through traffic in your
neighborhood, and is -- bikes are part is a solution of localizing and
having walkable, friendly streets and stuff like that, then that appeals
and I think -- so I think we need to -- we river environmentalists, we
"creek freaks," as I like to call us, we need to -- god, I don't want to
say "sell our vision." I guess sell our vision, whatever. (laughter)
Like, too marketing-crass, but we need to sell our vision in the mix of
something that appeals to people, and not try to -- I think we become
marginalized if we just say -- if we try to insist on the purest, most
natural solution, but I mean -- and I'm often in a group the one who's
saying, no, we really do need to, you know, look at the fish and restore
ecological function, so I mean, I'm not opposed to that viewpoint. I
just don't -- I just think it's more -- it's difficult and probably not
-- probably divisive and not consensus-building to insist on that over
everything.
-
COLLINGS
- And where does this expression "creek freaks" come from?
-
LINTON
- (laughter) Um, I think I heard it from Jessica Hall, who's this great --
she works for the Regional Water Board on the Ballona Creek restoration
stuff, but she did a thesis called "Seeking Streams" that's about
daylighting creeks, actually in this area. Like, Sacatella Creek is
right where First Street dips, like just a couple blocks. I'm pointing
out the window to a couple blocks away. So throughout L.A., there were
both year-round streams and seasonal streams, and we've paved those over
and some -- a movement that's occurred in many parts of the world, in
Berkeley and Switzerland and Toronto, where they've actually in places,
where possible in things like schoolyards and parking lots and parks,
been able to open up those creeks and let them flow again on the
surface, so...
-
COLLINGS
- So is this an expression that she coined?
-
LINTON
- I'm not sure.
-
COLLINGS
- Just because I've heard you use it several times.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I like it. (laughter)
-
COLLINGS
- And it's over the last couple -- and I was just wondering what it really
meant to you, with the -- who is a "creek freak?"
-
LINTON
- I mean -- there's a bunch -- part of it is, I mean, there are a bunch of
river activists. I actually like "creek freak" because it rhymes, of
course, and then in some ways, when I first got involved, really The
River was it and there wasn't a lot of attention to the tributaries, and
the more I study, the more I become aware, the whole system is entirely
interconnected and if we're going to restore the L.A. River we need to
be looking at the tributaries. We need to be looking at the
neighborhoods. We need to be looking at the entire watershed, and so the
way the system's built is to flush the water as fast as possible, and so
if we -- if we start to look at the main stem of the L.A. River and say
where can we restore here, it's actually more difficult to restore there
than it is to restore areas further up the watershed where we have less
water focused already by the collection system. So, if we're looking at
the most naturally authentic projects, we probably need to look at the
smaller creeks first, and build our way down. And it's all
interconnected, but I think that there's been somewhat of an unwarranted
emphasis on the main stem of the river itself.
-
COLLINGS
- What is your favorite part of the river? I mean, you've written this
wonderful book and it describes so many walks and so many of the spots,
and I was just wondering what...
-
LINTON
- There's a part -- it's actually the end of Meadowvale Street in Elysian
Valley. It's actually -- it's where I take people who have never seen
the river, or whatever, when I would get a call from a reporter or a
college student or somebody requesting to interview me or to see the
river, that's where I send them. It's an area, it's part of the Glendale
Narrows, where the water comes up from underground, so they didn't pave
the bottom, and there's a little street end, minipark built by North
East Trees that has sycamore and an oak tree and California sunflower
and it has sort of a retaining wall built out of broken concrete and
river rock and they've built this playful little, like a throne into the
retaining wall, where you can sit down and there's a bench by an artist
Brett Goldstone but really the river there -- the river meanders around
between two concrete slopes, so it's a trapezoidal channel with a soft
bottom, and that area -- so, and it changes from year to year,
gradually, but that area -- so many of the areas, many parts of the
Glendale Narrows from the Elysian Valley side, which is really where
more people live, in the southern part of the Glendale Narrows, anyways,
as opposed to Taylor Yard which is a railroad yard on the far side. Many
parts of the river, the water is running sort of behind some willow
trees and stuff, so it's harder to see the water, but the river has a
nice bend that it runs right near this little park and there's always
ducks and usually herons and egrets and so it's a nice -- there's plenty
of rocks and it has a good sound and it's in a neighborhood not too
close to the -- a lot of the Glendale Narrows runs along the 5 Freeway
so it sort of -- you get a lot of freeway noise, but in Elysian Valley,
especially the southern part of it, it's very nice.
-
COLLINGS
- The willow trees always lend a nice character to any setting. I noticed
that one of the first big public events of Friends of the L.A. River was
the clean-up, and it's in Spanish. How do you pronounce the...
-
LINTON
- La Gran Limpieza.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, and why was it publicized with a Spanish title?
-
LINTON
- Well, it's funny, because we translated it. Early on, we translated it
into Chinese and Spanish, and we actually got the Spanish wrong. We said
"La Gran Limpiada," which is what you might think it would be, but it's
slightly irregular. So it's limpieza and not limpiada. So we have a
T-shirt that says "limpiada." I forget who pointed that out. It was like
right as I was coming on, so -- I mean, really the river runs through a
lot of that communities -- I mean, like all of Los Angeles that are
largely Latino and we felt like we wanted to -- I mean, there has been
somewhat of a tension between -- Friends of the L.A. River is more -- is
whiter than the neighborhoods that it represents, and generally the
environmental movement is whiter than the emerging populations in
southern California, so we definitely have reached out to -- work with
Spanish speaking groups but also with Chinese and Korean speakers, so I
mean, yeah, if we want to reach people who live along the river, we need
to speak the language that they do.
-
COLLINGS
- So how successful were you in those campaigns, in bringing in Korean
speakers and Spanish speakers for the clean-up?
-
LINTON
- So actually, for Korean we partner with a group called PAVA, the
Pacific-American Volunteer Association that's largely Korean but
actually they brought in Taiwanese and other groups, but I mean, I think
our biggest successes have been when we've worked with organized groups
as opposed to just broadly reaching out. I mean, Spanish speakers, we've
involved a lot -- in the fight for the Taylor Yard, the railroad yard in
Cypress Park that's now a 40-acre river park and hopefully about a
100-acre river park on the way, we work closely with a group called the
Anahuak Youth Soccer Organization, and the -- actually, they're called
the Anahuak Youth Sports Association, but they're largely soccer. But
they -- the head of that is a gentleman named Raul Macias who's
primarily Spanish-speaking and all the youth are Latino and so in -- so
it's worked best in building coalitions and doing outreach to actually,
you know, connect with existing efforts like that, like Anahuak and like
PAVA.
-
COLLINGS
- Because you already have the trust of the community through this one
person.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, exactly.
-
COLLINGS
- And so one of the things that we were talking about was how do or don't
organizations structure themselves to sustain themselves beyond the
tenure of their charismatic founder? And how do you see Friends of the
L.A. River in that light?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, I mean, Lewis MacAdams is the founder, who's a poet, who I've
already talked about. I think it has been difficult for people to -- I
mean, Lewis remains 21, 22 years after founding, remains chairman of the
board and very involved on a day-to-day basis with our organization and
I think that it's both his strengths and his weaknesses that play out in
the way the organization works. And I think overall his impulses are
really good. His things like fighting for the cornfields, we all thought
it was -- we were all skeptical that it was a winnable battle, and then
it turned out it was. And had we been highly rational and strategic
about it, we may not have taken that on. But I mean, I think it's also
been difficult -- Lewis is, like, creative and visionary and good at
opening cans of worms and better at opening cans of worms than he is at
really finishing projects and something like that, so it's sometime
difficult to -- well, it's been difficult I think for leadership on the
board of directors to step up, because in the end it's sort of like what
Lewis says goes, so I know...
-
COLLINGS
- Is it because it's structured that way, or because he has sort of a
personality that creates that kind of situation?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, 'cause it's not -- formally it's not structured that way, but
informally that's how it works, so yeah, I think it has more to do with
his personality and the way he gets things done. I mean, there's an
instance of the board -- this is actually when I was not on the board,
that I was told about this, but the board deciding something and then
Lewis coming into the office the next day and telling the staff, oh, I
don't think you should work on that. So there's occasionally even very
direct undermining of board decisions.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, why do you believe that the cornfields was an unwinnable battle?
What led you to think that?
-
LINTON
- Well, there was -- I mean, there were -- Mayor Riordan was behind
industrial development at the cornfields and had secured -- I think it
was 14 million dollars in HUD funding for like a $30 to 40 million
project, so it just had a lot of money and Ed Roski, the developer of
the Staples Center was behind developing it, so it seemed like -- it
seemed like a pretty difficult sell, to stop the project that seemed to
have a lot of momentum for the site.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, you've also worked with the Bus Riders' Union. Would you like to say
a little bit about that?
-
LINTON
- So, a lot of what I've done -- I mean, actually, I used to go out and
volunteer for Bus Riders' Union in, like, '99 and 2000, and then more
recently I've generally just done artwork for them, for their flyers and
stuff. I mean, Bus Riders' Union is a very radical, very confrontational
group that sued the MTA and won, and has brought hundreds of millions of
dollars into investment in the bus system that was being systematically
neglected.
-
COLLINGS
- Didn't they play a large role in getting the buses switched over to
natural gas?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, the -- well, the MTA made a decision in like '94, '95 to go to CNG
buses, natural gas buses, and the bus riders sued and forced the MTA to
buy more buses. When they were about to buy more buses, there was a big
push by the board to say, "If we have to buy all these buses, let's get
the diesel ones, because they're cheaper," and the Bus Riders' Union
argued that in the lawsuit negotiations, when you agreed to buy the
buses, you were under a natural gas policy and therefore you should keep
that, and so the MTA had committed to natural gas buses prior to the Bus
Riders' Union, but was reneging on it and the Bus Riders' Union held
them to it. But I mean, the bus system largely -- as L.A. began to build
rails in the contemporary iteration of rail, according to this guy John
Walsh, who's sort of a gadfly who knows everything about the MTA, the
actual seated capacity of the overall transportation system from the
late 80's into the mid-90's declined by nearly 20 percent. Bus service
was being cut, buses were running down and degrading and a tiny bit of
rail was being added to the system but it was really massive
overcrowding and so I think the Bus Riders' Union played a critical role
in not allowing that to sort of crumble.
-
COLLINGS
- Pointing out that so much money was being put into the development of
these rail systems that were serving middle and upper-middle class
populations.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, white folks. (laughter) Yeah, no, absolutely. They sued on civil
rights law that said separate but unequal isn't allowed, and were able
to -- actually, it's interesting. I've learned -- I worked for a
gentleman named Robert Garcia who's a civil rights lawyer who is part of
the lawsuit, who now does work around access to parks and beaches
largely for communities of color, but he was saying that one of the most
convincing arguments in the MTA lawsuit was that the city of Manhattan
Beach had -- there was direct service from South Central Los Angeles to
the beach, and the city of Manhattan Beach had requested that the MTA
cut that service and not bring black people to the beach, basically, and
the MTA did it. So the decisions of -- you know, I think sadly, the
decisions of the MTA are not based on what's an effective transportation
system for southern California that will get people out of their cars,
but sort of -- it's often, I mean, I think there are racial motivations,
but I think money plays a huger role in it, that all the big
construction firms that want to build huge capital projects are pushing
for these massive capital projects, subways, and other rail, and not --
and there's not sufficient wisdom on the board and stuff like that to
resist these pressures to actually build systems that provide the
transportation needs for folks here.
-
COLLINGS
- It would certainly seem so. (laughter) Let's talk a little bit about your
work with Livable Places now, if you want to describe what the
organization does and what your role is.
-
LINTON
- So, Livable Places is a recently -- somewhat new group started in, like,
2001. We build affordable housing and we also advocate for policies for
livable neighborhoods. We push for, like, walkable, bikeable
transit-oriented development. It's called "smart growth," although that
term's somewhat overused anyways, but I mean that's something people
have heard of. We just opened a project in Long Beach along the Metro
Blue Line where people can walk a couple blocks and hop on a train, and
we're building another one in Lincoln Heights.
-
COLLINGS
- And how does the Olive Grove, is it? In Olive...
-
LINTON
- Yeah, Olive Court.
-
COLLINGS
- How does that work in terms of mixed income?
-
LINTON
- So what it is, is it has -- there are subsidies for first-time
homebuyers, largely, so there are -- and there are market-rate units for
sale just like any other condominium/. And I'm actually on the policy
side of the organization and I don't know as much about -- I mean, I'm
whatever, I'm curious in learning somewhat about what we call -- there's
a real-estate side and a policy side, so the real-estate side builds and
designs and builds and sells housing and then the policy side is
somewhat like watchdogging city policies and state policies and stuff to
ensure liveability -- which is a vague term, but to look at increased
affordable housing in standards for building close to transit, street
standards. A lot of sort of watchdogging of the city planning
department, and sort of the stuff that they're coming up with, the
housing element and the transportation element which is now called the
mobility element, and the community plans, and sort of involving people
who live in these areas to -- largely who live in the core parts of Los
Angeles to be involved and steer these kind of processes.
-
COLLINGS
- And how successful has that been?
-
LINTON
- Well, I think that organization's pretty young and we're not -- and I've
only been there since May 1st, and it's the end up June or whatever, so
I'm still less than two months, but the -- like, building affordable
housing is really tough in L.A., and if it were easy we probably
wouldn't have a huge shortage of affordable housing here, so a lot of
our planning codes and other subsidies and regulations tend to favor
for-profit development and it's -- and market-rate housing and so L.A.'s
long been -- you know, developments kind of mean, I guess Hollywood's a
bit institute but development's really a lot of the money that drives
politics and stuff like that, so there's a lot of instances of
relatively good plans that haven't been enforced or a developer is
getting what they want and not necessarily what the community's asking
for, and stuff like that, so as far as our effectiveness, I think it's
-- I think they're -- they have -- I mean, there are community
development corporations in L.A. like ELACC, the East Los Angeles
Community Corporation, that build affordable housing. There are
certainly bike groups, and some pedestrian groups and some transit
groups, but there haven't been -- I think (inaudible) fills a good niche
for looking at -- I mean, looking at how we build L.A. and not -- and
making it not car-centric and making -- you know, how do we -- it
actually mixes a lot of issues that are important and it's therefore
sometimes hard for me to describe what we do, but things like fighting
gentrification on, like, a broader policy basis. There are definitely
groups in neighborhoods that have an anti-gentrification agenda, but it
tends to be more "we're in MacArthur Park and we're worried about
gentrification." "We're in Echo Park, worried about gentrification
here," so I think Livable Places sort of looks at how can we build a
walkable, liveable city with a mix of parks and transit and housing and
commercial jobs and -- in a way that's, you know, out of the mainstream
with the direction that L.A. goes. L.A.'s very car-based and very
market-based and we're sort of saying how can we do that in a way that's
community-driven and environmentally friendly and about the people who
actually already live here. So...
-
COLLINGS
- Is there -- I mean, one of the things that one tends to find in a less
decentralized, more community-oriented neighborhood is, you know, some
sort of cultural cohesion. I mean, how does Livable Places look at the
ethnic diversity of Los Angeles?
-
LINTON
- I mean, it's -- it's a good question, and we're definitely -- we
definitely do a lot of work with what we call, like base-building
groups. There's ELACC, who I mentioned. There's a group called SAJE,
Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, and in the kind of
Westlake/MacArthur Park area there's Central City Neighborhood Partners
and Collective Space. We tend to actually -- we tend to be a little
more, like, wonky than the base-building groups, and so we don't -- I
mean, we definitely want to reach out and serve those populations, but
we tend to be, I think, like a little bit above the fray in that we're
sort of planning and -- I mean, I'd probably get in trouble for saying
that in front of my boss, but it's like, we don't have -- I mean, a lot
of those groups have, like, leadership training for the folks that
they're organizing within the neighborhood. We may do that ultimately,
but I mean, we're -- we're more prone to -- I mean, work with those
groups, like there's a series of community plan updates that the city's
doing and we're very interesting in making those progressive and
including things like affordable housing and transferring development
within those community plan updates. But we're also working with those
groups that are really based in those areas to say, hey, there's this
update. How do we approach this together, and what direction should we
be going with it? And it's not -- whatever. We're definitely reaching --
we're definitely attempting to serve and better the lives of low-income
communities of color in Los Angeles. And I think we'd do it -- we'd do
it working through other groups more than working directly with those
constituents. But I think too, one of the -- like, you talked about,
like, culture and -- a lot of those communities, in fact this
neighborhood falls into that -- a lot of these communities, people who
are kind of climbing their way up the American Dream, see -- and I
should put that in, like, quotes. (laughter) Because it's sort of the
lie, but I mean, a lot of people -- a lot of recent immigrants -- but
even, like, 20-year-old, people who have been here for 20 years, when I
say recent immigrants, first-generation immigrants perhaps -- live in
these neighborhoods and live here for a long time, but never see this as
where they're settling in, but see it as a waystation on their way to
bigger and better, and so I think part of what we want to do is work to
make these neighborhoods places that people feel like this is my
neighborhood and this is where I want to stay and I'm active in changing
my neighborhood for the better and I'm not going away, and that's tricky
because a lot of the folks who live in lower-income neighborhoods are
not very empowered about making change in their neighborhood, and part
of it is they're busy working two jobs or something too, and raising
kids and stuff, so...
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, so it's a real challenge for the city of Los Angeles, because such
a large number of people can and do face that situation.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, the city of L.A. has -- it's more than 60 percent. I think it's
almost 70 percent renters, people -- you know, and a lot of like, when
the city, you know, does notification on a policy that goes to
homeowners or whatever and stuff, so it's -- I think we need to
acknowledge that renters stick around for a long time, and are part of
their neighborhood and should have a say and should be engaged and
there's -- I mean, there's folks -- I mean, my next-door neighbor who's
an immigrant from Mexico, she's lived in this neighborhood for 20 years,
you know. So, and in the next building there's a gentleman who's been
here for like 45, renting, so renters are in many cases not as volatile
as city policy would think that they are.
-
COLLINGS
- Right. What do you think about the revitalization of downtown? What's
your opinion?
-
LINTON
- Well, overall, I think it's great. I think that we need to -- I mean,
with the L.A. River, and stuff like that, we need to sort of recenter.
We need to say we're not going to sprawl out into the foothills and the
hinterlands and drive forever, so I think that having a downtown that is
a center of activity -- I mean, frankly, downtown has been before white
people discovered downtown, Latinos were shopping there and North
Broadway and streets downtown, Main and...
-
COLLINGS
- It was always very vital to that (inaudible).
-
LINTON
- Had plenty of people and lots of shopping, and I think the trick with
downtown is -- I mean, something -- my boss, Beth Steckler, (inaudible)
is quick to point out, is that the housing that's been generated
downtown is almost entirely market-rate, and that I think we do need
more mixed-income, more affordable housing downtown if we're going to
create an non-homogenous mix, whatever. I think that there's -- what's
tricky downtown is that there's sort of an oil and water scenario that
there are a lot of establishments that serve Latinos, that take the bus
downtown and go to Broadway or whatever, and then there's sort of the
new yuppie-ish downtown emerging, and I think that as we're building
parks on the river downtown, as we're creating public space downtown --
where that is, it's hard to say. Parks, hopefully. I think we need to
really look at how we do things that serve all those populations and not
to continue to segregate them.
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, a lot of the housing thing seems to be pitched towards single,
which...
-
LINTON
- Yeah, empty nesters, they say. (inaudible) There's not a lot of kids
downtown yet.
-
COLLINGS
- Or white kids, particularly.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, that's true.
-
COLLINGS
- What is your opinion of the star power in the environmental movement?
Daryl Hannah at the farm, Lori Davids...
-
LINTON
- Ed Begley, Jr.
-
COLLINGS
- Right, exactly.
-
LINTON
- I think it's a problem. I mean, I think it's -- I mean, I had somebody, I
think it was in this documentary Eyes on the Prize talking about the
civil rights movement and how the media wants to pick the charismatic
leader who does everything and really, the civil rights movement was
about hundreds of thousands of people taking a stand, and when it boils
down to Martin Luther King, Jr., that's an issue, and I think that there
was a documentary -- I forget what it was called -- like, about the
environmental movement in Los Angeles. It was on PBS. Something green.
Anyways. (laughter) Sorry to go on. I guess that's good. And it was all
about, like, Ed Begley is saving the world and Lewis MacAdams and
Melanie Winter are saving the river, and Darryl Clarke is saving the
Expo Line or whatever, and it was like...
-
COLLINGS
- Was that on fairly recently in January or February and featured a piece
on TreePeople as well?
-
LINTON
- Andy Lipkis, yeah. And I think it's -- I don't know. I guess people
should be inspired by individual heroes or whatever, but I mean, I don't
know. I feel like it's very -- it's frustrating to me, actually, frankly
when -- I mean, there was a New Yorker article recently too, where it
was maybe 2004, where it was this huge profile of Lewis MacAdams and how
the river movement was Lewis MacAdams and I felt like that may have been
the case in '91 or something, but I mean, in 2004 it's misleading to say
that there's only -- there's basically one person out there saving the
river, and I mean, and Lewis is great and has done a lot, but I mean, I
think it's -- I don't know, I think it does a disservice to the
collective nature of struggle to say that, you know, "single-handedly
Lewis MacAdams is bringing back the L.A. River." It's like, no, it's not
true. So, and I mean, I don't know. Clearly, media has to simplify
messages and stuff, but it frustrates me -- people meet me or see me and
say, "Oh, you're the river guy?" And I'm like, no, I'm "a river guy."
And it's like -- I just don't like -- I don't know. It should never boil
down to -- and it never does boil down to, like, one person doing it. It
should always be a broader collective community effort, so I think the
celebrity thing doesn't serve that. Actually, it's been a big issue with
-- the Bike Kitchen is this collective bike shop that started here at
Eco-Village and now has its own storefront, and they have a staff of 35
-- they call them cooks, whatever, like bike mechanics who teach people
how to fix their bike, all of whom do at least four hours a week
volunteering many -- two shifts. And they have this very collective
sense and it's exasperating for them when the media go in there. They
want to say, "Jimmy Lizama is bringing bike culture to Los Angeles" or
whatever, and it's like, the media really wants to pick out the
personality, whatever, and when you're involved in a collective
enterprise it's disheartening when you see a newsmedia article that's
picked someone -- even when it's picked you -- and said "This is the
whole thing," and it's like, no, that's not the whole thing.
-
COLLINGS
- But do you think that these bike profile people such as Lori David or
Daryl Hannah bring publicity to the movement?
-
LINTON
- I guess. I'd rather Daryl Hannah was out doing good thing than out doing
bad things, but I mean, I'm not -- it's not -- I don't know, it's funny
'cause I know a bunch of people who work in the film industry and
(inaudible) and it's a huge -- I had a date on Saturday night and the
woman I was with said, "That guy is Jason Lee," is who he was, but it
was like -- and I was like, I didn't -- I mean, I don't have a TV. I
don't track that stuff, whatever. It's not -- my heroes are like Lewis
MacAdams and David Nahai and Mary Nichols, you know, people who have
done good things for a long time for the environment. Dorothy Green. So
that's who I would want to notice and say, "Hey, that's Dorothy Green,"
but it's like, I don't know -- I just don't -- I guess, I mean, frankly
I didn't recognize that person Jason Lee at all, and she's like, oh, no,
he's been in a bunch of movies. But who's that Lori David, who's that?
-
COLLINGS
- Well, she's the wife of -- now his name escapes me, but blank David --
Larry David, who is a huge producer. He was the producer of the Seinfeld
show, and she's really taken the lead.
-
LINTON
- Does she have -- did she direct or do something on An Inconvenient Truth?
-
COLLINGS
- I wouldn't be at all surprised if she had been involved with that. Sorry,
I don't remember what her exact credit would have been, but yeah.
-
LINTON
- I mean, I think it's good. I mean, I think that (laughter) (inaudible)
back to comic books as a kid, like Spider-man said, "With great power
comes great responsibility." I think if you're a media superstar, you
have a lot of people following what you're doing and you should use that
power to make things better, but I mean, as far as what -- you know,
it's like when we started the Bike Coalition, the State of California
group, the California Bike Coalition, there was a guy Chris Morfas, who
kept saying "You guys are L.A. You need to get celebrities up on
bicycles. That's your role." And I was just like, "I live in Koreatown.
There's no celebrities who live here." Or maybe there are, but I mean,
there's not -- L.A. is -- even the landscape, the world I live in, the
buses I ride on, aren't populated by movie stars. They're populated by
real working-class people that are living day-to-day and it's not,
whatever. It doesn't...
-
COLLINGS
- So your pragmatic view would not lend yourself to go in that direction?
-
LINTON
- Yeah, although I'm not opposed to whatever. If Daryl Hannah shows up at
Livable Places and says I want to help you sell your affordable condos,
I'm not going to say no. But I mean -- but at the same time, I'm not
going to seek that out as solution.
-
COLLINGS
- Now, speaking of bicycles, I notice in Los Angeles two entirely separate
groups on bicycles. I notice people in biking outfits...
-
LINTON
- Like lycra?
-
COLLINGS
- Yeah, and I notice people who seem to be heading off to work, no helmet,
rickety old bike.
-
LINTON
- Yeah. No, I...
-
COLLINGS
- Which of these populations does the Bicycle Kitchen serve? Or do they
serve a different group?
-
LINTON
- Definitely the Bicycle Kitchen is the working bicyclist and not the lycra
bicyclist. I mean, I think it's -- I think we need to be careful not to
-- I mean, I think that bicyclists are people who -- bicycling mode
share for transportation, for commutes is about one percent in L.A.
County, and so for bicyclists we need to be really careful not to say,
"Oh, I don't belong -- they're not part of my club because they wear
lycra and I don't," or whatever. I mean, I think we can all work
together and push to make things safer for bicyclists and that we'll all
benefit. But I mean, having said that, I'm very much on the side of
people who -- I rarely bike just for the joy of bicycling or the
exercise. I bike to get somewhere and I enjoy it and I get good exercise
out of that. But I mean, it's just when I go to work and when I go to
the gym, and when I go wherever I do it on a bicycle, so when I go to
the store, so I definitely identify with the second group that you're
describing, but I think that -- you know, all of us should be looking
at, whatever. I would want to appeal to people who see themselves as
bicycling only on the weekend for exercise, that when they have -- when
they're going to return that video, five blocks away, you know, they
should be able to do it on a bike. I mean, and they may not be car-free
tomorrow, but I mean, a friend of mine, Chuck, he looked at -- he had
two kids and his wife didn't really want to bike super-far, and he was
on the board of the Bike Coalition and they took a map at their house
and drew a two-mile radius around their house and said, "Any errand we
run that's within this two-mile radius, we're going to do it on bikes,"
and so I think that those recreational lycra bicyclists can -- I want
them to be aware that they can be, whatever. I want them to be more
aware of their bicycle as a transportation tool. So...
-
COLLINGS
- OK, well, just in sort of wrapping up here, you know, you're mentioned
people that you admire, Mary Nichols and Dorothy Green and Lewis
MacAdams and -- I mean, who have your mentors been along this road so
far?
-
LINTON
- I think -- Lewis MacAdams is a big one, and I think part of what he
showed me is sort of environmentalism can be about creativity and vision
and not about sort of plodding and sacrificing.
-
COLLINGS
- That's very interesting.
-
LINTON
- So I think -- there was -- I don't know if I talked about it. Did I talk
about the Memet Sander dance company? There was a dance company that I
worked with when I was in Long Beach, and this guy Memet Sander was this
very out, very queer, almost crazy in many ways, but a person who
creatively had just had this really clear, like, artistic voice and had
-- from, like, the way the curtain opened to the way the bows were taken
to what the program looked like, nothing was conventional. He wanted it
to be like his vision and Lewis had some of that too. I mean, there was
a board meeting when we were talking about the L.A. River clean-up and
we were broke and we were looking at how to trim back on costs and each
year we have musicians. We have bands play at clean-up sites and the
board was like, let's cut the bands and save money, and Lewis was like,
no, the clean-up -- we want people to have -- we want it to feel
festive. We want people to go down to the river and have a party and
enjoy it and the bands are important to that and stuff, so I think both
Memet and Lewis sort of said we can pursue these artistic, environmental
-- Memet wasn't environmental, but artistic endeavors in a way that's
uniquely our vision and that attention to detail and joy in detail are
huge parts of that, and I think that's something I believe in strongly,
like my book, that the drawings say somebody cares about this and
somebody enjoys this, more than just communicating, "OK, turn right
here."
-
COLLINGS
- So that -- I mean, that, I would think would be one thing that would keep
you going, that each of these actions is in a certain way a work.
-
LINTON
- Yeah. I would say too, it's building a culture, too. So...
-
COLLINGS
- What kind of music were the bands playing?
-
LINTON
- Oh, all kinds of stuff like there are steel drum bands, there was a brass
band. There was kind of just a blues guitarist. There's a really good
reggae hip-hop DJ turntable group, and there's all kinds. It's just like
-- and it was like, a lot of it was local. OK, this is the Long Beach
band, and this is the Frogtown band, and stuff like that. So it's not --
we tried to get stuff that would carry, 'cause it's a big outdoor event,
but it's -- lots of different kinds of stuff.
-
COLLINGS
- OK, I think we're just about done here. Anything you'd like to add?
-
LINTON
- No, I think that's all. It feels awkward, like I've -- I'm 43 and I --
I'm looking up -- I've got some, like the Bike Coalition gave me an
award, and the Occidental College, the Urban and Environmental Policy
Institute gave me an award and I'm being interviewed and stuff. It's
like, I think the...
-
COLLINGS
- The best is yet to come.
-
LINTON
- Yeah, the best is yet to come, exactly.
-
COLLINGS
- I'll have to catch you back up in 20, 30 years.
-
LINTON
- I think there's plenty to do still, so...